[Tome of Fire 02] - Firedrake

by Nick Kyme - (ebook by Undead)

  Pyriel’s hand was shaking and he’d twisted it into a claw. His fingers flexed as if pulling on the invisible skeins between the mortal world and the other.

  “He straggles…” said the Epistolary in a strained voice. He still hadn’t fully recovered from the ordeal against the reaper, “but I have him. Ask of it.”

  Dak’ir could feel the emanations of the warp echo tugging at the edges of his mind. It sent a spike of empathic pain through his fingertips as he reached out like his master to mentally brash against the void.

  “Who are you?” asked the Lexicanum.

  The baleful eyes of the revenant were like cold blue lampfires, the body itself incorporeal and transparent. As it lifted its chin, Pyriel seizing the invisible string that bound it, it smiled and then opened its mouth.

  At first, its utterances were out of synch with its lolling jaw movements. The voice came out in a deep rasping timbre, slowed to the point of incomprehension. Like muscles that had atrophied with the weight of years, so too had the revenant’s ability to speak been degenerated.

  “Again,” Pyriel urged. “It will remember how.”

  Dak’ir refocussed, using what little psychic power the dampener afforded to impel the revenant.

  “Your name, creature, speak it to me now.”

  “Caaaaaaalllllleeeeebbbbbbb…”

  It came out as a moan, drawn out and abyssal deep.

  “Caaaallleebbb…”

  Clearer this time, the resonance was fading.

  “Caleb,” Dak’ir repeated to the shade, understanding.

  “Caleb Kelock,” it uttered.

  Like a partially recorded pict, fraught with static, the image of a man flickered in front of the Lexicanum. The spiritual personification of Kelock wore a fine suit in the manner of the rogue traders with a brocaded jacket and attached cape. A thin strip of beard ran the length of his chin, ending in an arrow at the very tip. He wore gloves and his knee-length boots shone with an ethereal echo of what they must’ve been like when Kelock was still living.

  Dak’ir realised it was the man’s funerary attire, that if they wrenched open the crypt they would find a decayed and eroded version of these clothes attached like strips of flesh to a skeleton.

  “Who did this to you, who trapped your essence between worlds?” Dak’ir asked. Back on Aphium the warp echoes malingered because they had unfinished business. They craved peace that could only be brought about by blood-retribution. The Salamanders had granted them their vengeance and so lifted their curse on Mercy Rock.

  Kelock was no unquiet spirit, he was a prisoner.

  His incorporeal face twisted with anger and the lampfires in his eyes blazed.

  “Your kind,” he accused.

  “Ushorak,” Dak’ir muttered, feeling the chill of the technocrat’s ire as it formed ice on his battle plate. “Black armour,” he said to the shade, indicating his partly frozen suit.

  Kelock nodded, forming an angry scowl.

  “Dak’ir…” It was Pyriel. His voice sounded strained. “Hurry up. I can’t hold it… indefinitely.”

  The Lexicanum was about to go on when the solar glare bathing them from above suddenly died. A grey pall settled quickly over the massive cemetery. The lawns lost their lustre, the glory of its monuments seemed faded and dull. Hope and warmth bled away. It was the ashen wasteland Dak’ir had first imagined. How different the cryptoria appeared with the absence of light.

  Shadows were moving through its benighted depths. They flashed like balefires in Dak’ir’s retinal display. Minimal heat traces. He remembered the hordes of servitors tending the funerary gardens. Picks and shears could easily be turned into weapons. He suspected these creatures served a dual purpose—groundsmen and guardians, both.

  Rain was falling. Only it wasn’t really rain. It was the vapour in the atmosphere, condensed into heavy droplets in order to simulate rain. In seconds it turned from a light shower into a downpour.

  “Something is coming…” Heavy rain hammered on Dak’ir’s battle plate, turning the ingrained ash into black slurry. The glowing embers of mechanical optics were closing on the Librarians.

  “Then our time here is ended,” Pyriel had to snarl through clenched teeth. He was hanging on to Kelock’s apparition, but only just.

  The shade flickered briefly out of existence before resolving again.

  “What secrets did the Traitor glean from you, technocrat? Answer me and your torment will be ended.”

  Kelock beckoned him with an emaciated finger. Without time to wait, Dak’ir came forwards.

  “Sto—”

  Pyriel’s warning arrived too late, the substance of it lost to a chorus of screams in Dak’ir’s head as the apparition clenched his fingers around the Salamander’s battle helm.

  Images flooded the Lexicanum’s mind in hypno-conditioned flashes as Kelock divulged all that he knew and had seen in a single, cathartic release. For a brief moment, apparition and Astartes became one. Their disparate chronologies, both living and dead, fused. Threads of fate bound them together. One entity, one shared history. Awareness was like a lightning strike and Dak’ir was its grounding rod.

  Dak’ir staggered, falling to one knee. He shuddered once then again. Etheric smoke was rising from his armour. Ripples of energy coursed ephemerally over the ceramite, turning the blue edges black.

  “Release him…” he breathed when it was over, acutely aware of the servitors tramping closer. He had everything they needed. The truth of it made him feel hollow.

  “I cannot,” Pyriel admitted, and an anguished Kelock blinked out of existence.

  Dak’ir managed to stand. The servitors were still coming, just a few metres away. Their bladed implements shone in the half-light. “I made a vow.”

  “Which I broke. Only Ushorak or Nihilan can free the shade.”

  Dak’ir glared at his master. “Show me how to bring him back and I’ll do it myself.” He unsheathed Draugen, ready for the servitors, but kept the blade dulled.

  Pyriel turned to face their attackers. They were close enough to strike. “No time,” he said, unlocking his force staff. The Epistolary whirled it around his body, severing a mechanised spine with the first arc, punching through a servitor’s stomach with a heavy thrust at the end of the move.

  Dak’ir cut down a third, cleaving it from shoulder to groin. Oil spewed to the ground in thick gouts, wires dangling like intestine. He sliced the head from a fourth, the automaton collapsing first to its knees and then falling face-forwards. The earth was churned beneath their feet, becoming mired.

  They were all dead, not traitors or possessed machines, just loyal Imperial servants doing their duty. It left a bitter taste, but more were coming. These first few were just a proximal vanguard.

  “What happened?” Pyriel couldn’t wait to ask. “What did the technocrat show you?”

  Dak’ir’s eyes narrowed, the slits of fire in them turning into blades. He wrenched out his plasma pistol.

  He declined to answer.

  “We have defiled this place. Our sacrilege is no better than that of Ushorak.” A sizzling bolt tore a chunk from the base of a tall obelisk and sent it crashing like a felled tree into the path of more servitors. Those that escaped being crushed were suddenly impeded.

  There was a note of desperation in Pyriel’s voice as he reached for Dak’ir. “Lexicanum, I must know.”

  They were advancing along an oblique line, moving away from their attackers but keeping them in sight as they did. The few that reached the Salamanders Pyriel destroyed with efficient but deadly blows from his force staff. He was a master in more senses than merely the psychic. Dak’ir had heard about the Epistolary’s staff-fighting rotas. He followed the tribal katas of Heliosa, his Sanctuary City, blended with the pole-arm drills of Master Prebian.

  “Dak’ir!”

  The Lexicanum ripped off his battle helm. Rivulets of fake rain teemed down his face. There was pain and disbelief in his eyes.

  “I saw the end,”
he said. “I saw Nocturne’s doom.”

  With the mangled wreckage of the servitors around them, Pyriel and Dak’ir ran.

  Master glanced at apprentice as they sped through the tombs, their pursuers dogged behind them. A few had swelled to almost fifty. More were gathering, consolidating with the pack.

  Nocturne’s doom.

  It was just as the armour suits from Scoria had predicted.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I

  Allies and Traitors

  Elysius was stunned. He’d hit his head in the fall. No, that wasn’t right. He hadn’t fallen. Argos had pushed him.

  G’ord was dead. His blood washed the walls in long, grisly trails. Elysius’ enhanced olfactory senses rankled with the stink of copper.

  The screaming cut through the fog of dizziness. He recognised the voice. It was Argos. As the blurring went away, Elysius saw his brother Scout collapse with his hands to his face. His smoking, steaming face. Where the acid burned it. The acid meant for Elysius.

  He still had a partial clip of shells. The auto-readout glowed ugly red. Enough. His aim was off. Elysius could barely see. Argos, now with one hand on his ravaged face, tried to fend the xenos off with his combat blade. Once it closed, Argos would meet the same fate as G’ord.

  Elysius yanked on the trigger and filled the tunnel with the bolt pistol’s noise and fire. The first shell struck the ’stealer in the torso, pitched it back so it slammed into the wall. The second and third punched into vital organs. The resulting explosion from the mass-reactive rounds bathed the immediate area around the creature with xenos viscera.

  There’d be no tracking it now. Mission fail.

  Holding his wounded arm to his chest, Elysius managed to stumble to his fallen battle-brother.

  “You saved my—” The sight of Argos’ acid-maimed visage made him stop. One hand could barely cover such a horrific injury. Angry red flesh, bubbling and burn-twisted, glared from between trembling fingers. He was going into shock.

  “Get up,” Elysius heaved Argos’ free arm over his shoulder and supported him. The wounded Scout’s footing was unsteady but he could walk.

  “Why did you do that?”

  The voice that replied was a grating parody of the battle-brother Elysius used to know. “You would’ve too… What about G’ord?”

  “He’s dead, and no Apothecary will revive him or his gene-seed.”

  They struggled forwards, the two of them. Elysius managed to raise the comm-feed in his armoured collar.

  “Command echelon, this is Squad Kabe requesting assistance.”

  ++Speak, brother. This is Captain Kadai++

  “My lord, our mission has failed. We are trapped in the sewer tunnels, Argent Quadrant East, and require extraction. Threats proximate and numerous.”

  Elysius was guiding them away from the caved-in entrance and deeper into the sewer network. It meant drawing closer to the nest.

  ++Engage your emergency beacon. We will be with you soon, brother. Fortitude of Vulkan. Faith in the Anvil++

  “In his name, my lord.”

  The comm-feed returned to static as the link was severed. Elysius shut it off. It could be hours before they were found. He clicked the emergency beacon in his collar, part of the mission failsafe should the tracker be misdeployed.

  “I can walk unaided,” said Argos. That throaty rasp, robbed of its humanity, so unlike him.

  “You’ve suffered a massive trauma. You are in no fit condition to do much of anything unaided.”

  “I can walk alone!”

  Elysius let him go, surprised to see that Argos could do just as he’d said he could. He lowered his hand and the view made Elysius grimace.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it? The pain is lessening. My body compensates.”

  “I am so sorry, brother. My hubris brought this upon you, upon G’ord.” The cooling corpse of the dead Scout was behind them now, but the copper stink remained like an accusation in Elysius’ nostrils.

  “You were prosecuting the mission. How’s your arm? Can you fight with it?”

  Elysius tested it. Stiff, but the blood had clotted. He was healing. The marvels of Astartes physiology, even that of a lowly Scout, continued to amaze him.

  “Bolter and blade,” he replied, brandishing both.

  “That beacon will transmit all the way to the surface?” said Argos, pointing at his brother’s flashing collar.

  “Brother-Captain Kadai is tracking us as we speak, leading an extraction team. Why do you ask?”

  Argos checked the load on his bolt pistol and the two spare clips mag-locked to his belt. “Secondaries?” he asked.

  Elysius showed him the two extra clips attached to his own belt.

  Argos nodded. “A beacon in the hands of two Astartes Scouts is better than any tracker bolt.”

  “You want us to find the nest?” Elysius couldn’t hide his incredulity.

  “We must be close.”

  Elysius laughed. It would be one of the last times he ever did, and his mirth was tainted with fatalism.

  “Into the fires of battle then, brother,” he said.

  Argos racked the slide of his bolt pistol. The auto-readout snapped to “MAX”.

  “Unto the anvil of war, and may death take us should we be found lacking.”

  All the rumours and speculation, the grim beliefs passed from neophyte to neophyte, from battle-brother to battle-brother—unfounded. All of them.

  Ravaged by bio-acid, twisted by xenos-toxin, emaciated by the taint of warp sorcery, a bleached bone skull to match his battle-helm, Chaplain Elysius suffered from none of these. He never had. His face, his perfect, handsome face was his greatest shame, so he hid it behind a mask of death and bone.

  Ba’ken saw, but he did not quite believe. He always thought seeing the Chaplain’s visage would somehow lessen him, that his mystique and power would fade. The man was greater than the myth. He had given up the secret covenant he had made with himself and used it to make an ally of a warrior he didn’t even know.

  “Brother Zartath,” Elysius pressed. “I think there has been enough loyal blood spilled here already. We are kin, you and I. All of us are.”

  Zartath retracted the bone-blade with a snikt! as it raked against ceramite and finally into flesh.

  “You have my battle-helm,” he said, rising.

  Elysius looked down to where he’d mag-locked the helmet to his armour and smiled. He detached it with a faint chank of metal.

  “Now,” he said, handing the battle-helm over, “how do we escape?”

  “This is the Port of Anguish,” Zartath replied, extending his finger and twirling it around in a circle—his henchmen reacted by staying their weapons and disappearing from view as they made for the lower floor, “the gateway to Volgorrah,” he added, fitting his battle-helm. “There is no escape.”

  “There must be a way—” Ba’ken winced, still feeling his injuries acutely as he got up. The mark on his neck inflicted by the Black Dragon’s bone-blade was a sting to his pride more than his body, and he rubbed at it ruefully. Slowly his body’s reparatory systems were healing him, but he was still weak.

  Iagon was close by and came to support his fellow sergeant.

  “Concerned for my wellbeing, brother?” asked Ba’ken.

  “I would feel safer with your bulk between me and the dark eldar, is all,” came the taut reply, but there was some warmth in it.

  Zartath was already walking away, signalling he had no intention of answering Ba’ken.

  “No way of escape at all?” asked Elysius, standing aside.

  “Six years I have existed in this place,” snarled the Black Dragon, pausing as he went past the Chaplain, “and have found none. We are trapped here. All we can do is survive. Kill when we can, run when we cannot. That is all there is left.” He stalked away. “Follow if you wish,” he said, voice diminishing with the distance, “or not. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “This one has fallen far,” remarked Koto. His
voice was accusing as he watched the Black Dragons and his cohorts disappearing into the shadows of the amphitheatre.

  “Something that could be levelled against the Chapter,” added Ba’ken.

  “I agree,” said Iagon. “Can we trust this castaway and his followers?”

  Elysius looked on thoughtfully. “We have no other choice. Our survival in this place depends on us staying together. Brother Zartath has achieved that feat for six years—”

  “If he is to be believed,” remarked Iagon, butting in.

  The Chaplain glared at him, the perfect contours of his face like cut jet even when expressing displeasure. “Trust is in short supply in this benighted place already—let us not add to it, brothers.”

  A shout from Brother Koto interrupted Iagon’s apology.

  The Fire-born turned as one to see a gaggle of emaciated creatures lingering in the penumbral shadows.

  “Shall I engage, my lord?” asked Koto, a barbed trident in hand. Elysius had seen him in the battle cages. With a single throw he’d punched a training spear through the body of an armoured servitor. Reinforced carapace with a ceramite plating meant the servitors were tough. Not tough enough for Brother Koto. The Fire-born originally hailed from Epimethus, the only one of the Sanctuary Cities surrounded by the Acerbian Sea. Koto was a weapon specialist second and a spear-fisherman first. The gnorl-whales that inhabited the Nocturnean oceans had volcanic rock for their hides. Breaching them was no easy task, even for an Astartes. Any action taken by Koto would be bloody and final.

  “Negative.” Now he saw them, Elysius realised these things were wretches, little more than shrivelled ghouls, voyeurs to the recent carnage.

  Zartath’s harsh voice rang out across the amphitheatre. He was barely visible, half-swallowed by the darkness and well-camouflaged in his armour. A crack of light behind him framed the warrior from a hidden passageway leading further into the city.