‘We have better,’ admitted Eidolon with some reluctance. ‘Cross us and you’ll find out how much better.’
Part boast, part threat, Eidolon’s attempt at superiority was clumsy. Vull Bronn ignored the jibe. In a place like this, what did petty rivalries matter? Vull Bronn swallowed back a strange nausea, gritting his teeth and blinking away the irritation of the drifting fog of seductive musks.
‘I’m finding it hard to believe,’ said Grendel, watching as a host of black-clad warriors invaded the stage with screaming blades, but were taken apart in a blistering series of dazzling thrusts, ripostes and decapitating cuts.
‘There is one of the Legion known as Lucius who makes Abranxe look like a crippled child,’ said Eidolon, looking as if he was choking on the words.
‘I’ve heard of him,’ said Grendel. ‘He’s supposed to be good.’
Grendel vanished into the perfumed smoke to witness more of the swordsman’s display, leaving Vull Bronn with Eidolon. Berossus’s man had come armed, so perhaps he fancied his chances against Abranxe. Vull Bronn hoped not, but he was already growing less and less concerned with what happened to Cadaras Grendel.
Or to himself, truth be told.
Eidolon led him to a booth that felt like an island of normality in this kaleidoscope of marvels and wondrous new sensation. Vull Bronn had never known such an array of sensory bombardment, and though he had resisted the gamut of the unknown and the fearsome at first, he was now beginning to enjoy what he was experiencing.
The booth was cushioned with soft fabrics: velveteen, silk, variegated damask and rough textures like shark skin or squid hide. The sensation of reclining on them was unusual, but not unpleasant, and Vull Bronn found that he was, despite his earlier reticence, finding much to his liking in La Fenice. He wondered what the Emperor’s Children’s representative to the Iron Blood would make of their staid Legion practices.
Naked slaves, surgically modified with extra limbs like ancient, blue-skinned goddesses, slipped into the booth. They carried elaborate hookahs, with snaking pipes sheathed in serpentine scales and filled with bubbling smoke that coiled into deliberate, cursive shapes.
‘What is that?’ asked Vull Bronn as a hookah was set before him.
‘A concoction of the Phoenician,’ said Eidolon. ‘A key to the doors of perception and a means of finding the answers to all the questions you never even knew you were asking.’
‘Sounds potent,’ said Vull Bronn, already anticipating his first taste.
‘It is,’ agreed Eidolon, unhooking the pipe and holding it out to Vull Bronn. ‘Especially the first time you try it. Especially in the Eye of Terror.’
‘Eye of Terror?’
Eidolon looked confused, as though he had no idea where that name had come from.
‘This warp storm,’ said Eidolon, hesitantly. ‘That’s what it’s called.’
Vull Bronn nodded. He knew that. How he knew it, he couldn’t recall, but it felt as though he had always known it. He had no memory of being told the name, but there was no doubting its appropriateness.
He shook his head and took the pipe, its surface texture wet and organic. ‘Skin?’ he asked.
‘Laer,’ nodded Eidolon, pulling in a great lungful of shimmering smoke. His corpse eyes lost their emptiness for a moment, and his jaw stretched wider than any mouth should ever stretch. Tendrils of smoke gusted from his enlarged throat. Vull Bronn knew he should be horrified at the sight, but the sheer incongruity of it all was strangely fascinating.
He took a breath from the hookah, and a liquid grin spread across his face as the world around him appeared to sharpen, as though each edge and line were etched with greater force on the fabric of reality. He saw echoes in movement, sound as ripples in the air and darting shapes that danced on the edges of his vision. Everything suddenly seemed to be more real, as though what he had thought was reality was now revealed to be little more than a veneer over the true face of the world.
More of the adapted slaves appeared, each more outrageously mutilated than the last, and where they had shocked him before, he found himself revelling in each new disfigurement. They came bearing silver ewers, and a slave whose gender was impossible to fix held out a goblet that threw dazzling refractions of light in all directions from the complex lattice of its cut crystal. Vull Bronn tried to follow the myriad beams of light, reaching up to touch them, but gave up as another slave, one with what looked like two halves of separate faces alloyed together, poured a clear, viscous fluid into the goblet he wasn’t even aware he’d taken.
A heady aroma of salt swam in his senses and he raised the goblet cautiously to his face.
‘Ah, this you will like,’ promised Eidolon.
‘What is it?’
‘We call it Lacrimosa,’ said Eidolon. ‘An exquisite wine bled from the tears of slaves.’
Vull Bronn took a tentative sip. His eyes widened. The taste was, as Eidolon had promised, exquisite. The suffering of a thousand mortals distilled into a single mouthful. The flavour was pain and pleasure combined, a heady symphony of aromas from the erotic to the repugnant. It was heights and depths of emotion in liquid form. He tilted his face back to drain his goblet, and his eyes widened as he saw the portrait hanging high above their booth.
He gasped as he recognised the image of Fulgrim, clad as Vull Bronn remembered him, what seemed like a lifetime ago. The plates of his armour were brilliantly illuminated, each curve and sweep of a golden wing or the palatine aquila upon his heroic form brilliantly rendered, as though Fulgrim himself looked down upon him. As heroic as any portrait hung in the palaces of the Delchonian tyrant, this was Fulgrim as he had imagined himself to be.
Vull Bronn met the eyes of the portrait and the Lacrimosa curdled in his mouth.
A jolt of sublime pleasure punched into his system and he felt himself being pulled deeper into a morass of pure sensation. He had come to this place revolted, and a diminishing portion of his consciousness still cried out at the terrible things he was seeing. But the part of him that felt disgust was being compressed within him like the core of a dying star.
‘I should not be here,’ he said, feeling as though the words were coming from someone else’s throat. ‘This is not the way of the Iron Warriors.’
‘It could be,’ suggested Eidolon.
‘The Lord of Iron would never agree to it,’ he said, fighting to keep his thoughts coherent.
‘He would have no choice were the pleasures of the Lords of Profligacy to be brought to the Dodekatheon in secret. Spread through the Fourth Legion thanks to its masons’ lodge, Perturabo would have no choice but to accept the flesh profundities of the Dark Prince.’
‘Dark Prince…?’ asked Vull Bronn, already feeling the question squirming away from him.
‘Isn’t there a delicious frisson to be had in violating the mores of what most would call civilised, in revelling in that which others call debauched?’ said Eidolon, blowing a mouthful of potent hookah smoke in his face. ‘We have all broken our most treasured oath, so what does one more violation matter? Or ten more…?’
Vull Bronn nodded, the sense of what Eidolon was saying now obvious to him.
‘You’re right,’ he said, the words coming from his mouth despite the screaming warning in his skull. ‘I understand now.’
‘Drink,’ said Eidolon, refilling his goblet. ‘Seal your pact with the Dark Prince.’
Vull Bronn smiled and raised the goblet to his lips. ‘Yes, I think I will.’
Before he could drink, a figure loomed from the smoke before him and knocked the goblet from his hand with a backhanded slap. Enraged, he sprang to his feet, finding himself face to face with Cadaras Grendel.
‘Iron within, Stonewrought,’ said Grendel, and the words were a cold knife in his heart. ‘I think it’s time we departed, don’t you?’
‘I will kill you for that,’ snapped Vull Bronn.
‘No,’ said Grendel, casting a poisonous glance at Eidolon. ‘You’ll thank me.’
r /> Grendel’s sledgehammer fist slammed into his face.
And all the light and pleasure went out of the world.
Frater Thamatica’s earlier failure to make the thermic displacement beamer functional had not discouraged him from a second attempt. In fact, it had made him more determined than ever to rectify what had gone wrong before. He paced before the control mechanisms, watching the needles monitoring the power levels being fed into the magnetic gimbals as they sat at the farthest extreme of measurement.
‘That’s better,’ he said, tapping an iron finger on one dial that fluctuated more than most.
Down the laboratorium, two new spheres – reconstituted from the amalgamated remains of the first pair – spun in their concentric rings. The magnetic fields surrounding them were orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones he had employed when Wayland had come to observe, hence the greater distance between them and his control station.
Thirty chattering calculus-logi sat on three long benches arranged behind him, like worshippers at a heathen fane. Each blank-faced, shaven-headed autept was linked in parallel to his neighbour by a sheaf of coloured ribbon-cables, and their already phenomenal computational power was enhanced still further by the shared mindspace he had created in his most powerful data engine. Working as one linked brain, their eyes closed to keep all non-essential sensory inputs to a minimum, they crunched the vast array of arithmetical data and hexamathic geometries he needed to keep control of the building power.
Thamatica was certain he had the variables worked out of the experiment; it was all a matter of managing colossal power inputs and balancing them against the titanic energy requirements. His theory was sound, but Thamatica knew that theory had a perverse way of not matching up to practice.
A dozen servitors stripped of their mechanised parts – as far as was practical – maintained the machinery of the experiment in close proximity to the two rapidly rotating spheres. Thamatica didn’t dare approach too close to the machine; he was far too augmented to survive such conflicting magnetic fields. The energy would literally tear him limb from limb.
He checked the cascades of data on the numerous panels, giving each one a cursory inspection, but enough to satisfy himself that everything was as it should be. This was a highly dangerous experiment, but Thamatica’s sense for such things had diminished in the wake of every mechanical augmentation he had undergone. Ferrus Manus himself had often spoken with the Iron Fraternity of that reduced humanity, of its dangers and its potential to erode their human compassion, but any thoughts of acting upon that warning had been swept aside in the wake of his death.
The thought of his primarch’s murder left Thamatica strangely cold, and in his darker moments he had begun to question the wisdom of his Legion’s chosen path to enhanced augmentation. He had seen a direct correlation between the lack of human empathy in a warrior and the level of bionic enhancements he had undergone. It could be a fascinating avenue of research, but now was not the time for such indulgences.
In times of war, the Iron Fraternity were more concerned with the construction of weapons than with matters of philosophy. Such things were the purview of the Librarius, or at least they would have been had the Iron Hands ever possessed such an institution.
He shook off such tangential thoughts and returned to the matter in hand. The power levels were all approaching the regions the calculus-logi had extrapolated that he would require and the magnetic field strength was stable. As he had said to Wayland, he required bigger generators, and had linked his experimental machinery to the plasma drives, diverting their power to his laboratorium. On some level he knew he should have sought permission from Cadmus Tyro for that, but the irascible captain would only have refused.
Where was the sense in asking for what would almost certainly be denied?
‘Yes,’ he said to himself. ‘Yes, this will work. And even if it doesn’t, it’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.’
Thamatica pushed the activation button on his console, coupling the engine outputs to the machinery empowering his device. The readouts all began to climb, and Thamatica recorded them all through the data-capture optics in his bionic eye.
Lightning arced between the two spheres, a dancing web of eye-watering brightness. Three of the servitors were immolated by backwashing electrical discharge before self-preservation protocols made the others back away. The power contained there could vaporise the entire ship, and Thamatica began to channel that power into the experimental machinery that would begin the quantum swapping between the two spheres.
All he had to do was throw the two switches that would complete the circuit.
His hands hovered over the switches as a moment of doubt nested in the back of his mind.
‘What if this goes wrong?’ he said, turning to the gibbering calculus-logi autepts.
They had no answer for him, only waste numbers and remainders.
The flow of hexamathical calculus was reassuring in its simplicity, and Thamatica let out a relieved breath. He nodded and waved a hand as if silencing their admonition.
‘Of course, yes, you’re right,’ he said. ‘What purpose is served by timidity?’
He closed the switches and a thunderous bang echoed as the power levels spiked vertiginously. Relays blew out in an instant and lightning strikes whipped out in streaks of blazing energy and seismic detonation.
‘You bloody fool, Thamatica!’ he shouted as the calculus-logi shrieked with one voice and their shared mindspace blew out in a surge of feedback. All thirty slumped over, blood streaming from their fried brain cavities and smoke boiling from their skulls. It was impossible to know how far overloaded the system was: every needle and readout had melted.
Thamatica looked towards the two spheres. Blinding light flowed between them and the servitors were gone, immolated by the expanding ball of electro-magnetic fire. How this version of his experiment could have gone wrong was a question for another day, and Thamatica slammed his palm down on the emergency shutdown.
The power to the devices surrounding the spheres was cut off in an instant, and a billow of electrically charged air was all that remained of the potentially catastrophic power surge. Thamatica let out a sigh of relief and frustration, scanning the ruined console before him to see what, if anything, could be salvaged from this latest setback.
Almost nothing remained of his data recorders, but the one surviving gauge told him exactly where the vast quantities of power vented from the experiment had gone and what it would look like to any other ship in the vicinity.
‘Ah, electromagnetic venting,’ he said. ‘That’s not good. That’s not good at all.’
THIRTEEN
Back from the Brink
Unmasked
Attack Orders
It felt like waking from a nightmare, then realising the nightmare had followed him from sleep. Soltarn Vull Bronn’s skull throbbed as though it had been filled with boiling vapour, a pressurised container with no way to vent. He groaned. His mouth felt sticky, like he’d been force-fed gallons of syrupy food paste. His eyes were gummed shut, his throat raw and constricted.
What had happened to him?
He felt hollow, as though the most potent purgatives had flushed his system and left him drained of energy and shivering. Bright light was spearing through his eyelids, straight into his brain, which felt like a Dreadnought was crushing it in its motorised fist. Every nerve felt as though it were pushing out through his skin, such that every contact was painful.
‘He’s waking up,’ said a voice, gravelly and coarse.
‘I wasn’t sure he would,’ said another.
‘Didn’t hit him that hard,’ growled yet another.
He tried to make sense of what he was hearing. The cold, echoing hum of machinery and the bite of counterseptic and formaldehyde suggested an apothecarion, but the rough voices and scrape of armour plates and gun oil suggested a legionary’s arming chamber.
‘Where am I?’ he said,
his voice a strangled, dry wheeze.
‘Aboard the Iron Blood,’ said the first voice. ‘In the apothecarion.’
At least he’d got that right.
‘Why am I here? What happened?’
He opened his eyes, squinting against the glare of stark lumen strips and reflected light from brushed-steel cabinets and glass tubes of suspended flesh and replacement organs.
‘We were hoping you could tell us.’
The owner of the voice leaned over him, and he recognised Soulaka. The Apothecary was a warrior of Warsmith Toramino’s Grand Battalion and the current Honourable of the Dodekatheon, an honorific he actually deserved if rumour were to be believed.
Vull Bronn sat up, his body as weak as the day he had woken after the implantation of the black carapace. His limbs shivered and the muscles felt abused and stretched beyond their ability to endure. Hands reached out to steady him.
Warsmith Forrix stood to one side of the reinforced gurney upon which he sat, one arm holding tightly to his bicep. The grip was light but painful, and Vull Bronn pulled away.
By the wide doors of the apothecarion stood a bland-faced legionary with long hair worn in an elaborate braid over the right side of his skull. His face was familiar, but Vull Bronn couldn’t place it until he reached up to rub the tender skin at his jawline.
‘You struck me,’ he said, remembering the piledriver blow that had put him down.
‘You’re welcome,’ said Cadaras Grendel.
‘What?’ snapped Vull Bronn, wincing as the hammering in his skull intensified. ‘I should kill you for that.’
‘I think in this case we can forgo a disciplinary,’ said Forrix.
‘He struck a superior officer!’ protested Vull Bronn.
‘You really don’t remember what happened, do you?’ grinned the insufferable Grendel, his louche grin spreading wider. ‘That stuff Eidolon gave you must have been hellish strong.’
‘Eidolon?’ said Vull Bronn as a memory surfaced like a bloated body in water. ‘I remember smoking something. There was drink too, I think. Something made from tears, he said.’