[Tome of Fire 01] - Salamander Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  SALAMANDER

  Tome of Fire - 01

  Nick Kyme

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  For mum. For being you and always believing. With love.

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers arc the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants — and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  “In war, a Space Marine has no equal. He is the epitome of the warrior, a martial specimen of vast strength and dauntless courage. The Space Marine does not feel pain as other men do, he does not experience fear. He is master of both. But such inviolability must be honed, refocused before every campaign. It is here in battle-meditation that he girds himself, here that he finds the warrior spirit within.

  “In isolation do we find our true strength. Through self-sacrifice and endurance beyond all others do we become inviolable. These are the credos of the Promethean Cult; these are our tenets; these are our laws. From the fires of battle are we born, brothers. Upon the anvil of war are we tempered.”

  —attributed to Tu’Shan, Chapter Master of the Salamanders

  PROLOGUE

  Tsu’gan screamed as he plummeted from the stone parapet towards the temple floor below.

  “No!” The word was wrenched from his throat.

  He heard rasping laughter as he fell.

  Nihilan had planned this doom. He had fooled them all. It was this, the cold realisation of his failure, which sat like ice in Tsu’gan’s gut.

  He remembered the armoured shadow, closing in from where he should have been; where, as a loyal Salamander, he should have stayed sentry. Hubris and arrogance had impelled him to disobey. Tsu’gan had believed glory was worth the risk.

  The world passed by in a blur as Tsu’gan traversed the short distance to the ground. In his maddened urgency, he’d lost sight of the ambusher who was closing on Kadai. His captain was alone, standing before the pooled remains of the warp creature he had just vanquished, and he was weakened…

  Blinding light ripped into the darkness like a jagged knife, careless of the damage it wreaked. Tsu’gan kept his balance, a few seconds extending into lifetimes as he followed an incandescent beam searing through the gloom. He saw Dak’ir glanced by it, his battle-helm corroding, his pain at the beam’s malign caress emitted as a wail of agony. The force of it, surging from the multi-melta, spun him away from certain death. Undeterred, the beam sped on and struck Kadai. The captain’s body was lit up like an incendiary. Terrible light engulfed him. Kadai screamed and the wrenching sound echoed Tsu’gan’s own as he landed in a crouch, shattering rockcrete beneath his Astartes bulk.

  Heart thundering in his chest, Tsu’gan was on his feet and running, heedless of the danger presented by the shadows around the edges of the temple. The distance to his captain seemed so impossibly far, the chances of Kadai’s survival so remote. Yet he hoped.

  It was only when he closed and he saw Kadai’s armour fold in on itself that he realised his beloved captain was dead. He skidded to a halt, not wishing to touch the corroded remains, and slumped to his knees. Tsu’gan hung his head, even as he heard the cries of N’keln and his battle-brothers returning to reinforce them. Only, they were too late.

  “Salamanders! Slay them!”

  Barking bolter fire brought a crescendo of noise. Tsu’gan was dimly aware of the bucking forms of dying cultists — the followers of the debased cult that had brought the Salamanders to this graven place — as N’keln and the others tore them apart. He felt hollowed, as if a dagger had been thrust into his gut and all of his innards carved away. Physical agony, more painful and invasive than any torture, spread through his bones to his very core. It was as if he had ceased to exist in the world and merely watched as it revolved around him.

  A solid shot spanging off Tsu’gan’s pauldron brought him to his senses. Grief and denial became rage. Shaking hands became fists grasping his bolter. Tsu’gan was on his feet again. He looked to the dark, but Kadai’s murderer had fled.

  A cultist came at him, seen from the corner of his eye. The wretched creature’s stitched mouth prevented a battle cry. He wielded an eviscerator in bone-thin fingers. Ragged robes flapped around a withered body like a corpse.

  He would have to do.

  Tsu’gan ducked the clumsy swipe of the chainblade, hearing the churning teeth as they raked over his head. In the same motion, he brought up his fist into the wretch’s stomach, felt ribs crack and then the soft meat of his belly. With a bestial roar, Tsu’gan ripped out a fistful of viscera and finished the cultist with a heavy blow from his bolter stock.

  Tsu’gan barely registered the skull collapsing beneath his wrath when he turned and drilled three robed figures fleeing off into the dark. The muzzle flare from his bolter lit up their escape and they danced like doomed marionettes before the ammo storm. He found another, snapping its neck with a blade-like hand. Two more fell to his weapon’s retort, their chests exploded as the volatile rounds did their gruesome work; another crumpled beneath an elbow strike that shattered her neck and left it sagging.

  Green-armoured forms were moving around him too — his battle-brothers. Tsu’gan was only vaguely aware of them as he killed. He never moved far from his captain’s side, maintaining a cordon of protection that none would breach and live. The cultists were many and he revelled in their slaughter. When his bolter ran dry, Tsu’gan cast it aside and lifted the still whirring eviscerator, torn from the dead cultist’s grasp.

  A red haze came upon him. He cut and cleaved, and rent and slashed, and gored and sundered until a grisly wall of body parts surrounded him. When the cultists thinned at last and the final few were chased down and executed, Tsu’gan felt the strength in his mighty legs fail him. He fell again, once more to his knees, in a pool of enemy blood. With the tip of the eviscerator’s blade, he carved a long groove into the stone floor so the tainted vitae would not touch his captain. Tsu’gan then closed his eyes and despaired.

  “Brother-sergeant,” a voice came to him through a grief-filled fog. “Tsu’gan,” it insisted.

  Tsu’gan opened his eyes and saw that Veteran Sergeant N’keln stood before him.

  “It is over, brother. The enemy are slain,” he said, as if it was any comfort. “Your battle-brother will survive,”
he added.

  Tsu’gan looked nonplussed.

  “Dak’ir,” clarified N’keln. “He will live.”

  Tsu’gan hadn’t even realised he was there. Kadai was all that mattered. Tears were streaming down his face.

  “Kadai…” said the brother-sergeant, his voice barely a whisper. “He is dead. Our captain is dead.”

  Tsu’gan screamed as he plummeted from the stone parapet towards the temple floor below.

  “No!” The word was wrenched from his throat.

  He heard rasping laughter as he fell.

  Nihilan had planned this doom. He had fooled them all. It was this, the cold realisation of his failure, which sat like ice in Tsu’gan’s gut.

  He remembered the armoured shadow, closing in from where he should have been; where, as a loyal Salamander, he should have stayed sentry. Hubris and arrogance had impelled him to disobey. Tsu’gan had believed glory was worth the risk.

  The world passed by in a blur as Tsu’gan traversed the short distance to the ground. In his maddened urgency, he’d lost sight of the ambusher who was closing on Kadai. His captain was alone, standing before the pooled remains of the warp creature he had just vanquished, and he was weakened…

  CHAPTER ONE

  I

  The Old Ways…

  Dak’ir stood above the lake of fire, waiting to let his captain burn.

  What was left of Ko’tan Kadai’s corroded power armour was chained to a pyre-slab along with his half-destroyed body. Lava spat and bubbled beneath it, wafts of flame igniting in it before being consumed, only to flare to life again in another part of the molten flow. The black marble of the pyre-slab reflected the lava’s fiery glow, the veined stone cast in reds and oranges. Two thick chains were piston-drilled to one of the short edges, and the rectangular pyre-slab hung down lengthwise. Ceramite coated its surface, so the pyre-slab would be impervious to the magma heat. It would take Kadai on his final journey into the heart of Mount Deathfire.

  Inside the vast cavern of rock, Dak’ir recalled the slow and solemn procession to that great volcanic peak. Over a hundred warriors, marching all the way from the Sanctuary City of Hesiod, had made the pilgrimage. The mountain was immense, and tore into the fiery orange heavens of Nocturne like the tip of a broken spear. Ash drifts had floated from the crater at its peak, coming down in slow, grey swathes.

  Deathfire was at once beautiful and terrible to behold.

  But there was no pyroclastic fury, no belligerent eruption of rock and flame this day, just lamentation as the mountain took back one of her sons: a Salamander, a Fire-born.

  “Into fire are we born, so unto fire do we return…” intoned Dak’ir, repeating the sombre words of Brother-Chaplain Elysius. He was speaking rites of interment, specifically the Canticles of Immolation. Despite the Chaplain’s cold diction, Dak’ir felt the emotional resonance of his words as they echoed loudly around the underground cavern.

  Though ostensibly rough rock, the cavern was actually a sacred place built by Master of the Forge Tkell. Millennia old, its artifice and functionality were still lauded in the current decaying age. Tkell had fashioned the vault under the careful auspice of the progenitor, Vulkan, and had been amongst the first of his students upon his apotheosis to primarch. These skills Tkell would impart to future generations of Salamanders, together with the arcane secrets learned from the tech-adepts of Mars. The Master of the Forge was long dead now, and others walked in his mighty stead, but his legacy of achievements remained. The cavern was but one of them.

  A vast reservoir of lava dominated the cavern’s depths. The hot, syrupy magma came from beneath the earth and was the lifeblood of Mount Deathfire. It was held in a deep basin of volcanic rock, girded by layers of reinforced heat-retardant ceramite so that it pooled briefly before flowing onwards from one of the many natural outlets in the rock. There were no lanterns in the cavern, for none were needed. The lava cast a warm and eldritch glow. Shadows flickered, fire cracked and spat.

  Chaplain Elysius stood in the darkness, despite his prominence on an overhang of rock that sat on the opposite side of the cavern to Dak’ir. A spit of lava threw harsh orange light across the overhang. It was long enough for Dak’ir to see Elysius’ ebony power armour and the ivory of his skull-faced battle-helm. It was cast starkly, the light describing the edges of its prominent features. Eyes glowed behind the lenses, red and diabolic.

  Isolationism was a fundamental tenet of Promethean creed. It was believed this was the only way a Salamander could find the reliance and inner fortitude he needed to prosecute the Emperor’s duties. Elysius embraced this ideal wholly. He was insular and cold. Some in the Chapter reckoned in place of his primary heart, the Chaplain had a core of stone. Dak’ir suspected that might actually be true.

  Even though Elysius was often distant, in battle he was completely different. His barbed zeal, as tangible and sharp as a blade, as furious as a bolter’s voice, brought his battle-brothers together. His fury, his fierce adherence to the Promethean Cult, became theirs too. Countless times in war, the Chaplain’s faith had dragged hard-fought victory from bitter defeat.

  A symbol of devotion hung from his weapons belt, a simulacrum of a hammer. It was Vulkan’s Sigil and had once been carried by the famed Chaplain Xavier. Long dead now, like so many heroes, the legacy of Xavier as keeper of this badge of office had passed to Elysius.

  There in the highest echelons of the cavern, the Chaplain was not alone.

  Salamanders from the 3rd and 1st Companies were watching too from a ridge around the edge of the cavern, where they stood to attention in darkened alcoves, their red eyes ablaze. This ocular mutation affected all Salamanders. It was a genetic defect brought about by a reaction to the radiation of their volatile home world. Together with their onyx-black skin, it gave them an almost daemonic appearance, though there were none amongst the Emperor’s Astartes more noble, more committed to the defence of humanity than the Fire-born.

  Chapter Master Tu’Shan observed the ceremony from a massive seat of stone. He was flanked by his bodyguard the Firedrakes, warriors of the 1st Company, his company. Honour markings covered Tu’Shan’s noble countenance, a physical legacy of his deeds writ into his ebon flesh. They were the branding scars that every Salamander had, in keeping with Promethean ritual. Few amongst the Chapter, only the most distinguished veterans, ever lived to have them seared upon their face. As Regent of Prometheus, Tu’Shan wore a suit of ancient power armour. Two pauldrons sat upon his hulking shoulders, wrought into the image of the snarling fire lizards from which the Chapter took its name. A cloak of salamander hide, a more venerable and honour-strewn version of that worn by the Firedrakes, was draped across the Chapter Master’s broad back. Tu’Shan’s bald pate shone with the reflected lustre of the lava, the shadows of its undulations creeping up the walls like fingers of dusk. His eyes were like captured suns. The Chapter Master brooded, chin resting on his fist, as inscrutable as the very rock of the mountain itself.

  After acknowledging his Chapter Master, Dak’ir’s eye was drawn to Fugis. The Apothecary was one of the Inferno Guard, Kadai’s old retinue, of which only three now remained. He had removed his battle helm and clasped it in the crook of his arm. It was stark white like his right-side shoulder armour. His sharp, angular face was haunted by lava-shadows. Even through the rising heat shimmer emanating from below, Dak’ir thought he saw Fugis’ eyes glisten.

  Ever since Dak’ir had won his black carapace and become a battle-brother, throughout his forty years of service, he’d felt Fugis’ watchful eye. Before he became Astartes Dak’ir had been an Ignean, an itinerant cave-dweller of Nocturne. That fact alone was unprecedented, for no one outside the seven Sanctuary Cities had ever been inducted into the vaunted ranks of the Space Marines. To some it made Dak’ir unique; to others, he was an aberration. Certainly his connection to the human side of his genesis was stronger than any the Apothecary had ever known. During battle-meditation, Dak’ir dreamed. He remembered with unerring clar
ity the days before he became superhuman, before his blood and organs and bones were reshaped forever into the iron-hard cast of the alpha-warrior. Biologically, he was a Space Marine like any other; psychologically, it was hard to tell just what potential lay within him.

  Chaplain Elysius had found no taint in Dak’ir’s spirit. If anything, the Ignean’s strength of mind and purpose was remarkably pure, to such a degree that he had achieved the rank of sergeant especially swiftly given the slow and methodical nature of the Chapter.

  Fugis, though, was curious by his very nature and unshackled by the extreme views that afflicted the Chaplain. Dak’ir was an enigma to him, one he wished to fathom. But the Apothecary’s watchful eye did not scrutinise him this day. His gaze was turned inward instead, mired in grief-ridden introspection. Kadai had been Fugis’ friend as well as his captain.

  Unlike his brothers, Dak’ir wore the garb of a metal-shaper, the nomadic smiths who worked the iron found deep beneath the mountains and sweated over heavy anvils. The vestments were archaic, but then on Nocturne they still believed in the old ways.

  In the earliest millennia of civilisation, when the native tribes of the planet lived in caves, worshipping the fire mountain as a goddess and its scaled denizens as objects of spiritual significance, metal-shaping was regarded as a noble profession and its masters were tribal leaders. The tradition held thousands of years later, after the development of primitive technologies and the nascent art of metal shaping became forging, after the coming of Vulkan and when the Outlander had taken him away again into the stars.

  A pelt of salamander skin covered Dak’ir’s loins. Thick sandals were lashed about his feet. The Astartes’ bare chest shone like lacquered ebony, onyx-black and harder than jet. In his hands he clasped one of the thick chains that held Kadai’s corpse steady above the lake of fire.