[Tome of Fire 02] - Firedrake Read online

  Master the blade, the voice insisted. Use it! Arise now!

  “I cannot!” Fire burned throughout his body; not the flames of the underworld cavern where Pyriel had left him to die, but fire from pain, from the grievous injuries the monster pursuing him had inflicted.

  Dak’ir once believed only drakes prowled the humid deeps of Nocturne. Now, his eyes had been opened.

  Endure it, Salamander. This is nothing. You are a son of Vulkan.

  A series of low vibrations resonated through the earth releasing geysers of scalding steam, and spilling dust and debris from the cavern roof above. Like arteries veining a body, lava plumes erupted from the mountain’s craggy flesh, filling Dak’ir’s world with light and heat.

  A world consumed by fire.

  Shadows and smoke shrank and coiled in the magma flare. Pools of liquid fire bubbled and spat like cruel laughter nearby. A heavier percussion interrupted the steady thump of the golem’s approach. With his senses compromised, it was hard to gauge just how close and from what direction it came.

  The cavern itself was long, but also wide and tall. Stalactites jutted from a craggy ceiling, only just visible at the summit of the smoky cloud. Dak’ir couldn’t remember how he had got here. He recalled his initial encounter with the golem had gone badly. He had been forced to retreat, down, deep into the earth. Respite was brief. The monster had found him and this time there would be no escape.

  He was weak, in mind and body. Strength he thought he possessed, after he had mastered the burning, was mocked by the onyx-black giant intent on his destruction. He knew that now to his cost.

  I will die in this place, Dak’ir thought grimly, making a fist as the tremors jarred his wounded frame.

  Tentatively, he felt the cracks spoiling his fresh-forged ceramite. They were wide and deep. Blackened by soot, seared by fire, blue paint so reverently applied by the armour serfs chipped and worn, he would be broken by the time his body returned to the mountain.

  Gripping the haft of his force sword, Dak’ir’s fingers felt like spikes of unyielding stone. Tiny rivulets of lightning played across his knuckles as he tried to stir psychic energies into the blade.

  Endure it! Pyriel’s voice came again, hard and insistent across his head like a slap. You are Salamander!

  Hard rain was falling onto Dak’ir’s armour as the golem’s footfalls loosened the rocks above. Fist-sized chunks of granite hitting his helmet forced him to stand. The drakescale cloak attached to his armour and falling beneath its power generator felt denser than before, like an iron anvil tethered to his neck.

  Turning, Dak’ir closed his eyes and drew upon the burning. It had been over two years since he was first tested, since he had obliterated an ancient version of Nocturne in his dream-vision and nearly destroyed his mentor.

  He harnessed the power, corralling it with a thought. The blade of the force sword ignited into conflagration. Beneath Dak’ir’s feet, the ground shuddered.

  It was close.

  The heat, intense despite the arctic winter above, had masked the scent of anointing oils and sacred ash rubbed into his armour for a time, but it had cornered him now.

  Dak’ir opened his eyes.

  Standing under a hundred metres away, the golem was immense. The smoke and ash seemed to recoil from its presence, allowing Dak’ir to see the monstrous construct. It was over twice the Salamander’s height and half again as broad. It was a man, or at least a simulacrum of one. Its skin was onyx-black from the volcanic basalt used like clay to fashion it. Carved psychically by Pyriel’s mind, it was a creation of utter perfection and terrifying beauty. The enhanced musculature was exhaustingly defined. Its noble countenance was hard but eerily humanoid. Its bald pate shone like jet, the reflected fire light swathing it in an orange sheen. And the eyes… they burned like captured pools of flame.

  Pyriel had given it no weapons. It needed none. Two massive fists were hard enough to pound rock and ceramite to dust. A mere glancing blow had cracked Dak’ir’s armour so brutally.

  Two red orbs blazed through the smoky haze. Tendrils of it clung to the golem’s brawny body as it parted the grey miasma like a leviathan emerging from the Acerbian Sea. Hollow, pitiless eyes regarded prey.

  Death has come, Fire-born…

  For such a massive creature, the golem was fast. It ate up the distance between them in long, earth-pounding strides.

  Dak’ir braced himself as it gathered speed. It broke the longer stalactites as they scraped across its unyielding shoulders and smashed the columns of rock in its path aside. A juggernaut of impervious obsidian, nothing could stop it.

  With the golem scant metres away Dak’ir swung his force sword in a wide arc, fire trailing from the blade, before unleashing its fury. White fire thrashed against the golem’s bulky torso arresting its momentum abruptly and violently. It staggered, sending granite cascading from above with the sudden jerking motion. Psychic flames engulfed it, wrapping its obsidian body.

  Still it pushed, and Dak’ir took a back step. The golem thrust out its chin defiantly, though no discomfort or effort altered its blank face. It drove into the storm, matching its automaton’s implacability against the fledgling Librarian’s will.

  Dak’ir fed more energy into the blade, marshalling his powers and attempting to master a weapon only more experienced Codiciers had any right to. He drew upon the burning, the well of nascent destructive potential within his core, and unleashed it.

  Smoke, vapour and oxygen were devoured in an instant by the extreme heat. The backwash blistered Dak’ir’s armour, sending warning icons flashing frantically over his retinal display. His arms ached with the effort of holding the blade aloft and directing its terrible fire against the golem.

  Break. Damn. You, he willed.

  But to no avail.

  A massive fist loomed out of the blaze, wreathing in flickering bands. Flinging himself aside, Dak’ir narrowly avoided the blow. Behind him, the spur of rock he’d sheltered against was pulverised. Shards of it exploded against his armour. Several were embedded in the ceramite.

  Beads of sweat were running down Dak’ir’s face as he pulled himself up. Lances of agony skewered his side. He gritted his teeth. A chopping motion with the force sword sent an arc of fire into the golem, the beast turning when it realised its prey had eluded it.

  Dak’ir might as well have used harsh words for all the damage he caused. He mustered two more psychic bolts, dragon-headed and surging on contrails of fire, before the monster swung again.

  It came from the earth, moulded by fire… Pyriel’s voice echoed inside his head.

  Fighting just to breathe, Dak’ir didn’t answer. He was moving again, dodging the overhead blow meant to shatter his spine and end his life. Sheathing his blade, he concentrated on running through the cavern. Lava pools, smoking streams of fire went by in a blur of motion. The golem’s massive footfalls pounded behind him.

  The hot veins feeding the heart of the mountain thickened as Dak’ir went deeper into its fuliginous depths. A vast magma river surged alongside him as the cavern opened out and the smoke thinned at last. The end of the subterranean chamber was revealed. A sheer drop gaped in front of Dak’ir, the river cascading over the edge into a syrupy morass below.

  “Vulkan’s mercy…”

  Coming to an unsteady halt a few steps away from a fiery demise, Dak’ir suddenly found his battle-helm stifling. The hot metal seared his flesh, the smoke and ash clogging his respirator was choking him. He smashed at the mag-clamps urgently to disengage them.

  What are you doing? Do not remove your armour, Salamander!

  “Choking… can’t breathe…”

  The battle-helm came off with a jerk. Dak’ir let it fall from his fingers and land noisily at his feet. Without his auto-senses, even befouled as they were, his orientation worsened.

  At least the smoke and drifting ash was clearing.

  Something vast and powerful loomed from the thinning grey miasma…

  Throw
ing up a barrier of flame, Dak’ir took one final step towards the chasm behind him. The golem was close.

  “You have made a monster here, Pyriel…” Dak’ir muttered, collapsing a thick granite column into the monster’s path.

  It swept the obstruction aside, utterly heedless for its own safety, utterly committed to the destruction of the Librarian.

  Such an implacable foe…

  Sensing Deathfire’s heartblood beating beneath the cavern wall, Dak’ir opened a fissure in the rock with his blade and unleashed a fountain of lava onto the golem. The creature was bathed in liquid magma and the Salamander dared to hope… until it emerged on the other side unscathed. Waves of scalding heat emanated off its body in a haze as it charged, determined to end the fight and take them both over the edge and to oblivion.

  With all the incredible momentum of a battle tank, the golem couldn’t have stopped even if it wanted to. Its rudimentary intelligence did not appreciate the danger it was in as Dak’ir levelled his force sword like a spear and raced towards it.

  A tiny crack, the smallest of fractures was visible in its chest. Dak’ir had seen it when the monster parted his fire wall like it was air. The blast of white-hot fire had wounded it and the magma flow, expanding its igneous flesh, had exposed the weakness.

  Seconds before impact, Dak’ir pulled the blade back the full length of fist to elbow and then thrust it forwards as the monster crushed him.

  Dak’ir felt his rib-plate crack, the ceramite armouring it had already shattered exposing torn bodyglove and black Salamander skin beneath. Breathing was no longer possible; the air was punched from his lungs with all the force of a siege cannon shell. Blood filled his mouth, riming his teeth and releasing the heady stench of copper into his nose. The impact up his arm went all the way to his shoulder and fractured it, but the force sword had gone deep, splitting the golem’s impenetrable skin.

  Cracks webbed its onyx torso. Magma lines glowed inside them like the ichorous blood of the divine. Except the monster was not divine, it was a construct forged psychically from volcanic clay and fortified by Pyriel’s warpcraft.

  Consciousness fading, Dak’ir was vaguely aware of being carried along by the golem’s massive momentum. A few more steps and they would descend into the abyss…

  He fed a bolt of flame down the blade and the cracks widened. Lava gushed from the wound, corroding his armour where it splashed it. Dak’ir let his numbing fingers fall from the sword hilt, instead pressing his hand against superheated rock.

  We are not only pyromancers… we are earth shamans too.

  Pyriel’s words from the first day they had come to the catacombs beneath the mountain returned to him even as the golem slowed, as if only now realising its folly. Channelling the last of his power, Dak’ir sent a huge seismic tremor through the cracking flesh and like a fault line exposed, the tectonic fury of its plates pulling apart, the golem separated.

  Dak’ir fell backwards. His vision was fading. His last sight was of the golem breaking apart, devoured by its own heartblood into molten slurry… Beneath him, the chasm of fire beckoned.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I

  Unearthed

  Few amongst the Chapter could navigate the Tome of Fire as expertly as Vulkan He’stan. The Forgefather had spent years studying the volumes, committed all of their teachings, however obscure, however veiled, to his mind.

  He found the prophecy related in sigil-dialect upon the armour quickly. Something as prosaic as a leather-bound book contained an esoteric reference to it. Within its pages, secrets were revealed.

  “The icons are like a key,” he explained to Tu’Shan who waited pensively as He’stan turned the parchment pages reverently. “Alone, the passages on these pages are useless, without meaning.”

  “The armour is a codifier of sorts,” the Chapter Master interjected.

  “Yes…” He’stan was absorbing the writings in the book, matching it against the sigil pattern he’d seen on the armour and now committed to his memory. Such analysis would take a human lexicanum-savant weeks to complete; for the Forgefather it took only minutes. “Vulkan’s wisdom was indeed great,” he breathed. He’stan’s eyes blazed with satisfaction.

  “What other secrets did he conceal with it, I wonder?” Tu’Shan replied.

  “Incredible things… terrible things, my liege,” He’stan closed the book.

  Though almost empty, the Pantheon Chamber felt alive with nervous energy as if it might burst into flame at any moment.

  “A revelation?” Tu’Shan asked.

  He’stan nodded slowly.

  “We must return to Nocturne and the catacombs below Mount Deathfire.”

  A hot wind seared his face. He’d been lying on the ash-sand for some time. His skin burned as if on fire.

  The pain of his injuries was gone. He felt his broken shoulder gingerly, but the bone was intact, strong. His ribs no longer hurt; they were fused again, as one. Then he noticed he wasn’t wearing his armour anymore, nor did he carry a weapon—the force sword was gone.

  Dak’ir’s last sensation was of falling, down into the chasm of fire to be engulfed by Deathfire’s blood. The golem was dead but then so too was he, and yet here he was.

  This was the Pyre Desert, or at least it looked like the Pyre Desert. But that was impossible. Nocturne was in the grip of arctic winter; this terrain should be snowy tundra and not scorched ash-sand. It didn’t make any sense, but then so little of his Librarian training thus far had.

  Propping himself up on his elbows, Dak’ir noticed he was wearing a nomad’s garb. A long sand coat covered his body, with many-layered robes underneath it and voluminous pantaloons designed to keep out the heat. His sturdy boots were ingrained with sand and ash, affecting a smudged grey-ochre patina over the hard leather. Readjusting the scarves around his face and neck, he moved into a crouch so he could retrieve his wide-brimmed hat where it had fallen in the ash. Webbing around the back of the hat hung down in a veil designed to keep out the heat and the desert dust. Then he picked up his travelling cane, a black-wood staff with a dragon’s head carved at the peak. This he used to lever himself into a standing position.

  These were his trappings. He knew as he knew his own armour, and yet they should be foreign objects to him. The familiarity at their feel and heft was unsettling. It was like stepping into the flesh of another individual, like wearing their life as his own. But whose life was it?

  Looking around, Dak’ir realised the ash-plain was deserted. At least, almost…

  A tiny drygnirr regarded him from atop a small rock. It had coal-black scales with a blue streak down its back and spines. The lizard’s eyes flashed blood red as it took in the hulking nomad in its midst. He had seen the totem-creature before. Pyriel used it, his familiar and psychic embodiment in saurian form so he could observe all that Dak’ir did.

  “What now?” he asked it. “Isolation in this false desert will not challenge me, Pyriel.”

  The drygnirr turned its head away and looked to the horizon where a long line of fire blazed. The flames were rising with every passing moment. After they’d reached several metres, Dak’ir thought he could make out figures inside them.

  He set off towards the horizon and the wall of fire.

  This is the Totem Path, Pyriel’s voice drifted on the hot breeze. See those footsteps?

  Skirls and eddies of sand circled ahead of him, leaving shallow impressions in the desert plain. Dak’ir nodded slowly.

  They are yours…

  Dak’ir’s eyes narrowed. Pyriel’s meaning was lost to him for now. He only knew he must reach the wall of fire, treading his old steps to do it.

  “Am I destined to relive my past, then?” he asked the rising wind. It grew fiercer by the second but no answer was forthcoming. Ash-sand, whipped up on the breeze, stung his exposed face. Dak’ir drew his scarves tighter and lowered the brim of his hat. Pulling a pair of goggles over his eyes, he walked on.

  After almost an hour, he realised
he had lost the path. The wall of fire blazed ahead, even further away than before. He cursed, his frustration palpable in the tension throughout his body. A monster, however implacable, he could destroy. This would require patience and subtlety.

  The storms intensified, making it increasingly difficult to find the impressions in the ash-sand. Dak’ir wanted to remove the goggles. It was hard to see through the grimy plastek lenses. But without them he’d be truly blind.

  For all his strength, the abilities he’d honed over the last three years, even mastering the burning, it counted for nothing in the endless desert. It was like stepping into a void without form, a null place bereft of markers or way points. This was a labyrinth of a kind, he realised, its walls erected by the disorientation of its traveller.

  Discerning the path again was impossible. The maelstrom had engulfed him. Even the sun was consumed. It felt like a hammer blow as it struck, pitching Dak’ir to his knees. He had to dip his head or risk being choked alive. The roar of it was so loud it deafened him. But there was something on the wind, between the white noise of its fury… a susurrus of voices too faint and distant to really hear.

  Displaced ash-sand was building around him, slowly burying him. With effort, he rose but was buffeted down again. Grimacing, Dak’ir got up a second time. His shoulders were heavy with grains and flakes from the desert floor. Keeping low, he was able to make slow progress through the dunes but had lost all sense of direction. Everywhere he looked there was an undulating barrier of ash-sand. Even the drygnirr was gone.

  Pyriel… he cried out psychically.

  Only the sibilant voices replied but their meaning was unfathomable.

  Pyriel!

  Mocking laughter resolved itself on the wind.

  Dak’ir turned, trying to locate the source.

  Ignean… the voice returned.

  Dak’ir spun around slowly, first to his left then to his right, but there was nothing.