Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  The Techmarine still slept in suspended animation, but his bio-signs appeared stable and the burn damage that had melted the augmetic part of his cranium had begun to heal.

  ‘That is Forgemaster T’kell,’ uttered Saurian, ‘I cannot just–’

  ‘Wake him, brother.’

  ‘His injuries, he may not yet–’

  Gallikus was about to take a step towards the Apothecary when he felt something seize his wrist and looked down to see a hand.

  ‘Where is Obek?’ T’kell demanded. ‘Where are my legionary brothers?’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Will of iron

  Krask’s voice came over the teleportarium vox, thready and breathless.

  ‘We have gained the sanctum…’

  Ulok mounted one hemisphere of the dais with his Immortals. Obek, Xen and a veteran honour guard from the Unscarred took the other.

  A last broadcast emanated from the vox.

  ‘Teleport homer engaged,’ said Krask.

  Ulok gave the signal, and a storm lit up the chamber.

  The war party emerged in a maelstrom of light and aetheric wind. As the actinic glare faded, a host of warriors appeared in its wake, trailing corposant from their armour. They were standing on the deck of a warship, amidst the aftermath of a fierce battle. The overhead lume-strips flickered, most having been torn down from their housings, giving the scene an eerie sense of desolation. Bodies lay slumped against the walls. Some had died face down, their blood seeping through the mesh beneath. One appeared to have died on his feet, impaled by a broken power sword that transfixed him to a wall.

  One side stood battered but defiant. They wore green, though their Terminator armour was war-torn and scratched to bare gunmetal in places.

  ‘You look bloodied, Wyvern,’ said Obek, his gaze straying to the dead renegades but lingering on the two Firedrake bodies beside them.

  ‘We have been, and sustained losses, but fared better than the traitors.’ Krask had deep gouges in his war-plate, and parts of it were seared black from the touch of a power blade.

  ‘Hard fought, brother,’ said Xen, and nodded to the giant Terminator.

  Beyond the chamber where Krask and his men were standing, there was another, smaller room.

  Ulok had advanced to this inner sanctum and as Obek caught up to him, he saw the Iron Father facing the Mechanicum adept. Regulus looked much as he had in the tunnels, but appeared to offer no resistance. He merely stood and awaited his fate.

  ‘Has your search proven costly, Iron Father?’ asked the adept, his voice as metallic as Ulok’s face. ‘Am I to render my secrets to you now?’

  Ulok drew a plasma pistol. In the other hand, he carried a cog-toothed axe of gunmetal black. The clenched gauntlet of his Legion had been emblazoned on the blade in raised relief.

  ‘I am not an emotional being,’ he said, ‘but know this will bring me great satisfaction.’

  He fired the plasma pistol, the weapon emitting a shriek of energy discharge as it cored through the adept’s torso, setting his robes alight. Ulok let him burn for a few seconds before firing again.

  After the fourth shot almost nothing remained of Regulus, save a few scraps of burned sable and the twisted metal leavings that had been his body. Coldly, Ulok approached what was left of the adept’s head, crushing the malformed skull and bionic, and the little organic matter he had still possessed, into sticky remains.

  ‘Iron Father…’ Obek ventured at the threshold of the inner sanctum and watched in stunned fascination. Xen had half drawn Ignus but Obek gestured for calm. ‘You said you wanted to capture him.’

  ‘I did, once,’ Ulok replied. His back was to them, but his cohort of Immortals faced the Salamanders legionaries and had drawn up around the Iron Father.

  ‘Something changed?’ asked Obek, aware of his honour guard closing around him and Krask’s presence nearby, but also of a large body of warriors coming towards them. He doubted they were renegades.

  Ulok turned, his eyes dark as knapped flint. Even his bionic had dimmed to a glowering ember in its mechanical socket.

  ‘Do you know how those versed in the ways of the Omnissiah communicate?’

  ‘What is this, Ulok?’ Obek would have reached for his pistol but for the firing squad of bolters arrayed before him.

  ‘An answer, Drake?’

  Krask and his Firedrakes had advanced so they were behind the captain and his honour guard. Obek could heard the humming disruption fields of their wargear. He also heard the tramp of many booted feet closing, so chose to answer.

  ‘Binaric.’

  Ulok gave a humourless smile, and nodded. ‘Data flows. It is lighter than an atmosphere and even the hull of a warship is no impediment to its passage. I learned something from the traitor’s data-screed. A mote of knowledge, just a mote, and it confirmed all of my suspicions about you. Your vessel, what is its cargo?’

  A deep pit opened in Obek’s gut and his bionic arm suddenly felt like a foreign invader. The grip of his flesh-and-blood hand tightened around the haft of his sword. Xen, Phokan and the honour guard tensed but gave way to the Firedrakes as they edged in front of them and to their captain’s side.

  ‘Relics, Iron Father.’

  ‘I believe you. Forged by Vulkan’s hand, yes? Weapons. Peerless weapons,’ said Ulok and his eyes flashed hungrily. ‘I have need of them. This crusade has need of them.’

  ‘What crusade?’ said Obek, as his lip curled in distaste. ‘The Crusade has ended.’

  ‘The crusade of vengeance,’ Ulok said as if this were obvious. ‘For the Gorgon. He decrees it. Your arsenal was gratefully received, but I shall have more.’

  Obek slowly shook his head. ‘I won’t yield the Chalice of Fire to you, Ulok. That is what my father decrees. Those weapons are not yours or mine to wield.’

  ‘Forged by a primarch’s hand, how can we not? It is our duty.’ His teeth clenched at this impassioned outpouring. ‘Does vengeance not call to you Drakes as it does to us? We Iron Hands are cold,’ he nodded, ‘and driven by a vein of logic, but we are angered by the traitor’s deceit and all it has cost us. You are fireborn – how is it you can temper your wrath? When you saw your father slain on the black sand, did you not yearn for retribution?’

  Obek felt the shame and regret of his retinue in every clenched fist and tightened jaw.

  ‘We did not fight at Isstvan.’

  The coldness in Ulok returned in both his eyes and his manner. ‘No, you did not. You did not bleed as we bled, or as your braver kin bled.’

  Xen cursed. Obek heard it from somewhere behind him and willed his vexillary not to act rashly.

  ‘Whatever you are contemplating, Ulok, do not do it,’ said Obek.

  ‘Are you threatening me, Salamander? Are you willing to turn your guns on your allies but not unleash the war forge of your primarch on the enemy?’

  ‘I am pleading, Ulok. Do. Not. Do. This.’

  Ulok whispered, ‘Morikan… It is already done. Remember,’ he warned, ‘you wrought this upon yourselves.’

  The Immortals stepped forwards to fire as Krask and Ba’durak moved up with their storm shields to protect Obek. As the hail of shell impacted explosively against augmented dragonscale, the other Firedrakes unleashed a salvo from their combi-bolters, felling two of the Immortals before the door to the inner sanctum slammed shut to divide them.

  ‘Firebearer, are you injured?’ asked Krask, eyes front, looking over the edge of his shield, but the door to the inner sanctum stayed sealed.

  ‘No more than I already was,’ Obek replied. ‘Our Chaplain awaits us on the Chalice of Fire. He will have need of us.’

  Krask nodded, lowering his guard. ‘The ship’s teleportarium is close.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Faith in fire

  A deep wound had been torn in the Chalice of Fire and though it had been sealed off and the deck made safe, it remained a chink in a flank of otherwise sturdy armour.

  It had not been Ulok’s inten
t to make such a breach when he unleashed the Obstinate’s guns; he had wanted Regulus to himself and would countenance no others reaching the adept and either capturing or killing him. All of this was now immaterial as a new obsession had usurped the old, and violent providence had provided a way to realise it.

  A solitary gunship ghosted in through the ragged aperture, its lamps dulled, its engine near silent and every inch of it undetectable by augur or sensorium of any kind. Stealth had ever been the most formidable weapon of the XIX. It had not availed them on Isstvan V, for there can be no subtlety in a massacre, but the Raven Guard well knew its value all the same and had honed it to the fine edge of an assassin’s knife after their near annihilation.

  Since then the art of the unseen had come to represent something else, something more instinctual. Survival.

  The lone son of Corax aboard knew about survival, for he had attended the massacre which had claimed not only his voice but so many of his brothers and their allies. What had begun as a righteous endeavour to bring an errant primarch to heel, the primarch, had turned into something much uglier and more desperate. As the first barrage of bombs came hurtling down, many had believed it to be a mistake, even though such errors amongst the Legiones Astartes were inconceivable. Even with bodies flying through the smoke-choked air, their limbs and heads missing, some still clung to the lie that it had been unintended. When the legionaries who were meant to reinforce the Raven Guard and their allies turned their guns, then everyone knew the truth.

  Some railed, shouting their defiance. They died quickly and unheroically, blown apart or hacked down with their curses left unspoken. Others attempted to fight back, as if they still had a chance of victory. These were the Drakes. They lasted longer, but died all the same. The Gorgon’s sons fought for vengeance, with indignation in their hearts. They fell alongside the headless corpse of their father as another lie was exposed with the mortality of primarchs. Most fled, realising the cause lost and their oaths from others betrayed. The son of Corax had been such a legionary.

  Not out of fear, for such concerns were beyond him, but from the very instinct he had clung to ever since. Survival. To live and take revenge.

  An incendiary had killed his captain. It tore up his body and left transhuman offal in its wake. It killed a great many of his brothers too, making a mockery of armour and physiologies designed to withstand war. The second explosion, when it came, detonated so close that he was ripped bodily into the air, and so loud that it robbed his dying brothers of their voices. Their screams became noiseless, their shouts angry, silent imprecations.

  He had become silent then. If his defiance could not be heard, then he would not voice it. No sound of agony would pass his lips either, a small thing that he could deny his erstwhile allies.

  And in his flight, clambering through wreckage and across burning and dismembered bodies, inured to the horror of it all, a paradigm began to form. Gone was brotherhood and fraternity. Survival and fatalism replaced it. To live and take revenge.

  Only this and nothing more.

  The gunship touched down amidst a clutter of wreckage in the night-black landing bay. Most of the detritus from the attack that had ripped out much of the embarkation deck had either been removed or wrenched into the void, but some still drifted languidly in the airless space.

  A ramp opened silently at the front of the ship and the Raven Guard stepped out, again silent. Like the cavernous chamber, he too was night-black and blended so seamlessly as to be almost invisible. Only the faintest glow of his retinal lenses as he analysed the atmospheric conditions of the embarkation deck betrayed his position.

  The son of Corax drew his sword. It had a sickle edge, a falchion, and had been forged of monomolecular plasteel. When activated, the sword would vibrate so rapidly and infinitesimally as for the motion to be nearly imperceptible. Its blade reflected no light, and in the shadows it appeared as if it were an extension of his body.

  A sealed access hatch, small and nondescript, used for maintenance, led out of the damaged embarkation deck and into a conduit that would allow further ingress into the ship.

  As the Raven Guard headed towards it, he listened keenly over the vox for a command. His name.

  And soon enough, he heard it.

  ‘Morikan.’

  Zau’ull knelt in solemn reverie by the vault. It had been left in the secured dock since their departure from Prometheus and though the room was sealed at either end behind a reinforced adamantium gate, exhaust vents from the forges below bled in heat and the tang of cinder. Smoke clouded the air, but only thinly. The heady atmosphere bordered on volcanic, nothing less than a balm to a warrior of Nocturne.

  And for a time, Zau’ull basked in it.

  Obek had asked him to remain on board the Chalice of Fire to protect the artefacts. A pity, the Chaplain reflected, that he had not been asked to wait alone.

  ‘I am damaged, Firefather,’ a voice said from behind him, and Zau’ull sighed as he opened his eyes.

  ‘No more than any of us,’ he lied.

  Zeb’du Varr may have been referring to his burns and the scarification that ravaged his body, or his mind. Before T’kell had rallied the Unscarred to fulfill his last mission for Vulkan, Varr had sought out the reliquary often. He spoke of how his waking dreams were consumed by fire, that his every thought was obsessed by it. Pyromania, Zau’ull knew, but a profound version of it in which Varr believed he witnessed something in the flames.

  ‘I have seen things,’ he murmured. ‘In the fire.’

  ‘Vulkan, yes, you have said before.’

  ‘You sound as if you do not believe, Chaplain.’

  Zau’ull could not be sure that Varr’s reply wasn’t directed at him in a more general way.

  ‘I believe you believe,’ he said, opting for diplomacy.

  ‘And you do not?’

  Zau’ull felt no barb in the question, but the sting of it was acute nonetheless.

  ‘I do not see what you see, brother.’

  ‘I see much…’

  Zau’ull knew he could regret it, but it was his duty to minister to these warriors and so asked, ‘What have you seen, brother?’

  ‘I will die here. On this ship.’

  ‘Our fate was never to survive.’

  ‘It will be soon…’

  His reverie clearly ended, Zau’ull got up and turned to Varr.

  ‘None of us can know when we will die, brother,’ he said.

  ‘Zandu sees the burning man.’

  Zau’ull nodded, remembering his conversations with Zandu about it. ‘A dream, nothing more. How can you be so certain of your own fate?’

  Varr’s smile pulled at the ravaged canvas of his flesh. He was not alone; the last of his warriors were with him but did not trouble the Chaplain as their sergeant did.

  ‘I see it in the fire,’ said Varr. ‘A trail of smoke moving against the flame.’

  Zau’ull had often wondered if a touch of the wyrd did not resonate within Zeb’du Varr. He had never had any Librarius training, as far as Zau’ull knew, and most attributed his odd behaviour to his pyromania. Some, those who knew the old ways of Nocturne, the ones who still knew where to find the nomadic earth-shamans and who had sought their counsel, believed the flame to be alive and that some of its vigour and fury were passed on to those who venerated it.

  Though there had not been a fire cult on Nocturne since before Vulkan’s reunion with his father, the beliefs that had once perpetuated them still remained in part. Zau’ull considered Varr might have found such an earth-shaman and looked into the fire too long.

  Of course, he could just be insane.

  Zau’ull rested his hand upon Varr’s shoulder guard.

  ‘No fireborn son should fear smoke from any flame, least of all you, Varr.’

  The sound of the gate to the secured dock opening made Zau’ull turn. He thought he saw a shadow move against the wall but attributed it to the flicker of an internal lumen.

  ‘Not a fla
me,’ uttered Varr, ‘a shadow…’

  As the gate began to split along its diagonal, its venting pneumatics clouded the air around it. Zau’ull gripped his crozius mace, but it could be Obek returning. When he saw drake-green armour slowly emerging through the dissipating gas cloud, he frowned.

  ‘Firefist?’

  Zandu had come back to the Chalice of Fire. Alone. As he walked towards them, he showed no sign of having heard or understood Zau’ull, his gaunt and ashen face as expressionless as the dead. Zau’ull went over to him and was about to hail Zandu again, when he realised what Varr had just said. It echoed a word Obek had used before he had left for the Obstinate.

  He’s called the Silent, one of the Raven Guard. He fights like a shadow…

  ‘A shadow–?’ he began, remembering the flickering lumen as three feet of monomolecular plasteel impaled his abdomen. The blade came from behind, piercing up through Zau’ull’s back and out again, its end a ruby-red speartip.

  As the blade was withdrawn, Zau’ull fell forwards onto his hands and knees. Spewing up a gout of blood, he tried to draw his crozius but felt himself impaled a second time.

  Zau’ull heard Varr shouting and felt a surge of heat across his face as the shadows retreated into the periphery. His body fought to keep him functioning. His vision blurred but then began to focus again. He got back up. The wound was agony, but kept him conscious. Staggering, he almost fell but struck the side of the vault and stayed upright.

  Varr’s flamer lay in ruins as he and his warriors fought against the shadow. Morikan the Silent moved so quickly that Zau’ull thought his eyes were fogging again until he realised only the one in black was indistinct.

  A Drake fell, slit from groin to sternum, all his insides fleeing his body in a wash of crimson. A second saw his combat blade parried and a length of dark plasteel penetrating his gorget and throat.

  Varr and two others remained. As Zandu reached them, Zau’ull held on to a slim hope that he would intervene but he seemed oblivious. Instead, he advanced on the vault and Zau’ull regained his feet to bar the Drake’s way.