Tome of Fire

HELL NIGHT

It can’t rain all the time…

The trooper’s mood was sullen as he helped drag the unlimbered lascannon through the mire.

The Earthshakers had begun their bombardment. A slow and steady crump-crump – stop – crump-crump far behind him at the outskirts of bastion headquarters made the trooper flinch instinctively every time a shell whined overhead.

It was ridiculous: the deadly cargo fired by the siege guns was at least thirty metres at the apex of its trajectory, yet still he ducked.

Survival was high on the trooper’s list of priorities, that and service to the Emperor of course.

Ave Imperator.

A cry to the trooper’s right, though muffled by the droning rain, got his attention. He turned, rivulets teeming off his nose like at the precipice of a waterfall, and saw the lascannon had foundered. One of its carriage’s rear wheels was sunk in mud, sucked into an invisible bog.

‘Bostok, gimme a hand.’

Another trooper, Genk, an old guy – a lifer – grimaced to Bostok as he tried to wedge the butt of his lasgun under the trapped wheel and use it like a lever.

Tracer fire was whipping overhead, slits of magnesium carving up the darkness. It sizzled and spat when it pierced the sheeting rain.

Bostok grumbled. Staying low, he tramped over heavily to help his fellow gunner. Adding his own weapon to the hopeful excavation, he pushed down and tried to work his way under the wheel.

‘Get it deeper,’ urged Genk, the lines in his weathered face becoming dark crevices with every distant flash-flare of siege shells striking the void shield.

Though each hit brought a fresh blossom of energy rippling across the shield, the city’s defences were holding. If the 135th Phalanx was to breach it – for the Emperor’s glory and righteous will – they’d need to bring more firepower to bear.

‘Overload the generators,’ Sergeant Harver had said.

‘Bring our guns close,’ he’d said. ‘Orders from Colonel Tench.’

Not particularly subtle, but then they were the Guard, the Hammer of the Emperor: blunt was what the common soldiery did best.

Genk was starting to panic: they were falling behind.

Across a killing field dug with abandoned trenches, tufts of razor wire protruding like wild gorse in some untamed prairie, teams of Phalanx troopers dragged heavy weapons or marched hastily in squad formation.

It took a lot of men to break a siege; more still, and with artillery support, to bring down a fully functioning void shield. Men the Phalanx had: some ten thousand souls willing to sacrifice their lives for the glory of the Throne; the big guns – leastways the shells for the big guns – they did not. A Departmento Munitorum clerical error had left the battle group short some fifty thousand anti-tank, arrowhead shells. Fewer shells meant more boots and bodies. A more aggressive strategy was taken immediately: all lascannons and heavy weapons to advance to five hundred metres and lay void shield-sapping support fire.

Bad luck for Phalanx: wars were easier to fight from behind distant crosshairs. And safer. Bad luck for Bostok, too.

Though he was working hard at freeing the gun with Genk, he noticed some of their comrades falling to the defensive return fire of the secessionist rebels, holed up and cosy behind their shield and their armour and their fraggin’ gun emplacements.

Bastards.

Bet they’re dry too, Bostok thought ruefully. His slicker came undone when he snagged it on the elevation winch of the lascannon and he swore loudly as the downpour soaked his red-brown standard-issue uniform beneath.

There was a muted cry ahead as he fastened up the slicker and pulled his wide-brimmed helmet down further to keep out the worst of the rain – a heavy bolter team and half an infantry squad disappeared from view, seemingly swallowed by the earth. Some of the old firing pits and trenches had been left unfilled, except now they contained muddy water and sucking earth. As deadly as quicksand they were.

Bostok muttered a prayer, making the sign of the aquila. Least it wasn’t him and Genk.

‘Eye be damned, what is holding you up, troopers?’

It was Sergeant Harver. The tumult was deafening, that and the artillery exchange. He had to bellow just to be heard. Not that Harver ever did anything but bellow when addressing his squad.

‘Get this fraggin’ rig moving you sump rats,’ he barracked, ‘You’re lagging troopers, lagging.’

Harver munched a fat, vine-leaf cigar below the black wire of his twirled moustache. He didn’t seem to mind or notice that it had long been doused and hung like a fat, soggy finger from the corner of his mouth.

A static crackle from the vox-operator’s comms unit interrupted the sergeant’s tirade.

‘More volume: louder Rhoper, louder.’

Rhoper, the vox-operator, nodded, before setting the unit down and fiddling with a bunch of controls. The receiver was amplified in a few seconds and returned with the voice of Sergeant Rampe.

‘…Enemy sighted! They’re here in no-man’s land! Bastards are out beyond the shield! I see, oh sh–’

‘Rampe, Rampe,’ Harver bellowed into the receiver cup. ‘Respond, man!’ His attention switched to Rhoper.

‘Another channel, trooper – at the double, if you please.’

Rhoper was already working on it. The comms channels linking the infantry squads to artillery command and one another flicked by in a mixture of static, shouting and oddly muted gunfire.

At last, they got a response.

‘…aggin’ out here with us! Throne of Earth, that’s not poss–’

The voice stopped but the link continued unbroken. There was more distant weapons fire, and something else.

‘Did I hear–’ Harver began.

‘Bells, sir,’ offered Rhoper, in a rare spurt of dialogue. ‘It was bells ringing.’

Static killed the link and this time Harver turned to Trooper Bostok, who had all but given up trying to free the lascannon.

The bells hadn’t stopped. They were on this part of the battlefield too.

‘Could be the sounds carrying on the wind, sir?’ suggested Genk, caked in mud from his efforts.

Too loud, too close to be just the wind, thought Bostok. He took up his lasgun as he turned to face the dark.

Silhouettes lived there, jerking in stop-motion with every void impact flare – they were his comrades, those who had made it to the five hundred metre line.

Bostok’s eyes narrowed.

There was something else out there too. Not guns or Phalanx, not even rebels.

It was white, rippling and flowing on an unseen breeze. The rain was so dense it just flattened; the air didn’t zephyr, there were no eddies skirling across the killing ground.

‘Sarge, do we ’ave Ecclesiarchy in our ranks?’

‘Negative, trooper, just the Emperor’s own: boots, bayonets and blood.’

Bostok pointed towards the flicker of white.

‘Then who the frag is that?’

But the flicker had already gone. Though the bells tolled on. Louder and louder.

Fifty metres away, men were screaming. And running.

Bostok saw their faces through his gun sight, saw the horror written there. Then they were gone. He scanned the area, using his scope like a magnocular, but couldn’t find them. At first Bostok thought they’d fallen foul of an earth ditch, like the heavy bolter and infantry he’d seen earlier, but he could see no ditches, no trench or fire pit that could’ve swallowed them. But they’d been claimed all right, claimed by whatever moved amongst them.

More screaming; merging with the bells into a disturbing clamour.

It put the wind up Sergeant Harver – Phalanx soldiers were disappearing in all directions.

‘Bostok, Genk, get that cannon turned about,’ he ordered, slipping out his service pistol.

The lascannon was well and truly stuck, but worked on a pintle mount, so could be swivelled into position. Genk darted around the carriage, not sure what was happening but falling back on orders to anchor himself and stave off rising terror. He yanked out the holding pin with more force than was necessary and swung the gun around towards the white flickers and the screaming, just as his sergeant requested.

‘Covering fire, Mr Rhoper,’ added Harver, and the vox-operator slung the boxy comms unit on his back and drew his lasgun, crouching in a shooting position just behind the lascannon.

Bostok took up his post by the firing shield, slamming a fresh power cell into the heavy weapon’s breech.

‘Lit and clear!’

‘At your discretion, trooper,’ said Harver.

Genk didn’t need a written invitation. He sighted down the barrel and the targeting nub, seeing a flicker, and hauled back the triggers.

Red beams, hot and angry, ripped up the night. Genk laid suppressing fire in a forward arc that smacked of fear and desperation. He was sweating by the end of his salvo, and not from the heat discharge.

The bells were tolling still, though it was impossible to place their origin. The void-shrouded city was too far away, a black smudge on an already dark canvas, and the resonant din sounded close and all around them.

Cordite wafted on the breeze; cordite and screaming.

Bostok tried to squint past the driving rain, more effective than any camo-paint for concealment.

The flickers were still out there, ephemeral and indistinct… and they were closing.

‘Again, if you please,’ ordered Harver, an odd tremor affecting his voice.

It took Bostok a few seconds to recognise it as fear.

‘Lit and clear!’ he announced, slamming in a second power cell.

‘Not stopping, sir,’ said Rhoper and sighted down his lasgun before firing.

Sergeant Harver responded by loosing his own weapon, pistol cracks adding to the fusillade.

Casting about, Bostok found they were alone; an island of Phalanx in a sea of mud, but the advanced line was coming to meet them. They were fleeing, driven wild by sheer terror. Men were disappearing as they ran, sucked under the earth, abruptly silenced.

‘Sarge…’ Bostok began.

Onwards the line came, something moving within it, preying on it like piranhas stalking a shoal of frightened fish.

Harver was nearly gone, just firing on impulse now. Some of his shots and that of Genk’s lascannon were tearing up their own troops.

Rhoper still had his wits, and came forwards as the heavy weapon ran dry.

‘F-f…’ Harver was saying when Bostok got to his feet and ran like hell.

Rhoper disappeared a moment later. No cries for help, no nothing; just a cessation of his lasgun fire and then silence to show for the end of the doughty vox-officer.

Heart hammering in his chest, his slicker having now parted and exposing him to the elements, Bostok ran, promising never to bemoan his lot again, if the Emperor would just spare him this time, spare him from being pulled into the earth and buried alive. He didn’t want to die like that.

Bostok must’ve been dragging his feet, because troopers from the advanced line were passing him. A trooper disappeared to his left, a white flicker and the waft of something old and dank presaging his demise. Another, just ahead, was pulled asunder, and Bostok jinked away from a course that would lead him into that path. He risked a glance over his shoulder. Harver and Genk were gone – the lascannon was still mired but now abandoned – fled or taken, he didn’t know.

Some of the Phalanx were staging a fighting withdrawal. Gallant, but what did they have to hold off? It was no enemy Bostok had ever seen or known.

Running was all that concerned him now, running for his life.

Just reach the artillery batteries and I’ll be fine.

But then a hollow cry echoed ahead, and Bostok saw a white flicker around the siege guns. A tanker disappeared under the earth, his cap left on the grille of the firing platform.

The fat lump of numbing panic in his chest rose into Bostok’s throat and threatened to choke him.

Can’t go back, can’t go forwards…

He peeled off to the left. Maybe he could take a circuitous route to bastion headquarters.

No, too long. They’d be on him before then.

In the dark and the rain, he couldn’t even see the mighty structure. No beacon-lamps to guide him, no searchlights to cling to. Death, like the darkness, was closing.

The bells were tolling.

Men screamed.

Bostok ran, his vision fragmenting in sheer terror, the pieces collapsing in on one another like a kaleidoscope.

Got to get away… Please Throne, oh pl–

Earth became swamp beneath his feet, and Bostok sank. He panicked, thinking he was about to be taken, when he realised he’d fallen into an earth ditch, right up to his chin. Fighting the urge to wade across, he dipped lower until the muddy water reached his nose, filling his nostrils with a rank and stagnant odour. Clinging to the edge with trembling, bone-cold fingers, he prayed to the Emperor for the end of the night, for the end of the rain and the cessation of the bells.

But the bells didn’t stop. They just kept on tolling.

Three weeks later…

‘Fifty metres to landfall,’ announced Hak’en. The pilot’s voice sounded tinny through the vox-speaker in the Chamber Sanctuarine of Fire-wyvern.

Looking through the occuliport in the gunship’s flank, Dak’ir saw a grey day, sheeting with rain.

Hak’en was bringing the vessel around, flying a course that would take them within a few metres of Mercy Rock, the headquarters of the 135th Phalanx and the Imperial forces they were joining on Vaporis. As the gunship banked, angling Dak’ir’s slit-view downward, a sodden earth field riddled with dirty pools and sludge-like emplacements was revealed. The view came in frustrating slashes.

Dak’ir was curious to see more.

‘Brother,’ he addressed the vox-speaker, ‘open up the embarkation ramp.’

‘As you wish, brother-sergeant. Landfall in twenty metres.’

Hak’en disengaged the locking protocols that kept the Thunderhawk’s hatches sealed during transit. As the operational rune went green, Dak’ir punched it and the ramp started to open and lower.

Light and air rushed into the gunship’s troop compartment where Dak’ir’s battle-brothers were sat in meditative silence. Even in the grey dawn, their bright green battle-plate flashed, the snarling firedrake icon on their left pauldrons – orange on a black field – revealing them to be Salamanders of the 3rd Company.

As well as illuminating their power armour, the feeble light also managed to banish the glare from their eyes. Blazing red with captured fire, it echoed the heat of the Salamanders’ volcanic home world, Nocturne.

‘A far cry from the forge-pits under Mount Deathfire,’ groaned Ba’ken.

Though he couldn’t see his face beneath the battle-helm he was wearing, Dak’ir knew his brother also wore a scowl at the inclement weather.

‘Wetter too,’ added Emek, coming to stand beside the hulking form of Ba’ken and peering over Dak’ir’s broad shoulders. ‘But then what else are we to expect from a monsoon world?’

The ground was coming to meet them and as Hak’en straightened up Fire-wyvern the full glory of Mercy Rock was laid before them.

It might once have been beautiful, but now the bastion squatted like an ugly gargoyle in a brown mud-plain. Angular gun towers, bristling with autocannon and heavy stubber, crushed the angelic spires that had once soared into the turbulent Vaporis sky; ablative armour concealed murals and baroque columns; the old triumphal gate, with its frescos and ornate filigree, had been replaced with something grey, dark and practical. These specific details were unknown to Dak’ir, but he could see in the structure’s curves an echo of its architectural bearing, hints of something artful and not merely functional.

‘I see we are not the only recent arrivals,’ said Ba’ken. The other Salamanders at the open hatch followed his gaze to where a black Valkyrie gunship had touched down in the mud, its landing stanchions slowly sinking.

‘Imperial Commissariat,’ replied Emek, recognising the official seal on the side of the transport.

Dak’ir kept his silence. His eyes strayed across the horizon to the distant city of Aphium and the void dome surrounding it. Even above the droning gunship engines, he could hear the hum of generatoria powering the field. It was like those which protected the Sanctuary Cities of his home world from the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that were a way of life for the hardy folk of Nocturne. The air was thick with the stench of ozone; another by-product of the void fields. Even the constant rain couldn’t wash it away.

As Fire-wyvern came in to land with a scream of stabiliser-jets, Dak’ir closed his eyes. Rain was coming in through the hatch and he let it patter against his armour. The dulcet ring of it was calming. Rain – at least the cool, wet, non-acidic kind – was rare on Nocturne, and even against his armour he enjoyed the sensation. There was an undercurrent of something else that came with it, though. It was unease, disquiet, a sense of watchfulness.

I feel it too, a voice echoed inside Dak’ir’s head, and his eyes snapped open again. He turned to find Brother Pyriel watching him intently. Pyriel was a Librarian, a wielder of the psychic arts, and he could read people’s thoughts as they might read an open book. The psyker’s eyes flashed cerulean-blue before returning to burning red. Dak’ir didn’t like the idea of him poking around in his subconscious, but he sensed that Pyriel had merely browsed the surface of his mind. Even still, Dak’ir looked away and was glad when the earth met them at last and Fire-wyvern touched down.

The cold snap of las-fire carried on the breeze as the Salamanders debarked.

Across the muddied field, just fifty metres from the approach road to Mercy Rock, a commissarial firing squad was executing a traitor.

An Imperial Guard colonel, wearing the red-brown uniform of the Phalanx, jerked spastically as the hot rounds struck him, and was still. Tied to a thick, wooden pole, he slumped and sagged against his bonds. First his knees folded and he sank, then his head lolled forward, his eyes open and glassy.

A commissar, lord-level given his rank pins and trappings, was looking on as his bodyguards brought their lasguns to port arms and marched away from the execution site. His gaze met with Dak’ir’s as he turned to go after them. Rain teemed off the brim of his cap, a silver skull stud sat in the centre above the peak. The commissar’s eyes were hidden by the shadow the brim cast, but felt cold and rigid all the same. The Imperial officer didn’t linger. He was already walking away, back to the bastion, as the last of the Salamanders mustered out and the exit ramps closed.

Dak’ir wondered at what events had delivered the colonel to such a bleak end, and was sorry to see Fire-wyvern lifting off again, leaving them alone in this place.

‘Such is the fate of all traitors,’ remarked Tsu’gan with a bitter tang.

Even behind his helmet lens, Tsu’gan’s stare was hard. Dak’ir returned his glare.

There was no brotherly love between the two Salamanders sergeants. Before they became Space Marines, they had hailed from opposite ends of the Nocturnean hierarchy: Dak’ir, an Ignean cave-dweller and an orphan, the likes of which had never before joined the ranks of the Astartes; and Tsu’gan, a nobleman’s son from the Sanctuary City of Hesiod, as close to aristocracy and affluence as it was possible to get on a volcanic death world. Though as sergeants they were both equals in the eyes of their captain and Chapter Master, Tsu’gan did not regard their relationship as such. Dak’ir was unlike many other Salamanders, there was a strain of humanity left within him that was greater and more empathic than that of his brothers. It occasionally left him isolated, almost disconnected. Tsu’gan had seen it often enough and decided it was not merely unusual, it was an aberration. Since their first mission as Scouts on the sepulchre world of Moribar, acrimony had divided them. In the years that followed, it had not lessened.

‘It leaves a grim feeling to see men wasted like that,’ said Dak’ir. ‘Slain in cold blood without chance for reparation.’

Many Space Marine Chapters, the Salamanders among them, believed in order and punishment, but they also practised penitence and the opportunity for atonement. Only when a brother was truly lost, given in to the Ruinous Powers or guilty of such a heinous deed as could not be forgiven or forgotten, was death the only alternative.

‘Then you’d best develop a stronger stomach, Ignean,’ sneered Tsu’gan, fashioning the word into a slight, ‘for your compassion is misplaced on the executioners’ field.’

‘It’s no weakness, brother,’ Dak’ir replied fiercely.

Pyriel deliberately walked between them to prevent any further hostility.

‘Gather your squads, brother-sergeants,’ the Librarian said firmly, ‘and follow me.’

Both did as ordered, Ba’ken and Emek plus seven others falling in behind Dak’ir whilst Tsu’gan led another same-sized squad from the dropsite. One in Tsu’gan’s group gave Dak’ir a vaguely contemptuous look, before turning his attention to an auspex unit. This was Iagon, Tsu’gan’s second and chief minion. Where Tsu’gan was all thinly-veiled threat and belligerence, Iagon was an insidious snake, much more poisonous and deadly.

Dak’ir shrugged off the battle-brother’s glare and motioned his squad forwards.

‘I could see his attitude corrected, brother,’ hissed Ba’ken over a closed comm-link channel feeding to Dak’ir’s battle-helm. ‘It would be a pleasure.’

‘I don’t doubt that, Ba’ken,’ Dak’ir replied, ‘but let’s just try and stay friendly for now, shall we?’

‘As you wish, sergeant.’

Behind his battle-helm, Dak’ir smiled. Ba’ken was his closest ally in the Chapter and he was eternally grateful that the hulking heavy weapons trooper was watching his back.

As they marched the final few metres to the bastion gates, Ba’ken’s attention strayed to the void shield on the Salamanders’ right. The commissar lord, along with his entourage, had already gone inside the Imperial command centre. Overhead, the skies were darkening and the rain intensified. Day was giving way to night.

‘Your tactical assessment, Brother Ba’ken?’ asked Pyriel, noting his fellow Salamander’s interest in the shield.

‘Constant bombardment – it’s the only way to bring a void shield down.’ He paused, thinking. ‘That, or get close enough to slip through during a momentary break in the field and knock out the generatoria.’

Tsu’gan sniffed derisively.

‘Then let us hope the humans can do just that, and get us to within striking distance, so we can leave this sodden planet.’

Dak’ir bristled at the other sergeant’s contempt, but kept his feelings in check. He suspected it was half-meant as a goad, anyway.

‘Tell me this, then, brothers,’ added Pyriel, the gates of the bastion looming, ‘why are they falling back with their artillery?’

At a low ridge, just below the outskirts of the bastion, Basilisk tanks were retreating. Their long cannons shrank away from the battlefield as the tanks found parking positions within the protective outer boundaries of the bastion.

‘Why indeed?’ Dak’ir asked himself as they passed through the slowly opening gates and entered Mercy Rock.

‘Victory at Aphium will be won with strong backs, courage and the guns of our Immortal Emperor!’

The commissar lord was sermonising as the Salamanders appeared in the great bastion hall.

Dak’ir noticed the remnants of ornamental fountains, columns and mosaics – all reduced to rubble for the Imperial war machine.

The hall was a vast expanse and enabled the Imperial officer to address almost ten thousand men, mustered in varying states of battle-dress. Sergeants, corporals, line troopers, even the wounded and support staff had been summoned to the commissar’s presence as he announced his glorious vision for the coming war.

To his credit, he barely flinched when the Astartes strode into the massive chamber, continuing on with his rallying cry to the men of the Phalanx who showed much greater reverence for the Emperor’s Angels of Death amongst them.

The Fire-born had removed battle-helms as they’d entered, revealing onyx-black skin and red eyes that glowed dully in the half-dark. As well as reverence, several of the Guardsmen betrayed their fear and awe of the Salamanders. Dak’ir noticed Tsu’gan smiling thinly, enjoying intimidating the humans before them.

‘As potent as bolt or blade,’ old Master Zen’de had told them when they were neophytes. Except that Tsu’gan deployed such tactics all too readily; even against allies.

‘Colonel Tench is dead,’ the commissar announced flatly. ‘He lacked the will and the purpose the Emperor demands of us. His legacy of largesse and cowardice is over.’

Like black-clad sentinels, the commissar’s storm troopers eyed the men nearest their master at this last remark, daring them to take umbrage at the defamation of their former colonel.

The commissar’s voice was amplified by a loudhailer and echoed around the courtyard, carrying to every trooper present. A small cadre of Phalanx officers, what was left of the command section, were standing to one side of the commissar, giving off stern and unyielding looks to the rest of their troops.

This was the Emperor’s will – they didn’t have to like it; they just had to do it.

‘And any man who thinks otherwise had best look to the bloody fields beyond Mercy Rock, for that is the fate which awaits he without the courage to do what is necessary.’ The commissar glared, baiting dissension. When none was forthcoming, he went on. ‘I am taking command in the late colonel’s stead. All artillery will return to the battlefront immediately. Infantry is to be mustered in platoon and ready for deployment as soon as possible. Section commanders are to report to me in the strategium. The Phalanx will mobilise tonight!’ He emphasised this last point with a clenched fist.

Silence reigned for a few moments, before a lone voice rang out of the crowd.

‘But tonight is Hell Night.’

Like a predator with its senses piqued, the commissar turned to find the voice.

‘Who said that?’ he demanded, stalking to the front of the rostrum where he was preaching. ‘Make yourself known.’

‘There are things in the darkness, things not of this world. I’ve seen ’em!’ A gap formed around a frantic-looking trooper as he gesticulated to the others, his growing hysteria spreading. ‘They took Sergeant Harver, took ’im! The spectres! Just sucked men under the earth… They’ll ta–’

The loud report of the commissar’s bolt pistol stopped the trooper in mid-flow. Blood and brain matter spattered the infantrymen nearest the now headless corpse as silence returned.

Dak’ir stiffened at such wanton destruction of life, and was about to step forward and speak his mind, before a warning hand from Pyriel stopped him.

Reluctantly, the Salamander backed down.

‘This idle talk about spectres and shadows haunting the night will not be tolerated,’ the commissar decreed, holstering his still-smoking pistol. ‘Our enemies are flesh and blood. They occupy Aphium and when this city falls, we will open up the rest of the continent to conquest. The lord-governor of this world lies dead, assassinated by men he trusted. Seceding from the Imperium is tantamount to an act of war. This rebellion will be crushed and Vaporis will be brought back to the light of Imperial unity. Now, prepare for battle…’

The commissar looked down his nose at the headless remains of the dead trooper, now lying prone.

‘…and somebody clear up that filth.’

‘He’ll demoralise these men,’ hissed Dak’ir, anger hardening his tone.

Two infantrymen were dragging the corpse of the dead trooper away. His bloodied jacket bore the name: Bostok.

‘It’s not our affair,’ muttered Pyriel, his keen gaze fixed on the commissar as he headed towards them.

‘The mood is grim enough, though, Brother-Librarian,’ said Ba’ken, surveying the weary lines of troopers as they fell in, marshalled by platoon sergeants.

‘Something has them spooked,’ snarled Tsu’gan, though more out of contempt for the Guardsmen’s apparent weakness, than concern.

Pyriel stepped forward to greet the commissar, who’d reached the Salamanders from the end of the rostrum.

‘My lord Astartes,’ he said with deference, bowing before Pyriel. ‘I am Commissar Loth, and if you would accompany me with your officers to the strategium, I will apprise you of the tactical situation here on Vaporis.’

Loth was about to move away, determined to send the message that he, and not the Emperor’s Angels, was in charge at Mercy Rock, when Pyriel’s voice, resonant with psy-power, stopped him.

‘That won’t be necessary, commissar.’

Loth didn’t looked impressed at he stared at the Librarian. His expression demanded an explanation, which Pyriel was only too pleased to provide.

‘We know our orders and the tactical disposition of this battle. Weaken the shield, get us close enough to deploy an insertion team in the vicinity of the generatoria and we will do the rest.’

‘I– that is, I mean to say, very well. But do you not need–’

Pyriel cut him off.

‘I do have questions, though. That man, the trooper you executed: what did he mean by “spectres”, and what is Hell Night?’

Loth gave a dismissive snort.

‘Superstition and scaremongering – these men have been lacking discipline for too long.’ He was about to end it there when Pyriel’s body language suggested the commissar should go on. Reluctantly, he did. ‘Rumours, reports from the last night-attack against the secessionists, of men disappearing without trace under the earth and unnatural denizens prowling the battlefield. Hell Night is the longest nocturnal period in the Vaporan calendar – its longest night.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Yes.’ Loth’s face formed a scowl. ‘It’s sheer idiocy. Fearing the dark? Well, it’s just damaging to the morale of the men in this regiment.’

‘The former colonel, did he supply you with these… reports?’

Loth made a mirthless grin.

‘He did.’

‘And you had him shot for that?’

‘As my duty binds me, yes, I did.’ Loth had a pugilist’s face, slab-flat with a wide, crushed nose and a scar that ran from top lip to hairline that pulled up the corner of his mouth in a snarl. His small ears, poking out from either side of his commissar’s cap, were ragged. He was stolid when he spoke next. ‘There is nothing lurking in the darkness except the false nightmares that dwell in the minds of infants.’

‘I’ve seen nightmares made real before, commissar,’ Pyriel took on a warning tone.

‘Then we are fortunate to have angels watching over us.’ Loth adjusted his cap and straightened his leather frockcoat. ‘I’ll weaken the shield, be assured of that, nightmares or no.’

‘Then we’ll see you on the field, commissar,’ Pyriel told him, before showing his back and leaving Loth to wallow in impotent rage.

‘You really took exception to him, didn’t you brother?’ said Emek a few minutes later, too curious to realise his impropriety. They were back out in the muddy quagmire. In the distance, the sound of battle tanks moving into position ground on the air.

‘He had a callous disregard for human life,’ Pyriel replied. ‘And besides… his aura was bad.’ He allowed a rare smirk at the remark, before clamping on his battle-helm.

Overhead, the sky was wracked with jagged red lightning and the clouds billowed crimson. Far above, in the outer atmosphere of Vaporis, a warp storm was boiling. It threw a visceral cast over the rain-slicked darkness of the battlefield.

‘Hell Night, in more than just name it seems,’ said Ba’ken, looking up to the bloody heavens.

‘An inauspicious omen, perhaps?’ offered Iagon, the first time he’d spoken since landfall.

‘Ever the doomsayer,’ remarked Ba’ken under his breath to his sergeant.

But Dak’ir wasn’t listening. He was looking at Pyriel.

‘Form combat squads,’ said the Librarian, when he realised he was under scrutiny. ‘Tsu’gan, find positions.’

Tsu’gan slammed a fist against his plastron, and cast a last snide glance at Dak’ir before he divided up his squad and moved out at a steady run.

Dak’ir ignored him, still intent on Pyriel.

‘Do you sense something, Brother-Librarian?’

Pyriel eyed the darkness in the middle distance, the no-man’s land between the bastion and the shimmering edge of the far off void shield. It was as if he was trying to catch a glimpse of something just beyond his reach, at the edge of natural sight.

‘It’s nothing.’

Dak’ir nodded slowly and mustered out. But he’d detected the lie in the Librarian’s words and wondered what it meant.

False thunder wracked the sky from the report of heavy cannons at the rear of the Imperial battle line. Smoke hung over the muddied field like a shroud, occluding the bodies of the Phalanx troopers moving through it, but was quickly weighed down by the incessant rain.

They marched in platoons, captains and sergeants hollering orders over the defensive fire of rebel guns and the dense thuds of explosions. Heavy weapons teams, two men dragging unlimbered cannons whilst standard infantry ran alongside, forged towards emplacements dug five hundred metres from the shield wall.

Incandescent flashes rippled across the void shield with the dense shell impacts of the distant Earthshaker cannons and from lascannon and missile salvoes, unleashed when their crews had closed to the assault line.

In the midst of it all were the Salamanders, crouched down in cover, at the edges of the line in five-man combat squads.

Librarian Pyriel had joined Dak’ir’s unit, making it six. With the flare of explosions and the red sky overhead, his blue armour was turned a lurid purple. It denoted his rank as Librarian, as did the arcane paraphernalia about his person.

‘Our objective is close, brothers. There…’ Pyriel indicated the bulk of a generatorium structure some thousand metres distant. Only Space Marines, with their occulobe implants, had the enhanced visual faculty to see and identify it. Rebel forces, hunkered down in pillboxes, behind trenches and fortified emplacements, guarded it. In the darkness and the rain, even with the superhuman senses of the Astartes, they were just shadows and muzzle flashes.

‘We should take an oblique route, around the east and west hemispheres of the shield,’ Dak’ir began. ‘Resistance will be weakest there. We’ll be better able to exploit it.’

After Tsu’gan had secured the route, the Salamanders had arrived at the five hundred metre assault line, having stealthed their way to it undetected before the full Imperial bombardment had begun. But they were positioned at the extreme edges of the line – two groups east, two groups west – in the hope of launching a shock assault into the heart of the rebel defenders and destroying the generatoria powering the void shield before serious opposition could be raised.

‘Brother Pyriel?’ Dak’ir pressed when a response wasn’t forthcoming.

The Librarian was staring at the distant void shield, energy blossoms appearing on its surface only to dissipate seconds later.

‘Something about the shield… An anomaly in its energy signature…’ he breathed. His eyes were glowing cerulean-blue.

For once, Dak’ir felt nothing, just the urge to act.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know…’ The psychic fire dimmed in the Librarian’s eyes behind his battle-helm. ‘Oblique assault – one primary, one secondary. East and west,’ he asserted.

Dak’ir nodded, but had a nagging feeling that Pyriel wasn’t telling them everything. He opened a comm-channel to the other combat squads.

‘We move in, brothers. Assault plan serpentine. Brother Apion, you are support. We will take primary. Brother Tsu’gan–’

‘We are ready, Ignean,’ came the harsh reply before Dak’ir had finished. ‘Assault vector locked, I am the primary at the western hemisphere. Tsu’gan out.’

The link was cut abruptly. Dak’ir cursed under his breath.

Taking out his plasma pistol and unsheathing his chainsword, running a gauntleted finger down the flat of the blade and muttering a litany to Vulkan, Dak’ir rose to his feet.

‘Fire-born, advance on my lead.’

Emek’s raised fist brought them to a halt before they could move out. He had his finger pressed to the side of his battle-helm.

‘I’m getting some frantic chatter from the Phalanx units.’ He paused, listening intently. ‘Contact has been lost with several secondary command units.’ Then he looked up. During the pregnant pause, Dak’ir could sense what was coming next.

‘They say they’re under attack… from spectres,’ said Emek.

‘Patch it to all comms, brother. Every combat squad.’

Emek did as asked, and Dak’ir’s battle-helm, together with his brothers’, was filled with the broken reports from the Phalanx command units.

‘…ergeant is dead. Falling back to secondary positions…’

‘…all around us! Throne of Earth, I can’t see a target, I can’t se–’

‘…ead, everyone. They’re out here among us! Oh hell, oh Emperor sa–’

Scattered gunfire and hollow screams punctuated these reports. Some units were attempting to restore order. The barking commands of sergeants and corporals sounded desperate as they tried to reorganise in the face of sudden attack.

Commissar Loth’s voice broke in sporadically, his replies curt and scathing. They must hold and then advance. The Imperium would brook no cowardice in the face of the enemy. Staggered bursts from his bolt pistol concluded each order, suggesting further executions.

Above and omnipresent, the sound of tolling bells filled the air.

‘I saw no chapel or basilica in the Phalanx bastion,’ said Ba’ken. He swept his gaze around slowly, panning with his heavy flamer as he did so.

‘The rebels?’ offered Brother Romulus.

‘How do you explain it being everywhere?’ asked Pyriel, his eyes aglow once more. He regarded the blood-red clouds that hinted at the churning warp storm above. ‘This is an unnatural phenomenon. We are dealing with more than secessionists.’

Dak’ir swore under his breath; he’d made his decision.

‘Spectres or not, we can’t leave the Phalanx to be butchered.’ He switched the comm-feed in his battle-helm to transmit.

‘All squads regroup, and converge on Phalanx command positions.’

Brother Apion responded with a rapid affirmative, as did a second combat squad led by Brother Lazarus. Tsu’gan took a little longer to capitulate, evidently unimpressed, but seeing the need to rescue the Guardsmen from whatever was attacking them. Without the support fire offered by their heavy guns, the Salamanders were horribly exposed to the secessionist artillery and with the shield intact they had no feasible mission to prosecute.

‘Understood.’ Tsu’gan then cut the link.

Silhouettes moved through the downpour. Lasgun snap-shot fizzed out from Imperial positions, revealing Phalanx troopers that were shooting at unseen foes.

Most were running. Even the Basilisks were starting to withdraw. Commissar Loth, despite all of his fervour and promised retribution, couldn’t prevent it.

The Phalanx were fleeing.

‘Enemy contacts?’

Dak’ir was tracking through the mire, pistol held low, chainsword still but ready. He was the fulcrum of a dispersed battle-formation, Pyriel to his immediate left and two battle-brothers either side of them.

Ahead, he saw another combat squad led by Apion, the secondary insertion group. He too had dispersed his warriors, and they were plying every metre of the field for enemies.

‘Negative,’ was the curt response from Lazarus, approaching from the west.

Artillery bombardment from the entrenched rebel positions was falling with the intense rain. A great plume of sodden earth and broken bodies surged into the air a few metres away from where Dak’ir’s squad advanced.

‘Pyriel, anything?’

The Librarian shook his head, intent on his otherworldly instincts but finding no sense in what he felt or saw.

The broken chatter in Dak’ir’s ear continued, the tolling of the bells providing an ominous chorus to gunfire and screaming. The Phalanx were close to a rout, having been pushed too far by a commissar who didn’t understand or care about the nature of the enemy they were facing. Loth’s only answer was threat of death to galvanise the men under his command. The bark of the Imperial officer’s bolt pistol was close. Dak’ir could make out the telltale muzzle flash of the weapon in his peripheral vision.

Loth was firing at shadows and hitting his own men in the process; those fleeing and those who were standing their ground.

‘I’ll deal with him,’ promised Pyriel, snapping out of his psychic trance without warning and peeling off to intercept the commissar.

Another artillery blast detonated nearby, showering the Salamanders with debris. Without the Earthshaker bombardment, the rebels were using their shell-hunting cannons to punish the Imperials. Tracer fire from high-calibre gunnery positions added to the carnage. That and whatever was stalking them through the mud and rain.

‘It’s infiltrators.’ Tsu’gan’s harsh voice was made harder still as it came through the comm-feed. ‘Maybe fifty men, strung out in small groups, operating under camouflage. The humans are easily spooked. We will find them, Fire-born, and eliminate the threat.’

‘How can you be–’

Dak’ir stopped when he caught a glimpse of something, away to his right.

‘Did you see that?’ he asked Ba’ken.

The hulking trooper followed him, swinging his heavy flamer around.

‘No target,’ Ba’ken replied. ‘What was it, brother?’

‘Not sure…’ It had looked like just a flicker of… white robes, fluttering lightly but against the wind. The air suddenly became redolent with dank and age.

‘Ignean!’ Tsu’gan demanded.

‘It’s not infiltrators,’ Dak’ir replied flatly.

Static flared in the feed before the other sergeant’s voice returned.

‘You can’t be sure of that.’

‘I know it, brother.’ This time, Dak’ir cut the link. It had eluded him at first, but now he felt it, a… presence, out in the darkness of the killing field. It was angry.

‘Eyes open,’ he warned his squad, the half-seen image at the forefront of his mind and the stench all too real as the bells rang on.

Ahead, Dak’ir made out the form of a Phalanx officer, a captain according to his rank pins and attire. The Salamanders headed towards him, hoping to link up their forces and stage some kind of counter-attack. That was assuming there were enough troopers left to make any difference.

Commissar Loth was consumed by frenzy.

‘Hold your ground!’ he screeched. ‘The Emperor demands your courage!’ The bolt pistol rang out and another trooper fell, his torso gaping and red.

‘Forward, damn you! Advance for His greater glory and the glory of the Imperium!’

Another Phalanx died, this time a sergeant who’d been rallying his men.

Pyriel was hurrying to get close, his force sword drawn, whilst his other hand was free. In the darkness and the driving rain he saw… spectres. They were white-grey and indistinct. Their movements were jagged, as if partially out of synch with reality, the non-corporeal breaching the fabric of the corporeal realm.

Loth saw them too, and the fear of it, whatever this phenomenon was, was etched over his pugilist’s face.

‘Ave Imperator. By the light of the Emperor, I shall fear no evil,’ he intoned, falling back on the catechisms of warding and preservation he had learned in the schola progenium. ‘Ave Imperator. My soul is free of taint. Chaos will never claim it whilst He is my shield.’

The spectres were closing, flitting in and out of reality like a bad pict recording. Turning left and right, Loth loosed off shots at his aggressors, the brass rounds passing through them or missing completely, driving on to hit fleeing Phalanx infantrymen instead.

With each manifestation, the spectres got nearer.

Pyriel was only a few metres away when one appeared ahead of him. Loth’s shot struck the Salamander in the pauldron as it went through and through, and a damage rune flared into life on the Librarian’s tactical display inside his battle-helm.

‘Ave Imp–’ Too late. The spectre was upon Commissar Loth. He barely rasped the words–

‘Oh God-Emperor…’

–when a blazing wall of psychic fire spilled from Pyriel’s outstretched palm, smothering the apparition and banishing it from sight.

Loth was raising his pistol to his lips, jamming the still hot barrel into his mouth as his mind was unmanned by what he had seen.

Pyriel reached him just in time, smacking the pistol away before the commissar could summarily execute himself. The irony of it wasn’t lost on the Librarian as the bolt-round flew harmlessly into the air. Still trailing tendrils of fire, Pyriel placed two fingers from his outstretched hand onto Loth’s brow, who promptly crumpled to the ground and was still.

‘He’ll be out for several hours. Get him out of here, back to the bastion,’ he ordered one of the commissar’s attendants.

The attendant nodded, still shaken, calling for help, and together the storm troopers dragged Loth away.

‘And he’ll remember nothing of this or Vaporis,’ Pyriel added beneath his breath.

Sensing his power, the spectres Pyriel had seen had retreated. Something else prickled at his senses now, something far off into the wilderness, away from the main battle site. There was neither time nor opportunity to investigate. Pyriel knew the nature of the foe they were facing now. He also knew there was no defence against it his brothers could muster. Space Marines were the ultimate warriors, but they needed enemies of flesh and blood. They couldn’t fight mist and shadow.

Huge chunks of the Phalanx army were fleeing. But there was nothing Pyriel could do about that. Nor could he save those claimed by the earth, though this was the malice of the spectres at work again.

Instead, he raised a channel to Dak’ir through his battle-helm.

All the while, the bells tolled on.

‘The entire force is broken,’ the captain explained. He was a little hoarse from shouting commands, but had rallied what platoons were around him into some sort of order.

‘Captain…’

‘Mannheim,’ the officer supplied.

‘Captain Mannheim, what happened here? What is preying on your men?’ asked Dak’ir. The rain was pounding heavily now, and tinked rapidly off his battle-plate. Explosions boomed all around them.

‘I never saw it, my lord,’ Mannheim admitted, wincing as a flare of incendiary came close, ‘only Phalanx troopers disappearing from sight. At first, I thought enemy commandos, but our bio-scanners were blank. The only heat signatures came from our own men.’

Malfunctioning equipment was a possibility, but it still cast doubt on Tsu’gan’s infiltrators theory.

Dak’ir turned to Emek, who carried the squad’s auspex. The Salamander shook his head. Nothing had come from the rebel positions behind the shield, either.

‘Could they have already been out here? Masked their heat traces?’ asked Ba’ken on a closed channel.

Mannheim was distracted by his vox-officer. Making a rapid apology, he turned his back and pressed the receiver cup to his ear, straining to hear against the rain and thunder.

‘Not possible,’ replied Dak’ir. ‘We would have seen them.’

‘Then what?’

Dak’ir shook his head, as the rain came on in swathes.

‘My lord…’ It was Mannheim again. ‘I’ve lost contact with Lieutenant Bahnhoff. We were coordinating a tactical consolidation of troops to launch a fresh assault. Strength in numbers.’

It was a rarefied concept on Nocturne, where self-reliance and isolationism were the main tenets.

‘Where?’ asked Dak’ir.

Mannheim pointed ahead. ‘The lieutenant was part of our vanguard, occupying a more advanced position. His men had already reached the assault line when we were attacked.’

Explosions rippled in the distance where the captain gestured with a quavering finger. These were brave men, but their resolve was nearing its limit. Loth, and his bloody-minded draconianism, had almost pushed them over the edge.

It was hard to imagine much surviving in that barrage, and with whatever was abroad in the killing field to contend with too…

‘If Lieutenant Bahnhoff lives, we will extract him and his men,’ Dak’ir promised. He abandoned thoughts of a counter-attack almost immediately. The Phalanx were in disarray. Retreat was the only sensible option that preserved a later opportunity to attack. Though it went against his Promethean code, the very ideals of endurance and tenacity the Salamanders prided themselves on, Dak’ir had no choice but to admit it.

‘Fall back with your men, captain. Get as many as you can to the bastion. Inform any other officers you can raise that the Imperial forces are in full retreat.’

Captain Mannheim motioned to protest.

‘Full retreat, captain,’ Dak’ir asserted. ‘No victory was ever won with foolish sacrifice,’ he added, quoting one of Zen’de’s Tenets of Pragmatism.

The Phalanx officer saluted, and started pulling his men back. Orders were already being barked down the vox to any other coherent platoons in the army.

‘We don’t know what is out there, Dak’ir,’ Ba’ken warned as they started running in Bahnhoff’s direction. Though distant, silhouettes of the lieutenant’s forces were visible. Worryingly, their las-fire spat in frantic bursts.

‘Then we prepare for anything,’ the sergeant replied grimly and forged on into the churned earth.

Bahnhoff’s men had formed a defensive perimeter, their backs facing one another with the lieutenant himself at the centre, shouting orders. He positively sagged with relief upon sighting the Emperor’s Angels coming to their aid.

The Salamanders were only a few metres away when something flickered into being nearby the circle of lasguns and one of the men simply vanished. One moment he was there, and the next… gone.

Panic flared and the order Bahnhoff had gallantly established threatened to break down. Troopers had their eyes on flight and not battle against apparitions they could barely see, let alone shoot or kill.

A second trooper followed the first, another white flicker signalling his death. This time Dak’ir saw the human’s fate. It was as if the earth had opened up and swallowed him whole. Except the trooper hadn’t fallen or been sucked into a bog, he’d been dragged. Pearlescent hands, with thin fingers like talons, had seized the poor bastard by the ankles and pulled him under.

Despite Bahnhoff’s efforts his platoon’s resolve shattered and they fled. Several more perished as they ran, sharing the same grisly fate as the others, dragged down in an eye-blink. The lieutenant ran with them, trying to turn the rout into an ordered retreat, but failing.

Emboldened by the troopers’ fear, the things that were preying on the Phalanx manifested and the Salamanders saw them clearly for the first time.

‘Are they daemons?’ spat Emek, levelling his bolter.

They looked more like ragged corpses, swathed in rotting surplices and robes, the tattered fabric flapping like the tendrils of some incorporeal squid. Their eyes were hollow and black, and they were bone-thin with the essence of clergy about them. Priests they may once have been; now they were devils.

‘Let us see if they can burn,’ snarled Ba’ken, unleashing a gout of promethium from his heavy flamer. The spectres dissipated against the glare of liquid fire coursing over them as Ba’ken set the killing fields ablaze, but returned almost as soon as the fires had died down, utterly unscathed.

He was about to douse them again when they evaporated like mist before his eyes.

An uncertain second or two passed, before the hulking Fire-born turned to his sergeant and shrugged.

‘I’ve fought tougher foes–’ he began, before crying out as his booted feet sank beneath the earth.

‘Name of Vulkan!’ Emek swore, scarcely believing his eyes.

‘Hold him!’ bellowed Dak’ir, seeing white talons snaring Ba’ken’s feet and ankles. Brothers Romulus and G’heb sprang to their fellow Salamander’s aid, each hooking their arms under Ba’ken’s. In moments, they were straining against the strength of the spectres.

‘Let me go, you’ll tear me in half,’ roared Ba’ken, part anger, part pain.

‘Hang on, brother,’ Dak’ir told him. He was about to call for reinforcements, noting Pyriel’s contact rune on his tac-display, when an apparition mat-erialised in front of him. It was an old preacher, his grey face lined with age and malice, a belligerent light illuminating the sockets of his eyes. His mouth formed words Dak’ir could not discern and he raised an accusing finger.

‘Release him, hell-spawn!’ Dak’ir lashed out with his chainsword, but the preacher blinked out of existence and the blade passed on harmlessly to embed itself in the soft earth behind him. Dak’ir raised his plasma pistol to shoot when a terrible, numbing cold filled his body. Icy fire surged through him as his blood was chilled by something old and vengeful. It stole away the breath from his lungs and made them burn, as if he had plunged naked beneath the surface of an arctic river. It took Dak’ir a few moments to realise the crooked fingers of the preacher were penetrating his battle-plate. Worming beyond the aegis of ceramite, making a mockery of his power armour’s normally staunch defences, the grey preacher’s talons sought vital organs in their quest for vengeance.

Trying to cry out, Dak’ir found his larynx frozen, his tongue made leaden by the spectral assault. In his mind his intoned words of Promethean lore kept him from slipping into utter darkness.

Vulkan’s fire beats in my breast. With it I shall smite the foes of the Emperor.

A heavy pressure hammered at his thunderous hearts, pressing, pressing…

Dak’ir’s senses were ablaze and the smell of old, dank wood permeated through his battle-helm.

Then a bright flame engulfed him and the pressure eased. Cold withered, melted away by soothing heat, and as his darkening vision faded Dak’ir saw Pyriel standing amidst a pillar of fire. At the periphery, Ba’ken was being dragged free of the earth that had claimed him. Someone else was lifting Dak’ir. He felt strong hands hooking under his arms and pulling him. It was only then as his body became weightless and light that he realised he must’ve fallen. Semi-conscious, Dak’ir was aware of a fading voice addressing him.

‘Dragging your carcass out of the fire again, Ignean…’

Then the darkness claimed him.

The strategium was actually an old refectory inside the bastion compound that smelled strongly of tabac and stale sweat. A sturdy-looking cantina table had been commandeered to act as a tacticarium, and was strewn with oiled maps, geographical charts and data-slates. The vaulted ceiling leaked, and drips of water were constantly being wiped from the various scrolls and picts layering the table by aides and officers alike. Buzzing around the moderately sized room’s edges were Departmento Munitorum clerks and logisticians, counting up men and materiel with their styluses and exchanging dark glances with one another when they thought the Guard weren’t looking.

It was no secret that they’d lost a lot of troops in the last sortie to bring down the void shield. To compound matters, ammunition for the larger guns was running dangerously low, to ‘campaign-unviable’ levels. Almost an hour had passed since the disastrous assault, and the Imperial forces were no closer to forging a battle-plan.

Librarian Pyriel surveyed the tactical data before him and saw nothing new, no insightful strategy to alleviate the graveness of their situation. At least the spectres had given up pursuit when they’d entered the grounds of Mercy Rock, though it had taken a great deal of the Epistolary’s psychic prowess to fend them off and make retreat possible.

‘What were they, brother?’ said Tsu’gan in a low voice, trying not to alert the Guard officers and quartermaster who had joined them. Some things – Tsu’gan knew – it was best that humans stayed ignorant of. They could be weak-minded, all too susceptible to fear. Protecting humanity meant more than bolter and blade; it meant shielding them from the horrifying truths of the galaxy too, lest they be broken by them.

‘I am uncertain.’ Pyriel cast his gaze upwards, where his witch-sight turned timber and rockcrete as thin as gossamer, penetrating the material to soar into the shadow night where the firmament was drenched blood-red. ‘But I believe the warp storm and the spectres are connected.’

‘Slaves of Chaos?’ The word left a bitter taste, and Tsu’gan spat it out.

‘Lost and damned, perhaps,’ the Librarian mused. ‘Not vassals of the Ruinous Powers, though. I think they are… warp echoes, souls trapped between the empyrean and the mortal world. The red storm has thinned the veil of reality. I can feel the echoes pushing through. Only, I don’t know why. But as long as the storm persists, as long as Hell Night continues, they will be out there.’

Only a few metres away, oblivious to the Salamanders, the Guard officers were having a war council of their own.

‘The simple matter is, we cannot afford a protracted siege,’ stated Captain Mannheim. Since Tench’s execution and the commissar’s incapacitation, Mann-heim was the highest ranking officer in the Phalanx. His sleeves were rolled up and he’d left his cap on the tacticarium table, summiting the charts.

‘We have perhaps enough munitions for one more sustained assault on the void shield.’ The quartermaster was surveying his materiel logs, a Departmento Munitorum aide feeding him data-slates with fresh information that he mentally recorded and handed back as he spoke. ‘After that, there is nothing we possess here that can crack it.’

Another officer, a second lieutenant, spoke up. His jacket front was unbuttoned and an ugly dark sweat stain created a dagger-shaped patch down his shirt.

‘Even if we did, what hope is there while those things haunt the darkness?’

A patched-up corporal, his left eye bandaged, blotched crimson under the medical gauze, stepped forward.

‘I am not leading my platoon out there to be butchered again. The secessionists consort with daemons. We have no defence against it.’

Fear, Tsu’gan sneered. Yes, humans were too weak for some truths.

The second lieutenant turned, scowling, to regard the Salamanders who dwelt in the shadows at the back of the room.

‘And what of the Emperor’s Angels? Were you not sent to deliver us and help end the siege? Are these foes, the spectres in the darkness, not allied to our faceless enemies at Aphium? We cannot break the city, if you cannot rid us of the daemons in our midst.’

Hot anger flared in Tsu’gan’s eyes, and the officer balked. The Salamander snarled with it, clenching a fist at the human’s impudence.

Pyriel’s warning glance made his brother stand down.

‘They are not daemons,’ Pyriel asserted, ‘but warp echoes. A resonance of the past that clings to our present.’

‘Daemons, echoes, what difference does it make?’ asked Mannheim. ‘We are being slaughtered all the same, and with no way to retaliate. Even if we could banish these… echoes,’ he corrected, ‘we cannot take on them and the void shield. It’s simple numbers, my lord. We are fighting a war of attrition which our depleted force cannot win.’

Tsu’gan stepped forward, unable to abstain from comment any longer.

‘You are servants of the Emperor!’ he reminded Mannheim fiercely. ‘And you will do your part, hopeless or not, for the glory of Him on Earth.’

A few of the officers made the sign of the aquila, but Mannheim was not to be cowed.

‘I’ll step onto the sacrificial altar of war if that is what it takes, but I won’t do it blindly. Would you lead your men to certain death, knowing it would achieve nothing?’

Tsu’gan scowled. Grunting an unintelligible diatribe, he turned on his heel and stalked from the strategium.

Pyriel raised his eyebrows.

‘Forgive my brother,’ he said to the council. ‘Tsu’gan burns with a Nocturnean’s fire. He becomes agitated if he cannot slay anything.’

‘And that is the problem, isn’t it?’ returned Captain Mannheim. ‘The reason why your brother-sergeant was so frustrated. Save for you, Librarian, your Astartes have no weapons against these echoes. For all their strength of arms, their skill and courage, they are powerless against them.’

The statement lingered, like a blade dangling precariously over the thread of all their hopes.

‘Yes,’ Pyriel admitted in little more than a whisper.

Silent disbelief filled the room for a time as the officers fought to comprehend the direness of their plight on Vaporis.

‘There are no sanctioned psykers in the Phalanx,’ said the second lieutenant at last. ‘Can one individual, even an Astartes, turn the tide of this war?’

‘He cannot!’ chimed the corporal. ‘We need to signal for landers immediately. Request reinforcements,’ he suggested.

‘There will be none forthcoming,’ chided Mann-heim. ‘Nor will the landers enter Vaporis space whilst Aphium is contested. We are alone in this.’

‘My brother was right in one thing,’ uttered Pyriel, his voice cutting through the rising clamour. ‘Your duty is to the Emperor. Trust in us, and we will deliver victory,’ he promised.

‘But how, my lord?’ asked Mannheim.

Pyriel’s gaze was penetrating.

‘Psychics are anathema to the warp echoes. With my power, I can protect your men by erecting a psy-shield. The spectres, as you call them, will not be able to pass through. If we can get close enough to the void shield, much closer than the original assault line, and apply sufficient pressure to breach it, my brothers will break through and shatter your enemies. Taking out the generatoria first, the shield will fail and with it the Aphium resistance once your long guns have pounded them.’

The second lieutenant scoffed, a little incredulous.

‘My lord, I don’t doubt the talents of the Astartes, nor your own skill, but can you really sustain a shield of sufficient magnitude and duration to make this plan work?’

The Librarian smiled thinly.

‘I am well schooled by my Master Vel’cona. As an Epistolary-level Librarian, my abilities are prodigious, lieutenant,’ he said without pride. ‘I can do what must be done.’

Mannheim nodded, though a hint of fatalism tainted his resolve.

‘Then you have my full support and the support of the Phalanx 135th,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you need, my lord, and it shall be yours.’

‘Stout hearts and steely resolve is all I ask, captain. It is all the Emperor will ever ask of you.’

Tsu’gan checked the load of his combi-bolter, re-securing the promethium canister on the flamer element of the weapon.

‘Seems pointless, when we cannot even kill our foes,’ he growled.

The bellicose sergeant was joined by the rest of his brothers at the threshold to Mercy Rock, in the inner courtyard before the bastion’s great gate.

Behind them, the Phalanx platoons were readying. In the vehicle yards, the Basilisks were churning into position on their tracks. Anticipation filled the air like an electric charge.

Only two Salamanders were missing, and one of those was hurrying to join them through the thronging Guardsmen from the makeshift medi-bay located in the bastion catacombs.

‘How is he, brother?’ Emek asked, racking the slide to his bolter.

‘Unconscious still,’ said Ba’ken. He’d ditched his heavy flamer and carried a bolter like most of his battle-brothers. Dak’ir had not recovered from the attack by the spectre and so, despite his protests, Ba’ken had been made de facto sergeant by Pyriel.

‘I wish he were with us,’ he muttered.

‘We all do, brother,’ said Pyriel. Detecting a mote of unease, he asked, ‘Something on your mind, Ba’ken?’

The question hung in the air like an unfired bolt-round, before the hulking trooper answered.

‘I heard Brother-Sergeant Tsu’gan over the comm-feed. Can these things even be fought, brother? Or are we merely drawing them off for the Guard?’

‘I saw the Ignean’s blade pass straight through one,’ Tsu’gan muttered. ‘And yet others seized upon Ba’ken as solid and intractable as a docking claw.’

Emek looked up from his auspex.

‘Before they attack, they corporealise; become flesh,’ he said, ‘Although it is flesh of iron with a grip as strong as a power fist.’

‘I had noticed it too,’ Pyriel replied. ‘Very observant, brother.’

Emek nodded humbly, before the Librarian outlined his strategy.

‘Our forces will be strung out across the killing field, four combat squads as before. I can stretch my psychic influence to encompass the entire Phalanx battle line but it will be a comparatively narrow cordon, and some of the spectres may get through. Adopt defensive tactics and wait for them to attack, then strike. But know the best we can hope for is to repel them. Only I possess the craft to banish the creatures into the warp and that won’t be possible whilst I’m maintaining the psychic shield.’

‘Nor then will you be able to fight, Brother-Librarian,’ said Ba’ken.

Pyriel faced him, and there was an unspoken compact in his low voice. ‘No, I’ll be temporarily vulnerable.’

So you, brothers, will need to be my shield.

The severity of the mission weighed as heavy as the weather. Captain Mannheim had been correct when he’d spoken in the strategium: for all their strength of arms, their skill and courage, they were powerless against the spectres. Almost.

Pyriel addressed the group. ‘Fire-born: check helm-displays for updated mission parameters and objectives.’

A series of ‘affirmatives’ greeted the order.

‘Switching to tac-sight,’ added Tsu’gan. A data stream of time-codes, distances and troop dispositions filled his left occulobe lens. He turned to Pyriel just as the great gates to Mercy Rock were opening. ‘I hope you can do what you promised, Librarian, or we are all dead.’

Pyriel’s gaze was fixed ahead as he donned his battle-helm.

‘The warp storm is unpredictable, but it also augments my own powers,’ he said. ‘I can hold the shield for long enough.’

On a closed channel, he contacted Tsu’gan alone.

‘My psychic dampener will be low,’ he warned. ‘If at any moment I am compromised, you know what must be done.’

If I am daemonically possessed by the warp, Tsu’gan read between the Librarian’s words easily enough.

A sub-vocal ‘compliance’ flashed up as an icon on Pyriel’s display.

‘Brothers Emek, Iagon?’ the Librarian asked with the gates now yawning wide. The gap in the wall brought lashing rain and the stench of death.

Emek and Iagon were interrogating overlapping scan patterns on their auspexes in search of warp activity in the shadows of the killing field.

‘Negative, brother,’ Emek replied. Iagon nodded in agreement.

The way, for now at least, was clear.

Despite the rain, a curious stillness persisted in the darkness of Hell Night. It was red and angry. And it was waiting for them. Pyriel was drawn again to the patch of wilderness, far off in the distance.

Just beyond my reach…

‘Into the fires of battle…’ he intoned, and led the Salamanders out.

Dak’ir awoke, startled and awash with cold sweat. He was acutely aware of his beating hearts and a dense throbbing in his skull. Disorientating visions were fading from his subconscious mind… An ashen world, of tombs and mausoleums lining a long, bone-grey road… The redolence of burning flesh and grave dust… Half-remembered screams of a brother in pain…

…Becoming one with the screams of many, across a dark and muddied field… The touch of rain, cold against his skin… and a bell tolling… ‘We are here…’ ‘We are here…’

The first was an old dream. He had seen it many times. But now new impressions had joined it, and Dak’ir knew they came from Vaporis. He tried to hold onto them, the visions and the sense memories, but it was like clutching smoke.

With the thinning of the unreal, the real became solid and Dak’ir realised he was flat on his back. A wire mattress with coarse sheets supported him. The cot groaned as he tried to move – so did Dak’ir when the daggers of pain pierced his body. He grimaced and sank back down, piecing together the immediate past. The attack by the spectral preacher came back to him. A remembered chill made him shiver.

‘You’re pretty well banged up,’ said a voice from the shadows. The sudden sound revealed just how quiet it was – the dull reply of heavy artillery was but a faint thudding in the walls. ‘I wouldn’t move so quickly,’ the voice advised.

‘Who are you?’ rasped Dak’ir, the dryness in his throat a surprise at first.

A high-pitched squeal grated against the Salamander’s skull as a Phalanx officer sitting in a wheelchair rolled into view.

‘Bahnhoff, my lord,’ he said. ‘You and your Astartes tried to save my men in the killing field, and I’m grateful to you for that.’

‘It’s my duty,’ Dak’ir replied, still groggy. He managed to sit up, despite the horrendous pain of his injuries and the numbness that lingered well after the preacher had relinquished his deathly grip. Dak’ir was gasping for breath for a time.

‘Lieutenant Bahnhoff?’ he said, remembering; a look of incredulity on his face when he saw the wheelchair.

‘Artillery blast got me,’ the officer supplied. ‘Platoon dragged me the rest of the way. Took me off the frontline too, though.’

Dak’ir felt a pang of sorrow for the lieutenant when he saw the shattered pride in his eyes.

‘Am I alone? Have my brothers gone to battle without me?’ Dak’ir asked.

‘They said you were too badly injured. Told us to watch over you until they returned.’

‘My armour…’ Dak’ir was naked from the waist up. Even his torso bodyglove had been removed. As he made to swing himself over the edge of the cot, enduring still further agonies, he saw that his battle-plate’s cuirass was lying reverently in one corner of the room. His bodyglove was with it, cut up where his brothers had needed to part it to treat his wounds. Dak’ir ran his finger over them. In the glow of a single lume-lamp they looked like dark bruises in the shape of fingerprint impressions.

‘Here… I found these in a storage room nearby.’ Bahnhoff tossed Dak’ir a bundle of something he’d been carrying on his lap.

The Salamander caught it, movement still painful but getting easier, and saw they were robes.

‘They’re loose, so should fit your frame,’ Bahnhoff explained.

Dak’ir eyed the lieutenant, but shrugged on the robes nonetheless.

‘Help me off this cot,’ he said.

Together, they got Dak’ir off the bed and onto his feet. He wobbled at first, but quickly found his balance, before surveying his surroundings.

They were in a small room, like a cell. The walls were bare stone. Dust collected in the corners and hung in the air, giving it an eerie quality.

‘What is this place?’

Bahnhoff wheeled backwards as Dak’ir staggered a few steps from the cot.

‘Mercy Rock’s catacombs. We use it as a medi-bay,’ the lieutenant’s face darkened, ‘and morgue.’

‘Apt,’ Dak’ir replied with grim humour.

A strange atmosphere permeated this place. Dak’ir felt it as he brushed the walls with his finger-tips, as he drank in the cloudy air.

We are here…

The words came back to him like a keening. They were beckoning him. He turned to Bahnhoff, eyes narrowed.

‘What is that?’

‘What is what, my lord?’

A faint scratching was audible in the sepulchral silence, as a quill makes upon parchment. Bahnhoff’s eyes widened as he heard it too.

‘All the Munitorum clerks are up in the strategium…’

‘It’s coming from beneath us,’ said Dak’ir. He was already making for the door. Wincing with every step, he betrayed his discomfort, but gritted his teeth as he went to follow the scratching sound.

‘Are there lower levels?’ he asked Bahnhoff, as they moved through a shadowy corridor.

‘Doesn’t get any deeper than the catacombs, my lord.’

Dak’ir was moving more quickly now, and Bahnhoff was wheeling hard to keep up.

The scratching was getting louder, and when they reached the end of the corridor the way ahead was blocked by a timber barricade.

‘Structurally unsafe, according to the engineers,’ said Bahnhoff.

‘It’s old…’ Dak’ir replied, noting the rotten wood and the gossamer webs wreathing it like a veil. He gripped one of the planks and tore it off easily. Compelled by some unknown force, Dak’ir ripped the barricade apart until they were faced by a stone stairway. It led into a darkened void. The reek of decay and stagnation was strong.

‘Are we going down there?’ asked Bahnhoff, a slight tremor in his voice.

‘Wait for me here,’ Dak’ir told him and started down the steps.

‘Stay within the cordon!’ bellowed Tsu’gan, as another one of Captain Mannheim’s men was lost to the earth.

An invisible barrier stretched the length of the killing ground that only flared incandescently into existence when one of the spectres struck it and recoiled. Like a lightning spark, the flash was born and died quickly, casting the scene starkly in its ephemeral life. Gunnery teams slogged hard to keep pace and infantry tramped hurriedly alongside them in long thin files, adopting firing lines once they’d reached the two hundred metre marker. Las-bursts erupted from the Phalanx ranks in a storm. Barking solid shot from heavy bolters and auto-cannon added to the sustained salvo. So close to the void shield, the energy impact returns were incandescently bright and despite the darkness, made several troopers don photoflash goggles. For some, it was just as well that their vision was impeded for shadows lurked beyond Librarian Pyriel’s psychic aegis and not everyone was immune to them.

The barrier was narrow, just as Pyriel had warned, and as the Phalanx had tried to keep pace with the Salamanders on the way to the advanced assault line some stepped out of it. A muted cry and then they were no longer seen or heard from again. By the time the firing line was erected, some several dozen troopers were missing. The Salamanders, as yet, had not succumbed.

Tsu’gan saw the flickering white forms of the warp echoes through the Librarian’s psychic shield. They lingered, angry and frustrated, ever probing to test the limits of Pyriel’s strength. Though he couldn’t see his face through his battle-helm, Tsu’gan knew by the Epistolary’s juddering movements that he was feeling the strain. He was a vessel now for the near-unfettered power of the warp. Like a sluice gate let free, the energy coursed through him as Pyriel fought hard to channel it into the shield. One slip and he would be lost. Then Tsu’gan would need to act quickly, slaying him before Pyriel’s flesh was obtained by another, heralding the death of them all, Salamanders or no.

One of the creatures breached the barrier wall, corporealising to do it, and Tsu’gan lashed out with his fist.

It was like striking adamantium, and he felt the shock of the blow all the way up his arm and into his shoulder, but did enough to force the creature back. It flashed briefly out of existence, but returned quickly, a snarl upon its eldritch features.

‘Hard as iron you said,’ Tsu’gan roared into the comm-feed as the weapons fire intensified.

Overhead the Earthshaker shells were finding their marks and the void shield rippled near its summit.

Emek battered another of the spectres back beyond the psychic cordon, the exertion needed to do it evident in his body language.

‘Perhaps too conservative,’ he admitted.

‘A tad, brother,’ came Tsu’gan’s bitter rejoinder. ‘Iagon,’ he relayed through his battle-helm, ‘what are the readings for the shield?’

‘Weakening, my lord,’ was Iagon’s sibilant reply, ‘but still insufficient for a break.’

Tsu’gan scowled.

‘Ba’ken…’

‘We must advance,’ the acting sergeant answered. ‘Fifty metres, and apply greater pressure to the shield.’

At a hundred and fifty metres away, the danger from energy flares cast by void impacts and friendly fire casualties from the Earthshakers was greatly increased, but then the Salamanders had little choice. Soon the bombardment from the Basilisks would end when they ran out of shells. The void shield had to be down before then.

‘Brother-Librarian,’ Tsu’gan began, ‘another fifty metres?’

After a few moments, Pyriel nodded weakly and started to move forwards.

Tsu’gan turned his attention to the Phalanx.

‘Captain Mannheim, we are advancing. Another fifty metres.’

The Phalanx officer gave a clipped affirmative before continuing to galvanise his men and reminding them of their duty to the Emperor.

Despite himself, the Salamander found he admired the captain for that.

The bells tolled on as the Imperial forces resumed their march.

The stairs were shallow and several times Dak’ir almost lost his footing, only narrowly avoiding a plunge into uncertain darkness by bracing himself against the flanking walls.

Near the bottom of the stairwell, he was guided by a faint smudge of flickering light. Its warm, orange glow suggested candles or a fire. There was another room down here and this was where the scratching sound emanated from.

Cursing himself for leaving his weapons in the cell above, Dak’ir stepped cautiously through a narrow portal that forced him to duck to get through and into a small, dusty chamber.

Beyond the room’s threshold he saw bookcases stuffed with numerous scrolls, tomes and other arcana. Religious relics were packed in half-open crates, stamped with the Imperial seal. Others, deific statues, Ecclesiarchal sigils and shrines were cluttered around the chamber’s periphery. And there, in the centre, scribing with ink and quill at a low table, was an old, robed clerk.

The scrivener looked up from his labours, blinking with eye strain as he regarded the giant, onyx-skinned warrior in his midst.

‘Greetings, soldier,’ he offered politely.

Dak’ir nodded, uncertain of what to make of his surroundings. A prickling sensation ran through his body but then faded as he stepped into the corona of light cast by the scrivener’s solitary candle.

‘Are you Munitorum?’ asked Dak’ir. ‘What are you doing so far from the strategium?’ Dak’ir continued to survey the room as he stepped closer. It was caked in dust and the grime of ages, more a forgotten storeroom than an office for a Departmento clerk.

The scrivener laughed; a thin, rasping sort of a sound that put Dak’ir a little on edge.

‘Here,’ said the old man as he backed away from his works. ‘See what keeps me in this room.’

Dak’ir came to the table at the scrivener’s beckoning, strangely compelled by the old man’s manner, and looked down at his work.

Hallowed Heath – a testament of its final days, he read.

‘Mercy Rock was not always a fortress,’ explained the scrivener behind him. ‘Nor was it always alone.’

The hand that had authored the parchment scroll in front of Dak’ir was scratchy and loose but he was able to read it.

‘It says here that Mercy Rock was once a basilica, a temple devoted to the worship of the Imperial Creed.’

‘Read on, my lord…’ the scrivener goaded.

Dak’ir did as asked.

‘“…and Hallowed Heath was its twin. Two bastions of light, shining like beacons against the old faiths, bringing enlightenment and understanding to Vaporis,”’ he related directly from the text. ‘“In the shadow of Aphium, but a nascent township with lofty ambitions, did these pinnacles of faith reside. Equal were they in their fervour and dedication, but not in fortification–”’ Dak’ir looked around at the old scrivener who glared at the Salamander intently.

‘I thought you said they were not fortresses?’

The scrivener nodded, urging Dak’ir to continue his studies.

‘“–One was built upon a solid promontory of rock, hence its given appellation; the other upon clay. It was during the Unending Deluge of 966.M40 when the rains of Vaporis continued for sixty-six days, the heaviest they had ever been in longest memory, that Hallowed Heath sank down beneath a quagmire of earth, taking its five hundred and forty-six patrons and priests with it. For three harrowing days and nights the basilica sank, stone by stone, beneath the earth, its inhabitants stranded within its walls that had become as their tomb. And for three nights, they tolled the bells in the highest towers of Hallowed Heath, saying, “We are here!”, “We are here!” but none came to their aid.”’

Dak’ir paused as a horrible understanding started to crawl up his spine. Needing to know more, oblivious now to the scrivener, he continued.

‘“Aphium was the worst. The township and all its peoples did not venture into the growing mire for fear of their own lives, did not even try to save the stricken people. They shut their ears to the bells and shut their doors, waiting for a cessation to the rains. And all the while, the basilica sank, metre by metre, hour by hour, until the highest towers were consumed beneath the earth, all of its inhabitants buried alive with them, and the bells finally silenced.”’

Dak’ir turned to regard the old scrivener.

‘The spectres in the killing field,’ he said, ‘they are the warp echoes of the preachers and their patrons.’

‘They are driven by hate, hate for the Aphiums who closed their ears and let them die, just as I am driven by guilt.’

Guilt?

Dak’ir was about to question it when the scrivener interrupted.

‘You’re near the end, Hazon, read on.’

Dak’ir was compelled to turn back, as if entranced.

‘“This testament is the sole evidence of this terrible deed – nay; it is my confession of complicity in it. Safe was I in Mercy Rock, sat idle whilst others suffered and died. It cannot stand. This I leave as small recompense, so that others might know of what transpired. My life shall be forfeit just as theirs were, too.”’

There it ended, and only then did Dak’ir acknowledge that the old man had used his first name. He whirled around, about to demand answers… but he was too late.

The scrivener was gone.

The Earthshaker barrage stopped abruptly like a thumping heart in sudden cardiac arrest. Its absence was a silent death knell to the Phalanx and their Adeptus Astartes allies.

‘It’s done,’ snarled Tsu’gan, when the Imperial shelling ended. ‘We break through now or face the end. Iagon?’

‘Still holding, my lord.’

They were but a hundred metres from the void shield now, having pressed up in one final effort to overload it. Without the heavy artillery backing them up, it seemed an impossible task. All the time, more and more Phalanx troopers were lost to breaches in the psychic shield, dragged into dank oblivion by ethereal hands.

‘I feel… something…’ said Pyriel, struggling to speak, ‘Something in the void shield… Just beyond my reach…’

Despite his colossal efforts, the Librarian was weakening. The psychic barrier was losing its integrity and with it any protection against the warp echoes baying at its borders.

‘Stand fast!’ yelled Mannheim. ‘Hold the line and press for glory, men of the Phalanx!’

Through sheer grit and determination, the Guardsmen held. Even though their fellow troopers were being swallowed by the earth, they held.

Tsu’gan could not help but feel admiration again for their courage. Like a crazed dervish, he raced down the line raining blows upon the intruding spectres, his shoulders burning with the effort.

‘Salamanders! We are about to be breached,’ he cried. ‘Protect the Phalanx. Protect your brothers in arms with your lives!’

‘Hail Vulkan and the glory of Prometheus!’ Ba’ken chimed. ‘Let Him on Earth witness your courage, men of the Phalanx.’

The effect of the sergeants’ words was galvanising. Coupled with Mannheim’s own stirring rally, the men became intractable in the face of almost certain death.

Tsu’gan heard a deep cry of pain to his left and saw Lazarus fall, impaled as Dak’ir had been by eldritch fingers.

‘Brother!’

S’tang and Nor’gan went to his aid as Honorious covered their retreat with his flamer.

‘Hold, Fire-born, hold!’ Tsu’gan bellowed. ‘Give them nothing!’

Tenacious to the end, the Salamanders would fight until their final breaths, and none so fiercely as Tsu’gan.

The battle-hardened sergeant was ready to make his final pledges to his primarch and his Emperor when the comm-feed crackled to life in his ear.

‘You may have cheated death, Ignean,’ snapped Tsu’gan when he realised who it was. ‘But then survival over glory was always your–’

‘Shut up, Zek, and raise Pyriel right now,’ Dak’ir demanded, using the other Salamander’s first name and mustering as much animus as he could.

‘Our brother needs to marshal all of his concentration, Ignean,’ Tsu’gan snapped again. ‘He can ill afford distractions from you.’

‘Do it, or it will not matter how distracted he becomes!’

Tsu’gan snarled audibly but obeyed, something in Dak’ir’s tone making him realise it was important.

‘Brother-Librarian,’ he barked down the comm-feed. ‘Our absent brother demands to speak with you.’

Pyriel nodded labouredly, his hands aloft as he struggled to maintain the barrier.

‘Speak…’ the Librarian could scarcely rasp.

‘Do you remember what you felt before the first assault?’ Dak’ir asked quickly. ‘You said there was something about the shield, an anomaly in its energy signature. It is psychically enhanced, brother, to keep the warp echoes out.’

Through the furious barrage a slim crack was forming in the void shield’s integrity, invisible to mortal eyes but plain as frozen lightning to the Librarian’s witch-sight. And through it, Pyriel discerned a psychic undercurrent straining to maintain a barrier of its own. With Dak’ir’s revelation came understanding and then purpose.

‘They want vengeance against Aphium,’ said Pyriel, beginning to refocus his psychic energy and remould it into a sharp blade of his own anger.

‘For the complicity in their deaths over a thousand years ago,’ Dak’ir concluded.

‘I know what to do, brother,’ Pyriel uttered simply, his voice drenched with psychic resonance as he let slip the last of the tethers from his psychic hood, the crystal matrix dampener that protected him psychically, and laid himself open to the warp.

‘In Vulkan’s name,’ Dak’ir intoned before the link was overwhelmed with psychic static and died.

‘Brother Tsu’gan…’ Pyriel’s voice was deep and impossibly loud against the battle din. A tsunami of raw psychic power was coursing through him, encasing the Librarian in a vibrant, fiery aura. ‘…I am about to relinquish the barrier…’

Tsu’gan had no time to answer. The psychic barrier fell and the warp echoes swept in. Thunder split the heavens and red lightning tore across boiling clouds as the warp storm reached its zenith.

Already, the breach Pyriel had psychically perceived was closing.

‘Maintain positions!’ roared Mannheim, as his men were being taken. ‘Keep firing!’

Secessionist fire, freed up from mitigating the Imperial artillery barrage, was levelled at the Phalanx. Mannheim took a lucky las-round in the throat and was silenced.

Tsu’gan watched the officer fall just as Pyriel burst into violent conflagration. Running over to Mannheim, he scooped the fallen captain up into his arms, and watched as a bolt of flame lashed out from Pyriel’s refulgent form. It surged through the void shield, past the unseen breach, reaching out for the minds of the Librarian’s enemies…

Deep in Aphium rebel territory, in an armoured bunker sunk partially beneath the earth, a cadre of psykers sat in a circle, their consciousnesses locked, their will combined to throw a veil across the void shield that kept out the deeds of their ancestors. It was only around Hell Night when the blood storm wracked the heavens and brought about an awakening for vengeance, a desire for retribution, that their skills were needed.

One by one they screamed, an orange fire unseen by mortal eyes ravaging them with its scorching tendrils. Flesh melted, eyes ran like wax under a hot lamp, and one by one the psyker cadre burned. The heat inside the bunker was intense, though the temperature gauge suggested a cool night, and within seconds the psykers were reduced to ash and the defence of Aphium with it.

Upon the killing field, Tsu’gan detected a change in the air. The oppressive weight that had dogged them since mustering out for a second time on Hell Night had lifted, like leaden chains being dragged away by unseen hands.

Like mist before the rays of a hot sun, the warp echoes receded into nothing. Silence drifted over the killing field, as all of the guns stopped. The void shield flickered and died a moment later, the absence of its droning hum replaced by screaming from within the city of Aphium.

‘In Vulkan’s name…’ Tsu’gan breathed, unable to believe what was unfolding before his eyes. He didn’t need to see it to know the spectres had turned on the rebels of Aphium and were systematically slaying each and every one.

It wasn’t over. Not yet. Pyriel blazed like an incendiary about to explode. The Librarian’s body was spasming uncontrollably as he fought to marshal the forces he’d unleashed. Raging psychic flame coursed through him. As if taking hold of an accelerant, it burned mercilessly. Several troopers were consumed by it, the mind-fire becoming real. Men collapsed in the heat, their bodies rendered to ash.

‘Pyriel!’ cried Tsu’gan. Cradling Captain Mann-heim in his arms, he raised his bolter one-handed.

…you know what you must do.

He fired into Pyriel’s back, an expert shot that punctured the Librarian’s lung but wasn’t fatal. Pyriel bucked against the blow, the flames around him dwindling, and sagged to his knees. Then he fell onto his side, unconscious, and the conflagration was over.

‘Tsu’gan. Tsu’gan!’

It took Tsu’gan a few seconds to realise he was being hailed. A curious stillness had settled over the killing field. Above them the red sky was fading as the warp storm passed, and the rain had lessened. On the horizon, another grey day was dawning.

‘Dak’ir…’

Stunned, he forgot to use his derogatory sobriquet for the other sergeant.

‘What happened, Zek? Is it over?’

Mannheim was dead. Tsu’gan realised it as the officer went limp in his arms. He had not faltered, even at the end, and had delivered his men to victory and glory. Tsu’gan’s bolter was still hot from shooting Pyriel. He used it carefully to burn an honour marking in Captain Mannheim’s flesh. It was shaped like the head of a firedrake.

‘It’s over,’ he replied and cut the link.

A faded sun had broken through the gathering cloud. Errant rays lanced downwards, casting their glow upon a patch of distant earth far off in the wilderness. Tsu’gan didn’t know what it meant, only that when he looked upon it his old anger lessened and a strange feeling, that was not to last in the days to come, spilled over him.

Rain fell. Day dawned anew. Hell Night was ended, but the feeling remained.

It was peace.