Nocturne Read online

  WARHAMMER 40,000

  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 Emperor’s 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.

  Have you ever been to our benighted world?

  Its name literally means ‘night’, but we do not dwell in darkness.

  Hell comes to our cities and our peoples,

  it visits upon the earth such ravages as to make the sky black as sackcloth and the ground spew red, molten death.

  It is not a hospitable world, this world,

  for monsters lurk in its fuliginous depths and death is but a slip away for the careless, the unwary or the simply ill-fortuned.

  It is not a populous world because much of it cannot be populated.

  The mountains are bleak, craggy places, their summits wreathed with poisonous fumes.

  The deserts are many, and they are desolate, unforgiving plains of ash.

  Our few rivers are veins of acid and alkali, tainted by the sulphurous earth.

  We have no forests, save for the petrified groves that lurk in the hot shadows of our tallest peaks.

  Our fauna takes to the air on leathern wing or hunts the dune with tusk and claw.

  It is serpentine and reptilian; chitinous and saurian.

  But it is home, this broken land, and we defend it with our blood and breath.

  Woe betide any who come here seeking to put it asunder.

  They will find it a terrible place, a very terrible place.

  – Unknown Nocturnean tribesman of Themis

  PROLOGUE

  Black as old night, the giant asteroid hurtled through the void. Trailing cosmic wake, this harbinger had come far. It careened through space lanes, circled gravity wells, coursed alongside refulgent suns and past barren moons. Dead stars witnessed its passage, a seemingly random trajectory, but there was nothing random about fate. It skirted the atmosphere of a dozen backwards worlds, its potent magnetic field wreaking cataclysm and consigning to oblivion a host of lesser races whom the universe would never know and so never mourn.

  It was immense, a terrible gnarled orb, fanged with crags, colonised by hungry craters and possessed of a seeming sentience. Contrails of persistently clinging dust shadowed it like gossamer-thin fingers attempting to seize upon its celestial coattails. Dark splinters shed from its mass into an even darker plane, like jagged knives of night. It was inexorable, but when the warp swallowed it only to disgorge its unholy form back into reality, its journey was nearing its end. A world hung in its path, red and hot against the benighted canvas of space. It was a world of burning skies, of jet black mountains and deserts of fire.

  Centuries earlier, the Black Rock’s erratic course had been set. The Architect’s own clawed hand had put it into motion. Those with the sight, who could perceive the grand conjurations of the galaxy, would behold the strands of fate pulling it towards the red world, presaging apocalypse. They had but to look upon it.

  The Black Rock had seen much, and borne many travellers upon its ancient back over the years. The last had been tenacious, slow to die even when exposed to the cold grip of the void. Entire systems had fallen prey to its destructive appetites, devoured in the wake of its passing like tiny archipelagos erased by a violent tsunami.

  It was destiny. It was doom.

  The red world loomed before it, ringed by a haze of pyroclastic cloud.

  A fiery hell world, a furnace of the universe where civilisations were forged.

  Nocturne.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I

  The Killing Place

  This place was death. Its shadow clung tenaciously to every alcove, every column. It lurked beneath every archway and crept inside every antechamber. Whispering like the husk of a corpse, it was the final exhalation of dust swathing the cracking brick in a patina of age and melancholy. The very air reeked of it, flavoured with copper. The gummy rime underfoot that softened his boot tread was further evidence, so too the redness of the walls. Fear came with it and laced the atmosphere with a greasy pall. He could feel it trying to adhere to his bare skin: fear, and anticipation.

  Darkness only partially hid the crumpled forms of those that had come before him. Some had been dragged back into the barracks, broken and only half resembling men. Others had been recovered with shovels or would later be sluiced from the ground in a manky fluid.

  Many found it was the waiting that was worst. Brutal warriors became gibbering wrecks in the quietude before the killing-time, where all they could hear was the roar and the scream. He was not shaking; he barely moved at all, except to breathe. His time had come, the one before him had been ended.

  How many did that make for the beast? A tally of seven?

  An auspicious number, he thought, rising from his haunches.

  He’d seen some fighters clasp their hands together before going to their deaths, their lips mumbling oaths and promises in the hope of fortune. Others seized fists of earth as if tasting the battlefield and reading its ebb and flow. Such things were distractions only. They merely delayed and deluded. When he got to his feet, he rotated his arms in their sockets, and cracked his knuckles. His piecemeal armour clanked lightly as he did it; the chain attached to his weapon rattled dulcetly. He closed his eyes and peered through the narrow slits of his helmet a different being. To be a warrior was to be protean, the transition of one aspect to another. Mastery of both was the doorway to harmony and martial excellence. To embrace anything other was just reckless. For if a sword remained forever unsheathed it would eventually cut something for which it was not intended. When he opened his eyes again, his world was limned in crimson and he was of the killing mind.

  I am Helfist. I am gladiator.

  He climbed a sandy incline to the chorus of his chinking gladiatorial panoply. It was mainly leather, armour of the Old Ways as was tradition, but included some plated elements by way of aesthetic flourish. At the end of the ramp were a gate and a pair of grim-looking guardians festooned in metal from head to toe. Hulking, tall and muscular as if genebred for the very vocation, they still needed to look up as he strode past them.

  Through the metal-banded doors, through the slim gaps in their bars, he could see the killing place. It was sand, it was blood-scent and it was torture.

 
He heard the screaming, the broken ones that pleaded and the baying of beasts…

  Slowly but inexorably, the doors opened. Hollow skulls strung to their bars added a jangling refrain to the heavy creak of the iron.

  Sunlight washed in, as red and visceral as the walls of the passageway.

  He let it bathe his half-naked body before running the rest of the way up the ramp that led into the killing place. Ignoring the crunch of bone beneath him, Helfist stepped into the arena and listened to the adulation of the crowd.

  His eyes never left the arena floor. There his fate was all too easy to see in the corpses of the other combatants. Men lay without limbs in drying pools of their own blood, or with heads cut from bodies and left to fester in the sun, or bloated with gangrenous poison, their eyes bulging and their appendages in the final throes of nerve spasm. Such were the destinies of all warriors in the end.

  We are all merely ash on the wind, waiting to return to the mountain.

  A brother in arms had said that to him once, before war had crippled him and turned his friend from poet to cankerous recluse.

  A roar met his arrival in the arena, but the gladiator of Themis was unmoved. Let the mob bay and take their fill, it mattered not – his mind was on survival. Helfist adjusted the visor of his helm and peered through an aperture of pitted iron at the monstrous creature dominating the arena with its size and violent presence.

  Scorpiad.

  It was finishing the last morsels of its meal, another gladiator partly dissolved by intestinal acid from the creature’s ruddy maw, when its attention turned to Helfist. Anticipating carnage, the belligerent crowd quietened to a dull murmur.

  Dropping its half-eaten feast, the scorpiad advanced with clicking, syncopated movements.

  A dirt-dweller, the creature had tiny insect eyes that glittered like a pair of black pearls in its crustacean-like face. Overlapping bone plates formed a chitinous shell that shimmered like umber carapace over its snout and back. Its eight limbs were gnarled, but scaly rather than shelled, and its ribbed underbelly was thick and leathern.

  Due to their subterranean natures, scorpiads were not easy to catch. Groups of nomadic Ignean trappers went out onto the Arridian Plain in packs, tempting the creatures with sauroch carcasses, drawing them from their greasy burrows with the overwhelming promise of blood. Pay from the Themian Gladiatorial Guilds was high for any monstrous bounty brought intact and capable of fighting in the arena. It was just as well, for hunting the scorpiad came with a high mortality rate.

  Helfist could well appreciate that as the monster shifted its bulk towards him. It was massive, dwarfing even the giant gladiator and many times heavier. He drew back as it came on, eliciting some derisive goading from sections of the watching crowd. Behind their high walls and glass domes, looking down onto the anachronistic arena, what did they have to fear? They desired battle and death, not posturing.

  Helfist gave it to them.

  Goading the scorpiad with shouts and threats, he let it attack first. It lunged with a blood-crusted claw, which he ducked then rolled under to ram a fist-spike into the fleshy part of the monster’s limb. Its cry of pain manifested as a disconcerting wheeze from its puckered maw, where its mandibles clacked in agitation.

  Scuttling back, it dived down at him with its other claw like a spear, but only managed to impale dirt. Helfist yanked out the spike and a gushet of ichorous green fluid came with it. The acerbic stink of bile-acid burned at his nostrils and the weapon came out slightly corroded. He leapt to avoid the sweep of the scorpiad’s legs as it turned, and came up out of another roll just in time to see its barbed tail whipping towards him. Helfist parried using the glove of his fist-spike but felt the impact all the way to his shoulder. In seconds, the metal guard was rotten with venom from the scorpiad’s stinger, so he discarded it and left the weapon to slowly dissolve on the ground behind him.

  As he ranged around to the creature’s blindside it followed, scuttling sideways around its core, pummelling at Helfist as it moved. Dust was kicked up in the wake of the frenzied claw attack that also sent bits of dead gladiator spewing upwards like aerial chum. Helfist ducked and weaved, sprang back and bounded forwards again foiling every hammering impact of the scorpiad’s pincers. Hungry and becoming increasingly agitated; it combined thrusts of its tail with limb-slicing snaps of its claws. A spurt of acid from its fanged, tubular mouth left a burn scar across the sand but Helfist dodged that too. He pulled the monster around in circles, hacking off chips of chitin with a broad, crescent-shaped blade chained to his wrist and forearm. He went in low beneath its guard, dragging a bloody gash across its ribbed belly and drawing another agonised wheeze as the beast felt the wound bite. For Helfist it was exhilarating. His hearts were beating like forge hammers in his chest and above him the tumult of the crowd was growing. It had been a long time since he’d felt this vital, this strong, this invincible. He liked the sensation – it was addictive.

  Seven gladiators had died to this beast: seven hard men with warrior-spirits and wills of iron. Helfist was taking the scorpiad apart like it was nothing.

  The monster thrashed at him as he came from beneath it and this time he lashed out with his blade, cleaving a gore-slick wedge in the tail. It reared up on its hind legs, turning swiftly, its claws snapping impotently at the air.

  Helfist looked up at it, a sneer just visible below the visor of his helmet.

  ‘You are an ugly brute,’ he told it in a deep, chasmal voice. He released the grip on his forearm blade and it dropped to the ground like an anchor, the chain around his wrist unfurling as it fell.

  Every link was serrated like a knife-edge and as the scorpiad came thunderously back down Helfist yanked the blade up from the ground. As it cut through the air, it gave off a high-pitched keening sound before wrapping around the monster’s left foreleg.

  Helfist tugged and the serrated links of the chain drew taut and began to saw. The scorpiad stumbled, a panicked bleat issuing from its bubbling mouth. He heaved again and the chain came loose as the limb broke away from its host in a welter of greenish blood.

  It barely had time for a weak and flailing riposte before Helfist swung again, this time for a rear leg, and tore off another limb. Spewing dark and viscous fluid from the ruined stumps of its missing appendages, the scorpiad slumped down onto its belly. The tail whickered out as Helfist came on but he countered with a lash from his chain-glaive and the barbed tip was sent bundling across the arena floor, separated from the rest.

  A healthy sweat sheened the gladiator’s body, helping to define his immense musculature, and his chest heaved with a deep but strong rhythm. The cured black leather of his armour blended perfectly with his slab-like skin, and the sun made it shimmer like oil as he went down on his haunches to look the monster in the eye.

  ‘This was never a fair fight,’ he said with quiet solemnity. Some of the scorpiad’s blood had sprayed the bare flesh of his arms, adding to the many scars they already carried. ‘It will be quick,’ he added, rising.

  Helfist let the crescent-blade fall from his grasp as he reached up over his hulking shoulders to retrieve a long-hafted hammer. It was a magnificent piece of artifice that gleamed brightly in the light. Pistons worked in the weapon’s head, increasing its power and impact.

  Hefting it two-handed, Helfist split the scorpiad’s mewling face in two and ended its suffering. He turned and held the gore-slick piston-hammer aloft in salute of his opponent and his triumph.

  The mob roared.

  When Helfist returned to the barracks someone was waiting for him.

  ‘I thought I would find you here in these… pits.’ He spat the word as if it left an acrid flavour in his mouth.

  The figure was almost as tall as Helfist, clad in bulky green armour. Ribbed servos linked the joints between each concomitant plate and whirred as he moved. He still wore his battle-helm, which was white as opposed t
o green as was his right shoulder pad. The left guard bore the image of a snarling orange drake head on a black field to signify his allegiance.

  Helfist was carefully removing his leather hauberk and scraping the blood from his body with a sharp-stone. A robed and hooded serf waited in the shadows behind him with its head bowed.

  Overhead red sunlight hazed in, cut into grainy shafts by the barracks’ lattice ceiling. It illuminated suits of armour of all stripes and eras, and copious racks of war gear. There was a surgery too, its doorway shawled by a sheet of darkly spattered leather. Another gladiator, a survivor of the scorpiad, was inside laid up on the slab for the medicus to do his gruesome work. Underfoot was grit and sand in homage to the Old Ways. The air reeked of metal and sweat.

  Helfist answered without looking up from what he was doing. ‘You don’t approve of the Themian hell-pits then, brother?’

  ‘No. I simply object to having to come all this way to track you down.’

  There was bitterness in the other’s voice that Helfist found hard to reconcile. He kept his eyes on his labours though, unclasping one of his vambraces and dropping it into a barrel of oil to soak. ‘Keeps the leather supple,’ he said, ‘so it doesn’t crack in the heat.’

  The reply was caustic. ‘I know how to tend armour, even those barbaric trappings.’

  Helfist met the other’s gaze. His eyes burned like red furnaces. ‘It has been so long since I saw you with bolter and blade in clenched fist that I thought you might need reminding, Emek. How long since you graced the training cages or the arenas?’

  The Apothecary, Emek, didn’t answer. He stepped forwards. It wasn’t a deliberately aggressive gesture but Helfist turned his shoulders towards him and squared his body ready for a fight.

  Emek scoffed, ‘You’ve been in these tribal slums too long, Ba’ken.’

  Ba’ken scowled and clenched a fist. ‘These are your roots, brother. Too much time spent secreted in darkness on Prometheus has made you forget!’ His anger ebbed and he relaxed. ‘It’s time you took your head out of Fugis’s data-slates and rejoined your Chapter.’