The Eye of Medusa

by David Guymer

  Meduson – the origins of the name were lost to myth – was famously unwalled, and so despite the manifold aegises of the Felgarrthi archeotech, fierce winds still tore through the settlement’s streets. The Iron Hands were not great believers in walls.

  Walls encouraged the weak to prosper.

  The settlement itself was a mean thing, deliberately so, a compact cluster of metallic lean-tos under a canopy of electrical cabling. The wondrous technologies buried far under the site had brought to Medusa myriad sub-orders and borderline heretical sects of the Cult Mechanicus, and with them a promulgation of sprawling, semi-derelict temples. The shanties that had grown around them catered to the colourful needs of the priests, menials and visiting pilgrims that filled Meduson year-round, as well as the leaner demands of the Iron Council itself.

  Rauth approached the window and set his hand warily to the crystalflex, the rumble of the Broken Hand’s vast tracks transferred in some small way to his fingers. The temperature outside hovered around freezing but his breath produced no mist on the surface. His physiology was perfectly adapted for the retention of heat. Pressing his forehead to the dully vibrating surface, he peered down into the dust plumes of the caravanserai.

  An endless column of tired armoured vehicles, all of them much smaller than the Clan Borrgos crawler and many of them much much older, described a vast figure of eight around the Meduson uplands. Their relentless circuits had gouged a deep rut into the plain, a road in effect, the motley convergence of rusted crawlers. More continued to plough in from the plains as Rauth watched, breaking through spoil walls and lurching into column. Rauth could hear sporadic bursts of gunfire through the glass. The clan companies of the Iron Hands were in constant competition, but that was as nothing to the open warfare that existed between the mortal clans. Medusa was harsh, resources scarce. Loose alliances of a hundred clans would go to war over an underground aquifer or a rediscovered fuel cache. Thousands died every year in internecine struggles, for want of the essentials of food or shelter that they had lost or failed to claw from others.

  As it should be. He scowled, unsure from where the thought had arisen, or if it had come from him at all.

  The Iron Moon was a time of truce, but hatred infected a man. Hatred kept him warm when he had no walls. It killed his enemies when his gun was empty.

  I might not know innocence when I see it, but hate I know.

  ‘Would you all behold Rauth the One-Armed, the best of us all, awed by the spectacle of the Iron Moon.’

  Rauth turned from the window to see his brother neophytes loosely gathered, spread across one group of couches with bared grins and poorly muffled laughter.

  Khrysaar spread himself over a lounging chair, smile muscles tugging ineffectually at the metal of his bionic jaw. He was clad in plates of moulded black carapace, the strapping loosened sufficiently for the harness to creak as it settled. The neophytes were not built in to their armour in the same way as their masters, but it was an affectation they had all adopted. His left hand was a bandaged stump, awaiting augmentation as Rauth was. He looked up at Rauth. His eye bionic was the smooth pearlescent white of a blind man’s, set within a steel fixture that extended into his face from forehead to cheek to mouth. The other sparkled with challenge.

  Your brain must not be getting enough oxygen, brother. You speak like a man with two hands. ‘It gladdens me to see you more or less whole.’

  ‘And I, you,’ Khrysaar returned.

  Gritting his teeth, Rauth moved away. This is why Tartrak took my knife. Juraa looked up as Rauth stalked towards him and, like Khrysaar, moved to spread himself across the entirety of the couch. Then he caught Rauth’s eye. Try it. Just try it. See what happens to you tomorrow. As if the thought had been written into Rauth’s face, Juraa pulled his arm back in. Rauth then kicked Juraa’s leg out of his way, and sank onto the couch beside him, too bone-weary to maintain the effort of not being so damned bone-weary. He glared at Juraa as if to dare him to remark on it, then over the laden table at each of his brothers in turn. Make fun of my weakness. When they rebuild me, I’ll be stronger than I ever was.

  The prospect thrilled him. He hated himself for that most of all.

  But he hated the men who had made him feel this way more. He tried to call back the boy he had been, who had sworn that if he survived then he would be different, and could not.

  A young woman approached and poured wine into a glass on the table in front of him. Rauth tensed, watched the glass fill with dark red liquid, and then stared at her back as she turned to serve others.

  If he thought the Iron Hands’ treatment of their neophytes harsh, then their attitude to women, who could not even provide the base material for new Space Marines except at one step removed, was one of disdain verging on brutality. Rauth had not seen a woman in years. Seeing one now affected him little. His physiology was incapable of desire.

  His gaze passed to Sarokk last. Sarokk: the least threatening.

  The youngster looked away sharply, causing the serving girl to spill wine over his wrist. Sarokk swore, embarrassed, as the woman pulled a cloth from her waistband and set to work drying his arm. Mumbling apologies, the woman left her sodden cloth folded on the table and hurried away, presumably to fetch another.

  Rauth glared at the red-stained cloth, an itch of danger that he could not shake. Sarokk folded his arms and glowered as if his hardship was the fault of the universe.

  ‘It’s just a little wine,’ grunted Ehrlach. He was the middle child of the six, distinguished by a premature greying of his hair, which he wore in a tail. ‘They’ll take the hand tomorrow anyway.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ Sarokk shot back, tense as a struck blade. He leaned forward, hands clasped, only to rock back and cross his arms again, this time even tighter.

  The final pair, Juraa and Borrg, laughed at their younger brother’s impotence and Rauth found himself relaxing finally, even if only a little. The others had found a new target, or rather, like beasts returning year after year to familiar hunting grounds, they had recaptured the scent of their favourite prey.

  ‘Did the little girl hurt you, brother?’ asked Borrg, deadpan, while Juraa leaned forward, smirking. ‘Shall I find something cold to put on it until she returns?’

  New initiates were accepted for training and old ones inducted into Clan Dorrvok only during the period of tectonic upheaval known as the Iron Moon. So it had always been and so it always would be, but good luck to anyone who wanted to know why. It is traditional… by the Father, it could be like interrogating a servitor. Medusa’s thick clouds, of course, made her moon a silent partner, but when its perigee coincided with Medusa’s perihelion, then the three bodies of planet, moon and star aligned perfectly in space produced a gravitational effect that ensured its presence was felt.

  The moon’s odd periodicity meant that the interval between alignments varied greatly, but Sarokk was about as young as a neophyte could be and still be mature enough to participate in the ritual. Rauth was about as old.

  ‘It’s almost over,’ said Khrysaar, softly, the neophytes’ mutual dislike of one another petering out with Sarokk’s stubborn refusal to rise to their insults. ‘We survived. We six.’

  They looked at each other, warily.

  Rauth remained quiet, muscles stiff, eyes on the corners where the sheets of ironglass served to hide what was there. He had to force himself to lean forward, ignoring Sarokk’s sudden tension, and pick up what appeared to be half a mollusc shell stuffed with an alginate paste. He scooped the green slime into his mouth and chewed, his omophagea breaking down the complex provenance of its ingredients into a dizzying life history of rushing water, alien suns, and long, idling lapses between tides. He squirmed under the barrage of algal sensations, then discarded the shell for a draught of water to wash away the tastes.

  Another gift I would gladly go without.

  ‘I wonder why the tra
ining must be so ruthless,’ Khrysaar went on.

  ‘Because they’re sadists,’ grunted Juraa, a contention with which Rauth privately concurred.

  ‘It’s to weed out the weak,’ said Ehrlach. ‘Only six survived?’ He shrugged. ‘We are the six that were strong.’

  ‘You are wrong, as always, brother.’ Borrg had always laboured under the belief that his Clan Borrgos ancestry in some way earned him higher standing amongst the neophytes. Despite the fact that such favour had never yet become evident, he continued to act as though it was forthcoming. ‘It’s to make us biddable. I’ve overheard the battle-brothers’ debates when they think I’m not near. They want the next intake to be more obedient to the Iron Council.’

  Good luck with that.

  ‘The Kristosian Conclave,’ murmured Khrysaar. ‘I wonder if we’ll learn its purpose after the Iron Moon.’

  ‘Probably not.’ Borrg sighed into his own empty clamshell.

  ‘The meeting chambers of the Eye of Medusa are here, deep beneath the Felgarrthi Mountains.’ Rauth gestured to the crystalflex with a dark smile. ‘Why not petition the Iron Fathers for an audience and ask them?’

  ‘Why not find another bolt-round to walk into?’ Khrysaar returned with a mildness at odds with the molten anger in his organic eye.

  ‘There will be plenty waiting for us all on Thennos,’ said Rauth.

  ‘You think that’s where we’ll be sent?’ asked Juraa.

  ‘Of course it’s where we’ll be sent,’ Rauth snapped at him.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ said Borrg.

  Rauth rolled his eyes.

  Khrysaar leaned forward in a creak of armaplas plates and scooped the stem of his wine glass from the table between his fingers. His inhumanly large palm cupped the bowl. His bionic eye clicked as it dissected its contents. ‘I had expected something more from our final trials.’

  Borrg nodded. ‘Tartrak did make it sound more threatening.’

  Rauth’s neck prickled as though a servitor breathed on his back.

  ‘Sarokk, what are you doing?’

  Juraa looked over, calling Rauth’s attention to the fact that Sarokk had lifted the rumpled cloth from the table and was in the process of drawing something from under it. The something was small in his giant’s hand. It took a moment for Rauth to recognise it as a weapon. That recognition hit at the same time as the weapon fired and Juraa’s brains painted the side of his face. He spluttered, sucking a deal of it into his lung.

  Sarokk grinned like death. ‘Who is strong now? Brother?’

  He turned the stubber on Rauth.

  It should have been impossible, brother betraying brother, yet something in Rauth’s mind made him react as though it was not only possible but something he had always acutely suspected.

  He rolled from the couch, secondary heart thumping pain into his arteries, and hit the floor, the bullet meant for his forehead clipping the couch behind him and exploding from the back in a cloud of stuffing. Rauth reached for his sidearm and yelled a curse. He looked up, hand on the armrest. The cover provided by the couch was ridiculously light, but it might steal enough from a passing stub round to let his genhanced durability and carapace take the rest.

  Sarokk shifted his aim for another headshot, squeezed the trigger; the bullet whistled a centimetre from Rauth’s ear as Ehrlach tackled his younger brother to the ground. The pair went through the table together, laden platters falling as the glass beneath them disintegrated. Amidst the wreckage, Sarokk and Ehrlach fought over the gun, blows exchanged with such ferocity that one man’s fist or boot was indistinguishable from the other’s.

  Rauth vaulted the couch. Ehrlach had the beating of the younger neophyte, but the tenets of overwhelming force demanded his action. Defeat was defeat. Victory was crushing or nothing.

  Las-fire raked his chest piece as soon as he emerged. The fire tracked up, right to left, across the plexus reinforcement, and shaved the underside of his chin. Blood streaked down his neck from a sliced artery, his carapace otherwise proving equal, but the barrage of the impacts was enough to throw him back into the couch.

  Another attacker. Where?

  Khrysaar and Borrg had been circling round their respective seating to engage Sarokk, the instinct to overpower and destroy as fundamental to their makeup as it had been to Rauth’s. Neither was armed. Both now stopped to hunt for the second assailant. Then Rauth saw her.

  By the primarch!

  The serving girl had returned, and not with a cloth.

  Walking slowly towards the Space Marines with cold exultation showing on her face, she lowered the glowing-hot laspistol in her right hand and raised the one in her left. Rauth instinctively drew up an arm to guard his face, but the shot wasn’t for him.

  A hissing volley of las-fire scorched Ehrlach’s shoulder guard as he reared up over Sarokk with a raised fist to smash in his brother’s face. The flurry overheated the weapon’s cell, but twenty seconds of continuous fire melted the armaplas of Ehrlach’s chest carapace and dropped the neophyte permanently. He slumped over his younger brother as if his dying will had been to smother Sarokk with his corpse.

  ‘She’s yours,’ Khrysaar roared, and just this once logic overrode pride. Rauth was no match for Sarokk in his condition and he knew it.

  Rolling off the couch and onto his knees, he scrambled left while Khrysaar and Borrg moved in on Sarokk. Rauth saw the young neophyte bunch his legs under Ehrlach’s body and propel it hard into Borrg, then put a stub round point blank into Khrysaar’s bionic jaw. The elder neophyte ignored the sparks sputtering from his mouth and fell on the younger with a gurgling rage.

  The woman calmly, too calmly, tracked her aim towards Rauth.

  Las-bolts drew little gasps from the cushions as the pistol’s aim chased Rauth from cover. He fell into a roll, streaks of las searing the air above his head, and then came up behind one of the ironglass fixtures. Fulgrim and Ferrus Manus on Gardinaal. The title of the piece, Brotherhood, was inscribed in black. Rauth hauled in a breath as las-bolts raked the other side of the glass. He scowled at her distorted image, the steam-hiss then click of power cells being replaced.

  It would take a lascannon to fracture ironglass.

  ‘Manus,’ she murmured, unaware or perhaps uncaring of the fact that her genhanced prey might hear her. ‘Strengthen me as you are eternally strengthened. In eternum. In sanguine.’ She moved as she spoke, a wide circle around Rauth’s cover, and unleashed a flurry of las from both weapons simultaneously that forced him into a reckless dive for another fixture. He skidded behind it. ‘Blood of my flesh.’ She holstered her pistols, then drew a pair of knives, one long and serrated, the other curved, and broke into a sprint towards Rauth. ‘The Legion undying!’

  Rauth threw a punch that would have shattered a mortal’s bones had the woman not slid under it, leaving a pair of parallel gashes in his armour as she swung up. ‘Flesh!’ she hissed as the blood flowed, then drove a kick into the back of his knee. He grunted, the joint buckled, but he was stronger than that. He swung his elbow, windmilling back round to face her, but she somehow flapped aside his thrust with her arm. She was small, hard to hit, but what she lacked in strength she accounted for in speed. She came at him again, a blur of kicks and knife-punches that streaked his carapace with red. ‘Flesh!’ she crowed, with every puncturing blow. ‘Flesh! Flesh!’

  She slid the long knife from his stomach, where the girdle and groin pads of his carapace met, and swerved away, but the blade dragged on the carapace just enough for Rauth to grab her wrist before she could escape. His hand swallowed hers halfway to the elbow. He squeezed. Bones split. Blood drenched them where the knife caught between their palms cut them both. Rauth stared hard into the woman’s crazed eyes.

  Neither flinched.

  ‘Flesh is weak,’ the woman hissed.

  Rauth dragged the woman into the path of his boot,
a kick delivered straight from the body that, as he released her hand, launched her three metres back and would have sent her further yet had she not struck an ironglass etching. She hit it like a sack of tools.

  The ironglass shivered, appearing for a moment as if it would remain standing, then slowly tilted backwards and fell to the ground with a crash. The woman lay on top of it, head turned to one side, limbs splayed out. The image of a man on a lobotomy slab flashed through Rauth’s mind, and he blinked it away, ballooned his cheeks with air and then lurched after her.

  Death cult, murderess. There was rumoured to be a temple in the Land of Shadow, scrap-pedalled beliefs of the primarch as eternal and saviour, Ferrus the undying, building his strength one fool soul at a time for the last Black Crusade when he would lead them from the afterworld to battle. And on, and on, and on it went.

  He stood over the foot of the felled slab as the woman groaned and began to rise. Don’t you even dare. He stepped on her foot, breaking it, and she screamed as she dropped her last knife in favour of a laspistol. She swung it towards his head.

  The Iron Council finds a use for everything.

  There was a loud bang, and Rauth flinched. The woman’s trigger finger spasmed, but rather than fire, it tossed the weapon from her hand as the stub round that had breached her skull blew out the other side. The weapon skittered across the floor and she slumped back, dead.

  Khrysaar stood nearby, a bullet lodged in the metal of his chin, Sarokk’s stubber in one hand. For a moment the weapon’s aim strayed towards Rauth, then Khrysaar threw it away. Borrg removed his hands from Sarokk’s twisted neck. Rauth nodded wearily. Not gratitude so much as an acknowledgement of a job proficiently done.

  We are all brothers, after all.

  Then the door opened.

  VI

  Sergeant Tartrak surveyed the damage. Bodies. Shell casings. Shattered glass. The augmetic tendons of his bionic arm tensed and untensed as he turned his helmed gaze to the three bloodied survivors. To Rauth, drained beyond all emotion, he looked like an edifice of black iron and ceramite, the sort to which feral peoples would offer sacrifice, and grudgingly give worship through fear. The hum of his powered systems filled the broken quiet.