Wrenching out the vibro-knife with a grimace, Cartovandis staggered to his feet and turned to face the last of the daemonhosts. Adio held them all at bay, allowing his brother to have cast his knife. Gedd stood behind him, alive but almost spent.
‘It is impenetrable,’ Cartovandis said to Varogalant.
‘Nothing remains unbroken forever,’ he replied. He jammed his spear in the second sphere of the Cage, stopping it in a jerk of sparks and disgorged power. Then he seized it and the outermost frame of the Vexen Cage in both hands and started to pull.
Psychic energies rippled outwards like coronal mass ejections, striking Varogalant as he heaved at the relic. His armour and flesh burned, unmade by the arcane science of the Vexen Cage. Every strike lit his skin from the inside, turning it translucent and exposing the structure of his bones within.
He pulled, his face a rictus of agony, and slowly the complex frame of the Cage began to part. A fractious tendril of energy lashed out, impaling his body. Blood painted his armour. He kept pulling. The Cage began to slow.
Cartovandis roared as he leapt for the Cage, Arcana clasped in both hands. His blade struck the metal hard, but the force of the blow returned tenfold and he was thrown, pinwheeling, off the dais.
Gedd saw Cartovandis flying through the air. She had slumped to one knee, struggling to stay upright with the hammering inside her skull. Darkness encroached at the edge of her vision, but she saw the turning Cage and the Custodian being slowly ravaged to death by its foul energies.
She saw the man inside it turning too, his yawning mouth locked in a silent howl of sheer agony. The Cage was hard to look at, but she managed to lift the Verifier and take aim. She felt her fingers tightening over the trigger. She heard the ravening of the monsters behind her and the ferocious defence of the one who had sworn to protect her.
Gedd was just another mortal. She was not fit to fight alongside these auric gods, but Meroved had chosen her for a reason. She had endured terror and seen a glimpse of the galaxy’s true face. Unblinking, her outstretched arm steady, she faced the Cage, and fired.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
The bullet seemed to twist in slow motion. It passed through the nexus of psychic energy that was killing Varogalant and scraped against the finest edge of the Cage in a brief cascade of sparks before it struck the man within in the heart and ended it.
There was no explosion, no flash of energy. It simply stopped, like a turbine starved of power, grinding meekly to a halt.
With a final swipe of Puritas, Adio beheaded the last of the daemonhosts. The wretched creature dwindled to slurry, devouring its stolen body until nothing remained but smoke and charred bone. Breathing hard, he turned. His castellan axe clanged loudly against the ground as he saw what had become of Varogalant.
A skeletal husk poking through broken auramite was all that was left.
The Vexen Cage endured but it no longer turned, its metal spheres dormant once more. The figure inside it held his form for a few seconds before collapsing into ash, only to be scattered away on the air.
Cartovandis stood with difficulty. Gedd looked back at him, exhausted. She unclasped the null-collar, clearly relieved to be free of it. She looked weak, her body and mind at the very limit, but determined not to falter in front of the Custodians.
‘Is it over now?’ she asked him.
He exhaled a long, drawn-out breath and felt the impermanence of his flesh as never before.
‘By the Emperor’s grace, it’s over.’
But nothing would ever be the same again.
Epilogue
Several months later…
Vorganthian howled into the night, a wounded beast needing to lash out at its pain. Lawlessness plagued its streets and though the armies of neighbouring cities had begun to assert some form of order at the fringes, its heart remained in turmoil. Gangs roamed freely. Murder cults rose up from the ashes of unbelief. Its badly outnumbered peacekeepers found themselves beleaguered. It would yet be months before the greater Imperium came to reclaim the city.
The Eyes of the Emperor watched it all keenly, ever vigilant for a true threat to the Throne.
‘Order will return…’ a figure murmured, his face half lit by banks of pict screens, his attention split across manifold vox-channels and data-feeds. He saw all. He knew all.
‘And in the meantime?’ asked a second figure, much slighter and much shorter than the first.
‘We watch, Gedd,’ said Cartovandis, a shrewd smile turning the corners of his mouth, ‘and we listen.’
The Vexen Cage returned to Terra in a warded casket, thrice blessed by the most potent psykers of the Ordo Hereticus. Santic runes had been inscribed into the metal. Six belts of chain were wrapped tightly around the sides.
No triumphal fanfare greeted its successful recapture. It came back in secret, brought in via gunship with a guard of twelve Grey Knights swathed in black cloaks.
They met the Shadowkeepers at the subterranean gate to the Dark Cells, one group barely acknowledging the other during the silent transfer of responsibility. As the Grey Knights departed as clandestinely as they had arrived, the casket was placed upon a grav-sled and taken in solemn procession to its empty cell, where a Custodian armoured in black awaited it.
As the other Shadowkeepers went to their duties, he was left alone. Grasping Vigilance in both hands he stood with his back to the cell, determined to honour his brother’s sacrifice.
At the Tower of Heroes, the Bell of Lost Souls would be tolling.
‘For you, Varo,’ said Adio.
About the Author
Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Old Earth, Deathfire, Vulkan Lives and Sons of the Forge, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio dramas Red-marked and Censure. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Space Marine Battles novel Damnos, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Warhammer Chronicles novel The Great Betrayal and the Age of Sigmar story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm. He lives and works in Nottingham, and has a rabbit.