[Tome of Fire 02] - Firedrake

by Nick Kyme - (ebook by Undead)

  “Brothers,” He’stan addressed the late comers. Halknarr had one foot on the deckplating. The old veteran was clearly uncomfortable with riding the xenos machine, let alone entering their lair. Daedicus merely stood by and waited.

  “There is one more thing we need,” He’stan said, then told them both what he wanted them to do.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I

  Beneath the Veil

  Dak’ir was listening. Brazier-lamps, set into the alcoves of the bare rock walls, sent flickering tongues of light across his armour. The crown of his psychic hood threw deep shadows over his battle-helm. The lenses were cold and empty. Dak’ir’s eyes were firmly shut.

  In the background the low grind of industry invaded the silence. Labour-serfs—the grave-diggers, the corpse-masters and bone-gatherers—toiled nearby in legion-strong numbers. On Moribar, the dead outnumbered the living by many billions. The work for the armies of tomb-keepers was never done. While the cardinals and the priests and the preachers scribed in their ancient books, made the dead-lists and inked parchment with the details of Imperial bureaucracy that saw to the running of this world, the bodies grew and the grave pits deepened underneath them.

  “Nihilan’s psychic spoor is everywhere,” breathed Dak’ir. “It thrums in the very air.”

  Pyriel’s reply came from the shadows behind him. “He seeks to baffle us. By saturating the atmosphere with his warp-shadow, Nihilan knows we will find it harder to pinpoint the path he took.”

  “His last visit was more recent than decades, though. It’s obvious.”

  “Obvious?” asked Pyriel. He kept his voice low, out of respect for the dead. The hollow sockets of the skulls pockmarking the walls seemed to stare in approval. “Not to me, Dak’ir.”

  A note of uncertainly crept into the Lexicanum’s voice. “You think I am wrong, master?”

  “No, I think you are right. But you are just a novice and I, allegedly, the master. You discerned the truth of Nihilan’s psychic resonance much faster than I did.”

  Dak’ir opened his eyes.

  He saw again the subterranean world of Moribar’s catacombs. Here the dead were venerated. A tunnel stretched before him, cast in amber light from the lanterns lining the walls. Monolithic effigies of robed guardians supported its vaulted ceiling. They were called reapers, the massive servitor-statues that guarded these lower chambers. Though merely machines, the reapers were potent servants for the dead that ensured eternal rest was just that. The main channel leading deeper into the catacombs was ribbed by sepulchral arches and branched into several tributaries. Tomb-gates barred access to mausoleum chambers and the lesser crypts of the minor veins. The main artery was wider than a strike cruiser’s hangar and twice as tall. In the highest echelons, though in reality several kilometres below the surface, fluttering cyb-organic cherubim and darting servo-skulls could be seen weaving between the chains of hanging censer cauldrons. Great gusts of dark smoke exuded from the censers, wreathing the ceiling in a dense and unnatural fog.

  The lower deeps were filled with funerary pits and immolation cradles. The iron crucibles were stacked with burning coals to ignite the hordes of corpses fed to them by the labour army toiling below. They were pale shadows of the crematoria, though, the fiery heart of Moribar raging at the planet’s core.

  A bridge, cut from the same rock as the catacombs themselves, spanned a deep chasm filled with bones and ash. Iron gantries arced across a vast grate. Beneath it were row upon row of incinerators. Only pallid-skinned servitors could work the nadir of the chasm and even they were fitted with rebreathers and gas masks. The hot vapours from the incinerators formed as beads of sweat on the drone-like men and women some several hundred metres above. Nothing slowed them. Their barrows reached the funnels at the edge of the gantries that would take the dumped bodies to the incinerator floor. Shovelled into the fiery cages by the servitors, the dead would become bone then ash until finally joining the vast Moribar deserts.

  Dak’ir saw a perverted version of the Promethean Creed in what was being done on Moribar, but he didn’t voice his thoughts. This was cold, mechanical and bereft of ritual. It signified nothing more than the efficient disposal of waste and the rendering down of life into matter. It was not the way of earth, but the way of industry.

  Having seen enough in a few short seconds, he faced Pyriel.

  “What does it mean?” he asked, “that I recognised the truth of Nihilan’s passing faster than you, master?”

  Pyriel opened his eyes too. He kept his tone neutral.

  “Your power is growing.”

  “I can feel it,” Dak’ir confessed. It unnerved him, but he chose to keep that part to himself. During the burning, he’d been close to losing control. Even now, he sensed something within him, a nascent flame slowly being coaxed into a conflagration. Let it slip, even for a moment, and the whole world would burn.

  Pyriel’s gaze narrowed. “What else can you feel, Dak’ir?”

  Dak’ir focussed, trying to push the desperate toiling of the labour-serfs out of his mind. It was less about psychic resonance and more about tapping into his instincts.

  “If we find out why Ushorak and Nihilan came to Moribar, we will discover why my vision sent us here and perhaps what fate awaits Nocturne.”

  “We will see what lurks beneath the veil.”

  “Yes.”

  A flash of cerulean blue lit Pyriel’s eyes through his helmet lenses. “I sense reluctance in you, brother.”

  “Don’t do that,” Dak’ir snapped.

  “Then hide your thoughts, Lexicanum! I can read them like they’re writ upon your face.”

  A tremor of disquiet went through Dak’ir’s body as he realised Pyriel might have also seen his concerns about what happened during the burning and the doubts about his power that still plagued him. If his master did, he chose not to say anything.

  Dak’ir unclenched his fist and exhaled. “I am sorry, master. It’s been over four decades since I was here. I know this place is significant. I’m not sure I want to find out why.”

  “Go on.”

  “I am afraid, not in the sense of feeling fear. I am Astartes and have long since come to deny that emotion. Rather, it is… unwillingness to accept whatever destiny is before me.”

  Now Pyriel regarded him shrewdly and Dak’ir knew he had discerned the truth about the Lexicanum’s doubts and reservations.

  “We make our own fates, Dak’ir. I’ve told you this. You, me, Kadai, ultimately we must choose. Even Nihilan had that luxury once.”

  “And what if I don’t like the options before me?”

  “Then make another, but sometimes we have to face impossible decisions.”

  “And if I make the wrong one?”

  Pyriel laughed. It was a clipped and mirthless sound. “The only wrong decision is to do nothing and not act. There is more to courage than wielding a bolter and blade, Dak’ir.”

  “If only Tsu’gan realised that,” he muttered.

  “What does it matter what your brother does and does not realise? Zek Tsu’gan is Firedrake, now. He’s amongst the Lords of Prometheus. He chose.”

  “I saw him in the desert.”

  “The Pyre Desert, the Arridian Plain? What do you mean, Dak’ir?”

  “Below Mount Deathfire, during the Totem Walk and the final part of my training, I saw Tsu’gan. He tried to kill me.”

  “And you think this was prophetic, that your brother will turn and attempt to slay you?”

  “No. I think it might mean he has cause to do it, that I will be the one who turns.”

  Pyriel was growing angry. “You are one of the Emperor’s Angels, a First Founding Salamander. We do not turn.”

  Dak’ir’s voice was barely a murmur. “Then how do you explain Nihilan?”

  Pyriel looked away. His ire was obvious from the energies roiling over his force staff.

  “An aberration. Ushorak’s doing.”

  Stepping forwards, Dak’ir asked, “But how
? Was Ushorak so convincing?”

  “There is much you don’t know about Vai’tan Ushorak. I was there when Nihilan took his first steps on the path. Like you and Tsu’gan, we were brothers once. I never thought it possible that…” Pyriel’s voice trailed away, lost to remembered sorrow. His shoulders had sagged but now he straightened his posture.

  “It is history long dead,” he said, facing Dak’ir again, “and matters not. Can you discern the path Nihilan took?”

  Dak’ir’s eyes flared cerulean blue. He nodded.

  “A few years or four decades ago—both paths lead to same destination.”

  “Where?”

  The Lexicanum paused, as if unsure of his own psychic instincts. He shook his head slowly. “Not the crematoria, not at first anyway…”

  “You fought them there, though,” said Pyriel.

  “At the end, yes. But that wasn’t where they were going.”

  “Where then?”

  Dak’ir looked along the dark tunnel. It sloped downwards, deeper into the earth. The crematoria was nearby, but another branch in the catacomb network would take them to a different place, one the Salamanders had overlooked.

  “The cryptoria—a voice there speaks louder than the others.”

  Menials, peons, the masses of the insignificant dead all resided in the catacombs. It was the right of more vaunted Imperial servants, the ecclesiarchs, the lord-commanders, the aristocrats and the pious rich to be interred within the mausoleums of the cryptoria. Much like the world of the living, even the realm of the dead had a hierarchy.

  Dak’ir pointed. “We take the bridge across the incinerators.”

  Pyriel nodded, approving. “Lead us.”

  II

  Reapers

  The reaper’s chamber lay not far past the labour tunnels beyond the bridge. Both Librarians sensed the ending of their journey and brandished their psychic weapons in readiness for whatever challenge might still await them.

  Nihilan had come here after the death of Ushorak. He had come recently, in the last few years. To what end, Pyriel did not know. But he was certain it could not be good.

  “The cryptoria entrance is beyond that statue,” he said, pointing to the giant form of the reaper.

  It stood still before a massive arch. An underground field of mausoleums, tombs and crypts was hinted at in the shadows beyond. Hooded and robed, the reaper had the aspect of a priest. Its skeletal hands, resting on the blade of a giant scythe, betrayed that notion utterly.

  This was the lair, a massive plaza of stone-clad earth.

  Bones had been fashioned into the walls, turning it into a macabre ossuary temple. Headless skeletons held aloft their own skulls. Fused femurs became columns. Vaulted arches, fashioned from spinal cords and fragments of rib, framed a bleached yellow ceiling. The chamber’s periphery, shrouded by flickering shadow, was littered with coffins and sarcophagi. The vessels were made from marble, dark granite, even more bone and were sunk into the soft soil like the broken teeth of some half-buried giant.

  It was a grim place that reeked of death and eked away vitality. Neither Salamander had any wish to linger.

  “Do you hear that?” asked Dak’ir. He slowed, stalling a few metres from the reaper.

  A low scratching sound was just audible above the sound of the labour-serfs toiling in the distant tunnels behind the Salamanders.

  “Could be tomb rats or perhaps a skull-scribe?” suggested Pyriel.

  “It’s coming from this room.”

  Louder now, the scratching became more distinct, until both Librarians could detect the source.

  Pyriel sent a flare of psychic fire up the haft of his force staff. “Get your back to me, brother.”

  Dak’ir’s eyes were already aglow with warpcraft. He ignited the blade of Draugen in a heartbeat and took up a defensive posture with his master.

  Several of the coffin lids were rattling. The motion became increasingly violent as the seconds passed. One of the lids slid off and cracked when it struck an adjacent sarcophagus. Something within was moving, framed in silhouette.

  “We have descended into a trap,” snarled Pyriel as three more coffins shuddered loose on his side of the chamber.

  “I have at least six on my flank,” said Dak’ir.

  “There must be hundreds in here…”

  A great clamour filled the chamber as all of the half-sunken tombs and crypt-vessels joined the chorus. All the while, the reaper looked on, his shadow eclipsing the two Salamanders standing back-to-back in the centre of the room.

  As the first of the wretches dragged its rotting carcass into the light, Dak’ir was reminded of the servitors aboard the Mechanicus vessel Archimedes Rex. True, they did not possess any weapons, save their filth-encrusted talons or the implements used to bury them with, but their movements were syncopated in the same fashion and their hollow eyes gleamed with an evil fervour.

  “Nihilan has raised the undead to slay us!” Dak’ir crafted a ball of fire in his palm. He was about to unleash it into the growing throng of corpses advancing on him when Pyriel stopped him.

  “Wait until they get close, until enough are beyond the protection of their vessels.” Dak’ir held onto the flame, nurtured it within him, shaped it within his mind. He closed his eyes, and heard Pyriel’s voice.

  “Master Vel’cona, your teachings guide my fury, let the fire become a conflagration and render my enemies to ash.”

  The grave-stink was filling Dak’ir’s nose and mouth, even through his battle-helm. The scrape of the undead’s limbs as they dragged across the chamber floor was loud in his ears. He imagined their lopsided gait, the awkward shambling of limbs and muscles long atrophied forced into motion again. He could feel their collective animus, a pale echo of Nihilan’s own. The Dragon Warrior had invigorated these creatures. He had kept them quiescent until his enemies had come to this place. He knew.

  “They are close, master,” Dak’ir muttered, concentrating on his craft. This was to be its first real test since his training.

  Pyriel left a few seconds pause. The talons of the dead could only be a hand’s width away…

  “Purify them!”

  Dak’ir opened his eyes. As he unleashed the flame, he viewed the world through a fiery veil. It was a roiling wave, snapping serpents at its crest, and it rolled over the walking corpses with such intensity that skin and flesh flaked to ash in seconds. Echoes, soot-silhouettes, were all that remained of the foremost undead. The ones that followed crumpled against the heat, their desiccated bodies quickly collapsing. Others, those who had only just surfaced, carried on, their bodies ablaze.

  “Break formation, brother,” cried Pyriel. “Take them down!” A stream of bolter fire stitched a rank of flaming bodies, filling the chamber with the dense thunder of explosions.

  Dak’ir waded in hand-to-hand, seeing an opportunity to anoint Draugen in true battle. The corpses provided little challenge. Limbs and heads cascaded onto the ground, only to be stomped underfoot or forgotten as the next enemy came on. They were fearless, relentless creatures. For what did the dead have to fear? He thrust his sword into the chest of one creature and ignited its entire body with psychic fire. The ashen remains were still flaking off the blade when Dak’ir took the head from another. A third scrabbled at his shoulder pad, trying to drag him down. The Librarian drew his plasma pistol and put a bolt through its torso, ending it. The next shot vaporised the skull of a second.

  “We are breaking the sanctity of this place,” he snarled to Pyriel, splitting a creature’s torso.

  Facing the opposite side of the chamber, the Epistolary was possessed by a similar fury.

  “It’s too late for that. Nihilan defiled it when he cast his warp-sorcery.”

  The two Salamanders fought in one half-circle each, defending an arc and leaving a void of open ground between them in the centre. That way no creature could get behind them. One relied on the other for his protection. Trust was paramount.

  Despite the carnage,
more and more undead were shambling into the fray. Whereas before they’d attacked individually, now they struck in a mob. Dak’ir counted over thirty on his flank alone. More were coming.

  “In Vulkan’s name, they’re endless!”

  “Burn them, Dak’ir,” said Pyriel, a surge of fire channelled through his force staff interrupting him. “Unleash the deathfire.”

  His combat doctrines came by rote—the blade of Draugen dimmed and became just a sword, his pistol thundered at precise intervals. The undead were kept at bay whilst Dak’ir’s focus travelled inwards, seeking the fiery core within and the catalyst with which he could release it. The name passed his lips without him realising it had been spoken.

  “Kessarghoth…”

  Dak’ir’s eyes went from cold, cerulean blue to ardent flame red. He roared with the ancient voice of a long-dead drake, and the terrifying din drowned out all others in the chamber. Molten death spewed from his mouth, through the grille in his battle-helm, and bathed the deathless horde.

  “Pyriel, down!” The voice did not sound like Dak’ir’s, but the other Librarian crouched as the lava flow scorched overhead, engulfing the other side of the chamber. The walking corpses, hundreds strong, were swept up in a terrible maelstrom and melted away in moments. The coffins and sarcophagi proved more resilient but lasted only seconds more before they too had sloughed to insignificant wisps of smoke on a hot and undulating magma sea.

  It was over in moments. The lava cooled rapidly into rock, the two Librarians standing on a circular plateau surrounded by a ringed crater. Of the dead, of their vessels, there was no sign. Dak’ir had obliterated them utterly. Hundreds of them.

  “Wisdom of Zen’de…” breathed Pyriel. He straightened up to face his saviour.

  Fire wreathed Dak’ir’s body, incandescent and alive. Just being near him seared the other Librarian’s armour and sent radiation warnings spiking across his retinal display.