Salamander

proper you succeeded him.'

N'keln nodded sagely, but at Dak'ir's or his own inner counsel the brother- sergeant could not tell.

'As you know, Brother Vek'shan was slain on Stratos. I am in need of a Company Champion. Your record, your loyalty and determination in battle are almost peerless, Dak'ir. Furthermore, I trust your integrity implicitly.' The captain's eyes conveyed his certainty. 'I want to promote you to the Inferno Guard.'

Dak'ir was wrong-footed for a second time. When he shook his head, he saw the disappointment on N'keln's face.

'Sir, on Stratos I failed to protect Brother-Captain Kadai and that mistake cost his life and damaged this company into the bargain. I will serve you with faith and loyalty, but with the deepest regret I cannot accept this honour.'

N'keln turned away. After exhaling his displeasure he said, 'I could order you to do it.'

'I ask you not to, sir. I belong with my squad.'

N'keln regarded him closely for a few moments, making his decision.

'Very well,' he said at last, chagrined but willing to concede to his sergeant's request. 'There is something else,' he added. 'The other sergeants will hear of this soon enough, but since you are already here… I wish to heal the wounds in this company, Dak'ir. So, we are returning to the Hadron Belt. There we will scour the stars for any sign of the renegades. I mean to find them and destroy them.'

The Hadron Belt was the last known location of the Dragon Warriors. There it was that the Salamanders fought them on Stratos, or rather were ambushed by them and their former captain assassinated.

'With respect, sir, our last encounter with Nihilan was months ago. They will be far from there by now, likely returned to the Eye of Terror.' Dak'ir looked down at the maps on the altar-table and saw the dense and expansive region of the Hadron Belt. 'Even if, for some inscrutable reason, the Dragon Warriors still linger there, the Belt is a vast tract of space. It would take years to search it all with any certainty.'

N'keln allowed a brief pause, deciding if he should say anything further.

'Librarian Pyriel has been probing the star clusters out in the Belt and detected a resonance, a psychic echo of Nihilan's presence. We will use that as our marker.'

Dak'ir frowned.

'It is a slim hope to find them on such evidence. This remnant Brother Pyriel has found could be weeks old. What makes you think they will still be lurking in-system?'

'Whatever was begun on Moribar with Ushorak's death, it continued with the assassination of Kadai. Both planets are part of the Hadron Belt, which suggests that the Dragon Warriors have some lair situated there, from which they can launch their raids. Without the Imperium and the forges of Mars to sustain their war materiel, the renegades will need to get it from somewhere else. Piracy and raiding is the only way.'

'A slim hope - yes, I agree,' added N'keln. 'But a solitary flame when kindled can become a raging conflagration.' The captain's eyes flared with sudden zeal. 'It isn't over, Dak'ir. The Dragon Warriors have cut us badly. We must strike next and without restraint, so we are not blooded again.'

N'keln's final words before he dismissed Dak'ir sounded slightly desperate, and did nothing to assuage the brother-sergeant's own burgeoning doubts.

'We need this mission, Dak'ir. To heal the wounds of this company and restore our brotherhood.'

Dak'ir left the strategium feeling uneasy. The meeting with N'keln had unsettled him. The captain's candour, the admission of his own failings and deep-seated doubts, though masked, was disquieting, for no other reason than he now believed that despite his arrogance and vainglory Tsu'gan might be right. N'keln was not ready for the honour that had already been bestowed upon him, and he was brother-captain in name alone.

CHAPTER TWO

I Dragon Hunting

The dream had

changed.

Blood soaked the walls of the Aura Hieron temple, giving off an abattoir stink. It was copper and old iron tanging the tongue, and something else, something just beyond Dak'ir's reach…

Silence, as deafening as an atomic storm, filled the empty pantheon devoted to false idols. Dak'ir thought he was alone. Then in the distance, a span that seemed impossibly long for the small temple, he saw him.

Kadai was fighting the daemon-spawn.

And he was losing.

Lightning thrashed around his thunder hammer, streaking from its head and roiling down the haft. It coursed over Kadai's armour in a rippling wave, but was curiously quiescent. The daemon-spawn was indistinct, the edges of its reality blurred into a tenebrous void of clawed tendrils and raw malice.

Dak'ir was running noiselessly, crossing what felt like kilometres, when the thunder came. Faint at first, it built as a tremor until eventually it shook the heavens and sound rushed back in a cacophonous crescendo.

Through the conceit of hallucination, Dak'ir reached Kadai in time to see him smite the hell spawn down. Lightning arcs blasted its repugnant form until its grasp upon the material realm slipped utterly and it was claimed back by the warp.

The feat had taken its toll. Kadai was hurt. Breath wheezed in and out of his lungs, the genetic augmentation of his body failing to restore him. Armour, rent and torn in dozens of places, hung slack like shed skin about to crack and fall away.

'Stand with me, brother…' Kadai's voice was like gravel scraped over rock. There was the faintest gurgle of blood in the back of his throat.

He held out a trembling hand.

'Stand with me…'

Dak'ir went to reach for him when the stench of something on a sudden breeze pricked at his nostrils, making them burn. It was sulphur.

A feeling, alien and inchoate, gnawed at the back of Dak'ir's mind. Fear?

He was Astartes. He did not feel fear. Dak'ir quashed it beneath a resolve of steel.