Salamander

Val'in addressed your warrior in this way.'

Dak'ir exchanged a look with Pyriel and the Librarian responded with a slight widening of his eyes.

Fire-born, he thought.

Illiad went on.

'After my ancestors crashed, the Fire Angels tried to return to the stars. Our history does not say why. But their ship was destroyed and terrible storms engulfed the planet. Those that ventured into it, taking the ship's smaller vessels, did not return. The rest remained with us.'

'What happened to these other Fire Angels?' asked Dak'ir.

Illiad's face became grave.

'They were our protectors,' he began simply. 'Until the black rock came, and everything changed. It was thousands of years before I was born. Brutish creatures, like tusked swine and who revelled in war, descended upon Scoria in ramshackle vessels, expelled from the black rock. It eclipsed our sun and in the darkness that followed, the swine made landfall. The stories hold that the Fire Angels fought them off, but at a cost. Every few years, the swine would come back but with greater and greater hordes. Each time the Fire Angels would march out to meet them, and each time they were victorious but less and less of them returned. Inevitably, they dwindled, falling one by one until the last of them retreated underground with my ancestors and sealed themselves in. The last Fire Angel took an oath, to protect my ancestors and pass on the tale of him and his warriors if others like them ever returned to Scoria.

The years passed and the fate of that last Fire Angel was lost to history, the warriors from beyond the stars committed to mere memory… until now.

We

didn't venture above the earth after that, and the surface of Scoria became lifeless, inhabited only by ghosts. The swine did not return. Some reckon it was because there was no further sport to be had.'

Dak'ir's brow furrowed as he listened intently to Illiad's story.

'You stayed like this… for millennia then?'

'Until several years ago, yes,' Illiad replied. 'The storms that blighted our planet lifted for no reason other than they had run their course. Soon after, the Iron Men came.' Illiad's expression darkened at this memory.

'''Iron Men'?' asked Dak'ir, though he thought he already knew to whom Illiad referred.

'They came from the stars, like you. Thinking they were akin to the Fire Angels, I led a delegation to meet them.' Illiad paused to take a steadying breath and marshal his thoughts. 'Sadly, I was wrong. They laughed at our entreaties, turning their guns upon us. Akuma's wife and son were slain in the massacre. That is why he is so distrustful of you. He cannot see the difference.'

'You say you led the delegation, Illiad. How did you escape from the Iron Men?' asked Dak'ir, keen to learn all that Illiad knew of the Iron Warriors and their forces, for there could be no doubt that it was the sons of Per-turabo who had perpetrated the massacre.

Illiad bowed his head. 'I am shamed to say that I fled, just like the rest. They didn't give chase and those who eluded their guns stayed alive. We watched them after that from hidden scopes bored deep beneath the earth.'

Dak'ir remembered the sense of being watched he'd felt outside the wreck of the

Vulkan's Wrath,

and assumed this must have been Illiad or one of his men.

'They built a fortress,' Illiad continued.

'Our brothers have seen it,' Dak'ir told him, 'out in the ash dunes.'

Illiad licked his lips, as if slicking them so the words wouldn't stick in his throat.

'We kept a vigil on it at first, as the walls and towers went up,' he said. 'But the men keeping watch began to act erratically. Two of them committed suicide, so I put a stop to it after that.'

'Your men succumbed to the taint of Chaos,' said Pyriel sternly.

Illiad seemed nonplussed.

'Do you know what the Iron Men are doing in the fortress?' Dak'ir asked in the lull.

'No,' Illiad answered flatly. 'But we encountered them again, this time at the mine where we used to extract the fyron ore. We never got further than their sentries and though they must have known we were there, they seemed disinterested in slaying us.'

Pyriel's silken voice interrupted.

'They come for the ore, and are drilling deep to get it,' he said. The Librarian turned his cold gaze onto the human. Illiad, despite his obvious presence and courage, shrank back before it.

'Where is this mine?' Pyriel asked. 'Our brothers must be told.'

'I can take you there,' Illiad answered, 'but that is not why I brought you here. The legends of the Fire Angels are just tales to protect our young and placate the ignorant. I alone, know the truth.' Illiad turned to Dak'ir. 'You are not the first Fire Angel I have seen. There is another living among us.'

That got the Salamanders' attention. All thoughts of the mine and the Iron Warriors faded into sudden insignificance.

'The duty of recording our history was not the only thing my grandfather passed on to me,' Illiad told them. He moved to the back of the chamber. Dak'ir glanced over at Pyriel but the Librarian's gaze was fixed on the human. 'Wait there,' Illiad called back to them, working at a dust-dogged panel in the far wall.

Dak'ir saw the faint glow of illuminated icons as Illiad pushed them in sequence. A deep rumbling gripped the chamber, and for a moment the Salamander sergeant thought it was another tremor. It was, but not one caused by Scoria's fragile core; instead, it came from the flanking wall.

Stepping back, the Salamanders saw a recessed line emerge in the encrusted metal, spilling out tracts of dirt as a portal formed within it and opened with a hiss of pressure. Old, stale air gusted out from a darkened chamber beyond.

'Until my grandfather showed me this place, I thought the Fire Angels were just a myth. I know now they are very real and lived by a different name,' said Illiad upon reaching them. 'Now, I am the old man and I'm passing on the legacy of my ancestors to you, Salamanders of Vulkan.'

C

haplain

E

lysius never

got his gauntlets dirty during an interrogation. He was fastidious about this, to the point of obsession. This was an Astartes who knew how to inflict pain; agony so invasive and consuming so as to leave no mark, save the one in the victim's psyche.

Watching the partly dismanded Warsmith in the flickering half-light of the cell, Tsu'gan fancied that Elysius could even wrest a confession from one of the tainted.

After the brief battle in the torture chamber-cum-workshop - for Tsu'gan was convinced it was a union of both - the half-conscious Warsmith had been dragged above ground and taken to an abandoned cell in the upper level. There he lay now, as Tsu'gan watched, chained to an iron bench and bleeding from the wounds the Salamander sergeant had given him.

The tools the Chaplain had requested induded a pair of chirurgeon- interrogators that he'd had stored in the

Fire Anvil's

equipment lockers. The creatures, servitor-torturers, had unfolded from their metal slumber like the jagged blades of knives extending. Wiry and grotesque, the