The Ebonite Archymsts 30 страница

‘Gods?’

Fulgrim waved away the pejorative associations. ‘Entities so powerful they might as well be called gods. They are to mankind as we are to microbes: towering and immortal, magnificent and all-powerful.’

‘A microbe can still kill in great enough numbers,’ pointed out Perturabo, but Fulgrim ignored him.

‘Such entities dwell in the roiling depths of the warp and in return for power beyond imagining all they demand is devotion. One such being craved my body and, for a time, claimed it as its own to wreak great harm in my name.’

Fulgrim’s features twisted in distaste, as though an argument raged in his flesh all the way down to the cellular level.

‘As this creature learned of me, I too learned of it and discovered how to fight it. We struggled for mastery of my flesh, and eventually reached a form of… compromise. ’

Perturabo heard the scorn in that last word, knowing any kind of half-measures were anathema to the Phoenician.

‘I regained control of my body, but the touch of a creature of Chaos is a wound that never heals, stigmata that forever bleed. Without its presence I could never reach the exultant highs of perfection. No matter what I did, a piece of me was always left… wanting. I was a vessel that could never be filled, an itch never scratched, a hunger never satisfied. So I resolved to become like it. And here we are.’

‘And where is that?’

‘Here,’ said Fulgrim, clenching his fists and drawing his arms back towards his chest.

Perturabo heard a million cracks of what sounded like splitting bone, and the shimmering lights above him shifted. It seemed as though the far distant walls of the chamber were moving, and moments later he saw why.

At first it was like an approaching fog, like the dimly perceived movement of the galaxy’s outer spirals, but then Perturabo saw that it was something infinitely worse. Every single gemstone that had been set within the walls was hurtling towards the green sun blazing at Fulgrim’s back.

The glittering stones sped towards them like bullets, but the instant before impact, Fulgrim extended his palms and they ceased their forward movement, forming a sphere of shimmering gems around the sun. Only the upper reaches of the sphere remained open, through which Perturabo could see only darkness.

Was it just his fading sight or was the light of the sun diminishing? Like a star that had exhausted its inner reserves of fuel, the green star was collapsing into its doom. Its surface raged as it fought for existence, but it was a fight Perturabo could see it was destined to lose.

He slid Forgebreaker from his shoulder and with its head resting on the ground, pushed himself upright once more.

‘On your knees or on your feet, it makes no difference to what is going to happen,’ said Fulgrim.

‘It matters to me,’ said Perturabo, though the effort of speaking was almost too much for him. ‘If I am going to die, then I’ll do so standing up.’

‘I will miss you, brother,’ said Fulgrim, reaching down to pluck the golden stone from the silver skull at Perturabo’s breast. He set it within a cavity worked into the eagle upon his own breastplate, and sighed, like a slave to narcotics experiencing the bliss of the needle.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Fulgrim as the first faint threads of black streaked the stone. ‘Yes, it could be no other than you.’

Fulgrim stepped close to embrace him, a dreamy smile on his lips.

Perturabo felt sick at Fulgrim’s touch, but he barely had the strength to draw breath, let alone push him away. Fulgrim kissed both his cheeks and looked up with a rapturous expression on his face.

A glittering rain of broken glass was falling into the sphere, shards of crystal torn from the bedrock of another world and dropped into the upper reaches of the plunging shaft. This was what Fulgrim’s mortal followers had carried into the sepulchre on their backs.

‘And he shall build a glorious city of mirrors,’ said Fulgrim, radiant tears spilling from his eyes. ‘It shall be a city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.’

Perturabo could not speak as Fulgrim pulled him tight to his breast once again.

‘Come, brother,’ said the Phoenician. ‘Let us ascend!’

And, so saying, Fulgrim and Perturabo flew back to the surface like entwined shooting stars, with millions of screaming gemstones trailing behind them in a glittering comet’s tail.

TWENTY-FOUR

Iron on Iron
Legacy of Blood
A Hard Fight The Tormentor fired first, but in the end it didn’t matter, the strongpoint was destroyed anyway. The volcano cannon’s ignition recoil hurled the tank back on its raised platform, breaking the restraint couplings holding it in place with whipping cracks of high-tensile steel. Flailing cables snapped out, slicing through Iron Warriors by the dozen, their warplate no protection against such force.

Designed as a Titan-killer, the Shadowsword’s main gun was the deadliest weapon capable of being mounted on a tank. Its powerful laser could smash through the thickest armour, batter down layered void shields and deliver kinetic impact and explosive force greater than any other weapon in the Imperial arsenal, save those of the Titans themselves or the mighty Martian Ordinatus.

At close range, with its holo-fields useless and its hardened carapace bleeding cracks of light from the brawl with the Mortis engines, the eldar Titan had no chance.

Its upper torso simply vanished in a blaze of streaming light and shattering crystal. Absolutely nothing was left of the soaring war machine above its rotating hip-gimbals. It rocked back on the ruins of its legs, which swiftly became opaque as it haemorrhaged light like the final artillery salute at the Triumph of Ullanor. Cracks spread through the glassy substance of its remains, which collapsed down into itself like a sculpture made of ash.

Forrix let out a shuddering breath, but his elation was short-lived as he heard the steelwork and reinforced supporting elements of the Tormentor ’s platform buckle under the hideous stresses the volcano cannon’s recoil had inflicted. The structure had never been designed with any thought to the super-heavy’s main gun being fired, and now that short-sightedness was about to prove costly.

With a creaking groan of disintegrating supports, the back portion of the platform began to keel over, falling with exponential swiftness as each member failed in a cascade of collapse. The super-heavy tilted, its powerful engine revving and the tracks grinding to gain purchase as the driver fought to slow their descent.

The Tormentor slammed down, the tracks hitting the ground already in motion. The toothed edges ripped up the rock, hurling chunks of broken stone throughout the compound, but instead of burying itself in the ground, the motion of the tracks pulled it along, and the front end of the massive tank slammed down intact.

The prow of the tank slewed around, and Forrix saw what happened next in slow motion. Hitting at an oblique angle, the Shadowsword roared around in a tight arc, the armoured flanks rushing towards him like an oncoming wall. Though he knew he couldn’t possibly outrun it, Forrix turned to get out of the wild spin of the madly revving track units.

The collision was like being kicked by a Titan, and Forrix felt the plates of his armour crumple, his onboard systems smashed beyond useless. Forrix rolled, sky and earth trading place many times before he finally skidded to a halt at the end of a trench his fall had gouged.

He struggled to catch his breath. He couldn’t move. The enmeshed nervous system controlling the fibre-bundle musculature of his armour was shattered. Only his own strength would move the heavy plates of armour now.

Forrix looked up as he heard the unmistakable whine of artillery shells. Toramino’s barrage was inbound, but a lifetime spent in the trenches watching streaks of explosive ordnance passing overhead had given Forrix a sixth sense as to the trajectory of any fire mission.

‘Blood of Olympia!’ he swore, pushing himself onto his side with a desperate heave.

The first shells landed seconds later, slamming down with percussive booms of earth-shaking force. Forrix was knocked flat as the north-east corner of the strongpoint vanished in a crescendo of noise and fire. Bodies tumbled from the wreckage, Iron Warriors bodies, missing limbs, missing heads, fused into armour burned black or simply atomised.

Whickering shrapnel spanked Forrix’s armour and he spun away, keeping his head low and letting the buckled backplate take the worst of the blast. The shockwave almost knocked him to the ground, but he kept low and braced himself with his fists. The noise and air pressure was incredible, and Forrix’s eardrums ruptured instantly as the breath was sucked from his lungs by differential waves.

Yet more shells landed, this time obliterating the gateway and leaving a fifteen-metre crater between two broken stubs of wall section.

More corpses. Blood misted the air, body parts fell in a rain of blackened flesh. Broken plates of armour bounced and ricocheted like razored axe blades. The western walls vanished in a sheeting wall of flame, followed by the southern ramparts. Falling debris hammered down around him: a bouncing helmet with the ragged stump of a neck protruding, a mangled bolter and a chainsword with a blade of yellow and black chevroning.

His warriors were dying. Murdered.

Intersecting shockwaves pounded through Forrix’s body, shaking him like a rag doll and churning his genhanced anatomy. Only the ablating plates of his ruined armour saved his internal organs from liquefying entirely.

‘Cease fire!’ shouted Forrix. His voice sounded very far away.

He had no idea if his vox was even functional.

‘Iron on iron! Cease fire! Iron on iron!’

But the shelling continued unabated.

More and more rounds were falling, a radial bombardment pattern Forrix knew was centred on the strongpoint. A huge shape loomed from the mist before him, a roaring iron monster of thunder and noise. The vox sparked at his gorget, but he couldn’t hear anything beyond the muffled ringing and deadened whine of the blast-deafened.

The monster was coming to kill him.

It was the great beast of iron he had always known would one day kill him, ever since the oracle of Lochos had told him so as a boy. A childish fear, put away as a man, now rekindled in the face of its truth. Its great black maw opened and swallowed him whole, taking him down into a red-lit belly that stank of oil and machinery.

The shelling pounded the plaza to destruction. It struck the ground before the sepulchre over and over again with unrelenting impacts, utterly obliterating everything living, dead or somewhere in-between. Smoke and lung-blisteringly hot air tore through the shattered remains of the strongpoint until nothing was left standing.

No stone upon another, no iron bound to iron, no heart still beating.

Glowing shards of glass showered Kroeger as he swung his chainblade low through the legs of an eldar construct. The creature toppled onto its side, streaming light from its shorn legs and breaking into thousands of pieces as it fell. Kroeger stamped down on the gemstone that fell from its skull-helm, relishing the sense of finality in its destruction. He fought with rapid, controlled movements, his sword always in motion, his pistol stabbing out with every shot as though to give each round more force as it killed.

The fighting was all up close and personal, the eldar ghost warriors pushing them ever closer to the edge of the plunging shaft at the centre. Kroeger could feel the pounding pressure of the light geysering from far below, but kept his attention fully on the relentless horde of crystalline foes.

Though he had seen Perturabo issue no command, the Iron Circle had split themselves into two forces, one assigned to each of the two triarchs. Barban Falk fought to Kroeger’s right, with three battle robots protecting his flanks and rear, and Kroeger likewise had three of the Colossus alongside him. The automatons were not fast, nor were they especially skilled, but their shields pounded the eldar machines to broken shards with every blow and the chugging, booming thud of their shoulder cannons was enough to keep all but the luckiest enemies at bay.

Behind him, on the far side of the shaft, the Emperor’s Children waged their own war, fighting as though they expected reinforcements at any minute.

Kroeger’s inattention almost cost him dearly. A searing beam of emerald light struck him on the shoulder, spinning him around and causing him to lose his balance. An enemy warrior took advantage of his momentary distraction and fell upon him with a clubbing fist. The blow slammed into the side of his helm, fogging his visor with red warnings and crazing his vision with crackling traceries. He emptied his pistol into its chest as another creature battered him into the air with a sweeping, underhand blow. Kroeger slammed down at the edge of the shaft, losing his pistol as it skittered over the edge. The torrent of light pulled at him, like the hands of drowned ghosts trying to drag him into their watery grave.

Kroeger fought them, rolling clear as a heavy, crystalline foot slammed down where his head had been. He stabbed up with his sword, the blade shearing along its inner leg to its groin. Revving teeth bit home, spraying Kroeger with glass chips, and he wrenched his sword back, knowing he wouldn’t get another strike before it hurled him into the light.

Enraged at the thought of dying at the hands of an artificial being, Kroeger loosed a primal, animal howl and sprang forwards, tackling the creature and grappling its torn-up limbs. One leg split, a crack gushing with howling light, but the other held firm. Before he could strike again, a blow from an energy-wreathed sword broke the creature in half at the waist. Kroeger pushed himself to his feet, a red veil of anger blinding him to everything except the need to kill.

He swept up his own sword and brought the screaming blade down upon the nearest skull, a steeldust grey helm with a chevroned visor. It split apart and a jet of blood shot out, half a ruined head shorn away in a wash of crimson and grey matter.

Harkor didn’t fall immediately, but stood frozen in the act of killing the eldar construct, his sword arm extended before him, his half-face almost comical in its expression of shock.

Kroeger didn’t care that he had killed his lieutenant. That he had killed was enough.

Another of his robots went down with a crash of inert machinery, its shield a molten mass of blistered metal, its chest a crater of burned plasteel, fused bio-organic polymers and boiled dribbles of coolant.

Twin blasts of alien energy punched into Kroeger’s chest, but he didn’t feel the pain of his seared flesh, the heat-detonation of two ribs nor the flash-burn of his inner anatomy. He swung his sword again, bisecting an eldar construct and carrying the blow onwards into the faceplate of another. Their inset gemstones cracked and died and Kroeger roared with savage joy to see them brought low. Taking hold of his sword in a two-handed grip, Kroeger waded into the eldar, hewing left and right. He saw Falk and Berossus, but paid their fights no mind; all that mattered was that his blade be red with blood, dripping in chunks of flesh and sated with the skulls of the vanquished. Kroeger’s heart surged with the rightness of this slaughter, the singing joy that filled him with every sword blow.

His body was wounded nigh unto death, but hideous strength filled him and the red haze before him was a glorious curtain to his killing. His vision blurred and for a moment it seemed as though he were suddenly elsewhere – a broken plain of black ash, the sky a brazen bronze overseen by black thunderheads.

No longer was he fighting soulless machines, but men clad in rough furs with heavy brows and matted hair woven with bone fetishes. They swung crude, flint-bladed axes, and Kroeger laughed as he gutted them one after the other. Dozens, then scores came at him, then hundreds more, each screaming guttural barks of some proto-language that meant nothing to him. He slew without thought, knowing there could never be enough to satisfy his need to kill. He felt as though he had been fighting for hours, but his sword arm was still fresh, his body filled with reserves of power he knew would sustain him for an eternity of slaughter among the stars.

Without noticing it, Kroeger realised he was no longer killing fur-clad savages, but men clad in uniforms, puffed silk and iron breastplates. They wore cockaded helms and fought with long spears and wooden-handled firearms. Nor was he clad in burnished warplate of iron, gold and jet; but in animal skins, feathers and warpaint. The ashen plain was replaced by a lush jungle of tall trees and rich vegetation, though many of the trees around him had been felled by men with long-handled axes and logging saws.

Epunamun – for as well as his IV Legion attire, he had shed his name – swung his macuahuitl at a conquistador raising a long wooden musket to his shoulder. The shark teeth embedded along the length of Epunamun’s hungry wood struck the man just beneath the steel of his helm and tore through the meat and bone of his neck. The man’s head parted company from his shoulders and the spraying blood bathed Epunamun with hot wetness.

He blinked away the sticky blood and was not surprised to find himself somewhere else, this time in a mud-filled trench. Splintered duckboards lined the width of the trench and sheets of corrugated metal shored up its sides. Smoke and screams filled the air, and Karl blinked away spatters of mud from his eyes as he heard the approaching roar of voices from somewhere beyond the lip of the trench. He didn’t understand them and felt a growing hunger as he looked left and right at the men emerging from concrete bunkers worked into the trench walls. These were his countrymen, but he felt nothing for them but a vague contempt.

Men were scrambling onto the raised firing step, lifting heavy machine guns into position or working the bolts of their rifles. A man ran towards Karl, dressed in the mud-covered uniform of an Oberst and a ridiculous helmet topped with a bent metal spike.

‘Move! The enemy are here!’ shouted the Oberst, but before he could say any more, the blast of a grenade detonation spun him high into the air, leaving most of his legs behind. More blood sprayed Karl and he fell to his knees as the sound of gunfire exploded from the lip of the trench. He ran towards the screaming Oberst, who lay against the muddy wall, his body a mass of gouged shrapnel wounds and burned meat.

The smell was intoxicating, just like the meat he had cut from the curious gypsy he’d enticed back to his house at the edge of the village all those years ago. The man had fought, of course, but that had only given the flesh an astringent flavour that made the sense of power he’d felt at every white-meat mouthful grow stronger.

‘Karl,’ gasped the Oberst. ‘Oh God, it hurts… Please God, help me.’

Karl just looked at him, making no move.

The life went out of his eyes, and Karl lifted a handful of scorched flesh from the Oberst’s mutilated legs to his mouth. He bit down, letting the warm blood and fatty meat slide down his throat. He closed his eyes, savouring the forbidden flavours as the sounds of battle raged around him. Men were driven back from the lip of the trench by the charge of the enemy, but the screams of the dying meant nothing to him.

Verdun was lost, but Karl knew it was irrelevant who won or lost.

That all blood – his or his enemies’ – was welcome.

He ate more of the dead Oberst, feeling the strength of the dead man’s flesh fill him.

The screaming around him grew in volume and he heard a cry of revulsion behind him. He spun around, reaching for his rifle, ready to kill anyone who learned of his secret hunger – he had done it before, and would likely do it again before long. Too late, he saw the enemy infantryman thrusting with his bayonet, and Karl’s belly exploded with pain as the blade thrust home in his vitals. The soldier kicked him from the blade and raised it to strike again. Karl saw the man limned in the light of fires and explosions. His face was so very, very old and his eyes had seen more bloodshed than any other man on this planet.

The man’s dog tags swung out from beneath his torn shirt, and Karl saw a name etched into the pressed steel. At least he would die knowing his killer.

Pearsonne, Olivier.

But before the soldier could deliver the deathblow, a wave of grey-uniformed soldiers crashed into the fighting from the reserve trenches and drove him away in a storm of gunfire.

Once again the trench was theirs, and Karl let out a shuddering breath as a soldier with a badge of the medical services pinned to his lapel approached him.

He knew this man. He was from the same town as Karl.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Florian, ripping open a field dressing and applying it to the wound in his gut. ‘You’ll live.’

Karl nodded as blood from a cut he couldn’t remember suffering ran down his forehead and into his eyes. He blinked it away and–

Kroeger opened his eyes, the full weight of a million lives of bloodshed filling him like a vessel he hadn’t known was empty. His body was alive with power, his every vein surging with energy and every nerve alive with the prospect of harvesting the skulls of the fallen.

The eldar constructs surrounded him, hundreds deep, and he was utterly alone.

Harkor lay beside him, his skull smashed and his body laid open by a frenzy of sword cuts. Falk and Berossus were far from sight, and the eldar ghost machines closed in on him with relentless purpose.

This was death, but Kroeger welcomed the chance to die in battle. A fragment of the last life he remembered returned to him, words said in a million different tongues throughout the ages of the world, but unchanged in meaning since the first rock split the skull of the first innocent.

‘I care not from whence the blood flows,’ roared Kroeger as he charged the ghost warriors with his sword raised high. ‘Only that it flows!’

Light surrounded Perturabo and enfolded him. He was helpless in the grip of his brother, a passenger on this blazing ascent to the surface. Closer than twin souls, they flew through the heart of a world that was not a world and everywhere he looked, Perturabo could see nothing but his brother’s reflection.

Polished shards of glass and crystal fell into the shaft from above, the plundered remains of a world that had once been known as Prismatica. How Perturabo knew this he could not say, but he knew it with the certainty of his own name. He and Fulgrim were like bullets from a gun, and their ascent through the void was dizzyingly swift.

And as they blasted upwards to the surface, bodies were falling past them.

Fulgrim’s mortal followers, their lives given willingly in service to their liege lord.

Most were dead already, but those who still lived were shrieking with mindless ecstasy as their lives were spent carelessly by Fulgrim’s lusts.

His brother laughed and screamed as he basked in the glory of his reflections, each one different from the last, and each more monstrous in its depiction of the Phoenician. In one, Fulgrim was a beauteous creature of pearlescent wings, white-feathered and hung with pearls and silver chains like Sanguinius. In another he was ram-headed, ruddy-skinned and dripping in blood. Yet another showed him a formless spawn of primordial ooze, a rejected mass of mutated flesh, fallen too far to ever live.

A thousand times a thousand imagoes were thrown back at Perturabo, and at first he thought he had stumbled in his thoughts. Images.

No, his mind affirmed. Imagoes.

Fulgrim threw his head back and yelled, ‘I can feel the power. The Dark Prince favours me with attention!’

Perturabo wanted to answer him, to curse him for his treachery, but he had no strength to give it voice. The maugetar stone now set in Fulgrim’s breastplate pulsed with sated hunger, a monstrous, hideous thing of soul-sucking horror that had stolen Perturabo’s life. Looking at it now, it seemed to be an ugly thing, a bauble crafted in a shadow-haunted city of treachery and betrayal, imbued with its power by those who spent their days crafting ways for the living to suffer.

‘Can you feel it, brother?’ asked Fulgrim, cupping his face like a lover. ‘Can you feel the fates aligning? The eyes of the gods are upon us!’

Perturabo could feel something, a sensation like the world breaking apart, like the colliding of realities or the end of all things. Was this what the end of the universe would feel like, the destruction of time itself? When gods took notice of the affairs of men, it brought about cataclysms of unimaginable fury, and this would be no exception.

‘I will always carry you within me, brother,’ said Fulgrim, reaching down to tenderly stroke the black-veined maugetar stone with fingertips that looked altogether too slender, too claw-like. ‘What you give to me this day, I will never forget.’

‘I do not give it to you,’ said Perturabo, the power of his bitter rage giving him strength.

Fulgrim’s eyes turned cold at his response, angered that this moment should be sullied by anyone’s voice but his own.

‘Freely given or ripped from your beating heart, the result will be the same.’

Perturabo didn’t answer, saving what little energy he had clawed back from the stone at his breast. He closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of his brother’s reflections in the tumbling glass, and concentrating on undoing what the alien stone had done to him. It fought him – of course it did, jealously holding onto that which it had stolen – but Perturabo was the master of breaking into places that sought to keep him out.

Some thought that to be a purely literal interpretation of his abilities, but that was ever the way with Perturabo. People were always underestimating his capabilities beyond what they ascribed to him.

Perturabo reached deep inside, to that inner core of his being where iron and flesh became one, the inviolable heart of himself that was his and his alone. He focused all his attention on it, gathering what strength he had left and filling it with his dreams of youth, his ambition and his hatred of what Fulgrim was inflicting upon him.

The heart of his hatred grew, fed by the trauma of what was happening to him.

And then, what even the alchemists of old had known: like attracts like.

A trickle at first, but then with ever greater force, the stolen strength in the maugetar stone began to flow back into Perturabo as through a dam with the thinnest crack in its heart.

Such a reversal could not escape the notice of the Phoenician, and Fulgrim turned his black eyes upon him with a mixture of shock and incredulous fury.

‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

‘Taking back what is mine,’ snarled Perturabo.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13