The Ebonite Archymsts 34 страница

Perturabo nodded, but before he could issue any orders, the weapons of Toramino’s Land Raider swung up to bear, their charge capacitors building power to fire. Perturabo spun around, hearing a muffled roar through the banks of churned dust. Toramino’s Land Raiders manoeuvred into a firing line, but a familiar tenor in the sound made Perturabo raise his hand.

‘Hold your fire,’ he ordered as a hulking, battered shape emerged from the smoke.

The Tormentor, cratered, holed and pummelled almost to destruction, limped towards the line of Land Raiders. The Shadowsword’s main gun had been torn off at the root. Every one of its sponson guns had been blasted from the superstructure and its rear quarters were ablaze where its engine and fuel stores had ignited. Great gashes torn in its side flapped sheets of thick plasteel, and it trailed its mechanical innards behind it in a glistening river of oil.

The engine gave one last bang of internal reaction, and the super-heavy ground to a halt, never to move again. Its side hatches fell open, clanging against its ruined hull and spilling roiling banks of thick, tar-black smoke.

A warrior in armour the colour of soot and bare metal fell from the vehicle’s interior, dragging a figure in Cataphractii warplate behind him. The burden was too great for him and he collapsed in a broken heap, tearing off his helmet and drawing great gulping breaths. Both warriors were drenched in blood and scorched by the flames of the super-heavy’s demise, but Perturabo recognised the Stonewrought and Forrix almost immediately.

‘Falk, Kroeger, attend to your fellow triarch,’ ordered Perturabo, before turning back to Toramino. ‘Evacuation protocols. All craft and personnel are to return to the fleet immediately.’

Perturabo’s warriors hastened to obey him as he marched back to the landing fields.

Perturabo stood watching the final death throes of the eldar crone world. He had seen planets die before, cleansed of organic matter by the life-eater virus or bombed to extinction by cyclonic torpedoes. He had even seen one consumed by a rogue stellar flare, burned black in minutes by the raging violence of its star. But he had never seen a world die from within. The surface of the pearlescent globe was darkening by the second, its once pristine surface now sullied by clouds of ejected matter reaching up into the troposphere. Any structures remaining on the surface had long since been obliterated by the growing seismic force of the core-deep earthquakes or had sunk into the vast, continent-sized fissures tearing through the upper reaches of the artificial planetoid’s structure.

The Iron Blood strained to break orbit, but the force at the heart of the Eye of Terror was reasserting its grip on reality with a vengeance. Many of the smaller vessels of the Iron Warriors fleet had already been dragged within its embrace, swallowed by the black hole’s powerful energies.

Only the capital ships had engines large enough to resist the inexorable pull, but even they were only delaying the inevitable. The vessel’s Navigators could find no trace of the Paths Above that had led them to this world, and their desperate search for a way out was bearing no fruit.

Behind him, Forrix, Kroeger and Falk awaited his command, but he had none to give.

He was a primarch, crafted to be a god amongst men, but what was he in the face of such cosmic power? Could he demand the black hole release his ships, or turn back the course of time with a wave of the hand? He had great power, but even he was subject to the laws of the universe.

The Iron Blood groaned, hyper-stresses deforming its implacable superstructure with shear and torsion it had never been designed to endure. The ship was crying out in pain, its machine spirits filling the command deck with frightened static.

The Emperor’s Children fleet had vanished completely, taken up along with Fulgrim in his ascendance. Even Julius Kaesoron, who Forrix and the Stonewrought swore blind had escaped the barrage at the plaza with them in the Tormentor. Perturabo did not know where his duplicitous brother had gone, nor did he care. His betrayal had turned the last of Perturabo’s heart to stone, cementing his conviction that there was only one man whose orders he could trust.

One warrior who spoke without guile and with only noble intentions at his heart.

From now on, he would trust only Horus Lupercal.

‘My lord?’ said Forrix. ‘What are your orders?’

Perturabo turned to face his triarchs, each one of them scarred by the battles they had fought to reach this place.

Barban Falk stood taller, somehow fuller, as though imbued with a presence he had not possessed before. His armour was darker, almost black in places, and when Forrix had spoken to him by name earlier, Perturabo had heard Falk say, ‘I no longer know that name, I am simply the Warsmith.’

Kroeger too had changed, as though some secret part of him had unlocked and could never now be closed off. His killer’s swagger was still there, but it was distilled, honed, now directed into serving a higher purpose than simply the thrill of battle.

Forrix alone seemed to have been diminished by this campaign, the fire that had driven him into the most terrible battles smothered by bitterness. Perturabo knew that feeling well, it was the horror of betrayal, the crushing weight of knowing that there was no one worthy of your trust.

‘My orders?’ said Perturabo, turning back to the viewscreen, where the monstrous black hole seethed with dark energies. Perturabo looked into its heart, thinking back to the celestial myths and legends surrounding such phenomena, the scientific facts and suppositions of their origins and the wild theories of what might lie on the other side of such a thing.

‘I never go back,’ said Perturabo. ‘Only forwards.’

‘My lord?’ asked Forrix again. ‘What are your orders?’

‘We go in,’ said Perturabo.

‘Into the black hole?’ asked Kroeger in horror. ‘That’s suicide.’

‘No, my triarch,’ said Perturabo with sudden insight. ‘Fulgrim promised we would meet again, and I believe him. We are not meant to die here, and there is only one way onwards.’

Perturabo stared at the black hole, as if daring it to contradict him.

‘This is my order,’ he said. ‘Carry it out. Now.’

Theogonies – IV He was born in fire.

Or was that reborn?

Lucius felt it on his skin, a killing heat that consumed all before it. Fuelled by chemicals and accelerated by an almost sentient desire to devour. His eyes opened, and Lucius felt thrilling pain surge around his body. He was alive, which was something to be savoured, especially in the wake of what had gone before.

Sharrowkyn.

The Raven Guard had killed him.

And yet he was clearly alive.

Lucius remembered the twin black swords plunging into his body in the traditional manner of the executioner. The pain of the blades sliding down through his chest to pierce his hearts and puncture his lungs was a memory to cherish. It sent pulses of shivering pleasure through him even now.

He sat up, touching his hands to his shoulders and finding no trace of the killing wounds, only a smooth layer of skin that felt wondrous to the touch. He sat on a metal gurney in an apothecarion that looked like a madman’s laboratory, the walls hung with heavy tubes of gurgling fluids that bubbled and steamed in the heat pervading the chamber.

Fire blazed throughout its length and breadth, a raging inferno set by deliberate hand. Pools of toxic chemicals burned on the walls and floor, spilled from smashed beakers and poured from ruptured vats of highly toxic, highly flammable liquids.

He was not dead.

Nor was he alone.

In the centre of the laboratory a life or death struggle was under way. Two monsters of immense proportions fought with their creator and the master of this abode of the damned, Apothecary Fabius. One of the terata was a broken abomination of crooked limbs, its body swelling with mutant growths and hyper-evolving anatomy. The other sprouted new limbs with every breath, fresh organs and innumerable unfathomable body parts.

Yet amid all their hideous deformations, Lucius saw Legion markings on their flesh, swollen and twisted by their nightmarish transformation. Whatever these terata were on their way to becoming, they had both once been Imperial Fists.

Fabius fought the terata with a spike-topped rod and a wide-bore pistol that fired streaking rounds. Each impact detonated with virulent toxins, but each one seemed only to make the mutating beasts stronger. Only the flames were hurting them, and their supra-engineered flesh was potent fuel to the fire.

‘Lucius!’ screamed Fabius. ‘Help me! Save the gene-samples!’

Lucius had no interest in obeying the orders of the likes of Fabius, but reasoned that being owed a favour by someone with the Apothecary’s talents might be no bad thing. He swung himself from the gurney and scanned the workbenches lining the walls for the most useful-looking piece of apparatus, something that might fit the description.

At length he decided upon a silver cryo-storage case fixed to the wall by a series of coolant pipes and monitoring cables. Lucius fought past the flames, his armour proof against the worst of the heat, but he wore no helmet and the skin of his scarred face was blistering in the heat, and what little hair remained on his skull was burned away, never to return.

The pain was sublime.

One of the terata fell, pierced through by Fabius’s lethal maul, its body collapsing under the weight of its uncontrollable mutations. The other was aflame from head to foot, the flesh running from its twisted bones like hot wax. Fabius shot it in the head, and its spine cracked as an evolutionary spurt broke it apart.

Lucius took hold of the storage case and ripped it from the wall. Hot fluids sprayed him from the severed feed lines and the biological stink of it was a combination of ammoniac piss and organic waste. The sides of the box were red hot, and he roared in pain even as his mind lit up with pleasure.

‘Go!’ shouted Fabius, pushing through the laboratory as the flames spread to the drums of explosive elements. Thudding blasts from deeper in the apothecarion shook the chamber and sheets of billowing flame roared towards them.

Lucius turned and ran for the exit, following Fabius out into the corridor beyond.

Fabius hammered the door mechanism, and the armoured shutter slammed down. Even through the blast-shielded plasteel, Lucius could feel the intense heat and the percussive detonation of chemical vats.

‘Quickly!’ snapped Fabius. ‘The gene-samples, give them to me. They need to be kept frozen or they become non-viable.’

Lucius set down the cryo-storage case and disengaged the hermetic seal. Vapour spilled from the case as the upper half of the container slid clear. Fabius worked feverishly on his heavily modified narthecium gauntlet, opening a cylindrical vacuum flask capable of holding a number of sample tubes.

Lucius saw a row of twelve zygote tubes, some misted with heat damage and others cracked and leaking. Illuminators ran the length of the case, one for each tube. All but one glowed an angry, useless red.

‘Give it to me!’ shouted Fabius. ‘Now.’

Lucius unsnapped the last tube, its smooth metallic surface scorched and warped, yet the genetic material inside it miraculously still viable. Fabius snatched the tube from his grasp and twisted the pressure cap onto the receiver socket of his narthecium. The mechanism hissed with pressure differential and the containment level dropped until the zygote tube was emptied.

‘Only one,’ said Fabius in bitter disappointment, hurling the zygote tube down the corridor in frustration. ‘All that work, all that time spent, and only one survives.’

‘What happened in there?’ asked Lucius.

Fabius waved away his question. ‘Nothing of any concern to the likes of you, swordsman. I could ask you the same thing. When the Phoenician brought you to me you were cold and dead. How is it that you live?’

Lucius shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Death doesn’t want me yet.’

Fabius gave a short bark of laughter, grim and humourless.

‘Perhaps I could learn something from you then,’ said the Apothecary, staring at him with predatory malice. Lucius rose to his feet, sensing that to remain here would be dangerous. He walked away from the burning ruin of the apothecarion without looking back. By the time he reached a junction in the corridor, he felt stronger and more powerful than ever before, a dark prince among men.

Something crunched beneath his boot and he reached down to lift the empty zygote tube Fabius had thrown away. Its surface was black and yellow with heat damage, but a line of text could still be seen etched onto its side.

Lucius held it up to the glow of the lumens, but whatever had been written there was mostly illegible.

It looked like a name, but one he could only partially make out.

‘Hon… Sou,’ he read.

AFTERWORD

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most in writing about the traitor primarchs is delving deeper into why they turned from the Emperor and embraced treachery. To walk alongside Fulgrim as he descended into madness and to have stood beside Magnus as his world burned was incredibly satisfying, but they were primarchs who fell through trying to do the right thing. With those primarchs, I’d taken pains to make them sympathetic and have their falls portrayed in a way that made them tragic rather than simply treacherous.

But with Angel Exterminatus, I had a chance to tell the story of a primarch who’d gone over to Horus without high-minded notions of perfection or raising mankind to a new psychic awareness. Perturabo willingly embraced betrayal because he couldn’t see a way out of the rut he’d been driven into and the genocide he’d unleashed. Guilt and shame are powerful motivators, and to avoid facing them, the path of least resistance is often the one that takes you deeper into trouble.

When I was planning this book’s outline, I conceived it as a spiritual sequel to Fulgrim, a continuation of the Emperor’s Children’s story, but the more I wrote and the more it opened up to me, the more I realised that it wasn’t their story at all. Sure, they’re major players in the narrative, but this is well and truly Perturabo’s story.

Here was a primarch who found himself allied to the Warmaster without having been plied with obvious seductions of Chaos or the lures placed before primarchs like Angron and Mortarion. Why did a previously honourable warrior like Perturabo choose to destroy what he had helped build? That’s what’s at the heart of Angel Exterminatus, where we see portions of the Iron Warriors back story emerge over the course of their association with the Emperor’s Children, a slow unveiling of the deep wound in their psyche.

It’s a story that reminds us that even though the Warmaster’s forces are allied, old rivalries and divisions that existed between the Legions are still there and are only ever likely to get worse. And Fulgrim’s willingness to sacrifice his brother for the sake of his own selfish wants is a measure of how thoroughly he’s embraced the Ruinous Powers.

The Dark Prince is a demanding master, but the Lord of Iron is well-named.

And now Perturabo has a score to settle.

Graham McNeill
May 2012 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GRAHAM MCNEILL has written more than twenty novels for Black Library. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Originally hailing from Scotland, Graham now lives and works in Nottingham.

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