by Nick Kyme
Here then, was where we would end it. Curze and I. One would be free, the other lost forever to damnation.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
No more running
Elias was lying on his back. He was also alone. Momentary concern turned into anger when he realised that it wasn’t only the huntsman he was missing. The fulgurite was gone. Through filth-smeared retinal lenses, he looked up at the roaring cataracts of sewage pouring from the many outflows. Somewhere up there was his enemy. They had the spear. That bastard Salamander, the centurion. He had taken it during the fight before Narek had tackled them both over the edge.
‘Narek.’
After a moment, a breathless-sounding huntsman replied over the vox. He was running.
‘Our arrangement is concluded,’ he said.
‘I am lying down in a pool of filth, Narek. How is that a satisfactory conclusion?’
‘You have always lain with filth, Dark Apostle. A life for a life, yours for mine. I now have mine back. Our alliance is null and void. I told you that by turning a blind eye our debt was settled. I’ve decided to conclude my mission alone. My business is with them now. Be glad I let you live,’ he added, before the link was swallowed by static.
Elias didn’t bother activating the warp-flask; he suspected Narek had destroyed it. The huntsman wasn’t coming back, at least not to him.
A cursory scan informed Elias his armour functions were as normal. Some minor damage had been incurred during the fall, but it was negligible. He got up, struggling with only one hand and one arm, the burned limb cradled close to his chest. It hurt like hell, but he used it to fuel his anger.
Narek’s abandonment of his duty would not go unpunished. If he saw him again, Elias would kill the huntsman. Amaresh was supposed to have done it during the attack on the manufactorum, but fate had turned that plan awry. The pleasure of Narek’s demise would have to wait. Regaining the spear was paramount. If the loyalists had it and the human then there was but one move left to them.
‘Jadrekk,’ Elias growled down the vox, knowing that this lapdog would answer its master. Close by he could see the Ranos space port and knew there were docked shuttles capable of launch. Most of the Word Bearers’ ships had returned to the station and Elias had instructed a small garrison to guard it.
Jadrekk answered as predicted.
‘Lock on to my signal and bring all of our forces to the Ranos space port,’ Elias ordered. ‘Tell Radek to expect visitors and prepare a welcome party, and by welcome party I mean kill-squad.’
Jadrekk confirmed it would be done and Elias cut the link.
Erebus would be here soon. Elias was determined that both the spear and the human would be in his possession before then. Over to the north, he could see the tempest boiling over the sacrificial pit. Lightning trembled the sky, splitting the night in half. Once Grammaticus was cut by the spear, one of those jags would open and the Neverborn would spill forth. Elias would be rewarded for his faith and devotion. Trudging through the muck he heard that promise, whispering in sibilant non sequitur. He would be recognised by the Pantheon and ascend. It was his destiny.
‘No more running,’ Elias muttered, his gaze moving to the dark horizon of the south and the shadow of the space port, ‘only dying.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
Our final hours
Isstvan V
The blast struck with atomic force, or at least it felt that way to the Salamanders within it. They had been following Vulkan up the hill, hard on his heels as he smashed into the disciplined Iron Warriors ranks. He had hit the armour quickly, much more quickly than Numeon had believed possible.
Wrath drove him, that and a sense of injustice. The ignoble actions of his brother primarchs had wounded Vulkan to the core, far deeper and more debilitating than any blade. Vaunted warriors all, the Pyre Guard could scarcely keep up. It was snowing overhead, a squall of white ash descending upon them in their ignited fury. It was thick and strangely peaceful, but there would be no peace, not any more, not now the galaxy was at war. Horus had seen to that.
Battle companies followed in the wake of their lords, captains roaring the attack as thousands of green-armoured warriors chased up the slope to kill the sons of Perturabo. It was relentless, brutal. Withering crossfire from both the north and south faces of the Urgall Depression cut down hundreds in the first few seconds of deceit. The XVIII Legion were shedding warriors like a snake sheds scales. But still they drove on, determined not to back down. Tenacity was a Salamander’s greatest virtue – that refusal to give in. Upon the plains of Isstvan, against all of those guns, it almost ended the Legion.
It was at the crest of the first ridge, a jagged lip of stone studded with tanks, that Numeon first saw the arc of fire. It trailed, long and blazing, into the darkling sky. The tongue of flame climbed and upon reaching the apex of its parabola bent back on itself into the shape of a horseshoe. Rockets screaming, it came down in the midst of the charging Salamanders and broke them apart.
A savage crater was gored into the Urgall hills, like the bite of some gargantuan beast resurrected from old myth and birthed in nucleonic fire. It threw warriors skywards as if they were no more than empty suits of armour, bereft of bone and flesh. As a bell jar shatters when dropped onto rockcrete from a great height, so too did the Legion smash apart. Tanks following after their lord primarch were flung barrel-rolling across the black sand with their hulls on fire. Those vehicles in the mouth of the blast were simply ripped apart; tracks and hatches, chunks of abused metal torn to exploded shrapnel. Legionaries spared death in the initial blast were eviscerated in the frag storm. Super-heavies crumpled like tin boxes crushed by a hammer. Crewmen boiled alive, legionaries cooked down to ash in that furnace. It went deep, right into the beating heart of the Salamanders ranks. Only by virtue of the fact that they were so far ahead were the Pyre Guard spared the worst.
With immense kinetic fury, it threw them apart and smothered their armoured forms in a firestorm. An electro-magnetic pulse wiped out the vox, a threnody of static reigning in place of certain contact. Tactical organisation became untenable. In a single devastating strike, the Lord of Iron had crippled the XVIII Legion, severed its head and sent its body into convulsive spasm.
Retreat was the only viable strategy remaining. Droves fell back to the dropsite, trying to climb aboard ships that were surging desperately into the sky to outreach the terrible storm of betrayal below. It was not a rout, though for any force other than the Legiones Astartes it would have been, faced with such violence. Many were cut down as the traitors threaded the air with enough flak to wither an armada.
Groaning, feeling the extent of every one of his many injuries, and ignoring the urgent cascade of damage reports scrolling down the left side of his one still-functional retinal lens, Numeon staggered to his feet. A piece of armour, one he knew well and had seen before, lay within his grasp. He took the sigil once worn by Vulkan and tucked it into his belt. Leodrakk was with him, but he couldn’t see Vulkan or the rest of the Pyre Guard. Through a belt of grimy fog he thought he saw Ganne dragging Varrun by his metal collar – the veteran was on his back, legs shredded but still firing his bolter – but he was too far away to be sure and there was too much death between them to make regrouping an option.
Smoke blanketed the ridge and the ash-fall had intensified. Heat haze from the still-burning fire blurred his vision. He saw the crater – he’d been thrown back from its epicentre – and the hundreds of twisted bodies within. They were incinerated, fused into their armour. Some were still dying. He saw an Apothecary – he couldn’t tell who – crawling across the earth with no legs as he tried to perform his duty. No gene-seed would be harvested this day. No one who stayed on Isstvan in the emerald-green of the XVIII would live.
Numeon had to reach a ship, he had to save himself and Leodrakk. As he tried to raise the others and his primarch through the mire of static, he vague
ly recalled having been lifted off his feet and punched sideways by the backwash of heat from the explosion. They were far from the crest of the ridge now. They must have slipped into a narrow defile that had carried them back down and shielded their bodies from the fire. Numeon assumed that he had blacked out. There were fragments, pieces that he didn’t possess in his eidetic memory of what happened after the missile strike. He remembered Leodrakk calling out his brother’s name. But Skatar’var hadn’t answered. None of the Pyre Guard were answering.
‘Ska!’ Leodrakk roared, half delirious with pain and grief. ‘Brother!’
He was clinging to Skatar’var’s bloody gauntlet. Mercifully, there was no hand or forearm inside it. The glove must have been wrenched off in the blast.
Numeon seized Leodrakk by the wrist.
‘He’s gone. He’s gone. We’re leaving, Leo,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving now. Come on!’
The Salamanders were not the only Legion to be punished by Perturabo’s ordnance. Iron Warriors, those bearing the brunt of Vulkan’s wrath and that of his inner-circle warriors, had also been swept up in the explosion. One, his battered senses returning, went to intervene against Leodrakk and Numeon, but the Pyre captain cut him down with his glaive before he could open fire on them.
A warrior, one of K’gosi’s Pyroclasts, clawed at Numeon’s leg. By the time he looked down to help him the warrior was dead, burned from the inside out. A wisp of smoke trailed from his silent screaming mouth, and Numeon turned away again.
‘We have to regroup, rally…’ Leodrakk was saying.
‘There is nothing to rally to, brother.’
‘Is he…’ Leodrakk gripped Numeon by the shoulder, his eyes pleading. ‘Is he…’
Numeon broke his gaze, and looked down to where the guns of the Iron Warriors were scattering the remnants of his once-proud Legion.
‘I don’t know,’ he murmured.
Half blind, they staggered on shoulder to shoulder as the bombs continued to fall, not knowing where to turn or what the fate of Vulkan was. Smoke was spoiling the air, rich with the tang of blood, choking and black. Leodrakk’s vox-grille respirator was damaged and he was struggling to breathe. The spear of shrapnel impaling one of his lungs and still jutting from his chest also complicated matters.
The vox in Numeon’s ear crackled. He was so surprised by its sudden function that he almost lost his footing. It was an XVIII Legion channel.
‘This is Pyre Captain Numeon. We are effecting a full-scale retreat. I repeat, all fall back to the dropsite and secure passage off-world.’
He wanted to go back, return to find Vulkan, but in the carnage of the depression that was impossible. Pragmatism, not emotion, had to rule Numeon’s heart at that moment. His primarch had forged him that way, through his teaching and his example; he wasn’t about to dishonour that now.
‘Pyre brother…’
Numeon recognised the voice on the other end of the vox-link immediately. He glanced at Leodrakk, but the warrior was making his way down the ridge towards the dropsite and hadn’t noticed Numeon was in communication with someone. It was Skatar’var.
‘Is Leodrakk with you?’
‘I have him. Where are you?’ Numeon asked.
‘Can’t tell. I can hear screaming. I’ve lost my weapon, brother.’
A terrible thought struck Numeon as he paused to end a stricken Iron Warrior with half his chest blown out, struggling to rise.
‘What can you see, brother?’ he asked, ramming the glaive down and twisting the haft to make sure of the kill.
‘It’s dark, brother.’
Skatar’var was blind. Numeon cast around, but couldn’t see him. There was no way of telling where he was or if he was close enough to help. Scraps from other companies were storming back down the ridge, the Salamanders laying down covering fire as they retreated back to the dropsite. Numeon waved them on as he continued trying to find his Pyre brother.
‘Skatar’var, send out a beacon. We will come for you.’
‘No, captain. I’m finished. Get Leodrakk out, save my brother.’
‘We might be able to reach you.’ Numeon was scouring the battlefield for any sign, but he couldn’t find him.
Death hung in the air like the noisome smoke, palling overhead from the many fires. Somewhere in the haze, Commander Krysan crawled from the burning cupola of his battle tank. He was burning too. Salamanders were born in fire, and now Krysan would die in it. The fuel canisters cooked off and exploded just as Krysan fell from the turret, rolling, burning down the side of the hull and no longer in sight. Like their commander, his once-proud armoured company was no more than a wrecker’s yard of flame-scorched metal carcasses.
‘Are you injured, brother?’ Numeon asked, increasingly desperate. ‘Can you stand?’
‘The dead are upon me, Artellus. Their bodies crush my own.’
Looming from the oil-black fog was an Iron Warrior who was missing his helm and part of his right arm. He raised a bolter to fire but Numeon’s lunge cut short his attack and his life, as he disembowelled the traitor.
‘I need more than that, Ska. The dead are everywhere.’
It was like looking out onto a corpse sea.
‘It’s over for me. Get Leodrakk out.’
‘Ska, you must–’
‘No, Artellus. Let me go. Get free of this hell and avenge me!’
It was no use. The slope was thronged with retreating warriors now, and skirmishes between the survivors of both sides were breaking out.
‘Someone will come, get you to a ship,’ said Numeon, but the words sounded hollow even to him.
‘If they do, I hope we meet again.’
The vox-link went dead and Numeon couldn’t raise it again.
Deeper into the valley, smoke was rolling in thick and pooling at the nadir of the basin where the drop-ships were launching in beleaguered flocks. Two, eager to get airborne, collided with one another and both went down in flames. Another achieved loft and was clawing for the upper atmosphere when it was stitched by cannon fire and broke apart, its two burning halves sent earthwards.
Even coming down off the ridge relatively unscathed, escape was far from certain.
Finally reaching the dropsite with Leodrakk, Numeon found visibility was almost zero. Like tar turned into air, the blackness was virtually absolute. Auto-senses were of limited use, but Numeon managed to get as far as a ship. Leodrakk was retching in the vile smoke, so thick it would have killed a lesser man. He clung to Numeon’s left shoulder and let the Pyre captain guide him.
But Numeon was struggling, too. The drop-ship was close enough to touch but the filth besieging them made it impossible to gauge the location of the entrance ramp or if it was even open. Through the rough hull, Numeon felt the tremor from the vessel’s engines. They would need to get aboard now or they would have to find another ship.
Hell rained all around them – there would be no other ship. This was it; escape or die.
If it was to be the latter, Numeon avowed he would go down fighting. He would have done so already were it not for Leodrakk.
Out of the darkness, a hand reached for them, and together they stumbled onto the deck of a crowded Stormbird. It was black within the lander; smoke was also filling the hold and the internal lighting was out. Numeon slumped and rolled on his back, his eye burning like someone had thrust a knife into it and twisted the blade. He was more badly wounded that he had at first realised, having taken several hits during the descent as he shielded his Pyre brother from harm. Leodrakk was on his knees, coughing up the wretched smoke from his lungs.
The ramp to the drop-ship was closing. Engine shudder from rapid ignition was rocking the hold as the vessel fought for loft. Then they were airborne, thrusters cranked to full burn to reach escape velocity. The ramp sealed, the blackness became absolute.
Turning onto his
side, Numeon saw a single red band of light glowing in the darkness.
‘Be still, brother,’ a calm and serious voice said.
‘Apothecary?’
‘No,’ the voice replied. ‘I am a Morlock of the Iron Hands. Pergellen. Be still…’
Then unconsciousness took him and he was lost to it.
Numeon opened his eyes and touched one of his fingers to the wound that had nearly blinded him. It still hurt – the memory of it and what it reminded him of more than the actual pain.
The trek from the aqueduct, after they had met up with Pergellen, Hriak and the human, was a cheerless one. Shen’ra had been a long-standing comrade and, despite his irascible nature, had forged strong allies. Both Iron Hand and Raven Guard had bonded with him in their own way. It was hard to hear of his death, even though they all knew what his sacrifice meant. Daka’rai too would not see another dawn, nor Ukra’bar, and grief for them was worsened by the knowledge that the Salamanders had both been able warriors and that their small company had dwindled still further.
When Numeon had told Grammaticus of their decision to finally aid him, the human had greeted the news with a grim resolve, as if he knew this would happen or perhaps resented what would have to come next.
‘What made you change your mind?’ he had asked.
‘Hope, faith… this.’ Numeon had presented Grammaticus with the spear, but only shown it to him. ‘It stays with me until we can get you off-world,’ he had said, sheathing it in his scabbard. ‘And where will you go?’
‘I don’t know yet. Those instructions won’t be given until I’m safely off Traoris.’
The conversation had ended there, as Numeon had gone to consult with Pergellen on how they would approach an assault on a heavily guarded space port.
Using the Fire Ark was immediately discounted. Since the commencement of the bizarre storm that kept Ranos smothered in darkness and filled the sky with variegated lightning, there had been no communication with the ship. For all they knew, it was already destroyed. Several amongst the surviving legionaries had suggested as much until Numeon had silenced them.
