The Ebonite Archymsts 31 страница

Fulgrim shook his head and a gleam of golden fire appeared in his hand, the sword Ferrus Manus had crafted for him so long ago.

‘It’s mine!’ screamed Fulgrim, and rammed the blade into Perturabo’s stomach, tearing it up through his sternum and into his chest. The pain was incredible, the craft of the Gorgon ensuring the blade parted Perturabo’s armour like a plasma cutter through sheet iron. Rich blood flowed from the wound, bathing the Phoenician’s right hand in dripping crimson.

Perturabo threw back his head and loosed a bellow of rage and pain that echoed from the distant walls like continents colliding. He saw a shimmer of light above, a ring of flickering gunfire that could only mean they were near the surface. The black void above raged like the waves of a storm-wracked ocean.

Perturabo felt himself cast away like something unclean. His strength and blood were finite things, but with what he had clawed back, his hand reached out for the one thing he knew Fulgrim valued above all others.

He closed his fist and the world fell away.

Falk watched Kroeger charge into the mass of eldar constructs with disbelief, but he had no time to wonder what madness had possessed the headstrong triarch. The eldar creatures took advantage of the break in the Iron Warriors defensive line, and drove a wedge of their troops into the gap. Falk stitched fire over the chest of an alien, keeping his arm steady as the creatures’ bodies broke apart under his relentless barrages.

The Emperor’s Children were keeping to their own fight, holding their position as if expecting something to happen at any moment. They were taking no part in the fighting beyond that which was required to hold their position. An untenable strategy, so what did they know that Falk did not?

He put the III Legion from his mind as a glancing bolt of fire grazed his plastron. His Cataphractii armour was proof against all but the closest-range shots and none had thus far penetrated enough to cause him great harm. His power fist smashed through a flanking enemy, the return stroke batting another through the air like a toy. With every step he took, he fired his implanted weaponry and crushed the animation from his enemies.

Beside him, two of the Iron Circle took the brunt of the eldar fire with their shields. Both robots were dying, their ablative plates stripped away and their shields little more than ruined stubs of metal. Within moments they would be nothing but scrap.

Falk kept moving, never stopping to allow the eldar a clear run at him. A ghost warrior fell in front of him and he stamped down on its crystalline skull. It burst apart, and Falk was about to move on when he saw the hideous skull-face in the patterning of shards his boot had created. It leered up at him and Falk stood frozen in place for the briefest moment.

Brief as it was, it was all the eldar needed to bring their weapons to bear on him.

A combined blast of emerald fire slammed into his lower back and Falk staggered as the heat burned him through his battle-plate. A rippling blade of light stabbed up into his armpit, where the armour was thinnest. He roared in pain and hammered his fist down on his attacker’s helmet. A fountain of light erupted from the bulbous helm, and in the shimmer patterns of radiance, the skull grinned out at him again.

‘Get away from me!’ he yelled as the light died.

You are so close…

Falk heard the voice in every shred of his flesh, the voice that was not a voice resonating in his body from the smallest cell to the grandest element of his synaptic architecture. Once again, his enemies took advantage of his momentary distraction to concentrate their fire upon him.

‘Stay out of my head!’ cried Falk, wading through a knot of enemy warriors and striding back to where Berossus bludgeoned the eldar from his side with sweeping blows from his enormous hammer. The ranks of the Iron Warriors had thinned considerably – barely a hundred legionaries still fought within the sepulchre.

Thousands more remained outside, and Falk wondered if they were under so sustained an attack as well. The vox was dead, and none of his attempts to reach Forrix, Toramino or the Stonewrought had come to anything. Were these the last Iron Warriors left on Iydris? Had the Phoenician’s mad designs broken the IV Legion upon the anvil of his obsession?

Falk felt the resolve of the Iron Warriors strengthen at his presence.

He was the iron in the foundation, the bolt on the girder.

His presence would keep the rust from their hearts.

Berossus fought like one of the titans of Olympian legend, the creatures said to have sired the gods before falling to fratricide. His energised hammer broke the eldar apart with ease and though his rotor cannon had long-since fired itself empty, it served just as well as a heavy club. Falk took care with his approach; it wasn’t unknown for Dreadnoughts in combat to lose track of friend and foe.

A warrior with a bland, forgettable face and whose black hair was worn in plaited braids across the centre of his scalp fought at the warsmith’s side like his protector. Falk gave him an appraising glance before dismissing him as irrelevant. Berossus swung around to face him and Falk heard recognition in his voice.

‘A hard fight,’ said the Dreadnought.

‘It has had its moments,’ agreed Falk, firing off the last of his bolter rounds. ‘War as a Dreadnought suits you.’

‘Did you see that idiot Kroeger?’ said the Dreadnought.

‘I did,’ confirmed Falk, blasting a ghost warrior with a burst of fire.

‘Looks like there might be an opening in the Trident soon,’ said Berossus. ‘I might become a triarch after all.’

‘If we live through this, I’ll demand Perturabo elevate you,’ said Falk.

Before the Dreadnought could answer, a blast of energy erupted from the shaft behind him. Falk staggered, the force of the blast throwing him into the mass of eldar constructs. Even Berossus was knocked down by its power, and Falk struggled to regain his feet before the eldar creatures were able to close in for the kill.

Berossus struggled in vain to right himself, his weapon arms thrashing and his legs hammering the ground as he rocked back and forth. His carapace was split down the sides and his augmitters blared with angry frustration.

‘Damned eldar!’ bellowed the downed Dreadnought.

Falk finally managed to push himself onto his front and drag his legs into a position where he could brace himself enough to climb to his feet. With every passing second he expected a blast of emerald light to end his life, for the ghost warriors to finish what this new devilry had unleashed.

He raised his combi-bolter, though its magazine was now dry.

‘Get me up!’ roared Berossus. ‘I won’t die on my back!’

Falk looked around in wonder and shook his head.

‘I don’t think we’re dying today,’ he said.

All around the tiny island of Iron Warriors, the eldar ghost warriors had ceased their attack. They stood as silent and unmoving as statues, devoid of animation and the shimmering light that filled their skull-helms dimming like a battery-lumen running down. The tower of light that had blazed from the shaft at the chamber’s heart had vanished, snuffed out as though some great sluice had been sealed in the planet’s core. The blackness above them seethed and churned, as though its perturbations had somehow been kept in check by the river of light piercing its heart.

A dozen Iron Warriors manhandled the fallen Berossus back onto his feet, and the Dreadnought rotated his body through three hundred and sixty degrees.

‘What just happened?’ he asked, his voice patchy with damage.

‘I don’t know,’ said Falk, turning towards the shaft as he heard a rapidly building roar rising from its depths. The Iron Warriors turned their guns on the shaft as a geyser of the eldar gemstones erupted from it. Millions upon millions of the stones exploded into the air, filling the void above their heads with sparkling points of light.

But instead of falling to earth in a glittering rain, they filled the chamber like an impossibly complex map of the heavens, with every star, planet and point of light represented.

‘What–’ said Falk, but before he could finish, two figures shot from the mouth of the shaft like something vomited from the maw of a great beast; Fulgrim blazing and wreathed in heavenly fire, Perturabo held tight to his breast.

The primarch of the Emperor’s Children hurled his brother aside, and Perturabo fell in a languid arc to land with a crunch of metal and crystal at the edge of the shaft. Blood trailed the air in a streaming red arc from Perturabo’s chest.

Falk felt a sense of terror and unreasoning horror fill him.

The Lord of Iron lay unmoving, his body broken and lifeless.

TWENTY-FIVE

He That Was Dead
Dreams of Iron
The Eagle of the Tenth Lucius sprang to his feet, the first of the Emperor’s Children to right himself in the wake of the shockwave from the shaft. His every sense tingled in anticipation, the promise of a new sensation that was beyond anything he had ever experienced. His sword danced in his hand, its blade flickering.

Even the air recognised that an event of great moment was in the offing.

The fight in the chamber of towers had tested Lucius. Not in skill – the eldar ghost warriors were no match for his bladework – but in his endurance of boredom. The orders Eidolon had been given by the primarch were clear, to keep the mortals bearing the bounty of Prismatica safe until their precious cargo had been emptied into the shaft. Why such a task required Eidolon to enact it, Lucius didn’t know.

Perhaps it had something to do with his having died once.

In any case, once the mortals had emptied their containers, they stepped into the green light and dropped away. Had that been part of Eidolon’s command? Lucius didn’t really care.

The fighting had become a series of dull, repetitious combats that tested him not at all. None of the eldar machines could match his skill and he had fought in every style he knew, simply to stave off the boredom of utilising the same killing move more than once.

But now Fulgrim had re-emerged, haloed by millions of the same gemstones as those that rested at the heart of each of the dull-witted constructs. So dense was the canopy of drifting stones that the outer reaches of the chamber were all but obscured. Lucius caught fleeting glimpses of movement behind the mass of gleaming stones, his warrior instinct telling him that he was seeing things there that warranted note.

But his attention was irrevocably drawn back to his primarch.

Lucius saw the Phoenician was no longer the same being as had descended into the planet. He floated in the air above the shaft, which no longer poured its green torrent up to the restless darkness above, but simply radiated a fading glow of dying light. Fulgrim’s armour was shimmering with vitality, as though the light of a thousand suns were contained within him and strained to break free. The primarch’s dark, doll-like eyes were twin black holes, doorways to heights of experience and sensation the likes of which could only be dreamed by madmen and those willing to go to any lengths to taste them.

Fulgrim’s cloak fell away and his features twisted as though his body were being wracked by twin extremes of pain and pleasure. Reluctantly, Lucius let his gaze slip from Fulgrim’s wondrous form to the rest of the chamber’s occupants.

Lonomia Ruen stood next to him, his envenomed daggers useless against the eldar creatures. His caustic features were alive with excitement at the sight of Fulgrim’s imminent transformation, runnels of purplish blood dribbling from his nose and ears.

Marius Vairosean stood just in front of him, his sonic weapon stilled in the face of such wonder, and Lucius wanted to tell him to loose some blaring cacophony, for surely this moment warranted acknowledgement. Vairosean wept at the sight of Fulgrim, his disfigured features pulled in what might have been an expression of adoration and spiteful jealousy. It was sometimes hard to tell, such was the impressive nature of the man’s devotion to his flesh-alterations. Krysander of the Blades stood immobile, his face twisted in a grin of pleasure, his hooked tongue sliding across his knife-cut lips.

The Iron Warriors at last seemed to have developed a sense of wonder and stood immobile in the presence of a godlike being at the height of his powers. Even the plight of their doomed primarch wasn’t enough to break the spell of Fulgrim’s coming glory, for none of his feeble-witted warriors had yet approached him.

Eidolon alone seemed unaffected by the stupefaction that had seized the survivors of the eldar attack, and he walked towards Fulgrim as the primarch drifted down to the edge of the shaft. As Fulgrim’s feet touched the ground, Lucius felt a shudder go through the world, as though it rebelled at his touch. It was as if two tectonic plates had ground across one another, deep within the earth, and the titanic force that their collision had unleashed was only slowly making its way to the surface.

Lucius wanted to move, to draw closer to his primarch, but he could no more move than he could still his own heart. His flesh understood what his desire did not.

This was a moment of birth, and like all such moments, it was a private thing.

Eidolon removed a blade from beneath his cloak – a grey, glitterdust-bladed weapon that Lucius recognised immediately. It was a weapon with which a warrior might slay a god, a weapon that in ancient times would have been called enchanted.

The anathame was a shadow of the longsword that had, rumour said, been stolen from the Hall of Devices on Xenobia. Its blade had been chipped and shaved, reduced to the length of a ranker’s gladius by a Chaplain of the XVII Legion, though no one knew for what purpose. Eidolon lifted the anathame to Fulgrim’s eye level and spoke words that Lucius couldn’t hear. The primarch nodded and Eidolon rammed the blade into Fulgrim’s side.

The Emperor’s Children cried out as one, but the awesome power blazing from Fulgrim’s beatific form held them fast.

‘He that was dead shall bring me to life!’ cried Fulgrim, the pain in his voice bringing tears to Lucius’s eyes. ‘He that is risen shall be the witness of my rebirth!’

Eidolon circled around and stabbed the primarch again and again, each time driving the blade in to the hilt. Blood poured from Fulgrim, and his face betrayed the agony he suffered with each penetration. Eidolon sheathed the bloodied weapon and stood before Fulgrim. With both hands, he reached for the first wound he had caused and pulled it open.

Fulgrim threw back his head and loosed a bellow of rage that would have shamed Angron with its violence. No butcher’s nail had ever drawn so agonised a cry from a living being, and Lucius swore that he would kill Eidolon for causing the primarch such torment.

But Eidolon wasn’t done.

He moved around Fulgrim, pulling each wound open with his blood-slick gauntlets until the primarch was swaying on his feet, barely able to keep from collapse. His wounds were not healing, his metabolism kept in check by a self-imposed act of will. What purpose this mutilation served, Lucius could not fathom, but whatever it was, it was nearing completion as he felt a burgeoning power swell the chamber. It was a power now free to make its presence felt on a world whose dead guardians had kept it at bay for centuries. His flesh responded to its presence; skin puckering, nerve endings bathed in tremulous bliss and revulsion.

A potent sense of anticipation built within him, as when the Legion captains had waited to ambush Fulgrim in the Gallery of Swords, only honed and distilled to razor keenness. It was the instant before a lightning strike, the heartbeat before a bullet impact, the fractional pause before a drop pod assault. At any moment, power unlike any that mortals, post-human or otherwise, had witnessed in all the history of humankind would be revealed in all its glory. Lucius knew with utter clarity that this was what had driven the eldar to virtual extinction. They had sought to embrace glory, but been found wanting.

‘Do it,’ said Fulgrim to Eidolon, his face a mask of tears.

Eidolon nodded and reached up his hand. A constellation of spirit stones detached from the mass of stones filling the upper reaches of the chamber and flew to him. He plucked them from the air and pressed them into the wounds he had gouged in the primarch’s flesh. Lucius felt tiny flares of terror and desperation, but each one was swiftly extinguished as Eidolon drew more and more to him and fed them into Fulgrim’s body. First ten, then ten more and more and more until it seemed impossible that any others could still be swallowed.

Fulgrim undulated with the souls of the devoured dead, but Eidolon kept summoning them from the air and pushing them inside the many wounds.

‘No more,’ begged Fulgrim, but Eidolon shook his head.

Fulgrim sobbed and wailed, but for each pleading cry for Eidolon to stop, there was a fervent look in his eyes that said, more.

But at last Eidolon was done and Lucius let out a long, juddering breath.

‘One more,’ breathed Fulgrim. ‘The maugetar stone.’

Eidolon hesitated, circling his wracked primarch, examining every bloodied crevice on his armour.

‘Hurry!’ cried Fulgrim. ‘It must be now! The final fuel for my ascent!’

‘I do not see it, my lord,’ said Eidolon.

‘It’s there!’ screamed Fulgrim. ‘Set within my breastplate.’

And then a voice cut through the chamber, grating and harsh, like stone on metal.

Perturabo swayed on the edge of the shaft, his stomach and groin red from where a deep wound bled profusely. The Lord of Iron’s face was sallow and gaunt, a corpse draped in dried parchment skin and given febrile animation. In his hand he held the maugetar stone, its surface a roiling chaos of warring gold and black.

‘Looking for this?’ he said.

Perturabo knew he should destroy the stone in his hand. He could do it easily enough. Just holding it he could feel the strengths and weaknesses in its latticed structure, how much pressure he would need to exert to crack it, to shatter it or to crush it into powder. He knew he should do it, but what would become of him without it? Would the strength it had stolen from him be lost forever?

‘You brought me here to kill me,’ said Perturabo, walking towards Fulgrim, keeping the hand holding the maugetar stone extended over the shaft. The light of the dying green sun shone from far below, and though Perturabo was no celestial engineer, he knew that whatever mechanism was holding this planet from being torn apart by the singularity at the heart of the Eye of Terror was coming undone.

This world’s life was about to expire, and he was confident that whatever forces were at work below would destroy the maugetar stone.

Was that a risk he was prepared to take to stop Fulgrim?

‘You’re wrong,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I brought you here to bring me to life.’

‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison, is that it?’

‘Something like that,’ agreed Fulgrim.

Eidolon stepped to Fulgrim’s side, his hand sliding beneath his cloak.

‘Lord Commander Eidolon, if you take one more step, I’ll kill you where you stand,’ said Perturabo. ‘Even like this, you know I can do so.’

Eidolon stopped and looked to Fulgrim, who gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.

Perturabo looked his brother in the eye for some hint of remorse, a sign that he regretted that things had come to this, something to show he felt even a moment of shame at plotting to murder him.

He saw nothing, and his heart broke to know that the Fulgrim he had known long ago was gone, never to return. He hadn’t thought it possible that anyone could plunge so far as to be beyond redemption. A man might sink to the lowest level, degrade himself beyond belief, but he might yet save his soul if he truly experienced even a moment’s remorse.

If only he could believe that of himself.

‘You don’t know the power, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I will be able to do anything I desire in the blink of an eye. I will learn mysteries even Magnus does not suspect exist. I will become a god – a shimmering, diaphanous, beautiful creature. This is my apotheosis, where I become a general principal of Being, instantiated throughout all of the vistas of the galaxy.’

‘You don’t want to be an angel any more,’ said Perturabo. ‘You want to be a god.’

‘Is that so bad?’

‘Mankind has no need of gods,’ said Perturabo. ‘We outgrew them a long time ago.’

Fulgrim laughed, though Perturabo saw that the effort of holding his swelling body together was taking every ounce of his concentration. Beads of light, mercury bright, sweated from his skin, dripping from his cruciform stance in silver droplets.

‘Think you so? Then why are there still gods? Belief empowers them and we worship them in every act of slaughter, betrayal, depravity and quest for immortality we undertake. Whether we know it or not, we offer them fealty every day.’

Perturabo shook his head. ‘I worship nothing. I believe in nothing. ’

The finality of this last utterance almost stopped him in his tracks. The force of it was like a blow, a bitter seed of truth he had never acknowledged or known until this moment. He saw the awareness of it reflected in Fulgrim’s eyes.

‘And that is why you live a stale, bitter life,’ said Fulgrim, contempt and pity dripping from his scornful words. ‘You let yourself be abused; crushed into slavery by a god who doesn’t even have the decency to admit what he is. Our once-father ascended to godhood long ago and denies others their place at the table. He promised us a new world to live in, but he was always to be above us, the master with his loyal lapdog slaves.’

‘It that why you sided with Horus?’ demanded Perturabo, standing right in front of Fulgrim, his enraged features so close that none could come between them. ‘Jealousy? Vanity? Such pettiness is for the weak, we were made for greater things.’

‘What would you know of greater things?’ sneered Fulgrim.

‘You don’t know the things I dream,’ said Perturabo. ‘No one does, no one ever cared enough to find out.’

Fulgrim’s head shot forwards and a musk of glittering vapour, pink and veined with arterial red, blew from his open mouth, enveloping Perturabo in its astringent reek; part perfume, part cesspit.

‘Then show me your dreams, brother,’ hissed Fulgrim. ‘And let me make them real!’

The world as Perturabo knew it was replaced by a city he had dreamed into being every night since leaving Olympia. He stood in the centre of a great boulevard of marbled stone, its width lined by tall trees and magnificent statuary. Clad only in a long chiton robe of pale cream and sandals of softest leather, he was garbed as a scholar and a civic leader. He was a man who lived for peace, not war, and the fit of that man settled upon him like a second skin.

The air was achingly clear, scented with mountain pine from the high glens and fresh water from the crystal falls. The sky was wide and blue, streaked with clouds like wisps of breath. Even knowing this was a lie didn’t stop Perturabo admiring his handiwork, taking in the rugged vistas of mountainous beauty, the snow-capped peaks and the clean lines of the city around him.

Lochos, the grim mountain fastness of Dammekos remade in the mind of its adoptive son.

Buildings the likes of which had only ever been imagined filled the city, each one as familiar as a father’s sons, yet each one an impossibility, for none had ever been constructed.

Behind him was the Thaliakron, but fashioned from polished marble and ouslite, porphyry, gold and silver. All around him were the galleries of justice, the halls of commerce, the palaces of remembrance and the dwellings of the city’s inhabitants.

The people of Lochos thronged the boulevard, moving with unhurried grace and contented lives. Everywhere Perturabo looked, he saw men and women of peace, with ambitions and hopes, dreams and the means to make them real. These were the people of Olympia as he had always wished them, clean of limb, hale of heart and united in purpose. They welcomed him, each smile genuine and heartfelt. They loved him and their happiness was reflected in every kind word, every gesture of respect and every warm greeting.

This was his architectural library made real, a city of imagination, of harmony and light; and he moved through its many streets as its builder and its beloved father. It was a city of dreams. His dreams.

And though he could not see them, Perturabo knew that the twelve great city states of Olympia were all like this. Each one was built to his precise designs, logical and ordered, but built in the knowledge that these were places designed for people. No architecture, however grand, however lofty in ambition or scale, could ever call itself successful if one forgot that cardinal rule, and Perturabo had never forgotten it.

He walked the streets, knowing he was being manipulated, but not caring.

What man would not wish to look upon his dreams as reality?

The city opened up before him, its beauty and street plan intuitive and beguiling. It led him to wonders he had almost forgotten he had crafted on the pages of his many sketchbooks; youthful follies, adolescent vanities and mature structures that spoke of long apprenticeships served at the draughting table.

At length, his perambulations brought him to an octagonal space in the centre of the city, a place of gathering and chance encounters, a place where so often a wanderer’s footsteps would carry him without even realising it. Shops of craftsmen and vendors of pastries, fresh meat and produce lined the edges of the space, and at its centre was the towering statue of a warrior in burnished warplate, a lightning bolt in one hand, an eagle-topped sceptre in the other.

A god rendered in marble by the hand of a dutiful son.

Perturabo circled the statue, a curious mix of emotions churning within him.

‘I have to hand it to you, brother,’ said Fulgrim’s voice from the edge of the octagon. ‘When you dream, you dream grandly.’

Perturabo saw his brother seated at a wrought-iron table in front of a glass-walled bistro, dressed in an identical chiton. Two glasses carved from violet crystal sat on the table, one either side of a bottle of clear, honey-coloured wine.

‘You know, the Romanii people used to drink from amethyst cups in the belief that it would prevent intoxication,’ said Fulgrim, pushing back a chair with his foot and gesturing to the empty seat. ‘Come, sit, sit.’

Perturabo wanted nothing more than to wrap his hands around Fulgrim’s neck and snap it like a thin spar of wood. But in a place of illusions what would be the point? Instead, he took the seat opposite his brother as Fulgrim poured two glasses of wine.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13