Smoke blanketed the ridge and the ash-fall had intensified. Heat haze from the still-burning fire blurred his vision. He saw the crater – he’d been thrown back from its epicentre – and the hundreds of twisted bodies within. They were incinerated, fused into their armour. Some were still dying. He saw an Apothecary – he couldn’t tell who – crawling across the earth with no legs as he tried to perform his duty. No gene-seed would be harvested this day. No one who stayed on Isstvan in the emerald-green of the XVIII would live.
Numeon had to reach a ship, he had to save himself and Leodrakk. As he tried to raise the others and his primarch through the mire of static, he vaguely recalled having been lifted off his feet and punched sideways by the backwash of heat from the explosion. They were far from the crest of the ridge now. They must have slipped into a narrow defile that had carried them back down and shielded their bodies from the fire. Numeon assumed that he had blacked out. There were fragments, pieces that he didn’t possess in his eidetic memory of what happened after the missile strike. He remembered Leodrakk calling out his brother’s name. But Skatar’var hadn’t answered. None of the Pyre Guard were answering.
‘Ska!’ Leodrakk roared, half delirious with pain and grief. ‘Brother!’
He was clinging to Skatar’var’s bloody gauntlet. Mercifully, there was no hand or forearm inside it. The glove must have been wrenched off in the blast.
Numeon seized Leodrakk by the wrist.
‘He’s gone. He’s gone. We’re leaving, Leo,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving now. Come on!’
The Salamanders were not the only Legion to be punished by Perturabo’s ordnance. Iron Warriors, those bearing the brunt of Vulkan’s wrath and that of his inner-circle warriors, had also been swept up in the explosion. One, his battered senses returning, went to intervene against Leodrakk and Numeon, but the Pyre captain cut him down with his glaive before he could open fire on them.
A warrior, one of K’gosi’s Pyroclasts, clawed at Numeon’s leg. By the time he looked down to help him the warrior was dead, burned from the inside out. A wisp of smoke trailed from his silent screaming mouth, and Numeon turned away again.
‘We have to regroup, rally…’ Leodrakk was saying.
‘There is nothing to rally to, brother.’
‘Is he…’ Leodrakk gripped Numeon by the shoulder, his eyes pleading. ‘Is he…’
Numeon broke his gaze, and looked down to where the guns of the Iron Warriors were scattering the remnants of his once-proud Legion.
‘I don’t know,’ he murmured.
Half blind, they staggered on shoulder to shoulder as the bombs continued to fall, not knowing where to turn or what the fate of Vulkan was. Smoke was spoiling the air, rich with the tang of blood, choking and black. Leodrakk’s vox-grille respirator was damaged and he was struggling to breathe. The spear of shrapnel impaling one of his lungs and still jutting from his chest also complicated matters.
The vox in Numeon’s ear crackled. He was so surprised by its sudden function that he almost lost his footing. It was an XVIII Legion channel.
‘This is Pyre Captain Numeon. We are effecting a full-scale retreat. I repeat, all fall back to the dropsite and secure passage off-world.’
He wanted to go back, return to find Vulkan, but in the carnage of the depression that was impossible. Pragmatism, not emotion, had to rule Numeon’s heart at that moment. His primarch had forged him that way, through his teaching and his example; he wasn’t about to dishonour that now.
‘ Pyre brother…’
Numeon recognised the voice on the other end of the vox-link immediately. He glanced at Leodrakk, but the warrior was making his way down the ridge towards the dropsite and hadn’t noticed Numeon was in communication with someone. It was Skatar’var.
‘ Is Leodrakk with you?’
‘I have him. Where are you?’ Numeon asked.
‘ Can’t tell. I can hear screaming. I’ve lost my weapon, brother.’
A terrible thought struck Numeon as he paused to end a stricken Iron Warrior with half his chest blown out, struggling to rise.
‘What can you see, brother?’ he asked, ramming the glaive down and twisting the haft to make sure of the kill.
‘ It’s dark, brother.’
Skatar’var was blind. Numeon cast around, but couldn’t see him. There was no way of telling where he was or if he was close enough to help. Scraps from other companies were storming back down the ridge, the Salamanders laying down covering fire as they retreated back to the dropsite. Numeon waved them on as he continued trying to find his Pyre brother.
‘Skatar’var, send out a beacon. We will come for you.’
‘ No, captain. I’m finished. Get Leodrakk out, save my brother.’
‘We might be able to reach you.’ Numeon was scouring the battlefield for any sign, but he couldn’t find him.
Death hung in the air like the noisome smoke, palling overhead from the many fires. Somewhere in the haze, Commander Krysan crawled from the burning cupola of his battle tank. He was burning too. Salamanders were born in fire, and now Krysan would die in it. The fuel canisters cooked off and exploded just as Krysan fell from the turret, rolling, burning down the side of the hull and no longer in sight. Like their commander, his once-proud armoured company was no more than a wrecker’s yard of flame-scorched metal carcasses.
‘Are you injured, brother?’ Numeon asked, increasingly desperate. ‘Can you stand?’
‘ The dead are upon me, Artellus. Their bodies crush my own.’
Looming from the oil-black fog was an Iron Warrior who was missing his helm and part of his right arm. He raised a bolter to fire but Numeon’s lunge cut short his attack and his life, as he disembowelled the traitor.
‘I need more than that, Ska. The dead are everywhere.’
It was like looking out onto a corpse sea.
‘ It’s over for me. Get Leodrakk out.’
‘Ska, you must–’
‘ No, Artellus. Let me go. Get free of this hell and avenge me!’
It was no use. The slope was thronged with retreating warriors now, and skirmishes between the survivors of both sides were breaking out.
‘Someone will come, get you to a ship,’ said Numeon, but the words sounded hollow even to him.
‘ If they do, I hope we meet again.’
The vox-link went dead and Numeon couldn’t raise it again.
Deeper into the valley, smoke was rolling in thick and pooling at the nadir of the basin where the drop-ships were launching in beleaguered flocks. Two, eager to get airborne, collided with one another and both went down in flames. Another achieved loft and was clawing for the upper atmosphere when it was stitched by cannon fire and broke apart, its two burning halves sent earthwards.
Even coming down off the ridge relatively unscathed, escape was far from certain.
Finally reaching the dropsite with Leodrakk, Numeon found visibility was almost zero. Like tar turned into air, the blackness was virtually absolute. Auto-senses were of limited use, but Numeon managed to get as far as a ship. Leodrakk was retching in the vile smoke, so thick it would have killed a lesser man. He clung to Numeon’s left shoulder and let the Pyre captain guide him.
But Numeon was struggling, too. The drop-ship was close enough to touch but the filth besieging them made it impossible to gauge the location of the entrance ramp or if it was even open. Through the rough hull, Numeon felt the tremor from the vessel’s engines. They would need to get aboard now or they would have to find another ship.
Hell rained all around them – there would be no other ship. This was it; escape or die.
If it was to be the latter, Numeon avowed he would go down fighting. He would have done so already were it not for Leodrakk.
Out of the darkness, a hand reached for them, and together they stumbled onto the deck of a crowded Stormbird. It was black within the lander; smoke was also filling the hold and the internal lighting was out. Numeon slumped and rolled on his back, his eye burning like someone had thrust a knife into it and twisted the blade. He was more badly wounded that he had at first realised, having taken several hits during the descent as he shielded his Pyre brother from harm. Leodrakk was on his knees, coughing up the wretched smoke from his lungs.