Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  The legionary’s face remained impassive, but Obek saw the tremor of irritation in his jaw and silently celebrated this small victory.

  ‘So, you might as well kill me now.’

  The adept drew closer, almost scuttling instead of walking, though Obek could see no obvious sign of locomotion because of the long robes. His face was similarly obscured by a heavy cowl, though something glimmered in the deep shadows beneath it that could have been the adept’s eyes.

  ‘What did he ask of you?’ he asked simply.

  When Obek frowned, creasing the blood on his face, the adept asked again.

  ‘What questions were put to you? I would like to know.’

  Obek grimaced, then gestured to the blank pane which he knew his captors lurked behind. ‘Weren’t you listening?’

  ‘I prefer to observe without audio.’

  Obek sneered, his predicament loosening up his usually stoic demeanour. ‘You cannot find it distasteful?’

  ‘I neither find it one way or another. My preference is based on the most efficient method of gathering data. What remains unsaid or unexpressed can often be more telling than that which is revealed under torture.’

  ‘Fascinating.’

  ‘Your sarcasm is noted.’

  ‘Good.’

  A thin mechadendrite blade snapped out from beneath the adept’s robes. ‘To answer your first question, I am Regulus, Martian emissary to the Warmaster, amongst other things. I do have a promise, also, or rather, to be precise, a proposition. But first, answer my question – what did he ask of you?’

  Obek leaned back in his seat. The bonds around his wrists and ankles were strained, but still held. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Indeed. You were right again, legionary. There is no knowledge you possess that can help us. I merely wanted Solomus to hurt you. To see you hurt. I am gathering data on pain, especially that experienced by transhumans. I want you to know that you were invaluable to my research, but that is not the sole purpose of your continued survival.’

  ‘Should I be relieved?’

  More sarcasm. Obek had decided torture had that effect on him. Xen would be proud, if he lived.

  The adept didn’t respond. Instead, he turned to Rayko Solomus.

  ‘Can he walk?’

  ‘Not immediately. Given time, he will heal.’

  Regulus nodded. ‘No matter. Kronus will carry him.’

  ‘Are we going somewhere?’ Obek asked.

  ‘I said I had a proposition for you,’ the adept replied, and there was a brief flare of light in the optics Obek now saw under the black hood. He knew nothing about Mechanicum emotional impulses, if they even possessed any, but he swore it felt to him like amusement.

  Kronus dragged rather than carried Obek from the cell. His armoured feet dug furrows in the dirt at first and then scraped against metal as the terrain changed. He had been half-conscious throughout, the pain of his injuries finally telling after he’d resisted it to show no weakness before his interrogators.

  As he blinked awake again, Obek realised the air had changed. No longer the stale, subterranean odour he had experienced in the cell, but the smell of oil and machinery. He felt a thrum through the metal floor under his feet, heard it buzzing in the walls and knew they were still underground.

  Every few metres, he managed a step, trying to gauge the strength in his legs and how fast his enhanced physiology was healing. Too slow to mount any kind of escape. He was alone with the cybernetic and its master, who scuttled out ahead of them, but he was still vastly outmatched. He had seen Castellax battle-automata in action, during the Great Crusade, before the war. This one had been slightly modified from the versions he had seen previously. It had a left-arm power glove with minutely articulated digits, seemingly as dextrous as any human hand. The right arm ended in a circular saw appended to its main reactor core. A twin-barrelled heavy bolter jutted out from a mount on its right shoulder. Against something like that, unarmed, he might as well have taken his sidearm, if he knew where it was, pressed it to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  Obek embodied Salamanders pragmatism as much as any legionary of the XVIII, and right now it was telling him to be dragged and see what the maniac in the black robes wanted to show him.

  It wasn’t long before he found out what.

  The adept issued a blurt of machine noise, and the Castellax came to a halt at the exact same moment as its master.

  Despite the ambient noise and the ever-present throb through the metal, it was abjectly dark and Obek felt almost too weak to raise his head anyway. All he could see was metal and the blood trail he had left behind him.

  At another binaric command, the Castellax seized Obek around the jaw.

  ‘Decided to kill me after all,’ he snarled, bunching his muscles as he prepared to die fighting.

  ‘No,’ uttered Regulus. ‘I ordered Kronus to lift your head. Stop struggling. Look.’

  Obek did as asked. Though the darkness made it hard to discern exactly where, he realised they had come to the threshold of somewhere different entirely.

  Whirring, clicking mechadendrites broke the silence as Regulus interfaced with a control console in one of the walls. A harsh light filled the chamber soon after as phosphor-globes flared to life with an angry fizz of ignition.

  Blinking back the painful after-image seared against his retinas, Obek finally saw what it was the adept had wanted to show him.

  A gate, an immense impregnable gate that had to have been fashioned by the hand of a primarch, such was its artistry. His primarch. The icon of the Lord of Drakes and his Legion was emblazoned upon it, sunken into the metal. Austere, formidable. Through the fanged maw Obek saw a void, a mechanism, esoteric in design.

  ‘My proposition is thus,’ said the adept. ‘Open this door and I’ll let the others live.’

  It was here. The Mechanicum had found it. They just couldn’t access it.

  The Wrought, Obek realised.

  EIGHT

  Retreat into the dust

  Thick smoke was drooling from the engines of the lead gunship. It bled behind it, caught up in the backwash and streaked across the second Thunderhawk in a murky pall.

  Zandu tried not to think about how long they might stay aloft. During the evacuation, they had taken damage from the renegades. Every aberrant shriek of the turbines brought a fresh presentiment of a violent and fiery crash landing. He was staring out of one of the side viewing blocks, searching for a place for them to put down before they crashed down.

  ‘There,’ he voxed the pilot, indicating a raised plateau of land around which the remains of the dead city had eroded.

  Squalling red dust announced the gunships’ arrival. In the midst of its reconstruction, whatever atomic calamity had befallen this world had demolished the partial efforts of its native labourers and left behind a skeletal ruin, overgrown with indigenous plant life. Creepers swathed much of the ferrocrete shell and a shallow quarry harboured crates of munitions. Most were either empty or blasted apart. The scorched edges of a hangar-sized bunker delineated a zone of shattered aviation parts, and there were towers, silos and rusted machines. It had been a manufactorum, a large one, devoted to the mass production of materiel.

  This world had gone to war with itself, independent of the greater struggle for the galaxy.

  Radiation saturated the air, so when the Salamanders legionaries disembarked they did so wearing helmets, protected in their hermetically sealed armour and by its atmosphere filtration systems.

  Varr had begun to set up sentries as Zandu and Xen met in the middle of the plateau, just beyond the landing zone. In the background, the Techmarine pilots began the arduous process of repairing the gunships. Both were badly damaged, their armoured flanks breached by shell blasts and studded with shrapnel. Even if they wanted to, the Salamanders could not make atmospheric flight, so they did what they could to disguise the Thunderhawks’ presence with whatever flora was to hand. For now at least, the Chalice of Fire was out of reach
. Worse still, T’kell remained unconscious and had been left in the hold of one of the gunships with two of Zandu’s squad to watch over him.

  Zandu paced to the edge of the rise and stared, as if he would find the answers to their current trials somewhere along the horizon. All he saw were lightning-cast shadows and the silhouette of a dead land beyond restoration.

  ‘We need Krask,’ he said, his impatience as obvious as his anger.

  Zandu nodded. ‘Vox is down. Even if we could reach the Chalice of Fire, it will be several hours before they make planetfall. We use the time to regroup and consolidate our forces. If we are reckless then our survival will have been for nothing.’

  ‘And if we stand still, they’ll come and kill us in this ruin.’

  ‘Either way, we aren’t going anywhere yet. We hunker down, watch the approaches and only engage if necessary.’

  The accusation suggested earlier by Xen’s tone went unsaid until it couldn’t be ignored any longer.

  ‘What happened in the encampment? You were… disabled. I can think of no other word to describe what I witnessed. A mistake that–’

  Zandu clenched his fist with a growl of servos, but his frustration was focused inwards. ‘I saw it again,’ he whispered, as if to speak of it aloud would somehow make the apparition of his dreams manifest. ‘The burning man. Ever since Vulkan, ever since…’

  Xen drew up alongside him. ‘All of us have been touched by his death, brother. But you almost killed us. If we had stayed there–’

  ‘I know what I did.’

  ‘The burning man is… It’s not real, Zandu. It is a figment of your mind.’

  The sergeant half turned. ‘You knew I had seen it?’

  ‘I heard you. During the battle.’

  ‘Merciful Vulkan…’

  ‘Were you a psyker, before Nikaea? I didn’t know.’

  Zandu shook his head. ‘It feels more like a premonition.’

  ‘Of death?’

  ‘Of something I cannot escape.’

  ‘Embrace it! You cannot indulge doubt. Those renegades will be coming for us,’ Xen said. ‘We must be ready.’

  ‘Perhaps. We hurt them, though. Varr hurt them.’

  ‘Your premonition, is it the same as with that pyromaniac?’

  Zandu spared a glance towards Varr. He had siphoned the remaining promethium they had left into four canisters and had begun to test the igniters to see which of the flamers possessed the greatest efficacy. His eyes lit up, even behind the sheath of his retinal lenses, as he watched the small blue flame.

  ‘What do you think he sees?’

  ‘He says it’s Vulkan.’

  ‘Zau’ull sees Vulkan, he is Igniax. I think Varr is insane.’

  ‘He is one of us.’

  ‘I didn’t say we weren’t insane.’

  Xen laughed, but levity felt wrong in the circumstances and his humour quickly died in the face of cold necessity.

  ‘What about the Wrought? It’s likely defensible and as one of the primarch’s caches there will be weapons, ammunition. It is better by degrees than this ruined shell.’

  ‘It’s not a bad plan,’ Zandu said to the darkness, ‘but how would we find it?’

  ‘We revive T’kell.’

  ‘I am not sure how to do that either. He was unconscious the last time I checked. Even if we could, I won’t lead the Sons of Horus or the Mechanicum to the Wrought. That must be why they are here. They would have no reason not to kill Brother-Captain Obek, if he is still alive.’

  ‘He lives.’

  Both turned at the mechanised voice of T’kell.

  ‘His suit’s biological interface is still running. If it had been removed, it would not be. If he were dead, it would not be. It is running. He is still alive.’

  Zandu inclined his head. ‘Forgefather…’

  Xen bowed too. ‘Thank Vulkan you are awake.’

  ‘As much as I would like to account my revival to the will of our departed father, I was attacked by a screed of malicious machine code. I needed time to excise it.’

  Zandu clasped the Techmarine’s forearm. ‘Your coming back to us is the will of Vulkan, brother,’ but T’kell was slow to grip Zandu’s arm in return.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Zandu asked.

  ‘Weary, but I will be fine.’

  ‘If Obek lives then there is no other choice,’ said Xen. ‘We must attack.’

  Zandu let T’kell go but clapped his shoulder guard.

  ‘Is there something else?’

  The Techmarine slowly nodded.

  ‘The renegades have the Wrought. It is below their camp.’

  Zandu frowned. ‘You knew this?’

  ‘I knew it was near, if not the exact site. As soon as I drew close to the encampment, I could sense it. This burden has been mine to bear since before Isstvan. I hoped it would never come to pass. I hoped Vulkan would return and change his mind. I hoped…’ He breathed deeply, his humanity evidently still a part of him. ‘I hoped for much that has come to nothing.’

  ‘If it is here, then we take it from them,’ said Xen.

  T’kell disengaged himself from Zandu’s grip. ‘We cannot use the Wrought now,’ he replied. ‘Even if we killed every traitor on this world, it is no longer safe. We have to destroy it, or at least destroy whatever is left inside.’

  ‘Then we have a different mission,’ said Zandu. ‘We extract Captain Obek, kill as many as we can and leave.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Xen. ‘But we still need Krask. Hurt or not, the Sons of Horus would rather die than concede defeat.’

  ‘Vox is still down,’ said Zandu.

  ‘I will fix it and request reinforcement,’ said T’kell. ‘Both Thunderhawks are also still in need of repair if they are to breach the upper atmosphere. I’ll need time. I suggest you keep a watch, Brother-Sergeant Zandu.’

  T’kell left to join the pilots, who had already begun the arduous but essential task of patching and sealing the Thunderhawks’ armour.

  As soon as the Techmarine was out of earshot, Zandu spoke across Xen’s personal vox-channel.

  ‘Did he seem strange to you?’

  ‘No more than any son of Mars.’

  ‘He is a son of Vulkan first and foremost.’

  ‘Whatever his closest allegiance, he is still cold as a nuclear winter.’ As Xen was walking away, Zandu reached out and gripped his arm.

  ‘Watch him, brother.’

  Xen looked at Zandu, then to T’kell and back again. Understanding, he nodded.

  Restlessness had ever found its way into Xen’s blood.

  He had kept an eye on T’kell as bidden, but when it became apparent no ill was going to befall the Forgefather or his brothers, Xen sought other distractions. So, whilst the others stood sentry, assisted with repairs or maintained their weapons, he found a quiet place amongst the ruins to practise his blade-work.

  He had already cleansed both of his swords and during his vigil sharpened them, so when Xen drew both weapons from the sheath they shimmered like polished drake scale and vibrant flame, the metal stained jade and amber respectively.

  ‘Drakos, Ignus.’

  He named them aloud, all a part of his ritual.

  Xen knew how to wield. He didn’t limit the expression to one weapon, for his proficiency was with all weapons. A blade, a spear, an axe… In his hand they felt more natural than a gauntlet, more familiar than the touch of his own face. But Drakos and Ignus… they were swords almost without equal. Forged by his own hand, the serrated spatha was Drakos and the falchion power sword was Ignus.

  Tempered monomolecular steel, Nocturne-wrought and quenched in the ice floes of the Dragonspire mountains, neither blade had ever failed him. In some ways he felt closer to them than he did his brothers, but then Xen’s heart was solitary by its nature. Even so, a slight pang of guilt fell upon him as he began to slowly circle with the swords. Xen knew Zandu had misgivings about T’kell, but the Forgefather had more Martian blood in him than most cared to con
cede. His behaviour was strange, but Xen had never met a Techmarine who wasn’t.

  ‘I am no watchdog,’ he murmured, putting more effort into each blade rotation, increasing speed and complexity of motion. It was harder wearing full war-plate. It was the first thing of true consequence he remembered learning upon his apotheosis. To fight in Mark IV battle armour a warrior needed to dispense with certain misconceptions. Ease of movement, for instance. Despite its concomitant back-mounted generator, power armour was heavy and cumbersome but its bulk rewarded strength and raw aggression. Precision, efficiency, lethality – if a blow could be struck, make it a critical one or, better still, a killing one. Leave the exhibitions to the cages, the practice bouts and, if indulged on the field of battle, the dead men.

  Xen, in spite of his warrior’s creed, believed that he fought with a finesse and ruthlessness unmatched within his Legion. It genuinely baffled him, then, that he had never been given the honour of becoming a Pyre Guard.

  Artellus Numeon himself had seen him fight, and knew of his Crusade victories. No glory serving at Vulkan’s right hand for Xen. Instead he had been given a standard, an icon to tether him.

  ‘You show disrespect,’ Varr called from a gantry suspended above the barren assembly yard where Xen had come to wield his blades.

  As if he can hear my damn thoughts…

  ‘What do you want, legionary?’

  ‘Your scars. They are disrespectful.’

  ‘They are also underneath my armour. What offence could I have caused?’

  Varr slammed his fist against his pectoral armour. ‘Unscarred,’ he said, nodding. He had his gladius already drawn and pointed it at Xen. ‘Scarred.’

  Xen kept wielding, the blades flashing past one another: green, red, green, red… Drakos and Ignus in perfect harmony.