The Ebonite Archymsts 33 страница

Isolated from the fraternity of his brothers, the psychopathic tendencies that had attracted the attention of the Iron Hands recruiters crept back in like squatters into the mind of Brother Bombastus.

He relished battle. He endured the long sleeps between war and bloodshed, and was first to wake when the machines were empowered and the words of activation spoken. The combat on the Sisypheum had been fierce, but short, and fought against monsters. This fight, against fellow legionaries, was exactly the kind of fight he craved. Not for Bombastus the horror and tragedy of fighting his once-brothers. He welcomed it. They came at him again and again, insects against a Titan. Only the warrior Numen had killed with his volkite cannon had come close to doing any real damage. Without his external aural pickups, he fought in silence, which was proving to be more of an inconvenience than he’d expected.

The screams of the dying were as much part of the experience of killing as seeing it happen.

Then, from behind one of the strange, gem-studded towers, he saw something that sent a jolt of electrical excitement around his iron body. A Dreadnought, one marked with rank bars his internal database identified as a warsmith, no less.

Bombastus strode through the mass of fighting, ignoring everything else in his path as he fought to reach the one opponent that might challenge him. The heavier machine moved with a ponderous grace, its waist gimbal moving in dimensions his could not. Its hammer arm was crackling and lethal, but its main gun was silent.

No ammunition! roared Bombastus, though the words were only rendered as text on the inner face of his casket-visor. He could no longer hear the bellowed challenge.

The Dreadnought turned to face him, and Bombastus read the flurry of activations throughout its armoured shell. Automated weapon loaders sought and failed to find ammunition in the rear-mounted hoppers.

Bombastus sprayed the warsmith Dreadnought with a wash of blazing promethium, dousing its carapace from head to foot. He knew the damage would be minimal, but humiliation was the first part of any killing. He loosed an impudent blast of bolter fire across its carapace. Most of the rounds ricocheted, but one lucky shell caromed from the upper edge of its carapace and blasted a chunk of armour plating free. Sparks flared from a tantalising tear in its upper surfaces; a wound to be torn wider.

Then the time for guns was over and the two Dreadnoughts slammed together with a noise like starships colliding. A fight between Dreadnoughts was not a subtle affair of feints, counters and ripostes – it was a brutal, tearing, barging grapple where the victor was the war machine that offered the fewest openings to its foe.

The Iron Warriors Dreadnought was the heavier machine, but Bombastus quickly realised he had the edge in experience. Whoever had been interred in this burnished sarcophagus was a recent implantee, his skill and knowledge of the weapons, balance and moves available to him limited by his lack of experience. A thunderous uppercut paralysed his enemy’s cannon arm, tearing out the vulnerable servos beneath the curve of its shoulder guards. A body blow rocked Bombastus, but he rode the force of it, spinning around and stepping in to deliver a punishing ram.

A hammer blow pummelled his upper carapace, and a dozen damage indicators flared to life on his casket-visor.

Your height and weight advantage, he bellowed. I will not forget that again.

Bombastus pushed hard, slamming his fist down on the Dreadnought’s frontal section and driving it back. Momentum was the key. Pounding blows raining down. One after another.

Bombastus caught a flicker of motion to his side, but ignored it as his auspex registered a lone legionary. An Iron Warrior, but one without any discernible weapons capable of causing damage. Once again he pummelled the Dreadnought, breaking its armour open and exposing areas a Dreadnought ought never to expose.

Pinkish fluids and steaming oil poured from his foe’s carapace, its machine lifeblood.

A sudden threat indicator spiked at Bombastus’s rear as his auspex detected a thermal bloom from a damage-capable weapon. The Dreadnought was still reeling, no threat for now, so Bombastus spun round his central axis, feeding shells into the breech of his bolter.

Overkill for a single warrior, but immensely satisfying.

The melta blast took Bombastus in the centre of his casket, instantly vaporising the ablative layers of ceramite and melting through the inches of armour protecting the fleshy remains that empowered his battlefield divinity. Bombastus mind-screamed within his fluid-filled sarcophagus as life-preserving gels boiled and delicate bio-synaptic receptors were flash-burned in an instant. His motors spasmed in response to his agonies, and his body tilted on its axis as he spun back round.

The Iron Warriors Dreadnought’s hammer pistoned directly into the ruin of his casket, crushing the last remains of Bombastus to a pink mulch smeared on the inner face of an empty shell. He did not fall, his body was too immense and too heavy simply to topple over. Instead he sagged with his arms limp at his side, stinking bio-fluids pouring from his ruptured sarcophagus.

‘ Gratitude, ’ said Berossus, his augmitters crackling and gapped with interference.

‘I am your loyal bondsman,’ said Cadaras Grendel, turning the meltagun over in his hands with a newfound admiration.

The noose of battle was closing on the two primarchs at its centre – Perturabo locked on his knees, and Fulgrim hovering in the air as though bound to his brother by ties not even the call of war could break. Sharrowkyn kicked the swordsman’s body from his blades and swept up the stone the dead warrior had been so desperate to recover.

Its substance was a shifting thing, black and gold threads intertwined, swirling around in a complex pattern, like an eternally deadlocked yin and yang. Sharrowkyn had no idea what the gemstone might be; all that mattered was that Fulgrim desired it, and must therefore be denied it. Hideous as it might be to contemplate, it seemed his purpose and that of Perturabo were aligned.

The Iron Hands were mired in battle with the Emperor’s Children and Iron Warriors, zipping streams of fire blasting back and forth between them. Sharrowkyn saw Bombastus die as Vermanus Cybus and his Morlocks fought against a group of Phoenix Guard. Sabik Wayland coordinated the fire of supporting warriors and Cadmus Tyro circled around the shaft to come up on the flanks of the Iron Warriors.

He read the ebb and flow of the battle and knew the Iron Hands could do without him for now. He placed the gemstone on a flat piece of debris and pulled the bolt pistol from the holster at the swordsman’s hip. The grip was oddly textured, with an unpleasantly organic feel, and Sharrowkyn quickly checked for a round in the chamber.

The sooner he could throw this weapon away the better.

He aimed the muzzle at the gold and black stone.

Sharrowkyn pulled the trigger, and the maugetar stone exploded.

Perturabo felt the sudden release of power like a drowning man breaking the ocean’s surface just as his lungs were fit to burst. A torrent of iron-edged energy coursed through him; a seismic shockwave of his incredible power returned to him in a flash flood of rebirth.

He roared in the pain of it, for no rebirth was ever painless.

Golden light haloed him, his eyes afire with it and his veins burning with the molten fury of a primarch’s very essence. Such raw potency was never meant for such instantaneous transference, and his back arched as his weakened frame flexed to accommodate the sudden, shocking influx of power.

Fulgrim’s body arched in sympathetic resonance, for the maugetar stone contained more than just the strength stolen from Perturabo. It contained their mingled essences, a power greater than the sum of its parts, a power to fuel an ascent so brutal that only the combined life-force of two primarchs could achieve it.

Armour burned from Fulgrim’s body, flaking away like golden dust in a hurricane, leaving his monstrously swollen body naked and his flesh blazing with furnace heat. Spectral flames of shimmering pink and purple licked around his body, a hungry fire waiting to consume him the moment his focus slipped.

Perturabo slumped forwards onto his knuckles, holding himself erect with the iron in his soul and little else. Even as his strength returned, he felt the weight of it settle in his bones, like a burden he hadn’t realised was his to shoulder.

He pushed himself upright, his mastery of the power flooding his body growing with every second. His muscles surged with blood and golden energy, his heart beating with the strength of a forge-hammer. For the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, Perturabo felt as he had when he had first laid eyes on the Emperor.

All-powerful and all-knowing, privileged to know who he was.

Much had changed since that moment, but enough remained the same for him to relish the sense of rightness as he lifted Forgebreaker onto his shoulder. He flexed his fingers and took a moment to admire the craftsmanship. Horus had given him this weapon as a symbol of their unity, but had he ever expected Perturabo would use it to kill one of his brothers?

Fulgrim saw his death in Perturabo’s eyes and grinned, silver light spilling from his gullet as he said, ‘You know you have to do it.’

‘It didn’t have to end this way,’ said Perturabo.

‘You know it did,’ said Fulgrim. ‘So make it quick.’

Perturabo nodded and hefted Forgebreaker like a headsman at an execution.

The steel and gold head of the hammer’s killing face swung in a geometrically perfect arc, splitting the Phoenician’s body wide open.

And it was done.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Apotheosis
The End of the World
Into the Black But it wasn’t done, not by a long way. Fulgrim’s body exploded under the impact of Perturabo’s hammer, and the cry of release was a shrieking birth scream. An explosion of pure force ripped from the Phoenician’s destroyed flesh, filling the chamber of towers with a blinding light that was too bright to look upon, too radiant to ignore. Like a newborn sun, the wondrous incandescence was the centre of all things, a rebirth in fire, new flesh crafted from the ashes of the old.

Perturabo backed away from the light as it grew more intense.

The head of his hammer dripped the white phosphor of unleashed matter and he knew the glorious power he had felt at the destruction of the maugetar stone was but a shadow of what was being wrought.

Every eye in the chamber was turned to the light, though it would surely blind them or drive them to madness. Through slitted fingers and shimmering reflections, the survivors of the fighting bore witness to something magnificent and terrible, an agonising death and violent birth combined.

Screams issued from the heart of the light, the most awful screams imaginable. They spoke of loss, of pain, of despair and of things forgotten, never to be remembered. In its diabolical cadences of anguish, Perturabo heard the fear of the newborn emerging from its mother’s womb, the terror of being ejected into a new and pain-filled world, but also the anticipation of that world’s exploration. It carried the rapture of a fleshsmith who knows nothing of the principles of his art, only that he be exalted by it.

Just when it seemed that the agonised, euphoric screaming could go on no longer, the light began to unfold, like the petals of a night-blooming flower or an illuminated chrysalis being unwrapped by the metamorphic entity within.

A figure floated in the midst of the light, and it took a moment for Perturabo to recognise the impossibility of what he was seeing.

It was Fulgrim, naked and pristine, his body unsullied by any of the mawkish ornamentations with which he had defaced his flesh, as perfect as the day the Emperor had first conceived him. The greatest sculptors of stone would have thrown away their hammers, awls and rasps at the sight of the Phoenician, knowing they would never be able to render anything so beautiful.

No trace of the wounds Eidolon had inflicted was visible, and as Fulgrim lowered his arms, his eyes shone with the doom of extinguished worlds. He threw his head back and the millions of spirit stones that had followed his ascent from the heart of the world split asunder with a booming thunderclap. Their incineration spilled sacrificial energy into the light, bolstering it and multiplying its power a millionfold; a flickering web of silver with Fulgrim at its heart.

‘I am the whisper of a god that the warp has turned into a shout!’ said Fulgrim.

Fulgrim’s back arched and his bones split with gunshot cracks. His flesh, once so perfect, now ran fluid and malleable, his form moulding and remoulding as though an invisible sculptor pressed and worked him like clay upon a wheel. Fulgrim’s legs, extended like the man of Vitruvius, ran and lengthened, fusing together in a writhing serpent’s tail, the skin thickening and sheening with reptilian scales and segmented plates of chitinous armour.

Perturabo took a step towards this thing being born from the death of his brother, all the while despairing that this was his brother.

‘Fulgrim, no…’ he said, but what was done could not be undone.

All around this world of the dead, a world left in the wake of a stellar cataclysm in the hopes that one day its makers might return to claim the last remnants of their ancestors, every spirit stone in every tomb and every crystalline statue screamed in terror as the life bound within it was devoured by the hungry god whose appetite could never be satisfied. Fulgrim’s apotheosis She Who Thirsts…

An offering and a sacrifice, a feast and a fuel source, it was all these things and more, and Fulgrim was offering it all in return for this apotheosis.

Fulgrim’s torso split apart and swelled with writhing muscle as nubs of flesh pushed their way from his ribs. Writhing and gelatinous, they grew from his warping flesh like withered, atrophied limbs before gradually assuming the semblance of muscular arms. The new flesh was hued a mottled purple, and hissing venom dripped from the ebony claws.

But worse was yet to come; as Fulgrim was bent double by this agonised transformation, the light drew back into him, veining his body like cracks in the surface of a sun, before exploding from his back in two enormous wings of membranous mist. Insubstantial and threaded with dark energy, they gradually attained solidity, flesh wrought from energy, the stuff of the warp shaped into a form that could be pressed into the material world.

This was no body of bone and blood; Perturabo had destroyed Fulgrim’s mortal shell. This was an immaterial avatar of light and energy, of soul and desire. What was being done here was an act of will, a creature birthing itself through its own desire to exist.

An immaculate conception, a creature that was its own mother and father combined.

It was the coniunctio, the alchemical union of spirit, soul and body.

Fulgrim’s face was a mask of agonised rapture, a pain endured for the pleasure it promised.

Two obsidian horns erupted from Fulgrim’s skull, ripping through in the exact place that the sniper’s shot had struck him in the Thaliakron. They curled back over his skull, leaving his perfect face as unsullied as the most innocent child.

‘I ascend in Chaos,’ said Fulgrim, his voice musical and repellent. ‘A prince of the neverborn, a lord of the Ruinous Powers, the chosen of the Profligate Ones and beloved champion of Slaanesh!’

‘What have you done?’ said Perturabo, feeling the last dregs of life on this world rebel at the damned syllables of that name.

‘What none other dared before me,’ said Fulgrim, or whatever it was that Fulgrim had become. ‘I have been rewarded by my rebirth in the fire of sacrifice.’

Perturabo had nothing else to say. His brother was dead, and this monstrous creature was all that was left of him. Nothing remained of the once mighty and noble primarch the Emperor had crafted to be his perfect warrior, and Perturabo felt an all-consuming grief that what had begun in such glorious hope an age ago had been so perverted.

‘I see it all now,’ said Fulgrim, his gaze sweeping the chamber while the light around him began to fade as every spirit stone was finally drained of life. ‘The past and the futures, the present and the neverwas. The time we waste here is but a mote in the eye of the universe, a prelude to things infinite and things fleeting.’

Perturabo felt a tremor in the rock, the widening fault lines originating from the planet’s hollow core now rising to the surface. The floor of the cavern split apart with a booming crack and the last light of the dying green sun flooded the chamber.

‘Farewell, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘We will meet again, and we will yet renew our bonds.’

Fulgrim lifted his hands and a curtain of azure light rose up from the ground like a flare of teleportation energy. It was blinding and momentary, and when it cleared, Perturabo saw that Fulgrim was gone, and with him every one of the Emperor’s Children.

His Iron Warriors surrounded him, each one changed by what they had witnessed – some for the good, some for ill, though it was too soon to tell which was which. They stood ready for his command, his loyal sons all. Dust and a rain of debris fell from above, the cracks in the floor spreading to the great dome like fracturing glass. A zigzagging fault line ripped through the centre of the chamber and segments of the floor were thrust upwards as jets of pulverised rock geysered plumes of green dust.

Iydris was tearing itself apart. The force at the heart of the world was no more. The strength of the dead that had kept it safe was failing, and soon this planet would be swallowed by the unimaginable force of the supermassive black hole.

Across the chasm, the remaining Iron Hands gathered up their wounded and fell back from the spreading fissures and heaving ruptures opening in the floor. They looked upon Perturabo with hatred, and he could not say it was ill earned. Had he desired it, Perturabo could destroy them all single-handed. With his regained strength, there was not one of them that could resist him, and they knew it.

Perturabo slung Forgebreaker over his shoulder.

‘This world is dying,’ he said to his warriors. ‘But we will not die with it.’

Perturabo turned from the Iron Hands and walked away.

Cadmus Tyro watched the primarch of the Iron Warriors leave, and let out the breath it felt like he’d been holding for years. He knew there was no way they could have fought the Lord of Iron and lived, though it would have been a battle worthy of Medusan legend had anyone been left alive to speak of it.

‘They’ve gone,’ said Vermana Cybus, his weapons held limply at his side.

‘You sound disappointed,’ replied Tyro.

Cybus shrugged. ‘I expected to die at Perturabo’s hand. Any other death will feel small.’

Another crack burst the ground nearby and more of the sickly light spread from whatever lay at the heart of this planet. Debris fell from above, and slivers of the bruised sky above the sepulchre were visible through the disintegrating structure.

‘Then don’t die,’ said Tyro, gripping the veteran’s shoulder. ‘Live forever.’

Cybus nodded and turned away to gather his few surviving warriors. The Iron Hands fell back to the walls of the chamber, towards the dark, secret passages of the sepulchre through which Varuchi Vohra had led them. The eldar guide knelt by the walls, his hands sifting the knee-deep dust that was all that remained of the vast array of gemstones immolated by Fulgrim’s transformation. Tears streamed down the eldar’s face, grief at the passing of a world or something else.

‘We need to go,’ said Tyro as another violent shockwave bubbled up from the planet’s core. ‘This place will not last much longer.’

‘The maugetar stone…’ whispered Vohra between wracking sobs. ‘That should have been enough for him. Not this… this was too much. Now we have nothing.’

‘We are alive, eldar,’ said Tyro. ‘We faced enemy primarchs and yet we live. Be thankful for that. And whatever weapons they sought here, they’re not leaving with them.’

Vohra looked up at him, his face transformed from the bland scholar Tyro had always doubted he was into something cruel and inhuman, a monster that revelled in the suffering of others and the myriad pains he could craft.

‘The lords of Commorragh do not look kindly upon failure,’ said Vohra. ‘You upstart ape-creatures were only supposed to divert them, to keep the fallen ones from understanding the true prize of Iydris.’

‘The true prize?’

Vohra held up his hand, letting the grey, inert dust spill through his fingers.

‘All is dust,’ he said mirthlessly. ‘This was to be our salvation, a world’s worth of spirit stones to stave off the hunger of She Who Thirsts, but it’s all gone… The power to reclaim our birthright. I return to Commorragh to my death.’

Tyro had no understanding of the eldar’s words, but appreciated enough to know that he and his warriors had been deceived from the very beginning. This mission had never been about denying the traitors world-cracking weapons – most likely no such weapons had ever existed, and the tale Fulgrim had told Perturabo on Hydra Cordatus of the Angel Exterminatus was a grand lie constructed to bring the weapons and talents of the Iron Warriors to bear on this doomed world.

Just as Vohra’s words had been crafted to bring the Iron Hands to this place, to keep the Emperor’s Children and Iron Warriors from realising what was truly at stake. But something had gone awry and now the eldar’s plan was in ruins.

‘You brought us here to die,’ said Tyro. Spears of light spilled from above and he looked up at the opened roof, its circumference ringed by broken slabs of stone that spilled rivers of debris into the chamber.

‘It’s all you are good for, mon-keigh!’ snapped Varuchi Vohra, drawing his hands round and above him in an elaborate circle, as if defining the outline of a gateway around him.

Tyro drew his pistol and aimed it squarely at the eldar’s skull.

‘My brothers died for your lie,’ said Tyro. ‘Now you will too.’

The eldar spoke a grating word in his native tongue and a crackling violet light flared from the gate he had described around his body. Tyro squeezed the trigger, but his bolt blasted through empty air. He fired again and again, but Vohra was gone.

Sabik Wayland jogged over to stand beside him, Nykona Sharrowkyn at his side. Both bore grievous wounds and their armour was red with blood. Tyro nodded gratefully to the Raven Guard as he saw he carried the broken remains of Garuda. The golden eagle’s metal body was badly damaged, but he suspected Frater Thamatica would relish the challenge of making it fully functional again – assuming they could escape without the eldar guide.

‘What are you shooting at?’ said Wayland. ‘We need to get out of here.’

‘Vohra’s gone,’ said Tyro.

‘Gone?’ said Wayland. ‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. Some kind of personal teleporter, I think,’ said Tyro. ‘He must have a hidden starship in orbit.’

‘But he knew the way out,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘I tried to map it as we made our way in, but it was impossible. The paths were all wrong.’

‘Then we go out a different way,’ said Wayland, detaching a personal transponder from a cavity within his backpack. A winking green light shone from the bulky technology.

A roar of engines sounded from above and an aircraft descended on shrieking jetblasts. A Storm Eagle in the colours of the Iron Hands spiralled down through the shattered roof to hover on screaming pillars of rippling air. Thunderhawks and Stormbirds hovered in the air above the sepulchre, buffeted by storm-force winds.

Through the canopy of the Storm Eagle, Tyro saw Frater Thamatica, who sketched a wry salute through the polarised armourglass panes. As much as Thamatica had earned every punishment and more, Tyro had never been happier to see the wayward Iron Father. The assault ramp lowered on the Storm Eagle and Atesh Tarsa jumped down onto the heaving floor of the chamber.

‘Get the wounded and dead on board right now,’ he commanded. ‘The Sisypheum is on borrowed time to break orbit, but we leave no man behind.’

Whatever artifice the labyrinth once possessed to confound the senses was lost with the demise of the power at the heart of the world. Perturabo could feel its embers dying and knew they had little time until the singularity dragged Iydris into its black maw. He led the Iron Warriors through the inert maze and out into the plaza beyond, where it seemed the fighting had been no less fierce. He saw the shattered remains of an Iron Warriors strongpoint, but no sign of any of his gene-sons. The plaza had been laid waste by a merciless bombardment, the kind designed to wipe an area clean of life and leave no stone upon another; an Iron Warriors bombardment.

He ignored the questions of his legionaries as he led them through the cratered wasteland, back through the citadel of the dead that now truly deserved the name. The tombs were all empty, the few remaining statues utterly lifeless and every hint of the shimmering green light that had suffused each building now vanished.

The fortifications at the wall were gone, the Rhinos shattered and broken by shell-fire and the wall itself flattened for hundreds of metres in both directions. The few tombs and mausolea that had clustered near the wall on either side were gone too, pounded flat by a walking barrage that had cleared a path from the citadel back to the landing zone.

They saw no sign of the Emperor’s Children and no sign of the Iron Hands. Iydris was coming apart at the seams, deep fissures opening in the landscape and billowing clouds of dust and smoke pouring from the wounds in the planet’s surface. Fading green light suffused the dust, and a tortured groan sounded from deep below as impossible stresses cracked apart the planetary structure crafted by the long-dead eldar.

At length their brutal march pace through the obscuring, sound-deadening dust clouds brought them within sight of the fortifications around the landing zone, and Perturabo was relieved to find that they appeared to have escaped assault.

The walls were cracking from the base upwards, and on any normal world the life of the warsmith in command of such a fortress would have been forfeit. But this was no normal world and the earth upon which these walls had been built was, like the race that once dwelled here, untrustworthy and unreliable.

The gates of the fortress opened and an armoured squadron of iron-sheened Land Raiders emerged, chevroned in gold and jet. Their weapons were live, and riding in the topmost hatch of the lead vehicle was the master of the Stor-bezashk.

‘My lord,’ said Toramino. ‘You live! When Warsmith Forrix called in a final protective fire mission we feared the worst.’

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13