The Ebonite Archymsts 26 страница

‘So we’re here, now what?’ asked Perturabo.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Fulgrim. ‘We go in.’

To a warrior raised on a volcanic world of molten rivers and sulphurous skies, cold was normally something Atesh Tarsa felt keenly, but he no longer felt the chill of the apothecarion. Though he had stripped down to his thin bodyglove to avoid any possible secondary heating of Ulrach Branthan’s casket from the power plant of his warplate, the discomfort of the low temperatures was more than offset by the stasis-sealed mystery before him.

Frater Thamatica had run diagnostic checks on all the machines keeping Branthan alive and had found no flaws, no unexpected quirks in their construction and nothing that could adequately explain how a bolter wound had miraculously vanished from a warrior kept entirely in a time out of time.

Miraculous…

A word so casually deployed, but one that silences inquisition. Calling something a miracle denied enquiry by attributing an ineffability to its occurrence. The credo of the apothecarion was that there were no such things as miracles, only events. Only when the explanation of an event was more incredible than the event itself could such a thing be counted as miraculous.

Right now, Tarsa was inclined to believe in miracles.

He had examined the wound as best he could through the inviolable bubble surrounding Branthan, and there could be no doubt that the wound had almost entirely vanished. Not completely, for there was a pinkish cast to the skin, indicative of scarring and healing.

Even outside a stasis field, such a wound would have taken longer to heal.

With the warriors of the X Legion below on the planet the eldar guide had brought them to, the Sisypheum felt very empty, its corridors prowled by servitors who cared nothing for the comfort of lonely souls left aboard ship while there was fighting to be done. Tarsa was a warrior too, one of some note amongst his fellow Nocturneans, but the care of Ulrach Branthan could be left to no one else but an Apothecary.

Besides, the mission to the planet’s surface had the whiff of revenge to it, and such missions rarely ended well.

Frater Thamatica remained in the bowels of the ship, undoing the damage his ill-advised experiment had caused. Tarsa remembered the furious argument between the Frater and Cadmus Tyro, like two thunderheads colliding. But Tyro was a captain and the designated proxy of Ulrach Branthan. Thamatica was going nowhere.

Tarsa paced the apothecarion, tapping his fingertips over the surface of his data-slate, reviewing the latest batch of monitoring readings. Ulrach Branthan’s biometrics were slowed to a standstill by the temperature, let alone the stasis field, and the results were the same as the last hundred times he had checked them.

Nothing could change within a stasis field – something that should be self-evident – but somehow in that unchanging environment, something had changed. Branthan’s body had managed to heal itself. Or, rather, something had caused it to heal without registering on any of the highly advanced, incredibly accurate monitoring devices.

Could it be the Heart of Iron?

In all his probes of Branthan’s flesh, this alone was an element of uncertainty. Not even the Iron Hands could explain its workings. All that was known of the artefact was that Ferrus Manus was said to have been given it by a ghost in the Land of Shadows centuries ago. As contrary to the Imperial Truth and as unlikely as that sounded, it was the only explanation Tarsa had been given as to its provenance.

Every senior Iron Hand claimed to have some relic of vanished technology from that desolate, benighted wasteland. The place must have been a veritable treasure trove of plunder, with ghosts lining up to hand over their priceless trinkets.

Dismissing such thoughts, Tarsa retuned his attention to the grievously wounded warrior. Unmoving icy mist fogged the casket, but Tarsa’s red orbs could easily pierce the translucent sheen to the warrior below. Branthan’s body, regardless of any healed bolter wound, was still a mess of bloody skin and ruptured flesh, broken bones and shredded musculature. The Heart of Iron remained locked to his chest, a silent, unmoving parasite whose function defied easy explanation.

From what little Tarsa could ascertain, he believed the device was attempting to regrow the inner structure of the captain’s body. Yet it was doing so by feeding on – for want of a better term – his life force. On a warrior whose wounds were not mortal, it would probably heal the damage without killing him, but Branthan’s injuries were so severe that any healing done would be at the expense of his life.

This miracle would likely kill him.

Tarsa circled the casket, all the while knowing that there was nothing more he could do for the man inside without detailed real-time data. There was only one way to gather such data, and Cadmus Tyro would never allow him to bring Branthan out of stasis without a cadre of Iron Hands around in case those moments turned out to be his last.

But Cadmus Tyro wasn’t here.

The warriors of Nocturne were not known for their rebellious streak, in fact the chains of duty in which they wrapped themselves bound them to causes and courses of action that might be deemed unwise, but which were followed through to the end. Yet Tarsa felt his hand inching towards the machinery regulating the casket’s temperature and the gene-locked stasis controls.

‘To help you I need to bring you close to death,’ he said, the further damage that might be done by rousing Branthan from his cryonic state conflicting with his oath to do no harm. He resolved that dilemma by rationalising that if he were able to save the captain then that damage would be an acceptable price to pay.

The thought of Tyro and Cybus’s retribution should something go wrong momentarily stayed his hand. Even were he to learn something vital, they would still be furious, so there was really no sense in hesitating. Tarsa was heartsick at keeping a man in a state of vegetative existence, a man who was dead in all but the most generous terms.

Wasn’t it, in fact, doing more harm keeping Branthan like this?

His moral quandary resolved, Tarsa quickly set up his bio-recording equipment, plugging his narthecium into the casket to monitor every aspect of Ulrach Branthan’s physiology. If he was going to do this, he’d have to do it right, leaving nothing to chance and seizing every opportunity to gather as much information as he could.

With everything set up, Tarsa unlocked the controls. He took a breath of cold air, now feeling the chill of the sterile apothecarion settling in his bones. Or was it the chill of uncertainty? He had already made his mind up, so he didn’t know why he was hesitating. Was he giving himself one last chance to turn back, realising that he might be about to kill Branthan?

Tarsa turned the brass dial of the power coupling to zero and the stasis field fell away like a dropped theatre curtain. The curling mists in the casket churned as time recommenced within, and the frozen captain once again rejoined the natural flow of the universe. Having crossed this rubicon, Tarsa now began to increase the temperature of the captain’s body in fractional increments. The lights on his narthecium blinked and clicked as swarms of data mobbed its memory coils. The bio-monitoring equipment chattered as fresh information flowed from the thawing body, spewing ticker-tapes of punched data-ribbons.

The devices showed increased neural activity in the pre-frontal lobes, and a general increase in synapse communications. Soon, the captain’s brain would reach a level where cognition and awareness would be restored. When that happened, Tarsa would need to be succinct in his questions.

Brain activity continued to rise, and he watched the Heart of Iron as it extruded yet more hair-fine filaments into Branthan’s body. The segmented limbs slithered around his body, as though probing for something, and it vented a thin stream of toxic fumes that smelled of rotting flesh.

‘– ers, ’ said Branthan, finishing a sentence that had begun weeks ago.

‘Captain. I am Apothecary Tarsa. Your wounds are healing, but I am gathering information to ascertain why.’

A pause while the captain’s barely thawed brain raced to catch up to the present.

‘ The mission? ’

‘Is ongoing,’ said Tarsa, watching the spiking volume of data flow from the casket. ‘We are at the target world and your warriors are attempting to foil the traitor’s plans.’

Branthan’s brain activity suddenly spiked with waveforms Tarsa had never seen and which caused the captain’s body to twitch and spasm. Tarsa rose to his feet, looking into the casket as Ulrach Branthan’s eyes flickered with an eldritch green light.

‘ Iydris… ’

‘Captain?’

‘ This world. The dead call it Iydris. ’

‘I don’t understand, captain,’ said Tarsa. Had the captain been having lucid dreams while he was locked in stasis? That should be impossible, but if this mission into the heart of a warp storm had taught Tarsa anything, it was that words like impossible were for the foolish and the unwary. The green shimmer to Branthan’s eyes was surely a sign of something very wrong, but he hesitated to drop the temperature and re-engage the stasis field.

Instead, he asked: ‘What dead?’

‘ The souls of Iydris, I hear them all. They’re crying out in terror. ’

The captain’s voice trailed off, and Tarsa realised Branthan’s synapse network had decayed to the point where he was experiencing auditory hallucinations. It would be a mercy to let him die now before the honourable hero he had been was reduced to a rambling madman.

‘ You have to stop the Angel Exterminatus,’ said Branthan, as Tarsa’s hand hovered over the temperature controls.

‘What did you say?’ asked Tarsa. The data squirt inloaded by Sabik Wayland had included mention of the mythical creature, but Branthan’s words felt more specific, more immediately relevant.

‘ He seeks to be reborn on Iydris. You have to stop it. ’

Tarsa struggled to connect the captain’s words with what Wayland and Sharrowkyn had heard on Hydra Cordatus. The Angel Exterminatus was a dead god of the eldar, imprisoned beneath the world by their race’s supreme deity. What that actually meant in real terms wasn’t clear, but something of Branthan’s utterances didn’t gel.

‘What is the Angel Exterminatus?’ asked Tarsa, instinctively knowing this was the most important question he would ever ask.

‘ All the very worst things in the world given flesh and form. ’

‘How do you know this?’

‘ This world, it’s alive. It cries for help. It waits. ’

‘It waits?’ asked Tarsa. ‘What is it waiting for?’

‘ For its makers to carry the dead home. ’

A cordon was established around the sepulchre, and it was immediately apparent that it would need no lengthy siege to breach its walls. It boasted no defences and no emplaced guns, its approaches were unmarked by deep ditches, firepits, minefields or tearing wires, and the portal between the towering, crystalline giants was unbarred by any gate.

Perturabo instructed Forrix to begin work on establishing a fortified position in the open plaza before the sepulchre, and his lead triarch set about the task with gusto, requisitioning every available Rhino for the task. To surround the sepulchre would require thousands more Castellan Rhinos, thus Forrix crafted a rectangular secure area with angled bastion corners, the simplest fortress to craft with no blind spots. As each Rhino was driven into place and the armour plates unfolded, the central area of the plaza changed from being a place of shimmering light and ghostly laments on the wind to a place of cold iron, black spikes, coiled razorwire and armoured emplacements.

Few, even among the IV Legion, knew fortifications like Forrix, and even as Perturabo looked over, the final towers were rising at the corners of the emplaced position. The Mortis engines lifted the last elements into place as a final pair of Rhinos backed into position to form the two leaves of a motorised gate.

‘Your warrior works fast,’ noted Fulgrim, and Perturabo saw the jittering urge to be moving in every twitch of his limbs and every tic on his alabaster features. ‘But we should not linger.’

‘The weapons aren’t going anywhere,’ said Perturabo. ‘We don’t move until I have confirmation our fortified positions are secure.’

Fulgrim nodded, but there was a curt impatience to it.

Perturabo already knew all three fortified positions were in readiness. Despite the resistance of the rock, the fortress surrounding the landing zone was now secure, as was the makeshift fortress of Rhinos around the citadel’s walls. This latest fortification was as good as complete, but Perturabo took the time to study Fulgrim and his assembled host.

His brother was sheened in sweat, but it was not perspiration that beaded his brow.

Fulgrim was sweating light.

Faintly, to be sure, but visible to genhanced sight that saw beyond what even legionary eyes saw. Beads of light gathered at Fulgrim’s fingertips and fell to the ground, where they were swallowed by the earth and dissipated. He wondered if Fulgrim was aware of the radiance bleeding from him and decided he must be. His brother’s armour strained against his body and his features were drawn and tired, as though only by an effort of will was he still standing.

His captains looked no better, like hounds straining at the leash. Kaesoron stuck close to Fulgrim’s side, while Vairosean and his shrieking warriors roared and seethed with their bizarre sonic cannons. Eidolon and a cadre of bulky warriors in Cataphractii Terminator armour stood ready to spearhead the Emperor’s Children’s advance. The Lord Commander’s flesh was suffused with a similar light to that enveloping Fulgrim, a deathly radiance that had no place within a living being.

Alone of the Phoenician’s warriors, the swordsman Lucius seemed unaffected by the sense of potentiality that coursed through the Emperor’s Children. He glanced over towards Perturabo, as though aware of the scrutiny, and gave him an expansive bow. Perturabo saw through the blatant insincerity and felt a killing urge that saw him lift Forgebreaker from its harness at his back.

Karuchi Vohra stood next to Fulgrim, his hands knotting and twisting like a guilty man who knew they would never be clean of blood. Perturabo knew he should kill the eldar now, just crush his frail body with one blow of his hammer, but he sensed there was yet something he could learn from their guide.

Kroeger and Falk appeared, each warrior giving him a nod of readiness.

Only two blades of his Trident would follow him, but that would have to be enough.

The Iron Circle lifted their shields as Perturabo sent a pulse of activation through his MIU to the organic wetware of their cybernetic control centres.

‘Does that mean we can go now?’ asked Fulgrim, needy and irritating.

‘It does,’ said Perturabo.

The warriors chosen to accompany the two primarchs within the crystal beauty of the domed sepulchre marched in their wake; the Iron Warriors as regimented as the day they had first formed up on the martial fields of Olympus, the Emperor’s Children like a host of raucous barbarians. Hundreds of banners flew overhead and the howling skirl of sonic weapons battered the air and tortured the ears with their echoes.

Thousands of Fulgrim’s followers came too, each bearing rigid containers across their shoulders. Perturabo had watched them unload the cargo-20s and fill those containers with what looked like crystal shards. Burdened by such heavy weight, they would not keep up with the legionaries, and Perturabo wasn’t about to wait for them.

With the Iron Circle forming a heavy wedge of shields before them, Perturabo and Fulgrim led the way up a curling walkway that approached the main portal. Only as they drew near did its scale truly become apparent. Three hundred metres high and twenty wide, it was a vertical slash in the translucent crystal walls of the citadel. The sea-green glow that spread to the rest of the fortress was, it seemed, a radiance that only went one way. Inside, all was darkness, an enfolding blackness that swallowed the light and allowed none to escape. Perturabo was reminded of the great singularity at the heart of the Eye of Terror, and did not care for that likeness one bit.

Was the interior of the Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom a region that could be spatially mapped or did its internal geography owe nothing to empirical measurements?

‘I can feel it,’ said Fulgrim as they marched between the clawed feet of the flanking guardians of the sepulchre. Light flickered through them like glittering shoals of fish darting away from a hunter’s lure. Nothing here had yet reacted to their presence, but how long that would last once they were inside was something Perturabo wasn’t keen to find out.

Perturabo halted their advance and turned to his brother.

‘Before we go any further, there is something I have to ask you, brother,’ said Perturabo.

Fulgrim’s eyes narrowed, tense and wary. ‘What?’

‘Is there anything I should know?’ Perturabo asked. ‘I give you this one last chance to tell me anything you have kept to yourself.’

Perturabo saw the lie before it was spoken.

‘No, brother,’ said the Phoenician. ‘All is as I have told you.’

Perturabo nodded, the answer exactly what he’d expected. He turned away from Fulgrim and with his warriors at his side and his robotic guardians around him, marched into the sepulchre.

Darkness welcomed him, folding around his senses in a way that confirmed it was wholly unnatural. His senses spread out, questing at the edges of his perceptions in ways unknown to mortals. What would be unremitting blackness, impenetrable and cloying and impossible to escape, was – to him – merely a gloaming.

The portal led them within an echoing vestibule of sorts, its colossal dimensions seeming to alter with every glance. A number of passageways led onwards, leaf-shaped arches of deeper darkness, but Perturabo found it next to impossible to fix on exactly how many there were.

‘Parlour tricks,’ sneered Fulgrim, looking around the twisting passageways leading off in many different directions at once.

‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘It’s much more than that.’

‘Eldar witchery,’ spat Fulgrim. ‘Nothing of note.’

The beads of light falling from Fulgrim’s eyes were radiant tears, and the droplets sweating from his hands bloomed into liquid sunspots as they struck the marble-smooth floor of the sepulchre. Even the mortal warriors could see the Phoenician’s light within these walls. The Emperor’s Children cried out in adoration. The Iron Warriors ignored it.

Perturabo kept his gaze fixed on the black walls before him, seeing something in the shifting pathways and capricious dimensions of this space that was familiar to him. He had seen workings like this before.

‘It’s a labyrinth,’ he said. ‘And I know labyrinths.’

From a position of concealment high on a domed tomb farther out in the precincts opposite the citadel, Nykona Sharrowkyn and Sabik Wayland watched the two primarchs lead their warriors within. Perhaps a thousand legionaries and as many mortals had followed them, a narrow column that snaked inside like a parasitic worm infesting a host.

‘Cybus isn’t going to like this,’ said Wayland.

‘His likes and dislikes are immaterial to me,’ said Sharrowkyn.

‘Easy for you to say,’ replied Wayland. ‘Eventually you’ll go back to your Legion.’

Sharrowkyn said nothing in reply, and pict-captured images of the dreadful fortification in the centre of the plaza, knowing that to assault it would cost thousands of lives. Built with incredible economy of time and effort, its towers were guns taken from the Rhinos and armoured vehicles that formed its walls, and wire-surrounded emplacements housed growling Land Raiders that acted as mobile strongpoints.

‘Is that a Shadowsword?’ said Wayland.

On a raised platform in the centre of the fortification was a super-heavy tank, but one up-armoured and bulked out to an incredible degree.

‘Perturabo’s command tank,’ answered Sharrowkyn.

‘Its weapon systems can cover every inch of the walls and its main gun will simply obliterate anything that comes within its line of fire.’

‘Then we stay out of its line of fire,’ said Sharrowkyn.

Two Reaver battle engines bearing the banners and colours of the Legio Mortis faced off against their glassy counterparts, guns trained on them with unwavering precision. Perturabo’s warriors were nothing if not thorough.

‘A direct assault on this position will be suicidal,’ declared Wayland.

‘That’s never been the way of the Nineteenth,’ said Sharrowkyn.

‘I’ve come to learn that,’ said Wayland. ‘Come on, Captain Tyro needs to know there’s no chance of getting in this way.’

Sharrowkyn nodded and moved away from the edge of the roof. This far away from the enemy there was no need to wraith-slip, but he did it anyway. Ever since they’d made planetfall, Sharrowkyn’s preternatural senses had felt hostile eyes upon him, unseen observers watching his every move like a snake preparing to strike. Even moving with all the skill he could muster, he knew they could see him.

With sure steps, dizzying powered leaps and precipitous drops, Sharrowkyn and Wayland made their way to the sheltered portion of the ground where the incursion force of Iron Hands waited. Sharrowkyn dropped into shadow, stepping into full view of Cadmus Tyro and Vermana Cybus. Ignatius Numen and Septus Thoic held the quivering form of Varuchi Vohra between them, and Brother Bombastus towered over them all, the monstrous flamer flickering with a hot jet of blue light.

‘Well?’ asked Cadmus Tyro. ‘Can we fight our way in?’

The captain’s face was unreadable behind the iron mask of his helm. His warplate was scored with hundreds of names, so many that there was as much revealed ceramite as there was black paint. He had been in the thick of the hardest fighting on Isstvan, and it was easy to forget he had suffered as much as the rest of them. The golden-winged form of Garuda perched on his shoulder guard, wings folded back and its red eyes reminding Sharrowkyn of Atesh Tarsa.

The eagle had a sleek look to it that Sharrowkyn liked – a hunter on the wing, like him.

‘Not a chance,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘The Iron Warriors already have a fortress built right in front of the entrance. Nothing short of a full Legion assault would be able to punch through to the entrance.’

‘Then we’ve come this way for nothing!’ snapped Cybus, slamming a fist into his palm. ‘I said this was a doomed enterprise from the beginning. We’ve wasted our time coming here!’

‘You don’t agree?’ said Tyro, reading Sharrowkyn’s body language.

‘Fighting the Iron Warriors head-on will see us all dead,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘On that, Cybus and I agree, but we don’t need to fight them head-on.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Tyro.

Sharrowkyn beckoned Numen and Thoic forwards, and they hauled the sickly-looking eldar guide to stand before him.

‘Because the front door isn’t the only way in, is it?’

Varuchi Vohra looked up and nodded, the flesh of his face stretched tight like grease-paper over his jutting bones, his skin veined with purple lines and textured with an oily veneer.

‘No,’ said the eldar. ‘There are other ways to enter.’

TWENTY-ONE

Fragments of a Greater Whole
Immaterial Mathematics
They Never Were The nightmare of his existence hadn’t ended; in fact, it had only worsened. Felix Cassander – though that name meant little to him now – stalked back and forth in what had once been a medicae quarantine bay aboard the Pride of the Emperor. His bones ached, each joint stiff with broken-glass pain and his one remaining lung filled with acid-burning fluids that he hacked up his throat with crippling regularity.

His supra-engineered frame was keeping him alive despite his fervent desire for death.

He and Navarra were two amongst perhaps a dozen of Fabius’s terata that had survived the assault on the Iron Hands vessel. Navarra lay in abject misery in the corner of the quarantine cell, his mutated body undulant with motion as his internal anatomy combined and split apart in genetic revolt and his limbs reshaped themselves in response to hyper-mutation of his base-pairs.

The terata were little better than beasts now, howling, mindless things of appetite and aggression, but Cassander and Navarra alone had held onto the remembrance of their former lives. Navarra’s mind hung by a thread, a teetering consciousness that kept true to the word of Dorn only thanks to Cassander’s incessant repetition of the Legion’s roll of honour, starting with the Victorix Roma and ending with Honoris Martius. His own fractured sense of self remembered who he was, where he had come from, but most of all it remembered what he had done.

He had killed Space Marines loyal to the Imperium. He was no better than the Emperor’s Children or the Iron Warriors. The pain of his minute-by-minute existence was nothing compared to that. It was his punishment, his penance for giving in to adversity. He was one of the Emperor’s own Fists, a warrior against whom no foe could triumph, for whom no obstacle could delay and no pain could master.

All of it a lie.

Cassander picked at his muscle-bloated arms, the flesh scabbed with pus-filled sores that refused to heal as fresh toxins made war against his gene-twisted immune system. He had picked all the flesh from his right hand, leaving it a rotten, meat-flaked ruin. Rich crimson blood coated the bones there, the digits held together by strings of sinew and scraps of regenerative muscle tissue. He’d scraped intricate patterns into the bone with the overgrown claws of his other hand, relishing the agony of his self-mutilation and knowing it wasn’t nearly enough to atone for what he had allowed to happen.

He could still see the face of the legionary whose throat he had ripped out, the hatred that burned in his eyes. It was a hatred well earned. Though he had torn the flesh from his hand, he knew it would never be free of the loyal blood it had spilled. He tried to keep his focus on the blood, hoping that preoccupation with pain would keep the horror of what he had done and what he had become at bay.

Cassander’s perceptions were becoming ever more erratic, a collage of nightmarish images that belonged in a madman’s skull. Torturous experiments, pain-filled lights in his eyes and the crack of breaking bones as his body was continually reshaped and regrown. The passage of time itself was out of sequence, fragments of memory making no sense from one instant to the next.

One moment he was clawing the skin and meat from his guilty hand, the next he was staring up at a bank of lumen-strips in a clinically austere chamber of white ceramic tiles and steel girders painted a bilious industrial green. Being strapped to the gurney meant pain, and pain was all he wanted now. Pain meant escape. Pain was penance.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13