‘You know what this is?’ asked the Apothecary, and Cassander did not like the sudden confidence in his voice.
‘I don’t care,’ said Cassander. ‘I can still kill you, sword or no sword.’
‘This is the anathame,’ said Fabius, turning the blade and lifting it close to his lips. ‘The kinebrach blade that brought down the great Horus.’
‘It’s just a sword,’ said Cassander, throwing himself at Fabius.
The Apothecary whispered something he didn’t hear and swung the blade at him. It was a poor cut, one Cassander was easily able to deflect with his forearm. The blade caught the edge of his shoulder, nicking the skin. A tiny bead of blood welled in the cut, but then Cassander was past the blade and had his hands wrapped around Fabius’s throat.
He slammed Fabius against the wall and the sword fell to the floor as the Chirurgeon machine jerked to life, its multi-jointed arms stabbing down into his shoulders with blades, snapping pincers and invasive drills. Blood sprayed from the wounds, but the pain only drove Cassander on. Fabius grinned, the tendons in his neck bulging like steel hawsers as blood-flecked spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth and his black eyes bulged in his cadaverous features. He seemed to be enjoying the sensation of being choked to death.
Cassander spat in his face, but an instant later he was on his knees and screaming.
A supernova of unimaginable agony enveloped his entire body, spreading from the insignificant cut on his shoulder to wrap his flesh in the worst pain he had ever known. His blood was afire, his organs imploding and his bones cracking to powder. Every pain that could be conceived poured into Cassander’s body, the very worst agonies and the most inhuman tortures. They multiplied and combined, tearing his body into pieces, breaking him into his constituent parts and inflicting the same procession of agonies on each portion.
Cassander rolled onto his back, retching and shaking and sweating and screaming.
‘It’s exquisite, isn’t it?’ said Fabius. ‘At first I thought the sentience of the blade was entirely mad, that all it could do was kill. But I have discovered that it enjoys suffering too, that its effects can be tailored if you know how to ask.’
‘Kill me,’ hissed Cassander through bloodied, gritted teeth.
Fabius shook his head. ‘No, this was just a lesson. You are far too precious to kill, but not so valuable that I can’t let you suffer.’
Cassander felt the pain begin to ebb, but he still couldn’t move. So far was he beyond his pain threshold that he could not have risen even had the Emperor himself commanded it. He shivered, mewling like a newborn as shadows loomed above him. Flesh-cloaked servitors with static-hissing mouths, sutured eyes, patchwork bodies and limbs not their own lifted him from the ground as Fabius replaced the flint-bladed sword on the wall.
‘Put him with the terata,’ ordered Fabius.
Wayland had travelled close to regions of space where the strange realm of the warp bled into realspace before, but there was something about this storm that felt wholly different. It filled the viewing bay of the bridge, casting a pall of unnatural violet light throughout the vaulted compartment. Like most ships of the X Legion, the Sisypheum was as functional in its design as any engineering space. Fewer than half of the servitor stations were occupied, and the empty ones were scorched and black.
Frater Thamatica stood at the podium normally occupied by the vessel’s Master of Engines. The Master had been immolated by secondary damage inflicted by an Alpha Legion broadside. Likewise, the Master of Ordnance was dead, and the half-machine Vermanus Cybus – the senior surviving Morlock veteran – manned weapons control.
Never a place of irrelevant chatter at the best of times, the Sisypheum’s bridge was sombre under the warp storm’s relentless gaze. Too many had died here in the escape from Isstvan for it to be any other way, and even Thamatica kept his mordant humour under lock and key when serving on the bridge.
Wayland probed the outer front of the bleeding storm from the surveying station as Cadmus Tyro, standing at the captain’s control lectern, guided them towards the blistering edge of unlight that frothed from the outermost regions.
Most such spatial anomalies waxed and waned over time, like the tempests that raged over the seismotropic continental plates of Medusa. Such storms were fierce in their wrath, devastating settlements and wiping out entire clan branches, yet they were transient things that could be endured or avoided with enough warning.
But something of this storm spoke of permanence, as though it were only ever going to get bigger. If it had a history, no one aboard the Sisypheum knew it, and none of their surviving cartographical data accorded it more than a wholly unremarkable name that utterly failed to convey its dreadful permanence. Yet the more Wayland looked at it, the more it seemed as though it looked back, like a malignant presence set in the flesh of space to look down endlessly on the realms of men.
Something as dreadful as this would soon earn a name of note, but Wayland shied away from thinking of one, knowing that to name a thing was to give it power.
The golden-sheened eagle dropped from the upper vaults of the bridge and swooped down to land on the shoulder of Cadmus Tyro. It flexed its wings with a rustle of metal feathers, and shifted its bulk from foot to foot. Even this mechanised creature with no autonomous consciousness seemed to sense something grotesque from this storm front. Wayland checked himself. He was framing his points of reference in emotional superstition and attributing anthropomorphic behaviours to a soulless creature. That was a poor mode of thought for an Iron Father.
‘Any sign of a clear route through?’ asked Tyro, reaching up to stroke the bird.
Wayland shook his head. ‘Not that I can see,’ he said. ‘It’s a solid storm front.’
‘Frater Wayland, I hope for your sake you’re not telling me that we’ve pushed the engines to breaking point to get here ahead of the traitors for nothing.’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Wayland, understanding Tyro’s frustration, but wishing he could better clamp down on his emotional response to it.
‘When will you know?’
‘I won’t until the guide gets to the bridge.’
‘Thoic, Numen and Bombastus are bringing him up now,’ said Thamatica, speaking to head off further confrontation. ‘We’ll know more when they arrive. Either way, we should be able to collect some fascinating immeteorological data in there. Assuming we survive, of course.’
‘This isn’t a fact-finding mission, Thamatica,’ said Tyro.
Thamatica’s reply was cut off as the main access doors to the bridge opened and the booming footfalls of a Dreadnought broke the solemn silence of the bridge. Septus Thoic and Ignatius Numen walked either side of a slender figure in a shimmering robe of fuliginous hues of black. His hood was drawn up over his face, but there was no mistaking the alien poise of his race. Though he was counted as an ally, the Morlocks still had their guns drawn and held across their chests.
Behind the guide came a thunderously proportioned warrior, towering and armoured in heavy plating that had once been black, but which was now almost entirely stripped of paint by gunfire and flames. Brother Bombastus marched with mechanical weight, his Dreadnought body wheezing and leaking from the numerous patch-jobs and repairs done to his enormous body. A retro-fitted missile rack was rotated down over the rear plates of his armour, but the storm bolter slung beneath his enormous powered fist and the perforated nozzles of the monstrous flame cannons on his other arm were aimed squarely at the guide.
The guide was not a prisoner of the Iron Hands, but nor was he entirely trusted.
Trust was in short supply in the galaxy, and alien species were yet to earn humanity’s.
‘Here he is,’ growled Bombastus, the tearing fingers of his fist snapping and rotating in their housing. Dubbed ‘Karaashi’ after the peak into which Ferrus Manus had crashed in Medusan legend, Bombastus had been a warrior of great passions and furious charges. With a temper to match the bellicose temperament of the v
olcano and a love of fiery destruction, the name had stuck, even after his interment in a Dreadnought sarcophagus. If anything, the transition from mortal flesh to iron had only increased his aggression in battle.
Escorted by the Morlocks, the guide walked to stand before the captain.
‘Captain Tyro,’ he said, his voice soft and empty of emotion. ‘It is an honour.’
‘Remove your hood,’ said Tyro. ‘I don’t like it when people conceal their faces. It means they have something to hide.’
‘As you wish,’ said the guide, reaching up to pull back the velvet of his cloak.
Their guide was eldar, with sharply defined features, generous lips, and shimmering eyes of glacial blue. Wayland moved from the surveyor station to stand alongside him.
‘What’s it called?’ asked Tyro.
‘He is called Varuchi Vohra,’ said Wayland. ‘And your tongue will not shrivel up if you talk to him directly.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ snapped Tyro. ‘But I have met his kind on the battlefield before and seen Medusan lives ended on their blades. I don’t trust him.’
‘Then why are we here?’ demanded Wayland. ‘There is no way into the storm without him.’
Varuchi Vohra spoke again. ‘I assure you, Captain Tyro, I mean you and your warriors no harm. Quite the contrary. It is in my interests to stop your enemies as much as it is yours.’
‘Convince me,’ said Tyro. ‘Wayland’s told me why, but I want to hear it from you.’
‘As Sabik Wayland has said, I am a scholar, a poet and an explorer amongst other things. I belong to an academic order of my people known as the Ebonite Archymsts. We study the stars and the matter of the universe from which we are all derived. I know this region of space intimately, for I was the first of my kind to sing of its currents and its tempests.’
‘Sing them?’ asked Tyro.
‘It is the closest approximation I can give for how we communicate and store information,’ said Vohra. ‘It takes decades of training in our order’s shrine to master the technique, but I suspect you have neither the time nor inclination to learn of it.’
‘At least we agree on that,’ said Tyro. ‘I’m still not clear on why you’re helping us.’
‘The warriors you call “traitors” are dangerous beyond imagining. Not just to your race and your empire, but to all life. They serve the Primordial Annihilator, though only a handful of them truly appreciate what that means. Your goal and mine are in harmony, but we must not hesitate or our enemies will reach the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis before us.’
‘Amon ny-shak Kaelis? What does that mean?’
‘In an extinct dialect of my people, it means the Forge of Sun and Stars.’
‘And you say they have a guide like you?’ asked Tyro.
‘They do,’ agreed Vohra. ‘A renegade who was cast from our order. My brother.’
‘What do you have to do to be exiled from a bunch of scholars?’ asked Vermanus Cybus with his grating, mechanised tones.
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ said Thamatica. ‘Both the Mechanicum and the Iron Fraternity has threatened me with expulsion many times. Dangerous experiments, radical thinking, untested weaponry, that sort of thing.’
‘The amount of times you’ve almost blown us up, I almost wish they had,’ said Cybus.
A ghost of a smile hovered on the lips of the eldar as he continued. ‘Frater Thamatica is correct – my brother developed an unhealthy interest in the darker aspects of knowledge, the things that are kept hidden for good reason.’
‘Things like what?’ asked Thamatica. ‘Give me an example.’
‘You know I cannot do that, Frater Thamatica,’ said Varuchi Vohra. ‘Suffice to say that there are things in this galaxy that should forever remain shrouded in the past. What lies in the heart of the citadel is but one of them.’
‘And this renegade can guide the traitors to this citadel?’ asked Cybus, the red optics of his eyes unwavering in their scrutiny.
‘He can, but he does not know the paths I know,’ said Vohra. ‘The Paths Above are safer, but the Paths Below are quicker. With my help, you would steal a march on your foes through the spaces that are not warp-touched and arrive at Amon ny-shak Kaelis long before they could hope to reach it.’
‘Our instruments aren’t detecting any break in the storm front,’ said Tyro. ‘We’re not seeing a way in at all, let alone a safe one.’
‘Your instruments are incapable of seeing the Paths Below,’ said Vohra, ‘but they are there.’
‘Captain,’ said Wayland. ‘We don’t have a choice. We have to let Varuchi Vohra guide us.’
‘You said yourself there was no clear way in,’ snapped Tyro and the mech-eagle shivered its wings at his sudden outburst. ‘He could fly us straight into a warp squall and destroy us.’
‘He could, but why would he?’ countered Wayland. ‘He would die too, and I don’t think he sought us out to kill us in such an elaborate way. The Iron Warriors and the Emperor’s Children will be here soon, so we have two options: trust him or give up.’
It was an obvious gambit, and Tyro saw through it in a heartbeat.
‘You think you can goad me into giving the order you want?’
‘No, but it’s that stark a choice,’ said Wayland. ‘And we don’t have time for a debate.’
Tyro glowered, but Wayland already knew the captain would agree to letting the eldar scholar guide them. To give up was anathema to the Iron Hands. A task once begun was never abandoned, even in the face of insurmountable odds. That mindset had kept them fighting in the face of their grief, in the wake of their loss and against the pall of desperation that sought to engulf the remnants of the Legion.
Even so, for long moments, Cadmus Tyro stared at the billowing clouds raging at the edge of the storm surges and thunderheads of malignant light. He too was well aware of the dangers inherent in attempting to navigate such a dangerous region of space. Ships avoided such anomalies, especially when they bled through from the unknown alternate universe in which they existed. To entrust his ship and everyone on it to a xenos species known for their treacherous wiles and unpredictable nature went against every warning voice in his skull.
But what choice did he have?
‘Take us in, Varuchi Vohra,’ said Tyro. ‘But know this. If I think, even for an instant, that you are betraying us, I will have Bombastus here burn you to ashes. If you are leading us to our deaths within this warp storm, you will die first. Am I being clear?’
‘The warning is entirely clear, but it is unnecessary,’ said Vohra.
‘Not to me,’ said Tyro.
ELEVEN
A Heavy Burden
The Dodekatheon
A Memory of Flesh
Nearly two thousand Iron Warriors stood in unmoving ranks before Kroeger, and the idea that they were his to command staggered him. Since leaving Hydra Cordatus, a moment that had given him an un-accountable sense of relief, he had wrestled with the idea that he was a warsmith of the IV Legion. Orders were his to give, and lives his to command. Until now his only power of life and death had been that which rested on the edge of his chainblade or in the magazine of his bolter.
Now his very words would decide whether men would live or die.
Part of him relished that power, but the bulk of him resisted the inevitable distance that would put between him and the bloody edge of war. His weapons were as much a part of him as his hands and heart. Only in a swirling, bloody melee could a warrior ever feel truly alive. Life was at its most distilled in the spaces between the blades and bullets.
Behind the ranked-up warriors were squadrons of armoured vehicles: Rhinos, Land Raiders, Mastodons and hybrid machines fashioned by the Pneumachina from the wreckage of damaged vehicles and the strange machinery torn from the heart of the dismantled Cadmean Citadel. Since reaching the edge of the warp anomaly, the Pneumachina had worked with feverish intensity in their sealed forges, crafting ever more lethal-looking machines, as if just being in the shadow of th
is mysterious region had somehow empowered their labours. Some of their creations were blatant in their purpose, little more than towering gun-carriages or infantry crushers, but others were less obvious, festooned with caged machinery and dangerous-looking devices that seemed to serve no clear purpose.
Kroeger marched down the length of the ranked warriors, a vision of burnished iron with gold and jet chevroning. These warriors had brought countless worlds to ruin, toppled the fortresses of the mightiest empires, both human and alien, but who among the Imperium of Man knew any of their names?
At Kroeger’s insistence, none of his warriors wore their battle helms, each man’s stoic face staring straight ahead in iron unity. For the most part they had dark hair, close-cropped to the skull, but here and there he saw a warrior with the long scalp locks common amongst those from Lochos, the tattooed whorls of the Delchonians, the blood-tinted hair of his own folk from the Ithearak Mountains and the forked beards favoured by the Vedric Tyrpechs. He would know the men who fought for him, he would learn their names and tell them that he knew their deeds, for how else would they fight and die for him?
He looked closely at their faces as he passed.
Hard features, worn smooth by genetics, enhancement and war-won knowledge. The Iron Warriors knew the craft of death like few other Legions, and they had made uncounted sacrifices in service of the ideals of the Imperium. These men were mighty, they had fought to bring the galaxy to compliance. Their reward was to be cast aside in favour of those Legions with greater rolls of honour, Legions that had prospered on the broken backs of the Iron Warriors.
Heroes of the Ultramarines, the Blood Angels and the Imperial Fists were lauded and immortalised in art and verse, but where were the parades for the Iron Warriors?
Where was their glory?
The answer was quickly forthcoming: in ashes on Olympia. Blown to the wind from a billion worldwide pyres. Those who should have clamoured for tales of its crusading sons were all dead: the Legion had burned them all, and the despair of that day was etched into their skin, like ashes smeared on the cheeks of grieving widows and faithless sons.