The Ebonite Archymsts 29 страница

Forrix had blurted his demand for a final protective fire mission over the vox with breathless haste; a corridor of shelling to link the strongpoint at the sepulchre and the walls of the citadel. A clear zone was to be established between the two fortresses for when the time came to fall back to the landing zone. Toramino recalled that the vox-link had been distorted with static, laced with the unending keening of the wind, thus rendering the triarch’s words open to wilful misinterpretation.

A tragic error of communications, but one familiar to any warrior on the battlefield.

He scrolled through the topographical representation of the citadel, its blocky buildings picked out in white, the location of the Iron Warriors strongpoints marked in blue. The points of impact and areas of effect were red dots that expanded into circles of orange then yellow and finally to green.

Red and blue overlapped at the fortification occupied by Forrix and the Stonewrought. Toramino had nothing particular against Soltarn Vull Bronn, and his loss would rob the Legion of valuable insights, but that was a price Toramino was more than willing to pay. With such precise target information, the gunmasters of the Stor-bezashk needed no ranging shots or spotters. Toramino stood at the edge of the battlements, looking out over the smoking outline of the citadel. The shimmering green haze he’d seen on the horizon earlier had bypassed the landing zone, much to his relief, leaving the contravallations untouched. The billowing cloud of swirling shapes and half-glimpsed forms had swept on with unstoppable fury towards the fortifications around the citadel’s wall, where pillars of smoke and leaping columns of fire attested to the ferocity of the fighting within.

The final readiness icon flickered green on his data-slate and Toramino turned back to the multitude of gun barrels raised to the sky. These were his guns, his warriors. The Stor-bezashk answered to him and him alone. Soon they would be the honour guard of a triarch, and with that thought uppermost in his mind, he tapped the blinking red icon on his slate.

‘Fire for effect,’ he said.

TWENTY-THREE

Voices of the Dead
The Glory of the Fallen
The Harvester The light enfolded Perturabo and he felt the millions of spirits enmeshed in its dense wavelengths and spectra. At least Fulgrim hadn’t lied about one thing: a civilisation had ended here, though this was but a fraction of the lives that had been lost in that calamitous fall from grace. He neither knew nor cared what had happened to the eldar. Their doom was of an earlier age, its causes immaterial to him.

That they were declining to their eventual extinction was enough.

The dead of Iydris were still here and their spirits – though he disliked the supernatural connotations of that word – were woven into the substance of the light roaring up from whatever lay at the bottom of this shaft. The horror of their deaths was here too, and Perturabo felt their desperate hunger to imprint its tale upon him. He resisted, for he had other business to be about, but the farther he descended on the circling ramp, the harder they tried. His every step reverberated with echoes that lasted far longer and resonated far deeper than they had any right to, as though he no longer travelled on paths that could ever be mapped.

Though superficially obvious in its course, Perturabo understood that he was travelling a route not meant for humans, one where each downwards step bore no relation to distance in the world above. Glittering diamonds sparked in the walkway, skittering away from his footfalls like tiny crystalline arachnids. The wall next to him was utterly smooth, featureless save for the extrusion of the ground upon which he stood, though Perturabo saw hints of wraith-like forms swimming in its substance. They reached for him, but their essences were trapped within their crystal prison and could not escape.

All sounds of fighting from above had ceased, swallowed by the roar of the light and the susurration of billions of voices clamouring to be heard. Though he closed his thoughts to their touch, he couldn’t shut them out entirely. His mind was fashioned from the gene-structure of the Emperor, with perceptions and sensitivities beyond the comprehension of lesser minds.

The dead of Iydris could feel that and screamed at him with all their might.

Trapped in the heart of the Eye of Terror with only their fellow doomed souls around them, the chance to converse with a mind capable of listening was not to be missed. The dead of an entire world shouted their tales to him, a screaming wail of impenetrable sound. Yet in death, as in life, some voices were louder than others, and Perturabo perceived fragments of their lives.

They spoke of their loves, their dreams and their hopes. Of their loss, their aching loneliness, the fading hopes of their kin returning for them and the fear of that which pressed on the ever-shrinking borders of their doomed world.

But most of all they spoke of the unnatural desires that had driven them deeper and deeper into hedonistic indulgence, the wanton lusts and heedless descents into madness that had undone them. A lifetime of sorrow pressed in on Perturabo, but he fought against their maudlin laments.

‘You chose your path to destruction,’ he snarled. ‘Every one of you brought your deaths upon yourselves and I have no pity for you. You got what you deserved.’

Only as the voices of the dead kept pressing in upon him, telling him of the horror their lives had brought about and the route by which their doom had unfolded, did Perturabo come to understand they were not seeking his pity. They cared nothing for his understanding and his judgement was worthless to them.

The world of dead voices sought no boon from him.

They were warning him.

Beware She Who Thirsts…

Down, ever downwards.

An unending spiral towards a point of light that grew no brighter no matter how far he descended or how fast he strode. He began to doubt the wisdom of his course, but Perturabo had never given up on anything once he had begun, and this would be no different. He wondered how Fulgrim could have got so far ahead of him, but reasoned that time and distance held little meaning in this place.

He would find Fulgrim and he would kill him.

That fact alone sustained Perturabo as the voices of the dead became ever more insistent. He marched onwards, forcing himself into a kind of fugue state to keep his thoughts his own. His limbs moved mechanically; one foot in front of the other, ever downwards. Deeper and deeper.

The upper reaches of the plunging shaft were soon lost to sight in the haze of streaming light, but whatever lay at the bottom drew no closer. He thought back to the cliffs of Lochos, remembering a similar feeling as he climbed towards the unknown future at the top. But he had reached the top of that cliff, just as he would reach the bottom of this shaft.

He wondered if he would make that same climb again, knowing what he knew now, that only betrayal, bitterness and pain lay above him.

Might it not have been better to let go of the cliff and plunge to his death? Would it not have been easier to let his brains be dashed out on the rocks below? To be spared the cold, cheerless years to adulthood, without friends and kind words. Insulted by tutors whose teachings he mastered and surpassed in a matter of days, and mistrusted by a surrogate father who had cursed him the day he left his side to join his gene-sire in the stars.

Easier, yes, but easy had never been Perturabo’s way.

Long is the way, and hard, that leads out of hell and up to light.

The last remaining fragments of a proscribed book that had found its way into Perturabo’s personal library, but truer than even its lost writer could ever have known.

And from Olympia, what then?

A century and more of war, where his sons had broken their backs on countless worlds, bringing the strongholds of system tyrants and alien dominators to ruin. Campaign after campaign, battle after battle, each more gruelling than the last, each hope of a war of manoeuvre or a war of marching formations cruelly dashed by fresh tasking orders to resistant systems that knew the science of fortress-building better than most.

‘Perturabo throws men at walls,’ Dorn had once said of him. ‘If the Araakites so much as thought a wall he would pelt it with our legionaries as if there were no other way.’

The words had been said in jest, grim humour in the wake of a costly war of compliance in the Araaki Spiral, to imply shared adversity, but Perturabo hadn’t seen any of Rogal Dorn’s golden warriors up to their necks in mud and shit in the trenches. The Araakites had known their craft, and every stronghold was dug in deep around narrow passes, remote hilltops and natural barriers in the landscape. The system rock was bitter and hostile, the enemy warriors no less so, and it had taken many years for the IV Legion to regain its former strength.

Great works of art and heroic verse were composed in the wake of the victory, celebrating the courage of the Imperial Fists, the Dark Angels and the White Scars, but nowhere in the reams of poetry or artwork were the grim labours of the Iron Warriors judged worthy of note. Only in a predella to a larger work of Kelan Roget had warriors of the IV Legion even been shown, a lone Apothecary removing the gene-seed of a dying legionary as the flag of the Fists flew over a captured fortress.

The Glory of the Fallen it had been called, and Perturabo had sought out the artist so he could procure the piece for himself. Roget had been thrilled at his interest, but his pleasure had turned to dismay as Perturabo put it to the torch.

‘If my sons are not to be honoured properly then they will not be part of a record that glorifies another,’ Perturabo had told the horrified artist as the flames consumed the painting.

Perturabo heard afterwards that Dorn had offered a rich commission for the artist to repaint the predella, but Roget had declined. At least one mortal understood him. He hadn’t thought of that moment in decades, and knew that the voices of the dead were pushing his thoughts to days gone by, forcing him to relive his own path if he would not listen to theirs.

‘No man can buy back his past,’ he told the light. ‘So I’ll waste neither breath nor thought upon it.’

The journey downwards was never-ending, or so it seemed until it ended.

Perturabo had tuned out the dead, heeding their warnings while at the same time ignorant of their substance. Grim tales of their mistakes and follies did not interest him and only that curious phrase – Beware She Who Thirsts – had lodged in his mind like a buried splinter.

He had never heard of any such being, nor could he divine anyone who might fit such a description. Females had been few in number within his Legion’s expeditionary fleets, and virtually non-existent since he had purged the remembrancers from his ships. Any woman worthy of such a title would certainly have been known to him.

The levelling-out of the walkway caught Perturabo by surprise, his steps faltering as he realised he’d reached the bottom of the shaft. He looked up, the vague diaspora of his thoughts cohering into his singular purpose in taking this downward path. He unhooked Forgebreaker from his back, not surprised to find that the physical geometry of where he had arrived bore no relation to the route he had taken to reach it.

He stood at the origin of a slender bridge that arched out to the centre of a spherical chamber of incredible, sanity-defying proportions. The footings of the bridge were anchored on the equator, and a score of other bridges reached out to where a seething ball of numinous jade light blazed like a miniature sun. Its dimensions were impossible to guess, for the chamber itself was beyond anything he had dreamed possible.

Iydris, it transpired, was a hollow world, its core this colossal void with the impossibly bright sun at its heart. The shadows of the bridges danced on the inner face of the void, in which were set innumerable gemstones like those that guarded the surface. This was the source of the light, and of the voices that had plagued him on his descent with their tedious woes.

The curving walls were of a smoky, fire-veined stone, hued green by the fixed sun. The gems set within the inner faces of this spherical realm formed a firmament of stars, billions of glittering points of light that surrounded him above and below. Perturabo took a step out onto the bridge, looking down past its edges to the shimmering stones in the gloom, like bioluminescent creatures of the deep ocean slowly rising to the surface. His step faltered as a previously unknown sense of vertigo seized him.He took a moment to regain his equilibrium, slowing his breathing and letting his sense of spatial geometry recalibrate to the sheer vastness of the space in which he found himself. Perturabo walked out onto the bridge, no more than a metre in width and no thicker than an insubstantial treatise. Like the others around the chamber, it sloped on a gentle upward arc, the curve corresponding to the outer edges of the golden ratio.

Like the walkway that had brought him here, his steps covered distance with no regard for the physical laws of the universe, and the enormity of the green sun became apparent as he drew near the exact centre of Iydris. Perturabo kept his eyes fixed forwards, seeing a wavering silhouette against the incandescence ahead of him.

Fulgrim stood upon an elliptical platform at the terminus of the bridge, basking in the radiance of the sun’s energy. Perturabo made no attempt to soften his tread, knowing Fulgrim would already be aware of his approach.

‘This is what you came here for?’ said Perturabo. ‘This is the Angel Exterminatus?’

Fulgrim turned and his smile of welcome was so utterly genuine that Perturabo briefly entertained the notion that perhaps he was mistaken in thinking he had been betrayed.

‘No, this is nothing,’ grinned Fulgrim, shaking his head. ‘Alien necromancy, nothing more.’

‘So there never were any weapons?’

‘Not as your stunted intellect would understand it, no.’

‘And the Angel Exterminatus? It doesn’t exist either, does it?’

‘Not yet, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘But with your help, it soon will.’

Fulgrim laughed at his bemused expression, cruel even in victory. ‘Even after the bleating warnings of the eldar, you still don’t understand.’

‘Then illuminate me,’ said Perturabo, hefting his hammer onto his shoulder.

‘It’s me,’ said Fulgrim. ‘ I am to be the Angel Exterminatus.’

The strongpoint was an island of iron amid an ocean of ghostly green wraiths and their glass-limbed counterparts. For all that their bodies were insubstantial, some immutable essence of the life they once lived or some unknown quality of the Iron Warriors defences kept them from simply passing through the solid matter of the modular fortress.

Razorwire tore smoky matter from their bodies and physical trauma destroyed them as surely as a living foe. They could not penetrate the walls on their own, but the energy blasts of the wraith-constructs could put them asunder for the wraiths to breach. Their weightless forms could climb the riveted iron of the walls and storm the ramparts, and their hands could tear the heart from a warrior even through the protection of his warplate.

Forrix smashed his fist through the glass-domed helm of a tall construct as it clambered over the smoking, molten ruin of a destroyed Rhino making up part of the eastern wall. A blast of combi-bolter fire punched through the back of its head. He stepped back over the shattered remains of three of its brethren, letting Iron Warriors in power armour take his place.

Their guns shredded the gathering wraiths that pushed their way into the breach.

‘Stonewrought,’ he voxed, moving to stand in the shadow of Tormentor on its raised central plinth. ‘Eastern breach contained.’

The Shadowsword was confined to being a static weapons platform while the assault of the wraith army continued. The strongpoint would need to be dismantled before it could drive out, but with its many guns flaying the eldar attack, there was little need to expose it to the enemy’s close-range attention.

‘Some of those constructs coming for the gate,’ answered Vull Bronn. ‘Big ones.’

The Stonewrought fought from the upper hatch of the Tormentor, manning its cupola reaper cannon with steady traverses and directing the fire and deployment of the warriors on the ramparts.

‘Come on, Toramino,’ snarled Forrix. ‘Get those Stor-bezashk of yours breaking a sweat!’

Deafening blasts of warhorns and the slam of heavy glass limbs echoed from the walls of the citadel as the Mortis engines and the eldar Titans did battle somewhere nearby. Snatches of vox-echoes from nearby legionaries suggested to Forrix that only Mortis Vult was still in the fight, but he expected no aid from the Reaver unless it was somehow able to inflict engine kills on both eldar ghost machines.

On each of the strongpoint’s four walls, warriors in burnished iron, gold and jet fought the dead of Iydris with relentless, machine-like precision. Each warrior knew his role in the battle and with all of them working as one, their defence was unbreakable. Their bolters were firing down into the plaza in sequential volleys. As one warrior exhausted his magazine, he would step back from the firing line to reload as his brothers closed ranks.

For now, Forrix and a company-strength detachment were acting as a mobile reserve, plugging the gaps. Though he was all that remained of this detachment’s Terminator contingent, one warrior so clad was a force multiplier not to be taken lightly. So far he and his men had sealed five breaches and prevented twice as many line breaks.

Watching the indomitable fortitude of his Legion brothers on the ramparts, Forrix was reminded of the clockwork automatons the Lord of Iron built in the early days of the Crusade. He remembered a golden lion that was to be presented to the master of the Dark Angels, but which had never been finished, a bronze horse that had been designed for a great centrepiece at Nikaea and never used and a celestial timepiece that Guilliman had mounted on the tallest tower of his Temple of Correction on Macragge.

The Iron Warriors made war a thing of beauty, a science that was as magical as any lurid tales of bloody courage and heroism told by the likes of the Vlka Fenryka or the riders of Chogoris.

Neon bolts of energy flailed around the fortress, battering its structure and punching through previously weakened points. The vehicles’ damage-reduction mechanisms fought to repair the impacts, but the onboard components for achieving full functionality had long since been expended. The inner faces of the strongpoint were heaped with Legion dead, their bodies punched clean through by the plasma weapons of the enemy or torn open by ethereal claws.

Yes, the Iron Warriors were fighting like a well-oiled machine, but its component parts were being worn down. At current rates of attrition, the last round would be fired from a bolter within the next three minutes.

Forrix lumbered over to the gateway of Rhinos as a blast of blue-hot energy punched out of the crew compartment of one. Metal exploded outwards, molten droplets of adamantium and plasma residue dribbling to the ground. The two Rhinos boomed and rocked back under a terrific impact. Another blow and the stricken vehicles slammed back as though they had been struck by a siege Titan’s wrecking ball.

The skidding tank spun around as though on ice, heading straight for him.

Forrix braced his shoulder and leaned into the impact.

The Rhino slammed into him, its momentum almost unstoppable.

Almost.

Terminator armour turned a warrior into a man-portable tank, and matched with the cold iron of Forrix, the Rhino was going to come off worst. The vehicle buckled, stopping dead, and Forrix pushed it back the way it had come. Two of the eldar constructs, each twice as tall as a legionary, punched through the gateway, their limbs ablaze with emerald fire.

One staggered as the Rhino crashed into it. The weight of the vehicle broke its legs and it went down beneath the Rhino. Forrix charged the other, his gait ponderous but inexorable. The construct saw him coming and levelled its arm at him, a slender limb ending in a long-barrelled lance-like weapon.

Forrix could not hope to avoid the blast and steeled himself to fight through the impact.

Pulsing streams of energy slammed into him and Forrix yelled in pain as the plastron of his armour was shredded by the quickfire blasts. Fiery heat enveloped his chest, and but for the rigidity of his battle-plate, he would have fallen. The backwash of searing heat from the weapon melted away his vulcanised cowl and dragged the air from his lungs.

Forrix gasped for breath, knowing he could not survive another blast.

The tip of the construct’s weapon powered up to fire again, but before it could kill him, a streaking white contrail flashed overhead and struck it in the centre of its elongated head. The Tormentor ’s hunter-killer missile detonated with a thunderclap and the construct was burned to liquid in the blink of an eye, its death scream cut short.

Forrix turned his head and saw the Stonewrought with his shoulder bent to the auxiliary launch tube on the Tormentor ’s turret.

‘Fine shot, Stonewrought,’ said Forrix, pointing over Vull Bronn’s shoulder as a towering shadow engulfed the strongpoint. ‘But there’s a better target for you.’

Emerging from the rogue thermals and swirling vortices of smoke on the northern side of the strongpoint was the last eldar Titan. Its upper carapace bled light from the damage it had taken, and one spine-wing hung broken at its shoulder. It limped from a wound that gushed light in its leg, and was surely on the verge of dissolution. Both Mortis engines must have been put down, but they had clearly given a good account of themselves. The towering machine’s one remaining arm was a monstrously oversized variant of the weapon that had almost killed Forrix a moment before, and he knew that one shot would wipe them from the face of the planet.

The Stonewrought dropped into the Tormentor and the enormous turret immediately began to grind around on powerful servos. The barrel of the main gun elevated, a Phaeton-pattern volcano cannon. A Titan-killer.

Forrix didn’t move. He saw little point.

Whoever fired first would kill the other; the brutal arithmetic of war at its simplest.

Before either the Titan or the Shadowsword could fire, Forrix heard the unmistakable sound of incoming ordnance. He spun around and saw arcing lines of massed artillery fire streaking through the lower reaches of the atmosphere before nosing over and streaking towards the earth.

‘About bloody time, Toramino,’ he said.

‘You’re the Angel Exterminatus?’ said Perturabo, not knowing whether to laugh at his brother’s self-aggrandisement or stoke his rage with the arrogance of it. ‘You always did have an appetite for rampant narcissism, but this is the grandest delusion yet.’

Fulgrim spread his arms wide and let the seething tempest of the rising light billow his cloak out behind him. The light of the green sun haloed his head and limned his body in sickly radiance.

‘I don’t expect you to understand, brother,’ said Fulgrim, and it took Perturabo a moment to realise his brother was no longer standing on the ground, but slowly rising to float above it. ‘For the devotee of a long-dead man of feverishly inventive imagination and unquenchable curiosity, I imagine you would have made a poor pupil. You lack vision, brother dear, you always have. But what should we expect from a grubber in the dirt? Your nose always pressed to the mud, what chance did you have of grasping the rapturous horizons within our reach?’

Perturabo moved towards Fulgrim, but he had taken only a step when his brother spoke a single word. Its nightmare syllables tore at Perturabo’s brain like a barbed awl driven through his ear and into the heart of his skull. He stumbled, dropping to one knee as his nervous system shrieked in pain.

He pushed himself back to his feet, gritting his teeth against the grinding of his bones and the creak of every sinew as it threatened to snap.

‘Impressive, brother,’ said Fulgrim in surprise. ‘There are few who can resist the true name of the Profligate One.’

Fulgrim’s words made no sense, but Perturabo didn’t need to understand his brother to kill him. He kept on through the pain, each step a battle he wasn’t sure he could win. The weariness that had kept him aching and sporadically weak returned to stab him with draining force. Forgebreaker now felt like a dead weight on his shoulder and he had to fight for every breath, his lungs being crushed within his chest.

‘You are mighty, Perturabo, the mightiest of us all, perhaps,’ said Fulgrim with real admiration in his voice. ‘I suspect that is why it took the maugetar stone so long to drain enough of your strength.’

‘The… harvester?’ said Perturabo, his grasp of the eldar tongue fading and sluggish.

‘My gift to you,’ said Fulgrim, pointing a slender finger to Perturabo’s chest, where the golden gemstone at the centre of the skull-carved cloak pin now pulsed with its own internal heartbeat. ‘Your faculty with labyrinths was not the only reason it had to be you.’

‘Why what had to be me?’ hissed Perturabo, knowing his brother’s need to inflate his own ego would buy him some time.

‘A sacrifice is only a sacrifice if what is offered is valued greatly,’ said Fulgrim. ‘And your strength is valued very greatly. By me and the Warmaster. Horus will be angry, of course, but when he sees what I have become, he will realise the value of your death.’

‘You intend to kill me?’

Fulgrim gave him a faux-regretful grin. ‘That is rather the point of a sacrifice.’

‘Why? What do you think to gain by it?’

‘Ah,’ said Fulgrim, lifting his arms until they were outstretched to the glittering starscape of embedded gemstones. ‘Do you remember how I told you that many secrets had been revealed to me?’

Perturabo nodded, fighting to overcome the crushing lethargy wrapping his limbs in leaden weights. Fulgrim’s grin threatened to split his face, maniacal and hungry.

‘I told you I would share those secrets with you one day and that they would bring us closer than ever. Today is that day,’ said the Phoenician, and Perturabo sank to his knees as jolting pain surged through his body. It felt as though his heart had been pierced by a surgeon’s lance that was slowly draining him of his vital essence.

‘I am not the same person you knew, brother,’ said Fulgrim drifting towards him through the air. ‘Even before Isstvan I was changing, though I did not know it. It began on Laeran, but I suppose that’s not important to you. The race that called that oceanic rock home worshipped beings I mistook for invented species memory from their earliest prehistory, but I was wrong, brother. Their gods were real. Very real.’

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13