Perturabo shook off his moment of weakness and held the weapon out before him.
‘From iron cometh strength!’ he shouted.
‘From strength cometh will,’ returned his warriors.
‘From will cometh faith!”
‘From faith cometh honour.’
Perturabo hoisted Forgebreaker onto his shoulder and completed the Unbreakable Litany as he charged the foe. ‘From honour cometh iron!’
Five died to his first hammerstrike, six to the next. With the Iron Circle formed up around him, Perturabo was a force of nature. His hammer was death’s instrument and he smashed the enemy to broken shards as it looped around his body in ever wider circles. The weapons mounted on his gauntlet blazed with fire, and he reaped a fearsome harvest of the eldar machine-things.
The Iron Warriors fought shoulder to shoulder, disciplined and unbreakable. Their locked bolters roared with relentless ferocity, smashing the brittle bodies of their enemies to glittering shards. Falk commanded the left, Kroeger the right, and the two flanks were the walls of an impregnable fortress fashioned from flesh and blood.
Berossus smashed the eldar creations apart with every blow, his blitzing cannon, crushing hammer and brutish body unstoppable. Streaking bolts of emerald fire glanced from his casket and flared upon his armoured flanks. Berossus had been a powerful warrior in life, but as a Dreadnought he had ascended to another level of ferocity.
Hundreds of the eldar creatures broke against the iron bulwark, hurled back time and time again until freshly extruded things emerged from the towers with a glowing soulstone at their heart. The Emperor’s Children on the far side of the shaft were under attack, and Perturabo saw that they were protecting the men and women standing behind them.
What was so important about those mortals?
Perturabo’s hammer smashed heads, his fist broke limbs, and his kill tally rose in geometric leaps. Falk and Kroeger fought their own private battles, each warrior in his element as they fought to keep the eldar creatures from their primarch.
Against such overwhelming numbers, Perturabo knew it was a losing battle, but what else was there to do but fight?
His gene-father had always said that a bad plan was better than no plan, and one began to form in his mind as he pushed the eldar ghost machines back again. The things birthed from the towers were relentless, but individually they were no match for the Iron Warriors. Bathed in the glow of the column of light, Perturabo saw they were insensate things, given animation but without direction other than to attack. They fought without strategy or a plan.
Their only remit was to kill these intruders, no matter how many of them were destroyed in the process. They could be held off for a time, but sheer numbers would eventually win the day for them. Even Perturabo could not fight so many and live, but he realised there might yet be a chance to save something from this debacle.
He stepped back from the fighting lines and, together with the Iron Circle, marched back to the edge of the plunging shaft at the chamber’s heart. The Emperor’s Children at the ramp lifted their guns at his approach, but Perturabo shook his head.
‘Kill them all,’ he said.
The robotic warriors of the Iron Circle opened fire, heavy cannons and plasma weaponry punching all but one of the Emperor’s Children from his feet. The broken bodies were snatched up by the curtain of light as though caught in the rapids of a fast-flowing river. Perturabo watched their bodies wink out of existence as they were hurled into the blackness above.
Perturabo shot the last warrior with a precise blast from his gauntlet-mounted weapon. He felt no regret at killing the legionary. He had made his choice to stand against Perturabo and that was a death sentence, no matter to which Legion you owed your allegiance. He strode to the edge of the shaft, feeling the almost irresistible power of the emerald light as it thundered through the air towards the singularity above. Fulgrim’s remaining followers stared at Perturabo with undisguised hatred, the need for masks of brotherhood shed now that their master’s final deception was in effect.
Below, the ramp spiralled down towards a vanishing point, and Perturabo could almost believe that it led to the very centre of the world. Even as the thought occurred, he knew it to be true. That was exactly where this would lead him. To the heart of an artificially wrought planet, where the secret of Fulgrim’s desire had been hidden from sight since a time before mortal memory.
Perturabo saw Barban Falk coming towards him, knowing what he was going to say before he even heard the words over the vox.
‘Save your breath, my son,’ he said. ‘Where I go, you cannot follow.’
Perturabo stepped into the light, feeling its raging power tugging at his armour as it sought to tear him from the ground. This was not physical force, but the immutable will of the lives that made up this light, for he now understood that this was no elemental energy or mechanically generated motive force, but the distilled essence of all those who had died here.
And who still remained imprisoned within the glittering gemstones.
This was no abandoned world, it was a repository of the never-dead. Limbo souls whose bodies were no more, but whose spirits endured a twilight existence of incorporeality.
He could think of no crueller fate than to be consigned to such emptiness.
Perturabo descended into the heart of their world.
The guns of the Stor-bezashk trailed streamers of ghostly green corposant, as though a storm were gathering in the clashing skies. Toramino watched his gunmasters and their crews hauling shells from sunken casements, working with machine-like efficiency to ready their weapons to open up.
Forrix had blurted his demand for a final protective fire mission over the vox with breathless haste; a corridor of shelling to link the strongpoint at the sepulchre and the walls of the citadel. A clear zone was to be established between the two fortresses for when the time came to fall back to the landing zone. Toramino recalled that the vox-link had been distorted with static, laced with the unending keening of the wind, thus rendering the triarch’s words open to wilful misinterpretation.
A tragic error of communications, but one familiar to any warrior on the battlefield.
He scrolled through the topographical representation of the citadel, its blocky buildings picked out in white, the location of the Iron Warriors strongpoints marked in blue. The points of impact and areas of effect were red dots that expanded into circles of orange then yellow and finally to green.
Red and blue overlapped at the fortification occupied by Forrix and the Stonewrought. Toramino had nothing particular against Soltarn Vull Bronn, and his loss would rob the Legion of valuable insights, but that was a price Toramino was more than willing to pay. With such precise target information, the gunmasters of the Stor-bezashk needed no ranging shots or spotters. Toramino stood at the edge of the battlements, looking out over the smoking outline of the citadel. The shimmering green haze he’d seen on the horizon earlier had bypassed the landing zone, much to his relief, leaving the contravallations untouched. The billowing cloud of swirling shapes and half-glimpsed forms had swept on with unstoppable fury towards the fortifications around the citadel’s wall, where pillars of smoke and leaping columns of fire attested to the ferocity of the fighting within.
The final readiness icon flickered green on his data-slate and Toramino turned back to the multitude of gun barrels raised to the sky. These were his guns, his warriors. The Stor-bezashk answered to him and him alone. Soon they would be the honour guard of a triarch, and with that thought uppermost in his mind, he tapped the blinking red icon on his slate.
‘Fire for effect,’ he said.
TWENTY-THREE
Voices of the Dead
The Glory of the Fallen
The Harvester
The light enfolded Perturabo and he felt the millions of spirits enmeshed in its dense wavelengths and spectra. At least Fulgrim hadn’t lied about one thing: a civilisation had ended here, though this was but a fraction of the l
ives that had been lost in that calamitous fall from grace. He neither knew nor cared what had happened to the eldar. Their doom was of an earlier age, its causes immaterial to him.
That they were declining to their eventual extinction was enough.
The dead of Iydris were still here and their spirits – though he disliked the supernatural connotations of that word – were woven into the substance of the light roaring up from whatever lay at the bottom of this shaft. The horror of their deaths was here too, and Perturabo felt their desperate hunger to imprint its tale upon him. He resisted, for he had other business to be about, but the farther he descended on the circling ramp, the harder they tried. His every step reverberated with echoes that lasted far longer and resonated far deeper than they had any right to, as though he no longer travelled on paths that could ever be mapped.
Though superficially obvious in its course, Perturabo understood that he was travelling a route not meant for humans, one where each downwards step bore no relation to distance in the world above. Glittering diamonds sparked in the walkway, skittering away from his footfalls like tiny crystalline arachnids. The wall next to him was utterly smooth, featureless save for the extrusion of the ground upon which he stood, though Perturabo saw hints of wraith-like forms swimming in its substance. They reached for him, but their essences were trapped within their crystal prison and could not escape.
All sounds of fighting from above had ceased, swallowed by the roar of the light and the susurration of billions of voices clamouring to be heard. Though he closed his thoughts to their touch, he couldn’t shut them out entirely. His mind was fashioned from the gene-structure of the Emperor, with perceptions and sensitivities beyond the comprehension of lesser minds.
The dead of Iydris could feel that and screamed at him with all their might.
Trapped in the heart of the Eye of Terror with only their fellow doomed souls around them, the chance to converse with a mind capable of listening was not to be missed. The dead of an entire world shouted their tales to him, a screaming wail of impenetrable sound. Yet in death, as in life, some voices were louder than others, and Perturabo perceived fragments of their lives.
They spoke of their loves, their dreams and their hopes. Of their loss, their aching loneliness, the fading hopes of their kin returning for them and the fear of that which pressed on the ever-shrinking borders of their doomed world.
But most of all they spoke of the unnatural desires that had driven them deeper and deeper into hedonistic indulgence, the wanton lusts and heedless descents into madness that had undone them. A lifetime of sorrow pressed in on Perturabo, but he fought against their maudlin laments.
‘You chose your path to destruction,’ he snarled. ‘Every one of you brought your deaths upon yourselves and I have no pity for you. You got what you deserved.’
Only as the voices of the dead kept pressing in upon him, telling him of the horror their lives had brought about and the route by which their doom had unfolded, did Perturabo come to understand they were not seeking his pity. They cared nothing for his understanding and his judgement was worthless to them.
The world of dead voices sought no boon from him.
They were warning him.
Beware She Who Thirsts…
Down, ever downwards.
An unending spiral towards a point of light that grew no brighter no matter how far he descended or how fast he strode. He began to doubt the wisdom of his course, but Perturabo had never given up on anything once he had begun, and this would be no different. He wondered how Fulgrim could have got so far ahead of him, but reasoned that time and distance held little meaning in this place.
He would find Fulgrim and he would kill him.
That fact alone sustained Perturabo as the voices of the dead became ever more insistent. He marched onwards, forcing himself into a kind of fugue state to keep his thoughts his own. His limbs moved mechanically; one foot in front of the other, ever downwards. Deeper and deeper.
The upper reaches of the plunging shaft were soon lost to sight in the haze of streaming light, but whatever lay at the bottom drew no closer. He thought back to the cliffs of Lochos, remembering a similar feeling as he climbed towards the unknown future at the top. But he had reached the top of that cliff, just as he would reach the bottom of this shaft.
He wondered if he would make that same climb again, knowing what he knew now, that only betrayal, bitterness and pain lay above him.
Might it not have been better to let go of the cliff and plunge to his death? Would it not have been easier to let his brains be dashed out on the rocks below? To be spared the cold, cheerless years to adulthood, without friends and kind words. Insulted by tutors whose teachings he mastered and surpassed in a matter of days, and mistrusted by a surrogate father who had cursed him the day he left his side to join his gene-sire in the stars.
Easier, yes, but easy had never been Perturabo’s way.
Long is the way, and hard, that leads out of hell and up to light.
The last remaining fragments of a proscribed book that had found its way into Perturabo’s personal library, but truer than even its lost writer could ever have known.
And from Olympia, what then?
A century and more of war, where his sons had broken their backs on countless worlds, bringing the strongholds of system tyrants and alien dominators to ruin. Campaign after campaign, battle after battle, each more gruelling than the last, each hope of a war of manoeuvre or a war of marching formations cruelly dashed by fresh tasking orders to resistant systems that knew the science of fortress-building better than most.
‘Perturabo throws men at walls,’ Dorn had once said of him. ‘If the Araakites so much as thought a wall he would pelt it with our legionaries as if there were no other way.’
The words had been said in jest, grim humour in the wake of a costly war of compliance in the Araaki Spiral, to imply shared adversity, but Perturabo hadn’t seen any of Rogal Dorn’s golden warriors up to their necks in mud and shit in the trenches. The Araakites had known their craft, and every stronghold was dug in deep around narrow passes, remote hilltops and natural barriers in the landscape. The system rock was bitter and hostile, the enemy warriors no less so, and it had taken many years for the IV Legion to regain its former strength.
Great works of art and heroic verse were composed in the wake of the victory, celebrating the courage of the Imperial Fists, the Dark Angels and the White Scars, but nowhere in the reams of poetry or artwork were the grim labours of the Iron Warriors judged worthy of note. Only in a predella to a larger work of Kelan Roget had warriors of the IV Legion even been shown, a lone Apothecary removing the gene-seed of a dying legionary as the flag of the Fists flew over a captured fortress.
The Glory of the Fallen it had been called, and Perturabo had sought out the artist so he could procure the piece for himself. Roget had been thrilled at his interest, but his pleasure had turned to dismay as Perturabo put it to the torch.
‘If my sons are not to be honoured properly then they will not be part of a record that glorifies another,’ Perturabo had told the horrified artist as the flames consumed the painting.
Perturabo heard afterwards that Dorn had offered a rich commission for the artist to repaint the predella, but Roget had declined. At least one mortal understood him. He hadn’t thought of that moment in decades, and knew that the voices of the dead were pushing his thoughts to days gone by, forcing him to relive his own path if he would not listen to theirs.
‘No man can buy back his past,’ he told the light. ‘So I’ll waste neither breath nor thought upon it.’
The journey downwards was never-ending, or so it seemed until it ended.
Perturabo had tuned out the dead, heeding their warnings while at the same time ignorant of their substance. Grim tales of their mistakes and follies did not interest him and only that curious phrase – Beware She Who Thirsts – had lodged in his mind like a buried splinter.
He had never heard of
any such being, nor could he divine anyone who might fit such a description. Females had been few in number within his Legion’s expeditionary fleets, and virtually non-existent since he had purged the remembrancers from his ships. Any woman worthy of such a title would certainly have been known to him.
The levelling-out of the walkway caught Perturabo by surprise, his steps faltering as he realised he’d reached the bottom of the shaft. He looked up, the vague diaspora of his thoughts cohering into his singular purpose in taking this downward path. He unhooked Forgebreaker from his back, not surprised to find that the physical geometry of where he had arrived bore no relation to the route he had taken to reach it.
He stood at the origin of a slender bridge that arched out to the centre of a spherical chamber of incredible, sanity-defying proportions. The footings of the bridge were anchored on the equator, and a score of other bridges reached out to where a seething ball of numinous jade light blazed like a miniature sun. Its dimensions were impossible to guess, for the chamber itself was beyond anything he had dreamed possible.
Iydris, it transpired, was a hollow world, its core this colossal void with the impossibly bright sun at its heart. The shadows of the bridges danced on the inner face of the void, in which were set innumerable gemstones like those that guarded the surface. This was the source of the light, and of the voices that had plagued him on his descent with their tedious woes.
The curving walls were of a smoky, fire-veined stone, hued green by the fixed sun. The gems set within the inner faces of this spherical realm formed a firmament of stars, billions of glittering points of light that surrounded him above and below. Perturabo took a step out onto the bridge, looking down past its edges to the shimmering stones in the gloom, like bioluminescent creatures of the deep ocean slowly rising to the surface. His step faltered as a previously unknown sense of vertigo seized him.He took a moment to regain his equilibrium, slowing his breathing and letting his sense of spatial geometry recalibrate to the sheer vastness of the space in which he found himself. Perturabo walked out onto the bridge, no more than a metre in width and no thicker than an insubstantial treatise. Like the others around the chamber, it sloped on a gentle upward arc, the curve corresponding to the outer edges of the golden ratio.