by David Guymer
He cursed the logic of it. He was afraid because for the first time in his life he knew exactly what was going to happen next.
V
The Eye of Medusa was a vault, buried deep beneath the shifting plates of the Felgarrthi fault. Stronos had never been inside, but he had heard of its size and the technological marvels it contained from those few who had. Even its labyrinthine antechambers were rumoured to be a repository of lost wonders.
The Iron Hands had no particular name for those passages: they were a transitionary space, an incidental surety of the Eye’s sanctity, but to the Medusans they were the Maze of Glass.
Some believed that at the heart of its fractal, ever-branching passages was a crypt where a reliquary containing the severed head of Ferrus Manus rested on an altar of solid diorite, watched over by a Helfather that never moved, ate, spoke, or slept. To some – and Stronos had once heard Verrox voice such a belief – the primarch had never truly died, his mortal demise a myth of his own making to drive his sons to greater plateaus of strength, and he dwelled here, within the etched glass. More than one pilgrim had spoken boldly of the revelations he would seek at the demi-god’s knee, never to be heard from again.
The ironglass panelling trembled as Stronos walked by, emitting the vibrations of the Iron Moon as an eerie wail. It was as though Stronos had left the chaos of the surface world behind him, and found tranquillity in this cavern of singing crystal. The rituals on the surface were approaching their climax and Stronos would prefer to spend those hours prior to the meeting of the council of Iron anywhere but on the Felgarrthi plains. There were no humans here – something about the maze confounded the unaugmented’s power to navigate – just a handful of Iron Hands in old Mark of power armour studying the etched glasses in solitude.
Most of the panels carried depictions of Iron Hands triumphant – or, not infrequently, vanquished in bitterness – or scenes from The Canticle. A few were more abstract or impressionist in their subject.
Stronos found his footsteps drawn to one piece that was neither of those and yet immediately stood out. It portrayed a single Iron Hands battle-brother in antiquated wargear, facing down the viewer, the etcher having captured perfectly the rawness of a bolter mid-burst. It featured what looked like an injured warrior of the Raven Guard Legion, who at first glance the Iron Hand appeared to be sheltering behind his body. His face was pale against the dark of his armour, cleverly worked greyscaling serving to deepen the warrior’s eyes and draw the ridge of his brow from the pane. An illusion of shade, but an effective one. Stronos turned his head, twitching his occuli muscles to adjust his bionic’s focus, searching the two characters for some alternative interpretation beyond the obviously incorrect.
‘What are you thinking, Kardan?’
The sound of that familiar voice made his smile muscles ache. He studied the etching anew. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Good. It takes an elasticity of mind to be knowingly ignorant. Few are capable.’
A Space Marine in glossed black plate, his pauldron a nightshade blue bearing the white hand of the Iron Hands, came to stand beside him. He was unhelmed, the back of his head shrouded instead, in part, by the velveteen shimmer of a psychic hood. He looked at least a century younger than Stronos knew him to be, clean-skinned and bright-eyed, blond hair slicked back in rows.
Stronos had never wished for more than one friend. One was sufficient. Friends supported a man’s weaknesses. It was enemies that made him strong.
‘Lydriik. My friend. What are you doing here?’ He turned, the urge to clasp his brother’s wrist in welcome firmly suppressed. He looked his brother up and down, noting the uncompromising finish of his armour. ‘I had heard a rumour you were hunting eldar pirates in the Dawnbreak Cluster.’
‘The Deathwatch tie us with oaths of discretion, brother. I know how you loathe secrets, but trust me that they are necessary at times. Suffice to say that my tithe of service is almost paid and I will soon be returned to Clan Borrgos.’ A shadow momentarily darkened his face. ‘And I was nearby.’
Looking for a change of subject, Stronos found it in the ironglass etching. It sang urgently of the Iron Moon. ‘What is it?’
The darkness swiftly passed as Lydriik turned to matters nearer his heart than war. ‘It is Sharrowkyn and Wayland.’
‘Does it depict an actual event? It is difficult to conceive.’
Lydriik shrugged, a remarkably human mannerism, but then Lydriik was remarkably human. Only a handful of tiny augments silvered his face and neck where they traced the basilar artery to regulate blood flow to the brain. Both his hands were his own. Stronos supposed it was because the Epistolary was not Medusan. Isolationist though they could be, the Iron Hands were not above recruiting off-world for rare skills and Lydriik was one of those exceptions, taken from the Scholastica Psykana as their Black Ships had passed through the Medusan sector. It was a supposition that led to uncomfortable questions however – was the imperative towards perfection a cultural trait as much as it was one that the Iron Hands owed to the primarch? Did Stronos’ eye itch solely because those around him had discarded theirs? He and Lydriik had debated such problems of philosophy at length over the decades of the Western Veil Crusade, and had cemented a friendship that had been founded when the then Codicier Lydriik had been summoned to assess a certain neophyte of unruly psyche and uncommon weakness of temperament.
‘Do you still etch?’ Stronos asked
‘I find it focuses the mind.’
‘I am surprised you find the time.’
‘Time is an artifice,’ said Lydriik, smiling over his gorget’s high rim to show Stronos that he was being tested. ‘If I find time lacking then I make time.’
‘Ferrus Manus,’ said Stronos. ‘From The Scourging of the Vadraan Giants.’
‘Verse twelve. You’ve been reading.’
Stronos moved his arm to show the metal-plated leather holster in which he carried his copy of The Canticle. Lydriik’s eyes appeared to spark with shackled mirth. ‘I see you in the regalia of the Reclusiarch one day, Kardan.’
‘Perhaps in a hundred years or so,’ said Stronos, before adding, without exaggeration, ‘Jorgirr Shidd is indestructible.’
‘Believe me, brother. I see great things for you.’ Lydriik placed his gauntlet on Stronos’ shoulder, then looked back over his own as if to see whether the few Iron Hands wandering this section of the maze had moved on. They had. Lydriik smiled then and leaned in, as if the ironglass likenesses might read his lips. ‘You always had an open mind. That is the reason I have come here. I need to speak to you about Thennos.’
‘Thennos?’
Stronos probed his brother’s eyes for an explanation, but he did not have Lydriik’s talent for opening a man’s mind. He was about to break contact and speak further when the clump of boots on metal made him look up.
Another Space Marine walked towards him. This one, however, was no Iron Hand. The stoop of his shoulders, the way he prowled rather than walked, spoke of some proscribed abhuman rather than the gene-might of the Adeptus Astartes. Eyes the colour of molten amber with vertically slit pupils locked onto his the way a traversing sentinel-gun would track a static target. His long white hair he wore in a tail. Space Wolf. The feral warrior snarled, canines showing, as though as insulted by Stronos’ augmented strength as Stronos was his bestial odour. It was next to impossible to distract a Space Marine or to catch one unawares, and so Stronos was duly perturbed to look away and find himself staring into the featureless red eyes of a second member of Lydriik’s clave that had somehow come up on his blind side unannounced. His face was hairless, down to the eyelashes, his skin as white as regolith. His pauldron displayed the crossed-scythe emblem of a lesser Chapter with which Stronos was unfamiliar.
Stronos’ flesh prickled and he became acutely aware of Lydriik’s hand, firm now on his shoulder.
‘We want very much
to talk to you about Thennos.’
VI
Melitan watched the ceremony’s climax in horror. At her first Iron Moon, she had only been on Medusa a few weeks and had been so overwhelmed by the alien customs and the horrifying local climate that she’d missed the transports out for the laager. This time had been different. Her mind was a stew of insoluble algorithms that no amount of loud music or potent liquor seemed able to break down, and so she’d been among the first to the staging areas to wait for a transport, hoping for a different kind of distraction. Colleagues native to Meduson or who had been here longer had told her what to expect, but hearing it second-hand and feeling the work of the bone-drills for herself was another thing entirely. She was accustomed to surgical procedures, of course. This was something else.
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’ Callun’s hood was thrown back from his head, his sallow hair flying out behind him with their truck’s speed.
Melitan didn’t know when or how he had managed it, but Callun was drunk. Some time before he had tried to sneak her behind the pintle mount and kiss her, she suspected.
‘Torture,’ Melitan yelled back in disgust. ‘I can believe it of Dumaar, I really can. But I didn’t want to think they could all be the same. And the people. How do they stand it? Why do they not rise up and… and…?’
She trailed off, uncertain what it was exactly that she expected.
Callun looked up from his communion with the dustguards. His throat rippled with every judder of the truck’s suspension. ‘I was talking about our speeding round in circles like this. Has it started?’
‘Damn it, Callun. Throne of bloody Terra.’
‘What do you care? I thought you hated them anyway.’
‘I…’ Melitan turned away, their rugged truck banging on the hard pan. ‘They were human once. I suppose that’s hard to imagine.’ Ignoring the dry heaving from behind her, she peered through the black streaks of blow dust to where the Iron Hands had gathered at the heart of the whirlwind. ‘Look at the number of Terminator suits out there. At least two dozen. It has to be the Iron Council. The magos instructor told me that some disaster befell the Legion of old, long ago, and that most of their suits were lost.’
‘Mmmm.’
Ever since her transfer to the Rule of One, Melitan and her staff had done all they knew how to make sense of Ancient Ares’ memory problems. She knew she was good, but she was at a loss. Naavor couldn’t help. Braavos didn’t care. She didn’t know where else to turn.
Except. Maybe. The one who had authorised that transfer.
The Voice of Mars was the only permanent position on the Iron Council, and the Iron Council were right there in front of her. An idea began to form in her mind, and managed to achieve what all the distractions of Meduson had been unable to: clear it of worry.
‘What is it?’ Callun slurred. ‘You looked a little… far off, for a minute there.’
Melitan gave him her best, least artificial smile, and watched his frown melt as she’d known it would. She felt guilty about what she was about to ask even before she asked it. She was exploiting his weakness for her as any of the Iron Hands would have done in her place.
And it was the most natural thing in the world.
VII
The earth could shake all it wanted; it couldn’t deafen Rauth to the ignition of promethium torches being ignited, or the sound of bone drills being locked and whirred. With his eyes alone, Dumaar’s hand holding his face down as if to drown him in self-pity, Rauth watched the phalanx of gargantuan figures approach on foot. Rauth counted nineteen before the ache in his eyeballs forced him to look back down. Nineteen venerable Dreadnoughts and Terminator-armoured lords: the Iron Fathers, just under half the council’s full strength. After blinking several times, he looked up again, his eyes drawn towards the figure that led the March of the Fathers.
It was not a man he had ever seen, but one whose likeness stared out from more ironglasses than Rauth could recall, and whose appearance he could have conveyed simply from the legends of his deeds. It was not, in any recognisable way, a man.
Bionics had taken over a large part of the Iron Father’s bulk, insofar as there was any longer a distinction between the Iron Hands warrior and his armour. A lather of sanative oils bestowed both with shifting bands of colour. A servo-arm, bladed and weaponised, hooked like an iron mantis over a fully enclosing helm. Beneath its slowly rotating claws, eye slits shone like ice in the sun. A third and a fourth vision slit either side, where a man’s ears would have been, glowed with the same fell light. There was a ruby set into his chest. Wedged between the solid ceramite of his left pectoral and the complex moving parts of his right, it burned with a magmic wrath, tracers of energy spitting over his armour frame with each pounding step.
As the Iron Father drew nearer, Rauth heard the whispering cant of machine parts. The ancient whirred, clicked, as though he were an armour casing for a hive of warrior beetles, hummed with power. But for all that, the Iron Father was cold, an empty presence. Medusa blasted through him as though he wasn’t there.
‘By the Father,’ Rauth mouthed, similar exclamations of recognition and awe spilling from the mouths of the others.
At that very second the torch touched Rauth’s neck.
No more words. No more thoughts.
The fire burned them all away. The universe turned white, and behind the hole burned into the heart of it the promethium torch seared away all trace of weakness, baptised him in the vapour of his own flesh into the company of Clan Dorrvok. He knew better than to scream.
Because Iron Father Kristos had returned to Medusa.
Chapter Eight
‘God of the Machine. Oh, God…’
– Enginseer Melitan Yolanis
I
‘If you wanted to know about Thennos, brother, then you should have asked. I would have told you.’ Stronos spoke only to Lydriik. He had shared warzones with his brothers from other fathers many times: two squads of Crimson Fists on Lar’eshal, a full company of Aurora Chapter and their mortal armoury crew on Turkmen, but strict protocols ensured direct contact was minimal. He ignored them now as he had then. ‘The Iron Hands fear no secrets.’
The Space Wolf’s pantherish snort of amusement snarled back and forth between the reflective ironglass panes around him. Stronos looked over his shoulder, irritation preventing him from ignoring the outsider as he wished. That annoyed him. The warrior’s physique, though immense and essentially ageless in the manner of all Space Marines, was remarkably unenhanced. His armour too was standard pattern Mk VII. Functional. He looked away again as the white-maned warrior bared his teeth.
‘Ymir is a man of few words and acquired humour,’ said Lydriik. His warning glance evoked a hoary chuckle.
‘Do we share life histories now?’ The voice of the third Space Marine was little more than a whisper, almost lyrically Medusan in its minimalism, and even the wolf grew abruptly more severe. He turned to Stronos, and there was no evading the rufescent intensity of his eyes this time. ‘He said he would answer if you asked, Lydriik, so please, ask.’
‘Yes, Captain Harsid.’
‘Wait. You do not command?’ Stronos glanced at his friend in surprise.
‘Believe it or not, but Harsid’s rank is well earned,’ said Lydriik. ‘Serving alongside the sons of other fathers has given me renewed appreciation of the many ways in which one can be strong. It has also shown me other forms of weakness to which we have allowed ourselves to become blind.’
‘Weakness?’
‘A debate for another time, perhaps.’
Harsid’s eyes drew Stronos back in. ‘You are familiar with Thennos’… privileges.’
Stronos thought of the Devilfish he had seen, and the scores of covered vehicles in one-nine/seven-two/eta. How many more had there been in Port Amadeus before the Iron Hands had levelled the complex, which had, in i
tself, been little more than a warehousing and supply hub? How many more again had the Iron Council’s interdiction orders spared from destruction? From there his thoughts turned in a disconcertingly organic fashion to wondering what else the Iron Fathers sought to protect by restricting access to large swathes of Thennos’ surface.
Belatedly, thoughts lagging from the demands for processivity that so many questions made, he wondered at the perniciousness of the xenotech code corruption that could turn a skitarii princeps and a loyal garrison against their doctrina imperatives. He tried to stem the flow of thoughts there. Curiosity was a weakness of the flesh.
The Space Marine, Ymir, let go of a boisterous laugh. ‘Not so open with your secrets now, eh, Iron Hand?’
Stronos did not answer. The Imperium was full of men who thought it their right, their duty even, to pry into the Iron Hands and their traditions. As they should, he supposed, though without the strength to back it up, the affront was risible and generally treated accordingly. That Stronos did not care what weaker men thought or said was not the same as giving license to pry. That a man he called friend had brought two of them to the very threshold of the Eye of Medusa brought a sting of betrayal that Stronos had not felt since his Smelting. He glanced at Lydriik, aware as he did so of the light touch that skimmed the surface turmoil of his thoughts.
‘Keep your mind out of mine,’ Stronos warned.
‘I am sorry, brother,’ said Lydriik, chastened. ‘Truly. But if you know of Thennos’ unique status then you can understand the interest of the Ordo Xenos in recent developments.’
‘The Inquisition?’ Stronos felt a fresh twist in his gut, like a worm being squeezed in an iron brace.
‘Inquisitor Talala Yazir. She is aboard the Chartist conveyancer, the Lady Grey, that brought us here, one of several thousand with license to transport proscribed technologies to restricted handling sites like Thennos. She is attempting to bypass the fleet blockade around Thennos.’
