Polux glanced around as power failed in the hallway outside the chapel. He could smell burning. He drew his bolt pistol, favouring his right hand, not his healing new one.
‘I believe our audience for the day is over,’ said Polux. ‘I must take my leave and assist my brothers in halting this madness.’
‘Then I bid you farewell in your efforts, Polux,’ said the warsmith.
Polux glanced back at Dantioch icily, as if the earnest wishes of an Iron Warrior were more of a damnation than a blessing.
Three Ultramarines suddenly entered the chapel, weapons drawn, hunting for targets. When they sighted Polux, they lowered their aim.
‘Has he come this way?’ demanded the officer.
‘Curze? No,’ replied Polux.
‘This area must be secured,’ the officer told the two legionaries with him.
‘You think he’s close?’ Polux asked, walking towards him.
‘He’s everywhere,’ the officer replied grimly. ‘The order came “Kill all the shadows”. I thought… I thought that was nonsense at first. But he is like a daemon.’
‘He is a son of the Emperor,’ Dantioch said from the lustrous vision of Sotha’s tuning floor behind them. ‘He is a demigod. It is not possible to overestimate his potential.’
Dantioch had risen uneasily from his high-backed chair and come to the very edge of the communication field.
‘Beware,’ he said suddenly, looking around as he responded to the empathic vibrations of the quantum field. ‘My dear brothers, beware–’
All the candles in the chapel blew out. The sudden gloom was wreathed with tendrils of grey smoke roiling from the wicks. Now the greater proportion of light came from the polished cavern on Sotha, falling into the night-struck chapel through the communication field, and illuminated the room in an uncanny fashion.
The chapel had four sets of double doors, one at each compass point. The doors at the north end splintered open, demolished by brute force. Two figures came through, locked together, reeling across the chapel’s broad, paved floor. One was First Master Auguston, a raw-headed spectre drenched from head to foot in blood, Holguin’s long blade in his hand. The other was darkness manifest – a bigger, crueller, more elongated shape, an insubstantial horror, the fleeting ragged shadow left on the ground when a rook flies fast across a winter sky.
Polux and the Ultramarines rushed forward. The combatants were so interlocked that it was impossible to take a shot without risking Auguston. Polux hesitated, watching in horror. The Night Haunter seemed as a wraith, a mosaic, a suggestion of claws, of a ragged cloak, of long hair straggled and streaming, of a face white as a bared skull, of a black leering mouth.
‘He’s here!’ the Ultramarines officer yelled into his vox. ‘The chapel! The chapel!’
Auguston fell, broken, spent. He landed on his knees and, for an instant, Polux could see the appalling damage that had been wrought upon him. The First Master had been ripped open and gutted, half his face torn off. That Auguston was still moving spoke to his courage and transhuman thresholds.
The executioner’s sword was no longer in the First Master’s hand. Hurled, it crossed the chapel like a spear, and impaled the Ultramarines officer through the neck before he could repeat his call. He fell, drowning noisily in his own blood, air whistling out of the holes in his throat.
Polux and the two Ultramarines opened fire, but there seemed to be nothing to hit.
‘For Terra’s sake, Polux!’ Dantioch yelled from the edge of the communication field. ‘Flee! You can’t fight him. Flee now! Regroup!’
Claws came out of the smoking darkness and sheared through one of the Ultramarines. The other ran forward, firing repeated shots that hit nothing except his slain comrade. Darkness twisted around him, and his head turned through one hundred and eighty degrees with a brittle crack. The Ultramarine fell across his comrade’s corpse.
‘Polux! Run, brother! Run!’ Dantioch yelled in exasperation.
Polux had frozen. He turned slowly, bolt pistol raised, darkness melting and flowing around him. Silence hissed and breathed like a living thing. He could feel the monster close at hand. He could feel stinking evil circling him in the darkness. Nearby, Auguston let out a terrible gurgling sound. Spasms shook his kneeling form as death finally overwhelmed him. He toppled onto his side.
‘You’ve killed many tonight, monster,’ Polux told the darkness, still turning, still hunting. ‘None I doubt as great a warrior as that man now expired. None I doubt that put up so furious a fight against your evil. I hope I last half as long.’
The silence breathed.
‘Moreover,’ said Polux, ‘I hope I bathe in your blood before the night is done.’
‘To your left!’ Dantioch yelled.
Polux swung and fired. He heard something. Had he actually made contact? Drawn blood?
‘To your right!’ Dantioch shouted.
Polux turned again and fired two more rounds. The warsmith was using the field’s empathic vibrations to read the darkness and detect the Night Haunter’s movements.
‘Where now?’ Polux yelled back. ‘Where is he?’
‘At your back!’ Dantioch roared.
Polux wheeled, but he was not fast enough. He took a glancing blow that knocked him to the floor, hard. The bolt pistol skittered away from him across the flagstones.
‘Move!’ Dantioch cried.
Barabas Dantioch, the renegade warsmith
Polux rolled sideways desperately. Claws came out of nothingness, sweeping in a downstroke that split the flagstones where he had been lying.
He struggled forward on hands and knees, groping for his fallen weapon.
‘No! Keep moving!’ Dantioch yelled.
Polux hurled himself aside again as the claws came again and again. He was almost on top of the fallen Ultramarine. Heedless, frantic, Polux wrenched the executioner’s sword out of the man’s neck.
‘Left! Left!’ Dantioch cried.
Polux struck left with the long blade, once, twice.
‘Ahead!’
Polux swung another blow. With this one, he felt a contact through the hilt. Speckles of black blood dotted the flagstones. He had left a mark. He would make a good account of his death, as Auguston had.
‘Right! And behind!’ Dantioch shouted.
Polux put his weight into the sword as he turned, and felt the heavy blade rebound off claws. There was a shower of sparks as the Caliban-forged steel deflected Curze’s talons. Polux followed the block with another swing, and then another wild strike, hoping to keep the monster at bay.
The Dark Angel’s sword was so large that Polux realised he was instinctively using both hands; old hand and new, clamped expertly around the grip.
He feinted left and then chopped into the darkness to the right, and then ahead.
‘Guide me, warsmith! Where is he?’
‘There. To your left!’ Dantioch exclaimed, pointing uselessly at the dark within the darkness.
Polux struck hard to his left. He could smell the stink of something in the gloom, feel the heat of its rage. It was an unwashed smell, the smell of a diseased animal. It was like fighting all the beasts of Inwit’s nightside at once.
‘Left. Now!’
Polux roared at the effort as he struck with the blade. He connected again. He felt it.
‘Did I cut you?’ he asked the darkness. ‘Do you bleed?’
The answer was a blow to the face that smashed Polux to the floor. Dazed, he tried to recover. His mouth was full of blood.
He could hear Dantioch yelling his name, telling him to move. He couldn’t clear his head.
Another blow, a kick most likely, caught him in the belly, and sent him rolling across the chapel floor. The sword was no longer in his grasp. There was no air in his lungs. He spat blood.
He had ended up rig
ht at the edge of the communication field, bathed in the eerie light of Sotha. Dantioch was standing over him, yelling in helpless rage and frustration, apparently centimetres away yet actually light years distant. The warsmith’s anguish was terrible: he could do nothing but watch, and cry at Polux to get up, and scream obscenities at the thing in the dark.
Polux tried to rise.
Everything went very still. He could hear Curze breathing, panting like a dog. He was aware of the Night Haunter beside him, standing over him, the tips of the long, long talons slowly, almost delicately, scraping across Polux’s armour, about to flex and strike.
‘Yes, I bleed,’ rasped a death-rattle voice, ‘but not as much as you are about to, Imperial Fist.’
Polux flinched, braced for the kill-stroke.
A gauntlet seized his left hand and pulled. It pulled with immense power. It pulled him sidelong and out of the way, so that Curze’s scything deathblow missed entirely.
Polux looked up to see who could have entered the fight and intervened. But only three were present: Polux, the shadow of Curze and the warsmith.
Dantioch had a tight grasp on Polux’s new left hand. The air was cool, and smelled entirely different. The acoustics around him had changed. Polux was no longer in the chapel.
He was on the tuning floor on Sotha.
‘Dantioch…?’
‘I don’t have an answer…’ the warsmith replied.
They looked back. Curze, a towering, leering shade, cheated of his prey, gazed back from the darkness of the chapel. He reached out a handful of talons and tried to touch them, but they were as solid as smoke. Where Polux had passed across, Curze could not.
‘You will tell me,’ Curze hissed, spittle flecking between his blackened teeth, ‘how this is done. How this is achieved?’
‘The faith and will of good men,’ replied Dantioch. ‘When they stand together against infamy, the galaxy fights for them.’
‘I would hardly put my trust in the galaxy,’ Curze hissed. He was so thin, so tall, a cadaverous herald of death. ‘I have seen what it dreams of, and it is quite run mad.’
His leering smile faded away.
‘Now come back where I can kill you,’ he said.
‘I believe neither of us will accept your offer, Night Lord,’ said Dantioch. ‘Furthermore, I believe you are about to have more pressing matters to concern you. Auguston and Polux have between them kept you here longer than you meant to stay.’
Behind Curze, light flooded into the chapel as two sets of doors opened, the south and the west entrances. Framed in the south, blade drawn and flanked by Ultramarines, stood the Avenging Son.
‘Back off,’ Guilliman told his men. Rage smouldered from him like a heat haze. ‘This wretch is mine.’
‘No,’ said the Lion, leaving his Dark Angels at the threshold of the west doorway and striding forward. ‘He’s ours.’
‘Well now,’ murmured Konrad Curze, hooking down the left-hand corner of his lower lip thoughtfully with the tip of one extravagant, bloodied claw. ‘Interesting.’
16
Blood Brothers
‘I may call you kin, but you are un-kind. You are entirely not of me.’
– Ferrus Manus to Konrad Curze, reported
Curze stepped away from the communication field and faced his brothers. Guilliman and the Lion approached him, Guilliman to his left, the Lion to his right.
Guilliman clutched his gladius – not his most magnificent weapon, but a favoured piece. He had made more kills than he had truly cared about with that utilitarian blade than any fine sword in his arsenal. He had a gleaming combat shield strapped to his left arm. He was bare-headed.
The Lion’s hair was loose, his jaw set. He held a charged longsword that Farith Redloss had passed to him. It was known far and wide as the Lion Sword, said to have been forged on Terra by the Emperor’s own armourers. It shone with a pale inner light.
‘Not a man intervenes,’ Guilliman said to the Ultramarines and Dark Angels crowded at the chapel doors.
‘This is between us,’ the Lion agreed. ‘Farith, you may strike down any other who tries to engage.’
‘You heard that, Gorod,’ said Guilliman. ‘The same applies.’
Both Gorod of the Invictus and Farith Redloss made murmurs of acceptance.
‘You do not come to my world and do this,’ said Guilliman, stalking Curze. ‘You do not enter my house and do this.’
‘I do what I please, brother,’ Curze replied. They could smell the stink of his breath from across the chamber.
The Lion glanced sidelong at Auguston’s pitiful remains.
‘You have piled up too many corpses this night, Konrad. My legionaries, and too many of Roboute’s. This warrior, the Master of the First, is an especially grievous loss.’
‘He was pugnacious,’ Curze hissed. ‘Even when I’d taken out his gizzard and lights, he kept walking.’
‘Bastard!’ Guilliman snapped.
‘Master Auguston fought like the champions of legend, my lord,’ said Polux from the gleaming field. ‘He defied death to fight on. I have never seen its like.’
‘And you have defied corporeal physics to escape me, Imperial Fist,’ Curze whispered, his words issuing as though they had been ground out between millstones. ‘Come. Does no one else wonder at that?’
Guilliman was close to Curze. He began to loop and spin his gladius.
‘Brother has killed brother,’ he said. ‘As we were raised, that is unthinkable, but brother has killed brother. Every time, it has been a heretic son who has slain a devoted brother: Ferrus, Corax, Vulkan.’
‘Ahh now,’ murmured Curze. ‘Tut tut tut, Roboute. Vulkan lives.’
‘Then I rejoice,’ said Guilliman, ‘but I believe it is past time that the heretics paid a price. A blood price. I think it is past time that a devoted son put a heretic in the damned ground.’
‘Agreed, sevenfold,’ said the Lion in a low, hunting voice.
Curze faced them. He stood tall, taller than either of them – a stark figure of lean, long bones and hollowed frame. He looked like a starved giant, towering yet emaciated. His tattered, black cloak flowed from his shoulders to the ground like the furled wings of a wounded bird. His slender arms hung at his sides, the huge, slack power claws making his hands disproportionately long. He tilted his head back, his hair lank. He closed his eyes.
‘Brother,’ he said. ‘And you, brother. Come and get me.’
Guilliman surged forward. The Lion was faster. Guilliman was robust and dazzling, but the Lion was elegant. The Lion Sword described a buzzing arc in the air as it circled, leaving a bright after-image briefly stamped on the vision of all the legionaries watching.
The blade scythed at Curze’s head. He did not move.
Then he was smoke.
The power claws of Curze’s right hand snapped out and drove aside the stinging bite of the Lion Sword. The claws of his left met Guilliman’s gladius and deflected it.
Guilliman struck again, driven by fury, and cut through something.
It was only shadow. Only the tatter of a cloak.
Talons snapped back at him. He raised his shield. Razored claws ripped sparks off its surface and shredded its edges.
Guilliman hacked again. Nothing. Shadow. Shadow!
The Lion rotated like a dancer, and swung the famous Lion Sword sidelong at Curze with a two-handed grip. Curze ducked, evaded, and rotated in turn, punching away Guilliman’s next strike as he did so. The Lion tilted and swung his sizzling blade in a strike designed to unseam Curze from the groin to the throat.
But Curze was no longer there.
He had flickered left and blocked the upswing. Then he smashed his hand into the Lion’s face.
Blood burst from the strike. A talon had punched clean through the side of the Lion’s neck. The Lion reeled bac
kwards, his hand clamped to the wound to staunch it.
Some of his men mobbed forward in alarm.
‘No!’ the Lion yelled.
Guilliman slammed his ragged shield into Curze and drove him backwards. He stabbed twice with the gladius, rapidly, like a striking snake, and drew blood on the second jab.
‘Bastard!’ Curze hissed.
His talons struck Guilliman and knocked him aside, leaving four long gouges in his chestplate.
Guilliman recovered, sweeping in low with his blade, and then high on the return. Struck, Curze spun away and fell. When he rose, his right cheek was open to the bone.
‘Now we start in earnest,’ he hissed.
‘Now we finish in earnest,’ the Lion spat, coming at Curze with his sword ready.
Curze moved again, sliding into darkness. The blade ripped through smoke and shadow. The Lion turned and engaged again, striking once, twice, three times, each blow blocked by swift and savage claws.
‘Oh sweet Terra,’ Polux said. He looked at the warsmith. ‘Do you feel that?’
‘I do,’ agreed Dantioch. ‘I do most assuredly.’
The quantum field’s empathic effect was resonating through both of them.
They could both feel it. A truth, Curze’s truth. The efforts of Auguston and Polux had not delayed Curze too long. They had not kept him in place so that he might be trapped.
He had built this as a trap all along, a trap to kill one or more of his brothers.
‘Get out, my lords!’ Polux yelled. ‘Get out now! He has wired the Chapel! Get out, for the love of mercy!’
Driven back by Curze’s claws, Guilliman looked at the figures of Polux and the warsmith in the glow of the communication field.
‘He has what?’
‘Get out, my lord!’ Polux screamed.
Curze knocked the Lion’s blade aside.
He paused, and his black-toothed grin reappeared. It was a grin of triumph.
‘I have, since birth, been a staunch friend of death,’ he said. ‘I have learned that death is lonely, and so enjoys making new and lasting friends. Roboute? Great Lion? Let me make your introduction.’