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The Long Night – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Long Night

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

‘Jago.’ the girl’s voice breaks the silence. ‘Are you still alive?’

Sevatar sits with his back to the crackling force barrier, ignoring its incessant caress. Around him, only darkness. Not the darkness of a sunless night, but a blackness so absolute that even his eyes cannot pierce its veil. They keep him in this lightless cage, deactivating the barriers and awakening the illumination globes for fifteen minutes each day cycle. That’s when he’s permitted to eat. They bring him nutrient-rich gruel that tastes of bland chemicals and sticks to his tongue like wet sawdust. He grins at his captors every time, telling them it’s the finest thing he’s ever eaten, and that each meal is better than the last.

There’s comfort here in the darkness of his prison cell. Like silk against his bare skin, the blackness soothes his aching eyes. Unfortunately it does nothing for the pounding throb straining its way through his skull. Since his capture, only her voice has relieved the pain. Just one voice among many – the voices of the slain, dredged from his subconscious.

Sevatar has dreamed of the dead a hundred times and more. In those first heartbeats after waking, he sees their staring eyes in the darkness of his cell, and hears the echo of their cries inside his skull.

None of it is real. He knows that.

In the long watches of the night, boredom is his only true companion. The dead lie in their graves, silent and rotting, righteously punished. When he hears them in his restless sleep, it is nothing but the misfiring throb of his own imprisoned dreams.

‘Jago? Are you still alive?’

But not her. Her voice is the only one that lingers when he wakes. Stronger than any other echo. It has been a long, long time since he spoke with a ghost, and he wonders if she died in this very cell, with her shade now lingering within its walls. Perhaps she was killed nearby, and she comes to him now because her spirit smells his curse. She clings to him, the echoing voice of a strange and curious child, whispering to a murderer in the dark. He doubts she even realises she’s dead.

‘Jago?’

‘I am here,’ he says to the cold air. There is blood running from his nose, hot and thick and slow. He wipes it away with the back of his hand. ‘I am here, Altani.’

‘Is it the pain again?’

It takes effort to speak past the pressure grinding down on his brain meat, but he forces the lie past his lips. ‘It has been worse.’

‘It feels like you’re dying.’

He chuckles at that, but doesn’t deny it. ‘I am still here for now. What do you want?’

‘Just to talk. I’m lonely.’

‘I am sorry to hear that, little one.’ He hesitates, already uncomfortable yet wishing to keep her near for a while longer. Is this the fourth time she has come to him? The fifth? The pressure in his head defies his attempts to focus on even mundane tasks like tracking the passing of time. ‘Yours is the only voice I welcome. Did you know that?’

‘I don’t understand. You hear other voices? Even when you are awake? I thought they came only in your dreams.’

‘Yes, and no.’ He shrugs in the darkness, a futile gesture if ever there was one. As a child, he had always heard voices. The sounds of desire and anger inside other people’s skulls. The murmuring emotions that boiled behind their eyes. The raucous songs of the city’s crows as they fought over food.

Worse than any of them was the whispering of the dead. The burning flashes of someone else’s memories when he glanced into the eyes of a body in the gutter. The pleas of unseen voices, begging for him to avenge them. The strangling red torment he would feel in his throat when he passed beneath one of the Night Haunter’s victims hanging in public, disembowelled and crucified.

Sometimes they would speak with him, in that nameless place between slumber and consciousness.

Telepathy. Necromancy. Psychometry. A thousand cultures had a thousand words for such psychic gifts, but the words themselves didn’t matter. All of the music of sentient thought had been his to hear, until the Legion sealed it away, leaving him in blessed silence.

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A Black Library Publication

First published as an audio drama in Great Britain in 2014.
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.

The Long Night © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. The Long Night, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-441-1

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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