The Unremembered Empire Part 40

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, pa.s.sed 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 a hateful eyes, black-in-black, and a biting black maw in a spectral white face a 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 ma.s.sive 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, smas.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+rt-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-gla.s.s 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 reals.p.a.ce, freed from the prison of Damon's vessel and driven mad by its confinement. There was a brief and sickening suggestion of something ma.s.sive and glossy sprouting from the floor of the yard; something muscular and segmented, like a vast, jet-sh.e.l.led centipede writhing with wet pseudopods. Ushpetkhar attacked the first thing it saw a 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 ma.s.s of the daemon.

It tightened its coils. It rippled.

It squeezed them both out of reals.p.a.ce, and they vanished together.

Only a smear of iridescent black slime and broken fragments of red gla.s.s 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 kins.h.i.+p. 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 a his long, long Perpetual existence a 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 b.l.o.o.d.y idiot,' Damon said, chewing and spitting the words, painfully, out of his mangled mouth.

He could hear guns.h.i.+ps 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 G.o.dlike. There was no power left in it. He tried to pull it out, but it absolutely refused to move.

Guns.h.i.+ps 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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.'

a 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 s.h.i.+ps that Oberdeii's dream had foretold were coming to them.

From the bridge of his flags.h.i.+p, 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 n.o.ble 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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.'