Vulkan Lives Page 5

  Deep in the heart of Ranos, the tiny lights were going out.

  Overhead the thrum of heavy turbine engines invaded the silence. They were distant enough that neither man reached for his sidearm, but close enough that Sebaton went to grab a scope from inside the tent.

  ‘Landers,’ said Varteh, not needing the benefit of the scope to realise what the engines belonged to.

  ‘I count three, cutting through the cloud layer,’ Sebaton replied, scope pressed against his right eye. ‘Definitely a landing party.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘No idea,’ he lied again, shutting the telescopic lens and putting it in his pocket.

  They were bulky, heavily armed gunships. The kind used by deadly warriors. He’d met them before, and not enjoyed the experience.

  ‘I’d like to know what they’re doing here,’ said Varteh.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  Varteh laughed mirthlessly.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. I’ll go and kick our adept up the arse. See if we can move things up a notch.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  Varteh jogged back down the slope, one hand on his holster to keep it steady.

  Sebaton lost the gunships a few seconds later as they disappeared below benighted rows of smoke stacks and silos. He swore under his breath.

  ‘I suppose it was too much to ask that they didn’t show up.’

  The cup in his hands grew hot, much hotter than the tepid caffeine within. As he looked down into its brownish depths, he frowned.

  ‘Oh,’ said Sebaton, ‘it’s you.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sons of our fathers

  ‘Of all men else I have avoided thee.

  But get thee back. My soul is too much charged

  With blood of thine already.’

  – From ‘Masbeth’ by the dramaturge

  Kristof Mylowe.

  ‘Do you remember how I found you, alone on the ash plains? I thought you were a miracle, or some devil cast back from the earth to plague us. But you were just a child, an infant. Something so small, so vulnerable, surrounded by so much death. I thought you were dead, burned black from the crash. The sand inside the crater you made had turned to glass… But the fire never touched you, didn’t even leave a mark. You barely cried, and it wasn’t from pain or discomfort. You just didn’t want to be alone, Vulkan.’

  ‘I remember.’

  I smelled smoke and leather, metal and sweat.

  ‘Wake up, son,’ said a man, and in my half-conscious state I thought I recognised him.

  I was back in the forge. I was home.

  ‘Father?’

  Smoke cleared, darkness parted, I blinked and there he was before me. Like it was yesterday.

  N’bel.

  Face tanned by the Nocturnean sun, hands calloused from metal working, skin that felt rough in my grasp, N’bel was every inch the craftsman. He had the broad shoulders of a blacksmiter, the fuller tucked in his belt providing further unneeded proof of his profession. A coarse overall of dark, heavy fabric was overlaid by a smock of leather. His arms were bare, scarred and tanned like his face, bound with torcs, thick with brawn and ropes of sinew. This was a man who made a living out of honest toil and muscle. He had taught me everything I knew, or at least, everything I cared to remember.

  ‘You are alive…’

  He nodded.

  Longing ached in my chest, my eyes tearful. Around me was the workshop, smelling of ash, warmed by fire. Somewhere close by, an anvil chimed out a steady rhythm, the beat of a blacksmiter’s drum, one whose tune I knew very well. It was pure and good, this place. A stone hearth sat in one corner of the room, where a pot of broth bubbled dulcetly above a quietly crackling fire. Here was the earth. Here, I was in my element.

  ‘I have missed you, father.’

  Tears stained my cheeks. I tasted salt and cinder when they touched my lips as I embraced N’bel, a lost son returning home. Despite his brawn and bulk, he was like a child in my arms. We parted as a frown crept upon my face at our sudden reunion.

  ‘How? What about the war? Is it…?’

  Something was clouding my mind, preventing me from seeing clearly. I shook my head but the fog was not here, it was within.

  ‘All that matters is you are back, my son.’

  He clapped me on the arm and I felt the warmth of a father’s respect and admiration spread through me like a balm, washing away all the guilt and the blood.

  For so long, I had wanted to come back. After the Crusade was over, and the war was done; in my heart, I knew I would return to Nocturne and live in peace. A hammer can sunder – in my hands it was an incredibly effective weapon – but it was also a tool to craft. I had destroyed populations, razed entire cities in the name of conquest; now I wanted permanence, to fulfil a desire to build, not break.

  I helped build this place; not only this forge, but also this city in which I knew it resided, and the other six sanctuary cities besides. Nocturne had ever been a tribal society, the earth upon which it sat, but its trade and lifeblood was also its doom, as the hot and volatile world demonstrated during every Trial of Fire.

  N’bel’s eyes were staring, not with paternal joy at being reunited with his son, but in fear.

  I held him by the shoulders, firmly, but not so hard that I would hurt him.

  ‘Father, what is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘All that matters is you are back…’ he repeated, and nodded behind me.

  I followed his gaze to the door of the forge. It was ajar and the night-time sounds of Nocturne drifted inside on a warm breeze. I could smell the heat of the desert, taste the acid-tang of the Acerbian Sea and also something else.

  I released N’bel, turning to the door. ‘What has happened?’

  Nearby was the rack of tools my father used on the anvil. I picked up a branding iron shaped like a spear. It was an odd choice; there were several hammers, but for some reason I chose the iron.

  ‘You weren’t alone,’ breathed my father, his strong blacksmiter’s voice fading to a whimper, ‘when you came back.’

  I snarled, advancing on the door, the haft of the branding iron gripped tight in my hand.

  ‘Father, what has happened?’

  N’bel was lost to fear, and a sudden coldness swept through the forge, turning my blood to ice.

  In the days before the Outlander, we Nocturneans had fought warbands of dusk-wraiths for our freedom and safety. They were raiders, pirates and slavers. I later came to know them as the eldar, an alien species that had particularly blighted my world, but also countless others.

  I had wanted peace, a chance to build, but now I saw that fate would not release me – the galaxy wanted a warrior. My other father was calling and he would not be denied.

  ‘Stay in the forge,’ I told N’bel and went outside.

  The night was coal-black, and a vast pall of pyroclastic cloud moved slowly across the horizon like a dark phantom. All the lights were out. Every home, every forge and furnace was dead.

  I had stepped out onto a platform of iron and steel. Gone were the tribal dwellings of my formative years, gone were the simple forges of my forebears. With the coming of the Outlander, and the arrival of the nascent Imperium, Nocturne had changed. Vast mining engines, furnaces and manufactorums replaced the old forges now. Where once there had been humble dwellings, now there were great conurbations of habitation domes, relay stations and vox-towers. The earth-shaman and metal-shapers, even the blacksmiters had given way to seismologists, geologists and manufactorum masters. Our trade had not changed, but our culture had. It needed to. For Nocturne was a capricious world, ever on the brink of destruction.

  She was venting now, Mount Deathfire, in all her fiery glory. Pyroclastic cloud obscured most of my view, scudding across the invisible void shield suspended above me. The ge
nerators, one for each major city, were another gift from the Imperium. The one above me shimmered violently as pieces of debris flung from the volcano struck it. Fire was raining from the sky, cascading in waves and exploding into sparks as it met the resistance of the void shield.

  It was beautiful to behold, nature’s fury viewed in panorama like this. When I finally lowered my gaze from the heavens, that sense of awe and beauty left me. In its place was the coldness I had felt in the forge.

  ‘You.’ I uttered like a curse as I saw the lone figure with his back to me. He was sitting down, shoulders hunched over something. Dark hair cascaded over his back. He wore a smock of sackcloth. In one hand he carried a knife. Its edge was serrated and in the darkness I thought it had a blacker sheen around its toothed blade.

  He was at odds with this place. I knew it in my heart, but also saw it in his anachronistic clothing.

  He hadn’t heard me, so I stepped closer, my grip tightening around the branding iron.

  The dark figure was sawing, I could hear the rasp of his knife shearing through something. At first I thought it was wood, fuel for the furnace, but then I remembered the blade and the black sheen around the edge. A basket lay off to one side within easy reach. Every time he finished making a cut, he threw something into it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Even as I asked the question, I knew the answer. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked again. Rage took hold of me, and I raised the branding iron above my head like a spear.

  The black sheen around the blade… It was blood.

  No lights, no forge fires – the city was dead, and he had killed it.

  ‘Turn, curse you!’

  He stopped at the sound of his name. Sat up straight, knife held out casually to one side.

  ‘Murdering scum!’

  I pulled back my spear, aiming for his back, where I knew the iron would punch through into his heart. Even primarchs can die. Ferrus had died. He was the first of us, the first I was certain of, anyway. Even primarchs can die…

  ‘Vulkan, no.’

  The voice came from behind me, compelling me to obey.

  At first I thought it was N’bel, venturing out of the forge to see what was going on, but I was wrong. I turned, and standing before me, in the same robes he had been wearing on Ibsen, was the remembrancer Verace.

  ‘Vulkan, he is your brother and I forbid it.’

  My grip tightened on the spear. ‘But he murdered them.’

  ‘Do not kill him, Vulkan.’

  Who was this human to tell me my business, to give me orders? He was nothing to me, a memory from the Great Crusade, a– No, that wasn’t right. I shook my head, trying to banish the fog, but it wasn’t out here with me, it was within.

  Verace was no remembrancer. He was a cloak, a mask to hide something greater.

  Very few mortals could behold the Emperor’s true form and live. Even his voice was lethal. So he wore masks, erected facades that he might move around the galaxy without leaving deathly awe in his wake. I was his son, and as such able to withstand much more than any mortal man ever could, but even I had not seen my father’s true face. He was at once a warrior, a poet, a scientist and a vagabond, and yet he was also none of these things. They were, all of them, merely camouflage to conceal his true nature. And the costume my father chose to wear now was that of an ageing remembrancer.

  ‘My son, you must not kill him.’

  ‘He has earned his fate,’ I spat belligerently, not wishing to defy my father but at the same time unable to let the murderer go unpunished.

  ‘Vulkan, please do not kill him.’

  ‘Father!’

  I felt a hand grip my shoulder, cold and vice-like. The spear was no longer clenched in my fist, its absence like smoke escaping through my grasping fingers.

  ‘Brother…’ said Curze as he rammed the spear into my back and I saw it punch through my chest a second later.

  The world was fading again. I clutched at the iron impaling me, slumping to my knees as Curze let me go.

  Verace was gone and left no trace of his parting; so, too, was my brother, though it was the lack of his presence rather than his actual disappearance that I noticed.

  Above me, the void shield flickered once and died. Fire rained down, the skies were burning with it. Powerless, dying, I closed my eyes and let the conflagration take me.

  The reek of smoke and ash greeted me as I came round. For a moment I believed I was still on Nocturne, trapped in some infernal cycle from which there was no escape, destined to relive my imagined death at the hands of Curze, my brother, and now my captor, again and again.

  But when the cell and not N’bel’s forge came into focus around me, I realised I was truly awake and that my return home had just been a nightmare. Feverish sweat lathered my body; it was the first thing I noticed after the smell of the forge dissipated. Darkness reigned, as ever, and steam coiled from my oil-black skin as the heat of my body reacted to the cold. Honour scars stood out, my oaths of moment, etched into flesh and thrown into relief by a harsh light emanating from above. For a moment I thought I saw a marking I didn’t recognise, but lost it in the shadows.

  The second thing I noticed was that I was not alone, and this took my mind off the mark. Though the nightmare had left me, my ghastly cellmate had not.

  Ferrus was watching from the shadows, his dead eyes twinkling like opals.

  ‘You are dead, brother,’ I said to him, rising. ‘And I am truly sorry for that.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Ferrus, the gruesome neck wound adding more gravel to an already rasping cadence. ‘Do you blame yourself, brother?’

  It sounded almost like an accusation, so much so that it made me turn to regard him. He was truly a spectre, a shade, a withered version of what Ferrus Manus had once been, clad in my dead brother’s armour.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked, ignoring my dead brother’s question.

  ‘Where do you think we are?’

  ‘Isstvan.’

  Ferrus nodded. ‘We never left, either of us.’

  ‘Do not pretend to be him,’ I said.

  Ferrus opened his arms, looked around as if searching for answers, ‘Am I not? Is it easy to assuage your guilt if you make yourself believe I am not some aspect of him? Do you know where my body is now? It lies headless on a desert of black sand, slowly putrefying in its bloodstained armour. I don’t recall any of the statues erected in my honour bearing such an image.’

  I was tiring of this cajoling. It was beneath me, it was beneath Ferrus, and I felt like I was besmirching his memory by the very act of listening to it.

  ‘What are you, creature? For you are not Ferrus Manus.’

  He laughed. It was an unpleasant sound, like the cawing of a crow. ‘I thought I was your brother. Is that not how you addressed me? Am I so easily forgotten, now I am dead?’

  Ferrus, or the thing that wore his skin and armour like a man wears a cloak, feigned disappointment.

  I was unconvinced.

  ‘Ferrus was a noble warrior, a good and honest man. He was steel and he was iron, and I will never forget him. Ever.’

  ‘Yet you let me die.’

  Guilt was more painful than any blade, and as it pierced my weary heart I staggered at first, but then righted myself.

  ‘There was nothing I could do. Nothing either of us could do.’

  ‘“Either of us”?’ he asked, a look of belated revelation crossing his face, ‘Ah, you mean Corax. You want him to share in your guilt?’ His face brightened, as if enlightened, before it grew abruptly dark, prompting Ferrus to slowly shake his head, ‘No. You own this, Vulkan. This was your mistake. You let me down, not Corax.’

  I turned away, even as the spectre’s words cut me without showing any visible trace of the wounds they’d inflicted. ‘You are not real, brother. You’re just a figment of my imagination, a re
mnant of conscience…’

  ‘Guilt! I am your guilt made manifest, Vulkan. You can’t escape me because I live in you.’

  Trying not to listen, I started to examine the cell. It was circular, the metal used in its construction thick and impenetrable to my fists alone. But it was made in sections, and each of those was betrayed by a welding line that yielded a shallow lip. Fifty metres straight up. I couldn’t jump that distance, but I might be able to climb it. As my lucidity returned, so too did my capacity to plan and strategise. I put those gifts to work on my escape.

  An oubliette is a hole, a dungeon in which people are thrown and forgotten about. This was what Curze had done. He had left me in a hole, beaten me, cut me and assumed I would break, that my mind would shatter and I would be forever lost.

  Curze was not Nocturnean. Nostramans did not possess our pride, our determination, our endurance.

  ‘Despair’ was not a word we recognised, nor was ‘submission’.

  Purpose providing me with newfound strength, I seized my chains. The iron felt rough against the palms of my hands as my grip tightened. Muscles bunched in my neck, hardened over my shoulders and back. Threads of sinew stood out on my blacksmiter’s chest, cord thick and straining against the chains. And as I pulled, the links began to stretch and open, slowly yielding to my might. With a supreme effort, as much will as it was strength, I wrenched the chains apart and broke them. Each and every one, until their fragments lay scattered upon the cell floor.

  Ferrus sneered; I could almost hear his lip curling, ‘So, you are free of those chains. So what? You are weak, Vulkan. And because you are weak, you will fail. Just as you failed me, just as you failed your Legion.’

  I stopped for a moment, and bowed my head to remember the fallen.

  Nemetor, cradled in my arms… He had been the last.

  ‘I did not fail you, brother.’

  Pressing a hand against the cell wall, I felt for imperfections in the metal, the smallest handhold I could exploit.

  The voice behind me interrupted my planning.

  ‘Do you want to know how I died, brother?’

  I did not turn this time, for I had no wish to see the thing that had somehow crept inside my thoughts and was trying to unman me.