Forrix hadn’t thought of that. ‘Perturabo gave you Harkor’s Grand Battalion, so, yes, I suppose you are. Congratulations, Warsmith Kroeger.’
From the look on Kroeger’s face, Forrix might as well have handed him a chalice of graving acid and told him to drink every last drop.
‘I never thought to be a warsmith,’ said Kroeger. ‘It’s a rank that doesn’t suit my temperament.’
‘Then your temperament needs to change,’ said Falk.
Looking at the bloody streaks on Kroeger’s armour, Forrix wondered if that were possible.
Smoke fogged the lower reaches of the mountain promontory, propellant haze lying heavy on the metal-decked trench network like the noxious plague mists that attended the aftermath of a viral cleansing. Forrix watched the Stor-bezashk gun crews in reinforced artillery pits scrubbing out the scored barrels of the Thunderstrike artillery pieces, while bulky ogryn-servitors loaded unfired shells onto armoured leviathans for their return to the deep-storage magazines.
He passed slaves captured en route to this world toiling alongside servitors to shore up damaged portions of the circumvallation. With the fall of the citadel such efforts were largely redundant, but the whips of the discipline masters fell just as regularly and just as harshly. They lost Toramino somewhere near the gun batteries, and Forrix could already imagine the bile and venom spilling from his patrician lips.
Their route cut a zigzagging path through the siegeworks, each turn of the trench perfectly calculated to keep the warriors within sheltered from plunging fire. More like deep caissons for some undersea dig than mere trenches, their sides were high and sheathed in shock-resistant plates laced into the very bedrock. Blast-shielded shutters led down to the hardened redoubts that housed the Selucid Thorakite regiments. Natural-born Olympian soldiers who had joined with the Iron Warriors in the genocide of their homeworld, the Thorakitai were grim-faced men and women in faded khaki, scaled breastplates and helms fashioned in the image of a Mark IV suit. Their equipment was scoured a dull ochre by the omnipresent dust, but the firing mechanisms were protected in cloth wrappings, the focus rings in scratch-resistant foil.
Everyone Forrix saw was kneeling, for word of Perturabo’s coming had raced ahead of them with the speed of a rumour. Whatever industry was afoot in the trench network halted at the sight of Perturabo and his Iron Circle, but the primarch paid his devotees no mind, and the warriors behind him took his lead. Slaves abased themselves in the mud, the Thorakitai stood with rifles held across their chests and Iron Warriors hammered their fists into their palms.
Iron-skull standards and black banners bearing the amber Eye of Horus were unfurled as confirmation of the citadel’s fall spread throughout the surrounding army. Kroeger’s simple words returned to Forrix as he felt a tremor of unease at the sight of Horus Lupercal’s banners raised higher than the Legion standards. Trust was a hard-earned commodity within the Iron Warriors, and Forrix took a moment to wonder how the Warmaster’s commands would differ from those of the Emperor.
The cheering started slowly, for none in Perturabo’s Legion, whether mortal or post-human, were given to overt displays of emotion, but soon the bellowing roars of victory were ringing from one side of the valley to the other. Tales of how the primarch himself and his robot praetorians had ended the siege were already spreading and magnifying the farther they spread. Perturabo ignored the cheers as he ignored the abasement of his followers, marching now with purpose and direction towards his personal bunker complex.
The route to its sunken entrance was circuitous and fraught with peril, threading a tightrope-thin path through coiled banks of layered razorwire, constantly shifting minefields, conversion beam traps, las-nets, graviton crush-pits and melta-lined ditches. Even supplicants approached Perturabo’s inner sanctum as attackers must, and Forrix felt his skin crawl as the targeting optics of dozens of killing weapons tracked him towards the entrance.
Its heavy blast gates eased open on pneumatic hinges, unbreakable adamantium housed in tens of metres of kinetic-absorbent permacrete. Their outer faces were sheathed in beaten gold and silver murals taken from the sundered gates of the Palace of Lochos.
Guilt touched Forrix as he remembered the assault up the Kephalan Hill towards the last refuge of the self-appointed tyrant of Olympia, fighting through fortifications incorporated into the palace by a youthful Perturabo. Defences that would have been virtually impregnable with Iron Warriors defending them were overcome in days, but the cost of that victory had ripped a terrible wound in the Legion’s soul.
One from which it had yet to recover, thought Forrix.
Hard on the heels of that thought came another.
Could they ever recover from the atrocities wrought on Olympia?
The gates opened to the extent of their width, and the gold murals flattened by Perturabo’s assault were swept from sight. Forrix let out his breath, glancing left and right to see if his fellow triarchs were similarly affected by the reminder of their lost homeworld. Falk and Kroeger were keeping a tight rein on their emotions. Neither had set foot in Perturabo’s inner sanctum before this moment, and both warriors were eager not to let their awe show.
Of the two, Falk was doing the better job. Kroeger’s head craned back as they descended a widening ramp that led into the shadowed depths of the bunker. At the foot of the ramp was a semicircular arch of latticed ironwork, beyond which lay only shadows and the ambient glow of flickering electro-flambeaux.
‘Where are the defences?’ asked Kroeger, unable to keep silent any longer.
‘Defences?’ said Perturabo, finally turning to speak to his warriors. The Iron Circle stood behind him, shields locked together in an unbreakable wall. ‘What defences do I need when I have the Iron Circle and the Trident?’
‘I just expected more,’ said Kroeger. ‘Defence turrets. More guards. Traps.’
Perturabo grunted in amusement. ‘I like you, Kroeger. You are a simple man. You have none of the mistrust and scheming that touches most of the warriors who want to be where you are.’
Forrix wondered if that had been a barb aimed at him, but chose to believe it was directed at warsmiths like Toramino or Varrek, men who sought to rise in prominence and glory for its own sake. Forrix had never sought this position to serve his own ambition, but for the good of his beloved Legion. He was not immodest enough to brag of his skills, but knew there were few in the Iron Warriors who understood the mechanics of war and the logistical necessities of a mobile fighting force as intimately as he did.
‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ said Kroeger. ‘As you said, I’m a brawler.’
‘That is what you were,’ said Perturabo. ‘You are now a warsmith of the Iron Warriors, Kroeger. Start acting like one.’
So chastened, Kroeger pulled himself more erect. Perturabo turned and marched onwards, the Iron Circle parting to allow him into their midst before moving off in perfect lockstep. Forrix and his fellow triarchs followed the booming footsteps of the armoured robots, plunging into the flickering light of the Cavea Ferrum.
‘You wanted to know where the defences are?’ said Forrix as they passed beneath the ironwork archway. ‘This is it.’
Perturabo had designed the labyrinth of the Cavea Ferrum from a set of crumbling plans he had discovered a century and a half ago in the secret compartment of a tribal cremation pit of the Sabellian peoples of Old Earth. Perturabo had recognised the work as that of his beloved Firenzii polymath and instantly encased it in the preserving mechanism of a stasis field. That such a document could have survived the passage of tens of thousands of years was miraculous, but no less miraculous was how Perturabo had known a document so out of time with its final resting place had come to end up there.
Even then, newly reunited with his father, Perturabo had an affinity with earth and stone.
Had that been when the Emperor had chosen to yoke him to a singular purpose?
The walls of the labyrinth were featureless and grey, modularly constructed to be
identical and to facilitate its dismantling and storage between warzones. Every surface was utterly devoid of markings that might help any lost souls trapped in its convoluted depths. Though Perturabo denied it, Forrix was certain the routes chosen by any who walked its paths altered in the wake of their passage, such that it would be impossible to retrace any foolish steps that led to dead ends. Even the ensconced flambeaux seemed to burn with the same dancing pattern of flames, the same shadows and the same crackle of electro-chemical reactions.
Perturabo led them deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, taking turn after turn through its featureless walls, sometimes appearing to lead them back to its edges, sometimes winding closer to its secret heart. As he did every time he travelled the Cavea Ferrum, Forrix attempted to map the labyrinth in his mind, but within minutes he was hopelessly knotted in turns that should have been physically impossible and a route that owed nothing to the surety of Euclidian geometries.
‘This doesn’t make sense,’ muttered Falk, and Forrix knew he was encountering the same untenable convolutions in his mental cartography. ‘We’ve been down this passage before, I know we have. But that’s…’
‘Give up before you go mad,’ said Forrix. ‘I’ve tried scores of times to map this place, but I never manage more than a handful of turns before it all stops making sense.’
‘How is it possible?’ asked Falk.
‘The genius of a long dead gentleman of Firenza,’ answered Perturabo, emerging from the unfolding shields of the Iron Circle. ‘A bastard son who changed the world with his works.’
‘He designed this labyrinth for you?’ asked Kroeger.
‘No, his death was tens of thousands of years ago on Terra, supposedly in the arms of his patron king,’ said Perturabo, turning on the spot to regard the blank walls of the impossible labyrinth. ‘After the Emperor first came to Olympia and brought me to Terra, I learned of the Firenzii and searched the ruins of Old Earth for copies of his surviving journals, gathering his hidden papers and learning of the works he pursued in private.’
‘Sounds more like something the Crimson King would be interested in,’ said Falk.
Perturabo nodded, the hint of a smile tugging at the edge of his lips. ‘Magnus and I spent many months together in search of buried secrets. It’s true, though it was the esoteric writings of the world’s former masters that most interested him. He cared more for the ancient philosophies of the lost civilisations than its mechanical wonders, but it was a heady time of exploration for us both.’
Forrix had heard the primarch speak of the dead genius before, and, as before, the retelling ignited a fierce desire to excavate the remains of forgotten civilisations with no thoughts of war, only exploration and the discovery of unknown histories. Forrix had once harboured ambition to dig the soil of Terra in search of the past glories swept away in the chaos of Old Night, but that dream was dead now. Only conquest would take them to Terra, and any digging would be to hack trenches into the earth, raise walls and bring to ruin what they had helped to craft.
‘The Cavea Ferrum was nothing more than an intellectual exercise for the Firenzii, but I saw how it could be turned to defensive purposes, its geometries used to lure an unwary enemy into a foolish assault, trapping them in a way that would allow no escape.’
‘It’s impressive,’ said Kroeger. ‘Are there any others like it?’
‘Yes, there is one other,’ said Perturabo, almost reluctantly.
Forrix hid his surprise. He had not known that Perturabo had crafted another such labyrinth, but in the frenetic aftermath of massacre of their brother Legions, there was much he did not know of his primarch’s activities.
‘Where is it?’ asked Falk. ‘On Isstvan V?’
‘No, it is not on Isstvan V, it is aboard a gaol-hulk belonging to my Eighth Legion brother,’ said Perturabo. ‘I built him an imitation of this labyrinth in which to have his sport with… a uniquely capable prisoner.’
‘Who?’ asked Forrix.
Perturabo ignored the question and set off into the daedalan complexities of the labyrinth once more, tracing a path that was at once nonsensical yet led inexorably towards its secret heart. Forrix kept his eye on the primarch’s back, wondering what manner of individual could possibly warrant the construction of such an elaborate place of captivity.
After a span of time that his armour’s chronometer could not conclusively measure, the quality of light in the tunnels of the labyrinth began to change. The flickering light gave way to the diffuse illumination of candles and Forrix knew they had arrived at their destination. A last turn, and they had reached the centre of the labyrinth.
Forrix had known what to expect, but the others had not, and he savoured the expressions of surprise that spread across their faces as they beheld the primarch’s inner sanctum. ‘Organised chaos’ was how Golg had described it, where Harkor’s term had been ‘shambolic’. Forrix knew better, seeing through the apparent haphazard placement of drawing boards, model-making apparatus, t-squares, stretching frames and reams and reams of rolled manuscripts to the order beneath.
This was no random accretion of scattered detritus that had built up over the centuries, but a precisely ordered collection of genius to rival any work of Magnus or Guilliman. Its dimensions were modest in comparison to the scale and complexity of the surrounding labyrinth, yet the vaulted space was still the equal of a good-sized manufactory. The walls were faced in crumbling stonework that looked to have been brought block by block from some sunken ruin, and rebuilt with painstaking attention to restoring its previous incarnation as faithfully as possible. Murals depicting what might have been great birds were inscribed on one wall, and a flaking mosaic of painted clay covered another in a wide rendering of a group of faded men and women clustered around a central figure whose head was haloed in golden light.
Faded paintings held in shimmering stasis fields hung on the walls, one showing a semi-clothed man in the desert with a lion at his feet, another an unfinished work of a seated woman and her child in the centre of a circle of admirers while a great temple was rebuilt against a backdrop of fighting horsemen.
Heavy tables were strewn throughout the space, each one awash in rolled parchments, set-squares, wooden protractors and measuring rods. The tools of the mathematician and the engineer lay side by side with those of the warrior, the general, the anatomist and the statesman. Immense drawing desks bore architectural plans for grand pavilions, magnificent amphitheatres, complex industrial infrastructures, vast hives of habitation, impregnable citadels and ornate palaces to rival that of the mountain fastness of the Emperor himself.
Peeter Egon Momus himself had wept at the sight of these drawings and begged Perturabo to allow him to make them a reality. No architect of Terra had ever envisaged structures of such grandeur, and no fantasy of design had thought to render such magical buildings into life. That they had sprung from the hand of the Lord of Iron should have surprised no one, but the idea that a being so mired in destruction was capable of sublime creation seemed beyond comprehension.
Nor was Perturabo’s genius confined to the drawing board, for many of his tables and workbenches were home to hundreds of delicately wrought machines, trinkets and gewgaws of such fine construction that it seemed impossible one so huge had modelled them. A silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s head, gilded eggs, fabulously wrought birdcages that would never again confine a living creature, and miniature war machines competed for space alongside automata of all shapes and description – animal, mechanical, human and alien. A miniature Warhound Titan stood tallest of the automata, and Forrix felt an odd shiver of brooding prescience at the red, black and yellow of its carapace armour.
It was a treasure trove of wonders, miraculous creations and the most ancient history of Old Earth preserved in a hermetically sealed environment. None beyond the warriors of the Trident knew of its existence, and that was just the way Perturabo liked it. After so long spent taking the metal to the stone, better to be thought the simple j
ourneyman than reveal the soul of the craftsman within.
Perturabo sent the Iron Circle to a cleared corner of the chamber and moved through the creative disorder to a bronze-edged hololithic table that was, by its very ordinariness, the most unusual item in the collection. Its surface rippled with light, course vectors, geostationary anchor points and dotted trajectories. They formed a map of the heavens above this world, where a grand fleet of iron awaited Perturabo’s order to break orbit and continue the prosecution of the Warmaster’s campaigns.
This world was a spiteful diversion only, a chance to wreak harm on a Legion whose disdain was harshly earned and well deserved. Rogal Dorn’s boasts of his Imperial Fists’ superiority had brought the metal to the stone here, and the Iron Warriors had taken great relish in humbling his golden Legion.
And in the aftermath of Phall, it was doubly satisfying to kill warriors of the VII Legion.
Perturabo scanned the display, and in the second before it flickered and changed to reveal a completely different world, Forrix saw that the parabolic image contained a great many more ships than they had brought with them. The Iron Warriors vessels were constant and motionless, while these new arrivals moved in dangerous proximity, describing sinuous arcs overhead.
‘The Third Legion are here?’ he asked.
‘They are,’ agreed Perturabo. ‘But knowing my brother it will be many hours before his arrival will be as perfectly choreographed as he wants and he sends word of his coming.’
‘Do we know yet why the Phoenician requested this meeting?’ asked Falk.
‘No,’ replied Perturabo, his curiosity plain. ‘Fulgrim has not yet deigned to reveal his purpose. Though he tells me it is wondrous.’
Forrix narrowed his eyes. ‘Wondrous?’
‘His words.’
‘I guessed as much,’ said Forrix, and Perturabo gave a wry grin.
‘My brother always had a flair for the overdramatic, which only seems to have got worse since we threw in our lot with the Warmaster,’ said Perturabo.