Scorched Earth

by Nick Kyme

  Tarkan bowed his head to me as I walked along the grey-swathed corridor to the cockpit. He was kneeling down, etching something into the metal walls of the ship with his combat knife, and stood up just as I approached. I paused when I remembered something about his eyrie, but Tarkan had already deactivated the proximity mines before I even reached the section of the prow that was rent open to the elements. After that I felt his gunsights on me until I emerged fully into the half-light.

  It was not the first time I had come up here. Usually, I came alone and Tarkan seemed content to let me be so with my thoughts and concerns. He had never once asked me why I was here or tried to engage in conversation.

  A red moon waxed overhead. It was like an iris of blood, its large black pupil created by palls of drifting smoke. Ash smothered the shattered mechanisms and exposed workings of the drop-ship in grey-white. Pipes choked with it, cogitators and display screens suffocated. It was as if fire had decided to reclaim our ship, drag it back down into a sea of dust where it would be silent forever. Perhaps we were being dragged down with it, only the dust was moving too slowly for us to realise our peril and it would therefore be too late to do anything about it when we did.

  As Tarkan left us to return to the shadows, as he often did, I walked up beside Usabius and followed his gaze across the mountains and to Isstvan beyond.

  Another range of mountains, the mirror to our own Blackfangs, stretched away to the south. Behind it was a vast and empty salt plain, as desolate as my mood. The pyres were still burning, higher and more ferociously than ever. They reminded me of furnaces in some infernal machine, fuelled by treachery and betrayal. It was hard to fight down my anger at the sight of them, so I looked away.

  'One more mission, my friend,' I said.

  Usabius half-turned in profile. 'Ruuman found something?'

  My brother too, then, had been harbouring hope.

  'The primarch's drop-ship. It is confirmed.'

  I was smiling as Usabius faced me. Even through his battle-helm his eyes lit up like beacons.

  'Vulkan lives?' he said, disbelieving at first but then with greater confidence. Vulkan lives!'

  He clapped my shoulders, his voice quailing with emotion.

  I counselled caution, even though my own fell hopes were beginning to run away with me.

  'It is just a Stormbird, brother.'

  'How close to the enemy?'

  'Too close, but potentially far enough away that it may have escaped undetected.'

  'This is a sign, brother. I can feel it.' Usabius clenched a fist and there was a flicker of cerulean blue within the embers of his irises. 'We must leave immediately.'

  I put a hand on his arm. Firmly.

  'No. The Depression will be crawling with traitors by now. Our best chance is to wait until just before nightfall again.'

  Usabius was adamant. 'It might be too late by then!'

  I held his arm fast. 'He has survived this long, brother. If we fail now then we won't get another chance. If either we or the primarch are discovered through our lack of preparation and caution then we all die.'

  Usabius relented, and I let him go.

  'How is it to be done, then?'

  'Sulnar wants to discuss it in the strategium.'

  'The cripple has lost his mind, Ra'stan. He still thinks Ferrus Manus is alive and not slai—' Usabius stopped, remembering Tarkan. He lowered his voice. 'He decides this mission?'

  'He is the ranking officer.'

  'And half a lieutenant, does that equal a fully battle-worthy captain?'

  'Calm down. You're letting your emotions overwhelm you.'

  Letting me go, Usabius turned away.

  'I won't be attending his meeting,' he said flatly. 'I'll wait for you at the cargo ramp, ready to depart.'

  I bowed my head. 'If that is your wish.'

  'It is.'

  I allowed a pause between us and let the magnitude of our discovery sink in.

  The primarch.

  Vulkan.

  'I had begun to despair, brother,' I confessed.

  'As had I,' Usabius replied, his voice barely louder than a whisper. 'If only I could use my gifts.'

  The Nikaean Edict had seen Usabius reduced to a trooper of the line, a warrior who became one of my charges when before he had been my equal. He shouldered the burden with good grace and was an exemplary trooper. But it was not adherence to an outmoded oath that held his powers in check - since the betrayal many of the old Librarius had been ready to unleash their abilities again - it was fear.

  Not emotional fear, not fear of reprisal or sanction, but rather an unwillingness to open himself to the myriad torment and anguish. All that pain, all that death distilled into a single blow of psychological force. Any attempt to find our father that way would likely have killed him and all those nearby to him in a backwash of psychic energy.

  At the very least, it would have driven Usabius mad. I was surprised he had not cracked already.

  'We will find him, brother,' I muttered softly.

  'At the cargo bay ramp,' he said. 'I'll be waiting for you.'

  I nodded, leaving Usabius to his thoughts.

  Tarkan stopped me as I was walking past him back down the ventral corridor. He put his hand against my shoulder, but did not look me in the eye.

  'Did you find what you needed out there?' he asked, his voice deep and grating.

  I stared, nonplussed.

  'My brother will join me later,' I replied.

  He looked as if he were about to say something else when he simply patted my pauldron and let me go.

  I looked down at where he had been scoring the walls of the drop-ship.

  'What is that?' I asked, seeing letters worked into the metal. I read some of them: Desaan, Vutlich, Konn'ador, Tarsa, Igataron, Mendenach. The names were many but not ordered by Legion or company, rather by remembrance. I knew then the answer to my own question. It was a memorial.

  'The wind here is harsh,' Tarkan explained. 'It erodes the marks. The ash covers it too. I am ensuring they are not forgotten.'

  'I knew there was a shrine to the dead on the Purgatory,' I said. 'But had no idea it was here and you were its curator.'

  'Not all of them are dead,' Tarkan replied. 'Some are just missing.' He brushed away a swath of ash, revealing two names I was painfully familiar with.

  Corax.

  Vulkan.

  Both missing, presumed alive or dead depending upon whom you talked to.

  'I think we all need closure before we meet our last battle,' said Tarkan. 'I hope you get yours. I hope it can heal you, brother.'

  Not really knowing what he meant, I thanked him and walked away.

  'Emperor walk with you,' I heard him call as I was leaving the eyrie.

  'And you, Tarkan.'

  USABIUS WAS AS good as his word.

  After our discussion in the ship's prow, I had not seen him for the rest of that night and all of the following day until that moment. He was waiting by the cargo bay ramp, a bolter slung on its strap over one shoulder, power fist encasing his right hand and arm. He had also scavenged some grenades from somewhere and they sat snug in his webbing. A bolt pistol was holstered at his right hip and there were a few extra clips in his weapons belt. The battered helmet with its cracked retinal lens and scorch marks still covered his face.

  He nodded as he saw me.

  As I returned the gesture, Vogarr and E'nesh nodded to me too.

  The watchmen had not left their post. Only death would see it prised from their control. Much like Sulnar, they had accepted their fate and would wait here until the end.

  I was about to speak when Usabius inclined his head and I saw a third legionary join our party.

  'What are you doing here, Apothecary?' I asked.

  Haukspeer had emerged out of the shadows, armed and armoured for war. Casting off his reductor, he had replaced it with a lightning claw and the battle-helm he wore was beaked like a bird's head and black as coal.

  '
Isn't it obvious?' he said, speaking through the vox-grille of his avian helmet.

  'I see a legionary who has abandoned his oath to heal and adopted the posture of a warrior.'

  'Nothing nearly so poetic, Ra'stan,' Haukspeer replied, seemingly unfazed by my unintentional barb. 'I want to die fighting with my wings spread wide and a war shriek on my lips, not caged in here with the injured and the dead.' He waved his lightning claw, encompassing the entire hold. 'My usefulness as a healer has ended. If what you say is true about the enemy advancing then I have done everything I can for these legionaries. To preserve them like this, to keep them alive only for them to be slaughtered later, is not why I was called to the Apothecarion. So if I cannot mend, then let me break. I would kill the enemies of my Legion and the enemies of the Emperor one last time before I surrender to the long dark and fly no more.' He clenched his fist and a shock of energy sparked down his claws. 'Even if those enemies are my erstwhile cousins.'

  I looked sidelong at Usabius, who gave the slightest inclination of his head.

  I was glad, for I too wanted the Raven Guard as part of our mission.

  'Besides,' Haukspeer added, 'alone, you will only get yourself killed.'

  The sound of Sulnar's wheelchair approaching us interrupted my reply, and I turned to face our crippled commander.

  'The plan is set,' he said, 'I come to wish you good hunting.'

  I bowed to the Iron Hand, who gave a mirthless half-smile in response.

  'We will draw and keep them here,' he went on. 'But our sacrifice must be worth something.'

  'If Vulkan is alive, we will find him,' I said. I stared at Sulnar for a moment, at his staunch refusal to give up, his noble bearing despite his injuries, and his misplaced pride. 'Are you sure you won't come with us? Leave here and find another sanctuary. Keep moving and live, Sulnar.'

  'Just as you must go, Ra'stan, some of us must stay behind. If the traitors are amassing here then your route will be less perilous because of it. Let me give you that. Let us give you that.'

  I clasped his forearm in the warrior's grip. To Ruuman behind him, I nodded.

  'Make the scum beyond these mountains work for every drop of your blood,' I told him.

  'I swear it on the life of Ferrus Manus.'

  Unfortunately, Sulnar's oath was not a reassuring one.

  And then the gate to the Purgatory opened, letting us back out into hell.

  I RECALLED THE mission briefing. Sulnar had looked long and hard at the hololithic projection of the dropsite. Compared to the sheer size of the forces that had landed on it and the range of mountains where we had made our lair, the Urgall Depression was a modest area some twenty kilometres across.

  A single beacon, put there by Ruuman, had winked enthusiastically on the intermittent display. This was the crash site of Vulkan's drop-ship as divined by the seismic mapping staves before they had been destroyed. The distance from the Purgatory to the drop-ship was not inconsiderable. Several routes were plotted, flashing up as broken green lines barely visible through machine static. Those that would have brought us too close to the known enemy dispositions and the Urgall Depression itself, where the majority of traitor encampments could be found, were discounted. These lines had winked red, the path too dangerous to cross.

  I spoke little during the briefing, my eagerness to move out clouding my thoughts. I felt the eyes of the others upon me throughout, weighing and measuring as if to determine my suitability for the task. As one of the Fire-born, how could I be more suitable? Perhaps Usabius had been right to abstain, but then one of us needed to represent the Legion.

  Vulkan was our primarch. If he lived we would find him, and bring him back.

  By the time we concluded, Sulnar had seemed satisfied with that but would commit no additional resources to our cause. Going out in force would only attract unwanted attention to us and jeopardise the mission. Haukspeer's appearance at the ramp was therefore doubly surprising.

  So there we stood, four legionaries around a flickering hololith looking on at a broken green light as if its colour could make it any safer or guarantee success.

  OUR CHOSEN ROUTE was not without peril. We left the mountains, two warriors cloaked in the shadows, one a part of the darkness, and went south. Our trail took us through the wrecker's yards, the fields of broken and gutted vehicles, crashed ships and the sundered forms of dead battle tanks. The debris was dense here, the cargo holds and crew compartments picked clean of life and therefore sparse when it came to our enemies.

  Only a few sporadic packs of hunters slowed us down, World Eaters death-squads that brought out a rush of anger in Haukspeer that he quickly marshalled before exposing our position. They had come to the Isstvan system before, the Raven Guard, touched down on the third planet in the Redarth Valley to rejoice in another world compliant and illuminated by the Imperial Truth. That light had flecks of shadow in it now, tainted like an old lumen-strip, brown at the edges and flickering close to expiration.

  World Eaters, no longer the War Hounds, opposed them on their return. I knew because I had been privy to the tactical briefings, looking on in solemn silence like many of my fellow brother-captains, as it was described how we would fight and kill our former brothers. I also knew, because Haukspeer had described the attack to me, the sheer ferocity of Angron's Legion and then the perfidy that followed when the Night Lords revealed their true allegiance.

  Where once we had rivalries and allies to measure against, to aspire to and jockey with, now we had nemeses, every bloodied one of us. I thought of Curze's sons as ours in many respects, because of what happened before during the early years of the Crusade. I had heard about it, rather than seen it unfold, but knew it had left an indelible mark upon us and our relationship with the midnight clad VIII Legion.

  We left the wrecker's yard with night falling and the howls of the maddened throng chasing us into the darkness. Going west, we skirted the fringe of the Urgall Hills, entering more rugged terrain where the volcanic sand lapped at the edge of a barren steppe like the waves of a black and lonely ocean.

  Up another rise, the steppe giving way to much craggier, hilly environs, we crested a long dark ridge and looked down a wide valley of even deeper shadow.

  'I remember this place,' said Haukspeer with just enough breath to be heard. The Apothecary had been part of a survey team that had made landfall on Isstvan V, but they had found only ash and nothing of Isstvan Ill's original bucolic beauty.

  The cliff that dropped away a few metres in front of us was almost sheer but not impossible to traverse. Though he had advanced ahead of Usabius and me for a better look into the valley, I noticed he took great pains not to disturb any scree at the summit of the ridge. Tiny cascading stones might seem innocuous enough but we did not yet know what lurked in the valley darkness, if it slumbered or was waiting for prey.

  'Though we did our best to grind it down with our arrival, there was life here once,' said the Raven Guard. 'Green and purple heather, lichen of a deep cobalt blue that clung tenaciously to the pale rock. Dark, loamy soil was ripe for growth. We wounded it, but this… now…'

  It was a wasteland that stretched before us: bare rock, hard sand, dead earth. Nothing would live here ever again.

  'That was Redarth Valley,' I asserted. 'On Isstvan Three, brother. Not here. Not this world.'

  'Of course…' Haukspeer stumbled. The long nights had taken a toll on us all, challenged our sense of reality. 'You're right. This isn't Redarth.'

  He nodded solemnly, too moved to speak further at first.

  'Wait here while I scout the way ahead,' he said at last. Then he was gone, a wraith blending back into the shadows and becoming a concomitant part of them.

  Only when the Raven Guard had been gone for several minutes did Usabius speak up.

  'It's a miracle we have reached this far, brother.'

  'And yet, here we stand. Sulnar was adamant their sacrifice would open the gate into the traitors' territory to us. It seems he was right.' I
looked out to the north behind us and then the west towards the Urgall Depression. The fires were brighter and higher than ever, burning the sky with their hot talons. Death-squads were on the move, I heard their loud, discordant horns blaring into the night. A call to arms, to murder or the simple announcement of survivors found and drawn into the hunt?

  Usabius's voice brought me back from my morbidity. 'On the other side of this valley lies our father's ship. Vulkan may be within our grasp.'

  'Have you thought what we will do if we find him?' I turned to regard my brother, emphasising the pointedness of my question.

  'When we find him, you mean.'

  'No, if.'

  Usabius muttered something. For a moment I thought his anger and indignation would flare again, just as it had earlier aboard the Purgatory, but it faded.

  Capitulating, his shoulders sagged a fraction.

  'I had hoped the primarch would know what to do.'

  'We are, more than ever, in need of his guidance.' I hesitated to speak aloud what I was thinking next, but avoiding it was not addressing it. 'And if we find his body, if he is dead, what then, Usabius?'

  My brother sighed, a long, deep exhalation that carried with it all of his anxiety and uncertainty. 'Then we will go on for as long as we can, honouring Vulkan's memory and burning our enemies to ash.'

  It was a good answer.

  'Unto the anvil, brother,' I said, brimming with the fire of affirmation.

  'Unto the anvil,' echoed Usabius.

  A second later, I noticed Haukspeer returning from his reconnoitre. After giving me a curious look, head cocked slightly to one side like a bird, he said, 'Far as I can tell, the way is clear for the first few kilometres at least. But there is something in the air of this place…' He paused, and I heard the disquiet he felt in his voice when he continued. 'Staying overlong in this valley would not be wise, I think. All my instincts are screaming at me to avoid it.'