The Dark King - Enhanced Audio Edition by Graham McNeill

Author:Graham McNeill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

SCENE 6: Curze’s Judgement

[ATMOS: the bridge of a starship; the hum of engines; dialogue echoes in the chamber]

Night Haunter turned over the last card and his jawline tightened as the familiar pattern emerged once more. The strategium of his flagship was kept dark, the faint blue light of consoles and hololithic displays islands of light in the darkness.

The primarch of the Night Lords paid no attention to his surroundings, ignoring the pregnant pressure of anticipation that bristled from every member of his bridge crew.

A deck of worn cards sat on the softly glowing lectern before him, their edges scuffed and curled from decades of shuffling and dealing. Little more than a parlour game played by the indolent rich of Nostramo Quintus, he had since discovered that variations of these cards had been employed in the hives of Merica and by the tribes of the Franc as a means of divination in the time before Old Night had descended.

The cards apparently corresponded to the stratification of society at the time, with the various suits representing warriors, priests, merchants and workers. Ancient belief held that the future could be read in the patterns of cards known as the Lesser Arcanoi, but such traditions were outmoded concepts in this colourless, secular galaxy.

Except that no matter how thoroughly he shuffled the cards and dealt them on the polished glass of the lectern, the pattern was always the same.

The Moon, the Martyr and the Monster lay in a triangular pattern. The King lay reversed at the feet of the Emperor on one side of the pattern, and on the other, also reversed, was the Dove – a card academics postulated was a symbol of hope. The card he had just dealt sat at the top of the pattern, a card that had changed little over the centuries and the meaning of which, though often misinterpreted, was unmistakable.

CURZE: Death.

[SFX: Shang approaches over the deck]

He heard footsteps and looked up to see Captain Shang approaching, clad in his battleplate and wrapped in his ceremonial black cape of gleaming patagium. His helmet’s flaring wings framed a death mask of an alien skull, its tusked lower jaw thrust beyond his throat.

Behind his equerry, Night Haunter could see the gently rotating orb of Nostramo displayed on the viewscreen. Thick clouds of pollutants ringed the grey planet, shot through with emphysemic yellows and leprous browns. The radiation-blasted moon of Tenebor was just visible as a sickly orb emerging from the stained-lung corona of Nostramo’s dying sun.

CURZE: What it is, captain?

...asked Night Haunter.

SHANG: Word from the Choir chambers, my lord.

Night Haunter chuckled mirthlessly.

CURZE: My brothers?

SHANG: It would appear so, my lord.

Shang said.

SHANG: The astropaths sense a psychic bow-wave that appears to indicate a great many vessels approaching through the empyrean.

CURZE (muttering): Dorn...

...said Night Haunter, returning his attention to the cards before him.

SHANG: Undoubtedly. What are your orders, my lord?

Looking once again at the world of his youth, Night Haunter felt the ever-present anger seething under his skin like hot magma beneath the fragile crust of a dying planet.

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