‘Is that a Shadowsword?’ said Wayland.
On a raised platform in the centre of the fortification was a super-heavy tank, but one up-armoured and bulked out to an incredible degree.
‘Perturabo’s command tank,’ answered Sharrowkyn.
‘Its weapon systems can cover every inch of the walls and its main gun will simply obliterate anything that comes within its line of fire.’
‘Then we stay out of its line of fire,’ said Sharrowkyn.
Two Reaver battle engines bearing the banners and colours of the Legio Mortis faced off against their glassy counterparts, guns trained on them with unwavering precision. Perturabo’s warriors were nothing if not thorough.
‘A direct assault on this position will be suicidal,’ declared Wayland.
‘That’s never been the way of the Nineteenth,’ said Sharrowkyn.
‘I’ve come to learn that,’ said Wayland. ‘Come on, Captain Tyro needs to know there’s no chance of getting in this way.’
Sharrowkyn nodded and moved away from the edge of the roof. This far away from the enemy there was no need to wraith-slip, but he did it anyway. Ever since they’d made planetfall, Sharrowkyn’s preternatural senses had felt hostile eyes upon him, unseen observers watching his every move like a snake preparing to strike. Even moving with all the skill he could muster, he knew they could see him.
With sure steps, dizzying powered leaps and precipitous drops, Sharrowkyn and Wayland made their way to the sheltered portion of the ground where the incursion force of Iron Hands waited. Sharrowkyn dropped into shadow, stepping into full view of Cadmus Tyro and Vermana Cybus. Ignatius Numen and Septus Thoic held the quivering form of Varuchi Vohra between them, and Brother Bombastus towered over them all, the monstrous flamer flickering with a hot jet of blue light.
‘Well?’ asked Cadmus Tyro. ‘Can we fight our way in?’
The captain’s face was unreadable behind the iron mask of his helm. His warplate was scored with hundreds of names, so many that there was as much revealed ceramite as there was black paint. He had been in the thick of the hardest fighting on Isstvan, and it was easy to forget he had suffered as much as the rest of them. The golden-winged form of Garuda perched on his shoulder guard, wings folded back and its red eyes reminding Sharrowkyn of Atesh Tarsa.
The eagle had a sleek look to it that Sharrowkyn liked – a hunter on the wing, like him.
‘Not a chance,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘The Iron Warriors already have a fortress built right in front of the entrance. Nothing short of a full Legion assault would be able to punch through to the entrance.’
‘Then we’ve come this way for nothing!’ snapped Cybus, slamming a fist into his palm. ‘I said this was a doomed enterprise from the beginning. We’ve wasted our time coming here!’
‘You don’t agree?’ said Tyro, reading Sharrowkyn’s body language.
‘Fighting the Iron Warriors head-on will see us all dead,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘On that, Cybus and I agree, but we don’t need to fight them head-on.’
‘What do you mean?’ demanded Tyro.
Sharrowkyn beckoned Numen and Thoic forwards, and they hauled the sickly-looking eldar guide to stand before him.
‘Because the front door isn’t the only way in, is it?’
Varuchi Vohra looked up and nodded, the flesh of his face stretched tight like grease-paper over his jutting bones, his skin veined with purple lines and textured with an oily veneer.
‘No,’ said the eldar. ‘There are other ways to enter.’
TWENTY-ONE
Fragments of a Greater Whole
Immaterial Mathematics
They Never Were
The nightmare of his existence hadn’t ended; in fact, it had only worsened. Felix Cassander – though that name meant little to him now – stalked back and forth in what had once been a medicae quarantine bay aboard the Pride of the Emperor. His bones ached, each joint stiff with broken-glass pain and his one remaining lung filled with acid-burning fluids that he hacked up his throat with crippling regularity.
His supra-engineered frame was keeping him alive despite his fervent desire for death.
He and Navarra were two amongst perhaps a dozen of Fabius’s terata that had survived the assault on the Iron Hands vessel. Navarra lay in abject misery in the corner of the quarantine cell, his mutated body undulant with motion as his internal anatomy combined and split apart in genetic revolt and his limbs reshaped themselves in response to hyper-mutation of his base-pairs.
The terata were little better than beasts now, howling, mindless things of appetite and aggression, but Cassander and Navarra alone had held onto the remembrance of their former lives. Navarra’s mind hung by a thread, a teetering consciousness that kept true to the word of Dorn only thanks to Cassander’s incessant repetition of the Legion’s roll of honour, starting with the Victorix Roma and ending with Honoris Martius. His own fractured sense of self remembered who he was, where he had come from, but most of all it remembered what he had done.
He had killed Space Marines loyal to the Imperium. He was no better than the Emperor’s Children or the Iron Warriors. The pain of his minute-by-minute existence was nothing compared to that. It was his punishment, his penance for giving in to adversity. He was one of the Emperor’s own Fists, a warrior against whom no foe could triumph, for whom no obstacle could delay and no pain could master.
All of it a lie.
Cassander picked at his muscle-bloated arms, the flesh scabbed with pus-filled sores that refused to heal as fresh toxins made war against his gene-twisted immune system. He had picked all the flesh from his right hand, leaving it a rotten, meat-flaked ruin. Rich crimson blood coated the bones there, the digits held together by strings of sinew and scraps of regenerative muscle tissue. He’d scraped intricate patterns into the bone with the overgrown claws of his other hand, relishing the agony of his self-mutilation and knowing it wasn’t nearly enough to atone for what he had allowed to happen.
He could still see the face of the legionary whose throat he had ripped out, the hatred that burned in his eyes. It was a hatred well earned. Though he had torn the flesh from his hand, he knew it would never be free of the loyal blood it had spilled. He tried to keep his focus on the blood, hoping that preoccupation with pain would keep the horror of what he had done and what he had become at bay.
Cassander’s perceptions were becoming ever more erratic, a collage of nightmarish images that belonged in a madman’s skull. Torturous experiments, pain-filled lights in his eyes and the crack of breaking bones as his body was continually reshaped and regrown. The passage of time itself was out of sequence, fragments of memory making no sense from one instant to the next.
One moment he was clawing the skin and meat from his guilty hand, the next he was staring up at a bank of lumen-strips in a clinically austere chamber of white ceramic tiles and steel girders painted a bilious industrial green. Being strapped to the gurney meant pain, and pain was all he wanted now. Pain meant escape. Pain was penance.
The source of all his pain leaned over him, haloed in stark light and clicking machine arms.
‘You are special, my child,’ Fabius told him, a rivulet of black blood running from the corner of his mouth. ‘You Fists retain your higher functions. The rest devolve to beasts, but not you two. Why is that, I wonder?’
Cassander wanted to reach for the demented Apothecary and tear out his throat, but the chains securing him to the table this time were as good as unbreakable. Fabius grinned his corpse-grin at him and shook his head.
‘You think I learned nothing from our last contretemps?’ said Fabius, stepping away and altering the angle of the gurney upon which Cassander lay. ‘The Pride of the Emperor might not be as… private as the Andronicus, but it at least has the virtue of many well-equipped medicae levels.’
In complete opposition to the Apothecary’s previous lair, this space was brightly lit and organised much like a conventional medicae facility. The walls were lined with machine
ry that Cassander could not identify, save that they were all bespoke creations that no Apothecary in a loyal Legion would sanction using. Secured cabinets were filled with green glass beakers in which swilled unidentifiable mutant offspring, genetic abnormalities and hideously deformed foetal stages. Rows of reductor ampoules, each one labelled with a Legion symbol and engraved with what looked like a name sat in a glass cryo-vat filled with coils of nitrous gases. Tissue baths, centrifuges and retorts bearing bubbling tubes and bell jars hissed, spat and boiled on a silver-steel workbench, and an opened corpse lay on the gurney to his left, amid the labelled, spliced and sectioned portions of his inner anatomy. The corpse had no head, but a Legion tattoo on his right bicep revealed him to be IV Legion.
‘Turning on your own now?’ said Cassander through his mangled jaw structure.
Fabius turned to look at the dissected corpse as though he had forgotten it was there. ‘Even before Horus chose rebellion,’ he said.
‘Why?’ gurgled Cassander, flexing the bones of his mutilated hand as it throbbed painfully.
‘Because we are led to believe we are perfect creations,’ said Fabius, coughing a wad of black phlegm and holding his chest. ‘but nothing could be further from the truth. We are fragments of a greater whole, pale reflections of something incredible. Each of the Legions’ genetic structure contains a piece of that perfection, and I would know every secret of the Emperor’s workings.’
‘Why?’ repeated Cassander, knowing it was the most important question.
‘Because I don’t want to die,’ said Fabius, opening his robes to reveal two suppurating wounds crusted with tarry deposits. Sword wounds, but ones that hadn’t healed. ‘The Emperor’s soldiers who came before us, the Thunder Warriors, their gene-code carried the seeds of their own destruction. And the gene-boosted savages before them? They were fortunate to live as long as they did before their hyper-metabolism consumed them. The primarchs think their warriors are immortal, but they are wrong. We are as mortal as any living thing, we just take longer to die. I would not have it so.’
‘You want to live forever?’
‘Of course,’ said Fabius, angry he should even ask such a question. ‘Don’t you?’
‘No,’ hissed Cassander. ‘I want to die with every breath.’
Fabius leaned over him, and the chirurgeon extended its claw-like calliper arms. The razor-thin line of a thermal cutter sparked to life. A host of thick needles extended from another arm, followed by a blood siphon and a clacking suture gun on two more.
‘If that were true, then why have you not dashed your brains out against the walls of your cell?’ asked Fabius with the keen interest of a scholar.
Cassander had only one answer. ‘Because I am weak,’ he said, his powerful, mutated and abhorrent form heaving in torment.
‘No, my child, you are strong, so very strong. The others super-combusted with the fury of their accelerated metabolism, but not you or your Legion brother,’ said Fabius, almost tenderly. ‘That’s why I need to open you up again.’
The thermal cutter descended and the pain began again.
Atonement and agony, penance and pain.
Cassander welcomed them all.
Warsmith Toramino paced the ramparts of the landing-zone fortress, watching with ever-greater anger as the Pneumachina and his warriors battled to shore up the walls. Cracks spread and stone crumbled with every passing moment.
This world was anathema to the raising of foreign walls, and the sooner they were done with this place the better. Not even the aural filters on his helm could keep out the keening wail of the wind, and the crepuscular glow emanating from the distant city was grating on Toramino’s nerves.
Bad enough that he had been denied his rightful place in the Trident, but now he had been left as little better than a watchman. The master of the Stor-bezashk commanded firepower like no other, a host of ordnance and the means to deploy it. That he should be consigned to this lowly role was an insult to his pride and to the honour of his title.
True, in a warzone, such a task was a position of great importance and respect, but defending empty platforms and runways enclosed by high walls, minefields and acres of razorwire on a deserted world was a task with no honour and which offered no hopes for advancement. Such a task was for low-born fools like the Stonewrought or, more appropriately, Kroeger.
Harkor’s foolish recklessness on Hydra Cordatus had brought this situation about, but the former warsmith of the 23rd Grand Battalion was Olympian high-born, and even a fool of a noble was better than peon scum like Kroeger.
Toramino paused to look back into the heart of the defences constructed within the crumbling and sagging walls. A forest of cannon barrels angled to the sky like a thousand arms raised in salute: howitzers, bombards, Thunderstrikes, mortars, rocket batteries and precision hunter-killer missiles. Gunmasters and their crews swarmed their weapons, ready to unleash a rain of explosive death on any target that presented itself. Not that Toramino particularly expected that target to be a foe in the traditional sense.
It galled him that circumstances had forced his hand to fratricide, but when backed into a corner by the ignorance and jealousy of fools, what could any high-born warrior of rank and position do but fight back? He called up the schematics of the city onto his data-slate, the real-time information fed to him by the topographical data engines on the Castellan Rhinos. A three-dimensional image of the city, its buildings and the location of the Iron Warriors advance fortress hovered before him.
With such detailed target information, Toramino could flatten the eldar tomb city with a word or pick out one structure to demolish while leaving the rest untouched by so much as a shrapnel scar. He fed the data to the target-acquisition engines of his gunmasters, relishing the sheer destructive power at his command.
Toramino put away his data-slate as the wind’s lament changed in pitch, becoming more strident and insistent. He banged a palm against the side of his helmet, cursing and shaking his head in an effort to silence it. It was no use, the sound was only getting more irritating, and Toramino unsnapped the gorget seals, tearing his helmet off to reveal his patrician features and mane of ivory hair.
He sat the helmet on a toothed merlon and tilted his head to the side.
Toramino’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the horizon in puzzlement.
A faint haze rippled at the farthest extremes of his sight, a blur of greenish light like the approach of a distant sandstorm.
‘What is that?’ he wondered over the keening wail of the mournful wind.
Perturabo led the way, the pace necessarily slow as the enveloping darkness made haste impossible. The advance force kept tight together, a column of armoured warriors with blades bared and firearms primed. Even Fulgrim’s host kept their howls and chants to themselves. The heavy footfalls of Warsmith Berossus echoed from the obsidian walls, and the brittle clatter of glass from the containers being carried by Fulgrim’s mortal followers was a constant presence in the swallowing darkness.
The walls remained uniformly smooth, but distant lights swam in their glossy depths. Wheeling like distant galaxies, and just as populous, there was a universe of stars within the walls, Perturabo realised, each one distinct and no two alike.
He wondered what they might represent. Were the shimmers of light a purely aesthetic consideration on the part of the sepulchre’s builders or might they serve some unknown function? Could they be a self-repair mechanism, such as possessed by the Cadmean Citadel, an infestation of some lithobiotic parasite or perhaps the remnant of an ancient computational archive? Could this entire structure be a form of data repository, a species record of a once-dominant empire now fallen into decline? Perturabo knew better than anyone the value of the wisdom of the ancients. Hadn’t he constructed the Cavea Ferrum from the designs of a dead genius?
This labyrinth was constructed from the same principles, its intricacies working in multiple overlapping dimensions at once, and Perturabo understood that firmness of purp
ose was the best instrument of success when navigating a maze.
That, and the non-Euclidian equations of the Firenzii.
When ancient mathematicians first discovered the dimensions beyond the physical, many a classical scholar had been driven to insanity in his attempts to codify his findings in empirical terms. Thanks to the words encrypted in the secret journal of the Firenzii – the slender volume the Crimson King had helped him decode – Perturabo had learned the secrets of navigating such tempestuous calculus. It was an inexact science, not meant for mortal brains to comprehend, but his cognitive reach was far beyond those lunatic geniuses who had tried and failed to grasp the enormity of the worlds they had glimpsed in dreams and fugue states.
When Perturabo had first climbed to the top of the cliffs of Lochos as a youth and seen the Eye of Terror looking down at him from the other side of the galaxy, he had known instinctively there was a universe beyond its hellish borders, a place of dark miracles and nightmarish wonders. With every decade that passed and every fragment of know-ledge he uncovered, its impossible mechanics became ever more visible and less unknowable. Perturabo had gradually peeled back layer after layer of mystery until the alien mechanisms at its heart lay revealed to him.
The last part of the key had been provided by the discovery of the plans in the Sabellian cremation pit, the final, heretical workings of the Firenzii, and Perturabo had revelled in the white heat of immaterial mathematics and empyreal geometry as he crafted the impossible routes and impenetrable depths of the Cavea Ferrum.
What was at play here was no different.
Worked with a subtlety and grace that was breathtaking, but fundamentally the same.
He kept silent and shut out the echoing sounds around him as he processed the fiendishly difficult calculations that laid bare the workings of the labyrinth. He paid no attention to the matrices of darting light that passed through the walls, the panicked flickers of lambent mist swirling in their depths, nor did he note the passage of time or the insistent clicking of vox-traffic from beyond the sepulchre.