Deathfire

by Nick Kyme

  He left Basilysk in its holster, trusting to the sigil of Vulkan instead. No one questioned it. Most had seen or felt the power it held. How or why it had such power was impossible to say; all that mattered was they believed in it.

  Zytos hefted his hammer. The others had short combat blades and pistols, except Vorko, who carried a flamer.

  Fire and steel were a warrior’s most effective weapons against daemons, that and his innate will. The Ultramarine Aeonid Thiel had been adamant about that. The loss of Inviglio must have hurt him, Numeon thought, although he had masked it as they parted ways at Macragge. The Red-marked seemed a closely bonded order, not so different from the Pyre. An empty place lingered by Thiel’s side now, a gap where a brother should stand but where only a shadow lingered.

  Numeon had many such shadows by his side too, and shook his head to banish the memory.

  They are still torturing us, he thought, possessing enough self-­awareness to realise what was happening. Even in the Librarium, they were not safe. Though the wardings denied the physical presence of what they had come to call sirens, the minds of the Salamanders were still at risk.

  Numeon spared a glance for the huddled figures in the darkness they had to leave behind, clinging to each other as they clung to their shreds of sanity. Esenzi tried to rise.

  ‘Stay down,’ Numeon told the lieutenant. ‘Seal this door once we are through it. Do not open it again until Ushamann tells you.’

  Esenzi glanced nervously at the Librarian, whose teeth were clenched and whose eyes were now closed. Like Circe, he would fight his own battle as they rode the storm tides.

  ‘If we are successful, he’ll come back around.’ Numeon’s voice darkened. ‘If we fail, it won’t matter anyway. You have your sidearms?’ he asked both mortals.

  Esenzi nodded mutely. Adyssian stared at shadows, but still had his pistol.

  ‘Then you know what to do if something gets through that isn’t us.’

  ‘Take this,’ said Esenzi, gently removing the aquila charm from around her neck and giving it to Numeon. ‘To ward against evil.’

  The Pyre captain nodded, his fierce draconic eyes meeting the lieutenant’s and finding himself humbled by this simple act.

  ‘I shall return it.’

  ‘See that you do,’ she said.

  Numeon turned, his humanity spent for now. He needed a different aspect of his character to surface. Determination burned through his veins like fire. It stoked the furnace of his anger.

  Marshal it. Use it. Don’t allow it to use you.

  Vulkan’s wisdom. Numeon felt certain they would need it in the times to come.

  They would make for the generatorium and hope Gargo and Zonn still endured.

  Hand hovering just above the blast door’s release lever, Numeon paused.

  Across his helmet lens, he got a hazy visual, occluded by interference and other images, unreal phantasmal expressions created by the over-bleed of the warp.

  ‘Out there,’ he said. ‘Do not believe everything your eyes and senses tell you. Trust one another. Trust your instincts,’ he told them, guessing the visual feed would look the same for them too.

  Numeon engaged the release. Slowly, with grinding gear-shrieks, the blast door parted and admitted them beyond the Librarium to the rest of the Charybdis.

  Flickering half-light barely lifted the gloom in flashes of phosphor white. It did nothing to lessen the sense of foreboding out in the ventral access corridor to the Librarium.

  Diaphanous veils of plastek, insulation ripped from metres of cabling, gently swayed in front of them and obscured the view. Something else stirred in the artificial breeze generated by the ship’s atmosphere recyclers too, but Numeon tried not to dwell on that. It was thinly flensed and shone pale red in the phosphorous light. Parts of it, glimpsed between plastek sails, resembled faces, the stretched skin that had once been bound around limbs, a malformed tattoo, a piercing still lodged in the flesh, the hollows where the eyes had previously–

  Numeon shook his head and the veils became plastek again. Sweat from his brow ran down the bridge of his nose, inside his helm. A partial life support shutdown had made the Charybdis cold, yet he still perspired.

  After stepping beyond the threshold of the Librarium, Numeon raised his hand. ‘Hold here.’

  They needed to wait. Numeon told himself it was to ensure the blast door had sealed behind them, but the truth was somewhere nearer to the desire to wait and see what awaited them in the darkness.

  ‘Do you smell that?’ whispered Dakar.

  Numeon nodded, his eyes fixed on the shadow-haunted depths ahead. The ventral access corridor they occupied terminated in a junction, one starboard, one port, not quite aligned.

  ‘We all do,’ Zytos murmured, his fingers clenching tighter around the haft of his hammer.

  Sigils were revealed in the sharp stabs of light from the phosphor-­lumes. Dark, and jagged, they had been daubed crudely by inhuman hands. Numeon hadn’t seen them on the way in, and they glistened wetly.

  Faint giggling resolved on the air.

  ‘Shut it out,’ he told himself as much as the others. ‘Those things do not belong on this ship. I want them off. Scorch the decks black if you have to.’

  As they reached the junction, the giggling grew louder and deeper.

  ‘Find me a target,’ whispered Abidemi. The igniter on his flamer hissed. It almost began to sound like a voice shushing…

  More sails of plastek hung down this corridor, flapping quietly as before. Trunks of ducting ripped from the wall cavities lay strewn like intestines. Wires trailed from the damaged ceiling like veins.

  A blow hit the ship, briefly cutting out the lights. They were riding aetheric tides with a terrified steersman, caroming over waves of sentiment and emotion. The Charybdis had already taken a beating. Circe might even be dead, leaving them truly adrift.

  In the darkness, Numeon remained still. The others mirrored him, with Abidemi and Vorko facing the starboard corridor. Zytos and Dakar had their backs to them, facing to port and the other corridor.

  The awkward alignment put a few blade lengths between the squad as they tried to cover both approaches.

  ‘I see something,’ uttered Abidemi.

  So did Numeon.

  ‘She is here,’ he said.

  At the end of the corridor, just in front of the vent hatch, a small figure skipped into view. Her ragged, white dress came down to her knees. She whirled and sprang lithely on bare feet between the hanging strips of plastek.

  Gentle singing, a child’s voice, murmured across the vox.

  Numeon tried to get a reticule lock through his helm but the targeting crosshairs raced madly across his retinal display until he had to shut it down. What he saw through the bare lenses defied rational argument.

  Lank, dark hair fell across her face, obscuring her pallid features. No matter how mercurial she was, those drowned locks never parted.

  ‘Lost her again,’ said Vorko, advancing a few steps.

  Numeon hadn’t noticed him moving. ‘She’s right here.’

  ‘No. Still nothing. Find me a target.’ Vorko went on further.

  ‘Find me a target…’ a child’s voice whispered. She giggled, loud enough to spike Numeon’s audio.

  Scowling, he looked away from the capering child, still more than fifty metres distant, and saw Vorko well advanced into the corridor. Numeon lunged, grabbing Vorko’s shoulder guard and yanking him back. Tendrils of diaphanous white, reminiscent of a ragged dress, retreated from Vorko at the same moment.

  ‘Stay in formation,’ Numeon snapped. Visibly shaken, Vorko nodded.

  When Numeon looked back down the corridor, the girl was staring at him. She lifted her arm, but instead of a hand there was a claw and she wagged the pincer admonishingly.

  ‘Doesn’t take the bait.
’

  It was as if she were standing right next to him.

  ‘Doesn’t like the game…’

  Then her voice changed, becoming deeper, older, several voices, each one marginally out of synch with the others.

  ‘My sisters want to play.’

  One child became three.

  ‘That’s new…’

  Numeon had been about to voice a warning when Vorko lurched forwards. Blood teemed down his legs from a deep cut in his abdomen, so fine he had barely noticed.

  Before, the child had been content to merely taunt and deceive – now it wanted blood.

  ‘Our caress, our gentleness…’

  Snarling to deafen his mind to the voices, Numeon took up Vorko’s flamer and roared. ‘Destroy them!’

  Nozzle fully engaged, he unleashed a broad cone of flaming promethium into the corridor. Then another.

  One of the sisters went up in flames, hissing and screeching like a discordant bird as her dress ignited.

  ‘Three more behind us!’ shouted Zytos, as he, Abidemi and Dakar switched to bolt pistols. Blades would make certain of the kill, but for now they just had to keep the filth away from them. Numeon heard the hard staccato bangs and felt the resonance at the back of his skull as he released a third fiery burst. Blackened, the immolated siren collapsed and dwindled to ash.

  ‘Two more this side!’

  Dropping the flamer, Numeon pulled up his sword from where he had embedded it in the deck. With the other hand, he hauled Vorko up.

  ‘Are you dying here, brother?’

  Vorko slowly shook his head. He had already drawn his pistol.

  Numeon let him go then shouted to the others.

  ‘Moving now!’

  The Salamanders advanced together, Zytos moving up to the front with Numeon as Dakar and Abidemi took rearguard.

  Since leaving the Librarium, the engagement had ramped up considerably in intensity, but the legionaries were adapting.

  Numeon led them into the burning corridor. Plastek had melted down like wax in the inferno he had unleashed, dripping into long tendrils from ceiling to deck. Exposed for what they truly were, the sirens went on the offensive.

  Vorko put three shells in one of the sisters, only for her to spring back up. She was on him in seconds, raking furrows into the Salamander’s armoured chest as he screamed and fought.

  Numeon plunged Draukoros into her back. She shrieked, loud enough to put a crack in his eye lens. Her neck craned until she had turned almost all the way around to glare at him.

  ‘She cuts out the other eye…’

  Ripping out his sword through the siren’s back ended her. Mouth stretched in a silent scream, she dissolved into visceral matter that bled through the fissures in the deck and was gone.

  So was Vorko. He slumped back against the corridor wall, failing to hold in his shredded intestines.

  Swearing vengeance, Numeon swung Draukoros around but found himself alone.

  The other siren had gone.

  Flickering phosphor light returned to the ship. The noise from the atmosphere recyclers reasserted itself.

  ‘Is it over?’ asked Dakar, frantically scanning for targets.

  ‘For Vorko, yes,’ Zytos replied sadly.

  Numeon had taken a knee next to the stricken Salamander.

  ‘What now?’ asked Zytos.

  Numeon wrenched off his helm, feeling a brief interlude of discomfort as his biology adjusted to the sudden change in atmosphere. His seeing eye was staring through a web of cracks anyway.

  ‘We part company.’

  Zytos turned sharply. ‘What?’

  ‘It is worse than I thought,’ said Numeon, regarding Vorko’s corpse. ‘The Word Bearers, the hellspawn they have brought aboard this ship…’ He glanced down at the sigil gripped tightly in his hand. ‘Find the others, regroup. I am headed to the sanctum.’ Numeon arose and turned to meet Zytos’s blank helmet lenses. ‘This isn’t obsession or dereliction, brother. I have to protect the primarch. In my gut, I know he is under threat.’

  ‘He is well guarded, brother,’ Zytos replied.

  ‘And yet we have no word, no sign from Orhn and Ran’d.’

  ‘Xathen roams those corridors as we speak, brother.’

  ‘We too were patrolling when we ended up on one of the sealed decks. What we saw… I do not believe it was purely a manifestation of the sirens.’

  ‘You think it was real?’

  ‘Why else would he have bade you stop, Zytos? Even in death, he watches over us and now I must watch over him in return. Ever since Traoris, I have known this was my duty.’

  Zytos and Numeon clasped forearms, sealing their warriors’ pact.

  ‘Save our father, and I’ll save the ship.’

  Forty-Seven

  Interlopers

  Battle-barge Charybdis, cargo hold

  Unconsciousness had been momentary, but when Hecht came back around the Preacher was gone.

  He staggered, rising then falling against the wall and holding on to it for support as he regained some autonomy over his body. It was not just his body that had betrayed him, though. His mind had also been compromised.

  Two personalities shared the same psyche, and vied for dominance. He was Kaspian Hecht and he was Barthusa Narek, their objectives so closely aligned that whatever neural conditioning he had received had misfired and left him in this schizophrenic state.

  Quor Gallek had seen it and the revelation of that when confronted by Hecht’s conscious mind had briefly broken him. However hard he tried, as either Narek or Hecht, he could not remember what had been done to him or what deeply buried imperative he had been given to enact.

  He remembered his reflection, and how it had looked strange and yet utterly congruous at the same time. He knew he had a mission, and had always known, only the nature of it eluded him.

  ‘I am Kaspian Hecht,’ he murmured aloud, but didn’t find the words convincing. ‘I serve Lord Malcador as his Knight Errant, I–’

  No, you are Narek of the Word, his inner monologue told him, but even that rang hollow.

  A pool of blood lingered, bled from a gash in his head left when Quor Gallek had struck him. He regarded his reflection in it again, the noble features, the subtle adjustment to his physiognomy, the bleaching of flesh to render a blank canvas bereft of Colchisian script.

  He saw the chirurgeon’s marks, discerned the cuts and grafts, the skeletal realignment and muscle regrowth.

  I am remade, he thought.

  A mystery remained, though, one that pertained to his purpose. It was murky, as if overlapped by a film of memory that almost aligned with a previous impulse but was still fractionally out of synch and distorted like the blurring of deteriorated sight.

  ‘I am Barthusa Narek,’ he said aloud, although the face no longer matched the name, and with its utterance his purpose was revealed to him.

  His mission.

  To kill a primarch.

  Narek took up his fallen sword. Malcador’s lackeys had failed. Heading after Quor Gallek, he knew what he had to do.

  Quor Gallek left the corpses of the two legionaries in his wake as he searched for an obvious way to breach the sanctum. Through the murky glass, he could see the casket of the Lord of Drakes but had yet to lay eyes on the fulgurite.

  Again, he felt the psychic tether pull at his soul and knew he was running out of time.

  The door to the sanctum was little impediment in itself. Sealed and reinforced, it would deter most explosives and even hold up against magna-cutters for a while, but material obstacles posed no barrier to one who could move by immaterial means.

  Ingress meant siphoning off a further portion of his strength, a tightening of the noose around his soul, the very thing he had wagered even to get aboard the ship. But before this last bargain could be
struck, there was another impediment that must be overcome.

  Psychic wards had been carved around the doorframe, invisible to both mortal and transhuman eyes but not to an apostle of the Word. They made for effective protection against the ritual and the arcane.

  Quor Gallek scowled, removing his helm so he could look upon the wards without the barrier of glass lenses impeding him. It would take time to remove them. He took off a gauntlet and unsheathed a serrated knife, laid the blade hard across his palm and clenched it. He then dragged the bloodied knife across the wards and painstakingly scratched each one out, muttering canticles of desecration and unholy worship.

  Nothing that was could not be undone, such was the will of Chaos.

  Alone, Numeon realised he was vulnerable but he hoped he would bypass the sirens unnoticed, at least until he reached the sanctum.

  Calling up a schematic of the ship, he blink-clicked for diagnostic reports, including the hermetic integrity of Vulkan’s resting place.

  Still secure.

  There was some relief in that.

  A sudden tremor shook the hull, throwing Numeon to his knees. He grimaced as a spike of pain shot up his leg. Groaning armour plate from the Charybdis’s exterior sounded through the hull. Each successive blow was slowly taking the ship apart. Another hard impact slammed Numeon against the deck. A third hurled him into the wall.

  Frenetic light flicker indicated an imminent power outage. Klaxons kept up their cacophony of shrieking.

  Numeon bit his tongue to focus, shrugging off the dizziness. He grabbed fistfuls of dangling wires and latched on to every internal protruding buttress, hauling his way across the deck.

  An icon flashed up urgently on his retinal display.

  A vertical-conveyor that led to the lower decks and the sanctum was situated nearby. In a second, the reading went from secure to in danger of imminent breach.

  ‘Vulkan…’

  Could he trust what he was seeing? He decided he could not afford not to.

  Numeon took the conveyor.

  Thundering down the conveyor shaft, Numeon held the rail as the carriage shuddered. As the air rushed past, feelings of guilt began to manifest. He had left Zytos and the others to face horror alone. He had forsaken brothers for father, a body lying in stasis.