by Nick Kyme
I stooped and picked up the fallen hammer. It felt good to have Dawnbringer in my grasp again and I ran my thumb along the activation stud I had put on the grip.
‘You should not have led me here, Konrad,’ I told him. My brother was still curled up and shaking with the energy spikes from the shield. At first I thought he was sobbing, his shame and self-loathing having reduced my poor brother to melancholy again, but I was wrong.
Curze was laughing once more.
‘I know, Vulkan,’ he said, having recovered some of his composure. ‘Your beacon won’t work. This chamber is teleport-shielded. Nothing goes in or out except through that gate behind you.’ Still trembling with the aftershocks of absorbing the energy shield, Curze managed to stand. ‘Did you think you had broken me, brother? Did you believe you had tricked me into letting you escape?’ He grinned. ‘Hope is cruel, isn’t it? Yours was false, Vulkan.’
Before I could prevent it, he twisted something on his vambrace, activating some system slaved to his armour.
Hearing the churn of gears, I braced myself. I expected another death trap, a long plunge into a still deeper dungeon. Instead, I saw the floor retreat beneath my feet, leaving a sturdy mesh that supported our weight and that I could see through.
There was another chamber below the heart of the labyrinth, but it was nothing more than a dank cell. No, not a cell, a tomb. Weak lumen strips flickered in this hidden undercroft, and their combined light and shadow revealed hundreds of bodies. Humans and legionaries, prisoners of the Prince of the Crows, languished in the gloom. They were dead, but before they had died they had been tortured and brutalised.
‘This is my true work of art,’ Curze revealed, gesturing to the slain as a painter would his finished canvas, ‘and you, Vulkan, the immortal king presiding over the anguished dead, are my crowning piece.’
‘You’re a monster,’ I breathed, eyes wide with the horror of it.
‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ he hissed.
Meeting his madman’s gaze, I decided to oblige him.
‘You’re right,’ I conceded, holding up Dawnbringer so he could see it. ‘I fashioned it as a teleporter, a means to escape even a prison such as this. I counted on you leading me here, on you needing to face me one last time. It seems I was fooled into thinking you hadn’t planned for this.’ I lowered the weapon and let the weight of its head pull the haft down until my hand was wrapped around the very end of the grip. ‘But you’re forgetting one thing…’
Curze leaned in, as if eager to hear my words. He believed that he had me, that I would never escape his trap.
He was wrong.
‘What’s that, brother?’
‘It’s also a hammer.’
The blow caught him across the chin, a savage upswing that took Curze off his feet and put him on the ground again with the sheer force of the impact. He got to one knee before I hit him again, this time across his left shoulder blade where I split his pauldron in half. I jabbed into his stomach before swinging a second blow that put him on his feet.
Curze almost fell again when I drove into him, pressing the hammer’s haft against his throat and pushing him back until he slammed up against the wall. His gorget had broken apart and was hanging loose, so I kept the haft across his trachea and pushed against it, one hand on the pommel and the other on the hammer head, and slowly began to crush bone.
Blood and saliva flecked Curze’s armour, spat from his still grinning mouth.
‘Yes…’ he choked at me. ‘Yes…’
So wretched, I wanted to kill him, to end his suffering and take some measure of vengeance for all the suffering he had caused me and my sons.
‘Come on…’ Curze’s eyes were pleading, and I realised he wanted this. Ever since Kharaatan, he had wanted this. Not every chink of weakness I had seen in this place was feigned. Curze truly did loathe himself, so much so that he wanted it to end. If I killed him he would have everything he wanted, death and a means of bringing me down to his despicable level.
‘I am damned, Vulkan…’ he gasped. ‘End it now!’
The abyss was pulsing at the edge of thought, black and red, the monster crawling up from its depths to claim me. So many dead, I could almost hear the corpses willing me to do it, to avenge them.
And then I saw Ferrus, his proud and noble face looking down upon me, the beloved older brother.
‘Do it…’ Curze was urging. ‘I will only kill again, take another for my amusement. Corax, Dorn, Guilliman… Perhaps I’ll bait the Lion when we reach Thramas. You can’t risk letting me live.’
I released him, and he fell clutching at his throat, choking the air back into his lungs. From beneath the lank strands of his hair, he glared at me, eyes filled with murderous intent. I had scorned him; worst of all I had let him live when I had every reason not to, and proved that he was alone in his depravity.
‘You can’t escape,’ he spat. ‘I’ll never let you go.’
I looked down at him, pitying. ‘You’re wrong about that too. No craft you possess can hold me here now, Konrad.’ I brandished the hammer, held it aloft like itwas my standard. ‘Your dampeners are useless. I could have left as soon as I took the hammer from your cage, but I chose to stay behind. I wanted to hurt you, but most of all I wanted to know I could spare you. We are alike, Konrad, but not like that. Never like that. But if I see you again, I will kill you.’ I spoke these last words through clenched teeth, my sanity hanging by the barest thread as the grace Verace had given me finally faded. Or perhaps it was my own resolve that had preserved my mind, one last herculean effort to stave off madness? I would never know.
Pressing the stud upon Dawnbringer’s haft, I closed my eyes and let the flare of teleportation take me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Lightning fields
K’gosi was dead. The last burst had punched straight through his plastron and taken most of his upper torso with it.
‘Brother…’ Leodrakk snarled, firing back through the darkness and accumulated gun smoke. ‘Vulkan lives!’ he shouted, trying to be heard above the roar of automatic weapons. The remnants of his company were pinned. Blistering fire exploded overhead, showering the hunkered warriors with sparks and shrapnel from their slowly disintegrating cover.
A sub-entrance had got them this far, past the first patrols and through the outer gate. The space port was based on three concentric rings, each one diminishing towards the centre where the main landing apron resided. All the ships from the outskirts of the facility had been scuppered, leaving only those in the core.
Unfortunately, this area had proven to be the most heavily guarded, and the sub-entrance a lure to draw the shattered company inwards. A few hundred metres away, three shuttles as well as the Word Bearers’ own vessels stood ready for take-off.
Despite his defiance, Leodrakk knew they would never reach them. According to his retinal display, only six legionaries were still standing. The rest were down, or dead.
Firing off a snap-shot, he bellowed into the vox, ‘Ikrad, move your men up. The rest of you, covering fire!’
Three Salamanders advanced, inching along a corridor section overlooked by gantries that led onto the landing apron. G’orrn went down before he reached the next scrap of cover, a buttressed alcove with scarcely enough room for Ikrad and B’tarro.
Even with auto-senses it was hard to tell how many they were facing. Between bursts Leodrakk tried to count the power-armoured silhouettes jamming up the end of the corridor, but every time he did more were added to the horde.
The Word Bearers were holding and showed no signs of allowing the Salamanders to break through. Leodrakk emerged from cover for a second look. A shell whined near his head, the sound of it glancing off his helmet amplified by his auto-senses. Warning sigils cascaded across his failing retinal display. A close call, but his head was still attached. For now.
Ikrad’s voice crackled over the vox, ‘I can’t see the cleric.’
‘I can’t see much of anything,’ snapped Hur’vak.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Leodrakk replied. ‘Keep their attention focused on us. Hold them here.’
‘That may prove problematic, brother,’ said Kronor, gesturing behind them to where a second force of Word Bearers could be heard moving into position.
Beneath his faceplate, Leodrakk smiled. His ammo count was low. He suspected that his brothers’ were the same. Bolter fire was raining in from the end of the corridor now, accented by the occasional flash of a volkite. It chipped at the iron buttresses and the columns where the Salamanders were taking cover. Soon it would stitch them from either side and that would be an end to it.
Muttering an oath for Skatar’var, Leodrakk addressed what was left of his men.
‘How do Salamanders meet their enemies?’ he asked.
‘Eye-to-eye,’ came the response in unison.
‘And tooth-to-tooth,’ Leodrakk concluded, drawing his blade. He roared, and rose up. The others shouted after him, determined to die with their weapons in their hands and their wounds to the front. It was a glorious but short-lived charge.
‘Vulkan lives!’
Jags of lightning were dancing hard and fast across the desert. Buried under Numeon’s drake cloak, Grammaticus eyed them warily.
‘You’ll kill us all out here,’ he said, voice muffled through his rebreather. It was the one from the dig site, the only part of his original equipment he still carried, if not the persona they had formerly belonged to. As well as the lightning, which cracked the sky in a circulatory system of veins and arcing tributaries, ash storms raked the wastelands. The grit and mineral flecks were as abrasive as glass, and deadly when whipped up close to hurricane speeds. No barrier to an armoured legionary, they could prove fatal to a mortal.
Hriak warded off the worst of it with a psychic kine-shield he had thrown up and was taking painstaking effort to maintain in front of them. It was taxing the Librarian, and he hadn’t spoken since the three of them had entered the lightning fields.
‘Out here is what’s keeping us alive, John Grammaticus,’ Numeon replied.
Like Hriak, his armour was taking a battering out in the storm. Already, much of its green paintwork had been abraded by the gritty ash winds. Since planetfall the storms had worsened. Their initial march to the city proper was much less treacherous. There was but one small mercy – they had, as of yet, avoided the lightning. A bolt struck nearby, throwing up a gout of crystallised sand.
‘All evidence to the contrary,’ said Grammaticus, seeing the dark scar left in the wake of the lightning. ‘I think I would have preferred to be with our comrades at the space port.’
‘No you wouldn’t,’ said Numeon darkly, and that was an end to it. ‘The ship isn’t far. And besides,’ he added, glancing away to the dunes rising far off on their right, ‘we aren’t unprotected.’
Pergellen knew it grated at Numeon to leave the others behind. In the end, it was Leodrakk who had volunteered to lead the rest of the company into the space port so that the Pyre captain and Raven Guard could reach an alternate means of escape. Assaulting the space port had never been viable. It was dismissed before being mooted, but their enemy didn’t know that. Intent on killing the interlopers who had interfered with their plans, the Word Bearers had concentrated their entire force on the team attacking the space port. No one would see the three lonely travellers insanely braving the lightning fields. At least, that was the theory. Pergellen would have stayed with the diversion group, too, were it not for the fact that further insurance in getting the human off-planet was deemed prudent. His scope would watch them and track the ash wastes for errant legionaries who had scented the ruse and decided to come hunting.
He was lying flat, the scouring ash wind raking his power generator and shoulders as he propped his rifle beneath his chin. His eye had not left the scope since he had found his position on the dune. It was a good vantage, high enough to allow for decent coverage but low so that he didn’t stick out. It was solid too, a ridge of bedrock sitting under all that ash.
He first tracked Hriak, then Numeon, and finally Grammaticus, allowing the crosshairs of his targeter to settle on the human’s hooded head. Then he moved the scope back across the wastes to see if they were being followed.
So far, so good…
By his reckoning, the landing site wasn’t far, and once there they would find the gunship they had secreted upon planetfall. The other operational vessel didn’t matter now. It was far from their reach, but Pergellen had plotted a return route to it in case an emergency exfiltration was still possible.
A brief blizzard of ash squalled across him, muddying the lens of the Iron Hand’s scope. He maintained position, but as he peered through the now occluded scope he thought he caught sight of three large humanoid shapes moving against the storm. Visibility was already poor, but it was made worse by the dirty lens. Pergellen considered raising the alarm but decided against it in case vox-traffic was being monitored in any way. He doubted it was Leodrakk or any of his men, but had to be sure if he was going to make a kill. Lifting his body up onto his elbows, he went to clear the lens when he heard the faintest crunch of displaced sand behind him.
‘Stand and turn, I won’t shoot you in the back,’ ordered a gruff voice. It was the first time he had heard it, but Pergellen knew instinctively who it belonged to. With that information in mind, he relaxed the grip on the bolt pistol strapped to his hip.
‘Honour?’ queried Pergellen, rising. ‘I understood that the Seventeenth had long abandoned such scruples.’
‘I serve my own code. Now turn.’
Pergellen did so and saw a warrior armoured in red and black. His trappings were battered and stained. He remembered him from the ambush site, the attack on the manufactorum and the skirmish at the outflow. Seemed the Word Bearer remembered him too.
‘You are the scout,’ he said, nodding.
Pergellen wondered if he’d done it out of respect.
‘And you the huntsman.’
The warrior nodded again.
‘Barthusa Narek.’
‘Verud Pergellen.’
‘Your skill is impressive, Pergellen,’ Narek admitted.
‘I don’t think we’re here to compare notes, though, are we?’
‘Correct. I would have preferred to match myself against you rifle to rifle, but there is no time for that now.’ He sounded almost regretful. ‘Instead, we are left with bolt pistol or blade.’
Upon first sight of him, Pergellen had logged and gauged the threat of each of the huntsman’s weapons. They seemed to consist mainly of blades, but he also had a bolt pistol and the sniper rifle currently aimed at the Iron Hand’s heart.
‘Are you agreeable to these terms?’ Narek asked.
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I assume you’re not asking about the acts of my Legion, or my fealty to that Legion. If what I think you’re asking is why did I not just execute you where you lay and why now am I allowing you a chance to kill me, the answer is simple. I need to know… who is the better?’ Crouching down, his eyes never leaving Pergellen for a second, he unhooked the rifle’s strap from over his shoulder and set it down on the ridge in front of him. Then he stood. ‘Now we are even, so I shall repeat, bolt pistol or blade?’
The ash wind was howling and the grit lashing around the two legionaries facing one another across the dune. Pergellen estimated there was little more than four metres between them. He had to end it quickly. Enemies were converging on Numeon and the others. If nothing else, he had to issue a warning, but not before he dealt with this. He made up his mind.
‘A fair offer,’ said Pergellen. ‘Blades?’
‘Very well.’
Each legionary grabbed for his pistol, knowing that the othe
r would do the same. A single shot rang out. Narek was faster.
Numeon looked over to the ridge, tracking the report of a pistol heard even above the storm. A lightning bolt cracked the earth in front of him and sent the Pyre captain crashing down onto his back, armour drooling smoke.
In the same instant he turned and saw the warriors behind them. He counted three, and they were moving swiftly through the churning ash. They flickered, like a mirage shimmer, first distant, then closer, and closer still. It was warp-craft.
‘Hriak!’ he bellowed, slow to rise. On the far ridge, the one where Pergellen was meant to be keeping watch, he saw a slumped shadow and another, this one standing, disappearing into the storm as it backed away.
‘Prepare yourself,’ the Librarian hissed at Grammaticus. Then he was running, but not to Numeon’s aid. He passed the Pyre captain without a second glance, having sensed the psyker in their midst. ‘It’s the cleric,’ he shouted. ‘I’m sorry, Artellus, he must have followed my psychic spoor into the wastes.’
Numeon was back on his feet and rushing over to Grammaticus, who was struggling through the storm. Without the kine-shield he was being battered, and only the drake hide was keeping him alive.
‘Where is your fugging ship?’ he snapped, irritated, from inside the cloak.
‘Close.’
‘You hid a ship out here?’ asked Grammaticus.
‘Not I – my brother Ravens,’ said Numeon. ‘It was undetectable.’ He turned his attention to Hriak, who had begun to describe arcane patterns in the air before him. ‘Brother?’ Numeon called out. He blink-clicked a proximity icon that had recently flashed up on the part of his retinal display that was still working, and gestured into the storm.
Looking in the direction that Numeon had pointed, Grammaticus noticed a bulky silhouette looming through the ash-haze.
Hidden in plain sight, using the storm as cover, thought Gramma-ticus. How like the XIX.
‘Go, get him out,’ said Hriak. ‘I’ll deal with this. The raven’s feast has been long overdue for me. Victorus aut Mortis.’
