Deathfire

by Nick Kyme

  So it was with bitter regret that Barek Zytos knelt before the casket in which the Lord of Drakes was now entombed.

  ‘He belongs with the earth,’ uttered a solemn voice from the shadows of the deep vault. ‘Not in this cold and gilded barrow.’

  A single memorial flame alleviated the darkness, fluttering mournfully. Its lambent light caught the edges of Vulkan’s golden tomb, whilst limning the grieving features of Zytos.

  ‘A primarch held in state beneath the Fortress of Hera…’ Zytos murmured to the newcomer, his grief making him pause. ‘It is almost beyond countenance.’

  He had declared to Lord Guilliman his belief in Vulkan’s survival, defiant against any who would dare gainsay it. The bitter irony was their father had survived the Dropsite Massacre, only to be murdered by an assassin whilst purportedly on friendly soil.

  Loyalty was air and sustenance to Zytos – he could not eschew it any more than he could willingly stop breathing or eating – but the fate of Vulkan, and what he saw as the deception of Macragge, had wounded him deeply.

  ‘Let us hope he is the only one,’ said the other figure in the vault as he knelt beside Zytos.

  ‘Why are we still here, Var’kir?’ Zytos asked.

  Phaestus Var’kir did not answer immediately. He took a moment to bow respectfully to his primarch in state, and muttered a few words of Promethean ritual.

  ‘How do you propose we leave, Zytos?’ he asked, his cadence reminiscent of cracking parchment. ‘The Lord of Macragge forbids it whilst the Ruinstorm remains.’

  ‘I find that an overly lyrical and unnecessarily calamitous word for it.’

  ‘What? Ruin?’ Var’kir replied.

  Unlike Zytos, who wore the drake-green of the Salamanders, Var’kir was entirely clad in black. As a devotee of the Chaplaincy, it was his duty. He had often reminded Zytos, it was not because he was in mourning but on account of his calling, one needed more than ever in such tenebrous days.

  A wound not just of the flesh but of the spirit had been inflicted upon the nascent Imperium, provoking a theological war of the soul.

  ‘It has brought us to our knees,’ Var’kir admitted, ‘for a time, at least.’

  Zytos respected the sanctity of the chamber, even with all of its hollow opulence, but still transmitted the futile anger in his words.

  ‘How can we now rise? Our father came to a Legion approaching self-annihilation. Without his influence, how can we hope to avoid such a fate again?’

  The legionary had a stern countenance and the broad shoulders of a Themian. His deep crimson hair was cut short and on both hemispheres of his skull iconic representations of drakes were shaved into the scalp.

  Gently, Var’kir laid a gauntleted hand upon Zytos’s shoulder.

  ‘With his influence are we made protean, brother.’ He smiled warmly, despite their bleak surroundings. ‘We are much changed from the Dragon Warriors we used to be.’

  Few in the Legion knew, let alone spoke, the XVIII’s old cognomen. To do so prompted a reminder of the great shame it signified, of the days before Vulkan had taught them pragmatism to temper their self-sacrificial natures and humanity to counter their abyssal anger.

  Var’kir was badly scarred. The latter part of his name, kir, meant ‘chosen’. In Var’kir’s case, it was an apt honorific. As one of Lord Rhy’tan’s ‘Voices of Fire’, he had been sent to minister to the legionaries about to bring Horus the Renegade to heel, but scarcely survived the massacre. The stunted, ash-white crest bifurcating his hairless scalp suggested veteran, as did the closeness of his flesh to the skull. His eyes still held their Nocturnean fire, though, embers to the coal-black of his skin.

  A moment of pensive silence fell before Zytos said, ‘I thought I heard it beat. His heart.’

  As one, the eyes of the two Salamanders turned to regard their slain lord.

  Vulkan lay in silent repose. His eyes were closed and he looked serene behind the casket glass. He was, as he always had been, their father. Honour scars marked his face, branded into flesh by an iron rod. Hard to discern, except in a certain light, they described the legacy of Vulkan’s deeds.

  ‘Our minds can sometimes trick us into believing what our hearts desire, Zytos,’ Var’kir replied quietly. ‘It is well, at least, he is here to be mourned by his sons, instead of defiled on some distant battlefield.’

  Zytos lowered his gaze, unable to look upon his dead father any longer.

  Clenched in Vulkan’s fist was Dawnbringer, an artefact of peerless craftsmanship, wrought by the Lord of Drakes himself, and the very hammer that had spirited him across the empyrean to Macragge.

  Aside from his flesh and bone, it was the only thing that had survived atmospheric re-entry intact. In point of fact Vulkan wore not his draconian battleplate, but was instead clad in a suit of armour from Lord Guilliman’s vault. At least it had been crafted with the livery of the XVIII.

  Zytos and the other Salamanders who had made it to Macragge knew fragments of the story surrounding Vulkan’s violent arrival. Some aspects of it beggared belief to the sons of Nocturne, incredulous accounts of miraculous resurrection and healing, and a madness that rendered the Lord of Drakes into a frenzied beast.

  Rumours, nothing more. The former was cruel, giving hope where none existed, and the latter was an insult to Vulkan’s memory. Both Zytos and Var’kir had refuted them.

  ‘Has anyone else tried to remove it?’ The sound of Var’kir’s voice lifted Zytos from bleak reverie. The Chaplain’s hand wavered in front of him, held before the glass and hovering, fingers outstretched towards where the ugly spearhead jutted from the primarch’s chest. His gauntleted hand trembled at the horror of it, the abject violation. To see it was a constant reminder of Vulkan’s murder and the crude tool used to end him.

  ‘Some,’ said Zytos, a tacit admission in the tone of his answer that he could be counted amongst them, ‘but all who have tried, failed.’

  ‘None can,’ said Var’kir, tracing the words engraved upon the casket’s only ornamentation, a gilded scroll, with his fingers. ‘Unbound Flame…’ he whispered, reading the words aloud. His eyes strayed to the memorial flame.

  Var’kir was gifted. Like the Igniax of old, he perceived truth and wisdom in flames.

  Zytos had followed his gaze. In spite of his grief, his voice still betrayed a sliver of hope.

  ‘What do you see?’

  After staring for a few minutes, Var’kir shook his head.

  ‘Nothing,’ he murmured, regretful.

  ‘I would gladly sacrifice my life,’ declared Zytos, unashamed of the tears streaking down his face.

  ‘There are none amongst us who would not do so, brother.’

  The ancient Promethean creed told that the circle of death and rebirth not only maintained the balance of nature, but also held the belief of life eternal, of resurrection. Within the Legion, this had been accepted as the harvesting of gene-seed passing on from one host into another, so a warrior’s legacy might live on, but Zytos referred to a more literal interpretation. The sacrifice of one could bring about the apotheosis of another. It was foolish and sentimental; pragmatism was needed now. But grief had to be properly observed first.

  ‘Father,’ said Zytos, a fierce strength inflecting his voice, ‘we have great need of hope. Please…’

  He bowed his head, and Var’kir joined him in grave memoriam.

  Four

  The Preacher

  Pain woke Numeon.

  His treatment at the hands of Xenut Sul had been severe enough to render him unconscious. His first thought was of the fresh stitches in his side, the crude sutures in his chest and back. His second thought was the realisation he was no longer in his cell.

  A smell pervaded, faintly reminiscent of a slaughterhouse, though Numeon had learned to be suspicious of his senses in this place. Old friends, almost certainl
y dead, had come to him in his barely lucid moments, Leodrakk and Pergellen staring with ghoulish faces, their flesh sunken and putrefying. The stink of their rotting corpses, somehow animate and enslaved to hunger, had been so convincing that Numeon had almost believed they were real.

  Awaking in a feverish sweat, only to collapse in exhaustion a moment later, he had been sorely glad they were not.

  Dead is dead, and nothing could alter that.

  ‘Being able to distinguish phantoms from what is real will serve you well here,’ the Preacher said to Numeon, regarding him with the same detached interest a biologis adept might regard an insect.

  A cavernous yet claustrophobic chamber surrounded Numeon. Xenut Sul had gone, replaced by his new tormentor. And though it appeared as if they were alone, Numeon’s instincts warned him of the opposite.

  He heard… murmurings. Though he knew he could not rely upon anything he saw or heard, the voices sounded pained. They were also reminiscent of warriors he had fought beside before, not specifically but certainly of the same caste.

  What is this fell place? he wondered.

  About to speak the question aloud, he stopped when he realised he was bound hand and foot to a slab, and that the sigil was gone. Briefly, he glanced around for it but saw nothing save the blackness of the chamber and the Preacher before him.

  His interrogator paced a short arc, his eyes constantly scrutinising the prisoner.

  ‘The hammer…’ Numeon said at last, despising himself for the weakness in his voice. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It speaks,’ said the Preacher, ignoring his question, as calmly and conversationally as if they were two strangers just getting acquainted. ‘Xenut Sul said you would not speak to him. Will you speak to me then, Artellus Numeon of Vulkan’s honoured Pyre Guard?’

  Numeon bared his teeth but didn’t bother to strain against his bonds. It was a petty act of defiance, but the only one he had left.

  The Preacher gave no reaction. He was tall with transhuman physiology and wore long crimson robes, etched in Colchisian. His bald pate and face seemed strangely patterned, as if dark, tanned, until the Preacher drew close and Numeon saw the umber cuneiform marking his skin.

  ‘You’re a Word Bearer,’ spat Numeon.

  ‘So you will speak to me. Even if it is to state the obvious.’

  The Preacher bowed reverently.

  ‘You’re a traitor,’ the Salamander accused.

  A slight tremor below the right eye betrayed the Preacher’s annoyance.

  ‘Loyalty is just a matter of perspective, Artellus. Yours is merely different to mine.’

  ‘Is this your tactic now?’ asked Numeon, his eyes still searching the chamber for the sigil but finding only shadow. He heard the faint susurration of laboured breathing. ‘Am I to sympathise with betrayers and murderers? By seeing from your perspective will I give up what you want to know?’

  The Preacher laced his fingers and held his hands just above the abdomen.

  ‘I know everything you know, Artellus.’

  Numeon failed to mask his surprise. The reek of the charnel pit returned, and a sickening suspicion began to form as to both the chamber’s purpose and its inhabitants.

  The Preacher frowned. ‘Did you think you were brought here to bargain? To resist another round of torture?’ He laughed curtly. ‘Xenut Sul’s task was not the extraction of information – he merely wished to hurt you. That was my bargain… with him. Do you see?’

  Numeon did not, but he was weak and only half conscious. He could not even be certain he was awake and hunted the shadows for the spectres of his lost comrades. None manifested.

  ‘A mind as untrained as yours, however strong, is no barrier to a Dark Apostle,’ the Preacher said without pride. ‘Yes, I seek Barthusa Narek. He is a true renegade and shall be hunted to the ends of the galaxy for what he’s done.’

  Numeon remembered the Word Bearers marksman, but had not known his Legion considered him a betrayer.

  ‘So,’ said the Preacher, ‘I have given you something and now you must provide something in return.’

  Numeon scoffed. ‘You are deluded.’

  A thin smile gave the Preacher a sinister aspect.

  ‘I know you will because it will cost you nothing. Remember, I have reached inside your mind already. I know what you know, just as I am aware of the attachment you have to that scrap of your dead primarch’s armour.’

  ‘Vulkan li–’

  ‘Yes,’ the Preacher’s interruption cut Numeon’s declaration short, ‘so you keep saying, all evidence to the contrary.’

  He licked his lips in the manner of someone accustomed to speaking at length.

  ‘I am a believer too, as devoted to my faith as you are to your absent father. We have fallen from grace,’ he said, ‘all of us. For a time, not even a heartbeat in the endless saga of the cosmos, we turned our faces from the true gods and embraced a lie.’ The Preacher nodded to Numeon. ‘Your Emperor…’ then touched a hand to his chest, ‘…my former Emperor. And now we are being punished for it. This war is not about the exhortation of religion, it is not for the dominance and subjugation of our species. Our souls are at stake – this is our penance for the sin of unbelief.’

  Numeon scowled, already tired of the Preacher’s rhetoric and willing Xenut Sul to return. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To tell me what it was like.’

  ‘I am still no wiser, traitor.’

  The Preacher’s eyes flashed with fervent desire.

  ‘The fulgurite, the stone spear invested with the Emperor’s power on earth.’

  ‘It was…’ Numeon cast his mind back to his first meeting with the man who called himself John Grammaticus, how he had described the spear and what it purportedly represented, ‘…unremarkable.’

  Truthfully, he had barely seen it, but could gain a small victory in the torment of his interrogator.

  ‘Amusing,’ said the Preacher, turning his back.

  ‘It is a piece of cold stone.’

  ‘It is far more than that, I think.’

  Were he able, Numeon would have shrugged, but his bonds were tight. ‘Why do you even care? I thought you said the Emperor’s power was a lie.’

  The Preacher faced him. ‘His creed, not His power. I want it because it killed the immortal primarch, and turned one of our own against us. No cold stone can do that.’

  Numeon’s eyes widened. ‘Killed?’

  The Preacher nodded slowly.

  ‘You lie,’ Numeon sneered, eyes narrowing. ‘Vulkan lives,’ he declared with fierce anger, ‘and nothing you say will convince me otherwise, so you might as well just kill–’

  The chamber trembled. Numeon felt the tremor resonate through the slab.

  For a few seconds, the Preacher glanced over his shoulder as if speaking to someone standing just behind him. Numeon tried but failed to discern his exact words. Whatever was said, the Preacher looked perturbed.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Numeon demanded. ‘Who are you?’

  As the Preacher looked back, his form flickered as a second, corporeal figure walked through it and disengaged the hololith. Numeon had been speaking to the simulacrum of the Preacher, but Xenut Sul was very real as he advanced upon him.

  In a violent flare of magnesium-white, the lights in the chamber came on. After the hard metal shunt of phosphor strips engaging, Numeon took a few seconds to adjust. What he saw confirmed made him cry out in rage and anguish.

  ‘My brothers!’

  Row upon row of metal slabs, arrayed close together like ranks and files in battle, almost filled the chamber. In another light, it might have resembled an apothecarion but that would have been a lie.

  Blood and death drenched this place, far from imagined and very real. Legionaries of the XIX, X and XVIII lay strapped down to the slabs and, like Numeon, they had
been beaten grievously.

  ‘What is this?’ he roared, finding strength in his anger and tearing one of his bonds loose.

  Xenut Sul answered curtly. ‘Torture room. Have no fear, Salamander, yours is only just beginning.’

  Dagger-sharp pain flared in Numeon’s jaw. Black shadows crept over the edge of his sight. Xenut Sul disappeared behind a cloud of darkness. Before he passed out, Numeon heard the Word Bearer shouting orders.

  ‘All hands, repel boarders.’ The Word Bearer sounded calm, as if he had expected this. ‘They have found us. Kill any Ultramarine who sets foot aboard this ship.’

  The words faded, swallowed by unconsciousness, and as he fell into the blessed abyss, Numeon was left with the drone of klaxons and the thud of booted feet…

  Five

  Liberators

  Hunter-class destroyer Demagogue, Ultramar

  The bulkhead slammed hard against the deck, raising a loud clamour. Its burnt edges glowed solar-red before fading to embers then dull black metal. Through the ragged aperture, Inviglio led a strike squad of the Red-marked.

  Ahead, the narrow corridor section was dark. During ingress onto the Word Bearers ship, the Ultramarines had neutralised its primary power. Auxiliary did not stretch this far, so they were advancing through the dingy access tunnels as intended.

  The Demagogue was a much smaller ship than the Dark Sacrament, a destroyer-class vessel with fewer crew. It could have easily been missed; Inviglio still had no idea how the shipmistress aboard the Defiance of Calth had found it. Despite its size, though, it was still teeming with traitors.

  Bracheus saw them first. ‘Contacts!’

  The Ultramarine engaged, firing off a short staccato burst from his bolter. Muffled shouts followed, the pair of enemy combatants lit up briefly by Bracheus’s muzzle flare before the flash died and so did they.

  ‘Two kills,’ he barked, ejecting a spent clip before chanking a swift reload into the empty breech.

  ‘Advancing,’ stated Inviglio, darting forwards with his body crouched low to present a smaller target.