Vulkan Lives Page 4

  ‘They slaughtered them,’ said Nemetor as he surveyed the carnage. Four Salamanders accompanied him, and despite the fact they were wearing their battle-helms they looked just as uneasy as their captain.

  Vulkan unclenched his teeth.

  ‘Where are the rest of your company?’

  ‘Dispersed amongst the ruins, trying to find survivors.’

  ‘There’ll be none,’ Vulkan told him. ‘Recall them. We are not needed here. The people of Khar-tann are beyond our help.’ His gaze settled on a bloody symbol daubed on the wall of a scholam. The primarch’s jaw hardened.

  ‘When did they even make planetfall?’ asked Nemetor, following Vulkan’s line of sight.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He didn’t speak the language, but he recognised the cursive script, the sharp edges to the graffiti.

  It was Nostraman.

  Back up on the escarpment, Vulkan was alone but for the distant roar of the flames below.

  Khar-tann burned. It burned with the fire of a thousand flame gauntlets, Vulkan having set his Pyroclasts the task of turning the city to ash. He wanted no such monument to slaughter to stand any longer than was strictly necessary. Its very existence had disturbed the Army cohorts especially, and even the legionaries treated it warily.

  Vulkan waited patiently, listening to the vox-channel he had just opened. It took several seconds of softly crackling static before Vulkan got an answer. When he did, it sounded like the person on the other end of the link was smiling.

  ‘Brother.’

  Despite himself, Vulkan couldn’t disguise his anger. ‘What have you done, Curze?’

  ‘Freed you from dirtying your hands. We arrived early, while you were still marshalling your tanks and Titans.’

  ‘My orders were to take the city as bloodlessly as possible.’

  ‘I don’t follow your orders, brother. Besides, it’s better this way.’

  ‘Better for whom? You’ve slaughtered an entire city – men, women, children all dead. It’s a butchery worthy of Angron’s Legion in there!’

  ‘Don’t confuse me with our hot-headed sibling, though I believe you would run him close at this precise moment. Are you angry with me?’

  Vulkan clenched his fists, biting back a retort.

  ‘Where are you, Curze? Where are you hiding?’

  ‘I am close by. We will be reunited soon enough.’ Konrad Curze paused, his playful tone ebbed. ‘You and I know this was never going to be a bloodless compliance. One-Five-Four Six is a war world, and no warrior I have ever fought has given up without first shedding a little blood.’

  ‘A little? You practically exsanguinated the entire populace.’

  ‘And what do you think that would do to their fighting spirit?’

  Vulkan turned sharply at the sound of Curze’s voice. Not through the vox any more – he was here. The Night Haunter was a few paces behind him, standing in the shadows at the edge of the flickering firelight.

  ‘You are either bold or foolish, meeting me out here like this,’ Vulkan warned, the combination of the flames and his drake-like armour enshrouding him in a volatile aspect. Even the carcass of the great drake Kesare, slung over his right shoulder, seemed animate. His forge hammer was within easy reach but he didn’t so much as glance at the weapon.

  ‘Why, what are you going to do?’ Curze stepped out of the shadows.

  He went without a helmet, the light hitting his features in such a way that where the darkness pooled it made him appear gaunt, almost skeletal. Nostramo, his birthplace – unless one counted the laboratory where he, like all of his siblings, was first created – had been a lightless world. This fact was obvious in the chalk-like pallor of its inhabitants, and Curze was no exception to that. One onyx-skinned, the other alabaster; both primarchs were a study in chiaroscuro.

  In stark contrast to Vulkan’s fiery eyes, Curze’s were like thin ovals of jet staring through strands of lank, black hair that hung down across his face. Where Vulkan wore a firedrake hide as his mantle, Curze had a cloak of ragged crimson. One brother had a reptilian appearance in his scaled war-plate of oceanic green, clad with rare quartz; the other was armoured in midnight-blue, inscribed with sigils of death and mortality.

  Vulkan kept his voice level, neutral. ‘Are you trying to goad me, Curze? Do you want this to escalate?’

  ‘That sounded like a threat.’ Curze smiled thinly. ‘Was it a threat, brother? Am I a rough blade to be tempered at your righteous anvil? Do you also think yourself my better and my teacher, then?’

  Vulkan ignored him, instead gesturing to the inferno that had been Khar-tann City. ‘Look at what your deeds have wrought.’

  ‘Ha! What my deeds have wrought? Vulkan, you sound like a poet, and a poor one at that.’ Curze grew serious. ‘I’ve broken this world for you, brother. By culling the city you’re now putting to the torch, I’ve spared us a wealth of blood. What do you think this world’s rebels will do when they see and hear what we’ve done to one of their major cities?’ Defying Vulkan’s palpable anger, Curze took a step closer with every emphasised word. ‘They will cower, and shrink, and weep…’ When the two were face to face, he snarled the last part through a barricade of teeth, ‘Begging for mercy.’ He stepped back, opening his arms. ‘And you can give it to them, that is my gift.’

  Vulkan shook his head. ‘Terror is your gift. They were women and children, Curze. Innocents.’

  Curze sneered, bitterly. ‘No one is innocent.’

  ‘You came from the gutters, brother, but our father has raised you up. Stop acting like the murderous swine you inherited on Nostramo.’

  ‘Raised me, did he? Brought me up from the darkness and into the light? We are killers, Vulkan. All of us. Don’t try and convince me we are noble men, for we are not. My eyes have just opened before yours, that’s all.’

  Curze turned and walked away, back down the ridge. ‘Fear, Vulkan,’ he called, disappearing into the shadows, ‘that’s the only thing they understand. You all need to learn that.’

  Vulkan did not reply. His body was trembling. Looking down, he saw his forge hammer gripped in both hands. He hadn’t even realised he’d picked it up. He gasped, exhaling to relieve the tension, and fought his body. When he was calm again, he turned towards the inferno. The flames were rising now, touching the sky with tendrils of coiling black smoke. It reminded him of Ibsen, and the jungles they had set ablaze there.

  How many more worlds must burn before this is over?

  He stood in silence, just watching, and stayed like that for several minutes until a quiet voice from behind the primarch disturbed his reverie.

  ‘Lord Vulkan?’

  It was the remembrancer, Seriph.

  ‘Your equerry said you’d be up here.’

  ‘Did he also tell you I did not wish to be disturbed?’

  Seriph bowed her head slightly. ‘He was too preoccupied to stop me.’

  Vulkan turned his back on her. ‘I’m not in the mood for further questions now.’

  ‘Sincere apologies, my lord. I had hoped to continue our–’

  Vulkan’s head snapped around savagely. ‘I said not now!’

  She shrank back, her eyes alive with fear.

  Curze’s last words came back to him, almost mocking, but Vulkan was powerless. He glared, eyes burning hot with fury. This was the monster, this was the image he was trying so hard to conceal from the remembrancers. His hearts pulsed, and his chest heaved up and down like a giant bellows. Curze was right – he was a killer. That was the purpose for which he had been bred.

  His anger at what his brother had done, the memory of those bodies, the children… It was overwhelming, so consuming Vulkan hissed his next command and filled the air with the smell of ash and cinder.

  ‘Leave. Me. Alone.’

  Seriph fled down the ridge.

&nb
sp; Vulkan didn’t bother to watch her go. Instead he watched the burning ruins of Khar-tann.

  ‘It will all end in fire when the galaxy burns,’ he said, a heavy melancholy settling upon him. ‘And all of us will light the torch.’

  Pain awaited me when I awoke. I was no stranger to it, for I was a warrior born, a primarch. And it took a primarch to know how to really hurt another.

  Curze must have been well schooled, for my body was alive with pain. It brought me back from a torpor of unconsciousness into a world of nerve-shredding, white-hot agony. Even I, Vulkan, who have stood in the mouth of a volcano, who have endured the nucleonic, cleansing fire of a missile strike and lived. Even for me, this… hurt.

  I screamed, opening my eyes. Through vision drenched arterial red I saw a cell no larger than the hold of a gunship. It was black with circular walls, metal-forged and without any door or gate that I could see.

  First calming the urgent pulse of blood drumming through my hearts, I then slowed my breathing. Shock and severe injury were retarding my efforts to control my body, but my will was stronger, and I regained some semblance of function.

  I blinked, banishing the red rime of clotted blood that had crusted over my iris like a dirty lens. Aching bones and limbs protested, but I managed to rise. It was as if a Titan’s foot was resting on my back.

  I took a faltering step but staggered, falling painfully on one knee. I hadn’t walked in a while, I had no idea how long. The cell was abjectly dark despite my enhanced eyesight, and I had lost all sense of time.

  Rising to my feet again, I trembled, but stayed upright. Waiting like that for a few moments – it could have been an hour, it was difficult to gauge – the tremors ebbed and then ceased entirely as my strength gradually returned. I got three more steps before the shackles binding me to the wall yanked me back. I scowled, looking down at the chains fettered around my wrists and ankles as if seeing them for the first time. Another was fastened around my neck, attached to a collar. I pulled at one experimentally, assessing resistance. It did not yield. Even with two hands, I couldn’t break the chain.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ a familiar voice uttered from the darkness, making me quickly turn.

  ‘Show yourself,’ I demanded. My throat was sore from the sharp air in this place, and my voice lacked conviction because of it.

  Even so, a face loomed out of the shadows at my command. It was pale, framed by closely cropped black hair, with sunken cheeks and cold, glassy eyes. Sharks have eyes like that – dead eyes. But it was a man, not a shark at all. It was my brother. One I barely recognised.

  ‘Pleased to see me?’ asked Ferrus Manus, in gravel-raw tones.

  ‘What? How is this poss–’ I began before the blade slipped into my side. As white fire exploded in my flesh, I realised that my gaolers were here too, waiting silently in the dark. They had brought a great many swords with them. I heard them slip from scabbards before they sank into my body.

  Before I blacked out, the charnel stink of Curze’s breath washed over me, and as I fell again I caught a last glimpse of my cellmate.

  Those same dead eyes staring, Ferrus lifted his chin.

  Around his neck was a bloody scar, partly clotted with his primarch blood. I knew the wound, I had inflicted several during my time as a warlord. It was from decapitation.

  ‘As you can see,’ he answered, ‘it’s not possible.’

  And my world was swallowed by darkness.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Discovery

  ‘What is true faith? Is it belief in the absence of empirical truth? No. Faith is a manifestation of will, it is the fealty-price given in the presence of actual godhood and the only protection from its divine wrath. That is true faith.’

  – spoken during a meeting of the Lodge

  by a Chaplain of the XVII Legion

  Sebaton took a deep breath of clean, outside air. Confinement inside the catacombs had begun to manifest as mild claustrophobia and with the night air cooling his skin, he let the relief from being out of the hole wash over him. His heart was hammering so hard, he felt the need to put a hand over his chest just to quieten it. Fear of enclosed spaces wasn’t something he had suffered from before but the sense of creeping dread, that intangible belief that something – or someone – was tracking him like a bloodhound, had unsettled him more than he cared to admit.

  ‘Get a damn grip,’ he chided.

  Despite his promises to the contrary, he was right back where he didn’t want to be. He hoped after the last time that they would have left him alone. He had dared believe he was free, but he would never truly be free, not from them. And so, here he was.

  Darkness had fallen completely over the ruins and rain was trickling from bruise-purple clouds above, pattering on the canvas awning of his tent.

  They had made camp on a rocky promontory overlooking the dig site. The ruins were behind Sebaton, about twenty metres down, reachable via a slightly inclined slope. The other side of the promontory dropped away into a sheer-sided cliff, below which was a short expanse of grey scrub wasteland that was slowly being eroded by the creeping pipework and industry of Ranos.

  It was also the pain that had driven him out. Sebaton had felt it like an ache at the back of his skull, an itch behind his teeth that refused to be scratched, a bitter taste under his tongue that made him feel sick. It hurt to simply be in the hole. The closer they came, the harder it got to be down there. Sebaton wasn’t sure if that boded well or ill for his endeavour. His employers had been detailed about the object of this excavation, providing everything he needed to recognise it, as well as what it did, how it worked and what he was expected to do with it once he had it. This was the worst thing, not the digging, but what came next – his mission.

  It had grown colder above the dig site and Sebaton nursed a cup of cooling recaff in one hand in a vain attempt to warm up, kneading his right temple with the other. It didn’t help; he was still cold, and the migraine still lingered.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Varteh had followed him and was approaching up the slope, pistol loose in the holster, moving with that same soldierly confidence he always had. Sebaton stopped massaging his head, allowing his hand to stray to the pistol he wore, but immediately berated himself.

  Got you jumping at shadows, he told himself. When did you become so paranoid?

  Who are you kidding, you’ve always been this paranoid. Comes with the territory.

  ‘Fine,’ Sebaton lied, taking a sip of the brackish caffeine. He grimaced at the taste.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Varteh, reaching him at the summit of the ridge. ‘My brewing skills aren’t as honed as my ability to kill people.’

  ‘I’m hoping you won’t need to employ the latter.’

  The ex-Lucifer poured himself a cup, but didn’t answer.

  ‘It’s hot, at least,’ said Sebaton, turning to face the city as Varteh joined him. ‘Well… warm.’

  They chinked their cups together.

  ‘What are we drinking to?’ asked Varteh.

  ‘Getting out of here.’

  The ex-Lucifer’s expression suggested he thought Sebaton meant more than just Ranos. He took a rolled up stick of lho-leaf from his jacket pocket, offering one to Sebaton, who refused.

  ‘No, thank you. My mind feels overstimulated as it is.’

  ‘Keeps me sharp,’ said Varteh. ‘Funny what you miss when you’re out.’

  Sebaton turned to see the soldier’s profile. ‘Out?’

  ‘Service, the Army.’

  Ah, thought Sebaton, out…

  Now it was Varteh’s turn to ask, as he picked up on the change in mood, ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Freedom, Varteh. You’re talking about freedom.’

  ‘Not everyone desires it. And I was thrown out, remember? For some, routine is an anchor that keeps them grounded, st
ops them from drifting. I’ve met plenty of soldiers who think like that. They can’t function without it. Downtime is like hell for men like that.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Sebaton, taking in the sight of labyrinthine industrial works, manufactorums and hab-blocks, ‘I believe you.’ Tiny pinpricks of flickering light emanating from drum fires, cook stands and furnaces illuminated the otherwise drab vista. Sebaton imagined the hordes of indentured workers clustered around them for warmth. It had been months organising this dig, finding the correct site and then the excavation itself. Now, with the object of his visit so close, Sebaton was more than ready to leave.

  Varteh thumbed over his shoulder. ‘So, why here? I know you won’t give me details and I honestly don’t care if you’re doing this for profit or prestige, but this place is just rubble. There’s no tomb here, no Gyptian sarcophagus waiting for us to open it. Does it even have a name?’

  He wasn’t wrong. Even with the benefit of looking down on the ruins from above, it resembled nothing of the fortress it had once been. Now it was a rotting shell of overhanging beams, like spears of broken limbs jutting from the burned-out husks of long forgotten halls. For many years the people of Ranos, and even Traoris, had been in thrall to the masters of this fortress and the seven others dotted around the planet. This one had been the last, its octagonal border barely visible. Eight, eight-sided fortresses. Even that word was a misnomer. Some had referred to them by another name – temples.

  Yes, this place had a name but I won’t speak it. Not here, not to you.

  ‘Something happened here,’ said Sebaton instead, ‘something important, and a part of it was left behind.’

  ‘This “weapon” you mentioned?’

  ‘No, not that,’ said Sebaton, momentarily distracted, regretting even saying that much. He paused. ‘Does it seem overly quiet to you?’