[Tome of Fire 02] - Firedrake

by Nick Kyme - (ebook by Undead)

  Elysius screamed. A lash wreathed in hot, sparking energy wrapped itself around the Chaplain’s torso and burned. This was not a pure heat, like the fires of a forge or the touch of the brander’s iron—at that thought, a twinge of regret pricked him concerning Ohm—it was tainted, alien, an invasive and dirty pain Elysius reacted to.

  “Silence!” hissed another one of the whelpmasters, a female judging by the cadence of her voice.

  There were several of these sadists aboard, each armed with long energy whips that coiled and lashed with viperous energy. Even power armour was no proof against its painful effects. The whelpmasters were joined by a cohort of clan warriors in dark, segmented armour and carrying long, alien rifles. The one called Helspereth had joined them later, alighting from a seemingly isolated spur of rock floating in the darkness. Elysius had seen her step aboard but had no idea how she had come to be upon the rock spur. It was clear, though, that she held rank above the rest. Even the skiffs captain, sat smugly upon his command throne, deferred to her in the most obsequious fashion.

  The female whelpmaster released the lash and Elysius sagged before forcing himself upright again.

  “Remember the words of Vulkan,” he continued, “and the teachings of Lord Tu’Shan.”

  The power whip spat and sparked as another blow was about to be delivered when Helspereth spoke up.

  “Leave him,” she ordered coldly. “I like this one. He is defiant. I will relish breaking him. It will be exquisite. Krone,” she added, arching her neck and body seductively to regard the skiffs captain, “take us higher, my love.”

  Krone did as he was bid, smiling like a kept dog all the while.

  The skiff rose higher into the growing maelstrom.

  “Tell me something, mon-keigh preacher,” Helspereth said. She hefted something in her delicate but deadly hands. It was cumbersome and bulky, and looked utterly incongruous in her grasp. She held a broken crozius arcanum. The mace and symbol of office had belonged to Elysius. “Does this crude stick you wield contain the strength of your god?”

  “It is a sacred tool,” Elysius countered, trying to hide the agony in his voice, “used to smite the unclean and the heathen. You will be acquainted with it soon enough, hell spawn.”

  Helspereth laughed. It was an unpleasant, mirthless sound.

  She leaned forwards on the fuselage, drawing back her leg and showing Krone a little more flesh than he could really handle without wanting to act on it.

  “I look forward to you smiting me, then,” she said, and tossed the crozius onto the deck next to where the Chaplain was kneeling. It skidded, scraping against the metal, and came to rest against his armoured leg. “But first,” she added, “you have to learn how to fly.”

  The skiff was poised directly above the spire port-city now.

  Elysius looked down over the edge and saw an abyss of razor-barbs and lightning.

  At a command from Krone the chains shackling the prisoners to the skiff were released. Without orders, the whelpmasters came forwards.

  “Faith in Vulkan and the Emperor,” said Elysius to his charges, snatching up the crozius in his hand before diving off the side of the skiff and into the darkness below.

  “Slain, my lord,” said Daedicus. He gave a solemn shake of his head.

  The dead Salamander had been pinioned to a vertical strut supporting the warehouse roof of the Capitol building. The warrior’s armour was badly rent, the left lens of his helmet a shattered and bloody rain. Most disturbing of all though were the gaping crevice in his chest and its smaller twin in his gorget.

  Moving up alongside Daedicus, Halknarr could scarcely believe what he was seeing. “His progenoids have been removed.”

  “Ripped out,” added Daedicus.

  “No,” offered Mek’tar, kneeling by another of their fallen brothers on the other side of the floor, “the cuts here are almost surgical, analytical.”

  “Dusk-wraiths are debased creatures,” said Praetor, caring little for the disparities in how his kin had been mutilated. He ranged ahead of the others and surveyed the carnage around them with a wary gaze. Something about the scene bothered him—it was evident in his body language—and he interrogated every patch of shadow, every benighted nook and darkened vault in the high ceiling of the warehouse space. “Our ancestors, the first Nocturnean settlers, knew the evil of that race. Some enmities are built to last millennia, especially when forged in innocent blood.”

  Low mutters of agreement greeted the veteran sergeant’s statement. Every Firedrake in the room was affected by the debauchery committed by the dark eldar but they kept their anger in check under a mantle of stoic resolve. All, except one.

  Tsu’gan was in a dispersed formation called claw with the rest of his combat squad fanned around him. Each of the other three squad-leaders did the same, taking a separate quarter of the broad warehouse floor. His rage was like a font close to bubbling over. Only the presence of the Forgefather kept him still. He wanted to find the dark eldar responsible and slay them. Nothing short of a river of alien blood would account for these crimes. He revved his chainsword, his agitation echoed in its mechanised growling.

  ++Calm yourself, Tsu’gan++ said Praetor through a closed comm-link channel. The veteran sergeant was looking at him. ++Have Gathimu’s teachings had no effect on you whatsoever?++

  ++Brother Gathimu is dead, my lord++ Slain by a daemon-engine unleashed by a Khornate cult called the Red Rage, Gathimu had been Praetor’s intended mentor for Tsu’gan. He was supposed to have been a guide to temper his anger and hone it into something useful and less self-destructive. After Gathimu’s death, Praetor had yet to find a replacement. ++But not his words and deeds. They live on++

  Praetor turned away and closed the link.

  Tsu’gan’s black mood remained unleavened.

  “I am death,” he thought. “Its shroud follows me like a shadow I cannot shrug off.”

  The Firedrakes had moved into the building through the open bastion gate. That, in itself, was unsettling. This place had once teemed with labourers and, latterly, Imperial troops. Now it was empty and dead. With their bolters trained on the dark, the Fire-born had been met with the grisly remains of sentries in the outer corridors and then came the warehouse where the real carnage had begun.

  The slaughtered bodies of Night Devil troopers lay strewn about like refuse, sundered and cleaved. Some were even beyond human recognition such were the tortures the dark eldar had visited upon them. Shell impacts pockmarked the walls, and loose casings littered the ground together with the spent power packs from lasguns.

  “They fought hard,” said Halknarr, his armoured boot disturbing a welter of scattered ammunition spilled from an improvised heavy weapon nest.

  “But their efforts were ultimately for nothing,” snarled Tsu’gan, stalking around the perimeter. Stabs of light from his battle-helm’s halo-lamp array cut into the deepening shadows revealing further atrocities. Men hung like ragged cloth on a line, their skin flensed open, innards sagging to the floor in wet piles. Others dangled by their ankles, throats cut and having bled out a slow death. Some were dismembered; the collection of body parts so numerous that attributing them to any individual was impossible. Decapitations, exsanguinations, eviscerations and bifurcations: the cruel and grisly handiwork of the dark eldar was prevalent throughout the vast room. The air reeked of blood, the tiny drifting molecules of the slain clogging the rebreathers in the Salamanders’ battle-helms.

  “Here,” shouted Mek’tar. He was standing in front of one of the roof’s support columns. An elderly serf was staked to it, arms splayed and legs together in cruciform. Thick nails pinned his hands and feet. A branding rod impaled his thin chest through a ragged mess of robes that hung on his thin frame like scraps of skin.

  Mek’tar’s halo-lamp lit the victim’s face. A mask of pain was frozen upon it. The cheeks and forehead were swollen and purple. Dead hollows for eyes returned the Salamander’s stern gaze.

  “He was a ser
f, no warrior, just an old man. And they took his sight, the hell-kites.”

  Praetor sighed lamentingly when he recognised the wretched figure.

  “He was already blind, brother. That is Ohm, Chaplain Elysius’ brander-priest.”

  Mek’tar turned, the quickness of the move betraying his concern.

  “Then…?”

  “Our Chaplain’s fate is still unknown, and should be treated as such,” Praetor returned quickly.

  “How many of our kin?” asked He’stan, his voice breaking through the sudden tension. His eyes blazed with a fierce flame lighting the shadows around him. It was the first time the Forgefather had spoken since their cautious ingress into the Capitol, this but the bastion’s threshold.

  “I count four,” said Daedicus, surveying the high rafters where two more of their brethren had been bolted and crucified. His combat squad flanked across the right.

  “Five,” Praetor corrected. The veteran sergeant had moved towards the large doors at the far end of the warehouse where another Fire-born was slumped against the wall, bolter hanging limply in his dead hands. The warrior’s head had been removed and placed in his lap. The mouth was arranged in a savage grin.

  Praetor found a piece of cloth nearby and covered up the warrior’s face.

  “These are bad deaths,” he muttered, reminded briefly of the Firedrakes he had lost most recently on the missions aboard the Protean and on Sepulchre IV. They were regrettable enough but at least they had been clean, warriors’ deaths.

  Tsu’gan strafed the blackness with his helm-lamp, picking out a spastic silhouette locked in its final act of agony before expiring.

  So much blood and human wreckage—it was like a charnel house, a butcher’s block. Sundered flesh lay all about him. Tsu’gan believed humans to be weak, both physically and mentally. He was not surprised the dark eldar had slain them so easily. Doubtless his Fire-born brothers had given their own lives protecting them, or so he discerned from the positions of the dead. But to be degraded so, to be subjected to such heinous and sadistic mutilation… his combi-bolter quivered with channelled wrath in his clenched fist.

  “They feed on pain and suffering,” said a dulcet voice behind him.

  Tsu’gan half-turned. He hadn’t even heard Vulkan He’stan approach. The Forgefather appeared melancholic, a strange distemper affecting him. It obviously grieved him to see such wanton destruction inflicted by the old enemy.

  “Feed?” asked Tsu’gan in a half whisper, regarding the scene with fresh eyes. Was their some method to this insanity? He had taken it for alien savagery, nothing more.

  “Their souls, Tsu’gan,” said He’stan, “are dying.” He made a fist and slowly started to unclench it. “Imagine a ball of sand here in my gauntlet. Their souls are the sand and my fist is too loose to hold them. Slowly, as the grains would trickle free and into oblivion, so too would the souls of the dusk-wraiths dissipate and fade. Only by yoking the suffering of others can they forestall their destruction, being devoured by ruinous powers.”

  Tsu’gan was rapt. He knew the Salamanders possessed lore about the dark eldar, that as their ancestral enemies the primitive Nocturnean earth shamans had learned much about them. Upon his arrival on the world, the Primarch Vulkan had devoted copious amounts of study to fathom the nature of dusk-wraiths, but this was the first time Tsu’gan had ever heard it related so candidly and with such authority.

  “You mean the warp?”

  He’stan nodded. “Look around you, brother, and tell me this is not the act of Chaos or at least in reaction to the threat of it.”

  “Life signs, further into the bastion,” the voice of Daedicus interrupted them. He was reading an auspex in his left hand. “Distant but numerous,” he added.

  Praetor looked again at the position of the now shrouded Fire-born. The head was removed as an afterthought, he realised. This was where the body had landed when his brother was felled.

  “They attempted to make a last stand in this room,” he began.

  “But when that failed, they retreated,” He’stan finished for him, moving towards Praetor.

  All the Firedrakes now converged on their veteran sergeant.

  “There were twenty Astartes in that force,” added Tsu’gan, his agitated manner making his anger obvious. “Fifteen of our brothers, our Lord Chaplain included, could not be so easily overcome.”

  Halknarr’s eyes flashed behind his battle-helm.

  “They fight still.”

  “What is wrong, brother-sergeant?” asked He’stan. He was looking directly at Praetor.

  “Why do I feel like a sauroch drawn to the hunter’s eye?”

  Halknarr stepped forwards to emphasise his purpose. “Whatever is beyond those doors, we will be ready for it, Herculon.”

  Praetor regarded the doors now. They were thick and layered with plasteel rebars. A mechanism, operated by a servitor or labourer and located in a small control booth above, was required to open them.

  Such things were not impediments to Astartes, certainly not those with the determination and strength of Herculon Praetor. The veteran sergeant was as pragmatic as any Salamander. Misgivings or not, they would not discover what had befallen Elysius until they had delved further into the bastion. Hefting his thunder hammer he smashed open the massive doors open with a single blow.

  “My lord?” he asked, turning to He’stan. Before them, the gloom of the inner bastion loomed.

  “Lead on,” said the Forgefather, a fresh flare of fire lighting his eyes. Gone was anger; now vengeance roared within his red orbs. “Find our brothers and the xenos who took them.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I

  The Dead Speak

  Thick clouds of ash rolled across the grey plains, whispering with dead voices.

  The grave dust was clogging the lenses of Pyriel’s battle-helm as he and Dak’ir moved through the crematoria fog. Flakes smeared swathes of grey over the Librarius blue of their power armour. Pyriel had used his gauntlet to clear his vision on more than one occasion, despite the fact he could see well enough with his psyker’s sight.

  They’d left the Caldera several kilometres behind them with Brother Loc’tar. Lost to the storm, the Thunderhawk was a distant memory now. As soon as Lexicanum and Epistolary had stepped onto the ossuary road and beheld the soaring bone-tombs and barrow-monoliths of Moribar, all other thoughts had vanished. This place held a special significance for the Fire-born of the 3rd. Especially for Dak’ir, it represented a dark episode over forty years in his past.

  As soon as he’d left the gunship’s Chamber Sanctuarine, images had flashed into his mind demanding his attention. They spoke of fire and of dragons and of the betrayal of brothers. A twinge of guilt and accusation warred within him for dominance. It was just the psychic resonance of the place trying to assert itself. Dak’ir was stronger now. Unlike in the Aura Hieron Temple, where such visions had crippled him, he had now endured the burning. His training at the hands of his master beneath Mount Deathfire had girded him. He marshalled the images in his stride, compartmentalising them for later use.

  He knew that Pyriel had felt the mental echo of the deed and silently lauded him for his control.

  “Sleeping dragons lie beneath these plains,” Dak’ir said, drawing ahead of his master. Instinct guided him. With the shifting of the ash, the ravages of the decades and the ever accumulating monuments to the dead, the way to the crematoria had changed. It remained at the heart of the world but then the world itself had been altered and reshaped around it. Like he knew every contour of the plasma pistol bolstered at his hip, though, he knew how to get to the crematoria.

  So much had happened there. It seemed perversely fitting that they return and confront whatever spectres might lurk in the depths of Moribar.

  “Just memory echoes, Dak’ir,” counselled Pyriel. He drew his salamander mantle around him to ward off the raging dust and ash. “An inauspicious time for a visit, though,” he added ruefully.

 
“When is there a good time to visit such a place? It reeks of the dead, of old and forgotten things.”

  “Except they are not forgotten, are they? Not by us and not by them.”

  “Kadai’s fate was sealed beneath these grey vales, in its hollow catacombs.”

  Pyriel seized Dak’ir’s shoulder and turned him around. “Kadai’s fate was his own, Lexicanum. Never lose sight of that. Whatever he did to try and bring Ushorak back was right and just.”

  Dak’ir shrugged him away. “But you were not there, Pyriel. I saw what happened. I was part of it.”

  Pyriel looked about to retaliate but relented. Instead, he sighed and the sound joined the deathless chorus of the wind rising around them. “No, that’s true. But I knew well enough of Nihilan and his twisted ambition.”

  “He blames you for his fate, doesn’t he?”

  They were walking again, wading through the grey fog, ash up to the rims of their leg greaves.

  “He blames all of us, and he blames himself and Ushorak. Nihilan is insane, Dak’ir. That’s what makes him so dangerous. We are still pawns in his plan, make no mistake of that. There is a higher power guiding his hand, I can feel it.”

  “So what can we do, master?”

  Ahead, the shadow of a barrow-monolith loomed. Framed with a sepulchral archway depicting effigies of the Emperor’s cardinals and saints, it was a magnificent entrance that led into the lower domains of the world. It was one of several ways down to the crematoria. Its ossuary path was well-trodden. A low wall on either side was punctuated with skulls inscribed with holy sigils. Scripture nailed to the vertical columns of the arch fluttered violently in the wind.

  “Nothing but what we are doing. We must trust that we are guided here by Vulkan’s will, that the primarch is watching over us in this. Nocturne’s darkest hour approaches, Dak’ir. It is so close at hand I can almost taste the blood on the air.”