Old Earth

by Nick Kyme

  ‘You’ve said that already. I expected better, if I’m honest. Something…’ He frowned, trying to find the right word, but failed and settled for a lesser one. ‘More.’

  ‘You filth. Fight me. Prove who is the stronger. It’s what you want.’

  Marr stepped back.

  ‘Ah, that’s better. Trying to find a way out. Your strategy is flawed though. Because you’re wrong… Shadrak. You turned this into something personal. An oath sworn to your men, or more likely yourself. A vendetta. I, Tybalt Marr, your nemesis. I never cared about you, Meduson. But I had to be sure – I say that twice so you know why I’ve kept you alive this long. It’s not because you are a worthy foe and I wanted to fight you in some vainglorious arena of death. I had to know that you weren’t coming back to haunt me like you did before. I don’t want to duel…’ He frowned as if the very idea was distasteful. ‘Or prove my worth. There’s no honour in putting down a beaten dog. It’s just mercy. I just need you dead.’

  Meduson snarled, defiant to the end. ‘I hope you choke on my blood, you scum-eating wretch. You will never break us. The Iron Tenth will endure. We will end–’

  Marr drew his sword. It took one blow to cut off Meduson’s head.

  Tybalt Marr reached down to grasp the Iron Hand’s severed head by the scalp.

  ‘Like father, like son,’ he muttered. ‘Isn’t that the phrase?’

  ‘I would have fought him for you,’ said the champion, reluctantly sheathing his sword.

  ‘I would not have him sully your blade, Cyon.’

  Cyon Azedine looked down at the headless corpse. ‘He was a worthy enemy.’

  ‘Aye, he was. Most worthy. There will be worthier yet. Have no concern about that.’

  Scybale stepped into Marr’s eyeline, wearing a disgruntled expression.

  ‘You have something to add, Kysen?’ Marr asked. The part of the neck cavity still connected to Meduson’s severed head dripped quietly onto the floor.

  ‘The Iron Hands and their allies have withdrawn from the field. If we neglect to pursue they might–’

  ‘Do not worry yourself, Kysen. The Tenth are done. Without him, they pose no threat. He was a… singular leader.’

  ‘Is it wise to leave a hostile force at large?’

  ‘They abandoned their general, Kysen. They have no stomach for a fight. We can deal with them later, after Terra. We are rejoining the Warmaster’s fleet. I want to look Grael Noctua in the eye when I present to him the head of Shadrak Meduson.’

  Twenty-Four

  Caldera, the aftermath

  A glittering expanse of icy tundra glided past the viewslit. It quickly gave way to seemingly endless tracts of desert before finally the edge of a sprawling ash waste, littered with ugly crags, deep craters and mountains, appeared on the horizon.

  It had once been called Ibsen, though Imperial logisticians had classified it One-Five-Four Four.

  Vulkan knew it as Caldera.

  ‘A vast and fertile jungle existed here once,’ said Vulkan. His tone left it unclear whether he was speaking to himself or to Zytos and Abidemi.

  Neither had fought in this campaign, but they knew Numeon had. He had said little of the experience, only intimating its simultaneous success and failure.

  ‘Two of my brothers and I came to this world, and still we could not save it.’

  Vulcanis soared over a jutting mountain peak, and swept down into a deep valley basin. From their current altitude, structures of Imperial design could be made out. Blocky and functional, they were clustered together in self-sufficient units and surrounded by stockade walls.

  ‘Settlers have at least made it their home,’ offered Zytos, trying to lift his primarch’s spirits.

  Abidemi peered closer through another viewslit.

  ‘I see no people,’ he said.

  Vulkan had noticed it too, his expression one of growing horror.

  ‘Igen,’ he voxed to Gargo in the cockpit. ‘Bring us down. Do it now!’

  The engine drone changed as Gargo pushed the gunship into a steep and swift descent. He did so unflinchingly in a manoeuvre that would have tested most veteran Navy pilots.

  Vulkan wrenched open the side door. A hot wind rushed in, ­battering the warriors inside and trying to tear them from the hold, but the Drakes were unmoved. None of them could take their eyes off the settlement below.

  Ash from the mountains had painted the colony in a fine grey veneer, like dusty spiders’ webs draped across the furnishings of a long-undisturbed house. Doors swung agape and bullet casings littered the craggy earth like seeds, though nothing would grow from them but the suggestion of a bitter fight.

  Barricades had been erected in the main square. An oil drum lay upon its side, empty. Gun pits yawned emptily, their sandbag walls split and bleeding. A watchtower had collapsed across a section of the stockade, ripping it down the middle and forcing the two halves aside.

  Gargo found a place to set down, a rocky plateau just beyond the settlement walls.

  Vulkan crossed the rough terrain with an ease born of living amongst the volcanic crags of Nocturne, though this place was but a pale shadow of his adopted death world.

  The gates to the stockade hung half-open. A warm, sulphurous breeze disturbed banners declaring Imperial loyalty. Several had been burned or defaced. The snap of fabric on the wind, and the crunch of dirt and debris underfoot were the only sounds.

  Vulkan edged open the gates further to improve his view.

  Then he waited at the threshold of the settlement, observing everything.

  ‘I can see no survivors,’ said Zytos.

  He and Abidemi had followed the primarch as he had quit the gunship. Gargo had remained behind to shut down the engines and seal the hold, but he was coming now.

  ‘Nor I,’ said Abidemi.

  ‘Because there are none.’ Vulkan looked beyond the desolation of the place. Though the terrain had changed, burned away by the fires of compliance, the core geography had not.

  Marks had been daubed on the sides of some buildings – not pronouncements or the crude graffiti of thugs, more like brands. The Warmaster’s armies had come here, killing or capturing its inhabitants. The destruction was old, the perpetrators almost certainly long gone or the Drakes would have been attacked by now.

  Mortarion would have known what the marks represented, though the brands were Cthonian and not Barbaran.

  Zytos recognised them too.

  ‘Marr’s fleet did this,’ he said. ‘It could only be him.’

  ‘Then why not fortify it, and make it a staging ground?’ asked Gargo, who had joined them from the ship.

  Abidemi had sunk to one knee and ran the cracked earth through gauntleted fingertips. ‘This land is better suited to growing crops than as an armoury.’ He nudged a tiny piece of sharp, crescent-shaped crystal. ‘Besides, I think they may have been dissuaded from staying.’ He looked up at the others, showing off the piece of crystal. ‘Dusk-wraiths?’

  ‘No,’ said Vulkan, his gaze alighting on a mountain ridge a few kilometres beyond the settlement. ‘Their more enlightened kin. We fought them, Ferrus and I, and Mortarion…’

  Zytos stiffened at the mention of that name. The others failed to hide their long-harboured aggression too. They had all fought the Death Guard more than once since the war began, and still carried the scars of those battles.

  ‘This world belonged to the eldar once,’ said Vulkan. ‘We fought them for it, and believed we were liberating its peoples. We were wrong about that. We were wrong about a lot of things. The eldar have returned. Whether they fought the Sons of Horus or not, I don’t think they liked what they saw here.’ Vulkan gestured to the ridge. ‘Past that rise is another depression. It’s wide and empty. We can land Vulcanis there.’

  He shut the gates. The metal protested, squealing on old hinges, ­scr
aping across a carpet of debris, but it could not resist him. They sealed closed with a dull funereal clang, a lid drawn across an empty coffin.

  ‘What we seek is not in there,’ he said.

  Dense jungle, not a barren plain, crawled beyond the ridge line. Gargo landed at the very edge of the forest, the gunship’s turbofans bowing the trunks of trees and fluttering the leafy foliage of a thick canopy.

  Vulkan stepped from the hold, a look of consternation creasing his face.

  Back when the Crusade had come to this world, they had burned this place, all the way down to the root. He had watched the flames with Ferrus from a scorched hillside. It had been years ago, but the growth he now saw went beyond exponential. It was unnatural. To have risen again so quickly…

  He scowled, sensing an alien hand at work.

  ‘It’s here,’ he said. ‘The eldritch gate.’

  ‘In there?’ asked Zytos.

  ‘At its heart, Barek.’

  ‘I think perhaps the eldar do not want us to reach it,’ said Abidemi.

  Vulkan hefted his hammer. Its head ignited into flame. ‘Then they are going to be disappointed.’

  The darkness beckoned, arboreal and strange. Tall, tightly packed trees loomed over the Drakes, their trunks thick, their bark almost luminous, but doing nothing to alleviate the gloom. After taking what they needed from its armoury, the Salamanders left the gunship behind and entered the forest. Barely perceptible on the breeze was the sound of lilting laughter.

  It had been several hours and slow-going but no ambush had been sprung, and no trap of any kind had beset them. At least not one the Drakes could see.

  Zytos stood in a clearing, a shaft of milky sunlight kissing his armour and turning a patch of it red.

  He listened, lowering the chainblade he had taken from Vulcanis’ armoury for the first time. Mulch befouled its mechanism, making it drag, the teeth green and dripping. Garo and Abidemi carried chain weapons too, a spear of little use in clearing a jungle and a relic like Draukoros too fine to be put to so mundane a purpose. As ever, Vulkan stood alone, his hand upon the talisman, using it as a guiding lodestone.

  The threat of equipment malfunction had forced them to stop. Only now, as the sound of whirring and cutting ceased did the silence begin to encroach.

  ‘I hear nothing,’ said Gargo, pulling strings of rancid plant matter from his axe.

  ‘Have you ever known any forest be so quiet?’ asked Abidemi. ‘No sign of creatures of any kind, no birds, no insects. This is an unnatural place.’

  ‘We are not alone, my sons. They are watching.’

  All eyes went to Vulkan.

  ‘They?’ asked Gargo, his eyes darting from shadow to shadow but finding only darkness.

  ‘The eldar are here,’ said Vulkan. ‘I don’t think they ever really left.’

  Zytos eyed the shadows. ‘How long?’

  ‘As soon as we passed the tree line. They are very quiet…’ He gave a feral grin. ‘But I hear them well enough.’

  ‘Are they hostile, lord?’ asked Zytos, and sent a thrum of activation through his blade that spun the teeth and spat loose the last of the plant matter.

  ‘Extremely. We aren’t wanted here.’

  Gargo turned about again, his chainaxe held out in front of him.

  ‘Then why haven’t they attacked us yet?’

  ‘Someone is holding them at bay.’

  Zytos frowned. ‘We have an ally?’

  ‘I thought I imagined him, an old man dressed in rags,’ said Vulkan, still gazing into the beyond. ‘Now, I am not sure. Back on Nocturne he called himself “Deathfire”, though I don’t believe that’s who he really is.’

  ‘You think he’s eldar?’

  Vulkan’s eyes burned in the gloom as they set upon Zytos.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘What would one of their kind want with us?’ asked Gargo.

  ‘That I don’t know.’

  ‘He comes to you in disguise, his motives unknown. Can we trust this creature?’ asked Zytos.

  ‘As far as we can trust any eldar,’ said Vulkan. ‘I cannot pretend to understand their minds but I sensed no mendacity. I fear there is no other choice but to trust him.’

  ‘And that,’ said Zytos, gesturing to the fulgurite shard sheathed at Vulkan’s belt, ‘do you trust that? Why keep it, father?’

  Vulkan drew it. It was such a nondescript piece of stone, no larger than a gladius, but Zytos could feel a measure of the power it still contained. He wondered if it was dangerous.

  ‘Everything has its purpose, Barek,’ said Vulkan. ‘Even this.’

  No further explanation would be forthcoming. Perhaps there was none to give.

  Vulkan put the fulgurite away again, though it had stirred something in him, as his mind appeared to wander.

  ‘We should not linger,’ said Zytos, unsettled. The chainblades were all clean. ‘Can that compass get us to the heart of this jungle, lord?’

  ‘It can, Barek,’ Vulkan replied, holding up the talisman before him. The seven hammers upon its face slowly turned. ‘I am just not entirely sure it is a compass.’ He looked up, ignoring the questions in his sons’ eyes. ‘This way.’

  The Drakes delved deeper and after a few hours the vague presence Vulkan had mentioned before, of being watched, faded and they were truly alone.

  They emerged into a place where the canopy receded and the jungle lay open to the sky. The last rays of light ebbed above, slowly giving way to the ghosts of stars. Upon a shallow mound, and set into a dais of pale stone, stood an arch not unlike the one they had passed through beneath Mount Deathfire.

  Except here a warrior mounted on a strange scaled steed stood guard. He did not move when he saw the legionaries and their primarch approach through the forest, nor did he raise the arcane lance in his hand. Gemstones glittered in the hilt, capturing motes of sun and nascent starlight. Its speartip glowed.

  A baroque helm hid his face, but his smooth segmented armour betrayed his origin as quickly as any banner or icon of allegiance.

  An eldar stood before them, one of the Exodites.

  Uttering a word in his alien tongue, the eldar spurred his lizard steed and approached to halfway between the arch and the forest’s edge.

  ‘Sheathe your weapons,’ Vulkan said to his sons.

  They obeyed, but kept a keen watch on the strange dragon knight.

  Vulkan stowed his hammer, mag-locking it to his back and slowly approached the eldar. Once he was within a few paces, the dragon knight held up his hand.

  Vulkan stopped, mindful of the other warriors in the forest around them that he could not see but sensed.

  Sifting around in a pouch at his belt, the dragon knight pulled forth a shimmering silver seed as large as an acorn. He mimed putting the seed in his mouth and biting down. He then pointed to Vulkan and threw the seed, which the primarch caught, looked at once and ingested.

  ‘I am not unfamiliar with the eldar tongue,’ he said.

  The dragon knight did not respond at first. After a few moments, he said, ‘You will be unfamiliar with mine.’

  ‘You understood me?’

  The dragon knight gave a slow nod. He had yet to remove his helmet and spoke through its visor. It made his voice even more oddly ethereal and resonant.

  ‘The seed of Isha is the root to understanding,’ he said. ‘You and your kind are not welcome here, Lord of Drakes, but the seer bids us let you pass.’ He tilted his helm, a sneer behind that armoured visor not hard to imagine. ‘And so we shall. But do not return to this place.’

  ‘It would be unwise to threaten me,’ said Vulkan.

  The dragon knight gave a sonorous bleed of amusement, though his hand upon the lance trembled with anger.

  Vulkan brandished Urdrakule. The dragon knight flinched but held his ground.

/>   ‘This hammer has slain daemons, it has defeated primarchs and brought arch-tyrants to their knees,’ said Vulkan. ‘It is every ­hammer I have ever forged, because it is wielded by these hands. The spirits of these weapons are strong within the metal.

  ‘Caldera is under my protection. Remain if you will. Hide, if you must. But do not raise arms against the sons and daughters of the Imperium. Did you watch as they were slaughtered?’

  ‘Your struggle is no concern of ours, though your race heralds the end days and the last songs. Isha weeps at the corruption you have unleashed.’

  ‘Your seer appears to believe differently. I can only assume you are his gatekeeper, here to grant us passage and return us to the path.’

  The dragon knight did not answer. He reined his steed aside, though he reached to place the tip of his lance against the arch. A storm coalesced within it. Cold lightning and half-heard thunder raged. A chill wind formed hoar frost on Vulkan’s armour and the armour of his sons.

  ‘Did this gate not lead to darkness, lord?’ asked Zytos, warily eyeing the storm.

  The dragon knight laughed. It took all of Vulkan’s resolve not to strike him down.

  ‘Have no fear, mon-keigh. The seer has ensured you will reach your path. But know this,’ the dragon knight said, looking at Vulkan. ‘Your death has been foreseen, Lord of Drakes.’ And with that he rode back into the forest as the effect of the seed of Isha faded.

  ‘Aye, it is a familiar concept,’ Vulkan replied, unconcerned as he and his warriors strode into the light and the fury.

  Twenty-Five

  The last strand, cut

  A stranger walked amongst the crop, coming out of the midday sun. He held a staff and leaned on it heavily as he made his way through the field.

  The farmer watching the stranger paused in his labours, wiping the honest sweat from his brow with his sleeve, but kept the scythe to hand. Its sharp blade glinted in the hot sun. The air trembled and clouds gathered, presaging rain.

  The stranger kept on going, but moved slowly.

  Wounded, the farmer realised, or perhaps he was simply old or carrying a lasting injury. He had known soldiers who had done so. The memories of them and the places he had met them were vague, indistinct. More like impressions than true recollections.