Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  This blow was less effective. The impact dispersed across its heavily armoured shell as smoke plumed around its body, barely impeding the Castellax as it put itself between harm’s way and its master.

  Obek tried to rise, but stumbled and could only look back.

  Figures in power armour advanced towards him through the shadows. Three bolters flared as one but Obek’s vision had blurred and he couldn’t see his rescuers clearly. He knew they were Salamanders though.

  He barely had time to shout, ‘Vulkan lives!’ before Kronus’ shoulder-mounted cannon started up with a roar.

  Light, heat and noise filled the crowded corridor and one of the charging Salamanders legionaries went down hard. He struck the wall as the shells detonated, bounced off metal siding and kept running a few more feet before the heavy bolter put a hole in his torso.

  The others kept coming, shooting and advancing.

  A stray round struck Regulus, who emitted a panicked blurt of cant that made Kronus half turn. A plasma bolt screamed out of the chaos and destroyed the Castellax’s cannon, as a second bored a hole through its reactor. The air filled with an actinic stench and the ear-shredding whine of a reactor overload before a plosive detonation rocked the corridor. Dust and grit streamed from the ceiling as Kronus VI exploded loudly and violently. Thrown onto his back, agony surged anew through Obek’s already tortured body.

  Regulus had fared much worse. He staggered, using his servo limbs to try to steady himself. A piece of shrapnel jutting from his body was impairing the adept’s motor function. An amalgam of blood and machine oil was dripping from somewhere beneath his robes.

  The other Salamanders legionaries had been thrown too and were getting up at the same time Obek was dragging himself to his feet. He eyed the adept keenly, nodding to him as he reached down for a length of armoured piping spat from somewhere amidst Kronus’ inner workings.

  It wasn’t a bolter or a chainblade, but it would do.

  ‘Didn’t I say it would not be your last error…’

  Regulus gave a blurt of binaric as whatever passed for his lifeblood pooled on the ground around him.

  Obek grimaced, and tried not to enjoy his retribution too much.

  ‘There’s not enough left of that thing to save you any more.’

  ‘Not…’ said the adept, his voice modulation fluctuating wildly, ‘…for… Kronus…’

  A third plasma bolt vaporised him before he could say anything else, and Obek turned around to see who had denied him vengeance.

  His annoyance immediately abated when he recognised who it was.

  ‘Forgefather?’

  ‘I live, Firebearer,’ T’kell said, and gestured to Obek’s arm, ‘but you look barely alive yourself.’

  ‘Half,’ Obek said, and looked down at his severed arm. Regulus had dropped it when he had been impaled. ‘He said the door was sealed and only the primarch’s genetic markers could unlock it.’

  Xen’s arrival prevented any further discussion. He was bloodied and had come from farther down the corridor.

  ‘A second force is pushing this way,’ he told them, then remembered to salute his captain.

  Obek looked down the corridor but could see only darkness. He did hear the distant sound of combat, though, and said, ‘Speak, Xen.’

  ‘Battle-servitors, with renegades leading them. I heard it from Zandu.’

  ‘Where is he?’ asked T’kell. ‘And what of Krask and our egress?’

  Xen shook his head, just as the vox crackled to life.

  ‘This is Sergeant Zandu, respond.’

  ‘You are speaking to Obek, brother-sergeant. What is your position? Where is Krask?’

  ‘Captain, praise Vulkan you are alive!’ said Zandu, but his joy was short-lived. ‘Krask… I don’t know. Something has gone wrong. We were overwhelmed and surrounded.’

  ‘Where are you now, sergeant?’

  ‘Closing on your position, but we are embattled by a second force.’

  ‘Can you hold them until we arrive?’

  ‘Negative, brother-captain. Varr has cleansed and burned behind us, but the flames will only keep them at bay for so long. Our lead was scant to begin with and is being eroded. We are falling back.’

  ‘Understood. In your opinion, can we effect a breach in their lines given our current strength?’

  ‘Unless you are several full strength battle squads, brother-captain… again, negative.’

  Obek arched his neck and exhaled loudly. Hyper-aggressive endorphins in his blood had dulled his pain to a throbbing ache, but could do nothing for his frustration.

  ‘How long?’

  The distant sounds of gunfire intensified, growing louder by the second.

  ‘Imminently, brother-captain.’

  Obek looked to Xen.

  ‘Can we hold them here?’

  There was little cover, save for the shallow alcoves running down the walls.

  ‘If even a tenth of the force Zandu says is coming for us is behind him then, no, we cannot.’ He stripped out his bolt pistol and gave it to Obek, who nodded in thanks, checked the clip and sight, then slipped it into the holster where his own sidearm had been.

  Then he turned to T’kell.

  ‘You should not have come back for me. It was reckless.’

  Xen stepped in to answer. ‘Would you have left one of us, brother-captain?’

  Obek could hardly argue with that. He gripped Xen’s pauldron, then turned back to T’kell.

  ‘I am sorry, Forgefather. The Unscarred have failed you, we have failed the primarch, but we shall at least die with honour.’

  ‘We are not dead yet,’ T’kell replied. He had his back to Obek and was regarding the door to the Wrought.

  It was large, far larger than any of the Salamanders legionaries, and ornate, the metal carved with intricate care and an artisan’s skill, but with an impenetrability to rival any bastion gate. No locks were in evidence, no bars or visible defences of any kind, just the sigil and the mechanism with the drake’s fanged maw. Blood shone on the teeth, not fresh, not Obek’s. His wounds had been cauterised on impact.

  ‘It did not work?’ T’kell asked, as the sound of battle came increasingly closer. They could even make out Zandu’s bellowed imprecations to Vulkan and the wild laughter of Zeb’du Varr.

  ‘Forgefather?’

  Xen and the others had assumed firing positions, kneeling to make for smaller targets or pressed into the alcoves.

  ‘The door,’ said T’kell. ‘Your blood. It is sealed still. Did it not work, whatever the adept was attempting?’

  ‘He tried and failed.’

  T’kell lifted his arm to the light as if to examine it…

  ‘Part of me is still flesh and blood. I have to believe Vulkan bestowed this burden upon me for a reason. I think the door was gene-coded to me alone.’

  …and thrust his hand into the mouth of the drake sigil.

  FOURTEEN

  The last legacy of Vulkan

  Kurnan heard it in the deeps. A low churning of earth, a dulled echo of metal striking metal, mechanisms sliding into place and the awakening of the machine. The door…

  Vulkan’s armoury, at last laid open for them to pillage.

  Ahead of him, the corridor was burning and the flames were kicking out heat intense enough to melt plastek and warp metal. The battle-servitors suffered greatly. Their dead, gelid flesh curled and then blackened before finally sloughing away. Some collapsed amidst the firestorm; others, those possessing a modicum of remembered self-preservation, did pause.

  Kurnan crouched behind one of the dull-eyed servitors, using it as a meat shield as he cycled through the vision filters of his retinal lenses. Thick, oily smoke was spilling off the blaze in a pall but Kurnan found his enemies through the miasma and bellowed orders at his warriors to return fire. The Salamanders had fallen back in good order, but they had to know their plight was a hopeless one.

  Always outnumbered, thought Kurnan, destined to die.

>   One firestorm met another, and then a third as both sides exchanged fusillades of hard shells and las-bolts.

  ‘Fire…’ he grumbled to Solomus, who fell in beside him. ‘Why is it always fire with these legionaries?’

  The servitor meat shields jerked and thrashed as the bolter shells hit them.

  ‘Weren’t they born in it, or some such myth?’

  ‘They’ll die in it this day,’ chimed Krede. One-handed, he could only wield a bolt pistol and as he stretched out his arm to shoot, a round clipped him and blew apart his chin and most of the left side of his face. In agony, clutching at his ruined face with his one good hand, Krede crashed forwards into the fire and the upper half of his body ignited.

  Kurnan looked on aggrieved, but Solomus merely shrugged. ‘Never have I met an unluckier soul than Krede, but I echo his sentiment,’ he said. The other two Sons of Horus legionaries, Menatus and Ghodak, went to drag the body out of the flames, but Kurnan waved them back.

  ‘He’s dead. Stay down.’

  The fires were dying out – the servitors had absorbed much of their wrath and it had told on their numbers. They advanced now, those that still burned and those that followed in their wake, implacable and relentless. In their shadow, Solomus began to rise. ‘Let’s just kill these sons of the Drake.’

  The rest of the Sons were coming. Kurnan had heard them over the vox. He and Solomus were but the vanguard.

  Kurnan followed him into the storm, into the fury. So did Menatus and Ghodak. Harkus, who had fought in the battle above, was not far behind with Ezriah and Uziel, and with them came reinforcements of a different calibre to Mechanicum drones.

  Plunging into smoke, Kurnan felt his hatred rise anew. For the servitors and their slacked-jawed obeisance, for the adept and his arrogance, for Solomus’ impudence and the Salamanders legionaries’ refusal to just die. A barbed thing had grown within him ever since Isstvan III, violently flourishing with every betrayal and act of dishonour that came afterwards. But the deepest barb he reserved for an especial hatred – the deepest he left for himself.

  The doors to the Wrought ground open with a sound like tortured metal and for a moment the Salamanders legionaries stared, beholding a gateway to a mythical ark to which, after much struggle, they had finally gained admittance.

  Darkness beckoned, and the flickering glow of auto-sconces.

  Zandu had reached the infiltration squad by now, Varr too, though the number of Salamanders legionaries in their force was painfully low. They came past Xen’s sentries, battered and war weary, stopping at the threshold of Vulkan’s legendary armoury.

  ‘I smell cinder and ash,’ murmured Obek and fought the urge to bow his head.

  ‘We have no time for observance,’ said T’kell. His voice sounded strained, causing Obek to look over to him, but the Techmarine waved off his concern. ‘We have this chance now, only this. Into the Wrought!’

  Obek led them in, his borrowed bolt pistol held out before him. He went fast, his strength returning, las and shell fire chasing him into the shadows, with Zandu and the others closing protectively around their wounded captain.

  Xen and the rest still held the corridor as the renegades came through the conflagration laid down by Varr. Having joined up with Zandu, Raios now took up position with the infiltration squad and together they maintained a suppressing fire.

  T’kell lingered by the door, and shouted to the Vexillary now.

  ‘Xen… Flamesmote! We fall back now.’

  ‘To never know glory,’ said Xen, shouting above the roar of the bolters, ‘to be denied vengeance…’

  ‘Dying here in this place is not glorious–’ T’kell faltered, clutching his forehead, but Xen was preoccupied with the firefight and barely noticed. ‘Nor will it bring us vengeance.’

  Xen kept up his rate of fire but what came back in return outweighed it more than tenfold. Phokan was hit, a solid impact in the chest that his armour bore the brunt of. Then Gairon, spitting a cry of pain as his knee was blown apart.

  ‘Can you close it?’ Xen yelled, covering Raios as he went to grab Gairon and drag him back against the wall.

  ‘Now who’s the vengu,’ he heard Raios mutter to the veteran, earning a grunted invective in reply.

  ‘I can,’ said T’kell. ‘This door between them and us. No way in. An armoury at our disposal. We can prevail, brother.’

  Xen relented and gave the order for the squad to fall back.

  Once they were through the door, T’kell engaged the mechanism, this time to close the vault behind them. It did so quickly, the inviolable slab of primarch-wrought metal coming down like the lid to a tomb as the last futile shots from farther down the corridor slipped through but missed their targets, and as the door struck the ground it echoed with a resounding clang.

  ‘We are here then, at last…’ T’kell’s voice echoed off glinting obsidian as he addressed the last of the Unscarred. Hunched silhouettes of deep drakes regarded them from the shadows as if in silent appraisal. It was a mere entrance chamber, though vast in and of itself. Several others fed off from it into the seemingly infinite shadows.

  ‘The Wrought,’ he said, the others turning to face him. ‘The last legacy of Vulkan.’

  Kurnan reached the door long after it had already closed.

  Tentatively, his gauntleted fingers quested around the drake sigil and the mechanism he understood was located somewhere in its mouth. He considered trying it when he remembered what had happened to Krede and slowly drew away his hand.

  His gorge rose as he sensed the presence of Rayko Solomus nearby.

  ‘Master Regulus is dead.’

  So matter-of-fact, so dismissive. Kurnan had to resist the urge to kill him almost every time they exchanged words.

  ‘And his beast.’

  ‘It was a Castellax. An advanced war machine.’

  Solomus laughed. ‘We are advanced, brother.’ He rolled over a shredded piece of robot carapace. ‘Not this thing. Not them.’

  Kurnan glanced over Solomus’ shoulder at the battle-servitors standing in ragged ranks, awaiting instruction. They stared ahead with dead eyes, only moving when Harkus and the others shouldered past them.

  ‘How do we breach it?’ asked the legionary tersely. Harkus looked battle ready with his chainsword still bared and his armour flecked with blood. Some said his zealousness in killing the internecine traitors at Isstvan III had bordered on the obscene, but far from a kindred spirit, Kurnan saw only a maniac before him. Some of the XVI had never truly left Cthonia, and so it was said of Harkus.

  ‘Charges. Incendiaries. Everything we have got,’ Kurnan told him. ‘Muster the labour servitors down here too, those with drills and cutters. No door is unbreakable, not even one fashioned by a primarch.’

  Harkus gave a curt, dissatisfied grunt but went about his orders.

  ‘The emissary reckoned this metal could not be pierced by charges,’ said Menatus, he and Ghodak joining the two legionaries at the door. ‘I heard him say even meltas would not cut it.’

  ‘It’s why we had to keep that Drake, and not kill him,’ added Ghodak.

  ‘We still have his arm,’ offered Solomus, gesturing to the Salamanders legionary’s severed limb on the ground.

  Kurnan removed his helm so he could wipe some of the sweat from his scalp, using the opportunity to eye Solomus sternly. ‘I can never tell if you are serious, sarcastic or just psychotic.’

  Solomus had taken off his helm too, the rad-scrubbed air making it possible to do so without risk, and made a facial shrug.

  ‘Me neither,’ he said.

  Kurnan scowled, and tried not to think about how much he wanted to bury his combat knife in Solomus’ grinning face. ‘The limb is useless. We won’t unlock it from this side. We have to use force.’

  ‘That,’ uttered one of the servitors in a mechanised monotone, causing the legionaries to turn with weapons drawn, ‘is unnecessary, and extremely unwise,’ and it turned its dead eyes on Kurnan.

&n
bsp; FIFTEEN

  Besieged

  Obek paced the large, dark atrium in the shadow of drakes. The ebon statues looked down at him from their stone plinths, as if measuring his every deed.

  ‘Was there no word? Nothing?’

  Zandu shook his head, weary. He sat on a metal crate, one of hundreds in the entrance chamber. A cursory recon had revealed the first twenty or so armouries were well stocked, but to search every single room would have taken days, perhaps weeks, so the Salamanders had stayed near the entrance and secured the immediate area. The Wrought was meant to have room enough for the Chalice of Fire, so somewhere in its vastness was a hangar, but it was beyond the Salamanders legionaries’ reach. At least for now. Small parties of legionaries had been sent farther afield than the initial chambers, to gather supplies, weapons and ammunition.

  Mercifully, given the grim state of their number, materiel was in abundance.

  Apothecary Fai’sho was standing between his captain and the sergeant. As soon as the briefing was over, he would return to tending to Obek’s wounds and then the rest of the injured. Obek had insisted they take stock first and formulate a plan. Part of that plan should have involved Krask and Zau’ull.

  ‘We must assume they either made planetfall and were neutralised,’ Obek said, not wishing to dwell on that particular possibility, ‘or they were irrevocably delayed. Either way, we are facing this enemy without them.’

  None spoke of what that might mean for the Chalice of Fire or the artefacts of Vulkan the Unscarred had been charged with delivering. This place was meant to be a safehold, the end of their mission. Instead, it had turned into a fight for survival. T’kell had said nothing of the artefacts or what they should do with them now, and was not present for the briefing either.

  ‘We have to force a breach,’ said Zandu. ‘And must act quickly. How many other entry points does this place have? If we wait too long, we increase the chance of an assault on a second front. There are weapons here that can help us.’ He had removed his helm, as most of the legionaries had, and his face looked waxy and drained. Fai’sho had questioned it, but Zandu had told him he was fine. After the Apothecary had pressed further, Zandu showed him why Themians had such a fierce reputation, and that was the end to it.