Ichor hissed from the tears in the daemon's earthly form, its hold on reality slipping as Kadai punished it relentlessly with fist and hammer.
'...Time moves differently in that realm. For us it felt like centuries had passed before we found a way out.'
A chorus of screams ripped from the distended throat of the daemon-thing, as Kadai crushed its skull finally and banished it back into the warp, the souls it had consumed begging for succour.
'...It changed me. Opened my eyes. I see much now. A great destiny awaits you, Tsu'gan, but another overshadows it.' Nihilan gave the faintest inclination of his head towards Dak'ir.
The Ignean was fighting valiantly, cutting down the last of the cultists and heading for Kadai.
'Even now he rushes to your captain's side...' Nihilan said, insidiously, 'Hoping to gain his favour.'
Tsu'gan knew he could not trust the foul tongue of a traitor, but the words spoken echoed his own long-held suspicions.
And so, unbeknownst to the Salamander, Nihilan did plant a seed. Not one born of daemonic essence. No, this came about through petty jealousy and ambition, through the very thing Tsu'gan had no aegis against himself.
'This cult,' the Dragon Warrior pressed. 'It is nothing. Stratos is nothing. Even this city is meaningless. It was always about him!'
Kadai was leaning heavily on his thunder hammer, weakened after vanquishing the daemon.
Nihilan smiled, scarred flesh creaking.
A captain for a captain.
Realisation slid like a cold blade into Tsu'gan's gut.
Too late he saw the armoured shadow closing in. The Dragon Warriors springing their trap at last. By leaving his post, he had let them infiltrate the Salamanders' guard. The cultists were only ever a distraction; the true enemy was only now revealing itself.
He had been a fool.
'No!'
Sheer force of will broke Nihilan's psychic hold. Roaring the captain's name, Tsu'gan leapt off the parapet. Hoarse laughter followed him all the way down.
DAK'IR HAD ALMOST reached Kadai when he saw the renegade hefting the multi-melta. Shouting a warning, he raced to his captain's side. Kadai faced him, hearing the cry of Tsu'gan from above at the same time, and then followed Dak'ir's agonised gaze...
An incandescent beam tore out of the darkness.
Kadai was struck, and his body immolated in an actinic flare.
An intense rush of heat smashed Dak'ir off his feet, backwash from the terrible melta blast. He smelled scorched flesh. A hot spike of agony tortured his senses. His face was burning, just like in the dream...
Dak'ir realised he was blacking out, his body shutting down as his sus-an membrane registered the gross trauma he had suffered. Dimly, as if buried alive and listening through layered earth, he heard the voice of Sergeant N'keln and his battle-brothers. Dak'ir managed to turn his head. The last thing he saw before unconsciousness claimed him was Tsu'gan slumped to his knees in front of the charred remains of their captain.
WHEN DAK'IR AWOKE he was laid out in the Apothecarion of the Vulkan's Wrath. It was cold as a tomb inside the austere chamber, the gloom alleviated by the lit icons of the medical apparatus around him.
With waking came remembrance, and with remembrance, grief and despair.
Kadai was dead.
'Welcome back, brother,' a soft voice said. Fugis was thin-faced and gaunter than ever, as he loomed over Dak'ir.
Emotional agony was compounded by physical pain and Dak'ir reached for his face as it started to burn anew.
Fugis seized his wrist before he could touch it.
'I wouldn't do that,' he warned the sergeant. 'Your skin was badly burned. You're healing, but the flesh is still very tender.'
Dak'ir lowered his arm as Fugis released him. The Apothecary injected a solution of drugs through an intravenous drip-feed to ease the pain.
Dak'ir relaxed as the suppressants went to work, catalysing his body's natural regenerative processes.
'What happened?' His throat felt raw and abrasive, and he croaked the words. Fugis stepped away from Dak'ir's medi-slab to check on the instrumentation. He limped as he walked, a temporary augmetic frame fitted over his leg to shore up the break he had sustained in his fall. Stubborn to the point of bloody-mindedness, nothing would prevent the Apothecary from doing his work.
'Stratos is saved,' he said simply, his back to the other Salamander. 'With the Speaker dead and our flamers restored, the insurgents fell quickly. The storms lifted an hour after we returned to Aereon Square,' he explained. 'Librarian Pyriel arrived twenty minutes later with the rest of the company to reinforce N'keln, who had taken the wall and was already en route to Aura Hieron...'
'But too late to save Kadai,' Dak'ir finished for him.
Fugis stopped what he was doing and gripped the instrumentation panel he'd been consulting for support.
'Yes. Even his gene-seed was unsalvageable.'
A long grief-filled silence crept insidiously into the room before the Apothecary continued.
'A ship, Stormbird-class, left the planet but we were too late to give chase.'
The rancour in Dak'ir's voice could've scarred metal.
'Nihilan and the other renegades escaped.'
'To Vulkan knows where,' Fugis replied, facing the patient. 'Librarian Pyriel has command of Third Company, until Chapter Master Tu'Shan can appoint someone permanent.'
Dak'ir frowned. 'We're going home?'
'Our tour of the Hadron Belt is over. We are returning to Prometheus to reinforce and lick our wounds.'
'My face...' Dak'ir ventured after a long silence, 'I want to see it.'
'Of course,' said Fugis, and showed the Salamander a mirror.
Part of Dak'ir's facial tissue had been seared away. Almost half of his onyx-black skin had been bleached near-white by the voracious heat of the melta flare. Though raw and angry, it looked almost human.
'A reaction to the intense radiation,' Fugis explained. 'The damage has resulted in minor cellular regression, reverting to a form prior to the genetic ebonisation of your skin when you became an Astartes. I cannot say for certain yet, but it shows no sign of immediate regeneration.'
Dak'ir stared, lost in his own reflection and the semblance of humanness there. Fugis arrested the Salamander's reverie.
'I'll leave you in peace, such as it is,' he said, taking away the mirror. 'You are stable and there's nothing more I can do at this point. I'll return in a few hours. Your body needs time to heal, before you can fight again. Rest,' the Apothecary told him. 'I expect you to be here upon my return.'
The Apothecary left, hobbling off to some other part of the ship. But as the metal door slid shut with a susurrus of escaping pressure, Dak'ir knew he was not alone.
'Tsu'gan?'
He could feel his battle-brother's presence even before he saw him emerge from the shadows.
'Brother,' Dak'ir croaked warmly, recalling the moment of empathy between them as they'd fought together in the temple.
The warmth seeped away, as a cold wind steals heat from a fire, when Dak'ir saw Tsu'gan's dark expression.
'You are unfit to be an Astartes,' he said levelly. 'Kadai's death is on your hands, Ignean. Had you not sent me after the renegade, had you been swift enough to react to the danger in our midst, we would not have lost our captain.' Tsu'gan's burning gaze was as chill as ice. 'I shall not forget it.'
Stunned, Dak'ir was unable to reply before Tsu'gan turned his back on him and left the Apothecarion.
Anguish filled his heart and soul as Dak'ir wrestled with the terrible accusations of his brother, before exhaustion took him and he fell into a deep and fitful sleep.
For the first time in over forty years, the dream had changed...
SITTING IN THE troop compartment of the Stormbird, Nihilan turned the device stolen from the vault in the depths of Cirrion over and over in his gauntlet. His fellow Dragon Warriors surrounded him: the giant Ramlek, breathing tiny gouts of ash and cinder from his mouth grille
as he tried to calm his perpetual anger; Ghor'gan, his scaled skin shedding after he'd removed his battle-helm, cradling his multi-melta like a favoured pet; Nor'hak, fastidiously stripping and reassembling his weapons methodically; and Erkine his pilot, the other renegade left behind to watch the Stormbird, forearm bone-blades carefully sheathed within the confines of his power armour as he steered the vessel to its final destination.
The Dragon Warriors had risked much to retrieve the device, even going as far as to establish the elaborate distraction of the uprising to cloak their movements. Kadai's death as part of that subterfuge had been a particularly satisfying, but unexpected, boon for Nihilan.
The Stormbird had been primed and ready before the trap in Aura Hieron was sprung. With eager swathes of suicidal cultists to ensure their escape, the renegades had fled swiftly, leaving the atmosphere of Stratos behind them as the engines of their extant craft roared.
'How little do they realise...' Nihilan rasped, examining every facet of the gilt object in his palm. Such an innocuous piece of arcana; within its twelve pentagonal faces, along the geodesic lines of esoteric script that wreathed its dodecahedral surface, there was the means to unlock secrets. It was the very purpose of the decyphrex, to reveal that which was hidden. For Nihilan that enigma existed in the scrolls of Kelock, ancient parchments he and Ushorak had taken over forty years ago from Kelock's tomb on Moribar. Kelock was a technocrat, and a misunderstood genius. He created something, a weapon, far beyond what was capable with the crippled science of the current decaying age. Nihilan meant to replicate his work.
Over a thousand years within the Eye of Terror, patiently plotting revenge and now he finally was closing on the means to destroy his enemies.
'Approaching the Hellstalker,' the sepulchral voice of Ekrine returned over the vox.
Nihilan engaged the grav-harness. As it crept over his armoured shoulders, securing him for landing, he peered out of the Stormbird's vision slit. There across a becalmed and cobalt sea, a vessel of molten-red lay anchored. It was an old ship with old wounds, and older ghosts. The prow was a serrated blade, ripping a hole in the void. Cannons arrayed its flanks, gunmetal grey and powder-blackened. Dozens of towers and antennae reached up like crooked fingers.
Hellstalker had entered the Eye a mere battle-barge and had come out something else entirely. It was Nihilan's ship and aboard it his warriors awaited him - renegades, mercenaries and defectors; pirates, raiders and reavers. There they gathered to heed of his victory and the slow realisation of their ambition - the total and utter destruction of Nocturne, and with it the death of the Salamanders.
Fires of War - Nick Kyme Page 8