Old Earth

by Nick Kyme

  Zytos tried to recoil but could not. His hammer fell loose by his side, useless in the thrall of the dark glass holding him against his will, seizing every limb in ice.

  He reached out determined to shatter the glass and undo whatever enthralment had been inflicted on him, when he saw a gauntlet grown ugly with talons, the metal black and corrupted.

  ‘It cannot be…’ he gasped, looking down and seeing the reality of his horrific transformation, unable to prevent it. ‘It cannot be!’

  He roared, defiant, and a serpentine tongue slipped from the mouth of his war-helm to taste the air.

  ‘It cannot–’

  ‘Barek!’

  Zytos felt himself yanked hard away from the tower. As he sprawled onto his back, half-mad with the visions, a hammer blow cracked the glass and banished the grim reflection.

  A firm hand gripped Zytos around the forearm, prodigious strength hauling him to his feet.

  ‘Barek,’ urged Vulkan, ‘draw your weapon. They are here.’

  The frost swathed the dark moor, cracking across the menhirs and shawling the rough glass like a cloak.

  It was their sign, he realised. The shadows in the fog.

  Groggy, Zytos found the haft of his thunder hammer and felt sense return. He was as he had always been, a Salamander. Vulkan had broken the grim fiction that assailed him.

  Other images filled the glass now, not reflections but captured shadows, dividing along every fracture caused by Vulkan’s blow, lethal, corporeal and manifold.

  Overhead, the fell birds returned, cawing an announcement.

  Images filled Zytos’ mind.

  Long, lank hair the colour of winter flows on an unfelt breeze…

  Skin black as oil, rune etched in smoking viridian, shimmers…

  A hooked blade, a curved sickle, a serrated sword, their edges catch the light…

  Dirty skirts of ragged brown leather, tied with braided sinew draped languidly as…

  …a hand engulfed in green fire reached out through the glass.

  A shadow-thing sprang at Vulkan, who struck as it leapt for him, obliterating bone that was not bone, sundering flesh that dispersed into tatters of night. It came from the dark, its presence in the glass another lie.

  Vulkan felled another as it bled from the shadows, his unyielding hammer reducing it to ragged strips of darkness that drifted in the wake of his swing like tossed feathers.

  A third appeared in the wake of the second, and Vulkan crushed it, the body dispersing into a fine black powder before dissipating on the breeze.

  ‘Barek!’ shouted Vulkan. The enemy ranks swelled. A ring of grinning shadows appeared, their eyes gleaming and malevolent, their hooked and sickle blades chiming.

  Zytos engaged. His first swing cut air as he misjudged the blow. A second fared no better, but earned mocking laughter. A blade struck into his side, biting, painful, and a rash of warning icons flared in his retinal feed. Zytos ignored them.

  He deflected a sickle aimed at his neck. It rang like a bell, the shadows cackling as they surrounded him, their faces twisting and reshaping. The blade had lodged fast, its wielder sawing eagerly.

  A thunder hammer cleaved air, and failed to land. Two slivers of jade narrowed, amused at an enemy thwarted.

  Zytos roared, venting his anger.

  The sickle returned, aimed high and glinting dully. A hammer’s haft repelled it, but missed the chain. His forearm ensnared with an adder’s swiftness, hauled off balance, Zytos stumbled.

  Yanked clear, the blade that had struck him left a gouge. Another blade hooked into the joint between greave and shoulder. Blood spouted from the wound, forcing a muffled cry from Zytos.

  Shadows rippled, bolder, hungry, finding nourishment. Faces shimmered, as cold malevolence turned to hunger. Maws opened, over-wide, fringed with needle teeth.

  ‘They feed on pain,’ said Vulkan, smearing a shadow-thing into the tower.

  Zytos snarled, his pride hurting more than his flesh.

  ‘Then feast on this!’

  The hammer swung side to side, a brutal pendulum at arm’s length. Two shadows died, one shattering as if had been blown from glass, while the other bled away like dispersing ink. No two deaths, if death was what truly had claimed them, were the same.

  A lamprey mouth latched on to his shoulder, biting deep. Zytos gave a strangled cry of pain then crushed the head and the shadow winked out, a light extinguished.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Abidemi cut one into smoke. His brother cleaved a savage circle with Draukoros, slicing off strips that drifted away like thin parchment, Numeon’s former sword reaping a tally.

  ‘Stand with me, brother,’ Zytos called to him, and they fought back-to-back.

  Vulkan fought alone, and gave no quarter.

  Beset by these wraiths, he took a measure that would have broken any corporeal foe, but the shadows were relentless.

  ‘Draaksward,’ he cried, ‘to my side!’

  Abidemi led a brief charge across the moorland and soon all three Drakes were united.

  The gunship circled above, harassed by flocks of dark birds, the emaciated ravens of the grove having reached them at last and reacted to the aerial threat. Gargo gunned them down with prow-mounted heavy bolters, and the air filled with rangy feathers and bloody sinew.

  He peeled off left, more ravens giving chase, unperturbed at their fellows’ destruction, and became a distant shape against the horizon.

  Before the tower, the wraiths attacked from every cleft, every scrap of darkness. The moors thronged with them, sibilant, half-seen, perfidious.

  Zytos and Abidemi held them back, cutting several down, but the tide kept rising.

  Vulkan hurled back a swathe of shadows and let the darkness take them, earning a few seconds’ respite.

  ‘Keep them back,’ he told his sons. ‘This only ends if we breach the tower.’

  ‘Breach it how, father?’

  ‘It is protected by a shadow field, Barek.’

  ‘A barrier?’ asked Abidemi, fending off two cuts with a single crossways slash of his sword. Both warriors looked battered, their armour split in over a dozen places. Blood dripped down Abidemi’s­ right gauntlet and ice numbed Zytos’ left leg, turning black around the greave.

  ‘A powerful one,’ replied Vulkan, ‘but it will yield to me.’

  The tower was the shadow field, realised Zytos. And he heard the blow against it like struck thunder…

  But it did not yield.

  Vulkan swung again, two-handed, putting all of his strength into the blow. The tower cracked. Fissures ran across the glass like ugly veins, but as they did, the older cracks resealed. Every fresh attack undid the damage of the last.

  Determined to breach the tower, Vulkan unleashed a hail of blows but did no better than before.

  He looked at the talisman of seven hammers, but it didn’t move. Its purpose remained mysterious. As his fingers touched the fulgurite, he felt the tremble of god-power within but knew this was not the way either. How he knew these things, how he had acquired these instincts, Vulkan could not articulate, but he had returned from the dead in possession of hitherto unknown knowledge. Matters were becoming clearer, but gaps in his understanding yet remained.

  Rather than trying to grasp something beyond his reach, Vulkan focused instead on what he did know.

  He had come here before, long ago. His warriors had reached the tower. It was a gateway, he knew this, but it was more than that. It led to another place first, to the hunter of heads and a dark refuge. A lair. A thwarted predator denied his due.

  Lowering the hammer, Vulkan leaned close to the glass, so close his hot breath fogged against a frosty pane

  ‘I’m here, Kheradruakh,’ he whispered.

  The hail of his father’s blows still rang in his ears, and Zytos glanc
ed over his shoulder in the hope of seeing the tower broken. Instead he saw ice riming empty footprints and no sign of Vulkan.

  Six

  An old debt, remembered

  The chill of the dark moor abated, swallowed by a subterranean swelter. It smelled of damp and animal sweat, a fever heat. Down here, wherever here was, the air grew thick with a fug of cloyingly fecund earth. Spores hung in unseen updraughts, clinging like dust motes. A greasy film settled on Vulkan’s war-plate, reaching into joints, trying to befoul them.

  Standing perfectly still, the primarch got his bearings.

  The tower had gone, and a burrow had replaced it. A large earthy cavern surrounded him, low, close, choking. Roots protruded from the cavern walls, osseous and calcified. Not the natural reaching tendrils of trees. Skulls protruded too, plugged into the mud like bony mushrooms, pale sockets staring, rictus grins on every fleshless face.

  Vulkan recognised them. How could he not?

  Krael of Themis, Hrun’din of Hesiod, Ildra of Aethonion brought low to Ignea, the labyrinth of the Nocturnean underworld.

  And they were not alone. Every warrior who had come on Vulkan’s ill-fated quest resided here, beheaded and trapped in the earth. Their names echoed in the earth hall, briefly alarming the primarch.­ Vulkan had not realised he had spoken them aloud.

  ‘This is not Ignea,’ he said boldly, a challenge issued to the heady darkness in front of him. He hefted his hammer.

  ‘And this is not Krael…’ He smashed the skull apart. The others lasted a few seconds longer, until Vulkan had turned every skull into bone fragments.

  ‘Are you here, shade stalker?’ shouted Vulkan. ‘I have returned.’

  The end of the chamber led away into darkness, still and silent but for the faintest sound of metal scraping against bone. Vulkan knew it well. The hunter of heads was hard at work.

  Vulkan lowered Urdrakule and followed the sound.

  Darkness fell about him like a cloak, neither comforting nor malevolent. It soon yielded to an eerie hemispherical sanctum, a cavern lined with rank upon rank of flensed skulls, their empty eye sockets pointed inwards towards their skulking slayer.

  He squatted atop a mound of heads, some bare to the bone and stained in blood, others with flesh still attached. Their keeper ­busied himself, rooting amongst his trophies and dextrously skinning them with an immense curved blade. His hair was long, dark and lank with two bones impaled crossways through a ragged topknot.

  Tattered scraps of cloth clung to his frame and wizened limbs, the latter rangy but taut with unnatural strength. Runes marked his skin, glowing dully like sickly emerald.

  As Vulkan stepped beyond the threshold, Kheradruakh glanced up from his labours, a second pair of arms revealed as his body slowly unfurled.

  His eyes were hollow pits of fathomless black, promising an eternity of agony.

  The wretched creature smiled, a repugnant expression, then pointed with a long-taloned finger to a gap in his legion of skulls.

  He clutched a head still, its pallid flesh clinging to the bone, but swiftly rolled it between his four upper limbs like a spider fashioning silk. Rather than spinning, however, his intent was quite the opposite. In a few short moments, a gleaming skull sat in Kherad­ruakh’s hands.

  ‘A place for me, shade?’ said Vulkan calmly. ‘I am honoured, but shall have to decline. Instead, I will need passage through the gate. I know it is here. You’ve hidden it behind this shadow. You will reveal it now.’

  A harsh choking sound haunted the chamber. It took Vulkan a moment to realise it was laughter.

  All the while, Kheradruakh moved neither his lips nor his limbs, but the air around him crackled… and suddenly he was gone.

  Vulkan moved fast, raising Urdrakule as a long curved blade raked across its haft. He barely saw the shade stalker – Kheradruakh had vanished almost as he appeared.

  Vulkan turned and intercepted a beheading blow that fell so hard his ears rang. Again, Kheradruakh vanished.

  A third attack jarred the hammer haft once more. A fourth grazed Vulkan’s arm as he raised it in defence. Every blow was a killing strike, aimed at the neck. Kheradruakh did not wound his prey, he slew them outright. A hunter of heads. A decapitator of rare and gruesome talent.

  And he did not yield to frustration. Patiently, relentlessly, he wore at the primarch, vanishing and reappearing, flitting from shadow to shadow. From above, from below, no direction of attack was barred to him. Slowly, Vulkan began to tire. Fatigue gnawed at him but whatever evil lurked in this place was draining him too.

  Souls, he realised. The eyeless sockets of the staring skulls had some anima left. Every one had turned to regard him. Ice coated the primarch’s armour, reaching beyond ceramite and adamantium.

  The laughter returned, dripping with ancient malice. Kherad­ruakh sensed the end.

  ‘None defy me,’ he said, a half-heard echo. ‘You could not escape my blade forever…’

  ‘You should know, shade stalker,’ Vulkan said, slightly breathless, ‘that I cannot die. Not by your hand.’

  He had no idea if that was true anymore, but it felt reassuringly bold.

  Vulkan remembered. He remembered the hunters following him into the lair. He remembered an arachnid thing scuttling across the ceiling on six rangy limbs. He remembered Krael’s head falling from his shoulders, the tribesman’s face cold and dumbstruck.

  Eight had made it this far. Many more had entered the rift. None of them got any further. Every warrior of Nocturne died, beheaded.

  Belgerad had been the last. He had wrapped a cloth around his hunter’s­ spear and doused it with drakespit. The volatile substance gave off a noisome reek that had stung the nostrils. The blade had severed Belgerad’s neck just as he lit the rag and fire and light flared ferociously.

  ‘Belgerad…’ uttered Vulkan, provoking a moment’s hesitation from Kheradruakh.

  Does he remember that name? wondered Vulkan. The one who hurt him.

  The primarch’s fingers traced the ancient sigils wrought into the haft of the hammer. He shut his eyes as he found the one engraved into the icon of a blazing sun, his last glimpse that of a spider descending. ‘You never did like the light.’

  The blind flare fashioned into Urdrakule’s head exploded into searing magnesium brightness.

  Kheradruakh shrieked in agony. The scent of withered old flesh burned on the foetid air. Eyes still closed, Vulkan swung with ­Urdrakule and heard the crunch of bone. Daring to look, half-blind, he saw the hunter of heads scurrying back into shadow, two of his limbs hanging loose by his sides and leaving a trail of dark blood in his wake.

  Stung, Kheradruakh folded his other limbs protectively against his body.

  As the light died, the chamber faded with it. First it thinned to gossamer, then a dry mist. The skulls disappeared. The chamber disappeared. Kheradruakh lingered longest, the hollows of his eyes pitiless and already yearning for revenge.

  And then he was gone, and only a black cube remained. It levitated above the ground, slowly turning in the air, sparks of dark lightning cascading off its iridescent surface.

  The shadow field, or at least its cause.

  Vulkan destroyed it.

  Gargo circled the gunship around again, heavy bolters roaring a brutal chorus as they tore up the avian flocks trying to bring him down. He had come for the others almost as soon as Vulkan had vanished, the enemy having retreated enough for him to set the gunship down.

  An engine stuttered, spitting blood and greasy feathers across the side of the smeared viewing pane. Gargo altered his angle of approach as the suicidal birds arrowed for the turbofans. Claw marks raked against cockpit glass, obscuring his view but not penetrating. Dark bodies bounced across the prow and hull, their tiny bones breaking on impact.

  As he pulled the gunship into a sharp banking manoeuvre, he felt Zytos’ gauntlete
d hand on his shoulder.

  ‘There,’ Zytos said, and pointed through the forward viewing pane.

  A spear of white soared up into the sky, brighter than daylight.

  Gargo engaged the flare shields, tinting the armourglass.

  The tower collapsed, shattering like fluted glass exposed to the perfect resonance. It fell straight down, the individual shards like drops of rain suspended in time then abruptly released before dissipating into nothing.

  A silhouette stood in the light, one arm aloft, a hammer clutched in his hand.

  ‘Vulkan…’

  Beaten but unbowed. The primarch’s armour had been split in a dozen places. Wearied, he arched his neck to find the descending gunship as it came for him.

  A tempest grew as the light finally died, small at first and snapping with eldritch energies, but unravelling. A cold wind blew against Vulkan’s back, encrusting his shoulder guards with hoar frost and kicking up his drakescale cloak like a banner.

  Zytos voxed Abidemi in the hold.

  ‘Brother, we have him.’

  The ramp lowered as the gunship came in hard, fighting the wind. Ice began to obscure the viewing pane.

  ‘Make it fast,’ Gargo warned, manoeuvring the vessel into an about-turn as Vulkan staggered across the moor. Flicking a pair of switches on the control panel, he auto-reloaded the forward heavy bolters.

  The shadows, having fled the moment the primarch had entered the tower, returned. As the ramp slammed down, Zytos had already gone back into the hold. A sustained bolter salvo roared from within, chopping either side of Vulkan as he clambered aboard. The heavy bolters attached to the cockpit roared too.

  The shadows weaved, spectral, serpentine, but exercised much less caution in their eagerness to kill the wounded primarch. Bolt-rounds tore them apart, smoke and ink and shattering glass erupting with every detonation.

  ‘We have him!’ Zytos bellowed, firing one-handed, careless of his inaccuracy and hammering the back of the side of the hold with a clenched fist.