Angel Exterminatus

by Graham McNeill

  Like the walkway that had brought him here, his steps covered distance with no regard for the physical laws of the universe, and the enormity of the green sun became apparent as he drew near the exact centre of Iydris. Perturabo kept his eyes fixed forwards, seeing a wavering silhouette against the incandescence ahead of him.

  Fulgrim stood upon an elliptical platform at the terminus of the bridge, basking in the radiance of the sun’s energy. Perturabo made no attempt to soften his tread, knowing Fulgrim would already be aware of his approach.

  ‘This is what you came here for?’ said Perturabo. ‘This is the Angel Exterminatus?’

  Fulgrim turned and his smile of welcome was so utterly genuine that Perturabo briefly entertained the notion that perhaps he was mistaken in thinking he had been betrayed.

  ‘No, this is nothing,’ grinned Fulgrim, shaking his head. ‘Alien necromancy, nothing more.’

  ‘So there never were any weapons?’

  ‘Not as your stunted intellect would understand it, no.’

  ‘And the Angel Exterminatus? It doesn’t exist either, does it?’

  ‘Not yet, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘But with your help, it soon will.’

  Fulgrim laughed at his bemused expression, cruel even in victory. ‘Even after the bleating warnings of the eldar, you still don’t understand.’

  ‘Then illuminate me,’ said Perturabo, hefting his hammer onto his shoulder.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I am to be the Angel Exterminatus.’

  The strongpoint was an island of iron amid an ocean of ghostly green wraiths and their glass-limbed counterparts. For all that their bodies were insubstantial, some immutable essence of the life they once lived or some unknown quality of the Iron Warriors defences kept them from simply passing through the solid matter of the modular fortress.

  Razorwire tore smoky matter from their bodies and physical trauma destroyed them as surely as a living foe. They could not penetrate the walls on their own, but the energy blasts of the wraith-constructs could put them asunder for the wraiths to breach. Their weightless forms could climb the riveted iron of the walls and storm the ramparts, and their hands could tear the heart from a warrior even through the protection of his warplate.

  Forrix smashed his fist through the glass-domed helm of a tall construct as it clambered over the smoking, molten ruin of a destroyed Rhino making up part of the eastern wall. A blast of combi-bolter fire punched through the back of its head. He stepped back over the shattered remains of three of its brethren, letting Iron Warriors in power armour take his place.

  Their guns shredded the gathering wraiths that pushed their way into the breach.

  ‘Stonewrought,’ he voxed, moving to stand in the shadow of Tormentor on its raised central plinth. ‘Eastern breach contained.’

  The Shadowsword was confined to being a static weapons platform while the assault of the wraith army continued. The strongpoint would need to be dismantled before it could drive out, but with its many guns flaying the eldar attack, there was little need to expose it to the enemy’s close-range attention.

  ‘Some of those constructs coming for the gate,’ answered Vull Bronn. ‘Big ones.’

  The Stonewrought fought from the upper hatch of the Tormentor, manning its cupola reaper cannon with steady traverses and directing the fire and deployment of the warriors on the ramparts.

  ‘Come on, Toramino,’ snarled Forrix. ‘Get those Stor-bezashk of yours breaking a sweat!’

  Deafening blasts of warhorns and the slam of heavy glass limbs echoed from the walls of the citadel as the Mortis engines and the eldar Titans did battle somewhere nearby. Snatches of vox-echoes from nearby legionaries suggested to Forrix that only Mortis Vult was still in the fight, but he expected no aid from the Reaver unless it was somehow able to inflict engine kills on both eldar ghost machines.

  On each of the strongpoint’s four walls, warriors in burnished iron, gold and jet fought the dead of Iydris with relentless, machine-like precision. Each warrior knew his role in the battle and with all of them working as one, their defence was unbreakable. Their bolters were firing down into the plaza in sequential volleys. As one warrior exhausted his magazine, he would step back from the firing line to reload as his brothers closed ranks.

  For now, Forrix and a company-strength detachment were acting as a mobile reserve, plugging the gaps. Though he was all that remained of this detachment’s Terminator contingent, one warrior so clad was a force multiplier not to be taken lightly. So far he and his men had sealed five breaches and prevented twice as many line breaks.

  Watching the indomitable fortitude of his Legion brothers on the ramparts, Forrix was reminded of the clockwork automatons the Lord of Iron built in the early days of the Crusade. He remembered a golden lion that was to be presented to the master of the Dark Angels, but which had never been finished, a bronze horse that had been designed for a great centrepiece at Nikaea and never used and a celestial timepiece that Guilliman had mounted on the tallest tower of his Temple of Correction on Macragge.

  The Iron Warriors made war a thing of beauty, a science that was as magical as any lurid tales of bloody courage and heroism told by the likes of the Vlka Fenryka or the riders of Chogoris.

  Neon bolts of energy flailed around the fortress, battering its structure and punching through previously weakened points. The vehicles’ damage-reduction mechanisms fought to repair the impacts, but the onboard components for achieving full functionality had long since been expended. The inner faces of the strongpoint were heaped with Legion dead, their bodies punched clean through by the plasma weapons of the enemy or torn open by ethereal claws.

  Yes, the Iron Warriors were fighting like a well-oiled machine, but its component parts were being worn down. At current rates of attrition, the last round would be fired from a bolter within the next three minutes.

  Forrix lumbered over to the gateway of Rhinos as a blast of blue-hot energy punched out of the crew compartment of one. Metal exploded outwards, molten droplets of adamantium and plasma residue dribbling to the ground. The two Rhinos boomed and rocked back under a terrific impact. Another blow and the stricken vehicles slammed back as though they had been struck by a siege Titan’s wrecking ball.

  The skidding tank spun around as though on ice, heading straight for him.

  Forrix braced his shoulder and leaned into the impact.

  The Rhino slammed into him, its momentum almost unstoppable.

  Almost.

  Terminator armour turned a warrior into a man-portable tank, and matched with the cold iron of Forrix, the Rhino was going to come off worst. The vehicle buckled, stopping dead, and Forrix pushed it back the way it had come. Two of the eldar constructs, each twice as tall as a legionary, punched through the gateway, their limbs ablaze with emerald fire.

  One staggered as the Rhino crashed into it. The weight of the vehicle broke its legs and it went down beneath the Rhino. Forrix charged the other, his gait ponderous but inexorable. The construct saw him coming and levelled its arm at him, a slender limb ending in a long-barrelled lance-like weapon.

  Forrix could not hope to avoid the blast and steeled himself to fight through the impact.

  Pulsing streams of energy slammed into him and Forrix yelled in pain as the plastron of his armour was shredded by the quickfire blasts. Fiery heat enveloped his chest, and but for the rigidity of his battle-plate, he would have fallen. The backwash of searing heat from the weapon melted away his vulcanised cowl and dragged the air from his lungs.

  Forrix gasped for breath, knowing he could not survive another blast.

  The tip of the construct’s weapon powered up to fire again, but before it could kill him, a streaking white contrail flashed overhead and struck it in the centre of its elongated head. The Tormentor’s hunter-killer missile detonated with a thunderclap and the construct was burned to liquid in the blink of an eye, its death scream cut short.

  Forrix turned his head and saw the Stonewrought with his sho
ulder bent to the auxiliary launch tube on the Tormentor’s turret.

  ‘Fine shot, Stonewrought,’ said Forrix, pointing over Vull Bronn’s shoulder as a towering shadow engulfed the strongpoint. ‘But there’s a better target for you.’

  Emerging from the rogue thermals and swirling vortices of smoke on the northern side of the strongpoint was the last eldar Titan. Its upper carapace bled light from the damage it had taken, and one spine-wing hung broken at its shoulder. It limped from a wound that gushed light in its leg, and was surely on the verge of dissolution. Both Mortis engines must have been put down, but they had clearly given a good account of themselves. The towering machine’s one remaining arm was a monstrously oversized variant of the weapon that had almost killed Forrix a moment before, and he knew that one shot would wipe them from the face of the planet.

  The Stonewrought dropped into the Tormentor and the enormous turret immediately began to grind around on powerful servos. The barrel of the main gun elevated, a Phaeton-pattern volcano cannon. A Titan-killer.

  Forrix didn’t move. He saw little point.

  Whoever fired first would kill the other; the brutal arithmetic of war at its simplest.

  Before either the Titan or the Shadowsword could fire, Forrix heard the unmistakable sound of incoming ordnance. He spun around and saw arcing lines of massed artillery fire streaking through the lower reaches of the atmosphere before nosing over and streaking towards the earth.

  ‘About bloody time, Toramino,’ he said.

  ‘You’re the Angel Exterminatus?’ said Perturabo, not knowing whether to laugh at his brother’s self-aggrandisement or stoke his rage with the arrogance of it. ‘You always did have an appetite for rampant narcissism, but this is the grandest delusion yet.’

  Fulgrim spread his arms wide and let the seething tempest of the rising light billow his cloak out behind him. The light of the green sun haloed his head and limned his body in sickly radiance.

  ‘I don’t expect you to understand, brother,’ said Fulgrim, and it took Perturabo a moment to realise his brother was no longer standing on the ground, but slowly rising to float above it. ‘For the devotee of a long-dead man of feverishly inventive imagination and unquenchable curiosity, I imagine you would have made a poor pupil. You lack vision, brother dear, you always have. But what should we expect from a grubber in the dirt? Your nose always pressed to the mud, what chance did you have of grasping the rapturous horizons within our reach?’

  Perturabo moved towards Fulgrim, but he had taken only a step when his brother spoke a single word. Its nightmare syllables tore at Perturabo’s brain like a barbed awl driven through his ear and into the heart of his skull. He stumbled, dropping to one knee as his nervous system shrieked in pain.

  He pushed himself back to his feet, gritting his teeth against the grinding of his bones and the creak of every sinew as it threatened to snap.

  ‘Impressive, brother,’ said Fulgrim in surprise. ‘There are few who can resist the true name of the Profligate One.’

  Fulgrim’s words made no sense, but Perturabo didn’t need to understand his brother to kill him. He kept on through the pain, each step a battle he wasn’t sure he could win. The weariness that had kept him aching and sporadically weak returned to stab him with draining force. Forgebreaker now felt like a dead weight on his shoulder and he had to fight for every breath, his lungs being crushed within his chest.

  ‘You are mighty, Perturabo, the mightiest of us all, perhaps,’ said Fulgrim with real admiration in his voice. ‘I suspect that is why it took the maugetar stone so long to drain enough of your strength.’

  ‘The… harvester?’ said Perturabo, his grasp of the eldar tongue fading and sluggish.

  ‘My gift to you,’ said Fulgrim, pointing a slender finger to Perturabo’s chest, where the golden gemstone at the centre of the skull-carved cloak pin now pulsed with its own internal heartbeat. ‘Your faculty with labyrinths was not the only reason it had to be you.’

  ‘Why what had to be me?’ hissed Perturabo, knowing his brother’s need to inflate his own ego would buy him some time.

  ‘A sacrifice is only a sacrifice if what is offered is valued greatly,’ said Fulgrim. ‘And your strength is valued very greatly. By me and the Warmaster. Horus will be angry, of course, but when he sees what I have become, he will realise the value of your death.’

  ‘You intend to kill me?’

  Fulgrim gave him a faux-regretful grin. ‘That is rather the point of a sacrifice.’

  ‘Why? What do you think to gain by it?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Fulgrim, lifting his arms until they were outstretched to the glittering starscape of embedded gemstones. ‘Do you remember how I told you that many secrets had been revealed to me?’

  Perturabo nodded, fighting to overcome the crushing lethargy wrapping his limbs in leaden weights. Fulgrim’s grin threatened to split his face, maniacal and hungry.

  ‘I told you I would share those secrets with you one day and that they would bring us closer than ever. Today is that day,’ said the Phoenician, and Perturabo sank to his knees as jolting pain surged through his body. It felt as though his heart had been pierced by a surgeon’s lance that was slowly draining him of his vital essence.

  ‘I am not the same person you knew, brother,’ said Fulgrim drifting towards him through the air. ‘Even before Isstvan I was changing, though I did not know it. It began on Laeran, but I suppose that’s not important to you. The race that called that oceanic rock home worshipped beings I mistook for invented species memory from their earliest prehistory, but I was wrong, brother. Their gods were real. Very real.’

  ‘Gods?’

  Fulgrim waved away the pejorative associations. ‘Entities so powerful they might as well be called gods. They are to mankind as we are to microbes: towering and immortal, magnificent and all-powerful.’

  ‘A microbe can still kill in great enough numbers,’ pointed out Perturabo, but Fulgrim ignored him.

  ‘Such entities dwell in the roiling depths of the warp and in return for power beyond imagining all they demand is devotion. One such being craved my body and, for a time, claimed it as its own to wreak great harm in my name.’

  Fulgrim’s features twisted in distaste, as though an argument raged in his flesh all the way down to the cellular level.

  ‘As this creature learned of me, I too learned of it and discovered how to fight it. We struggled for mastery of my flesh, and eventually reached a form of… compromise.’

  Perturabo heard the scorn in that last word, knowing any kind of half-measures were anathema to the Phoenician.

  ‘I regained control of my body, but the touch of a creature of Chaos is a wound that never heals, stigmata that forever bleed. Without its presence I could never reach the exultant highs of perfection. No matter what I did, a piece of me was always left… wanting. I was a vessel that could never be filled, an itch never scratched, a hunger never satisfied. So I resolved to become like it. And here we are.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘Here,’ said Fulgrim, clenching his fists and drawing his arms back towards his chest.

  Perturabo heard a million cracks of what sounded like splitting bone, and the shimmering lights above him shifted. It seemed as though the far distant walls of the chamber were moving, and moments later he saw why.

  At first it was like an approaching fog, like the dimly perceived movement of the galaxy’s outer spirals, but then Perturabo saw that it was something infinitely worse. Every single gemstone that had been set within the walls was hurtling towards the green sun blazing at Fulgrim’s back.

  The glittering stones sped towards them like bullets, but the instant before impact, Fulgrim extended his palms and they ceased their forward movement, forming a sphere of shimmering gems around the sun. Only the upper reaches of the sphere remained open, through which Perturabo could see only darkness.

  Was it just his fading sight or was the light of the sun diminishing? Like a star that had exhaus
ted its inner reserves of fuel, the green star was collapsing into its doom. Its surface raged as it fought for existence, but it was a fight Perturabo could see it was destined to lose.

  He slid Forgebreaker from his shoulder and with its head resting on the ground, pushed himself upright once more.

  ‘On your knees or on your feet, it makes no difference to what is going to happen,’ said Fulgrim.

  ‘It matters to me,’ said Perturabo, though the effort of speaking was almost too much for him. ‘If I am going to die, then I’ll do so standing up.’

  ‘I will miss you, brother,’ said Fulgrim, reaching down to pluck the golden stone from the silver skull at Perturabo’s breast. He set it within a cavity worked into the eagle upon his own breastplate, and sighed, like a slave to narcotics experiencing the bliss of the needle.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Fulgrim as the first faint threads of black streaked the stone. ‘Yes, it could be no other than you.’

  Fulgrim stepped close to embrace him, a dreamy smile on his lips.

  Perturabo felt sick at Fulgrim’s touch, but he barely had the strength to draw breath, let alone push him away. Fulgrim kissed both his cheeks and looked up with a rapturous expression on his face.

  A glittering rain of broken glass was falling into the sphere, shards of crystal torn from the bedrock of another world and dropped into the upper reaches of the plunging shaft. This was what Fulgrim’s mortal followers had carried into the sepulchre on their backs.

  ‘And he shall build a glorious city of mirrors,’ said Fulgrim, radiant tears spilling from his eyes. ‘It shall be a city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.’

  Perturabo could not speak as Fulgrim pulled him tight to his breast once again.

  ‘Come, brother,’ said the Phoenician. ‘Let us ascend!’

  And, so saying, Fulgrim and Perturabo flew back to the surface like entwined shooting stars, with millions of screaming gemstones trailing behind them in a glittering comet’s tail.