Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia

by Guy Haley

  Fortreidon had his gun up, wavering between the two battling pairs of Iron Warriors.

  Zankator had Kellephon against the wall and was stabbing madly at his joints, trying to pierce the articulated metal and arming suit beneath Kellephon jammed the heel of his hand tinder the visor of Zankator’s helmet, forring it backwards. The two of them were locked together in a deadly impasse, neither of them able to break the other. Zankator grunted as he tried to bring his head back down.

  Fortreidon looked from one to the other. The reek of smoke and blood seeping through his helmet’s grille had him breathing hard.

  Perturabo had ordered this, the Hammer of Olympia living up to his name one final time. Fonreidon remembered when he was recruited, the chime of acceptance from the testing equipment proving that he was worthy. He remembered his mother’s tears and the weeping of women as yet more sons were taken from their homes. He remembered growing up without brothers, without his father.

  He remembered… He remembered… pride, lie remembered when he donned his battleplate for the first time and felt the honour of serving his primarch. He remembered the might given to him as he fought and bested creatures from the depths of nightmare. That was the future he had been promised, and it had been delivered to him by Perturabo.

  He strode forwards, suddenly angry. Men like Kellephon would take that away, and leave humanity weak and divided. He raised his bolter and jammed it into the side of Kellephon’s helm.

  Zankator laughed horribly. ‘Kellephon, you always were weak.’

  Kellephon did not relent in his grip. ‘What are you doing, boy? Can you not see? This is not our way!’

  Fortreidon pressed the bolter harder into the side of Kellephon’s helmet.

  ‘Iron within, iron without,’ said Fortreidon, and fired.

  Kellephon’s body hit the ground with a flat clang. Zankator kicked it.

  Bardan was badly wounded. Fan was dead, Ildermais stood alone, seemingly in shock.

  ‘Do not think I will forget this, Udermais,’ said Zankator.

  ‘What about Bardan?’ said Fortreidon. His head was swimming, and there was a buzzing in his ears.

  ‘Leave him. If he lives, the Lord of Iron will deal with him.’ Zankator sheathed his blade and retrieved his bolter. ‘We have a city to burn.’

  FIFTEEN

  IRON WITHOUT

  000.M31

  LOCHOS, OLYMPIA

  For the last time, Perturabo returned home.

  The Palace of Lochos lay open to him. The plaza before it was cratered, riven with cracks, its fine marble flagging pulverising into dust. The gates were blown wide open and the relief panels of gold and silver that had adorned the gates lay twisted on the steps. Perturabo kicked them aside as he strode through the blackened archway. Gunfire echoed at his back.

  Past the gates, the damage to the palace was less obvious. Its halls were dusty and deserted. The rich had fled. They were always the first to go. Sifts of dust drifted down from the ceiling with every explosion going off in the streets outside and the glass was cracked in its fine windows, but in the main the building was unmarked. For the time being, it remained the way he remembered it.

  Perturabo recalled the first day he had been brought there – how mighty the great stone edifice had looked to his uneducated eyes! Now he knew more of the galaxy it seemed as rude as a grox shed, and he disdained its attempt at glory. Many times he had offered to build Dammekos a palace that the ruler of Lochos deserved, only to be declined. Perturabo fulminated on the snub still, but then he had always misunderstood his foster-father.

  In the middle of the hall was a bier, carved in stone with marvellous skill, as was the Olympian way. A coffin of fine rock crystal, pan melted and reconstituted to make panes of diamond-hard glass, rested atop it. Within it, on cushions of the finest velvet, slept the preserved corpse of Dammekos, lately Tyrant of Lochos and the Imperial satrap of Olympia.

  Perturabo walked reverently to the coffin, though he had exhibited little deference to his foster-father during the tyrant’s long life. Perturabo’s huge armoured boots crunched on the scattering of debris that had fallen from the roof, the weight of his battleplate crushing it to powder.

  He laid his hand upon the lid with the faintest metallic dick. Framed in the gun barrels of his wrist cannons was the tyrant’s face shrunken and sallow with great age. Dammekos had lived a very long time - this diminution in stature aside his years had not weighed heavily on him. His corpse wore no augmetics, and had none of the horrifying alterations one could find among the Mechanicum. He was simply very old, and in spite of that a proud patriarch of Lochos still.

  Perturabo sighed deeply. His anger flowed out of him.

  The smallest noise echoed boldly in the palace hall. The thunderous sounds of destruction outside from the thump of shells to the whooping of air displaced by energy weapons, struggled to penetrate the building’s (hick walls. An implacable silence had hold of the place, and would not be easily broken by bombs or by rage. Perturabo had both these things in plenitude, and had in fact relied on them for too long If is higher faculties had become blunted by war. The silence, overlaid though it was upon a muffled symphony of destruction, was welcome.

  ‘Father,’ he said, and closed his eyes. ‘What a pass we find ourselves at.’

  ‘You never called him that when he was alive. Why do you do it now?’

  Beneath the age-cracked whisper was a voice he recognised.

  Calliphone.

  Perturabo looked up. His foster sister occupied the throne of Lochos, sat between the statues of the twin god-kings now made quaint by changing times. Bent with age Calliphone looked older than Dammekos by far. Perturabo found her appearance profoundly shocking. His foster sister, the arch, complicated and intelligent girl he had come close to loving - the only person he had ever felt that way for, save the Emperor himself - had become a hag, and it disgusted him.

  ‘Sister,’ he said.

  ‘So now I am sister and he is father? Only rebellion could wring such words from you. A pity.’

  A crackle of bolter fire popped like firecrackers some way off.

  ‘Rebellion,’ said Perturabo. ‘I should never have trusted you to rule your own affairs.’

  ‘Please!’ she said. She breathed hard between her sentences, her ancient lungs insufficient to power her words. ‘Do you think this is father’s fault?’

  ‘He was agitating behind the scenes against me for years.’

  ‘Trying to claw back a measure of the power he regarded as his, never quite having the courage to acknowledge he held that power because of you,’ she said.

  Penurabo looked down on the dead face of the man who had tried to be a father to him.

  ‘Accepting the governorship of his own world for the Imperium was an act of realpolitik,’ he said. ‘He was too cynical to believe in the Emperor’s dreams sincerely. I never expected him to be completely faithful.’

  ‘You knew what he was doing, and you did not stop him,’ she said. ‘Why should I?’ he said. ‘He was no threat. No one took his sedition seriously, not even him. I think it was a posture he adopted. He could never quite relinquish the role of strongman.’ Perturabo smiled at a private memory.

  ‘His actions have unleashed devastation upon us,’ she said. ‘He encouraged others to think that we could be free again. This is your fault.’

  ‘And you? Do you think Olympia should be free?’ said Perturabo. He took two clanking steps towards his foster sister.

  ‘Thanks to you, I have been forced to think so. You were seen as a gift from the gods. Perhaps you were their judgement instead. You are a scourge on this world.’

  ‘There are no gods,’ said Perturabo, his voice whispering around the empty hall.

  ‘You deny that too hard, brother,’ she said.

  ‘All men decide their own fate. We all choose.’ He pointed at her. ‘There are no demigods weaving our tapestry of life. We are all sinners, as the old Catherics of Terra had it, and we d
well in their hell.’

  ‘Your nihilism is contemptible, brother,’ said Calliphone, ‘but I think there is more to you than that. Perhaps you allowed father his games out of affection, and a desire to save his pride.’

  Perturabo looked down. He did not know if she were right or not. ‘And now he is dead, and his world is ruined.’

  ‘Do not be too sorrowful. Dammekos was a black-hearted man. He drowned my brother Herakon in a vat of wine when he tried to overthrow him. I can’t say I was surprised… My brother was rash, a fool. Still, exile may have been more moderate.’

  ‘He drowned him?’

  ‘In wine,’ she emphasised. ‘Did you spare no thought for what was occurring here while you were on your crusade?’

  ‘What of Andos? He was always the best of you.’

  Perturabo privately felt Andos was better than him. Not in any objective sense, for Perturabo was superior to all men, but Andos was balanced in a way that he could never be. He envied him for it.

  ‘Andos refused the medicines of the Emperor, withdrew to his workshops and died ninety years ago. He would have been regarded as a master artisan in his lifetime, were it not for you. You overshadowed everything he ever did, but he did not complain.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Why?’ said Calliphone. ‘You care for nothing but your dreams of utopia. What do real people matter? They get in the way of perfection.’

  ‘I realised something recently,’ the primarch said suddenly, spurred to confession by his sister’s words. ‘Dammekos and I have common ground. The Imperium - it cannot work.’ A snort of rueful laughter escaped him. ‘Dammekos used to call the drawings I did - the plans, the treatises, all those things I worked on so earnestly - he used to call them my follies. It enraged me. It still does, if I am truthful. But I begin to think maybe he was right. Maybe I inherited this tendency for grandiose plans from my real father.’

  Perturabo looked his sister dead in the eye, though it distressed him to stare at that wrinkled face.

  ‘The Imperium is my father’s folly,’ he continued. ‘I try to believe in it because I want it to be true, just like I wanted my great buildings to be true, and the perfect societies that would use them to exist. But they cannot be. There is no such thing as perfection. Humanity is too chaotic to accept true order.’

  His facade of iron cracked.

  All the pain he had suffered - the isolation, the sense of abandonment that had dogged him all his life, the awful knowledge that he was a hawk among fowl that must restrain itself, the rejection of his brothers, the disregard of his father - was all concentrated in that moment. A single tear dared to roll down his cheek and was immediately resented - not only for the weakness that it showed, but because Perturabo wanted to cry for the broken dream, but he could not. The dream was what should be mourned, yet he could only cry only for himself.

  ‘Wanting something to be does not make it so,’ he murmured.

  Calliphone nodded. ‘You are weak. Badly forged iron looks strong but is brittle as a dried reed. You never understood. People cannot be forced to live to an ideal, they must be led. People are messy, and more complicated than your most profound calculations. You would build a perfect world, realising at the final moment that its greatest mar were the people living within it. Now you would destroy them to save your creation. You are a marmoreal god, ‘Bo, a tomb lord. You cannot achieve the impossible so you rage like a child, and now you have unleashed this horror upon us because you can accept no compromise.’

  A heavy shell exploded near the palace, shaking the windows.

  ‘People do not listen,’ said Perturabo. ‘They do not know what is good for them.’

  ‘People do not bow to you without love, without respect! Great tyrants rule with the blessing of their people, effective ones through fear. But no tyrant ever achieved anything through indifference. You have sulked your way to damnation. You refused to accept the love of the people. You were given the approbation of a god and an army to conquer the stars, and your first act was to decimate your Legion.’

  ‘They had failed,’ he said, clenching his fist.

  ‘Failed to do what? Be the best? You waste your men to prove a point that needs no proof, and then grow angry when no one notices and praises your self-sacrifice. Your petulance has cost this planet whole generations of its youth, bringing your Legion up to strength again and again. You have been an absent king. You have not seen the empty schools, the haunted mothers, the husbandless women.’

  ‘My brother Curze did worse,’ said Perturabo. ‘I have come to set things right, not to destroy everything as he did. This punishment for treachery must be borne, but I will rebuild Olympia.’

  ‘Comparing yourself to the worst of your brothers to excuse the enormity of your own crimes,’ said Calliphone. ‘Listen to your words! Setting things to rights would be to cease recruiting and to hear the grievances of the people with forgiveness in your heart. Not this… massacre! You slaughtered the delegation that came to see you, brother. In that moment you lost You lost everything. This was a good place once. Bellicose and unfair, but it had its measure of beauty and nobility. You have destroyed all that. Why, brother?’

  ‘I have other brothers now, my true siblings. I am not yours.’

  Calliphone wept, her tears tracking through the dust caking her face.

  ‘And do they care for you as your family here did?’ she asked.

  ‘Dammekos never cared for me.’

  ‘No, he only adopted you into his household, and raised you as his son.’

  ‘A calculated risk. He used me for his own ends.’

  ‘He reached out to you over and over,’ she retorted. ‘You are blind as you are selfish. All wrapped up in yourself, in your own brilliance, in your difference!’ Her voice changed, becoming quiet. ‘I cared for you.’

  ‘What of it?’ he said coldly. ‘What good did the affection of mortals ever do for me?’

  ‘You always thought yourself superior to those around you.’

  ‘I am,’ he said plainly. ‘Look upon me, foster sister. I was made by the Emperor of all mankind, one of twenty sons forged to conquer the galaxy. You are withered, yet I am young. Of course I am superior.’

  Calliphone threw up her hand and looked away. ‘What happened to the man I knew who wished for no more war? The boy who drew such wonderful things?’

  ‘Nobody wanted them,’ he said. ‘The Emperor uses me for the most thankless tasks. My men are thrown against the worst of horrors, given the most gruelling roles. We are divided, our talents ignored, our might reduced to splitting rock. My father ignores me. My men go unsung. Our triumphs are unremembered. My brothers mock me as my men bleed. Nobody cares.’

  ‘Is that so?’ she said. ‘Let me present a different hypothesis to you, brother. Use that fine mind of yours to judge its worth. Here is my version of the story - the Emperor of all mankind came here and found a son whom he valued. He saw an indomitable will, with unshakable determination. He recognised that you would not give up, that you would rise to best any difficulty, that the tedious to you is as necessary a challenge to overcome as the glorious, and neither are to be shirked. Seeing these qualities in you, your father set you difficult tasks, not because he saw no value in you, but the exact opposite - he can trust no one else to get them done.’

  ‘That is not true,’ said Perturabo, though the acid of uncertainty began to eat at him. ‘He underestimates me. They all do.’

  Calliphone went on. ‘For a long time, I thought you a fool to follow the Emperor. After all, he is a tyrant like all the rest. Look what he has done to you, I thought. He has brutalised you, and your wars have brutalised your home. But the truth is, brother, I have followed your campaigns carefully, and I noticed a pattern that disturbed and then alarmed me. Always you do things the most difficult way, and in the most painful manner. You cultivate a martyr’s complex, lurching from man to man, holding out your bleeding wrists so they might see how you hurt yourself. You brood i
n the shadows when all you want to do is scream, ‘Look at me!’ You are too arrogant to win people over through effort. You expect people to notice you there in the half-darkness, and point and shout out, ‘There! There is the great Perturabo! See how he labours without complaint!’

  ‘You came to this court as a precocious child. Your abilities were so prodigious that nobody stopped to look at what you were becoming.’

  She got shakily to her feet. Exoskeletal braces whirred under her skirts.

  ‘Perturabo, this will anger you, but you never truly grew into a man.’

  ‘I am not a man,’ he said. ‘I am far more.’

  ‘In those words is the poison that spoils your potential. It is not the Emperor who has driven this world into rebellion. It is not he who has held it back. It is you and your woeful egotism. Let me tell you, my brother, you who affects to despise love so much yet must certainly crave it over all other things, you are the biggest fool I have ever met.’

  With a cry of anger, Perturabo lunged forwards and grasped her by the throat. He raised her up until she was level with his eyes. She grabbed weakly at his wrist. Her mouth gaped for air.

  ‘I am far from a fool, sister,’ he said. ‘I wished for more from life. I hoped to build a better world for people. I have found that there is only brutality. Whether the court intrigues of the tyrants or this war to conquer the stars, it is all the same. Violence is the constant of human existence.’

  ‘It need not be…’ she choked. ‘That is the violence… within you… speaking…’

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said soothingly. ‘I know my own limitations. My temper does not cloud my judgement, it focuses it. Humanity is venal and fractious. It can never be governed as one. Everything else is an impossible dream. There is no peace. There is no goodness.’ He stroked away the hair from his sister’s face with one hand as he strangled her with the other. ‘And in such a flawed universe, there can be no mercy for traitors.’

  She choked, trying and failing to speak.

  Coldly, Perturabo squeezed the life from her. ‘You have lived long enough.’