‘What are you staring at?’ snarled the Salamander. He was crouching down, and had been looking at his helmet, facing him on his lap.
‘I’m wondering what happened to you,’ said Grammaticus.
‘War happened to us,’ he replied curtly.
‘You are made for war. There is more to it than that.’
Leodrakk looked into the stinking filth that streamed beneath their feet, but found no answers in the dirty water.
Instead, the Librarian spoke up.
‘We were betrayed,’ he rasped, ‘at Isstvan. It was worse than atrocity. The massacre we endured was only the physical manifestation of our collective trauma. The real pain was to come, and it was a malady of the mind. Not everyone survived it.’
Hriak, the Raven Guard, paused as if trying to see into Grammaticus’s mind for the source of his curiosity. It was deeply unsettling, and Grammaticus fought to keep his hand from trembling. Many years ago he believed that a very close friend of his had succumbed to a psyker’s mental intrusion. It was all lies, of course. Everything about it had been a lie, one way or another. It had still unnerved him, though, the sheer destructive potential of battle psykers. No wonder the Emperor had removed them from the Legions.
‘From the horror of Isstvan, we escaped aboard a drop-ship,’ Hriak continued, ‘but the horror did not end there. All of us were changed by what we had witnessed, the sight of our brothers slain in droves beside us, our former allies turning their guns on our backs while at the same time known traitors to our fronts opened up with their weapons in vicious concert.’
Grammaticus looked askance at Leodrakk for a reaction as Hriak related their story, and found him to be deeply uncomfortable at the retelling, but content to let it go on.
‘Some of the survivors aboard our drop-ship were not themselves,’ said Hriak. ‘When a man is heightened to a certain point of battle fervour, it can be difficult for him to come down from that. Sometimes, if the experience is particularly traumatic, he can never fully recover and a part of him will always be at war, in that self-same conflict. Such men, blinded by this trauma, have killed in error, believing friends to be foes. It takes a great deal for the Legiones Astartes to succumb to such a trauma. Our minds are much stronger than ordinary mortals, but it is possible.’
And then Grammaticus knew. He knew how Hriak had sustained the wound to his neck, the one that had very nearly slit his throat completely. It wasn’t actually on Isstvan that he’d received it, it was on the drop-ship. It was inflicted by–
‘That’s enough, Hriak,’ whispered Leodrakk. ‘We don’t need to remember that, and he doesn’t need to hear it either.’
‘My presence here has complicated things for you, hasn’t it?’ said Grammaticus.
‘You have undermined our entire mission.’
Grammaticus shook his head, nonplussed at the mordant Salamander. ‘What the fug did you intend to achieve, anyway? What were you, twenty-something men against an entire host, an entire city? I get it that you want payback, but how does throwing yourselves on your enemies’ swords get you what you want?’
Leodrakk stood, and for a brief moment looked like he was about to end Grammaticus, but decided against it.
‘It is not so simple as revenge. We want to get back into the war, make a difference, for what we do to have meaning. Before we came here, we had been tracking the Word Bearers of this particular cult for a while. We followed them to a small, backwater world called Viralis but were too late to prevent what they unleashed there.’
Grammaticus frowned. ‘Unleashed?’
‘ Daemons, John Grammaticus, a subject about which I suspect you are well-versed.’
‘I have seen the Acuity,’ he admitted.
‘Caeren Sebaton’
Leodrakk scowled. ‘I won’t even ask what that is. A gift from your Cabal, no doubt.’
‘It’s no gift, it’s truth and one I wish I could erase from my mind.’
‘Again, not my concern. What does concern me,’ he gestured to Hriak too, ‘ us, our mission, is to prevent what happened on Viralis from happening here. Their leader, the Word Bearers cleric, was supposed to die by our hand. We would slip in unnoticed, find him and execute him. Pergellen was our trigger man, the rest of us would ensure rapid egress in the face of reprisal. Our chances of success were good, our chances of survival less so, but at least we would die knowing Traoris was safe.’
‘No world is safe, Salamander,’ Grammaticus countered. ‘No part of the galaxy, however remote, is going to be spared.’
Leodrakk snarled, angry, but more at the situation than Grammaticus. ‘We would spare this world. At least from that.’ He backed down, the threat of violence ebbed. ‘But now we are discovered and being hunted. Shen and Pergellen should have left you in that warehouse.’
Grammaticus nodded. ‘Yes, they should have. But they didn’t, and now you have me and know what I know, so what are you going to do with that?’
‘Nothing,’ said a voice from deeper in the tunnel. It was dark, but even Grammaticus recognised the warrior coming to meet them. He was not alone, either.
‘Numeon.’ Leodrakk went to greet him. They locked wrists. Hriak merely bowed his head to acknowledge the captain. Leodrakk’s good mood soured when he saw who else had come back with Numeon. ‘So few?’ he asked.
‘Their sacrifice will have meaning, brother.’
Of the twenty-three legionaries that had made planetfall on Traoris from the Fire Ark, barely thirteen remained. Shen’ra had come back with Numeon, as well as K’gosi. Pergellen lingered at the back of the group, returning a few minutes after having made sure they were not followed. Hriak was the last of the Ravens now, and he muttered a Kiavahran oath for the fallen Avus. The rest were Salamanders.
Grammaticus beheld a broken force. Fate, oh that capricious mistress, had conspired against them. It had delivered him into their grasp and the fulgurite spear to the Word Bearers. The phrase ‘fugged beyond all reason’ didn’t even begin to describe it.
He also noticed that a key figure was missing, as did Leodrakk.
‘Where is Domadus?’ asked the Salamander.
Numeon sighed, weary. He took off his battle-helm. ‘We lost him during the fight. He and several others went out to meet the Seventeenth to stymie their assault. I didn’t see him fall, but…’ He shook his head.
‘So, what now?’ asked Shen’ra, hobbling to stand beside his brothers.
Grammaticus answered.
‘Let me go. Help me reclaim the spear and get off Traoris. What is there to lose now?’
Numeon ignored him, and went over to Shen’ra. He was badly wounded and struggling.
‘I have seen better days, before you ask,’ said the Techmarine acerbically. He was slumped against the tunnel wall, a trickle of effluence from the cracked ceiling painting a grubby track down his armour. Numeon kneeled to speak with him.
‘You saved us all, you irascible bastard.’
‘Lost the track-mount, though. Anyway…’ he paused to cough, ‘someone had to.’
Numeon laughed, but his humour quickly faded when he saw Shen’ra’s injuries.
The Techmarine’s bionic eye was only partially functional and he carried a limp, but his cracked breastplate hinted at the real damage. Internal injuries, partial biological shut-down.
Two other Salamanders in the returning party were already comatose as their brutalised bodies tried to repair themselves. Prognosis did not appear favourable. Three more were dead, shredded by bolt-rounds, impaled by blades. Not one killing wound, but several small ones amounting to the same. Attritional deaths. Their brothers had carried them, those that were washed down with them into the tunnels, just as they had before.
Grammaticus was surprised at the level of humanity they showed to their dead, and wondered if it was a common Nocturnean trait.
‘So, what now?’ he asked. ‘Are we to hide out in these tunnels until they find us?’