Angel Exterminatus
It wasn’t at first apparent what he was seeing, because his mind refused to accept it.
But the more he looked, the more it became impossible to deny.
Branthan lay as he always had, cold and unmoving, with the Heart of Iron wrapped around his body like a squatting mechanical parasite. His limbs were still wrecked and broken, his chest ruined by the four mass-reactive craters punched through his torso.
No, not four.
Tyro saw only three bolter wounds.
TWELVE
The Palace Besieged
A Taste for Profligacy
Bigger Generators
Impervious and impregnable were words spoken by tyrants since the first earthworks of antiquity had been thrown up around their great halls. History told grim tales of how such words were no more than empty boasts, that time and firepower could bring down any wall. No fastness was ever impregnable, no wall impervious, and there was no artifice of man that could not be torn down.
Or so Forrix had always thought.
As Kroeger laid siege to the Emperor’s Palace, he watched with grim amusement as Perturabo fended off his first attacks. For all his initial bluster that he was no warsmith, Kroeger was holding his own, making cautious moves to test his enemy and bold offensives in an attempt to catch him off balance. Perturabo was falling for none of it, and each time it appeared Kroeger might have made some significant gain, a later gambit of the primarch’s would reveal it for the trap it was.
Over-extended thrusts were decapitated and the proxy warriors caught in the pockets quickly surrounded and destroyed. The siege was played out at speed, days passing in minutes as Kroeger’s armies crashed against the walls of the Palace like bloody breakers. The earthworks at Haldwani, long regarded as fundamentally flawed by the Iron Warriors, took every punishment Kroeger could hurl at them, and the Legion warriors manning them even mounted a number of devastating sorties through their fire-blackened gates.
Divisions of men and swaggering mobs of Titans were removed almost as soon as they took to the field of battle. Orbital plates saturated the battlefield with earth-shaking bombardments and emplaced guns swept the Gangetic Plain with hellish pyrostorms in the wake of repeated strafing runs and incendiary barrages.
Kroeger was controlling a continent’s worth of armies single-handedly, and the strain of such a complex command was starting to show. He began to make mistakes. Like a gifted amateur playing a host of regicide grandmasters at once, he could not hope to see every angle and every riposte to his attacks. Every warsmith in the hall gathered round, their own battle simulations now meaningless in the face of this titanic conflict.
The Petitioners’ City fell to Kroeger’s armies, flattened to a rocky desert as it became a battleground of titanic war engines. Its dispossessed inhabitants fought alongside the Legions of the Emperor, rising up in a great ragtag host to defend their demolished homes and ruined lives. The Navigators’ Quarter vanished in a seething cauldron of flame, a sudden drop assault contained within its boundaries and incinerated under a relentless barrage of Imperial shells and counter-attacking battle robots. It had been a baited trap, and now the foremost shock troops of Kroeger’s army had been slaughtered for nothing.
Where the gathered warsmiths had shouted encouragement and heckled in previous iterations of this battle, they now watched in silence, awed at the performance of their primarch as he conducted the music of battle like a virtuoso. Where Kroeger struggled to keep up with his available forces, the avenues of attack opening or denied him, Perturabo had no such trouble. His forces came smoothly to him, his every opportunity seized, his every setback transformed from a potential disaster to a superlative counter-strike.
It was an unequal struggle, but Kroeger wasn’t about to give in.
Brahmaputra, the great avenue into the heart of the Palace, was held by a golden army of Custodians, and Kroeger contented himself by pinning them in place, while launching attacks across the canyons of the Karnali and the bleak precincts of the City of Sight. Far from being an easy route through a benighted region of the Palace, the pyskers’ enclave was held by the Black Sentinels, reinforced by mysterious regiments that went unlabelled on the hololithic projectors.
Falk leaned over and whispered, ‘He’s not doing too well, is he?’
‘Better than I thought he would.’
‘True,’ admitted Falk. ‘You think he could use some help?’
‘Almost certainly,’ said Forrix, nodding towards the Dhawalagiri prospect. ‘But let’s see how he takes on the Custodians’ assault.’
‘What Custodians’ assault? The only ones deployed are the ones at Brahmaputra, and they’re not going anywhere.’
‘Wait and see.’
An unstoppable charge of hundreds of Battle Titans strode up the statue-lined prospects of the Dhawalagiri. To group so many of his mightiest war machines in one assault was risky, but looking at the disposition of forces, Forrix couldn’t blame Kroeger for taking the potentially battle-ending gambit. But Kroeger hadn’t seen what Forrix had.
The ‘Custodes’ pinned in place at Brahmaputra were not Custodes at all, merely a decoy to mask the presence of the Emperor’s praetorians elsewhere. In a sweeping pincer, two golden sickle-bladed sorties swept out from the sunken bartizan towers of the outer precincts of the Dhawalagiri. The artillery that had pounded the great avenue to splintered ruin fell to the vengeful Imperials, and the guns turned on the Titans crashing up the Dhawalagiri like mindless savages sacking the capital of a dying empire.
No sooner had the guns staggered the battle engines than Perturabo launched his iron fist.
Lion’s Gate burst open and a reserve of Titans emerged to do battle, riding out like knights of old with their lances lowered. The Custodians fell on the scrums of infantry supporting the Titans and within moments the Dhawalagiri was a corpse-choked wasteland of dead attackers.
And with the fall of the last war engine the battle was over and the Palace saved.
Kroeger had nothing left to carry the day and he threw his hands up in defeat, angry and elated in the same moment. He looked like he’d fought the Iron Circle in a sparring session.
Once again time unwound and the scene before them reverted to its original setting, but this time there was remarkably little of the Palace to be rebuilt. The previous engagement had seen it reduced to rubble, a gothic ruin of shattered marble, burning glass and molten gold. Perturabo’s defence had preserved all but the most functional of walls.
‘You won, my lord,’ said Kroeger.
‘Of course I won,’ said Perturabo. ‘Dorn is a fool, and wastes time and effort with the idea that everything he has done to the Palace can be undone. He builds a fortress with one hand tied behind his back, thinking that he can put everything back the way it was. Once a thing is broken, it will always be broken, but my brother cannot accept that.’
‘It was an honour to face you, my lord,’ said Kroeger.
Perturabo looked at him strangely, and Forrix saw what was coming a heartbeat before the primarch waved him and Falk forwards.
The primarch shook his head. ‘You think we’re done here?’
‘My lord?’
‘Now it’s my turn to attack,’ said Perturabo.
It was over in moments.
Perturabo’s armies blew their way through the massive earthwork defences at Haldwani and Xigaze. The sky at the top of the world was on fire. Despite the bombardments of the orbital plates and the constant sorties of Stormbirds and the Hawkwings, the Lord of Iron’s Legions advanced, up through the Brahmaputra, along the delta of the Karnali.
Continental firestorms raged across the Gangetic Plain once again.
As they entered the rampart outworks of the Palace, his streaming, screaming multitudes and the striding war machines were greeted by monsoons of firepower. Every emplacement along the Dhawalagiri prospect committed its weapons. Las-fire reached out in neon slashes, annihilating everything it touched. Shells fell like sleet. Titans explode
d, caught fire, collapsed on their faces and crushed the warriors swarming around their heels. Still they came. Lancing beams struck the armour-reinforced walls like lightning. The walls fell. They collapsed like slumping glaciers. Gold-cased bodies spilled out, tumbling down in the deluge.
The Palace began to burn.
Primus Gate fell; Lion’s Gate, subjected to attack from the north; Annapurna Gate. At the Ultimate Gate, Perturabo’s divisions finally sliced into the Palace, slaughtering everyone they found inside. Around every broken gate, the corpses of Titans piled up in vast, jumbled heaps where they had fallen over each other in their desire to breach the walls. The victorious host clambered across their carcasses, pouring into the Palace to fall upon its master and tear him from his golden throne in readiness for the galaxy’s new ruler.
The combined tactical ability of three of the greatest Iron Warriors had singularly failed to keep Perturabo out. A salutory reminder that the master of defence was also the master of attack. Under his command the Palace would be an ironclad fortress, but as his target it was a fragile thing just waiting to be broken open.
Before the attacking red divisions swarmed over the inner precincts of the palace, Perturabo ended the simulation. The holographic elements of the battle faded, leaving only the broad sweep of the sculpted table in its wake. Perturabo leaned over the ruins of the Ultimate Gate and shook his head with a wry grin.
‘I am better than you, brother,’ he said, as much to himself as to those around him. ‘I will always be better than you. I know that’s what you’re really afraid of.’
The Stonewrought’s title was well deserved, for while it was said that he was fashioned from the very substance of worlds, Soltarn Vull Bronn knew that it was literally true for all of them, but refrained from pointing out what should have been obvious. They were all made from the leavings of stars, ejected matter compressed and reshaped by billions of years of stellar engineering and biochemical and electrical reactions.
Whether his understanding of this gave him insight into the heart of the stone was a mystery he did not examine too closely. That the stone spoke to him and unveiled its secrets and strengths was enough for him. To know its structure and composition came as naturally to him as breathing, and amongst a Legion like the Iron Warriors that made him special.
Though not, apparently, special enough to avoid this onerous duty.
Accompanied by a brutish warrior named Cadaras Grendel from the Grand Battalion of Warsmith Berossus, Vull Bronn made his way through the fetish-hung corridors of the Pride of the Emperor. They followed a limping warrior named Lord Commander Eidolon, who wore a razor-hooked cloak over his garishly coloured armour and bore a monstrously heavy hammer not unlike that of the Lord of Iron.
Eidolon had greeted them cordially on the embarkation deck, accompanied by an honour guard of warriors whose armour was a riot of clashing colours and horned spikes. The gorgets of their armour extended beyond their shoulders, fitted with all manner of vox pick-ups and augmitter enhancers. Their helms bulged with aural implants and instead of bolters they carried bizarre weaponry that pulsed like generators on the verge of an overload.
Eidolon had named them Kakophoni, but had declined to explain their nature.
Vull Bronn tried to conceal his shock at the sight of the Emperor’s Children’s flagship, but he was sure that Eidolon had seen his reaction and grinned. The Lord Commander’s manner put Vull Bronn on edge. His skin was ashen and lifeless, his eyes sunken in their sockets like those of a cadaver.
The Pride of the Emperor was a place of light and noise, of spectacle and grotesqueries. At every turn, Vull Bronn’s eyes beheld some new and terrible sight. His senses reeled at the sensory overload, but the journey to La Fenice was just the beginning.
Rumours had spread amongst the Warmaster’s allies of the great debauch that had taken place here, an opera of such staggering excess that it had driven the Emperor’s Children to madness. No one had really believed it, but as the warped doors of the grand theatre swung open before him, Vull Bronn suddenly believed every wild rumour and knew them to have entirely failed to capture the horror of what had truly happened.
‘Throne…’ he hissed, before remembering the inappropriateness of that oath.
No one appeared to notice.
Cadaras Grendel let out a breath of astonishment.
‘Welcome to La Fenice,’ said Eidolon.
Vull Bronn had seen picts of Fulgrim’s grand theatrical ballroom, some reportedly taken by the renowned Euphrati Keeler, but this place bore only a fleeting resemblance to that once magnificent playhouse. Vull Bronn squinted through the dazzling beams of intense light strobing down from the arched roof, barely able to make out shadowy forms moving through the clouds of musky incense that boiled from hanging censers like an alchemical experiment gone wrong.
The stench was sickly sweet, hot and fragrant, but with a lingering hint of something rotten beneath. It caught at the back of Vull Bronn’s throat and he wanted to spit to rid his mouth of the taste, feeling some lingering after-effect worming its way into his system. Garlands of faces and stretched canvases of human skin hung from the royal boxes above, and bouquets of bones sprouted from dripping iron sconces. Unseen drums boomed in a discordant thunder like an arrhythmic heartbeat that wove in and out of a roaring, squealing morass of sounds from swaying vox-casters.
The Thaliakron had majesty and grandeur, but La Fenice had none of that.
‘What have you done to this place?’ asked Vull Bronn.
‘Raised it to the level of wonder,’ said Eidolon, his voice little more than a rasping growl, as though his throat and vocal chords were no longer working in sync.
Mindful of his status as a guest, Vull Bronn said, ‘It is like nothing I have ever seen.’
‘Few have,’ agreed Eidolon. ‘It must be a welcome change from the tedious formality of the Dodekatheon. Here we celebrate what we have become, rather than dwelling on the past or things that might have been, but never will be.’
‘The Dodekatheon is a gathering of warriors,’ said Vull Bronn, masking his irritation at Eidolon’s casual insult. ‘We gather to better ourselves.’
‘As do we,’ said Eidolon, leading him deeper into La Fenice.
Their path wound through a cavalcade of nightmares made real, a corruption of everything for which the Legions had once stood. Vull Bronn saw flesh opened up and the glistening insides brought forth for sport, for interest and for pleasure. Mortals and Legion warriors made play with their bodies, cutting them with symbols and designs that were beyond comprehension or belief.
Great casks of wine were siphoned with intestinal pipes, like giant organs being drained of their vital fluids. Heaped piles of reclining bodies drew smoke from drooling hookahs, their eyes glassy and limbs slack. Grendel paused to snatch a fleshy tube from a supine legionary with blood-frothed saliva drooling from the corner of his mouth. He sucked hard and grimaced at the taste of whatever was coming through the tube.
He spat a mouthful of viscous ooze that looked like the scrapings from a cancerous lung.
‘It’s not Olympian vintage, but it’s got a kick to it,’ said Grendel.
‘Touch nothing,’ ordered Vull Bronn, but Grendel ignored him and took another swig.
Creatures that might once have been human stalked the theatre like numinous observers, beings so far removed from their original physical template that they were an entirely new species. Bodies of patchwork torsos from a dozen different individuals moved with reptilian locomotion on limbs that were a mix of arms and legs taken apart, broken and remade in dozens of unique and terrible ways, like the aborted failures of some diseased creation myth. Lunatic eyes stared at him, and he recoiled from the repugnant mix of joy and terror, ecstasy and insanity in the faces grafted to the bellies and spines of the unnatural creatures.
‘From iron cometh strength,’ said Vull Bronn, girding himself against the abomination, but the words sounded hollow, as though drained of their power in t
his place of dark raptures.
‘The Unbreakable Litany,’ laughed Eidolon. ‘In time you will learn nothing is unbreakable.’
‘What are they?’ said Vull Bronn as the nearest gestalt creature moved away, followed by capering, hunched figures chained to it like offspring wailing to be suckled.
‘Fabius calls them his terata,’ spat Eidolon, his hand unconsciously going to his neck.
‘Terata?’
Eidolon waved a dismissive hand at the departing monstrosity, relishing Vull Bronn’s discomfort. ‘It’s what he calls the deformed monsters he makes aboard the Andronicus with gene-seed torn from the dead. He treats them like children.’
‘Some children,’ said Grendel. ‘Wouldn’t want to meet the mother.’
Vull Bronn asked nothing more of the hideous terata, hearing the disgust and hatred in Eidolon’s voice. Whatever this twisted Apothecary Fabius was to Eidolon, clearly there was no love lost between them.
The smoke parted for a moment, like a curtain being drawn in readiness for a performance. A baying crowd of legionaries and mortals watched a warrior with a tattooed cheek leaping and spinning across the stage with a pair of silver-bladed swords. His skill was breathtaking, his movements like a dancer.
‘Who’s the swordsman?’ asked Grendel, wiping black residue from his chin with the back of his hand and a grimace of distaste.
‘Bastarnae Abranxe,’ said Eidolon. ‘A captain of what was once the 85th Company.’
‘He is supremely skilled,’ said Vull Bronn, still observing the correct protocol in the face of what he now understood was its utter inconsequence.
Eidolon’s shoulders lurched awkwardly, and Vull Bronn realised it was a shrug. ‘He fancies himself a great bladesman, but he is no more than competent.’
‘He’s not bad,’ said Grendel, sizing Abranxe up, as though they might one day be enemies.