‘It’s actually quite stunning when you look at it from this distance,’ Numeon said once Leodrakk had gone. He was watching the lightning flashes over the ash wastes.

‘The word that springs to my mind is deadly,’ Grammaticus replied. He was on his feet and standing next to the Pyre captain.

‘Most beautiful things in nature are, John Grammaticus.’

‘I didn’t have you pegged as philosophical, captain.’

‘When you’ve seen the fury of the earth up close, watched mountains spit fire and the sky redden to the hue of embers, reflecting its hot breath against the ash clouds overhead, you learn to appreciate the beauty in it. Otherwise, what’s left but tragedy?’

‘It’s all about the earth,’ Grammaticus muttered.

Numeon looked sidelong at him. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. You are doing the right thing.’

‘I don’t need you to tell me that.’ The Salamander turned to regard Grammaticus. Towering over the human, his face was unreadable. ‘Betray me, and I’ll find a way to kill you. Failing that, I’ll take you back to Nocturne and show you those fire mountains I mentioned.’

‘I get the impression I won’t see their beauty like you do, Salamander.’

Numeon’s eyes seemed to burn cold. ‘No, you won’t.’

Behind him, the human became aware of another’s presence. Numeon nodded to him.

‘Hriak, all is ready?’

‘Everything is in place, the plan is formed,’ he rasped.

Grammaticus raised an eyebrow, ‘What plan?’

Numeon smiled. He could see that it unnerved the human.

‘I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Dawnbringer

I named it Dawnbringerfor a very specific reason.

Names are important for weapons, they attribute meaning and substance to what might otherwise be merely tools for war. Curze never paid much attention to that. His concerns are less sentimental, bloodier. To my benighted brother, a spar of sharpened metal is as good as the master craftsman’s finest blade if it kills the same. This was his oversight, this was why I had fashioned the hammer as I had. Dawnbringerwas different. It would literally bring the light.

And now it was before me at the heart of Perturabo’s labyrinth, but the hammer was not what my eye was drawn to first.

Both of them were dead. I knew it before I crossed the threshold but I still grieved for them upon sight of their bloodless bodies.

‘Were they dead before I even entered this place?’ I asked.

To my surprise, Curze answered.

‘ Before you came aboard my ship.’

His voice was disembodied, but it came from somewhere in the heart chamber.

Nemetor, of course. It would have to be him. He was the last of my sons I ever set eyes upon. Curze knew that would breed a special blend of pain for me. The other one brought me a different kind of grief, for he was part of a brotherhood I had long considered my council.

‘Skatar’var…’ I whispered the name as I raised my hand to touch his skeletal body, but fell just short of making contact.

Averting my gaze from my dead sons, I resisted the urge to cut them down from where they hung like meat and instead focused on Dawnbringer.

The hammer was exactly as I remembered. It looked innocuous enough resting on an iron plinth, though I can humbly say it is the finest weapon I have ever crafted. It shone in a place that was drab and ugly by comparison.

The heart of the Iron Labyrinth was an octagonal chamber, supported by eight thick columns. The dark metal seemed to drink the light, absorb it like obsidian into its facets. But it was merely iron, the walls, the ceiling, the floor. It was heavy and dense with little in the way of ornamentation… or so I at first believed.

As I lingered, I started to discern shapes wrought into the metal. They were faces, screaming, locked forever in moments of pure agony. Beneath each of the arches to which the columns abutted hung a grotesque and malformed statue. They were monstrous things, ripped from a madman’s fever dream and trapped in this iron form. No two were alike. Some had horns, others wings or bestial hooves, feathers, talons, a hooked beak, a swollen maw. They were wretched and repellent, and I could not imagine what had compelled my brother to sculpt them.

If this was a heart, it was a blackened, cancerous organ whose slow beat was as the chime of death.

Seeing no other recourse, I walked up to the plinth and reached for the hammer. Some kind of energy field impeded me, giving out an actinic flash of light as I touched it and making me recoil.

‘ You didn’t think I’d just let you take it, did you?’ Curze’s voice rang out, everywhere and nowhere as it was before.

I backed away from the plinth, the gate by which I had entered the heart closing behind me as I warily eyed the shadows. I had no intention of leaving. There was no escape that way. The end of this torment was in here with my brother. With the entrance now sealed, darkness reigned fully. There were no lumen orbs, braziers nor lanterns of any kind. I touched the energy field again, prompting a flare of light briefly to encase the hammer before dying again like a candle flame. The flash gave me little to see with, though I turned as I thought I saw one of the statues start to move.

‘These fear tactics might work on mortals but I am a primarch, Konrad,’ I declared, grateful to my father for gifting me these last moments of lucidity. I would need them to fight my brother now. ‘One worthy of the name.’

‘ You think me unworthy, do you, Vulkan?’

His voice came from behind me, but I knew it to be a trick and resisted the temptation to face it.

‘It doesn’t matter what I think, Konrad. Nor what the rest of us think. You behold your reflection, brother. Is that not what you see?’

‘ You won’t goad me, Vulkan. We’ve come too far, you and I, for that.’

‘Did you think there would be no mirrors in the darkness, nothing to reflect your worthless self? Is that why you cower there, Konrad?’

I began to turn, sensing my brother’s closeness, if not his actual presence. He was gifted, despite my taunts suggesting the contrary, not so unlike Corvus, though his methodology was far removed from that of the Ravenlord.

‘ Do you seek me, Vulkan? Do you wish to have your chance again, like you did at Kharaatan?’

‘Why would I want that? You are beneath me, Konrad. In every way. You always have been. The Lord of Fear has no land, no subjects but the corpses he makes. You have nothing, you are nothing.’

‘I am Night Haunter!’

And at last Curze gave in to his self-hatred, his pathological denial, and revealed himself to me.

At the heart of the labyrinth, Curze finally faces Vulkan

One of the statues hanging down from an archway, a chiropteran creature I mistook to be a carven gargoyle, slowly unfurled its wings and dropped to the ground. It was him, and he brandished a long serrated blade.

‘We are both such savage weapons, Vulkan,’ he told me. ‘Let me show you.’

Curze lunged, laughing. ‘Never gets old,’ he said, hacking into my body again and carving a deep wound.

I cried out but kept my senses long enough to hammer a punch into his neck. Even his armour was no protection against my blacksmiter’s fists. I had bent metal, grasped burning coals. I was as inviolable as the hard onyx of my skin and I let my brother feel every ounce of that strength.

He staggered, slashing wildly and catching me just above the left eye as I advanced. A jab aimed for his exposed throat missed and fractured Curze’s right cheek instead. In return, he skewered my left leg, ripping the blade and some flesh out before I could trap it. Now I stumbled and Curze wove round my clumsy right hook to bring his sword down onto my clavicle. I threw up my forearm just in time and felt the weapon’s teeth bite bone. Then I charged in with my shoulder, trying to ignore the agony igniting down my arm. I heard him grunt as my body connected, smashing into his torso.