Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  My gaze went skywards as the shadow of another drop-ship crept across my flame-seared face. Looming over me it was massive, blotting out the sun we had striven so hard to reach above the belt of cloud. We sustained a glancing hit, I think – its prow raked our flank, but it was enough to put us down. The other drop-ship was a ball of fire. I saw bodies wreathed in flame, hazed by the heat, trapped in its confines. Some jumped, even though the drop was fatal. A few legionaries had jump packs. Most went up in secondary explosions as their overheated turbines cooked off. Ravens went down, feathers aflame. Iron plummeted from the sky. Drakes burned. The rest were cut apart by streamers of flak from the entrenched cannons below, sawn in half before they had even gotten clear of the destruction.

  I saw a group, a mix of Salamanders and Raven Guard, setting up line launchers as they readied to evacuate across to our ship. I could not hear them through the roar of bloody salvoes and the detonation of explosions, but their urgency was clear enough, as were their gestures to us.

  The plan was stillborn, however. A fusillade of missiles from some unseen battery below tore up their lander amidships, pushing a firestorm through its belly that blew the would-be commandos from the hold and into oblivion.

  I turned, tried to drag one of my brothers with me, but the conflagration gushed out of the dying ship faster than I realised, burning me in my armour and incinerating my slower brother. He was gone when I looked back, the claw marks of his fingertips etched into steel the only evidence of his fate.

  We lurched. The hull groaned and split again, micro-fractures webbing the metal.

  I grabbed a bulkhead and held on, feeling gravity leave me for a moment as a perverted sense of tranquillity took over.

  Like a comet, our Stormbird fell from the sky but dropped well wide of the Urgall Depression. Gravity violently reasserted itself, slamming my body hard into the deck and shattering my leg. We struck the mountain, rupturing entire cliffs and sending them into the abyssal chasm below us. Our structural integrity held and we lay there, a wounded predator ready to be put out of its misery.

  Almost ready, but not quite.

  ‘How many staves did you plant this time?’ Ruuman asked, bringing my mind back to the present.

  ‘Six,’ Usabius replied.

  The Ironwrought nodded, and almost looked impressed.

  ‘That was a great risk to do that.’

  ‘Let us hope a fruitful one then,’ I interjected. ‘For we would risk everything for this.’

  ‘We?’ asked the Ironwrought. ‘Your Legion?’

  Although I knew I was vehement, I’m not sure I conveyed the ardency of my belief to Ruuman, but the Ironwrought was largely divorced from emotion.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘all of us who are still alive.’

  Ruuman held my gaze for a moment, then, showing us his back, he switched on a small scanner sitting on a bench behind him and squared away from the weapons. It was a cluttered space with room enough for three, but only three. As the pict screen came to life in an ugly flare of green neon, a voice from behind us said, ‘You’re late.’

  Ishmal Sulnar waited in the doorway to the armoury, arms folded. The Iron Hands legionary was a brute and filled the width of the space easily with his imposing silhouette, but not its height. Sulnar’s head barely came two-thirds up the door frame. For the proud legionary was enthroned in a makeshift wheelchair, part gun carriage, part gurney, with wheels stripped from the broken chassis of an ammo hopper.

  Pieces of his armour had been destroyed during the fighting and the crash. He only wore a single pauldron, his left, and both his arms were bare of vambrace or gauntlet. The right arm was entirely bionic, as were his left hand and his right eye. The red retina flickered, on account of its damaged focusing rings. It made Sulnar squint and sometimes pulled up one side of his mouth in a disapproving scowl.

  Much of his armoured greaves were missing from just above the knee, so too were his legs.

  ‘What happened out there?’ he asked.

  Usabius failed to rein in his anger.

  ‘Carnage happened, Sulnar!’

  ‘Brother turned on brother and thousands died. We lived through that, if you remember it.’

  Perhaps it was guilt talking. We never got a chance to discuss it later.

  Sulnar unfolded his arms and I tensed for a fraction of a second as I thought he might strike my brother, though he kept his eyes on me. Perhaps he could not meet Usabius’s gaze for fear of what he might do if he did. The Iron Hands legionary might no longer walk but his fists had lost none of their potency.

  Sulnar kept his composure, and held up a placating hand.

  ‘I remember it,’ he answered quietly. ‘We have all lost, brother. Our fathers are missing and we are besieged by enemies we once called allies… even friends.’

  ‘Your father is–’

  I warned Usabius off with a look. Sulnar had deluded himself into believing that Ferrus Manus was not dead. None of us had seen the Gorgon fall, but the reports we had heard left little doubt. Even still, there was nothing to gain in arguing about it.

  ‘Nothing,’ Usabius relented. ‘I am sorry, brother. My temperance is being sorely tested this night.’

  ‘You take on too much,’ said Sulnar. He bowed his head fractionally, but I detected the tremor of involuntary motion in his bionic eye and realised he was hanging by a tender thread. He bore the chair stoically, but it was demeaning. Any contribution he could make now would be minimal and not in the front line of a last stand, as I suspect he would have preferred. We were, all of us, warriors. And as such we would not get to choose the manner in which we died. Cut apart by a dozen blades, beheaded by a sworn friend turned enemy, crushed beneath the treads of a heavy battle engine – during the Dropsite Massacre I had witnessed all of these deaths and many others. I believe, deep down, that Sulnar would have accepted any of them above the fate that awaited him. He waved my brother’s contrition away.

  ‘And no apology is needed,’ he added. ‘These are trying times for all of us. Impossible, even. I ask again then, what happened?’

  I told him, leaving out the part where Usabius crushed the Raven Guard’s neck to maintain our concealment. Sulnar seemed particularly interested in the enemy patrols and their dispositions.

  ‘Did you encounter any other resistance groups? Any other ships, either grounded or lying in low anchor that we can join up with?’

  ‘There are none, brother,’ I answered.

  Sulnar looked down, thinking. ‘We will try again tomorrow. Only by forging some kind of battle order can we hope to strike back at the traitors. If we could make contact with one of the primarchs…’

  Usabius lost his temper again, the objects on Ruuman’s workbench trembling with psycho-kinetic anger. ‘Are you blind in both eyes, Sulnar? There is no resistance. We are not fighting a guerrilla war. This is survival for as long as we can hold out, no more than that.’

  Except, he and I knew that was not entirely true. We had not been running the gauntlet with Ruuman’s staves these last days for something to occupy our minds. Our purpose was much greater than that.

  Usabius stalked out of the armoury, moving past Sulnar who seemed not to notice or care, and carried on as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Were you followed?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. ‘Though their patrols are widening by the hour. It won’t be long before they decide to venture into the mountains and after that… Well, we all know what happens after that. There is a bottom line to all of this,’ I added.

  Sulnar’s studied silence bade me continue.

  ‘Our time is almost up. We can’t stay here any more. If we do, they will find us and destroy us. We have to move on.’

  Sulnar was emphatically blunt. ‘We cannot.’ He rolled back on his wheels so he could gesture to the infirmary behind him. ‘There is no moving on. Most of these legionaries won’t make the journey.’ In a quieter voice, he added, ‘I won’t make the journey. This is it for most of these
warriors, Ra’stan. Our crusade ends on the black sands of Isstvan, curtailed by treachery and deceit. I do not think it is fitting, but I am pragmatic enough to realise it is irrefutable as our fate.’

  ‘And the fate of Lord Manus? Why do you refute that?’

  Sulnar looked down. ‘Because I have to believe in something. I am half the legionary I was. I cannot be rebuilt, not in these conditions with these resources, so I must sit when I would rather stand. I must wait when I would rather forge out with you. These things I cannot deny, and their weight upon me is a heavy one. The death of my father? That I can deny. Until I see it with my own eyes, until I see his headless corpse and not in my nightmares, I choose hope over despair. You have, why not I?’

  It was hard to argue, and I could not bring myself to do so anyway. But it did not change some universal truths.

  ‘They are coming,’ I reasserted. ‘It will be soon. You need to be ready.’

  ‘Make no mistake,’ Sulnar declared, leaning forwards in his chair to emphasise his words, ‘we will all meet these traitorous bastards on our feet, Ra’stan, one way or another. We are ready because there is nothing left to us but retribution.’

  I was about to continue, but realised it was futile to argue further. Sulnar would stay, so would the others, and in so doing meet their deaths as heroes. What right did I have to deny them that? I nodded.

  Sulnar reciprocated the gesture and after a few moments went back to his debrief. ‘Did you penetrate any farther into enemy-held territory?’

  ‘We made significant inroads towards the Urgall Depression. Most of the enemy’s forces are still concentrated there but beginning to branch. There will be gaps in their pickets that a small commando force could exploit.’ I licked my lips, mouth suddenly dry. ‘I also think we got close to his ship. Another deep infiltration and I believe we will find it.’

  Sulnar rolled forwards on his wheels so he could put his hand on my forearm.

  ‘You don’t have to do this, Ra’stan.’

  But of course I did.

  ‘I would rather die out there, in search of hope, than trapped in here with our despair and fatalism as my companions.’

  I looked at Ruuman, who was busily recording the seismic data from our staves and mapping out the region beyond it.

  ‘The sensors have a five-kilometre range in all directions,’ he explained to the screen where a rough topography of Isstvan was slowly being sketched out. Data was streaming along one side of the image, too rapidly for my eye to follow but not for the Ironwrought.

  A second later and the image collapsed, the screen blanking out into a flat field of green neon.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Signal interrupt.’

  One or more of the staves had been destroyed.

  ‘Did you get anything?’ I sounded more urgent than I intended.

  ‘Yes,’ Ruuman replied. He appeared almost reluctant to continue.

  My tone was deliberately impatient. ‘Well?’

  ‘It is his drop-ship, yes.’

  My heart leapt, but I held it fast in a fist of my own pragmatism.

  ‘Intact?’

  ‘It crashed several kilometres from the Urgall Depression, north of your last recorded position, Brother Ra’stan.’

  I struggled to maintain my composure, masking my hope with sudden, direct action.

  ‘I must go at once,’ I said.

  Usabius would want to hear this news.

  ‘This matter should be discussed first,’ said Sulnar as I pushed past him. ‘Strategy will be needed. Equipment gathered. Even a legionary does not wander into territory overrun by this kind of enemy without first pausing to consider tactics. We must plan our next move.’

  I regarded him incredulously. ‘Our next move?’ I said, pausing in front of his hulking plastron but looking down on the crippled warrior. ‘There is but one course. We go and find the primarch. We rescue Vulkan.’

  I tried hard not to hope. On Isstvan it was a cruel, capricious thing. It crept into the heart, the soul, expanding silently but filling the body with warmth and vigour. But it was not real. What the hopeful did not realise was that hope was a flame that burned you from within, turning your spirit and your will to ash so that when it inevitably faded there was nothing left behind but a hollow shell.

  If Vulkan was dead like Ferrus Manus, I vowed I would not submit to the same denial as Sulnar. I would bear it, and do so stoically as every Fireborn son of Nocturne had been taught to shoulder adversity.

  If my father was slain, I would mourn, expressing my grief in a final, violent, red act against my enemies.

  But if he lived…

  Hope was kindled and then I knew I was its willing slave.

  I found Usabius up at the prow. He was not difficult to track down. Drop-ships are sizeable craft but most of ours was uninhabitable. Aside from Haukspeer’s infirmary, the armoury and the ‘strategium’, as Sulnar mistakenly referred to it, there was only one place left to go.

  It was ripped out and ragged, the roof long gone and now part of the battle debris littering Isstvan. The drop-ship had a long neck to the cockpit and I walked the entire length like it was some bleak processional. Either side were the twin troop holds, their cages wrecked and torn out. When I was about halfway down, I saw the sniper. Armoured in iron-black, the white hand emblazoned proudly, the son of Medusa looked strangely at ease with his posting.

  Tarkan bowed his head to me as I walked along the grey-swathed corridor to the cockpit. He was kneeling down, etching something into the metal walls of the ship with his combat knife, and stood up just as I approached. I paused when I remembered something about his eyrie, but Tarkan had already deactivated the proximity mines before I even reached the section of the prow that was rent open to the elements. After that I felt his gunsights on me until I emerged fully into the half-light.

  It was not the first time I had come up here. Usually, I came alone and Tarkan seemed content to let me be so with my thoughts and concerns. He had never once asked me why I was here or tried to engage in conversation.

  A red moon waxed overhead. It was like an iris of blood, its large black pupil created by palls of drifting smoke. Ash smothered the shattered mechanisms and exposed workings of the drop-ship in grey-white. Pipes choked with it, cogitators and display screens suffocated. It was as if fire had decided to reclaim our ship, drag it back down into a sea of dust where it would be silent forever. Perhaps we were being dragged down with it, only the dust was moving too slowly for us to realise our peril and it would therefore be too late to do anything about it when we did.

  As Tarkan left us to return to the shadows, as he often did, I walked up beside Usabius and followed his gaze across the mountains and to Isstvan beyond.

  Another range of mountains, the mirror to our own Blackfangs, stretched away to the south. Behind it was a vast and empty salt plain, as desolate as my mood. The pyres were still burning, higher and more ferociously than ever. They reminded me of furnaces in some infernal machine, fuelled by treachery and betrayal. It was hard to fight down my anger at the sight of them, so I looked away.

  ‘One more mission, my friend,’ I said.

  Usabius half-turned in profile. ‘Ruuman found something?’

  My brother too, then, had been harbouring hope.

  ‘The primarch’s drop-ship. It is confirmed.’

  I was smiling as Usabius faced me. Even through his battle-helm his eyes lit up like beacons.

  ‘Vulkan lives?’ he said, disbelieving at first but then with greater confidence. ‘Vulkan lives!’

  He clapped my shoulders, his voice quailing with emotion.

  I counselled caution, even though my own fell hopes were beginning to run away with me.

  ‘It is just a Stormbird, brother.’

  ‘How close to the enemy?’

  ‘Too close, but potentially far enough away that it may have escaped undetected.’

  ‘This is a sign, brother. I can feel it.’ Usabi
us clenched a fist and there was a flicker of cerulean blue within the embers of his irises. ‘We must leave immediately.’

  I put a hand on his arm. Firmly.

  ‘No. The Depression will be crawling with traitors by now. Our best chance is to wait until just before nightfall again.’

  Usabius was adamant. ‘It might be too late by then!’

  I held his arm fast. ‘He has survived this long, brother. If we fail now then we won’t get another chance. If either we or the primarch are discovered through our lack of preparation and caution then we all die.’

  Usabius relented, and I let him go.

  ‘How is it to be done, then?’

  ‘Sulnar wants to discuss it in the strategium.’

  ‘The cripple has lost his mind, Ra’stan. He still thinks Ferrus Manus is alive and not slai–’ Usabius stopped, remembering Tarkan. He lowered his voice. ‘He decides this mission?’

  ‘He is the ranking officer.’

  ‘And half a lieutenant, does that equal a fully battle-worthy captain?’

  ‘Calm down. You’re letting your emotions overwhelm you.’

  Letting me go, Usabius turned away.

  ‘I won’t be attending his meeting,’ he said flatly. ‘I’ll wait for you at the cargo ramp, ready to depart.’

  I bowed my head. ‘If that is your wish.’

  ‘It is.’

  I allowed a pause between us and let the magnitude of our discovery sink in.

  The primarch.

  Vulkan.

  ‘I had begun to despair, brother,’ I confessed.

  ‘As had I,’ Usabius replied, his voice barely louder than a whisper. ‘If only I could use my gifts…’

  The Nikaean Edict had seen Usabius reduced to a trooper of the line, a warrior who became one of my charges when before he had been my equal. He shouldered the burden with good grace and was an exemplary trooper. But it was not adherence to an outmoded oath that held his powers in check – since the betrayal many of the old Librarius had been ready to unleash their abilities again – it was fear.