The Ebonite Archymsts 25 страница

Each force was a concentration of martial power that could bring a world to heel by itself, its fighting strength far in excess of what would be required to capture this place. Perturabo was taking no chances; if events unfolded as he suspected, he wanted overwhelming power ready to respond in an instant.

Fulgrim’s host broke apart into individual warbands, ranging in size from around a hundred warriors to groups of nearly a thousand. Each of these autonomous groups appeared to be led by a captain, though such was the bizarre ornamentation and embellishment on each warrior’s armour, it was often impossible to discern specific rankings. Though far from standard Legion doctrine, the III Legion’s warriors at least retained a measure of their former adherence to a chain of command as they spread out and attached themselves to one of the three prongs of the Trident. Lastly came a long convoy of cargo-20s, sixty heavily laden and high-sided container haulers with their bellies riding close to the ground. Normally used to ferry the vast quantities of ammunition required by mobile artillery regiments, they were guarded by warriors in Terminator armour and a host of Dreadnoughts.

‘What are you planning, brother?’ wondered Perturabo, keeping his voice low.

Fulgrim looked over and gave Perturabo an expansive bow, his cloak flaring out behind him like the golden wings of the mythical beast to which he had always likened himself. Karuchi Vohra stood in Fulgrim’s shadow, attended by two of his brother’s Phoenix Guard. The eldar’s face was gloating, but pinched tight with wary hostility, as though the citadel’s interior simultaneously entranced and terrified him.

Perturabo decided that when they were done with this place he would kill the alien.

‘Give the word, brother,’ said Fulgrim, the feral smile and indulgent tone making it sound as though this was a gesture of magnanimity on his part.

Perturabo nodded and a howling cheer erupted from the throats of the Emperor’s Children as hundreds of vehicle engines roared to life.

His triarchs turned away to rejoin their warriors, but Perturabo stopped them.

‘Be watchful,’ he said, stealing a sidelong glance at the Emperor’s Children. ‘For anything.’

Forrix nodded in understanding. ‘Iron within,’ he said.

‘Iron without,’ answered Perturabo, and leaving the fortified bridgehead behind, he led the Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children into the heart of Amon ny-shak Kaelis.

Lucius jogged alongside the growling Rhinos as they prowled through the plaza-streets of the citadel, irritated there was no sign of any enemy. The shimmering green light of the city illuminated well enough, but there was no life to it. One curious fact he noticed was that it reflected from nothing, no matter how polished and clear it might be. The blade of his sword showed not the slightest green tint in the gleaming silver.

Warriors of the III Legion moved in a rabble, each warband finding its own pace; some dawdling, some pushing ahead of the vehicles. Jetbikes shot overhead, weaving complex patterns through the air and sometimes flashing so close he could have beheaded the pilot had he so wished.

The dour Iron Warriors formed the centre of the advance, their combined force ridiculously overpowered for such a ludicrously easy task. This element of the assault was led by Barban Falk, one of Perturabo’s inner circle, and Lucius passed a few idle moments working out the man’s balance, reach and strength.

In case this fragile alliance should crack, he thought with delicious amusement.

Falk was a giant, even allowing for the layered bulk of Cataphractii plate, who seemed to be looking for something, judging by the way his head was darting around from place to place. Lucius saw hesitancy in the warrior, a wariness that was keeping him from matching the pace of the other two thrusts.

Lucius wondered what Falk was seeing, filing this latest fragment of information away. Lucius knew his blade would struggle to penetrate Falk’s armour, but even with that advantage the Iron Warrior wouldn’t be fast enough to get his tearing gauntlets upon Lucius. The swordsman flexed his fingers over the whip he’d taken from dead Kalimos. The textured grip was fashioned from the outer skin of a deep sea cephalopod, and micro-hooks extruded from every square millimetre of its surface, making it wondrously intense to crack.

Lucius tore his thoughts from the murder of Barban Falk to the statues lining the wide streets. Letting the armoured column slowly rumble past him, Lucius jogged over to a nearby sepulchre, drinking in the bright colours and vibrant texture of the mosaics rendered on its surface.

The figures were, for the most part, a mix of artists, sculptors, singers, acrobats and other creative types, but what seemed like a disproportionate amount were also warriors. Some made war with long pikes that spat fire, others wore screaming masks, while still others fought with twin blades. Lucius liked the grace and poise of these warriors and followed the movements of the sword-wielding eldar, adopting their poses and fighting stances as he leapt and danced, with his blade spinning a web of silver steel around his body.

Lucius grunted, moving faster and faster, each twist of his body and flickering blow a blur of pinkish-purple plate and glistening blade edge.

He spun around the statues lining the road, revelling in the rapturous glances he was receiving from his Legion brothers and those of grudging admiration from the Iron Warriors. Lucius slalomed down the length of the mausoleum, weaving a path between the crystalline statues. As he approached the end of the structure, he leapt into the air and cracked the barbed whip. The toothed length wrapped around the neck of the statue at the corner of the building and sliced cleanly through its glittering neck.

As the head fell, Lucius’s sword licked out and cut through its centre. The two halves fell to the ground and exploded into gleaming shards of glass. He dropped lightly from his spinning decapitation, blade angled up behind his body and whip twitching on the ground.

Lonomia Ruen detached himself from the advance, and Lucius cursed. Since the death of Bastarnae Abranxe, Ruen had transferred his cultish adoration to Lucius. For a while it had been an interesting diversion to have a slavish devotee, but Lucius was already tiring of the man’s desperate need.

‘Your body is a wonder,’ said Ruen.

Sycophancy was always welcome, but Lucius preferred his flunkies to have sense enough to keep their distance. Ruen remained blissfully unaware of his status as a supreme irritant, and had become Lucius’s newly acquired shadow.

‘Learning anything new?’ asked Ruen.

‘Only that eldar fighting styles don’t suit me,’ Lucius said, coiling the whip with a twist of the wrist and hooking it on his belt.

‘Looked good from where I was standing,’ pointed out Ruen.

‘Because you barely know one end of a sword from the other,’ snapped Lucius, sheathing his sword. ‘Did Abranxe teach you nothing of their use?’

Ruen’s posture stiffened, and Lucius grinned, wondering if he would go for one of his envenomed blades.

‘Abranxe was a master swordsman, but he was no instructor,’ allowed Ruen, his survival instinct restraining his sense of hurt outrage. ‘Tell me then, why is the eldar way of the blade no use to you?’

‘The postures are intended for the lightweight physiques of the eldar and their skinny bodies,’ said Lucius, in a rare moment of indulgence. ‘It’s no use to a Space Marine. Fast as we are, we’ll never be as fast as them.’

‘You could be. Some day.’

‘Don’t be foolish, Ruen,’ said Lucius, though the sincerity of the flattery touched him despite his best efforts to remain aloof.

A warrior detached himself from the advancing column of armoured vehicles and artillery moving through the city streets, a bulky, asymmetrical warrior with a long, pole-armed axe weapon that boomed and skirled with shrieking harmonics. Marius Vairosean came with a group of similarly armed warriors, and Lucius felt his teeth rattling in his skull at the approach of the Kakophoni. Even with the majority of their sonic cannons sheathed, each warrior acted as a conduit for constant, nerve-jangling wails.

Vairosean’s bare head was a mass of fresh surgical scars where resonating amplification devices had been worked into the reshaped bone of his skull. His eyes were maddened black orbs submerged in pallid, doughy flesh, the skin flaking and veined with ruptured blood vessels.

‘Keep moving,’ said the master of the Kakophoni, and the pitch of his words sent a spasm of pain through Lucius. Vairosean’s stretched mouth formed words with difficulty, and expanding flesh sacs at his neck moved in time with his breathing. Every one of the Kakophoni were implanted with organic echo chambers in their necks and chests to enhance the nerve-paralysing effect of their sonic bellows.

‘Just admiring the architecture,’ said Lucius, bending to lift the smooth ruby stone lying amid the shattered remains of the head he had cut from the statue. It felt warm in his hand, and he laughed as he sensed panic emanating from within, as though the stone were afraid.

The sonic cannon on Vairosean’s back gave a barking howl, and the weapons of his men squealed and shrieked in syncopation. Lucius gave the stone a squeeze, grinning as its panic crystallised into terror.

‘What is that?’ demanded Vairosean, holding out his hand.

Lucius shrugged and placed the stone in Vairosean’s upturned palm.

The stone vibrated as though dissonant harmonics were passing through it, dancing on Variosean’s hand like a polarity-shifting magnet. With a sharp crack, the stone split in two and Lucius gasped as he felt a sudden jolt of energy slam into his body, as if a shot of the most incredible battle stimm had just been dumped into his system. He knew Vairosean felt it too, his face twisted in rapt bliss. The weapons of the Kakophoni blared with deafening power and half a dozen nearby statues burst apart as though attacked by invisible sledgehammers.

Reduced to powdered shards no larger than a fingernail, each fragmented statue bore a similar gemstone at its heart, and the shrieking Kakophoni wasted no time in falling upon them. They fought one another for the heart stones, clawing and barging one another as they snatched up the warmly glowing gems. No sooner had each stone been grasped than it exploded and sent billowing surges of blood-boiling ecstasy through every warrior close enough to feel it. Their weapons brayed and honked and let out shrieking howls of atavistic pleasure, filling the streets with atonal echoes that bounced from tomb to crypt like bloodhounds in search of prey.

Lucius backed away from Vairosean as the warrior unslung his poleaxe, its long haft enveloped in flickering blue light and its body thrumming with power. Vairosean slammed his hand down upon it, and a blazing whipcrack of lightning-wreathed noise pounded the air with ferocious disharmony. The facade of the tomb split open and a bomb-blast shockwave punched a ten-metre-wide crater in the road.

Awareness of the gemstones’ bounty spread through the Emperor’s Children like an infection. And what had begun as a ragged but relentless advance devolved into a raging free-for-all as every statue within reach was torn down and smashed apart in an orgy of destruction.

Barban Falk’s Iron Warriors pressed on, leaving the Emperor’s Children behind.

Nykona Sharrowkyn watched the riot spread to encompass the entire Emperor’s Children component of the traitor advance on this axis. Statues were smashed apart and the stones within them crushed underfoot, swallowed whole or placed within freshly cut, self-inflicted wounds. The screams were orgiastic, their actions inexplicable.

‘What new lunacy is this?’ wondered Sabik Wayland, shaking his head in disbelief.

‘Ever since Isstvan and the attack on the Sisypheum I’ve given up trying to rationalise the motivations of traitors,’ answered Sharrowkyn.

‘What happened to “know your enemy”?’

‘I’m coming to understand that’s not always sound advice,’ said Sharrowkyn slowly. ‘To know the Emperor’s Children would be to invite a terrible madness into your soul.’

‘You’ll get no argument from me on that,’ agreed Wayland as Sharrowkyn leaned out over the parapet of the strangely glowing sepulchre upon which they perched. Wayland had climbed hand over hand to reach this place, where Sharrowkyn had used his heavily modified jump pack. Its cross-section was less than half that of an Assault Marine’s standard equipment, and its emissions were almost invisible unless you were looking right at it.

Two hundred metres below them, the Emperor’s Children clawed and tore at each other as they fought for possession of the warmly glowing stones within each of the crystal statues. Sharrowkyn had no idea what inherent quality they possessed that had triggered such destructive behaviour, but even he felt the terrible sadness that accompanied each one’s destruction.

The Iron Warriors ignored the antics of their brethren, advancing deeper into the city. Sharrowkyn didn’t blame them. Better to have no allies than ones you couldn’t count on.

At least Sharrowkyn could count on the Iron Hands. He had fought beside a great many of his brother legionaries, but he held none in such esteem as the fatherless sons of Ferrus. A hundred and forty-six warriors of the X Legion were concealed in the shadows around the citadel’s central mausoleum-temple, the obvious focus of the traitors. Their deployment, advance and formation only confirmed that they were heading straight for the battered warriors of Ulrach Branthan.

Sharrowkyn had known where the Iron Warriors would make their ingress, and brought the Iron Hands in on the opposite trajectory once the dust had settled from the bombardment. Cadmus Tyro led the incursion force, with the veterans of Vermana Cybus spread through the Iron Hands like structural pins in a weakened facade. Cybus had more or less recovered from his encounter with Perturabo. The crushed mechanised portions of his anatomy had been replaced with fresh augmetics cannibalised from the Sisypheum and those organic parts that couldn’t be fully restored were coated with synth-skin and implanted plasteks.

Yet more of his humanity sacrificed in the fight against the Warmaster.

The Sisypheum remained in low orbit; as close as the heavily damaged ship dared. Her encounter with the Andronicus had left her broken and torn, but like the Legion she served, the Sisypheum would endure. She was pulled in tight to the planet, skimming the zones of interference between atmospheric layers to avoid detection. She was close, but still far too distant if they were detected. Only Frater Thamatica and Atesh Tarsa remained aboard, one as a punishment, the other as a guardian. The Stormbirds and Thunderhawks that had brought them to the surface sat atop sepulchres deeper into the city, clustered on rooftops like raptors waiting patiently in their eyries.

It was beyond foolish to be here.

Yes, Raven Guard squads were frequently outnumbered when they operated behind enemy lines, but this was ridiculous. Tens of thousands of Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children were drawing near a group of warriors who couldn’t hope to fight them off. Odds of a thousand to one and beyond were the stuff of legend, but most of them were precisely that. Legend. All very well to toast such ancient victories until you had to face those odds yourself.

Sharrowkyn’s vox crackled and the brusque tones of Vermana Cybus filled his helmet.

‘What do you see?’ asked the commander of the X Legion’s Morlocks.

‘One column of Emperor’s Children is slowing down, but the Iron Warriors are pressing on,’ he said. ‘Multiple company strengths of armour, minimum of fifteen thousand warriors and supporting artillery. And two Reaver battle engines.’

To Cybus’s credit, the vast array of enemy power advancing on his position didn’t appear to faze him.

‘How long until they reach the sepulchre?’ he demanded.

‘No more than ten minutes.’

‘Right, we’ll be waiting,’ said Cybus. ‘Get back here now.’

The vox spat static and went silent.

Wayland had heard the exchange and felt Sharrowkyn’s aversion to Cybus. ‘A hard man to like, but a good one to follow.’

Sharrowkyn shook his head. ‘He’s forgotten that he is a leader of men. He takes your Legion’s reverence for iron and makes a virtue of flesh-hate.’

‘You misunderstand us,’ said Wayland. ‘My brothers and I, we do not hate flesh, we just know that it cannot be relied upon like iron.’

‘Too subtle a distinction for me,’ said Sharrowkyn.

‘I highly doubt that.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘You know as well as I that warriors need to feel they’re following a being of flesh and blood, someone who understands and shares the risks they’re being asked to take.’

‘Deliverance?’

Sharrowkyn nodded. ‘The lessons learned during the uprising are still fresh, and any Raven Guard commander who forgets them will soon find he has no army left to lead.’

‘Perhaps you are right, but this is not the time to speak of it,’ said Wayland. ‘They are on the move again.’

Sharrowkyn followed Wayland’s gaze and saw that his comrade was right. Whatever madness had seized the Emperor’s Children had abated, and a measure of order had been restored. Among the traitors, Sharrowkyn recognised a whip-wielding warrior, the consummate swordsman he had faced aboard the Sisypheum.

He felt an unseemly thrill of recognition, reliving their duel on the embarkation deck in a heartbeat. Sharrowkyn had never faced an opponent like him and he could not have predicted the outcome had their dance of blades not been interrupted.

‘What is it?’ asked Wayland.

‘A familiar face,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘Someone I want to kill.’

TWENTY

Isha’s Doom
This World is Alive
I Know Labyrinths Kroeger’s column of rumbling vehicles, marching infantry and mobile artillery – with their barrels raised to the heavens – reached the heart of the citadel first. Moving unopposed, there was little need for caution, for Kroeger felt emptiness like a physical absence in his gut. Only by an exercise of his will was he able to quell the urge to charge at speed for their objective.

The advance through the citadel had grated at his nerves. The rasping, unfocused hostility he felt from every lambent green wall was like a weapon aimed at his head. His body was flooded with combat stimms and he flexed his fingers on the grip of his chainsword. He wanted to kill something, anything, just to feel the release of the tension that had been building in him ever since they had landed on this world.

The column spread out as it emerged from the wide plaza-street, moving smoothly into a staggered line. Despite his avowed distrust of Harkor, the warriors of his former Grand Battalion were well trained and highly disciplined.

And if there was one place capable of sealing in the remains of a doomed god, the building at the heart of Amon ny-shak Kaelis was it. The Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom was a monumental palace, sprawling and richly ornamented with bulbous mourn-towers and sweeping, ivory-roofed domes. Its facades were awash with curling arches and lofty processionals that were at once airy and crafted as if spun from moonbeams, and yet possessed of a strength that belied their gossamer fragility. The entire structure was like a great sculpture of ice and glass, like a natural accretion of organic crystal that had grown in some dark cave and which, once exposed to the light, had furiously accelerated its growth in new and unexpected ways. It was a wholly natural-looking formation, but the subtlety of its precise ratios was impossible to miss; organic and artificial at the same time.

The enormous structure was all contradiction – fortified and open, geometric and yet seemingly unfettered by the constraints of an architect. Thousands of the same crystalline statues that lined every roadway stood immobile in glittering alcoves and atop ranked plinths along the curving walkways that led up to a tall opening in its frontage, a narrow portal flanked by two enormous replicas of the smaller sentinels. They were easily the equal in size – if not stature – of the Mortis engines; Kroeger had seen similar war machines wreak havoc on the battlefield.

But these representations were unmoving and glassy, fragile and easily broken.

The undersea light that permeated the entire citadel was strongest here, the walls of the Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom radiant with their own inner illumination. The smooth stone of the ground was veined with that same glow, capillaries of energy and a network of living light. Kroeger’s footfalls left lightless bruises on the ground and he felt as though he were walking on the surface of some planet-wide neural network.

A Rhino forested with vox-aerials ground to a halt next to him, black worms of unlight spreading from the pressing weight of its bulk. Kroeger felt Harkor’s presence before his lieutenant spoke.

‘Something you should hear,’ said Harkor, a vox headset pressed to his ear.

‘What is it?’ snapped Kroeger; angry, but unable to say why.

Harkor held out the headset and said, ‘Listen.’

Kroeger removed his helmet and climbed onto the running board of the vehicle. He snatched the headset and mashed it to the side of his head. He heard nothing beyond a mournful howl of static, rising and falling like a desert wind at night.

‘What am I supposed to be hearing?’ he asked.

‘Keep listening,’ urged Harkor.

Kroeger kept the headset pressed to the side of his face as the lead elements of Perturabo’s column emerged from the wide streets a kilometre and a half to the east. Streaming honour banners were just visible over the roofs of the intervening structures, and the honking bellows of the two Titans echoed dully through the open plaza. Kroeger’s gaze strayed farther east, but there was no sign of Falk’s column yet.

‘I’m not hearing anything apart from static,’ he said.

‘Listen harder.’

Kroeger glared at Harkor, wondering how much trouble it would cause were he to kill the former warsmith right now. He dismissed the idea as he heard snatches of what sounded like Imperial Gothic mired in the static. Nothing certain and nothing he could fully understand, but there was something there.

‘What is it?’

‘Encrypted vox traffic,’ said Harkor. ‘Tenth Legion comms.’

Harkor watched as Kroeger’s commandeered Rhino raced off to rejoin Perturabo’s blade of the Trident thrust at the citadel’s vitals. He found it impossible to keep the sneer from his lips at the thought that he had been displaced from command by a common thug like Kroeger. The man had no nobility to him and possessed little in the way of culture. Harkor had done his research and knew that Kroeger had no blood worth a damn in his lineage. He was peasant-born, a ragamuffin child with a fortuitous confluence of genes and a barely acceptable level of genetic variance that only just kept him from being rejected by the Legion’s fleshsmiths.

To have such a low-born fool in command of a Grand Battalion was an insult to the honour of the Legion. The thought made him shiver in disgust, and he keyed the vox to the previously agreed-upon frequency, one at the very edge of usability.

‘You were right,’ he said, not identifying himself and knowing that only one person would be listening on the other end. ‘His anger is growing beyond his control.’

A swoop and sway of static followed, with clicks and burps of encryption.

‘You told him of the Tenth Legion vox traffic?’ said a voice heavy with distortion.

‘I did,’ said Harkor. ‘And it was all he could do not to charge the sepulchre all by himself with his sword waving.’

‘He is low-born,’ said the voice. ‘You can expect little else from those not of noble lineage.’

‘It galls me that Perturabo cannot see it.’

‘The Lord of Iron is wise in many things, but he was wrong to remove you from leadership,’ said the voice. ‘Having mongrels like Kroeger in command is the thin end of the wedge. It is indicative of a slide into mediocrity that will lead to polluted bloodlines being raised to the fighting ranks.’

‘Over my dead body,’ spat Harkor.

‘We are the noble blood of Olympia,’ said the voice. ‘We have that uniting factor, and blood will prove true in the end.’

‘But we can hasten that end, yes?’

‘Indeed we can,’ said the voice. ‘And not just for Kroeger. Forrix can trace his blood to one of the Twelve, but he will never support your reinstatement.’

‘Then he has to die too,’ said Harkor.

‘I am master of the Stor-bezashk,’ said Toramino. ‘I can make that happen.’

Perturabo didn’t need the flickering data streams cascading down the side of his visor display to know that they had reached their destination. The Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom was an edifice like no other he had seen or imagined. The proportions were effortlessly harmonious, its structural elements innately perfect in a way that no amount of training or study could replicate. There could be no other temple raised that would do justice to the final resting place of a god.

Except there likely was no god, he reminded himself.

‘Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?’ said Fulgrim, approaching with his Phoenix Guard and the cringing form of Karuchi Vohra. ‘Beyond anything you or I might design and commit to the earth.’

Perturabo bristled at the thinly veiled insult, and only bit back a bitter response because he knew Fulgrim was correct. Just looking at the spun sugar of its web-like flying buttresses and coiling walkways, he knew he could never have designed anything like it. Yet that did not lessen the sting of Fulgrim’s words or the apparent pleasure his brother took in voicing them.

‘No, perhaps not,’ he agreed. ‘But it’s what’s within that interests me more.’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Fulgrim, staring with undisguised hunger at the wondrous tomb-palace. ‘It gladdens my soul to finally see the object of our quest.’

Perturabo looked past his brother to Karuchi Vohra. The eldar guide seemed even more apprehensive now that they had finally reached their goal, as though just being here was making him ill. He had the sickly pallor of withdrawal and body-wide shivers.

‘Your guide doesn’t appear to think so,’ he said. ‘Why is that, Vohra?’

The eldar swallowed heavily and looked up at Perturabo through eyes the colour of bloodstained milk, ‘Would you be happy to visit a mass grave? Does being in the presence of the dead make you smile?’

Vohra’s tone was insubordinate, verging on hostile, and Perturabo thought of killing the eldar right now.

‘This is no grave,’ he said. ‘This is a city built to the memory of the dead, nothing more.’

‘Be kind to the creature,’ said Fulgrim, though even he was openly sceptical of the eldar’s explanation. ‘We are here and that is in no small measure down to my allowing him to live.’

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13