by Nick Kyme
‘What exit?’ Since being in the drop-ship I had yet to see one.
‘It’s a gaping tear in the hull. You’ll know it when you see it.’
I was about to head out, back into the dark where I hoped Usabius and my primarch were waiting, when I glanced up.
‘Ruuman, I don’t know how and why you got here but I am in your debt for saving my life.’
‘I’ll explain on the other side of the ship,’ the Ironwrought replied, and then he was gone from my sight.
Heart pounding, as much from anticipation as adrenaline, I rushed back through the ship to the corridor where we had found the survivor.
‘I hope you are soaring free now, my friend,’ I muttered to the shadows as I left.
Usabius was not there. He had moved off somewhere else, and was no longer waiting. The booted feet of the survivor were, but my battle-brother was absent. For a moment I considered the worst had happened, that Usabius was dead and the survivor as well. A brief vision filled my mind of the blind-hunter killing them first before it caught up to us. Not that it had had enough time to do that, but my senses were not entirely reliable of late. Perhaps it was longer than I had originally thought. Panic overtaking my limbs, filling them with nervous energy, I ran.
Only when I closed on the survivor did I check myself, slow and finally stop.
It was not Vulkan. It was not even a Salamander.
Armoured in magenta with a broken aquila adorning his breastplate, the survivor was not even an ally.
Slumped against the half-crushed confines of a detention cell wall, flecked with his own blood, was one of Fulgrim’s sons. Emperor’s Children. A prisoner. My enemy.
Usabius must have seen him too, and hope kindled that he still lived.
My enemy groaned. His booted feet were moving but only attached to his torso by the scantest of threads. Most of his left side was crushed too, the armour dented and split. Fulgrim’s warriors were slaves to perfection, and as I listened to the one before me groan I wondered if it was not pain but the fact that he was in such poor condition that ailed him.
‘Who are you?’ I demanded, approaching slowly with my chainblade out in front.
An eye opened. Just one; the other was bruised shut. The Emperor’s Children legionary turned his head, an agonising motion I assumed but he appeared to revel in it.
‘Salamander…?’ he rasped, smiling through red-rimmed teeth. ‘Is your kind still alive?’ He found that amusing until I crouched down to his level and smashed my fist into his plastron. It was a light blow, I did not want to kill him yet, but fresh cracks still webbed the mocking eagle device he wore.
‘Answer the question, traitor,’ I growled, trying to remain calm.
Spitting up a gobbet of blood, the warrior drew in enough breath to speak.
‘Lorimarr.’
He attempted to laugh but pulled up short as a hacking cough took over. Blood spittle flecked the ruins of his plastron but could barely be discerned amongst the rest of the damage.
‘Where is Usabius?’ I asked, stepping closer, acutely aware of Ruuman’s heavy footfalls on the roof overhead.
‘Who?’ Lorimarr asked. ‘You are the first soul I have seen.’
‘Don’t lie to me.’ I wanted to give him a taste of my blade but saw the futility of torture at once. This cur would only enjoy it. ‘The warrior I came into this ship with, another Salamanders legionary like me. Where is he?’
‘There was no one else before you.’
‘Liar!’ I brandished my blade, let him see the chained teeth and imagine them ripping into his flesh. If it would yield the truth, I would maim the traitor just as he had maimed countless numbers of my battle-brothers.
Lorimarr forced a chuckle, undermining my menace. ‘What can you do except kill me?’ he said. ‘No blade will loosen my tongue. There is nothing left to threaten me with. Besides,’ he added, growing serious, ‘I am not lying. You are the first soul I’ve seen,’ he repeated, a slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, ‘but not that I’ve heard. They died slow, your kin… crying out for their father.’
My patience at its limit, I was about to strike him and end his miserable life when a voice said, ‘Brother…’
I turned and at the end of the corridor I saw Usabius shrouded in shadow.
‘I thought you were de–’
‘This way,’ he said sombrely and walked off as if to lead me.
Lorimarr followed my gaze into the darkness and when he looked back at me started to laugh uncontrollably.
‘Delicious,’ he wheezed through his tears, his pain and his pleasure. ‘Exquisite.’ His mania was killing him, but I doubted that he cared.
I ignored the wretch, and went after Usabius.
Ruuman was right about the exit to the troop hold, but when I passed through the ragged portal he was not there to meet me. Instead I saw Usabius, waiting less than fifty metres from the drop-ship.
He was standing stock still with his back to me, and looking at something lodged in the dark sand.
As I approached him, I tried to block out the insane laughter echoing from inside the drop-ship, willing Lorimarr to die at the same time.
‘I wanted to kill him too,’ Usabius told me, the edges of something in front of him just coming into view over his shoulder.
‘Why didn’t you?’ I asked, realising I was looking at a battle-helm partially buried in the Isstvan earth.
‘Because I found this.’
Ornate beyond reckoning, so finely and perfectly crafted it brought tears to my eyes just to see it, I realised what it was that had enraptured my brother.
Before us lay the battle-helm of a primarch, the battle-helm of Vulkan.
For a brief, macabre moment I hoped there would not be a head inside it, but as I stooped to retrieve it, I realised there was no blood, no evidence of injury of any kind or even a struggle.
It was just a beautiful battle-helm, lying incongruously, discarded in the dirt.
My fingers trembled as I went to touch it, and I could almost feel the resonance of my father emanating from its very fire-tempered metal. Vulkan’s hands had crafted this piece of armour and a measure of his presence and power still imbued it. I saw a face in its fearsomely wrought visage, in the gem-like retinal lenses, the gilded maw, the flat snout. It was Vulkan’s, the face I had seen him wear on the battlefield time and again, his war face, and it chilled me to look upon it now, empty of life. Though it must have been lying in the sand for many hours, even days, the helmet was still warm as if it had just been fresh-forged. Even through the ceramite of my gauntlet, I felt its heat. It banished the cold and I took strength from it.
Mild despair followed in the wake of my initial elation. As I carefully mag-locked Vulkan’s war-helm to my belt, I realised why Usabius had not picked it up.
Rising, I said, ‘Our primarch would not have left his battle-helm here willingly. And if his body is not here, and there is no evidence of his death then…’ I turned.
‘Then he has been captured by the enemy, and is somewhere else,’ Usabius concluded.
‘How will we find him?’
The slow shake of Usabius’s head only increased my sense of defeat.
‘I don’t know, Ra’stan. The drop-ship was our compass. Without it, we have no bearing, nothing to guide us. Without it, we are…’
‘Lost, brother,’ I told him.
Ruuman announced his presence with the clank of his heavy footfalls on the roof of the drop-ship. The Ironwrought had taken his time. When I saw the magnoculars in his hand, I realised why.
‘Traitors are moving,’ he said, his iron voice ringing across the space between us. ‘Purgatory is destroyed.’
My jaw stiffened as I clenched my teeth.
What was left to us now except for petty retribution?
‘We have one of them inside the ship,’ I said, my meaning obvious.
Ruuman’s gaze shifted down a fraction as he saw the battle-helm clamped to my belt.
/> ‘I think vengeance would be understandable.’ The Ironwrought nodded, as if in approval of what I had decided to do. ‘Be quick with it,’ he added, turning away. ‘I will keep a watch.’
With Usabius behind me, I stalked back to the ship.
Lorimarr was waiting for us. He rested his head against the back of his broken cell, pieces of his shattered plastron rising and falling with the legionary’s shallow breathing.
‘I am dead anyway,’ he hissed to the darkness, not bothering to open his eye this time. Blood was eking from the left corner of his mouth, so too from his nose and ear.
I wanted to destroy him, to exact some measure of pain from this traitor as if it would account for all the death and agony he and his kind had inflicted upon us. Perhaps if we had still been in the valley of bones, I would have, but the killing rage was gone and only pity and self-pity remained.
‘But you are in far greater agony than me,’ said Lorimarr, opening his eye to stare at me and then the battle-helm I carried. ‘Aren’t you, Salamander?’
I wanted to smack the supercilious smile off his face.
‘Kill him,’ said Usabius.
‘In cold blood?’ I replied, my wrath ebbing. ‘We would be no better than them.’
Lorimarr laughed again.
‘You really are broken, aren’t you?’ he said to me.
I glared down at him disdainfully. ‘I think you are the one smashed up, absent your legs, brother.’
Snorting derisively, Lorimarr replied, ‘I know.’
‘What?’
The traitor’s eye narrowed. ‘I know,’ he repeated.
‘Speak plainly,’ I warned him.
‘What you seek,’ he said.
‘Kill him, right now!’ Usabius snarled.
I turned to him saying, ‘Wait! Just wait…’ before looking back at our prisoner. I showed him the battle-helm. ‘This? Is this what you mean?’
Lorimarr inclined his head, ever so slowly.
I sneered, fighting down hope and revulsion in the same ambivalent emotional cocktail.
‘Why would you help us?’
‘He’s lying,’ Usabius insisted and took a forward step when I put up my arm to stop him advancing further.
‘Wait.’
I turned my attention back to Lorimarr, crouching down at his eye level.
‘No,’ I said, reading the cruelty there, ‘he isn’t. You want us to go after him. You want to give us hope.’
‘It is false, brother!’
I shrugged off Usabius’s hand on my shoulder, watching Lorimarr’s eye flick back and forth between us, his smile broadening as it did so.
‘Tell me,’ I demanded. ‘I’ll make it quick.’
‘You have nothing to offer me, Salamander. But I will give you a gift…’ He grunted, leaning forward and reaching out with his hand.
I flinched, suspecting an attack, but saw that the Emperor’s Children warrior was unarmed and missing two fingers. He stretched towards me with the remaining digits as if about to perform some kind of benediction.
‘Don’t let him touch you!’ Usabius snapped, but I was already leaning in, closing my eyes…
Too late, I realised the danger I was in.
Lorimarr was a psyker and I a slave to his malicious will.
As his fingers touched my battle-helm, just the lightest caress of metal against metal, I was bombarded with a host of painful images.
Fire… An endless conflagration and the destruction of a hundred battle tanks.
A roar of anger, a curse spat from a primarch’s lips in accusation of a brother.
Pain and light, so hot it seared the very flesh off my skeleton and turned my bones to ash.
I pulled away from Lorimarr’s touch, my ears ringing and a trickle of blood seeping from the corner of my mouth. I wiped it away, about to kill the traitor when I saw that the Emperor’s Children legionary’s eye was open and unblinking. In his last act of attempted murder, he had ended himself.
‘Ra’stan…’
The voice sounded dim, the edges of my sight still hazed, and odd after-images related to my earlier visions assailed me like pieces of a broken kaleidoscope.
‘Ra’stan, are you hurt?’
Usabius was holding me up. Without his intervention I would have fallen, such was the intensity of Lorimarr’s psychic assault.
I nodded, my senses returning.
‘He tried to kill you,’ he added, letting me go so I could support myself.
‘A Librarian…’
‘More like a sorcerer, I think, but yes.’
‘I should not have survived that attack,’ I said, facing my brother. ‘How could I?’
‘I don’t know, but you did. Vulkan protects even his wayward sons.’
‘So we might carry on with our mission?’
I did not believe that, but decided not to question the distant providence that had kept me alive. For now, it was enough to know that Lorimarr had been thwarted and he was left for whatever carrion feeders haunted the skies of this place.
‘I saw something,’ I told Usabius as the two of us stood before the slumped body of the traitor. ‘I suspect it was a fragment of what this legionary knew.’
‘Beware such falsehoods, Ra’stan, especially when given by a deceitful messenger.’
‘It did not feel false. I don’t think he meant for me to see it. I think he was telling the truth.’
Ruuman’s booted feet hammering on the roof above us returned, cutting our debate short.
Usabius gave me a warning look, but I was convinced.
‘I know, brother,’ I whispered, as if to speak it louder would make the visions disappear, their lodestar blink out.
With the clank of his heavy armour, the Ironwrought jumped down from the roof of the drop-ship and landed with his back to me. He arose swiftly, bionics whirring, and fixed me with a hard glare as he turned.
‘We’re out of time. The war party is coming back, sky-hunters leading the vanguard.’
Jetbikes, incredibly swift and deadly to a small party like ours. I had seen them operating in packs out on the plains, using their superior speed to encircle and then execute isolated groups of survivors. At Ruuman’s mention of them, a bleak memory resurfaced of one of my brothers being dragged to his death, chains hooked to his flesh on the back of a jetbike while its rider laughed at the grim spectacle.
Some rode solo too, and these scouts could be just as deadly. If spotted by one, it would be almost impossible to silence the outrider without drawing unwelcome attention. If that happened then the vultures would flock to the feast with us as their carrion meat.
The appearance of the sky-hunters was therefore problematic.
The Ironwrought asked, ‘Did you get what you needed?’
‘Yes. A map of sorts,’ I said, tapping my battle-helm with my finger.
Ruuman stared, waiting for more.
So I gave him it. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know where they took Vulkan.’
Deciphering a clear image from the painful mental assault Lorimarr had inflicted on me was not easy. Through the fire, and the agony and the light, I saw a cave. On the surface, it was a fairly nondescript – even ubiquitous – landmark on the Isstvan plains where there were many crevices and chasms. However, this one carried a mark. It was a star with eight points and to see it, even in my mind’s eye, made my stomach tighten and my tongue itch. The sensation was akin to that which we had felt in the valley of bones, so I knew it must be significant.
The suggestion of a craven altar, a ritual knife with the infernal power to cut through reality itself, forced its way into my consciousness and I suddenly dreaded what had become of my father. It had been prepared for him this place, this cave; that much I knew.
And from our vantage point, standing as we had in Tarkan’s eyrie on the Purgatory, I had seen it. Then it had just been a shape, another lumpen blister in a black desert studded with gibbets, pyres and death-pits. Now it was a beacon, calling me to him.
From the details of the hololithic map I studied during Sulnar’s briefing, I remembered the relative position of the cave to the Purgatory and by extrapolation the position of Vulkan’s crashed drop-ship.
I found the cave and led us to it, that part was easy. Getting to it across an encampment thronged with Iron Warriors was not.
Ruuman lowered the scopes and scowled. The bionics in his face growled with the effort.
‘I can see no route through them.’
A hot wind was blowing in from the north, disturbing squalls of ash that painted our armour in murky grey. I imagined the heat was coming off the Purgatory and the bones of the poor souls we had left there to burn. Ruuman had not said much about why he had left. Apparently, Sulnar had sent him. Perhaps Tarkan had seen what was coming and the imminent threat had made the lieutenant commander send reinforcements? Perhaps the Ironwrought had simply decided it was time to leave? Either way, he had reached us somehow and now here we were, contemplating another desperate act.
We had taken up a position sheltering behind a cluster of rocks, slightly elevated above the desert floor on a shelf of obsidian and surveying the majority of the encampment.
Warriors encircled small fires, talking, cleaning their weapons, sharpening knives. Some sat alone, staring catatonically into the darkness. Others sat on the hulls of their battle tanks, hunched over with their weapons held casually at ease. The vehicles formed a loose laager within which the Iron Warriors had pitched tents and made their fires. I suspected they did so to keep whatever dogs were also prowling the night at bay. Of all the murderous thugs left behind to cleanse Isstvan V, only the sons of Perturabo acted as if they were not also part of the Warmaster’s chaff. Primarchs had left behind the very worst and most volatile of their warriors, mad dogs in every sense, for this dirty job. The IV Legion had never done anything but the dirty jobs and so there was no distinction to make. It also meant they were more ordered and less unpredictable than their wilder brethren. If they had dug in, it was likely they would not strike camp until ordered to by Perturabo, and that would only happen when we were all dead.
Some of the sand had been restored to the hourglass, but it was dwindling perilously close to expiry again.
‘Must be over fifty warriors,’ breathed Usabius.
