The bird banked around, its gimlet eyes alive with the hybrid technologies of its unique mind. Its wings beat with a clash of metal on metal, angling its flight back to the far side of the chamber.
A barrage of bolter fire punched through the screen of spirit stones and a handful of Emperor’s Children were pitched from their feet.
Perturabo saw the veil part, and didn’t know whether to weep or rejoice at the sight of warriors charging towards him.
Black-armoured and bearing a mailed fist upon their shoulder guards.
The Iron Tenth.
TWENTY-SIX
A Common Foe
The Sound of Madness
No Pleasure
Lucius was at the edge of the shaft in a heartbeat, but the golden-winged eagle was already too far away for his whip. He pulled his bolt pistol and drew a bead on its golden form. Almost immediately, the bird began jinking and weaving through the air, as though it somehow sensed it was being targeted. Lucius fired, but his shot went wide. Two more shots missed before a fourth finally clipped the edge of the bird’s wing.
‘Got you,’ he said triumphantly, watching as it spiralled downwards.
Falk felt the paralysing lethargy that had held him rooted to the spot fall away, and immediately moved in Perturabo’s direction. The Iron Hands were here, and they were advancing behind a screen of fire towards the primarchs. Their presence here amazed him. How had they come through the labyrinth? Had they found a secret way into the sepulchre that Karuchi Vohra had not known existed? Amid the charging Iron Hands, Falk saw a half-glimpsed shape at the edge of the chamber, a slight figure in a long black robe, and his pace faltered as he recognised Karuchi Vohra.
At first he assumed he was mistaken, but then he saw the figure again, and this time there was no mistaking the thin features. The eldar Perturabo had killed in the labyrinth, could he have a brother? It was surely the only explanation, but as he looked closer, he saw that the resemblance was more than just fraternal.
The eldar with the Iron Hands was identical in every way to Karuchi Vohra.
Falk threw off his shock and forced himself to concentrate on the important matters at hand. He had no understanding of the subtleties of this situation, only that the Lord of Iron needed at least one of his triarchs at his side.
‘To the primarch!’ he yelled, leading the Iron Warriors in defence of their liege lord.
The Emperor’s Children were mirroring his actions, rallying to Fulgrim’s side as coruscating loops of purple and gold lightning flailed from his body, as though he had become a vast, overloading generator.
An Emperor’s Children warrior with blades sheathed in the bare flesh of his chest came at him, swinging a giant, tooth-bladed chainaxe. His helm was an older mark, making him look like one of the techno-barbarians of the Unification Wars. Falk angled his shoulder guard to take the blow, and the screaming teeth bit only a finger-breadth before sliding clear.
‘Fool!’ cried Falk. ‘We have a common enemy!’
The barbarian paid his words no heed and raised his axe for another strike.
Falk punched clean through the warrior’s chest, the power fist obliterating his entire torso and leaving only a gory heap of dismembered body parts in its wake. He stamped the warrior’s helm flat as he continued, his combi-bolters blasting out the last of his twin magazines. Two black-clad warriors fell into the shaft, the bolter fire blowing them apart from the inside.
Gunfire roared all around as the Iron Warriors came with him, a hammer of righteous fury. Like Falk, they didn’t know what Fulgrim and his debauchers were doing to Perturabo, but that it was harmful was obvious. Berossus crashed into the Phoenix Guard forming a cordon around them, and three of Fulgrim’s elite praetorians were smashed to bloody ruin in as many blows.
The rest were not so easily felled, fighting with powered halberds that carved great chunks from Berossus’s armour. The struggle became a close-range firefight, the fighting warriors blasting at one another with pistols and clubbing with fists and feet.
‘Fight the Iron Hands!’ yelled Falk, but his words were falling on deaf ears.
He pulled up short as the skull face that had haunted him from the warp took shape in the blood spatter patterns on a smashed storm shield.
Speak with my voice… the glossiaic unspeech…
Falk’s anger brimmed over; anger at the Iron Hands, at the Emperor’s Children, but most of all at the sheer stupidity of disunity. This fight needed a warrior who could take charge, a warrior whose words would be obeyed.
‘Fight the Iron Hands!’ he yelled, and those warriors nearest him recoiled at the force of his words, seals popping on their gorgets and paint blistering on their armour. Those without helms staggered as their gag reflex brought up the oily, acidic contents of their stomachs.
For a fraction of the smallest moment, they stared at him in awe and fear.
And then they obeyed.
Kroeger put aside his heedless smashing of the motionless eldar constructs at the sight of the Iron Hands, feeling the red fog in his mind disperse enough for him to see that a greater enemy had presented itself. He stood atop a heap of shattered glass and broken eldar remains.
He could remember nothing of the slaughters that had seen them destroyed, and that complete loss of control shocked him. The Iron Warriors were hard fighters, but they were no screaming berserkers. Not for them the unshackled fury of Angron’s World Eaters – that way lay madness, and Kroeger would not surrender to such an irreversible course. He still felt the lure of complete surrender, but clamped down on it with a whispered recitation of the Unbreakable Litany.
‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron,’ he said. ‘And may it ever be so.’
He took deep breaths, feeling the bonds of control clamping down on his beating aggression. It still lurked in the heart of him, but it was his to command, his to release or his to ignore.
For now.
Kroeger began running to where Barban Falk led a cadre of Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children against the Iron Hands.
Marius Vairosean ripped his hand across the firing frets of his sonic cannon, playing the shrieking harmonics over the Iron Hands. They were advancing in the cover of the towers, but his weapon blazed through them with caroming detonations. One warrior was torn apart, the force of the impact vibrations ripping both his arms from their sockets and pulping his head like an eggshell. Another’s armour went into resonant frequency shock and reduced his flesh and bone to liquid paste.
He laughed to see such death, hammering his hand down again and again, sending out ripping chords of dissonant frequency blasts. Everywhere he aimed, the ground erupted in fissuring gouges. Enemy warriors were flung away by the screaming power. He and the few Kakophoni still alive paid no heed to the Iron Warrior with the booming voice, though the piercing violence of it had pleased Marius greatly.
More focused than Eidolon’s sonic shriek, but less painful, and therefore less stimulating.
Though his senses had been heightened in almost every way by the ministrations of Fabius, Marius had lost none of his tactical acumen, and saw that the Iron Hands had the best of this conflict so far.
They were fresh into the battle, whereas the Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children had already fought a deadly enemy, and their ammunition stocks were depleted, their numbers diminished and their primarchs unable to fight. The black-armoured warriors were fighting in smaller kill teams, moving implacably forwards under the withering fire from a braying Dreadnought. Its bolter and flamer bathed the chamber in strobing muzzle flare and whooshing gouts of promethium. It advanced over a flaming avenue of broken eldar bodies, unstoppable and immense. Marius looked for the Iron Warriors Dreadnought, and grinned lopsidedly as he saw it fighting through the towers to reach its enemy twin.
A group of Iron Hands broke from cover, a leader and a combat cell with a bulky cannon weapon, and Marius stepped o
ut into the open with his three Kakophoni. He played a shrieking burst of soundwaves and blistering powered chords. Three of the warriors went down, scattered but not dead.
A fourth rolled to his feet and aimed a long, custom-designed carbine at Marius.
The shot punched through the weapon Marius had fashioned from the instruments designed by Bequa Kynska for her Maraviglia, and a wailing explosion of clashing harmonics exploded outwards; the death scream of a living being. He hurled the dying device aside as the looming form of the Iron Hands Dreadnought hove into view.
A hurricane of shells slammed into him, punching him from his feet and ripping through his Kakophoni. They died screaming, revelling in the sounds of their own death. Blood pooled in Marius’s armour, but he welcomed the sensation. It had been too long since he had felt real pain, and orgasmic synaptic connections exploded in his cortex, stimulating him beyond all reason.
He surged to his feet, the muscles and bones in his jaw distending and reshaping in readiness. The warrior with the carbine flicked a selector switch on the weapon’s stock, but before he could fire, Marius drew breath and unleashed a shrieking blast of sound from his swelling lungs and altered trachea. The warrior, an Iron Father he now saw, fell back, clutching his helmet as the deafening, ear-bursting volume of Marius’s shout overloaded his battle armour’s auto-senses before they could protect him.
Even the Dreadnought rocked back under the sonic force, its aural receptors exploding in a shower of cascading sparks. That would dis-orientate it long enough for Marius to finish the legionaries under its protection and move on.
Marius’s face moved with grotesque, fleshy undulations, drawing a huge amount of air into his lungs for another sonic exhalation. One of the warriors climbed to his feet, his armour torn and scorched almost bare of paint. Reeling, the warrior staggered under the weight of a heavy volkite cannon. He struggled with the unfamiliar weapon, hauling on arming levers and charging cranks. The gun’s tip crackled with building energy, but such a powerful weapon took time to fire.
Time this warrior didn’t have.
Marius spread his arms and leaned into his screaming bellow.
The air between the two warriors fractured with sonic detonations, a jagged haze of noise that filled the chamber and shattered hundreds of spirit stones floating above the battle. Marius screamed until his lungs were emptied, the cathartic sound of madness setting his brain afire with blistering sensations of pleasure, pain and ecstatic joy.
Incredibly, impossibly, the warrior remained standing.
‘What?’ said Ignatius Numen grimly. ‘I didn’t catch that.’
Marius ballooned his lungs for another shriek of power.
Deaf to all sound, the Morlock triggered the volkite cannon.
The searing ray punched through Marius Vairosean’s breastplate, and explosively boiled his flesh and blood in the blink of an eye.
He didn’t even have breath to scream.
Picking his way between the knots of fighting legionaries, Lucius spied the struggling form of the golden bird. It lay in a pile of broken crystal twenty metres away, its wing shattered and one leg bent back at an unnatural angle. The black and gold gemstone Fulgrim coveted lay beside its crumpled beak, and Lucius took a moment to wonder whether such automata could feel pain.
A scuffle of boots on loose stone and crystal sounded behind him, careless and club-footed. Lonomia Ruen dropped into the cover of a collapsed pillar with him, a dripping dagger held in one hand, a needle pistol in the other.
‘What is that stone?’ asked Ruen.
Lucius didn’t bother to hide his irritation at Ruen’s presence, and ignored the question.
He didn’t know what was so important about it, but that Fulgrim desired it was enough for him. A darting shape moved through the shadows before him, and Lucius squinted through the misty haze of green fog and gunsmoke. Something was out there, but he couldn’t see it properly. Even his genhanced acuity, further sharpened by the spatial rewiring of the sensory centres of his brain, couldn’t pick out what it was.
It was a shadow where no shadows should be, a ghost out of place on a world of ghosts.
Lucius smiled as comprehension dawned.
‘Ruen,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the downed eagle. ‘You see that?’
‘What?’ said Ruen, scrambling to the edge of the pillar and peering round its broken stub.
‘There,’ said Lucius. ‘Quickly.’
‘I don’t see anyth–’ said Ruen before a tiny thip, thip sounded and the back of his helmet blew out. He slumped over onto his side, both eye lenses shattered and scorched.
‘Idiot,’ said Lucius, swinging his bolter up over the pillar and aiming at the point where he’d seen the tiny, telltale flash of the needler. Most observers wouldn’t have seen the weapon’s las-flare, concealed within a shadow and shrouded by fallen debris.
But Lucius wasn’t most observers.
The Raven Guard would already be displacing, but Lucius could give him something to force his head down: bolt shells stitched a percussive path through the shadow. He kept firing as he vaulted the fallen pillar and ran towards the fallen eagle. Solid needle rounds puffed the ground behind him in a blitzing series of innocuous-sounding impacts.
Lucius dived over the fallen remains of an eldar construct and scooped up the gold and black gemstone. It was heavier than it looked, the weight in his palm considerable and the heat that it exuded made it feel like it had been left in an oven overnight. That heat flowed through him, and the feeling of immortal vitality that saturated his flesh was so intense that he almost cried out.
‘No wonder Fulgrim wants this,’ he said, holstering his pistol and drawing his sword.
As soon as the blade was in his hand, a black shape streaked from the shadow of a nearby tower on a near-silent plume of whooshing jet-flame.
Shots hammered Lucius’s chest, but failed to penetrate. He dived to the side and brought his blade up in a slashing motion that sheared the barrel from the weapon in a cracking shower of non-reflective ceramite. The Raven Guard twisted in mid-air, dropping lightly to his feet and throwing aside the ruined halves of his weapon.
‘You bring a needle-carbine to a sword fight?’ sneered Lucius.
Once again his opponent triggered his jump pack, shooting forwards to deliver a thunderous kick to the centre of Lucius’s breastplate. Lucius was hurled back, hearing the crack of splitting plasteel. The Raven Guard sprang at him with his twin black swords extended before him. Lucius rolled aside and sprang to his feet in time to block a downward cut, and scissored his body to avoid a disembowelling slash to the gut. His own sword lanced down to the Raven Guard’s neck, but a burst of thrust carried the warrior away again.
Lucius unhooked the whip he’d taken from dead Kalimos, letting the barbed length of it uncoil like a hungry snake.
‘Just me and thee now,’ said Lucius, removing his helmet and tossing it aside. He reached up to a raised weal on his cheek, a scar that should have long-since healed, but which had been kept raw and marked with caustic powders. ‘You cut me before, and I will always treasure that wound. But that’s all you’re getting, Raven Guard.’
‘Sharrowkyn,’ said the warrior.
‘What?’
‘My name,’ said the Raven Guard. ‘It’s Nykona Sharrowkyn. Just so you know who it is that’s killed you.’
‘Nykona Sharrowkyn,’ said Lucius, rolling the name around his mouth as though experiencing a new flavour. ‘No, that’s not the name of a man that can kill me.’
‘You don’t get to decide,’ said Sharrowkyn, one sword held high over his head, the other extended low. They circled one another warily, each aware of the other’s skill, and knowing they were well matched. Neither paid heed to the battles raging around them, the life and death struggles being played out in the ruins of a dying race’s tomb. All that mattered was the purity of the duel. All other pretenders to this fight were dead, and all that remained to be decided was which of the
m would walk away.
Lucius attacked first, lashing his whip at Sharrowkyn’s head. The barbed tip scored a line through the faceplate and left eye lens. Lucius followed up with a low cut to the thigh, redirected at the last instant for the groin. Sharrowkyn read the move and blocked with crossed blades, spinning on his heel to hammer his elbow into Lucius’s head.
But Lucius wasn’t there, rolling forwards beneath the blow to thrust his blade at the base of Sharrowkyn’s spine. More flame from the Raven Guard’s jump pack carried him away from the paralysing strike, and he spun as he landed to face Lucius once more.
‘You’re fast, son of Corax,’ said Lucius.
‘Too fast for you, traitor.’
Lucius smiled. ‘You won’t goad me into foolishness.’
Even before Lucius finished speaking, Sharrowkyn gunned his jets again. Instead of dodging, Lucius leapt to meet the Raven Guard, his whip slashing and his sword stabbing. The lash cracked around Sharrowkyn’s neck, constricting and drawing blood before releasing. Lucius rammed his sword up, but Sharrowkyn’s blade turned it aside at the last second, its edge scraping a finger-deep furrow in the ceramite.
They landed badly, the stuttering jets of Sharrowkyn’s jump pack skidding them along the ground towards the edge of the shaft. All skill was irrelevant, only brute ferocity as the two swordsmen grappled and kicked at one another. Too close for sword-work, Sharrowkyn rammed his helmeted head into Lucius’s unprotected face.
Blood burst from his broken nose and his cheekbone shattered under the force of the impact. Lucius blinked away bloody tears and pushed himself away from Sharrowkyn. He saw the black outline of the Raven Guard coming at him and stabbed his sword into where Sharrowkyn’s throat would be.
His blade struck only empty air, and the shock of that almost cost him his life.
Somehow, impossibly, the Raven Guard wasn’t there.
A blade plunged into his side, and Lucius twisted away from the fiery, unexpected and exquisite pain. He shook his eyes clear of blood and felt the Raven Guard behind him – he spun and thrust low with his sword, but once again his blades cut air and not flesh. Another lancing blow plunged into his back, and this time the pain was an unwelcome sensation. Lucius could see the Raven Guard, but he moved like nothing he had ever seen before, faster than any mortal man could possibly move, like a wraith or a being out of step with time.