Salamander

The only way to end it…

'Please, make it stop,' Tsu'gan gasped. The muzzle felt cold against his sweat-drenched forehead. The sound of the slowly squeezing trigger was as deafening as thunder.

'

Vulkan's fire burns in my breast,'

a powerful voice intoned, eclipsing the beat of hammered metal. '

With it I shall smite the foes of the Emperor!'

Sensation, vague and indistinct at first, returned to Tsu'gan. He was faintly aware of a reassuring presence nearby, a lodestone to which he could anchor himself.

'

For we are the Angels of the Emperor, servants of the Golden Throne, and we shall know no fear.'

Tsu'gan caught hold of the voice, stentorian and commanding, grasping it like a rope of salvation. A refulgent figure stood beside him, a crackling stave held in his outstretched hand.

'

From the fires of battle are we born.'

No, not a stave - the warrior, sable-armoured with a face of death, held a hammer.

'

Upon the anvil of war are we tempered.'

A blazing aura roiled from it like a fiery wave, chasing down the darkness and burning back the apparitions that tried to clench to them like parasites.

'Speak the words!' Brother-Chaplain Elysius snapped. 'Speak them and find your courage, Salamanders!'

Tsu'gan and his squad uttered the words as one, and the fog of insanity lifted.

The Chaplain smacked a reassuring hand against Tsu'gan's pauldron.

'Good enough, brother-sergeant,' he said. 'I will take the lead from here. Restore your battle-helm and follow me.'

Tsu'gan looked down at the battle-helm cradled in his grasp, agog. He hadn't even realised he'd removed it. Wiping away the sweat that was very real, he set his helmet back on and obeyed. The rest of his brothers had come to their senses as well, and followed with weapons ready. Even Tiberon had stopped. He let the Chaplain catch up to him before falling in behind.

Elysius had secured Vulkan's Sigil to his belt, though the artefact still glowed faintly with remembered power. Undoubtedly, the Chaplain had saved their lives. Whatever malfeasance preyed upon these lower catacombs had very nearly forced Tsu'gan and his squad to turn their guns on themselves. A few moments more and they would have done.

'Heretics are close,' Elysius rasped, his crozius arcanum igniting like a flaming torch in his mailed fist.

Tsu'gan realised that the heavy metal

clank

had returned to normal. It was still loud, and emanated from a sealed hatch ahead of them.

A few steps from the hatch, the Chaplain brought up his bolt pistol.

'Steel yourselves,' he warned.

The strange malaise affecting the tunnel returned but lingered at the periphery of Tsu'gan's thoughts as if unwilling to press further. The brother-sergeant gripped his bolter for reassurance, running a gauntleted finger over the flame icon embossed on the stock. Muttering a litany of warding, Tsu'gan opened his eyes and saw that the Chaplain had stepped aside from the hatch.

The entrance was locked and barred.

Tsu'gan beckoned Tiberon and Lazarus, who came to the front of the squad with krak grenades primed. After affixing the explosives with a dull, metallic

thunk,

the two Salamanders fell back. Honorious moved ahead of them, but kept low and at a safe distance. Tsu'gan pressed his body against the wall. He noted the Chaplain did the same on the opposite side, trusting to solid steel rather than his rosarius this time.

Squad in position, spread either side of the tunnel and outside the blast funnel, Tsu'gan drew his hand across his gorget in a slashing motion.

Aiming down his bolter's targeter, Iagon fired a single shot into one of the mag-locked krak grenades. A second later the hatch exploded.

Smoke and fire surged down the corridor in a plume, sending pieces of shrapnel brushing against the Salamanders' armour.

Stalking through the dirt cloud, Chaplain Elysius was the first to enter the room beyond the hatch, Tsu'gan close behind him. They emerged into a metal-bound vault, dimly lit and filled with the stink of copper and iron. Rust streaked the walls like blood. Barbed hooks embedded in the metal resonated with remembered agony. Pitted manacles dangled slackly like hanged men.

This was a place of death and horror.

Crunching servos heralded a sudden attack by a quartet of ghoulish drones. Grey-faced, skin webbed by livid red veins, the automatons were an analogous but twisted variant on the servitors from the

Archimedes Rex.

The wretched parodies screamed in agony as they came at the interlopers, as if their bodies were still in pain from the invasive techno-surgeries employed to fashion them. Pain synapses flared with every motion, fuelling a terrible rage, only leavened by the shedding of blood and the rending of flesh.

Swollen with grotesque musculature, the monstrous ghoul-drones were the size of ogryn. They barrelled for the black-armoured warrior suddenly in their midst. Elysius ignored them, bent on an ironclad figure toiling over some device at the back of the chamber, apparently oblivious to the fight.

Tsu'gan only caught flashes of the mysterious artificer between the gaps in the Chaplain's body as he moved: a servo-arm attached to the generator on the figure's back; the colour of the dirty steel; yellow and black chevrons framing the armour; gilded greave plates fringed with rust around the bolts; pipes and cables, serpentine and alive; hydraulic gases venting and spitting like a curse.

Evil emanated from this being. Every blow from its incessant hammering was like the beat of a fell heart. Even as he closed, Tsu'gan couldn't tell what the Warsmith laboured at so furiously, smothered as it was by thick shadows and an even thicker sheet of coal-black plastek.

A bolter flare lit up Tsu'gan's left flank as a ghoul-drone was torn apart in a welter of oil and viscera. His battle-brothers were covering him as the sergeant shadowed his Chaplain, knowing that he couldn't leave Elysius to face the Warsmith alone.

Another ghoul-drone was destroyed, engulfed by Honorious's flamer. Its biologically unstable frame collapsed hideously in the intense heat. It muscles cooked and burst in blood-red torrents. A third beast dragged lengths of saw-toothed chain from the stump of its arm. Hot bile rose in his throat as Tsu'gan realised the chains were actually part flesh, part sinew and that some of the teeth were human bone. Boltgun roaring, he sundered the abomination and stamped over the remains. Punching a fourth, he knocked the creature aside to try and stay in the Chaplain's wake. Gore and charred meat peppered Tsu'gan's armour in a grisly spray. Maintaining momentum, Iagon had punctured the ghoul-drone's cranium with a bolt round that exploded it from within and obliterated the eight-pointed star branded onto its face.

The ghouls were all dead, but their hellish master endured still.

At last, the Warsmith seemed to realise his peril and reached for a combination melta-bolter on a work-slab alongside him. Lightning arcing from his crozius arcanum, Elysius severed the clutch of cables linking the weapon to the Iron Warrior's fusion generator. Undeterred, the Warsmith spun about, revealing