Angel Exterminatus

by Graham McNeill

  His brother laughed and screamed as he basked in the glory of his reflections, each one different from the last, and each more monstrous in its depiction of the Phoenician. In one, Fulgrim was a beauteous creature of pearlescent wings, white-feathered and hung with pearls and silver chains like Sanguinius. In another he was ram-headed, ruddy-skinned and dripping in blood. Yet another showed him a formless spawn of primordial ooze, a rejected mass of mutated flesh, fallen too far to ever live.

  A thousand times a thousand imagoes were thrown back at Perturabo, and at first he thought he had stumbled in his thoughts. Images.

  No, his mind affirmed. Imagoes.

  Fulgrim threw his head back and yelled, ‘I can feel the power. The Dark Prince favours me with attention!’

  Perturabo wanted to answer him, to curse him for his treachery, but he had no strength to give it voice. The maugetar stone now set in Fulgrim’s breastplate pulsed with sated hunger, a monstrous, hideous thing of soul-sucking horror that had stolen Perturabo’s life. Looking at it now, it seemed to be an ugly thing, a bauble crafted in a shadow-haunted city of treachery and betrayal, imbued with its power by those who spent their days crafting ways for the living to suffer.

  ‘Can you feel it, brother?’ asked Fulgrim, cupping his face like a lover. ‘Can you feel the fates aligning? The eyes of the gods are upon us!’

  Perturabo could feel something, a sensation like the world breaking apart, like the colliding of realities or the end of all things. Was this what the end of the universe would feel like, the destruction of time itself? When gods took notice of the affairs of men, it brought about cataclysms of unimaginable fury, and this would be no exception.

  ‘I will always carry you within me, brother,’ said Fulgrim, reaching down to tenderly stroke the black-veined maugetar stone with fingertips that looked altogether too slender, too claw-like. ‘What you give to me this day, I will never forget.’

  ‘I do not give it to you,’ said Perturabo, the power of his bitter rage giving him strength.

  Fulgrim’s eyes turned cold at his response, angered that this moment should be sullied by anyone’s voice but his own.

  ‘Freely given or ripped from your beating heart, the result will be the same.’

  Perturabo didn’t answer, saving what little energy he had clawed back from the stone at his breast. He closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of his brother’s reflections in the tumbling glass, and concentrating on undoing what the alien stone had done to him. It fought him – of course it did, jealously holding onto that which it had stolen – but Perturabo was the master of breaking into places that sought to keep him out.

  Some thought that to be a purely literal interpretation of his abilities, but that was ever the way with Perturabo. People were always underestimating his capabilities beyond what they ascribed to him.

  Perturabo reached deep inside, to that inner core of his being where iron and flesh became one, the inviolable heart of himself that was his and his alone. He focused all his attention on it, gathering what strength he had left and filling it with his dreams of youth, his ambition and his hatred of what Fulgrim was inflicting upon him.

  The heart of his hatred grew, fed by the trauma of what was happening to him.

  And then, what even the alchemists of old had known: like attracts like.

  A trickle at first, but then with ever greater force, the stolen strength in the maugetar stone began to flow back into Perturabo as through a dam with the thinnest crack in its heart.

  Such a reversal could not escape the notice of the Phoenician, and Fulgrim turned his black eyes upon him with a mixture of shock and incredulous fury.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘Taking back what is mine,’ snarled Perturabo.

  Fulgrim shook his head and a gleam of golden fire appeared in his hand, the sword Ferrus Manus had crafted for him so long ago.

  ‘It’s mine!’ screamed Fulgrim, and rammed the blade into Perturabo’s stomach, tearing it up through his sternum and into his chest. The pain was incredible, the craft of the Gorgon ensuring the blade parted Perturabo’s armour like a plasma cutter through sheet iron. Rich blood flowed from the wound, bathing the Phoenician’s right hand in dripping crimson.

  Perturabo threw back his head and loosed a bellow of rage and pain that echoed from the distant walls like continents colliding. He saw a shimmer of light above, a ring of flickering gunfire that could only mean they were near the surface. The black void above raged like the waves of a storm-wracked ocean.

  Perturabo felt himself cast away like something unclean. His strength and blood were finite things, but with what he had clawed back, his hand reached out for the one thing he knew Fulgrim valued above all others.

  He closed his fist and the world fell away.

  Falk watched Kroeger charge into the mass of eldar constructs with disbelief, but he had no time to wonder what madness had possessed the headstrong triarch. The eldar creatures took advantage of the break in the Iron Warriors defensive line, and drove a wedge of their troops into the gap. Falk stitched fire over the chest of an alien, keeping his arm steady as the creatures’ bodies broke apart under his relentless barrages.

  The Emperor’s Children were keeping to their own fight, holding their position as if expecting something to happen at any moment. They were taking no part in the fighting beyond that which was required to hold their position. An untenable strategy, so what did they know that Falk did not?

  He put the III Legion from his mind as a glancing bolt of fire grazed his plastron. His Cataphractii armour was proof against all but the closest-range shots and none had thus far penetrated enough to cause him great harm. His power fist smashed through a flanking enemy, the return stroke batting another through the air like a toy. With every step he took, he fired his implanted weaponry and crushed the animation from his enemies.

  Beside him, two of the Iron Circle took the brunt of the eldar fire with their shields. Both robots were dying, their ablative plates stripped away and their shields little more than ruined stubs of metal. Within moments they would be nothing but scrap.

  Falk kept moving, never stopping to allow the eldar a clear run at him. A ghost warrior fell in front of him and he stamped down on its crystalline skull. It burst apart, and Falk was about to move on when he saw the hideous skull-face in the patterning of shards his boot had created. It leered up at him and Falk stood frozen in place for the briefest moment.

  Brief as it was, it was all the eldar needed to bring their weapons to bear on him.

  A combined blast of emerald fire slammed into his lower back and Falk staggered as the heat burned him through his battle-plate. A rippling blade of light stabbed up into his armpit, where the armour was thinnest. He roared in pain and hammered his fist down on his attacker’s helmet. A fountain of light erupted from the bulbous helm, and in the shimmer patterns of radiance, the skull grinned out at him again.

  ‘Get away from me!’ he yelled as the light died.

  You are so close…

  Falk heard the voice in every shred of his flesh, the voice that was not a voice resonating in his body from the smallest cell to the grandest element of his synaptic architecture. Once again, his enemies took advantage of his momentary distraction to concentrate their fire upon him.

  ‘Stay out of my head!’ cried Falk, wading through a knot of enemy warriors and striding back to where Berossus bludgeoned the eldar from his side with sweeping blows from his enormous hammer. The ranks of the Iron Warriors had thinned considerably – barely a hundred legionaries still fought within the sepulchre.

  Thousands more remained outside, and Falk wondered if they were under so sustained an attack as well. The vox was dead, and none of his attempts to reach Forrix, Toramino or the Stonewrought had come to anything. Were these the last Iron Warriors left on Iydris? Had the Phoenician’s mad designs broken the IV Legion upon the anvil of his obsession?

  Falk felt the resolve of the Iron Warriors stren
gthen at his presence.

  He was the iron in the foundation, the bolt on the girder.

  His presence would keep the rust from their hearts.

  Berossus fought like one of the titans of Olympian legend, the creatures said to have sired the gods before falling to fratricide. His energised hammer broke the eldar apart with ease and though his rotor cannon had long-since fired itself empty, it served just as well as a heavy club. Falk took care with his approach; it wasn’t unknown for Dreadnoughts in combat to lose track of friend and foe.

  A warrior with a bland, forgettable face and whose black hair was worn in plaited braids across the centre of his scalp fought at the warsmith’s side like his protector. Falk gave him an appraising glance before dismissing him as irrelevant. Berossus swung around to face him and Falk heard recognition in his voice.

  ‘A hard fight,’ said the Dreadnought.

  ‘It has had its moments,’ agreed Falk, firing off the last of his bolter rounds. ‘War as a Dreadnought suits you.’

  ‘Did you see that idiot Kroeger?’ said the Dreadnought.

  ‘I did,’ confirmed Falk, blasting a ghost warrior with a burst of fire.

  ‘Looks like there might be an opening in the Trident soon,’ said Berossus. ‘I might become a triarch after all.’

  ‘If we live through this, I’ll demand Perturabo elevate you,’ said Falk.

  Before the Dreadnought could answer, a blast of energy erupted from the shaft behind him. Falk staggered, the force of the blast throwing him into the mass of eldar constructs. Even Berossus was knocked down by its power, and Falk struggled to regain his feet before the eldar creatures were able to close in for the kill.

  Berossus struggled in vain to right himself, his weapon arms thrashing and his legs hammering the ground as he rocked back and forth. His carapace was split down the sides and his augmitters blared with angry frustration.

  ‘Damned eldar!’ bellowed the downed Dreadnought.

  Falk finally managed to push himself onto his front and drag his legs into a position where he could brace himself enough to climb to his feet. With every passing second he expected a blast of emerald light to end his life, for the ghost warriors to finish what this new devilry had unleashed.

  He raised his combi-bolter, though its magazine was now dry.

  ‘Get me up!’ roared Berossus. ‘I won’t die on my back!’

  Falk looked around in wonder and shook his head.

  ‘I don’t think we’re dying today,’ he said.

  All around the tiny island of Iron Warriors, the eldar ghost warriors had ceased their attack. They stood as silent and unmoving as statues, devoid of animation and the shimmering light that filled their skull-helms dimming like a battery-lumen running down. The tower of light that had blazed from the shaft at the chamber’s heart had vanished, snuffed out as though some great sluice had been sealed in the planet’s core. The blackness above them seethed and churned, as though its perturbations had somehow been kept in check by the river of light piercing its heart.

  A dozen Iron Warriors manhandled the fallen Berossus back onto his feet, and the Dreadnought rotated his body through three hundred and sixty degrees.

  ‘What just happened?’ he asked, his voice patchy with damage.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Falk, turning towards the shaft as he heard a rapidly building roar rising from its depths. The Iron Warriors turned their guns on the shaft as a geyser of the eldar gemstones erupted from it. Millions upon millions of the stones exploded into the air, filling the void above their heads with sparkling points of light.

  But instead of falling to earth in a glittering rain, they filled the chamber like an impossibly complex map of the heavens, with every star, planet and point of light represented.

  ‘What–’ said Falk, but before he could finish, two figures shot from the mouth of the shaft like something vomited from the maw of a great beast; Fulgrim blazing and wreathed in heavenly fire, Perturabo held tight to his breast.

  The primarch of the Emperor’s Children hurled his brother aside, and Perturabo fell in a languid arc to land with a crunch of metal and crystal at the edge of the shaft. Blood trailed the air in a streaming red arc from Perturabo’s chest.

  Falk felt a sense of terror and unreasoning horror fill him.

  The Lord of Iron lay unmoving, his body broken and lifeless.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  He That Was Dead

  Dreams of Iron

  The Eagle of the Tenth

  Lucius sprang to his feet, the first of the Emperor’s Children to right himself in the wake of the shockwave from the shaft. His every sense tingled in anticipation, the promise of a new sensation that was beyond anything he had ever experienced. His sword danced in his hand, its blade flickering.

  Even the air recognised that an event of great moment was in the offing.

  The fight in the chamber of towers had tested Lucius. Not in skill – the eldar ghost warriors were no match for his bladework – but in his endurance of boredom. The orders Eidolon had been given by the primarch were clear, to keep the mortals bearing the bounty of Prismatica safe until their precious cargo had been emptied into the shaft. Why such a task required Eidolon to enact it, Lucius didn’t know.

  Perhaps it had something to do with his having died once.

  In any case, once the mortals had emptied their containers, they stepped into the green light and dropped away. Had that been part of Eidolon’s command? Lucius didn’t really care.

  The fighting had become a series of dull, repetitious combats that tested him not at all. None of the eldar machines could match his skill and he had fought in every style he knew, simply to stave off the boredom of utilising the same killing move more than once.

  But now Fulgrim had re-emerged, haloed by millions of the same gemstones as those that rested at the heart of each of the dull-witted constructs. So dense was the canopy of drifting stones that the outer reaches of the chamber were all but obscured. Lucius caught fleeting glimpses of movement behind the mass of gleaming stones, his warrior instinct telling him that he was seeing things there that warranted note.

  But his attention was irrevocably drawn back to his primarch.

  Lucius saw the Phoenician was no longer the same being as had descended into the planet. He floated in the air above the shaft, which no longer poured its green torrent up to the restless darkness above, but simply radiated a fading glow of dying light. Fulgrim’s armour was shimmering with vitality, as though the light of a thousand suns were contained within him and strained to break free. The primarch’s dark, doll-like eyes were twin black holes, doorways to heights of experience and sensation the likes of which could only be dreamed by madmen and those willing to go to any lengths to taste them.

  Fulgrim’s cloak fell away and his features twisted as though his body were being wracked by twin extremes of pain and pleasure. Reluctantly, Lucius let his gaze slip from Fulgrim’s wondrous form to the rest of the chamber’s occupants.

  Lonomia Ruen stood next to him, his envenomed daggers useless against the eldar creatures. His caustic features were alive with excitement at the sight of Fulgrim’s imminent transformation, runnels of purplish blood dribbling from his nose and ears.

  Marius Vairosean stood just in front of him, his sonic weapon stilled in the face of such wonder, and Lucius wanted to tell him to loose some blaring cacophony, for surely this moment warranted acknowledgement. Vairosean wept at the sight of Fulgrim, his disfigured features pulled in what might have been an expression of adoration and spiteful jealousy. It was sometimes hard to tell, such was the impressive nature of the man’s devotion to his flesh-alterations. Krysander of the Blades stood immobile, his face twisted in a grin of pleasure, his hooked tongue sliding across his knife-cut lips.

  The Iron Warriors at last seemed to have developed a sense of wonder and stood immobile in the presence of a godlike being at the height of his powers. Even the plight of their doomed primarch wasn’t enough to break the spell
of Fulgrim’s coming glory, for none of his feeble-witted warriors had yet approached him.

  Eidolon alone seemed unaffected by the stupefaction that had seized the survivors of the eldar attack, and he walked towards Fulgrim as the primarch drifted down to the edge of the shaft. As Fulgrim’s feet touched the ground, Lucius felt a shudder go through the world, as though it rebelled at his touch. It was as if two tectonic plates had ground across one another, deep within the earth, and the titanic force that their collision had unleashed was only slowly making its way to the surface.

  Lucius wanted to move, to draw closer to his primarch, but he could no more move than he could still his own heart. His flesh understood what his desire did not.

  This was a moment of birth, and like all such moments, it was a private thing.

  Eidolon removed a blade from beneath his cloak – a grey, glitterdust-bladed weapon that Lucius recognised immediately. It was a weapon with which a warrior might slay a god, a weapon that in ancient times would have been called enchanted.

  The anathame was a shadow of the longsword that had, rumour said, been stolen from the Hall of Devices on Xenobia. Its blade had been chipped and shaved, reduced to the length of a ranker’s gladius by a Chaplain of the XVII Legion, though no one knew for what purpose. Eidolon lifted the anathame to Fulgrim’s eye level and spoke words that Lucius couldn’t hear. The primarch nodded and Eidolon rammed the blade into Fulgrim’s side.

  The Emperor’s Children cried out as one, but the awesome power blazing from Fulgrim’s beatific form held them fast.

  ‘He that was dead shall bring me to life!’ cried Fulgrim, the pain in his voice bringing tears to Lucius’s eyes. ‘He that is risen shall be the witness of my rebirth!’

  Eidolon circled around and stabbed the primarch again and again, each time driving the blade in to the hilt. Blood poured from Fulgrim, and his face betrayed the agony he suffered with each penetration. Eidolon sheathed the bloodied weapon and stood before Fulgrim. With both hands, he reached for the first wound he had caused and pulled it open.