Vulkan Lord of Drakes

by David Annandale

  But there was a war to finish, so the primarch turned from the body of his fallen enemy and fell upon the orks. Numeon did too, fighting with the ferocity of resurrected hope.

  With Rhy’tan and T’kell, Numeon and Orasus blasted through the orks and reached Saluran where he lay. They were joined by still more legionaries who had dropped from the Thunderhawk after Vulkan. They and Orasus set up a ring of bolter fire that kept the greenskins back while Numeon knelt over Saluran. A glance told him everything. Saluran’s torso was destroyed. His bones were shattered, and his hearts and lungs, pierced and failing, were exposed to the air. He gurgled something, and Orasus removed his helm. Saluran’s face was slack and grey, but his eyes burned. He gazed past Numeon to where Vulkan brought destruction to the orks. His lips twitched and he whispered, ‘I see him.’

  ‘You held the ground, and our primarch is here,’ Numeon told him.

  Rhy’tan crouched on the other side of Saluran. ‘You have triumphed,’ he said. ‘You will be remembered, brother.’

  ‘Brother,’ Saluran repeated. Then he died, his eyes shining with thanks.

  In the corner of his eye, Vulkan saw the legionaries rise from their dead brother and exact vengeance on the orks. Above, the two Thunderhawks pounded the xenos with their dorsal cannons, heavy bolters and missiles. They burned huge furrows in the orks, the explosions of their ordnance like a chain reaction of volcanic eruptions.

  The chieftain was dead, the skies raged on the orks and at last they knew despair. The greenskins fell back before Vulkan, faster and faster, and then they fled. They retreated in disarray, racing north towards the Cauldron. Perhaps, in the depths of their brutish instincts, a glimmer of pride pushed them to try to destroy the Terran XVIII in a final act of defiance.

  If this was the impulse that drove them, it was an illusion and it did not last long.

  Vulkan pursued the greenskins. Rhy’tan, T’kell and the rest of his escort charged in his wake with Numeon and Orasus. Behind them, the heavy armour roared in, speeding across the plain, flattening the remains of a routed army. In the middle distance to the north, the flights of gunships laid waste to the horde. Vulkan had commanded them to assist the advance of the Terran XVIII, but as he raced north, closing in on the glow of the eruption, he saw that the besieged warriors had already received what they needed. The Cauldron itself was destroyed, a flaming glow on the mountainside, exploding ammunition silhouetting the lava-swept ruins. The legionaries had stormed out with such force that they had done more than punch through the orks at the base of the volcano.

  They had set them to flight.

  The Legion of Terra and the Legion of Nocturne converged, crushing the orks between them. As he drew closer to the sons he had nearly lost, Vulkan saw the fury with which they were attacking. After more than a year of being eroded to the marrow by the orks, the return of hope had filled them with justified fury, and the demoralised greenskins could not withstand the hurricane of rage that descended upon them from the erupting volcano.

  The end came quickly. Abandoning themselves to panic and flight, their army already reduced to a mere vestige of the swarm it had once been, the orks turned west. Beyond the lava fields, the land descended to the bed of a long-vanished ocean. On an endless plain of petrified coral, with no shelter for thousands of kilometres, shell and flame pursued the orks to their final end.

  When the last of the greenskins was a smouldering corpse, the warriors of Terra and Nocturne regarded each other, and Vulkan saw the alloy he needed had been forged on the fields of Antaeum. Brother had encountered brother and known that they were no longer lost to each other.

  Numeon and Orasus had kept to within a few metres of Vulkan during the entire rout. Now they dropped to their knees before him. The entirety of the Terran XVIII did the same.

  ‘No,’ Vulkan said. ‘Rise, my sons. I am your father, not your king. We do not kneel in fealty.’

  They looked up at him and, after a hesitation, got to their feet again.

  Vulkan was not finished. ‘Kneeling is an act of respect. It is a tribute that must be earned. And you have earned it.’

  He knelt, and the Legion in its entirety murmured in awe.

  ‘Your sacrifices to save the people of the Taras Division will be remembered forever. You performed what was impossible and made the sacrifice without hesitation, knowing your task doomed you, and that it was thankless. But I give you my thanks now.’ He bowed his head.

  After a long moment, he rose and walked through the silent, attentive ranks to a Thunderhawk that had landed in the last minutes of the fight. An Apothecary had transported a medicae bed down the ramp, and Vulkan approached the warrior who lay on it.

  Vaughn was close to the end, but triumph lit his drawn face.

  ‘Primarch…’ Vaughn rasped.

  Vulkan knelt beside the lord commander. He detached the ork claw from his belt and presented it to Vaughn. ‘Your enemy is dead,’ he said. ‘His weapon is now your own.’

  ‘I would still serve…’ said Vaughn.

  ‘And you will,’ Vulkan told him, standing again. ‘I will see you rise again, Cassian Vaughn, your strength the equal of your will.’

  He turned to the combined Legion. ‘This warrior has fought to the edge of certain doom. So have all who followed him. But we have defeated doom, and so we shall again.

  ‘Behold the Eighteenth Legion!’ he announced, his voice thundering across the dead ocean. He spoke to himself as much as to his sons. The truth of their nature rushed over him. Did you know, Father? he wondered. Did you know this moment would come? Is that why you bade me wait? So that I too would see and understand?

  Vulkan pointed back to the east, where the eruptions and lava flows turned the horizon red. ‘Behold the furnace! Behold the anvil of war! Behold the flames of rebirth! Hear me, my sons! Hear your name! You are the fire-born!

  ‘YOU ARE THE SALAMANDERS!’

  About the Author

  David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, including Warden of the Blade and Castellan, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

  An extract from Jaghatai Khan Warhawk of Chogoris.

  The door shivered, its onyx panels already cracked and its carved jambs cracking. A storm blew through it, a roar of gold and white, as elemental as the summer gales on the Altak. A window pane shattered, sending teardrops of glass bouncing.

  Courtiers scattered, hitching up heavy brocade robes and tottering like birds. A woman screamed, while a man stumbled and scrabbled on all fours towards the stairwell.

  The storm paid them no heed. He strode through the crowd, eyes bright with a vital anger, towering over even the greatest and making them appear insignificant. In his wake came two armoured giants, clad in ivory and jasper, their heavy tread resounding on hard floors. All three titans glittered under the wheeling light of disturbed suspensors that set their scabbards and blade-pommels flashing.

  ‘His neck,’ said the Khagan of Chogoris, the Great Khan of the Fifth Legion Astartes, his long black hair flying loose. ‘If He does not learn to bend it, one day it will break.’

  The primarch swept through the antechambers of the Imperial Palace, his cloak hem snapping like a whip about his heels. With him came the twin masters of his young army, Hasik and Giyahun, their bronze faces impassive.

  Gold pillars soared up around them, chased and fluted and spiralled, inlaid with glass and studded with pearls. Marble statuary stood in blank isolation ami
d the mirrors and the porcelain, barred by the warm light of the Terran dawn.

  A man in the robes of the Senatorum Imperialis emerged at the far end of the long gallery, took one look at the rampaging primarch, then darted out again. Other courtiers shrank back, bowing and stammering.

  ‘The mind – unequalled,’ the Khan growled, swinging into another hall. His closed fist punched out at a bulbous vase, and it shattered into a rain of echoing fragments. ‘But the neck. That is the weakness. That is the flaw.’

  High windows passed by, leaded and mullioned, each offering glimpses of the immensity beyond – parapets rearing above parapets, glare-white from the mountain air. The Palace was a never-ending project, they said, a billion techwrights working on it daily to render the peaks into cathedrals of the mind and the soul, raising up monuments to Unity that would endure for eternity. No guns marred the ramparts in those days, only pennants and propaganda, for war had left Terran skies a lifetime ago and now burned its way across the vaults of a deeper heaven.

  ‘He gazes on the infinite,’ the Khan spat, ‘but we are body, blood and bone.’

  His retinue made no reply. They did not as much as glance at the finery around them; their eyes were fixed forwards, their sun-darkened faces held rigid. Both carried a long scar on their cheeks, zigzagged in ritual imitation of lightning, the kindler-destroyer of the borderless grass. Both understood that they were not being addressed. This was their master in his anger, unleashing the torrent as a mountain unleashes its storms.

  ‘Scorn not your tools, say the sages,’ the Khan said. ‘Scorn not the blade that cuts, lest it open your own veins.’

  Another hall beckoned, another chamber within that cavernous interior, just as ornate, just as immaculate. Jewelled incense-drones swerved out of the primarch’s path, whining as their grav-plates struggled to gain loft.

  The Khan halted at last. More than thirty figures barred the way ahead. Some were armoured as he was, arrayed in a variety of Crusade-pattern war-plate. Others wore the uniforms of the Imperial Army – stiff jerkins, high collars, flak-weave half cloaks. A scattering of them were wrapped in the long robes of officials.

  Jaghatai Khan glared at them hungrily, as if poised to attack. His great fist, locked within an ivory gauntlet, flexed instinctively. The delegation shrank back; it was never easy to look a primarch in the eye, no matter one’s rank or training, and it was almost impossible to face an angry one.

  ‘Who dares this now?’ the Khan demanded.

  Most did not speak. Some looked as if they had lost the capacity. Only one managed to return that gaze, and did so uneasily, as if he feared attracting the storm’s full wrath.

  ‘May it please you, lord,’ he started, ‘the ship is ready.’

  The man was heavily built, old but not decrepit. His skin was lined, his muscle tone rigid, and he wore the dress uniform of an admiral in the Naval high command. In ordinary circumstances, he would have been a man of substance, one from whom many would take an order without question. Perhaps he had commanded many starships, and seen many worlds wreathed in the coronas of battle. Yet right then, just then, as he looked up into the face of one of the Emperor’s sons, he might as well have been a youth of sixteen on his first assignment.

  The Khan rounded on him. ‘What ship?’

  ‘The one ordained for you.’

  ‘Without my knowledge.’ The Khan shot a sour smile at Hasik. ‘It’d better be a good one.’

  The admiral swallowed. ‘The best, lord. The very best. A Gloriana.’

  ‘Those words mean nothing to me.’

  ‘Perhaps, then…’ The admiral’s eyes fell away. ‘Perhaps it would be better to see it, then.’

  As soon as the words left his lips, he went white. He took an involuntary step backwards, flinching as if in anticipation of a blow.

  The Khan stared at him. The air seemed to fizz a little, as if energy were coiling somewhere. The light around them thickened, and the ivory gauntlet clenched into a fist.

  Then the primarch laughed. He looked over at Giyahun, who grinned back.

  ‘He thinks I’ll skin him alive,’ the Khan said, speaking to his gene-son in Khorchin, the kin-speech of the Talskar of Chogoris.

  ‘Give the order, Khagan. My knife grows blunt in this shit shed.’

  ‘Ha. We’re guests, and my Father objects to blood on his fine floors.’ The Khan looked back at the admiral. ‘I was told I had an army,’ he said, reverting back to thickly accented Gothic.

  Another official stepped forwards then, a portly woman with a severe bob and jowly cheeks. ‘Ready for inspection, lord.’

  ‘I was told I had counsellors.’

  A third shuffled into view, a thin man with an augmetic jawline and receding hair. ‘Whenever you wish to consult us, lord.’

  Hasik raised an eyebrow. ‘Never been given an army before,’ he said in Khorchin. ‘Always had to take them.’

  The Khan shot him a dry look. ‘No man gives a gift without expecting another in return. We didn’t come here with our hands full.’

  ‘As they never cease to make clear.’

  The primarch turned back to the first speaker. ‘Where is it, then?’ he asked. For all his imposing demeanour, there was something in that question – an eagerness, only part suppressed by awareness of rank, as if he had been shown some ancient blade only offered to the sons of princes.

  ‘Void-dock above Luna, lord,’ the admiral replied. ‘Ready for examination whenever you deem fit.’

  The Khan scrutinised him a little longer. ‘Who sent you here? Malcador? My Father? You know I come from Him now? You know what we talked of?’ He waved the stuttering answer away. ‘No matter. Take me there – I need to fill my lungs with purer air.’ He glanced back at Hasik. ‘You, go and see this army. See if it’ll fight, or if it’s as slack-gutted as everything else in this place.’

  He gestured for Giyahun to follow him, then paused.

  ‘Where’s Yesugei?’ he asked.

  ‘Exploring,’ ventured Giyahun, shrugging.

  The Khan looked amused. ‘One day that’ll get him into trouble.’ He summoned the admiral with a snap of his fingers. ‘Come. Show me this ship you’re so proud of. It had better be worth the journey.’

  He stood in the chamber, chin raised, looking through the slender window. On the far side of the glass, a bird hopped across the stone sill. He watched it silently. The bird’s head turned, angling a jewelled eye towards him. For a moment, they stared at one another.

  Then a door creaked, tripping an announcement chime, and the creature fluttered away in a snap of feathers.

  He watched it go, before turning to see who had entered.

  A woman stood in the doorway. She was tall, her face angular. She wore deep green robes and bore the stylised I-icon of the Imperium atop a long metal staff.

  ‘My apologies,’ she said. ‘Am I disturbing you?’

  He bowed. ‘Not at all.’ He beckoned her in. ‘Come.’

  Only when she stepped under the light of the lumens was it apparent how tall she was. Most humans looked like children beside one of the Legiones Astartes, but she didn’t. Perhaps that was due to her physical presence; perhaps something else.

  ‘I was told you’d found your way here,’ she said, looking around the chamber. ‘Not many come this far up.’

  The walls around them were decayed, a mottled stone that had aged and rotted. Packing crates lay about the floor, most filled with old machinery. A defunct cogitator stood in the shadows, its data-maw empty and gaping. The window looked out over far newer reaches of the Palace, all coronets of gold and silver, sharp-edged against the eye-watering dazzle from the mountains.

  ‘Old, this place,’ he said, smiling apologetically. ‘Like me. Too old, they said.’

  The woman leaned against the wall opposite him. ‘For induction into the Legions? It depe
nds. Sometimes the seed takes, sometimes it doesn’t. Your Legion took a surprising number of post-adolescents. I wonder why?’

  ‘Forgive,’ he said, clasping his hands together in gesture of politeness. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Magister Niasta. The office of the Sigillite. I was asked to make myself known to you. That proved harder than anticipated – you don’t stick to your itineraries. None of you do.’

  He bowed. ‘Is true. I am–’

  ‘I know who you are.’ She looked at him carefully, a half-smile playing on her lips. ‘Tell me if I pronounce it right – zadyin arga, Targutai Yesugei.’

  ‘Excellent. You speak Khorchin. If we may?’

  ‘Afraid not. I know those two words, nothing else. They tell me it’s damned hard to learn.’

  Yesugei gave a rueful smile. ‘And other way round. Will take time.’

  ‘The lexicographers will have the syntax decoded in a month. Then at least we’ll be able to use transcoder beads. Until then, it’s fumbling and stumbling.’

  ‘Fumbling and stumbling,’ Yesugei repeated, liking the sound of the words. ‘Yes, all of us.’

  ‘The rest, maybe. You, not so much.’ She ran her finger absent-mindedly up the length of the staff, right under the iron symbol of Malcador’s office. ‘You have an interesting mind, Targutai Yesugei. I sensed it when your delegation arrived, and now I’m standing close to you, I feel it more strongly. You know what I mean, I think.’

  He smiled. Like all his kin, when he smiled his whole face creased. ‘Weather-magic,’ he said. ‘They told us it causes trouble.’

  ‘Weather-magic? How quaint. I’ve seen reports of what you can do with it. I think you’d better come up with a better name.’

  ‘Suits us.’

  ‘But it’s dangerous, this business.’ She looked at him more seriously. ‘That’s why we brought you here. Well, it’s one of many reasons, but an important one. You don’t hide it. You don’t seem to feel the need. I could admire that, but you’ll need to learn to.’