[Tome of Fire 02] - Firedrake Read online

  “Show yourself!”

  He was struck in the back by a heavy blow like a battering ram and fell forwards. As he turned onto his back quickly, trying to rise, his attacker fell upon him and held him down.

  The raging ash-sand made it difficult to see anything other than a bulky silhouette, but Dak’ir’s assailant was unmistakeable when it spoke.

  Ignean, it spat.

  “Tsu’g—” The choking hands around Dak’ir’s throat cut him off.

  His attacker’s eyes blazed through the storm wind like tiny balefires of hate.

  Dak’ir struggled against the figure’s grip, seizing his assailant’s wrists and trying to pull them away from his neck, but the fingers were locked fast like iron.

  “Tsu—” he rasped again, his wide eyes accusing then slowly consumed by wrath.

  Harder and harder his attacker pressed, gradually smothering Dak’ir beneath his hatred and the consumptive ash-sand. The Librarian thrashed, raging against the shadow figure, knowing whose avatar it was that had manifested to destroy him.

  Anger fed the burning core within, stoked the inner psychic fires.

  I will turn you into ash…

  Dak’ir would immolate his would-be murderer. There would be nothing left but a charred mark on the plain.

  Give in to it, brother, it mocked, further fuelling Dak’ir’s ire until it was a blazing nexus of flame inside his mind.

  We are no so different, you and I… it concluded and its burning gaze mirrored the image of fire cultivated in Dak’ir’s witch-sight.

  “No…” he gasped, and let go. His hands fell to his sides, the nexus of flame diminished until it was nothing but vapour and then even that was lost on the abstract wind of Dak’ir’s psyche.

  The figure evaporated at once as if made from a pillar of sand, the grains breaking away on the desert zephyrs and carried off to rejoin the storm. Dak’ir heaved a breath into his lungs, coughing and spluttering as he fought to turn onto his hands and knees. His throat was sore, his windpipe almost crushed.

  The maelstrom battered him still, paying no heed to his condition. Here, only the strong prevailed and the weak were swept away. Dak’ir looked up. Another figure loomed in his eye-line. This one stood just in front of him, seemingly untouched by the storm as if he existed in another piece of time and had broken through the temporal barrier separating parallel universes. Dak’ir could see him perfectly. His fists clenched.

  Nihilan, sorcerer and warlord of the Dragon Warriors, impeded his path.

  “You are the destroyer, Dak’ir,” he said. “You will burn all of Nocturne until it is a blackened rock, bereft of all life.”

  Dak’ir fell again, as if the weight of Nihilan’s prophecy was physical.

  “Fall now,” he continued, “fall and save your planet from destruction. You are the one, you will devour it with your power. Fall and do not rise again.”

  Perhaps he was right; perhaps it would be better if Dak’ir stopped now. He remembered with painful clarity the dream-vision he’d had during the burning. Nocturne was utterly enflamed—there was nothing left, its people were shadows on a dead breeze.

  He had unleashed that holocaust. It had come from within him and he’d been powerless to stop it. Dak’ir already knew that Pyriel regarded him as dangerous, that his potential, if not properly harnessed, could outreach him and the dire consequences of that if it did.

  It would be easy to fall…

  Perhaps…

  But these were not his words.

  No. I am Salamander. I know my will and my mind. I shall endure. I shall overcome. It is the Promethean Creed.

  “Stand aside, doubter…” he muttered, standing easily and passing through Nihilan as he evaporated like haze.

  Revealed in the fading apparition’s wake through the raging ash-sand was the outline of something large and blocky. It was only a few metres away. Dak’ir had almost missed it. The storm showed no sign of abating. He needed shelter.

  Every step took several minutes, his momentary confidence at defying Nihilan having drained away like the final grains through the neck of an hourglass. Dak’ir slipped three more times before he reached out and touched what he hoped was salvation. Treading his old steps would have to wait…

  Or am I on the path?

  …Any longer in the storm and a bleached bone corpse would be the Salamander’s only legacy.

  Dak’ir moved slowly down the object, feeling with his hands and using its metal flank as a guide until he came to an opening. It was partially ajar, wedged fast with a build-up of ash-sand. With a grunt, he ripped it loose, just wide enough for him to enter.

  His occulobe implant allowed his eyes to adjust in seconds from the glare of the desert to the gloom of an expansive troop hold. It was a vessel, or at least the gutted remains of one, and though its internal power was no more lamps strung over its exposed beams and struts provided luminance.

  Dulled by the thick adamantium hull of the ship, the storm winds became an eerie howl. The metal bent and creaked as if shifting uncomfortably against it.

  Dak’ir breathed deep, relieved to have found shelter, and sank down. After a few moments, he looked around.

  “Stormbird…” he murmured, knowing the inside of the Astartes assault craft from the old versions he’d seen in the Promethean Hall of Remembrance. Few Chapters used them anymore, preferring the faster and more manoeuvrable Thunderhawks to act as their gunships. This one was ancient. It had crashed a long time ago. Much of the hold had been reclaimed by the desert, the slow process of its digestion taking centuries.

  Ship no longer, it was a haven now and not just for Dak’ir.

  “Identify yourself!” he said when he saw the booted feet sticking out from around a corner. There was a promethium stove and a selection of excavating tools nearby.

  “Speak now,” Dak’ir reached for a plasma pistol that was no longer there. Instead, he brandished his staff, adopting a fighting grip as taught to him by his trainer-sergeant when he was just a Scout.

  Despite the implicit warning, the figure did not move.

  Dak’ir lamented his lack of auspex or auto-senses, but his instincts told him either the stranger hadn’t heard him or he was already dead. Rounding the corner, he found the latter to be true.

  Slumped with its back against one of the hold’s bulkheads, an emaciated skeletal figure regarded him with sunken eyes. Obviously another nomad, it was similarly attired to Dak’ir, though its hat had fallen from the head that lolled on one side in death.

  Something about it was familiar and Dak’ir leaned in close to get a better look.

  The skin, which he had at first thought was decayed or scorched by exposure to the sun, was black. It was onyx-black, a Salamander’s skin.

  Realisation dawned and Dak’ir hung his head, muttering a name.

  “Fugis…”

  So the old Apothecary had not survived the Burning Walk.

  Real or imaginary, the sign wasn’t good. Despite the unreality of this place, Dak’ir felt it carried a certain resonance with it into the actual world, as if what he were seeing and experiencing were merely echoes of a greater truth. On the Totem Path nothing could be taken for granted.

  A faint disturbance in the sand mounds that had spilled through several of the Stormbird’s hatches got Dak’ir’s attention. He trained his Lyman’s ear on a sound too sporadic, too loud to be merely subsidence. As he got back to his feet, the first of the pyre-worms breached the surface.

  Chitinous armour lined their long backs, the segmented plates clicking as they moved. Each of the beasts was over two metres long and as thick as Dak’ir’s arm. A round maw, filled with spine-like teeth, champed eagerly as it tasted necrotic flesh on the humid air. Pyre-worms were carrion creatures—they ate the dead.

  Cast back into the fire, becoming one again with the mountain and Nocturne—that was how a Salamander should make his final journey. Not like this, devoured by desert vermin.

  Dak’ir willed a ball o
f flame into existence but found his hand empty.

  His psychic core was drained. There was nothing left.

  Turning on his heel, he hoisted the body of Fugis over his shoulder and ran through the hold.

  “Come, brother,” he said, “we’ll return to the mountain together.”

  Tiny spines lined the pyre-worms, long armoured bodies propelling them along the ground at speed. Such creatures were easy to slay alone. In packs they were deadly, even to an Astartes. And pyre-worms were never alone. Dak’ir knew it was a nest. A small colony chittered behind them, their mandibles clacking hungrily.

  The end of the hold was looming, so too was the exit hatch leading out the side of the fuselage.

  Enter the storm again and risked being buried alive or face the pyre-worms and allow Fugis to be devoured.

  “No choice at all, brother,” a cracked voice told him. Old ceramite, blackened by fire, corroded by age and violence seized Dak’ir’s forearm in a gauntleted fist.

  Ko’tan Kadai, almost a cadaver himself and with a ragged melta burn cratering his torso until faint light showed through to the other side, looked on Dak’ir with dying eyes.

  “My lord…” Dak’ir faltered, losing his momentum.

  The pyre-worms were closing. He couldn’t carry them both and get out of the Stormbird in time.

  Dak’ir shook Kadai’s hand loose. “I cannot save you…” he uttered and barrelled through the exit hatch.

  It gave with a resounding screech of tearing metal and flung open. They stumbled through to the other side, into the blazing sun and the utter silence of a barren desert plain. The storm had abated.

  The Stormbird was gone too, as was Fugis’ body. The wall of fire was closer than before. It burned and beckoned the Salamander onwards.

  “What are you showing me, Pyriel? What manner of trial is this?”

  There was no answer, no voice inside Dak’ir’s head.

  In the distance, sitting on a lonely rock, was the drygnirr.

  The steps, his steps, were gone. The storm had erased them as surely as it had erased the crashed ship and the spectres of Dak’ir’s subconscious mind. He focussed, imagining the impressions he had seen in the ash-sand. Banishing all doubt, all anger, even guilt, he drew deep of his psychic well. When he opened his eyes again, the footsteps had returned. Each one was filled with fire, ignited impossibly against the desert plain. They were beacons, leading him to his destination.

  Good, the voice of Pyriel returned. Only unshackled and unburdened can you reach the wall of fire.

  Dak’ir took his final steps confronting the eternal blaze bisecting the desert plain. Where it touched the ground, the ash became as dust and the sand as fractured glass. The heat of it was incredible and Dak’ir wondered if a Salamander in power armour could pass through it unharmed, let alone one wearing the trappings of a nomad.

  Then he saw the figures within. They went the entire length of the wall, all the dead of Nocturne, all of those that had returned to the mountain, in rank upon endless rank stretching all the way to the end of the world itself.

  They are Nocturne’s heart, said Pyriel, her lifeblood. It is the Circle of Fire, Dak’ir.

  “Resurrection,” he answered in a low and reverent voice. To be in the presence of such ancients, native Nocturneans and Salamanders, was humbling. They were speaking. Their lips were moving but the roar of the eternal flame that held them in its flickering grasp obscured the voices.

  Dak’ir leaned in closer. His skin was burning.

  The spirits were whispering.

  Destroyer… some said.

  Saviour… others hissed.

  “Which am I?”

  A pair of gauntleted hands thrust out of the blaze, seizing Dak’ir by the shoulders and dragging him into the wall of fire.

  Incredible agony reached every nerve of his body, so strong he thought he would pass out.

  Gravius would not allow it, though. He drew Dak’ir close, his ancient and withered face no different to how it had been on Scoria.

  A low-born, one of the earth, shall pass through the gate of fire… The flames whirled around them, the other spirits coalescing into the blaze, becoming one with it. The heat grew. Dak’ir screamed as his clothes were burned off and his skin seared away in an instant until all that remained was bone.

  He will be our doom or salvation.

  II

  Legends

  A Thunderhawk brought them to the surface of the planet, touching down with flaps extended, landing thrusters melting the ice into a grey-black slush underneath. The gunship’s green armour plating was soon dappled by snow after its clawed stanchions made purchase on the frozen plains of the Pyre Desert.

  The vessel’s hull was scaled like some mythical beast of the deep earth, its nose and glacis plate fashioned into the image of a mighty drake. Even the long, sweeping wings were clawed; the mouths of its cannons and incendiaries crafted into maws.

  Primordian was Tu’Shan’s personal carrier, though he seldom used it. The return of the Forgefather was a unique occasion, however. The gesture felt justified.

  Regent and Forgefather stepped out into the white void, armed and armoured. A fierce arctic wind was tossing the drifts into frenzy and unsettled the heavy drake cloaks about their backs as if the beasts they’d been skinned from still lived.

  He’stan was the first to alight, an icy veneer crunching under the weight of his ornate power armour as he stepped from Primordian’s extended embarkation ramp.

  Deathfire loomed distant on the horizon. Smoke exuded from its craggy mouth like a promise. A deepening glow burned in the nadir of its hellish cradle, waiting to be unleashed. Nocturne was a restless mother. She did not slumber long. Her volcanic heart would soon beat again.

  ++To see it thus++ said He’stan over the comm-feed—the weather was too hostile to speak openly without it, ++it is truly beauteous++

  ++I prefer her savage face, brother++ Tu’Shan replied standing alongside him.

  He’stan laughed loudly. With a twinge of sadness, he realised he hadn’t done that in a very long time.

  ++These may be inauspicious times, Regent, but I am glad to be amongst my Chapter again++

  Tu’Shan clapped him on the shoulder. It was the only affirmation He’stan needed.

  As they started off, two legends amidst a desolate arctic vista following the still bubbling veins of the mountain, the Thunderhawk took off behind them. Soon it was lost to the snowstorms, its turbine engines swallowed by the howling wind.

  Deathfire glowered over Dak’ir like an unhappy mistress. Her craggy flanks were wreathed with lava, her maw slathered with magma as the Time of Trial neared. Earthquakes shook Nocturne’s bedrock, its tectonic plates in turmoil as Prometheus’ stronger gravity exerted its violent influence.

  Halfway up the mountain, Dak’ir saw the mouth of a cave. Here, he knew, was the gate of fire and the place of destiny he was prophesied to pass through.

  Slowly, he began to climb. His sandals did little to insulate his feet from the ash slurry and broken cinder burning beneath him. His bare flesh—arms, legs and much of the torso exposed in the metal-shaper’s garb—tingled with the heat. Plumes of steam swathed him in a fever-sweat, though he was not sick. The forging hammer on his back was heavy, but it was a good burden, an honest burden at one with the earth.

  He needed Pyriel’s voice no more. Dak’ir knew his path. Even as the sky rained with fire and the earth below rambled and moaned in agony, he was unperturbed.

  By defeating the onyx-golem he had proven his strength. His successful passage across the endless desert and through the wall of fire had demonstrated his spirit. Here, climbing the rugged crags of Mount Deathfire, what could be left for him to prove?

  Courage…

  The word entered Dak’ir’s mind as he reached the rocky plateau that led to the cave mouth. Inside it, the gate of fire was a flickering oval of intense heat. He only had to look upon the flames to know he would not endure them. But i
t was the beast outside, the gate’s slumbering keeper that arrested the Librarian’s attention.

  Kessarghoth…

  The drake’s name was old. It was born when Nocturne was young, its people tribesmen and shaman, not giant warriors who waged war across the stars first in the name of a glorious father and then in the memory of His life-sustained corpse. Scaled plates looked as thick as Dreadnought armour as they shifted placidly with Kessarghoth’s breathing. Its broad back was festooned with a ridge of spines twice as long as a Themian hunting spear. Their sharpness, Dak’ir did not doubt, was equal to any power blade in the Salamander’s arsenal. The beast was immense, like a pair of Land Raider battle tanks stood end-to-end and twice as wide.

  Yet it slept, and while it slept Dak’ir lived, for to awaken such a creature would surely be the end of him.

  Dragging his body up over the lip of the plateau, Dak’ir crouched low to consider his options. A tremor ran up the side of the mountain and for a moment he feared Kessarghoth would wake, but the beast merely stirred briefly and continued to sleep.

  It would take more than the shifting of the world to disturb it.

  And also something much less, Dak’ir thought shrewdly. He eyed a length of chain that shackled Kessarghoth to the mountainside. The oval links were massive, far larger than a fully-grown Astartes. Though it blocked most of the cave mouth, there was room enough to squeeze through without touching the drake.

  Unhitching the hammer from his back, though it seemed a moot gesture in the face of such a monster, Dak’ir edged slowly towards Kessarghoth and the gate.

  As a boy, before his apotheosis to the ranks of the Salamanders, he had hunted in the depths of Ignea. The subterranean continent, like much of Nocturne, was a dangerous place. Saurian beasts, giant insectoid creatures and other horrors lurked in its darkness. Long ago, Dak’ir had learned to walk quietly and carefully whilst stalking prey and although Kessarghoth was no prize to be slain, he followed those lessons now.

  He kept his steps short and light, the strides small so the resonance of his movements was kept to a minimum. Gaze never leaving the drake, focussed on its eyes and mouth for signs of disturbance, Dak’ir crossed the rocky plain and entered the threshold of the cave.