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Fear of the Dark - Graham McNeill

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FEAR OF THE DARK

Graham McNeill

The wound was turning to ice. That was a novel sensation for Aethon Shaan. He had discarded his captain’s cloak of iridescent black feathers in the darkened companionways leading to the genaratorium, knowing that it was of no use, that his foes knew the dark just as well as he.

More so.

A warrior of the Raven Guard at a disadvantage in the dark?

Another novel sensation.

Shaan’s gaunt face was that of an alabaster sculpture, lips of blue, eyes cat-like and yellow. He pressed his palm to the deathly chill in his side, feeling the cold seep into his blood to freeze it solid within his veins.

And he was the least wounded.

Revys Kyre was still healing from the bolter wounds he’d taken beneath Calth. Fereld Laotz’s ribcage had been crushed in the collapse of the Tomb of Ventanus and the bones were still regrowing beneath a girdle of regenerative stimulators. Kort Sjaak’s breath came in wheezing rasps through a number of icy claw wounds through his lungs.

None of them were fit to fight, but fight they must.

Do you see it? I’m blind here, said Revys Kyre, using night-sign to pass his words silently.

Shaan made the sign for enemy unseen, feeling like he was making a terrible confession.

What are they? asked Fereld.

Warp spawn, replied Shaan, the gesture obscene.

Shaan had come to Ultramar in search of a traitor, but the hunt that had consumed nearly a century of his life had ended with him transporting the body of Ardaric Vaanes to the Ravenspire as a brother of Deliverance.

Without a Chaplain in whom he could confide and seek guidance, Shaan had been forced to confront his conflicting emotions alone. Pasanius of the Ultramarines had described Shaan as a man unused to the company of others, but that wasn’t true. Shaan could hunt as a lone raven in the dark with superlative skill, but such instances were rare. More often than not, he fought with his warriors, attacking from the shadows, withdrawing and then attacking again.

Their cruiser had left Ultramar without fanfare, and the journey through the immaterium had been unsettling, as always, but without incident.

Or so he had thought until the vessel translated back into their home system.

Something had come back with them. Something monstrous and evil.

Within sight of Deliverance, it claimed their astropath and turned him into a void-dark gateway to a place where the shadows at the end of the world were cast. The dark swarmed through: a host of midnight assassins, swallowers of light and destroyers of flesh. Their touch was ice and froze the blood. They revelled in slaughter and even the Raven Guard were helpless before them.

You think this will work? asked Sjaak, the frozen touch of the Chaos shadows rendering his pallid features almost translucent.

It has to, answered Shaan, moving through cold darkness that, until now, had always been his ally. Spread out.

The vast machines of the generatorium loomed to either side, powerful furnace-engines that supplied the ship with heat and the means to carry its warriors between the stars. They advanced through the darkness towards the stepped plinths where the ship’s crew controlled the titanic machines empowering the cruiser.

The ship’s lumens haven’t been lit in centuries, said Laotz.

Then we may have to do this the old fashioned way, replied Shaan.

The old fashioned way is always messy, said Revys Kyre, who had fought at Shaan’s side the longest.

Shaan didn’t answer, but kept moving towards the brass and wood panels that controlled the shipboard lighting systems. He was no Techmarine, but had befriended enough in his time to gain a basic understanding of how things worked aboard a starship.

He’d just begun to climb the steps when the shadows came to life.

Sjaak was the first to feel their touch. The darkness enfolded him like a trap, fangs and wings and tearing claws that left negative burns on the retina. He screamed once before the darkness pulled him inside and swallowed him whole.

Shaan leapt for the controls and hauled the rusted lever controlling the ship’s illuminators. Ancient machinery engaged with a crash of coupling circuit breakers. Power flowed through the panel.

Shaan hoped for a cascade of functioning illuminators, a dazzling radiance that would drive the monsters away.

Lumen strips that had last known the touch of power four centuries before blew out in a rippling series of explosions. Corroded wiring, recalcitrant machine-spirits or missing components all conspired to deny the Raven Guard the light they so desperately needed. Here and there a light stuttered and flickered, but these were remote islands of illumination in a sea of night.

The shadows giggled and howled.

Run, signed Shaan.

Like a flock of startled crows, the Raven Guard dispersed into the generatorium. Normally each warrior would make his own way back to a designated rally point, moving from shadow to shadow, but the darkness was now their enemy.

Sjaak was next to fall, smothered by a ravenous shadow-pack before he had a chance to move. He fell into endless night, dragged to the Emperor only knew where by a creature of the damned.

Centuries of training and experience warred with the new rules of survival as Shaan bounded between patches of faltering light, pushing ever up-ship towards the bridge. Spindly limbs clawed at him, freezing the plates of his armour and blackening the skin beneath, each touch drawing a measure of his strength from his body.

They feared the light. It burned them as though the hell-realm in which they dwelled was inimical to the touch of anything that might reveal their foulness.

Shaan heard Laotz scream. Bolter fire and lightning discharge strobed the blackness.

The ship was smaller than most in the Space Marine fleet registries, but right now it felt as though he had the length of a battleship to travel. He stumbled as his legs grew numb, the void-touch of the shadows finally reaching his hearts and encasing the mighty organs in ice.

The darkness raced ahead of him, cackling and chittering with glee. The shadows were taunting him with his inability to escape. His hunters were gathering to watch him die, to toy with him before dragging him to his doom.

Shaan crashed into the empty bridge of the cruiser, its many data-slates and hololithic projectors dark and lifeless, the armoured blast shutters protecting the bridge still lowered after their translation. He was alone, and staggered over to the captain’s command throne.

His breath was ice, his lungs freezing within his chest and his twin hearts fighting to beat.

A slick of darkness, oily and impenetrable, poured through the door to the bridge. It was the dark of wasteland space, so far from the stars that it had never known the boon of their light and never would. Shadows capered on the walls, images of claws and horns, forked tails and ebon fangs with an utter absence of anything definable as form.

But it had edges, places where the darkness did not reach.

Which told Shaan that it was finite.

‘You think the Raven Guard are afraid of the dark?’ he said aloud. ‘You’re wrong.’

Shaan hammered his fist down on the throne and shielded his eyes as the blast shutters thundered back into their housings and the polarising filters disengaged. The light of Deliverance’s sun blazed into the bridge like the cleansing fire of the Emperor himself.

And where it touched the shadows it burned them to dead ash.

Shaan felt the heat of the star’s light, and gasped as warmth flooded back into his hardening flesh. The pain was incredible, but he laughed as it buckled him at the knees. He fell to the cruiser’s deck, letting the pain breathe life into him. The shadows had nowhere to hide, and Shaan saw the last of them fall to dissolution with a shriek of inhuman agony.

He heard footsteps and looked up to see Revys Kyre limp onto the bridge.

‘The old fashioned way?’ said the sergeant, shaking his head and wading through the heaps of lifeless ash. ‘Messy as usual.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Graham McNeill has written a host of novels for Black Library, including the ever popular Ultramarines and Iron Warriors series. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Originally hailing from Scotland, Graham now lives and works in Nottingham.

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