by Nick Kyme
‘I am converging on the dropsite. Will I meet you there?’
Vulkan paused and it felt like the few seconds stretched into minutes before he gave his answer. Numeon was reminded of their words aboard the Fireforge, of Ferrus Manus’s wrath being his undoing, of the foreseen distemper in Horus and the profound disquiet about this very battle. They rose up in the Pyre Guard captain, threatening to choke him with their sense of foreboding.
‘Aye,’ said Vulkan at length. ‘We shall consolidate at the dropsite. Perhaps Ferrus will see sense and muster with us.’
‘He won’t.’
‘No, you’re probably right.’ Vulkan ended the transmission. It was as if a mantle of grief lay about his shoulders, heavy with the burden of a fear that had been confirmed in what he’d just heard or felt. Numeon could not explain it.
‘Order all companies to fall back to the dropsite,’ Vulkan told him.
Numeon voxed down to K’gosi at once. The Pyroclasts had all but cleansed the trenches of the enemy, leaving the route back clear and open.
Whilst the retreat of Horus’s rebels was ragged and disorganised, the warriors of the XVIII and XIX Legions fell back in good order. Tanks returned to column, rumbling slowly but steadily back down the slope. The scorched trenches emptied as legionaries filed out in vast hosts, company banners still flying. They were battered but resolute. The dead and injured came with them, dragged or borne aloft by their still standing brothers. It was a great exodus, the black and green ocean of war retreating with the tide to leave the flotsam of their slain enemy behind it.
Most of the fortifications were destroyed. Huge sections of earthworks and spiked embankments lay open like rotting wounds. Bodies were impaled upon them, some clad in dusky white, others in arterial red or lurid purple. It was the evidence of fratricide a thousand times over, and it was this that Vulkan lingered behind to look upon before he quit the field.
‘This is not victory,’ he murmured. ‘It is death. It is bonds broken and bloody. And it shall mark us all for generations.’
On the northern side of the Urgall Depression, a fresh sea made ready to sweep in and carry all of the mortal debris away.
Across from the muster field of the Salamanders, which was little more than a laager of drop-ships, were the Iron Warriors. Armoured in steel-grey with black-and-yellow chevrons, the IV Legion looked stark and stern. They had erected a barricade, the armoured bastions of their own landing craft alloyed together, to bolster the northern face of the slope. Great cannons were raised aloft behind it, their snouts pointing to the ash-smothered sky. A line of battle tanks sat in front, bearing the grim icon of a metal-helmeted skull. And in front of that, Iron Warriors arrayed in their cohorts, thousands strong. They held their silence and their weapons across their bodies, with no more life than automatons.
The drop-zone was flooded with warriors now, as a makeshift camp materialised to serve the injured and secure the bodies of the dead. Tank yards manifested as labour teams of Techmarines and servitors assembled to make standing repairs. Multiple triage stations were being set up in the lee of the larger Stormbirds, whilst the holds of some Thunderhawks acted as emergency infirmaries. The able-bodied looked to their armour and weapons. Quartermasters took stock, replenished ammunition and materiel where they could. Officers reorganised in the face of casualties. Subalterns and equerries gave brief reports to line officers, and standard bearers acted as rally points as the entire Vexillarius was put into motion organising for the second assault.
Not a single legionary about the XVIII stood idle.
Yet the Iron Warriors, the entire muster on the northern slope, neither spoke nor moved beyond what was necessary to assemble.
Chief Apothecary Sen’garees voxed through to the command echelon, including Vulkan and the Pyre Guard, complaining of the lack of reply regarding requests for aid, specifically medical.
Numeon felt a grim silence descend across the whole Urgall Depression like when a storm eclipses the sun, as he saw Captain Ral’stan of the Firedrakes raise his fist in salute to their iron allies.
Not one responded to his hail. Only the wind kicking at their banners gave any sense of animus to the IV Legion throng.
‘Why do they ignore us?’ asked Leodrakk openly.
Vulkan was staring in the direction of his brother, Perturabo. The Lord of Iron returned the Lord of Drakes’ gimlet gaze with one of his own.
‘Because we are betrayed…’ said Vulkan, disbelieving, horror turning to anger on his face, ‘To arms!’
More than ten thousand guns answered, the weapons of their allies turned on them with traitorous intent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Reunited
‘Though the battle had ended and the enemy was far from the reach of our blades, most of us didn’t come back from the Urgall Depression. Even those men who escaped, those pitiful few, even they didn’t come back. They’re still there now. We all are, fighting for our lives.’
– unknown legionary survivor of the Isstvan V massacre
It looked bad. There was no other way to describe it. Definitely bad. Nurth was bad, but this was a whole other pit of groxshit that Grammaticus had found himself in. And then there was the alien. Not Slau Dha, or Gahet. Certainly not anyone affiliated with the Cabal. Here was a different player entirely, an eldar whose agenda was as inscrutable as his identity.
And then there was Oll.
But he couldn’t worry about that now. He’d done everything he could on that front, and as much as his old friend had clearly resented being reached out to, what other choice did Grammaticus have?
The universe suddenly felt very small, and Grammaticus was somehow at its beating heart and under intense scrutiny from all interested parties. Insects on microscope slides had more privacy. He thought of Anatol Hive, and wished that he had been allowed to die in the Unification Wars.
Fate had other plans for him, though. If asked at the time, he doubted he would have said that that fate included a battered group of legionaries and running for his life down a sewer tunnel. If they knew of his true mission…
His two minders looked tired, and fraught. The one called Leodrakk, the Salamander, had eyed him several times since they had reached what Grammaticus assumed was a rendezvous point. He also assumed that whoever Leodrakk was meant to be rendezvousing with was late. This would be Numeon, his captain and the legionary in charge. It didn’t bode well. What boded worse was if Numeon was dead. That left Leodrakk running things, and he looked about ready to charge to his glorious death, killing Grammaticus into the bargain. Not that it would matter, but then his mission would effectively be over. He also feared to imagine what the Word Bearers would do to him.
He didn’t know what the Salamanders and their allies in the other broken Legions had intended to achieve here on Traoris. Whatever it was, it had gone awry, and he suspected that he carried some weight of blame in that.
Leodrakk’s eyes told him all of this. They spoke of grief and a dangerously fatalistic desire for revenge. Grammaticus had seen men like that in the united armies, when they were fighting Narthan Dume. He’d never seen it in a Space Marine before, and he wondered just what these warriors had lost to transform them so egregiously.
‘What are you staring at?’ snarled the Salamander. He was crouching down, and had been looking at his helmet, facing him on his lap.
‘I’m wondering what happened to you,’ said Grammaticus.
‘War happened to us,’ he replied curtly.
‘You are made for war. There is more to it than that.’
Leodrakk looked into the stinking filth that streamed beneath their feet, but found no answers in the dirty water.
Instead, the Librarian spoke up.
‘We were betrayed,’ he rasped, ‘at Isstvan. It was worse than atrocity. The massacre we endured was only the physical manifestation of our collective t
rauma. The real pain was to come, and it was a malady of the mind. Not everyone survived it.’
Hriak, the Raven Guard, paused as if trying to see into Grammaticus’s mind for the source of his curiosity. It was deeply unsettling, and Grammaticus fought to keep his hand from trembling. Many years ago he believed that a very close friend of his had succumbed to a psyker’s mental intrusion. It was all lies, of course. Everything about it had been a lie, one way or another. It had still unnerved him, though, the sheer destructive potential of battle psykers. No wonder the Emperor had removed them from the Legions.
‘From the horror of Isstvan, we escaped aboard a drop-ship,’ Hriak continued, ‘but the horror did not end there. All of us were changed by what we had witnessed, the sight of our brothers slain in droves beside us, our former allies turning their guns on our backs while at the same time known traitors to our fronts opened up with their weapons in vicious concert.’
Grammaticus looked askance at Leodrakk for a reaction as Hriak related their story, and found him to be deeply uncomfortable at the retelling, but content to let it go on.
‘Some of the survivors aboard our drop-ship were not themselves,’ said Hriak. ‘When a man is heightened to a certain point of battle fervour, it can be difficult for him to come down from that. Sometimes, if the experience is particularly traumatic, he can never fully recover and a part of him will always be at war, in that self-same conflict. Such men, blinded by this trauma, have killed in error, believing friends to be foes. It takes a great deal for the Legiones Astartes to succumb to such a trauma. Our minds are much stronger than ordinary mortals, but it is possible.’
And then Grammaticus knew. He knew how Hriak had sustained the wound to his neck, the one that had very nearly slit his throat completely. It wasn’t actually on Isstvan that he’d received it, it was on the drop-ship. It was inflicted by–
‘That’s enough, Hriak,’ whispered Leodrakk. ‘We don’t need to remember that, and he doesn’t need to hear it either.’
‘My presence here has complicated things for you, hasn’t it?’ said Grammaticus.
‘You have undermined our entire mission.’
Grammaticus shook his head, nonplussed at the mordant Salamander. ‘What the fug did you intend to achieve, anyway? What were you, twenty-something men against an entire host, an entire city? I get it that you want payback, but how does throwing yourselves on your enemies’ swords get you what you want?’
Leodrakk stood, and for a brief moment looked like he was about to end Grammaticus, but decided against it.
‘It is not so simple as revenge. We want to get back into the war, make a difference, for what we do to have meaning. Before we came here, we had been tracking the Word Bearers of this particular cult for a while. We followed them to a small, backwater world called Viralis but were too late to prevent what they unleashed there.’
Grammaticus frowned. ‘Unleashed?’
‘Daemons, John Grammaticus, a subject about which I suspect you are well-versed.’
‘I have seen the Acuity,’ he admitted.
‘Caeren Sebaton’
Leodrakk scowled. ‘I won’t even ask what that is. A gift from your Cabal, no doubt.’
‘It’s no gift, it’s truth and one I wish I could erase from my mind.’
‘Again, not my concern. What does concern me,’ he gestured to Hriak too, ‘us, our mission, is to prevent what happened on Viralis from happening here. Their leader, the Word Bearers cleric, was supposed to die by our hand. We would slip in unnoticed, find him and execute him. Pergellen was our trigger man, the rest of us would ensure rapid egress in the face of reprisal. Our chances of success were good, our chances of survival less so, but at least we would die knowing Traoris was safe.’
‘No world is safe, Salamander,’ Grammaticus countered. ‘No part of the galaxy, however remote, is going to be spared.’
Leodrakk snarled, angry, but more at the situation than Grammaticus. ‘We would spare this world. At least from that.’ He backed down, the threat of violence ebbed. ‘But now we are discovered and being hunted. Shen and Pergellen should have left you in that warehouse.’
Grammaticus nodded. ‘Yes, they should have. But they didn’t, and now you have me and know what I know, so what are you going to do with that?’
‘Nothing,’ said a voice from deeper in the tunnel. It was dark, but even Grammaticus recognised the warrior coming to meet them. He was not alone, either.
‘Numeon.’ Leodrakk went to greet him. They locked wrists. Hriak merely bowed his head to acknowledge the captain. Leodrakk’s good mood soured when he saw who else had come back with Numeon. ‘So few?’ he asked.
‘Their sacrifice will have meaning, brother.’
Of the twenty-three legionaries that had made planetfall on Traoris from the Fire Ark, barely thirteen remained. Shen’ra had come back with Numeon, as well as K’gosi. Pergellen lingered at the back of the group, returning a few minutes after having made sure they were not followed. Hriak was the last of the Ravens now, and he muttered a Kiavahran oath for the fallen Avus. The rest were Salamanders.
Grammaticus beheld a broken force. Fate, oh that capricious mistress, had conspired against them. It had delivered him into their grasp and the fulgurite spear to the Word Bearers. The phrase ‘fugged beyond all reason’ didn’t even begin to describe it.
He also noticed that a key figure was missing, as did Leodrakk.
‘Where is Domadus?’ asked the Salamander.
Numeon sighed, weary. He took off his battle-helm. ‘We lost him during the fight. He and several others went out to meet the Seventeenth to stymie their assault. I didn’t see him fall, but…’ He shook his head.
‘So, what now?’ asked Shen’ra, hobbling to stand beside his brothers.
Grammaticus answered.
‘Let me go. Help me reclaim the spear and get off Traoris. What is there to lose now?’
Numeon ignored him, and went over to Shen’ra. He was badly wounded and struggling.
‘I have seen better days, before you ask,’ said the Techmarine acerbically. He was slumped against the tunnel wall, a trickle of effluence from the cracked ceiling painting a grubby track down his armour. Numeon kneeled to speak with him.
‘You saved us all, you irascible bastard.’
‘Lost the track-mount, though. Anyway…’ he paused to cough, ‘someone had to.’
Numeon laughed, but his humour quickly faded when he saw Shen’ra’s injuries.
The Techmarine’s bionic eye was only partially functional and he carried a limp, but his cracked breastplate hinted at the real damage. Internal injuries, partial biological shut-down.
Two other Salamanders in the returning party were already comatose as their brutalised bodies tried to repair themselves. Prognosis did not appear favourable. Three more were dead, shredded by bolt-rounds, impaled by blades. Not one killing wound, but several small ones amounting to the same. Attritional deaths. Their brothers had carried them, those that were washed down with them into the tunnels, just as they had before.
Grammaticus was surprised at the level of humanity they showed to their dead, and wondered if it was a common Nocturnean trait.
‘So, what now?’ he asked. ‘Are we to hide out in these tunnels until they find us?’
Numeon finished muttering some words of encouragement to the Techmarine and rose to his feet.
‘We move on. Find another way to achieve our mission.’
Leodrakk approached, noticing Numeon touching the sigil of Vulkan he had carried ever since they had fled Isstvan.
‘What do you think it’s for?’ he asked.
Numeon glanced down at it. Fashioned into a simple blacksmith’s hammer, it looked unremarkable.
‘I think it’s a symbol,’ he said. ‘When I see it, I believe in our primarch, that he is still alive. Beyond that, I don’t kn
ow.’
‘I hope you’re right, brother.’
Pergellen, returning from scouting out the tunnel ahead, interrupted them.
‘The way on is clear,’ he put in. ‘This tract ends in an outflow. It’s towards the edge of the city and should give us a good vantage point to plan our next move.’
Numeon nodded. ‘Make sure there are no surprises.’
Taking K’gosi with him, the scout headed back off into the darkness.
‘I hate to echo the human,’ said Leodrakk when Pergellen had gone, ‘but what is our next move?’
Numeon regarded Grammaticus.
‘They’re after him now. The attack on the manufactorum is proof of that. We might be able to use that. To use him.’
And just like that, fate twisted again and Grammaticus bemoaned that he had ever been ‘saved’ by the Salamanders.
The outflow ended in a broad sink, a few metres deep. It was raining heavily overhead, causing the dirty sewer run-off in the manmade basin to flow over its rockcrete lip in a rushing cataract that crashed down in an ever-deepening pool below.
At one side of the sink there was a wooden jetty. The bodies of three men laid face down on it. Their attire suggested they were sump-catchers. They had been stabbed to death, and the crude sigil daubed in blood on the jetty suggested it was cult-related. Above them hung a lattice of fishing lines, dead sump rats strung along them by their tiny feet. There were a couple of long pikes, too, and a crumpled-up net stuffed into an empty oil drum. A tarpaulin provided ineffective protection against the elements, covering two thirds of the jetty and suspended on guide poles like a crude tent.
‘Don’t want to slip in there, human,’ muttered Leodrakk as he escorted Grammaticus over a wooden walkway that creaked with the legionary’s every step.
Grammaticus looked down into the viscous, grimy soup slowly coagulating in the sink. Foulness practically radiated from it, the water an ugly pale yellow. Carcasses bobbed up and down in it, disturbed by the effluvia running out from the pipe and cascading over the basin edge.
