Gravius continued and for once the link was clean. ‘What’s happening?’

Heka’tan had three hundred and sixty-two Legiones Astartes left in his command. They had forged a ring around the shattered drop-ship. Over half that number again was forever entombed inside their vessel, lost before the fight had even begun, a fight the brother-captain didn’t understand.

‘Assume defensive postures,’ he answered, for want of something better, something that made sense.

The line of iron opened up with its weapons. Fusillade met fusillade as both sides engaged, hundreds of muzzle flares ripping up the smoke like jagged knives of hot light.

It was but a skirmish in a maelstrom of death. This was a battle like no other. It was a reckoning. It was a show of force. But above all else it was fratricide on an epic scale.

Heka’tan’s words to Gravius sounded hollow even to him. ‘Hold out as long as you can.’

It was over. Even before he’d seen the armoured column advancing behind the infantry, Heka’tan knew it. He took a round to the shoulder, the explosive impact nearly tearing off the pad and spinning him. A second struck him in the chest and he staggered.

One of his own, Ikon he thought, died to a throat wound. More followed, too numerous and rapid to count. Apothecaries were a pointless luxury during this nascent massacre. The air shimmered with the heat of shells passing so close that some struck one another and deviated from their original targets. Above, Thunderhawks and Stormbirds tried to escape. Heka’tan saw several in the livery of the Raven Guard and Iron Hands plunge from the smoke-blackened sky like broken comets. Distant explosions announced their destruction.

Bleak was not the word for their chances.

Fatalism, yes, but capitulation was not amongst Heka’tan’s emotional vocabulary. Sons of Nocturne were born of sterner stock. They came from the earth and its fiery heart-blood. They would not go to Mount Deathfire with the foe unbloodied.

‘Burn them!’

A wave of super-heated promethium spewed from the Salamanders’ serried ranks. Several Iron Warriors fell to the flamers, first going to their knees before collapsing onto the shell-strewn earth.

It wasn’t enough. More were coming. Tongues of fire spilled off their armour like bright vapour contrails. They brought autocannon and multi-lasers, Rapier and Tarantula guns.

Brother killed brother in an endless firestorm that had yet to even reach its full fury.

Now, the long turrets of the battle tanks made themselves known. It was easy to imagine skulls being crushed beneath their tracks, the slow and steady disintegration of civilisations under their massive bulk. Kill markings marred their hulls. How many would be attributed to the Salamanders Legion before this madness was done, Heka’tan wondered?

The tanks were still manoeuvring into position when the Son of N’bel fell upon the line of iron, bending it to his will. A gleaming figure surged into the Iron Warriors, distant but still magnificent. Vulkan and the Pyre Guard slammed into the betrayers with unrelenting vengeance. The primarch’s hammer smashed a bloody wedge into the throng, slow to react to the flank attack.

From below, Heka’tan found it hard to keep track of his father, but saw enough to know iron helms were sundered and chestplates crushed against his wrath. A spit of flame drove the traitors back up the hill, colliding with the advancing armour. Vulkan’s gauntlet engulfed them in a conflagration so intense that power armour was no defence against it.

He reached the first of the battle tanks, a Demolisher that the primarch lifted with his bare hands and turned over. A second he punched through the hull with his hammer, wrenching out the crew within before the Pyre Guard, his retinue and inner circle warriors, followed up with grenades. The back of the tank blew out in a plume of fire, smoke and shrapnel.

Then Heka’tan was running, back up the hill towards his father.

‘Forward in the name of Lord Vulkan! Unto the anvil!’

The ring of three hundred took up the charge, ragged banners snapping defiantly in the icy wind. Snow turned to slush with the heat of their flamers, levelled at the crumbling line of Iron Warriors.

‘Perturabo!’ The voice shook the very ridgeline as deep and forbidding as a Nocturnean lava chasm. Vulkan was enraged, battering tanks aside like children’s toys. He was not the most gifted swordsman, nor was he a master strategist or a psyker of any note, but his strength and fortitude… in that, the Eighteenth Primarch was unrivalled.

Had Ferrus Manus lived there might be cause for debate, but with the Iron Hands primarch’s head lying separate from his body in the shrinking snow that point was now moot.

The low whine of a missile barrage cutting through the air at speed answered Vulkan and he looked to the heavens.

Heka’tan followed his primarch’s gaze a second later and saw the danger too late.

Fury lit up the ridgeline, ripping tanks and bodies the same, tossing Salamanders and Iron Warriors indiscriminately. The backwash boiled down the hill in a fiery bloom, thundering into Heka’tan just as Vulkan was obliterated from his sight. Then the world faded, darkening in every sense and–

–he awoke.

Something was scratching at the Salamander’s fingers. The efforts were frantic but ineffective. Heka’tan opened his eyes, still shaking. His hand was clenched around a woman’s throat. Eyes narrowed, he released her.

‘What are you doing here?’ He rose from his haunches but the artificer backed off when he tried to approach her. She massaged her throat, trying to breathe.

The skin around her neck was already bruising and there were burn marks where Heka’tan’s fingers still carried the brazier’s heat.

‘Brother Arcadese…’

‘Should not have sent you.’ Heka’tan glowered.

The artificer shook her head. ‘What did I do?’ She was raving a little now, afraid and a little incensed.

Heka’tan rose to his full height, and loomed over her. ‘The rites of Nocturne are for Vulkan’s sons alone.’ There was obvious reproach in his voice. The artificer’s annoyance melted away with the sudden fire blazing in the Salamander’s eyes. They were red but stoked like a furnace. The effect, coupled with the warrior’s ebon skin, was disturbing. ‘Nor do we have use for artificers.’ He would speak to Arcadese later.

‘You’re my first Salamander,’ she admitted, mustering her courage in the face of the diabolic warrior.

‘Then you’re fortunate, for there are few of us left.’ Heka’tan turned away. ‘Now leave me. A Salamander must be fire-touchedbefore battle.’

‘Battle? I thought this was a diplomatic mission?’

The Salamander glared at her. ‘Do I look like a diplomat to you?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘Don’t call me that. I am not your lord, I merely am. Now, go.’

A sudden jolt through the chamber sent the artificer scurrying for footing. Heka’tan caught her. His grip was gentle this time.

A vox crackle made them both turn towards the receiver unit on the wall. The frantic voice of the pilot quickly followed.

‘…vasive action… brace for… mpact!’

‘Huh–’ The half-formed thought was smothered by the explosion rocking the hull and the blast wave ripping through the ceiling.

Heka’tan bore down on Persephia like the coming of night.

Then came smoke and the scent of burning.

Debris

I

THE SLEEK VESSEL touched down with barely a tremor. Its long silver prow shone in the setting Bastion sun, slightly at odds with the functional grey and bronze of the docking towers. This was not a sleek, smooth shipyard; it was a place of hard edges, of logical, minimalist architecture, of sprawling technological megaliths and super-rigs.