‘Perfection,’ Corynth said. He closed his eyes. ‘Strike, Phoenician. Strike and may your desire be fulfilled, at last.’
Fulgrim struck.
The war for Byzas ended.
Seventeen
katabasis
‘Well, that’s it, then. A toast, to your triumph, Lord Fulgrim.’ Pyke held up her glass and emptied it. The wine was from the Hereditary Governor’s private cellar. The Primary Iterator seemed to have developed a taste for the bitter vintage.
Fulgrim acknowledged the gesture with a nod, and went back to examining the sword Corynth had nearly killed Cyrius with. He held the edge of the trans-sonic blade up to the light and studied it. It was a beautiful weapon, forged on Terra in the early days of Old Night. He wished he could ask Corynth about its pedigree.
He paused. He wished he could ask Corynth many things. Too late now. He lowered the blade and looked around. The gardens were silent. Even the birds were quiet. Soldiers were unobtrusively stationed nearby, waiting to escort them to the throne room.
Pandion would be there, coming to grips with his newfound authority. Today, as part of the compliance ceremonies, he was to publicly pardon the families of those members of the patricians who had risen against him. He had resisted, at first, but Fulgrim had pointed out the obvious merits of such a reconciliation. The aristocracy had long memories, and a reputation for benevolence would serve a man like Pandion better than an iron fist.
It would also buy his heirs enough consideration to keep them safely on the throne, until the new status quo had been established. Once the bureaucrats arrived from Terra, and the Great Crusade passed on, things would begin to change.
That was the hope, at any rate. ‘I called our mission here an anabasis,’ he said idly. ‘A march inland. The reverse is a katabasis - a march to the sea. The victors return to their ships, leaving change in their wake’
‘And is that what you have done?’ Pyke asked, pouring herself another glass of wine.
‘Not so much as I might like, but some. The sickness which afflicted this world has been ameliorated somewhat.’
‘Like pus drained from a boil.’
Fulgrim laughed. ‘Exactly.’ He swept Belleros’ sword out and made a graceful lunge. ‘Lanced by a perfect thrust.’ Even as he said it, he felt a twinge of something - guilt, perhaps. Or regret. As with the Sulpha on Chemos, he had been forced to eradicate the Sabazian Brotherhood in order to save Byzas. It did not sit well with him, but he did not see how it could have been otherwise.
Or was it simply that he did not wish to see it?
The thought brought him up short. Desire and purpose. Which had driven him? Had Belleros been right? Did it even matter? In victory, his superiority was proven. Messages of congratulations were already coming in, some more grudging than others. He had succeeded. He had proven himself. Proven the superiority of his Legion. But still, he thought of the kneeling assassins, waiting patiently for his blade, and wondered.
‘Hindsight is wonderful for smoothing the rough edges, isn’t it?’ Pyke’s question struck him like a fist. He looked at her.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Hardly perfect, was it? How many thousands dead? How much destruction?’ The questions were pointed, and the same ones he’d been asking himself. Fulgrim felt a flash of irritation. Did she think he was not aware of the cost?
‘Its perfection is obvious. Compliance was achieved, and stability ensured. In a few weeks, with barely a handful of warriors, I accomplished what would have taken my brothers months, and hundreds - if not thousands - of warriors.’ It was a boast, but a truthful one. He lowered the trans-sonic blade, quieting its hum. ‘I have acquired a new world for the Imperium, at minimal cost, and a new source for potential aspirants for my Legion. More, I have proven my ability to any who might doubt it.’
‘Or maybe you’ve proven that they were right all along.’
Fulgrim shook his head, annoyed. ‘If that’s the case, then there is nothing that will convince them otherwise.’
Pyke frowned. ‘I’ve been reading those Sabazian treatises you found,’ she said, indicating the books scattered on the table before her. ‘Desire and purpose and all that. It makes for an interesting look into the mind of our late enemies. There’s much to be learned from them.’
‘I have already seen to it that their martial teachings are integrated into our combat training. It will prove invaluable to my warriors, of that I have no doubt.’ That they’d almost carved Cyrius out of his armour was proof enough of that.
‘And their philosophy?’
Fulgrim hesitated. ‘What of it?’
Pyke sighed and picked up one of the books. ‘“The search for perfection is a subtle drug,”’ she read. ‘“It draws the mind along circuitous routes, deeper and deeper into itself, until nothing can be seen except the ideal. Desire blinds one to purpose, and thus renders true perfection impossible.”’
‘But is attainment of the ideal not worth such a torturous journey?’ Fulgrim said. ‘Only through desire can perfection be imagined, and attained.’
‘Some would say that the journey itself is more important.’
‘Some have more patience than me.’
Pyke acknowledged the point. ‘Then you must ask yourself this - is the ideal you seek worth the cost?’ She hesitated. ‘This could have all gone very wrong, Fulgrim. You were almost killed at Sabazius-Ut-Anabas, whether you admit it or not. You let your pride blind you, and walked into a trap designed to kill a demigod.’
‘And I walked out again,’ Fulgrim said softly. He didn’t look at her.
‘But Cyrius almost didn’t. Corynth and his fellows almost killed him.’
Fulgrim turned. ‘Casualties are the price of victory.’
Pyke frowned. ‘And that is the very excuse those bureaucrats you so detest use to reason away the neglect of your sons. Their lives were spent like bullets, one after the next, to buy victory after victory. I thought you wanted to find a better way, Phoenician.’
Fulgrim tensed, angry. He looked down at her, so old and frail. A single twitch of his hand would serve to shatter her irrevocably. She could feel his anger - he knew she must. But she did not look away. Pyke was not speaking for herself. She was speaking with the voice of Terra, the voice of Malcador and, ultimately, the Emperor.
Worse, she was not wrong. He had acted foolishly, thinking himself clever. His desire for the perfect thrust had blinded him to the desperation of his enemies. He had left them no choice but to kill him, for the good of their world. The thought of his failure was like acid on his mind. How would his brothers judge him, should they learn of it?
He remembered Corynth, kneeling before him. The serenity of his smile. Had he achieved perfection, in his final moments? The thought haunted Fulgrim. He replayed the moment over and over again in his head, studying it from every angle. Why had Corynth allowed himself to die? Had he too been proving a point?
In those final moments, had he won the duel, between desire and purpose?
Fulgrim forced the anger down. ‘I… misjudged the situation,’ he said. ‘You are right. My desire to prove myself got the best of me, and I made an error in judgement.’ He paused. ‘Several, in fact.’
Pyke blinked, surprised. Fulgrim allowed himself a smile. Whatever she thought, she did not quite have the measure of him. His brothers might internalise their flaws, but only by admitting his own would he achieve the perfection he sought.
‘Desire and purpose,’ he said. He tapped the stack of treatises. ‘Perhaps you’re right about their philosophy as well. It might be the tempering my sons need, if they are to reach their full potential.’
‘What now?’ she asked after a moment.
‘Now?’ Fulgrim smiled. ‘We have marched inland, and won ourselves a kingdom.’ He turned away from her. The war is over.’ He looked up, imagining the glories to come. Byzas was but the first. There were worlds without number out there, awaiting the light of his illumina
tion.
‘It is time to return to the sea.’
About the Author
Josh Reynolds is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Fabius Bile: Primogenitor and Deathstorm, and the novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio drama Master of the Hunt. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden, Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows, Nagash: The Undying King and Black Rift amongst others. In the Warhammer World, he has written the End Times novels The Return of Nagash and The Lord of the End Times, the Gotrek & Felix tales Charnel Congress, Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen. He lives and works in Northampton.
An extract from Angel Exterminatus.
A small detail, almost inconsequential, but important nevertheless. A creature no larger than a man’s thumb: a winged clade with a segmented carapace and a brittle exoskeleton of variegated puce. Atop its head, whiplike antennae tasted the myriad new scents flavouring the air, moving with uncharacteristic slowness as toxic numbness spread throughout its body.
The creature, a Cordatus vespidae, moved with a drunken gait across the churned red mud of the hillside, buffeted by warring thermals gusting from the earthworks sprawling at its base like a virulent plague. Sky-bound anabatic winds carried the smells of war – burned iron, smoky chemical propellants, musky post-human oils, lubricant and blood.
To any student of xentomology, the creature’s behaviour would have seemed strange to say the least. Its feeder mandibles snapped at nothing and its legs twitched as though rogue impulses were firing from its tripartite brain along its nerve stems, like a palsy. Its hive-nest had once been situated in the waving branches of a tall polander tree, but shell-fire had long since reduced the stepped banks of agri-terraces to a cratered wasteland of splintered stumps.
Fire had gutted the nest’s interior and killed the hive-queen, though residual traces of excreted pheromone resins had been strong enough to guide the vespidae back home. Whether pure instinct or a desire to die within its former home had driven the creature to ascend the muddy ridges of the hillside would never be known, but whatever ambition had driven it to complete its upward odyssey was to be thwarted. Its body finally succumbed to the paralysing toxin, injected with a murderer’s thoroughness, and the vespidae ceased its upward climb. It sat unmoving on a flattened berm of earth beneath a shattered terrace of reflective stone. Jutting lengths of rusted steelwork radiated from the wall, like spread fingers with the ends burned black.
The creature appeared to be dead, but its belly and flanks still rippled with motion. Its head bulged and swelled as its internal structure seemed to rove within its exoskeleton with a frantic desire to reshape itself. Wriggling motion shook its carapace, undulant pressure bending its flexible segments outwards as though they sought to fly away and abandon its dying form. A chitinous plate detached from the creature’s body and beneath it writhed a gelatinous, worm-like extrusion, a parasitic passenger sating its newborn hunger by feasting on its host’s internal organs.
The cannibalising organism pulled itself from the shell of its birth vessel, its flesh already hardening in the air. From translucency to opacity in a heartbeat, its rapidly forming carapace was a riot of shimmering hues, a wondrous oil spill of colours designed to beguile and entrance. The cracked and husked-out remains of its vespidae host crumbled under the weight of the growing creature, its morphogenesis progressing at a staggering rate.
From a split along the middle, gossamer wings unfolded, dragonfly-long in proportion to its body and edged with a membranous web of trailing cilia. With its wings beginning to beat, a segmented tail of shimmering gold and jet unfolded from beneath the cuckoo creature to give it perfect symmetry.
Though its birth had been horrific and needlessly cruel, its final form was undeniably beautiful. An elegant swan hatched from a bloody carcass, a reminder that even the most terrible cruelty can fashion the greatest beauty.
An iron-shod boot slammed down, crushing the newborn creature into the mud beneath its tread. Brutal proof – if proof were needed – that the living world existed with no thoughts of compassion, justice or mercy.
The owner of the boot, clad in the hulking plates of Cataphractii Terminator armour, stared at the smoke-wreathed mountain and the golden citadel crowning its summit. Unaware of the tiny life he had just snuffed out, Forrix scanned the blasted terraces of the Cadmean Citadel, grudgingly admiring the elegance with which it had been integrated into the local topology and the surrounding city. The warmasons of the Imperial Fists were cold and efficient, but their master understood the first maxim of the victor: that the best people to leave in the wake of your campaigns were those who did not feel they had been conquered.
It was a maxim to which the Iron Warriors paid little heed.
‘The conqueror makes fair his walls, and all should welcome him as a liberator,’ said Forrix, looking back over his shoulder to the wide valley below. Sawtooth fortifications surrounded the citadel in jagged layers of razorwire and pugnacious walls, bludgeoning their way across the lower town and tearing through habitations, agriculture, industry and places of wondrous natural beauty with equal aplomb. Redoubts, bunkers, and high-walled donjons grew like rocky stalagmites in a dripping cave, and a pall of smoke hung low over the dusty red valley like a shroud.
The lower reaches of the promontory at the heart of the great starport were now clad in metal, each dawn revealing a higher course of steelwork and scaffolds that crept uphill like a spreading cancer that would climb and climb until the red-and-ochre skin of the mountain was entirely encased. Freshly laid funicular rails came with the steelwork, heavy-gauge tracks that would allow mighty bombards and howitzers to be raised into battery positions hacked into the stepped bedrock. Thus far the Basilisk workhorses of the siege train had shouldered the bulk of the barrage work, but the heavier guns were only days away from being brought high enough to lob fat cauldrons of high explosive into the heart of the citadel.
And when that happened, it was all over.
No fortress could long resist when the lords of the artilleryman’s craft were brought to bear. The Iron Warriors would flatten Dorn’s mountain and erase all trace of the Cadmean Citadel, heedless of the technological marvels worked into its walls.
Forrix watched the progress of a group of captured city folk hauling long lengths of steel-wound cable uphill, sweating and bloodied by the effort and driven by the whips of Obax Zakayo. Behind them, clawed and spider-limbed construction engines drilled into the mountain to lace its structure with the bolts, fasteners and clamps required of the siegemasters behind them. There was a relentless and pleasing regularity to the work, a dance of logistics, effort and planning that only those versed in the arts of making and unmaking fortifications could appreciate. Amid the brutality, the slavery, the misery and the rape of the landscape there was art and there was beauty of a strange, under-appreciated kind.
‘Admiring your handiwork again, triarch?’ said Barban Falk, climbing into the shielded observation post below the ruined outwork that marked the point where the Imperial Fists had first broken the earth of this world.
‘No, admiring theirs,’ he replied, jerking his head uphill. Smoke hung over the citadel, its walls pocked and scarred by shell-fire, but already wreathed in a haze of ancient mechanisms of self-repair. Driving dust squalls and oppressed sunshine rippled in the mirage of its void shields, throwing up splintered rainbows of distorted light.
‘You always did like living dangerously, didn’t you, Forrix?’ said Falk, the enormous bulk of their armour filling the small space.
Forrix didn’t have to ask what he meant.
Since the debacle at Phall, to speak of the sons of Dorn with anything other than hate was to invite terrible retribution from the Lord of Iron. Had it been anyone else, Forrix wouldn’t have spoken, but as far as any Iron Warrior ever trusted another, he trusted Barban Falk.
‘I know you think the s
ame,’ he said.
‘True, but I know better than to voice it.’
‘You always played the politics better than I did,’ admitted Forrix.
‘Yet you hold a position in the Trident and have the ear of the primarch.’
‘Precious few of us can claim that now,’ said Forrix, with an honesty that surprised him.
Falk shrugged, no easy feat in such a bulky suit of armour. His monstrous Terminator plates were chevroned with gold and jet, and the smoothness of the heavy, barrel-vaulted pauldrons was in stark contrast to the war-worn condition of Forrix’s armour. Falk’s battle gear had originally been crafted for Warsmith Dantioch of the 51st Expedition, but after the triple disasters of Gholghis, Stratopolae and Krak Fiorina it had been reassigned to a more deserving wearer. Like Phall, no Iron Warrior now mentioned Dantioch. His legacy was utterly expunged; his name a byword for failure on an epic scale.
‘I do not claim to understand our master’s mind, but I can read the tides of his anger,’ said Falk, flexing the chisel-like fingers of his power fist, as though carefully weighing his next words. ‘Tides that grow ever stronger and more frequent.’
‘How are the western approaches?’ asked Forrix, unwilling to address Falk’s comment.
Falk chuckled. ‘Do you think I am trying to entrap you, Forrix?’ said the giant warrior, running a hand over his oil-dark hair and narrowing his already hooded eyes. ‘You think I seek to goad you into careless words I can then report back to the primarch? If I had any feelings to be hurt, they would be bleeding to death right now.’
Forrix allowed himself a thin smile. ‘No, I don’t think that,’ he said.
‘Well you should,’ said Falk. ‘I’d betray you in a heartbeat if I thought it would earn me a place in the Trident. Especially now that Golg’s a corpse and Berossus is as good as a corpse and isn’t likely to be elevated.’
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