‘The armies of Hresh-selain, rebuilt in secret and scattered in dimensions beyond the reach of the eldar, finally assembled and struck back at their conquerors. With their king at their head, the Hresh-selain slaughtered the eldar by the tens of thousand in battles that left entire regions of the galaxy uninhabitable for millennia.
‘The eldar were mighty, yes, and their warriors peerless, but the armies of the Hresh-selain outnumbered the stars, and though each battle saw the dead number in the millions, it was but a drop in the ocean to the full might of their grotesque battle hosts.’
Fulgrim had by now unsheathed his sword and the golden blade drew fresh gasps of astonishment and roars of approval. Fulgrim spun and leapt like a dancer, yet Perturabo saw the fierce skill in his every move, the lethal grace that had made his brother a matchless swordsman, beyond even the technical ability of Guilliman or the enraged purity of Angron.
‘The eldar were on the verge of defeat, and the gods wept to see their favoured children so humbled. Once again Eldanesh cried for his mother goddess to aid him and she was shamed enough by his pleas to beg her brother-husband, the war god Kaela Mensha Khaine, to fight alongside the eldar. Khaine refused, for he had ever been jealous of Asuryan’s brood and relished the sight of their pain. But when Isha offered him the sanctity of her once-virgin flesh, the war god relented and took what she offered without heed for her life. No sooner had he planted his bloody seed in Isha’s belly, than a fiery avatar tore its way from her womb with claws of blood and a hunger for destruction beyond even the war god’s power to unleash…’
Perturabo felt the audience’s terror at the idea of so monstrous a creature, though what the allegory of legend actually meant in terms of real history was impossible to tell.
‘Isha’s death scream was her warchild’s birth scream, a battle cry that stilled the very heart of the galaxy in fear and echoes in the hearts of all who spill blood to this day. The eldar knew this being as Maelsha’eil Atherakhia, a name unspoken by their race, but which lives in their withered hearts as a gnawing fear.’
‘What does the name mean, brother?’ asked Perturabo. ‘I know the tongue of the eldar, but those words are unfamiliar to me.’
Fulgrim paused in the telling of the tale, his face a brittle mask that looked to be on the edge of violence at this interruption.
‘It is an ancient name, my lord,’ said Karuchi Vohra. ‘One never spoken aloud. It means the beautiful eagle from hell that brings the end of all things. Which translates imperfectly as–’
‘The Angel Exterminatus,’ finished Perturabo.
‘Then might I continue?’ snapped Fulgrim, still poised on the brink of hostility.
Perturabo nodded and Fulgrim slipped back into the tale as though he had not spoken.
‘The Angel Exterminatus joined the fight against the Hresh-selain, and mighty were the slaughters it wreaked across the galaxy. Eldanesh welcomed its aid, even as he realised his own cowardice had caused the death of his mother goddess. Ulthanesh was broken by the price they had paid for this newborn creature of destruction, a beautiful creature that inspired love and terror in equal measure. Truly the Angel Exterminatus was an eldar demigod like no other, blessed with the most beguiling countenance, the greatest strength and the highest intellect. What the gods knew, it knew, and what power they feared to wield, it unleashed with a song in its heart.
‘While Ulthanesh quailed at the power of the Angel Exterminatus, Eldanesh grew to love the stink of blood in his nostrils, the smell of charred flesh and the sight of carrion picking the flesh of the dead. He grew jealous of the power so casually wielded by the Angel Exterminatus and plotted to bring it to ruin once the war against the Hresh-selain was done. Yet even as his people’s enemies retreated in the face of the Angel Exterminatus, Eldanesh’s desire to utterly destroy the Hresh-selain grew to become an obsession. Only the total extinction of his foes would satisfy such bloodlust, and he bade the Angel Exterminatus to craft weapons that would wipe their worlds from time and memory. Blind to Eldanesh’s madness, the Angel Exterminatus agreed, and forged weapons of such power that their very concept drove those who learned of them to take their own lives, rather than live in a galaxy where such things were conceived.’
Now Perturabo’s interest was well and truly snared. Whether this was embellished allegory or wild fantasy didn’t matter. This was the heart of the matter and the crux upon which his indulgence hung.
‘To fashion such weapons was no little matter,’ said Fulgrim. ‘And the Angel Exterminatus was weakened by their creation, for much of its power was bound into their destructive hearts. Exhausted by its labours, it sank into a great slumber on an ancient battleground, leaving Eldanesh to revel in what it had created. But Eldanesh saw what the Angel Exterminatus had wrought and despaired, for he now understood that such weapons were an abomination. The veils of his madness parted, and he saw what he had become and what he had lost in his quest for victory. He summoned Ulthanesh to his side, and offering great prayers to Asuryan, they sought to banish the Angel Exterminatus to the netherworlds beyond the walls of space and time and consign it to the hells from whence it had been conceived. Sensing their intent, the Angel awoke from its rest and fought back.’
Fulgrim hacked his sword through the air as he spoke, each stroke theatrically desperate, as though he fought for his life against unseen opponents that were steadily wearing him down. Breathless and dishevelled, Fulgrim dropped to one knee, his golden sword held out before him, a perfect rendition of a beleaguered hero, bowed, but unbroken. Perturabo had long since tuned out the more mythic elements of the tale, focusing instead on what the truth behind the legend might be.
Fulgrim rose unsteadily to his feet, as though pushing against an invisible force that sought to keep him down. ‘Such a battle had never yet been seen in the ages of the galaxy. A being with the power of a god assailed by its wayward heirs, and no mercy was to be found in their hearts as blood flowed and the very warp and weft of the galaxy was torn asunder by the violence of their conflict. None now live who remember how long these demigods fought, but against the power of the Angel Exterminatus, Eldanesh and Ulthanesh could not hope to prevail. Both were driven to their knees, and faced the final wrath of the very thing they had helped to create. But before the Angel Exterminatus could slay them, Asuryan himself intervened to save his foolish sons. The Angel Exterminatus was a god, but Asuryan had ruled the heavens for an age before it had sprung from Isha’s bloody carcass, and his power was terrible to behold. He finished what Eldanesh and Ulthanesh had begun, and ripped the galaxy apart, folding the tortured skeins of space and time around the Angel Exterminatus and sealing it away in a prison from which there could be no escape, and no reprieve from the terror it had unleashed.’
Perturabo hid his scorn at such a deus ex machina ending to the legend, but as Fulgrim cast his eyes heavenwards, he knew what was coming next.
‘Behold the ancient prison of the Angel Exterminatus!’ screamed Fulgrim, thrusting his blade towards the fallout-wracked clouds. Though kilometres thick, a halo of light parted them for long enough for the night’s blackness to become visible.
And in that slice of darkness, the ugly bruise of the star maelstrom.
‘Range confirmation?’
‘Five hundred and six metres.’
Sharrowkyn used the tip of his right thumb to minutely adjust the focus of his sight. The position he had selected was an optimum kill site, in line with prevailing winds to prevent projectile drift that would alter his shot’s trajectory. Thermo-auguries on his cooled rifle sheath measured the surrounding temperature and blinked a correction to compensate for what lift the warm air would impart to the large-bore steel needle.
Likewise, the strength of the planet’s geomagnetic field factored into Sharrowkyn’s calculations when deciding upon the angle of his shot.
In his mind’s eye, any conventional target was already dead.
But a primarch was no conventional target.
&nbs
p; ‘As soon as I take this shot, we go,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘We get out, and we get out fast. Even if I miss, you understand?’
‘I understand,’ said Wayland. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t go berserk and charge in single-handed.’
Sharrowkyn sighted on his target’s skull, slowing his heart rate and letting his breathing even out as he applied the tiniest pressure to the trigger. Ready icons winked to life on his helm, a dotted line tracing the route his needle would take.
Right through a primarch’s eye.
‘Taking the shot,’ he said.
The crowd bayed at the sight of the leering smear of unlight and tortured spacetime in the heavens and Perturabo despised them for their easily bought wonder. They had no idea the danger it represented, the dreadful insidious canker that wormed its way into the heart. Like a wasting sickness of the soul, its appearance abraded all joy and all life from those who saw it, and Perturabo had seen it for a very long time indeed.
‘The great star maelstrom!’ cried Fulgrim, like a fiery preacher of a bygone age. ‘A wound ripped in the galaxy to imprison a godlike being by a race who would not accept that their time was at an end. This is where the greatest glory and the greatest shame of the eldar lies bound by chains that Asuryan decreed never be undone until the end of the universe itself. And so it has been from that day to this…’
Fulgrim paused, savouring the deliciousness of what he was about to say and letting the moment of anticipation build until Perturabo feared the audience might riot if he kept silent much longer.
‘But Asuryan is forgotten, his people broken by their own weaknesses, and we pay no heed to the decrees of a failed god. The way is open for those with the boldness to act.’
Fulgrim sheathed his sword, his eyes fevered, his skin sheened in perspiration.
His chest heaved with the effort of storytelling, as though he had played host to the spirit of Thalia herself. Perturabo saw through the fiction of his exhaustion, knowing his brother was playing to the crowd’s expectation and the grandeur of the amphitheatre.
‘While the Angel Exterminatus sleeps, we will storm Asuryan’s gaol and take for ourselves the weapons forged in ancient times!’ roared Fulgrim.
Perturabo saw the tiny puff of blood appear on Fulgrim’s skull a second before he heard the crack of the shot. Fulgrim’s black eyes rolled back into his skull.
‘No!’ cried Perturabo as his brother dropped to the flagstones of the arena, his ashen face masked with blood.
‘Go!’ shouted Sharrowkyn, already moving and collapsing the long-range scope of the carbine. He turned and ran for the shadowed cloister of statues that ringed the outer circumference of the great amphitheatre as pandemonium erupted behind them. Baying cries of horror and anger echoed all around them, amplified tenfold by the structure’s acoustical genius, but neither Sharrowkyn nor Wayland had time to savour them.
The hunters would already be on their trail.
‘Did you kill him?’ asked Wayland as they reached their exit point, where coiled lengths of high-tensile wire were hidden in the shadows.
‘I hit him where I meant to,’ said Sharrowkyn, looping his wire around the neck of a goddess statue before attaching it to a metal ring on his armour. ‘Whether that’s enough to kill him is another matter. Drop now, talk later.’
Both warriors turned back to face the centre of the amphitheatre, balancing on the lip of a carved stone ledge hundreds of metres above the ground.
‘Ready?’ asked Sharrowkyn.
‘Ready,’ confirmed Wayland.
‘Drop.’
Sharrowkyn pushed out from the ledge and fell in a curving parabola down the face of the building. He controlled the rapid descent with his heavy-duty gauntlets, slamming back into the face of the structure halfway down. Marble cracked beneath his boots and fell in a splintered white rain to the ground below. Wayland was still higher than him, his jumps shorter. Sharrowkyn jumped again, turning in mid-flight to face the ground as it rushed towards him.
Crowds were already flooding from the amphitheatre in a panic. Perhaps they feared Imperial retribution, a warfleet that had approached in secret and not fallen foul of betrayal.
Would that were the case, thought Sharrowkyn.
Shots rang out, blasting chunks from the carved bas-relief above him, and he saw three warriors in the dull, unpainted armour of the Iron Warriors with their weapons trained upwards. Sharrowkyn arrested his descent as he snapped the wire from the metal ring. He fell the last twenty metres to the ground, landing with his weapon unlimbered and ready to fire.
He dropped to one knee and put a burst of needles through the visor of the nearest Iron Warrior. The traitor fell without a sound and Sharrowkyn put a single tox-round through the grilled faceplate of the next before rolling aside as a tearing blast of bolter fire chewed up where he’d landed. Another rapid spray of needles punched through the thin neck joint of the third Iron Warrior and blood sheeted down his bare metal breastplate as he toppled.
Wayland crashed to the ground next to him, and Sharrowkyn winced at the awkwardness of the Iron Hand’s landing.
‘A Corrivane novitiate has more grace in the air than you, brother,’ said Sharrowkyn.
Wayland grunted a reply and ran south as the sounds of panic spilled from the amphitheatre with the baying mobs of enemy followers and warriors. Sharrowkyn set off after him, following the course they had plotted en route to their clandestine observation of the two traitor primarchs. What had been planned as a fact-hunting mission had become one of assassination.
They moved through the debris of the theatre’s ultra-rapid construction, a city of vast spoil heaps, trenches, material stores and towering construction engines. Abandoned worker camps and supply depots flashed past on either side as they made their escape. Amid the sounds of terror surrounding the amphitheatre, Sharrowkyn heard the unmistakable sounds of pursuit. A life lived behind enemy lines had given him a preternatural sense for being hunted. For all that he hated the traitors and all they had done, he didn’t forget that these were warriors of the Legions. They were just as deadly and just as proficient as any of the Emperor’s warriors.
But they had never fought a Raven Guard and an Iron Hand like this.
‘They’re coming,’ he shouted to Wayland.
‘Blowing the first charge.’
A thunderous detonation shook the ground as Wayland triggered the first of many explosives seeded along their escape route. A cascade of dirt and broken body parts rained down as the echoes of the thermic charge faded.
Sharrowkyn skidded to a halt behind an overturned skip-loader, resting his rifle on the battered metal lip of the hopper. A mob of men and women in garish robes emerged from the shadow of a heap of discarded rock debris, and Sharrowkyn put the first six down with as many shots. The rest faltered in their advance, but kept coming even as he killed another five.
‘Displace!’ ordered Wayland. Sharrowkyn snapped up his rifle and ran.
Screams of hate erupted at the sight of him and a ragged volley of poorly aimed shots chased him down. A chugging blast of bolter fire ripped through the mob, tearing a handful to shreds and blowing limbs from yet more. Where Sharrowkyn’s fire was more efficiently lethal, the savage roar of Wayland’s bolter cowed the mortals more effectively.
Sharrowkyn reached Wayland’s position behind a piled heap of steel rebar cages and slapped his shoulder guard, taking up a covering position as he heard the roar of engines and the thunder of booming footsteps that shook the earth.
‘Rhinos,’ he said.
‘No, Land Raiders,’ answered Wayland.
‘They’re looking to box us in,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘We need to keep moving.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Go,’ said Sharrowkyn, shouldering his rifle as the weight of fire intensified around them.
Wayland ran for the narrow cut between two pyramidal heaps of broken stone and loose rubble. Shots burst around Sharrowkyn, and fragments scored his armour as the angry roar of
a madly revving engine echoed from somewhere nearby.
‘Sharrowkyn!’ shouted Wayland as another buried explosive ripped through their pursuers.
‘Cover me,’ he shouted back.
Bolter shots punched through the screaming mob, and Sharrowkyn ran to join Wayland.
He risked a backwards glance in time to see a pair of Land Raiders crest a metallic dune and crash back down with earth-shattering slams of iron. Their hulls were maddening swirls of purple and pink, organically scaled as though clad in serpent skin. Glistening banners trailed from their topsides and smoke dispensers trailed a mist of iridescent fumes in their wake. The sight of them was so bizarre that Sharrowkyn’s step faltered at their appearance.
It was a hesitation that saved his life.
Flaring beams of incandescent las-fire pulverised the stack of rubble ahead of him, sending a column of ash and steel mushrooming skywards. Sharrowkyn was hurled through the air and landed hard on stacked entrenching tools. He rolled back to his feet and set off again as another syncopated blast blew out the ground behind him.
Sharrowkyn dropped into a wide trench bedded with rail tracks as shots spanked from the stone and earth and the rapid spray of heavy-calibre bolters sawed the air. One shot clipped the edge of his breastplate and spun him around. He rose, kept running. He looked up to see bulky figures in Legion warplate moving along the top ridges of stone and excavated earth either side. Mass reactive fire stitched the earth around him, but the stealth upgrades worked into his battle armour were throwing off the targeting mechanisms of the enemy guns.
That’s what happens when you rely on machines and not a good eye.
A shot punched down into his shoulder guard, and he stumbled, weaving left and right as the screaming roar of the Land Raiders swelled behind him. He heard steelwork groan and buckle, the screech of tracks tearing over debris and the coughing howl of engines. The wide trench opened out into a circular materials depot, heaped with blocks of shaped stone, permacrete in moisture-proof vacuum sacks, steel reinforcement towers and rows of giant pipes the size of a Titan’s gun barrels.