‘He’s here,’ John gasped.
‘Who? Who’s here?’ Narek asked.
An unnecessarily tall shadow leapt from the quad roof and landed between them. Slowly, it straightened up.
‘I dreamed of you,’ it hissed to John Grammaticus. ‘Suddenly, I saw you in my waking dreams. You have something I need. Give me the spear.’
John shook his head. ‘Never.’
Narek growled and raised his rifle to fire at Curze, but the primarch punched him aside without looking. Blood flew into the air from the impact. Narek landed several metres away.
‘Give me the spear,’ Curze repeated.
‘Never,’ said John Grammaticus.
Konrad Curze smiled.
‘No one ever, ever refuses me,’ he hissed.
‘Yeah?’ said Damon Prytanis from a few metres away. ‘Welcome to a whole new painful world.’
He opened fire on Konrad Curze with both sling guns.
23
Life for Life
‘In all things there is an exchange; of death for life, of darkness for light, of life for death, of light for darkness. Thus is universal equilibrium sustained.’
– Ulthrion Aledred, Precepts of Fortitude Against
the Primordial Annihilator (translated)
Vulkan, monolithic, had soaked up Damon’s streams of expertly placed razor-shot.
Curze merely sidestepped them. The eldar munitions, screaming like a billion angry hornets, passed through and around the fold of smoke that Konrad Curze had become. He was untouched.
Unchecked by any object, the razor-shots screamed on, ripping a long, broad blizzard of stone chips out of the quadrangle wall.
Curze left his laugher behind him.
Aghast, Damon stopped firing for a second, turning, trying to see where his target had gone. How could anything so big move so fast, so unnaturally?
A shadow slapped the sling pistols out of his hands. Damon winced and cried out. He had broken a shoulder blade and several ribs in his fall, and the impact across his wrists jarred him badly.
His pain had only just begun.
A single metal talon slid under his chin, punching up under the jaw through the floor of Damon’s mouth. He gurgled in agony, his tongue pushed sideways, his mouth and throat rapidly filling with blood. Curze laughed again and lifted Damon off the ground on the hook of his single talon.
‘A whole new painful world,’ Curze hissed, sing-song.
Damon struggled. It felt as if his face was about to be torn away.
Whining furiously, the chainsword tore into Curze from behind. John drove it in with all his might. He’d considered using the spear, but he was afraid of what that might do to Curze.
The chainsword was a more reliable choice.
Curze yelped. Blood and shreds of black armour and cloth were flung out by the sword’s cycling teeth. He let Damon fall, and wheeled at John. His visage – hateful eyes, black-in-black, and a biting black maw in a spectral white face – was the most terrifying thing John had ever seen.
He didn’t stand a chance.
But Vulkan did.
The decompressive pop of a teleport displacement drove John back as Vulkan materialised between him and the lunging Curze.
A hammer blow drove Curze back. A second made him reel sideways. Curze swung back with his claws, deflecting the hammer’s third and fourth attacks.
The action between them began to accelerate. They rapidly became post-human blurs, trading blows back and forth with unimaginable speed.
Vulkan abruptly connected in a fundamental way. His huge broad back and massive arms slammed the hammer into Curze’s torso. Plasteel cracked like a gunshot. Curze, seemingly no more than a bundle of black rags, was hurled backwards. He brought down two of the quad’s pillars in a rain of stones and dust, and smashed through the wall into one of the empty sheds.
Broken masonry slithered and dropped in the aftermath of the impact. Vulkan surged forward, using Dawnbringer to break the wall down further and get at his foe. Fully half of the fabricatory shed’s outer wall collapsed in an avalanche of stonework and dust. Vulkan churned on in the rising dust, smashing debris out of his way to find Curze.
The Night Haunter came at him, screaming, claws wide.
‘Why won’t you just die? This is nothing more than the end of the fight we began months ago, brother… and believe me, it will be the end!’
He drove Vulkan back through another section of the shed wall, bringing down another cascade of masonry. Vulkan stepped back on his right foot, braced, and slammed the haft of the hammer around like a bludgeon, ramming the base into the side of Curze’s head. Curze jolted sideways and then met the hammerhead coming the other way, and the blow sent him stumbling and flailing back into the yard.
Vulkan followed, whirling Dawnbringer in a vertical undersweep that struck Curze in the solar plexus, cracking him up and over onto his back.
He rolled out of the way of Vulkan’s next strike, and screamed at John Grammaticus.
‘Give me that thing! Give it to me!’
John was at Damon’s side. Damon’s mouth, chin and shirt-front were soaked with blood, and he was spitting out more as his mouth kept filling. He couldn’t speak, but he looked at John. His eyes were wide. Curze, a rapid shadow, rushed at them to claim the spear and finish Vulkan any way that he could count on as permanent.
Damon shoved John out of the way, and pulled out the last of his four weapons. It was the small, red-glass bottle. He hurled it at Curze.
The bottle was a tiny and very precious thing. The vessel had been carefully charged by Cabal specialists with warp-magic for use in utter emergencies. Damon had learned its method by rote, and it had saved his life in the mountains, three days after his arrival on Macragge.
As it shattered at Curze’s feet, it released the thing that Damon had trapped in it that day.
Ushpetkhar re-entered realspace, freed from the prison of Damon’s vessel and driven mad by its confinement. There was a brief and sickening suggestion of something massive and glossy sprouting from the floor of the yard; something muscular and segmented, like a vast, jet-shelled centipede writhing with wet pseudopods. Ushpetkhar attacked the first thing it saw – it shot up in an instant, out of nowhere, curling over to collapse and constrict Konrad Curze. He fought back, astonished, screaming, shredding its noisome flesh with his claws. Ushpetkhar locked around him. The giant figure of the primarch was engulfed in the greater, more fluid mass of the daemon.
It tightened its coils. It rippled.
It squeezed them both out of realspace, and they vanished together.
Only a smear of iridescent black slime and broken fragments of red glass remained where they had been.
Damon flopped back, gurgling blood as he tried to breathe.
John rose to his feet and faced Vulkan.
‘You know what I’m trying to do, don’t you?’ John said. ‘Even in your distraction, you sense our kinship. Lives and deaths, over and over again. All that pain. We’ve both known it.’
Vulkan didn’t respond, but he kept watching John with his burning eyes.
John stepped closer, the spear in his hand.
‘Life for life, my lord,’ he said. ‘My life to cure yours. Take it. Take it gladly, so that you may fight for us all.’
Behind him, Damon made a wretched sound. He tried to rise. He understood what John was about to do.
John raised the spear.
Damon spat out a mouthful of blood. ‘Don’t. Don’t!’ he managed to splutter.
Vulkan saw the spear and recognised that he was about to be struck by a weapon. Involuntarily, he made to block it and break John with his hammer.
John was already too close.
He plunged the spear into the primarch’s chest. It went in without resistance, cutting clean through
what was left of his armour plate, and transfixed Vulkan’s heart.
Electric fire wreathed them both. Corposant ignited and burned around the stricken primarch and the man driving the weapon into him.
Holding on, yelling in pain, John felt his life – his long, long Perpetual existence – flowing out of him through the spear into Vulkan.
He hoped it would be sufficient.
They fell. Vulkan landed on his back, the spear penetrating him. John fell across him. The lightning crackled around them for another few seconds, and then it sputtered out.
In great pain, Damon Prytanis got to his feet. He limped over to them.
They were both dead. This time, there was absolutely no sign of Vulkan rising again.
John had been wrong. Whatever madness he had been thinking, whatever had made him defy his orders, he’d got it wrong, and now, he too was dead.
‘You bloody idiot,’ Damon said, chewing and spitting the words, painfully, out of his mangled mouth.
He could hear gunships circling, the ominous howl of Storm Eagle engines. The fight had attracted a great deal of attention.
It was time to go. It was long past time to go.
Narek of the Word stirred and sat up. His transhuman metabolism had finally clotted and closed the wounds Curze had left upon him.
He got to his feet. Further devastation had evidently swept through the machine shop quad while he had been unconscious. Curze had vanished, and the two humans were gone too.
Vulkan still lay there, however.
Narek could hear the enemy approaching, but he limped over to Vulkan’s side and bent over him.
The primarch was dead. The spear impaled his chest. Narek thought to pull it out, to take it and escape so he could put it to his own purpose.
When he touched the spear, however, it was cold and inert. It no longer felt godlike. There was no power left in it. He tried to pull it out, but it absolutely refused to move.
Gunships chattered in overhead. He heard the crunch of heavy footsteps.
The Cataphractii of Guilliman’s Invictus bodyguard entered the broken quad from all sides.
Narek rose to meet them. He tossed his rifle aside and slowly, reluctantly, raised his hands.
‘Get this bastard contained,’ said Drakus Gorod. ‘Now.’
24
The Unremembered
Empire
‘Those who urgently wish to rule are the last people
who should be allowed to do so.’
– Konor, private writings
On the morning of the next day, the main strength of the Ultramar fleet put out from Macragge and, by the light of the Pharos, met the ships that Oberdeii’s dream had foretold were coming to them.
From the bridge of his flagship, clad in ceremonial plate, Guilliman looked into the hololithic projection before him. He saw the face of his brother looking back.
Guilliman smiled.
‘Well met, Sanguinius,’ he said. ‘I welcome you to Ultramar and the Five Hundred Worlds. It is good that you are here. Now we can begin.’
Sanguinius, Primarch of the IX Legion Blood Angels, entered the Audience Hall, trailing an honour guard of his finest warriors, clad in their bright crimson wargear.
He was always a breathtaking figure, dressed in golden armour and a mantle of spotted carnodon fur. His face, so noble of feature, was framed by a radiant sunburst. His great wings, of course, made him more like an angel than anything else.
Guilliman stepped forward to meet him, and they embraced. Then Sanguinius turned to the Lion and embraced him too.
‘Whence come you, brother?’ Guilliman asked.
‘From Signus Prime,’ Sanguinius replied. His voice was, as ever, like music, but Guilliman could sense pain deep within it. ‘From a bloody fight and a hard betrayal. I fear that my fleet has been adrift in the warp for a long time since, and only your strange light has shown us the way out.’
‘What strength are you?’ asked the Lion.
‘To all sensible purposes, my entire Legion,’ Sanguinius replied.
‘And what befell you on Signus Prime?’ asked Guilliman.
Sanguinius seemed reluctant to reply.
‘We faced down an enemy the like of which we have never known,’ he replied. ‘It cost us. It is now my dearest intention to make best speed for Terra and stand alongside our father, against the treachery of Horus Lupercal.’
‘Return to Terra at this time is not viable,’ said Guilliman. ‘I am sorry to say that the Ruinstorm chokes all travel out.’
‘We too wish to stand with Terra, if Terra still stands,’ the Lion said, including both himself and Guilliman in the remark. ‘For now, we must abide here, and build other strengths.’
‘In what particular?’ asked Sanguinius.
‘I want Roboute to tell you about his efforts to keep the very essence and spirit of the Imperium alive,’ the Lion said. ‘I want him to tell you about Imperium Secundus.’
The three brothers stood and looked upon the body of Vulkan for a long time. The fallen primarch had been placed in a golden casket, fashioned by artisans of the Mechanicum.
‘Vulkan. Terra, you should have told me, Roboute!’ said the Lion.
‘Just as you should have told me about Konrad,’ Guilliman replied.
‘What was it? “You keep too many secrets, brother”,’ the Lion reminded him.
‘Point taken,’ Guilliman said. He sighed.
‘It is a preservation capsule,’ Guilliman told his brothers. ‘It is intended to sustain our dear brother Vulkan’s body in the slightest hope that his extraordinary gifts may yet return him to life.’
The top of the casket was clear glass. Vulkan’s body had been dressed in fresh wargear taken from Guilliman’s armoury and decorated in the livery of the Salamanders. His hammer, Dawnbringer, lay upright across his breast. No one had been able to remove the spear lodged in his heart.
‘It is a sorry sight,’ whispered Sanguinius. ‘How many more of us must fall? How many more of us will Horus take?’
‘Vulkan lives,’ said Guilliman. ‘This is the cry of the Salamanders, and I heartily uphold it. Even in his state of death, he represents the will in us to survive.’
‘It is still a sad fate,’ said Sanguinius, ‘to be held in a casket here in the cold cellars of your Fortress, consigned for all eternity.’
‘It is not a fate I would wish,’ Guilliman agreed. He gestured towards the figures of Zytos and the other Salamanders survivors who had blown to Macragge from the bosom of the storm. They knelt around the golden casket, forming a mourning vigil.
‘I have pledged that, once the storm has abated, good Zytos and his brothers will transport our brother’s body back to Nocturne and inter him in the clean soil of his home world.’
‘This is more fitting,’ the Lion said.
They withdrew from the vault. Guilliman turned and took a last sad look at the casket.
Engraved upon it, on a gilded scroll, were the words ‘The Unbound Flame’.
‘Will he do it?’ Euten asked.
‘I believe the Lord Sanguinius is somewhat unwilling,’ said Farith Redloss.
‘Well, they are talking at least,’ Dolor pointed out.
The three primarchs had withdrawn to the seldom-visited chamber where Guilliman had set the long table and the twenty-one seats draped with banners. The broad doors were closed. Euten and the ranked officers of all three Legions were obliged to wait in the hall for a verdict or command.
‘He is the most suitable,’ Euten said. ‘To see him up close… Lord Sanguinius is the most…’
She searched for a word.
‘He is angelic,’ said Dolor.
‘He is numinous,’ added Farith Redloss. ‘He is more like his father in that respect. Some of the primarch lords are very much of the flesh.
Horus is one, and your lord Guilliman another. They have physicality. But the Emperor… To be in his presence is to be in the presence of that which is spiritual, and has no constant form. It is said the Emperor appears to each man in the image that man wishes to see. I think Lord Sanguinius has inherited much of that trait.’
Euten nodded.
‘It is true. I do not think of him as a face or a figure. I think of him as a light. The very colour of his hair and his eyes seems to change with his mood, and with mine.’
‘This has been noted by others,’ Dolor agreed. ‘Several of the primarchs have this quality beyond simple physical stature, but none more than Sanguinius.’
‘He would be perfect,’ she said.
‘Many think so,’ said Farith Redloss. ‘Just as many wonder why Horus and not Sanguinius was chosen as Warmaster after Ullanor. If Horus was preferred, and yet has revealed such mortal flaws since, one wonders what secret flaws reside in the Lord of the Blood Angels?’
‘Imperium Secundus represents continuity,’ Guilliman said. ‘Since Calth, it has been all I can do to hold the fractured parts of the Five Hundred Worlds together. Ultramar is all that we know we have. If the Imperium endures, then we will re-join it when the storm dies, but if it has not endured elsewhere, then we have preserved it here.’
Guilliman had sat in the seat marked with the cobalt-blue banner of his Legion. Likewise, the Lion had placed himself in the seat covered by the Dark Angel’s proud flag. Sanguinius had chosen to remain standing. He paced, troubled but thoughtful.
‘Roboute has made this argument to me at length,’ said the Lion, ‘and though I have been troubled by some of its details, I find myself seeing the value of it more and more.’
‘How so?’ asked the angelic lord.
The Lion sat back, his hands flat upon the edge of the table.
‘The events of last night alone,’ he said in a quiet tone, ‘have made me value life and kinship more than ever. We have lost another brother, and Macragge, great heartstone of the Five Hundred Worlds, was almost brought low by the deeds and machinations of just one demented traitor. I have witnessed the venom of our enemy, and I have seen the sad fragility of those assets and lives that remain to us. Roboute and I do not think alike on many subjects. We disagree. But we also stand together, loyal. We fight for the Imperium, and this is all of the Imperium that we have.’