[Tome of Fire 02] - Firedrake

by Nick Kyme - (ebook by Undead)

  “Like the city itself has moved?” offered Halknarr.

  Praetor looked up at the old campaigner, “Aye.”

  “There is more.” He traced back his steps to slightly farther up the ridge, just a few metres back. He pointed, “See the deep impressions?” A few of the Firedrakes nodded. “Someone knelt here. In power armour.”

  “A deathblow, perhaps?” suggested Persephion.

  Halknarr shook his head. “No blood.”

  “Surrender then?” Praetor said, nonplussed. No Astartes, especially not a Fire-born, would even consider it, let alone actually do it.

  As Tsu’gan looked on, he was reminded of He’stan’s words to him.

  “Are you saying the dusk-wraiths have taken a prisoner, Brother Halknarr?” asked Daedicus.

  “I am, and one that went willingly.”

  “Not Elysius?” said Persephion.

  “It wasn’t the Chaplain,” Tsu’gan asserted at last. “It was Cerbius Iagon, my old squad brother.”

  All eyes, barring the Forgefather’s, turned to Tsu’gan.

  “I fear he has betrayed his own.”

  “Perhaps he had no choice?” offered Daedicus, more with hope than conviction.

  None amongst the Firedrakes wanted to believe betrayal amongst brothers.

  “This place affects the mind,” muttered Halknarr, eager to be moving on. “Who knows what pressures our brothers were under?”

  Praetor stood. His face was a stern, unreadable mask. He’d heard enough. “Elysius lives still, we can we sure of that.”

  “Their pursuers doubled back,” added Halknarr. “Whatever route our brothers took it did not end here in this place, but nor were the xenos able to follow.”

  “Then we follow those tracks and try to get ahead of them. We have to reach the Chaplain first.”

  “No, Brother-Sergeant Praetor,” uttered He’stan, clutching the Spear of Vulkan in his fist like a divining rod. His eyes blazed brightly. “I have seen another way.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I

  The Enemy of Doubt

  Not since his trials on the Cindara Plateau had Elysius fought this hard to overcome adversity. Back then, over a century before, he had been human. Now he was Astartes and still this darkling place punished his mind, body and soul to its limit.

  Ba’ken was a heavy burden on his back and they had fled through the xenos wasteland for hours. Throughout, they’d been harried by mercenary bands. Whooping hellions, atop their savage sky-boards, had tried to draw down on them in a narrow defile of rains; a pack of whelpmasters and their warp hounds had dogged them without relent until Zartath had found another escape route; the very shadows themselves hunted, gelid warriors with alabaster skin and lank hair like ocean-weed. Through guile and cunning, Zartath kept them ahead of the dark eldar’s clutches, taking the survivors down new routes when others were closed off.

  And as they ran, Elysius couldn’t shake the feeling they were heading somewhere. An inexorable destination awaited them on the dark horizon, drawing closer with every moment, and when they arrived it would all end, one way or another. Tonnhauser acquitted himself well—the human was resourceful, strong, steeled by his experiences of the night-city. While Zartath scouted ahead, Tonnhauser became Elysius’ running companion. The Chaplain was glad of it. The human’s resolve shored up his own. More than once, Elysius had wanted to stop and turn, to face his foes in glorious battle and end the hunt in blood. Tonnhauser stopped him. If nothing else, the human should be given every chance to live, even though Elysius thought the likelihood of that very doubtful.

  When the baying of distant beasts ceased and the pursuit horns and the shrieked goading of the slavers stopped, when they did finally rest in a small, dark place below the earth, it felt as if they’d been running for days.

  “Nothing. I’ve heard nothing for almost an hour.” Elysius had his head pressed against the cavern wall. It was cool, but with an icy bite that pained his exposed cheek.

  Ba’ken was prone in the middle of the small chamber. His breathing was so shallow his chest appeared still, as if it wasn’t rising at all. But he was alive. For now.

  Zartath regarded the Chaplain from across the opposite side of the cavern. He’d taken them deep into the bowels of the Razored Vale, away from the hunting packs and the sky-bound mercenaries that sought them. Of Helspereth and her wyches, there’d been no sign since the encounter on the ridge.

  “Means nothing,” the Black Dragon snarled. “They will come when they are ready. The xenos always do.”

  It spoke of years of bitter experience and again Elysius found himself wondering at just how long Zartath and his brothers had been incarcerated. To have survived this long, it was an incredible achievement but it had broken the Astartes irrevocably.

  What fate awaits you if we live through this, mutant? Elysius wondered, and his gaze went to Tonnhauser.

  Despite his courage, the Night Devil looked exhausted and close to the end of his strength. He’d become an increasingly feral and ragged figure since they’d first been brought to the Reef on Helspereth’s raider. It seemed like several lifetimes ago. When the hunt was on, when life or death became split decisions, governed by fate more than design, it was easy. Move and live. Stand still and die. It was a simple yet brutal doctrine. But now, in the quiet dark with only each other and their thoughts for company, a different battle for survival was being fought. It existed in the mind and Elysius knew of it all too well. He was Astartes, one of the Reclusiam, and his resilience was formidable. But lately, he had found his resolve sorely tested, in this his personal cauldron. Zartath was testament to the fate waiting for any Space Marine who gave in to the madness of the Reef.

  Doubts crept in to Elysius’ mind like insidious fingers of shadow. What if they were never found? What if even now his rescuers lay slain? What if he fell before he could deliver the Sigil? Then it too would be lost. The Nine would become the Ten and the Forgefather’s quest made much more difficult.

  Elysius crushed his misgivings in a clenched fist.

  Faith is my shield. It is the wellspring of my conviction. It is water when I thirst. It is warmth when I shiver. It is vigour when I am weak. It is nourishment when I hunger. With it I am tempered and my will forged into a weapon. This I swear in Vulkan’s name.

  The litany did its work. For Elysius the words brought a measure of comfort but also a sense of defiance. They had made it this far.

  “A few steps farther…” he said out loud.

  “What do you say?” asked Zartath.

  “Nothing. How long must we linger here?”

  “Soon, we’ll move again.”

  “And to where would you have us go, Black Dragon?” asked Elysius, standing to stretch the muscles in his legs and back. A half-glance at his crozius and he saw the dullness of its haft in the reflected glow of his eyes. Hope was close to being extinguished too.

  “To wherever the xenos are not,” came Zartath’s laconic reply.

  “And after that?”

  The Black Dragon’s annoyance was obvious as he eyed the Chaplain.

  “We move again, Vulkan-priest. And so on, and so on, as I and my brothers have these last years. Do you think there’s an alternative?” he snapped.

  “Sooner or later they will catch us. By then Ba’ken will be dead from his injuries and you and I will be weakened. We should consider finding somewhere to take a stand, at least make our sacrifice a cost the xenos won’t forget.”

  Zartath rose rapidly like a striking adder. “Fool! We are already forgotten. Vulkan’s sons, so quick to stand and hold for glory. Your tenacity will see you dead, brother-priest. We move and do not stop. How else do you think my kin and I lived this long? Honour and nobility are concepts alien to this place. They’ll get you nothing but an unremembered death. Not until I see her or him again and can kill them, will I stop moving. Only then will I have peace. Only then will a measure of revenge begin to account for the loss of my brothers.” />
  The close confines of the underground cavern magnified and reflected the sound. Zartath’s impassioned words were echoing into silence when the grind of gears emanated from below. At once, the ground started to tremble and a thin sliver of light cracked the ceiling above them.

  “What is this place? Where have you brought us, Zartath?” asked Elysius, going to his crozius.

  The Black Dragon was vigorously shaking his head. “We are moving,” he hissed.

  “Up…” added Tonnhauser, his voice choked with fear as his gaze went skyward.

  The crack was widening and the floor was moving underneath them.

  “Sealed,” said Elysius, heaving on one of the doors to the chamber. It had locked when the gears were engaged—it was all a part of the same mechanism, a trap sprung by the movements of its prey.

  Zartath tested the only other. “This one too.”

  “Up we go then,” said the Chaplain and raised his head towards the chasm of light.

  It was a lifter chamber, concealed in the rock. Elysius realised that now, somewhat belatedly. The inexorable destination he had felt them approaching—they had finally arrived.

  II

  The Coliseum of Blades

  Slowly, they were ferried upwards. The walls fell away as the lifter plate rose, much larger than the chamber itself. There was no way out but up into the unknown light. Elysius was shielding his eyes, crozius drawn, when they emerged into an arena.

  Shadows folded upon shadows, the gloom unleavened by brazier-lanterns hewn into the flagstone floor. The lambent light from their dulcetly burning embers hinted at patches of old blood, described the outline of barbed walls. Broken weapons, the skeletons of old warriors long dead in the black dust, were limned in red firelight that gave a visceral cast to the scene.

  Open to the sky, lightning revealed the mouldering battlefield in flashes of blood-tinged monochrome. The dour faces of statues glared down upon it. These were the dracons and archons, nobles of the frontier realm. They stood upon their black pedestals, titanic in stature, a testament to the egotism and vainglory of the dark eldar. Some were dilapidated, age simply eroding them; others were defaced, their reigns ended in bloody assassination or worse, forgotten ignominy. One stood unblemished, aside from the rest. He was depicted in his lamellar, insectoid armour, a long cape drawn about his broad shoulders. The effigy cradled a helm in the crook of its arms, and its eyes stared imperiously from a face drawn in cruelty and casual malice. An’scur—Lord of the Reef.

  Sunken into a deep oval trench, the arena was surmounted by blades. In the darkened pulpits and stalls a gaggle of ghouls looked on.

  The Parched. Elysius recognised the wretches from before. Here they were in their hundreds, awaiting a spectacle. His gaze was drawn to the centre where a tall, lithe creature beckoned him with just her eyes. They glittered like poisoned emeralds behind a domino mask.

  Helspereth.

  She had drawn him here. It was not vanity on the part of the Chaplain that led him to this conclusion. Elysius knew the wych queen was obsessed with him, like a child fascinates over a trapped insect until its wings and appendages have been removed and the curiosity dies with the creature itself. Ever since the ridge, perhaps ever since they’d arrived in the Razored Vale, she had herded him here.

  She wanted him, in her own twisted way. And now she had him and an audience to bear witness to whatever humiliation she had planned. This was Helspereth’s intended theatre, the final act about to commence.

  “And then there were four,” she said, in a sibilant silken voice with hidden barbs. She gave a vicious smile when she regarded Ba’ken. “Well, soon to be three.”

  A rattle of blades revealed a coven of her wyches, hiding in the shadows behind the survivors. Zartath had loosed his bone-blades but was not quick enough to react.

  Elysius felt the cold press of metal against his neck and knew the others were similarly incapacitated. One thrust was all it would take…

  “Welcome,” said Helspereth with mock geniality, “to the Coliseum of Blades.” She flung her arms wide to encompass the gruesome place in all its anti-glory. “True,” she mused, “it has seen fairer times. The flesh trade here is not what it once was. Dysjunction is a cruel and draconian mistress.”

  Eyes adjusting to the preternatural gloom, Elysius did now see how ruined the arena was. Its towers and cages were broken and rusted; cracks in some of the walls ran deep; a thick veil of dust swathed almost every surface. It was now a fallen shrine to murder, a Coliseum of Blades no longer.

  Helspereth’s eyes took on a fevered aspect as a tremor ran through her body. “I have slain so many in this arena. Gutted and cleaved and hewn and sawed and devoured… it is my temple. Here I worship. Katon, the Slaver King slighted me—I killed his gene-bred humanoid, the troglodyte barely whetted my bloodlust. Katon followed…” She pointed to a spike where an impaled skull grinned macabrely. A scrap of hair clung tenaciously to the bleached bone scalp. It trembled in an eldritch wind emanating from behind the wych. A coldness came with it, a chill that Elysius felt in his marrow.

  Something else was with them in the arena, something the Chaplain could not yet see.

  “Morbane, mon-keigh barbarian-lord, fell to my trident,” she went on, touring the shadows, revisiting old victories in her mind’s eye, “Shen’sa’ur, one of the hated kin, I strangled with a barbed whip; the green-skinned brute, its hollow name was Tyrant, died to a thousand of my dagger cuts. I have bled them, I have decapitated, eviscerated and disembowelled. My legacy of blood is longer than ten of your lives, mon-keigh. You should feel honoured that I want you at the end of my sword.”

  Then Elysius did something he hadn’t done for many long years.

  He yawned, a long and exaggerated gesture that ended with a curt rejoinder for the wych. “Are you done?”

  Helspereth stuttered, wrong-footed, “W-what?”

  “I tire of your rambling, hell-kite. I said: are you finished with it?”

  Imperious nostalgia turned to anger in Helspereth’s expression and body language.

  “Face me now,” she said evenly, “and I will release the others. Once I’m done with you, I’ll give them all a head start before I follow.”

  “Why me?” Elysius asked.

  “Because you are not entirely unbeautiful for a mon-keigh,” she snarled and her own false beauty was eclipsed, “because I want to crush your pathetic illusions of faith and expose the error of supplication to a powerless, mortal god.” She moved closer. Her eyes were like black, pitiless coals. “I will drink in your sorrow and despair like a panacea. Such divine and sustainable agonies I will reap from your sundered flesh,” she purred. Licking her blood-red lips in anticipation, she suppressed a tiny thrill.

  “Now,” she added, “come to fight. I have yearned for this since first I took your fleshless arm from your quivering body.”

  Elysius’ mouth was a grim straight line. It barely moved. “Very well.”

  Helspereth smiled without warmth, without feeling. “Choose your weapon.” She stood aside, revealing a host of blades and bludgeons. The Chaplain recognised a defunct chainblade, even a broken storm shield amongst a mass of lesser weapons.

  He looked away. “I am already armed.”

  Helspereth glanced scornfully at the crozius Elysius brandished.

  “That preacher’s stave? What weapon is that for a warrior?”

  “It is mine, given in honour and received with belief and humility,” the Chaplain said. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand, wych.”

  Helspereth made the facial equivalent of a shrug and hissed. “Let’s begin…”

  She flew at Elysius, grinning savagely, and he was hard pressed to deflect her attacks. Wounds opened up in his cheek and above his left eye, and a score of deeper rents marked his power armour before the Chaplain had regained his footing and realised what had happened.

  He was breathing hard when she came again. Helspereth’s blade whickered, like it was fluid an
d not edged metal at all. Elysius parried, once, twice and again before a stab of pain tore into his side like a torch and his skin burned with his own blood.

  “Too slow… too slow…” she goaded, stepping back to admire her murder-craft. The wych’s chest was steady, her heartrate barely above a casual beat.

  “Don’t listen to that hell-bitch!” snarled Zartath, struggling against the bonds and blades that held him down. A skein of razor-edged wire bound the Black Dragon, while a pair of wyches pressed spears to his neck. Beads of Zartath’s blood were already rolling down the tips and hafts due to his efforts. Tonnhauser was bowed by a sabre to his neck, whereas Ba’ken was unconscious and left alone to his oblivion.

  Evidently, Helspereth wanted Elysius’ companions to bear witness to his demise.

  The cold came again. It fringed the eldritch wind, preceding it like a frosty veil. Something shimmered, dark on dark, like two pict negatives overlapping one another and exposed to a half-light.

  “Tell me, wych,” said Elysius. “Did your great triumphs come at your hand or something else’s?” He thrust into the formless shadows with his crozius, rewarded when it struck flesh and a creature resolved itself. Impaled on the Chaplain’s stave, it squirmed and shrieked in pleasure-pain. A cold thing, a white thing, a creature of lank, almost vampiric appearance—Elysius had heard of mandrakes. He grunted as he twisted the innards of this one and gutted it.

  The Parched, already drooling at the arena’s bloody proceedings, swooned above them.

  “A simple test, my love…” Helspereth purred, her excited gaze drinking in the dying mandrake’s agony, “…to see if you were worthy.”

  Elysius shrugged the corpse off his crozius, the macelike head threaded with ropes of gore. “No more games.”

  She came again, buoyed on bounding pirouettes, her twin blades a whirlwind of edged metal. Elysius ignored them. He missed with a swipe to the body but caught Helspereth across the cheek with his fist as he backhanded.