Lords Of Nocturne, page 66
Zartath bared his fangs. ‘You had best be right about your relic, son of Vulkan,’ he said and bolted back down the ridge the way they had come.
It was a fighting retreat. No way could they hold the ridge against such numbers and with the weakened state of their forces, but they couldn’t hope to outpace the dark eldar either.
Elysius was falling back when he blocked a falchion intended to cut his throat. He headbutted the shrieking wych and sent her tumbling. Out the corner of his eye he saw one of Zartath’s mercenaries fall to a spear in the chest. Another became tangled by a net of razor-wire and swiftly bled to death. The Astartes were holding their own.
Ba’ken and Iagon had made it back to the base of the ridge. Koto was engaged in running battle still. Zartath and Kor’be were reluctant to give ground and fought savagely.
‘Fall back to defensive positions!’ Ba’ken cried. The strain in his voice betrayed the severity of the wounds he’d sustained fighting the hound-creatures in the amphitheatre.
It wouldn’t be enough. A last stand here would be just that. The Sigil. Something had triggered a desire to preserve it in the Chaplain’s mind. He needed to keep it safe. Help was coming. With the dead scattered across the ridge, the human mercenaries all but wiped out, Ionnes farthest back with the surviving Night Devils, Elysius countered his brother-sergeant’s order.
‘Retreat! Keep moving!’ Through the melee, breaking another wych against his crozius, Elysius found a way to Ba’ken’s side. ‘Stand now and we’ll be overrun.’
The brother-sergeant nodded, before making a laboured parry against a wych’s serrated blade. He swung himself, trying a get a blow in, before she sprang away to engage a different enemy.
Ba’ken was panting hard – his wounds, the battle, were taking a toll on the big warrior. ‘Why doesn’t she attack?’
Helspereth had regained the summit of the ridge but had yet to commit herself to battle. She held a third of her coven back with her, too.
Even the wyches that had engaged them were taking bites at the Astartes but then feinting away before they could be drawn into a deadly combat. All the while the Salamanders and Black Dragons were giving ground.
Elysius’s gaze narrowed. Both groups of Astartes were bunching. Barring the Night Devils, the humans were almost all dead. ‘They’re herding us. Culling the chaff first and then priming us for the kill. It’s sport to them. And it extends the sensation, the soul reaping.’
Pegged back like cattle surrounded by a ring of patient predators, the Astartes came shoulder to shoulder and the fighting stopped.
‘What now?’ snapped Iagon, wearing a fresh gash across his cheek.
The wyches were closing. Twelve of the twenty Helspereth had unleashed remained, their blades blood-slick but far from sated. Hell-red flared in their cruel eyes.
‘Here is where you tell us you have a way out of this place,’ Elysius hissed to Zartath.
A deep rumbling, the distant sound of churning machinery buried far beneath the earth, answered for him. Gripped by sudden superstitious paralysis, the wyches ground to a halt. Rivulets of dust and dislodged pieces of debris were cascading from the structures around them.
It was the same as before, when they’d originally landed in the broken temple. Elysius realised the city was moving. Some infernal engine, its science lost to myth or intellectual decay, compelled it. Avenues and corridors shifted, bridges and platforms rose and fell, dead ends became conduits, towers plummeted and new levels rose out of the darkness. Capricious will manoeuvred it without discernible scheme or design. The way behind the Salamanders and their allies opened, a vast crack splitting the platform they were on. The endless city became an ever-widening chasm behind them, the level they were on a precipice.
Zartath had his back to the Chaplain. The Black Dragon was laughing. Out beyond the edge of the precipice, hot winds squalled and twisted. Splinter dust abraded the Astartes’ armour and made their skin itch. A lightning flash from higher up threw their shadows in front of them. The wraith-like silhouettes were there and gone in an instant, like the echo of their lives.
‘We were already dead when we came to this place,’ growled Iagon, before Elysius’s glare silenced him.
Ba’ken couldn’t say much of anything. He was holding his chest, a recently revived Tonnhauser and the other two Night Devils supporting him.
‘Well?’ Elysius pressed the Black Dragon.
Helspereth and the rest of her coven were descending the ridge. The wych queen’s shrieking commands overrode their fear at the sudden dysjunction.
‘You’re not going to like it,’ Zartath replied, legs braced as the tremors slowly started to abate. He turned to Kor’be. The big Black Dragon nodded as he recognised some previously held agreement between the two of them.
‘Make ’em count,’ Zartath whispered. There was a flash of acknowledgement in Kor’be’s eyes.
‘On the shores of Cable, a small iron world in a sector I’ve long forgotten,’ Zartath began, slowly backing away, ‘my brothers and I fought the warband of the Incarnadine Supplicants to the edge of a fire-blasted cliff. It was called Doomfel on account that no living thing could survive the drop. An alkali ocean had existed there centuries ago but had drained, and left a deep trench in its wake.’
Iagon interrupted. ‘Is this really the time for war stories?’
Zartath ignored him. They were less than a metre from the precipice now. A dark chasm yawned beyond it, getting ever wider, filled with lightning and blades. ‘Face death at our hands or take Doomfel. Do you know what those traitors did?’
Elysius shook his head but could see where this was going. Helspereth had almost reached her kin. When she did, she’d signal the attack.
Zartath grinned and mouthed, Farewell, brother, to Kor’be. ‘They jumped.’ Turning on his heel, Zartath sprinted off the edge of the precipice and leapt into the gloom.
II
APOCALYPSE NEAR
A storm was rising. Out in the ash wastes of Moribar the winds were picking up. Grey squalls, congealed bone dust and stone, grew in intensity with each passing minute. A world was suddenly out of balance. Watching his ward with wary eyes, Pyriel couldn’t be sure that Dak’ir wasn’t the cause.
‘Not far now, master,’ he said, just audible above the growing storm.
‘Move swiftly, Dak’ir. We don’t want to be caught in whatever is coming on the horizon.’
At his master’s word, Dak’ir looked there and saw the cloud of dust slowly obliterating dunes and monuments. Grey death was approaching, fast and pitiless on a howling wind. Warning klaxons, blaring all across Moribar, announced it. None save the Salamanders heard them – them and the dead, of course. The pilgrims and missionaries had fled to underground bunkers; the servitors were dormant inside their subterranean cribs. The land above was bereft of life and yet in utter turmoil.
‘It’s as if Moribar itself is in upheaval.’
‘You can feel it?’ asked Pyriel, trudging through the thickening ash a few paces behind.
‘I feel something,’ Dak’ir confessed. His gaze tracked east. He recognised the rocky overhang where they’d left the Caldera several hours before. Hopefully, Brother Loc’tar would be there too, waiting for them.
Already the paint was being eroded from their armour, the glossy blue reduced by slashes of gunmetal grey.
‘This wind will shear us to pieces. It’s harsh enough to cut ceramite,’ muttered Pyriel, his displeasure at the vandalism done to his armour obvious. Even in the face of a growing hell-storm, the Epistolary was fastidious about his appearance.
A pregnant pause passed between master and apprentice before Pyriel spoke again. He used the time to catch up to Dak’ir and was walking alongside him.
‘You said you witnessed the end, the doom of Nocturne,’ he said tentatively. ‘What exactly did Kelock show you?’
Dak’ir stopped and faced him. ‘I’m not sure the apparition showed me anything. What I saw, I saw because–’ A wave of heat, rising from the east, interrupted him. ‘I saw–’ Dak’ir began before his body was wracked with seizure. His arm was flung out and he gripped his master’s vambrace. In that moment Pyriel saw everything too.
A wall of fire, so high it reached the heavens, surged from the earth. Nocturne’s surface had become a web of fissures, the planet’s lifeblood seeping out of them in rivulets of lava. The sky was ablaze. In the blood red firmament a star was falling. Prometheus burned, the metallic orb wreathed in re-entry flare as it cascaded like a doomed comet towards the planet below. Its gravity had failed. Death was certain.
From the hellish night above an incandescent beam speared down to strike Nocturne’s heart, impaling it. From the lowest depths of the world, a death cry sounded. It came from the ancient drakes who had lived in the bowels of the earth for millennia. Their spirits were dying. Nocturne was dying. Their mournful sound was a lamentation for a doomed world.
The rest came in flashes, each a jolt of lightning through Dak’ir and Pyriel, their consciousnesses linked in brief symbiosis.
The Acerbian Sea boiled into a great pall of steam, burning away the skiffs, eradicating the gnorl-whales and scalding Epimethus from existence.
On the Arridian Plain, Themis – City of Warrior-Kings – was dragged under the sands, lost to the wailing dunes.
Mount Deathfire belched fire and fury, the haemorrhaging of a vital artery bared open by a mortal wound. She spluttered, like a body with its lungs ruptured, her breaths the last from a life almost ended. The Dragonspire ridge collapsed, the craggy rises falling one by one into smoke and ruin. It was followed by the chain of the Serpent’s Fang. Forests of granite shattered, broken by the atomic blast wave coursing through them. Then came the Cindara Plateau, that most holy of monuments, swallowed beneath the fracturing earth.
Chapter Bastions, tribal settlements that had stood upon inviolable bedrock since the dawn of ages cracked and crumbled against the cataclysmic forces unleashed in the planet’s death throes.
‘Tempus Infernus’ – the words burned into the Librarians’ minds as indelible as a blacksmith’s signature on a blade, but still it wasn’t over.
Ignea, an entire region of subterranean caves, was sundered in a single, devastating instant. The only legacy of its existence, a deathly cloud of displaced ash.
Hot winds came from the east, transforming the Gey’sarr Ocean into a blanket of fire and scorching the white walls of Heliosa, the Beacon City, black.
Aethonian, the Fire Spike, ruptured and split, lava oozing down its once proud flanks like blood.
Hesiod, Clymene, as far as the Themian Ash Ridges, as deep as the T’harken Delta where the leo’nid preyed and the sauroch herds gathered – all of Nocturne became as dust. Its cities were shadows; its peoples not even a memory. Burned from the galactic sky, it was a warning, a cautionary tale. An entire civilisation was gone, rendered into atmospheric dust.
The fires grew and grew until they eclipsed the Librarians too. They had seen it before, during the burning. Except now the reality of it was closer than ever. Prophecy and destiny were coming together, closing in towards an apex of inevitability. The course of fate was locked; there would be no turning from it.
‘Tempus Infernus’ – Time of Fire. And all would burn before the last of its sands had run out.
Pyriel collapsed, his body seizing in the psychic aftermath.
Dak’ir shook his head free of the visions and found the solidity of the Moribar ash deserts beneath him again. His heart was racing, his eyes firmly shut. It took an effort of will to open them again. It took him a moment to realise he was on his knees, the vision felling him as surely as a hammerblow. The storm had engulfed them and the rocky overhang where the Caldera waited was slowly becoming obscured. Delay much longer and they would never find it, the senses in Dak’ir’s armour baffled by atmospheric interference.
Rise, he willed, rise up and overcome.
It was the Promethean Creed, to endure what others could not, to fight when the body rebelled.
Rise now. Vulkan’s strength is in my veins.
Dak’ir got to his feet.
Save for the nerve-tremors, his master wasn’t moving. His armour was turning grey as the thrashing whorls of spinning sand abraded it. When a small chip appeared in the shoulder guard of his own armour, Dak’ir knew it was time to go.
Hefting an unconscious Pyriel onto his back, he quickly activated the comm-link in his battle-helm.
‘Fifty metres from your position, Brother Loc’tar,’ he said ‘Lift her now and come for us, or we’re not getting off this grey rock.’
A grainy affirmative returned from the Thunderhawk pilot and after a few minutes the sound of blazing engines intruded on the storm winds. Dak’ir had trudged a few metres when a dense black shape resolved itself in the grey fog surrounding it. He stood beneath it and engaged the link again.
‘Master Pyriel requires recovery. Unconscious but stable.’
Through the gloom a winch hook glinted, attached to a strong line. It was less than half a metre away before Dak’ir saw it, tossed about in the breeze. He managed to grab it when it was close enough and cinched it around Pyriel’s waist. Two hard tugs on the line and the automated mechanism kicked in and retracted it.
Within seconds, a rapidly ascending Pyriel was lost from view. Once the Librarian was safely aboard, the Caldera risked a further descent. When it was low enough for Dak’ir to jump, he boosted the final few metres and hauled himself onto the embarkation ramp.
‘Go now!’ he cried as the tumult smashed into them.
Engines whining, Loc’tar punched the Caldera into a savage ascent. Dak’ir clung on, fingers denting the metal of the ramp, until they were clear of the worst of it. When he’d dragged himself into the Chamber Sanctuarine, he rolled onto his back. His hearts were hammering, his breath ragged in his heaving chest.
‘Tempus Infernus…’ he rasped, and shut his eyes.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I
SIGIL FIRES
It was as if the world had split and been remoulded by savage hands.
A jagged wound ran through what might have once been an amphi-theatre or temple. Its bifurcated hemispheres now sat at uneven levels, where once they might have been joined. Between them there rose a bridge of stone, wide enough for a trio of Land Raiders abreast. Smaller spans bled off from this grey artery. They were fringed by spikes and razored balustrades. Columns punctuated the main span – skeletal remains, human and xenos, hung from them by chains and steel cords. In the distance, there was a spire. Several figures were impaled upon it like graven offerings.
‘It’s called dysjunction,’ said He’stan, who’d halted the Firedrakes at the threshold to the temple, where the bridge began. There they waited together, in two lines of five. They’d heard and felt the capricious motions of the twisting city as they closed in their borrowed raider. It was junked now, rendered inoperable by Tsu’gan’s hand. He’d taken great pleasure in its destruction and bemoaned the curtness of the task. Deep in the avenues and conduits of the dark eldar’s frontier settlement, the Firedrakes had no further use for it. Besides, it could be tracked and at this point covertness was paramount. The rest of the way would be conveyed on foot.
Halknarr, for one, was glad of it.
‘Even their cities are twisted aberrations.’ He hawked and spat in the tradition of old campaigners.
‘It is the dusk-wraiths’ way,’ counselled He’stan. ‘Their borders are ephemeral, their pacts and allegiances likewise. It bodes well.’
‘How so, my lord?’ Halknarr asked. ‘Bad enough we must navigate this labyrinth without it changing on us constantly.’
‘The city’s denizens will require time to adjust, redraw their tiny empires and claw fresh lines of dominion in the sand. We can exploit this distraction, use it to get closer to the Sigil undetected.’
‘You mean closer to Elysius, my lord,’ ventured Daedicus.
‘No, brother, I meant what I said. The Sigil is all. I fear for Elysius.’
Daedicus’s silence betrayed his shock.
‘If there is a way, he will survive,’ Tsu’gan noted grimly. ‘The Chaplain is a tough and unyielding bastard.’
Praetor let the remark go. It was true enough.
‘Look!’ It was Halknarr, pointing towards the bridge. All eyes followed to alight on a body caught in the balustrade, snagged on the spikes; a body that wore green power armour.
‘Brother,’ cried Daedicus, starting to move before He’stan’s raised hand stopped him.
‘He’s dead,’ announced the Forgefather grimly, noting the absence of life readings through his retinal display.
The sound of a clenching fist signalled Tsu’gan’s anger. ‘But they are not…’ he said and nodded in the direction of the bridge.
A cluster of emaciated, grey-skinned, ghoulish figures was thronged around pieces of a broken dark eldar skiff. From this distance they had blended in with the debris at first and it was hard to tell what the undulating mass was doing. After a few moments, though, it became apparent.
They were gnawing… on flesh.
The distaste in Halknarr’s voice rang out, ‘Carrion-eaters.’
‘More of our brothers could be amongst them,’ said Daedicus.
‘Depraved bastards…’ Tsu’gan brandished his combi-bolter only for Praetor to push his aim downwards.
‘No, brother,’ said the veteran sergeant. His mouth was set in a tight line. ‘We go hand-to-hand this time.’
Tsu’gan grinned beneath his battle-helm. The hard red flash in his eyes mirrored He’stan’s own. The Forgefather’s decree was emphatic.
‘Slay them all,’ he said, and was running at the creatures.
Like the hive of a lava-ant, as soon as the ghouls were disturbed they broke apart and attacked en masse. There were at least a hundred of the wretches, shrieking and clawing, so pumped up on their cannibalistic activities as to eschew all sense of self-preservation.
