by David Guymer
There was a gasp of congealed air, a click of fossilised joints, and the servitor closest to him lifted its head.
Stronos drew back, knife raised, steady in his grip.
Again that sense, that certainty, that he was not alone.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
The servitor made no move to close the distance; it simply rolled its head until its gaping eye sockets found his.
The silver edge bit deep into the breastplate of his brother’s armour, and the primarch of the Iron Hands cried out, falling to his knees once again as the blade’s flaring energies parted his dark armour like a fingernail through cold grease. Hot blood sprayed from the wound and Fireblade slid from Ferrus’ hand as he gasped in fierce agony.
Stronos stumbled, fumbling his knife as though it had become suddenly heavy. He stared at it, expecting to see his grip soaked in his Father’s blood. Air slammed in and out of his mechanical lungs. ‘No,’ he mumbled, staring at the knife. ‘No. This is… This is not…’
A second servitor shambled towards him, gripped his face in withered, desiccated hands and forced him to look into its eyes.
The primarch’s grip was locked on to the weapon, and even as he recognised how far he had fallen, he knew that he had come too far to stop, the realisation coupled with the knowledge that everything he had striven for had been a lie.
‘Who are you?’ he croaked.
He fell to one knee. His knife slipped from his grip and clattered to the walkway.
How many times had he revisited that dark day? He still remembered the histories that Chaplain Marrus had drilled into him as a neophyte. He had pored over them since, agonised, they all did, he knew, in their hearts, even if no one ever confessed to it. Their Father was weak. They would not be. Torturing themselves affected nothing.
And yet…
The third servitor lurched forwards. He would not meet its eyes.
It did not matter.
Unnatural warp-forged steel met the iron flesh of a primarch. Its aberrant edge cut through Ferrus’ skin, muscle and bone with a shrieking howl that echoed in realms beyond those knowable to mortals. Blood and the monumental energies bound within the meat and gristle of one of the Emperor’s sons erupted from the wound, and he fell back as the searing powers blinded him, dropping the silver sword at his side.
‘No!’
With a crash, Stronos landed on his back.
All his life he had known anger, known grief, known self-deception and loathing, but for one cosmic instant, he knew it as a being beyond him had once known it. As a god that had spent the life of his brother knew it. A knife pierced his heart. A bar of cold twisted his guts in his belly. His thoughts stopped. This was the end of the universe and the beginning of another. This was where he lived now, this moment, forever, no matter how long he lived or what acts he perpetrated to destroy the memory. This was everything. A halcyon moment of transcendent grief to pierce the veil between dimensions, the beat of a butterfly’s wings that had given birth to a storm.
Curling onto his side Stronos wept, oil and saline dribbling over his cheeks and blubbering from his lips. When had he last wept like this? As a child? An infant? The final servitor loomed over him, offering a shrivelled paw encased in a rusted steel glove. Glimmers of purple fire burned in its sockets. In a rattle of collapsed lungs and liquefied vocal cords it spoke.
‘You know who I am, Kardan Stronos.’
‘You… are the Sapphire King.’
The servitor chuckled, echoed by the quartet of dead mouths.
Stronos drew his hand back along the walkway towards him and concentrated on pushing himself up off the ground. In a squish of dried meat, one of the servitors squatted beside him.
‘Your arm is shaking,’ said the servitor.
‘My systems are exhausted.’
‘Of course. Your systems.’
Again, the servitor offered its hand.
It would be easier to take it than not, use what was given, take the more certain path. He stared at the hand, then took a shuddering breath and pushed himself up onto his knees. He sagged onto his haunches, the stiff armour joints in his legs complaining. A servitor appeared by his shoulder, breathing rasping through its teeth.
‘You would be wise to conserve your strength.’
‘Fight the battles that need to be fought,’ hissed another.
Stronos did not turn, staring back the way he had come as his vision clicked out of wavelength, one nanometre at a time. ‘You were born in the fires of…’ He scrunched his eyes and forced himself to say it. ‘…of Isstvan.’
‘I am the Phoenician’s pain,’ said one.
‘And his exultation,’ voiced another.
‘His grief.’
‘And his joy.’
‘I am his love for his brother.’
The voices swam around Stronos. He pressed his palm into his chest. His hearts were racing. His lungs straining their motors. ‘But this machine. It is eldar. It predates you by a thousand years or more. It has nothing to do with Isstvan, or my Chapter.’
‘Kristos made it about you. It was crafted by the eldar at the apex of their hedonism, an engine to probe their innermost and lift them towards their desires.’ The servitor emitted a crackling sigh, and another took up in its place. ‘Their desire, of course, was pleasure. That is not Kristos’ desire.’
Stronos forced his mind to concentrate, recalling what the Iron Father had said to him on Thennos, shortly before the Iron Father had ripped off his helmet and left him to burn.
‘The Iron Hands falter. The strength of our Father wavers year by year. What the Imperial Guard found on Dawnbreak was a new direction, a path to perfection.’
Was this his meaning, to use the power of the Dawnbreak engine to realise the Iron Hands’ long-held ambition of perfection through metal?
‘Yes,’ the servitors answered as one. They creaked nearer. He felt them behind him. ‘You are weak, Kardan Stronos. Weak and angry. So very afraid.’
Unbidden, memories of the anger he had felt towards Barras for destroying him in the practice ring, Thecian for embarrassing him in front of Magos Phi, his resentment of her. He remembered every black moment, every long voyage spent amongst brothers yet trapped, each of them in their own shell, alone with the bitterness of his nature. He remembered it, for his memory at least was perfect.
Was Kristos’ proposition not couched in logic? Was it not the natural extension of the Iron Creed to take the simple, surer road to their final objective?
He thought then of Draevark, his captain, of Drath and Ares, dead on Thennos. He thought of Kristos. These were ancient warriors, surpassing him by centuries, beings of iron.
Was there one amongst them that was any less embittered or broken than he?
‘I am flawed,’ Kristos had said to him. ‘We are all of us flawed. I seek the same perfection as do we all.’
Stronos shook his head.
‘No.’
There was a hiss of anger as the servitors closed ranks behind him, and in a growl of servos Stronos forced himself to his feet and turned to face them.
‘I will not allow my Chapter to trade its soul.’
‘Why not? It is your weakness. Your ultimate weakness. The Dawnbreak engine can make it all go away.’
Stronos snorted.
‘All of what?’
His memories were vivid and painful, but he found that he was no longer as angry as he remembered. His hearts held on to no bitterness that he could not express. The slow erosion of his humanity and of his Chapter’s soul no longer suffused him with the existential dread it once had. The vessel was broken and what it had held inside was gone. Tears on the walkway, a road of bloodily slain skitarii behind him. Stronos did not think it would ever be refilled again and the thought made him… hopeful.
He was unsure i
f that feeling was more or less strange than that of wetness on his cheek.
With a shove, he sent the servitor closest to him flying from the walkway. It flailed silently before splattering on the ferrocrete below. The remaining three grabbed at him, steel-gloved claws sliding into grip-holds in his battered plate.
‘Do not think you can defeat me so easily, Kardan Stronos,’ they rasped in unison. ‘I am no creature of flesh. Everywhere a child of Ferrus Manus is tormented by guilt or rage, be they Medusan, Kalavelan, Raikanan, I am there. That is what you would defy.’
The servitors’ bio-augments made their shoulders massive, their biceps bulged with myosin scaffolds and actin ratchets, but the meat of their foundations had rotted long ago. Stronos shook them off, flesh tearing away in clumps, as their prodigious strength clattered piecemeal to the floor. Pushing through them, he advanced on the slumbering machine.
For a moment Stronos could see it, even without his eyes.
And he felt it see him in return.
Blue eyes as hard and ancient as precious stones drilled through the dark between them. A mane of long hair fell from a face that was at once hard and beautiful, shockingly inhuman, yet achingly empathic. His armour was facetted like a jewel, brilliant as a B-type star, draped with white-hot iron chains that spat and fizzled with the creature’s core of fury. Crystalline wings folded partway over its breastplate. Its arms were folded. One hand was metal. Iron.
Stronos blinked it away.
‘The Dawnbreak engine is not me.’ The voice did not come from the servitors now. It came out of the darkness. ‘It is a skin I choose to wear, a vessel I choose to ride. You cannot break me with fists.’
Stronos raised his gauntlets. His vision rained with sapphire afterimages.
‘Then I shall begin with your skin.’
Chapter Twenty-one
‘We made you stronger, more resilient, more efficient, less distracted by free will – are these such crimes?’
– Logi-Legatus Nicco Palpus
I
Verrox moved faster than should have been possible for a being of his formidable bulk and age. He knocked the Helfather’s assault cannon aside on his jaw, then bit onto the gun barrel, teeth screaming, chewing out fat sparks as his fist slammed into the Helfather’s girdle plate with a resonant thud. The Helfather did not seem to register the impact, driving his chainfist into Verrox’s thick shoulder armour and beginning to carve. Verrox’s mouth distended, throat rippling with a silent growl; not with pain so much as exhilaration. He had been waiting a century or more to feel that kind of pain. The Iron Father bent backwards. The chainfist dug in. His knees bent, body tensed, the Helfather was halfway through his shoulder, and with a roar Verrox lifted the aged Terminator off the floor. There was a scream as the chainfist came loose, and the Iron Father threw him into one of the glass reliquaries.
The sound of raining glass seemed to shock the watching assassins into life.
Bolts of supercharged las, shifted red, stabbed at Lydriik from the four corners of the hall as he dragged the Canticle of Travels from its plinth and dropped to one knee. Las-fire thumped into the plinth’s thick basalt, his armoured back shielding the priceless tome against the single assassin that still had a clear shot. The powdered smell of baked rock filled his nostrils as he wrapped the book in the hard felt of his equipment pouch.
The Helfather was on his back, lying in a bed of broken glass and unloading his assault cannon into Verrox’s armour. The Vurgaan Iron Father gnashed his teeth and took it, his face thrown into hellish relief by the muzzle flashes as he raised a boot and smashed it down on the downed warrior’s gun-arm. The Helfather’s combi-flamer breathed out, and suddenly both warriors were aflame.
It did not seem to trouble either of them.
Checking that the book was secure, Lydriik forced a fragment of his will into his axe. White light screamed from the heavy blade, rattling the plinth on the flagstones and causing those beneath his boots to reorient as if to get away from the power of his mind. With the strength he had to spare, he let his consciousness roam; it touched the walls, explored every plinth and pedestal and cabinet, the fountain, probed the assassins. There were six of them. He saw them moving, circling to flush him out of cover.
He found Nicco Palpus.
The Voice of Mars hovered a few metres back from where Lydriik had seen him last, apparently torn between seeking refuge and seeing this complication resolved in person. Sara Valorrn stood in front of him, hellgun crossed protectively over her chest. The priest’s metallic eyes shone, reflecting the bonfire that had engulfed Verrox and the Helfather.
With a scowl, ignoring the hell-blasts that had cooked through his backplate in numerous places, Lydriik aimed his pistol at the Voice of Mars and fired. Sara bundled the logi-legatus behind a wide plinth and his burst butchered the stonework.
‘You are better warriors because of us,’ Palpus called out from behind the chewed-up pedestal once the noise had faded. ‘You are better because of us.’
Lydriik hissed as a hell-blast seared his neck, and shifted position to show the shooter his side instead, covering his equipment pouch with his axe hand.
‘You made us slaves of Mars,’ he yelled back.
‘We made you stronger, more resilient, more efficient, less distracted by free will – are these such crimes?’
Lydriik let his bolter answer for him, demolishing a section of the Voice of Mars’ cover. Metal hit the stone at his feet and bounced as he released his magazine and reloaded.
‘That rock is getting smaller, Palpus.’
‘You are a warrior, Epistolary. It was all you were ever meant to be. You could have been content with the greatness we offered, but no, Kristos had to pursue his mad quest to rid himself of flesh, while Verrox there would have you break from Mars entirely. And Stronos?’ Palpus scoffed. ‘Even Stronos does not know what Stronos wants.’
‘If you disagree with Kristos then why not countermand him?’
‘Because he is useful, and because he can be controlled, which is more than I can say for you.’ The soft metal of Palpus’ face appeared from behind the crumbled carving, flushed by the promethium glow and the flash of hell-blasts. ‘Mars is ancient. It is wise. It owns this galaxy and allows, in its wisdom, that the Imperium of Man should exist in it. The Iron Hands are a part of that whether you wish it or not.’ He shook his head sadly, as though forced to reprimand a rebellious serf, and glanced towards the burning Helfather. He was still down, he and Verrox continuing to hammer fists into one another. ‘We possess you.’
A growl rising from his throat, Lydriik rose.
The hell-fire abruptly stopped. Nicco Palpus regarded his assassins quizzically. Lydriik’s eyes pulsed with witchfire. His psychic hood danced with light.
‘And I possess them,’ he said.
Sara’s rifle swung towards the Voice of Mars. She stared at her weapon in shock.
Nicco Palpus only looked disappointed. ‘If only it could be that simple. You cannot kill the–’
The Voice of Mars’ augmented cranium exploded, the forced discharge of a hotshot blast to the back of the head vaporising its cyborganics before they had a chance to spill. The priest was tossed to the ground like a headless doll, skidding a short way before coming to a halt halfway towards Lydriik, steaming.
A furious mewl escaped Sara’s lips, the hellgun shaking in her hands.
A remarkable strength of will.
Pity.
Lydriik severed her body from her brain with a thought and she dropped like a bag of stones. He felt a moment’s regret. He had been genuinely fond of Laana, and would probably have felt the same about her sister too, had circumstances permitted. He walked towards Palpus, holding his will firmly over the trigger fingers of the remaining assassins, and put four more rounds through the Voice of Mars’ back. Detonations ripped through the adept’s body.
With the Adeptus Mechanicus one could never be too certain, but if there was a redundant personality store hidden somewhere in the priest’s body then it wasn’t there now.
The crackle of burning flesh and its accompanying charnel stench announced Verrox’s arrival beside him.
‘He always overlooked the flesh,’ he observed.
Lydriik nodded.
‘I thought the Deathwatch had made you soft.’
The Iron Father was breathing heavily and partially aflame, fires guttering inside his mouth each time he opened it to breathe. His right arm hung by a clutch of wires, slowly fraying in the heat. White bone and dark metal plates showed where skin had dribbled away from his face, the motorised gearings and belt systems of his teeth exposed in all their ravenous detail. The Helfather lay amidst broken glass and crushed shell casings and puddles of lit promethium, still now. Dead? Alive? The Helfather was beyond Lydriik’s power to read.
‘It made me recognise my weakness,’ he whispered. ‘That can only make a warrior stronger.’
‘I am rarely glad to be proven wrong. I make an exception today.’ Verrox looked down at Sara. She gasped on the floor like a paralysed fish.
Lydriik laid a hand upon the equipment sack at his belt. ‘This is more important than a human life.’
‘We still need to have a conversation.’
‘We do.’
‘About this Yeldrian, to start with.’
‘I know.’
‘Now seems like a good time,’ Verrox growled.
‘Not now.’ Lydriik looked around, mentally bidding the assassins to lower their weapons and back away. They obeyed. ‘The Dawnbreak Technology will be safe enough here. The cult will see to it.’ He turned back to Verrox, his hand resting protectively over the tome at his hip. ‘First, I need you to summon the Iron Council.’
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Supplemental One
