[Tome of Fire 01] - Salamander

by Nick Kyme - (ebook by Undead)

  “Yes, he is certain,” answered Dak’ir, his attention only half on the skeleton crew from the Spear of Prometheus. The servitors were part of Brother Argos’ retinue and assisted in transporting the suspensor-lofted cryo-caskets up the embarkation ramp into the gunship’s otherwise barren hold. The Master of the Forge kept a watchful eye over proceedings. In order to ensure the Chamber Sanctuarine, where the caskets would be housed, was as empty as possible he had shed his servo-harness and wore only a basic Techmarine’s rig. He still looked formidable — Argos had lost the left side of his face whilst fighting alongside the 2nd Company on Ymgarl. He had only been a Techmarine then, a mere novice of the Cult Mechanicus and recently returned from a long internship on Mars where he had learned the liturgies of maintenance and engineering, and mastered communion with the machine-spirits.

  Fighting side by side with the now Brother-Sergeant Lok of the 3rd Company Devastators, an encounter with a broodlord had robbed him of his face but not his life, Argos severing the creature in half with his plasma-cutter whilst Lok had applied the kill shot to its bulbous cranium with his bolter.

  A steel plate concealed his injuries now, augmented by a bionic replacement for the eye that he’d lost. The image of a snarling firedrake was burned into it, tail coiled around the optical implant, as an emblem of honour. The numerous branding marks that swathed his skin in concentric vortices of scarification came much later — proud sigils of his many deeds.

  Like many devoted to the Omnissiah, Argos had forked plugs punching from the flesh of his bald head, with a nest of wires and cables that wormed around the back of his neck and into his nose. His armour was old, an artificer suit but not in the same respect as that worn by another veteran of the Chapter. Festooned with mechanical interfaces, tools and power arrays, it was utterly unlike any power armour, relic or otherwise. It carried the cog symbol to show his allegiance to the Mechanicus, but this was married up with the icon of his Chapter displayed proudly on his right pauldron. A device on his gorget translated his hollow, metallic speech into binaric as he directed the servitors.

  “The origin stamp was very clear,” stated Dak’ir as the first of the cryo-caskets was brought aboard the Spear of Prometheus. “It came from Isstvan.”

  Ba’ken exhaled deeply as if trying to mitigate a heavy burden.

  “Now that is an old name, gratefully forgotten.”

  Dak’ir said nothing. The fell legend of Isstvan need not be spoken aloud. All of the old XVIII Legion knew of it.

  The Isstvan system was notorious in the historical annals of the Astartes. It held perhaps no greater resonance than that felt by the Salamanders Chapter. Though now the substance of myth and ancient remembrance, it was during the Great Betrayal when the Warmaster Horus lured Vulkan and his sons into a terrible trap and almost destroyed them. The Salamanders had been a Legion then, one of the Emperor’s original progenitors. Turned upon by those who they thought were their brothers, the Salamanders, together with two other loyal Legions, were devastated on the planet of Isstvan V. In what was later recorded as the Dropsite Massacre, thousands were slain and the sons of Vulkan pushed almost to extinction.

  What miracle transpired, allowing them to avoid that doom, was a mystery some ten thousand years old, as was the fate of their beloved primarch who, some believed, never returned from the battle. Verses were still sung of Vulkan’s heroism that day, but they were the stuff of conjecture and halcyon supposition. The truth of what happened during that disaster was lost forever. Yet the pain of it remained, like an old wound that would not heal. Even replenishing fire could not burn it from the Salamanders’ hearts.

  “So the mission into the Hadron Belt is over?” asked Ba’ken as the last of the caskets was brought aboard the gunship and the Salamanders started making ready for their final departure from the Archimedes Rex.

  “For now,” Dak’ir replied.

  The two Salamanders were apart from the rest of their battle-brothers who stood in discreet groups of two and three, dispersed across the fighter bay, watching proceedings, staying vigilant and awaiting the order to embark.

  “And we are going back?”

  “Yes, brother. To Nocturne.”

  Dak’ir felt ambivalent about a return to their home world. Like all Salamanders, his planet was part of him and to be reunited with it was cause to rejoice, despite its volatile nature. But to come back so soon… it smacked of failure and only made Dak’ir’s concerns about Captain N’keln’s leadership deepen. “Pyriel wants to bring the chest before Tu’Shan and have him consult the Tome of Fire.”

  “What do you make of it?” asked Ba’ken as Dak’ir’s thoughts were steered back towards that moment in the storage room when he’d found the chest with Vulkan’s icon upon it.

  “The chest? I don’t know. Pyriel was certainly unsettled when he ascertained its provenance.”

  “It seems strange to have been amongst weapons and armour,” said Ba’ken. “How did you even find it amidst all of that?”

  “I don’t know that either.” Dak’ir paused, as if admitting the next part would confirm the reality of it, one that he was unwilling to face. The fact that the two Salamanders were engaged in private conversation and that he trusted Ba’ken like no other was the only reason he spoke up at all. “I thought the artefact was in plain sight. It was as if I homed in on it, as if a beacon was attached to the chest and I had locked in to its signal.”

  Dak’ir looked at Ba’ken for a reaction but the bulky Salamander gave none. He just stared ahead and listened.

  “When Pyriel found me, I wasn’t even aware I had picked it up. Nor did I remember ransacking the munitions crates to unearth it,” Dak’ir continued.

  Ba’ken remained pensive, but his body language suggested he wanted to say something.

  “Tell me what you are thinking, brother. In this I am not your commanding officer and you my trooper — we are friends.”

  There was no sense of accusation in his posture as Ba’ken faced him, no distrust or even wariness — only a question. “Are you saying that the chest was meant to be found, and by you alone?”

  Dak’ir nodded almost imperceptibly. His voice came out as a rasp. “Am I somehow cursed, brother?”

  Ba’ken didn’t reply. He merely clasped his battle-brother’s pauldron.

  It would be several days before Tu’Shan and his council emerged from the Pantheon. The chamber was one of few in the Salamanders fortress-monastery on Prometheus. Though, in truth, the bastion was not much more than a space port linked to an orbital dock where the Chapter’s modest armada of vessels could be refitted and repaired. An Apothecarion saw to the outfitting of new recruits and their genetic enhancement as they became battle-brothers. Trial arenas were sunk into the basement level. It was here in these pits that initiate and veteran together could undergo tests of endurance and self-reliance, as was in keeping with the tenets of the Promethean Cult.

  Walking across hot coals, lifting massive boiling cauldrons, enduring the searing pain of the Proving Rod or bearing red-hot iron bars were just some of the labours expected of the sons of Vulkan to show their faith and will. There were dormitories and relic halls, too, though again relatively few in number. The most prestigious of these was the Hall of the Firedrakes, a vast and vaulted gallery hung with the pelts of the great salamanders slain by the warriors as a rite of passage, and from which the hall took its name.

  The Firedrakes, of which Tu’Shan was captain as well as regent, were barracked on Prometheus along with the Chapter Master himself. These venerable warriors were almost a breed apart; the transition they made to the vaunted ranks of the 1st Company changing them in myriad ways as they embraced the full evolution of their genetic encoding. Unlike their fellow battle-brothers, the Firedrakes were seldom seen on the surface of Nocturne where the other Salamanders would readily cohabit with the human populace, albeit often as part of a solitary lifestyle. Their rites were ancient and clandestine, conducted by the Chapter Master himself. Only
those who had undergone the most heinous of trials and endured hardship beyond imagining could ever hope to aspire to become a Fire-drake.

  Akin to that sacred and revered order, access to the Pantheon was also restricted. Dak’ir for one had never seen it, though he knew it was a small deliberation chamber located at the heart of Prometheus.

  Only matters of dire import or of profound spiritual significance were ever discussed in the Pantheon. It had eighteen seats, representing their original Legion number — a fact that remained unchanged during the Second Founding, an act in which, due to their debilitated strength, the Salamanders had been unable to participate.

  The head seat was reserved for the Chapter Master, an honour that had been Tu’Shan’s these last fifty years or so. Thirteen were for the other masters: six to the captains of the remaining companies; one each for the Apothecarion, Librarius, Chaplaincy and Fleet; with a further three devoted to the Armoury and the Masters of the Forge, an unusual triumvirate but necessary given the Salamanders’ predilection for weaponscraft.

  Three of the seats were for honoured guests sequestered by the Chapter Master himself and by dint of the rest of the council’s assent. Praetor, the Firedrake’s most senior sergeant, often assumed one of these seats. Dak’ir knew that Pyriel now occupied another. He wondered if the Librarian would be unflinching before the Chapter’s hierarchy, particular under Master Vel’cona’s gaze. The last position had remained empty for many years, since before Tu’Shan had even assumed the mantle of Regent of Prometheus. Its incumbent was a figure of much veneration.

  Here the Masters of the Salamanders would sit and consult the Tome of Fire. This artefact was written by the hand of the primarch himself in ages past. Though Dak’ir had never seen it, let alone perused its pages, he knew that it was full of riddles and prophecies. Rumours purported that the words themselves were inked partly in Vulkan’s blood and shimmered like captured fire if brought up to the light. It was not merely one volume, as the name suggested, but rather dozens arrayed in the stacks around the circular walls of the Pantheon. Deciphering the script of the Tome of Fire was not easy. There were secrets within, left by the primarch for his sons to unlock. It foretold of great events and upheavals for those with the wit to perceive them. But perhaps most pointedly, it contained the history, form and location of the nine artefacts Vulkan had hidden throughout the galaxy for the Salamanders to unearth. Five of these holiest of relics had been discovered over the centuries through the travails of the Forgefathers; the locations of the remaining four were embedded cryptically within the tome’s arcane pages.

  So Chapter Master Tu’Shan and those masters still on Prometheus had convened and would pore over the Tome of Fire in the hope of unearthing some inkling that pertained to the discovery of the chest. The artefact’s origin stamp had already ignited something of a fire within the Chapter. Some proposed that it meant the return of Vulkan after so many millennia in unknown isolation; others refuted this, claiming that the primarch was not lost on Isstvan at all, but had returned already at the breaking of the Legions and whatever the chest contained it could not relate to that; more still remained silent and merely watched and waited, unwilling to hope, not daring to suggest what apocalypse might be about to befall the Salamanders if their progenitor had fated a reunion. Patience, wisdom and insight were the only true keys to unlocking the Tome of Fire, and with it the chest’s mystery. Like tempering iron or folding steel at the foot of the forge’s anvil, any attempt to try and unravel its enigmas had to be approached slowly and methodically. It was, after all, the Salamanders’ way.

  Dak’ir exercised these credos in the swelter of one of the workshops deep in the undercroft of Hesiod’s Chapter Bastion.

  The Vulkan’s Wrath had returned to Nocturne several days earlier. Of the seven Mechanicus adepts in the cryo-caskets salvaged from the Archimedes Rex, none had survived the journey. Their bodies had been incinerated within the pyreum. It rubbed salt into already bitter wounds as more questions were raised about the viability of the mission into the Hadron Belt and Captain N’keln’s decision to undertake it. Such objections were spoken in whispers only, but Dak’ir knew of them all the same. He saw it in the looks of discontent, the agitated postures of sergeants and heard it in the rumours of clandestine meetings to which he was not invited. Ever since 3rd Company had made landfall, Tsu’gan had been waging a campaign of no confidence against N’keln. Or at least, that was how it appeared to Dak’ir.

  Promethean lore preached self-sacrifice and loyalty above all else — it seemed that the loyalty felt by some of the sergeants towards their captain was being stretched to its limit.

  The only shred of exculpation for N’keln was the chest discovered in the storage room. 3rd Company’s strike cruiser had barely landed on Prometheus when Librarian Pyriel stalked down the embarkation ramp, eschewing all docking protocols as he went in search of his Master Vel’cona who could press for an audience with the Chapter Master. The council in the Pantheon had been arraigned in short order. Their verdict and the announcement of it would not be so forthcoming. The rest of the Salamanders aboard the Vulkan’s Wrath had disbanded, waiting to be recalled by their liege-lords at the appropriate time.

  Dak’ir, like many others, had returned to the surface of Nocturne.

  Classified a death world by Imperial planetary taxonomers, Nocturne was a volatile place. Fraught with crags and towering basalt mountains, its harsh environment made life hard for its tribal inhabitants. Burning winds scorched its naked plains, turning them into barren deserts. Rough oceans churned, spitting geysers of scalding steam when they met spilled lava.

  Nocturne’s settlements were few and transient. Only the seven Sanctuary Cities were strong enough to serve as permanent havens to a dispersed populace eking out an existence amongst rock and ash.

  However arduous, it was nothing compared to the Time of Trial. Being one half of a binary planetary system, Nocturne shared an erratic orbit with its oversized moon of Prometheus and great strife befell the planet every fifteen Terran years whenever these two celestial bodies came into proximity. Molten lava would spew from the earth, and entire cities would be swallowed by deep pits of magma; tidal waves, like foaming giants, would smite fishing boats and crush drilling rigs; clouds of ash, belched from the necks of angry mountains, would eclipse the pale sun. Massive earthquakes shook the very bedrock of the world below whilst above, the skies would crack and fire would rain. Yet, in the aftermath rare metals and gems could be reaped from the ash. And it was this which promoted Nocturne’s culture of forgesmithing.

  After a few short hours since their arrival in-system, Dak’ir alighted from the Fire-wyvern on the Cindara Plateau. Several of his brothers went immediately to their training regimen or summoned brander-priests for excoriation in the solitoriums; others made for their respective townships or settlements. Dak’ir chose the workshops and spent his time at the forge. The events aboard the Archimedes Rex, in particular his discovery of Vulkan’s chest, had disturbed him greatly. Only in solitude and through the purging heat of the forge would he find equilibrium again.

  The crafting hammer pounded a steady rhythm that matched the beat of Dak’ir’s heart. The Salamander was in total synchronicity with his labours. He wore leather smithing breeches and was naked from the waist up, his branded torso marred by ash and soot. Sweat dappled his ebon body, rivulets following the grooves of his muscles. It came from exertion, not from the heat.

  The forges of the undercroft were excavated down to Nocturne’s very core and ponds of lava gathered in the cavernous depths providing liquid fire to fuel the foundries and scalding steam to impel bellows. There was a strange anachronism about the sweltering forges, the way they blended the ancient traditions of the first Nocturnean blacksmiths and the technologies of the Imperium.

  Adamantium blast doors, strengthened by reinforced ceramite, marked the entrance to the chamber where he toiled. Bulkhead columns, the foundations of the Chapter Bastion, plunged down from
a stalactite ceiling and bored deep into the rocky earth below. Mechanised tools — rotary blades, bench-mounted plasma-cutters, belt grinders, radial drill presses — stood side by side with stout anvils and iron-bellied furnaces. Intricate servo-arrays and ballistic components were racked with swages, fullers and other smithing hammers.

  The air was filled with heady smoke, turned a deep, warm orange from the lambent glow of the lava pools. Dak’ir drank in the fuliginous atmosphere as if it were a panacea, soaking his every pore with it. And like the metal on the anvil before him, the impurity in his troubled soul was gradually beaten out with each successive hammer blow.

  Dak’ir was gasping by the end, a reaction to the purging of emotional trauma rather than physical exertion. As the last ring of the anvil echoed into obscurity, he set down the forging hammer and took up a pair of long-handled tongs instead. He had tempered neither blade nor armour but something different entirely, its glow slowly fading. Gouts of steam rushed off the artefact when it breached the water’s surface in the deep vat alongside the anvil. When Dak’ir withdrew it, pinched between the iron fingers of the tongs, it shimmered like molten silver. Captured light from the lava flows blazed over its contours like a fiery sea.

  It was a mask — the simulacrum of a human face; his face, or at least half of it. Dak’ir took the newly forged item in his hands. The metal had cooled but it still seared his fingers. He barely felt it as he trod silently to a plane of hammered silver, around a metre wide and three metres high, resting against the wall of the forge. Dak’ir’s image was reflected in it. Burning red eyes set into an ebon countenance stared back at him. Only the face was actually half black; the other half was bleached near-white. Its normally black pigmentation, the melanin defect that marked all Salamanders, had been burned away. Apothecary Fugis had told him the scar would not heal, that Dak’ir’s defacement was damage caused at the cellular level.

  Dak’ir touched the burnt skin and the memory of the melta-flare on Stratos rekindled in his mind’s eye. Kadai’s death pulled at his gut. As he raised the mask to his face, flashes of remembrance like slivers of ice on calm water floated to the surface of his mind: rock harvesting in the depths of Ignea, hunting sauroch over the Scorian Plain, dredging on the Acerbian Sea — all deadly pursuits, but the formative memories of Dak’ir’s pre-adolescence. The images faded like smoke before a cool wind, leaving a pang of regret. Some part of Dak’ir felt sorrow the loss of his old life, the death of his former existence before he was battle-brother, when he was just Hazon and his father’s son.