Konrad Curze the Night Haunter - Guy Haley Read online

  Occupying a broad ledge that had housed statues, now broken on the ground, the Raven Guard had the higher position. Unlike the Night Lords, they had their weapons raised.

  ‘You have us at a tactical disadvantage,’ said Curze. ‘I trust neither you nor my sons will do anything regrettable.’ He looked at Sevatar. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘If they move, take them down,’ said Sevatar. He held his glaive ready, his finger hovering over the activation stud.

  None of the Raven Guard spoke. They left that to their lord.

  Very little shocked Sevatar. Even for a Space Marine he was solid as stone, unmoved by the remnant emotions his brothers suffered so much from. But when Corvus Corax emerged from shadow far too shallow to accommodate him, he blinked in surprise. Nothing that big should have been able to materialise that way – his battleplate alone should have revealed him; every mark of power armour growled and thumped and whined with activity. Corax’s did not. His armour ran silently, with no grinding joints, no teeth-itching hum. He appeared from nothing as noiselessly as oil running over water. Masters of fear and pitiless killers all, the Night Lords felt the unfamiliar pangs of disquiet.

  ‘Brother,’ said Corax. ‘I come to you without violent intent, but please, explain to me what is going on in this city.’ His voice was soft like the Night Haunter’s, though not as sibilant, and with a more measured tone. Sevatar refused to let it beguile him. The threat Corax made was clear enough.

  Warsuit cogitators redrew the target outline around Corax, expanding it from the legionary it thought it had seen to the primarch he revealed himself to be. With an apologetic flourish, their sensorium aids graced the weak points of Corax’s sable armour with floating recommendations for targeting. The hum in Sevatar’s helm changed pitch as his war-plate reconsidered the primarch’s threat rating, appending a rune of high danger to Corax’s head. It flashed but did not change when Corax removed his helm. The warnings weren’t worth a damn. The primarch would be on them before their fingers could squeeze their triggers, even with the Night Haunter there. He looked between his father and his distant uncle, caught for an eternity upon the blade of choice. If he acted first, he would probably die. If Corax had violent intentions towards Curze and made the first move, then he’d definitely die.

  The vox clicked. Vor’s voice breathed private uncertainty into his ears.

  ‘Sev, what do we do? These bastards have the drop on us. If…’

  The First Captain cut him off. ‘Do not think it. Certainly do not say it. Wait.’

  Sevatar had never met the Ravenlord, only seen him from a distance, and he had never seen the Night Haunter and Corax side by side. It was said they were brothers cast in the same mould, and truly the similarities between them were astonishing. Their skin shared death’s pallor. Their eyes were sinister orbs of ink, the Lord of Ravens’ completely black, the Lord of Murder’s barely less so, only a touch of white either side of his enlarged pupils. Both carried talons of steel. Both evoked winged creatures of darkness: one chiropteran, the other avian. Both were masters of the dark. Their facial features were markedly fraternal, long thin noses, narrow faces, high cheek bones, sharp chins, jet black hair.

  The differences were starker for the similarities. Curze was filthy and stank of blood; Corax was clean, his armour polished. But it was in their expressions that they diverged the most. Corvus Corax bore a perpetual light frown, and an expression of such utmost seriousness it strayed into caricature. Curze’s face changed constantly, small tics transforming it from arch knowingness to wild-eyed threat, signs of the incipient madness that, even then, Sevatar was becoming aware of.

  The possibility of violence turned the air to glass which any sudden movement might shatter. Two lords of men, one midnight clad, the other armoured in shadow, stared at one another. Distant rumbling sent dying tremors through the building as the bombardment moved on to other districts.

  Corax broke the silence first. ‘What is the meaning of this, my brother?’ he said, gesturing metre-long claws at the mess of the slain. ‘What happened to your warriors?’

  Unable to help himself, the Night Haunter snarled. He caught it and turned it into a mocking smile, but not before all present had seen his anger. He was a predator challenged by something just as dangerous. For a moment, Konrad Curze exhibited weakness.

  ‘I happened to them,’ said Curze evenly.

  Corax looked over the ruined flesh in the room in disbelief. ‘What have you done?’

  Curze smiled blackly. ‘An internal dispute, Lord Corax,’ he said airily. ‘A Legion matter, that I have resolved. You must understand, there are many criminals in your Legion also. You have your ways of dealing with those who stray too far from the bounds of good conduct.’ He poked a blade of Mercy through the shattered eye lens of a helm and held it up for Corax to see. ‘This is mine.’

  Corax’s eyes lingered on the blood staining Curze’s chin.

  ‘Then perhaps you could tell me why you are bombarding this already compliant sector?’

  ‘This Ravenlord has fought most of his brothers. Let our lord teach him a lesson,’ Vor voxed Sevatar. ‘I say we fight!’

  ‘Do not open fire!’ Sevatar ordered.

  The muted clicks of the Ravens’ voxes intruded on their frequency, a sure sign the Ravens were also communing with each another. From their stance, he guessed their conversation was going the same way.

  Curze shifted his weight imperceptibly. Corax reacted in kind. His fingers twitched a fraction of a millimetre. The pair of them appeared at ease, but they were a hair’s breadth from striking.

  Don’t, Curze, thought Sevatar. Don’t fight him.

  Curze’s narrowed eyes crinkled with a smile. A little tension bled from the room. ‘We are the weapon of fear no other Legion dared to be. We are the glorious Eighth. You think I am a monster. I am a simple tool, like you. We have different uses, though identical edges.’

  ‘I do not think anything about you,’ said Corax. ‘Other than the disgust I feel for your methods.’

  Curze shrugged. ‘You may join the line of all the others who feel the same. I don’t care. I am exactly as the Emperor intended me to be. Are you really any better than I, Corax shadow-skulker? The Eighth are open in our murders. The Nineteenth are assassins. We are all killers. We are brothers in method as well as in blood.’

  ‘Our way of war is clean,’ said Corax. Sevatar found his voice annoyingly lugubrious. Such misery. They said he was raised in a prison, and that accounted for his saturnine demeanour. Sevatar wanted to hurl him into the deeps of Nostramo’s hives, so he might better learn what lawlessness was. The primarchs were preening fools, self-obsessed, unable to see the truth for their own, aggrandised woes. Curze was lonely in being true to himself. He was a fiend, but at least he was honest.

  ‘No war is clean. All of them come with a price,’ Curze continued. ‘Some are more obvious than others, that is all, and the price must always be paid.’ Curze sighed, shrinking into himself, bored. ‘War’s reckoning awaits you. Do you wish to know the cost?’

  Corax’s black, unreadable eyes rested on Curze for several seconds. ‘I will return to my ship. Stop this bombardment. The conquest is falling behind schedule. We risk turning the population further from the Emperor’s light.’

  ‘I think you’ll find them most pliable when I am done,’ said Curze. He turned his attention back to the broken helmet. He was done with the conversation.

  An unseen command passed between Corax and his warriors. Still covering the Night Lords, they retreated from the auditorium.

  When they were gone, a chime in Sevatar’s helm signified that Corvus Corax wished to speak to him directly.

  ‘First Captain,’ that silky, miserable voice said. ‘Does he believe it to be true, that your Legion is a weapon of fear?’

  ‘He does.’

  ‘Do you believe it?’

  Sevatar did not reply.

  ‘I say many of the other Legions see you as a coterie of sadists
and murderers,’ said Corax. His voice was totally isolated from outside noise, and spoke eerily into Sevatar’s helm. ‘So I ask you again, do you believe it?’

  ‘My Lord Curze,’ Sevatar said stiffly, and severed the vox. ‘My lord Night Haunter, what are your orders?’ Sevatar asked the question as neutrally as he could, belying his concern that the answer might result in a command to hunt down their allies.

  ‘Let them go,’ said Curze sadly. ‘Now is not the time for us to kill our brethren.’

  Cold, dark dread rose through the choked channels of Sevatar’s mind at those words. He stamped it flat, but not before unease threaded his veins with ice. A headache pulsed behind his left eye, making the lid twitch. He was grateful his face was hidden by his helmet.

  Curze grinned at the First Captain suddenly, transforming his visage into a death’s head rictus lit by febrile eyes.

  ‘Now you have met my brother, you must surely prefer crows to ravens.’

  That was a joke, thought Sevatar. He did not understand jokes. ‘My lord, are we finished?’

  For some unfathomable reason, that made Curze cringe, and he nodded like a rebuked child. His sons wavered in their adoration, then Curze gathered his dignity and his wits. Standing from the pile of the dead, he clothed himself in a primarch’s majesty, obliterating memories of the pitiful, cannibal thing he had been a few moments before.

  ‘We return,’ he said, his voice rich with power, steady as his brother’s had been. Sevatar let out a relieved breath that his father showed them this side of himself.

  ‘I shall arrange a teleport back to the Nightfall.’ Sevatar dismissed the others. They reluctantly departed the theatre. Sevatar hesitated. ‘My lord, you said now is not the time to kill our brothers.’

  ‘I did?’ said Curze distractedly. He was examining the auditorium, as if seeing it as it was before, unmarked by war and the blood of his sons.

  Sevatar thought carefully before continuing, but caution had never been his strongest attribute.

  ‘The phrasing you employed suggested to me that you have foreseen bloodshed. Is that the case?’

  Curze stared at him, the black buttons of his depthless eyes threatening to swallow the First Captain whole.

  ‘Will there come such a time?’ persisted Sevatar.

  ‘I can tell you how you die, if you wish,’ said Curze softly, grave as a corpse-choked battlefield from whence all the glory has fled. ‘Do you want to know? It is far, far away from here, in the endless dark.’

  ‘No,’ said Sevatar firmly. ‘I do not want to know.’

  ‘Then never ask me questions like that again, Sev,’ said Curze. ‘Your question and mine are different, but you will like the answer to neither much.’

  Curze licked the blood from his already healing knee, lost in memory.

  ‘Corax affronted me, ordering me about like that. When the call came for the Eighth Legion to terrorise the Carinaen Sodality into submission, I arranged to be elsewhere,’ he told the flesh sculpture. ‘I foresaw the event, and what would occur there when I was too far away to assist, and how poorly Corax’s failure while acting in my stead would reflect on him. I assume he learned his lesson. He was not so different to me. He espoused justice. He and Guilliman could fill a room with prattle about the law. Neither of them understood that laws are a modest cloak for feeble morality, a half effort. Justice has no morals. It must be a bloody undertaking.’

  Curze smiled to himself, amused by the memory.

  ‘So righteous. So foolish. Corax wished for justice, but never understood how to ensure it.’ Curze sniffed. ‘Yet another of your failures.’

  He sniffed again, then scrubbed hard at his nose with the back of his wrist. Flecks of dried blood speckled his arm.

  ‘The corruption had taken root in the Night Lords by then. I was aware that the Legion was no longer mine. Criminals on Nostramo were providing poor stock, emptying their prisons, passing them off to bribed recruit masters as the finest individuals. Your great dream undermined by money. Fate was set. Soon the cries of brother slaying brother that troubled my waking moments would become visions of the end, where your precious Horus turned and spat on all you held dear. Your hubris echoed loudly down time, father, loudly enough for me to see and hear it, but not loudly enough to convince the others. Not at all. Once more, I spoke truth. I tried to tell Fulgrim. I tried to warn Dorn. Again, I was called a monster.’

  His eyes unfocused, and he sat silent for a long time, his jaw working rotten teeth on rotten teeth, so they wobbled in their gums and blood-threaded drool tracked down his chin.

  He did not notice.

  ‘I had a pet for a while,’ he said, apropos of nothing.

  SEVEN

  THE FOURTH PASSENGER

  In the beginning, there was muzzle flash and the snap of weak las-beams heat-shocking the air. There were shouts of triumph when their prey was sighted and pursuit was given, but they did not last long. Screams took the place of all else, until they too dwindled to long, tense silences, stirred up again to symphonies of agony when the creature found one of the Sheldroon’s last crew members. By that point in the slaughter the few remaining had gone to ground, hoping against all evidence to the contrary that the creature would overlook them.

  It had been some days since the last of the primarch’s victims gave out its final bubbling, sobbing moans. Elver reckoned he was among the last alive, perhaps the last. Currently he was holed up in a nameless, numberless ventilation tube far from the principal areas of the ship. It was bizarre, he reflected as he spooned unidentifiable slop from a ration tin into his mouth, that he’d learned his way around the Sheldroon as boy solely to avoid Overton’s violent outbursts, and that it was only that knowledge, bought at such hideous cost, that was keeping him alive now.

  He was too thoroughly pissed off to feel even slightly thankful to the captain.

  ‘Whatever, I’m alive. All the rest are dead,’ he whispered to himself insistently. He was talking to himself more and more. Dangerous, obviously – who knew how well the cadaverous being they’d dragged aboard could hear – but he couldn’t help himself. Talking kept the gnawing dread at bay.

  ‘Alive,’ he repeated. He frowned at the ration tin’s emptiness. ‘Not much comfort,’ he said. He tossed the tin aside, shuddering at the quiet clank it made against the wall. ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. At first he’d gathered up his rubbish meticulously, to hide all traces of his trail. After not very long it had struck him as pointless, and he’d given up. The thing was going to get him, no matter what he did. It was a primarch. A primarch! He had the gut-clenching feeling it was playing with him. In light of that, his littering was a small defiance. Let it come. Let this be over with.

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ he told himself sternly. ‘I don’t want to die.’

  His brief outburst done, he slumped. The business of surviving for the next five minutes pressed. It was surprisingly tedious, hours of creeping about and peeking round corners, salted by seconds of nauseating terror. He glanced both ways down the tube.

  ‘To the prow,’ he said, though the word was barely applicable to the Sheldroon’s blunt, void-corroded snout.

  At a crouch, he could traverse the conduits at a fair pace, whereas the monster would have to worm its way along. Primarch or not, that would cost it time, and he’d be able to see it coming. Keep to the small places where it would struggle to go, that was the key. Keep out of its way.

  Freezing cold emanated from ahead. He slowed, tentatively probing the thin metal of the duct. Blisters covered one palm where he’d been less than cautious before. The crew must have vented parts of the vessel in an attempt to blast the primarch into space. Fair enough – it’s what he would have done, had he not been hiding – but it did make his job harder. He kept his bare skin off the metal and risked picking up speed to get clear, wincing at every echoing thud his footsteps made.

  He’d gone a little further when a moaning screech shuddered through the hull. He s
topped, prey still. Elver wasn’t a hundred per cent sure which, but it was certainly one of the ship’s systems giving out. Without the minimal oversight of Overton’s crew, things were beginning to go wrong. Judging by the erratic gusting of the atmospheric cyclers, the life support was already dying, and once that went, so would Elver. When the ship’s thermal regulators failed, the cold would cease to be a problem; rather, it would be heat that killed him. Insulated by the void’s vacuum, and without being actively vented, heat from the reactor would build up in the Sheldroon until Elver died. It would then continue to get hotter and hotter, until it became too hot for the machines and they died too, and then, when the ship was floating unmanned and unpowered through the void, heat would slowly radiate away, and the Sheldroon would become cold as the void, though it would take a long while for that to happen. What was certain was that Elver wouldn’t be around to experience it.

  The duct rounded a corner, whereupon Elver came to an angry, swearing stop.

  A few centimetres from his nose, the duct had been crushed up into nothing by an impact from below. Elver squinted at it a moment, seeing a familiar pattern in the metal but not quite recognising it, until the detail leapt out at him. Impressed into the sheet steel was a human face, mouth open in a scream.

  ‘Balls,’ said Elver. He backed up. There was a service hatch a little way behind, to which he made his way back. When he got to the hazard-striped locking mechanism, he spent five minutes stock still, staring at the handle, aware with painful clarity that twisting it could see his short life terminated.

  Spitting an extreme oath of a kind that would earn him a death sentence on more conservative worlds, he suddenly flipped the release, opened the plex-glass panel over the lever, and grasped it.