Текст книги "Vulkan Lives"

Автор книги: Ник Кайм

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Perhaps Perturabo hated me as much as he did the rest of us, and he had simply decided that hurting one of his brothers was as good as hurting any? Maybe he resented the fact that I had survived his glorious barrage on Isstvan V, and refused to yield to his lines of armour? Whatever the reason, he had crafted this place with one purpose in mind; that whoever entered it would never leave. It suited Perturabo’s mindset, I think, to imagine me wandering these halls forever, although he could not have known about my immortality. I believed that Curze needed more immediate closure, however. Patience was not his virtue, nor restraint. In the hammer he had provided me with hope. I suspected that he meant to drive me further into madness with that hope. He did not realise that he had actually provided a realistic means of escaping his dungeon.

Deciding that it mattered little if I couldn’t find the heart of the labyrinth, I took the left fork and wandered on.

Unlike my previous trials at my brother’s tender claws, there were no traps, no enemies, no obstacles of any kind. I reasoned the labyrinth itself was the trap, the ultimate snare in fact, fashioned by an arch-trapsmith. Once again, I felt the pulse of the abyss nearby, the black and the red, its savage teeth closing around me. It called to a feral part of my psyche, the monster Curze had spoken of.

I shook the sensation off. Somewhere in this accursed place were my sons. I had to find them, and hoped that I would not come across them in the many bodies I had seen so far. Most of the remains were skeletal, though some yet retained their withered flesh. They were Curze’s rats, the poor wretches who had tried to conquer the labyrinth before me. All of them had died still clinging to hope, desperate and out of their minds.

I think that was what Curze wanted for me, to be emaciated, brought low and desperate, a plaything to mock and punish when his own loathsome presence became too much for him to bear.

Ferrus was with me still. He didn’t speak any more, he just followed like my shadow. I could hear his armoured footsteps dogging my tread, slow and cumbersome.

‘I think we are getting closer, brother,’ I said to the spectre lurking a few metres away.

His teeth clacked together in what I took to be mocking laughter.

‘Ye of little faith,’ I muttered.

I wandered like this for days, possibly even weeks. I did not sleep, nor did I rest and I couldn’t eat. Vigour left me and I began to waste and atrophy. Soon I would not be so different from Ferrus, no more than an angry shadow doomed to walk these halls forever.

And then I heard the talons.

It began as the light tapping of metal on metal, a sharp tip rapped against the walls, echoing through the labyrinth towards me. I stopped and listened, sensing a change in Curze’s game, a desire to see it ended. The tapping grew louder and transformed into the scraping of claws. I was no longer alone with my slow, creeping madness.

‘Curze,’ I called out, challenging.

Only the scraping metal answered. I thought it might be coming closer. I began to move, trying to locate the source of the sound, walking at first, then breaking into a run.

‘ Vulkan…’ hissed the air in my brother’s goading voice.

I ran after it, all the while the scraping and the tapping clawing its way into my skull, setting my teeth on edge.

I rounded a corner, chasing my instincts, but found only another corridor as gloomy and unremarkable as all the others.

‘ Vulkan…’

It came from behind me and I whirled around as something dark and fast slipped by me. I winced, clutching my side. Taking my hand away I saw blood and the shallow cut my brother had delivered.

‘Come out!’ I bawled, fist clenched and a feral hunch to my shoulders. I barely recognised my own voice, it had grown so animalistic.

Only the scraping answered.

I chased it, a bloodhound on the hunt, but could find no trace of Curze. The line between predator and prey was blurring: at times I gave pursuit; at others, my brother. I reached another junction, another crossroads and tried to get my bearings, but the throbbing in my skull wouldn’t allow it.

‘ Vulkan…’ The voice returned, taunting me.

I roared, thundering my fist into the nearest wall. It barely made a dent. I roared again, arching back my neck, calling ferally into the darkness. The monster within was unleashed and it craved blood.

Curze cut me again, unseen in the dark, and drew a line of glittering rubies across my bicep. It drove me on, fuelled my rage. A third cut opened in my chest, the blood flowing in red tears across my pectoral muscle. A fourth slashed my thigh. I almost caught him that time, but it was like grasping smoke.

‘ Vulkan…’ he whispered, ever scraping, ever goading.

I was bleeding from at least a dozen wounds, my vitae running down my legs and pooling between the gaps in my toes so that I left bloody footprints in my wake. It was only when I looked down at the path I was about to take that I stopped and saw the mark of my passage, the smeared but unmistakable impression of my feet.

I sagged, defeated, nothing to do with my anger but turn it inwards. Closing my eyes, I saw the abyss. I was perched on the very edge, staring down.

A sudden lance of pain in my side drew me back snarling.

‘Don’t worry,’ Curze hissed, claws pinching my shoulder as he thrust his knife into my right side, ‘this won’t kill you.’

I spun around, spitting fury, ready to wrench my brother’s head from his shoulders, but Curze was gone, and I was left grasping at air.

Laughter trailed in his wake, together with the by-now ubiquitous scraping of his talons.

A red film laid over my vision, the filter of my wrath. I was about to go after him, sensing subconsciously that this was what he had planned all along, when I stopped.

Barring my path, I saw him. He was standing right in front of me, as clear and real as my own hand before my face.

Verace, the remembrancer.

‘I have seen you before,’ I whispered, holding my hand out towards him as if to gauge how real or spectral the unassuming man was.

Verace nodded. ‘On Ibsen, now Caldera,’ he said.

‘No, not there.’ I frowned, trying to remember, but my thoughts were muddled with anger. ‘Here…’

‘Where?’ asked Verace.

He was barely a few metres away when I stopped moving towards him.

‘Here,’ I repeated, my memory clearing as he stepped towards me instead. ‘You were with them, the prisoners Curze had me murder.’

He looked at me quizzically. ‘Did you murder them, Vulkan?’

‘I couldn’t save them. You were at the banquet, too. I remember your face.’

‘What else do you remember?’

Verace was scarcely a metre away. I knelt down so we were almost eye to eye. It was the Salamanders’ way.

‘I am a primarch.’ I felt calmer in his presence as the fractured pieces of my mind started to coalesce. ‘I am Vulkan.’

‘Yes, you are. Can you remember what I said to you once?’

‘On Ibsen?’

‘No, elsewhere. On Nocturne.’

Tears were welling in my eyes, as I fervently hoped this was not just another apparition, a cruel trick to send me further into madness.

‘You said,’ I began, my voice choking with emotion, ‘you would watch over us when you could.’

‘Close your eyes, Vulkan.’

I did, and lowered my head for him to put his hand upon it.

‘Be at peace, my son.’

I expected revelation, a flash of light, something. But all that followed was silence. Opening my eyes, I saw that Verace was gone. For a moment I wondered if he had been real, but I felt some strength returning to my limbs and fresh resolve filling me as I stood. The monster within was at bay, firmly shackled. For now at least, my mind was my own again. For how long, I didn’t know. Whatever peace I had been given would not endure in this place. I needed to act.

Curze was broken; I think I knew it back on Kharaatan. He had always been that way, without hope, anger turned within and without. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live with that, but then I thought of all the suffering he had caused, the lives he had taken needlessly to satisfy his sadistic appetites. I remembered Nemetor, and all the others he had tortured and killed all in the name of nothing greater than boredom.

My pity was short-lived, my resolve stiffening by the second.

‘You were right,’ I called out to the shadows where I knew my brother was listening. ‘I do think I am better than you. Only a weakling and a coward fights as you do, Konrad. Our father was right to ignore your mewling and discard you. I suspect it sickened him. Only you know true terror, isn’t that right, brother?’ I scowled. ‘So weak, so pathetic. Nostramo didn’t make you the worthless wretch you are, brother. You were languishing in the gutter with the rest of those deviants the moment our father erred in creating you.’ I laughed self-indulgently. ‘It was inevitable that one of us would be flawed, so rotten with human failing that he cannot bear his own presence or the presence of others. You can’t help it, can you? To measure yourself against each of us. How many times have you found yourself wanting after such observation? When was it you realised that blaming your upbringing and your brothers no longer rang true? When did you turn the mirror and see the worthless parody you’ve become?’

No answer came from the darkness, but I could feel my brother’s rising anger as palpably as the iron floor beneath my feet.

‘No one fears you, Konrad. A different name won’t change who you really are. I’ll let you in on a secret… We pity you. All of us. We tolerateyou, because you are our brother. But none of us are afraid of you. For what is there to fear but a petulant child raging at the dark?’

I expected him to come at me, claws bared, but instead I heard a great engine turning beneath me, under the labyrinth itself. With the grinding of heavy gears, a large portion of the wall retracted into the floor. Then another and another. In seconds, a path was laid before me and at the end of it another gate, etched in the same manner as the Iron Labyrinth’s entrance.

I knew I could not have found my way out alone. Once the fog of my feral rage had been lifted, I realised that there was only one way to reach the prize. Curze would have to show me. My brothers and I were made differently from the adopted sons of our Legions. In the process of creating progeny, our father had distilled a portion of his essence and will into all of us. In the Legiones Astartes he fashioned an army of warriors, bred for a single purpose, to unite Terra and then the galaxy. In my brothers and I, he desired generals but also something else; he wanted equals, he wanted sons. Into us he poured his matchless intelligence and peerless ability in bio-engineering. We became more than human; every trait, every chromosome was enhanced and brought to its genetic apex. Strength, speed, martial acumen, tactical ability, initiative, endurance, all of it was magnified by the Emperor’s miraculous science. But like a lens directed at an old painting, it was impossible to enhance one detail without enhancing all the others at the same time. We were more than human, greater than Space Marines, but while our assets were magnified, so too were our flaws.

It didn’t matter at first, not while the Crusade roared on brightly, a comet bringing light to the benighted heavens. Rivalry soon became jealousy, envy; confidence grew into arrogance; wrath turned into homicidal mania. All of us were flawed, because to be human, even enhanced as we were, is to be flawed. A perfect state cannot be rendered from an imperfect design.

Curze was more flawed than most of us. His shortcomings were obvious, his all too human weakness evident in his every word and action. Revenge was in his blood. It clawed at him, a nihilistic desire to turn upon others the hurt that was inflicted upon him. He hated himself and so reflected that hate outwards. But to have the mirror turned back by another, to have one of his hated siblings show to him the self-loathing creature that he already knew he was… that could not go unreckoned. My gaoler had revealed much to me of his inner self during my incarceration. I wondered, in those final days, who in fact was trapped with whom. I had preyed on Curze’s weakness and my brother had shown me the way out. He wanted to be released as much as I did.

As I started walking down the path towards it, the gate began to open. Within I saw the heart of the labyrinth and in the centre of the chamber, my hammer, Dawnbringer. Around it, I saw as I drew closer to the yawning gate, were my sons.

Here then, was where we would end it. Curze and I. One would be free, the other lost forever to damnation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

No more running

Elias was lying on his back. He was also alone. Momentary concern turned into anger when he realised that it wasn’t only the huntsman he was missing. The fulgurite was gone. Through filth-smeared retinal lenses, he looked up at the roaring cataracts of sewage pouring from the many outflows. Somewhere up there was his enemy. They had the spear. That bastard Salamander, the centurion. He had taken it during the fight before Narek had tackled them both over the edge.

‘Narek.’

After a moment, a breathless-sounding huntsman replied over the vox. He was running.

‘ Our arrangement is concluded,’ he said.

‘I am lying down in a pool of filth, Narek. How is that a satisfactory conclusion?’

‘ You have always lain with filth, Dark Apostle. A life for a life, yours for mine. I now have mine back. Our alliance is null and void. I told you that by turning a blind eye our debt was settled. I’ve decided to conclude my mission alone. My business is with them now. Be glad I let you live,’ he added, before the link was swallowed by static.

Elias didn’t bother activating the warp-flask; he suspected Narek had destroyed it. The huntsman wasn’t coming back, at least not to him.

A cursory scan informed Elias his armour functions were as normal. Some minor damage had been incurred during the fall, but it was negligible. He got up, struggling with only one hand and one arm, the burned limb cradled close to his chest. It hurt like hell, but he used it to fuel his anger.

Narek’s abandonment of his duty would not go unpunished. If he saw him again, Elias would kill the huntsman. Amaresh was supposed to have done it during the attack on the manufactorum, but fate had turned that plan awry. The pleasure of Narek’s demise would have to wait. Regaining the spear was paramount. If the loyalists had it and the human then there was but one move left to them.

‘Jadrekk,’ Elias growled down the vox, knowing that this lapdog would answer its master. Close by he could see the Ranos space port and knew there were docked shuttles capable of launch. Most of the Word Bearers’ ships had returned to the station and Elias had instructed a small garrison to guard it.

Jadrekk answered as predicted.

‘Lock on to my signal and bring all of our forces to the Ranos space port,’ Elias ordered. ‘Tell Radek to expect visitors and prepare a welcome party, and by welcome party I mean kill-squad.’

Jadrekk confirmed it would be done and Elias cut the link.

Erebus would be here soon. Elias was determined that both the spear and the human would be in his possession before then. Over to the north, he could see the tempest boiling over the sacrificial pit. Lightning trembled the sky, splitting the night in half. Once Grammaticus was cut by the spear, one of those jags would open and the Neverborn would spill forth. Elias would be rewarded for his faith and devotion. Trudging through the muck he heard that promise, whispering in sibilant non sequitur. He would be recognised by the Pantheon and ascend. It was his destiny.

‘No more running,’ Elias muttered, his gaze moving to the dark horizon of the south and the shadow of the space port, ‘only dying.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

Our final hours

Isstvan V

The blast struck with atomic force, or at least it felt that way to the Salamanders within it. They had been following Vulkan up the hill, hard on his heels as he smashed into the disciplined Iron Warriors ranks. He had hit the armour quickly, much more quickly than Numeon had believed possible.

Wrath drove him, that and a sense of injustice. The ignoble actions of his brother primarchs had wounded Vulkan to the core, far deeper and more debilitating than any blade. Vaunted warriors all, the Pyre Guard could scarcely keep up. It was snowing overhead, a squall of white ash descending upon them in their ignited fury. It was thick and strangely peaceful, but there would be no peace, not any more, not now the galaxy was at war. Horus had seen to that.

Battle companies followed in the wake of their lords, captains roaring the attack as thousands of green-armoured warriors chased up the slope to kill the sons of Perturabo. It was relentless, brutal. Withering crossfire from both the north and south faces of the Urgall Depression cut down hundreds in the first few seconds of deceit. The XVIII Legion were shedding warriors like a snake sheds scales. But still they drove on, determined not to back down. Tenacity was a Salamander’s greatest virtue – that refusal to give in. Upon the plains of Isstvan, against all of those guns, it almost ended the Legion.

It was at the crest of the first ridge, a jagged lip of stone studded with tanks, that Numeon first saw the arc of fire. It trailed, long and blazing, into the darkling sky. The tongue of flame climbed and upon reaching the apex of its parabola bent back on itself into the shape of a horseshoe. Rockets screaming, it came down in the midst of the charging Salamanders and broke them apart.

A savage crater was gored into the Urgall hills, like the bite of some gargantuan beast resurrected from old myth and birthed in nucleonic fire. It threw warriors skywards as if they were no more than empty suits of armour, bereft of bone and flesh. As a bell jar shatters when dropped onto rockcrete from a great height, so too did the Legion smash apart. Tanks following after their lord primarch were flung barrel-rolling across the black sand with their hulls on fire. Those vehicles in the mouth of the blast were simply ripped apart; tracks and hatches, chunks of abused metal torn to exploded shrapnel. Legionaries spared death in the initial blast were eviscerated in the frag storm. Super-heavies crumpled like tin boxes crushed by a hammer. Crewmen boiled alive, legionaries cooked down to ash in that furnace. It went deep, right into the beating heart of the Salamanders ranks. Only by virtue of the fact that they were so far ahead were the Pyre Guard spared the worst.

With immense kinetic fury, it threw them apart and smothered their armoured forms in a firestorm. An electro-magnetic pulse wiped out the vox, a threnody of static reigning in place of certain contact. Tactical organisation became untenable. In a single devastating strike, the Lord of Iron had crippled the XVIII Legion, severed its head and sent its body into convulsive spasm.

Retreat was the only viable strategy remaining. Droves fell back to the dropsite, trying to climb aboard ships that were surging desperately into the sky to outreach the terrible storm of betrayal below. It was not a rout, though for any force other than the Legiones Astartes it would have been, faced with such violence. Many were cut down as the traitors threaded the air with enough flak to wither an armada.

Groaning, feeling the extent of every one of his many injuries, and ignoring the urgent cascade of damage reports scrolling down the left side of his one still-functional retinal lens, Numeon staggered to his feet. A piece of armour, one he knew well and had seen before, lay within his grasp. He took the sigil once worn by Vulkan and tucked it into his belt. Leodrakk was with him, but he couldn’t see Vulkan or the rest of the Pyre Guard. Through a belt of grimy fog he thought he saw Ganne dragging Varrun by his metal collar – the veteran was on his back, legs shredded but still firing his bolter – but he was too far away to be sure and there was too much death between them to make regrouping an option.

Smoke blanketed the ridge and the ash-fall had intensified. Heat haze from the still-burning fire blurred his vision. He saw the crater – he’d been thrown back from its epicentre – and the hundreds of twisted bodies within. They were incinerated, fused into their armour. Some were still dying. He saw an Apothecary – he couldn’t tell who – crawling across the earth with no legs as he tried to perform his duty. No gene-seed would be harvested this day. No one who stayed on Isstvan in the emerald-green of the XVIII would live.

Numeon had to reach a ship, he had to save himself and Leodrakk. As he tried to raise the others and his primarch through the mire of static, he vaguely recalled having been lifted off his feet and punched sideways by the backwash of heat from the explosion. They were far from the crest of the ridge now. They must have slipped into a narrow defile that had carried them back down and shielded their bodies from the fire. Numeon assumed that he had blacked out. There were fragments, pieces that he didn’t possess in his eidetic memory of what happened after the missile strike. He remembered Leodrakk calling out his brother’s name. But Skatar’var hadn’t answered. None of the Pyre Guard were answering.

‘Ska!’ Leodrakk roared, half delirious with pain and grief. ‘Brother!’

He was clinging to Skatar’var’s bloody gauntlet. Mercifully, there was no hand or forearm inside it. The glove must have been wrenched off in the blast.

Numeon seized Leodrakk by the wrist.

‘He’s gone. He’s gone. We’re leaving, Leo,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving now. Come on!’

The Salamanders were not the only Legion to be punished by Perturabo’s ordnance. Iron Warriors, those bearing the brunt of Vulkan’s wrath and that of his inner-circle warriors, had also been swept up in the explosion. One, his battered senses returning, went to intervene against Leodrakk and Numeon, but the Pyre captain cut him down with his glaive before he could open fire on them.

A warrior, one of K’gosi’s Pyroclasts, clawed at Numeon’s leg. By the time he looked down to help him the warrior was dead, burned from the inside out. A wisp of smoke trailed from his silent screaming mouth, and Numeon turned away again.

‘We have to regroup, rally…’ Leodrakk was saying.

‘There is nothing to rally to, brother.’

‘Is he…’ Leodrakk gripped Numeon by the shoulder, his eyes pleading. ‘Is he…’

Numeon broke his gaze, and looked down to where the guns of the Iron Warriors were scattering the remnants of his once-proud Legion.

‘I don’t know,’ he murmured.

Half blind, they staggered on shoulder to shoulder as the bombs continued to fall, not knowing where to turn or what the fate of Vulkan was. Smoke was spoiling the air, rich with the tang of blood, choking and black. Leodrakk’s vox-grille respirator was damaged and he was struggling to breathe. The spear of shrapnel impaling one of his lungs and still jutting from his chest also complicated matters.

The vox in Numeon’s ear crackled. He was so surprised by its sudden function that he almost lost his footing. It was an XVIII Legion channel.

‘This is Pyre Captain Numeon. We are effecting a full-scale retreat. I repeat, all fall back to the dropsite and secure passage off-world.’

He wanted to go back, return to find Vulkan, but in the carnage of the depression that was impossible. Pragmatism, not emotion, had to rule Numeon’s heart at that moment. His primarch had forged him that way, through his teaching and his example; he wasn’t about to dishonour that now.

‘ Pyre brother…’

Numeon recognised the voice on the other end of the vox-link immediately. He glanced at Leodrakk, but the warrior was making his way down the ridge towards the dropsite and hadn’t noticed Numeon was in communication with someone. It was Skatar’var.

‘ Is Leodrakk with you?’

‘I have him. Where are you?’ Numeon asked.

‘ Can’t tell. I can hear screaming. I’ve lost my weapon, brother.’

A terrible thought struck Numeon as he paused to end a stricken Iron Warrior with half his chest blown out, struggling to rise.

‘What can you see, brother?’ he asked, ramming the glaive down and twisting the haft to make sure of the kill.

‘ It’s dark, brother.’

Skatar’var was blind. Numeon cast around, but couldn’t see him. There was no way of telling where he was or if he was close enough to help. Scraps from other companies were storming back down the ridge, the Salamanders laying down covering fire as they retreated back to the dropsite. Numeon waved them on as he continued trying to find his Pyre brother.

‘Skatar’var, send out a beacon. We will come for you.’

‘ No, captain. I’m finished. Get Leodrakk out, save my brother.’

‘We might be able to reach you.’ Numeon was scouring the battlefield for any sign, but he couldn’t find him.

Death hung in the air like the noisome smoke, palling overhead from the many fires. Somewhere in the haze, Commander Krysan crawled from the burning cupola of his battle tank. He was burning too. Salamanders were born in fire, and now Krysan would die in it. The fuel canisters cooked off and exploded just as Krysan fell from the turret, rolling, burning down the side of the hull and no longer in sight. Like their commander, his once-proud armoured company was no more than a wrecker’s yard of flame-scorched metal carcasses.

‘Are you injured, brother?’ Numeon asked, increasingly desperate. ‘Can you stand?’

‘ The dead are upon me, Artellus. Their bodies crush my own.’

Looming from the oil-black fog was an Iron Warrior who was missing his helm and part of his right arm. He raised a bolter to fire but Numeon’s lunge cut short his attack and his life, as he disembowelled the traitor.

‘I need more than that, Ska. The dead are everywhere.’

It was like looking out onto a corpse sea.

‘ It’s over for me. Get Leodrakk out.’

‘Ska, you must–’

‘ No, Artellus. Let me go. Get free of this hell and avenge me!’

It was no use. The slope was thronged with retreating warriors now, and skirmishes between the survivors of both sides were breaking out.

‘Someone will come, get you to a ship,’ said Numeon, but the words sounded hollow even to him.

‘ If they do, I hope we meet again.’

The vox-link went dead and Numeon couldn’t raise it again.

Deeper into the valley, smoke was rolling in thick and pooling at the nadir of the basin where the drop-ships were launching in beleaguered flocks. Two, eager to get airborne, collided with one another and both went down in flames. Another achieved loft and was clawing for the upper atmosphere when it was stitched by cannon fire and broke apart, its two burning halves sent earthwards.

Even coming down off the ridge relatively unscathed, escape was far from certain.

Finally reaching the dropsite with Leodrakk, Numeon found visibility was almost zero. Like tar turned into air, the blackness was virtually absolute. Auto-senses were of limited use, but Numeon managed to get as far as a ship. Leodrakk was retching in the vile smoke, so thick it would have killed a lesser man. He clung to Numeon’s left shoulder and let the Pyre captain guide him.

But Numeon was struggling, too. The drop-ship was close enough to touch but the filth besieging them made it impossible to gauge the location of the entrance ramp or if it was even open. Through the rough hull, Numeon felt the tremor from the vessel’s engines. They would need to get aboard now or they would have to find another ship.

Hell rained all around them – there would be no other ship. This was it; escape or die.

If it was to be the latter, Numeon avowed he would go down fighting. He would have done so already were it not for Leodrakk.

Out of the darkness, a hand reached for them, and together they stumbled onto the deck of a crowded Stormbird. It was black within the lander; smoke was also filling the hold and the internal lighting was out. Numeon slumped and rolled on his back, his eye burning like someone had thrust a knife into it and twisted the blade. He was more badly wounded that he had at first realised, having taken several hits during the descent as he shielded his Pyre brother from harm. Leodrakk was on his knees, coughing up the wretched smoke from his lungs.

The ramp to the drop-ship was closing. Engine shudder from rapid ignition was rocking the hold as the vessel fought for loft. Then they were airborne, thrusters cranked to full burn to reach escape velocity. The ramp sealed, the blackness became absolute.

Turning onto his side, Numeon saw a single red band of light glowing in the darkness.

‘Be still, brother,’ a calm and serious voice said.

‘Apothecary?’

‘No,’ the voice replied. ‘I am a Morlock of the Iron Hands. Pergellen. Be still…’

Then unconsciousness took him and he was lost to it.

Numeon opened his eyes and touched one of his fingers to the wound that had nearly blinded him. It still hurt – the memory of it and what it reminded him of more than the actual pain.

The trek from the aqueduct, after they had met up with Pergellen, Hriak and the human, was a cheerless one. Shen’ra had been a long-standing comrade and, despite his irascible nature, had forged strong allies. Both Iron Hand and Raven Guard had bonded with him in their own way. It was hard to hear of his death, even though they all knew what his sacrifice meant. Daka’rai too would not see another dawn, nor Ukra’bar, and grief for them was worsened by the knowledge that the Salamanders had both been able warriors and that their small company had dwindled still further.

When Numeon had told Grammaticus of their decision to finally aid him, the human had greeted the news with a grim resolve, as if he knew this would happen or perhaps resented what would have to come next.

‘What made you change your mind?’ he had asked.

‘Hope, faith… this.’ Numeon had presented Grammaticus with the spear, but only shown it to him. ‘It stays with me until we can get you off-world,’ he had said, sheathing it in his scabbard. ‘And where will you go?’