Vulkan waited patiently, listening to the vox-channel he had just opened. It took several seconds of softly crackling static before Vulkan got an answer. When he did, it sounded like the person on the other end of the link was smiling.
‘ Brother.’
Despite himself, Vulkan couldn’t disguise his anger. ‘What have you done, Curze?’
‘ Freed you from dirtying your hands. We arrived early, while you were still marshalling your tanks and Titans.’
‘My orders were to take the city as bloodlessly as possible.’
‘ I don’t follow your orders, brother. Besides, it’s better this way.’
‘Better for whom? You’ve slaughtered an entire city – men, women, children all dead. It’s a butchery worthy of Angron’s Legion in there!’
‘ Don’t confuse me with our hot-headed sibling, though I believe you would run him close at this precise moment. Are you angry with me?’
Vulkan clenched his fists, biting back a retort.
‘Where are you, Curze? Where are you hiding?’
‘ I am close by. We will be reunited soon enough.’ Konrad Curze paused, his playful tone ebbed. ‘ You and I know this was never going to be a bloodless compliance. One-Five-Four Six is a war world, and no warrior I have ever fought has given up without first shedding a little blood.’
‘A little? You practically exsanguinated the entire populace.’
‘And what do you think that would do to their fighting spirit?’
Vulkan turned sharply at the sound of Curze’s voice. Not through the vox any more – he was here. The Night Haunter was a few paces behind him, standing in the shadows at the edge of the flickering firelight.
‘You are either bold or foolish, meeting me out here like this,’ Vulkan warned, the combination of the flames and his drake-like armour enshrouding him in a volatile aspect. Even the carcass of the great drake Kesare, slung over his right shoulder, seemed animate. His forge hammer was within easy reach but he didn’t so much as glance at the weapon.
‘Why, what are you going to do?’ Curze stepped out of the shadows.
He went without a helmet, the light hitting his features in such a way that where the darkness pooled it made him appear gaunt, almost skeletal. Nostramo, his birthplace – unless one counted the laboratory where he, like all of his siblings, was first created – had been a lightless world. This fact was obvious in the chalk-like pallor of its inhabitants, and Curze was no exception to that. One onyx-skinned, the other alabaster; both primarchs were a study in chiaroscuro.
In stark contrast to Vulkan’s fiery eyes, Curze’s were like thin ovals of jet staring through strands of lank, black hair that hung down across his face. Where Vulkan wore a firedrake hide as his mantle, Curze had a cloak of ragged crimson. One brother had a reptilian appearance in his scaled war-plate of oceanic green, clad with rare quartz; the other was armoured in midnight-blue, inscribed with sigils of death and mortality.
Vulkan kept his voice level, neutral. ‘Are you trying to goad me, Curze? Do you want this to escalate?’
‘That sounded like a threat.’ Curze smiled thinly. ‘Was it a threat, brother? Am I a rough blade to be tempered at your righteous anvil? Do you also think yourself my better and my teacher, then?’
Vulkan ignored him, instead gesturing to the inferno that had been Khar-tann City. ‘Look at what your deeds have wrought.’
‘Ha! What my deeds have wrought?Vulkan, you sound like a poet, and a poor one at that.’ Curze grew serious. ‘I’ve broken this world for you, brother. By culling the city you’re now putting to the torch, I’ve spared us a wealth of blood. What do you think this world’s rebels will do when they see and hear what we’ve done to one of their major cities?’ Defying Vulkan’s palpable anger, Curze took a step closer with every emphasised word. ‘They will cower, and shrink, and weep…’ When the two were face to face, he snarled the last part through a barricade of teeth, ‘ Beggingfor mercy.’ He stepped back, opening his arms. ‘And you can give it to them, that is my gift.’
Vulkan shook his head. ‘Terror is your gift.They were women and children, Curze. Innocents.’
Curze sneered, bitterly. ‘No one is innocent.’
‘You came from the gutters, brother, but our father has raised you up. Stop acting like the murderous swine you inherited on Nostramo.’
‘Raised me, did he? Brought me up from the darkness and into the light? We are killers, Vulkan. All of us. Don’t try and convince me we are noble men, for we are not. My eyes have just opened before yours, that’s all.’
Curze turned and walked away, back down the ridge. ‘Fear, Vulkan,’ he called, disappearing into the shadows, ‘that’s the only thing they understand. You all need to learn that.’
Vulkan did not reply. His body was trembling. Looking down, he saw his forge hammer gripped in both hands. He hadn’t even realised he’d picked it up. He gasped, exhaling to relieve the tension, and fought his body. When he was calm again, he turned towards the inferno. The flames were rising now, touching the sky with tendrils of coiling black smoke. It reminded him of Ibsen, and the jungles they had set ablaze there.
How many more worlds must burn before this is over?
He stood in silence, just watching, and stayed like that for several minutes until a quiet voice from behind the primarch disturbed his reverie.
‘Lord Vulkan?’
It was the remembrancer, Seriph.
‘Your equerry said you’d be up here.’
‘Did he also tell you I did not wish to be disturbed?’
Seriph bowed her head slightly. ‘He was too preoccupied to stop me.’
Vulkan turned his back on her. ‘I’m not in the mood for further questions now.’
‘Sincere apologies, my lord. I had hoped to continue our–’
Vulkan’s head snapped around savagely. ‘I said not now!’
She shrank back, her eyes alive with fear.
Curze’s last words came back to him, almost mocking, but Vulkan was powerless. He glared, eyes burning hot with fury. This was the monster, this was the image he was trying so hard to conceal from the remembrancers. His hearts pulsed, and his chest heaved up and down like a giant bellows. Curze was right – he was a killer. That was the purpose for which he had been bred.
His anger at what his brother had done, the memory of those bodies, the children… It was overwhelming, so consuming Vulkan hissed his next command and filled the air with the smell of ash and cinder.
‘ Leave. Me. Alone.’
Seriph fled down the ridge.
Vulkan didn’t bother to watch her go. Instead he watched the burning ruins of Khar-tann.
‘It will all end in fire when the galaxy burns,’ he said, a heavy melancholy settling upon him. ‘And all of us will light the torch.’
Pain awaited me when I awoke. I was no stranger to it, for I was a warrior born, a primarch. And it took a primarch to know how to really hurt another.
Curze must have been well schooled, for my body was alive with pain. It brought me back from a torpor of unconsciousness into a world of nerve-shredding, white-hot agony. Even I, Vulkan, who have stood in the mouth of a volcano, who have endured the nucleonic, cleansing fire of a missile strike and lived. Even for me, this… hurt.
I screamed, opening my eyes. Through vision drenched arterial red I saw a cell no larger than the hold of a gunship. It was black with circular walls, metal-forged and without any door or gate that I could see.
First calming the urgent pulse of blood drumming through my hearts, I then slowed my breathing. Shock and severe injury were retarding my efforts to control my body, but my will was stronger, and I regained some semblance of function.