by Nick Kyme
Hriak let him go, relieved no longer to be in contact.
‘Do you see now?’ said Numeon. ‘We have suffered much and have little left to lose, save for our honour,’ he told Grammaticus. ‘I would have no compunction killing you now or later if you lie to us or obfuscate the truth again.’
‘I am not lying. Vulkan lives,’ Grammaticus said simply.
‘He doesn’t know anything else,’ rasped Hriak, taking Numeon’s arm as it was offered and getting back to his feet. He had yet to put his helmet back on, even though he was clearly uncomfortable with his comrades seeing his damaged face. Breathing was obviously easier without it, though. ‘Or at least, not yet. His instructions have been imparted psychically. Some are locked. I cannot reach them.’
‘He’s preventing you?’
‘Someone is.’
‘This Cabal, his masters?’
Grammaticus interrupted, ‘They guard their knowledge well. No amount of digging around in my skull is going to unearth what you’re after.’
‘I have to concur,’ Hriak conceded, reaching for his helmet.
‘Either help me or let me go,’ said Grammaticus. ‘This stalemate achieves nothing for either of us. Let me save him.’
‘How?’ asked Numeon, suddenly angry. ‘I need to know. I have to know.’
Grammaticus sagged, defeated. ‘I don’t know. How many times must I say it? I only know it concerns the spear.’
Numeon calmed down, but his frustration was still bubbling under the surface. He turned to the others. ‘The cleric likely has the spear now,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it from him.’
‘From his dead hand,’ put in Leodrakk as he saw the chance for petty revenge.
‘One way or another,’ Numeon replied. He glanced at Grammaticus. ‘Bind him. I don’t want him trying to escape.’
Domadus nodded and began uncoiling a length of rappelling cable from his belt.
‘This is a mistake,’ said Grammaticus.
‘Maybe. Either way you are not leaving us just yet. I want to see what happens when you are reunited with the spear, see what fresh secrets tumble from your mind. Then I’ll have Hriak pry open your skull and extract whatever is hidden within.’
Grammaticus hung his head, let his arms fall by his sides and cursed whatever fates had delivered him to the Salamanders.
Eighty metres from the manufactorum, Narek hunched low behind a half-collapsed wall and peered in awe through his scope.
‘Impossible…’ he breathed, adjusting the focus, enhancing the image through the shattered window-glass.
He saw six legionaries, the guerrilla fighters from before, just as he had predicted. What surprised him was the sight of the man he had killed, the one who could not have survived his wounds and yet stood unscathed in the middle of the manufactorum floor. Standing. Breathing. Alive.
Narek opened the vox to Elias, vaguely aware of his companions around him and knowing the rest were converging from separate angles on the manufactorum.
‘Apostle…’ he began.
Things were about to change.
Despite the attentions of his Apothecary, Elias was in excruciating pain. After a struggle, two legionaries had managed to get him back into his power armour but his burned arm remained unclad. It was black and almost useless. The wounds from the godfire that had seared him seemed unaffected by his enhanced physiology or any healing skill his Legion possessed. Only a rival patron could restore him, and as he sat clenched with agony in his tent, Elias thought bitterly on the failed ritual.
The spear was nearby, lying on a table within reach. It no longer glowed, nor burned. It simply appeared to be a spearhead fashioned from rock and mineral. But that simple shell contained something much more potent.
Elias was considering when to apprise Erebus of his progress, but wanted to be in a clear frame of mind first. His master would have questions, questions Elias wasn’t sure he had the answers to just yet. So when the vox crackled to life, his mood was particularly fractious.
‘What is it?’ he snapped, wincing at the pain in his arm.
It was Narek.
At first Elias was annoyed. How many more times would he have to tell the huntsman what was required of him? It was a simple task, a well-trained dog could do it. He was considering in what manner to sever his ties with Narek when what he heard changed his mind on the subject. The contortion of Elias’s face, a grimace of pain and snarl of anger, turned to interest and machination.
Suddenly the pain seemed to diminish, his maiming become less significant.
The ritual had failed. Not because of the spear, or the words. It was the sacrifice that he had got wrong. Now he knew why.
Elias rose from his seat and reached for his battle-helm.
‘Bring him to me. Alive, so I can kill him.’
Fate and the Pantheon had not abandoned him after all.
He smiled. Erebus would have to wait.
Something had happened. Narek could tell from the tone of Elias’s voice. He sounded in pain, and the huntsman wondered what Elias had tried to do with the spear. Something foolish, driven by hubris. He put it out of his mind. Amaresh was waiting. He could almost hear the eager rush of blood in the other Word Bearer’s veins.
‘What are we waiting for?’ he growled.
Narek didn’t bother making eye contact. He lowered the scope.
‘Plan’s changed,’ he said, relaying his orders across the vox to his men. ‘Our orders are to extract the human. Alive.’
‘You are not serious,’ snarled Amaresh, grabbing for Narek’s shoulder guard. In a single movement, the huntsman twisted the other Word Bearer’s armoured wrist and smashed him down onto the ground. He did it so quickly that the others had barely noticed. Amaresh went to rise, but found the blade of Narek’s knife pressed at his throat. One thrust and it would pierce gorget, neck and bone.
‘Deadly serious,’ he told him. ‘Dagon,’ he began after a few seconds, once he was sure that Amaresh would follow orders. ‘Maintain eyes on all the exits.’
Dagon gave a clipped affirmative.
‘Infrik, come around the front and– Wait, there’s something…’ Narek had looked up to gauge the relative positions of his men. That was when he saw the smallest glint of metal, reflected from a scope lens. ‘Clever…’
Amaresh had only just risen to his feet when the bolt-round entered the back of his battle-helm, into his head, and exited through his left retinal lens in a welter of blood and bone. Even a legionary as gifted as Amaresh couldn’t survive that.
Narek hit the deck.
He doubted that the sniper would take another shot, at least not a meaningful one. He knew the shooter. It was the one from the cooling tower, the legionary who had seen him and Dagon before. Amaresh was a jerking corpse as the last dregs of nervous convulsion left him. Narek found himself liking this enemy.
The plan changed again.
He reopened the vox, relaying calmly, ‘Full attack.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Torment
‘I have seen darkness, witnessed it in my dreams. I am standing at the edge of a chasm. There is no escaping it, I know my fate. For it is the future and nothing can prevent it coming to pass. So I step off and welcome the dark.’
– Konrad Curze,
the ‘Night Haunter’
I returned from the darkness again, only now I possessed the knowledge of how and why. To most men, learning that you are immortal would be the cause of unbridled euphoria. For is it not the ambition of mankind to endure, to live on, to eke out more years? Cryogenics, rejuvenat, cloning, even pacts with fell creatures… Through science or superstition, mankind has always sought to avoid the end. He will cheat it if he can, devoting the resources of his entire existence to just a little more.
I cannot be killed. Not by any means known to me, or to m
y vicious brother. It would not end. Ever.
To know you are immortal is to know that time is meaningless, that every ambition you ever aspired to fulfil could be, one day, within your grasp. You would not age. You could not be maimed or debilitated physically. You would never die.
To know immortality was, for some men, to know the greatest gift.
I knew only despair.
As I came round, the phantom pain in my chest reminded me of the blade my brother had rammed into it. Curze couldn’t kill me. He had tried, extremely hard. It begged the question of what he would do next.
The answer to that would not be long in coming.
When I tried to move my arms, I found that I couldn’t. Disorientated, I was slow to realise that I was neither chained nor back in the dread chamber where my weakness had consigned so many to death; I was in an entirely different trap.
At first I felt the weight upon my shoulders, heavy and biting. Bolts and nails had been hammered into my flesh, pinning them. The device of my apparent crucifixion was some kind of metal armature, humanoid in shape but armoured in barbs and spikes that both extruded from and intruded upon the wearer. A crude mechanism locked into my jaw and chin, forcing it up. My lips were wired together. My legs and arms were sheathed in metal, the latter ending in a pair of blades. Stooped, I felt the first jerk of my marionette’s strings and saw my left leg rise and fall in a single step.
‘Hnngg…’ I tried to speak but the razor in my mouth muffled any protests.
I was in a corridor, the ceiling low enough that my armoured chassis just scraped it. The metal bulk of the death machine I was wearing filled its width. Ahead of me, partially shrouded by the gloom, I saw their eyes. They were wide, and widened further when they saw me, or what had become of me.
‘Run!’ a man wearing a dirty and tattered Army uniform said to another. They fled into the dark, and with the sound of my metal skull scraping the ceiling above, I gave chase. My strides were slow at first, but built with a steady, loping momentum. Rounding a corner, I caught sight of the men. They had taken a wrong turn and were trapped at a dead end. I could smell ammonia and realised that one of the troopers had soiled his fatigues. The other was wrenching a pipe off the wall, trying to make an improvised weapon and a last stand.
He swung it experimentally, like a man standing next to a fire who wields a burning torch to fend off a predator. I heard a low shunk of metal as a switch was thrown remotely. Harsh light suddenly filled the corridor from the search lamps on my chassis, blinding the two men. I tried to resist but my armoured frame propelled me after them, the serrated blades at the ends of my arms blurring into life with a throaty roar.
I tried to stop it. I heaved and thrashed, but could barely move. A passenger of the machine, I could only watch as I turned the men to offal and listened to their screaming. Mercifully, it ended quickly and the air grew still again. Only the sound of my desperate breathing and the gore dripping off my spattered frame in fat clumps disturbed the quiet.
Something scurried past behind me and my deadly armour turned as if scenting prey. I was moving again, striding down the corridor on the hunt for fresh victims. I struggled, but could not stop or slow the machine. Along the next stretch of tunnel, I saw three figures. More of my brother’s slaves. I had been unleashed upon them in this pit, clad in death. Curze was making me kill them.
My lumbering gait turned into a frenzied run, the clanking footfalls like death knells to my ears. Up came the search lamps again, hot and buzzing next to my face, and I saw three men. Unshaven, brawny, they were veterans. As I bore down on them, they grimly held their ground. One had fashioned an axe from a section of plating, a taped-up rag around the narrow end for a handle; another had an improvised club like my last kill; the third just clenched his fists.
Such defiance and insane valour. It would not avail them.
‘Come on!’ the one with the axe shouted down at me. ‘Come on!’
My armoured frame obliged, responding to the goad with chainblades spinning.
When I passed another corridor that crossed with the one I was in, I realised what the veterans had done. My puppeteer did not.
As I reached the crossroads, heading blindly at the three men who were shouting and jeering a few metres beyond the junction, a second group of prisoners sprung the trap. A spear thrust grazed my ribs and I grimaced. It went on into the metal vambrace encasing my left arm, severing some cabling. Oil and fluid began to vent furiously.
Just as I was turning to face my first attacker, a second axe weighed in and embedded itself in my right hip. It bit into my flank but the armour bore the brunt. My chain-blade tried to lash out but the cabling snapped and the armature fell limp.
A stern-faced legionary looked up at me, pulling his spear back for another thrust. He wore the black and white of the Raven Guard, through his armour and iconography had seen far better days. My still functional right arm whipped around and took off the warrior’s head before he could attack again.
As the black, beak-nosed helmet bounced off into the darkness, my search lamps flickered and all of the ambushers attacked me at once. I spun, opening up two of the veteran troopers and spilling them out onto the metal deck. The third stooped to pick up his comrade’s fallen club, but my leg snapped out before he could grab it. The impact hit him square in the chest. I heard ribs break and watched him half spiral down the corridor before crumpling in a lifeless heap.
My last opponent struck again, focusing on the damaged arm, which was spitting sparks and spraying oil. Another legionary loomed into my eye line. My heart sank when I saw the colour of his battle-plate.
Emerald-green.
He was broad-shouldered, the faded insignia of the 15th company emblazoned on his dented pauldron.
Nemetor…
I had believed he was dead. Curze had saved him. He’d done it so I was the one that butchered him.
Entombed in the machine, I was unrecognisable to my son. Ducking a hopeful swipe of my remaining chainblade, he hacked into my left arm and jolted some of the pins impaled in my nerves loose. Some feeling returned, and I found I could move the arm again. Watching Nemetor’s hope turn into horror as the weapon he thought he’d destroyed began to move as I lifted it, I then turned the buzzing chainblade on myself. Momentum from my frenzied machine’s attacks drove the saw into my body, first cutting metal, then flesh.
I let it gore me until darkness began to crouch at the edge of my vision, until death, however brief, reclaimed me.
‘Clever,’ I heard the voice of my brother say.
I blinked, opening my eyes and saw the death machine had been removed and that I was back in my cell.
‘I stand both impressed and disappointed,’ he said.
At first I saw armour of cobalt-blue, trimmed with gold; a firm and noble countenance, framed by close-cropped blond hair; a warrior, a statesman, my brother the empire builder.
‘Guilliman?’ I breathed, hoping, my sense of reality slipping for a moment.
Then I knew, and a scowl crept onto my face.
‘No… it’s you.’
I was sitting with my back against the wall, looking up murderously at my brother.
Curze laughed when he noticed my expression.
‘We’re getting close now, aren’t we?’
‘How long?’ I croaked, tasting ash in my mouth and feeling a fresh brand in my back.
‘A few hours. It’s getting faster.’
I tried to stand, but was still weak. I slumped back.
‘How many?’
Curze narrowed his eyes.
I clarified my question, ‘How many times have you tried to kill me?’
My brother crouched down opposite, within my reach but betraying no concern about retaliation for what he had done to me, what he continued to do to me. He nodded to the wall behind me.
I t
urned to see my reflection mirrored in obsidian. I saw Curze too, and Ferrus Manus, now little more than a walking cadaver in his primarch’s armour, standing just behind him.
‘You see them?’ He pointed to the numerous honour scars branded into my back. Some stood out from the others, a clutch of more recent brandings that I had no memory of and could attribute no oath to.
Curze leaned in and whispered into my ear, ‘A fresh scar every time, brother…’
There were dozens.
‘Every time, you returned to torment me,’ he said.
I faced him. ‘Torment you?’
Curze stood, his armoured form casting a shadow over me from the low light in the cell. He looked almost sad.
‘I am at a loss, Vulkan. I don’t know what to do with you.’
‘Then release me. What is the point of killing me over and over again if I cannot die?’
‘Because I enjoy it. Each attempt brings with it the hope you will stay dead, but also the dread that we shall be forever parted.’
‘Sentiments of a madman,’ I spat.
Curze’s eyes were oddly pitying. ‘I think, perhaps, not the only one. Is our dead brother with us still? Is Ferrus here?’
At the mention of his name, the cadaver’s mouth gaped as if amused. Without eyes or much flesh, it was hard to tell.
I nodded, seeing no point in hiding the fact I saw the undying effigy of Ferrus Manus.
‘I thought so,’ said Curze, unable to shake his melancholy. ‘Our father gave you eternal life. Do you know what he gave me? Nightmares.’ His mood darkened further, his face transformed into genuine anguish. For a moment I caught a glimpse of my brother’s true self and despite all that he had done or claimed to have done, I pitied him.