‘Either help me or let me go,’ said Grammaticus. ‘This stalemate achieves nothing for either of us. Let me save him.’
‘How?’ asked Numeon, suddenly angry. ‘I need to know. I haveto know.’
Grammaticus sagged, defeated. ‘I don’t know. How many times must I say it? I only know it concerns the spear.’
Numeon calmed down, but his frustration was still bubbling under the surface. He turned to the others. ‘The cleric likely has the spear now,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it from him.’
‘From his dead hand,’ put in Leodrakk as he saw the chance for petty revenge.
‘One way or another,’ Numeon replied. He glanced at Grammaticus. ‘Bind him. I don’t want him trying to escape.’
Domadus nodded and began uncoiling a length of rappelling cable from his belt.
‘This is a mistake,’ said Grammaticus.
‘Maybe. Either way you are not leaving us just yet. I want to see what happens when you are reunited with the spear, see what fresh secrets tumble from your mind. Then I’ll have Hriak pry open your skull and extract whatever is hidden within.’
Grammaticus hung his head, let his arms fall by his sides and cursed whatever fates had delivered him to the Salamanders.
Eighty metres from the manufactorum, Narek hunched low behind a half-collapsed wall and peered in awe through his scope.
‘Impossible…’ he breathed, adjusting the focus, enhancing the image through the shattered window-glass.
He saw six legionaries, the guerrilla fighters from before, just as he had predicted. What surprised him was the sight of the man he had killed, the one who could not have survived his wounds and yet stood unscathed in the middle of the manufactorum floor. Standing. Breathing. Alive.
Narek opened the vox to Elias, vaguely aware of his companions around him and knowing the rest were converging from separate angles on the manufactorum.
‘Apostle…’ he began.
Things were about to change.
Despite the attentions of his Apothecary, Elias was in excruciating pain. After a struggle, two legionaries had managed to get him back into his power armour but his burned arm remained unclad. It was black and almost useless. The wounds from the godfire that had seared him seemed unaffected by his enhanced physiology or any healing skill his Legion possessed. Only a rival patron could restore him, and as he sat clenched with agony in his tent, Elias thought bitterly on the failed ritual.
The spear was nearby, lying on a table within reach. It no longer glowed, nor burned. It simply appeared to be a spearhead fashioned from rock and mineral. But that simple shell contained something much more potent.
Elias was considering when to apprise Erebus of his progress, but wanted to be in a clear frame of mind first. His master would have questions, questions Elias wasn’t sure he had the answers to just yet. So when the vox crackled to life, his mood was particularly fractious.
‘What is it?’ he snapped, wincing at the pain in his arm.
It was Narek.
At first Elias was annoyed. How many more times would he have to tell the huntsman what was required of him? It was a simple task, a well-trained dog could do it. He was considering in what manner to sever his ties with Narek when what he heard changed his mind on the subject. The contortion of Elias’s face, a grimace of pain and snarl of anger, turned to interest and machination.
Suddenly the pain seemed to diminish, his maiming become less significant.
The ritual had failed. Not because of the spear, or the words. It was the sacrifice that he had got wrong. Now he knew why.
Elias rose from his seat and reached for his battle-helm.
‘Bring him to me. Alive, so I can kill him.’
Fate and the Pantheon had not abandoned him after all.
He smiled. Erebus would have to wait.
Something had happened. Narek could tell from the tone of Elias’s voice. He sounded in pain, and the huntsman wondered what Elias had tried to do with the spear. Something foolish, driven by hubris. He put it out of his mind. Amaresh was waiting. He could almost hear the eager rush of blood in the other Word Bearer’s veins.
‘What are we waiting for?’ he growled.
Narek didn’t bother making eye contact. He lowered the scope.
‘Plan’s changed,’ he said, relaying his orders across the vox to his men. ‘Our orders are to extract the human. Alive.’
‘You are not serious,’ snarled Amaresh, grabbing for Narek’s shoulder guard. In a single movement, the huntsman twisted the other Word Bearer’s armoured wrist and smashed him down onto the ground. He did it so quickly that the others had barely noticed. Amaresh went to rise, but found the blade of Narek’s knife pressed at his throat. One thrust and it would pierce gorget, neck and bone.
‘Deadly serious,’ he told him. ‘Dagon,’ he began after a few seconds, once he was sure that Amaresh would follow orders. ‘Maintain eyes on all the exits.’
Dagon gave a clipped affirmative.
‘Infrik, come around the front and– Wait, there’s something…’ Narek had looked up to gauge the relative positions of his men. That was when he saw the smallest glint of metal, reflected from a scope lens. ‘Clever…’
Amaresh had only just risen to his feet when the bolt-round entered the back of his battle-helm, into his head, and exited through his left retinal lens in a welter of blood and bone. Even a legionary as gifted as Amaresh couldn’t survive that.
Narek hit the deck.
He doubted that the sniper would take another shot, at least not a meaningful one. He knew the shooter. It was the one from the cooling tower, the legionary who had seen him and Dagon before. Amaresh was a jerking corpse as the last dregs of nervous convulsion left him. Narek found himself liking this enemy.
The plan changed again.
He reopened the vox, relaying calmly, ‘Full attack.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Torment
‘I have seen darkness, witnessed it in my dreams. I am standing at the edge of a chasm. There is no escaping it, I know my fate. For it is the future and nothing can prevent it coming to pass. So I step off and welcome the dark.’
– Konrad Curze,
the ‘Night Haunter’
I returned from the darkness again, only now I possessed the knowledge of how and why. To most men, learning that you are immortal would be the cause of unbridled euphoria. For is it not the ambition of mankind to endure, to live on, to eke out more years? Cryogenics, rejuvenat, cloning, even pacts with fell creatures… Through science or superstition, mankind has always sought to avoid the end. He will cheat it if he can, devoting the resources of his entire existence to just a little more.
I cannot be killed. Not by any means known to me, or to my vicious brother. It would not end. Ever.
To know you are immortal is to know that time is meaningless, that every ambition you ever aspired to fulfil could be, one day, within your grasp. You would not age. You could not be maimed or debilitated physically. You would never die.
To know immortality was, for some men, to know the greatest gift.
I knew only despair.
As I came round, the phantom pain in my chest reminded me of the blade my brother had rammed into it. Curze couldn’t kill me. He had tried, extremely hard. It begged the question of what he would do next.
The answer to that would not be long in coming.
When I tried to move my arms, I found that I couldn’t. Disorientated, I was slow to realise that I was neither chained nor back in the dread chamber where my weakness had consigned so many to death; I was in an entirely different trap.
At first I felt the weight upon my shoulders, heavy and biting. Bolts and nails had been hammered into my flesh, pinning them. The device of my apparent crucifixion was some kind of metal armature, humanoid in shape but armoured in barbs and spikes that both extruded from and intruded upon the wearer. A crude mechanism locked into my jaw and chin, forcing it up. My lips were wired together. My legs and arms were sheathed in metal, the latter ending in a pair of blades. Stooped, I felt the first jerk of my marionette’s strings and saw my left leg rise and fall in a single step.