‘It will be slow,’ he said.

Light flashed off the blade of a flensing knife clutched in the legionary’s left hand, an unspoken promise of pain to come.

Nowhere left to turn…

Something whipped by Sebaton’s ear, like an arrow loosed from a bow, only much, much faster.

The legionary stumbled as if struck. It took Sebaton half a second to realise that he actually had been. A burst of dark liquid and bone had exploded from the legionary’s neck. Feebly, the Word Bearer reached up with his hand to try and staunch the wound. A second impact hit him in the chest, fast and hard like the first. It tore open his armoured ribcage and put him on his knees, where he wavered for a few seconds before collapsing onto his side.

Someone else was in the room with Sebaton and they had just killed a Space Marine with the same ease it takes to swat a fly. Equally disturbing was that he had failed to detect their presence. He turned around and saw a hulking figure blocking him.

Sebaton backed up. Too late, he realised a second figure had crept up behind him. The blow came swift and hard, with blackness following close behind it.

CHAPTER SIX

From ice to fire

‘Let me make something clear – death isn’t personal. It isn’t. It doesn’t happen to you, it happens to everyone else left behind after you’re gone. That’s the truth about death. Death’s easy. It’s life that’s hard.’

– Lonn Varteh, ex-Lucifer Black

Kinetic thunder vibrated the air. A storm raged around us. Fire and smoke billowed overhead. A body spiralled through this fog, pinwheeling wildly until arcing downwards to the battlefield where it was lost amongst a host of others. Reeling, struggling to comprehend the sheer depth of this betrayal, I looked upon a sea of ruin…

My sons, carved open upon the dark sands of Isstvan V.

Lifeblood ran in rivers, turning the earth underfoot into a viscous sludge.

It was carnage: armour plate ripped apart, peeled back like a metal rind, exposing fragile flesh beneath; retinal lenses shot out, the head beneath broken and oozing; stray limbs strewn like a butcher’s leavings; a ribcage, split open and wet with crimson. Death screams strangled the breeze, almost as loud as the threats of vengeance.

We were under heavy bombardment. Ordnance struck the ground around the Legion, shaking my very bones. Somewhere in the distance, on a black hill, Perturabo was shelling us. His tanks glowered down ferally, snouts aimed squarely at our ranks.

Impact bursts dug instant craters in the black earth, driving thick dust clouds into the air and spitting up plumes of rock. Flung bodies joined the flying dirt, half entangled in razor-wire, their limbs limp and broken. Emerald-green war-plate turned dark and red, the blood of my sons spilled to satisfy a traitor’s ambition and measure a warsmith’s guns.

I ran, cleaving fury and a righteous sense of retribution to my pounding chest. Not even blood would slake my desire for revenge. Nothing could balance the scales of this perfidious act. I wanted the Iron Lord’s head, and then I’d take Horus’s next.

Time slowed, the ground beneath my boots thickened into a quagmire and I was suddenly waist-deep in sucking earth and bodies.

The storm abated, and slowly the sound of thunder lessened until it was a drumming on the inside of my skull. Growing fainter, the sound rose in pitch until it was reduced to the slow plinkof liquid hitting metal. I awoke. The black desert where my Legion’s soul fought a losing battle for its body was no more. Isstvan V was gone.

I heard my breath rattling through my chest, trembling in the aftermath of a nightmare. I grimaced, hurting. My senses were still over-attuned, unable to properly regulate the information being fed into my brain. Sweat and melting ice were rolling off my body. Beads of liquid hit the ground beneath me, not as loud as ordnance any more but still over-pronounced. Pitted steel and mesh felt rough to my touch. A faint heat warmed my fingertips, but burned at first. It was like being born anew, my mind and my body not quite in concert with one another.

A tightness clenched my muscles until I rose up from my knees and flexed, cracking a veneer of void-frost encasing my body. Like a serpent with an old skin, I shed it. Underneath the onyx-black of my body, my flesh was burning as if some profound biological trauma had spurred my physiology into sudden and urgent action.

I tried to recall what had happened to me, but my memory was fragmented. Only pieces of it were connected, the rest adrift in my shattered psyche. I remembered running, the adrenaline rush from my escape attempt. I had climbed from the pit where I’d been cast down. Blood was on my hands, both legionary and mortal. An impression of the tunnels came back. I remembered the sense of rising, the familiarity in form and structure of the bonded cage around me. I knew the hand that had fashioned this elegant prison. In its bowels I had seen a dead man, rendered in my mind’s eye. First my sibling, now also my tormentor; he was the expression of my guilt incarnate. And like a lake mist banished by the heat of a rising sun, my occluded memory cleared. Through the parting haze, I remembered something else too, an alien figure, one revealed to me in aetheric snatches, reminiscent of a bad pict-feed.

A last, final revelation dawned. It visited my mind like a hammer, smashing the hope I’d harboured into dust. I was aboard a ship, a great space-faring vessel. Cold reality asserted itself with that knowledge. I was not on Isstvan. I was no longer on earth of any kind. I was in Curze’s element now and there would be no escaping from it.

A chamber slowly came into focus around me, the frost that encrusted my eyelids cracking as I opened them to see it. This was not the same cell as before. It was much larger, not an oubliette but an octagonal shaft hundreds of metres up and down. No chains; my wrists and ankles were free of any fetters. A circular platform surrounded me instead, not much wider than the span of my feet. Here was the pitted metal I had felt upon waking and the mesh through which I now saw the dull orange glow from where the heat was emanating. Surrounding the platform were my new chains – a gulf, many metres across and a fathomless drop into a scorched black abyss. And at the edges of this prison without walls, this cage without bars, was a thin gantry of steel.

A dull throb invaded my senses, which were slowly returning to normal. Far below, a turbine was whipping currents of hot air up the shaft, foul with the stench of engine wash. In one corner, looking on as I assessed the manner of the trap ensnaring me, was the apparition of my dead brother.

‘You look ill, Vulkan,’ said Ferrus, the shadows in the chamber pooling in his cadaverous features. ‘You’re burning up.’

I didn’t answer. As I reasserted control over my senses, I did the same for my body. My skin was cooling, the intense heat I had previously felt now abating. I smelled cinder and ash like before. An itch on my back irritated, as if a brand had been seared in my flesh. I couldn’t see it but managed to touch the edges of the mark with my fingers, navigating past countless others that I knew as intimately as my own face. This one, however, was unfamiliar and the very fact of its existence terrified me. For what else had I forgotten?

Like a shadow creeping across a lone traveller on a desolate road, I felt another presence in the chamber. As I realised who it was, the chill of the void came back anew.

Like Ferrus, he sat in darkness. But he didn’t just inhabit the dark, he was a part of it, he moulded it and made it his mantle.

‘Curze.’ I didn’t have the strength to force any real vitriol into my voice.

‘I am here, brother.’

His tone was almost soothing. Did he regret this insanity?