Deathfire

by Nick Kyme

  He crushed down the feeling, knowing it was the sirens’ influence, or perhaps just the unnatural distemper created by the storm. Either way, Numeon’s mind was stronger. He mastered his emotions, cleaving to his purpose and his duty.

  ‘Rise for us now, Vulkan,’ he whispered, his voice stolen by the urgency of his descent.

  Reaching the lowest deck of this part of the ship, Numeon wrenched open the cage and hurried to the sanctum. The lower decks were empty, and the ship resounded to the drumming of his footfalls. As he neared the door to the sanctum, he realised he was not alone, even though he had met no one on the way there. Not only that, but Numeon had been lured to this place.

  ‘She is here…’

  Quor Gallek erased the last of the wards, his face awash with feverish sweat. The exertion came from holding on, from the tether heaving at his soul. He had sunk to his knees to remove the final protective sigil and it took effort to rise again.

  He reached for his discarded helm but decided to leave it behind. The close metal confines would only stifle what little breath he had. Marshalling his strength, he uttered a further incantation and stepped through the door as if it were as incorporeal as mist. The warp had bled over the ship – not enough for an incursion of any significance but sufficient for Quor Gallek to pass through solid adamantium and emerge into the sanctum.

  Reverently, for this was still a primarch before him, Quor Gallek removed the lid to Vulkan’s sarcophagus. He slid it aside just enough so he could reach the fulgurite. Even to Quor Gallek’s practised eye, the Lord of Drakes appeared deep in preternatural slumber. Vulkan gripped the haft of a huge hammer, laid across his chest, and the scalloped armour that clad his body was funereal. They were taking him to his final rest, burning him to ash in the fires of their world. Quor Gallek was no authority on the customs of other Legions, but he knew enough to realise that this was what the Salamanders were planning.

  His eyes strayed to the prize he had long sought, that which Elias had squandered.

  ‘Impaled like the blood-drinking striganoi of myth, or the kingmaker of Albion fable…’ breathed Quor Gallek, recalling Terran legends of night-haunting fiends and stone kings of old. Awed by the sight of the artefact now within his reach, he hesitated before he touched it. ‘I wonder which you are closer to.’

  His fingertips brushed the end of the spear, then, as he grew more confident, wrapped around the haft.

  He felt… nothing and frowned, unsure of what he had expected.

  Narek had claimed to have received an epiphany. Truth, he had said. Eyes opened.

  Perhaps, Quor Gallek thought, he had already opened his eyes. He did wonder how this cold piece of uninspiring stone could lay low a primarch.

  To see it now, it seemed incredible.

  In spite of his doubts, he could not resist pulling on the spear. Unsurprisingly, it did not yield.

  Snorting in derision, he released the haft and instead drew the Asirnoth knife. Whether it was the essence of one primarch reacting to the other, or something else, the blade seemed to vibrate in Quor Gallek’s hand.

  Destiny, now so imminent, caused his heart to thunder.

  He raised the knife above his head, vaguely aware of another presence in the corridor outside the sanctum. It didn’t matter, he was too close now to be stopped. The fulgurite would be his. And with it, he would–

  Quor Gallek convulsed as the immense psychic presence he had felt closing on the Charybdis suddenly came into being. There was only enough time for the slightest cut to claim but a sliver of what he actually wanted. Snarling with frustration, he released the tether and the sanctum faded, replaced by a blinding light…

  Quor Gallek, Dark Apostle of the Word Bearers

  The little girl in the ragged white dress, all alone, stood barefoot in Numeon’s path. Between the strands of her tumbledown hair, he caught a glimpse of malicious inhuman eyes. Too large, too black, they beckoned him unblinking.

  ‘She cuts out the other eye…’

  Numeon brandished Draukoros, and smiled.

  ‘It cuts out your daemon heart.’

  Then his smile faded, usurped first by grief and then anger as he saw the slain. Orhn and Ran’d were dead, each impaled on the other’s blade, turned by some primordial evil that Numeon did not understand but now accepted as real.

  Superstition versus science, enlightenment proven false before the evidence of the arcane and the eldritch. It had turned Horus, he who was meant to be the best of them. What chance had Orhn and Ran’d had against that?

  And yet, Numeon still resisted. Others resisted, his father amongst them. A grim darkness had been revealed by this war but it was not without its bastions of light.

  And in that small moment of revelation, Numeon knew one thing for certain.

  Vulkan had to return.

  ‘Step aside, wretch.’ He bared his teeth behind a mask that had fangs of its own.

  The girl smiled coyly. She had fangs too, to go with her talons.

  ‘Sacred is six and six is sacred,’ she said shrilly in a sing-song voice.

  Numeon’s boldness took a back step as five more sirens emerged from dark alcoves and shadows where there had previously been nothing but air.

  He raised the sigil, holding it out before him, and felt emboldened.

  ‘I am sending you back to the aether,’ he promised. ‘Now get away from my father!’

  The sisters seemed to hesitate at the sight of the primarch’s icon clenched so vehemently by one of such belief. For a moment, Numeon dared to hope it might shield him long enough to reach Vulkan.

  ‘She cuts off his hand. She kills the father…’

  The sirens drifted closer as one, their tiny feet making no sound against the deck as they moved.

  Numeon gave Draukoros a practice swing to loosen his wrist and shoulder. Its teeth whistled as they carved through air.

  ‘Blind and one-handed, I would still defy–’ His words stuck in his mouth. The sisters had stopped moving. Everything had. Even the dust motes cascading through shafts of phosphor light had ceased. Condensation dripping off the pipes, smoke rising from vents, sparks flaring from shorting wires, all in stasis.

  His beating heart like a drum, his breathing a thunderous report, Numeon drank in the quietude and tried to understand why he could still move. Realisation was not long coming.

  ‘You are lost, Artellus,’ a voice uttered, brittle and rasping.

  A figure stood before the door of the sanctum, too large for a legionary.

  A primarch.

  Numeon fought the urge to kneel as an incredible sense of immense power and potency fell upon him. He dared to hope, but saw that hope quickly dashed as the primarch stepped from the shadows, or perhaps willed himself to appear.

  Bronze skin, flaking to a rough patina of oxidised green. Armour of baked leather, cracked and split. A staff, clutched in thin fingers, gnarled and twisted. Limbs, brittle, colonised by sharp protrusions. One eye, the other a cruel slit cut between scar tissue.

  The Cyclops.

  ‘Beyond all reach… except mine.’

  Arrogant. Omniscient.

  Magnus the Red.

  Forty-Eight

  The King in Crimson

  Battle-barge Charybdis, cargo hold

  Numeon cowered before the almighty primarch of the Thousand Sons. Not out of fear – it wasn’t a psychological reaction to the Crimson King’s presence – but rather he knelt out of compulsion. Despite the urging of his mind, the Salamander’s legs became leaden and his head lowered in forced supplication. Only his eyes were upraised, wary but defiant as Numeon glared at the primarch.

  It was hard to hold his gaze. A volatile aura bled off Magnus the Red, so hot that it burned to look at it. It was echoed in his barbed appearance.

  He was not as Numeon remembered – although that meeting
, long ago, had been brief. Here, in this moment, he seemed almost... diminished, as if somehow fractured. It was beyond Numeon to fathom how or why, but the impression of it was strong.

  ‘I have wandered the storm,’ uttered Magnus, ‘and know what lurks within its turbulent seas, as I know what resides within you, Numeon.’

  Beyond rumours, little was known about the fealty of the Thousand Sons. Scant reports had reached the survivors of Isstvan V of the greater war, and few of these could be verified. Even within Imperium Secundus, Numeon had gleaned only scraps of what the Ultramarines knew. Information was thin, occluded by oceans of doubt and silence.

  Magnus might be loyal to the Throne or in league with Horus; Numeon could not tell the primarch’s allegiance merely by looking at him.

  All he discerned was anger. And condescending amusement.

  ‘Doubt,’ said Magnus, and a cruel smile played across his lips. ‘It hollows you as surely as any knife.’

  Numeon wanted to deny it, to declare his faith and purpose, but felt it would be an extremely poor decision to interrupt the demigod before him.

  If Magnus had heard these thoughts, he did not show it. Instead, he scraped his nails across the inner hull and raked his staff across the deck beneath, as if amused at the ship’s ragged state of disrepair.

  ‘Hurling yourselves into the warp without thought or concern as to what you do, or the nature of the ocean you sail. Such ignorance,’ he sneered, ‘such hubris. Wayward souls, all of you, at my mercy.’

  Numeon felt his skin prickle in reaction to the heat of the Crimson King’s aura, but he did not flinch. He felt the knife-edge they were balanced on, and saw the abyss plunging away on either side of it. He began to understand that Magnus stood on the same edge, destined to fall to a different fate and currently deciding which he should condemn Numeon and his brothers to. The primarch leaned forwards, as if he were getting a better look at Numeon’s soul.

  ‘So lost, but you are the one who has truly lost his way.’

  ‘We are lost,’ said Numeon at last, trying to rise but finding the effort beyond him. He wanted to grasp the fuller for reassurance, for another miracle, but whatever power it possessed was wise enough to lie dormant in the presence of the primarch.

  Magnus looked down on him as a king might a peasant, or a man an ant.

  ‘Help us,’ Numeon pleaded, realising he would have to convince the primarch of their plight. ‘Help my father, your brother.’

  Magnus smiled, though it was crooked and more like a scowl.

  ‘You believe I can?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps I am a revenant, a shard, a figment, an aspect of your fevered mind made manifest?’

  ‘You look as flesh and blood as I, as my father.’ Numeon gestured to the sanctum.

  Magnus stood straighter, leaning hard on his staff to do so.

  ‘Vulkan.’ His eye narrowed, releasing a spider’s web of wrinkles across his face. ‘You seek to bring him back.’

  Numeon lifted his chin. It took a supreme effort of will to raise his hands and take off his helm. He wanted to look the Crimson King in the eye before declaring, ‘Vulkan lives.’

  A mote of sadness passed over the primarch’s face, darkening it further, but in melancholy not wrath.

  ‘He is dead. Vulkan is dead.’

  ‘No.’ Numeon shook his head vehemently. ‘I refuse to accept that. I refuse to–’

  ‘You refuse?’ Magnus bellowed, lurching forwards to tower over the kneeling Salamander. ‘It is not a request. My brother is gone, his mind fled and his essence scattered. You ferry a corpse, nothing more.’

  Numeon wanted to lash out, to plunge his blade into this mendacious creature, but he knew his life would end the moment he raised his hand in anger.

  ‘He lives,’ he said instead.

  ‘You believe…’

  ‘So must you, or why else intervene?’ Numeon gestured to the frozen statues of the sirens.

  Magnus shrank down again, bent-backed and weary as he regarded one of the creatures.

  ‘Little daemonettes…’ His baleful eye lingered on the sirens. ‘They are Neverborn, soul-hungering husks of things, a wretched birthing of black emotion. They were made by mortals, as all such things are and ever will be. I have seen such wonders within the Eye…’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Magnus turned his baleful gaze on the Salamander. He was far from the resplendent primarch Numeon had heard Vulkan describe, but he was as arrogant and forbidding as expected.

  ‘Few do, except my father and I.’ A tremor of unresolved trauma flickered across Magnus’s face at the mention of the Emperor. ‘Lorgar too, perhaps, though my brother does tend to overreach.’

  ‘No,’ said Numeon. ‘I don’t understand why you are here. If it is to end us then end us. But the Magnus my father spoke of was wise and generous.’

  ‘Your father, eh? You think he knows me, my mind? I know his.’

  His face suddenly shifted as if his features were things of clay and an unseen hand had moulded them to the primarch’s whim. Brittle became solid, umber flesh darkened to the colour of onyx. His hunched back straightened. His limbs thickened and grew stronger. Bone cracked, as if physically breaking and reshaping at will.

  Armour that had been pitted and tarnished took on fresh lustre. The verdigris of age that colonised the bronze plates grew into an encompassing patina which shone vibrantly as the rigours of entropy regressed. Gilded edges emerged from greaves like petals reacting to the sun. His ragged cloak took on the permanence of scales. The mane of red hair, lank and dishevelled, withered away as if dragged back into a scalp of increasingly black skin.

  Head bowed, body shuddering, the primarch had become mythical Proteus of old, but his change was far from fluid. No flare of transformative light filled the cargo hold. It was pain, the agonised rendering of a brittle and broken thing into a more substantial form, bereft of rancour.

  Last were the eyes, and Numeon did not see them until the protean form looked up from its torturous change and met his terrified gaze.

  The light of embers burned within them, stunning Numeon into silence.

  ‘You have been seeking me, my son,’ said Vulkan, rising to his full height.

  Through sheer strength of will, Numeon overcame his paralysis and forced himself to his feet.

  He backed off a step, looking up at the Lord of Drakes.

  ‘A cruel trick,’ he breathed, shutting off his mind to the implications raised by the apparition. Was it so easy to create a simulacrum of his father? Could he have been fooled so easily before? ‘You are not him…’ He tried to glance past the primarch to where he knew his real father was still at rest, but couldn’t see the sanctum or the casket within. ‘This is a lie…’

  Vulkan moved so quickly that Numeon barely had time to register it before a scalloped gauntlet was locked around his throat.

  ‘A lie, is it?’ The voice was deep and venomous, the tone Vulkan’s but not the words. He snarled, revealing dragon-like fangs. Black scales manifested across his neck, obscuring the branding marks.

  Numeon choked, his neck constricting even in his armour, as he was lifted off the deck.

  ‘Is this how you treat your estranged father, come back from the dead?’ A nictitating membrane slid over the sclera of both eyes as Vulkan blinked.

  The fingers around Numeon’s throat tightened so much that he fought to answer.

  ‘You are not… my father.’

  Vulkan’s eyes blazed hotter, twin furnaces of anger. A forked and serpentine tongue slid between his lips to taste the air.

  ‘Am I not? Am I so different, Artellus? Nothing that comes back can ever truly be the same, so says the Circle of Fire.’

  Blackness crawled at the edge of Numeon’s vision, presaging unconsciousness. He fought to hold on a l
ittle longer.

  ‘You are not him… I am not sure… you are even… Magnus…’

  The tension around Numeon’s neck instantly relaxed as he was released. He clattered to the deck in a heap, gasping for breath and tearing off the gorget around his neck.

  Bitter laughter issued from the primarch’s lips. He shrank again, bent-backed and wretched, the drake armour spontaneously mottling with patches of dirty bronze and oxidised green. The onyx cracked and sloughed away like a snakeskin, revealing angry red beneath.

  The hair grew back, the limbs withered and the dishevelled form of Magnus the Red was restored.

  Hunched over, a lank mane of red hair partially obscuring his face, he glared.

  ‘How is it you have lived this long, Salamander, when my brother with all his gifts could not?’

  He laughed again, but this time Numeon thought he heard regret.

  ‘Vulkan will live again. I shall see to it.’

  A hacking, mirthless chuckle escaped Magnus’s lips.

  ‘Such arrogance. Do you believe that fate or destiny has brought you this far? Did you think my brother had some power of the warp?’ he asked, frowning with amusement. ‘That you do?’

  Now on his feet, Numeon refused to be cowed again.

  ‘I have witnessed miracles.’

  Magnus smiled, but the coldness of his lonely eye betrayed his intent.

  ‘A beacon that brought saviours to your rescue?’ he said. ‘Stalling the murderous rampage of Xenut Sul? Enduring a baptism of flame? The blow that shattered that Cataphractii war-plate? Are these the miracles of which you speak, Artellus Numeon? Tell me, how many times is it that you have cheated death?’

  ‘I–’

  ‘You died on Traoris, and have been enslaved to my strings ever since. I have watched over you, Numeon.’

  ‘Why? To what end?’

  ‘Vulkan is my brother, is that not reason enough?’

  ‘It makes no sense.’

  ‘Nothing about this war does,’ admitted Magnus, and there was melancholy in his voice. He looked away, as if searching inwardly. ‘I had to see if I had it in me.’