Deathfire

by Nick Kyme

  War, and the memory of its coming, faded. The world reclaimed that which had sought to despoil it until nothing remained in sight of the Draconius Gate but ash.

  Numeon walked. He did so alone, for in his grief he could find no comfort in brotherhood or the companionship of others.

  A low tremor resonated underfoot. He had felt it ever since leaving the fastness. Zytos had a garrison there now, one of many outposts to maintain a vigil over the land.

  None had seen him leave, Numeon made sure of that. He had left his battleplate and his weapons behind, venturing out into the desert in little more than fatigues. The bare metal of his interface ports, those which linked him via the black carapace to his power armour, felt searing hot to the touch. The sun was at his back now, glaring with hateful intensity.

  Numeon defied it. He had defied everyone and every obstacle in his path, yet still it was not enough.

  Anger followed, and with it a determination not to accept his fate or the fate of his primarch.

  Weary, exhausted, he sank to his knees in the burning sand and cried out to the sky.

  ‘What more do you ask of me? I have given all. Please, what more is there?’

  An answer came with the rumbling of thunder, and the presage of a storm. The tremor below was intensifying, growing into a seismic event that would send the mountains into apoplexy and drown the earth in fire.

  Numeon bowed his head, fists clenched against his body as he fought to deny the inevitable truth.

  Vulkan is dead.

  Everything they had endured, all that had been lost, his dead brothers and the mortals who had served them dutifully, all for nought. A sacrifice without reward.

  Without purpose.

  Distantly, he heard the warning horns blare across the desert. With the Time of Trial imminent, all Nocturneans were being called back to the cities and the outposts for their own protection.

  Few but the mad and desperate went out into the storm. Numeon was both.

  He rose to his feet, finding an inner resolve he thought he lacked, and saw his destination loom ahead of him.

  ‘Deathfire.’

  Through the scopes, Zytos watched the procession of mortals through the distant gates of Themis.

  He was standing on the wall of the Wyvern Hold, amongst the sentries but not so close that he could not enjoy his relative solitude.

  Soon the gates of the Sanctuary City would close and the void shields would rise. Any beyond its borders after that would be sealed outside and left to the mercy of the elements.

  The neophytes had responded well to training and seven detachments had been formed from their number. As soon as the storm ebbed, they would embark on ships bound for Terra. Zytos only hoped it would not be too late and that there was still an important role for the Salamanders to play in the outcome of the war.

  Too long, they had been broken or sitting idle. He had hoped Numeon would lead them. He hoped still. He had even begun to believe that Vulkan might return against all odds. That hope died when they interred the primarch’s body into the mountain. It ended false beliefs, and brought about a sense of finality and closure so that the Legion could be reforged.

  Vulkan was dead, and so now another had to claim the old title of Legion Master. If not Nomus Rhy’tan, then it could be but one other.

  It was only when the void shields activated with their actinic hum and the faint reek of cordite, that Zytos asked aloud, ‘Where is Numeon?’

  Smoke had gathered at the foot of the mountain, though Numeon could see to its summit. Crags like claws reached for a sky the hue of spilled blood, and fire reigned above as the mountain spat its anger.

  As the earth trembled, a bleak mood fell upon Numeon that left him feeling hollowed, cursed.

  His feet were badly blistered, worn bloody and raw by the many leagues he had walked across the desert.

  It had not been forgiving. But he knew his journey slowly reached its end with every bloody step he left behind him.

  Slowly, perhaps inevitably, he began to ascend the mountain’s flank. Ash and cinder burned his skin, but he could barely feel it any more. He rose, hand over hand; the climb was tough but he was beyond fatigue now.

  A darkness pulled at him, a deep well of grief from which he could not escape. Though his limbs screamed in agony and his flesh burned, the numbness of his mind kept him going with mono­tonous, dead-eyed determination.

  Despair gnawed at his resolve, but he had enough will left for this.

  A deep rumble came from above, louder than the roar of oceans. It echoed across the mountain, across the desert, and the land began to break apart.

  One eye on the summit and the flood of lava its wrath surely presaged, Numeon almost missed the fissure in the rock. Heat poured from the vent, which was partially obscured by smoke.

  A deep crack resonated up the side of the mountain as a massive pillar of lava soared upwards to touch the clouds with fire.

  In desperation, Numeon scrambled for the fissure and gladly crawled through it into the darkness beyond. A swathe of pyroclastic cloud swept over the craggy aperture through which Numeon had passed. But when the cloud parted and the mountain bled with liquid fire, the fissure was gone, as if it had never been there in the first place, and Numeon with it.

  A sacrifice.

  A squadron of Sky Hunters sped across the desert. As soon as the void shields had come down, Zytos had led out the search party.

  The jetbikes were battered and repurposed, but they were by far the quickest way to cross the ash plains. Zytos remembered the trappings left behind in the vault where Vulkan’s casket still remained. Inside, they had found Numeon’s weapons, armour, even the sigil itself.

  Without wishing to acknowledge it, Zytos knew what his captain had come out here to do.

  A voice crackled across the vox. Abidemi.

  ‘I have something.’

  Zytos locked the coordinates from his feed into the navigation console on the jetbike.

  ‘I’m coming, brother,’ he said, cutting the feed and beginning to hope that Numeon might have somehow survived.

  They found him huddled on the plain, half buried in ash and in sight of Mount Deathfire.

  Zytos had drawn up alongside Gargo and Abidemi, the black-smiter having received a bionic graft to replace his missing limb.

  ‘Slow down,’ Zytos warned them both.

  Eager though they were to reach their stricken captain, were he wounded then the last thing Numeon needed was to be showered by flung ash from the engine wake of the jetbikes.

  All three decelerated, closing on the distant figure. Definitely, a Salamander. Alive but weak.

  Zytos voxed back to the Draconius Gate for an Apothecary to recon­noitre with them on the ash plain. As he approached the figure, he slowed down to a crawl and then stopped, dismounting and leaving the jetbike hovering but locked in place.

  ‘Brother,’ he began, moving closer. He was but a few strides away now but Numeon had his head down and must not have heard.

  Gargo and Abidemi were close behind, Zytos heard the crunch of their footfalls.

  ‘Numeon?’

  As he approached, Zytos reached out, but stopped short of touching his brother’s shoulder when he realised something was wrong.

  ‘Is he alive?’ asked Gargo, readying what few medical provisions he had been able to carry.

  ‘In the name of…’ Zytos fell to his knees as his words trailed away.

  It was not Numeon. Someone else was huddled but breathing on the ash plain.

  Abidemi stopped as soon as he saw who it was.

  Gargo was last to realise, but none of them could be mistaken as the figure rose unsteadily to his feet, a hand clenched around a spear tip still embedded in his chest.

  ‘My sons…’ said Vulkan.

  Vulkan lives... />
  Afterword

  Remember back at the start, back when the Horus Heresy was still young? We opened the saga with a trilogy, and after that there was a great diaspora of storylines as the series expanded and extra­polated out of necessity and a desire to explore and create.

  It took a while to come back to the idea of truly connected storytelling, as was in the opening three books. Sure, there was connective tissue linking the books, mainly the primarchs and the Legions, but the stage had grown so large and so epic that the idea of sequels seemed a little impossible.

  Now, as we enter the final stages of the Horus Heresy – and, genuinely, we are in that place, the ‘Age of Darkness’ era – I found myself approaching a sequel in my own trilogy within the Heresy.

  I was a fairly late arrival to the Heresy scene, but had managed to stake a pretty strong claim to that oft-neglected Legion the Salamanders, and their indomitable primarch Vulkan.

  Back when I pitched and was then writing Vulkan Lives, I had a very rough framework in mind for how the next two books would pan out to effectively tell his story. All of it, in full, up to the end. I speak frequently with the other writers, all of them fine chaps and some I would consider actual friends, but I don’t know of any one of them that had planned out a character’s arc as I had done with Vulkan. It probably helped that my focus was fixed solely on one story, of one Legion and one primarch.

  So, when it came to write Deathfire, I had a strong idea as to what I wanted to achieve with the story and, more importantly, where I needed the characters to be at the end of it to set things up for a grand finale.

  They say that sequels are tough, especially after a successful debut. By all accounts, Vulkan Lives went down very well (if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this afterword for a follow up, despite all my planning). It felt like it had meat and purpose, momentum… moving the story forward. Indeed, I wish I’d had more time to explore Isstvan V, but the place where we were at in the meta-narrative of the series would not allow for that, nor would the hordes of baying fans (you, dear reader) who wanted some serious forward movement.

  Nonetheless, Vulkan Lives had the mother of all twists, the notion that Vulkan is immortal; moreover, he cannot be killed… at least, not by conventional means. It also had the core of an intriguing conflict, both physical and psychological, between two primarchs. What wholesome and filling material for any writer to get his literary teeth into, yes?

  So, it was with a little trepidation that I approached Deathfire. In the ‘wrangling’ process, that odd, nebulous period when a writer is mainly thinking and planning, and not actually writing, the book went through several different iterations. There’s an entire, meaty subplot that never made it into the novel. This was for several reasons. Some of it related to time and space, but the main driver for shelving it was one of focus. I wanted this book to be all about the Salamanders, their character, what they believe, why they believe it. The subplot I had in mind (cool as it was) would have diluted that focus and left the core of the book diminished. Sometimes, it’s facing up to these tough choices and then having the courage to make them that helps you turn the corner as far as getting the novel you want, and the one you believe your readers want, is concerned.

  So it was with Deathfire.

  It was an entirely different prospect to Vulkan Lives, since it didn’t/couldn’t feature Vulkan, although his presence is felt throughout, but rather focused on a key group of his legionaries.

  Even before getting started on my sequel (remember what I said about them being tough), I had some baggage to resolve from Dan’s novel, The Unremembered Empire. We had colluded, you see, pre and post Vulkan Lives. We were literary athletes in the narrative equivalent of a relay race with Vulkan as the baton. Dan took him to the place I needed him to be to pick up the ragged pieces for Deathfire. I salute him for that, because he handled it superbly.

  But, still, there was baggage to resolve.

  Getting Vulkan and the Salamanders out of Imperium Secundus was tricky. The main reason was because I needed this part of the story to feel believable and have weight, but at the same time couldn’t spend too long on it as the actual story of Deathfire is of the Salamanders’ odyssey back to Nocturne.

  There are strong themes in this book. First and foremost is that of grief. As I was writing, I had the five stages of grief on a post-it note above my iMac. Here, in these five words, was Numeon’s journey. All the Salamanders are hurting, but it’s Numeon that really feels it, that experiences it and refuses to accept, until the very end, that Vulkan is dead.

  Much like the Charybdis and its crew (oh, and the references to The Odyssey are deliberate, of course), Numeon has a spiritual and mental journey that he has to go on before he’s able to accept his fate (that he will never see Vulkan again). There’s tragedy to that, I think. He is the one character that drives the rest to bring Vulkan back and defy all the odds, and he’s the only character that cannot ever see his father rise from the ashes.

  Obviously then, another of the book’s themes is resurrection. I have always alluded to the idea of rebirth and transformation in my Salamander novels and stories, but in Deathfire it is at its most overt. Because of the Legion’s association with fire and the earth, it felt natural to assume their cultural language and belief system would hinge on principles like rebirth and transformation.

  There’s a mystical, otherworldly aspect to the story too. The exact ‘how’ of the Salamanders reaching Nocturne through the storm is deliberately vague and relies a lot on their belief that they can and they will. It is much the same as how Vulkan rises from death. It is miraculous, but then so is he.

  At the start of all this blathering about Deathfire, I mentioned that the books formed a trilogy, echoing back to that first trilogy which opened the series. The last book will round the whole, epic saga off. It wouldn’t be appropriate to talk about that here. Besides, I haven’t started it yet, it’s still in that pre-­embryonic planning stage.

  I do know I’ll be sad to see it end, but we are not there just yet. Not yet.

  Nick Kyme

  February 2015

  About the Author

  Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Deathfire and Vulkan Lives, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio drama Censure. His novella ‘Feat of Iron’ was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. For the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Space Marine Battles novel Damnos, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Time of Legends novel The Great Betrayal for the War of Vengeance series. He lives and works in Nottingham, and has a rabbit.

  An extract from Blades of the Traitor.

  An extract from ‘Twisted’ by Guy Haley.

  The Vengeful Spirit had changed. Horus had changed. But the tedious intricacies of running a warfleet had not. Warfare was warfare, whether conducted at the behest of the Council of Terra or the urging of howling gods. It always came down to the numbers.

  The fifty-eighth petitioner to the Warmaster that day was a short logistician, principally composed of fat and fear. He blinked and mumbled his way through his request, eyes sliding every second – if not more often – to the pair of Justaerin Terminators flanking the basalt throne at the heart of Lupercal’s Court.

  No one sat upon the throne. It was the throne of the primarch, and none but he might occupy it.

  Horus was absent. The Warmaster had no time for petty concerns.

  Maloghurst, the equerry of the Warmaster, sat in judgment in his stead on a stool by the throne’s dais. Were it not for his own great personal presence, he might have looked ridiculous. The throne was sized for a demigod, the dais tall, the court that surrounded it dizzyingly high and ornate. Battle honours stirred in ventilation draughts. Stars glared mercilessl
y from the void through armourglass ports. Blue shadows jealously guarded the statues and weapons set into the walls.

  Horus was not there, but his presence steeped the court.

  Maloghurst was insignificant in comparison – worse, he was far from the most perfect of Horus’s sons. His back was perpetually slanted, a cane forever close to hand – he was a fallen angel whose imperfections were made all the more glaring in his master’s shadow.

  His back was broken, but his intellect was not. Twisted in mind as well as body. Maloghurst’s name had become a byword for fear.

  The fat man’s lips stumbled to a stop.

  ‘In three days’ time, we are due to engage in the assault on Lamrys,’ said Maloghurst, ‘and you choose now to bring this trivial matter to my attention?’ His voice growled threateningly from behind his respirator. He wore his armour and his mouthpiece constantly, more or less. His battleplate had become a crutch.

  Still, the logistician blanched.

  ‘I am sorry, my lord, but the correct scheduling of fuel distribution prior to the attack is of great importance. It must be performed before we approach the mid-system line. I cannot fulfil my role if–’

  Maloghurst cut him off by rapping his cane hard against the marble floor. The crack echoed and multiplied from the walls.

  ‘All of us are burdened. Do you choose to consider your burden to be greater than that of the Warmaster?’

  ‘No, my lord!’

  ‘This is Lupercal’s Court.’ Maloghurst pointed to a wide arch. ‘Through there the Warmaster has his staterooms. I am the Warmaster’s equerry. Here you are but one step from the ear of our Lord Horus himself. You should be mindful of what you choose to speak into it.’