by Nick Kyme
Numeon turned back to the human. ‘Are you all right, are you–’
Grammaticus aimed his fist at him. Something sparkled on the ring he wore.
‘Better than you, I’m afraid.’
The las-beam stabbed into Numeon’s retinal lens, burning out his eye and searing his face beneath. He cried out, clutching his eye, the trauma of it putting him on his knees. The bolt had struck him, and split part of his armour. It wasn’t clotting properly, Numeon’s enhanced physiology undone by something in the storm, something the cleric had incepted. It made the eye burn all the more painfully.
Half blind, he snatched for the human, meaning to crush him this time.
Grammaticus had hit him with a potent charge. Whilst the legionaries were plotting their assault on the space port and this cunning feint to get him to another ship, he had been altering the tech in his ring. The blast had exhausted it. The digital weapon was done and wouldn’t charge again, but it pierced the legionary’s defences and put him down long enough to scurry from the warrior’s grasp.
He snatched the fulgurite from Numeon’s scabbard, deftly avoiding the Salamander’s grab.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Grammaticus, his voice growing more distant the farther away he ran, ‘but you were in my way.’
Running hard against the storm, he reached the ship. The gentle throb of turbine engines was obvious up close. Now he was alongside the ship, he could see it more clearly. He looked back for any sign of his captors.
Lightning crackled in the distance that was not caused by the storm. It illuminated three figures, armoured in legionary battle-plate. One other, the Raven, opposed them. Numeon was still down but rising.
He could pilot this vessel without the Salamander’s help, but Grammaticus knew he didn’t have long to get aboard and get away. Moving around to the rear access ramp, he paused.
There was something dripping through the rear access hatch, as if someone had released a valve and filled the hold with water. It was dark, murky and reeked of stagnation. There was something wrong about this place, this city. Grammaticus had felt it ever since he had made planetfall with Varteh and the others. He had no weapon – the ring was useless, and so he could only rely upon his own wits. At that precise moment they seemed more than a little fragile.
Hammering the hatch release icon, Grammaticus braced himself for what was within. He had wanted to leap up and onto the gunship’s still descending ramp, to rush to the cockpit and quit Traoris for good, but the figure standing before him was blocking his path.
Trapped for so long in the drainage basin, all those years… The water had not been kind. Grammaticus couldn’t remember his name, but the thing glaring at him through the strands of lank hair hanging down over its sunken face knew Grammaticus.
Instinctively, he backed away, his ankle throbbing where the five tiny weals still showed on his flesh.
‘You aren’t…’ he began, but how could he be sure? All the things he had seen, all the deeds he had done…
The drowned boy advanced towards Grammaticus, his gait shuffling and unsteady, leaving a trail of drain water behind him.
A childhood trauma, one from his first life; why did this horror eclipse all the others?
Grammaticus recoiled and found unyielding war-plate preventing further retreat. He turned to face his attacker, knowing the game had ended at last.
‘You’re headed the wrong way if you want to escape,’ said Numeon, one eye ablaze through his retinal lens.
Glancing back, Grammaticus saw that the drowned boy was gone. But the delay had cost him dearly.
‘Is this when you kill me?’ he asked, still a little shaken but shoring up his composure with each passing second.
‘I should have killed you when I saw you. Tell me this. Is what you said true, does Vulkan still live?’
‘As far as I know–’ Grammaticus’s answer was cut by the report of a bolt pistol.
In front of him, Numeon convulsed as the shell struck him in the torso and punched the Salamander off his feet.
‘You have proven remarkably elusive, John Grammaticus,’ said a cultured, yet terrifying voice. The dull click of a bolt pistol being primed to fire again froze Grammaticus in place. He turned, having made it halfway up the ramp, and saw the Word Bearers cleric drawing down on him. ‘But then you are quite remarkable, aren’t you?’
‘So I’m told,’ he said, fulgurite still in hand.
‘Give the spear to me,’ the Dark Apostle ordered. ‘Throw it onto the ground.’
Numeon was still down and not looking like he was going to get up. Grammaticus obeyed.
‘What now?’
‘Now you will come with me and I shall show you the true meaning of the warp.’
‘I’ll pass if that’s all the same to you.’
‘I didn’t say you had a choice, mortal.’ Elias wagged the pistol’s muzzle, gesturing for Grammaticus to step down from the ramp and out of the gunship’s waiting hold.
He hesitated. ‘I’ll be shredded out there.’
Elias briefly looked at the athame dagger sheathed at his belt.
‘You won’t be out here long enough for that. The shredding comes later, though.’
Grammaticus was taking his first steps back down the ramp, trying desperately to think of a way out of this, when a charge trembled the air. It wasn’t from the lightning field, it was nothing to do with the storm at all. Elias felt it, too, and began to turn.
Something was coming.
Numeon was dying. He didn’t need the failing biometric data relayed by his armour to tell him that. Red warning icons were flashing across his vision, a sputtering, static-crazed feed that did more to impede his senses than enhance them.
He discharged the locking clamps on his helmet and tore it off.
The Word Bearer, the cleric they had been seeking, who had undoubtably killed Hriak, paid him no heed. As he gazed into the storm, Numeon detected a change in the air. He felt heat, and imagined the trembling of atoms as the veil of reality was parting and being rewritten.
He reached out, ostensibly for a weapon, perhaps his pistol, as the glaive was now too far to grasp, but found himself clutching the sigil.
Vulkan’s sigil.
For his legionaries it had become an enigmatic symbol of hope, but for the primarch it held no such mystery. He had crafted it, imbued it with technologies beyond even his Legiones Astartes sons.
It was a beacon, a light to bring a stricken ship to shore or a lost traveller home.
For a few brief seconds the storm abated to a murmur, the last jag of lightning seemingly frozen in place and becoming a tear in reality that exuded light.
Gazing into that light, Numeon saw a figure limned in godlike power.
‘Vulkan lives…’ he breathed, emotion and blood both swelling up into his throat to choke him.
Elias holstered his pistol, realising it would have little effect on whatever was about to emerge into reality. He was reaching for his athame, intent on flight, when he recognised the figure that appeared before him.
‘My master,’ he murmured and fell to one knee, bowing his head before Erebus.
Erebus ignored him. Instead he regarded John Grammaticus, who was still standing on the ramp of the gunship, transfixed by what he had just witnessed.
The traveller was hooded. His dark robes swathed a power-armoured frame. There was no face beneath the cowl, only a silver mask fashioned to resemble one. In one hand Erebus held a ritual knife which he secreted back beneath his robes; the other was bionic, yet to be re-fleshed, and reached to retrieve the fulgurite.
‘Rise,’ he said to Elias, though he was looking at Grammaticus. His voice sounded old, but bitter and filled with the resonance of true power.
‘You have arrived at an auspicious moment–’ Elias began, before Erebus lashed out with the ful
gurite and slit the other Dark Apostle’s throat.
‘Indeed I have,’ he said, allowing the blood fountaining from Elias’s ruptured arteries to paint the front of his robes.
Dying, unable to staunch the wound from a god-weapon, Elias was reduced to clawing at his former master. He managed to grasp the silver mask and tear it from his master’s face before Erebus seized his flailing hands and threw him back.
Grammaticus recoiled as Erebus faced him. Something akin to a daemon regarded him, one with a hideous flayed skull, blood-red and patched by scar tissue that wasn’t healing as ordinary flesh and skin. It was darker, incarnadine, and shimmered with an unearthly lustre. Several small horns protruded from his pate, little nubs of sharpened bone.
At Erebus’s feet, Elias was gasping like a fish without water. He was dying. His desperation seemed to draw Erebus’s attention, and Grammaticus was glad those hellish eyes were no longer focused on him.
Crouched down, Erebus addressed his former disciple.
‘You are as stupid as you are short-sighted, Valdrekk.’ He showed him the fulgurite, still glowing slightly, clenched in Erebus’s bionic hand. ‘This does not win wars, mere chunks of wood and metal cannot do that. It was never the weapon you were looking for. The primarchs, the god-born, are the weapons. Sharpen our own, blunt our enemy’s.’
Erebus leaned down and clamped his flesh hand over Elias’s gaping mouth. The struggle was brief and uneventful.
‘He goes to the Neverborn as a reward for trying to betray me.’
It took Grammaticus a couple of seconds to realise that Erebus was talking to him. He looked down and saw the fulgurite brandished towards him.
‘Take it,’ Erebus said. ‘No one will stop you.’ Now he looked up and there was terrible knowledge in his eyes. ‘Go to your task, John Grammaticus.’
Warily, Grammaticus took the spear. He then walked back up the ramp and pressed the icon to close it. When he looked back, both Erebus and Elias were gone.
Although he was no legionary, he could fly the ship. His abilities as a pilot were exemplary and there weren’t many vessels, human or xenos, that he couldn’t fly. Heading across the troop hold, Grammaticus opened the door that would allow him access to the cockpit. It was large, built to accommodate a legionary, but he managed well enough. It took him a few minutes but he got the ship’s systems online for atmospheric flight, and the engine turbines were already warmed up.
Through the glacis plate he noticed the sky over Ranos was changing. There were shapes in the storm clouds now, looming large and too distinct to be merely shadows. Erebus had done more than end the life of a rival when he had killed Elias. Grammaticus wasn’t about to stick around and find out what that was.
Engine ignition sent tremors through the ship as Grammaticus boosted forwards and then started to gain loft. A quick check of the sensor array revealed a path through the scattering of vessels in orbit. None of them were suitable; he’d need to find another space port and gain passage aboard a cruiser, preferably non-military.
It would be guarded, he knew that. But if he got there before Polux, he’d have a much better chance of slipping through their security nets.
Dark sky gave way to desolate, black void as the gunship streaked through the upper atmosphere and beyond.
A reflection in the glacis made Grammaticus start at first, the memory of the drowned boy still all too fresh, but he masked his sudden panic well. The eldar regarded him sternly.
‘You were successful, John Grammaticus?’ asked Slau Dha.
‘Yes, the fulgurite is in my possession.’
‘And you know what you must do?’
‘You still doubt my conviction?’
‘Just answer the question.’
Grammaticus sighed, deep and world-weary. ‘Yes, I know what must be done. Although killing a primarch won’t be easy.’
‘This has ever been your mission.’
‘I know, but even so…’
‘His grace is bound to the earth. Separated from it, he will be weak and can be slain like any of the others.’
‘Why him? Why not the Lion or that bastard Curze? Why does it have to be him?’
‘Because he is important and because he must not live to become the keeper of the gate. Do this and your pact with the Cabal is ended.’
‘I somehow doubt that.’
‘It doesn’t matter what you believe, mon-keigh. All that matters is what you do next.’
‘Don’t worry, I know my mission and will carry it out as ordered.’
‘When you reach Macragge,’ said the autarch, threatening even though he was only flecting, ‘find him. He has been there some time already.’
‘Shouldn’t be too difficult.’
‘It will be harder than you think. He is not himself any more. You’ll need help.’
‘Another primarch, yes, I know. I suspect few will be lining up to be his executioner, however.’
‘You would be surprised.’
‘Your kind are full of them.’
Slau Dha ignored the slight, deeming it beneath his concern.
‘And then,’ he asked instead, ‘when the fulgurite is delivered?’
A sudden star flare forced Grammaticus to dim the glacis, effectively ending the flect, but he answered anyway.
‘Then, Vulkan dies.’
Falling from grace…
Burning. Endlessly burning.
I awoke to heat and the stench of my own scorched flesh. My body was wreathed in flame. I didn’t need to look to know it, my every nerve ending screamed it.
Falling.
I thought I had succumbed to another of my brother’s death traps, some pit or chasm of fire.
But I had descended for too long and too weightlessly for it to be that.
I opened my eyes and in the few seconds I had before their vitreous humours boiled and then evaporated in their sockets, I saw a vast orb below me through the blazing heat haze.
It was a grey – almost pallid world – wreathed with white cloud. I was far above it, breaching its upper atmosphere without a ship or even the protection of my armour.
Skin burned away. Flesh too, then muscle.
My head wrenched back, my mouth agape in a silent scream as I experienced agony on a scale without measure.
Stars and nebulae flashed before me but I had not the facility to see them.
As my brain rebelled against what my body was telling it, I witnessed my own destruction through my mind’s eye.
Vulkan, his body an inferno…
…skin shrivelling like parchment, his meat-fat spitting…
…his flesh sloughing away and disintegrating.
Vulkan, rendered down to blackened bone.
His withered skeleton breaches the upper atmosphere until finally…
Vulkan dies.
AFTERWORD
I’ve had this story in my head for a long time. A very long time. Ever since I started researching the Salamanders and their tragic past, there has been this desire to fill in that most glaring of gaps in the Horus Heresy timeline: what was the fate of Vulkan?
Opinions at the time varied widely on the subject from stating out and out that he was dead, killed in a blast of nucleonic fire never to be seen again, to that he had somehow miraculously survived and was present at the breaking of the Legions.
It was a mystery, in many ways the mystery. It’s the one piece of Heresy lore, other than the identity and fate of the lost Legions (and don’t hold your breath on that one, folks – no, really, you’ll only asphyxiate yourselves…) that has never truly been answered.
I thought it never could, or never would.
Turns out I was wrong about that.
Years ago when the sum total that we, the readers, knew about the Horus Heresy was the contents of the collectible card ga
me (later transferred and translated into the various Horus Heresy ‘Visions of…’ art books), Vulkan’s storyline ended at Isstvan V, the primarch engulfed in a massive explosion. Believe it or not, there was more to that story. It just never got told. That’s not to say that it existed; it didn’t, but it was always meant to. But, the CCG ended prematurely, and so many tales that were begun never got the ending they deserved.
Vulkan was one of them. A big one.
Fast forward several years and here I am writing the afterword to part one of the answer to that mystery. I say ‘part one’ because I see Vulkan’s journey as a saga that won’t truly meet its resolution, and therefore have closure or an answer, until we’re standing at the Gates of Terra in defiance of tyranny and Chaos.
There will be more. You must have figured that out on account of the open-ended finale. In the manner of a relay race, I have merely held the baton for my lap and now pass it on to the next runner. Fully recovered from my heroics on this novel, I’m hoping I’ll get it back for the last leg.
So then, this novel provides an answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the Horus Heresy – what happened to Vulkan on Isstvan V? Does he live, did he die? What did he have to go through? If you’ve skipped to the end and are reading this before the novel, you might think there’s a pretty big clue in the title. Well, you’d be wrong about that. And if you’ve read the novel and think you know the answer then I challenge you to read on beyond my own first, modest volume in this saga of sagas and see where it takes the Lord of Drakes.
Nick Kyme,
Nottingham,
April 2013
Acknowledgements
A few thanks need sharing around to some dedicated and very special folks without whom this novel would not have been possible, my editors Christian Dunn, Lindsey Priestley, Laurie Goulding and Graeme Lyon. Also, the legendary Neil Roberts for the fantastic cover. To Dan Abnett, whose advice and support has been utterly invaluable. Last, but not least, my wonderful other half, Stef, whose patience, understanding and encouragement got me through the tough times.