The Ebonite Archymsts 24 страница

Forrix was forced to agree; the orbital augurs had failed utterly to capture the scale and drama of the place. Not even Fulgrim’s hyperbolic tale-telling in the Thaliakron had come close to the sheer immensity of the eldar tomb city.

With relentless inevitability, the Iron Warriors were fortifying the landing zone, but where the rock of Hydra Cordatus had welcomed the blades of their picks and augers like a lover, this world rejected them. It resisted their giant digging machines, it mocked their leviathan earth-movers and not a stone was laid that didn’t have to be reinforced beyond all expectations.

Three hours in-theatre and the initial contravallations were still unfinished.

Forrix was livid, loudly berating the Pneumachina, his underlings and his sapper crews, but there was little to be done. High, spike-topped walls were stretching around the vast acreage of the deployment zone, much slower than Forrix had ever known, but lengthening with every passing minute.

Warsmith Forrix, First Captain of the Iron Warriors Forrix moved down the line of this newest segment, the heaving, belching, grinding engines of the Pneumachina like colossally industrious worker ants pasting together a hive for their queen from sheet metal, liquid permacrete, high-tensile rebars and ultra-dense hardcore. Walls like this could take a hit from a starship’s macro-cannon and remain standing. Blockhouses, barracks and strongpoints were worked into the fabric of the walls, and battalions of Selucid Thorakite were already occupying them.

Dust from the orbital bombardment hung in the air like granular mist, hazing the strange light in the sky. From orbit, the planet’s environment had appeared serene, but from the ground, it was anything but. A keening wail filled the air, like a plaintive cry at the threshold of hearing; some strange side effect of the bombardment or a lingering echo of some local phenomenon. Either way, it was a disquieting sound, part lament, part hostile curse. Strange colours swirled in the choked sky, a ceiling of pus yellow, spinning matter ejections of bruised purple and red, and vomited froths of bilious green.

All lit by the noctilucent glow from Amon ny-shak Kaelis.

The lambent emerald light seeped into the sky from beyond the wall, as though the stone of the distant sepulchre were irradiated. It oozed over the landscape, sluggish and lethargic, bathing the invasion forces in a poisonous green glow.

Forrix’s dislike for this place was only getting worse.

He watched scurrying riveter-slaves following in the wake of a towering, smoke-belching machine that swallowed debris and excreted pre-formed blocks of hardened stone, enjoying the repetitive rhythm of their work. The engine’s hydraulic jaws crushed gathered stone and its piston-driven hammers pounded the blocks into shape, ready for its rear-mounted lifter gear to haul into place. Forrix knelt to examine where the shaped stone met the ground, seeing a web of hair-fine cracks spreading from the sloped base. Already the walls needed strengthening and he shook his head in disbelief.

The Pneumachina engines had moved on, an implacable process of construction that was much slower than he demanded, but which was still unstoppable. Forrix reached a set of ironwork stairs bolted to the walls and climbed their scissoring height to the ramparts, emerging onto a covered walkway of overhanging kinetic hoardings, murder holes and grenade dumpers. Designed to secure a landing site or prevent an enemy force from relieving a besieged city, the walls were square-edged and hard-lined, the very antithesis of this world’s organic architecture.

All around the landing zone, the vast bomb-razed plain stretched to the horizon in all directions, an exclusion zone made secure by the orbital bombardment. Nothing moved on this flattened wasteland. Only glittering reflections and drifting banks of smoke broke the uniform emptiness.

Despite the bleakness of the landscape, Forrix could not escape the feeling of being watched, as though a host of unseen observers were studying him, assessing him and determining his worth. Forrix shook off the sensation and stalked the ramparts. Iron Warriors from the 134th Grand Battalion and the Thorakites manned the walls. The officers gave him nods of respect as he passed. Forrix crossed the rampart, staring at the distant city he and his fellow warriors were to put asunder.

It was a city of elegantly proportioned towers with fluted leaf-domes, sweeping walls that were gracefully defensible and arcing bridges of such slender dimensions that it must surely be impossible they could bear any weight. The city was alive with temples of gilded roofs, sepulchres that celebrated the lives of those interred beneath, and mausolea of such grand scale that only an emperor would be worthy to lie within.

The city was haloed on the far horizon by a disc of monstrous blackness, the terrifying black sun that lay at the heart of the Eye of Terror. It was an emerald city in the shadow of a nightmarish power that could devour it with a single inhalation.

Yet for all the city’s beauty, there was no mistaking its hollow emptiness.

Nothing lived here. Nothing had ever lived here, nor ever would.

The Stonewrought had said it best when he stepped from the belly of a Stormbird.

Placing one palm on the ground, Vull Bronn had shaken his head and said, ‘This world is dead, it has no soul. The rock will not stand.’

Overly poetic perhaps, but for once Forrix knew exactly what the Stonewrought meant.

Three kilometres farther along the wall, Barban Falk stared at the rising section of bastion before him, his breath coming in short, wheezing hikes. The same grinning skull-face he’d seen on the bridge of the Iron Blood was leering back at him from the cracks in the crumbling stonework of a toothed merlon that had fallen from the battlements.

‘No,’ he hissed. ‘I am not seeing this.’

Denial, a keening voice in his head seemed to laugh. How unoriginal…

Falk shook his head and tore his gaze from the phantom image, striding down the length of the construction and forcing his mind to concentrate on the details of his Grand Battalion’s work. Fresh sections of wall were being lifted in by enormous crane-engines under the supervision of his warriors and beaten into place by titanic siege robots with hammers the size of Land Raiders.

Falk felt an insistent tugging on the frayed edges of his mind – a wheedling, insistent pressure carried on the sighing cries of the wind that compelled him to pause and stare at the newest section of wall like a malfunctioning servitor. At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary, but then the arrangement of stress lines, runnels of permacrete and hissing rivets at the base of the wall seemed to cohere into that familiar deathly face, as though skilfully placed there by an artist who desired an audience of one. He blinked and the image was gone, but no sooner had he turned away than he saw it billowing in a dust cloud, shaped by an arc of the Pneumachina’s crane limbs or formed in a scattering of superfluous offcuts. Falk shut his eyes, letting the image of the grotesque skull fall from his mind, even as he heard it scratching at his thoughts, like an animal left out in the dark.

He released a shuddering breath, and forced himself to look back at the work as it progressed. The grinning, fleshless face met his gaze and this time there was no mistaking the voice in his head.

Barban Falk, it said. A name for he who will be nameless.

Kroeger hated this world like he had hated no other.

The shimmering green glow from the distant sepulchre tainted everything with a sickly illumination, fraying Kroeger’s already short temper. Since making planetfall, nothing had gone as planned. Machines had failed, stone had crumbled and metal had warped beyond usable tolerances.

He bit back an angry curse as yet another portion of the wall footings sank into the rock, leaving the split line flush with the surface. Dust billowed from the sunken blocks, necessitating yet another halt in the work as heavy lifter machines with bright carapaces and fluttering cog banners rolled in on wide tracks to haul them from the ground.

Gangs of robotic and cybernetic slaves dragged long bars of rust-coloured steel to add yet more reinforcement to the foundation trench.

‘Another delay this campaign can ill afford,’ said Harkor with a weary resignation Kroeger only half believed.

‘I know,’ he snapped in reply. ‘My first war action as triarch and I’m behind in every element of our projected advance. Might as well have myself buried in the foundations.’

Harkor held out a data-slate with crawling lines of progress reports.

‘Every other warsmith is encountering similar delays.’

‘I don’t care about them,’ said Kroeger. ‘All I care about is that I’m on schedule. The sooner this work is complete, the sooner we can attack that cursed sepulchre and get off this world.’

The growling roars of the construction engines cleared Kroeger’s thoughts as a cloud of filthy blue oilsmoke enveloped them. Cursing, he moved clear, hearing the grinding crack of splitting stone as the earth-moving leviathans fought to remove the subsided blocks from ground that now seemed to want to grip them tightly.

‘Some strong words with the Pneumachina might speed things up,’ suggested Harkor.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ said Kroeger, pushing through the silent ranks of servitors as a block was wrenched from the ground and broke apart in a cascade of crumbling fragments.

The servitors ignored him, and Kroeger saw a trio of black-robed magi arguing in crackling binary at the edge of a rubble-filled trench that was supposed to be heavy with foundation stones. Multiple holographic images of ground-penetrating auspex readings haloed one of the priests, and Kroeger felt his anger focus on this inhuman hybrid.

The magos waved multiple augmetic arms as he directed the work of whipped slave gangs with blurts of binaric nonsense. Before Kroeger even knew it, his sword was in his hand, his thumb pressing the activation stud.

One economical swing and the machine priest fell to the ground, hacked down from shoulder to groin. A squealing roar of machine pain erupted from his augmitters, which was swiftly silenced as the organic components of the priest collapsed in a clatter of metal and a wash of oily blood.

The remaining Pneumachina priests retreated from the sudden death of their leader, barking furious scraps of machine code. Kroeger put a bolt-round through the gleaming, half-flesh, half-iron skull of the nearest and brought the smoking barrel to bear on the last hooded priest.

The Pneumachina’s agent balked at Kroeger’s rage and loosed a burst of panicked binary.

Kroeger eased the hammer back on his pistol.

‘Gothic,’ he said. ‘Do you speak it?’

The priest nodded and Kroeger heard a series of wetly metallic clicks as whatever passed for vocal chords were rearranged beneath its hood.

‘I do, warsmith,’ said the priest. ‘Enhancement: as did my compatriots.’

‘I’m sure they did, but they’re both dead and now you’re in charge of this wall’s construction,’ said Kroeger. ‘So tell me, what’s the damn hold-up?’

‘You understand the difficulties we face?’ asked the priest.

‘I do,’ said Kroger. ‘And I don’t care, just get this bastard wall built.’

The priest pressed on, resigned to or uncaring of Kroeger’s volatile temper. ‘Clarification: then you must also be aware that this ground is not conforming to any known model of geological dynamics in the Martian records. Its measured strength is not matching up to the reality of our build parameters.’

‘Here’s some clarification for you,’ said Kroeger, pulling the trigger.

Harkor knelt beside the corpses and flipped back the hood of the last priest. Nothing was left of the man’s face, only a snake’s nest of cables twitching from the ragged stump of neck. Pumping squirts of black, bio-organic fluid spilled into the trench. The stink was all chemicals and spoiled meat.

‘Those were some strong words,’ said Harkor.

‘Get me some more Pneumachina priests,’ snapped Kroeger. ‘Ones that know how to build a damn foundation.’

Kroeger turned on his heel.

NINETEEN

Amon ny-shak Kaelis
Disharmony
Someone I Want to Kill The assault began five hours later, despite the full circuit of fortifications still being incomplete. The landing zone was almost surrounded, but the encircling walls had yet to meet one another. Layered rings of minefields and acres of razorwire spread from the outer faces of the walls, making the approach next to impossible for anyone without detailed maps and temporary dormancy codes.

Leaving Toramino and five thousand Iron Warriors to oversee the completion of the works and establish battery positions for the guns of the Stor-bezashk, Perturabo climbed to the cupola of a converted Shadowsword, one with additional armour plating to all sides and extended command and control functions. To accommodate the Lord of Iron’s scale and his automaton bodyguards, the vehicle’s superstructure and engine had been radically overhauled by the Pneumachina. Its main weapons were enhanced, and no more effective a killing machine existed in the Legion’s vehicle pool.

Perturabo gave his transports no names, but the Iron Warriors knew it as Tormentor.

Normally he did not hold with the theatrics of riding into battle in a vehicle’s cupola, but as this army’s commander, sometimes a little theatre was not to be forgone.

Perturabo lifted Forgebreaker from his shoulders and held it high enough for all to see.

‘Take the iron within!’ he roared, sweeping the weapon down.

The Shadowsword’s engine roared with a thunderclap of combustion, and a belching, toxin-laden cloud billowed in its wake as Tormentor rumbled forwards, crushing the rocky ground beneath its three-hundred-tonne weight.

The engines of a thousand Rhinos roared as they moved off with a thrumming bass note that cracked the foundations of the walls around the landing zone. The very air shook with the reverberating sound, and a fog of exhaust smoke drifted over the planet’s surface. Alongside the Rhinos came entire squadrons of Land Raiders, Predators, Whirlwinds and the strange, agglomerated vehicles of the Pneumachina: claw-armed walkers, stalking tanks with underslung weapon pods, flame spheres, wrecking machines and others whose purpose was not so easily divined.

The two Battle Titans of Legio Mortis marched with the Iron Warriors, Reavers both, and engine killers of their former brothers. Mortis Vult and Malum Benedictio had fought through the viral hellstorm of Isstvan III and both bore newly crafted kill banners depicting those Legions that had once fought as their brothers.

The Iron Warriors had come in force and the Emperor’s Children no less so.

Scouting III Legion jetbikes zipped through the air above and in front of Perturabo’s war ensemble, pink-skinned darts that probed the ground before the army’s advance. Perturabo’s lip curled in distaste at Fulgrim’s riotous assembly of armour and infantry, a pageant of armoured vehicles at play. Like Perturabo, Fulgrim rode at the head of his army, a warrior god in impossibly bright armour. His brother might have ceded control of this mission to him, but Fulgrim was making sure he was still its figurehead. With his golden sword held out before him like a knightly lance, an outside observer could be forgiven for mistaking Fulgrim for the leader of this host.

Perturabo’s gaze was drawn to the lunatic mortals following Fulgrim’s warriors. The carnivalia of madness that attended the Emperor’s Children’s arrival on Hydra Cordatus was in full force. Skirling music drifted from its heaving mass and hundreds of vividly patterned banners fluttered and snapped in the riptide thermals of engine heat.

Throughout the history of war, armies had been attended by all manner of hangers-on: suppliers, smiths, butchers, whores, ostlers, families, bakers, launderers, surgeons, tailors and a hundred more professions, but they were traditionally left in the rear when battle was joined.

Fulgrim, it seemed, intended to bring his army’s followers to the heart of the battle.

Tormentor travelled the distance between the landing zone and the isolated sepulchre quickly and implacably, grinding the rubble of pulverised tombs beneath its tracks as it approached what crumbling ruins the orbital barrage had left standing. The shell-cratered emptiness gave way to occasional stumps of walls, lone facades and brittle exoskeletons of structures that looked more like pollarded trees than anything built from component materials.

Thermal-tugged dust clouds slipped through the shattered buildings and the keening cries that drifted on the air were amplified by the ruins. The advance slowed as the driver picked a path through the outer elements of the sprawling citadel. Lower-yield munitions had been employed closer to the citadel, and areas of this outer region of impact had been left more or less unscathed. Tormentor smashed it all aside, the vehicle’s heavy prow bludgeoning an unwavering path towards the point where orbital surveyor feeds had identified a number of entrances in the citadel’s wall.

Perturabo kept a constant data feed open between his visor’s display and the super-heavy tank’s auspex suite. Low-grade interference was fogging much of the returns, but what he was seeing did not worry him unduly. The ruins were empty of life – no hidden graviton traps, no sniping rocket teams and no buried minefields to blow a track.

For all intents and purposes, the route into the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis was undefended and their route unopposed. An axiom of war that Corax was fond of repeating was that it wasn’t the enemy you saw that killed you, it was the enemy you didn’t see, and Perturabo couldn’t quite believe that a world of such obvious importance to the eldar had been so comprehensively abandoned. Snares and delusions to deter the unwary were all very well, but were no substitute for warriors with guns, who knew how to use them.

Even the impenetrable Cavea Ferrum was typically surrounded by thousands of legionaries.

Perturabo opened a helm pict-link to Fulgrim, and a shimmering holographic representation of his brother appeared floating in the air before him, suspended above the armoured glacis of the Shadowsword.

‘Exhilarating, is it not?’ laughed Fulgrim, his dark eyes wide with anticipation and his moon-pale hair pixelated behind him.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Perturabo. ‘It’s too easy.’

Fulgrim looked irritated at having his ebullience punctured. ‘We are on the verge of achieving what we set out to do, brother. Why must you spoil this moment for me?’

‘Because when the tactical situation’s too good to be true, it’s usually a sign you’re about to get hit harder than you ever thought possible.’

Fulgrim shook his head and said, ‘Be maudlin if you must, brother. I will enjoy this moment of sweet success.’

‘This place is empty, its walls undefended,’ said Perturabo, twisting to look around as the density of structures became greater. ‘You must have known that.’

‘I suspected it might be the case,’ admitted Fulgrim.

‘Then why did we not simply launch our assault straight into the heart of the citadel on the wings of Stormbirds and drop pods?’ growled Perturabo, angry at this latest revelation.

‘Because it might not have been the case,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Besides, I didn’t want to deny you the chance to build some of your grand fortresses. To plant the flag, so to speak.’

‘You didn’t need me here,’ said Perturabo. ‘Nor my Legion.’

‘On the contrary, I’d say it’s always better to have a siege master nearby and not need him, than to need him and not have him.’

Fulgrim smiled, but there was predatory malice to it. ‘Trust me, Perturabo, I cannot do this without you. I will need you at my side before this is done, brother dearest.’

Fulgrim’s words sent a dark chill down Perturabo’s spine, but everything Fulgrim said these days was loaded with hidden meaning and secret poisons. Nothing his brother said could be taken at face value, but whatever barb these words contained would need to wait.

The buildings Tormentor passed were those on the very edge of the bombardment’s outer area of effect, and which had retained much of their former character. White-gold towers of a strange lucite material soared overhead, reflecting the spectral illumination that emanated from the city itself. Perhaps these had once been an inner precinct of the citadel, a grand approach to its magnificence. Now they were its outer edges, tombs and buildings of unknown purpose that possessed a grace and harmony Perturabo found beguiling.

Even in his most unfettered flourishes of design, when he had relaxed his obsession with straight lines, he had never known such fluid grace in his architecture. A sudden guilt touched Perturabo at this wanton destruction, and the image of burning Olympian towns and cities, the burned-meat smell of the world-pyres, and the ashen taste of loss returned to him with a powerful jolt.

‘Brother?’ said the holographic Fulgrim.

Perturabo shook off the disorientating memory as the ground opened up into a wide circuit passing around the outer walls of the citadel. Soaring hundreds of metres into the air, the citadel’s walls were smooth and unblemished, like the face of a beloved gem polished by a skilled gemsmith.

It was from these walls and the structures within that the greenish glow emanated, a soft radiance that somehow managed to illuminate an impossible world. Wondrously shaped towers rose from the battlements, looking more like organic growths of coral than anything formed by the craft of an artificer. A multitude of wide gateways led within, tall and leaf-shaped, their outer edges carved with alien letterforms. It seemed ludicrous to build such high walls only to pierce them with so many entrances.

‘There aren’t even any gates,’ he said, aiming Tormentor towards the nearest opening.

‘You sound disappointed,’ replied Fulgrim.

‘Not disappointed,’ answered Perturabo, watching the smooth battlements for any sign of a mythical army of immortals appearing above him. ‘Just suspicious.’

Tormentor passed beneath the archway and Perturabo felt a shiver of scrutiny, like the tingling sensation of a medical auspex or a biometric analyser as it penetrated flesh and bone. The feeling of being watched that he had experienced since landing increased, as though a hidden, glacially slow sentience at the heart of this world had only now become aware of their intrusion. Though tactical prudence and natural inclination urged Perturabo to keep pushing deeper into the citadel, he brought Tormentor to a halt three hundred metres inside the wall.

He climbed down from the high cupola, dropping to the ground in front of his growling Shadowsword, letting the funereal character of the interior wash over him. The Iron Circle disembarked from widened crew doors on the super-heavy tank’s side, forming a shieldwall around him.

Perturabo ignored them and craned his neck to examine the coffered panels on the upper pediments of the nearby sepulchres. Each was filled with emerald-lit murals of weeping maidens and hooded reapers. Vibrant frescoes and mosaics adorned the lower reaches of every facade, depicting the dead in the passage of their life; arms aloft in unbounded joy before being plunged into all-consuming despair in an endlessly repeating cycle.

Perturabo saw no two alike, and marvelled to see such love and care lavished upon those who would never know of it. Thousands of glittering oval gemstones of ocean green, sky blue and blood-drop red were inset on every mural: some as the necklaces and brooches of the immortalised dead, some as allegorical representations of hearts and souls.

The spaces between the mourn-towers, mausolea and sepulchres were wide, more akin to open plazas dividing grand civic structures than streets, making the city feel open and airy, like a wide park filled with sculptural architecture. Yet there was an oppressiveness that made Perturabo feel as though the buildings were pressing inwards like the crushing walls of a compactor.

The sense of being watched was stronger than ever.

The Iron Circle parted to allow the Trident through as Perturabo’s attention turned to the slender-limbed statues of bulbous-headed constructs on plinths that lined the spaces between each building. Taller than a Contemptor Dreadnought, but without the obvious bulk and power of such war machines, they were exquisite carvings, fashioned from an opaque crystal. Wing-like spines flared from their shoulders, and winking gemstones glittered deep in the centre of their elongated helm-skulls. Thousands of these statues lined the avenues and processionals of the city, silent observers to this violation of its inner precincts.

‘The army of immortals?’ wondered Forrix, following Perturabo’s gaze.

‘If so, then they are a poor choice of guardian for this place.’

Perturabo once again felt that cyclopean presence within the citadel, like a colossus that only now took notice of the ants swarming at its feet.

‘My lord,’ said Barban Falk. ‘Should we press on?’

‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘We dig in.’

The Iron Warriors complement of Rhinos divided into three sections. The first formed a laagered bridgehead within the citadel, while the second created a cordon around the ingress points. Each of the IV Legion’s Rhinos was a specially converted Castellan variant, a design of Perturabo’s, with unfolding armour plates and impact bracing that turned them into miniature bunkers. The modular construction allowed the Rhinos to be linked together in a chain, forming a makeshift fortified line when materials for more permanent emplacements were unavailable or a defence had to be fashioned quickly.

Four hundred Rhinos assumed a perfect formation outside the walls in a layered barbican protecting the Legions’ line of retreat, while inside, an identical number of vehicles mirrored them. With the perforated citadel walls dividing them, the Rhinos became a fortified bunker complex from which to launch operations within the citadel. Another three thousand Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children would hold this smaller fortification.

Perturabo broke the final section down still further into three smaller forces, giving command of each to one of his triarchs. Kroeger would take the left thrust, Falk the right, while he and Forrix advanced along the centre. Each blade of the Trident’s advance was comprised of around three thousand Iron Warriors, with thirty Rhinos, ten Predator tanks, four Land Raiders and assorted mobile artillery support. Warsmith Berossus led the Legion’s thuggish Dreadnoughts through the wall and attached himself to the centre, spreading his war machines throughout each blade of the Trident. Both Titans of the Legio Mortis marched straight up the middle, a pair of towering war gods walking in escort of the primarch himself. The colossal battle engines loosed braying war shouts that echoed from the buildings and shook their very foundations. Mortis came not in the shadows, not in ambush, but loudly and with malice in their hearts. The enemy would know they were coming, and that fear would only grow with each titanic footfall that brought the war engines closer.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13