The Gorgon fought without his battle-helm and was bludgeoning his way into the enemy’s flank. Forgebreakerrose and fell like a metronome in his silver hands, crushing skulls and smashing eldar into the air with the hammer’s every formidable swing. Zeal and fury radiated from his granite face as he drove the Morlocks relentlessly. Blistering fire flared between both sides but none of the Iron Hands slowed, let alone fell.
The kindred of eldar fighting them was soon overwhelmed and lethally despatched, but more enemies were coming.
Encouraged by the bloodletting, a pack of crimson-scaled carnodons snorted a throaty challenge. Their riders bellowed for the monsters to charge. The Iron Hands were still cutting down a few defiant stragglers from the eldar kindred when Ferrus Manus bellowed at them. Vulkan could read his lips and imagine his wrath.
“Finish them now!”
In his eagerness to end the fight quickly, a wayward blow from the primarch’s hammer crunched through the side of a nearby column and sent it tumbling. Vulkan balked when he saw who was in its path.
Like a ghost materialising corporeally in the fog, the boy-child appeared from nowhere. His naked torso was drenched in sweat and someone else’s blood, and he wailed blindly as he fled. As if sensing the sudden danger, the boy-child froze abruptly in the shadow of the falling column and could only watch his impending death approaching. He raised his arms feebly over his eyes.
Don’t look, child…
Vulkan was running, leaving his praetorians behind him. It would not be enough. Without intervention, the column would crush the boy-child. He cried out, knowing that to even witness the death of such an innocent would forever stain his immortal soul.
Arrested from his battle frenzy by his brother’s anguish, Ferrus turned and saw the danger.
“First-Captain!” he bellowed, and Gabriel Santar was there.
At his urging, the Morlocks drove on ahead of him to meet the carnodons with bolters flaring. Santar lagged behind and threw himself against the collapsing column. Using both hands, he caught the chunk of broken stone and held it. Servos in his bionic arm and legs whined in protest at the sudden strain they were put under.
He had enough strength spare to turn his head towards the terrified infant. His grey eyes churned with the turmoil of a captured storm as he glowered down at him. “Flee now!”
Screaming, the boy-child ran.
And as if heralding a flood, there were suddenly hundreds of the fleeing humans. Like leaves blown about on an eddying breeze, the frightened flock scurried in all directions and from everywhere at once.
“Terra and the Emperor,” breathed Ferrus Manus, unable to comprehend the insane exodus.
“My lord…”
In spite of his cybernetics, Gabriel Santar’s legs buckled to the knee and his elbows bent with the sheer immense weight of the column. The Gorgon was quick to relieve him, stowing Forgebreakerand hoisting the broken chunk of rock from his equerry as though it were little more than a bolter.
He roared to the Morlocks, who were seconds from hand-to-hand combat, “ down!” and hurled the shattered pillar like a spear. The front carnodon took the brunt of the improvised missile, howling in agony as its forelegs were broken. It hit the ground muzzle first, trammelling the other beasts that tripped and blundered, losing the impetus of their attack. The Morlocks were quickly amongst them, Santar having rejoined their ranks.
Ferrus Manus glowered at Vulkan, his gimlet gaze singling out the other primarch easily in the throng.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me to try not to kill them?” he declared through the feed.
It was easier said than done. Though the boy-child had reached relative safety, Vulkan saw hundreds fleeing in his wake. The natives were running loose all over the killing fields, heedless of the danger. Emerging from their nests and hidden places in a panicked mass, it was as if the humans had been displaced from a major settlement by the eldar war host. Either that or it was some desperate gambit on the aliens’ part to try to disrupt the Imperium’s inevitable victory.
Vulkan felt his wrath for the eldar renewed. Painful reminders of Nocturne during the Time of Trial, when fire rained from the sky and the earth cracked, flickered in his mind. He remembered their fear and the grim resignation that all they had striven for, when everything they had created was about to end. Perhaps the tribes of Ibsen were not so different after all.
Ibsenagain. He saw this world through a fresh lens, but why?
Ferrus was right: flesh wasweak but because he was strong, Vulkan was duty bound to protect them.
Whatever the cause of the frantic flight, the humans were at terrible risk. Entire families raced madly through the fading fog, screaming and wailing as a pervasive hysteria overtook them. Some even attacked the Army divisions in their desperation to escape, throwing rocks or beating them with their fists. None dared approach the Legionaries for fear of the consequences.
And if they’d carried carbines and rifles instead of sticks and rocks?
The tribal tattoos, the apparent ease with which they’d been conquered, coupled with the eldar’s total infiltration—in spite of his empathy, Vulkan began to wonder just how far from the Emperor’s light the natives had fallen.
Through the smoky bloom of a grenade detonation, a mother and daughter emerged unscathed. Vulkan saw them running; they were just a few metres from the primarch’s position, then he noticed the unexploded shell in their path. The girl-child was already screaming when a second grenade, fallen from a dead troopers grasp, rolled up to the shell.
“Pyre Guard,” Vulkan roared. “Shield them!”
The praetorians were catching up to the primarch but had reacted to the danger. Hot frag pierced the shell’s casing and it erupted in a firestorm. Numeon and Varrun put their bodies between it and the cowering humans, crouching over them and wrapping their drake cloaks around them. The rain of fire and shrapnel vented to nothing without causing harm.
Numeon was shaking the dust from his helmet lenses when a tiny infant hand pressed against his plastron. He met the girl-child’s curious gaze and was abruptly stunned.
Then they were gone, lost to the madness. The mother wasn’t about to wait for another stray bullet or lurking shell to claim them. For Numeon, the moment of connection passed as swiftly as it had materialised.
Vulkan reached them quickly. “Thank you, my sons.”
Both nodded, but Numeon’s eyes went briefly to the fog the girl-child had vanished into.
“Protect them,” said Vulkan softly, following his equerry’s gaze.
“With our breath and blood, my primarch,” Numeon replied. “With our breath and blood.”
Vulkan opened the comm-feed. “Ferrus, despite their agitation, these are innocents. Be mindful.”
“Concern yourself with killing the enemy, not saving the natives, Vulkan.” The Gorgon scowled, but his face softened before engaging the carnodons. “I’ll do what I can.”
A band of iron was tightening around the eldar’s defensive strongpoint. Vulkan knew if he continued to advance through the centre and Ferrus maintained his pace into the flank, their paths would meet. Together they would destroy the arch and end the eldar’s occupation of Ibsen. He only hoped it would not take an unconscionable loss of human life to achieve it.
As of yet, nothing had penetrated the psychic shield emanating from the coven of eldar witches surrounding the arch. Vulkan had also yet to see the female seer who’d almost defeated his Legion back in the jungle. She was the one the eldar looked to for leadership. Despatch her and the aliens would be all but defeated. Victory was near. But something still gave the primarch pause. Above him, the jungle canopy was vast, dark and labyrinthine. Like his brothers, Vulkan had good instincts and harboured the sense that something watched him from those lofty arbours; something predatory. But his hesitation was not merely on account of that. Monsters he could kill easily enough. He’d been unsettled ever since speaking to Verace. The feeling was not one he was accustomed to, nor was the way the human had spoken to him, and yet the primarch had allowed it unchallenged. Verace was hiding something. It was only now, his thoughts purified by the anvil of war, that he realised it. Stern of face, Vulkan resolved to get answers from the remembrancer.