Fulgrim kept close, stealing awed glances at him as he chose each turn in the maze, leading them deeper and deeper into its convoluted depths. Their path took them up and down, through spiralling walkways, back around on themselves and through chambers, tunnels and echoing halls designed to confuse and disorientate. Perturabo kept true to his principles of inter-dimensional calculus and forced his natural instinct for direction to cede control of their course to his intellect. He sensed his brother’s frustrations at the labyrinth and his inability to map it in his head. Even boastful Dorn would find it next to impossible to navigate the maze of the Cavea Ferrum, let alone this exquisite alien rendition of its myriad complexities.
The path through the maze was elaborate and layered, twisting like a nest of writhing snakes and rearranging around him in relation to their onward passage. With every step, Perturabo felt the gelid sentience at the heart of this world – if it even was a world, and he was beginning to have his doubts – becoming ever more focused in its attentions.
Whatever lay beneath them, the dreams of a dormant god or a reactivating cache of sentient weapons, Perturabo knew they didn’t have much time until it grew powerful enough to actively resist them. With a sudden self-aggrandising epiphany, Perturabo knew with absolute certainty that he alone in all the galaxy was capable of navigating this labyrinth. Not even Fulgrim’s pet guide could have done so. Far from pleasing Perturabo, the thought struck a discordant note of imminent threat.
Fixing points of reference in his mind – spatial, empyreal and mathematical – Perturabo halted their progress at an intersection of four passageways. Each was superficially identical, yet only one offered onward passage.
‘Why do we stop?’ asked Fulgrim. ‘We must be near the heart of the labyrinth by now.’
‘We are,’ agreed Perturabo. ‘One of these passages will lead us to whatever lies beneath the central dome we saw from outside. The rest lead to eternities of wandering and madness.’
‘But you know which to take?’
‘I do.’
‘Then why do we hesitate?’
‘Berossus,’ commanded Perturabo. ‘Bring me Vohra.’
The thunderous form of Warsmith Berossus hauled the cringing eldar forwards, the push of the Dreadnought’s heavy hammer ungentle. Stealing furtive glances at the behemoth behind him, Karuchi Vohra bowed to Perturabo. The guide looked terrible, thin and wasted, as though the life was being drawn from him with every step he took into the labyrinth.
‘My lord?’ said Vohra.
‘The lights in the walls,’ said Perturabo. ‘What are they?’
‘It is difficult to explain, Lord Perturabo,’ said Vohra. ‘My people do not craft walls of stone and steel as you do.’
‘Yes, you grow your structures from some bio-polymer,’ said Perturabo. ‘I’ve brought more than one to ruin over the centuries. But answer the question. What are the lights in the walls?’
‘What does it matter how this place is built?’ snapped Fulgrim before Vohra could answer, eager to be moving on.
‘It matters because I say it matters,’ said Perturabo, taking hold of Karuchi Vohra’s robe and easing him forwards to stand facing the four onward passages. Each was dark, with nothing to differentiate them from the hundreds of others they had travelled.
‘Which one?’ said Perturabo, resting his hand lightly on Vohra’s shoulder.
‘My lord?’
‘Which one?’ repeated Perturabo. ‘We are almost at the heart of the sepulchre, so I want you to tell me which of these passages will lead us there.’
Karuchi Vohra glanced nervously back at Fulgrim, as Perturabo knew he would, before hesitantly lifting his arm and pointing to the passageway second from the left.
‘That one,’ said the eldar.
‘Wrong,’ said Perturabo, snapping Vohra’s neck.
The sense of claustrophobia in the Iron Warriors stronghold had been overpowering, and Julius Kaesoron’s innards squirmed to be free of his body with every moment he’d paced its bland, steel-edged courtyard. Like a caged raptor, he was not suited for confinement or to remain static behind high walls. A wise man had once told him that stagnation was death, and that was never truer than of the Emperor’s Children.
The Lords of Profligacy had lifted the suffocating veils of the mundane from their eyes and shown them unlimited worlds of sensation and indulgence. Undreamed vistas of excess in all things: noise, music, bloodshed, hedonism, torture, violence, adoration and most of all, worship. Every second not spent indulging desires declared taboo in an earlier age was a waste of life, and Julius Kaesoron had long since declared that no act of indulgence would remain beyond his grasp.
Leaving the dull-minded Iron Warriors behind their impermeable walls, Julius led his three thousand warriors into the plaza before the sepulchre, leaving them to desecrate and destroy as they saw fit. Julius revelled in the sensation of untapped power he felt seeping up into the world like oily water in sodden sand. He bludgeoned crystalline statues and smashed the glowing stones against his skull, grinding the crushed fragments into the cuts in his skin.
The anticipatory pleasure was almost as great as the indulgence, and his altered sight perceived the lines of force and memory that threaded every structure on this planet. He marvelled that the Iron Warriors couldn’t see it, and almost pitied them their limited perceptions. How intolerable their lives must be, restricted to seeing only the functional building blocks of what was deemed reality by their own stunted senses.
Julius and his warriors circled the Iron Warriors fortress, thousands of whooping and yelling maniacs holding weapons and war banners high. The energy saturating this world was on the verge of release; like a volcano on the brink of eruption or a singer approaching a high note. He wished he could puncture whatever was holding it back, letting its bounty flow through the streets like a surge tide to drown them all.
He laughed hysterically, drawing his combat knife and plunging it up into the space beneath his skin-draped shoulder guard and scored breastplate. The pain was fleeting, the flow of blood momentary, but with every droplet that spilled onto the ground, he felt this world’s horror grow.
With a certainty not his own, he understood that his blood was polluted with something wonderful, something intolerable to the race that had built this world. Blood was his devotion, its substance tainted by the force that had ripped its way to life from the afterbirth of this race’s death.
In that instant, he knew what he had to do.
Julius threw aside his knife, its blade too small and inconsequential for what needed to be done. He drew his serrated sword, the blade impregnated with hooked barbs worked along its length. He howled his submission to the kaleidoscopic skies and charged into the chanting mass of his warriors.
His first blow hacked one of Vairosean’s Kakophoni in two, blood erupting from the mutant’s body like an exploding fuel bladder. His second opened the belly of a warrior whose armour was so torn it should have been discarded long ago. A third beheaded a bullish champion whose neck jetted twin fountains of blood three metres into the air. Julius barged and cut and hacked his way into the Emperor’s Children, feeling his certainty that this was the right thing to do with every opened artery, every severed limb and every drop of blood spilled.
He laughed as he saw the Iron Warriors looking on in horror as he slaughtered his brother legionaries, their incomprehension plain even through their flat, expressionless helmets. The stink of blood filled his senses, together with a potent sense of being on the cusp of something magnificent.
Following his lead, the Emperor’s Children fell upon one another in an orgy of bloodletting, all cohesion and sense of purpose forgotten in the lustful savagery of killing. Julius remembered the blossoming sense of freedom he’d felt in La Fenice, when the avatars of the Lords of Profligacy manifested through the broken shells of mortal bodies. The exquisite pain and ecstatic feeling of being truly alive had faded with time, and to feel that again, he would endure any pain
, inflict any suffering.
No sooner had he wished for it than he felt a tugging sensation in every cell of his body, a pleading invitation to surrender his flesh.
No, not yet. Let me enjoy this a little longer…
The entire plaza before the sepulchre was now a killing floor, a battlefield with no enemy, just a screaming host of warriors bent on self-destruction.
The Emperor’s Children offered themselves up as a willing yet unwitting sacrifice, their blood carrying with it the memory of life and death, birth and doom.
The power at the heart of Iydris spasmed in hateful recognition of that contradiction.
And awoke.
‘Brother!’ cried Fulgrim as Perturabo dropped Vohra’s lifeless body to the floor.
Perturabo ignored his brother’s shock and marched in the direction of the leftmost passageway. His warriors moved off with him, the Iron Circle matching his swift stride effortlessly and without complaint. Berossus passed insultingly close to the Phoenician as he strode on.
Fulgrim’s hand closed on Perturabo’s arm, and he rounded on his brother, his fist balled in anticipation of violence. The Iron Circle turned with a clatter of shields and armaments, every carapace weapon aimed squarely at Fulgrim.
‘Do you really have to ask?’ demanded Perturabo.
‘Ask what?’ said Fulgrim, backing away with a look of outrage that made Perturabo sick to his stomach with its theatricality.
‘Karuchi Vohra had never set foot on this world before now, had he?’ said Perturabo.
Fulgrim’s mask finally cracked and he grinned, the liar exposed, the deceiver unmasked.
‘I doubt it,’ said Fulgrim. ‘But even if he had not, does it truly matter?’
‘Of course it matters,’ said Perturabo, teeth bared. ‘Because he couldn’t possibly have reached this far into the labyrinth. Yet he claimed to have seen the weapons we seek. How do you explain that, brother?’
Fulgrim shrugged and Perturabo had never wanted to take Forgebreaker to a skull more than he did at that moment. He lowered his fist slowly and turned away before his anger got the better of him.
‘I knew you were lying to me from the start,’ he said. ‘But I held onto a shred of hope that there might be a fraction of truth to what you promised. More fool me. I should never have come here with you, brother.’
‘No, I needed you to come,’ implored Fulgrim, following him, but making no moves to touch him. ‘I may have exaggerated some aspects of the eldar legend, but I knew that only you could navigate this labyrinth.’
‘So why lie to me? Why create this fiction?’
‘Would you have come if I told you I needed you just to unravel a maze?’
‘No,’ said Perturabo.
‘There, you see?’
Perturabo nodded in the direction of the passageway and said, ‘So what are we really going to find in here? What could be so important to you that you would expend so many lives and lie to your brother?’
‘Exactly what I promised,’ said Fulgrim. ‘The ability to destroy worlds and lay waste to armies. The power of the Angel Exterminatus lies at the heart of this world, truly, but it will take the two of us to unlock it. No more lies, brother, not now we are so close to victory.’
Despite himself, Perturabo could feel his curiosity piqued. Fulgrim had lied and cheated and deceived to bring him this far, but he heard no falsehood in this latest declaration. Even so, he didn’t believe his brother’s vacant sincerity.
Whatever lay at the heart of the sepulchre would be Perturabo’s alone.
‘Then we will seize it together,’ he lied.
The carnage being wreaked beyond the strongpoint’s walls was as horrific as it was senseless, and Forrix could only watch in open-mouthed incomprehension as the Emperor’s Children systematically butchered themselves. Warriors who had marched together beneath the same banners now hacked at each other with great broadswords or unloaded entire magazines into their corpses.
The wet sound of steel on flesh and the barking rattle of gunfire filled the plaza. Forrix had no intention of moving aside the Rhinos barring entry to his position to allow those few warriors not partaking in the slaughter back within his walls.
‘What in the name of the Twelve are they doing?’ said Forrix, gripping the steelwork of the battlements with his powered gauntlets. ‘It makes no sense.’
Standing beside him, Vull Bronn shook his head. ‘I have no idea. After what I saw on the Pride of the Emperor, I’ve given up trying to figure out any sense in the Third Legion.’
‘But this is so… wasteful!’ shouted Forrix, the metal bending beneath his grip.
‘Did you see what started it?’
‘I don’t know what started it, but I know who,’ said Forrix, pointing at the blood-drenched figure of Julius Kaesoron as he fought like a demented berserker through those few Emperor’s Children still standing. The captain’s sword was red with entrails and torn flesh, his hysterical screaming like fingernails on slate.
‘Should we try and stop it?’ asked the Stonewrought.
‘You want to get in the middle of that?’
‘Not when I’ve a wall to stand behind.’
‘Then we leave them to it,’ said Forrix. ‘The fools.’
The killing didn’t take long to burn itself out, thousand of lives ended in a convulsion of manic death-dealing. Forrix had never seen anything like it. As silence fell over the plaza, only Julius Kaesoron was left standing, his purple and gold armour entirely covered in crimson and loose, dribbling chunks of skin.
The sword fell from his hand and he slumped to his knees, a plaintive shriek of something dark and primal torn from his throat. The warrior buried his head in his hands and he fell forwards, as though grovelling to some unseen liege lord.
‘I don’t know why Kaesoron did this, but I’m damn well going to find out,’ said Forrix, descending to the courtyard of the strongpoint and summoning his fellow Terminators to his side. Together with five other towering warriors, he marched to the Rhino gates. With a nod, the two vehicles retracted their bracing footings from the ground and started their engines with a throaty metallic cough.
‘I will be the iron within,’ said the Stonewrought as the Rhinos reversed.
‘As I will be the iron without,’ replied Forrix, leading his warriors beyond the walls.
The gates closed behind them as Forrix marched towards the weeping form of Kaesoron.
The plaza was an abattoir, a charnel house of ripped bodies, emptied bellies and wasted lives. The Iron Warriors gave the dead no reverence, crushing the remains beneath their feet without remorse. With every step they took, Forrix felt the hostility and unseen eyes that had been upon them ever since their landing intensify their scrutiny, as if they were now within easy reach. He halted before Kaesoron, who lifted his head at their approach.
The man’s face was a horror of liquid scar tissue, burned meat and monstrous surgery. Whatever he had looked like before was utterly obscured beneath a leathern mask of self-inflicted mutilations. Kaesoron grinned, exposing rotten teeth, twisted fangs and a lizard-like tongue of reptilian scales.
‘We got their attention,’ he rasped through a mouth clogged with mutant flesh.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The dead,’ rasped Kaesoron. ‘We goaded them and they came. Now the Angel Exterminatus can rise from the ashes of his unmaking.’
‘You killed your own men,’ said Forrix.
‘They weren’t mine,’ said Kaesoron. ‘They never were.’
‘No? Then whose were they?’
Kaesoron seemed to consider the question, tilting his head to the side as though listening for an answer. Then he smiled, and his face pulled apart as the skin folded back on itself, sloughing from his skull.
‘They belong to Slaanesh!’ screamed Kaesoron in revelatory ecstasy.
Forrix recoiled from the name, feeling it stab into him like a curse.
Then, from all around the plaza, Forrix hea
rd a snap and crash of grinding glass. The omnipresent wail that keened on the mournful wind grew to a wounded shriek as thousands of plumes of illuminated smoke erupted from the ground. Forrix and his Terminators immediately formed a defensive circle, auto-loaders feeding shells into the breeches of combi-bolters.
‘Stand to!’ ordered Forrix. ‘Stonewrought!’
Through the plumes of writhing mist, Forrix saw the surviving crystalline statues throwing off their previous immobility. They moved stiffly, like sleepers awoken from an aeons-long slumber, and the gems at the heart of their bulbous heads bled vibrant colour into glassy bodies that suddenly seemed significantly less fragile. Kaesoron’s warriors had ruined many, but hundreds more remained in the plaza, not to mention the thousands still standing between them and the citadel’s walls.
Forrix felt his heart sink as he saw the titanic guardians of the portal were moving too. Light poured through their enormous limbs from the gemstones set throughout their bodies, and the sweeping, wing-like spines at their shoulders blazed with coruscating energies. Spumes of shimmering light washed from their fists, and the crack and grind of their flexing joints was like the splitting of a glacier.
‘Back to the strongpoint,’ he ordered. ‘Now!’
The lumbering Terminators moved as one, but before they had taken more than half a dozen steps, their way was blocked. Not by the glassy constructs stepping from their plinths, but by an army of spectral warriors coalescing from the emerald-lit mists. Thousands upon thousands of their shimmering forms filled the plaza, clad in form-fitting plates of armour and armed with long blades. White eyes shone through translucent porcelain helmets, and Forrix felt their intense hatred for him.
Though it ran contrary to every secular belief in his head, he understood exactly the nature of this army of wraiths.
These were the eldar dead of Iydris.
TWENTY-TWO
Half-Imagined Horizons
Wraith War
Fire for Effect