Gantulga turned, abruptly, and hurried towards the closing gates.
‘What are you doing?’ Kleve called after him, starting to follow. ‘The chamberlain was quite specific! This is no time for individual action or improvisation! We are here only if we conform to discipline and command! Gantulga! We have a duty!’
The White Scar turned and looked back at the Iron Hands legionary for a second.
‘We do,’ he said, ‘but he’s not here. We are here, all of us, circling the herd. He has done what he can, but it is too dangerous for him to be here. There are too many of us. So he has gone where we are not.’
‘The Residency,’ said Kleve, understanding.
‘The Residency,’ Gantulga agreed.
He found a hall. It was unlit. It was a private place. His eyes saw all the details, despite the darkness. This was a room for trophies and keepsakes, a room where a proud man kept the relics and reminders of his career: books, charts, coats of armour, weapons.
This was not merely a man, though. Even in its raving delirium, his mind recognised that. This was more than a man. This was a master of worlds, a demigod.
Here hung blades of great scale – falchions and broadswords, powered glaives and hooked axes. Here were suits of plate and wargear master-crafted for state occasions. Here were the scrapes and notches of their service. Here were mantles and cloaks, robes and banners, the raiments and decorations of kingship.
He reached out with bloody hands.
The enemy was close.
He needed to be ready.
‘Hello?’
There was no one there.
Euten paused, and then shook her head. Her nerves were taut. She was jumping at shadows.
She had retired to Guilliman’s withdrawing chamber, so recently refurbished and repaired that it seemed half-empty. So many items needed to replaced, and so very many never could. The walls were bare of paintings. The newly installed cognis-signum cogitator device purred softly, and seemed cold and clinical compared to the ancient machine it had replaced.
She poured herself a drink, a small amasec.
The night was bleak outside the windows, cut only by the baleful glow of the Pharos. She tried to ignore the way the low clouds were side-lit and ruddy from the fires in the Fortress.
She sat, but could not settle. Setting down her glass, she went to the chamber doors. An officer of the praecental guard stood guard outside.
‘My lady?’
‘I am bothered, Percel,’ she said. ‘Is there really still no word from our Lord Guilliman? Please, good sir. It has been overlong.’
‘I will check again, my lady,’ the officer replied.
Euten went back into the room and resumed her seat. Her drink remained untouched. She tapped her fingers on her knee.
Her back ached. Her joints were sore. How miserable it was to be human and old, no matter the sciences that prolonged the mortal span. Euten resented the way that her life and capabilities were slowing down. Oh, to be transhuman in measure – to be so strong, to possess such vitality.
The day is not far off, she thought, when I will be of no more use to him, when I will need to be cared for like a child, and my part in his life will finally be over. Soon thereafter, I will be gone from this vale altogether. Have I done enough for him? I have stayed the course, stayed it well, from the days of Konor to this dark night. Surely I can serve him yet–
A noise. Was that a knock at the chamber door?
‘Come?’ she called out.
No one came. A cloud passed across the solitary star, briefly.
Why was there still no word from the Fortress?
Euten rose and crossed to the door.
‘Percel?’
There was no one in the hall. Glow-globes sizzled softly in their sconces.
He has gone as I ordered, she decided. He has gone to seek word.
The chamberlain went back into the room. She felt that she might fidget herself to death with nervous energy. She felt great agitation. It was ridiculous to be so, in a well-lit chamber, in a fortress-palace, guarded by the best soldiers in Ultramar. It–
She froze.
The name was written plainly on the wall. It had not been there when she had gone to the door. It was there now.
Roboute.
It was written – and Euten knew this even though she knew not how she knew it – in the still-warm blood of Officer Percel.
Horror clenched her. It drove the air from her lungs and the power from her voice. Her heart had never beaten so fast.
On the desk, there was a switch for the alarm. It seemed to be leagues away from her.
She turned slowly, turned in a full circle, waiting to set eyes upon the grinning thing that she knew must be waiting behind her.
There was nothing there. Nothing. Nothing.
Yet the letters of her master’s name still trickled red down the wall.
‘Who is here?’ she hissed.
No answer.
‘Who? Who is here?’
Nothing.
She looked around, hunting for detail. That name, daubed across the wall.
‘I am not afraid of you,’ she said. ‘I am August Chamberlain Principal of the Five Hundred Worlds, and damaged fiends like you do not frighten me. Show yourself. Be a man and confront me. I dare you.’
What other details had changed while she had gone to the door?
Her glass. Her glass. It still sat where she had set it upon the side table, but it was no longer full of amasec. The spirit had gone. The glass was filled with blood.
Terror touched her heart. She could not fight it. Its fingers were like ice. Like a child, she fell to the floor and scrambled behind the nearest piece of furniture, staying low, crawling into shadows. Maybe she could hide. Maybe she could–
Officer Percel was waiting for her beneath the sofa. His severed head at least. His eyes were glazed. His mouth was half-open, as if in the middle of some great and dismaying surprise. He stared back at her from between the sofa’s elegant bluewood feet.
Euten recoiled.
There was someone standing over her, right behind her. His shadow fell across her. He was huge, silent and powerful, and he stank of blood and war.
She wanted to ask him, beg him, to make it quick, but her voice would not come out at all.
He put a massive hand on her shoulder. She flinched.
‘He’s here,’ the shadow said. ‘Stay down.’
She turned and looked up. Axe raised, alert, Faffnr Bludbroder stood over her.
‘You stayed,’ she whispered.
‘We don’t leave the hearth,’ he replied. He looked down at her. ‘Stay down. Run when I tell you. I will protect you with every drop of my blood.’
Still cowering, Euten looked around. As silent as falling snow, the other savage members of Faffnr’s pack were creeping into the chamber, weapons ready, ears pricked for any sound or motion. Their silence was extraordinary. They padded like…
…like wolves on snow.
Faffnr sighed. ‘Now we have it,’ he said.
Konrad Curze came out of somewhere. It was not exactly clear where. It might have been a shadow, or a fold of drapery, or even merely a tiny crack in the wall. He manifested. He was monstrously vast, a black shadow, power claws unfurled like the flight feathers of a raven. His hair was a halo of filth. His mouth was impossibly large, a yawning, blackened maw that stretched the thin white flesh of his angular skull as though it would split it. His right cheek was slashed to the bone and clotted with dark blood.
The Wolves went for him without hesitation. Their blades were thirsty.
Only Faffnr stayed his place, loyal Faffnr, covering her, defending her with his blade and body.
‘Run now,’ he told her.
‘I can’t run,’ she said, barely a
ble to get up.
‘Hjold! You’ll damn well run if I tell you to run, female!’
A blur. Bo Soren swung his axe, but it was stopped dead by curved talons. Shockeye Ffyn lunged with his longsword, but cut only smoke.
Gudson Allfreyer came at the beast, but was smashed aside, spitting blood and broken teeth. Mads Loreson tried to swing, but was blocked by the reeling Allfreyer.
A primarch. A squad of the Legiones Astartes. One locked room. The same locked room. How would history repeat itself? How would it be revised?
The Wolves were the Emperor’s executioners.
But Curze…
Malmur Longreach, spear thrusting, and Salick the Braided, axe low, attacked together. One struck home, for blood spattered the floor and the furniture around Euten, but both were knocked aside. Kuro came in, Biter Herek, then Nido Knifeson.
Blades hammered off armour and drew flinty sparks from whirling claws. Curze grabbed Salick by the throat and threw him across the chamber into the wall. Biter Herek buried his axe in the depths of Curze’s darkness. Blood sprayed. Mads Loreson went down on one knee, clutching at his torn throat, trying to stem the blood gushing from it. Kuro Jjordrovk sailed across the chamber and demolished a chair and table as he landed.
Curze was laughing. His pale, harlequin face was split by a maniacal grin of delight in bloodshed. He threw Shockeye Ffyn through the chamber windows, which detonated as one sheet like a glass bomb. He kicked Biter Herek to the ground and cracked his skull with a vicious, armoured, driving elbow. He took Gudson’s sword away, broke it across the Wolf’s back, then drove the broken blade into Bo Soren’s cheek. Malmur grappled with him, and Nido Knifeson joined him.
Both were cast aside, bones snapping and armour cracking.
‘I told you to run,’ Faffnr said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Euten replied.
‘Last chance,’ he said, raising his axe and rushing the Night Haunter.
Euten found her feet. She got up and tried to run. A Wolf, bleeding and writhing, lay in her path, another to her left, and a third against the wall, who appeared dead.
The doors were close.
Something flew over her, a huge thing. It hit the doors ahead of her and smashed them down entirely.
It was Faffnr Bludbroder.
The pack-leader lay in the wreckage of the doors, and did not rise.
Euten stopped. She turned.
Konrad Curze bowed to her. He was a smile made of shadows and smoke and sickness. He was wickedness itself.
‘Tarasha,’ he sighed. A smile should not be that wide.
‘He will kill you for this,’ she said.
‘He’s dead, Tarasha,’ Curze replied.
All her strength left her. Grief felled her. She dropped to her knees.
‘No…’
‘I killed him,’ Curze cooed. ‘Roboute and the Lion both. I have studied his story, of course. As the little emperor he pretends to be, he does so chronicle himself. I have heard of you. Tarasha Euten, Chamberlain Principal, and to all intents a mother to him. A mother.’
Curze sighed.
‘Thanks to the genius of my father, my kind does not enjoy the luxury of mothers. You are rare. You are a rare and obscene thing, you ragged witch. I wish Roboute had been alive to suffer the damage of your death.’
Euten rose to her full height and looked the monster in the eye.
‘Go to hell, you bastard,’ she said.
Curze drew back his claws.
Something entered the room. It entered with great speed and force. Euten felt the rush of it, the shockwave. She recoiled, reeling, stunned.
Suddenly, her killer was no longer in front of her.
Curze was being driven towards the exploded window by an elemental force.
It was clad in mismatched armour plate and mail, all purloined from Guilliman’s trophy hall, armour built to fit a primarch’s scale. It wielded a battle mace, a fine piece that Roboute had used early in the Great Crusade.
The elemental force, raging and screaming, its skin sheened with blood, smashed Curze backwards and drove the mace into his slender chest.
The elemental force had a name, though it did not know it or remember it.
That name was Vulkan.
Locked together, he and Curze tumbled out of the chamber windows and into the precipitous gloom beyond.
18
Death Denied
‘There may, perforce, be one end of time, one end
of the long thread, that playeth out to such dimension that it
out-spans all things, and all things loseth their measure beside it:
the edges of our cosmos, the puissance of our gods,
the endeavours and limits of life, all would be found less
than the extremity of time. Indeed, so far may time extendeth
that it outstretches even death itself, so death itself must perish.’
– from The Night Sound of Insects,
by the Sage of Sanaa [antiquity]
The primarchs, wrestling and falling like rebel angels, dropped into the night.
The lower roofs of the Residency slammed up to meet them. Their mutual impact shattered tiles and broke finials from the caps of the roofline. Near to the site of their impact, the sprawled body of Shockeye Ffyn lay at an angle over a gutter pipe where he had landed before their plunge.
They were still a long way up. The Residency was of considerable height. Behind them lay the Aegis Wall and the even more significant drop off the Castrum of the Palaeopolis into the out-spread Civitas. To the west of them, the night wind blew in thick smoke from the burning Fortress.
The jarring force of impact barely interrupted their fight. Vulkan rolled across the broken tiles and rose at once, swinging the mace; it wasn’t a warhammer, but it was close enough to register in his damaged mind. Curze squealed in pain and indignation, and writhed at his attacker, lashing out with his talons.
‘You live! You live!’ shrieked the Night Haunter. ‘Still your damned life plagues me! Still you won’t let me take it! Why do you still deny me? Why won’t you let me take it? Eventually even you must die!’
Vulkan’s answering howl was incoherent. He slammed his mace home, and drove it against warding claws. Sparks billowed out in the night wind.
‘I have killed two brothers tonight!’ Curze yelled. ‘A third would make this hour most perfect in outrage! And your life, yours of all lives, so inextinguishable, would be the greatest trophy of all!’
Vulkan did not understand the words that were being yelled at him. He understood very little. His mind had been destroyed by unbearable pain, by suffering, by the meticulous and ingenious torment that Curze had forced him to endure over a period of months. Curze had annihilated Vulkan’s spirit and sanity, but he had been unable to terminate his actual life.
He had discovered that Vulkan possessed one inhuman trait that the other primarchs did not. This vexed Curze immeasurably. It offered a challenge that a being raised on murder, blood and terror could not resist.
All Vulkan saw was his tormentor, his abuser, the man who had killed him over and over again in search of a way of killing him permanently; the brother who had, through the uttermost cruelty, revealed Vulkan’s immortal gift. The rage to exact vengeance consumed him.
The claws of Curze’s left hand ripped across Vulkan, stripping away part of his borrowed plate in silvered metal shavings. Vulkan drove the head of his mace into Curze’s left shoulder-plate with a swift, short-arced blow, and then swung the weapon sideways into Curze’s head.
The haft, not the head, caught Curze across the cheek, and sent him reeling. He tried to rally, and turn to check his opponent, but shattered tiles slithered under his feet. He fought for a second to control his position.
Vulkan exploited that second, and drove a ferocious two-handed swing into Curze’s w
avering body.
Plasteel cracked. Curze screamed, knocked clean off the slope of the roof. He pitched and fell, dropping ten metres onto the next shelf of the Residency roofscape. Grey slates, mined and shaped in the high peaks of Hera’s Crown, burst under him like sheet ice, throwing chips and slivers into the air.
Arms wide, Vulkan leapt off the roof and dropped feetfirst. Curze was not going to escape him.
On the slates below, Curze stirred. He looked up, saw Vulkan plunging towards him, and rolled desperately to avoid being crushed beneath his brother’s armoured bulk. Vulkan’s landing shattered more of the slates, and sent some large pieces whipping into the wind as shrapnel.
Instantly braced, Vulkan swung from the waist and drove his mace’s head at the sprawled Curze. The Night Haunter half-leapt, half-folded himself aside. The mace punched a significant hole through the roof, but the head wedged there for a second.
Curze retaliated, laughing with insane glee. He embraced Vulkan with his left arm, pulling their faces almost tenderly cheek to cheek. He drove his right arm in, a sharp understroke, palm up.
All four primary finger points stabbed into Vulkan’s side, coring through armour, underplate, flex sub-suit and directly into his torso. Blood gouted. Vulkan’s head snapped back and he clenched in pain, his blazing eyes closed. Curze held onto him, pulled the claws out, and repeated the stab.
Vulkan wrenched himself away. His side, left leg, and the tiles beneath him ran with blood. He staggered, and then fell onto the roof with a clatter of armour and cracking slates. He twitched violently and fell still.
Curze spat out clots of blood and phlegm. The wind whipped at his filthy hair.
‘See?’ he demanded. ‘This is death. Learn to accept it, brother!’
Vulkan’s eyes snapped open.
‘Oh,’ said Konrad Curze in disappointment. ‘That was quick.’
Gantulga raced up the central staircase of the Residency, sword in hand, with Eeron Kleve close behind him. Vodun Badorum and details of praecental guardsmen were already rushing to the private quarters across the landing and along the main corridor.
‘He’s here!’ Gantulga roared at them. ‘Have a care. He’s in this house!’