Deathfire

by Nick Kyme

  In a few minutes, the Iron Hands legionary was dead.

  ‘They won’t survive the Ruinstorm,’ Quor Gallek told Degat, moving on to the second prisoner, his blade still bloody. ‘I’m scripting a coda to the primarch’s symphony. Its echoes will ripple across endless night and when it has them, when they falter… then we fall upon the Drakes and finish what was begun at Isstvan.’

  Twenty-Five

  Our father’s sons

  Battle-barge Charybdis, the sanctum

  It felt like a mausoleum, only less dignified. The cold and solemnity of the vault on Macragge had been exchanged for the cold and solemnity of a cargo hold. Numeon dubbed it the sanctum and, in many ways, Zytos supposed it was.

  The memorial flame had been replaced by a phosphor-lume but this was still a grave and not a cryostasis chamber as some believed.

  ‘Enter then, if you’re going to.’ Numeon didn’t look up. He was crouched down in reverie, clutching the sigil as always and looking for any sign of life. At the Pyre captain’s request, Zonn had rigged a bio-reader to the primarch’s casket. Any faint rhythm, a stirring no matter how small, would be detected.

  Nothing had changed. Vulkan remained in seemingly eternal slumber.

  As he stepped across the sanctum’s threshold, Zytos noticed blood on Numeon’s hands. The sight of it trickling down the haft of the ceremonial fuller made Zytos uneasy.

  ‘Our presence on Rampart did not go unnoticed.’

  ‘Impossible, we brought down all their ships.’

  ‘Not before one sent out a pulse.’

  A tremor of consternation registered below Numeon’s sightless eye.

  ‘The Death Guard frigate?’

  Zytos nodded.

  ‘They’ll come for us. Out of petty revenge, if nothing else.’

  ‘Agreed. Your orders then?’

  ‘Are your orders, sergeant. Do as you see fit. I shall maintain vigil here.’

  Numeon glanced over when he realised Zytos was still there.

  ‘Something to say?’

  ‘On Rampart, you said something during the mission,’ Zytos began.

  ‘I said several things, brother. You must narrow it down.’

  ‘My men, you called them. Our battle-brothers, the sixty-six from Macragge. The Pyre.’

  ‘We had fewer than sixty-six on Rampart.’

  ‘You meant all of them. Respect me enough not to deny that.’

  ‘Respect you?’ Numeon scowled, rising to face him. ‘I thought I was respecting you. You led our brothers in the absence of our father, and kept them together. They should follow you, not my rank.’

  ‘You are our leader, now. If we make it back to Nocturne–’

  ‘When we make it back, brother,’ Numeon warned him.

  ‘On Nocturne, you will take us back into the war, give us purpose.’

  ‘We have a purpose. Vulkan is our purpose. He will rise again, just as he has risen before. I am not Legion Master, not whilst we have a primarch. If we are to succeed, I cannot believe in anything else.’

  ‘We are but one ship, cast into the void. Your beliefs could kill us all.’

  Numeon’s declaration was emphatic. ‘I would sacrifice everything for this.’

  Zytos tried reason. ‘Lead us, Numeon. You hide yourself in this tomb, waiting for a miracle. Step out of the shadows and into the light. It is madness to hold to this course.’

  ‘And what would you do, if not this? Stay on Macragge as a symbol of Guilliman’s fear?’

  ‘What fear?’ Zytos tried but could not keep the growl out of his voice.

  ‘That Terra is gone, the Emperor slain. You are willing to believe in that horror, but not that our father lives? Tell me, brother, when did you lose all hope?’

  Zytos stared sadly.

  ‘When I looked upon his cold corpse.’

  Something primal and anguished roared out of Numeon. Denial, anger, pain, frustration… emotions coalesced and warred for dominance. He tackled Zytos around the torso and bore him down despite the Themian’s bulk.

  Hitting the deck hard, they raised a loud clamour as metal struck metal.

  Zytos lashed out, punching Numeon in the face and staggering him.

  ‘You’ve asked for this,’ said Zytos, ‘every damn blow.’

  Numeon blocked a right hook with his forearm, trapped it and landed a palm-strike to Zytos’s solar plexus. Armour plate dented.

  Zytos grimaced, hurting. He grappled Numeon, pinning his arms and hurling him against the cargo hold wall. Holding on, he began to tighten his grip.

  Numeon’s knee hit like a mace. Zytos grunted in pain and he released his grip a little. Using the respite, Numeon freed an arm and smashed his elbow down into Zytos’s clavicle. Almost loose now, he brought up his knee again into the Themian’s unprotected chin.

  Zytos staggered back, momentarily stunned. Numeon let him wipe the blood from his mouth.

  That was a mistake.

  Zytos rushed him. A brutal shoulder-barge. A battering ram, clad in adamantium and ceramite, drove the air from Numeon’s lungs and hoisted him off his feet. His head sprang back, jerked by the Themian’s hard skull hitting his chin.

  Crimson arced from Numeon’s mouth.

  In a brawl, momentum was everything. Zytos had the impetus. Numeon fought inertia. The blade of each hand, spring-loaded and unleashed into either side of the Themian’s neck, put Numeon back on level terms.

  Zytos sagged. He was choking.

  Shrugging off unconsciousness, Numeon released an explosive jab that cracked his brother’s plastron.

  Falling, Zytos found nothing to grasp but air and slipped. He backed up and went low, almost down to his knee. A hail of blows came in, fast, powerful. His defence kept out the worst of it, but Zytos was reeling.

  Swinging blind, he caught Numeon’s midriff with his arm, held on and hurled him into the back of the cargo hold.

  Though sprawling, Numeon was quickly on his feet but Zytos landed two right jabs followed by a crushing left hook that put him down again.

  ‘What does this prove?’ Zytos growled. Battered, bloody and bruised, his face had become a mask of pure rage.

  Numeon’s was no better.

  He tried to rise. Zytos hit him again.

  ‘Stay down,’ he warned.

  Glaring, snarling through blood-rimed teeth, Numeon attempted to rise again.

  Zytos hit him harder.

  ‘You’ll have to kill me,’ Numeon said, drooling blood.

  ‘I believe you.’

  All the anger in his face bled away as Zytos let his arms fall in a gesture of submission.

  Unsteady, Numeon got up. A faltering step took him within striking distance.

  Arm trembling, he raised his fist.

  ‘Our father may be dead, but we are brothers still,’ said Zytos. ‘Are we not enough?’

  ‘He is our primarch, Barek.’ Even saying it, Numeon knew it was no answer, no excuse. His fist unclenched. His arm dropped to his side. It was over.

  Zytos walked away, weary, and left Numeon alone to wallow in anger and self-pity.

  ‘Alive or dead,’ he said, leaving, ‘this would not be Vulkan’s will.’

  ‘I ask for nothing but hope,’ Numeon uttered to his back.

  ‘Then give it to us. But not like this.’

  Tensions flare between Numeon and Zytos

  Twenty-Six

  Broken brothers

  Battle-barge Charybdis, forges

  The metal bent and buckled, yielding to the blow.

  Gargo struck again, harder, and the chime of his hammer rang discordantly through the heady air. The muscles in one shoulder burned and beneath his armour his skin ran with sweat, but he would not relent.

  With a grunt, he struck a third time and split the grea
ve apart. It needed rewelding and pinning before it could see service again.

  Several other pieces, gorgets, vambraces, a dented cuirass, even a helm split across the join, lay on three metal workbenches in the Charybdis’s forges. Found below decks, near to the enginarium, the forges were immense but almost empty. With only sixty-six legionaries aboard the ship, Gargo had chosen one of the smaller forges equal to his needs.

  It was brazier-lit, the air thick with heat and dark with smoke. Soot clung to the walls, crawling up the internal buttresses. An anvil dominated the middle of the chamber and it was here that Gargo toiled in isolation.

  He had tasked himself with repairing the broken armour pieces from the mission to Rampart. Without imminent resupply or the possibility of reinforcement, the Salamanders could not afford to be profligate. Everything would be used and reused until it was broken beyond recall.

  Gargo had reworked several pieces already and they glistened fresh from dousing, exuding a quivering aura of heat. Every artistic flourish had been restored, and the black-smiter’s craft was almost without peer in the Legion with the exception of Master T’kell. Yet still he frowned whenever he looked at them. He glanced at the arm holding the tongs that snared the metal pieces in place. At one time, it had been his preferred hand to hammer with. Now, it could only clamp metal in place.

  He raised the fuller again, about to strike out a dent, when a voice from the darkness stopped him.

  ‘What will become of us, blacksmith?’

  Gargo turned to Xathen, who had been watching silently. A pall of smoke gusted from the corner of his mouth, inhaled from his rhaga pipe.

  ‘How long have you been sitting there?’

  ‘A while. What else is there to do while we sail the stars but wait?’

  Gargo carefully set the fuller down. It clanked dully against the surface of the anvil. He left the greave he had been reforging, dissatisfied with his efforts anyway.

  ‘Is that Vorko’s?’ Xathen asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  He nodded, impressed.

  ‘Didn’t think you would be able to fix it after a volkite.’

  ‘It isn’t fixed yet.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You need something, Xathen?’

  ‘An answer to my question.’

  ‘I don’t know what will become of us. But with Vulkan we can be Legion again.’

  ‘I’ve seen his body in that cargo bay Numeon is using for a shrine, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘You don’t believe Vulkan will rise again.’

  ‘Isn’t it somehow twisted to believe the dead can rise from the grave? Nothing that dies can ever come back the same.’

  ‘During the ancient days of Nocturne, it was believed possible. Devotees of the Promethean creed would daub their faces in white ash as part of a ritual to bring about resurrection.’

  ‘Did our Chaplain tell you that?’ Xathen already knew that he had.

  Var’kir knew much about the history of Nocturne, its customs and ceremonies. How they fitted into a secular galaxy, governed by the Imperial Truth, was a question no one had yet thought to ask, but it lingered, waiting, nonetheless.

  ‘He spoke the creed. I listened. It only affirmed to me that Vulkan yet lives.’

  Vulkan had tempered the creed and with his craft as a father and a black-smiter moulded his Legion into a better version of itself. From a spiral of self-immolation, he had given them not only the means to survive, but to flourish. It wasn’t in his deeds, but his wisdom.

  Xathen believed in the creed too, but his focus tended towards the volatile and the incendiary, the supremacy of fire. Temperance and pragmatism were neglected concepts in his character.

  ‘Alive, dead…’ Xathen shrugged. ‘I just want to kill traitors, brother. I breathe vengeance, my sustenance is retribution. I just want them to burn.’

  ‘And what about a higher cause?’

  ‘There is nothing else, nothing higher than that for me.’

  ‘Then why come here at all?’

  ‘I was bored.’

  Xathen got to his feet, done with self-flagellation for now. He doused the rhaga pipe, blowing out a last plume of clinker-like smoke.

  ‘We have never seen eye to eye, but we are brothers,’ Gargo told him. ‘This fatalism is destructive.’

  Xathen drew one of his blades and showed it to the light.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You forged it.’

  ‘I forged many of the Pyre’s weapons,’ said Gargo.

  Xathen shook his head as he examined the stunning blade. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This was before Macragge, before we became bodies for the pyre.’

  Unsure where this was going, Gargo let him speak.

  ‘The armour you forged for Numeon was a thing of beauty. Any master artisan would be justly proud. Not you though, Gargo.’ He smiled sadly. ‘This,’ he lifted the blade and turned it around in his grip before sheathing it, ‘and that armour… as night and day, brother.’ Xathen’s melancholy turned to anger. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t want blood for that, for everything you’ve lost.’

  Gargo looked at the armour pieces he had reworked, at the fine engraving and every ounce of craft he had invested in them.

  ‘Yes, I want blood for that,’ he said as he threw it all back into the forge fire, determined to begin again.

  Twenty-Seven

  Dying light

  Battle-barge Charybdis, novatum

  Circe saw only blackness. She was closeted within the narrow confines of her novatum away from the rest of the crew.

  Sparsely appointed, the chamber was austere in the extreme. These were not Circe’s quarters, though she spent a great deal of time in seclusion within them. The novatum was a bare metal hold, not much more comfortable than a cell. Appended to the bridge, secured in its upper vaults and accessible via a shallow walkway, it was nonetheless segregated and sealed off. It had enough room for a small cot bed. There were no mirrors, no reflective surfaces of any kind. A simple vox-unit linked her to the bridge below her and the lumens worked into the deck at her feet were kept low at all times. It was warm, stifling even, but she knew it would grow colder soon enough.

  An arcane circle delineated the area in which the Navigator would do her work. Circe was kneeling inside it, a metaphor for separation. Her gift was isolation. It was fear, segregation and the absolute certainty of never having a chance for a normal life. Her ‘warp eye’ as it was known, that which could perceive what all other sight could not, made her both incredibly valuable and almost universally loathed by her fellow man.

  Aside from a few rudimentary materials, the novatum’s only adornment was a tattered paper pict. As Circe closed her natural eyes, she caressed the faded vellum, imagining her fingers touched the face of the little girl captured forever upon it.

  A tear ran down her cheek, and she wiped it away with a frail hand.

  Circe engaged the vox and heard Lieutenant Esenzi’s voice crackle into life at the other end of the link.

  ‘Mistress.’

  Circe didn’t like that word, although she knew Esenzi meant nothing by it. She nodded.

  ‘I am prepared,’ she replied.

  ‘All hands ready.’

  She nodded again, trying to stifle a slight tremor of unease that had suddenly manifested in her gut. It felt like a spike of ice in the heady atmosphere of the novatum.

  ‘Shipmaster?’ she said, needing Adyssian’s confirmation though actually wanting to hear his voice.

  ‘At your will, Circe. Take us into the storm,’ he said, whispering. ‘Let the Emperor’s grace keep you and stave away harm.’

  ‘His light guides us…’ she whispered back, finishing the quote from the Lectitio Divinitatus.

  As she reached up to her silver circlet,
she trembled.

  Circe had to admit it. She was scared.

  Gird yourself, Navigator,+ a deeper, harsher voice intruded. Not through the vox-feed; this one spoke to her mind.

  Ushamann.

  Despite her unease about him, she was glad of the Librarian’s presence.

  Circe removed her band, exposing her third eye.

  Darkness unfurled before her, an endless night. Silence dulled her senses, both natural and preternatural, but not for long. Something moved in the shadow, a slowly uncurling tendril. It coiled and twisted, writhing as further tendrils unfurled, reaching for the Charybdis.

  Circe saw into the storm, not its heart but its virgin borders… and quailed.

  ‘There is no light…’

  Hold to your post,+ the stern voice told her.

  Like a thunderclap presages the breaching of the heavens and the deluge that follows, the silence broke and in its place came screaming.

  Circe gritted her teeth. She tasted blood. Her limbs trembled.

  The ship bucked, like a schooner struck by a plunging breaker as the Charybdis was tossed around in the storm.

  Pressing her feeble hands against her ears, she tried in vain to arrest the screaming.

  Maintain heading,+ said Ushamann, more strained than stern now.

  Circe could barely hear it. The screaming drowned out the words.

  ‘No light…’ she sobbed.

  Endless darkness, cold and suffocating, swallowed her.

  ‘No light…’

  She screamed too, her grasp slipping.

  Navigator!+

  Ushamann was too late.

  Circe fell, and the Charybdis fell with her.

  Twenty-Eight

  Tremors

  Battle-barge Charybdis, cargo decks

  A tremor rippled down the length of the ship. The lurching deck threw Zytos hard against the wall but he kept his footing. Others, mortals, in the corridor ahead of him fell. Some were injured. He saw a woman badly gash her forehead. She had been ushering a young girl to their quarters when the tremor hit.

  She looked like one of the refugees.