The Unremembered Empire Part 26

*Then make sure of it. Your men will help my men find this monster,' Guilliman said.

*Agreed.'

*No more lies, Lion. No more secrets.'

*Agreed. Let me contact Holguin anda'

Alarms started to ring throughout the Residency.

*Perimeter breach. The Fortress,' said Gorod, reading the dataflow off his visor.

*Which means?' asked the Lion.

*Well, unless you have any other surprises you haven't told me about,' said Guilliman, *he's here. He's on the Castrum. He's in the Fortress. Curze is here.'

His eyes widened. His mouth opened and looked as though it was screaming, though no sound came out.

*I don't like this,' said Captain Casmir. *What's he doing?'

The medicae staff shook their heads. Behind the armourgla.s.s, the insane primarch flexed his hands and howled without sound. His dark skin was still healing and still bleeding. He resembled some grotesque revenant, some grisly spectre that had fled death and returned from the grave.

*Get someone!' said Casmir.

*Who?' asked the chief attending.

*I don't know! Tetrarch Dolor! Guilliman himself!'

Several aides began to back away to do as he ordered, but no one wanted to take their eyes off Vulkan.

There was a sense of power in him, terrible power and terrible purpose. Madness still invested his eyes, but it was focused now, as though all his wrath and pain had been concentrated into one thing.

He was mouthing something, over and over again.

*What is that? What's he saying?' asked Casmir.

*He's just raving,' the chief attending replied.

*No, that word...' Casmir stepped forward. *Read his lips. He's saying...'

Casmir turned and looked at the medicae staff and the guards.

*He's saying... Curze.'

Vulkan screamed the name of his tormentor. He locked his b.l.o.o.d.y fingers together and began to smash his fists against the gla.s.s like a pounding hammer in a forge, like the working, toiling beat of a smithy, making and unmaking, shaping and unshaping. The armourgla.s.s wall, smeared with the blood of his previous blows, s.h.i.+vered. It vibrated.

It cracked.

*Seal this level! Now!' yelled Casmir. *Seal it!'

Vulkan's fists kept pounding. The gla.s.s cracked more broadly.

Then the whole wall exploded in a blizzard of fragments.

Vast, dark, murderous, Vulkan stepped out of his cage. Casmir and other Ultramarines rushed forward in desperation to restrain him, but he threw their armoured forms aside as though they were dolls.

Vulkan was free.

In his madness, he would not be stopped.

Not again. Not by anything.

15.

Kill all the

Shadows

*I know you are my eldest brother; and, in the

gentle condition of blood, you should know me...

You are the first-born; but the same tradition takes not

away my blood, were there twenty brothers betwixt us:

I have as much of my father in me as you.'

a from As You Alike (attributed to the dramaturge Shakespire), circa M2 *Make your report!' Guilliman demanded into his armour's vox-link. He strode along the grand colonnade that linked the Residency to the Fortress proper, with the Lion and an a.s.sembly of bodyguards from both Legions at his heels.

*Captain Terbis, my lord,' the vox scratched back. Overlapping ambient noise suggested a great activity at the other end. *We've... we've found three men dead in the Portis Yard, strung from the Aegis Wall with wire.'

*Our own men?'

*Three Ultramarines from 27th Company. Roster confirms they were on sentry duty. Wait! Stars of Ultramar! One's still alive! Hurry! Hurry, cut him down! Cut him downa'

*Wait!' the Lion cried, grabbing Guilliman's arm. *Tell them no! Tell thema'

Despite the distance, they felt the blast. The vox-link scratched out, dead. A haze of red light glowed over the fortress wall, casting an infernal wash across the stately buildings of the Palaeopolis.

*Terbis!' Guilliman yelled into the vox. *Terbis!'

*He mines the bodies,' said the Lion. *I've known him use the method several times. He takes munitions and grenades from those he slays or maims, and sets them with time or motion triggers on the fallen. Such is his insidious poison. He spreads terror. We cannot trust our own dead.'

Guilliman looked at Gorod.

*Issue a warning to that effect. All channels.'

*Aye, my lord,' rumbled Gorod.

Before the Invictus commander could begin the task, another ripple of blasts s.h.i.+vered the night air. This time, the detonations came from the direction of the Sword Hall. Beyond the Fortress wall, Guilliman could see flames scudding from the lip of a roofline. He looked at the men with him and drew his gladius.

*He will commit no more injury,' he said, *no more insult, no more outrage. Let it be known, we hunt him with maximum prejudice. No matter he is our brother, all warriors are hereby notified to stop Curze with lethal force.'

On the piered western walkway that skirted the Praetorium, t.i.tus Prayto held up his hand sharply.

*Stop. Stop dead!'

At his side, Captain Thales and his a.s.sault squad came to a sudden halt.

*What do you sense?' asked Thales.

*Something... He's here. Or, he was here,' said Prayto. To the east of them, the blast of a grenade rang through the inner yards. Alarms and bells sounded from all quarters.

*He's... everywhere, it seems,' Thales murmured. *Are we sure he is alone? It feels like a strike force has infiltrated the Fortress.'

*We know nothing for sure, but I feel he is alone,' said Prayto. *This is his art. He moves fast, and unpredictably. He leaves death and traps where he walks. Thus he is everywhere and nowhere, and so terror mounts.'

Prayto looked back along the walkway. Something had made him halt their urgent advance. He unclipped his lamp pack.

*We are Ultramarines, captain,' Prayto added. *He can sow all the terror he likes. We shall know no fear.'

Prayto had set his lamp to ultraviolet so that it might further enhance his transhuman ocular implants. He shone it along the walkway. The night's shadowed darkness was mottled with the glow of distant flames.

*There,' Prayto said. The hard light of his lamp caught wires stretched taut between the piers of the walkway at s.h.i.+n height. It showed them as sharp white lines.

*Trip wires,' he said. *He's wired the walkway. Thales, close off this area. Tell everyone not to enter by the western gate. You three, start clearing these wires. Make them safe.'

The Ultramarines moved forward, clamping their boltguns to free their hands. Another blast, from the direction of the Library, lit the night above the walkway's roof.

*My lord!' one of the men called out.

*What have you found?' asked Prayto.

*These wires, my lord... They are just wires. They are tied between the piers, but there's nothing attached to them.'

Even his traps are traps, Prayto thought. He binds us and blocks us, merely with the idea of death...

*More confusion,' Prayto said to Thales and the men. *Every action is designed to wrong-foot us, occupy us, delay us. He is the opposite of all he does.'

Prayto turned to look back down the walkway, the way they had come.

The shadow standing silently behind them smiled at him.

Prayto was fast, but a rush of inimical malice flooded his brain with stunning force. It was as though Curze had kept his corrosive mind hidden, and now suddenly allowed Prayto's sensitivity to read it.

Claws scythed the air. Prayto felt pain deep in his side. The impact hurled him sideways into one of the corridor's stone piers, which he bounced off with a clatter of plate. Before he even hit the ground, he was covered in blood.

It belonged to Captain Thales. The officer was still standing, but his head had been removed. A considerable volume of blood was jetting from the stump of his neck, plastering the walkway like torrential rain.

One of the squad members got off two shots: bright flashes and deafening noise in the covered s.p.a.ce. Almost instantly, the man sailed backwards through the air, his boltgun spinning out of his slack grip, his chest plating ripped open like torn foil.

Despite the terrible wound in his side, Prayto got to his knees. Bringing his bolter to bear, he fought to discern which of the night's shadows was Curze.

There? There?

*Kill all the shadows!' he roared, and opened fire. The remaining men fired too, wildly, in all directions. The searing light of gunfire dispelled the darkness, and the furious bolt-rounds ripped into the stone work of the piers and the walkway, filling the night air with dust, micro-metal fibres and fyceline fumes. They kept firing until their magazines were empty. The pulsing, juddering flash of the shots showed them nothing but the emptiness of the shadows.

Curze had already moved on.

But Curze had let Prayto taste his mind.

Prayto had him.