Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  As of this moment, we knew it as Isstvan.

  We set down our burden as we went to ground, scrambling behind rocks and the burned-out wrecks of drop-ships. These military leviathans could carry entire battle companies and their convoys of support vehicles, serfs, Mechanicum adepts and Dreadnoughts. Now they were downed, their guts ripped open to fester in the smoke-thronged air, festooned with bodies, charnel houses in every aspect. The dirty little patch of earth where we squatted was also a wrecker’s yard… Land Raiders, Rhino armoured personnel carriers and the skeletal remains of speeders littered our position along with the massive drop-ships like an iron graveyard.

  Even with a drop-ship’s coal-black fuselage between us and our hunters, the firefight still far off and explosions distant, I did not feel safe. Nowhere was safe and eventually we too would be swept up in the tide of anger that had descended on the Urgall Depression like a cloud in which fratricide on a grand scale was the only constant.

  ‘Keep him still,’ I said to Usabius, knowing my brother would not allow our burden to reveal our position.

  Even in the wastes, far from the Urgall Hills, there was still a lot of black sand between us and solace.

  I glanced back and saw him muttering something reassuring to the half-dead Raven Guard we were carrying. The drop-ship against which we were hiding had belonged to his Legion. Black on black, the scorch marks from the terrible fires that had eventually destroyed it had obliterated the white corvidae device on both the wing and the torn-up hull.

  Edging around the nose of the drop-ship, which was half-buried in dark sand, I tried to gauge the level of threat beyond our fragile sanctuary.

  I saw a pack of eight warriors in sea-green armour, black trim around the edges of their battleplate, carrying a mixture of power mauls, glaives and chainblades. The chain weapons were burring noisily, vying with the dark laughter of these killers and the mechanised barking of their beasts.

  ‘A death-squad,’ I told Usabius, who did not respond. ‘With mastiffs. No blind-hunters.’

  I almost felt my brother relax at the last remark.

  I felt far from sanguine, but then I could see what was happening beyond the nose of the drop-ship in a shallow, ellipse-shaped gully.

  Three other warriors, two in armour of coal-black, a white hand emblazoned on their left pauldrons, and one in darker armour still with his battle-helm torn off to reveal a chalk-white face beneath, were being encircled by the death-squad.

  I saw a second group of hunters, six this time. Same damn Legion, bolters loose. One carried a missile tube, the cause of the earlier explosion that had frozen us in place.

  After a few seconds of charged silence, Usabius asked, ‘Can we move?’

  I shook my head, motioned for him to stay still.

  No point in letting Usabius see this. He would want to fight, to try and save the warriors in the hunters’ deadly trap. It was a death sentence and I had not rescued him from mortal peril once only for him to cast away his life meaninglessly. I wanted to save them too, but nailed my resolve through my feet so I would not move.

  So, as the jaws of the trap closed and the hunters advanced, I waited and watched. And hated myself for that.

  They were badly injured, the three in black. But two attacked anyway, thunder hammers swinging. I flinched involuntarily as the trio of bolt rounds sounded like a parade drum, a staccato one-two one and the Iron Hands jerking to their deadly tattoo.

  One fell, chest ruptured, arm severed at the shoulder. I saw sparks, thrashing serpentine wires severed from their connections in a bionic arm. The hand came away at the wrist, sawn off in the kinetic impact of bolter shells.

  My muscles felt tight and heavy like slabs of lead. I realised I was tensing them. Blood pounded hard against the inside of my skull, my enhanced metabolism recognising the electrical signals my brain was sending it and preparing for combat. I calmed down, reasserted my order to Usabius to hold after having heard the shots and moving up a fraction.

  Be still, I willed him as I saw the second Iron Hand die. He was impaled by a chainblade, then bludgeoned to death. His scream was a mechanised blurt of pseudo-static that chilled my lava-hot blood.

  ‘Brother…’ Usabius urged from behind me. He spoke the word through clenched teeth and made it sound like an imprecation.

  The last slipped the net, afforded an escape route by the sacrifice of the others. I saw him barrel two of his would-be torturers out of the way, spearing the guts from one and slashing off half the face from another with his claws.

  Sons of Horus, mewing and cursing as they choked on their own blood… It gave me more satisfaction than it should have, and for a moment I balked at my own transformation.

  As the Raven Guard took flight, I dared to hope and wanted to clench my fist in triumph and defiance.

  I waited and watched as muzzle flares lit up the darkness, the scurrying and shouting that followed as the hunters tried to reset their trap.

  Then came the chill in my blood, renewed by an avian cry of anguish. Someone was dying somewhere ahead of us. A few minutes later, I saw the Raven Guard raised up on an eight-pointed cross, snatches of his crucifixion revealed to me through flashes of incendiary and the dull lambent glow of funerary pyres. On the horizon line, I saw a long chain of those burning hillocks, bodies for fuel; the bodies of my brothers. They were large, some even dwarfed the Urgall Hills. One, I think, was comprised entirely of skulls but I looked away as a strange sense of wrath and sickness came upon me. Somewhere up there was his fortress, where the Emperor’s fallen son had plotted his deception and seen it enacted in full.

  I averted my gaze, tried to shut out the sound of the Raven Guard’s torment and saw something crawling towards me. Arachnid, spastic motions made it hard to identify immediately. I recoiled when I realised it was a hand, the same bionic ripped from one of the dead warriors during his execution. Without thinking I crushed it beneath my boot, horrified at the very sight, and looked up.

  The death-squad lingered, their silhouettes bulky and spiked against the roaring pyres behind them, their hounds snarling at the leash. They were torturing, and relishing the act. I knew pain, I had inflicted it upon my enemies, received it back in turn. I had even visited it upon captured foes in order to learn of their battle plans or ascertain mission objectives when none were obvious. It left a taste like the dust of the Scorian Plain in my mouth, but this was something else. My deeds, however repugnant to me, had purpose. The cruelty the death-squad were subjecting the crucified legionary to was animalistic, debased. I had to fight not to reach for my bolter and put the poor bastard out of his misery. But to do so would reveal our position, then we would be the ones upon the eight-pointed cross.

  We would have to stay and listen to them have their sport. I could feel Usabius’s anger like an electric tang in the air behind me. I held out my hand in warning. ‘Wait.’

  ‘This one might not last,’ he snarled, anger bubbling over, referring to our own wounded Raven Guard.

  We were hunting too, for survivors, for survival, anything that would fill the glass with more grains and allow us that time to hit back, for revenge, because we would never understand why. For Usabius and me, there was also something else, someone else we were looking for. We had been close when we heard the moaning from inside the drop-ship and found the son of Corax bathed in his own blood. He did not moan any more, but was largely still and quiet. This bothered me more than I let on to Usabius, because to admit that our efforts had been futile in rescuing him would also force us to admit other truths which we were not yet ready to face.

  I had not seen Ferrus Manus die.

  I think I felt his death through the rage and anguish of his sons. The Iron Hands were normally so stoic, as mechanised with their emotions as they were with the slow metal colonisation of their bodies.

  The flesh is weak, so went their Legion mantra.

  All of us were weak. Weak when faced with treachery beyond countenance when the guns at our backs
that were meant to protect us turned…

  I was there on the left flank. An entire Legion arrayed for battle, led ingloriously by our father into a fight we did not want but could not avoid. Death came first, for them and us. Horus had leashed three primarchs to his cause, as well as his own devoted Legion. Perhaps we should have known when his cult of personality overtook him, when the title of Warmaster changed to warmonger and became the right of a disaffected son, not an honour bestowed by a grateful father. He changed their name, no longer content to share the lupine aspect with a more obviously feral and deserving brother Legion, and made them all his sons in identity as well as blood.

  Perhaps then we should have known, but even if those signs were there, we could not have divined what happened next.

  We had lost a lot, killed our brothers in what felt like senseless slaughter. It paled to what followed as we were retreating back towards the dropsite, licking our wounds and consolidating our forces so that others could resume the fight in our stead. Banners of the Hydra and the Iron were behind us, ready reinforcements and the very real evidence that Horus had erred. But the unthinkable became reality: seven Legions had defied the Emperor and joined Horus. Our numerical advantage, our tactical superiority, disintegrated like flesh before a nuclear sunrise. Our reinforcements became the hammer against Horus’s anvil. And so the guns turned.

  Night had fallen upon Isstvan, though that could be the floating ash and vast palls of smoke that had blotted out the sun. It mattered not. Black on top of black again, that was the only time when we could move with any hope of secrecy. There was a distant glow to the north, where our treacherous enemies had cast off their cloaks and revealed themselves. I revised my estimate – night was falling. Warriors, or the semblance of warriors in some instances, were stirring from debauched torpor, roused to ritual and supplication in the name of dark gods.

  This was supposed to be an age of enlightenment, where superstition had been banished by the light of empirical truth. Where was that light now, I wondered as I stared into the darkness, recognising the echo of it that had taken root in my soul.

  Finished with their sport the death-squad moved on, hooting and grunting in voices barely describable as human any more.

  ‘We go,’ I said to Usabius and reached down to hook my arm beneath the Raven Guard.

  ‘Should we mark it?’

  As I turned to look at my brother I saw the short metal rod he clutched in his off-hand. It had a small barrel at the end with a number of lightless diodes awaiting activation. Ruuman had given us the seismic mapping staves, said it would help with triangulation. I actually think he was just humouring us with his aid, but Usabius and I were grateful anyway.

  ‘Do it,’ I said and watched my brother plant the stave deep, twisting the barrel to begin signal transmission.

  They were ostensibly designed for siege warfare, but we had an entirely different purpose in mind for them.

  ‘Secure?’ I asked, eager to move.

  With the night came relative obscurity, but it also brought horrors that were not present in the sun.

  Usabius paused. ‘I don’t think he’s breathing,’ he replied. I did not see my brother’s face, it was hidden behind the scarred battle-helm he wore, but knew it would be grim.

  ‘Keep moving,’ I said, as we emerged from behind the drop-ship, trying to block out the noise of murder while still listening for signs of danger.

  We got another eighty metres before Usabius hissed, ‘Armour!’

  Inwardly, I cursed. We had stayed too long and now our journey back would be long and perilous, if we made it back at all.

  A crater, strewn with power armoured corpses, most of their iconography burned away, was our only hope of anonymity.

  We plunged down into it, amongst the charred skeletons of warriors we might have known and fought beside. Limbs, torn and limp, slapped against my greaves. A skeletal hand touched its fingers to my face. Another scraped against my shoulder guard and my mind was suddenly filled with images of the dead: putrefied and rotting inside their armour, risen up in damnation and silent accusation at our survival. I banished the thought – it would not serve me here – blaming fatigue and trauma. Cogency was often the first aspect of a warrior’s efficacy to be tested during periods of prolonged and extreme mental stress. I cannot think of any ordeal greater than Isstvan in my experience.

  Scrambling over the bodies, I slipped and went vambrace-deep into the ragged cavity of an ex-legionary’s chest. Unflinching, I yanked my hand out, breaking off a piece of already shattered rib, and tried not to linger on the gore coating my gauntleted fist. No honour, no glory in this pit of the dead. Here was a place that heroes went to die, unremembered and unmourned. We were barrow-worms, crawling amongst them. Dragging the lifeless body of the Raven Guard with us, we kissed the earth and tried to burrow down into it.

  Hearts hammering in my chest, I felt the low rumble of the tank company rolling towards us through the trembling earth. Before I shut my eyes, concealing the fire burning vitally within them, I noticed vibrating grains of black sand cascading over the edge of the crater and was put in mind again of the hourglass. Then I surrendered to the dark and hoped it would not be my last sight.

  Usabius’s prediction about the armoured company’s arrival saved us both. Death on Isstvan was swift, usually instantaneous. Whatever order had once held sway in this force was gone as Legion commanders left only their worst, their dogs, behind to hunt and scrape our feeble resistance from this world. Soon the legionary-hounds would retreat too and anything that had escaped their teeth and claws would be atomised from orbit.

  I tried to focus, concentrate on the act of subterfuge that was necessary for my survival, however much it galled me not to take bolter and blade to these traitors. Some had tried. They slept in craters like the one in which we were hiding. Dwelling on the myriad ways I might meet my own demise would only bring it about quicker. So instead I let my senses bring me back to the present.

  It was an unpleasant reunion.

  Blood scent, old but still wet, crept into my nostrils. The taste of metal tanged my palate. Decaying flesh was redolent on the hot air coming off the tanks. Visions of the unquiet dead, mouths agape with tongues lolling through nubs of broken, black teeth, returned. I could crush the nightmare in my head, but the stench would not abate so easily. Without the air filters in my battle-helm, I almost gagged.

  The hard chank of brake blocks, the heady pall of heat from still-cooking engines, announced the tank company’s abrupt halt.

  ‘Thought I saw movement this way,’ a grating, iron voice said like two rusted girders scraping against one another.

  One of Perturabo’s sons.

  Hate practically emanated off the legionary in waves. I expected to hear the clank of booted feet against a tank’s hull, the dull resonance as they stomped down the rungs of a ladder attached to its turret and finally the crunch of earth beneath a heavy tread.

  Close inspection at the end of a bayonet would undo our efforts. My gladius was within reach and short enough to draw without needing to rise. I resolved not to go down without a fight…

  Instead, I heard a metal creak and the low fizz of a lamp burning into life.

  Seconds later a cold, harsh light oozed into the crater and I resisted the urge to crawl deeper into the morass of bodies. Even with my eyes closed, I could detect the change in light and hoped the infinitesimal reaction of my eyelids would not give us away. It moved slowly, like a slick, painting my armour with greasy, oleaginous fingers. I remained still, pretending to be dead, unsure for a moment if I was not dead already, and let the searchlight strafe.

  I heard the tanks growling nearby, guttural, bestial. The stench of promethium was noxious. Their crews were talking to one another, though I could not discern what was being said over the comm static. It sounded like a question to whoever was on the searchlight in the turret.

  The legionary’s answer was all too audible.

  ‘Fire’s
killed most of them. A few are still fresh, though. We could burn it out again.’

  I am a Salamander, born from fire, but even my endurance would not allow me to survive a promethium bath.

  There was a pause as whoever was inside the tank replied.

  ‘At your command, sergeant,’ answered the turret-man, and relief washed over me like a balm.

  The heat of the searchlight passed, evaporating like a very real weight lifting from my back. I allowed my heart rate to go back to normal just as the Raven Guard began to stir.

  Half-delirious with pain, our brother could not have known our predicament, nor the fact that he imperilled us all with his untimely return to consciousness.

  Daring to open my eyes a fraction, I saw the Raven Guard trying to move but was too far away to do anything about it. The tanks that had just begun to roll out again seemed to pause. I heard the legionary in the turret, the crackle of his vox as he told the driver to halt.

  Usabius was glaring at me through the cracked left lens of his helmet. It was badly split and I could clearly see the fiery glow of his true eye beneath it. In our frantic flight, our wounded companion had ended up right next to him.

  Tracks were grinding against earth, against sand, against bone…

  The Iron Warriors were turning back!

  Usabius did not stop glaring. As first I thought he was trying to prevent our discovery through sheer determination, as if by willing it we would become invisible. It was only as I reached, millimetre by agonising millimetre, for my bolter that I realised he wanted my permission.

  If he did this, it would be on us both. He could not carry the burden of it alone.

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I nodded.

  From above, the sound of shifting armour was different – the lead tank was moving alone, returning for a last look with the baleful eye of its searchlight. In the few seconds remaining to us before it reached the edge of the crater and picked out the wounded warrior stirring in its bowels, Usabius reached over with the power fist he wore over his right hand, slowly formed a vice around the Raven Guard’s neck and squeezed.