Vulkan Lives

Curze tried to laugh it off, but his fractured cheek was paining him and I’d just punched most of the air from his lungs.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ferrus watching the uneven duel. He was no longer the cadaverous ghoul I had made him. The Gorgon had become as he was, as I wanted to remember him. No longer berating me, I sensed in him a willing urge for me to triumph instead.

‘Let me tell you a secret, brother,’ I said, breathless.

We were a few handspans apart, battered but regrouping for another round. Amused, Curze bade me continue.

‘Of all of us, father made me the strongest. Physically, I have no equal amongst my siblings. In the sparring cages I used to hold back… especially against you, Konrad.’

All the mirth drained away from Curze’s already pallid face.

‘I am Night Haunter,’ he hissed.

‘What was your boon, Konrad?’ I asked, backing up as he advanced with sword held low.

‘I am the death that haunts the darkness,’ he said, angling the blade so it would cut across my stomach and spill my viscera.

‘Always the weakest, Konrad. I wasafraid, I admit that. But it was from the fear of breaking you. I don’t need to hold back, though, any more,’ I said, smiling in the face of my brother’s rising hatred. ‘Now I can show you how much better than you I am.’

Possessed by a sudden rage, Curze threw down the blade and came at me with his bare hands. I knew it was coming and had shifted my stance just slightly so I was ready for it. I let him land the first blow. It was vicious and tore a hunk of flesh off my cheek. He reached for my throat, talons poised to rip it out, teeth bared in a savage snarl… before I clamped my fist around his forearm, falling back and using his momentum to carry him up and over me.

In the forge, the hammer swing is everything. Shaping metal, bending it to my will, it is the blacksmiter’s art. By its nature, metal is unyielding. It breaks stone, sunders flesh. Strength is not enough. It takes skill, and timing. Judgement of when the hammer has reached its apex, when the strike is purest, that is what I knew. It was ingrained in me by my Nocturnean father, N’bel.

I used his lessons in that moment, I lifted my brother like the smiter lifts the fuller and brought him down upon the iron plinth, my anvil. A sharp crack and a light surge that painted the chamber in blueish monochrome preceded the collapse of the energy shield. Curze broke it with his back, his body. As he rebounded hard off the iron floor, the energy coursed over him, setting fire to nerve endings and burning hair and scalp. He rolled with the last of his momentum, smoke exuding from the plates of his armour.

I stooped and picked up the fallen hammer. It felt good to have Dawnbringerin my grasp again and I ran my thumb along the activation stud I had put on the grip.

‘You should not have led me here, Konrad,’ I told him. My brother was still curled up and shaking with the energy spikes from the shield. At first I thought he was sobbing, his shame and self-loathing having reduced my poor brother to melancholy again, but I was wrong.

Curze was laughing once more.

‘I know, Vulkan,’ he said, having recovered some of his composure. ‘Your beacon won’t work. This chamber is teleport-shielded. Nothing goes in or out except through that gate behind you.’ Still trembling with the aftershocks of absorbing the energy shield, Curze managed to stand. ‘Did you think you had broken me, brother? Did you believe you had tricked me into letting you escape?’ He gri

Before I could prevent it, he twisted something on his vambrace, activating some system slaved to his armour.

Hearing the churn of gears, I braced myself. I expected another death trap, a long plunge into a still deeper dungeon. Instead, I saw the floor retreat beneath my feet, leaving a sturdy mesh that supported our weight and that I could see through.

There was another chamber below the heart of the labyrinth, but it was nothing more than a dank cell. No, not a cell, a tomb. Weak lumen strips flickered in this hidden undercroft, and their combined light and shadow revealed hundreds of bodies. Humans and legionaries, prisoners of the Prince of the Crows, languished in the gloom. They were dead, but before they had died they had been tortured and brutalised.

‘This is my true work of art,’ Curze revealed, gesturing to the slain as a painter would his finished canvas, ‘and you, Vulkan, the immortal king presiding over the anguished dead, are my crowning piece.’

‘You’re a monster,’ I breathed, eyes wide with the horror of it.

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ he hissed.

Meeting his madman’s gaze, I decided to oblige him.

‘You’re right,’ I conceded, holding up Dawnbringerso he could see it. ‘I fashioned it as a teleporter, a means to escape even a prison such as this. I counted on you leading me here, on you needingto face me one last time. It seems I was fooled into thinking you hadn’t pla

Curze leaned in, as if eager to hear my words. He believed that he had me, that I would never escape his trap.

He was wrong.

‘What’s that, brother?’

‘It’s also a hammer.’

The blow caught him across the chin, a savage upswing that took Curze off his feet and put him on the ground again with the sheer force of the impact. He got to one knee before I hit him again, this time across his left shoulder blade where I split his pauldron in half. I jabbed into his stomach before swinging a second blow that put him on his feet.

Curze almost fell again when I drove into him, pressing the hammer’s haft against his throat and pushing him back until he slammed up against the wall. His gorget had broken apart and was hanging loose, so I kept the haft across his trachea and pushed against it, one hand on the pommel and the other on the hammer head, and slowly began to crush bone.

Blood and saliva flecked Curze’s armour, spat from his still gri

‘Yes…’ he choked at me. ‘Yes…’

So wretched, I wanted to kill him, to end his suffering and take some measure of vengeance for all the suffering he had caused me and my sons.

‘Come on…’ Curze’s eyes were pleading, and I realised he wantedthis. Ever since Kharaatan, he had wanted this. Not every chink of weakness I had seen in this place was feigned. Curze truly did loathe himself, so much so that he wanted it to end. If I killed him he would have everything he wanted, death and a means of bringing me down to his despicable level.

‘I am damned, Vulkan…’ he gasped. ‘End it now!’

The abyss was pulsing at the edge of thought, black and red, the monster crawling up from its depths to claim me. So many dead, I could almost hear the corpses willing me to do it, to avenge them.

And then I saw Ferrus, his proud and noble face looking down upon me, the beloved older brother.

‘Do it…’ Curze was urging. ‘I will only kill again, take another for my amusement. Corax, Dorn, Guilliman… Perhaps I’ll bait the Lion when we reach Thramas. You can’t risk letting me live.’

I released him, and he fell clutching at his throat, choking the air back into his lungs. From beneath the lank strands of his hair, he glared at me, eyes filled with murderous intent. I had scorned him; worst of all I had let him live when I had every reason not to, and proved that he was alone in his depravity.

‘You can’t escape,’ he spat. ‘I’ll never let you go.’

I looked down at him, pitying. ‘You’re wrong about that too. No craft you possess can hold me here now, Konrad.’ I brandished the hammer, held it aloft like itwas my standard. ‘Your dampeners are useless. I could have left as soon as I took the hammer from your cage, but I chose to stay behind. I wanted to hurt you, but most of all I wanted to know I could spare you. We arealike, Konrad, but not like that. Never like that. But if I see you again, I will kill you.’ I spoke these last words through clenched teeth, my sanity hanging by the barest thread as the grace Verace had given me finally faded. Or perhaps it was my own resolve that had preserved my mind, one last herculean effort to stave off madness? I would never know.