Lords Of Nocturne, page 101
‘With our deeds, raise them!’ he’d proclaimed to the wall before the siege began, in earshot of the huddled civilians. ‘Our courage shall be an example to all. It will galvanise our people and show them what it means to be Fire-born. We are Vulkan’s shield!’
The great cheer that had followed was gratifying, but these were words and as such meant nothing without action. It had been too long since the Third stood in glory. He would restore them, return honour to their name, and the long diminished Inferno Guard to pre-eminence.
Even though he openly refuted such things, he’d once thought the captaincy of Third to be a poison barb, cursed to suffer endless ill-fortune. Now he believed it was a calling. All he had to do to answer it was survive.
The loss of the void shield was troubling and what Techmarines the captain could spare were already working hard to repair Hesiod’s generator. The deep quakes, the ones that shook the bedrock and had split the Sanctuary’s foundation stone, concerned Agatone the most. He’d experienced the Time of Trial on many occasions before but this was different, almost apocalyptic, and now this… this creature.
‘What is that thing?’ he said, scowling at its scaled and muscular body, its long leathern neck and vast unfurled wings. Old paintings of Terran myth and rumours of the lowest deeps beneath Mount Deathfire arose unbidden in his mind. ‘It looks like…’
‘It is a drakon,’ uttered Vel’cona, ‘or at least a simulacrum of one.’ He was at the captain’s side and vanquished a scurrying band of galthite pirates with a torrent of serpentine flame. Their noisome flesh cooked in their armour, their saurian faces ablaze. ‘It is also known by other names… wyvern, felldrake… estragon. Fenrisians call them ormr or wurm.’ The Master Librarian’s inflection was thick with rustic accent, hinting of the campaigns he had fought beside the Wolves. He followed the monster’s immense shadow with his eyes until it reached the cloud bank and disappeared. Even then his gaze lingered.
‘In ancient days, primitive human tribes worshipped and feared it. They called it dragon.’
Agatone slowly shook his head. Through the comm-feed in his battle-helm reports were coming in from the wall sentries that a massed force of Dragon Warriors was marching across the ash-dunes to meet them. There was little time for investigation.
‘Whatever name the beast goes by,’ he said, ‘it tossed those renegades like they were chaff.’ He met Shen’kar’s gaze. ‘What if it is from the deep world, roused in anger at Nihilan’s sacrilege?’
Every culture of the civilised galaxy had its tales of monsters, Nocturne more than most. Drakes had many names, not just their given ones that Salamanders had rune-branded on their flesh. There was the lohikäärme and the tulikäärme. Ancient sok and the serpentine kulebre. These were old beasts, legends of a forgotten world before even the time of Vulkan.
‘No, its aura is malfeasant. Can’t you taste the acrid taint of it on your tongue, brother? Like rusted metal and putrefaction. This thing did not come from the earth. It is a daemon, here to lay waste to us all.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I
SACRIFICES
Tsu’gan kept low and fast as he crossed the dunes. He’d scavenged a bolter with a half clip and another spare from the body of a dead renegade half-buried in the ash-sand to add to his chainsword. They were battered weapons, unworthy of a Salamander, but then he reminded himself he was no longer one of them.
Killing his enemies was all that drove Tsu’gan now. Achieve that and he might attain some small measure of peace. He was following the Marines Malevolent’s trail when he heard the reverberant screech tear into the air and turned.
Something reptilian and borne aloft on membranous wing had just disappeared into the thick cloud swathing all of Nocturne. He suppressed an involuntary shudder as he realised what this must be. During his incarceration, Tsu’gan had heard mutterings about the ‘vessel’. On several occasions, Iagon had goaded him with it, suggesting a loathsome fate for the once-Salamander.
He thought back to the Aura Hieron temple on Stratos. Nihilan had threatened him with daemonic possession, tried to turn him to the renegade’s cause. He’d done it again on Hell-stalker. Though his masochism had made him weak, even fatalistic, Tsu’gan had refused the sorcerer’s overtures. He was broken inside but no traitor. Willingly, he would never betray his brothers.
Iagon, though… he was all too willing. Rage and jealously were potent nectars for the soulless fiends that lurked beyond the veil. Such weakness thinned the gossamer membrane keeping mortal and daemon separate.
The monstrous creature was gone for now, lost to the roiling night above, and Iagon was first amongst its victims.
‘I pity you,’ Tsu’gan muttered, knowing that if he returned to where he’d killed the traitor there would be no bodily remains.
Thunderous impacts shook the earth, signalling the use of ordnance. Renewed conflict had broken out amongst Hesiod’s sallying defenders and the renegades’ second front. The opening salvos were devastatingly loud and monstrously destructive. Tsu’gan lost his footing more than once as he scrambled between flowing lava channels to the summit of a volcanic crag. Lorkar had come this way. His troops were lying in wait in a ravine below.
Tsu’gan kept down, crouched at the foot of a jutting rock split in half by the tectonic event ripping into Nocturne. Its broken peak was scattered across the crag’s flanks and basin. It was large enough for him to hide behind and creep closer to the Marines Malevolent.
One was pointing and Tsu’gan followed the direction of his outstretched arm to where a vast column of tanks was rolling into view. His gaze alighted on Tu’Shan, leading from the front in Promethean. The Land Raider was ancient, its twin-flamers on either sponson clearing a burning path to the heart of the Dragon Warrior positions.
A squadron of Predator battle tanks, Destructor and Annihilator variants, rumbled along in its wake. Autocannon turrets and side-mounted lascannons riddled the static enemy artillery with armour-busting fire.
A missile battery went up in a blaze of fire and shrapnel. The explosion spread to a heavier ground-to-air Bombard, killing its crew and scuppering the war engine. Renegade armour that had been focused on the advancing ground force from the city turned to intercede against the flanking threat.
Tsu’gan watched them gun their track beds in desperate rotational manoeuvres as they tried to bring firing arcs to bear. Ponderous ordnance tanks, the Whirlwinds and Vindicators of Master Kor’hadron’s Armoury, laid down suppressing fire from a distance. Rocket bursts chewed up the earth in front of the enemy tanks and split their tracks, slowing their response to Tu’Shan’s flanking column. Fat shells spat from the mouths of Demolisher cannons tipped entire vehicles onto their sides where the escaping crew were lit up like burning torches from Tu’Shan’s flamestorm side-mounts.
They’d been battered, the Chapter Master and his tank commanders, doubtless come from Themis, but their fury was brazier-hot.
Dragon Warrior tanks ruptured and died in the aggressive cannonade from the forward Predators and Land Raiders. The hulls of some burst apart in the barrage, others merely slowed to an all-stop, billowing smoke.
Tu’Shan rolled over the mechanised outriders, smashing the wrecks from his path and grinding foot troops to paste beneath his iron-shod tracks. In a few short minutes, the artillery was almost totally destroyed and the Dragon Warriors were in retreat. But they were a shadow of the forces Tsu’gan had seen arrayed on the Hell-stalker. Nihilan had cohorts and fighting battalions numbering in the hundreds. This was just a fraction of his martial strength.
As he picked his way silently down into the ravine, he wondered what the sorcerer was saving in reserve and why he hadn’t committed his entire army. Nocturne was wounded, her blood was evident across the cracked and fiery earth, but she wasn’t dead. This wasn’t the abject annihilation that Nihilan had threatened.
With the faint scrape of metal against scabbard, Tsu’gan drew his borrowed chainblade as the first of Lorkar’s sentries came into view.
What is your purpose, sorcerer? he asked himself, preparing a kill-strike aimed at the Marine Malevolent’s back.
An answer of sorts came with the sound of leathern wings flapping on the breeze and a crimson shadow bolting out of the ash clouds. Like a hunter-seeker on an inexorable course, it arrowed towards Tu’Shan.
Nihilan embarked from the belly of the Stormbird to stand upon a vast and yawning crater.
Two of his Glaive followed, taking up position at either shoulder.
Ramlek crouched at the edge, looking down. His boot disturbed a piece of rock that went skittering off into the gloomy depths.
‘Deep,’ he uttered, a ghosting of fine cinder spilling from his fanged vox-grille.
Thark’n nodded, his thick arms folded across his chest.
‘It leads to the heart of Nocturne,’ Nihilan told them, ‘and our destiny.’
Forged by the fury of the seismic cannon, the bore hole was also wide. It walls were ridged, and descended in molten rings. In the manner of a colossal drill, the energy lance had pierced the many layers of rock and earth between the surface and the magma halls beneath it. Laid open like a wound, Nihilan had but to turn the enemy’s eye away and he could walk into this realm unmolested.
‘Soon…’ he promised, though the intended recipient wasn’t listening, at least not in any conventional sense.
Behind them, the shadow of the Stormbird slowly receded as Ekrine guided it above the cloud layer and out of sight. He’d stay nearby but also hidden.
Close to the summit of Mount Deathfire, the air was acrid and foul with sulphur. Shimmering heat, exuded off the lava tracts and growing magma pools, flaked the paint from their armour. Only the ceramite shielding kept them from burning up.
Banks of pyroclastic cloud ringed the peaks that only Nihilan’s witch-sight could penetrate. Far below, he saw the battle raging and the daemon as it descended on Tu’Shan.
‘Even if it doesn’t end you, there’s a second blade with your name on it,’ Nihilan promised under his breath.
Though he couldn’t see it, all creatures touched by the warp could detect the presence of another. Especially powerful ones blazed like hell-fires.
‘Why the worm and not the warrior?’ asked Ramlek. He looked up at his lord. ‘And why leave its manifestation to chance?’
He was not questioning in the sense that he disagreed, the dutiful hound would never do that; he merely wanted to understand.
‘Tsu’gan was more resilent than I thought.’
‘Mind and flesh,’ Ramlek agreed. He rubbed at his neck where the razor-fan the once-Salamander had thrust him into had severed it.
‘Possession was far from a certainty,’ Nihilan continued. ‘Resistance, or the very least hindrance, could have ruined everything. I needed a pliable vessel. Iagon was perfect, flawed in every way.’
He neglected to say that a part of him respected Tsu’gan, was in awe of his rage and determination. In him he saw an ally, a potential convert. Even now, after everything and on the cusp of achieving his ultimate goal, Nihilan hadn’t abandoned the idea of turning the once-Salamader to his cause. But that wasn’t for Ramlek to know. Spit on a dog’s food enough and soon it will look to find its meat elsewhere, perhaps even the flesh of its master.
Nihilan’s eyes narrowed as he contemplated the strands of fate he’d woven to bring about this reality. ‘It wasn’t chance, Ramlek. It was preordained. The worm, as you call him, hated his old sergeant. Murder was inevitable, and Tsu’gan provided it as I knew he would. After its millennia of yearning, Engel’saak is free.’
A clenched fist suggested Ramlek’s barely restrained zeal. ‘I would witness its slaughter.’ He brandished a hefty power axe in his left hand. ‘My blade yearns for the kill. I envy Nor’hak. At least he will face the Firedrakes.’
Nihilan scoffed. ‘Don’t be so quick to crave blood and death. There’ll be plenty to slake your desires, Ramlek.’ He gazed down into the swirling smoke. ‘I would rather leave Engel’saak with that bastard Lorkar and his cronies. Daemons have no true allegiance, save to themselves. Be glad you are up here and not below with the other sacrificial dogs. Not out of desire, do I bring them to the altar to bare their necks. It is out of necessity and the furthering of our creed. Everything has led to this.’
Ramlek bowed his head. ‘Your will is great, my lord.’
‘It will need to be greater for what follows.’
Up in the vaults of the world the thunder was louder and the crimson lightning fiercer. A bolt jagged out of the darkness, striking the crater’s edge not far from Ramlek’s feet. Tiny pieces of rock caromed off his armour but the Dragon Warrior didn’t even flinch.
Nihilan lifted his eyes to the sky. ‘She voices her displeasure.’ The darkness of the crater beckoned.
Ramlek turned his head. ‘What is that sound?’
A sonorous mewling echoed from the deeps, resonating off the walls and carried all the way to the surface.
‘Drakesong,’ answered Nihilan, ‘A cry for the dying world. We move now.’
Engaging the ignition stud on his jump pack, Nihilan felt the gout of chemical-blue flame lick from the exhaust-port. Angular vanes attached to the jet engine to assist with trajectory fanned out like draconian wings. Convection vents manufactured into the sides plumed invisible heat vapour. A cruel machine-spirit lurked within, eager to be let loose.
Nihilan obliged it, leaping off the crater’s edge and into the abyss.
‘Stay close,’ he growled against the rushing descent wind. ‘There may be defenders we don’t know about. Without the daemon to augment them, my powers have lessened.’
The Glaive warriors were as the sorcerer’s shadow, ever at his heel down into the long darkness of Nocturne’s subterranea.
II
BORN OF FIRE
Pyriel unclenched his eyes and found he was still alive. Heat radiated off his armour and seized his limbs, despite the psychic shield he’d erected. It was hard to uncurl his body and stand. He felt fused together, as if labouring under a heavy weight that he couldn’t throw off.
It took a few seconds for him to realise he was breathing through his battle-helm’s internal filters. All the oxygen in the vault had been burned up in the fire. The air blurred with heat haze. It was heady and thick, like moving through liquid.
Fugis was crouched next to him, huddled in a foetal position. Pyriel reached out, snatching his hand back when he realised his gauntlets would likely scald the Apothecary.
‘Hold on, brother,’ he murmured. His tongue was leaden too, his lips reluctant to function.
Fugis was suffocating.
Staggering, the lactic acid in his knee joints like blade thrusts with every step, Pyriel hit the wall and hammered on the door release.
He called out, rasping, ‘Elysius…’
The vault wouldn’t open. Its gears protesting, the ancient mechanism whined and growled at the punishment it had suffered. Still sluggish, struggling to stay on his feet, Pyriel said again, ‘Elysius!’
Fugis was suffocating.
A crackling shield of energy dissipated from around the kneeling Chapain. He arose on steady limbs, feeding a jolt of power into his crozius.
‘Step aside!’ he commanded, swinging the mace around in a blazing arc. The first hit made a dent but the door wouldn’t yield. Elysius took the power stave in two hands and swung again. This time he made a crack. It was wide enough for his fingers to get some purchase. For good measure, he made a third strike and opened the crack a little further for greater leverage.
‘Now, brother,’ he said, ‘help me!’
Together they pulled at the door to the vault, Pyriel low and Elysius high, one at either side. Slowly, the two halves of the gate parted and the heat began to escape pushed out by the onrushing air.
Elysius grabbed Pyriel’s gorget and pulled him close. His face was a mask of anger but untouched by the flame. ‘What was that? What have we done here?’
The Librarian was almost too dazed to answer. He fought for lucidity, but could remember nothing after the conflagration had engulfed them.
‘Fire…’ he murmured, ‘there was only fire…’
Elysius struck him with the back of his gauntlet, hard enough that Pyriel slid a half metre across the floor. Relentless, the Chaplain advanced on him.
‘Gather yourself! You mind has been overwhelmed but it will pass.’ In the corner of the chamber, Dak’ir’s still body was slumped on its side and unmoving. ‘I need to know what I have sanctioned.’
Pyriel was coming around, but it was taking time. He looked incredulously at the Chaplain. ‘How are you?’
Elyisus brandished his rosarius. ‘Faith protects me.’ There was a mania in his wide eyes. ‘What did we unleash? Tell me, Pyriel!’
The Librarian turned to the corner of the chamber. It was blackened, the metal scorched. Reduced to a few scattered pieces, the ancient armour from Scoria was no more.
‘Dak’ir…’
Fugis had crawled over to the Lexicanum’s prone form and was trying to check his vitals.
‘Apothecary?’ Elysius called from across the room.
Fugis hauled himself up so he was kneeling by Dak’ir.
‘Not even warm,’ he muttered.
Elysius left Pyriel gibbering as he tried to recover from the psychic storm.
‘Our Librarian is gone for the time being, what do you have left?’
Steam was emanating from the Apothecary’s skin. Unlike the others, he wasn’t wearing power armour but he’d still survived. It seemed a message might not be the only thing he’d brought back from the desert.
His fingers were trembling. Fugis noted the Chaplain’s worried expression.
