Deathfire

by Nick Kyme

  Not everyone in the scattered Legion had seen and fought against the unnatural. At least, they hadn’t knowingly. Unburdened, Never­born, they had several names and all anyone knew for sure was they were old, powerful and dangerous.

  ‘Hold this door,’ Numeon told the two line troopers. ‘Nothing enters, nothing leaves without our say so. Once Zytos and I have cleared the bridge, follow up as rearguard. Understood?’

  The two nodded, as Numeon turned back to his sergeant.

  ‘You and I are going in.’

  Zytos confirmed his readiness. His fists clenched around the haft of his thunder hammer.

  Then the blast doors parted, admitting them to a scene of visceral carnage. The bridge had become an abattoir, barely recognisable behind a veil of gore. Bodies were strewn about, some facedown, slain as they fled, others impaled by struts of rebar wrenched from the walls. The hot metal stink of freshly spilled arterial blood throbbed on the air, churning through the atmosphere recyclers until they slowed and clogged.

  Deep crimson, accented by the intermittent flash of stark overhead lumes, painted every surface. Frozen expressions of horror, bent and broken limbs were captured in the light.

  Corpses suspended from the ceiling by their own intestines swayed gently like dormant marionettes. They were dolls, mere playthings to whatever monster had torn and tortured them.

  It was waiting in the shadows, though neither Salamander saw it at first.

  Zytos made the first error.

  ‘A survivor,’ he called out grimly to Numeon, who had moved to the other side of the bridge. Both Salamanders advanced slowly. With the atmosphere recyclers shut down, it was deathly quiet. The energy feed from Zytos’s thunder hammer gave off an irritated hum as he crept towards the little girl. She was hiding under a console, just visible between the legs of a servitor who had been bifurcated across the waist. For the moment, it was impossible to find the torso amongst all the other body parts.

  ‘Clear the room first,’ Numeon told him.

  ‘It’s a child, brother.’

  Zytos had almost reached her when he saw the blood. It was the pattern of it that gave him pause. Her white dress was pristine. Her little feet left prints across the entire deck. In places, they didn’t look like a little girl’s feet any more. Zytos couldn’t see her face. Too much hair, too black, too lank, too long, hung over it. But her hands were so bloody, like she had dug them into the deep red places of these poor souls and just ripped.

  So he paused, the hand reaching out to cradle her into the light clenching into a fist.

  ‘Numeon!’

  She shrank back, giggling in two voices blended together but slightly out of synch.

  Zytos’s blow crushed the remains of the servitor and sundered the console in a welter of sparks and twisted metal. He kicked aside what was left, but the girl was no longer there.

  She was hiding at the back of the room, in the shadow of the blanked viewport.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here…’ she uttered, sounding disturbingly like Arikk Gullero, though the first officer of the Charybdis had been amongst the first corpses they had found.

  ‘Leave this ship, you fiend!’ Numeon was moving around to outflank the girl even as Zytos came at her directly.

  Her head snapped around, still obscured by all that hair, though there was something writhing and serpentine about it now.

  ‘Vulkan is dead,’ she spat, giggling, the deep and resonant voice her own at last. ‘No one believes you. Vulkan is dead. You can’t come back. No one comes back.’

  The Salamanders got to her at the same time, but as she backed away from their raised weapons, she became one with the shadows.

  Zytos cast about, looking for her.

  Numeon sheathed his sword. ‘She’s gone. Don’t waste your efforts, brother.’

  ‘What was that thing? Like Xenut Sul?’

  ‘Hecht said we would face worse in this storm.’ Numeon regarded the charnel pit before them. ‘This horror is worse.’ He paused, his hand slipping back around the grip of Draukoros.

  There was a survivor, a tiny figure shuffled tight into an alcove. Spattered with blood, almost wrenched into a foetal position as she was, he barely recognised Lyssa Esenzi looking up at him from across the bridge with terrified eyes.

  Numeon released his grip on his sword and went over to her.

  ‘Throne of Terra…’ breathed Zytos as he looked down at the dishevelled officer.

  Numeon had sunk to his haunches and removed his helmet so as to be less intimidating. He laid Vulkan’s sigil down in front of him, so he could keep it in sight at all times. It still felt warm to the touch and gave off a faint aura of heat. It had started doing so since just before they had entered the bridge.

  ‘Are you injured, lieutenant?’ Numeon asked gently, but used her rank to remind her who she was, and of her duty to the ship.

  Esenzi slowly shook her head.

  ‘I don’t…’ she began, struggling to form the words. ‘I don’t think so.’

  She was covered in so much blood, it was hard to tell if any of it was hers.

  She held on to something, a small charm that she had hidden beneath her uniform. Delicately, though her hands were tiny in his, Numeon eased Esenzi’s fingers open so he could see it.

  It was a simple gold aquila, strung on a thin chain around Esenzi’s neck. On the back, she had etched a symbol of a hammer. Vulkan’s symbol.

  ‘I prayed,’ she gasped, relieved to confess but also fearful of what the secular legionaries might do. Religiosity was a heretic sin, but the Emperor’s enlightenment had seen its share of challenges to that belief.

  Numeon gave her a sad smile as he closed Esenzi’s fingers back around the charm. ‘Keep this close,’ he told her. ‘Show no one.’

  Zytos had seen everything but said nothing. Like Numeon, he had witnessed things beyond the ken of mortal understanding, things that defied the bastions of reason and left few explanations beyond the arcane.

  Numeon rose to his feet and beckoned the others to come in.

  ‘We need to keep her safe and find Adyssian,’ he told Zytos.

  ‘We can’t do that here.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Then where?’

  The vox crackled over the feed, the first time any contact had been made with it in a while.

  It was Zonn.

  ‘Something has been interfering with our communications, brother-captain,’ said the Techmarine. ‘I believe we have just met it down on one of the ghost decks.’

  ‘A little girl in a white dress?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Any casualties?’

  ‘We fired first and forewent the interrogatives.’

  Numeon raised an eyebrow at the Techmarine’s apparent callousness. ‘You opened fire on a child?’

  ‘She wasn’t breathing and had survived temperatures inimical to human function. I also noticed a tiny fissure in our warp shielding before Gargo and I made contact. It suggested something unhuman had made its way aboard our vessel. The Geller field is suffering in the storm. Cracks are forming.’

  ‘Is that how it breached our defence?’

  ‘I think it was already inside, brother-captain. Someone brought it here with them, though you will need to ask Ushamann or our grey legionary how that was possible. It is beyond my expertise to explain.’

  ‘Understood. Secure the deck and get back up here. I am locking down this entire ship so we can hunt and kill this thing.’

  Zonn gave an affirmative and cut the link.

  Zytos glanced at Esenzi, before nodding to the others and finally looking at Numeon. ‘If Zonn saw her down in the ghost decks, and we just saw her here on the bridge…’

  ‘There is more than one. A plague has come aboard this vessel. Of what, I have only a vague idea.’
r />   ‘Should we drop out of the warp?’

  It was a valid suggestion, but not really tenable.

  ‘Too much risk to both Navigator and our Librarian. I doubt the Charybdis would take it, either.’

  ‘Then we have to fight.’

  Numeon smiled savagely. ‘We have been fighting all our lives, Zytos.’ He looked to Dakar and Abidemi. ‘You two link up with Vorko and get Lieutenant Esenzi below decks to Ushamann’s Librarium. I can’t think of a safer place right now. And seal this damn bridge. It’s no use to us at the moment anyway.’

  ‘What about Circe?’ asked Zytos. ‘Her novatum is part of the bridge. She’ll be trapped too.’

  ‘And all the safer for it. Circe can’t be interrupted. We all almost died last time she lost concentration. She stays.’

  There was no question as to whether she had survived or not. Her novatum was warded against intrusion. If she had died, everyone aboard would know about it by now.

  ‘And us?’

  ‘You and I, Zytos, are going to find our errant shipmaster. We’ll need him and the lieutenant here again once we leave the warp.’

  ‘He said he was going to his quarters, before…’ Esenzi had found the strength to get to her feet, but still couldn’t fully absorb the terror of what she had survived.

  Numeon gently laid his gauntleted hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Then that’s where we begin. Thank you, lieutenant. You’re under our protection now. My legionaries will not leave your side.’

  She nodded, trying not to look at the carnage of her crewmates, trying not to tremble too much and to show courage in the face of her noble lords.

  ‘Vulkan lives,’ Numeon told her softly, and Esenzi touched the charm she had secreted back beneath her uniform.

  ‘May he protect you as he did me, my lord.’ She reached out to touch a patch of ash scorched onto Numeon’s armour. Then, with her finger, she daubed a sigil upon her cheek. It was an old ritual, Promethean in origin. Perhaps she had learned it from one of the legionaries aboard. Xathen was a warrior ascetic, it could have been him. Regardless, the sigil meant ‘protection’.

  Numeon let her go. Something was changing within the Pyre, and that included the ship’s crew. Belief, but in something older. He should have chastised her, upholding the secular over the superstitious, but daemons were aboard his ship. Actual daemons that defied nature and encouraged the terrifying belief in old, malicious gods. Numeon thought on it no further. It was time to go find Adyssian, if he still lived.

  Adyssian fled. He fled without knowing where he was going or what part of the ship he had blundered into. Blind panic had seized him, and the instinctive response was to run.

  Many times, especially since he had seen the refugee girl, Adyssian had imagined being reunited with his daughter. Clutching the tattered parchment pages of the Lectitio Divinitatus, he had prayed for it and rehearsed in his head what he might have said to his dear departed Maelyssa.

  Those words fled now, just as he fled from the revenant that had taken his daughter’s form.

  ‘Daddy, daddy, daddy…’

  The echoing voice that chased him chilled his marrow so deeply that Adyssian was almost unable to speak. Defiance and a desire for retribution against the thing that had so corrupted his memory of Maelyssa gave him the courage he needed.

  ‘Shut up! Be silent! You are not my daughter…’ He sobbed, the grief of years ago relived again. ‘Maelyssa is dead.’

  ‘I’m here, daddy. Don’t leave me. Chase! Chase!’

  She giggled, the thing that wore a version of Maelyssa’s flesh, and as Adyssian rounded the next corner, trying to shut his senses to it, he saw her waiting at the next junction.

  ‘Oh Throne…’ He staggered, slowing to a fumbling, drunken walk.

  The deck lurched, and Adyssian was thrown hard into the wall. The girl didn’t move, but remained rooted, silently beckoning him.

  Adyssian’s hand slid against an access panel in the wall. The door it opened led to the armsmen barracks. He dared not think what this thing might do to him if it caught him. He needed help. Using his shipmaster’s override, he disengaged the lock. The door slid open a fraction, revealing a sliver of a deep red room that stank of sweat and hot iron. It jammed and when he looked up, Adyssian saw why.

  Ushamann stood over him, his stern faced etched with concentration. His eyes had a cerulean glow as he focused his attention on the girl.

  ‘Burn the witch!’ she giggled, advancing towards them both at speed.

  ‘You and I are leaving, shipmaster,’ Ushamann told him. He raised his hand and the girl stalled as if caught in psychic aspic. Sweat already beading his forehead, Ushamann closed the barrack room door and left Adyssian with only a hint of the horror within.

  ‘Where?’ he asked, transfixed by the sight of the girl’s limbs as they writhed against containment. ‘Where is there that’s safe aboard this ship?’

  Ushamann grimaced with sustained effort. ‘I know a place. Follow me now.’

  Together, they retreated down the corridor. Adyssian had only turned away briefly, but when he looked back the girl had disappeared.

  ‘She–’

  ‘Will return,’ said Ushamann.

  ‘What does she want?’

  ‘She hungers, shipmaster. She wants to feast.’

  Forty

  Them or us

  Battle-barge Charybdis, lower decks

  Var’kir led a twenty-strong cadre of the Pyre through the lower decks. All efforts to rouse the ship’s armsmen had failed. Vox was reaching the barracks, but no answer ever came back from the Chaplain’s hails.

  They were under attack. Again.

  How these attackers had come to be aboard and suddenly every­where seemed impossible. No teleportation signature had been detected, no breach by conventional means. Something else, then – something unknown, and no doubt tied to the warp.

  Another vessel, markedly smaller than the Charybdis but too large to ignore, had abruptly appeared in the storm. Since no sane traveller would brave this tempest, the Chaplain could only assume their enemies had found them again.

  Of the girl, neither he nor Hecht had seen any sign. But she was still present on the ship; Var’kir could almost detect her by the profound sense of unease he felt in his gut. His face still throbbed painfully, though his transhuman physiology was doing its best to deaden it.

  She was a harbinger, a distraction to allow their true enemy passage aboard the Charybdis. Her appearance only made the other vessel’s arrival beyond coincidental. And when he saw its designation scroll across the data-feed in his retinal display, the pieces came together.

  Monarchia.

  Var’kir’s lip curled with the taste of revenge not yet sated.

  It was less subtle than the first attack, and confined to the foredecks and lower ship hold. It happened fast but did not come at the hand of Neverborn or Unburdened.

  Bearers of the Word stalked the Charybdis, their bodies cast through the warp by the will of their Chaplain and the dark entities he served.

  Var’kir recognised him, although the preacher wore Colchisian-etched, baroque war-plate, not the incarnadine robes Numeon had described.

  Chaplain met the gaze of Chaplain across a long stretch of abandoned deck. Philosophies, both old, both anathema to one another, collided in that glance.

  Var’kir snarled.

  Both gave the order to fire simultaneously and the corridor thundered to the roar of competing bolter storms.

  Several legionaries from either side were hit before the majority found cover in the alcoves and behind minor bulkheads. The dead were left out in the open, as the injured were dragged aside. Every scrap of metal that stood between body and bolt was sought. Some legionaries fired from a braced kneeling position, others stood and loosed snap shots or blind-fired around pilla
rs and stanchions. Dispensed shell casings began to fill the void between, and muzzle flare flashed like dying stars in the gloom.

  ‘They’re falling back,’ said Ungan. From Hesiod, Ungan had been a vox-master before the massacre. Now he was a line legionary, and one of the brave souls at Var’kir’s side. How quickly fates could change during war.

  Another one of those souls Var’kir knew less well, and had scarcely trusted until he had saved his life in the solitorium.

  Kaspian Hecht shook his head, speaking between single, pinpoint-­accurate bolt shots.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. They’re headed to an objective, leaving stragglers to slow us down.’

  A Word Bearer jerked back as his visor exploded, taking most of his skull with it. A second spun and crashed into the wall, bouncing back into the hail of fire with his throat already shot out.

  Var’kir had been checking the tactical display overlaid on his left eye lens. This was only one of several engagements happening at the same time across the Charybdis.

  We need more men, he thought, bitterly. Sixty-something legionaries to defend a vessel this size against a foe that could appear almost anywhere and without warning… There were too many vulnerabilities to protect at once.

  ‘How did they even penetrate the ship without us knowing?’

  ‘I can think of one explanation,’ answered Hecht, dispatching another Word Bearer with a kill-shot and revealing the retreating form of the enemy Chaplain behind him.

  Var’kir tried not to imagine the power an individual like that would have within the storm. He focused on being pragmatic instead.

  ‘Where are they going?’

  ‘Judging by the incendiaries those rear rankers are carrying, I’d say they mean to destroy something important,’ said Ungan.

  Sudden acuity manifested in Var’kir as if he had looked into the flame and seen the truth of his enemy’s intentions.

  ‘They want to bring down the Geller field and swarm this entire ship with hellspawn. That girl, that wretch, was just the vanguard.’

  Hecht nodded as the shells caroming off their cover lessened with the rapid redeployment of the Word Bearers.