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Night Lords : The Omnibus – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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I

NOSTRAMO

A lone asteroid spun in the stillness of space. Tens of millions of kilometres from the closest planetary body, it was clearly no natural satellite belonging to any of the planets in the sector.

This was good. This was very, very good.

To the keen eyes and knowing smile of Kartan Syne, the hunk of rock twisting endlessly through the dead space of Ultima Segmentum was a thing of beauty. Or rather, what it represented was a thing of beauty, because what it represented was money. A great deal of money.

His vessel, a well-armed bulk trader by the delightfully ostentatious name Maiden of the Stars, sat in a loose orbit around the vast asteroid below. The Maiden was a big girl, and she threw her weight around when it came to tight manoeuvres, but while Syne hated a little meat on his women, he loved a little bulk to his ship’s hull. The sacrifice of speed for greater profit was worth it.

Pirates were no issue. The Maiden bristled with weapons batteries, all bought with the profits of his mining runs. Often he’d settle for a finder’s fee, but in cases like this – and cases like this were few and far between – he felt the need to fall into orbit and set his servitor teams on the surface to start digging. They were down there now, lobotomised lords of their own little mining colony. It had only been a handful of hours since planetfall, but already his automated crews were hard at work.

Lounging in his command throne, Syne watched the occulus screen as it displayed the asteroid spinning below, grey-skinned and silver-veined, a massive shard of untapped profit. He glanced at the data-slate in his hand for the hundredth time that hour, reading the figures from the planetary scan. He smiled again as his dark eyes graced the numbers next to the word ‘Adamantium’.

Holy Throne, he was rich. The Adeptus Mechanicus would pay well for a hull full of precious, precious adamantium ore, but better yet, they’d pay a High Lord’s ransom for the coordinates of this rock. The trick would be to leave enough ore here for the Mechanicus’s exploratory vessels to confirm the intense value, but still have a cargo hold full of collateral when he approached them. Given the amount of the rare metal woven through the vast asteroid below, that wouldn’t be a problem, not at all.

He glanced at the figures again, feeling a smile break out across his handsome face. The glance became a gaze, and the smile became a grin. This smirking leer was broken less than three seconds later, when proximity alarms began to ring across the Maiden’s untidy bridge.

Servitors and human crew moved about the circular chamber, attending to their stations.

‘A report right about now would be just wonderful,’ Kartan Syne said to no one in particular. In answer, one of the servitors slaved to the navigation console chattered out a babble of binary from its slack jaws.

Syne sighed. He’d meant to get that servitor replaced.

‘Well, I’m none the wiser, but thanks for speaking up,’ Syne said. ‘How about an answer from someone who isn’t broken?’

Blood of the Emperor, this was bad. If another rogue trader had chanced upon this site, then Syne was entering the murky waters of profit-sharing, and that would end in tears for all concerned. Worse yet, it could be the Mechanicus itself. No finder’s fee, no hull full of rare ore, and no room to negotiate, either.

Navigation Officer Torc finally looked up from his monochrome screen and the bright runic writing trailing across it. His uniform was about as official as Syne’s own, which meant both men would have looked at home in an underhive slum.

‘It’s an Astartes vessel,’ Torc said.

Syne laughed. ‘No, it’s not.’

Torc’s face was pale, and his slow nod halted Syne’s laughter. ‘It is. Came out of nowhere, Kar. It’s an Astartes strike cruiser.’

‘How rare,’ the trader captain smiled. ‘At least they’re not here for the mining, then. Bring us about and let’s have a look at this. We might never see one again.’

Slowly, the view in the occulus changed from a gentle blur of stars to settle on the warship. Vast, dark and deadly. Jagged, long and lethal. Midnight blue, wreathed in bronze trimmings, blackened in places from centuries of battle damage. It was a barbed spear of violent intent: the fury of the Astartes in spaceborne form.

‘She’s a beauty,’ Syne said with feeling. ‘I’m glad they’re on our side.’

‘Uh… She’s on an approach course.’

Kartan Syne turned from the majestic view to frown at Torc. ‘She’s doing what now?’

‘She’s on an approach vector. It’s bearing down on us.’

‘No,’ he said again, without laughing this time, ‘it’s not.’

Torc was still staring at his data display screen. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Someone give me its transponder code. And open a channel.’

‘I’ve got the identification code,’ Torc said, his fingertips hitting keys as he looked into his screen. ‘It reads as the Covenant of Blood, no record of allegiance.’

‘No allegiance code. Is that normal?’

‘How am I supposed to know?’ Torc shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen one before.’

‘Maybe all Astartes vessels do this,’ Syne mused. It made sense. The Astartes were famously independent of traditional Imperial hierarchy and operation.

‘Maybe.’ Torc didn’t sound too sure.

‘How’s that channel coming along?’ Syne asked.

‘Channel open,’ murmured a servitor, its head attached to the communications console via several black cables.

‘Let’s get this sorted out, hm?’ Syne lounged in his throne again, clicking the vox-caster live. ‘This is Captain Kartan Syne of the trading vessel Maiden of the Stars. I have claimed this asteroid and the profit potential therein. To my knowledge, I am in no violation of any boundary laws of the local region. I bid you greetings, Astartes vessel.’

Silence answered this. A pregnant silence, that gave Syne the extremely uncomfortable feeling the channel was still live and the Astartes on board the other vessel were listening to his words and choosing not to reply.

He tried again. ‘If I have erred and claimed a source of profit already marked by your noble forces, I am open to negotiation.’

‘Negotiation?’

‘Shut up, Torc.’

Torc didn’t shut up. ‘Are you insane? If it’s theirs, let’s just go.’

‘Shut up, Torc. Do the Astartes even mine for their own materials?’

Again, Torc shrugged.

‘We have precedent to stake the claim,’ Syne pressed, feeling his confidence ebbing. ‘I’m just trying to keep our options open. Need I remind you that there’s also the matter of over a hundred servitors and several thousand crowns worth of heavy-duty mining equipment on the surface of the asteroid? Need I remind you that Eurydice is down there with the digging teams? We won’t get far without her, will we?’

Torc paled and said nothing for a moment. Needless to say, he’d been adamant in his advice to keep Eurydice on board and curtail yet another of her ‘I’m bored, so I’m going’ jaunts off the ship.

‘The cruiser’s still bearing down on us,’ Torc said.

‘Attack vector?’ Syne leaned forward in his throne.

‘Maybe. I don’t know how these vessels attack. They have one hell of a forward weapons array, though.’

Syne liked to think he was a genial soul. He enjoyed a laugh as much as the next man, but this was getting quite beyond the realm of light entertainment.

‘Throne of the God-Emperor,’ Torc swore in a soft voice. ‘Its lances are primed. Its… everything is primed.’

‘This,’ Syne said, ‘has crossed the border into ridiculous.’ He clicked the vox live again, failing to keep a note of desperation out of his voice. ‘Astartes vessel Covenant of Blood. In the name of the God-Emperor, what are your intentions?’

The reply was a whisper, edged with a smile. It hissed across the Maiden’s bridge, and Syne felt it on his skin – the chill of the first cold wind that always precedes a storm.

‘Weep as you suffer the same fate as your corpse god,’ it whispered. ‘We have come for you.’

The battle did not last long.

Combat in the depths of deep space is a slow-moving ballet of technology, illuminated by the bright flickers of weapons fire and impact explosions. The Maiden of the Stars was a fine enough vessel for what it did; long-distance cargo hauling, deep-range scouting and prospecting, and fighting off the grasping attentions of minor pirate princes. Its captain, Kartan Syne, had invested years of solid profit into the ship. Its void shields were well-maintained and crackling with multi-layered thickness. Its weapons batteries were formidable, comparable to an Imperial Navy cruiser of similar size.

It lasted exactly fifty-one seconds, and several of those were gifts; the Covenant of Blood toyed with its prey before the killing strike.

The Astartes strike cruiser drew closer, opening up with a barrage of lance fire. These cutting beams of precision energy slashed across space between the two vessels, and for several heartbeats, the void shields around the Maiden lit up in flaring brilliance. Where the lances stabbed against the shields, a riot of colours rippled around the trader ship, like oil spreading across the surface of water.

The Maiden’s shields endured this beautiful punishment for a handful of seconds, before buckling under the warship’s assault. Resembling a popping bubble in almost all respects, the void shields collapsed with a crackle of energy, leaving the Maiden defenceless except for its reinforced hull armour.

Kartan Syne had the wherewithal to get his bridge crew together by this point, and the Maiden returned fire. The barrage from the trader’s conventional weapons batteries was monumentally weaker than the lance strikes of the Astartes ship. The Covenant of Blood drifted ever closer, its own shields now displaying the rippling colours of attack pressure, except – much to the unsurprised dismay of Syne – the warship’s shields showed no strain at all. The approaching vessel ignored the minor assault. It was already firing its lances a second time.

This time, with the shield bubble popped, the lances ate directly into the Maiden’s hull. Predatory incisions were made in the steel flesh of the prey vessel, and the lances tracked and turned, beams of cutting laser fire neatly slicing through the lesser vessel’s armour. The Maiden had barely responded, yet it was already listing, losing stability, and shaking apart from half a dozen detonations across its length. The Covenant had picked the paths of its lances with due care, targeting explosive sections of the ship: the engine core, the plasma batteries, the fuel chambers.

The strike cruiser broke off, its engines roaring into the silence of space to put distance between itself and its crippled prey.

On the Maiden’s bridge, as his ship rattled and shook with myriad explosions, Kartan Syne glared into the occulus screen as the graceful warship speared away. For a sickening moment, he recalled when he’d hunted grey lynxes on Falodar, and the time he had seen one of the great cats kill one of the equine beasts that served as its preferred prey. The lynx had struck in a blur of movement, ripping great wounds in the horse’s throat and belly, then retreated to watch the creature bleed out and die. He’d never forgotten that. At the time, he’d suspected the planet was tainted somehow, to breed such behaviour in the fauna.

‘You remember Falodar?’ he asked Torc.

There was no response. The bridge was a maelstrom of shouts and alarms, as the crew and servitors fought hopelessly to hold the ship together. The noise annoyed Syne. It wasn’t like their struggles could actually achieve anything now.

Syne was still watching the occulus when the final lance strike came. He saw it reaching out towards him, a beam of migraine-bright white that hurt his eyes, seeming to stretch an impossible distance across the stars.

It arrived in a flash of burning light that blessedly silenced the panic around him once and for all.

Eurydice Mervallion saw the Maiden destroyed in orbit. She stood staring in horrified awe as it exploded under the lance strikes of another vessel, but even peering into space through her magnoculars, the enemy ship was too distant to identify with any clarity. Whatever it was, it outgunned the Maiden by a vast degree. That meant she was probably dead, too.

As deaths were concerned, this was hardly how she’d imagined she would go out. Perhaps it was her mutational gift that led her to such assumptions, but she’d always assumed her end would come when Kartan Syne ordered her to find a way through some horrendously difficult warp storm, and the Maiden was another ‘lost with all hands within the Sea of Souls’ footnote in some minor chronicle. She certainly never assumed she’d live to be interred in the undervaults of House Mervallion, but that suited her fine, anyway. House Mervallion, as Navigator Houses went, wasn’t worth much in her eyes.

And truthfully, not in anyone’s eyes.

Mervallion was one of the lesser-known families within the myriad cluster of minor Houses: small, lacking influence, providing relatively mediocre Navigators, and largely devoid of wealth – all of which added up to why the Navis Nobilite had seen her assigned to a semi-respectable (at best) junker like the Maiden of the Stars, under the command of a weasel like Kartan Syne.

Still, despite the weakness of her bloodline and pedigree, she figured she deserved a better death than this.

The camp, such as it was, was unfinished. A bulk lander sat in the heart of the base, surrounded by teams of servitors still unloading the mining vehicles and drill columns. In an ungainly, cheap and uncomfortable atmosphere suit topped by a glass sphere for a helmet, Eurydice watched the black sky, ignoring the servitors around her. They shambled around in their modified protective suits, machine parts spinning, tensing, locking and unlocking as they wheeled equipment into position and constructed what should have been a fully-functional mining operation.

She couldn’t help feeling annoyed. What a stupid, pointless way to die. Even if the unknown enemy up there didn’t land, she was still marooned. Her lander wasn’t capable of warp flight, so her ability to find the Astronomican didn’t matter a damn, and she had no supplies for any serious travelling even if she did somehow have the capacity to leave this barren rock behind.

What she did have was an indefinite air supply within the lander, about three weeks’ worth of food, and about one hundred servitors that were still getting ready to mine adamantium from a mineral-rich asteroid. The mindwiped slaves lacked the intelligence to realise their mother ship was now nothing more than debris in space.

Not for the first time, she regretted taking the job with Syne. Not that she’d had any choice, of course.

Three years earlier, she’d been dressed in the black toga traditionally worn by her family while on Terra, kneeling before the Celestarch of House Mervallion in his throne room.

‘Father,’ she had said, head cast down.

‘Eurydice,’ he replied, his voice flat and toneless as it bleated in a metallic drone through the bulky voxsponder unit replacing the lower half of his face. ‘The House calls upon you.’

Those words sang through her body like a chill in her blood. Nothing would be the same again. At twenty-five standard years of age, duty had finally called her into service. Still, she couldn’t meet his face. Eurydice knew her father was lucky to have survived the destruction of his speeder six months before. The juvenat surgeries to repair his body had been both extensive and costly, but he was far from the man she remembered from her youth. House Mervallion, even as part of the Navis Nobilite, could hardly afford to flush a fortune into the regeneration treatments the Celestarch would need to restore himself to wholeness. She hated to see him so ruined.

But it was his burden to bear. He had chosen to ignite the rivalry with House Jezzarae. He had signed the contract that brought about the death of Jezzarae’s heir. As far as she was concerned, Eurydice figured her father deserved his speeder being sabotaged. She had no time for the petty feuds and revenge debts that linked the Navigator Houses more completely than any bonds of blood.

‘Who has purchased the talents of our House, father?’

It would be wrong to say she’d dreamed of this day. At least, not with any real excitement. Between House Mervallion’s station and the fact she was the eighth of her father’s daughters, laughably distant from even scenting an inheritance, she’d known as long as she could remember that she was destined for life on some mass-conveyance scow. No glory, no honour, no excitement. Just a pittance bleeding back to the family coffers.

But she couldn’t help it. Now the moment had come, she dared to imagine what lay ahead. The thrill of hope prickled her skin, and she felt herself smiling. Perhaps she would be chosen to guide one of the Imperial war vessels through the Sea of Souls, part of the Imperium’s unending crusades. Perhaps even the Adeptus Astartes…

‘The rogue trader,’ her father said, ‘Kartan Syne.’

The words meant nothing to her. Nothing, except to kill her hope like a candle guttered by sudden wind. No rogue trader dynasty of any worth would stoop to purchasing a daughter of House Mervallion.

It had been a satisfactory three years, though. Of course, fending off Syne’s smirking advances had been no treat, but she’d seen a wealth of the segmentum in her tenure as the Maiden’s Navigator. She came to know the ship as well as she knew the crew. Awake or asleep, she would hear the old girl’s voice in the creaks of the hull and the grumbling engines. She was a placid thing, the Maiden, and her complaints were gentle. Eurydice had liked her.

But it had been unfulfilling. Of course it had. Especially when one considered the money hadn’t even been all that great. True, she’d raked in more than she would have expected, permitted a small allowance to her personal finances as well as the tithe to House Mervallion, but she was hardly living comfortably. Syne was always spending massive sums of Imperial crowns on upgrading his precious fat matron of a ship, and wasn’t that just so very hilarious in light of recent events. Good job, Captain Syne. All those guns certainly helped when it really counted.

Very calmly, with another glance around the camp and its busy servitors, she spoke a stream of curses that would have made any within her family utter a prayer for her apparent degeneracy. Several of the words in this barrage of invective were made up, but remained obscenely biological.

All of her worries quickly became moot, however. Unarmed, stranded on an asteroid, not as rich as she’d like to be (and doomed to die within the month anyway) Eurydice watched a fireball streaking down from the starry sky.

‘Tomasz?’ she spoke into her vox-mic, hailing the mining operations chief. She wasn’t entirely alone down here, but a dozen technicians and the pack of armsmen with her hardly mattered if the enemy was capable of ending the Maiden’s journeys in the blink of an eye.

‘Yes, my lady?’ came the response from the other side of the camp.

‘Uh. Problems.’

‘I know, my lady. I know, we see them coming, too. You must get to safety.’

‘Really? Where’s safe?’

He didn’t respond. She looked over her shoulder at the four armsmen; they never left her side when she was out of her trance chambers. They were staring as well, over to the horizon, at something inbound.

‘Lady Mervallion,’ the leader, Renwar, voxed. ‘We need to leave the site. Come with us.’

‘Sounds fun, but I’ll die here, thank you.’

‘Lady…’

‘You can run if you like. I think with Syne dead, you’re excused from needing to guard me with your lives.’

‘Lady, the secondary landing site–’

‘Is over two weeks’ march from here,’ she laughed. ‘You think we can outrun their landing vessel?’

‘Lady, please. We have to go.’

‘I don’t have to do anything. We don’t have time to fire up the lander, and we’d likely be shot down if we tried. And while the four of you look awfully proud with your shotguns, I doubt they will do much against whatever is coming our way.’

The soldiers shared worried glances. ‘Lady,’ Renwar said, not meeting her eyes, ‘can’t you… use your powers?’

‘My what?’

‘Your eye, my lady. With all due respect. Can’t you kill them?’

Her forehead itched. Covered with a black bandana, her third eye, the gift of her Navigator heritage, pulsed softly beneath the material. She wanted to scratch, which was impossible in her glass helmet.

What could she say? Her powers were weak? Her eye didn’t work that way? She’d never even tried to employ it in such a manner?

‘Just go,’ she sighed. ‘Syne is dead. We have no way off this rock, and I’m not coming with you to the second camp.’

The men moved away in silence, and she felt their relief all too clearly. Guarding her had been a pleasure for none of them. Fear came with the duty. She was too different. She saw into the warp, and no sane soul wanted anything to do with those who stared into the empyrean.

The thought never depressed her. From birth, it had always been this way. The unease of other humans was so ingrained within her perceptions that she barely noticed it happening.

‘Tomasz?’

‘Yes, my lady?’

‘Are you taking the servitors?’

‘We planned to leave them as a distraction, my lady.’ She chuckled at that. Bloody cowards. Eurydice waited as the technicians and armsmen started their low-gravity loping run to the south.

Soon she was alone but for the continued unpacking and unloading of the hundred servitors all around. The fire in the sky grew, drawing closer. Whoever or whatever had killed Syne and the rest of the crew – she wouldn’t exactly call them her friends, but Torc hadn’t been so bad – was evidently on its way to kill her.

‘Well,’ she said, using a word that had featured heavily in her last tirade, ‘shit.’

The landing party consisted of four demigods and one mortal. Septimus, in an old atmosphere suit, trailed behind the lords Cyrion, Uzas, Xarl and his own master. Their boots made the gunship’s gang ramp shake as they stalked down to the asteroid’s silver-grey surface.

The human slave allowed himself a moment of smiling reflection as he glanced skyward. It wasn’t much of a sky – just stars, like always, no clouds or sunlight – but it was enough of a change to keep him smiling as he followed the demigods.

Septimus’s master led the small group, clad in his battle armour, breathing the chemical-tasting recycled air within his helm. His visor display, tinted crimson through ruby eye lenses, flickered from servitor to servitor as the squad moved through the small camp. In his dark fists was an ancient bolter, loaded and primed, though he doubted he’d have cause to fire it.

‘Servitors,’ he said, for the benefit of those back aboard the Covenant. ‘Technical servitors, outfitted for mining. I count a hundred and seven.’

‘Perfection,’ drawled a voice over the vox. It was a wet, burbling growl, like a wolf with a throat full of tumours. Septimus’s own vox-link allowed him to listen to the demigods speaking. He shivered at the voice of the Exalted.

The squad moved in patient precision around the camp, utterly ignored by the labouring servitors. The bionic slaves paid them no heed at all, mono-tasked as they were to perform their current operations.

‘Final count is one hundred and seven,’ Septimus’s master repeated. ‘Most of these could be easily refitted for our use.’

‘Who cares?’ another voice snarled. Septimus watched as Xarl stopped in his patrol ahead. Skulls, some alien and some human, were mounted on Xarl’s war-plate. Several dangled on chains from his belt, forming layered faulds that covered his thighs. ‘We did not come here for mindless slaves.’

‘Yes,’ one of the others growled, most likely Uzas. ‘We must not delay here. The Warmaster calls us to Crythe.’

‘Septimus,’ the master said, turning back to his servant. ‘Confirm the asteroid is what we seek.’

Septimus nodded, already scanning a gloved handful of dust and small rocks. His handheld auspex display showed a series of green bars in perfect alignment with a previously imprinted pattern.

‘Confirmed, master.’

The bulk lander from the Maiden towered above them all. Its armament was pathetic, but with the most irritating timing imaginable, the single laser turret mounted upon its hull opened fire on the demigods below. Inside the grounded ship, Eurydice Mervallion sat at the helm console, directing the turret’s aim through a distorted pict-link, scowling at the blurry screen and not hitting a damn thing.

Outside, the squad remained unharmed, taking cover behind six-wheeled ore loader trucks and drilling tractors. They watched the lone turret unleashing its minor rage, the red beams pulsing into the dusty ground, nowhere near any of them.

‘Under fire,’ Cyrion voxed to the Covenant. He sounded amused.

‘Barely,’ Septimus’s master amended.

‘I’ve got this one,’ Xarl said, rising out of cover, his bolter in his fist. It shuddered once, the echo of its fire transmitting over the vox but not in the airless atmosphere. On the side of the lander, the single weapon detonated under the kiss of the explosive bolt shell.

‘Another glorious victory,’ Cyrion chuckled in the silence that fell afterwards. Septimus couldn’t help but smile as well.

‘Do we truly have time for this idiocy?’ Xarl grunted.

‘Someone is alive in there,’ Septimus’s master said quietly. The squad looked up at the cargo lander, its blocky sides and the gaping maw of its landing bay, lit from within by dim yellow light. ‘We must face them.’

‘This is insignificant prey,’ Xarl argued.

Uzas grunted an agreement. ‘The Warmaster calls. Battle awaits us in Crythe.’

‘Yes,’ Xarl voxed back, ‘let this weakling prey rot.’

Cyrion spoke up, cutting them off. ‘This prey is someone capable of managing a hundred servitors. They almost certainly possess technical skill. Such skill will be of use to us.’

‘No,’ Septimus’s master breathed. ‘The prey is much more than that.’

Xarl, draped in skulls, and Uzas, his dark armour sporting a cloak of light brownish leather that had once been the skin of a hive world’s royal family, both nodded their reluctant assent.

‘A prisoner, then,’ Xarl said.

‘Night Lords,’ came the wet growl of the Exalted, ‘move in.’

They divided up once they were inside. The lander was large enough that even separated it would take them up to fifteen minutes to sweep the entire hulk. Uzas took the storage decks and the cargo hold. Xarl made for the bridge and the crew deck. Cyrion remained outside, watching over the servitors. Septimus and his master moved towards the engineering deck.

Septimus drew his own weapons as he followed the reassuring bulk of his master. Two laspistols, Imperial Guard standard issue, were gripped in his fists.

‘Put those away,’ his master said without turning around. ‘If you shoot her, I will kill you.’

Septimus holstered the pistols. The two figures moved down a row of silent generators, each one twice as tall as a man. Their boots clanked on the metal gantry of the floor. Beyond the threat, which was hardly out of character for any of the demigods, something in his master’s answer caught his interest.

‘Her?’ he asked over a direct vox-link to his master.

‘Yes.’ His master advanced, his weapons undrawn but his gauntleted hands tensed into claws. ‘Even had I not seen her in my vision, I can smell her skin, her hair, her blood. Our prey is female.’

Septimus nodded, shielding his eyes again from the glaring illumination of the strip lighting above. It ran the length of the chamber, just as it had in the previous three chambers.

‘It’s bright in here,’ he said.

‘No, it’s not. The ship is on low power. You are just used to the Covenant. Be ready, Septimus. Do not, under any circumstances, look at her face. The sight will kill you.’

‘Master–’

The demigod held up a hand. ‘Silence. She is moving.’

Septimus couldn’t hear anything, except his master’s vox-clicks as he changed channels to address the rest of the squad.

‘I have her,’ he said, and calmly turned to catch a blur of shrieking movement that launched at him.

Eurydice had been watching from her darkened hiding place between two rumbling generators. She had no weapon except for a crowbar that she’d scrounged from her tools, and although she’d been scowling alone and telling herself she would go down fighting, kicking and screaming, that pledge faded a little when she saw the two figures coming down the gantry. One was a human, armed with two pistols. The other was a giant, well over two metres tall, and wearing archaic battle armour.

Adeptus Astartes.

She’d never seen one before. It was not a pleasant sight. Awe met fear, mixing to form a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach and a sour taste that doggedly coated her tongue no matter how much she tried to swallow it. Why were they attacking? Why had they killed Syne and destroyed the Maiden?

She retreated into the shadows, willing her heart to calm, and gripped her crowbar in sweating fists. Maybe if she aimed for the joint where his helmet met his neck? Throne, this was insane. She was dead, and there was nothing she could do about it. With a mirthless grin, she suddenly regretted all the mean things she’d said to… well, to everyone. Except to Syne. He was always an arse.

For all her faults, her spiteful tongue among them, Eurydice Mervallion was no coward. She was the daughter of a Navigator House, even if their name wasn’t worth spit, and had looked into the madness of the warp and guided her ship safely each and every time. The sight of a demigod stalking closer to her made her head ache and her guts tighten, but she kept the promise she’d made to herself. She’d go down fighting.

They drew near, walking down the aisled gantry. Eurydice’s forehead itched with fierce sensitivity, and with her free hand, she pulled off the bandana of black silk. The recycled air of the lander’s internal atmosphere tingled unpleasantly on her third eye, even closed as it was. As naturally as drawing a breath, she opened the eye slowly, feeling the uncomfortable tingle intensify, on the edge of irritation now. The tickling connection of the eye’s milky surface meeting the air forced a shiver through her body. It was a sickening sense of vulnerability. The eye saw nothing, yet it felt the warm, scrubbed air brush over its soft surface with every movement she made.

She was ready. Eurydice clutched the crowbar in both hands again.

The giant passed slowly, and as he did, she leapt at him with a cry.

The crowbar banged against his helm with the dull clang of iron on ceramite. It was a strange sound, half a metallic chime, half a muted and echoless clank. She swung with all her strength coupled with a rage born of desperation. The impact would have staved in the head of a human, and had she chosen her target better, Septimus’s skull would have collapsed under the blow, killing him instantly. But she chose the Astartes.

That was an error.

The bar had already struck three times before she realised two things. Firstly, her furious strikes against the giant’s helm were barely even causing him to move his head. His skull-faced helmet glared at her with ruby eye lenses, juddering only slightly under each of her flailing strikes.

Secondly, she hadn’t landed yet. That was what sent her into a writhing panic. He’d caught her as she jumped, and was holding her off the ground with his hand around her throat.

The realisation hit her when he started to squeeze. The pressure on her throat choked her so suddenly, so completely, that she didn’t even have time to squawk a cry of pain. The crowbar landed one last time, deflected from his forearm by the dark armour he wore, before it clattered to the ground with a reverberating clang. She couldn’t hear it; all she heard was her own heart thundering in her ears. Eurydice kicked out at him as she dangled, but her boots clacking against his chestplate and thigh armour met with even less success than her crowbar had.

He wasn’t dying. Her eye… it wasn’t killing him. All her life she’d heard tales that allowing any living being to stare into a Navigator’s third eye would result in some arcane, mystic, agonising death. Her tutors had insisted this was so – a by-product of the Navigator gene that granted her this obscene and priceless mutation. No one understood the reason behind it. At least, no one in the ranks of House Mervallion, but then Eurydice knew she’d only ever had access to tutors of relatively poor quality.

She stared at the giant with her third eye wide and open, as her human eyes narrowed in breath-starved pain. Yet the Astartes stood unfazed.

She was right. Had the demigod looked into her sightless eye the colour of infected milk, he would have died instantly. But behind the crimson lenses, his own eyes were closed. He knew what she was. He had foreseen this moment, and a true hunter didn’t need every sense to bring down prey.

Her vision started to swim. She couldn’t tell if she was really being pulled closer to him, but his skull helm filled her sight, bone-white and blood-eyed. The giant’s voice was low, inhumanly low, grinding like distant thunder. As her vision misted and finally blackened, the demigod’s words followed her down into unconsciousness.

‘My name is Talos,’ he growled. ‘And you are coming with me.’

Septimus’s master was the last to leave the asteroid. He stood on the surface, his boots leaving eternal prints in the silver-grey dust, and he looked up at the stars. Stars he didn’t recognise from the last time he’d stood upon this rock and stared up into the heavens. This asteroid had been a world once – a planet far from here.

‘Talos,’ Cyrion’s voice crackled over the vox. ‘The servitors are loaded. The prisoner is ready to be taken to the mortals’ decks aboard the Covenant. Come, my brother. Your vision was true, there was much to discover here. But the Warmaster calls us to Crythe.’

‘What of those who fled?’

‘Uzas and Xarl have ended them. Come. Time eludes us.’

Talos knelt, seeing how the dust clung to his black-blue armour in an ashen covering. Like sand sifting through his fingers, he watched a fistful of the dust cascade from his open hand.

‘Time changes all things,’ Talos whispered.

‘Not everything, prophet.’ That was Xarl, his voice pitched in respect as he waited in the gunship. ‘We fight the same war we’ve always fought.’

Talos rose to stand once more, making his way to the waiting Thunderhawk. Its engines cycled live, blasting dust away in all directions as it readied for the return flight, where the Covenant of Blood waited in orbit.

‘This rock came a long way,’ Cyrion voxed. ‘Ten thousand years of drift.’

Uzas chuckled. It wasn’t that the emotional significance was lost on him. It was simply that the situation held no emotional weight in his mind at all. He couldn’t have cared less.

‘It was good to come home again, hmm?’ he said, still smirking inside his helm.

Home. The word left a burning afterimage in Talos’s mind – a world of eternal night, where spires of dark metal clawed at the black sky. Home. Nostramo. The VIII Legion’s home world.

Talos had been there at the end, of course. They all had. Thousands of the Legion standing on the decks of their strike cruisers and battle-barges, watching the shrouded world below as the end rained down upon it, piercing the caul of cloud cover, tearing holes in the dense blanket of darkness in the atmosphere and revealing a venomous illumination: the orange glow of flame and tectonic ruination blazing across the surface. The skin of the world split, as if the gods themselves were breaking it apart out of spite.

And in a sense, they were.

Ten thousand years before, Talos had watched his world burn, shatter, and crumble. He’d watched Nostramo die. It was sacrifice. It was vindication. It was, he told himself, justice.

Talos’s boots thudded on the ramp as he boarded the gunship. Once inside the hangar, he cast a single glance at the herd of lobotomised servitors standing impassive in the deployment bay, and thumped his fist against the door lock pressure pad. The ramp withdrew and the blast doors slammed shut in a grinding chorus of hydraulics.

‘Do you think we’ll ever see another shard that size?’ Cyrion asked as the Thunderhawk shuddered into the air. ‘That must have been at least half a continent, all the way down to the outer core.’

Talos said nothing, lost for a moment in the memory of raging fire flickering through breaks in dense cloud cover, before an entire world came to pieces before his eyes.

‘Back to the Covenant,’ he finally said. ‘And then to Crythe.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘Shadow Knight’ first published in Hammer and Bolter magazine in 2010.
Soul Hunter first published in 2010.
‘Throne of Lies’ first published as an audio drama in 2010.
Blood Reaver first published in 2011.
‘The Core’ first published in the anthology Fear the Alien in 2010.
Void Stalker first published in 2012.
This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Emma Eaton-Knight.

Night Lords: The Omnibus © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2023. Night Lords: The Omnibus, 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.
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ISBN: 978-1-78251-548-7

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