by Nick Kyme
‘Psychic subversion,’ said Varrun. ‘A trick to bend weak minds, favoured by the witch. How many worlds have we seen undone, thusly?’
Grunts of agreement from the other Pyre Guard met this proclamation from the veteran.
‘I can think of one very recent in the memory,’ uttered Ganne.
‘The tribes of Ibsen were victims, not cohorts,’ Numeon corrected him.
‘But how to choose which from which amongst this sorry lot?’ said Varrun, smoothing his ashen beard as if contemplating that very conundrum.
Army troopers and Munitorum staff were thronging the camps now as the citizens of Khartor were steadily divided. A sea of desert-tan fatigues and grey Departmento-issue uniforms swept between the Salamanders and the Night Lords, parting them. The legionaries could still see one another, as they towered above the humans, their upper torsos, shoulders and heads still visible.
Numeon had seen and heard enough.
‘Get to the ships and finish the muster. All shall be in readiness for the primarch’s return.’
The Pyre Guard were moving out when Numeon saw a flicker of activity in the third camp enclosing the xenos. He was half-turned when he noticed the flash of light in his peripheral vision, harsh against the setting sun, that described the Night Lords in monochrome. Suddenly, they were moving. Someone cried out and fell, his voice too deep and vox-augmented to be human.
Another flash came swiftly. Lightning. And not a cloud in the sky.
‘The psykers!’ snapped Leodrakk.
A muzzle flare erupted, the deep, staccato report of a bolter echoing across the muster field and the encampments at the same time. It traced a line through the masses, shredding blood and bone, sundering flesh as the hail of shells reacted.
A second flare was born, chasing the quarry of the first. Then a third and a fourth.
Numeon saw their prey, just as he saw the numerous Vodisian troopers and Munitorum clerks destroyed as they fell beneath the guns, collateral damage to the Night Lords’ efforts at recapture.
The eldar were loose.
Somehow, they had slipped the psychic noose put about their necks by the VIII Legion Librarians and were now running amok.
In the face of this unexpected carnage, panic swiftly followed. In seconds, the close confines of the camps became a crush.
Khar-tans fled, leaping over the barriers intended to funnel them towards their new lives, only to be gunned down as discipline masters shouted orders to open fire. Others fought, tearing at their new oppressors with bare hands and teeth. Cudgels and shock mauls were unsheathed. Some wept, the terror for them not yet over. Many were trampled in the stampede, taking Imperial servants with them. One clerk, slow to realise what was happening, disappeared in a surging mass of shrieking Khar-tans. A trooper was knocked aside accidentally, crushed against a ship’s hull. Blood fountained up its grey flank in an arterial spray.
‘Into the crowd!’ Numeon bellowed, leading the others in to restore order.
Behind them, the rest of the Legion had begun to move.
‘Brother?’ It was Nemetor, hailing Numeon over the vox-link.
‘Breach the Munitorum’s cordon,’ Numeon shouted. ‘Get their pilots to move those ships. Tell them if they don’t, their precious mortal cargo will be crushed to death.’ He cut the link, letting Nemetor get to work.
The Pyre Guard formed up quickly into a spear shape, piercing the morass of bodies the Munitorum and Army seemed adamant would not spill out onto the desert.
‘Break your ranks,’ Numeon snarled at a Vodisian lieutenant, yanking the young officer off his feet.
His brothers did the same, ripping out the herding pens the Munitorum had put in place and relieving the pressure on the deadly crush that had begun to form.
‘Arvek,’ Numeon voxed, grunting as a Khar-tan man was floored as he bounced off the Pyre Guard’s war-plate. Leodrakk hauled him to his feet, sending him on his way. ‘Tell your men to break ranks.’
The Vodisian commander sounded fraught when he replied. ‘Negative. We have the situation contained. None of these rebels will get past our cordon.’
‘That is the problem, commander. Kharaatan native and Imperial servant alike are being crushed in this chaos. Break your ranks.’
Upon seeing the commotion, Arvek had brought his armoured companies together, plugging gaps in the Munitorum’s encampments, closing off escape, herding the frightened natives back onto themselves.
Officials farther back, confused by the commotion at first, had not realised what was happening and had continued to feed more natives into the grind. By the time they had taken stock of the situation, hundreds more had added to the pressure. Fearing for their lives when the crowd had realised their fate and their potential salvation, the Munitorum clerks had sealed the natives in behind a wall of tracked steel.
‘They will escape,’ Arvek countered, voice echoing in the confines of his Stormsword.
‘And will you unleash your guns next if they try to scale your hull?’ Numeon batted a discipline master aside with the back of his hand.
Together, the Pyre Guard had made a small vent. Their brothers in the XVIII were now working hard to widen it. People began to spill free – exhausted, bleeding, halfway dead. The presence of the Salamanders kept them rooted, however. None were willing to transgress and attempt escape with the red-eyed devils watching them.
But deeper into the camp, people were dying, smashed against the armoured prows of Vodisian tanks.
‘I will do what is necessary to maintain security.’ Arvek cut the feed.
‘Bastard…’ Numeon swore. A discussion with the commander would have to come later.
‘It’ll be a massacre…’ said Varrun.
Numeon eyed the static Vodisian armour that had now engaged loudhailers and search lamps as additional deterrents. People staggered back into one another, blinded and deafened. Arvek was employing riot control tactics where the rioters had no room to back down.
‘We need to move that armour.’
Through the thickening mob, it might as well have been leagues away.
Then Numeon saw the primarch, towering above the madness.
Realising the danger presented by the tanks, Vulkan had raced towards them. Not slowing, he shoulder-barged Arvek’s Stormsword at full pelt and began to push.
Grimacing with effort, booted feet digging trenches in the earth, he heaved the super-heavy back. Its sheer bulk dwarfed the primarch, the veins cording in Vulkan’s neck as he exercised his prodigious strength. Even Arvek dared not defy the will of a primarch and could only look on as Vulkan hauled the Stormsword’s dead weight across the sand. He roared, body trembling as he forced a gap wide enough for the trapped masses to escape.
Without waiting to recover, Vulkan was moving again, fleeing Khar-tans flowing around him in a flood of mortal desperation. The primarch barged his way through them towards the escaped xenos, using his size and presence to make a path. He had yet to draw a weapon, instead focusing on cutting off the eldar as they sought to run into the desert.
No, Numeon realised as the Pyre Guard waded through the sea of bodies, still fighting to reassert some order; he was going for Seriph. Several of the remembrancers were already wounded, possibly dead. Abandoned by the Utrich fusiliers, they clung to each other, striving not to be dragged into the chaos, holding close to ride out the sudden storm.
Yelling Nostraman curses, the Night Lords closed on the xenos from behind, firing off their bolters indiscriminately in the hope of hitting an eldar.
Five of the witches were already down, one with a still-churning chainblade embedded in its chest. Another two threw up a kine-shield of verdigrised light to absorb the chasing bolt-rounds.
A hot shell grazed Vulkan’s cheek, searing it as he was caught in the crossfire. Reaching the remembrancers, putting himself between them and
the Night Lords’ heedless fury, he raised his gauntlet.
Thanks in part to the VIII legionaries’ bloody efforts but also because of the breach left by Arvek’s forcibly reversed Stormsword, the area around the eldar had cleared. Staring down a primarch of the Emperor did not seem to give the xenos pause, but before they could cast their lightning arcs, Vulkan unleashed a storm of his own.
An inferno burst from his outstretched hand, the in-built flame units in his gauntlet reacting to their master’s touch. What began as a plume of flame expanded quickly into a conflagration of super-hot promethium. The eldar were caught by it and engulfed, their bodies rendered in heat-hazed, brownish silhouettes as they shook inside the blaze. No kine-shield could save them; their robes and armour burned as one, fused to flesh until all was reduced to ash and charred bone.
Vulkan relented. The fire died and so too the riot, which was now being wrestled under control.
A single eldar witch remained, her face blackened by soot, her silver hair singed and burned. She looked up at the Lord of the Drakes, eyes watering, rage telegraphed in the tightness of her lips and the angle of her brow. The faltering kine-shield that had spared her life crackled and disappeared into ether.
She was not much older than a child, a witchling. Teeth clenched, fighting the grief at the death of her coven, the eldar offered up her wrists in surrender.
Numeon and the others had just breached the crowds, which were now slowly dissipating into the wider desert and being mopped up diligently by Nemetor and the rest of the Legion. In the wake of the fleeing civilians, the true cost of the eldar’s escape attempt was revealed.
Men, women, children; Khar-tans and Imperials alike, lay dead. Crushed. Blood ran in red rivulets across the sand, the death toll in the hundreds.
Amongst them a solitary figure was conspicuous, crowded by a clutch of battered remembrancers unwilling to let anyone close, desperate to defend her unmoving body.
Vulkan saw her last of all, the shock of this discovery turning to anger on his noble face. His eyes blazed, embers flickered to infernos.
The eldar child raised her hands higher, defiance turning into fear upon her alien features.
Numeon held the others back, warning them with a look not to intervene.
Glaring down at her, Vulkan raised his fist…
Don’t do it…
…and turned the air into fire.
The eldar child’s screams didn’t last. They merged with the roar of the flames, turning into one horrific cacophony of sound. When it was over and the last xenos was a smoking husk of burned meat, Vulkan looked up and met the gaze of the Night Lords.
The legionaries had stopped short when the flame-storm began. They stood and watched the primarch of the Salamanders at the edge of the scorched earth he had made. Then, without uttering a word, they turned and went to retrieve their wounded.
Ganne muttered something and made to go after them.
Numeon barred his path, his gauntlet clanking against Ganne’s breastplate, ‘No, go to the primarch,’ he said to all of them. ‘See him away from this place.’
Ganne backed down and the Pyre Guard went to their lord.
Only Numeon stayed behind, opening a channel over the vox to Nemetor.
‘Prepare the primarch’s transport. We’re coming in,’ he said, and cut the link.
Vulkan was standing over the lifeless body of Seriph. A stray bolt-round had grazed her side. It had been enough to kill her. There was a lot of blood – her robes were sodden with it; so, too, were the robes of the other remembrancers who had tried to save her.
Despite the primarch’s presence, his obvious threat, the other remembrancers did not shrink away from Seriph’s side.
An elderly man with rheumy eyes and wizened features gazed up at the Lord of the Drakes.
‘We’ll see her back to the ships,’ he said.
Vulkan opened his mouth to say something, but could find no words to express his feelings. Instead, he nodded before replacing his helmet, but found it could not hide his shame as well as it could his face. Turning, he became aware of his warriors gathering next to him.
‘The Legion awaits you, my lord,’ said Varrun humbly, and gave a slight bow of his head.
About to respond, Vulkan stopped short when he felt someone watching him from afar. Looking around, he caught sight of a dark and distant shadow out on the dunes. A second later and his helmet vox crackled to life.
‘See brother, I knew you had it in you. A cold-hearted killer, just like me.’
Vulkan replied, ‘I am nothing like you’, and severed the link, yet the stench of burning alien flesh remained.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mortal pillars
‘To be more than human is; at the same time, to be less than human. Within us is the capacity for greatness. We are warriors, but we must also be saviours. Our ultimate goal is self-obsoletion, for when our task is successful and peace, not war, reigns in the galaxy, our usefulness will be ended and with it us too.’
– Vulkan, from the Trials of Fire
The dream ended and I shuddered myself awake.
Curze’s last words on the outskirts of Khartor had unsettled me and forced me to look within myself for evidence of the monster he claimed me to be. They echoed in my skull like old bones, unearthed from an old grave thought long forgotten.
The past will always come back. It never truly stays dead.
The first thing I realised upon opening my eyes was that this was not my cell.
The chamber was small, and yet expansive at the same time. Its walls were white, glowing, smooth like bone. I heard voices within them, and as I strained my eyes saw tiny circuits of light rushing like shoals of minnows with the river’s flow.
There was no smell, no taste. As I moved, rising to my feet, I made no sound. I could detect no air and yet I still breathed, my lungs functioning as they always had. Evidence of my previous tortures could not be seen, my body as unblemished and bereft of scars as when I had first arrived on Nocturne.
‘What is this place?’ My voice echoed as I asked the question of the figure standing opposite me.
Its face was hooded, and the rest of its body draped in robes, but I could tell immediately that it wasn’t human. Too tall, too slight. I knew an eldar when I saw one. This one was a farseer.
‘Nowhere of consequence, a meeting place is all,’ he said in a low, mellifluous voice.
‘You speak Gothic?’ I asked, though he had just given me the answer to that question.
The eldar nodded.
He wore black, with strange sigils and eldritch runes stitched into the slightly iridescent cloth. A weeping eye, a pyramid, a pair of bisected squares rendered into an angular figure of eight – I could not read them but suspected they were symbols of the farseer’s power and even origin. Though his face was concealed by the hood, and perhaps an even more effective and unnatural concealment, the edges of his aquiline features were suggested where the shadows lessened.
In his right hand, which was hidden beneath a black glove, he clutched a staff. Like the runes described on his robes, the figure’s staff was fashioned from the same strange bone-like material forming the chamber. Its peak was a simple eye and teardrop design.
I believed that this too was a glamour, in the same way that the eldar had masked his true appearance from me.
‘You are dreaming, Vulkan,’ he said, not stepping towards me, not moving at all, not even breathing. ‘That isn’t air you are taking into your lungs. That isn’t light making your pupils retract. You are not really here.’
‘Who are you?’ I demand, angry at being manipulated by this psychic passenger.
‘It doesn’t matter. None of this is real, but what is very real is what I am about to impart to you. The very fact you have not chosen to attack me suggests I chose wisely.’
&nbs
p; ‘You make it sound like you’ve tried this before,’ I said.
‘Not I, one of my kindred. Despite my warning not to, he proceeded anyway.’ There was resignation in the eldar’s voice, changing its melodic tone into something approaching regret. ‘It went poorly, I’m afraid, and so we are here. You and I.’
My eyes narrowed, the words of the alien coiling in my mind, unfathomable and deliberately obscure.
‘Are you a spirit, a wraith followed me from Kharaatan?’
I sensed the ghost of a smile in my strange companion’s reply.
‘Something like that, but not from Kharaatan. Ulthwé.’
‘What? Why am I here?’
‘It’s not important, Vulkan. What is important are my words, and the matter of earth.’
‘The matter of earth?’
‘Yes. It is tied inextricably to your fate. You see, I needed to speak to you. While you were still able to heed me, before you were lost.’
‘Lost? I am already lost. A prisoner aboard my brother’s ship, at least…’ I looked down at my bare feet, ‘I think I am.’
‘Are your thoughts so confused already?’
Looking up again, the eldar had drawn closer to me. His eyes, oval and lambent with power, bored into me.
‘I saw you, didn’t I?’ I asked. ‘On the ship, before I realised where I was.’
‘I tried to make contact before, but your mind was reeling, overcome with rage and a desire for freedom. You were also not long recovered.’
‘Recovered from what?’
‘As I say, it is the matter of earth upon which I must speak to you.’
‘You’re making no sense, creature.’
‘This might be the only chance I get to contact you. After this, I may not be able to return. You must live, Vulkan,’ the alien told me, ‘you must live, but stand alone as a gatekeeper. You are the only one who can perform this duty. You alone are the hope.’
I frowned as the words spilling from this alien’s lips made less and less sense to me. I shook my head, believing it to be another trick of my gaoler, albeit an extremely elaborate one.