The Unremembered Empire Part 31

Both were cast aside, bones snapping and armour cracking.

*I told you to run,' Faffnr said.

*I'm sorry,' Euten replied.

*Last chance,' he said, raising his axe and rushing the Night Haunter.

Euten found her feet. She got up and tried to run. A Wolf, bleeding and writhing, lay in her path, another to her left, and a third against the wall, who appeared dead.

The doors were close.

Something flew over her, a huge thing. It hit the doors ahead of her and smashed them down entirely.

It was Faffnr Bludbroder.

The pack-leader lay in the wreckage of the doors, and did not rise.

Euten stopped. She turned.

Konrad Curze bowed to her. He was a smile made of shadows and smoke and sickness. He was wickedness itself.

*Tarasha,' he sighed. A smile should not be that wide.

*He will kill you for this,' she said.

*He's dead, Tarasha,' Curze replied.

All her strength left her. Grief felled her. She dropped to her knees.

*No...'

*I killed him,' Curze cooed. *Roboute and the Lion both. I have studied his story, of course. As the little emperor he pretends to be, he does so chronicle himself. I have heard of you. Tarasha Euten, Chamberlain Princ.i.p.al, and to all intents a mother to him. A mother.'

Curze sighed.

*Thanks to the genius of my father, my kind does not enjoy the luxury of mothers. You are rare. You are a rare and obscene thing, you ragged witch. I wish Roboute had been alive to suffer the damage of your death.'

Euten rose to her full height and looked the monster in the eye.

*Go to h.e.l.l, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' she said.

Curze drew back his claws.

Something entered the room. It entered with great speed and force. Euten felt the rush of it, the shockwave. She recoiled, reeling, stunned.

Suddenly, her killer was no longer in front of her.

Curze was being driven towards the exploded window by an elemental force.

It was clad in mismatched armour plate and mail, all purloined from Guilliman's trophy hall, armour built to fit a primarch's scale. It wielded a battle mace, a fine piece that Roboute had used early in the Great Crusade.

The elemental force, raging and screaming, its skin sheened with blood, smashed Curze backwards and drove the mace into his slender chest.

The elemental force had a name, though it did not know it or remember it.

That name was Vulkan.

Locked together, he and Curze tumbled out of the chamber windows and into the precipitous gloom beyond.

18.

Death Denied

*There may, perforce, be one end of time, one end

of the long thread, that playeth out to such dimension that it

out-spans all things, and all things loseth their measure beside it:

the edges of our cosmos, the puissance of our G.o.ds,

the endeavours and limits of life, all would be found less

than the extremity of time. Indeed, so far may time extendeth

that it outstretches even death itself, so death itself must perish.'

a from The Night Sound of Insects,

by the Sage of Sanaa [antiquity]

The primarchs, wrestling and falling like rebel angels, dropped into the night.

The lower roofs of the Residency slammed up to meet them. Their mutual impact shattered tiles and broke finials from the caps of the roofline. Near to the site of their impact, the sprawled body of Shockeye Ffyn lay at an angle over a gutter pipe where he had landed before their plunge.

They were still a long way up. The Residency was of considerable height. Behind them lay the Aegis Wall and the even more significant drop off the Castrum of the Palaeopolis into the out-spread Civitas. To the west of them, the night wind blew in thick smoke from the burning Fortress.

The jarring force of impact barely interrupted their fight. Vulkan rolled across the broken tiles and rose at once, swinging the mace; it wasn't a warhammer, but it was close enough to register in his damaged mind. Curze squealed in pain and indignation, and writhed at his attacker, lashing out with his talons.

*You live! You live!' shrieked the Night Haunter. *Still your d.a.m.ned life plagues me! Still you won't let me take it! Why do you still deny me? Why won't you let me take it? Eventually even you must die!'

Vulkan's answering howl was incoherent. He slammed his mace home, and drove it against warding claws. Sparks billowed out in the night wind.

*I have killed two brothers tonight!' Curze yelled. *A third would make this hour most perfect in outrage! And your life, yours of all lives, so inextinguishable, would be the greatest trophy of all!'

Vulkan did not understand the words that were being yelled at him. He understood very little. His mind had been destroyed by unbearable pain, by suffering, by the meticulous and ingenious torment that Curze had forced him to endure over a period of months. Curze had annihilated Vulkan's spirit and sanity, but he had been unable to terminate his actual life.

He had discovered that Vulkan possessed one inhuman trait that the other primarchs did not. This vexed Curze immeasurably. It offered a challenge that a being raised on murder, blood and terror could not resist.

All Vulkan saw was his tormentor, his abuser, the man who had killed him over and over again in search of a way of killing him permanently; the brother who had, through the uttermost cruelty, revealed Vulkan's immortal gift. The rage to exact vengeance consumed him.

The claws of Curze's left hand ripped across Vulkan, stripping away part of his borrowed plate in silvered metal shavings. Vulkan drove the head of his mace into Curze's left shoulder-plate with a swift, short-arced blow, and then swung the weapon sideways into Curze's head.

The haft, not the head, caught Curze across the cheek, and sent him reeling. He tried to rally, and turn to check his opponent, but shattered tiles slithered under his feet. He fought for a second to control his position.

Vulkan exploited that second, and drove a ferocious two-handed swing into Curze's wavering body.

Plasteel cracked. Curze screamed, knocked clean off the slope of the roof. He pitched and fell, dropping ten metres onto the next shelf of the Residency roofscape. Grey slates, mined and shaped in the high peaks of Hera's Crown, burst under him like sheet ice, throwing chips and slivers into the air.

Arms wide, Vulkan leapt off the roof and dropped feetfirst. Curze was not going to escape him.

On the slates below, Curze stirred. He looked up, saw Vulkan plunging towards him, and rolled desperately to avoid being crushed beneath his brother's armoured bulk. Vulkan's landing shattered more of the slates, and sent some large pieces whipping into the wind as shrapnel.

Instantly braced, Vulkan swung from the waist and drove his mace's head at the sprawled Curze. The Night Haunter half-leapt, half-folded himself aside. The mace punched a significant hole through the roof, but the head wedged there for a second.

Curze retaliated, laughing with insane glee. He embraced Vulkan with his left arm, pulling their faces almost tenderly cheek to cheek. He drove his right arm in, a sharp understroke, palm up.

All four primary finger points stabbed into Vulkan's side, coring through armour, underplate, flex sub-suit and directly into his torso. Blood gouted. Vulkan's head snapped back and he clenched in pain, his blazing eyes closed. Curze held onto him, pulled the claws out, and repeated the stab.

Vulkan wrenched himself away. His side, left leg, and the tiles beneath him ran with blood. He staggered, and then fell onto the roof with a clatter of armour and cracking slates. He twitched violently and fell still.

Curze spat out clots of blood and phlegm. The wind whipped at his filthy hair.

*See?' he demanded. *This is death. Learn to accept it, brother!'

Vulkan's eyes snapped open.

*Oh,' said Konrad Curze in disappointment. *That was quick.'

Gantulga raced up the central staircase of the Residency, sword in hand, with Eeron Kleve close behind him. Vodun Badorum and details of praecental guardsmen were already rushing to the private quarters across the landing and along the main corridor.

*He's here!' Gantulga roared at them. *Have a care. He's in this house!'

*Curze?' asked the guard commander.

*Of course, Curze!' Kleve growled.

Badorum barked orders to his men, orchestrating their advance. Weapons snapped up, aimed and ready. Powerfeeds whined to charge.

*We have heard a terrible commotion from the private quarters,' Badorum told the White Scar and the Iron Hands officer.

*Get behind us,' Kleve told him, *and ready those plasma weapons to fire.'

Gantulga led the way, slowing his advance to a prowl, his sword raised and ready. Kleve had his rotor cannon braced and armed. He swung the heavy thing from side to side, hunting for a target.

The main doors to the inner rooms had been smashed down. Euten knelt in the wreckage of the doorway, wiping blood from the brow of the crumpled, half-dead Faffnr Bludbroder.

*Mamzel!' Kleve cried, and ran to her. Gantulga flew past them into the chamber, and took a quick inventory of the scene. The place was wrecked, the floor littered with hurt and dying s.p.a.ce Wolves. The night's cold air was gusting in through destroyed windows.

*Great stars of Ultramar,' Vodun Badorum murmured.