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Massacre – Extract

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Massacre

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

‘We have been summoned,’ said Malcharion. ‘Not the Army detachments with us. Not the auxilia. Not the Mechanicum. We alone.’

The fleetmaster had opened the council with those words, knowing there would be many warriors who wished to reply to them.

‘The highest authority demands this of us,’ he continued.

‘The Emperor?’ called one of his warriors, out of turn. As intended, the question was met with muted grunts of amusement from the ranks.

‘The highest authority that we recognise,’ Captain Malcharion amended, unsmiling. He was monumentally stern, and not a man to show his amusement even on those rare occasions he actually felt it.

Malcharion’s war councils were informal gatherings, though not without certain protocols. Much to the irritation of his subordinate officers, the Tenth Captain of the VIII Legion saw fit to change those protocols without a moment’s notice, appropriating traditions of etiquette from other cultures, and even other Legions, seemingly on random impulse.

He claimed it encouraged his kindred to consider new perspectives in the planning and prosecution of warfare. Many of his brethren simply believed he did it out of perverse eclecticism.

His current preference was a distorted mimicry of the Luna Wolves’ custom of warriors placing tokens and mementos in the centre to indicate that they wished to speak before their brethren. Aboard the Vengeful Spirit, it was common for Luna Wolf officers to place their weapons or helms upon the central table and wait to be granted permission to speak. Here, in the war councils of the VIII Legion aboard the Covenant of Blood, Malcharion had decreed that his officers could only use tokens taken from the bodies of fallen foes.

Almost fifty officers were present – shipmasters, centurions, champions, all accompanied by their oathbound honour guards and personal attendants, bringing the total close to two hundred warriors standing beneath the banners of four battle companies.

Every Night Lord present was entitled to speak no matter his rank, which meant that skulls – used as tokens – were in plentiful supply. The oversized, elongated skulls of dead aliens were piled upon the table, each one scratched or painted with the curved runic lettering of the mellifluous Nostraman language. Here and there among the tokens of skinless bone lay exotic weapons and armour fragments of fallen human cultures, from kingdoms either brought to compliance by the VIII Legion, or rendered extinct by it.

Talos looked over the mournful mess taking up most of the central table in disorganised heaps. Whatever order prevailed when the Luna Wolves practised this tradition was absent in the Night Lords’ incarnation. Without a Space Marine’s eidetic memory, recalling which warrior had placed which relic would have been impossible.

The young Apothecary carried his helm beneath one arm, breathing in the warm, stale air that barely circulated through the cavernous chamber. A sweet reek nagged at his senses, something not far from spoiled food and a strangely musky spice. He found it cloying rather than unpleasant; one didn’t join the Night Lords Legion to fight their wars and train aboard their crypt-ships only to balk at the stench of decaying flesh.

Talos spared a brief glance for the hundreds of corpses hanging from the ceiling on industrial chains. Most were human or eldar, their armour cracked by bolts and rent by blades, many of them now little more than sinewy skeletons in broken carapace plate. Several were strung up by their wrists and necks; others by their ankles with their dead hands hanging down towards the gathered officers in beseeching silence. Many of the bodies were wrapped so utterly in binding chains that they hung as though cocooned by the hungry whims of some impossible metallic arachnid.

The Apothecary returned his dark gaze to the briefing. A hololith of the Night Lords armada dominated the air above the relic-strewn table, showing the fifteen vessels of varying classes that escorted the Covenant of Blood. Talos watched the warship, his home since leaving Nostramo so many years before, rendered in blue light and flickering as it sailed in formation. The lesser cruisers and escort frigates turned in a slow perimeter dance around their flagship, while the other three Night Lord warships kept close to the Covenant at the armada’s heart.

Talos had watched his home world die from the Covenant’s command deck.

He’d stood there with his closest brothers over two decades ago as the VIII Legion poured fire upon their own birth-world and pulled it apart with the anger of ten thousand guns.

It had been the last great gathering of the Night Lords. A bittersweet fact, at best.

Of all the eighteen Legions, few avoided their own brothers’ company with the tactful frequency of the VIII. It was said by many Imperial commanders that they didn’t work well with others, but the truth was a little more amusingly bleak.

The Night Lords scarcely worked well with each other.

Apothecary Talos blinked once, inhumanly languid, and turned iris-less eyes upon the figures around the table. Officers from all four companies comprising the 2,901st Expeditionary Fleet had been summoned to the emergency council. The gathering was limited to the warriors of the Legion. Their Imperial Army counterparts and the auxilia officers that had served faithfully – if uncomfortably – at their sides for the last several campaigns remained aboard their own vessels.

Beyond the ever-present thrum of so many suits of active power armour, the gathered warriors were silent and voiceless. No murmurs or whispers passed their lips. They waited, unnaturally quiet, not through discipline but through cold expectation.

Something was wrong. All of them felt it.

Chained skulls rattled against Malcharion’s war plate as the fleet lord keyed a command into the central table’s hololithic projectors. The fleet display sparked out of existence and another image crackled into audio-visual resolution above the pile of grisly tokens.

First Captain Jago Sevatarion, Praetor Nox of the VIII Legion, stood rendered in jagged light. His crested helm hung at his belt, while his spear, the weapon almost as renowned among the Legions as the warrior himself, rested across one shoulder. Two of his Atramentar warriors flanked him as motionless avatars, their lightning claws silent and still in deactivation. The pale faces of the warriors around Talos looked on, their white skin turned a consumptive blue by the ethereal light.

‘Brothers of the Eighth Legion,’ said the recording of Sevatar, his voice hissing with vox corruption. ‘Wherever you are in this hypocritical empire, whatever campaigns you are prosecuting in its name, our father demands that you join the Nightfall at once.’

Talos noted the vital signs of his squad elevating slightly on his narthecium gauntlet as the First Captain spoke once more.

‘The time has come. Make all speed to the Isstvan System.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2015
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-073-4

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