Oh Blade of Night
Davos sat alone, still brooding over the confrontation. His child, his irascible and impulsive now-heir, was a source of near-limitless frustration. He had never lavished his attention upon Erastus as he had with Evelyne, content to watch them develop in their divergent pathways, to better serve the legacy of their family. Generations long since dead had struggled to forge their dynasty, and it had endured ten thousand years. More sure and steady than any number of the Imperium’s crumbling institutions.
It is a curse, to live long enough to see times such as these. The thought drifted through his mind, even as his quill worked, scratching away at the vellum as he recorded old pilgrim’s paths across the stars, measuring them against recent astrocartography. Wherever he looked, there was the seeping horror of the Rift. Infecting the galaxy, staining everything with its dire and fluctuating tides. To plot a course through it verged upon madness, but to find those points; those places where metaphysics waned and human ambition might prevail… That was the mark of true glory.
‘Perhaps,’ he mused aloud, and the vox-thief built into his desk clicked avariciously at the sound, ‘if Egeria could look at these records? Maybe her Navigator’s sight might see what I cannot.’
He rubbed his eyes, and stood to stretch. When doubt plagued him, he found comfort in pacing the great chamber. He had vague memories of his own father doing the same, while Davos sat at his studies, an occasional question being cast across the room at him.
The current stability of the last promethium intake?
The gunnery complement numbers for the starboard gun decks?
The dominant trade paradigms of Galleti?
Every day of his youth had been a challenge. Everything had been a test. He had taken those lessons to heart, imparted them in turn to Evelyne. Erastus…
He sighed, and quickened his pacing. He walked the edges of the chamber, letting his hand drift across the stellar maps rendered in gold thread upon the tapestries. He toyed with crystalline sculptures as his mind raced.
It was the duty of a father to prepare his children for the wider universe; to prime them for their roles in life. This was as true of the lowest hive-scum as it was for the mightiest of Imperial nobility. He had done as he had thought best. The galaxy was not a kind cradle, and so he had armoured them as they ought to be: with a father’s determination and the terse guidance his own patriarch had handed down to him. Evelyne had risen to the challenge, as befitted the heir, but Erastus… The boy had never truly understood the necessity of what Davos had done. To force him to walk the path of the warrior. To see the Emperor’s dominions as they were, not simply a larder for Erastus’ baser mercantile appetites.
If Davos had been too stringent and unyielding – if he was considered cruel – then let it be so.
There was, of course, the other matter.
He did not look back at the desk, where the missive lay, its presence almost looming up from the wooden surface. When Haran, chief of his astropathic choir, had brought it to him the old psyker had seemed ashen, even by the standards of his stunted complexion. He had left it, and slunk away trembling. To be rid of it was to have discharged a burden. Davos had tried to read it, but it made less sense than the pilgrim’s maps. It was a warped thing. Twisted by the tides of the Rift and a near-impossible transit. A communication from Imperium Nihilus, as impossible as that seemed.
There are few who would attempt such a communion. Could it be–?
He had turned back towards the desk, distractedly reading the text of the Warrant, when he heard a noise behind him. Faint, like the barest hint of movement. He did not look back. He had an idea of who he would find there.
‘Erastus, if you have come to grovel, then–’
The first fall of the blade stopped his words in his throat.
He gasped at the sudden rush of pain and violation, feeling the metal scrape against his spine. A gloved hand, musty leather, forced itself against his mouth as the blade was dragged up. He could feel the spreading wetness of blood, the hot burst of agony. He struggled like a pinned beast, thrashing in the iron-hard grip of his assassin. Davos braced his foot against the desk and pushed back hard, knocking over data-slates and letting the desk-lumen crash to the floor.
Still his assailant did not relent. Instead the hand clenched tighter. Davos tried to spin free, to find some way to put distance between them. To put him in reach of a weapon, or to be one. His hand lashed out, seeking his foe. As he moved round, the assassin shifted, allowing him to wriggle out of his grasp so he could almost escape, could feel the faintest, hopeful desperation.
Davos’ fist found its mark, impacting against the solidity of flesh. It made no difference. The blade came up and across his eyes; there was a flash of white-hot pain, red-stained, before the darkness came. He stumbled backwards, sprawling onto the desk. His blood was soaking into the dark wood of it, seeping into the maps that remained upon its now tarnished surface. He could not see it. It ran under his fingers in a mortal tide. He could feel his life haemorrhaging away, out across the dominions of Man that he had sworn to serve. Only in death would such duty end.
He tried to push himself up, suddenly aware of how weak he was. His limbs flailed, like some grounded oceanic beast. He gawped and gasped for air, alone in the darkness. Isolated in his blind suffering. He felt a hand take hold of his hair, yanking his head up with brutal efficiency. He could feel the blade, cold against his skin and yet warm with his own vitae. He tried to speak. To ask why, to understand. Instead, the blade slid across his throat with a wet rush of release.
He was still alive long enough to feel the assassin’s fingers as they probed the wound in his back.
The assassin turned away from the body, raised its fingers to one of the paler tapestries upon the wall, and began to write.