He snatched the fulgurite from Numeon’s scabbard, deftly avoiding the Salamander’s grab.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Grammaticus, his voice growing more distant the farther away he ran, ‘but you were in my way.’
Running hard against the storm, he reached the ship. The gentle throb of turbine engines was obvious up close. Now he was alongside the ship, he could see it more clearly. He looked back for any sign of his captors.
Lightning crackled in the distance that was not caused by the storm. It illuminated three figures, armoured in legionary battle-plate. One other, the Raven, opposed them. Numeon was still down but rising.
He could pilot this vessel without the Salamander’s help, but Grammaticus knew he didn’t have long to get aboard and get away. Moving around to the rear access ramp, he paused.
There was something dripping through the rear access hatch, as if someone had released a valve and filled the hold with water. It was dark, murky and reeked of stagnation. There was something wrongabout this place, this city. Grammaticus had felt it ever since he had made planetfall with Varteh and the others. He had no weapon – the ring was useless, and so he could only rely upon his own wits. At that precise moment they seemed more than a little fragile.
Hammering the hatch release icon, Grammaticus braced himself for what was within. He had wanted to leap up and onto the gunship’s still descending ramp, to rush to the cockpit and quit Traoris for good, but the figure standing before him was blocking his path.
Trapped for so long in the drainage basin, all those years… The water had not been kind. Grammaticus couldn’t remember his name, but the thing glaring at him through the strands of lank hair hanging down over its sunken face knewGrammaticus.
Instinctively, he backed away, his ankle throbbing where the five tiny weals still showed on his flesh.
‘You aren’t…’ he began, but how could he be sure? All the things he had seen, all the deeds he had done…
The drowned boy advanced towards Grammaticus, his gait shuffling and unsteady, leaving a trail of drain water behind him.
A childhood trauma, one from his first life; why did this horror eclipse all the others?
Grammaticus recoiled and found unyielding war-plate preventing further retreat. He turned to face his attacker, knowing the game had ended at last.
‘You’re headed the wrong way if you want to escape,’ said Numeon, one eye ablaze through his retinal lens.
Glancing back, Grammaticus saw that the drowned boy was gone. But the delay had cost him dearly.
‘Is this when you kill me?’ he asked, still a little shaken but shoring up his composure with each passing second.
‘I should have killed you when I saw you. Tell me this. Is what you said true, does Vulkan still live?’
‘As far as I know–’ Grammaticus’s answer was cut by the report of a bolt pistol.
In front of him, Numeon convulsed as the shell struck him in the torso and punched the Salamander off his feet.
‘You have proven remarkably elusive, John Grammaticus,’ said a cultured, yet terrifying voice. The dull click of a bolt pistol being primed to fire again froze Grammaticus in place. He turned, having made it halfway up the ramp, and saw the Word Bearers cleric drawing down on him. ‘But then you are quite remarkable, aren’t you?’
‘So I’m told,’ he said, fulgurite still in hand.
‘Give the spear to me,’ the Dark Apostle ordered. ‘Throw it onto the ground.’
Numeon was still down and not looking like he was going to get up. Grammaticus obeyed.
‘What now?’
‘Now you will come with me and I shall show you the true meaning of the warp.’
‘I’ll pass if that’s all the same to you.’
‘I didn’t say you had a choice, mortal.’ Elias wagged the pistol’s muzzle, gesturing for Grammaticus to step down from the ramp and out of the gunship’s waiting hold.
He hesitated. ‘I’ll be shredded out there.’
Elias briefly looked at the athame dagger sheathed at his belt.
‘You won’t be out here long enough for that. The shredding comes later, though.’
Grammaticus was taking his first steps back down the ramp, trying desperately to think of a way out of this, when a charge trembled the air. It wasn’t from the lightning field, it was nothing to do with the storm at all. Elias felt it, too, and began to turn.
Something was coming.
Numeon was dying. He didn’t need the failing biometric data relayed by his armour to tell him that. Red warning icons were flashing across his vision, a sputtering, static-crazed feed that did more to impede his senses than enhance them.
He discharged the locking clamps on his helmet and tore it off.
The Word Bearer, the cleric they had been seeking, who had undoubtably killed Hriak, paid him no heed. As he gazed into the storm, Numeon detected a change in the air. He felt heat, and imagined the trembling of atoms as the veil of reality was parting and being rewritten.
He reached out, ostensibly for a weapon, perhaps his pistol, as the glaive was now too far to grasp, but found himself clutching the sigil.
Vulkan’s sigil.
For his legionaries it had become an enigmatic symbol of hope, but for the primarch it held no such mystery. He had crafted it, imbued it with technologies beyond even his Legiones Astartes sons.
It was a beacon, a light to bring a stricken ship to shore or a lost traveller home.
For a few brief seconds the storm abated to a murmur, the last jag of lightning seemingly frozen in place and becoming a tear in reality that exuded light.
Gazing into that light, Numeon saw a figure limned in godlike power.
‘Vulkan lives…’ he breathed, emotion and blood both swelling up into his throat to choke him.
Elias holstered his pistol, realising it would have little effect on whatever was about to emerge into reality. He was reaching for his athame, intent on flight, when he recognised the figure that appeared before him.
‘My master,’ he murmured and fell to one knee, bowing his head before Erebus.
Erebus ignored him. Instead he regarded John Grammaticus, who was still standing on the ramp of the gunship, transfixed by what he had just witnessed.
The traveller was hooded. His dark robes swathed a power-armoured frame. There was no face beneath the cowl, only a silver mask fashioned to resemble one. In one hand Erebus held a ritual knife which he secreted back beneath his robes; the other was bionic, yet to be re-fleshed, and reached to retrieve the fulgurite.
‘Rise,’ he said to Elias, though he was looking at Grammaticus. His voice sounded old, but bitter and filled with the resonance of true power.
‘You have arrived at an auspicious moment–’ Elias began, before Erebus lashed out with the fulgurite and slit the other Dark Apostle’s throat.
‘Indeed I have,’ he said, allowing the blood fountaining from Elias’s ruptured arteries to paint the front of his robes.
Dying, unable to staunch the wound from a god-weapon, Elias was reduced to clawing at his former master. He managed to grasp the silver mask and tear it from his master’s face before Erebus seized his flailing hands and threw him back.
Grammaticus recoiled as Erebus faced him. Something akin to a daemon regarded him, one with a hideous flayed skull, blood-red and patched by scar tissue that wasn’t healing as ordinary flesh and skin. It was darker, incarnadine, and shimmered with an unearthly lustre. Several small horns protruded from his pate, little nubs of sharpened bone.
At Erebus’s feet, Elias was gasping like a fish without water. He was dying. His desperation seemed to draw Erebus’s attention, and Grammaticus was glad those hellish eyes were no longer focused on him.
Crouched down, Erebus addressed his former disciple.
‘You are as stupid as you are short-sighted, Valdrekk.’ He showed him the fulgurite, still glowing slightly, clenched in Erebus’s bionic hand. ‘This does not win wars, mere chunks of wood and metal cannot do that. It was never the weapon you were looking for. The primarchs, the god-born, are the weapons. Sharpen our own, blunt our enemy’s.’