A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL SOUL HUNTER Night Lords - 01 Aaron Dembski-Bowden (An Undead Scan v1.0) 1 Katie, will you marry me? 2 It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die. Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech- priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants—and worse. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods. 3 TRAITORS’ UNITY PART ONE “My sons, the galaxy is burning. We all bear witness to a final truth—our way is not the way of the Imperium. You have never stood in the Emperor’s light. Never worn the Imperial eagle. And you never will. You shall stand in midnight clad, Your claws forever red with the lifeblood of my father’s failed empire, Warring through the centuries as the talons of a murdered god. Rise, my sons, and take your wrath across the stars, In my name. In my memory. Rise, my Night Lords.” —The Primarch Konrad Curze, at the final gathering of the VIII Legion 4 PROLOGUE A GOD’S SON It was a curse, to be a god’s son. To see as a god saw, to know what a god knew. This sight, this knowledge, tore him apart time and again. His chamber was a cell, devoid of comfort, serving as nothing more than a haven against interference. Within this hateful sanctuary, the god’s son screamed out secrets of a future yet to come, his voice a strangled chorus of cries rendered toneless and metallic by the speaker grille of his ancient battle helm. Sometimes his muscles would lock, slabs of meat and sinew tensing around his iron-hard bones, leaving him shivering and breathing in harsh rasps, unable to control his own body. These seizures could last for hours, each beat of his two hearts firing his nerves with agony as the blood hammered through his cramping muscles. In the times he was free from the accursed paralysis, when his reserve heart would slow and grow still once again, he would ease the pain by pounding his skull against the walls of his cell. This fresh torment was a distraction from the images that burned behind his eyes. It sometimes worked, but never for long. The returning visions would peel back any lesser torment, bathing his mind once more in fire. The god’s son, still in his battle armour, rammed his helmed head against the wall, driving his skull against the steel again and again. Between the ceramite helmet he wore and the enhanced bone of his skeleton, his efforts did more damage to the wall than to himself. Lost in the same curse that led to his gene-father’s death, the god’s son did not see his cell walls around him, nor did he detect the data streaming across his retinas as his helm’s combat display tracked and targeted the contours of the wall, the hinges of the barred door, and every other insignificant detail in the unfurnished chamber. At the top left of his visor display, his vital signs were charted in a scrolling readout that flashed with intermittent warnings when his twin hearts pounded too hard for even his inhuman physiology, or his breathing ceased for minutes at a time with his body locked in a seizure. And this was the price he paid for being like his father. This was existence as the living legacy of a god. The slave listened at his master’s door, counting the minutes. Behind the reinforced dark metal portal, the master’s cries had finally subsided— at least for now. The slave was human, with the limited senses such a state entailed, 5 but with his ear pressed to the door, he could make out the master’s breathing. It was a sawing sound, ragged and harsh, filtered into a metallic growl by the vox-speakers of the master’s skull-faced helm. And still, even as his mind wandered to other thoughts, the slave kept counting the seconds as they became minutes. It was easy; he’d trained to make it instinctive, for no chronometers would work reliably within the warp. The slave’s name was Septimus, because he was the seventh. Six slaves had come before him in service to the master, and those six were no longer among the crew of the glorious vessel, the Covenant of Blood. The corridors of the Astartes strike cruiser stood almost empty, a silent web of black steel and dark iron. These were the veins of the great ship, once thriving with activity: servitors trundling about their simple duties, Astartes moving from chamber to chamber, mortal crew performing the myriad functions that were necessary for the ship’s continued running. In the days before the great betrayal, thousands of souls had called the Covenant home, including almost three hundred of the immortal Astartes. Time had changed that. Time, and the wars it brought. The corridors were unlit, but not powerless. An intentional blackness settled within the strike cruiser, a darkness so deep it was bred into the ship’s steel bones. It was utterly natural to the Night Lords, each one born of the same sunless world. To the few crew that dwelled in the Covenant’s innards, the darkness was—at first—an uncomfortable presence. Acclimatisation would inevitably come to most. They would still carry their torches and optical enhancers, for they were human and had no ability to pierce the artificial night as their masters did. But over time, they grew to take comfort in the darkness. In time, acclimatisation became familiarity. Those whose minds never found comfort in the blackness were lost to madness, and discarded after they were slain for their failure. The others abided, and grew familiar with their unseen surroundings. Septimus’ thoughts went deeper than most. All machines had souls. This he knew, even from his days of loyalty to the Golden Throne. He would speak with the nothingness sometimes, knowing the blackness was an entity unto itself, an expression of the ship’s sentience. To walk through the pitch-blackness that saturated the ship was to live within the vessel’s soul, to breathe in the palpable aura of the Covenant’s traitorous malevolence. The darkness never answered, but he took comfort in the vessel’s presence around him. As a child, he’d always feared the dark. That fear had never really left him, and knowing the silent, black corridors were not hostile was all that kept his mind together in the infinite night of his existence. He was also lonely. That was a difficult truth to admit, even to himself. Far easier to sit in the darkness, speaking to the ship, even knowing it would never answer. He had sometimes felt distant from the other slaves and servants aboard the vessel. Most had been in service to the Night Lords much longer than he had. They unnerved him. Many walked around with their eyes closed, navigating the cold hallways of the ship by memory, by touch, and by other senses Septimus had no desire to understand. Once, in the silent weeks before another battle on another world, Septimus had asked what became of the six slaves before him. The master was in seclusion, away 6 from his brothers, praying to the souls of his weapons and armour. He had looked at Septimus then, staring with eyes as black as the space between the stars. And he’d smiled. The master rarely did that. The blue veins visible under the master’s pale cheeks twisted like faint cracks in pristine marble. “Primus,” he spoke softly—as he always did without his battle helm—but with a rich, deep resonance nevertheless, “was killed a long, long time ago. In battle.” “Did you try to save him, lord?” “No. I was not aware of his death. I was not on board the Covenant when it happened.” The slave wanted to ask if the master would have even tried to save his predecessor had the chance arisen, but in truth he feared he knew the answer already.