‘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.
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 grinned. ‘Hope is cruel, isn’t it? Yours was false, Vulkan.’
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 planned for this.’ I lowered the weapon and let the weight of its head pull the haft down until my hand was wrapped around the very end of the grip. ‘But you’re forgetting one thing…’
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.