Guilliman did not loosen his grip.
‘Tell me how this happened. Tell me about Curze!’
The Lion’s hands remained at his sides. He did not resist the fury and the formidable pressure pressing him into the wall, but it was plainly a feat of determination not to.
‘Since Thramas, I have held several officers of his Legion prisoner,’ the Lion said, ‘including that bastard known as Sevatar. Curze was on my ship too, loose in the unregulated decks. I hunted him. He could not escape, but I could not capture him. It appears he has now… made his exit.’
‘Upon your arrival, this wasn’t the first thing you chose to tell me?’ asked Guilliman. ‘That one of the worst of our traitor brothers hides within your flagship?’
‘In hindsight, I could have been more… open,’ said the Lion. ‘In truth, as we are speaking plainly, I was ashamed that I could not confine him. I would gladly have brought him before you in chains, on his knees and pleading, so we might have sequestered him in your darkest dungeons. While he was free, however, he was my problem, my curse to contend with.’
‘But you didn’t,’ said Guilliman, ‘and men are dead because of it, and more will die, and we are at each other’s throats.’
‘Quite literally,’ said the Lion, looking down at Guilliman’s crushing hand.
Guilliman released his grip and stepped back. The Lion stood up properly.
‘That will not happen again,’ said the Lion.
‘It might,’ replied Guilliman.
‘Not that way around.’
‘Don’t test me, brother!’ Guilliman snapped. ‘Can you not see the anger in me?’
‘I can, but I am better at hiding things, and you clearly cannot see the anger in me. That will not happen again.’
‘Then make sure of it. Your men will help my men find this monster,’ Guilliman said.
‘Agreed.’
‘No more lies, Lion. No more secrets.’
‘Agreed. Let me contact Holguin and–’
Alarms started to ring throughout the Residency.
‘Perimeter breach. The Fortress,’ said Gorod, reading the dataflow off his visor.
‘Which means?’ asked the Lion.
‘Well, unless you have any other surprises you haven’t told me about,’ said Guilliman, ‘he’s here. He’s on the Castrum. He’s in the Fortress. Curze is here.’
His eyes widened. His mouth opened and looked as though it was screaming, though no sound came out.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Captain Casmir. ‘What’s he doing?’
The medicae staff shook their heads. Behind the armourglass, the insane primarch flexed his hands and howled without sound. His dark skin was still healing and still bleeding. He resembled some grotesque revenant, some grisly spectre that had fled death and returned from the grave.
‘Get someone!’ said Casmir.
‘Who?’ asked the chief attending.
‘I don’t know! Tetrarch Dolor! Guilliman himself!’
Several aides began to back away to do as he ordered, but no one wanted to take their eyes off Vulkan.
There was a sense of power in him, terrible power and terrible purpose. Madness still invested his eyes, but it was focused now, as though all his wrath and pain had been concentrated into one thing.
He was mouthing something, over and over again.
‘What is that? What’s he saying?’ asked Casmir.
‘He’s just raving,’ the chief attending replied.
‘No, that word…’ Casmir stepped forward. ‘Read his lips. He’s saying…’
Casmir turned and looked at the medicae staff and the guards.
‘He’s saying… Curze.’
Vulkan screamed the name of his tormentor. He locked his bloody fingers together and began to smash his fists against the glass like a pounding hammer in a forge, like the working, toiling beat of a smithy, making and unmaking, shaping and unshaping. The armourglass wall, smeared with the blood of his previous blows, shivered. It vibrated.
It cracked.
‘Seal this level! Now!’ yelled Casmir. ‘Seal it!’
Vulkan’s fists kept pounding. The glass cracked more broadly.
Then the whole wall exploded in a blizzard of fragments.
Vast, dark, murderous, Vulkan stepped out of his cage. Casmir and other Ultramarines rushed forward in desperation to restrain him, but he threw their armoured forms aside as though they were dolls.
Vulkan was free.
In his madness, he would not be stopped.
Not again. Not by anything.
15
Kill all the
Shadows
‘I know you are my eldest brother; and, in the
gentle condition of blood, you should know me…
You are the first-born; but the same tradition takes not
away my blood, were there twenty brothers betwixt us:
I have as much of my father in me as you.’
– from As You Alike (attributed to the dramaturge Shakespire), circa M2
‘Make your report!’ Guilliman demanded into his armour’s vox-link. He strode along the grand colonnade that linked the Residency to the Fortress proper, with the Lion and an assembly of bodyguards from both Legions at his heels.
‘Captain Terbis, my lord,’ the vox scratched back. Overlapping ambient noise suggested a great activity at the other end. ‘We’ve… we’ve found three men dead in the Portis Yard, strung from the Aegis Wall with wire.’
‘Our own men?’
‘Three Ultramarines from 27th Company. Roster confirms they were on sentry duty. Wait! Stars of Ultramar! One’s still alive! Hurry! Hurry, cut him down! Cut him down–’
‘Wait!’ the Lion cried, grabbing Guilliman’s arm. ‘Tell them no! Tell them–’
Despite the distance, they felt the blast. The vox-link scratched out, dead. A haze of red light glowed over the fortress wall, casting an infernal wash across the stately buildings of the Palaeopolis.
‘Terbis!’ Guilliman yelled into the vox. ‘Terbis!’
‘He mines the bodies,’ said the Lion. ‘I’ve known him use the method several times. He takes munitions and grenades from those he slays or maims, and sets them with time or motion triggers on the fallen. Such is his insidious poison. He spreads terror. We cannot trust our own dead.’
Guilliman looked at Gorod.
‘Issue a warning to that effect. All channels.’
‘Aye, my lord,’ rumbled Gorod.
Before the Invictus commander could begin the task, another ripple of blasts shivered the night air. This time, the detonations came from the direction of the Sword Hall. Beyond the Fortress wall, Guilliman could see flames scudding from the lip of a roofline. He looked at the men with him and drew his gladius.
‘He will commit no more injury,’ he said, ‘no more insult, no more outrage. Let it be known, we hunt him with maximum prejudice. No matter he is our brother, all warriors are hereby notified to stop Curze with lethal force.’
On the piered western walkway that skirted the Praetorium, Titus Prayto held up his hand sharply.
‘Stop. Stop dead!’
At his side, Captain Thales and his assault squad came to a sudden halt.
‘What do you sense?’ asked Thales.
‘Something… He’s here. Or, he was here,’ said Prayto. To the east of them, the blast of a grenade rang through the inner yards. Alarms and bells sounded from all quarters.
‘He’s… everywhere, it seems,’ Thales murmured. ‘Are we sure he is alone? It feels like a strike force has infiltrated the Fortress.’
‘We know nothing for sure, but I feel he is alone,’ said Prayto. ‘This is his art. He moves fast, and unpredictably. He leaves death and traps where he walks. Thus he is everywhere and nowhere, and so terror mounts.’
>
Prayto looked back along the walkway. Something had made him halt their urgent advance. He unclipped his lamp pack.
‘We are Ultramarines, captain,’ Prayto added. ‘He can sow all the terror he likes. We shall know no fear.’
Prayto had set his lamp to ultraviolet so that it might further enhance his transhuman ocular implants. He shone it along the walkway. The night’s shadowed darkness was mottled with the glow of distant flames.
‘There,’ Prayto said. The hard light of his lamp caught wires stretched taut between the piers of the walkway at shin height. It showed them as sharp white lines.
‘Trip wires,’ he said. ‘He’s wired the walkway. Thales, close off this area. Tell everyone not to enter by the western gate. You three, start clearing these wires. Make them safe.’
The Ultramarines moved forward, clamping their boltguns to free their hands. Another blast, from the direction of the Library, lit the night above the walkway’s roof.
‘My lord!’ one of the men called out.
‘What have you found?’ asked Prayto.
‘These wires, my lord… They are just wires. They are tied between the piers, but there’s nothing attached to them.’
Even his traps are traps, Prayto thought. He binds us and blocks us, merely with the idea of death…
‘More confusion,’ Prayto said to Thales and the men. ‘Every action is designed to wrong-foot us, occupy us, delay us. He is the opposite of all he does.’
Prayto turned to look back down the walkway, the way they had come.
The shadow standing silently behind them smiled at him.
Prayto was fast, but a rush of inimical malice flooded his brain with stunning force. It was as though Curze had kept his corrosive mind hidden, and now suddenly allowed Prayto’s sensitivity to read it.
Claws scythed the air. Prayto felt pain deep in his side. The impact hurled him sideways into one of the corridor’s stone piers, which he bounced off with a clatter of plate. Before he even hit the ground, he was covered in blood.
It belonged to Captain Thales. The officer was still standing, but his head had been removed. A considerable volume of blood was jetting from the stump of his neck, plastering the walkway like torrential rain.
One of the squad members got off two shots: bright flashes and deafening noise in the covered space. Almost instantly, the man sailed backwards through the air, his boltgun spinning out of his slack grip, his chest plating ripped open like torn foil.
Despite the terrible wound in his side, Prayto got to his knees. Bringing his bolter to bear, he fought to discern which of the night’s shadows was Curze.
There? There?
‘Kill all the shadows!’ he roared, and opened fire. The remaining men fired too, wildly, in all directions. The searing light of gunfire dispelled the darkness, and the furious bolt-rounds ripped into the stone work of the piers and the walkway, filling the night air with dust, micro-metal fibres and fyceline fumes. They kept firing until their magazines were empty. The pulsing, juddering flash of the shots showed them nothing but the emptiness of the shadows.
Curze had already moved on.
But Curze had let Prayto taste his mind.
Prayto had him.
Half-unconscious with pain, the Librarian opened his vox-link.
First Master Auguston heard the roar of bolter fire and turned.
‘That sounds like a whole damned squad unloading!’ he roared. ‘Where is that?’
The sergeant beside him checked his auspex.
‘Locator places the weapon discharge in the western walkway, my lord,’ he reported. ‘Beside the Praetorium.’
Auguston’s squad turned, weapons raised, as warriors approached along the hallway. It was the Lion’s man Holguin, and a band of his Dark Angels.
They faced each other uneasily for a moment.
‘Anything?’ asked Auguston.
‘He left grenades seeded in the beds of the ornamental garden,’ replied Holguin, ‘and two more of yours dead outside the Sacristy.’
‘I will have his head on a spike,’ said Auguston.
The vox crackled.
‘This is Prayto! Respond!’
‘Auguston,’ the First Master replied.
‘He was here, Phratus! At the Praetorium. Where are you?’
‘In the hall of the Eastern Communication.’
‘Then he’s coming your way, Phratus. I can sense him. He’s coming your way and he’s coming fast.’
‘Titus? Titus?’
The link was dead. Auguston looked at Holguin, his combi-bolter raised.
‘You hear that, Dark Angel? It appears we may be the ones to end this.’
Holguin was holding his executioner’s blade.
‘It is an honour I am happy to share,’ he replied.
Auguston gestured, and the Ultramarines spread down the long, high-ceilinged hallway. The Dark Angels moved to the left, covering the closest of the doorways.
‘This is Auguston,’ the First Master said into his vox. ‘I have it on good authority that our tormentor is moving into the Eastern Communication, heading towards the Chapel of Memorial. Available squads close in. Block access to the Sword Hall and the Temple of Correction.’
He waited.
‘Respond!’ he hissed.
There was a shiver on the vox, distant static, like the dry skeleton of a voice.
‘Roboute…’ it said.
‘Who speaks?’ Auguston demanded.
‘Roboute…’ the dry crackle repeated. It was almost crooning the name.
‘Flames of Terra,’ Auguston said, looking at Holguin. ‘He’s even inside the damned vox.’
A bang made them all turn. The light bank at the far end of the Communication went out. Quickly, in sequence, the other light banks along the hallway went out, each one with its own bang. Darkness marched towards them along the hall.
The lights went out overhead, and then behind them. Then the lights were extinguished all the way to the far end of the Communication.
Silence. No emergency power cut in. No secondary lighting. It was as though the darkness had obeyed Konrad Curze, and all light had fled from him in panic.
Every helm visor lit up, Ultramarines and Dark Angels alike. High resolution enhancement searched the darkened Communication for movement. Auguston and his men saw the area as a green twilight.
‘Roboute…’ the vox whispered.
Suddenly, Holguin was moving. The massive, round-tipped executioner’s sword caught the infralight on its edge as it swung. There was a shadow, just a shadow… No, even less than that. Just the hint or memory of a shadow. The blade caught something, a tatter of night.
Then there was an impact, bloody and crunching. Holguin lurched backwards and crashed against the wall. The Dark Angel beside him seemed to pivot oddly. His side came open, armour and torso parting to release blood and slippery organs.
Auguston began firing. They all began firing.
In the rapid, hellish flash of the multiplying gunfire, Auguston turned full circle, hunting for his foe.
He suddenly found a face immediately in front of his, just centimetres away, staring straight into his soul. The face had eyes like black suns, and skin as white as a bone desert, made sickly by the green infralight. Long, ragged, black hair half-stuck across the cheek and nose, glued by the blood of dead men. The mouth leered, revealing blackened teeth and blue gums. The leer stretched the mouth open impossibly, inhumanly wide.
Auguston heard laughter.
He lunged at Curze, firing his combi-bolter. The face and the shadow, even the insane laughter, all vanished in a moment. In dismay, Auguston saw that his shots had felled a Dark Angel on the far side of the hall.
Other men were still firing. It was madness, confusion. All discipline was lost. It had scarcely been se
conds since the first instant of the fight. Auguston realised he was bellowing, expressing his fury as desperate non-words.
Was this fear? Was this actually fear?
He saw a legionary, an Ultramarine, struck into the air. The warrior had been touched by nothing more than a piece of shadow, the tatter of a butcher-bird’s black, ragged wing, but the impact was as though he had been fired from a cannon. Flailing, he struck one of the hall’s great windows, shoulders first, and went through it in a blistering cascade of broken glass.
The helm of an Ultramarines sergeant rolled along the stone floor at Auguston’s feet.
There was still a head in it.
‘Face me!’ Auguston roared. ‘Face me like a man! You coward! You night-thing!’
Curze’s answer was a clawed hand that punched through ceramite, armoured under-mail and fibre-sheaves into the living gut.
Auguston fell forward, blood spewing out of the eviscerating wound. So much blood had come out of the dead Ultramarines and Dark Angels that there was almost a pressurised tidal flow along the Communication’s floor. The darkness stank of blood – the blood of good Space Marines.
Curze paused for a second, a towering, skeletal shadow in the twilight, one clawed hand raised, clutching steaming ropes of Auguston’s viscera as some ragged trophy.
‘I’m not dead yet, you bastard,’ Auguston spluttered, bubbles of blood-froth bursting at his lips. Soaked almost head to foot in his own gore, he came at Curze with the executioner’s sword clenched in his right fist.
From inside the candle-lit Chapel of Memorial, the sounds of the Night Haunter’s campaign of terror could be distinctly heard: the alarms, the frantic vox, the sounds of running feet, gunfire, the random detonation of grenades and other devices from the east, the west, from every quarter.
‘It sounds as though a war rages through the Fortress,’ said the vision of Warsmith Dantioch.
‘Be thankful you are not here,’ replied Alexis Polux. ‘I have heard many tales of Curze’s malevolent and vicious talents, but this night he seems to be excelling himself.’