The Ebonite Archymsts 32 страница

‘Absolute nonsense, of course,’ continued Fulgrim, ‘but you can’t fault people for believing in things when they don’t know any better, can you?’

Perturabo said nothing and took a drink. A sweet wine from the vineyards on the slopes of the Ithearak Mountains to the south. His favourite, but of course it would be. Why would a dream of perfection be otherwise?

‘Just look at this place,’ said Fulgrim, leaning back in his seat and sweeping a hand around to encompass the octagon and the city beyond. ‘I never knew you had such vision. ’

‘What are you doing, Fulgrim? We should be settling this like warriors.’

‘But we are not warriors, brother,’ said Fulgrim, brushing an imaginary speck from his chiton. ‘In your ideal world we are diplomats, and we settle our disputes with words, yes?’

‘I think it’s too late for that.’

‘Not at all. I look around this city and see I made the mistake I swore I would not. I underestimated you.’

‘I said you would.’

‘And I didn’t listen, yes, I know,’ said Fulgrim, waving a dismissive hand. ‘But look at this place, it outshines Macragge in its splendour! All the grandeur, but none of the starch, that’s no small achievement.’

‘It’s not real,’ said Perturabo. ‘It never was. And it never will be.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Fulgrim, leaning forwards as if to whisper some seditious gossip. ‘I can help you make this real. All of it.’

‘Another empty promise?’

‘No, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I think we’ve come too far for empty promises, don’t you? All we have left are cold, hard truths. And the truth is, if you give me the maugetar stone, I will breathe life into Olympia again.’

Perturabo searched Fulgrim’s face for the lie, but saw nothing but truth. Still, he didn’t believe him. He had been betrayed before by words he thought to be true.

‘I’ll die if I give it to you. You said so yourself.’

‘Isn’t that a price worth paying for Olympia’s rebirth?’

‘Of course, but I’d have to trust you, and…’

‘Yes, I have made it a little difficult for you trust me, haven’t I?’ grinned Fulgrim.

‘Impossible is the word I’d use.’

Fulgrim poured two more glasses of wine. ‘Very well, let me put it like this – think of all the people who have scorned you. Dorn, the Khan, the Lion… They all look down on you, they all think you and your sons are nothing but diggers. You became nothing more than the Legion to call when there was dirty work to be done and they didn’t want to get down in the mud.’

‘You thought the same, as I recall,’ pointed out Perturabo.

‘True, but now I’ve seen this city, I perceive the error of my ways,’ said Fulgrim. ‘This is a perfect city, brother, one I myself might have conceived, but I did not. You did. Of course, you know that the others were repulsed by what happened here? They despised you for it, laughed at you for failing to hold onto your adopted homeworld. I can give you the power to rebuild it, to make it so that it might as well never have happened. All you have to do is give me the maugetar stone. Or not; I can do this without it.’

Perturabo heard the lie in Fulgrim’s words, sensing his brother’s fear that this moment might pass unfulfilled. Even in this fantasy, he felt the unique confluence of energies crossing in the sepulchre, a conjunction of the spheres that would never come again.

‘Think of it, brother, together we can make Olympia rise from the ashes of its destruction like the phoenix of antiquity.’

‘Olympia is dead, Fulgrim,’ said Perturabo. ‘I killed it, and the dead stay dead, no matter what power you think you’ll get.’

Fulgrim leaned across the table and rested his hand on Perturabo’s arm.

‘Brother, think hard on all that you have lost, all that you have sacrificed,’ said Fulgrim, his dark eyes swirling with the light of distant galaxies. ‘I can give you all that you want.’

‘Maybe you can give me what I want,’ said Perturabo sadly, ‘but you can never give me what I need.’

‘And what is that?’ sneered Fulgrim. ‘Punishment?’

Perturabo pushed back his chair and tipped over his wine glass. ‘We are done talking.’

The amethyst wine glass rolled from the table and smashed to purple shards on the ground, the pieces scattering in a curious star shape, one arm for each side of the octagon. Fulgrim shook his head and the skin of the scholar and the administrator sloughed from him as a serpent sheds its skin, revealing the falsehood he was, a brazen liar in the guise of a friend.

Once again, they stood in the chamber of the sepulchre and his brother was as Perturabo had last seen him: naked and squirming with power and sweated light.

Olympia as he had dreamed it was gone, consigned to the past where its people were dead and burned and its future crushed beneath the iron boot-heel of the IV Legion.

‘You should have taken my offer,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Now all that is left to you is death.’

‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘Not all.’

And so saying, he hurled the maugetar stone into the shaft.

The stone flashed gold and black, gold and black, spinning end over end as it arced out into the centre of the abyss. Fulgrim screamed a denial, and with that shrieking cry, the spell holding every warrior immobile was broken. Perturabo’s throw had been a poor one, much weaker than even a crippled old man might have managed, but it was enough.

He watched the stone begin its downward arc, relieved to be rid of the parasitic talisman.

His relief turned to horror as he saw a golden shape dive from the drifting dome of spirit stones and plunge towards the stone. He saw it was a mechanised eagle, its feathers rendered in shimmering gold, its body a wonder of clockwork automation and lost technologies. He recognised it as having sprung from the same mind as the machines he had built in his sanctum. It seemed he was not the only savant whose works were inspired by the long dead gentleman of Firenza. The bird loosed the cry of a hunting raptor, its legs extended before it and its wings booming as it lunged in the air to pluck the maugetar stone in its obsidian talons.

The bird banked around, its gimlet eyes alive with the hybrid technologies of its unique mind. Its wings beat with a clash of metal on metal, angling its flight back to the far side of the chamber.

A barrage of bolter fire punched through the screen of spirit stones and a handful of Emperor’s Children were pitched from their feet.

Perturabo saw the veil part, and didn’t know whether to weep or rejoice at the sight of warriors charging towards him.

Black-armoured and bearing a mailed fist upon their shoulder guards.

The Iron Tenth.

TWENTY-SIX

A Common Foe
The Sound of Madness
No Pleasure Lucius was at the edge of the shaft in a heartbeat, but the golden-winged eagle was already too far away for his whip. He pulled his bolt pistol and drew a bead on its golden form. Almost immediately, the bird began jinking and weaving through the air, as though it somehow sensed it was being targeted. Lucius fired, but his shot went wide. Two more shots missed before a fourth finally clipped the edge of the bird’s wing.

‘Got you,’ he said triumphantly, watching as it spiralled downwards.

Falk felt the paralysing lethargy that had held him rooted to the spot fall away, and immediately moved in Perturabo’s direction. The Iron Hands were here, and they were advancing behind a screen of fire towards the primarchs. Their presence here amazed him. How had they come through the labyrinth? Had they found a secret way into the sepulchre that Karuchi Vohra had not known existed? Amid the charging Iron Hands, Falk saw a half-glimpsed shape at the edge of the chamber, a slight figure in a long black robe, and his pace faltered as he recognised Karuchi Vohra.

At first he assumed he was mistaken, but then he saw the figure again, and this time there was no mistaking the thin features. The eldar Perturabo had killed in the labyrinth, could he have a brother? It was surely the only explanation, but as he looked closer, he saw that the resemblance was more than just fraternal.

The eldar with the Iron Hands was identical in every way to Karuchi Vohra.

Falk threw off his shock and forced himself to concentrate on the important matters at hand. He had no understanding of the subtleties of this situation, only that the Lord of Iron needed at least one of his triarchs at his side.

‘To the primarch!’ he yelled, leading the Iron Warriors in defence of their liege lord.

The Emperor’s Children were mirroring his actions, rallying to Fulgrim’s side as coruscating loops of purple and gold lightning flailed from his body, as though he had become a vast, overloading generator.

An Emperor’s Children warrior with blades sheathed in the bare flesh of his chest came at him, swinging a giant, tooth-bladed chainaxe. His helm was an older mark, making him look like one of the techno-barbarians of the Unification Wars. Falk angled his shoulder guard to take the blow, and the screaming teeth bit only a finger-breadth before sliding clear.

‘Fool!’ cried Falk. ‘We have a common enemy!’

The barbarian paid his words no heed and raised his axe for another strike.

Falk punched clean through the warrior’s chest, the power fist obliterating his entire torso and leaving only a gory heap of dismembered body parts in its wake. He stamped the warrior’s helm flat as he continued, his combi-bolters blasting out the last of his twin magazines. Two black-clad warriors fell into the shaft, the bolter fire blowing them apart from the inside.

Gunfire roared all around as the Iron Warriors came with him, a hammer of righteous fury. Like Falk, they didn’t know what Fulgrim and his debauchers were doing to Perturabo, but that it was harmful was obvious. Berossus crashed into the Phoenix Guard forming a cordon around them, and three of Fulgrim’s elite praetorians were smashed to bloody ruin in as many blows.

The rest were not so easily felled, fighting with powered halberds that carved great chunks from Berossus’s armour. The struggle became a close-range firefight, the fighting warriors blasting at one another with pistols and clubbing with fists and feet.

‘Fight the Iron Hands!’ yelled Falk, but his words were falling on deaf ears.

He pulled up short as the skull face that had haunted him from the warp took shape in the blood spatter patterns on a smashed storm shield.

Speak with my voice… the glossiaic unspeech…

Falk’s anger brimmed over; anger at the Iron Hands, at the Emperor’s Children, but most of all at the sheer stupidity of disunity. This fight needed a warrior who could take charge, a warrior whose words would be obeyed.

‘Fight the Iron Hands!’ he yelled, and those warriors nearest him recoiled at the force of his words, seals popping on their gorgets and paint blistering on their armour. Those without helms staggered as their gag reflex brought up the oily, acidic contents of their stomachs.

For a fraction of the smallest moment, they stared at him in awe and fear.

And then they obeyed.

Kroeger put aside his heedless smashing of the motionless eldar constructs at the sight of the Iron Hands, feeling the red fog in his mind disperse enough for him to see that a greater enemy had presented itself. He stood atop a heap of shattered glass and broken eldar remains.

He could remember nothing of the slaughters that had seen them destroyed, and that complete loss of control shocked him. The Iron Warriors were hard fighters, but they were no screaming berserkers. Not for them the unshackled fury of Angron’s World Eaters – that way lay madness, and Kroeger would not surrender to such an irreversible course. He still felt the lure of complete surrender, but clamped down on it with a whispered recitation of the Unbreakable Litany.

‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron,’ he said. ‘And may it ever be so.’

He took deep breaths, feeling the bonds of control clamping down on his beating aggression. It still lurked in the heart of him, but it was his to command, his to release or his to ignore.

For now.

Kroeger began running to where Barban Falk led a cadre of Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children against the Iron Hands.

Marius Vairosean ripped his hand across the firing frets of his sonic cannon, playing the shrieking harmonics over the Iron Hands. They were advancing in the cover of the towers, but his weapon blazed through them with caroming detonations. One warrior was torn apart, the force of the impact vibrations ripping both his arms from their sockets and pulping his head like an eggshell. Another’s armour went into resonant frequency shock and reduced his flesh and bone to liquid paste.

He laughed to see such death, hammering his hand down again and again, sending out ripping chords of dissonant frequency blasts. Everywhere he aimed, the ground erupted in fissuring gouges. Enemy warriors were flung away by the screaming power. He and the few Kakophoni still alive paid no heed to the Iron Warrior with the booming voice, though the piercing violence of it had pleased Marius greatly.

More focused than Eidolon’s sonic shriek, but less painful, and therefore less stimulating.

Though his senses had been heightened in almost every way by the ministrations of Fabius, Marius had lost none of his tactical acumen, and saw that the Iron Hands had the best of this conflict so far.

They were fresh into the battle, whereas the Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children had already fought a deadly enemy, and their ammunition stocks were depleted, their numbers diminished and their primarchs unable to fight. The black-armoured warriors were fighting in smaller kill teams, moving implacably forwards under the withering fire from a braying Dreadnought. Its bolter and flamer bathed the chamber in strobing muzzle flare and whooshing gouts of promethium. It advanced over a flaming avenue of broken eldar bodies, unstoppable and immense. Marius looked for the Iron Warriors Dreadnought, and grinned lopsidedly as he saw it fighting through the towers to reach its enemy twin.

A group of Iron Hands broke from cover, a leader and a combat cell with a bulky cannon weapon, and Marius stepped out into the open with his three Kakophoni. He played a shrieking burst of soundwaves and blistering powered chords. Three of the warriors went down, scattered but not dead.

A fourth rolled to his feet and aimed a long, custom-designed carbine at Marius.

The shot punched through the weapon Marius had fashioned from the instruments designed by Bequa Kynska for her Maraviglia, and a wailing explosion of clashing harmonics exploded outwards; the death scream of a living being. He hurled the dying device aside as the looming form of the Iron Hands Dreadnought hove into view.

A hurricane of shells slammed into him, punching him from his feet and ripping through his Kakophoni. They died screaming, revelling in the sounds of their own death. Blood pooled in Marius’s armour, but he welcomed the sensation. It had been too long since he had felt real pain, and orgasmic synaptic connections exploded in his cortex, stimulating him beyond all reason.

He surged to his feet, the muscles and bones in his jaw distending and reshaping in readiness. The warrior with the carbine flicked a selector switch on the weapon’s stock, but before he could fire, Marius drew breath and unleashed a shrieking blast of sound from his swelling lungs and altered trachea. The warrior, an Iron Father he now saw, fell back, clutching his helmet as the deafening, ear-bursting volume of Marius’s shout overloaded his battle armour’s auto-senses before they could protect him.

Even the Dreadnought rocked back under the sonic force, its aural receptors exploding in a shower of cascading sparks. That would dis-orientate it long enough for Marius to finish the legionaries under its protection and move on.

Marius’s face moved with grotesque, fleshy undulations, drawing a huge amount of air into his lungs for another sonic exhalation. One of the warriors climbed to his feet, his armour torn and scorched almost bare of paint. Reeling, the warrior staggered under the weight of a heavy volkite cannon. He struggled with the unfamiliar weapon, hauling on arming levers and charging cranks. The gun’s tip crackled with building energy, but such a powerful weapon took time to fire.

Time this warrior didn’t have.

Marius spread his arms and leaned into his screaming bellow.

The air between the two warriors fractured with sonic detonations, a jagged haze of noise that filled the chamber and shattered hundreds of spirit stones floating above the battle. Marius screamed until his lungs were emptied, the cathartic sound of madness setting his brain afire with blistering sensations of pleasure, pain and ecstatic joy.

Incredibly, impossibly, the warrior remained standing.

‘What?’ said Ignatius Numen grimly. ‘I didn’t catch that.’

Marius ballooned his lungs for another shriek of power.

Deaf to all sound, the Morlock triggered the volkite cannon.

The searing ray punched through Marius Vairosean’s breastplate, and explosively boiled his flesh and blood in the blink of an eye.

He didn’t even have breath to scream.

Picking his way between the knots of fighting legionaries, Lucius spied the struggling form of the golden bird. It lay in a pile of broken crystal twenty metres away, its wing shattered and one leg bent back at an unnatural angle. The black and gold gemstone Fulgrim coveted lay beside its crumpled beak, and Lucius took a moment to wonder whether such automata could feel pain.

A scuffle of boots on loose stone and crystal sounded behind him, careless and club-footed. Lonomia Ruen dropped into the cover of a collapsed pillar with him, a dripping dagger held in one hand, a needle pistol in the other.

‘What is that stone?’ asked Ruen.

Lucius didn’t bother to hide his irritation at Ruen’s presence, and ignored the question.

He didn’t know what was so important about it, but that Fulgrim desired it was enough for him. A darting shape moved through the shadows before him, and Lucius squinted through the misty haze of green fog and gunsmoke. Something was out there, but he couldn’t see it properly. Even his genhanced acuity, further sharpened by the spatial rewiring of the sensory centres of his brain, couldn’t pick out what it was.

It was a shadow where no shadows should be, a ghost out of place on a world of ghosts.

Lucius smiled as comprehension dawned.

‘Ruen,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the downed eagle. ‘You see that?’

‘What?’ said Ruen, scrambling to the edge of the pillar and peering round its broken stub.

‘There,’ said Lucius. ‘Quickly.’

‘I don’t see anyth–’ said Ruen before a tiny thip, thip sounded and the back of his helmet blew out. He slumped over onto his side, both eye lenses shattered and scorched.

‘Idiot,’ said Lucius, swinging his bolter up over the pillar and aiming at the point where he’d seen the tiny, telltale flash of the needler. Most observers wouldn’t have seen the weapon’s las-flare, concealed within a shadow and shrouded by fallen debris.

But Lucius wasn’t most observers.

The Raven Guard would already be displacing, but Lucius could give him something to force his head down: bolt shells stitched a percussive path through the shadow. He kept firing as he vaulted the fallen pillar and ran towards the fallen eagle. Solid needle rounds puffed the ground behind him in a blitzing series of innocuous-sounding impacts.

Lucius dived over the fallen remains of an eldar construct and scooped up the gold and black gemstone. It was heavier than it looked, the weight in his palm considerable and the heat that it exuded made it feel like it had been left in an oven overnight. That heat flowed through him, and the feeling of immortal vitality that saturated his flesh was so intense that he almost cried out.

‘No wonder Fulgrim wants this,’ he said, holstering his pistol and drawing his sword.

As soon as the blade was in his hand, a black shape streaked from the shadow of a nearby tower on a near-silent plume of whooshing jet-flame.

Shots hammered Lucius’s chest, but failed to penetrate. He dived to the side and brought his blade up in a slashing motion that sheared the barrel from the weapon in a cracking shower of non-reflective ceramite. The Raven Guard twisted in mid-air, dropping lightly to his feet and throwing aside the ruined halves of his weapon.

‘You bring a needle-carbine to a sword fight?’ sneered Lucius.

Once again his opponent triggered his jump pack, shooting forwards to deliver a thunderous kick to the centre of Lucius’s breastplate. Lucius was hurled back, hearing the crack of splitting plasteel. The Raven Guard sprang at him with his twin black swords extended before him. Lucius rolled aside and sprang to his feet in time to block a downward cut, and scissored his body to avoid a disembowelling slash to the gut. His own sword lanced down to the Raven Guard’s neck, but a burst of thrust carried the warrior away again.

Lucius unhooked the whip he’d taken from dead Kalimos, letting the barbed length of it uncoil like a hungry snake.

‘Just me and thee now,’ said Lucius, removing his helmet and tossing it aside. He reached up to a raised weal on his cheek, a scar that should have long-since healed, but which had been kept raw and marked with caustic powders. ‘You cut me before, and I will always treasure that wound. But that’s all you’re getting, Raven Guard.’

‘Sharrowkyn,’ said the warrior.

‘What?’

‘My name,’ said the Raven Guard. ‘It’s Nykona Sharrowkyn. Just so you know who it is that’s killed you.’

‘Nykona Sharrowkyn,’ said Lucius, rolling the name around his mouth as though experiencing a new flavour. ‘No, that’s not the name of a man that can kill me.’

‘You don’t get to decide,’ said Sharrowkyn, one sword held high over his head, the other extended low. They circled one another warily, each aware of the other’s skill, and knowing they were well matched. Neither paid heed to the battles raging around them, the life and death struggles being played out in the ruins of a dying race’s tomb. All that mattered was the purity of the duel. All other pretenders to this fight were dead, and all that remained to be decided was which of them would walk away.

Lucius attacked first, lashing his whip at Sharrowkyn’s head. The barbed tip scored a line through the faceplate and left eye lens. Lucius followed up with a low cut to the thigh, redirected at the last instant for the groin. Sharrowkyn read the move and blocked with crossed blades, spinning on his heel to hammer his elbow into Lucius’s head.

But Lucius wasn’t there, rolling forwards beneath the blow to thrust his blade at the base of Sharrowkyn’s spine. More flame from the Raven Guard’s jump pack carried him away from the paralysing strike, and he spun as he landed to face Lucius once more.

‘You’re fast, son of Corax,’ said Lucius.

‘Too fast for you, traitor.’

Lucius smiled. ‘You won’t goad me into foolishness.’

Even before Lucius finished speaking, Sharrowkyn gunned his jets again. Instead of dodging, Lucius leapt to meet the Raven Guard, his whip slashing and his sword stabbing. The lash cracked around Sharrowkyn’s neck, constricting and drawing blood before releasing. Lucius rammed his sword up, but Sharrowkyn’s blade turned it aside at the last second, its edge scraping a finger-deep furrow in the ceramite.

They landed badly, the stuttering jets of Sharrowkyn’s jump pack skidding them along the ground towards the edge of the shaft. All skill was irrelevant, only brute ferocity as the two swordsmen grappled and kicked at one another. Too close for sword-work, Sharrowkyn rammed his helmeted head into Lucius’s unprotected face.

Blood burst from his broken nose and his cheekbone shattered under the force of the impact. Lucius blinked away bloody tears and pushed himself away from Sharrowkyn. He saw the black outline of the Raven Guard coming at him and stabbed his sword into where Sharrowkyn’s throat would be.

His blade struck only empty air, and the shock of that almost cost him his life.

Somehow, impossibly, the Raven Guard wasn’t there.

A blade plunged into his side, and Lucius twisted away from the fiery, unexpected and exquisite pain. He shook his eyes clear of blood and felt the Raven Guard behind him – he spun and thrust low with his sword, but once again his blades cut air and not flesh. Another lancing blow plunged into his back, and this time the pain was an unwelcome sensation. Lucius could see the Raven Guard, but he moved like nothing he had ever seen before, faster than any mortal man could possibly move, like a wraith or a being out of step with time.

A black blade licked out and laid his cheek bare to the bone, a matching wound to the one Sharrowkyn had given him the last time their blades had crossed.

Lucius spun, feeling suddenly helpless as the Raven Guard slipped around him with dizzying speed, his blades stabbing again and again. Lucius felt his sword tumble from his hand, the whip wrapping itself around his wrist as though unwilling to be parted from him, even in death.

Then the Raven Guard was at Lucius’s back, pushing him to his knees, blades pressed down through his gorget into the hollows either side of his neck.

‘It gives me no pleasure to do this,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘You are nothing to me, simply a rabid dog that needs to be put down.’

Lucius tried to speak, to say something to mark his death.

Sharrowkyn’s blades stabbed down behind Lucius’s collarbone, tearing through his hearts and lungs, severing arteries and wreaking catastrophic damage that not even a Space Marine’s post-human physiology could undo.

And all thoughts of a worthy valediction died with him.

Brother Bombastus had a fist that could crush Cataphractii armour, tear open the hulls of Baneblades and rend the steel of hive towers. His flamer burned the Emperor’s Children, melting their warplate and roasting them within their ceramite armour.

On any civilised world of the Imperium, Bombastus would have been labelled a psychopath, a dangerously unstable individual who would most likely have ended up in an execution cell after who knew how many brutal murders. Yet those very tendencies that marked him out as dangerously aberrant in human society rendered him perfect clay from which to mould a Space Marine.

Decades of conditioning, training, discipline and brotherhood had wrought as honourable and devoted an Iron Hand as could be expected, but that had all come to an end at the hands of a hybrid alien creature on the inverted deck of a crippled Diasporex vessel as it plunged down into the Carollis Star.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13