Old Earth Read online

  His forehead touched the scalloped knuckles of his gauntlets. Eyes closed, he breathed slowly and calmly through his mouth, filling the hold with the scent of ash and cinder. Those of Vulkan’s bloodline were said to breathe the fire of the mountain. In this way, it was true.

  Abidemi sang. Sitting opposite his sergeant, he bellowed above the roar of the storm outside, singing of Nocturne and the deep drakes, of their majesty and fearsome, elemental power. He held the sword Draukoros, sheathed across his lap, in both hands. It had been Numeon’s blade once, but now it had passed to another, to be wielded in his name. Abidemi had no doubt that when his end came at last, a different warrior would take up the sword. It was a dragontooth, a kind of Nocturnean blade only a few smiths knew how to forge. Its serrated edge could even cut bonded ceramite and adamantium.

  Salamanders liked to name their weapons – not an uncommon trait amongst the Legions, but a tradition no warrior of the XVIII would ever eschew. Strength resided in names. The better the name, the greater the strength. A sword was just a sword until its naming. Then it became something other. It gained a spirit.

  ‘Gargo,’ Zytos said, rasping but making himself heard across the vox. He never opened his eyes and only moved his lips to speak, a statue of onyx and dark jade sitting on the grav-bench, growing impatient.

  Abidemi stopped singing, and merely sat, eyes blazing into the darkness.

  ‘Am I to ride into the burning chasm of fire, brother?’ asked Igen Gargo from the pilot’s throne.

  ‘You are to do Vulkan’s will,’ Zytos replied, still unmoving.

  ‘I cannot see him or hear him to know his precise will, brother.’

  ‘Our black-smiter sounds a little… strained,’ offered Abidemi.

  Zytos smiled. ‘Should I be more empathic?’ he asked.

  Abidemi leaned back on the grav-bench as far as his armour’s generator would allow. He feigned nonchalance.

  ‘Oh, I would not go that far. But I have a keen desire not to crash upon Deathfire’s crags. At the least, I think Vulkan would look down on that.’

  Now Zytos laughed, raising his eyes and favouring Abidemi with a feral grin.

  ‘Death upon the flanks of the mountain or death inside the mountain – it is still death.’

  Abidemi thought on that, and gave a facial shrug.

  ‘Well, as we are born in fire…’

  Zytos nodded, his gentle gibing at Gargo’s expense at an end.

  ‘Ash and flame it is then,’ he said, and raised the vox again. ‘Into the chasm, black-smiter. Into the flame and the hells of Deathfire. That is where our father awaits us.’

  Gargo did not reply. He heard Abidemi’s singing across the vox and gave a fierce grin.

  The gunship banked, stabilisers flaring urgently as it turned sharply and growled with sudden and violent thrust.

  They speared towards the crack in the mountain. Flames lapped at the hull, searing fresh burns into the armour plates. Chunks of cinder fell upon the prow, some embedding themselves, still burning as the gunship flew on. The roar of the furious earth rose to a crescendo that shivered bone and rattled the hull as though a giant shook it in an angry fist. Smoke descended, a crackling, black miasma of pyroclastic cloud that enveloped the gunship, smothering it utterly.

  Every augur died at once, and the darkness became abject as the gunship entered the mountain and disappeared.

  From the pilot’s throne, Gargo saw only darkness through the viewing pane. A bank of soot and ash rolled over the glacis, smearing his only means of guiding a vessel bereft of its sensors.

  It was the very definition of flying blind. He trusted to sound instead, listening to the pitch and yaw as the hot air inside the mountain pulled at the gunship. He fought it, striving not to overcompensate and throw them into solid rock.

  The gunship was a Thunderhawk. A pugnacious vessel, it had seen some use in the war, despite being a less-favoured option during the Great Crusade. It lacked the size and brute strength of a Stormbird, but possessed greater manoeuvrability. Hardy as it no doubt was, a collision inside the burning interior of a volatile volcano would see it destroyed. So Gargo listened and tried very hard not to crash, and to die.

  After almost a minute, the viewing pane began to clear, the soot burned off by the heat of the lava-filled chasm rushing up to meet them.

  Gargo gritted his teeth, hauling on the flight stick. ‘Blood of Nocturne!’

  A sharp ascent provoked a shriek of disquiet from the engines, but the deathly plunge to certain immolation had been averted.

  Easing back on the throttle, his hearts steady, Gargo appraised their surroundings… and felt awe.

  A cavern yawned before them, immense, as large as a city. Crags encroached upon it, great rending claws reaching into smoke-shrouded depths. Below, a lava sea spat tendrils of flame as molten rock slid through its burning currents. Pillars of fire rose up, magnificent but ultimately ephemeral. Clouds of sulphurous gas expanded from gigantic fumaroles, thick and coiling like whirlwinds slowed in time, each turn bringing them closer to dissolution only for new plumes to emerge in the wake of their passing. A vault above strained with spears of rock, an army of stalactites dripping with caustic and corrosive vapours.

  Majestic as it surely was, the cavern paled in comparison to its denizens.

  Through languid palls of ash black, Gargo saw them… Gargantuan. Armoured in hoary, overlapping scales each at least as large as a breacher shield. Teeth as long as spears. Hunched in hollows and caves, their eyes flashed like flaming rubies. Hissing saliva drooled from their fanged mouths, corroding the rock where it made contact. Their dark, leathery tongues lashed the air as if seeking to taste the morsel in their midst.

  A few stirred to bellow their discontent, their stentorian calls resonating through the rock. The majority merely bore witness. Unsurprisingly, they seemed unconcerned.

  ‘Leviathan…’ Gargo whispered.

  Few had ever seen these deep drakes, let alone done so and lived. Here, Gargo rode the ship through an entire nest. In their blindness, the Salamanders had descended farther than he realised.

  ‘Brothers,’ he dared utter, though he kept his voice quiet across the vox. Out of caution or reverence, he could not say for certain.

  One of the larger drakes uncoiled, serpentine and magnificent. The gunship would have fit into its mouth entire. It eyed them with fascination and belligerence as it slid into the lava sea, a great horned tail following in its wake as it swam into the depths.

  ‘It is almost beyond my reckoning,’ Zytos hissed. ‘Tread warily here, Gargo. This is no longer a realm of men.’

  ‘How many do you think there are?’ asked Gargo.

  ‘Enough to rend apart this ship and us with it many times over,’ Zytos replied.

  Abidemi had no words, stunned into silence at what lay beyond the viewslits.

  The cavern felt endless, and where the lava sea met its edge it spilled ferociously into an even deeper well. A vibrant, trembling heat flickered up from this pit suggesting more flame at its nadir through the occluding darkness.

  Gargo led them into it, easing the gunship into a gentle descent, spiralling into the void below rather than arrowing headlong.

  A crag of rock jutted from the pit wall, flattened into a rugged ­plateau and revealed in a brief parting of black smoke.

  ‘Blood of Nocturne!’ he swore, as he saw a figure calmly standing upon the rock, as incongruous here in this underworld as the gunship itself.

  Vulkan had armoured himself, and held a hammer close to his breast as he watched the gunship descend. As it came closer, the Lord of Drakes raised the weapon and Gargo kept the vessel steady as he engaged the forward ramp.

  ‘Is it him?’ asked Abidemi as they drew nearer and all the finery of the primarch’s craft and artisanal skill became apparent in his armour.

  Zytos
frowned as he turned to the other. ‘Who else would it be?’

  ‘No,’ uttered Abidemi, his tone suggesting to Zytos a question meant for long before this moment, ‘is it him?’

  There was no time for Zytos to consider his answer. Up close, it became obvious that the promontory Vulkan had chosen was crumbling. Soon it would be no more. The fiery depths below seemed bottomless. The primarch looked unconcerned as the prow of the gunship opened to admit him, and with a single bound he was aboard.

  He had leapt into a crouch, head down, hammer across his bent knee. Behind him, seen by Zytos and Abidemi through the closing ramp, the plateau fragmented and collapsed. It fell slowly, reluctantly, but disappeared into darkness all the same.

  ‘Father,’ said Zytos, genuflecting before his primarch. Abidemi mimicked him.

  ‘Rise, both of you,’ said Vulkan, his gaze as forbidding as the deep drakes they had seen in the cavern, and much more fearsome.

  Vigour emanated off Vulkan, as hot and vibrant as the flaming core of the mountain from which he had seemingly been reborn. An almost otherworldly aura pervaded in his presence, a shimmering of vitality as of a blade freshly forged and gleaming.

  He was resplendent, a feral king in his finest panoply of war.

  They obeyed, almost without thinking.

  Vulkan arose too, his long cape of drakehide unfurling like a banner behind him, his stature dwarfing that of his sons. The splinter had gone from his chest, and was instead sheathed at his belt like a gladius. He wore an amulet too, a large disc engraved with the image of seven hammers.

  The primarch’s drakescale-green armour was veined with gold. Dragons and their kin had been graven upon its plates. His scalloped gauntlets ended in claws, and a long-snouted helm clung to his thigh, draconic, its teeth bared in anger. Red eye slits glared from its faceplate, impassive, unforgiving.

  ‘Three suns,’ he said, his voice as deep as thunder. ‘You came.’

  At first Zytos mistook his meaning. ‘As you asked us to, my lord. We spoke to no others of your miraculous return.’

  Vulkan nodded, his hand upon the side of the hull.

  ‘A good ship,’ he said, silently appraising. ‘It will serve us well.’

  ‘Vulcanis,’ said Gargo, giving its name.

  ‘But I would ask how it shall serve, Lord Vulkan,’ said Zytos. ‘I am yet to understand how we will find the shadowed road.’

  Vulkan clapped a gauntlet on his shoulder.

  ‘Soon, I promise, Barek, you will know everything. And you, Atok,’ he said, glancing at Abidemi. ‘No secrets will be kept from my sons, but we cannot linger here. It is more dangerous than you could know.’ He smiled, and in a way the expression terrified Zytos. ‘We must head deeper.’

  Gargo flew them into the pit, with only Vulkan’s voice across the vox a light with which to navigate the underworld.

  Great oceans of lava roared in the darkness, throwing off light enough to deepen the shadows but nothing more. Endless tracts of smoke rolled across the ship, sparking with pieces of burning material, thickened by ash.

  On Gargo flew, Vulkan at his ear, guiding the ship with his voice. Deeper still, and the mountain had yet to reach its nadir. A sense of otherness intruded on the Salamanders that Vulkan appeared oblivious to, or was studiously ignoring. The rock formations subtly changed, and had more in kind with rugged scale. Crags many times larger than the gunship drooled, slick, smooth and not at all like stone or earth. More like bone. Caves gaped invitingly, their wide arching mouths ringed with bony stalactites and stalagmites, oddly ranked and partially uniform. Sulphurous gas exuded in heavy exhalations, slow and regular. Vulkan steered Gargo through fissures and clefts, ancient tunnels, but stayed away from the fanged cave mouths and said nothing of why.

  As they flew low across a river of lava, a hump bulged up from the morass, huge, forbidding, barely visible in the dark.

  ‘Cleave to the tunnel edge, Igen,’ whispered Vulkan, and Zytos could not force down a tremor of unease at the primarch’s sudden caution.

  The lava mound rose a little higher, and a dark slit appeared across its middle. A membrane slid slowly over it, revealing an oily sclera. Then the mound submerged, an island sinking beneath the sea, and Vulkan raised his voice from a whisper again.

  Zytos said nothing of this, and only realised how tightly he had gripped his hammer when he heard the creak of protesting metal. He released the breath he had been holding and spoke, his voice harsh and low.

  ‘Is this the shadowed road?’

  Certainly the soot and drifting palls of ash lent it that quality.

  ‘We are close,’ said Vulkan. ‘Only a little farther now.’

  Abidemi gave Zytos an incredulous look, and made a gesture to the primarch.

  Vulkan’s eyes were closed.

  Beyond the viewslits, the tunnel walls trembled. At first, Zytos thought it was heat haze but then he knew it was something else entirely.

  ‘It’s moving,’ he said, still unable to do much more than rasp. ‘The rock, it is…’

  ‘Alive?’ Vulkan suggested.

  Zytos nodded. Vulkan must have heard it in the growl and purr of his armour, for he answered.

  ‘It is not rock, Barek.’

  ‘Then, what–’ Abidemi began.

  ‘They are the world serpents, the eldest of all the ur-drakes of Nocturne, so old they have passed into myth.’

  ‘I can see them, lord. They are not myth.’

  Vulkan laughed, echoing, unnerving.

  ‘All in this place is myth,’ he said. ‘None but you here have ever seen it. These ur-drakes are Nocturne. They coil around its heart, forever entwined, their breaths the very movement of the earth.’

  He turned, and his eyes flared red like two blazing forge fires.

  ‘Are you disturbed by this, my sons?’

  ‘It is beyond my understanding,’ said Zytos, looking down dis­believingly at his hand as it trembled.

  Dryness crept into his throat, nullifying speech.

  Abidemi clung to Numeon’s sword, fingers taut on both hands, but did not answer either.

  ‘It is beyond primal,’ Vulkan told them, ‘beyond even my father’s gene-craft to fully inure you against.’

  ‘I find the feeling… unfamiliar,’ Zytos replied, but ceased the trembling in his hand. He snarled as if rejecting the sensation.

  ‘Rest easy, my sons. The ur-drakes sleep, and have done for thousands of years. You merely witness their slumber, the dreaming of god-beasts.’

  ‘And what, my lord,’ said Abidemi, ‘do such things dream of?’

  Vulkan’s teeth shone brightly, a white crescent cutting through the shadows.

  ‘Fire.’

  As they passed beyond the long tunnel and entered a broader, lightless chamber, Gargo took the ship to the edge of the lava river. A gelatinous cataract fed down from it into a shallow basin, spilling across a flat stump of rock that diverted the languid flow to either side of a monstrous cliff.

  ‘This is it,’ said Vulkan. ‘Follow the cliff all the way to the bottom, Igen.’

  The gunship banked at first then slowly came around, angling into a patient descent that followed the sheer face of the cliff. A belt of cloud impeded the viewing pane but passed in seconds. Then came another and another, the gunship spearing each fresh veil until a massive cavern appeared through the dregs of clinging ash.

  A great magma sea spread across the cavern floor, fuming, shrouded and undulant. A glow bathed the cavern walls, the shadows cast upon it flickering as if they were possessed. A flat, circular plateau of stone jutted up from the burning sea like a pugnacious chin. It shone with obsidian lustre, the veins of volcanic glass reaching the cliff and colonising it.

  ‘Here,’ said Vulkan. ‘Put us down here, Igen.’

  Descent thrusters flaring, the gunship raised its
prow as it came down to land. Clawed stanchions extended from beneath the hull, digging into rock, grasping for purchase, a bird of prey rendered in adamantium.

  As the turbofans died to a low whir, the disturbed ash and grit falling into gentle eddies, the forward ramp opened and the gunship settled into position.

  Vulkan emerged first, unblinking into the magma light.

  Zytos followed, taking in everything beyond the confines of the hold. He wore his helm now, observing pointedly that his primarch­ did not.

  ‘My lord, the atmosphere…’ he began, his armour alerting him to the extreme heat and the concentrations of toxic volcanic gases in the air.

  Vulkan waved away his concerns before they could be voiced.

  ‘It is a small matter, Barek. ‘Keep your war-helm on, my son.’

  Abidemi joined him, Gargo a moment later from the cockpit. Paint blistered where it was thinnest at the gunship’s hard edges. Bare metal glinted through in sliver slashes.

  ‘He is unhelmed,’ said Gargo quietly, gesturing to the primarch.

  ‘I know,’ Zytos replied, his eye venturing ahead of Vulkan.

  Past the plateau of rock where their vessel had alighted, a few crudely hewn steps led up to a pillar of stone, a gently smoking caldera at the summit. The blood of the mountain had grown thin here, little more than pale yellow sulphurous deposits, and Zytos felt his heart warn him of something momentous as he caught sight of the shape worn into the middle of the caldera.

  Anthropomorphic, almost foetal in aspect…

  He did not dare to wonder, though he looked askance at his primarch.

  Vulkan paid him no heed. The primarch’s attention had fallen upon a spire of rock thrusting up from the lava. Then, as if he were expecting to see something but had found it absent, he looked away. He stopped at the edge of the plateau and turned to his sons.

  ‘This is the deep forge, the Maw,’ he told them, gesturing to a thin path that led from the plateau to an antechamber feeding off from the main cavern. ‘It is where I forged my armour.’

  Zytos saw an anvil, the tools of a smith laid neatly upon its face. Its edges still glowed with the act of forging and he could scarcely comprehend what sort of wonders might have been wrought here.