“Ghor’gan…” bellowed Nihilan to the Dragon Warrior with the multi-melta, the rest of his command smothered by the noise of roaring bolters as he and the other renegade drew away into the darkness. The one called Ghor’gan merely nodded and stood his ground. Nihilan was trying to escape.
This could not be allowed to happen. Dak’ir launched himself across the lava stream. It looked an impossible jump, but incredibly he landed on the other side, the heels of his boots scraping at the edge of where the rock fell away to hot oblivion. Ignoring the Iron Warrior, Dak’ir used his momentum to drive on at the Dragon Warrior with the multi-melta. Reacting to the sudden threat, Ghor’gan swung the deadly weapon about, a nimbus of energy already building in its twin-nosed barrel.
Pyriel was nearing the end of the narrow rock bridge when the last Iron Warrior threw himself into his path. In his mind, the Librarian heard the slow pull, the long metal report of the depressed trigger as the traitor unleashed his bolter at him.
A bolter’s velocity is ferociously quick, its rate of fire faster than an eye-blink. Pyriel’s mind was faster.
Bolter shells exploded ineffectually against an invisible shield, dense blooms of light rippling in midair with each percussive impact.
Pyriel ran on, seeing Dak’ir land ahead of him on the other side, and reached his assailant. Changing tactics, the Iron Warrior slowed his fire rate to use his sarissa blade. Pyriel had unsheathed his force sword and parried the thrust meant to impale him. With the Iron Warrior unbalanced, he thrust himself and rammed the blade of his eldritch weapon halfway into the traitor’s stomach. Plates of ceramite parted easily before the force sword, undone by its shimmering power field, before the Librarian lowered the invisible shield and channelled his psychic might through the edge of the weapon.
At once the Iron Warrior sagged as his soul was sundered, cast into the oblivion of the warp to be fed upon by daemons. Smoke exuded from the traitor’s eye-slits and a deep light glowed from within. He screamed, a long and wailing note that echoed somewhere beyond the realm of reality, and sank into a heap, a scored-out husk all that remained..
With the traitor slain, Pyriel looked ahead to his battle-brother.
Fuelled by fury, Dak’ir hurled himself at Ghor’gan. The multi-melta’s beam stabbed out, but the renegade’s aim was off, pressurised into an early shot by the Salamander’s headlong assault. It scorched the edge of Dak’ir’s battle-helm, the actual beam itself passing a few centimetres overhead. It was close enough to burn through ceramite. It kept burning, melting away at the armour around Dak’ir’s head, who wrenched it off before the corrosive effects ate through it completely and started in on his face.
The ruined battle-helm clattered to the ground, half-disintegrated, as Dak’ir hit Ghor’gan with a roar. Swinging his chainsword two-handed, the Salamander tore into the heavy weapon that had ended Kadai’s life, shearing it in two.
Pyriel got to the end of the narrow span across the lava stream before he realised Ba’ken wasn’t with him. He turned, with half a glance at Dak’ir hammering at the massive Dragon Warrior, before searching for Ba’ken.
The heavy weapons trooper was retreating back down the rock bridge.
“Brother!” cried Pyriel, a hint of accusation in his voice.
Ba’ken half turned his head.
“I cannot leave him, Librarian,” was his only explanation.
Pyriel was about to cry out again, when he saw that Ba’ken was heading for the boy, Va’lin.
Geysers of fire and lava were breaking the surface of the cavern now, the forked cracks in the earth splitting apart and allowing Scoria’s blood to seep through. Va’lin had retreated to one corner of the cavern, keeping his head down and himself well hidden. Thick veins of encroaching lava webbed his retreat route to the entrance and spears of flame shot sporadically from the ground around him. The boy was crouched atop the skeletal frame of an excavator, clinging on for his life and too afraid to move.
In his determination to reach the Dragon Warriors, and perhaps the pain in his shoulder caused by the melta beam’s savage caress, Pyriel had failed to hear Val’in’s plaintive cry. Human life was important; Vulkan had taught them that. The Salamanders were protectors as well as warriors.
Ba’ken had heard the boy and was answering his noble calling as a Fire-born of Nocturne.
“In Vulkan’s name, brother,” the Librarian muttered. Smoke was billowing into the cavern now and occluded his view. The hulking form of Ba’ken was lost in the grey and black.
Returning his attention to Dak’ir, Pyriel had taken just a step from the rocky span when a forked seam split the ground before his feet and a titanic wall of intense heat and fire impeded him.
Thrown off by the force of the flame-geyser’s expulsion, Pyriel had to scramble back up so as not to be pitched into the lava stream. Warning icons flashed red on a status slate in his gauntlet. Tentatively, he went to touch the fiery barrier but withdrew his hand as the heat sensors in his armour spiked. His gauntlet came back badly scorched and partially melted.
Behind the flickering heat, the struggle between Salamander and renegade became an amorphous haze.
“Dak’ir!” he cried, venting his impotency and frustration. There was nothing he could do; the wall of fire stretched the width of the cavern. Dak’ir was alone.
The Dragon Warrior let the cleaved ends of the multi-melta fall from his grasp, and jabbed his left claw into Dak’ir’s neck like a blade, while the other slashed at his assailant’s wrist. The Salamander’s gorget took the brunt of the blow to the neck, but Dak’ir was stunned and lost his grip on the chainsword when Gor’ghan’s scything talons ripped a chunk of ceramite from his gauntlet. The empty thud of the weapon hitting the ground, the churning teeth slowing to a stop, felt like a death knell.
Dak’ir recovered quickly, barely noticing the barrier of fire that had erupted behind him, butting the Dragon Warrior’s helmet and crumpling the nose despite the pain it caused him. Ghor’gan staggered back with a muffled cry of pain, ripping off the helm to reveal a scaled visage as dark as burnt umber and perpetually flaking. He tore at the shards of ceramite embedded in his reptilian face, casting the bloody wreckage aside before flying at Dak’ir.
The Salamander met him mid-attack and the two of them locked together, neither with the strength or purpose to gain the upper hand.
“Murdering dog!” Dak’ir raged, about to spit acid from his betcher’s gland into the renegade’s face when Ghor’gan stopped him by shoving his forearm under the Salamander’s chin and forcing his mouth shut. The caustic bile bubbled over Dak’ir’s bottom lip harmlessly.
“Fight with honour,” countered the Dragon Warrior, his voice like crackling magma. In the frantic struggle, Dak’ir noticed a ragged wound, only half-healed, across his neck and assumed this was the reason for Ghor’gan’s throaty cadence.
“You possess none,” Dak’ir accused when he’d pushed back the renegade’s grip on his neck. “I know you are the assassin that shot my captain when his back was turned.”
Ghor’gan’s face darkened in what might have been regret.
“I am a warhound, like you,” he rasped, then granted as he tried to seize a hand around Dak’ir’s throat. The Dragon Warrior was big, easily the size and heft of Ba’ken, and Dak’ir was finding his strength a severe test. “I follow orders, even those I disagree with. It is the way of war,” he concluded.
“Pleading for mercy already, renegade?”
“No.” Ghor’gan’s answer was flat, his tone almost weary. “I just wanted you to know before you die.” The Dragon Warrior exerted his full strength, pressing Dak’ir into a crouch, and slipping his claws around his neck.
Dak’ir felt his throat constricting from the external pressure. He raked gauntleted fingers over Ghor’gan’s face, trying to leaven his grip, but came away with a fistful of shed skin instead. Ghor’gan snarled at the ragged wound in his cheek but kept the pressure up, extending his arms to force Dak’ir away. The
Salamander went for his holstered pistol but the renegade saw the move and smashed him into the cavern wall. White fire flared behind Dak’ir’s eyes as hot knives stabbed his side where he’d struck the rock.
“Don’t resist,” growled Ghor’gan, almost fatherly, “Your pain is almost at an end…”
Dak’ir’s lungs felt like withered sacks in his chest, as his throat was slowly being crashed. Darkness impinged at the edge of his sight and he felt himself slipping…
He reached out, trying to deny the inevitable. Pyriel was far away, behind the wall of fire. Dak’ir was alone with Ghor’gan, his old captain’s killer about to add to his murder tally.
Ba’ken reached the edge of the growing lava pool slowly encircling Va’lin on his island of metal. The boy was choking on the sulphurous fumes and smoke wreathed his tiny refuge. Ba’ken would have to jump. He couldn’t make it and return with the boy as well if he kept on his heavy flamer rig. Without a second thought, he disengaged the locking straps and shrugged the bulky canisters off his back, laying them carefully on the ground with the weapon itself.
Muttering a painful litany as he traced his hand lightly across the barrel of the gun he had forged and crafted, Ba’ken rose to his feet and leapt to Va’lin.
“Climb on, boy,” he said, once on the other side. The skeletal frame of the excavator was already buckling under the Salamander’s weight, whilst around them the lava crept ever closer.
Va’lin clambered onto Ba’ken’s shoulders, clinging desperately to the Fire-born’s neck and pauldron.
“Don’t let go,” the Salamander told the boy and launched himself back across, just as the lava flow began eating away at the excavator, until in a few seconds it had consumed it.
The molten stream raging through the cavern, bisecting it with a ribbon of viscous heat, had spilled over the rock span. There was no way back to Pyriel and Dak’ir. Ba’ken could scarcely see them through the smoke and falling debris.
He cried out. “Brothers!”
A spurt of flame erupted from the earth near where he was standing and Ba’ken stepped away, grimacing.
“Brothers!” he bellowed again, his voice swallowed by the cracking of earth, the roar of fire answering.
The end of Scoria was at hand. There was nothing left for this world now. Maybe there was nothing left for Dak’ir or Pyriel either. Beseeching the Emperor and Vulkan for their safe return, Ba’ken fell back reluctantly.
Va’lin was suffocating; the Salamander heard it in the boy’s wheezing breaths, his shuddering chest.
Ba’ken turned and made for the exit.
“Hang on,” he said grimly, racing for the tunnel back to the surface.
In the midst of the fighting, Tsu’gan had thought he’d seen Romulus and Apion return from the emergence hole, a wounded Brother Te’kulcar draped across their shoulders. He couldn’t see the fyron ore, but then his view was fleeting in the press of combat.
A full assault was ordered and the Salamanders were pressing the orks with all the flame and fury they could muster. The line was no more; it had given way to probing attacks launched at strategic points throughout the greenskin horde. Witnessed from above, the assaults would have looked bullet trajectories, forcing their way slowly through the dark green flesh of the beast.
Mob leaders, totem carriers, psykers — these were the Salamanders’ targets. Cripple the orks’ leadership. Show them their mightiest could all fall beneath a Fire-born’s flame and blade. Here the Assault squads excelled, Vargo and Gannon conducting raiding attacks on vulnerable positions or leaders exposed by the sudden death or retreat of their brethren.
Thousands of greenskins lay dead for little reply. That said, every Salamander casualty was felt keenly. Fugis had returned to the fight with Brother-Sergeant Agatone. The two fought shoulder-to-shoulder, their courage worthy of even Vulkan’s praise. But the Apothecary, as heroic as he was, couldn’t minister to all of his fallen brothers. If they survived this fight, there would be much work for Fugis to do in the aftermath.
Tsu’gan had lost sight of them after N’keln’s full assault order and he wondered if they fought still.
It was stretched and the ash dunes were like a copper desert now, so stained were they with blood. Tremors wracked the undulating landscape almost constantly and dark lightning ripped strips into the sky as the volcanoes vented. Their voices were a doom-laden refrain to the heavy thunder overhead.
“The world is ending, brother,” roared Tsu’gan. He had not left Praetor’s side, although the sergeant’s squad had fragmented in the dense melee. Iagon, for instance, was elsewhere on the field of war. Tsu’gan hoped he was still alive.
“A fitting end for us then,” Praetor replied, crashing an ork with a crackling blow from his thunder hammer, “consumed by smoke and fire. All is ash at the end of days, brother.”
Tsu’gan smiled to himself — it sounded like something Brother Emek would say.
“All is ash,” Tsu’gan agreed and fought on.
Above the rising tumult of Scoria’s last storm, just audible over the raging battle, the churning report of metal could be heard echoing from the innards of the iron fortress.
Peaking above the lip of the wall, the stub-nose of the long cannon forged by the Iron Warriors but purified by the Salamanders emerged. Dust and rock was cascading from its metal casing in huge drifts, its pneumatic platform raising it from the depths of the keep to glower imperiously over the surface of Scoria like the metal finger of a dark and vengeful god.
For a moment, a fleeting second only, the fighting slowed as all who beheld the cannon’s emergence gaped in awe. Its eye was fixed heavenward as it sought to destroy a black sun.
Fyron-fuelled capacitors charged the air, their throb and pulse emitted as a wave of force as the cannon was empowered and a second later, unleashed.
II
Retribution
Dak’ir’s world was darkening. His arms grew heavy as his vision faded to black and his struggles against Ghor’gan ebbed.
“That’s it,” he heard the crackling magma voice say. “That’s it, find peace…”
A trembling in the earth below prevented the Salamander’s fall into oblivion. When it shook the very ground, its violent insistence threw the grappling Space Marines apart.
Clutching his neck, Dak’ir coughed and spluttered hot, smoky air back into his lungs. The sensation reminded him of Nocturne and the caves of Ignea — it was like breathing in a panacea.
Ghor’gan was getting to his feet as Dak’ir’s vision cleared. The Dragon Warrior braced himself against the rock wall as the entire cavern shook. A huge crack ran up the side of it as geysers of scalding steam and fire roared through the slowly fragmenting ground. In places small chasms and crag-walled pitfalls opened up like yawning mouths, their liquid tongues hot and glowing below. The renegade moved around them, stalking towards Dak’ir, determined to finish what he had begun.
“Relent, little Salamander,” he said, his voice low and weary.
Ghor’gan didn’t see the combat blade in Dak’ir’s hand until it was too late. The blade was only half a metre long but the Salamander sank it to the hilt in the renegade’s chest. The precise blow exploited a gap in the ceramite plates and penetrated armour, bone and flesh.
“A life for a life,” snarled Dak’ir. “My captain must be avenged.”
Ghor’gan’s mouth curled in pain; his eyes narrow slits of agony. Even as Dak’ir twisted the blade, searching out vital organs and soft tissue, the renegade fought on and dug his claws into the Salamander’s neck.
Dak’ir cried out, aiming a savage punch to the Dragon Warrior’s ear even as he shoved the combat blade harder with his other hand. Ghor’gan shifted his head, and took the blow on his much harder jaw instead, but it jarred enough to force him to release his claw.
Blood was dripping off Ghor’gan’s extracted talon when a ball of fire rolled through the wall of heat nearby, wreathed in flames and trailing smoke. From it emerged Pyriel, fu
rled within the protective confines of his drakescale mantle.
Out of the corner of his eye, Dak’ir saw Pyriel move to assist him but the sergeant urged the Librarian on as he kept the bulky Dragon Warrior pinned.
“Stop Nihilan,” he roared, his voice hoarse from being half-choked to death. “Don’t let the bastard escape again.”
Pyriel didn’t even pause. The Librarian knew his duty and sped on after Nihilan and his brood.
“Just you and I again,” sneered Dak’ir, scenting the sulphur gas streaming from a craterous hole behind the Dragon Warrior. A sudden idea occurred to him. “You’re not Fire-born, are you renegade…”
The idling of powerful engines throbbed ahead of him as Pyriel thundered down the tunnel after Nihilan and the other Dragon Warrior.
Dak’ir was right — they could not be allowed to escape again. If it had to end here on Scoria then the renegades would die with them. The Librarian could feel peace if he knew that was so.
Too late, Pyriel arrived at the tunnel’s terminus. In the expansive cavern before him, a Stormbird was waiting. Its engines were burning with a dull, red glow. The embarkation ramp in the gunship’s hold was slammed down. The fang-mouthed Dragon Warrior was ferrying the last of the fyron ore aboard via the six-wheeled loader, his master looking on.
Just before Nihilan turned to see the foe in his midst, Pyriel looked up and realised the roof to the cavern was vaulted. In fact, it tapered several hundred metres up into a narrow chimney that led directly to the surface. Narrow, yes, but wide enough to accommodate the span of a Stormbird if piloted correctly.
A psychic cry ripped from Pyriel’s throat as he recognised his chance to stop the Dragon Warriors was already beyond his grasp. He fashioned a bolt of flame from the essence of the warp, channelling it down his force sword to lash at Nihilan. At least he would sear him.
[Tome of Fire 01] - Salamander Page 38
