Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  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 I 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 Fireborn, 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 III’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.’

  ‘Like an ambush?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Haukspeer said. ‘Something else, something I can’t quite identify.’

  ‘We could go wide of the valley, risk the fringes of the Urgall Hills?’

  Haukspeer shook his head, already turning to make his descent a second time. ‘Too dangerous,’ he said. ‘We head down, eyes and ears open.’ He looked over his shoulder, over the silent power generator that fed his armour. ‘I will lead.’

  Usabius shrugged to me, and we followed the Raven Guard into the shadows.

  We lost sight of Haukspeer almost immediately after we reached the foot of the valley. It was a deep basin, angular and narrow like a jagged blade but more than wide enough to accommodate three legionary warriors.

  Within minutes I felt the same intangible sensation that had unsettled Haukspeer. With less than a hundred metres in my wake, a strange harrowing feeling stole over me. Like razors in my mouth, though there was no blood, or grit beneath my fingernails despite the fact that my hands were encased in ceramite. An itch was the only way I could think to describe it, like a gunsight at the back of my head or a knife a hair’s-breadth from my exposed throat.

  ‘Do you feel that?’ I asked Usabius in a whisper.

  ‘Like chewing on rusty nails or walking on glass.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, realising that we had stopped. I checked the retinal display in my battle-helm. The distance reading since we had set foot in the valley was eighty-eight point eight eight metres.

  Precisely.

  ‘Strange…’ I muttered.

  The vox crackled in my ear.

  ‘I’ve found something.’ Haukspeer’s voice sounded strained.

  ‘Are you all right, brother? You don’t sound your–’

  ‘Come quickly, and quietly. Follow the route to my ident-icon exactly, no deviations,’ he said, adding, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t see this before,’ then cut the link.

  Haukspeer was not far. He crouched down by a mound of stones, examining each one with the tips of his lightning claw.

  As soon as we reached his position I checked my retinal display: five hundred and twelve metres. Again, it was an exact reading, the dial ending on zero the moment I had stopped moving.

  ‘Eight times eight times eight…’ I breathed.

  Haukspeer turned sharply. ‘What did you say?’
/>
  ‘I don’t know why I said that.’ I gestured to the mound. ‘What are you looking at?’

  It was twice the height of a legionary, with a wide base that tapered up to a point. Veiled in the black volcanic dust and ash of Isstvan, it was hard to make out what it was.

  Tentatively, Haukspeer brushed away the worst of the dust and I saw a skull underneath.

  My heart lurched as I fought down the bile rising in my stomach, doused the hot rage warming my face and body.

  ‘Are they who I think they are?’

  Haukspeer could only nod. He clenched his fist, releasing an energy flurry across his talons.

  Usabius was similarly dumbstruck at first.

  It was a mound of skulls, the heads of our Legion brothers. I balked at just how many.

  ‘There will be vengeance for this,’ Usabius hissed.

  ‘Look around us,’ said Haukspeer, lost in a pit of his own private despair.

  I did.

  Unnoticed until that moment, we were surrounded by pillars of skulls like the skeletal remains of some vast and ancient ruin. Cloaked in volcanic black, they varied in size and form. Some were columnar, others were flat plains of bone or winding ossuary roads fashioned from the deaths of our brothers.

  Underfoot, the ground crunched like shale or the shelled bank of some beachhead. It was neither; we walked upon the skeletons of our slain kin, grinding them down to dust with every booted step.

  Wrath, inchoate but rising, filled me. Like someone had turned a switch in my mind, I was suddenly possessed of the urge to kill the ones responsible for this. Hateful red hazed my vision, and I welcomed it. I heard the beat of my own angry hearts in my head – after a while it sounded like a chant.

  No, wait… It was a chant.

  ‘Do you hear that too?’ I asked, speaking through clenched teeth. My jaw was wired so tight, I thought it would snap.

  Usabius nodded.

  ‘I hear it,’ Haukspeer gurgled through saliva foaming at the corners of his mouth.

  It foamed at mine too, and tasted like blood.

  ‘That way,’ said Usabius, and I followed his outstretched, trembling finger.