by Nick Kyme
Despite the bitter taste that the other Legions’ treachery had left in his mouth, Numeon had never been more certain of anything.
‘I am sure of it. Whatever sickness has come upon our old allies, we will burn it to ash.’
‘Then we are as one. Thank you, Artellus.’
‘I did nothing, my lord.’
‘You heeded me when my mind was troubled. You did more than you realised.’ Vulkan gave a feral smile, his misgivings transformed and reforged into purpose. ‘Eye-to-eye, Pyre captain.’
‘Tooth-to-tooth, my lord.’
‘The bombardment is soon?’ Vulkan asked.
‘Imminent,’ said Numeon, reassured and galvanised by Vulkan’s revivified demeanour. He realised, as Vulkan attached Dawnbringer to his belt, that it wasn’t weakness he had seen in his primarch, but humanity. It was the genuine concern that his brothers had fallen to darkness, and the emergence of the resolve he would need to fight them. He should doubt the justness of this fight, and he should stop to consider the consequences of it. Only by doing so could a warrior be sure that he drew bolter and blade in good cause and against a true enemy.
This, Numeon realised, was Vulkan’s teaching.
Morality, conscience, humanity, these were not flaws; they were strengths.
‘Take me to the muster deck,’ said Vulkan, donning his war-helm. ‘When we make planetfall, I would look my brother in the eye and ask him why he did this, before he’s taken to Terra in chains.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The dread feast
‘If music is nourishment for the soul, what then of screaming?’
– Konrad Curze,
the ‘Night Haunter’
After the shame of my defeat, I became lost for a time. Curze did not visit me, Ferrus’s malignant presence was conspicuous by its absence, and I even started to miss the shade of my dead brother. There was only the stench of the dead, rising over the hours and days to a noisome fume that filled my senses with the stink of failure.
Ferrus had been right; I was weak. I could not save the mortals from their fate, I could not beat Perturabo’s death trap. Curze had changed tactics. I had no idea why. Instead of trying to punish my body, he had decided to punish my conscience.
The effects were enervating.
Cut adrift amongst my fractured thoughts, I sat unmoving in the darkness of my cell and in that moment I am not too proud to admit that, for the first time, I truly knew what it was to despair.
Suns rose and fell, stars were born and died again. The cosmos shifted around me, and after a while time ceased to have meaning. I was as a statue of onyx, my arms hanging by my sides, my forehead touching the ground. Arch-backed, too wounded to do anything but breathe, I felt the slow atrophy of my limbs and the hunger in my chest. Vigour was leaving me, as steam flees cooling metal, and I welcomed it.
To die would be a mercy.
A legionary can live for many days without sustenance. His physiology is enhanced to such a degree that he can be practically starved and still march, fight and kill. Our father made His sons even stronger still, but I knew, as a man who knows he is dying of cancer, that I was not myself. My humours were out of balance; the many woundings Curze had subjected me to, the mental tortures, were beginning to take their toll. At my lowest ebb, when even my will was fading, I slipped into blessed oblivion and let it take me in.
My peace was not to last.
A sound like a distant stream trickling next to my ear brought me to my senses. I realised as I opened my eyes that I was still in the deathly chamber, but that now it was filling with water. It chilled my face, lapping up against my cheek. Lips parched, tongue leathern, I tried to drink but found the water brackish and metallic tasting. My guts churned, hunger gnawing, threatening to devour me from within. Too weak to stand, to even lift my body, I could only watch, and see the open sluices at the base of the walls admitting this languid torrent.
I saw the spark of electricity a moment later and had only a few seconds of realisation before the shock hit and I was jerked off the ground in a bone-wrenching spasm. My wretched frame, emaciated from lack of food and water, groaned; my muscles, partially atrophied from lack of use, burned. My throat, dry as desert ash, could barely muster a scream.
‘Vulkan…’
As if I were trapped in a deep well, my saviour calling down to me from above, I heard my name.
‘Vulkan…’ it repeated, only this time the voice was clearer. I was reaching for the light, kicking hard to breach the surface and end my submergence.
‘Vulkan, you must eat.’
As my eyelids snapped open, I discovered that I must have passed out, and had regained consciousness in a different part of the ship.
I was sitting down; my hands and feet were bound.
Opposite me, sitting across a broad banquet table, my dead brother grimaced at me.
‘Take your fill,’ he said, hollow eye sockets gesturing to the feast arrayed before us. ‘You must eat.’
We were sitting in a long gallery. Ornate candelabras, steeped in dust, provided a flickering luminescence. Above us, silver chandeliers swayed lightly on a stagnant breeze. Gossamer-thin strands conjoined them like the webs of some ancient and long dead arachnid. Similarly, the feast itself was swathed in a fine and farinaceous veneer of grey-white.
I smelled meat, but here and there the scent was somehow wrong, as if some of it were spoiled or raw. There were fruits and bread that both bore the suggestion of mould despite their ostensible freshness. Carafes of wine littered the table in abundance but in some the grapes were bad, the vintage corked and unpalatable.
Despite the decaying feast, I salivated at the prospect and struggled impotently against my bonds to taste it.
‘Eat, Vulkan,’ Ferrus urged. ‘You are wasting away, brother.’
I tried to speak, but my throat was so raw I barely managed to croak.
‘Speak up,’ said Ferrus, his lipless mouth champing open and shut, the darkness of his tongueless mouth gaping and black but somehow still able to form words. With a skeletal hand, he made an expansive, sweeping gesture. ‘We all want to hear what you’ve got to say.’
Until that moment, I had not noticed the other guests.
Seventeen men and women sat around the banquet table. Like the other prisoners Curze had shown me, these humans were both Army and Imperial citizenry. I even saw some remembrancers amongst the host, and one who bore a resemblance to Verace. Of all the guests, he was the only one who seemed calm and unaffected by it all. It could not be the remembrancer, of course, for Verace was not a man in the strictest sense. He was merely a mantle, thrown about the shoulders of a being who wore it like a cloak.
Skin stretched across their bones like thin parchment, lips were drawn back over their gums, eyes hooded with dark rings of fatigue – the mortals were evidently being starved too.
Unlike me, though, they were not bound.
Instead, I noticed their hands had been removed at the wrist. Impaled in the cauterised stumps were long, jagged knives and trident-pronged forks. A few of the humans had managed to spear hunks of meat or carve into wedges of bread but could not bring these victuals to their mouths, the length of their concomitant utensils preventing them.
This great feast was laid out before them and they could only watch as it decayed and festered whilst they starved.
Ferrus got my attention by raising a goblet.
‘Should I toast, brother? It seems in order, before this greedy rabble devours everything.’
Again, I tried to speak, but my throat felt as if it had been scoured raw by razor blades and all I achieved was an aggravated rasp. I clenched and unclenched my fists, straining weakly against my bonds. I stamped my feet, feeling the bone bruise and crack.
‘To you, dear Vulkan,’ said Ferrus, raising the goblet to his lips and draining it. Dark
red wine cascaded down his throat, through the ruin of his neck and out again via the cracks in his ribcage where his armour and flesh had begun to crumble away with the onset of decay.
As if bemused, Ferrus looked around at the other diners.
‘Perhaps they are waiting for you, brother?’ he suggested. ‘They have yet to consume a single morsel.’
The bindings around my wrists were beginning to bite into skin now. I ignored the pain, my jaw locked in anger and my entire body trembling.
‘F… e…’ I croaked. ‘F… e… e…’
Ferrus turned his head as if trying to listen, but his ears had shrunk into nubs of rotten flesh.
‘Speak up, Vulkan. Let’s all hear what you have to say.’
‘F… e… e… d. Feed. Feed! Feed each other!’
I roared and struggled but still couldn’t break free.
Slowly, certainly, Ferrus shook his head.
‘No, Vulkan. I’m sorry, but they cannot hear you.’ He pointed a bony digit at one thrashing individual, a dried rivulet of blood having crusted from his ear and down the side of his head.
Deaf.
As the poor man turned to face me, I noticed the milky consistency of his iris.
Blind too.
Only smell, touch and taste remained. So cruel to be so close to what the body craves and the mind imagines, only for it to be denied.
‘The greedy cannot listen, won’t listen,’ said Ferrus. ‘Nor can you make them. Humankind’s greed will eventually destroy it, Vulkan. By aiding them you are only prolonging the inevitable.’
I stopped listening and ignored my dead brother’s babbling mouth. Instead, I roared. I cursed Curze’s name until I no longer had voice to speak it.
And then I sat there, a king at his dread feast as his guests slowly starved and died.
My constitution, however weak, kept me going. Curze knew I would survive longer than the humans and when the final one breathed his last, I was alone.
I wept as the candles bled down to nubs and the accumulated dust snuffed them out as well as the chandeliers above me, throwing the hall into darkness.
‘Curze…’ I sobbed.
‘Curze!’ With greater vigour this time, my anger lending me much-needed strength.
‘Curze!’ I shouted it, bellowing at the shadows. ‘Curze, you coward. Come out! Finish me if you can. Even like this, I will not yield.’
A slow sigh made me start, so close that I knew it came from the seat next to me.
‘I am here, brother,’ said Curze, seated by my side. ‘I have always been here, watching, waiting.’
‘Waiting for what?’ I hissed, the effort to speak after my outburst taxing me.
‘To see what happens next.’
‘Cut my bonds and find out, brother…’
Curze laughed. ‘Still fierce, eh, Vulkan? The monster within isn’t cowed quite yet, is he?’
I growled, ‘Kill me or fight me, just get it over with.’
Curze shook his head.
‘I didn’t want you to beg. I don’t want you to beg. I would not have you brought low like that. You are better than that, Vulkan. Better than me at least. Or so you think.’
‘I’m not begging, I’m giving you a choice. One way or the other, you will have to kill me. As a dog or as your equal.’
‘Equal?’ Curze snapped in a sudden burst of apoplexy. ‘Are we peers then, you and I? Are we princes of the universe, bonded by common cause and blood?’
‘We are warriors and still brothers, despite how far you have fallen.’
‘I have fallen nowhere. My perch is as lofty as it ever was. You. You are the one who is brought down from grace. Not so noble in the shadows, are you? Tell me, Vulkan, now you inhabit the gutters as I do, what do you see in the black mirror before you? Are we all our father’s sons, or are some of us just a little better than the others? Do you think he made all twenty of us believing we each would have a purpose beyond making his favourites shine that little bit brighter?’
‘Envy? Is that still it? Is that why I am here?’
‘No, Vulkan. You are here for my amusement. I cannot be jealous of someone who is only as great or weak as I am.’
‘Cut me loose, face me without these games, and we shall see who is weak.’
‘I would slay you where you stand, brother. Have you seen yourself, lately? You aren’t looking so formidable.’
‘Then what is the purpose of all this madness and death? If you want to kill me, just do it. Get it over with. Why won’t you just–’
Shadow-fast, Curze snapped the fork off one of the dead human’s wrists and rammed it deep into my chest.
I felt it pierce the breastbone, the dirty metal driven into my heart to impale it. Crouching over me, Curze proceeded to drag the blunt implement up through my ribcage, tearing through the chest and neck as I jetted blood across his breastplate in arterial black.
‘I tried,’ he told me, snarling through his anger as the fork reached my chin and blackness began to intrude at the edge of my vision. ‘I cut off your head, pierced your heart, crushed your skull, impaled every major organ in your body. I even burned and dismembered you. You came back, brother. Every. Single. Time. You cannot die.’
Aghast, mind reeling with my brother’s confession, I died.
Curze had done as I asked, as I begged, and killed me.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Burned
Though the spearhead felt light in his grasp and cold to the touch, Elias knew the weight of the moment and the weapon’s part in it before him.
He had returned to the pulpit, choosing to be divested of his armour and coming to his altar of sacrifice wearing only his priestly vestments.
Eight fresh supplicants stood ready around the pit, including the one waiting on his knees before Elias on the stone pulpit. Behind them, seven of the Dark Apostle’s most devout disciples loomed. These men and women were not the sacrificial lambs of Ranos – they were adherents to the cult, true believers. They had given themselves willingly, to become part of the Pantheon’s great weft and weave. Not a one amongst them quavered or wept; they merely prayed, and it gave Elias’s heart such joy to hear it.
‘Reveal your devotion!’ he cried to the eight, prompting the cultists to disrobe and expose their carved flesh.
Skin profaned with dark and fell sigils was revealed from under crimson cloth. Using ritual blades, the cultists had marked themselves with a serpent that uncoiled across all of their bodies. Elias’s supplicant was the eighth and his chest bore the serpent’s head, described in his own partially clotted blood.
‘It is good,’ he muttered, becoming lost in reverie.
Hell would come to Traoris and he would be its gatekeeper, admitting it into the mortal plane.
Chanting the names of the Neverborn, Elias began the ritual. He felt the thrum of power in the spearhead, saw its fulgurant glow between raptures and knew that this was the tool of his elevation. Not Erebus, not even Lorgar, but he would be the one.
Valdrekk Elias would receive what he had always craved. Ascension.
Beseeching the daemons of the aether to hear him, praying for them to be attracted to the spear’s psychic resonance, he felt the heat from the blade begin to intensify. At first it was just uncomfortable, a necessary forbearance to yield the greater prize, but then it became painful. Looking down at the weapon in his grasp, Elias realised it was aflame and his skin with it.
He uttered the cursed verses faster, prompting his disciples to chant with ever greater vigour. Still it burned.
The glow was so bright that it lit up the sacrificial site, chasing back the shadows that had been slowly creeping from the old ruins like spilled ink. They seemed to recoil, as did the supplicants, smoke rising from their mutilated bodies.
One woman cried out, and Elias almost faltered in
his well-practiced dogma before a Word Bearer held her steady. Others were showing signs of displeasure too, writhing and coughing as their forms were devoured by cleansing flame. It spread, the burning light, crawling inexorably over the disciples.
The names of the Neverborn, so crucial to the ritual, slipped from Elias’s memory. The agony in his arm was such that he clutched it. Rendered down to blackened flesh, he balked at his sudden dis-figurement and realised that harnessing the power of the spearhead was beyond him. Like a horse that has slipped its reins, it was wild. But it was also vengeful.
‘Kill them!’ Elias cried, with more fear than he intended, but it was too late.
Unfettered, the power contained within the fulgurite broke free of its shackles and coursed out in a flood. It sprang from Elias, a storm seeking to earth itself in a lightning rod.
It found seven.
Sinking to their knees, their ritual daggers now forgotten, the disciples died quickly and in agony. Their battle-plate was no protection.
Furcas clutched at his throat, a death scream issuing from his mouth in a plume of smoke. Dolmaroth, his hands held up to his head, became fused in a solid mass of flesh and metal. Imarek managed to wrench off his helmet before he died, but took half of his face with it as it stuck to the inside. Eligor shuddered and melted like wax through the vents in his armour. The others fell in similar fashion, prompting the Word Bearers watching from behind them to recoil for fear of sharing their brothers’ fate.
The supplicants were already charred meat and bone before the first disciple fell, and they were blasted to ash by an unfurling wave of fire.
Realising his peril, teeth clenched with the pain of his arm, Elias rammed the spearhead into the stone dais of his pulpit and fell back as the fire returned.
The Dark Apostle bounced off one step then another, tumbling into a wretched heap.
Of his pulpit, only a jagged spur of burned rock remained, with the still-glowing spearhead lodged within it.
Breathing hard, acutely aware of the trauma his body had suffered, Elias screamed. Not in pain, but in anger and frustration. He had expected ascension, revelation, not to be thwarted.
