by Dan Abnett
‘It is not.’
‘Prove it.’
Narek thought for a long time.
‘A comrade would be welcome on my lonely mission,’ he muttered. ‘A battle-brother, an ally. Even… a person in alignment.’
‘Take off the torc,’ John said. ‘Let’s find out where we are. Let’s get in alignment.’
Narek paused.
‘I do not trust you, John Grammaticus,’ he said.
‘I know,’ John replied, ‘but there’s no one else here, and you need to trust someone.’
Narek hesitated, and then reached out and removed the noose from around John’s neck. He slung his cased rifle over his shoulder, took a breath, and drew his bolt pistol from its holster.
He aimed the weapon at John, and, with his other hand, reached for the control stud on the side of the psychic torc.
Narek pressed the stud. At a deep, psychic level, there was a local suspension of vibration. The aching dullness that had been hobbling John’s hind brain for hours began to dispel.
It was an unpleasant, nauseating experience. John staggered, and rested his hand against the wall of the storm drain. His mind was rapidly becoming aware of its environs, an overload of restored psychic feedback.
Narek watched him warily. He unclasped the torc and handed it to John.
John took it.
‘Do not make me regret this,’ Narek said.
‘Oh, he won’t,’ said a voice from behind them.
Narek turned with transhuman speed to locate the source of the voice. His pistol wavered, aiming, seeking a solid target.
Damon Prytanis stepped out from behind the curve of the brick-built drain, an oddly slovenly figure in his dirty fur coat. He had a shuriken pistol aimed in each hand.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said brightly, and opened fire. ‘The Blessed Lady sends her regards.’
Narek fired once, but projectiles had already punched into his hand, arm and shoulder and ruined his aim. The discharged bolt shell shot wild and struck the ceiling of the drain tunnel.
Damon’s fusillade ripped across Narek, a blanket of whizzing monomolecular discs. Damon Prytanis employed none of the feather-finger restraint he had used against the praecentals to conserve ammunition. This was a fully armoured Space Marine. The blitz of razor-rounds shredded into Narek of the Word, and explosively peppered the tunnel wall behind him. John had to dive into the ooze for cover.
‘Johnny-boy!’ Damon yelled, still shooting. ‘Come to papa! It’s time to depart!’
Narek went down into the sluice water, hurt and gagging, his plasteel fingertips scraping on the limed brick walls.
John got up and staggered past him towards Damon Prytanis.
‘You bloody idiot!’ John yelled. ‘I had him. I had him right where I wanted him!’
Damon nodded. ‘Right. Eating out of your hand. You’d virtually broken that torc’s restraint, right? You were right in his head.’
‘No! I was negotiating. I had him. I was persuading him!’
‘Screw that,’ said Damon. ‘Life’s way too short. That’s your trouble, John. You like to solve problems the hard way. You don’t like to get wet. You’re too genteel. Let’s exit.’
They started to run along the drain, side by side, towards the next outfall.
‘What are you doing here?’ John asked him. He slowed his pace for a second and winced.
‘What?’ Damon asked. ‘What’s up?’
‘My head. It’s been blanked for too long. Everything’s coming back. Perceptions. It’s not pleasant. I asked you a question, Prytanis. What are you doing here?’
Damon grinned.
‘The usual. Gahet asked me to check you were performing according to schedule.’
‘You’re my insurance?’
‘Positively, yes.’
‘And if it looks like I’m falling down on the job?’
Damon Prytanis shrugged, Guh’hru in one hand and Meh’menitay in the other.
‘Guess I’d just have to mess you up to teach you a lesson,’ he said. Then he laughed.
‘I’ll tell you what you’ve messed up,’ said John. ‘This whole entire assignment. The Cabal should never have sent in the cavalry.’
‘Cavalry, am I? You know something, I actually was, once. Seventh Cavalry. Tell you what, those Lakota–’
‘You know what I mean,’ said John.
‘So do you. You know they had to,’ said Damon. ‘You were wavering.’
‘I was not.’
‘You so were. This job needs to get done, and done fast. Vulkan has to die. That’s the way it has to go. That’s the order of it all. You’ve got this spear thing?’
John gestured with the carrybag in his hand.
‘Good,’ said Damon. ‘Good for you. That’s all that matters. Let’s get this done. I’ll be there as your support. Your… guarantee. So tell me, Johnny, how is this supposed to work? Gahet was not specific.’
‘I place the spear in the hands of a primarch, and in his hands, that spear becomes capable of slaying another of the eighteen.’
‘Vulkan.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do we know why Vulkan is the target?’
‘It’s just another version of the Alpharius Position,’ said John. ‘Horus has to win this war, and win it so brutally that the human race is engulfed and takes the taint of the Primordial Annihilator with it to its grave. The victory of Horus and the death of our species is the pyre that burns Chaos out. That means major loyalist players like Vulkan must be turned or taken out.’
‘So, the spear?’ asked Damon. ‘Which one of Vulkan’s brothers do you give it to? I mean, here on Macragge? I don’t see either Guilliman or the Lion being willing to take a pop at Vulkan.’
‘There is one viable candidate on this world,’ said John Grammaticus.
‘There’s another primarch here? Who?’
‘Curze,’ said John.
Damon stopped and whistled. ‘Curze? That maniac is on Macragge?’
‘Yes, he is,’ said John. ‘The last thing I sensed before the Word Bearer captured me was the Night Haunter making planetfall.’
Damon shuddered. He looked up at the sewer roof.
‘Screw that. I didn’t sign on for Konrad Curze.’
‘Well, Damon, let me put it this way… ‘ said John. ‘Boo hoo, too late.’
He didn’t hear Prytanis’s sardonic reply. A fierce migraine was knifing him suddenly, almost forcing him to his knees. Tears welled in his eyes.
‘John? What is it?’
John Grammaticus’s psykana gift was suddenly returning in full force. The flooding rush of restored perceptions was almost overwhelming. He was registering the unmediated auras and perceptions of the Civitas around him. It was too much, like a vox floating between channels, its volume turned up full. He struggled to establish some control.
He got sharp waves of pain, anger, outrage. He looked at Damon Prytanis.
‘I can feel…’ he tried to explain. ‘My psyk’s returning. Fast. Oh.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a good thing we’re not relying on Guilliman or the Lion,’ said John, struggling to maintain his wits.
‘Why?’ Damon asked warily.
‘Guilliman is gone. The Lion too. They’re dead, Prytanis.’
‘Are you joking?’ asked Damon. ‘Tell me you’re damn well joking!’
‘I wish I was,’ John replied. He was shaking with the intensity of the psyk-rush. ‘The sense of hurt and loss is so strong. I’m getting it from the minds of hundreds of Ultramarines and Dark Angels.’
‘Pull yourself together. Come on. If this is true, I need you sharp.’
John swallowed hard and nodded.
‘Yes. Right. I will,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s just a lot to deal with. You wou
ldn’t understand. Imagine being deaf for a few hours, getting your hearing back, and then getting shouted at by everyone in a city all at once.’
Damon maintained eye contact, concern on his face.
‘I’m all right,’ said John. ‘It’s becoming a little more stable now.’
He glanced over his shoulder.
‘You didn’t kill him,’ he said.
‘The Word Bearer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Damn. I thought I’d done that very nicely.’
‘Well, you didn’t,’ said John. ‘I can read him, getting back on his feet. He’ll come after us. He’s good at that, Damon.’
‘We had better keep moving then, hadn’t we?’ said Damon.
They used a stone rain chute to clamber back up to street level. It was a few hours before dawn. The sky was heavy with air cover from the Fortress.
‘That’s a major search,’ said Damon.
‘Curze ripped the heart out of the Fortress tonight,’ John replied. ‘They’re hunting for him and for Vulkan.’
‘Can you find either of them?’
John paused, concentrating.
‘Curze, no. It’s as if I can read him sometimes, and then at other moments he’s utterly invisible. As though he can cloak his mind. When I can read him, it’s unbearable, but the rest of the time he’s not even a shadow.’
‘What about Vulkan?’ asked Damon.
‘Wait, I’m trying.’
‘Well, we need them both,’ said Damon.
They walked slowly along a quiet backstreet between two grander avenues. John focused his mind. He had been attuning it to Vulkan’s thought signature since setting foot on Macragge. It was hard when that thought signature was so deranged. It was also hard in the middle of a city filled with so many agitated, unguarded minds.
He smiled.
‘What?’ asked Damon.
‘I think I have Vulkan. He’s moving south of us, south-east. Going into Anomie Deme.’
Damon nodded.
‘What’s he doing there?’
‘No idea. He’s hard to read. He’s… not entirely sane these days.’
‘Great. We’re tracking a mad primarch?’
‘Yeah. Didn’t the Cabal tell you that? Didn’t Gahet brief you? I hope they gave you plenty of ammo. And danger money.’
Damon scowled. ‘But you found him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Still no read on Curze?’
‘Not yet,’ said John.
‘Well, one of them is a start. Good job. Good job, John. You look pleased with yourself.’
John was. Focusing on Vulkan’s thought pattern had revealed something else to him. The enforced psychic isolation created by Narek’s torc had allowed his brain to quietly, subconsciously unpack.
Suddenly, he was able to see clearly what the farseer’s conduit had imprinted on his mind. He understood what Eldrad Ulthran wanted him to do.
He understood how.
He understood why.
He took a deep breath. Finally, here was a way he could serve the forces of light. He could defy the wishes of the Cabal, and fight for his birth-race. At last he could strike a proper blow for his species, something he had been longing to do since his xenos masters first dragged him into the Horus War.
Of course, it would cost him his life, but that hardly seemed a big price to pay.
The pair of them straightened up and moved off down the street, following a route that Damon had dug up on a data-slate, a route that would get them into Anomie Deme by the shortest path.
High up on a jutting, ornamental rain spout, a crouching shadow watched them move.
Curze licked his lips.
This piece was a fascinating new addition to the spilled jigsaw of his mind. From the moment he had stepped out of the Nymphaeum pool, new visions had been coming to him. The crazed, random flow of his waking dreams had shown him a possibility called John Grammaticus. There was something curious about Grammaticus. Curze wasn’t sure what it was exactly, but it was creepy and abnormal. Grammaticus was not a regular human. He was, somehow, like many humans all at once, or like a single human with inexplicable dimensional proportions. In particular, his fourth dimension, his time, was stretched, elongated…
It didn’t matter. The latest reflections had shown Curze one especially clear thing. There was a spear, a spear that could kill Vulkan. Not only that, Grammaticus was supposed to give the spear to Curze so he could use it.
He would use it. He would use it to finish what he had started in the Iron Labyrinth.
It would make the night perfect. Sunrise would reveal that Konrad Curze had descended like an eclipse upon bright Macragge and, in one period of darkness, had slain three of the Emperor’s sons, including the one that, apparently, could not die.
That was a fundamental achievement, a superlative ritual achievement, a crushing achievement: haughty Guilliman, the vainglorious Lion, the unkillable Vulkan.
All three, in one single night.
Horus could go burn in the warp! Nothing he had achieved was even half so impressive! Konrad Curze was about to anoint himself as the Emperor’s greatest and most formidable son.
He would do it by bringing his father’s Imperium crashing down more thoroughly and painfully than anything that the Lupercal had so far managed. He would do it by bringing about not a change of state or leadership, but utter galactic oblivion.
They would die. All of the primarchs would die, and in dying they would witness the sheer magnificence of his terror.
Curze rose. The two men on the empty street below him hurried out of sight.
He spread his tattered cloak and launched himself towards the next rooftop.
21
Dreams and
Visions
‘There is only one way to see, and that is through
the knowledge of one’s own eyes,
looking straight ahead.’
– Rogal Dorn, Principles of Sound Defence
The sun came up fast. It was bright and warming. He watched it glinting off the waters of the bay.
He tried to relax.
The farm workers had started their toil early, wandering up the mountain slopes from the settlement below before sunrise, their scythes across their shoulders. He could hear them, as he had heard them for the last two hours, taking their blades to the grasses that threatened to choke Sotha’s black halls, laughing, chatting.
He could smell the rich scent of cut stalks filling the early morning air.
Guilliman sat down on the grassy promontory, the upper slope of Mount Pharos. He wiped a hand across his brow.
Sotha was a good world, a peaceful place. All of the forces and influences that insisted he return to Macragge were somehow softened here in this summer light. Guilliman, to his shame, realised how much he craved this peace. Sotha was like a mythical Eden. For an irrational moment, Roboute Guilliman willed Dantioch to fail in his efforts to re-tune the Pharos, and wished never to return. A part of him knew that he could live out his days on Sotha in utter contentment, barebacked and tanned in the sunlight, careless, mowing the grasses with his scythe, season in and season out.
It was just a dream. Such simple, pastoral destinies did not lie in store for beings like Roboute Guilliman. Fate held, for him, a future of duty and responsibility, very different from that which might await an honest agri-worker. No common farmer would play a role in the final battle against Horus.
He heard a heavy tread crunching towards him and looked up.
‘My lord,’ Sergeant Arkus said, saluting. He was carrying his company’s standard.
‘At ease, Arkus,’ Guilliman told the Ultramarine. Arkus’s armour glinted in the sunlight.
‘You’re trying too hard,’ he added.
‘My lord?’
‘When
I arrived last night, your armour was in perfectly respectable condition, as was the plate of the other battle-brothers in your company. I remember these things. This morning, you’ve buffed your plate to the point of insanity.’
‘My primarch is here,’ Arkus said, offended. ‘A surprise inspection of this post. What else would I do?’
Guilliman got up and faced him.
‘I’m sorry, Arkus. My remark was petty and uncalled for. Your armour code is perfect.’
Arkus nodded, and rested the base of the standard on the ground.
‘My lord,’ he said. ‘I am an Ultramarine. Trying too hard is the entire point of us, isn’t it?’
Guilliman smiled and saluted Arkus.
‘Make your report, brother,’ he said.
‘Warsmith Dantioch says we will be ready to test in one hour,’ Arkus said.
‘You can tell him I’ll be there,’ Guilliman said.
Arkus saluted and walked away.
Guilliman turned his face towards the sun and tilted his head back.
‘Brother?’
Guilliman turned and saw the Lion walking down the mountain slope towards him. Behind the Lion, a young Scout from the 199th Aegida followed anxiously.
‘Brother?’ Guilliman returned.
The Lion sat down on a boulder, tired and frustrated. He locked his hands over his knees.
‘Roboute,’ he said, ‘you should listen to this young neophyte. What’s your name, lad?’
‘Oberdeii, my lord,’ the Scout said.
‘Tell it to Roboute… My pardon, tell the primarch before you,’ said the Lion, ‘what you told me.’
Oberdeii looked at Guilliman.
‘It’s all right,’ Guilliman said. ‘Tell me, son.’
‘The most noble Lord of the First,’ replied the Scout, ‘was asking me about this site, about the experience of the posting here. I may have spoken out of turn.’
‘Then if the harm is done,’ said Guilliman, ‘you can do no more harm repeating it. Speak, Oberdeii. There will be no repercussions.’
‘Well, then, about this place, lord,’ Oberdeii said. ‘It is an odd place to be. An odd place to garrison for any time. The Pharos… It breeds dreams. It is alive with them. If you stay here long enough, or live here as we do, the dreams begin to permeate you. They are as much part of this mountain as the grass, rock and air.’