Текст книги "Vulkan Lives"

Автор книги: Ник Кайм

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

CHAPTER TEN

Burning flesh

‘We have all burned. Down in the fire pits, or from the brander’s iron in the solitorium, we have all touched the fire. It leaves scars, even for us. We carry them proudly, with honour. But the scars we took that day on that battlefield, we bear only with shame and regret. They are a memorial in flesh, a physical reminder of everything we have lost, a burn even we fire-born cannot endure without pain.’

– Artellus Numeon,

Captain of the Pyre Guard

I lived.

Despite the fire, I had, against the odds, survived. I remembered the furnace, or at least fragments of what it had done to me. I remembered my skin blistering, the stench of burning fat, the smoke from cooking meat filling my eyes as the vitreous humour boiled within them.

Scorched black, rendered to ash, I was nothing but dust. A shadow without form, not unlike my gaoler-brother’s favoured aspect.

And yet…

I lived.

The furnace was gone. Ferrus was gone. All was darkness and cold. I remembered that I was on a ship, somewhere in deep space. I remembered the prison that my iron-hearted sibling had made for me, a cage strong enough to hold a primarch.

I was still weak. My limbs felt heavy and my hearts were beating furiously in my chest as some act of enhanced physiology worked to keep me alive. Perhaps I had healed, some regenerative gift I didn’t know I possessed. More likely, the furnace was not real, nor my ordeal in it. I had been seeing the grim corpse-visage of my dead brother, after all. Who knew what traumas my mind had endured?

For a moment I considered the possibility that all of this was fabrication, that I was lying on Isstvan V, wounded and in a sus-an membrane coma. Or that I had been recovered and my body laboured to revive itself in some clinical apothecarion chamber, my mind struggling to catch up with it.

All of this, I dismissed. My abduction was real. Curze was real. This place, this prison that Perturabo had made for me, was real. There was no waking up from a nightmare – this wasthe nightmare. I was living it. Every tortured breath.

But it was hard to think, to reason. Ferrus’s very presence and everything I had seen or not seen made me question myself. It was harrowing enough to have flesh and bone rent, split and cleaved, but what was truly terrifying was the slow erosion of sensibility, of self and the trust in my capacity to tell reality from fantasy. How can you defend yourself against your own mind, what your senses tell you? There was no armour for that, no shield or protection save strength of will and the ability to reason.

I didn’t try to rise. I didn’t voice my defiance or anger. I merely breathed and let the coolness of my darkling cell wash over me. I tried to recall everything I knew of my gaoler, everything I could accurately remember.

And then, closing my eyes, I allowed myself to dream.

Kharaatan, during the Great Crusade

Unwashed, malnourished, the soldiery of Khartor City were a sorry sight. Like an ant horde, dressed in carapaces of dirty red, they filed from the open city gates with their arms held above their heads in surrender.

The wall guard had come first, escorting their captains and officers. Then the first line troopers from the courtyard, and the second barricaders, the tower sentries, the inner barracks troopers, the reserves, the militia. They piled their weapons in the city square as instructed by the loudhailers of Commander Arvek’s black-jacketed discipline masters. By the time the city had been emptied of its warriors, the surrendered materiel reached into a mighty black pyre.

Civilians came next.

Women pressed infants to their chests, wide-eyed men tramped in solemn procession, too afraid to cry or wail, too broken to do anything beyond stare into the rising dawn that crept across the sand dunes like a patient predator. Canines, cattle led by farmers, labourers, fabricators of every stripe, vendors, clerks, scribes and children. They vacated Khartor, their home and solace, in a great and sullen exodus.

Vodisian tanks flanked battalions of Utrich fusiliers and Navite hunters, crisp in their Imperial Army uniforms. Even Commander Arvek himself leaned from the cupola of his Stormsword to watch the throng of natives tramp past. Several stopped at the feet of their oppressors, pleading for mercy until the discipline masters moved them along. Others balked in the shadow of Princeps Lokja’s Fire Kings, believing them gods rendered in iron. When aggression and intimidation could not move them, these poor individuals had to be carried by teams of orderlies from the medicae. There was little else to use these surgeons and hospitallers for – the Imperial force had ended the conflict unscathed. And this was despite the presence of xenos amongst the dirty hordes.

It was a fact that both pleased and irritated the Lord of the Drakes greatly.

‘He was right,’ Vulkan muttered, watching Khartor City from a distance as it gradually emptied.

‘My lord?’ asked Numeon, standing beside his primarch in the muster fields. Nearby, on a plain of earth flattened by Imperial pioneers, the Salamanders were re-embarking their Stormbirds for immediate redeployment. Compliance was over. The Imperium had won.

‘Bloodless, he said,’ Vulkan replied, surveying the human masses as they left the city.

On the walls of this last bastion, cannon embrasures lay empty, watch towers stood like impotent sentinels and only shadows manned the battlements. One by one, soldier and civilian alike, the entire populace of Khartor submitted to the will of the Imperium.

Numeon frowned. ‘Was it not?’

For the first time in almost an hour, Vulkan turned his fiery gaze on his equerry. Numeon did not so much as flinch. Even his heartbeat did not betray him.

‘You are a brutal warrior, Artellus,’ said the primarch.

‘I am as you need me to be, my lord.’ He bowed his head just a little, showing deference.

‘Indeed. All of the vaunted Pyre Guard are without equal in the Eighteenth. Like the deep drakes, you are savage and fierce, sharp of claw and tooth.’ Vulkan nodded to the blade affixed to his equerry’s back. It had yet to be bloodied on this campaign and judging by the utter capitulation of the Khar-tans, it would remain unsullied. ‘But would you slaughter an entire city, soldier and civilian alike, just to send a message and spare further bloodshed?’

‘I…’ There was no right answer, and Numeon knew it.

‘The scales are in Curze’s favour. Blood for blood. Yet, I am left with a cloud of compromise and guilt over my conscience.’

Numeon looked down as if the earth at his feet could provide an answer. ‘I feel it too, my lord, but what is there to be done?’ He spared a glance at the rest of the Pyre Guard, who were waiting solemnly for their captain and primarch a little way back, separate from the Legion.

Vulkan looked over to where one army was met by another as several of Commander Arvek’s battalions joined up with swathes of Munitorum staff to receive the natives and accept their surrender. The Army troopers did it with their lasguns held ready; the Munitorum officers greeted them with mnemo-quills and data-slates instead.

‘I don’t know yet, but had I realised how deep Curze’s malady went, I would not have agreed to this compliance.’

Numeon regarded Vulkan. ‘His malady? You think the primarch ill?’

‘In a manner of speaking, yes. A sickness, and a most insidious one. The darkness of his home on Nostramo – I think he never really left it.’

‘You could take these grievances to Lord Horus or Lord Dorn.’

Vulkan nodded. ‘I have always valued the counsel of my elder brothers. One is close to the Crusade, the other to Terra. Between them, they will know what to do.’

‘You still sound troubled, my lord.’

‘I am, Artellus. Very much so. None of us wants another sanction, another empty pillar in the great investiary, another brother’s name excised from all record. It is shame enough to bear the grief for two. I have no wish to add to it, but what choice do I have?’

Numeon’s reply was muted, for he knew how it grieved Vulkan to speak ill of his brothers, even one such as Curze. ‘None at all.’

Nestling in a shallow desert basin by the muster field, the Munitorum had assembled an armada of transportation vessels. Gunmetal grey, stamped with the Departmento sigil and attended by a flock of overseers, guards, codifiers and quartermasters, the ships were being prepped for immediate atmospheric embarkation. Unlike the Stormbirds, these vessels were not bound for fields of war. Not all of them, not yet.

They were vast, cyclopean things, far larger than the legionary drop-ships or the tank transporters utilised by the Army. Designated for recolonisation, Army recruitment and, in some instances, potential Legion candidacy, the fate of every Khar-tan man, woman and child would depend on how wholly they embraced their new masters. Certainly, none would return to Kharaatan again; only the manner of their departure and their onward destination were in question.

After several hours of slowly denuding the city of its occupants, two camps had begun to form comprised of Khartor’s citizens: those who had fought alongside the xenos willingly and those who had fought against them. Establishing the guilt or innocence of either was taxing the Munitorum staff in the extreme, and herds of people were amassing in a sort of limbo between both whilst a more thorough assessment could be made. Pleas were made, bribes ignored under the watchful eye of Munitorum overseers, but one by one they were codified and hustled aboard ships.

It was tight. Between the sheer number of bodies, the pre-fab Munitorum herding stations, tanks and landers, there was little room to move or breathe. Processing was taking too long, but still more were fed into the codifying engine of the Departmento. Hundreds became thousands. Choke points began to form. Unrest developed, put down by vigilant discipline masters. Order held. Just.

Within the gaggle of Imperial servants, the Order of Remembrancers was also represented. Cataloguing, picting, scribing; some rendered the scene in art that would later be confiscated, others took personal testimony of the liberated where they could – this too would be redacted. No images or reports of the Crusade escaped into the wider Imperium without first being sanctioned. Capturing glory, the gravitas of the moment, that was the purpose of the remembrancers. Nothing more. Vulkan saw Seriph amongst the throng, carefully staying out of the way behind a squad of Utrich fusiliers.

Following his primarch’s eye, Numeon asked, ‘Isn’t that your human biographer, my lord?’

‘We parted poorly when we last met. Another effect of Curze’s presence on me, I am ashamed to admit. I will redress that.’ Vulkan started off towards the Munitorum encampment. Despite the cramped conditions, none stood in his way. ‘Have the Legion ready to depart when I return,’ he called to his equerry, who saluted behind him. ‘I wish to linger here no longer than is necessary.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Numeon replied, and in a lower voice added, ‘You will find no argument here.’

Numeon’s gaze strayed from his primarch to the edge of the camps where a squad of Night Lords looked on. Wisely, they had chosen to pitch their landers far from the Salamanders’ muster field and were represented by a token force yet to join the others. There was no sign of Lord Curze.

The VIII legionaries mingled with the Munitorum officers, who gave every one of them a wide berth. This was also wise. Even with their skull-faced helmets concealing their expressions, Numeon could tell that the Night Lords were enjoying this petty act of intimidation. More than once, a legionary deliberately strayed needlessly close to the path of a busy clerk or scribe, forcing the poor individual to alter his course lest he be harassed or called to account under the glare of retinal lenses. The others not involved in these ‘games’ muttered snidely with one another at the obvious sport.

‘They’re goading us,’ said Varrun, appearing quietly at Numeon’s side with the rest of the Pyre Guard.

‘Our primarch,’ said Atanarius, noble chin lifted in the face of the VIII, ‘how does he fare?’

Numeon answered honestly, ‘The same as us. The Kharaatan compliance has left a bitter taste.’

‘They revel in it,’ offered Ganne, only half holding back a snarl.

‘I would see the smirks wiped off their faces,’ said Leodrakk, prompting a slow nod and muttered agreement from his brother, Skatar’var.

‘Aye,’ Varrun agreed. ‘In the duelling cages, I would measure their true worth as warriors.’

Only Igataron said nothing, silently glowering at the Night Lords.

‘They are still our brothers-in-arms,’ Numeon reminded them. ‘Our allies. Their cloth is not so different from ours.’

‘It is of a darker hue,’ snarled Ganne. ‘We all saw the slain in Khar-tann City.’

Numeon gestured to the human rebels being herded slowly into the Munitorum’s pens.

‘And here, the very much alive citizens of Khartor. It is a fact difficult to ignore.’

No one spoke, but the heat of anger was palpable between them and directed at the VIII Legion.

The Night Lords were not just there to cajole, however. Their legionaries ringed a third, much smaller encampment. This one was a prison of enclosed ceramite, warded by no fewer than three Librarians. It surrounded the xenos overlords who had enslaved this world.

Khartor had been the greatest of Kharaatan’s cities, its planetary capital. And it was here, when the Imperium returned with flame and retribution, that the aliens had chosen to make their lair. A coven of twelve had subverted the will of Kharaatan, a cautionary tale of the dangers of xenos collusion. Xenographers codified them: eldar. Long-limbed, almond-eyed and smouldering with arrogant fury, the XVIII knew this race well. They were not unlike the creatures they had fought on Ibsen, or the raiders that had once plagued Nocturne for centuries before the coming of Vulkan. The Pyre Guard were Terrans by birth, they had not experienced the terrors inflicted on their primarch’s home world, but shared his ire at the aliens in spite of that.

The natives of Kharaatan had worshipped these witch-breeds as gods, and would pay a price for that idolatry.

‘What persuasion could the xenos have used to press an entire population into service?’ Numeon wondered aloud.

‘Psychic subversion,’ said Varrun. ‘A trick to bend weak minds, favoured by the witch. How many worlds have we seen undone, thusly?’

Grunts of agreement from the other Pyre Guard met this proclamation from the veteran.

‘I can think of one very recent in the memory,’ uttered Ganne.

‘The tribes of Ibsen were victims, not cohorts,’ Numeon corrected him.

‘But how to choose which from which amongst this sorry lot?’ said Varrun, smoothing his ashen beard as if contemplating that very conundrum.

Army troopers and Munitorum staff were thronging the camps now as the citizens of Khartor were steadily divided. A sea of desert-tan fatigues and grey Departmento-issue uniforms swept between the Salamanders and the Night Lords, parting them. The legionaries could still see one another, as they towered above the humans, their upper torsos, shoulders and heads still visible.

Numeon had seen and heard enough.

‘Get to the ships and finish the muster. All shall be in readiness for the primarch’s return.’

The Pyre Guard were moving out when Numeon saw a flicker of activity in the third camp enclosing the xenos. He was half-turned when he noticed the flash of light in his peripheral vision, harsh against the setting sun, that described the Night Lords in monochrome. Suddenly, they were moving. Someone cried out and fell, his voice too deep and vox-augmented to be human.

Another flash came swiftly. Lightning. And not a cloud in the sky.

‘The psykers!’ snapped Leodrakk.

A muzzle flare erupted, the deep, staccato report of a bolter echoing across the muster field and the encampments at the same time. It traced a line through the masses, shredding blood and bone, sundering flesh as the hail of shells reacted.

A second flare was born, chasing the quarry of the first. Then a third and a fourth.

Numeon saw their prey, just as he saw the numerous Vodisian troopers and Munitorum clerks destroyed as they fell beneath the guns, collateral damage to the Night Lords’ efforts at recapture.

The eldar were loose.

Somehow, they had slipped the psychic noose put about their necks by the VIII Legion Librarians and were now running amok.

In the face of this unexpected carnage, panic swiftly followed. In seconds, the close confines of the camps became a crush.

Khar-tans fled, leaping over the barriers intended to funnel them towards their new lives, only to be gunned down as discipline masters shouted orders to open fire. Others fought, tearing at their new oppressors with bare hands and teeth. Cudgels and shock mauls were unsheathed. Some wept, the terror for them not yet over. Many were trampled in the stampede, taking Imperial servants with them. One clerk, slow to realise what was happening, disappeared in a surging mass of shrieking Khar-tans. A trooper was knocked aside accidentally, crushed against a ship’s hull. Blood fountained up its grey flank in an arterial spray.

‘Into the crowd!’ Numeon bellowed, leading the others in to restore order.

Behind them, the rest of the Legion had begun to move.

‘ Brother?’ It was Nemetor, hailing Numeon over the vox-link.

‘Breach the Munitorum’s cordon,’ Numeon shouted. ‘Get their pilots to move those ships. Tell them if they don’t, their precious mortal cargo will be crushed to death.’ He cut the link, letting Nemetor get to work.

The Pyre Guard formed up quickly into a spear shape, piercing the morass of bodies the Munitorum and Army seemed adamant would not spill out onto the desert.

‘Break your ranks,’ Numeon snarled at a Vodisian lieutenant, yanking the young officer off his feet.

His brothers did the same, ripping out the herding pens the Munitorum had put in place and relieving the pressure on the deadly crush that had begun to form.

‘Arvek,’ Numeon voxed, grunting as a Khar-tan man was floored as he bounced off the Pyre Guard’s war-plate. Leodrakk hauled him to his feet, sending him on his way. ‘Tell your men to break ranks.’

The Vodisian commander sounded fraught when he replied. ‘ Negative. We have the situation contained. None of these rebels will get past our cordon.’

‘That is the problem, commander. Kharaatan native and Imperial servant alike are being crushed in this chaos. Break your ranks.’

Upon seeing the commotion, Arvek had brought his armoured companies together, plugging gaps in the Munitorum’s encampments, closing off escape, herding the frightened natives back onto themselves.

Officials farther back, confused by the commotion at first, had not realised what was happening and had continued to feed more natives into the grind. By the time they had taken stock of the situation, hundreds more had added to the pressure. Fearing for their lives when the crowd had realised their fate and their potential salvation, the Munitorum clerks had sealed the natives in behind a wall of tracked steel.

‘ They will escape,’ Arvek countered, voice echoing in the confines of his Stormsword.

‘And will you unleash your guns next if they try to scale your hull?’ Numeon batted a discipline master aside with the back of his hand.

Together, the Pyre Guard had made a small vent. Their brothers in the XVIII were now working hard to widen it. People began to spill free – exhausted, bleeding, halfway dead. The presence of the Salamanders kept them rooted, however. None were willing to transgress and attempt escape with the red-eyed devils watching them.

But deeper into the camp, people were dying, smashed against the armoured prows of Vodisian tanks.

‘ I will do what is necessary to maintain security.’ Arvek cut the feed.

‘Bastard…’ Numeon swore. A discussionwith the commander would have to come later.

‘It’ll be a massacre…’ said Varrun.

Numeon eyed the static Vodisian armour that had now engaged loudhailers and search lamps as additional deterrents. People staggered back into one another, blinded and deafened. Arvek was employing riot control tactics where the rioters had no room to back down.

‘We need to move that armour.’

Through the thickening mob, it might as well have been leagues away.

Then Numeon saw the primarch, towering above the madness.

Realising the danger presented by the tanks, Vulkan had raced towards them. Not slowing, he shoulder-barged Arvek’s Stormsword at full pelt and began to push.

Grimacing with effort, booted feet digging trenches in the earth, he heaved the super-heavy back. Its sheer bulk dwarfed the primarch, the veins cording in Vulkan’s neck as he exercised his prodigious strength. Even Arvek dared not defy the will of a primarch and could only look on as Vulkan hauled the Stormsword’s dead weight across the sand. He roared, body trembling as he forced a gap wide enough for the trapped masses to escape.

Without waiting to recover, Vulkan was moving again, fleeing Khar-tans flowing around him in a flood of mortal desperation. The primarch barged his way through them towards the escaped xenos, using his size and presence to make a path. He had yet to draw a weapon, instead focusing on cutting off the eldar as they sought to run into the desert.

No, Numeon realised as the Pyre Guard waded through the sea of bodies, still fighting to reassert some order; he was going for Seriph. Several of the remembrancers were already wounded, possibly dead. Abandoned by the Utrich fusiliers, they clung to each other, striving not to be dragged into the chaos, holding close to ride out the sudden storm.

Yelling Nostraman curses, the Night Lords closed on the xenos from behind, firing off their bolters indiscriminately in the hope of hitting an eldar.

Five of the witches were already down, one with a still-churning chainblade embedded in its chest. Another two threw up a kine-shield of verdigrised light to absorb the chasing bolt-rounds.

A hot shell grazed Vulkan’s cheek, searing it as he was caught in the crossfire. Reaching the remembrancers, putting himself between them and the Night Lords’ heedless fury, he raised his gauntlet.

Thanks in part to the VIII legionaries’ bloody efforts but also because of the breach left by Arvek’s forcibly reversed Stormsword, the area around the eldar had cleared. Staring down a primarch of the Emperor did not seem to give the xenos pause, but before they could cast their lightning arcs, Vulkan unleashed a storm of his own.

An inferno burst from his outstretched hand, the in-built flame units in his gauntlet reacting to their master’s touch. What began as a plume of flame expanded quickly into a conflagration of super-hot promethium. The eldar were caught by it and engulfed, their bodies rendered in heat-hazed, brownish silhouettes as they shook inside the blaze. No kine-shield could save them; their robes and armour burned as one, fused to flesh until all was reduced to ash and charred bone.

Vulkan relented. The fire died and so too the riot, which was now being wrestled under control.

A single eldar witch remained, her face blackened by soot, her silver hair singed and burned. She looked up at the Lord of the Drakes, eyes watering, rage telegraphed in the tightness of her lips and the angle of her brow. The faltering kine-shield that had spared her life crackled and disappeared into ether.

She was not much older than a child, a witchling. Teeth clenched, fighting the grief at the death of her coven, the eldar offered up her wrists in surrender.

Numeon and the others had just breached the crowds, which were now slowly dissipating into the wider desert and being mopped up diligently by Nemetor and the rest of the Legion. In the wake of the fleeing civilians, the true cost of the eldar’s escape attempt was revealed.

Men, women, children; Khar-tans and Imperials alike, lay dead. Crushed. Blood ran in red rivulets across the sand, the death toll in the hundreds.

Amongst them a solitary figure was conspicuous, crowded by a clutch of battered remembrancers unwilling to let anyone close, desperate to defend her unmoving body.

Vulkan saw her last of all, the shock of this discovery turning to anger on his noble face. His eyes blazed, embers flickered to infernos.

The eldar child raised her hands higher, defiance turning into fear upon her alien features.

Numeon held the others back, warning them with a look not to intervene.

Glaring down at her, Vulkan raised his fist…

Don’t do it…

…and turned the air into fire.

The eldar child’s screams didn’t last. They merged with the roar of the flames, turning into one horrific cacophony of sound. When it was over and the last xenos was a smoking husk of burned meat, Vulkan looked up and met the gaze of the Night Lords.

The legionaries had stopped short when the flame-storm began. They stood and watched the primarch of the Salamanders at the edge of the scorched earth he had made. Then, without uttering a word, they turned and went to retrieve their wounded.

Ganne muttered something and made to go after them.

Numeon barred his path, his gauntlet clanking against Ganne’s breastplate, ‘No, go to the primarch,’ he said to all of them. ‘See him away from this place.’

Ganne backed down and the Pyre Guard went to their lord.

Only Numeon stayed behind, opening a channel over the vox to Nemetor.

‘Prepare the primarch’s transport. We’re coming in,’ he said, and cut the link.

Vulkan was standing over the lifeless body of Seriph. A stray bolt-round had grazed her side. It had been enough to kill her. There was a lot of blood – her robes were sodden with it; so, too, were the robes of the other remembrancers who had tried to save her.

Despite the primarch’s presence, his obvious threat, the other remembrancers did not shrink away from Seriph’s side.

An elderly man with rheumy eyes and wizened features gazed up at the Lord of the Drakes.

‘We’ll see her back to the ships,’ he said.

Vulkan opened his mouth to say something, but could find no words to express his feelings. Instead, he nodded before replacing his helmet, but found it could not hide his shame as well as it could his face. Turning, he became aware of his warriors gathering next to him.

‘The Legion awaits you, my lord,’ said Varrun humbly, and gave a slight bow of his head.

About to respond, Vulkan stopped short when he felt someone watching him from afar. Looking around, he caught sight of a dark and distant shadow out on the dunes. A second later and his helmet vox crackled to life.

‘ See brother, I knew you had it in you. A cold-hearted killer, just like me.’

Vulkan replied, ‘I am nothing like you’, and severed the link, yet the stench of burning alien flesh remained.