Текст книги "Vulkan Lives"

Автор книги: Ник Кайм

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Now it was Varteh’s turn to smile.

‘I did, that’s why I’m in this shit hole with you.’ Varteh let it go. ‘Fair enough. We all have our secrets, I suppose. Yours, I suspect, are many.’

‘It’s because you’re a shrewd man that I hired you, Varteh.’ Sebaton looked back up at the opening.

Varteh took a step towards him and whispered, ‘What’s coming, Sebaton? What is this all about?’

Sebaton was staring. ‘What it’s always been about, Varteh. Weapons.’ He twisted the small ornate ring he wore on one finger, before returning his gaze to the ex-Lucifer. ‘Keep digging.’

CHAPTER TWO

Remembrance

‘What we do defines us. Our deeds are like shadows and depending on whether we run into or from the sun, they either lie behind us or before us.’

– ancient Terran philosopher, unknown

Kharaatan, during the Great Crusade

Smoke hung over Khar-tann City in a dark pall. It seemed to stick to its towers and battlements, drenching them in an oily gloom.

Fifteen hours of bombardment. Its shields had taken quite a battering. Parts of the city were demolished, but its main gates, its core walls and its defenders were still intact. Defiant. It was the first of nine major cities on One-Five-Four Six, or Kharaatan, as the natives called it.

Regarding the shadows that haunted its walls, its people unmoving as they watched the massive force sent to quell them, Numeon hoped the other cities would be easier to crack. He stood just over eight kilometres away on a rough escarpment of dolomitic limestone with three of his closest brothers. The Salamanders stood apart from the rest of the Imperial officers, who were farther back, camped halfway down a ridge that descended into a wide, low basin where their forces gathered.

‘It’s quiet,’ hissed Nemetor, as if to speak any louder would shatter the calm before the coming storm and pre-empt their attack.

‘Wouldn’t you be, facing off against the Legion?’ said Leodrakk. He looked up, craning his neck and pointing the snout of his dragon’s helm to the sky. ‘Two Legions,’ he corrected, though he could see no sign of their cousins.

Both warriors were Salamanders, yet could not be less alike. Nemetor was softly spoken and wore the emerald-green of the Legion, his iconography that of the 15th Company with a white drake head on his left shoulder guard. He was broad, with a thick neck and shortish, stout legs. Even out of his war-plate, he was formidable. It was partly the reason he was also known as ‘Tank’.

‘Perhaps they’re thinking about giving up, Tank,’ offered Atanarius, watching the city’s movements through a pair of magnoculars.

Like Leodrakk, he was armoured in the trappings of the Pyre Guard, a suit of plate fashioned in a draconian aspect with a reptilian battle-helm and scalloped greaves, pauldrons and cuirass. It was permanently blackened from Promethean ritual, and branding marks scored the metal in the Salamanders’ oaths of moment. Both warriors were taller than Nemetor, but lost ground in terms of sheer bulk.

‘Is that what your eyes tell you, Atanarius?’ Numeon asked in a deep voice. He turned, the fire-red crest jutting from the crown of his battle-helm marking him out as their captain. He was also the primarch’s equerry, and that made him unique. Even through his retinal lenses, his gaze was penetrating.

Over the Phatra plain where Khar-tann City presided, night was starting to fall. Like hot embers in a fire, Numeon’s eyes blazed in the pre-dark. All of the Salamanders’ eyes did. It was a part of their heritage, like the onyx black of their skin and the self-sacrificial mindset of their Promethean creed.

‘Even through the scopes, it’s hard to be certain of anything they are telling me, Pyre captain.’ Atanarius lowered the magnoculars, returning them to his equipment belt, before facing Numeon. ‘I can detect very little movement. If they were planning on trying to repel our forces, then whatever measures they mean to use to do it are already in place.’

‘Eight thousand fighting men, plus twice that number again in civilians, some of whom may have been levied to bolster the troops,’ said Leodrakk. ‘Nothing they can do will prevent us knocking down their gate and cleaning house.’ He sounded belligerent as ever. A hot vein of magma ran through his skin and bone, as was often remarked by his brothers.

Nemetor cocked his head. ‘I thought you were planning on burning down their house, not cleaning it, brother?’

Leodrakk glared, cracking his knuckles inside his gauntlets.

‘Temper, Leo,’ Atanarius warned, before turning to Nemetor, ‘but don’t think your familiarity with the Pyre Guard allows you to disrespect us, Nemetor. Even from a captain, that won’t be tolerated.’

Nemetor inclined his head to apologise.

‘If you are finished goading one another then please attend.’ Numeon nodded down the ridge where several Army officers were slogging uphill, ‘I believe we are about to get some news.’

Numeon opened up a vox-link in his battle-helm.

‘Skatar’var.’

A crackling voice answered immediately.

‘Summon Lord Vulkan,’ said Numeon. ‘The Army and Titan legio are ready to march.’

He cut the link, knowing the order was given, so would be carried out.

Below in the desert basin, the Legion waited. A sea of emerald-green, six thousand warriors stood ready to bring a city to its knees. Beyond them, four full regiments of tanks, including super-heavies, a squadron of Infernus-pattern Predators and enough Mastodons to transport every legionary on the ground. Behind the infantry loomed a trio of Warhound Titans from Legio Ignis, nicknamed the ‘Fire Kings’. Traditionally, Warhounds fought alone, but this particular pack was seldom parted.

Khar-tann City was formidable, its armed forces devoted, but it could not outlast this. There was something unsettling about the silence and the way the Khar-tans had given in wholly to alien subjugation.

Numeon snarled, feeling the old familiar call to war. It filled his vox-grille with the reek of ash and cinder from his heavy exhalations. In the end, their resistance mattered not.

‘It’s time to make them burn.’

Vulkan kneeled, head down, inside a cell of obsidian and black metal. What little light penetrated the darkness was from the forge-heat of irons and brands, the warm glow of embers surrounding a pit of coals.

The air was hot, stifling. Seriph was wearing a rebreather, and put questions to the primarch through a vox-coder attached to her belt. It made her otherwise mellifluous voice tinny and marred with static.

‘And so you were raised a blacksmith’s son?’ she asked, wiping away another bead of sweat from her brow, dark patches showing under the arms of her robes and down her back. The remembrancer took a moment to sip from a flask she wore at her hip. Without it, dehydration and acute heatstroke would have occurred in minutes. She wanted longer with the Lord of the Drakes, and if this was the only way then so be it.

‘Is that so hard to believe?’ Vulkan answered as the sound and smell of burning flesh – his flesh – filled the chamber. ‘And he was a blacksmiterand a metal-shaper, a craftsman of consummate skill that I greatly admired.’

A human, augmented to be able to perform his duty and live to do so again, withdrew a burning brand from the primarch’s skin.

‘Noted,’ said Seriph, scratching with her stylus on the data-slate in her other hand. ‘It just seems like a humble origin for a lord of Space Marines.’

The remembrancer was sweltering now, having endured a full twenty-one minutes in the primarch’s chambers, a feat none before her had matched without expiring from the heat.

‘Should I have had a more regal upbringing then?’

The brander picked up a fresh iron, examining the hooked end and imagining the shape of the mark it would make.

‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ said Seriph, wincing as Vulkan’s flesh burned anew, sizzling like meat in a cook-pan. ‘I just assumed all the primarchs came from warlike, vaunted beginnings. Either that or born as orphans on death worlds.’

‘Nocturne isa death world and hardly civilised. But our origins were all very different. I wonder sometimes how we all came back to our father’s service as warriors and generals, but here we stand at the forefront of the Great Crusade doing just that.’

Seriph frowned, then wiped her brow with the sleeve of her robe.

‘What else could you have been?’

‘Tyrants, murderers… architects. It was only fate that made us leaders, and I am still unsure as to how our genetic heritage predisposed us to that calling.’

‘And which would you have been, then?’

Vulkan smiled, though it did little to warm his diabolic voice.

‘A farmer, I think.’

‘You would take your blacksmiter’s anvil and turn a sword into a ploughshare, is that it?’

‘Overly poetic, but yes that’s it.’

Seriph paused. Either she was gasping in the heat or drawing some conclusions.

‘You don’t seem like the others.’

‘And you know my brothers, do you, Remembrancer Seriph?’ There was mild reproach in Vulkan’s tone, just enough to intimidate.

It flustered the remembrancer and she looked on the verge of collapse. ‘No, of course not. I have just heard–’

‘A wise chronicler does not believe all she hears, Seriph.’ For the first time since the interview began, Vulkan raised his head. ‘Tell me,’ he said, his voice deepening, ‘what do you see in my eyes?’

They blazed like the calderas of a volcano.

‘F… fire…’

At last she wilted. Vulkan rushed forwards and caught her so that she didn’t fall.

At the same moment a crack opened in the darkness and Skatar’var stepped through it into the branding chamber.

‘My lord,’ said the Pyre Guard.

Skatar’var was one of two brothers that were now part of the primarch’s inner circle. Like his sibling, he was haughty and proud. A warrior-king of Hesiod, he had learned nobility from his biological father and honed it in the Legion.

The warrior bowed his head a fraction, before realising what he was seeing. ‘Another one unequal to the task?’

A large draconian horn arched from his back, attached to the power generator of his armour. He had ‘won’ the trophy when he had slain Loktaral, one of the deep drakes, and joined his brother at Vulkan’s side. Leodrakk, his hot-tempered younger sibling, bore the other horn. They had killed the beast together.

‘She was strong, and lasted longer than the others. I will speak with her again,’ said Vulkan, cradling the woman and passing her over to Skatar’var like he would an infant to its parent. ‘I assume you come to tell me the Army is ready.’

Skatar’var looked down at the woman like she was a piece of unfamiliar equipment, before answering his primarch. ‘Aye, the Legio Ignis too.’

Vulkan nodded.

‘Very well. Remove her from here and make sure she stays with the medicaes. I have one more oath to take before we can make war on Khar-tann City.’

‘Yes, lord.’

Skatar’var took the woman and his leave.

In the darkness, Vulkan turned back to his brander. The primarch’s onyx-black body was like a muscled slab of granite. Almost every part of his exposed skin was marked. They represented deeds, battles, lives taken and spared. Some even went as far back as Nocturne, before he was reunited with the Outlander. Without exception, Vulkan remembered each and every one in precise detail.

It was ritual, a part of the Promethean creed which was born upon Nocturne many years ago. Method and tradition were important to Vulkan; his teachings to his sons were predicated on these very tenets.

‘So comes the moment, so the brand is burned,’ he said, kneeling as he lowered his head again. ‘Prepare me for war.’

In the shuddering confines of the Mastodon, the hololithic image of Commander Arvek phased in and out of resolution.

‘ Once the core wall is breached, we can roll right into Khar-tann and demolish it,’ the Army officer declared, smacking a fist against his open palm for emphasis. Even through the built-in vox-unit, he sounded imperious. He hailed from Vodis, a world of austere military households that could trace their lineage back to the first ancient kings of Terra.

The audio was as bad as the visual, but the commander’s meaning was clear enough.

‘Negative,’ said Vulkan firmly. ‘Breach the wall, then withdraw.’

Arvek tried to mask his surprise. ‘ With respect, lord primarch, we can crush them with minimal casualties. I was led to believe–’

Vulkan cut him off. ‘To our ranks, commander, not theirs. There are over fifteen thousand civilians in Khar-tann. I’ve read your collateral damage estimates – they are conservative at best and even that forecast is unacceptable. Make a hole for the Legion, and we will subdue the native soldiery with the minimum loss of civilian life. Consider that an order.’

Arvek saluted sharply, the medals and laurels on his crisp blue uniform jangling as he moved.

Vulkan nodded to him, and switched the link.

The grainy, semi-monochrome image of the tank commander hazed out and was replaced with that of Princeps Lokja. The Titan officer was festooned with mind impulse cables, linking his cerebral cortex to the violent anima of his war machine. Already deep into the mind-link, his brow was furrowed, his curled black moustaches raised in a snarl of concentration.

‘ Lord Vulkan,’ Lokja acknowledged in the cultured accent of Attila.

‘Commander Arvek is going to make a hole in the core wall for the Legion. I need the Fire Kings to shepherd them in. Threat response only, do not engage the city’s soldiery.’

‘ Understood,’ said Lokja, a blink relaying the orders to his moderati sitting below him in the Warhound’s cockpit.

The princeps cut the feed and the interior of the rumbling Mastodon went dark.

Their eyes ablaze in the hold, seven Pyre Guard awaited their lord and master’s next words.

‘Soon as the gate is down and Arvek has withdrawn, Fifteenth go in as first recon,’ said Vulkan. ‘We follow swiftly, supported by the rest of the Firedrakes.’

Numeon nodded curtly, turning as he opened up a channel to Nemetor.

Vulkan then added, ‘We will lead the spearhead, fighting in pairs, dispersed formation. Suggestions?’

Varrun stroked his chin, smoothing his ash-grey beard. As the oldest amongst the order, he was often allowed to speak first. ‘One point of ingress, we’ll be attracting a lot of fire.’

‘We’ve taken worse,’ said Leodrakk. His eyes flared with fierce pride. ‘The honour of securing the breach should fall to us, and with the primarch leading us they don’t have nearly enough guns on that wall.’

A chorus of nods and muttered agreement went round the warriors.

‘I’d recommend storm shields in the first breach team,’ said Ganne, nodding to Igataron, who sat unmoving at the edge of the group. Both were assault specialists: the former outwardly pugnacious, the latter silent, but ferociously aggressive.

Varrun chuckled. ‘I thought the objective was to minimise civilian casualties.’

Ganne’s slab jaw tightened as he sent a crackle of energy down the haft of his thunder hammer, but he didn’t bite.

‘Skatar’var and I will go in as second wave,’ suggested Leodrakk, ignoring his bantering brothers.

‘Side by side, brother,’ said Skatar’var and the two locked gauntlets, hand to forearm.

‘That leaves you and I,’ Atanarius said to Varrun.

‘Hold the breach, leave it clear for the Legion,’ said Varrun. ‘We’ll keep the gate open for the Drakes.’

Ganne bared his teeth, ‘Rearguard obviously plays to your strengths, Varrun.’

Varrun bared his teeth back.

Inwardly, Vulkan smiled. They were hungry, ready for war. Pyre Guard were not like other Salamanders; they had more fire, more fury. Like the volcanoes of ancient Nocturne, the great jagged chains of the Dragonspike and Mount Deathfire, they were perpetually on the brink of eruption. Even the Pyroclasts weren’t as volatile.

Pyre Guard were chosenwarriors, those that displayed a level of self-sacrifice and self-sufficiency that exceeded all others. Like the saburaiof old Nihon, they were fighters foremost, who could ally as a unit or function expertly on their own. They were also leaders, and each of the Pyre Guard commanded a Chapter of the Legion in addition to their duties as the primarch’s inner circle warriors. All were Terran-born but still displayed the physical traits of onyx-black skin and red eyes, an irreversible reaction to the unique radiation of Nocturne combined with the genetic heritage of their primarch, which every Salamander, regardless of origin, possessed.

‘Skatar’var,’ said Vulkan. ‘How is Seriph?’

‘The remembrancer?’ he asked, initially wrong-footed by the request. ‘She lives.’

‘Good,’ said Vulkan. He addressed them all. ‘You are my finest drakes, my most trusted advisors. Our father fashioned us as crusaders, to bring fire and light to the darkest reaches of the galaxy. Our task is to protect mankind, shield humanity. It’s important that the Remembrancer Order sees this. Our appearance is…’

‘Monstrous, my lord,’ ventured Leodrakk, eyes blazing through his helm lenses.

Vulkan nodded. ‘We come to Kharaatan as liberators, not conquerors. We cannot forge civilisations out of rubble, out of sundered flesh and bone.’

‘And our cousins, will they hold to that also?’ a voice asked from the shadows.

All eyes turned to Igataron, whose gaze was fixed on the primarch.

‘If they do not,’ Vulkan promised, ‘my brother and I will have words.’

Numeon ended his vox exchange with Captain Nemetor. ‘Fifteenth are advancing,’ he announced, as he turned back to face his brothers.

Vulkan nodded. ‘Commander Arvek will be making contact in less than a minute. Helms on, prepare for immediate embarkation. When the ramp opens we will be ready to advance.’

In clanking unison the Pyre Guard obeyed.

Igataron and Ganne moved to the front, shields up, as Leodrakk and Skatar’var unhitched their power mauls and went in just behind them. Vulkan was next, Numeon at his side clutching the staff of his halberd. Varrun and Atanarius were last; the former holding his power axe high up the short haft near its double-edged blade, the latter unsheathing a power sword to kiss the naked blade.

All seven warriors carried bolters. Save for Varrun, who was an exceptional marksman, they seldom used them. Every one of their weapons was forged by its bearer, every one could spit fire like the drakes of old.

‘Eye-to-eye,’ snarled Numeon, reciting the Pyre Guard’s war mantra.

‘Tooth-to-tooth,’ the rest replied, including Vulkan.

Now they were forged and ready.

The hololith transmitter crackled into life, displaying a head and torso rendering of Commander Arvek.

‘ You have your breach, my Lord Primarch. Withdrawing now.’

Through his retinal lenses, Vulkan saw Arvek’s tank formations pushing away from Khar-tann’s core wall. Each engine was rendered as an icon – the display was awash with their signatures. Behind them came the Rhino armoured transports of the 15th and behind that were the Mastodons.

‘Any losses?’ asked Vulkan.

‘ None. We met zero resistance. Even when we closed to fifty metres they did not fire on us.’

A tremor of unease entered Vulkan’s mind, but he concealed it at once.

‘Relay to Captain Nemetor,’ he said to Numeon through the vox-feed as he cut the link to Arvek.

‘Something wrong, my lord?’ asked Numeon.

‘I expected some form of counter-attack.’

‘Perhaps they’ve decided to capitulate after all,’ suggested Atanarius.

‘Then why not open the gates?’ countered Varrun.

‘A trap?’ growled Leodrakk, prompting a nod of agreement from his sibling Skatar’var.

Vulkan’s mood darkened, his unease evident in his silence.

Either way, once Nemetor was inside the core wall they would find out.

Captain Nemetor had already removed his war-helm as he met Vulkan at the breach point in the core wall. The broad-shouldered warrior looked uneasy, and a fine sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead.

All lights inside the city were doused; roads, battlements and interior buildings snuffed out by darkness. The only source of illumination came from scattered fires left by the earlier bombardment, but even in this gloom evidence of Commander Arvek’s armoured assault could be seen everywhere.

Bodies of the Khar-tann soldiery were twisted amidst the rubble of the shattered core wall, which had collapsed in on itself from the severe shelling. Several watch towers had fallen into the city itself, lying broken in heaps of rockcrete and plasteel. Corpses lingered here too, already polluting the air around them with the stench of putrefaction. The entire city was rank with it, and stank of death.

Beyond the core wall and the flattened gate, burst inwards by a demolisher shell, there was a long esplanade. From the positions of exploded sandbags and mangled tank traps, Vulkan imagined the Khar-tans might have been staging a second defence line here. In several places he noticed the burned-out shells of pillboxes designed to create choke points and funnel an invading enemy into a kill zone. Punctuating the line of pillboxes were much larger bunkers, solid-form and permanent additions to the city’s defences. Smoke still drooled from the vision slits of some of the bunkers, telltale evidence of a rapid and aggressive clearance.

Of the inhabitants of Khar-tann, there was no sign.

‘Do you see that?’ asked Numeon, nodding to where the primarch had been looking.

‘Yes.’ Vulkan’s earlier sense of unease grew further.

‘A tank bombardment doesn’t do that. It flattens bunkers, it doesn’t cleanse and burn them. A strike team has already been here.’

Vulkan took in the scene of carnage, tried to look beyond the obvious wreckage and mortal destruction. Past the esplanade, the concentration of buildings thickened from initially military to civilian. He saw warehouses, manufactorums, vendors, commercia… homes. Through a gap in the narrow city streets he caught a glimpse of something swinging gently in the breeze.

Nemetor saluted as Vulkan reached him, the sharp clank of his fist striking his left breast enough to get the primarch’s attention. Behind him, the Pyre Guard were spreading out. Strict orders had been given that the rest of the Legion should stand down and wait outside.

‘Captain,’ said Vulkan.

Nemetor was shaken, though it was hard to tell from what. ‘You need to see this, my lord.’

Vulkan spoke over his shoulder to Numeon. The Pyre Guard were to secure the area immediately beyond the breach but advance no farther. Then he nodded to Nemetor, and the captain led them both on.

At the heart of Khar-tann City they found the bulk of the dead. Soldiers in barrack houses, gutted and flensed; pyres of still-burning bodies, impossible to identify from their charred remains, filling the air with greasy smoke; city officials impaled on spikes; civilians hanging by their necks, swinging to and fro in the breeze.

‘They slaughtered them,’ said Nemetor as he surveyed the carnage. Four Salamanders accompanied him, and despite the fact they were wearing their battle-helms they looked just as uneasy as their captain.

Vulkan unclenched his teeth.

‘Where are the rest of your company?’

‘Dispersed amongst the ruins, trying to find survivors.’

‘There’ll be none,’ Vulkan told him. ‘Recall them. We are not needed here. The people of Khar-tann are beyond our help.’ His gaze settled on a bloody symbol daubed on the wall of a scholam. The primarch’s jaw hardened.

‘When did they even make planetfall?’ asked Nemetor, following Vulkan’s line of sight.

‘I don’t know.’

He didn’t speak the language, but he recognised the cursive script, the sharp edges to the graffiti.

It was Nostraman.

Back up on the escarpment, Vulkan was alone but for the distant roar of the flames below.

Khar-tann burned. It burned with the fire of a thousand flame gauntlets, Vulkan having set his Pyroclasts the task of turning the city to ash. He wanted no such monument to slaughter to stand any longer than was strictly necessary. Its very existence had disturbed the Army cohorts especially, and even the legionaries treated it warily.

Vulkan waited patiently, listening to the vox-channel he had just opened. It took several seconds of softly crackling static before Vulkan got an answer. When he did, it sounded like the person on the other end of the link was smiling.

‘ Brother.’

Despite himself, Vulkan couldn’t disguise his anger. ‘What have you done, Curze?’

‘ Freed you from dirtying your hands. We arrived early, while you were still marshalling your tanks and Titans.’

‘My orders were to take the city as bloodlessly as possible.’

‘ I don’t follow your orders, brother. Besides, it’s better this way.’

‘Better for whom? You’ve slaughtered an entire city – men, women, children all dead. It’s a butchery worthy of Angron’s Legion in there!’

‘ Don’t confuse me with our hot-headed sibling, though I believe you would run him close at this precise moment. Are you angry with me?’

Vulkan clenched his fists, biting back a retort.

‘Where are you, Curze? Where are you hiding?’

‘ I am close by. We will be reunited soon enough.’ Konrad Curze paused, his playful tone ebbed. ‘ You and I know this was never going to be a bloodless compliance. One-Five-Four Six is a war world, and no warrior I have ever fought has given up without first shedding a little blood.’

‘A little? You practically exsanguinated the entire populace.’

‘And what do you think that would do to their fighting spirit?’

Vulkan turned sharply at the sound of Curze’s voice. Not through the vox any more – he was here. The Night Haunter was a few paces behind him, standing in the shadows at the edge of the flickering firelight.

‘You are either bold or foolish, meeting me out here like this,’ Vulkan warned, the combination of the flames and his drake-like armour enshrouding him in a volatile aspect. Even the carcass of the great drake Kesare, slung over his right shoulder, seemed animate. His forge hammer was within easy reach but he didn’t so much as glance at the weapon.

‘Why, what are you going to do?’ Curze stepped out of the shadows.

He went without a helmet, the light hitting his features in such a way that where the darkness pooled it made him appear gaunt, almost skeletal. Nostramo, his birthplace – unless one counted the laboratory where he, like all of his siblings, was first created – had been a lightless world. This fact was obvious in the chalk-like pallor of its inhabitants, and Curze was no exception to that. One onyx-skinned, the other alabaster; both primarchs were a study in chiaroscuro.

In stark contrast to Vulkan’s fiery eyes, Curze’s were like thin ovals of jet staring through strands of lank, black hair that hung down across his face. Where Vulkan wore a firedrake hide as his mantle, Curze had a cloak of ragged crimson. One brother had a reptilian appearance in his scaled war-plate of oceanic green, clad with rare quartz; the other was armoured in midnight-blue, inscribed with sigils of death and mortality.

Vulkan kept his voice level, neutral. ‘Are you trying to goad me, Curze? Do you want this to escalate?’

‘That sounded like a threat.’ Curze smiled thinly. ‘Was it a threat, brother? Am I a rough blade to be tempered at your righteous anvil? Do you also think yourself my better and my teacher, then?’

Vulkan ignored him, instead gesturing to the inferno that had been Khar-tann City. ‘Look at what your deeds have wrought.’

‘Ha! What my deeds have wrought?Vulkan, you sound like a poet, and a poor one at that.’ Curze grew serious. ‘I’ve broken this world for you, brother. By culling the city you’re now putting to the torch, I’ve spared us a wealth of blood. What do you think this world’s rebels will do when they see and hear what we’ve done to one of their major cities?’ Defying Vulkan’s palpable anger, Curze took a step closer with every emphasised word. ‘They will cower, and shrink, and weep…’ When the two were face to face, he snarled the last part through a barricade of teeth, ‘ Beggingfor mercy.’ He stepped back, opening his arms. ‘And you can give it to them, that is my gift.’

Vulkan shook his head. ‘Terror is your gift.They were women and children, Curze. Innocents.’

Curze sneered, bitterly. ‘No one is innocent.’

‘You came from the gutters, brother, but our father has raised you up. Stop acting like the murderous swine you inherited on Nostramo.’

‘Raised me, did he? Brought me up from the darkness and into the light? We are killers, Vulkan. All of us. Don’t try and convince me we are noble men, for we are not. My eyes have just opened before yours, that’s all.’

Curze turned and walked away, back down the ridge. ‘Fear, Vulkan,’ he called, disappearing into the shadows, ‘that’s the only thing they understand. You all need to learn that.’

Vulkan did not reply. His body was trembling. Looking down, he saw his forge hammer gripped in both hands. He hadn’t even realised he’d picked it up. He gasped, exhaling to relieve the tension, and fought his body. When he was calm again, he turned towards the inferno. The flames were rising now, touching the sky with tendrils of coiling black smoke. It reminded him of Ibsen, and the jungles they had set ablaze there.

How many more worlds must burn before this is over?

He stood in silence, just watching, and stayed like that for several minutes until a quiet voice from behind the primarch disturbed his reverie.

‘Lord Vulkan?’

It was the remembrancer, Seriph.

‘Your equerry said you’d be up here.’

‘Did he also tell you I did not wish to be disturbed?’

Seriph bowed her head slightly. ‘He was too preoccupied to stop me.’

Vulkan turned his back on her. ‘I’m not in the mood for further questions now.’

‘Sincere apologies, my lord. I had hoped to continue our–’

Vulkan’s head snapped around savagely. ‘I said not now!’

She shrank back, her eyes alive with fear.

Curze’s last words came back to him, almost mocking, but Vulkan was powerless. He glared, eyes burning hot with fury. This was the monster, this was the image he was trying so hard to conceal from the remembrancers. His hearts pulsed, and his chest heaved up and down like a giant bellows. Curze was right – he was a killer. That was the purpose for which he had been bred.

His anger at what his brother had done, the memory of those bodies, the children… It was overwhelming, so consuming Vulkan hissed his next command and filled the air with the smell of ash and cinder.