Salamander, page 38
As he bolted for the rocky channel that led across the lava chasm, Dak’ir hoped four barrels would be enough. Just before he’d reached the edge of the lava stream, a flash of hot light burned past him and Te’kulcar’s icon in the sergeant’s helm display flickered and went out. A glance back showed him the battle-brother was on the ground a few metres from his previous position, part of his torso melted away.
‘Get him out!’ Dak’ir cried, recognising the brutal effects of the multi-melta. Knowing Apion and Romulus were retreating with Te’kulcar and the fyron ore, Dak’ir raced heedlessly onto the rock channel. Intense heat from the lava flow either side of him prickled at his armour and warning icons flashed up on his display.
Grimly ignoring the discomfort, he was halfway across when the Iron Warrior on the other side emerged from cover. A bark of fire from Pyriel’s bolt pistol, the Librarian a few steps behind the sergeant, clipped the traitor’s pauldron and gorget, pinning him back.
But then another foe stepped into Dak’ir’s eye line.
Nihilan was grinning, a grotesque and bizarre expression given his facial scarring, as his force staff crackled with power. He levelled it at Dak’ir, who could not avoid the shadowy arc lightning that ripped from its tip and struck him full on in the chest. This was the raw energy of the warp, channelled by Nihilan’s sorcery. No one could survive such a blast.
Dak’ir cried out, his voice an agonised scream.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I
A Black Rock Dies
The line was holding. Few Astartes could boast tenacity as unshakeable as the sons of Vulkan. Here, against an unrelenting and seemingly endless horde of orks, the 3rd Company drew upon it like never before.
Heavy guns, aimed from the rear of the Salamanders’ formation, softened up the onrushing greenskins, seeking to close with their opponents and exploit their chief strengths: raw aggression and brutality.
But the Salamanders were equally adept, if not superior, eye-to-eye with the enemy. The recently returned flamers exacted a sizeable toll on the orks as they came through the Devastators’ fusillade.
Unlike the initial assaults against the iron fortress, the orks were predominantly on foot, supported by their piston-legged machineries, crude analogues of Space Marine Dreadnoughts. They eschewed the wagons, bikes and war trucks of the earlier sorties of their kin. Long-ranged guns were largely absent, too, and instead an expansive melee of chainblades, cleavers and clubs thundered at the Salamanders to bludgeon them into submission.
The orks found only fury and iron-hard resistance where they’d expected red-wreathed death and capitulation. Alloyed together, at almost full company strength and protecting the relatively narrow defile in which the iron fortress was situated, the Salamanders were all but impregnable.
Casualties had been few, and those that could no longer serve the Chapter were dragged behind the stalwart line of armour, their absence accounted for by their brothers.
Tsu’gan gunned open the chest of an ork some ten metres away, downing the brute as if it were an enraged sauroch. Another took its place and he killed that one too with a precise burst to its snarling head. Several more followed, greenskins running the punishing gauntlet of Salamander guns. They were obliterated from view when Sergeant Vargo’s depleted Assault squad landed amongst them. The exchange was savage and swift. Vargo and his troopers took to the air on tongues of fire less than a minute later, seeking other foes isolated by their eager bloodlust from the main greenskin throng. Carcasses rendered by bolt and blade, and a patch of scorched earth were all that was left in the Assault squad’s clearing smoke.
‘Press forward!’ The bellowed order of N’keln reached Tsu’gan through the comm-feed as his captain sought to exploit the short gap that had developed through the Salamanders’ recent mauling of the orks.
The line advanced as one. Tsu’gan felt the heavy footfalls of the Terminators alongside his squad through his booted feet.
‘Unto the anvil, brother-sergeant,’ said Praetor, a dark grin upon his face as he swung his thunder hammer towards the next wave of greenskins.
Snorting amusedly at the fatalism of it all, Tsu’gan fired again and his face was lit by the muzzle flare of his bolter. He laughed in tandem with the weapon’s roar.
Overhead, the ork vessels streamed like cancerous veins in the sky. The black rock was venting constantly now. Soon there would not be enough of the ash dunes to hold all the greenskins expelled from its craterous surface.
Tsu’gan laughed harder at the thought of it, before his battle hysteria ebbed with a fresh realisation.
As long as the black rock endured there could be no victory here. If it wasn’t destroyed soon, they’d all be dead.
Dak’ir was swathed in black lightning, the dark energies from Nihilan’s force staff coursing over his armour. He cried out and fell to one knee, fists clenched over his weapons and shuddering against the terrible sorcery.
Vaguely, at the edge of his nulled perception, Dak’ir thought he heard Pyriel bellow his name. His tone was anguished, already grieving. The sergeant’s eyes were clamped shut and saw again the Cindara Plateau, his ascent to the summit the final stage of his induction to become a neophyte. The acrid tang of the Acerbian Sea pricked his nostrils and the hot downdrafts of the Ignean caves of his birth warmed his skin.
Then he returned and the wracking pain of the lightning subsided; his nerve endings, previously ablaze, were still and warm. Dak’ir opened his eyes and realised he was still alive.
An amused look crossed Nihilan’s face, the power in his force staff receding, before he turned and fell back with his traitorous brethren.
Ribbons of sorcerous smoke spilled upwards off Dak’ir’s body as he started to rise, tugged forward in the draft from Pyriel racing past him.
He felt the presence of Ba’ken slowing just behind. Dak’ir staggered to his feet, waving the heavy weapons trooper on.
‘Stop the renegades…’ he slurred, still mustering his strength.
‘I thought you were dead, Hazon,’ Ba’ken murmured, before going on after on Pyriel.
‘I should be,’ rasped Dak’ir, his senses returning. He was about to drive on when he saw the beam of the multi-melta search menacingly out of the darkness. It forced a scream from Pyriel, his shoulder seared by the deadly weapon through his pauldron. The Librarian nearly fell, but managed to hold on.
Gritting his teeth in anger, Dak’ir found Pyriel’s attacker. He recognised his shadowy form from the Aura Hieron temple, back on Scoria. He hadn’t realised at first, but now he knew – this was Kadai’s assassin, the killer of his old captain.
‘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 Va’lin’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 grunted 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 crushed. 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.
‘Get him out!’ Dak’ir cried, recognising the brutal effects of the multi-melta. Knowing Apion and Romulus were retreating with Te’kulcar and the fyron ore, Dak’ir raced heedlessly onto the rock channel. Intense heat from the lava flow either side of him prickled at his armour and warning icons flashed up on his display.
Grimly ignoring the discomfort, he was halfway across when the Iron Warrior on the other side emerged from cover. A bark of fire from Pyriel’s bolt pistol, the Librarian a few steps behind the sergeant, clipped the traitor’s pauldron and gorget, pinning him back.
But then another foe stepped into Dak’ir’s eye line.
Nihilan was grinning, a grotesque and bizarre expression given his facial scarring, as his force staff crackled with power. He levelled it at Dak’ir, who could not avoid the shadowy arc lightning that ripped from its tip and struck him full on in the chest. This was the raw energy of the warp, channelled by Nihilan’s sorcery. No one could survive such a blast.
Dak’ir cried out, his voice an agonised scream.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I
A Black Rock Dies
The line was holding. Few Astartes could boast tenacity as unshakeable as the sons of Vulkan. Here, against an unrelenting and seemingly endless horde of orks, the 3rd Company drew upon it like never before.
Heavy guns, aimed from the rear of the Salamanders’ formation, softened up the onrushing greenskins, seeking to close with their opponents and exploit their chief strengths: raw aggression and brutality.
But the Salamanders were equally adept, if not superior, eye-to-eye with the enemy. The recently returned flamers exacted a sizeable toll on the orks as they came through the Devastators’ fusillade.
Unlike the initial assaults against the iron fortress, the orks were predominantly on foot, supported by their piston-legged machineries, crude analogues of Space Marine Dreadnoughts. They eschewed the wagons, bikes and war trucks of the earlier sorties of their kin. Long-ranged guns were largely absent, too, and instead an expansive melee of chainblades, cleavers and clubs thundered at the Salamanders to bludgeon them into submission.
The orks found only fury and iron-hard resistance where they’d expected red-wreathed death and capitulation. Alloyed together, at almost full company strength and protecting the relatively narrow defile in which the iron fortress was situated, the Salamanders were all but impregnable.
Casualties had been few, and those that could no longer serve the Chapter were dragged behind the stalwart line of armour, their absence accounted for by their brothers.
Tsu’gan gunned open the chest of an ork some ten metres away, downing the brute as if it were an enraged sauroch. Another took its place and he killed that one too with a precise burst to its snarling head. Several more followed, greenskins running the punishing gauntlet of Salamander guns. They were obliterated from view when Sergeant Vargo’s depleted Assault squad landed amongst them. The exchange was savage and swift. Vargo and his troopers took to the air on tongues of fire less than a minute later, seeking other foes isolated by their eager bloodlust from the main greenskin throng. Carcasses rendered by bolt and blade, and a patch of scorched earth were all that was left in the Assault squad’s clearing smoke.
‘Press forward!’ The bellowed order of N’keln reached Tsu’gan through the comm-feed as his captain sought to exploit the short gap that had developed through the Salamanders’ recent mauling of the orks.
The line advanced as one. Tsu’gan felt the heavy footfalls of the Terminators alongside his squad through his booted feet.
‘Unto the anvil, brother-sergeant,’ said Praetor, a dark grin upon his face as he swung his thunder hammer towards the next wave of greenskins.
Snorting amusedly at the fatalism of it all, Tsu’gan fired again and his face was lit by the muzzle flare of his bolter. He laughed in tandem with the weapon’s roar.
Overhead, the ork vessels streamed like cancerous veins in the sky. The black rock was venting constantly now. Soon there would not be enough of the ash dunes to hold all the greenskins expelled from its craterous surface.
Tsu’gan laughed harder at the thought of it, before his battle hysteria ebbed with a fresh realisation.
As long as the black rock endured there could be no victory here. If it wasn’t destroyed soon, they’d all be dead.
Dak’ir was swathed in black lightning, the dark energies from Nihilan’s force staff coursing over his armour. He cried out and fell to one knee, fists clenched over his weapons and shuddering against the terrible sorcery.
Vaguely, at the edge of his nulled perception, Dak’ir thought he heard Pyriel bellow his name. His tone was anguished, already grieving. The sergeant’s eyes were clamped shut and saw again the Cindara Plateau, his ascent to the summit the final stage of his induction to become a neophyte. The acrid tang of the Acerbian Sea pricked his nostrils and the hot downdrafts of the Ignean caves of his birth warmed his skin.
Then he returned and the wracking pain of the lightning subsided; his nerve endings, previously ablaze, were still and warm. Dak’ir opened his eyes and realised he was still alive.
An amused look crossed Nihilan’s face, the power in his force staff receding, before he turned and fell back with his traitorous brethren.
Ribbons of sorcerous smoke spilled upwards off Dak’ir’s body as he started to rise, tugged forward in the draft from Pyriel racing past him.
He felt the presence of Ba’ken slowing just behind. Dak’ir staggered to his feet, waving the heavy weapons trooper on.
‘Stop the renegades…’ he slurred, still mustering his strength.
‘I thought you were dead, Hazon,’ Ba’ken murmured, before going on after on Pyriel.
‘I should be,’ rasped Dak’ir, his senses returning. He was about to drive on when he saw the beam of the multi-melta search menacingly out of the darkness. It forced a scream from Pyriel, his shoulder seared by the deadly weapon through his pauldron. The Librarian nearly fell, but managed to hold on.
Gritting his teeth in anger, Dak’ir found Pyriel’s attacker. He recognised his shadowy form from the Aura Hieron temple, back on Scoria. He hadn’t realised at first, but now he knew – this was Kadai’s assassin, the killer of his old captain.
‘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 Va’lin’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 grunted 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 crushed. 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.
