Текст книги "Vulkan Lives"

Автор книги: Ник Кайм

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Reunited

‘Though the battle had ended and the enemy was far from the reach of our blades, most of us didn’t come back from the Urgall Depression. Even those men who escaped, those pitiful few, even they didn’t come back. They’re still there now. We all are, fighting for our lives.’

– unknown legionary survivor of the Isstvan V massacre

It looked bad. There was no other way to describe it. Definitely bad. Nurth was bad, but this was a whole other pit of groxshit that Grammaticus had found himself in. And then there was the alien. Not Slau Dha, or Gahet. Certainly not anyone affiliated with the Cabal. Here was a different player entirely, an eldar whose agenda was as inscrutable as his identity.

And then there was Oll.

But he couldn’t worry about that now. He’d done everything he could on that front, and as much as his old friend had clearly resented being reached out to, what other choice did Grammaticus have?

The universe suddenly felt very small, and Grammaticus was somehow at its beating heart and under intense scrutiny from all interested parties. Insects on microscope slides had more privacy. He thought of Anatol Hive, and wished that he had been allowed to die in the Unification Wars.

Fate had other plans for him, though. If asked at the time, he doubted he would have said that that fate included a battered group of legionaries and running for his life down a sewer tunnel. If they knew of his true mission…

His two minders looked tired, and fraught. The one called Leodrakk, the Salamander, had eyed him several times since they had reached what Grammaticus assumed was a rendezvous point. He also assumed that whoever Leodrakk was meant to be rendezvousing with was late. This would be Numeon, his captain and the legionary in charge. It didn’t bode well. What boded worse was if Numeon was dead. That left Leodrakk running things, and he looked about ready to charge to his glorious death, killing Grammaticus into the bargain. Not that it would matter, but then his mission would effectively be over. He also feared to imagine what the Word Bearers would do to him.

He didn’t know what the Salamanders and their allies in the other broken Legions had intended to achieve here on Traoris. Whatever it was, it had gone awry, and he suspected that he carried some weight of blame in that.

Leodrakk’s eyes told him all of this. They spoke of grief and a dangerously fatalistic desire for revenge. Grammaticus had seen men like that in the united armies, when they were fighting Narthan Dume. He’d never seen it in a Space Marine before, and he wondered just what these warriors had lost to transform them so egregiously.

‘What are you staring at?’ snarled the Salamander. He was crouching down, and had been looking at his helmet, facing him on his lap.

‘I’m wondering what happened to you,’ said Grammaticus.

‘War happened to us,’ he replied curtly.

‘You are made for war. There is more to it than that.’

Leodrakk looked into the stinking filth that streamed beneath their feet, but found no answers in the dirty water.

Instead, the Librarian spoke up.

‘We were betrayed,’ he rasped, ‘at Isstvan. It was worse than atrocity. The massacre we endured was only the physical manifestation of our collective trauma. The real pain was to come, and it was a malady of the mind. Not everyone survived it.’

Hriak, the Raven Guard, paused as if trying to see into Grammaticus’s mind for the source of his curiosity. It was deeply unsettling, and Grammaticus fought to keep his hand from trembling. Many years ago he believed that a very close friend of his had succumbed to a psyker’s mental intrusion. It was all lies, of course. Everything about it had been a lie, one way or another. It had still unnerved him, though, the sheer destructive potential of battle psykers. No wonder the Emperor had removed them from the Legions.

‘From the horror of Isstvan, we escaped aboard a drop-ship,’ Hriak continued, ‘but the horror did not end there. All of us were changed by what we had witnessed, the sight of our brothers slain in droves beside us, our former allies turning their guns on our backs while at the same time known traitors to our fronts opened up with their weapons in vicious concert.’

Grammaticus looked askance at Leodrakk for a reaction as Hriak related their story, and found him to be deeply uncomfortable at the retelling, but content to let it go on.

‘Some of the survivors aboard our drop-ship were not themselves,’ said Hriak. ‘When a man is heightened to a certain point of battle fervour, it can be difficult for him to come down from that. Sometimes, if the experience is particularly traumatic, he can never fully recover and a part of him will always be at war, in that self-same conflict. Such men, blinded by this trauma, have killed in error, believing friends to be foes. It takes a great deal for the Legiones Astartes to succumb to such a trauma. Our minds are much stronger than ordinary mortals, but it is possible.’

And then Grammaticus knew. He knew how Hriak had sustained the wound to his neck, the one that had very nearly slit his throat completely. It wasn’t actually on Isstvan that he’d received it, it was on the drop-ship. It was inflicted by–

‘That’s enough, Hriak,’ whispered Leodrakk. ‘We don’t need to remember that, and he doesn’t need to hear it either.’

‘My presence here has complicated things for you, hasn’t it?’ said Grammaticus.

‘You have undermined our entire mission.’

Grammaticus shook his head, nonplussed at the mordant Salamander. ‘What the fug did you intend to achieve, anyway? What were you, twenty-something men against an entire host, an entire city? I get it that you want payback, but how does throwing yourselves on your enemies’ swords get you what you want?’

Leodrakk stood, and for a brief moment looked like he was about to end Grammaticus, but decided against it.

‘It is not so simple as revenge. We want to get back into the war, make a difference, for what we do to have meaning. Before we came here, we had been tracking the Word Bearers of this particular cult for a while. We followed them to a small, backwater world called Viralis but were too late to prevent what they unleashed there.’

Grammaticus frowned. ‘Unleashed?’

‘ Daemons, John Grammaticus, a subject about which I suspect you are well-versed.’

‘I have seen the Acuity,’ he admitted.

‘Caeren Sebaton’

Leodrakk scowled. ‘I won’t even ask what that is. A gift from your Cabal, no doubt.’

‘It’s no gift, it’s truth and one I wish I could erase from my mind.’

‘Again, not my concern. What does concern me,’ he gestured to Hriak too, ‘ us, our mission, is to prevent what happened on Viralis from happening here. Their leader, the Word Bearers cleric, was supposed to die by our hand. We would slip in unnoticed, find him and execute him. Pergellen was our trigger man, the rest of us would ensure rapid egress in the face of reprisal. Our chances of success were good, our chances of survival less so, but at least we would die knowing Traoris was safe.’

‘No world is safe, Salamander,’ Grammaticus countered. ‘No part of the galaxy, however remote, is going to be spared.’

Leodrakk snarled, angry, but more at the situation than Grammaticus. ‘We would spare this world. At least from that.’ He backed down, the threat of violence ebbed. ‘But now we are discovered and being hunted. Shen and Pergellen should have left you in that warehouse.’

Grammaticus nodded. ‘Yes, they should have. But they didn’t, and now you have me and know what I know, so what are you going to do with that?’

‘Nothing,’ said a voice from deeper in the tunnel. It was dark, but even Grammaticus recognised the warrior coming to meet them. He was not alone, either.

‘Numeon.’ Leodrakk went to greet him. They locked wrists. Hriak merely bowed his head to acknowledge the captain. Leodrakk’s good mood soured when he saw who else had come back with Numeon. ‘So few?’ he asked.

‘Their sacrifice will have meaning, brother.’

Of the twenty-three legionaries that had made planetfall on Traoris from the Fire Ark, barely thirteen remained. Shen’ra had come back with Numeon, as well as K’gosi. Pergellen lingered at the back of the group, returning a few minutes after having made sure they were not followed. Hriak was the last of the Ravens now, and he muttered a Kiavahran oath for the fallen Avus. The rest were Salamanders.

Grammaticus beheld a broken force. Fate, oh that capricious mistress, had conspired against them. It had delivered him into their grasp and the fulgurite spear to the Word Bearers. The phrase ‘fugged beyond all reason’ didn’t even begin to describe it.

He also noticed that a key figure was missing, as did Leodrakk.

‘Where is Domadus?’ asked the Salamander.

Numeon sighed, weary. He took off his battle-helm. ‘We lost him during the fight. He and several others went out to meet the Seventeenth to stymie their assault. I didn’t see him fall, but…’ He shook his head.

‘So, what now?’ asked Shen’ra, hobbling to stand beside his brothers.

Grammaticus answered.

‘Let me go. Help me reclaim the spear and get off Traoris. What is there to lose now?’

Numeon ignored him, and went over to Shen’ra. He was badly wounded and struggling.

‘I have seen better days, before you ask,’ said the Techmarine acerbically. He was slumped against the tunnel wall, a trickle of effluence from the cracked ceiling painting a grubby track down his armour. Numeon kneeled to speak with him.

‘You saved us all, you irascible bastard.’

‘Lost the track-mount, though. Anyway…’ he paused to cough, ‘someone had to.’

Numeon laughed, but his humour quickly faded when he saw Shen’ra’s injuries.

The Techmarine’s bionic eye was only partially functional and he carried a limp, but his cracked breastplate hinted at the real damage. Internal injuries, partial biological shut-down.

Two other Salamanders in the returning party were already comatose as their brutalised bodies tried to repair themselves. Prognosis did not appear favourable. Three more were dead, shredded by bolt-rounds, impaled by blades. Not one killing wound, but several small ones amounting to the same. Attritional deaths. Their brothers had carried them, those that were washed down with them into the tunnels, just as they had before.

Grammaticus was surprised at the level of humanity they showed to their dead, and wondered if it was a common Nocturnean trait.

‘So, what now?’ he asked. ‘Are we to hide out in these tunnels until they find us?’

Numeon finished muttering some words of encouragement to the Techmarine and rose to his feet.

‘We move on. Find another way to achieve our mission.’

Leodrakk approached, noticing Numeon touching the sigil of Vulkan he had carried ever since they had fled Isstvan.

‘What do you think it’s for?’ he asked.

Numeon glanced down at it. Fashioned into a simple blacksmith’s hammer, it looked unremarkable.

‘I think it’s a symbol,’ he said. ‘When I see it, I believe in our primarch, that he is still alive. Beyond that, I don’t know.’

‘I hope you’re right, brother.’

Pergellen, returning from scouting out the tunnel ahead, interrupted them.

‘The way on is clear,’ he put in. ‘This tract ends in an outflow. It’s towards the edge of the city and should give us a good vantage point to plan our next move.’

Numeon nodded. ‘Make sure there are no surprises.’

Taking K’gosi with him, the scout headed back off into the darkness.

‘I hate to echo the human,’ said Leodrakk when Pergellen had gone, ‘but what isour next move?’

Numeon regarded Grammaticus.

‘They’re after him now. The attack on the manufactorum is proof of that. We might be able to use that. To use him.’

And just like that, fate twisted again and Grammaticus bemoaned that he had ever been ‘saved’ by the Salamanders.

The outflow ended in a broad sink, a few metres deep. It was raining heavily overhead, causing the dirty sewer run-off in the manmade basin to flow over its rockcrete lip in a rushing cataract that crashed down in an ever-deepening pool below.

At one side of the sink there was a wooden jetty. The bodies of three men laid face down on it. Their attire suggested they were sump-catchers. They had been stabbed to death, and the crude sigil daubed in blood on the jetty suggested it was cult-related. Above them hung a lattice of fishing lines, dead sump rats strung along them by their tiny feet. There were a couple of long pikes, too, and a crumpled-up net stuffed into an empty oil drum. A tarpaulin provided ineffective protection against the elements, covering two thirds of the jetty and suspended on guide poles like a crude tent.

‘Don’t want to slip in there, human,’ muttered Leodrakk as he escorted Grammaticus over a wooden walkway that creaked with the legionary’s every step.

Grammaticus looked down into the viscous, grimy soup slowly coagulating in the sink. Foulness practically radiated from it, the water an ugly pale yellow. Carcasses bobbed up and down in it, disturbed by the effluvia running out from the pipe and cascading over the basin edge.

It reminded him of the drainage basin on the outskirts of Anatol Hive when he had been just a child. As he looked down into the sink’s murky depths he tried not to picture the corpse-white face of the boy, and found that he had to look away. Instead, he thought about the eldar who had flectedhim in the infirmary. He had offered him a way out, a choice, a truth. Albeit one that had yet to be revealed to him in full. It went against his mission – it might also be a pack of lies, a test by the Cabal to see if he could be trusted. Tired wasn’t the word for how he felt now. He was ragged, just like the warriors who were escorting him. Not only that, he was a traitor to his race. His entire fugging race! That was something not many could claim, not that he was proud of it. He felt grubby, and not just from the sewer pipe. He wanted to believe what he had seen in the infirmary, he neededto. But what if it wasn’t real? What if Slau Dha, Gahet and all those other bastards were manipulating him still? All he had was his mission, and even that sickened him.

Thoroughly miserable, Grammaticus winced as a droplet from above splashed his eye.

Numeon lifted up his dripping gauntlet for retinal analysis.

‘High acid content,’ he said. ‘Better give him something to keep off the worst of it.’

‘How about we go somewhere other than a fugging sewer,’ suggested Grammaticus, ‘perhaps indoors and not surrounded by shit and piss?’

‘Here.’ K’gosi handed him his cloak. It was drake hide, virtually impervious to fire and more than adequate protection against acid-rain.

Grammaticus took it, grudgingly.

‘Why not give me one of theirs?’ he asked, gesturing to the dead Salamanders being carried out onto the jetty.

‘Not mine to give,’ said K’gosi.

‘They’re not going to need them.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ the Pyroclast replied and went to help secure the outer perimeter.

Pergellen was standing at the edge of the basin, a couple of metres away from the gushing cataract.

‘It’s sheer, over eighty metres straight down,’ he told Numeon, who had just joined him. ‘Though the water makes it look shorter than that.’

The dirty torrent from the sewer pipe was coming down so hard that it frothed and foamed below, rising and bubbling in a small but violent tumult. The spray kicked up all the way to the top of the outflow, but Pergellen’s gaze had moved skywards, to a high column which comprised part of an aqueduct that flanked the torrent.

‘Looks like a good vantage point,’ he said.

A walkway led from the jetty, along the side of the outflow pipes, all the way to the aqueduct, and had enough room for men to traverse in file. Beyond the aqueduct, the rest of Ranos was laid open. Numeon could see that since making planetfall they had moved east, towards the edge of the city.

His eyes narrowed.

‘Is that…?’ he asked.

‘The space port? Yes, it is,’ said Pergellen.

Numeon looked back over his shoulder to where Grammaticus was huddled up and shivering in K’gosi’s cloak.

‘This is no place to make a stand, brother.’

‘Agreed,’ said Pergellen. ‘What do you have in mind?’

Numeon watched the lines of dead sump-rats swaying with the foetid breeze.

‘Bait,’ he said.

Narek’s gladius slid from the Salamander’s neck with a wet slurrch. The legionary was dead before he had cleaned the blade and was moving on to the next. Bodies from both sides littered the street. Of the three squads he had taken to eliminate the loyalists, only a handful remained. It had been bloody, and harder fought than he had expected. The sniper had escaped. Again. This stuck in Narek’s craw, and irritated. Approaching the edge of the pit where the manufactorum had collapsed, he thought of the ones who had escaped. An underground river flowed beneath this part of the city, connected to its drainage system. He had no map of those tunnels, no knowledge of their existence or where the outflow would deposit anyone caught in the current, so he let it go.

The loyalists were running out of places to hide. Even if it took him to the edge of the city and the lightning-blasted wastes beyond it, he would track them down. He had sworn, so it would be done. Or he would die in the attempt. Honour about one’s duty, he felt, should still mean something.

‘Stop,’ he said, his boot pressed down on the chest of another half-dead enemy, but Narek was looking at Vogel, who was straddling a Salamander’s chest and was about to begin cutting flesh with his ritual knife.

‘What?’ asked the Word Bearer, head snapping round to regard the huntsman.

‘None of that.’ Narek left the other dying legionary where he was and walked over to Vogel.

‘I honour the Pantheon,’ Vogel hissed, evidently displeased.

‘You dishonour the deed, your kill,’ Narek replied, holding his gladius casually in his off-hand. ‘Mutilate the human chaff, by all means, but these were Legion warriors, once our brothers-in-arms. That should still mean something.’

Vogel went to rise, but Narek put the tip of his gladius to his throat and he stopped in a half-crouch.

‘You overstep your bounds,’ hissed Vogel.

‘If I do, it’ll mean this blade goes through your neck.’

Vogel didn’t look like he wanted to back down just yet.

‘Dagon agrees with me,’ said Narek.

Vogel followed the huntsman’s gaze to the other sniper, who had his rifle trained and ready. The belligerent Word Bearer raised his hands in a placatory gesture and Narek let him step away. When he was certain Vogel was content just to curse him and not retaliate, Narek looked down on the stricken Salamander his comrade had been about to defile.

‘ Thank… you…’ the warrior muttered, close to death.

‘It wasn’t for you, legionary,’ Narek uttered, and plunged the gladius into his heart.

The sound of a turbine engine getting louder and closer made Narek turn. He saw the Stormbird that belonged to Elias, and wondered what had happened to bring him here.

‘Gather,’ he voxed to the others. ‘The Dark Apostle is here.’

Elias was wounded. He had also been paid a visit by Erebus himself. As he stood before the Dark Apostle in the lee of the landed Stormbird, it suddenly made sense to Narek why his master had come. He had been ordered to.

‘Another failure?’ asked Elias, surveying the carnage.

‘Not entirely,’ the huntsman replied. He had removed his battle-helm in the Dark Apostle’s presence and held it in the crook of his arm.

They were alone, in so far as the rest of the legionaries were standing guard or rounding up still-living prisoners. Narek wished dearly he’d had the time to give all of them clean deaths. Irritating Vogel was one thing; he wouldn’t defy the Dark Apostle.

‘Did you kill all of them, and apprehend the human?’

‘Not yet.’

‘A failure then.’

Narek briefly bowed his head. ‘One I shall rectify.’

‘No, Narek. Your chance has passed for this glory. Erebus himself comes and has asked me to eliminate our enemies and recapture the human, John Grammaticus.’

‘He asked you, did he?’

‘Yes,’ hissed Elias with more than a hint of anger. ‘I am his trusted ally in this.’

‘Of course, master,’ Narek responded coolly. His eyes strayed to the fulgurite spear scabbarded at Elias’s waist.

It still gave off a faint glow, and seemed to make the Dark Apostle uncomfortable to wear it. Narek realised that the spear had somehow burned Elias’s arm to all but a scorched mess.

‘You are wondering if we were right to worship the Emperor as a god,’ Elias said to him, when he noticed Narek looking at the sheathed spear.

‘I am.’

‘We were, brother. But there are other gods, Narek, who would give us favour.’

‘I see no boon in it,’ he admitted.

Elias laughed. ‘I could have you executed for that, for your lack of belief.’

‘I believe, master. That is the problem – I just do not like where that belief is taking us.’

‘You will come to like it, huntsman. You will embraceit, as we all will. For it is the desire of Lorgar and the Pantheon that we do so. Now,’ he added, growing bored of his sermon. ‘Where is the man, where is John Grammaticus?’

‘He is almost certainly still with the broken Legion survivors. Their trail won’t be hard to track.’

Elias dismissed the idea with a desultory wave of his hand.

‘It’s of no consequence. I can find him through different means.’ He eyed one of the legionary prisoners, one yet to be given a clean death, and pulled out his ritual knife.

Domadus was alive, but somehow pinned. Since the battle had ended, they had been raking through the casualties, looking for survivors. He dimly recalled being dragged, and half-heard guttural laughter from one of his captors. Part of his spinal column had been severed. He was paralysed from the waist down. He also had several potentially fatal internal injuries, and was too weak to fight back.

His bionic eye no longer functioned, so he was left blinded in it. His organic one opened, and the view this received was of the ground. At the edge of his reduced vision he thought he saw the open hand of a legionary lying on his back. The gauntlet was emerald-green, the fingers unmoving. A bolter lay a few centimetres away from it grip.

‘This one,’ he heard a voice say. He sounded cultured, almost urbane.

Firm, armoured fingers seized the Iron Hand’s chin and lifted it up so that Domadus could see his oppressors.

Word Bearers. One, standing behind the other, had scripture painting his cheekbones in gold. His black hair was short with a sharp widow’s peak. One of his arms was badly burned, and he held it protectively to his body. This was the cleric, it had to be. The other one who was holding Domadus’s chin was a veteran, definitely a soldier in the most pugnacious sense of the word. He was flat-nosed, but thin of face, and carried a slight limp.

Through dulled senses, Domadus became aware that his wrists were bound with razor-wire and he was attached to the side of a Word Bearers gunship. His breastplate had been removed, as well as his mesh under-armour, exposing the skin beneath.

‘There is no other way?’ asked the soldier.

The cleric drew forth a jagged ritual knife and Domadus steeled himself for what he knew was coming next.

‘None,’ answered the cleric, who traced a long nailed gauntlet across the flesh of the Iron Hand’s cheek, before taking up a chant.