As though sensing his thoughts the Nightbringer slowly turned to face him, the yellow pits of its eyes burning his soul, boring into the core of what made him human.
But Kasimir de Valtos had set himself to becoming an immortal god and utter single-mindedness filled his thoughts as a creature from the dawn of time swept its darkness around him.
‘Make me like you! I freed you. I demand immortality – it is my right!’ shrieked de Valtos as the Nightbringer lowered its gaze to his.
He felt himself sucked into the creature’s eyes, the emptiness of its stare more terrifying than anything he could comprehend. He saw the dawn of the alien’s race, the things they had done, the misery and suffering they had inflicted upon the galaxy and the blink of an eye that was the race of man.
He dropped to his knees as the sheer insignificance of his existence trembled before the unutterable vastness of the alien’s consciousness. The fragile threads that were the twisted remains of Kasimir de Valtos’s sanity shattered under such awful self-knowledge. This being had tamed stars and wiped entire civilisations from existence before the human race had even crawled from the soup of creation. What need had it of him?
‘Please…’ he begged, ‘I want to live forever!’
The Nightbringer closed its clawed hand over de Valtos’s head, the blackened fist completely enclosing his skull. Kasimir shrieked in terror at its touch, his flesh sloughing from his bones as it fed on his life energies.
The dark scythe slashed towards his neck.
He had a brief moment of perfect horror as he felt his own death flow through him, feeling his own terror and pain as the flimsiest morsel, barely worth feeding on, yet inflicted for the sake of the death it caused.
His head parted from his body.
The Nightbringer released its grip on de Valtos, letting his ravaged body topple to the ground. Slowly, deliberately, it turned its attention to the glowing metal fixed in the centre of its former tomb, passing its gnarled fingers over the shape.
And in space, a crescent shaped starship began to slowly drag itself from the shadowy realm it had occupied for the last sixty million years, called back into existence by its master.
URIEL WATCHED DISPASSIONATELY as the alien creature killed de Valtos. He felt nothing at his foe’s death: the stakes were now far higher than personal revenge. He must somehow destroy this creature, or banish it: at least, stand against it.
The alabaster guardians stepped to intercept him, but Uriel was not to be denied. Pasanius, Learchus and Dardino joined him in his dash for the alien creature. Crackling emerald energies fired from the staff of the first two warriors. Uriel blocked the first bolt with the power knife and dodged the second. Pasanius raked one of the perfect figures with bolter fire, blasting porcelain-like chunks from its body, as Learchus drove his chainsword through its belly. A sweep of its staff smashed both sergeants from their feet, wreathing their bodies in green balefire.
Dardino hacked the warrior’s legs from under it with a sweep of his power sword and Uriel leapt feet first at the second. His boots hammered home, but it was like striking a solid wall. The white figure rocked slightly, but did not fall, stabbing at Uriel with its copper staff. Uriel barely raised the knife in time, the power behind the blow sending hot jolts of agony up his arm. He rolled to his feet, punching the power knife through the figure’s groin, slashing upwards and outwards. The alien warrior toppled, its leg severed at the hip, and Uriel ducked below the sweeping slash of yet another of the emotionless warriors’ weapons.
Pasanius rose to his feet, firing at the remaining figures and punching another from its feet in a hail of white splinters. The final figure took a step back, Learchus’s sword slashing at its head. Its master’s clawed hand swept out and felled Learchus with a single blow. The sergeant groaned and struggled to rise.
Uriel, Pasanius and Dardino faced the awesome form of the Nightbringer, weapons drawn, feeling waves of horror breaking against them, but standing firm in the face of the enemy.
Uriel had nothing but contempt for the massive alien creature before him. The darkness of its spectral cloak billowed around its form and twin pools of sickly yellow pulsed within the darkness where its head might be.
The howling darkness of its scythe-arm lashed out, faster than the eye could follow. Sergeant Dardino grunted, more in surprise than pain as his torso toppled from his body and his legs crumpled in a flood of gore.
Pasanius opened fire, his bolts stitching a path across the swirling night of the alien’s form. Hollow, echoing laughter pealed from the walls as each bolt flickered harmlessly through the enveloping darkness. The scythe licked out again and Pasanius’s bolter was sheared in two perfect halves. The return stroke removed his right arm below the elbow.
Uriel used the distraction to close with the alien, slashing the power knife into the darkness. He screamed as the glacial chill of the being’s substance enfolded his arm.
The creature’s awful talons swung in a low arc, punching through Uriel’s chest, tearing through a lung and rupturing his primary heart. He hurtled backwards, landing awkwardly across the remaining slab of the tomb, the glowing metal burning its image into the back of his armour. Pain ripped through him, deep in his chest, along his arm and within every nerve of his body. He groaned, fighting to push himself to his feet as he watched the Nightbringer begin the slaughter of his men.
INQUISITOR BARZANO WATCHED with pride as Uriel and his comrades stood before the power of the Nightbringer, despite the utter impossibility of victory. He pulled himself towards the slab even as life ebbed from his body. He could feel the flow of powerful energies flooding through the chamber, nightmarish visions the proximity of the Nightbringer was generating, and something else…
A soundless shriek, dazzling in its purity of purpose, called into the depths of space, calling the lost ship home. The living metal that shaped its form could not resist, pulled back from the realm it had been stranded in all these years.
So powerful was the summons that he could practically see the rippling waves of power radiating from where the C’tan’s tomb had once stood. Or, more precisely, the glowing metal talisman buried in the slab.
His strength was all but gone, but still he tried to pull himself across the floor. He moaned as he watched Pasanius fall and Uriel thrown across the chamber, the Nightbringer’s long, claws punching effortlessly through his armour.
Barzano felt the last of his strength drain from his body, but desperately held onto life. Where there was life, there was hope. He saw Uriel fight to pick himself up from the temple floor and realised he had one chance left.
URIEL ROARED WITH rage as the Nightbringer effortlessly butchered his men. Knowing that there was no chance to defeat this impossible creature, still they faced it, refusing to give in. Pasanius fought one-handed, slashing wildly at the creature as it darted about the chamber, cutting and slicing. A dazed Learchus bellowed at the Ultramarines to stand firm.
Horrid roars, like breakers against a cliff, echoed throughout the tomb and with a start Uriel realised that the alien creature was laughing at them, taking them apart slowly, painfully and sadistically.
Hot anger poured fuel on the fire of his endurance and he rose to his feet, a snarl of anger and pain bursting from his lips. He gathered up his fallen knife and hobbled forward, pulling up short as a sudden powerful imperative seized him. For a second he thought that the Nightbringer’s infernal presence had breached his mind once more.
But there was a familiarity in these thoughts, a recognition.
Uriel turned to see Inquisitor Barzano staring at him, sweat pouring in runnels from his face, veins like hawsers on his neck.
The metal, Uriel, the metal! The metal…
The thought faded almost as soon as it formed within his head, but Uriel knew that the inquisitor had given his all to make sure he had heard it and he would not allow that effort to have been in vain.
He dropped to his knees at the edge of the slab, the glare of t
he glowing metal blinding to look at. He could feel its heat through the rents in his armour. What was he to do? Shoot it, stab it? Shouts of pain and rage from his men decided the issue.
Uriel hammered the power knife into the edge of the metal, wedging it between the stone of the slab and the glowing icon. He sensed a shift in the tortured energies filling the chamber and looked up to see the vast shape of the alien towering above the Ultramarines, two battle brothers held impaled on its claws.
He pushed down on the inlaid handle, feeling the blade bend as the metal’s substance resisted him. He did not have the strength to force it from the slab.
The Nightbringer hurled the Space Marines aside, spinning with a ferocious sweep of its dark matter. Uriel felt its fury, its outrage that this upstart prey creature dared meddle in its affairs.
The alien’s mind touched his with an anger that had seen stars snuffed out and Uriel let it in, feeling its monstrous rage flood through his body, feeling that rage empower him.
His own hatred for this being merged with its fury and he used the power, turning it outwards, ripping the metal from the slab with the sheer force of his anger-fuelled strength.
The metal clattered onto the floor of the tomb, the Nightbringer roaring in bestial rage as the connection to its star-killing vessel was severed, stranding it once more in the haunted depths of the immaterium. Uriel gripped the blazing metal and scrambled backwards. He snatched at his grenade dispenser as Pasanius leapt towards the creature.
A casual flick of its midnight talons sent him sprawling, but the veteran sergeant’s attack had given Uriel the chance he needed. As the Nightbringer swept towards him, he held up the glowing metal, showing the hideous alien what he had fixed to its surface.
Uriel doubted the Nightbringer had any concept of what a melta bomb was, but somehow he knew that it would understand what it could do.
The creature drew itself up to its full height, spreading wide its taloned fists, the burning yellow of its eyes fixing Uriel with its deathly gaze.
Uriel laughed in its face, feeling the alien’s terrible power pressing in on his skull. Visions of death tore at Uriel’s mind, but held no terror for a warrior of the Emperor. He could feel the creature’s consternation at his resistance.
The darkness began to swell around the creature’s form, but Uriel moved his free hand to hover over the detonation rune. He smiled, despite the pain and tormented visions in his head.
‘You’re fast,’ whispered Uriel, ‘but not that fast.’
The Nightbringer hovered before him, flexing its claws in time with the boom of its alien heart. Uriel could feel its power and anger as a physical thing pressing in around him, but he could also sense something else.
Unease? Doubt?
The connection made between them by the Nightbringer granted Uriel the barest insight into the manifestation of this utterly alien being and suddenly he knew that despite the carnage it had wreaked, it was but a fraction of its true power. It was still so very weak and needed to feed. Uriel knew that every second that passed granted the Nightbringer fresh power as it fed on the strong life energies blazing in this place.
This was as close a chance as he was going to get to defeat the alien. Keeping his voice steady he said, ‘This place is filling with explosive fumes and if I detonate this device, you will be buried beneath ten kilometres of rock. I don’t know what you are or where you come from, but I know this. You’re not strong enough yet to survive that. Can you imagine another sixty million years trapped below the surface of this world, with nothing to sustain you? You will be extinguished. Is that what you want? If you can reach into the minds of men, know this. I will destroy us all before I allow you to have that vessel.’
The pressure on his mind intensified and Uriel weakened his mental barrier, allowing the alien to see his unshakeable resolve. Its claws rose and fell, the darkness swirling around its nebulous form as its rage shook the chamber. Cracks split the walls and the red soil of Pavonis spilled through.
Uriel watched as the veil of darkness spiralled around the Nightbringer’s form, sweeping up and over it like a dark tornado, gathering up the shattered remains of its guardian creatures within its furious orbit.
Uriel had a last glimpse of the Nightbringer as its yellow orbs were swallowed up by the encroaching darkness of its ghostly shroud. An alien hiss filled the chamber as the black storm shot upwards, impacting on the gold cap of the ceiling, shattering it into a thousand of pieces.
Then it was gone.
URIEL LOWERED HIS arm, his mind feeling as clear as a summer’s day as the oppressive weight of the Nightbringer’s horrific thoughts departed. He smiled, unable to prevent a huge grin splitting his face. He felt no desire to smile, but the sheer clarity of his own thoughts, freed from visions of murder and torture allowed no other reaction.
He put down the metal, its surface now cold and lifeless, and crawled towards Ario Barzano, who lay unmoving in a vast pool of blood. Uriel knelt beside the inquisitor, searching for a pulse, almost laughing in relief as he felt a weak beat.
‘Get Apothecary Selenus!’
Barzano’s eyes fluttered open and he smiled, his empathic senses also free of the Nightbringer’s visions.
‘It’s gone?’ he coughed.
Uriel nodded. ‘Yes, it’s gone. You held it at bay for just long enough.’
‘No, Uriel, I only pointed the way. You held it off yourself.’
Barzano shuddered, his lifeblood flooding from him.
‘You did well, I am proud of you all. You—’ Barzano’s words were cut off as a coughing fit overtook him and his body spasmed, fresh blood frothing from his chest wound.
‘Apothecary!’ shouted Uriel again.
‘The governor…’ gasped Barzano, through clenched teeth, ‘Look after her, she trusts you. She’ll listen to you… others will too… she will need your counsel and support. Do this for me, Uriel?’
‘You know I will, Ario.’
Inquisitor Ario Barzano nodded, slowly shut his eyes and died in Uriel’s arms.
HAVING GATHERED THEIR dead, the Ultramarines left the chamber of the Nightbringer. The only other survivor of the carnage was Vendare Taloun, whose unconsciousness had prevented the Nightbringer’s visions from driving him insane. Uriel personally marched the man back to the elevator car at gunpoint. There was little need for force: Taloun was a broken man. It irked the Space Marine to have to hand his prisoner a rebreather mask for fear he would succumb to the fumes and escape just punishment for his treachery.
Along with their honoured dead, Uriel took the piece of metal he had removed from the alien’s tomb, its glimmering surface still unblemished despite the none too tender ministrations of his power knife. It would go back to Macragge, to be sealed forever within the deepest vault in the mountains.
When his men had returned to the worker elevator that had brought Barzano to the bottom of the mine, Uriel handed Taloun over to a white-faced Pasanius and said, ‘Wait.’
He returned the way he had come, picturing the faces of all the men he had lost on this mission, but knowing that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
Standing alone in the alien’s tomb, he watched the earth of Pavonis pouring into the chamber, knowing that soon it would be buried once more. But Uriel needed more.
He knelt and placed a cluster of melta bombs on the slab the metal had come from and set the timers.
As he had promised the Nightbringer this blasphemous place would be buried forever under ten kilometres of rock.
Uriel turned and marched wearily from the chamber.
NINETEEN
Three months later…
VENDARE TALOUN WAS executed three months to the day after the battle at Tembra Ridge. During a very public trial, he confessed to his alliance with Kasimir de Valtos, the murder of his brother and a number of other appalling acts in his time as head of the Taloun cartel. He had been led, weeping and soiled, to the wreckage of Liberation Square, where he was hanged fro
m the outstretched arm of the Emperor’s statue.
Several more battles were fought before Imperial rule was restored to Pavonis, most between the squabbling PDF units whose cartel affiliations overcame any sense of loyalty to the cause they had supposedly been fighting for. Deprived of leadership, the cartel followers had soon reverted to their natural prejudices and suspicions.
When the deaths of Solana Vergen, Taryn Honan, Kasimir de Valtos and Beauchamp Abrogas became public knowledge, the cartels were thrown into disarray, paralysed by inaction as the scions and heirs fought for political and financial control.
The battalion commanders who had managed to retain a semblance of order amongst their units pulled back to their barracks to await whatever retribution might come their way. The tanks and soldiers of the Shonai cartel fought several actions to bring those men who had betrayed their oaths of loyalty to justice.
But when the Vae Victus lent her support to an attack on the de Valtos-sponsored barracks with devastating orbital barrages, the flags of surrender were raised as soon as the Shonai tanks came in sight of every other enemy stronghold. The Space Marine vessel had also hunted down the damaged eldar starship and, much to Lord Admiral Tiberius’s delight, blasted it to atoms as it attempted to escape the Pavonis system.
When Mykola Shonai returned to Pavonis it was alongside Lortuen Perjed and at the head of the Ultramarines, their armour repaired and wounds dressed (though the Chapter’s artificers would never be able to remove the cruciform shape burned into the back of Uriel’s armour).
As she took her seat in the Chamber of Righteous Commerce after Vendare Taloun’s execution there were shouts of approval and support from every section of the chamber.
URIEL SAT ON a marble bench, its surface cracked and pitted. This was the only portion of the palace gardens to have escaped the devastation of the shelling and the annihilation of the underground arsenal. Pasanius waited by the far entrance to the gardens, his bolter gripped tightly in his new bionic arm.