The Unremembered Empire Page 17

  ‘Surely the mortal laboratory would have been a better venue for dissection,’ Guilliman began.

  ‘I authorised the transfer of the patient,’ Dolor replied simply.

  Guilliman stopped in his tracks so abruptly that Captain Casmir almost bumped into him.

  ‘You said patient,’ Guilliman said quietly.

  ‘My lord, I did,’ said Dolor. ‘By the stars of Ultramar, my lord, he is alive.’

  ‘How?’ asked Guilliman. He asked it first of Dolor, a mix of anger and incomprehension crossing his face.

  ‘How? How?’ he repeated, turning to look at Casmir, Prayto and the suddenly tense medicae personnel.

  ‘He… healed, my lord,’ said Prayto.

  ‘Healed?’ Guilliman snapped. ‘He fell out of the damn sky! From orbit! He burned to a crisp and dove deep into the Civitas like a meteor! You don’t heal from that!’

  ‘And yet–’ Dolor began.

  ‘May the old gods come and strike you all down as either liars or incompetents!’ Guilliman yelled. ‘Whatever else, you said, Dolor, you told me he was dead! Organic residue. A corpse. A cremated corpse!’

  ‘I did not lie,’ Dolor said calmly. ‘He was utterly dead… Utterly. All life sign was extinct, all brain function. There was no viable organic tissue on his charred bones whatsoever. Your best physicians and analysts confirmed this, and so did all the instrumentation of the medicae hall.’

  He paused.

  ‘He was dead, lord. And then… he was not. Life returned where life was not and could not be. He healed.’

  ‘You do not heal from death!’ Guilliman roared.

  ‘It appears you do, my lord,’ said Prayto quietly, ‘if you are one of the sons of mankind’s Emperor.’

  Silence. Guilliman turned to look at Prayto.

  Titus Prayto held his master’s stare and nodded confirmation.

  Guilliman turned away and strode towards the occupied cell. Guards and personnel darted out of his path. He reached the thick armourglass wall, stopped a few centimetres from it, and stared inside.

  The cell was a bare white space. A single male figure occupied the left-hand corner away from the glass. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the walls, his forearms resting on his raised knees. He was naked. He stared ahead, towards some distant spot that was not in the room.

  He was a massive form, heavily muscled. The fire of his long fall had shrivelled his corpse but his stature, so much greater than human, was obvious now that he was restored to life. He possessed a primarch’s build, a being scaled to fit only the largest chairs in Guilliman’s Residency.

  There were no marks on his body, no hair. By whatever means he was healing, it was still happening. Every part of his skin was raw and bloody as some miraculous process brought living tissue out of burned residue.

  ‘I don’t…’ Guilliman began, his breath making a fog on the surface of the glass wall. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘It is Vulkan,’ said Dolor.

  Guilliman gasped in pain and recognition. ‘You are sure?’

  ‘I’m certain,’ said Titus Prayto.

  Guilliman raised both hands, and placed the palms against the armourglass on either side of his face, peering in. He paid no heed to the fact that both were jacketed in full ceremonial plate and massive, ornate lightning claws.

  ‘Let me in there,’ Guilliman said, staring at his brother.

  ‘No, my lord,’ Dolor replied.

  ‘Let me in there, damn you! My dear brother is returned to me! Twice! Once from the death that I thought had befallen him on the traitor’s field, and once from the death that delivered him here! Let me in!’

  Guilliman slammed his clawed and armoured fists against the unbreakable wall in frustration. The sound shook the cell.

  Vulkan looked up, brought out of his reverie. Eyes as blood-red as the healing flesh of his body fixed upon Guilliman. They fixed upon the massive, clawed figure standing at the glass.

  ‘He sees me,’ Guilliman said. ‘Let me in there!’

  ‘My lord–’ Dolor began.

  Vulkan lunged. With an anguished scream of rage and horror, he leapt up and threw himself across the cell at Guilliman. The attack was so sudden and so violent that Guilliman started back from the protective armourglass in surprise.

  Howling words that meant nothing and sounds that meant every pain in the galaxy, Vulkan hammered his fists against the glass, until it was slippery with blood and tissue-fluid from his healing, still-forming flesh. His teeth were brilliant white enamel chips in his screaming mouth.

  His eyes were glaring circles of blood.

  ‘Don’t! Brother, stop!’ Guilliman cried out in alarm. ‘Brother, it is me! It is Roboute. Calm yourself!’

  ‘He does not hear you, my lord,’ said Dolor miserably. ‘He does not hear any of us.’

  ‘The Salamanders who have come to your hall were right, my lord,’ said Titus Prayto. ‘Vulkan lives. But whatever he has endured, it has driven him mad. Your brother, my lord, is quite insane.’

  That three of the Emperor’s sons were present on the same world at the same precise moment was a truly auspicious conjunction, whatever the circumstances.

  For different reasons, none of them knew that the true number of primarchs who had converged that day on Macragge was, in fact, four.

  Deep in the pitch-black, unregulated spaces of the First Legion’s flagship, the Invincible Reason, the quarry exhaled slowly.

  It was time. Time.

  Visions flickered through his head like a broken, mis-cued pict-feed. Visions had always flickered through his head, since his earliest childhood – visions of the future, of the possible, of the probable. Of the next, and the next after that.

  It was the visions that had driven him mad.

  Just now, though, the visions were coming to him more cleanly. They were bearable, tolerable. They were not the prescient nightmares of a galaxy in flames and a doomed future. They were not the hellish sights of a corpse-universe that came to him too often and caused him to devolve past the point where life – his or any other – retained any value.

  The quarry breathed carefully. The visions firing behind his blood-rimmed eyes were calm and trustworthy. The ship had translated into realspace after weeks of travail through the storms of the warp, and suddenly he had clarity.

  He knew who he was: a lord of the dark. A master of the lightless. A night haunter.

  No, the Night Haunter: Konrad Curze. Konrad Curze.

  ‘Konrad Curze,’ he whispered to himself, speaking his name like a benediction. A benediction, or a death sentence.

  He knew who he was and he knew his purpose. At that moment, in the bleak and bloody years of Horus’s revolt, Konrad Curze understood his purpose the most cleanly and most perfectly of all the Emperor’s eighteen sons.

  The pitiless void had shown it to him. The endless night, his friend and tormentor, had shown it to him. His dreams had shown it to him.

  Terror, pain, iconoclasm. All would pay. All of them, every soul, every one. They would all scream with him.

  The mighty Invincible Reason creaked and groaned around him as its titanic superstructure, a billion tonnes of alloy, settled and unstressed from the tensions of warp-transit. Curze knew where they were. He had envisioned it, so he knew that it was almost assuredly true. They occupied high orbit above the grey-sheened glory of Macragge.

  Macragge. Ultramar. The thought of the self-righteous Guilliman made Curze want to piss acid. His blood-brother the Lion was his blood-enemy, as the Thramas fight had proven, but Guilliman…

  Toad. Reptile. Fool. As bad as Dorn, as bad as Vulkan. So blindly indoctrinated into the belief that the future would be a noble, golden age. So insufferably honourable. So eager to please their father. So eager to cry, ‘Look at me! I have built an empire just for you! Just like yours!’<
br />
  Jump up and down all you like, little child. Boast all you want.

  They were all going to pay. They were all going to understand the truth, the truth that only Curze saw. He would bring them down once more in fire and fear, until they were as broken as him. Perhaps, if he provoked them far enough, one of them might even kill him. Curze was waiting for his end. He welcomed it. If he could force one of his oh-so-noble brothers to deliver it, and thus reduce themselves to his level, it would serve a sweet, delinquent purpose.

  Guilliman. Proximity and fortune had raised him up the list of priorities. Guilliman was an icon to topple and break. Guilliman, and his world along with him.

  Curze closed his eyes. Visions played. He saw the streets of Macragge Civitas carpeted with bodies. He saw the towers and spires ablaze. He saw blood. He saw–

  The red visions struck him with the force of arterial spray. He composed himself. It was too soon to devolve. He had work to do. He had to retain some focus. Anger was only useful when it was forged as a weapon. The same was true for terror. He knew both intimately.

  It was time, time to leave the ship. Now they were back in realspace, the Invincible Reason was open and unbarred.

  First he had to break out of the ship. Then he had to break into Macragge. Guilliman was a toadying cur, but he was no amateur. His defences would be sound.

  The Night Haunter was not put off for a moment.

  Visions flowed through his head like a river, the surface shot with reflections.

  Curze mostly trusted them, for they were almost always true. Only occasionally, when fate shivered its spine, did a vision prove to be a false promise. He usually knew when they were lies. He certainly knew when they were questionable. He was always aware that he was playing a chance. With each vision, he had to decide if it would prove true or false, trustworthy or untrustworthy. He decided whether to act on a vision or not, and he calmly accepted when those decisions were wrong.

  The current stream of visions seemed particularly dependable. Curze decided to follow their hints.

  One in particular kept coming to him: a vision of rust, of a hard-void seal, of a sign. Cargo Load Hatch 99/2.

  He smiled.

  Sixteen minutes later, Curze exited the flagship’s hull by shearing through the second cargo hatch of the ninety-ninth deck. The ninety-ninth was one of the unmediated spaces in which he had been sealed and hunted by his brother.

  The shredded hatch blew out into the nearspace glow, cascading bright fragments of debris after it. Curze saw the world below, lit by the rising star. He saw the hard edges all shadows possessed in the contrast of the void. This was a stern, geometric night to haunt.

  He saw the orbital plates circling below the standing fleet like artificial continents.

  He had long since lost his helm. He simply held his breath as he flew out of the ship, and bounded, weightless, along the skin of the hull. The sheer cold of the hard vacuum was bracing.

  Curze squatted beside Hatch 22/3, waiting for it to open. Prescience had shown this to him too. Hatch 22/3 was where the repair crews would emerge if a cargo hatch blew on the ninety-ninth.

  It took them eighteen seconds. The hatch opened and light shafted out. The Night Haunter tilted back, so as not to be seen immediately.

  It was not a repair crew, however. It was an assault squad of Dark Angels, warriors wearing the marks of the Stormwing, braced with boarding shields.

  Curze shrugged. Sometimes the reflections were unreliable. The Lion, it seemed, had anticipated that Curze would try to break out. He had set his men on alert. Full marks, brother. Full marks.

  He would kill them anyway.

  Curze paused for a second to see if Hatch 22/3 reconciled in any way with the recurring visions he had had of his death. Was this it? Was his last moment rushing up at him?

  No. His mind simmered, confident. His death lay somewhere and somewhen else.

  The first Dark Angel pulled himself clear into the weightless space, one hand on his shield straps, the other on the hatchway rail.

  Curze lunged at him hard and fast, the way a shark slams into a swimmer. A crunch, a single wound trauma that nothing could survive.

  The Night Haunter’s claws took away both the gorget and the throat of the Dark Angel as he came clear of the hatch. Vast beads of blood bobbled away into the vacuum.

  The man fell away, limp, trailing balloons of blood, his head held on by a twist of metal and a shred of gristle.

  As the first victim went by, Curze took his shield from him and slammed it into the face of the warrior emerging from the hatch behind him.

  The impact was hard. Things broke – a skull, primarily – beneath all of it. The blood oozed out of the crushed faceplate in oily, weightless bubbles.

  The blow knocked the man back. Curze reached in and scooped him out through the hatch so he could get at his next kill. The dying Dark Angel was propelled away from the hull so hard that his twitching form quickly overtook the drifting, rotating corpse of the first victim, and dropped towards the bright, grey planet below. It began to glow blue and then burn like a shooting star.

  Curze went in through the open hatch. He re-entered the ship feet first. He was moving so fast, shadows barely stuck to him. His heels met the shield of the Dark Angel advancing behind the first two, and kicked the warrior back down the gullet of the hatch’s void-lock. The man dropped heavily.

  Landing on a foot and one knee in the gate beside the Dark Angel, Curze slew him before he could rise again by slamming down the edge of the captured boarding shield and crushing his throat.

  Now there was confusion. Now there was reaction. Possibilities flew fast. Curze obeyed the visions. He responded, reacting to things that had not yet occurred.

  Two Dark Angels came at him, firing. Bolter-rounds burned silently across the narrow space of the gate. Curze could hear, through vox-chatter or his visions, the outrage and profanity they were screaming, because of his attack and the murder of their brothers.

  They wanted him dead.

  Their wish would be entirely denied.

  Curze tilted, and stopped the shoal of bolter-rounds with the captured shield. One, two, three and four, five and six, he swatted them aside. He felt the impact of their detonations transmitted up his arm. Flickering reflections had told him where each blazing shell would be before it had even been fired.

  Curze went for the poor bastards. He removed a head with the long claws of his right hand. He eviscerated a torso with the long claws of his left.

  Conflicting arterial geysers hosed the ceiling and wall.

  Another Angel, a veteran of the Deathwing, rushed at Curze. Curze impaled him upon the claws of his left hand. Blood squirted in a torrent as the poor fool bled out around the adamantium hooks rammed through his torso.

  The killing was only just starting.

  The visions told him that a great many more Dark Angels were closing in on his location.

  That meant that a great many more lives were about to end.

  ‘I seldom come to this chamber,’ Guilliman said, ‘but when I do, it reassures me.’

  The Lion followed him into the room. Guilliman’s Cataphractii bodyguard held the broad doors open for him.

  ‘You give me a tour of the most magnificent fortress stronghold beyond Terra itself,’ The Lion said, ‘and believe me, I am impressed, Roboute. But you decide that this tour should include a chamber you seldom visit?’

  He stopped, and looked around.

  ‘I see,’ he said, nodding. His lieutenants stood in the doorway behind him. He nodded to them, dismissing them.

  ‘Leave us,’ Guilliman said to Gorod. The warriors of the bodyguard turned, and closed the doors.

  The two primarchs were alone for the first time.

  ‘The Fortress of Hera is a true achievement, brother,’ the Lion said quietly. ‘
It is more than I could have believed. It exceeds my imaginings.’

  He smiled and glanced at Guilliman.

  ‘That was not a slight, Roboute. I have never doubted your abilities. But I stand in awe of your achievements. The Fortress. Macragge. The Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar. All of it.’

  Guilliman pursed his lips. ‘I do what I was bred to do, brother,’ he said. ‘What we were bred to do.’

  ‘Ah, that,’ the Lion murmured, as if contemplating things that Guilliman could not possibly know.

  ‘The Fortress is robust,’ Guilliman went on, a little stiffly. ‘It serves me and it serves my Legion. It is fit for purpose.’

  ‘It is entirely and magnificently practical,’ the Lion replied. ‘Truly, a wonder. I have no doubt it will endure for a thousand years or more. But you were always practical, Roboute. You, Rogal too. Men of the head. Led by your brains, by your processed data, not your emotions. That’s why the two of you have the best and most efficient Legions in human space.’

  The Lion tapped his brow with one long index finger.

  ‘You think, and you apply that thought, and you don’t let emotions cloud you. Not like Vulkan, or dear Ferrus, or Jaghatai.’

  ‘Or Russ,’ Guilliman added.

  ‘Heavens, no!’ the Lion laughed.

  ‘Terra help me, Russ.’

  ‘So, this,’ the Lion said, gesturing to the long table. ‘This surprises me. A work of emotion, not logic.’

  The light of the late afternoon, discoloured by the storm, flooded the chamber through high windows. A long table, carved from stone, dominated the length of the room. Around it were twenty-one chairs, all built for the scale of a primarch. Each one was cut from the same mountain granite as the table.