The Unremembered Empire Part 28

The Dark Angel's sword was so large that Polux realised he was instinctively using both hands; old hand and new, clamped expertly around the grip.

He feinted left and then chopped into the darkness to the right, and then ahead.

*Guide me, warsmith! Where is he?'

*There. To your left!' Dantioch exclaimed, pointing uselessly at the dark within the darkness.

Polux struck hard to his left. He could smell the stink of something in the gloom, feel the heat of its rage. It was an unwashed smell, the smell of a diseased animal. It was like fighting all the beasts of Inwit's nightside at once.

*Left. Now!'

Polux roared at the effort as he struck with the blade. He connected again. He felt it.

*Did I cut you?' he asked the darkness. *Do you bleed?'

The answer was a blow to the face that smashed Polux to the floor. Dazed, he tried to recover. His mouth was full of blood.

He could hear Dantioch yelling his name, telling him to move. He couldn't clear his head.

Another blow, a kick most likely, caught him in the belly, and sent him rolling across the chapel floor. The sword was no longer in his grasp. There was no air in his lungs. He spat blood.

He had ended up right at the edge of the communication field, bathed in the eerie light of Sotha. Dantioch was standing over him, yelling in helpless rage and frustration, apparently centimetres away yet actually light years distant. The warsmith's anguish was terrible: he could do nothing but watch, and cry at Polux to get up, and scream obscenities at the thing in the dark.

Polux tried to rise.

Everything went very still. He could hear Curze breathing, panting like a dog. He was aware of the Night Haunter beside him, standing over him, the tips of the long, long talons slowly, almost delicately, sc.r.a.ping across Polux's armour, about to flex and strike.

*Yes, I bleed,' rasped a death-rattle voice, *but not as much as you are about to, Imperial Fist.'

Polux flinched, braced for the kill-stroke.

A gauntlet seized his left hand and pulled. It pulled with immense power. It pulled him sidelong and out of the way, so that Curze's scything deathblow missed entirely.

Polux looked up to see who could have entered the fight and intervened. But only three were present: Polux, the shadow of Curze and the warsmith.

Dantioch had a tight grasp on Polux's new left hand. The air was cool, and smelled entirely different. The acoustics around him had changed. Polux was no longer in the chapel.

He was on the tuning floor on Sotha.

*Dantioch...?'

*I don't have an answer...' the warsmith replied.

They looked back. Curze, a towering, leering shade, cheated of his prey, gazed back from the darkness of the chapel. He reached out a handful of talons and tried to touch them, but they were as solid as smoke. Where Polux had pa.s.sed across, Curze could not.

*You will tell me,' Curze hissed, spittle flecking between his blackened teeth, *how this is done. How this is achieved?'

*The faith and will of good men,' replied Dantioch. *When they stand together against infamy, the galaxy fights for them.'

*I would hardly put my trust in the galaxy,' Curze hissed. He was so thin, so tall, a cadaverous herald of death. *I have seen what it dreams of, and it is quite run mad.'

His leering smile faded away.

*Now come back where I can kill you,' he said.

*I believe neither of us will accept your offer, Night Lord,' said Dantioch. *Furthermore, I believe you are about to have more pressing matters to concern you. Auguston and Polux have between them kept you here longer than you meant to stay.'

Behind Curze, light flooded into the chapel as two sets of doors opened, the south and the west entrances. Framed in the south, blade drawn and flanked by Ultramarines, stood the Avenging Son.

*Back off,' Guilliman told his men. Rage smouldered from him like a heat haze. *This wretch is mine.'

*No,' said the Lion, leaving his Dark Angels at the threshold of the west doorway and striding forward. *He's ours.'

*Well now,' murmured Konrad Curze, hooking down the left-hand corner of his lower lip thoughtfully with the tip of one extravagant, bloodied claw. *Interesting.'

16.

Blood Brothers

*I may call you kin, but you are un-kind. You are entirely not of me.'

a Ferrus Ma.n.u.s to Konrad Curze, reported Curze stepped away from the communication field and faced his brothers. Guilliman and the Lion approached him, Guilliman to his left, the Lion to his right.

Guilliman clutched his gladius a not his most magnificent weapon, but a favoured piece. He had made more kills than he had truly cared about with that utilitarian blade than any fine sword in his a.r.s.enal. He had a gleaming combat shield strapped to his left arm. He was bare-headed.

The Lion's hair was loose, his jaw set. He held a charged longsword that Farith Redloss had pa.s.sed to him. It was known far and wide as the Lion Sword, said to have been forged on Terra by the Emperor's own armourers. It shone with a pale inner light.

*Not a man intervenes,' Guilliman said to the Ultramarines and Dark Angels crowded at the chapel doors.

*This is between us,' the Lion agreed. *Farith, you may strike down any other who tries to engage.'

*You heard that, Gorod,' said Guilliman. *The same applies.'

Both Gorod of the Invictus and Farith Redloss made murmurs of acceptance.

*You do not come to my world and do this,' said Guilliman, stalking Curze. *You do not enter my house and do this.'

*I do what I please, brother,' Curze replied. They could smell the stink of his breath from across the chamber.

The Lion glanced sidelong at Auguston's pitiful remains.

*You have piled up too many corpses this night, Konrad. My legionaries, and too many of Roboute's. This warrior, the Master of the First, is an especially grievous loss.'

*He was pugnacious,' Curze hissed. *Even when I'd taken out his gizzard and lights, he kept walking.'

*b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' Guilliman snapped.

*Master Auguston fought like the champions of legend, my lord,' said Polux from the gleaming field. *He defied death to fight on. I have never seen its like.'

*And you have defied corporeal physics to escape me, Imperial Fist,' Curze whispered, his words issuing as though they had been ground out between millstones. *Come. Does no one else wonder at that?'

Guilliman was close to Curze. He began to loop and spin his gladius.

*Brother has killed brother,' he said. *As we were raised, that is unthinkable, but brother has killed brother. Every time, it has been a heretic son who has slain a devoted brother: Ferrus, Corax, Vulkan.'

*Ahh now,' murmured Curze. *Tut tut tut, Roboute. Vulkan lives.'

*Then I rejoice,' said Guilliman, *but I believe it is past time that the heretics paid a price. A blood price. I think it is past time that a devoted son put a heretic in the d.a.m.ned ground.'

*Agreed, sevenfold,' said the Lion in a low, hunting voice.

Curze faced them. He stood tall, taller than either of them a a stark figure of lean, long bones and hollowed frame. He looked like a starved giant, towering yet emaciated. His tattered, black cloak flowed from his shoulders to the ground like the furled wings of a wounded bird. His slender arms hung at his sides, the huge, slack power claws making his hands disproportionately long. He tilted his head back, his hair lank. He closed his eyes.

*Brother,' he said. *And you, brother. Come and get me.'

Guilliman surged forward. The Lion was faster. Guilliman was robust and dazzling, but the Lion was elegant. The Lion Sword described a buzzing arc in the air as it circled, leaving a bright after-image briefly stamped on the vision of all the legionaries watching.

The blade scythed at Curze's head. He did not move.

Then he was smoke.

The power claws of Curze's right hand snapped out and drove aside the stinging bite of the Lion Sword. The claws of his left met Guilliman's gladius and deflected it.

Guilliman struck again, driven by fury, and cut through something.

It was only shadow. Only the tatter of a cloak.

Talons snapped back at him. He raised his shield. Razored claws ripped sparks off its surface and shredded its edges.

Guilliman hacked again. Nothing. Shadow. Shadow!

The Lion rotated like a dancer, and swung the famous Lion Sword sidelong at Curze with a two-handed grip. Curze ducked, evaded, and rotated in turn, punching away Guilliman's next strike as he did so. The Lion tilted and swung his sizzling blade in a strike designed to unseam Curze from the groin to the throat.

But Curze was no longer there.

He had flickered left and blocked the upswing. Then he smashed his hand into the Lion's face.

Blood burst from the strike. A talon had punched clean through the side of the Lion's neck. The Lion reeled backwards, his hand clamped to the wound to staunch it.

Some of his men mobbed forward in alarm.

*No!' the Lion yelled.

Guilliman slammed his ragged shield into Curze and drove him backwards. He stabbed twice with the gladius, rapidly, like a striking snake, and drew blood on the second jab.

*b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' Curze hissed.

His talons struck Guilliman and knocked him aside, leaving four long gouges in his chestplate.

Guilliman recovered, sweeping in low with his blade, and then high on the return. Struck, Curze spun away and fell. When he rose, his right cheek was open to the bone.

*Now we start in earnest,' he hissed.

*Now we finish in earnest,' the Lion spat, coming at Curze with his sword ready.

Curze moved again, sliding into darkness. The blade ripped through smoke and shadow. The Lion turned and engaged again, striking once, twice, three times, each blow blocked by swift and savage claws.

*Oh sweet Terra,' Polux said. He looked at the warsmith. *Do you feel that?'

*I do,' agreed Dantioch. *I do most a.s.suredly.'

The quantum field's empathic effect was resonating through both of them.

They could both feel it. A truth, Curze's truth. The efforts of Auguston and Polux had not delayed Curze too long. They had not kept him in place so that he might be trapped.

He had built this as a trap all along, a trap to kill one or more of his brothers.

*Get out, my lords!' Polux yelled. *Get out now! He has wired the Chapel! Get out, for the love of mercy!'

Driven back by Curze's claws, Guilliman looked at the figures of Polux and the warsmith in the glow of the communication field.

*He has what?'

*Get out, my lord!' Polux screamed.

Curze knocked the Lion's blade aside.

He paused, and his black-toothed grin reappeared. It was a grin of triumph.

*I have, since birth, been a staunch friend of death,' he said. *I have learned that death is lonely, and so enjoys making new and lasting friends. Roboute? Great Lion? Let me make your introduction.'

Curze clapped his clawed hands.

The seventy-five grenades wired around the eaves of the Chapel triggered.

In a sheet of white flame and fury, the Chapel of Memorial ceased to be.