‘I see it all now,’ said Fulgrim, his gaze sweeping the chamber while the light around him began to fade as every spirit stone was finally drained of life. ‘The past and the futures, the present and the neverwas. The time we waste here is but a mote in the eye of the universe, a prelude to things infinite and things fleeting.’
Perturabo felt a tremor in the rock, the widening fault lines originating from the planet’s hollow core now rising to the surface. The floor of the cavern split apart with a booming crack and the last light of the dying green sun flooded the chamber.
‘Farewell, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘We will meet again, and we will yet renew our bonds.’
Fulgrim lifted his hands and a curtain of azure light rose up from the ground like a flare of teleportation energy. It was blinding and momentary, and when it cleared, Perturabo saw that Fulgrim was gone, and with him every one of the Emperor’s Children.
His Iron Warriors surrounded him, each one changed by what they had witnessed – some for the good, some for ill, though it was too soon to tell which was which. They stood ready for his command, his loyal sons all. Dust and a rain of debris fell from above, the cracks in the floor spreading to the great dome like fracturing glass. A zigzagging fault line ripped through the centre of the chamber and segments of the floor were thrust upwards as jets of pulverised rock geysered plumes of green dust.
Iydris was tearing itself apart. The force at the heart of the world was no more. The strength of the dead that had kept it safe was failing, and soon this planet would be swallowed by the unimaginable force of the supermassive black hole.
Across the chasm, the remaining Iron Hands gathered up their wounded and fell back from the spreading fissures and heaving ruptures opening in the floor. They looked upon Perturabo with hatred, and he could not say it was ill earned. Had he desired it, Perturabo could destroy them all single-handed. With his regained strength, there was not one of them that could resist him, and they knew it.
Perturabo slung Forgebreaker over his shoulder.
‘This world is dying,’ he said to his warriors. ‘But we will not die with it.’
Perturabo turned from the Iron Hands and walked away.
Cadmus Tyro watched the primarch of the Iron Warriors leave, and let out the breath it felt like he’d been holding for years. He knew there was no way they could have fought the Lord of Iron and lived, though it would have been a battle worthy of Medusan legend had anyone been left alive to speak of it.
‘They’ve gone,’ said Vermana Cybus, his weapons held limply at his side.
‘You sound disappointed,’ replied Tyro.
Cybus shrugged. ‘I expected to die at Perturabo’s hand. Any other death will feel small.’
Another crack burst the ground nearby and more of the sickly light spread from whatever lay at the heart of this planet. Debris fell from above, and slivers of the bruised sky above the sepulchre were visible through the disintegrating structure.
‘Then don’t die,’ said Tyro, gripping the veteran’s shoulder. ‘Live forever.’
Cybus nodded and turned away to gather his few surviving warriors. The Iron Hands fell back to the walls of the chamber, towards the dark, secret passages of the sepulchre through which Varuchi Vohra had led them. The eldar guide knelt by the walls, his hands sifting the knee-deep dust that was all that remained of the vast array of gemstones immolated by Fulgrim’s transformation. Tears streamed down the eldar’s face, grief at the passing of a world or something else.
‘We need to go,’ said Tyro as another violent shockwave bubbled up from the planet’s core. ‘This place will not last much longer.’
‘The maugetar stone…’ whispered Vohra between wracking sobs. ‘That should have been enough for him. Not this… this was too much. Now we have nothing.’
‘We are alive, eldar,’ said Tyro. ‘We faced enemy primarchs and yet we live. Be thankful for that. And whatever weapons they sought here, they’re not leaving with them.’
Vohra looked up at him, his face transformed from the bland scholar Tyro had always doubted he was into something cruel and inhuman, a monster that revelled in the suffering of others and the myriad pains he could craft.
‘The lords of Commorragh do not look kindly upon failure,’ said Vohra. ‘You upstart ape-creatures were only supposed to divert them, to keep the fallen ones from understanding the true prize of Iydris.’
‘The true prize?’
Vohra held up his hand, letting the grey, inert dust spill through his fingers.
‘All is dust,’ he said mirthlessly. ‘This was to be our salvation, a world’s worth of spirit stones to stave off the hunger of She Who Thirsts, but it’s all gone… The power to reclaim our birthright. I return to Commorragh to my death.’
Tyro had no understanding of the eldar’s words, but appreciated enough to know that he and his warriors had been deceived from the very beginning. This mission had never been about denying the traitors world-cracking weapons – most likely no such weapons had ever existed, and the tale Fulgrim had told Perturabo on Hydra Cordatus of the Angel Exterminatus was a grand lie constructed to bring the weapons and talents of the Iron Warriors to bear on this doomed world.
Just as Vohra’s words had been crafted to bring the Iron Hands to this place, to keep the Emperor’s Children and Iron Warriors from realising what was truly at stake. But something had gone awry and now the eldar’s plan was in ruins.
‘You brought us here to die,’ said Tyro. Spears of light spilled from above and he looked up at the opened roof, its circumference ringed by broken slabs of stone that spilled rivers of debris into the chamber.
‘It’s all you are good for, mon-keigh!’ snapped Varuchi Vohra, drawing his hands round and above him in an elaborate circle, as if defining the outline of a gateway around him.
Tyro drew his pistol and aimed it squarely at the eldar’s skull.
‘My brothers died for your lie,’ said Tyro. ‘Now you will too.’
The eldar spoke a grating word in his native tongue and a crackling violet light flared from the gate he had described around his body. Tyro squeezed the trigger, but his bolt blasted through empty air. He fired again and again, but Vohra was gone.
Sabik Wayland jogged over to stand beside him, Nykona Sharrowkyn at his side. Both bore grievous wounds and their armour was red with blood. Tyro nodded gratefully to the Raven Guard as he saw he carried the broken remains of Garuda. The golden eagle’s metal body was badly damaged, but he suspected Frater Thamatica would relish the challenge of making it fully functional again – assuming they could escape without the eldar guide.
‘What are you shooting at?’ said Wayland. ‘We need to get out of here.’
‘Vohra’s gone,’ said Tyro.
‘Gone?’ said Wayland. ‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. Some kind of personal teleporter, I think,’ said Tyro. ‘He must have a hidden starship in orbit.’
‘But he knew the way out,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘I tried to map it as we made our way in, but it was impossible. The paths were all wrong.’
‘Then we go out a different way,’ said Wayland, detaching a personal transponder from a cavity within his backpack. A winking green light shone from the bulky technology.
A roar of engines sounded from above and an aircraft descended on shrieking jetblasts. A Storm Eagle in the colours of the Iron Hands spiralled down through the shattered roof to hover on screaming pillars of rippling air. Thunderhawks and Stormbirds hovered in the air above the sepulchre, buffeted by storm-force winds.
Through the canopy of the Storm Eagle, Tyro saw Frater Thamatica, who sketched a wry salute through the polarised armourglass panes. As much as Thamatica had earned every punishment and more, Tyro had never been happier to see the wayward Iron Father. The assault ramp lowered on the Storm Eagle and Atesh Tarsa jumped down onto the heaving floor of the chamber.
‘Get the wounded and dead on board right now,’ he commanded. ‘The Sisypheum is on borrowed time
to break orbit, but we leave no man behind.’
Whatever artifice the labyrinth once possessed to confound the senses was lost with the demise of the power at the heart of the world. Perturabo could feel its embers dying and knew they had little time until the singularity dragged Iydris into its black maw. He led the Iron Warriors through the inert maze and out into the plaza beyond, where it seemed the fighting had been no less fierce. He saw the shattered remains of an Iron Warriors strongpoint, but no sign of any of his gene-sons. The plaza had been laid waste by a merciless bombardment, the kind designed to wipe an area clean of life and leave no stone upon another; an Iron Warriors bombardment.
He ignored the questions of his legionaries as he led them through the cratered wasteland, back through the citadel of the dead that now truly deserved the name. The tombs were all empty, the few remaining statues utterly lifeless and every hint of the shimmering green light that had suffused each building now vanished.
The fortifications at the wall were gone, the Rhinos shattered and broken by shell-fire and the wall itself flattened for hundreds of metres in both directions. The few tombs and mausolea that had clustered near the wall on either side were gone too, pounded flat by a walking barrage that had cleared a path from the citadel back to the landing zone.
They saw no sign of the Emperor’s Children and no sign of the Iron Hands. Iydris was coming apart at the seams, deep fissures opening in the landscape and billowing clouds of dust and smoke pouring from the wounds in the planet’s surface. Fading green light suffused the dust, and a tortured groan sounded from deep below as impossible stresses cracked apart the planetary structure crafted by the long-dead eldar.
At length their brutal march pace through the obscuring, sound-deadening dust clouds brought them within sight of the fortifications around the landing zone, and Perturabo was relieved to find that they appeared to have escaped assault.
The walls were cracking from the base upwards, and on any normal world the life of the warsmith in command of such a fortress would have been forfeit. But this was no normal world and the earth upon which these walls had been built was, like the race that once dwelled here, untrustworthy and unreliable.
The gates of the fortress opened and an armoured squadron of iron-sheened Land Raiders emerged, chevroned in gold and jet. Their weapons were live, and riding in the topmost hatch of the lead vehicle was the master of the Stor-bezashk.
‘My lord,’ said Toramino. ‘You live! When Warsmith Forrix called in a final protective fire mission we feared the worst.’
Perturabo nodded, but before he could issue any orders, the weapons of Toramino’s Land Raider swung up to bear, their charge capacitors building power to fire. Perturabo spun around, hearing a muffled roar through the banks of churned dust. Toramino’s Land Raiders manoeuvred into a firing line, but a familiar tenor in the sound made Perturabo raise his hand.
‘Hold your fire,’ he ordered as a hulking, battered shape emerged from the smoke.
The Tormentor, cratered, holed and pummelled almost to destruction, limped towards the line of Land Raiders. The Shadowsword’s main gun had been torn off at the root. Every one of its sponson guns had been blasted from the superstructure and its rear quarters were ablaze where its engine and fuel stores had ignited. Great gashes torn in its side flapped sheets of thick plasteel, and it trailed its mechanical innards behind it in a glistening river of oil.
The engine gave one last bang of internal reaction, and the super-heavy ground to a halt, never to move again. Its side hatches fell open, clanging against its ruined hull and spilling roiling banks of thick, tar-black smoke.
A warrior in armour the colour of soot and bare metal fell from the vehicle’s interior, dragging a figure in Cataphractii warplate behind him. The burden was too great for him and he collapsed in a broken heap, tearing off his helmet and drawing great gulping breaths. Both warriors were drenched in blood and scorched by the flames of the super-heavy’s demise, but Perturabo recognised the Stonewrought and Forrix almost immediately.
‘Falk, Kroeger, attend to your fellow triarch,’ ordered Perturabo, before turning back to Toramino. ‘Evacuation protocols. All craft and personnel are to return to the fleet immediately.’
Perturabo’s warriors hastened to obey him as he marched back to the landing fields.
Perturabo stood watching the final death throes of the eldar crone world. He had seen planets die before, cleansed of organic matter by the life-eater virus or bombed to extinction by cyclonic torpedoes. He had even seen one consumed by a rogue stellar flare, burned black in minutes by the raging violence of its star. But he had never seen a world die from within. The surface of the pearlescent globe was darkening by the second, its once pristine surface now sullied by clouds of ejected matter reaching up into the troposphere. Any structures remaining on the surface had long since been obliterated by the growing seismic force of the core-deep earthquakes or had sunk into the vast, continent-sized fissures tearing through the upper reaches of the artificial planetoid’s structure.
The Iron Blood strained to break orbit, but the force at the heart of the Eye of Terror was reasserting its grip on reality with a vengeance. Many of the smaller vessels of the Iron Warriors fleet had already been dragged within its embrace, swallowed by the black hole’s powerful energies.
Only the capital ships had engines large enough to resist the inexorable pull, but even they were only delaying the inevitable. The vessel’s Navigators could find no trace of the Paths Above that had led them to this world, and their desperate search for a way out was bearing no fruit.
Behind him, Forrix, Kroeger and Falk awaited his command, but he had none to give.
He was a primarch, crafted to be a god amongst men, but what was he in the face of such cosmic power? Could he demand the black hole release his ships, or turn back the course of time with a wave of the hand? He had great power, but even he was subject to the laws of the universe.
The Iron Blood groaned, hyper-stresses deforming its implacable superstructure with shear and torsion it had never been designed to endure. The ship was crying out in pain, its machine spirits filling the command deck with frightened static.
The Emperor’s Children fleet had vanished completely, taken up along with Fulgrim in his ascendance. Even Julius Kaesoron, who Forrix and the Stonewrought swore blind had escaped the barrage at the plaza with them in the Tormentor. Perturabo did not know where his duplicitous brother had gone, nor did he care. His betrayal had turned the last of Perturabo’s heart to stone, cementing his conviction that there was only one man whose orders he could trust.
One warrior who spoke without guile and with only noble intentions at his heart.
From now on, he would trust only Horus Lupercal.
‘My lord?’ said Forrix. ‘What are your orders?’
Perturabo turned to face his triarchs, each one of them scarred by the battles they had fought to reach this place.
Barban Falk stood taller, somehow fuller, as though imbued with a presence he had not possessed before. His armour was darker, almost black in places, and when Forrix had spoken to him by name earlier, Perturabo had heard Falk say, ‘I no longer know that name, I am simply the Warsmith.’
Kroeger too had changed, as though some secret part of him had unlocked and could never now be closed off. His killer’s swagger was still there, but it was distilled, honed, now directed into serving a higher purpose than simply the thrill of battle.
Forrix alone seemed to have been diminished by this campaign, the fire that had driven him into the most terrible battles smothered by bitterness. Perturabo knew that feeling well, it was the horror of betrayal, the crushing weight of knowing that there was no one worthy of your trust.
‘My orders?’ said Perturabo, turning back to the viewscreen, where the monstrous black hole seethed with dark energies. Perturabo looked into its heart, thinking back to the celestial myths and legends surrounding such phenomena, the scientific facts and suppositions of their ori
gins and the wild theories of what might lie on the other side of such a thing.
‘I never go back,’ said Perturabo. ‘Only forwards.’
‘My lord?’ asked Forrix again. ‘What are your orders?’
‘We go in,’ said Perturabo.
‘Into the black hole?’ asked Kroeger in horror. ‘That’s suicide.’
‘No, my triarch,’ said Perturabo with sudden insight. ‘Fulgrim promised we would meet again, and I believe him. We are not meant to die here, and there is only one way onwards.’
Perturabo stared at the black hole, as if daring it to contradict him.
‘This is my order,’ he said. ‘Carry it out. Now.’
Theogonies – IV
He was born in fire.
Or was that reborn?
Lucius felt it on his skin, a killing heat that consumed all before it. Fuelled by chemicals and accelerated by an almost sentient desire to devour. His eyes opened, and Lucius felt thrilling pain surge around his body. He was alive, which was something to be savoured, especially in the wake of what had gone before.
Sharrowkyn.
The Raven Guard had killed him.
And yet he was clearly alive.
Lucius remembered the twin black swords plunging into his body in the traditional manner of the executioner. The pain of the blades sliding down through his chest to pierce his hearts and puncture his lungs was a memory to cherish. It sent pulses of shivering pleasure through him even now.
He sat up, touching his hands to his shoulders and finding no trace of the killing wounds, only a smooth layer of skin that felt wondrous to the touch. He sat on a metal gurney in an apothecarion that looked like a madman’s laboratory, the walls hung with heavy tubes of gurgling fluids that bubbled and steamed in the heat pervading the chamber.
Fire blazed throughout its length and breadth, a raging inferno set by deliberate hand. Pools of toxic chemicals burned on the walls and floor, spilled from smashed beakers and poured from ruptured vats of highly toxic, highly flammable liquids.