Fulgrim

by Graham McNeill

  Without warning, all three machines leapt into life, ball joints and rotating gimbals on their ceiling mounts allowing them a full range of motion around him. A sword blade licked out, and Julius swayed aside, ducking as a spiked ball slashed towards his head and a pistoning spike thrust towards his belly.

  The nearest armature launched a savage series of clubbing blows, but Julius laughed as he blocked them with his forearms, the pain making him grin as he kicked out behind him and sent the armature that had been coming in to attack spinning back. The third machine sent a hooking blow towards his head. He rolled with the impact as it snapped his head around.

  He tasted blood and laughed, spitting it at the first machine as it darted in to deliver a killing blow. Its blade slashed out and caught him a glancing blow to his side. He welcomed the pain, stepping in to deliver a thunderous series of hammer blows to the machine.

  Metal split and the armature was wrenched from its mount on the ceiling. Even as he savoured its destruction, a powerful blow smashed into the side of his head, and he dropped to one knee, feeling the new chemicals in his blood pumping fresh strength into his body in response.

  He leapt to his feet as a blade scythed towards him, and slammed his palm down hard onto the flat of the blade, snapping it from the machine. With the weapon gone, Julius stepped in close and enveloped the machine in a crushing bear hug, hauling it round to face the final armature as it let rip with a volley of iron spikes.

  All three pierced the body of the armature he held, and it sputtered with sparks as it died. He pushed it aside and rounded on the final machine, feeling more alive than ever before. His body sang with the pleasure of destruction, and even the pain of his wounds was like a tonic flowing in his veins.

  The machine circled him warily, as though appreciating on some mechanical level that it was on its own. Julius feinted a blow to it with his fist. The armature darted to the side, and Julius delivered a powerful roundhouse kick that crumpled the machine’s side and rendered it motionless.

  He shook his head, dancing back and forth on the balls of his feet as he waited for the machine to restart, but it remained inert and he realised that he had destroyed it.

  Suddenly disappointed, he opened the sphere of the training cage and stepped back down into the hall. He had not even broken sweat, and the excitement he’d felt as he’d faced the three machines seemed like a distant memory.

  Julius closed the training cage, knowing a servitor would already have been despatched to repair the damaged armatures, and made his way back to his personal arming chamber. Scores of Astartes warriors trained in the halls, either in feats of arms or simple physical exercise to maintain the perfection of their physiques. A strict regime of chemical enhancers and genetic superiority kept an Astartes body in peak physical condition, but many of the new drugs being introduced to the dispensers in Mark IV plate required physical stimulation to begin the reaction in the recipient’s metabolism.

  He opened the door of his arming chamber, the smell of oil and his armour’s lapping powder filling his nostrils. The walls were of bare iron, and a simple cot bed ran the length of one wall. His armour hung on a rack next to a small sink, his sword and bolter in a footlocker at the end of the bed.

  The blood drawn by the training machines had already clotted, and he picked up a towel from a rail beside the sink to wipe it from his body before slumping on the bed and wondering what to do next.

  A metal-framed shelf unit beside his bed held Ignace Karkasy’s Reflections and Odes, Meditations on the Elegiac Hero and Fanfare to Unity, books that had, until recently, filled him with joy whenever he read them. Now they seemed hollow and empty. Beside Karkasy’s works were three volumes of Cornelius Blayke that he had borrowed from Evander Tobias. He reached up to read more of the fallen priest’s words.

  This particular volume was entitled The Book of Urizen and was the least impenetrable of Blayke’s books he had read thus far. In addition, it was prefaced by an anonymously written biography of the man, the reading of which greatly illuminated the text that followed.

  Julius now knew that Cornelius Blayke had been many things in his life, an artist, a poet, a thinker and a soldier, before finally deciding to enter the priesthood. A visionary from childhood, Blayke had, it appeared, been afflicted with visions of an ideal world where every dream and desire could be realised, though he struggled to reproduce them in paintings, prose and hand coloured etchings with poetic text.

  Blayke’s younger brother had died while fighting in the many wars that raged in the Nordafrik Conclaves, an event the biographer credited with driving him into the priesthood. In later life, Blayke attributed his revolutionary techniques of illuminated printing to his long dead brother, claiming that he had been shown the technique in a dream.

  Even as a priest, a life Julius suspected he had chosen as a means of refuge, the visions of forbidden desires and his powers as a mystic returned to haunt him. Indeed, it was said that when the high priest of another order first laid eyes upon Blayke, the sight of him caused the man to drop dead on the spot.

  Cloistered in a church within one of the nameless cities of Ursh, Blayke became convinced that mankind would profit from his efforts, and bent his will to perfecting the means by which he could best convey his beliefs.

  Julius had read much of Blayke’s poetry and, while he was no scholar, even he knew that much of it had no clear plot, rhyme or meter. What did make sense to Julius was Blayke’s belief in the futility of denying any desire, no matter how fantastical. One of his chief revelations had been the understanding that the power of sensual experience was necessary for creativity and spiritual progress. No experience was to be denied, no passion was to be restrained, no horror to be turned from and no vice to remain unexplored. Without such experience there could be no progression towards perfection.

  Attraction and repulsion, love and hate: all were necessary to further human existence. From these conflicting energies sprang what the priests of his order called good and evil, words that Blayke had quickly realised were meaningless concepts when set beside the promise for advancement that could be achieved by indulging every human desire.

  Julius chuckled as he read this, knowing that Blayke had later been cast from his religious order for practising his beliefs vigorously in the back streets and bordellos of the city. No vice was beneath him and no virtue beyond him.

  Blayke believed that the inner world of his visions was of a higher order than that of physical reality, and that mankind should fashion its ideals from that inner world rather than from the crude world of matter. His work spoke over and over of how reason and authority constrained and inhibited mankind’s spiritual growth, though Julius suspected that this was a reflection of his feelings towards the ruler of the client state of Ursh, a warrior king named Shang Khal, who sought to dominate the nations of the Earth through brutal oppression.

  To have openly espoused such philosophies in such a time reeked of madness, but Julius was reluctant to dismiss Blayke as a madman; after all, his pronouncements had attracted a great many followers who hailed him as a great mystic, set to usher in a new age of passion and liberty.

  Julius remembered reading the aphorisms of Pandoras Zheng, a philosopher who had served in the court of one of the Autarchs of the Yndonesic Bloc. He had spoken in support of mystics and how they exaggerated truths that truly existed. By Zheng’s definition, the mystic could not exaggerate a truth that was imperfect. He had further defended such men by saying, ‘To call a man mad because he has seen ghosts and visions denies him his full dignity, since he cannot be neatly categorised into a rational theory of the cosmos.’

  Julius had always enjoyed the works of Zheng and his teaching that the mystic did not bring doubts or riddles, for the doubts and riddles existed already. The mystic was not the man who made mysteries, but the man who destroyed them through his works.

  The mysteries Blayke sought to destroy were those that held mankind back from achieving its full potenti
al and the understanding of the hope for a better future. All of which placed him in opposition to the despairing philosophies of men like Shang Khal and the despot, Kalagann, tyrants who preached an inevitable descent into Chaos, a terrifying realm that had once been the womb of creation, and which would inevitably be its grave.

  Blayke used beauty as a window to this wondrously imagined future, and from contemporary thinkers, he had been drawn to ideas of alchemical symbolism, coming to believe, as the Hermetists did, that mankind was the microcosm of the Divine. His reading became voracious, and he became well versed in the Orphic and Pythagorean tradition, Neo-Platonism, the Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and the alchemical writings of scholars such as Erigena, Paracelsus and Boehme. Julius knew none of these names, but felt sure that Evander Tobias could help him find their works should he desire it.

  Armed with such weighty knowledge, the gigantic framework of Blayke’s mythology took shape in his greatest poem, The Book of Urizen.

  This epic work began the narrative of the Fall of the Heavenly Man into the maelstrom of experience, what Blayke called, ‘the dark valleys of self-hood’. Over the course of the book, mankind struggled with the task of transmuting his worldly passions into the purity of what Blayke called the Eternal. To help this cosmic process along, Blayke personified the essence of revolution and renewal in a fiery awakener, a being he named ork, and Julius laughed at the aptness of the name, wondering if Blayke had foreseen the scourge of the greenskin that infested the galaxy.

  According to the poem, mankind’s fall from grace had divided him from his divinity, and through the ages he was forced to struggle to reunite himself with the Divine. In the poem, mankind’s soul was disintegrated and had to reconcile every element of its being on the road back to the Eternal, echoing a myth he had read of the Gyptian tombs. This legend spoke of the dismemberment of an ancient god known as Osiris at the beginning of time, and man’s obligation to gather together the dismembered parts in order to arrive once more at spiritual wholeness.

  In the works of Blayke, Julius recognised an original voice in a conventional age unsuited for such libertarian philosophies. Pitted against forces of oppression that could not be swayed by reason, he had resorted to violent imagery and the force of his powers as a mystic.

  He had become what forces of order do not welcome, a disturbing spiritual force that urged men to awaken their passions in order to change and grow.

  ‘Knowledge is merely sense perception,’ said Julius, smiling as he read aloud from the book. ‘Indulgence is the wellspring of all things in Man, and reason the only curb upon nature. The attainment of ultimate pleasure and the experience of pain are the end and aim of all life.’

  TWELVE

  No Purity in Pride

  Paradise

  Never be Finished

  ONCE AGAIN EVERY seat around the round table in the Heliopolis was occupied. The tiered chamber was lit only by the flames burning in the brazier at the centre of the table and torches that hung from the golden plinths of the statues. This was only the second time Saul Tarvitz had set foot in the Heliopolis, though he knew he had changed a great deal since the first time he had sat in this brotherhood.

  Lord Fulgrim stood by the Phoenix Gate, dressed in a purple toga embroidered with gold thread and emblazoned with a phoenix motif. His long hair was crowned in a wreath of golden leaves, and a new sword with a silver hilt was belted at his side. The primarch personally welcomed his captains back to the quiet order, and the effect on each warrior as Fulgrim offered his greeting was incredible. Tarvitz still felt the tangible excitement and pleasure that came from being personally acknowledged by such a beautifully perfect warrior.

  Solomon Demeter of the Second sat opposite him and had given him a quiet nod of acknowledgement when he, Lucius and Lord Commander Eidolon had passed through the Phoenix Gate. Marius Vairosean sat sullenly beside Captain Demeter, and Julius Kaesoron laughed and told wild tales of his exploits in fighting the xenos creatures of the Diasporex, complete with gestures and hand motions to demonstrate a particularly delicious blow.

  Tarvitz caught the glint of annoyance in Solomon Demeter’s eyes as Captain Kaesoron described how he and the primarch had fought their way to the bridge of the hybrid command ship, though Tarvitz had already heard that it had been Captain Demeter’s warriors who had the honour of first reaching the bridge.

  Lord Commander Vespasian sat in the seat next to the primarch’s, and his eyes sparkled with good humour at seeing their safe return from their mission. Tarvitz returned the lord commander’s smile, though in truth he was weary and glad to be back amongst his brothers, for the experience on Murder had been a draining one. The megarachnid had been a terrible foe and the raw vigour of the Luna Wolves was, in its own way, exhausting.

  He glanced over at Eidolon, remembering the tense standoff between the lord commander and Captain Torgaddon on the surface of Murder after the Luna Wolves speartip had arrived. Though Tarvitz was honour bound to serve Eidolon, he couldn’t deny the satisfaction he had taken from seeing the lord commander put in his place by the irrepressible Tarik Torgaddon. Although Eidolon had later managed to work his way back into the good graces of the Warmaster, he still smarted from his mistakes on Murder and the insolence Torgaddon had shown him.

  Nor had Lucius come back from the time spent with the Luna Wolves without scars. A duel in the training cages with Garviel Loken had given him a much-needed lesson in humility and seen his nose broken. Despite the ministrations of the Apothecaries, the bone had not set properly, and Lucius’s perfect profile was, in his eyes, ruined forever.

  At last the Phoenix Gate closed and Fulgrim took his seat at the table, extending his hand towards the brazier.

  ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘in the fire I welcome you all back to the Brotherhood of the Phoenix.’

  The assembled warriors mirrored the primarch’s gesture and said, ‘In the fire we return.’

  ‘Ah, it is good to see you all again, my sons,’ said Fulgrim, favouring each of them with a radiant smile that lit up each warrior’s soul. ‘It has been some time since our order met to tell tales of courage and honour, but we are once again whole and set upon the discovery of new wonders in an unknown region of space. Our astropaths can tell us little of the region of space we find ourselves in, but we are not cowed by such mysteries, rather we welcome them as a chance to further our pursuit of perfection.’

  Tarvitz saw the fierce excitement in Fulgrim’s eyes, and felt it transmitted to him like a fire in his blood. Even in his most eloquent moments, the primarch had never seemed this energised, his entire body looking as though charged with the enjoyment of every word.

  ‘Our beloved brothers are returned from their peacekeeping duties, and though I know they feared for the glory they would miss while we fought with our brothers in the Iron Hands, they have won laurels of their own, and were fortunate enough to fight alongside the Warmaster’s warriors against a vile alien foe.’

  Tarvitz recalled the war on Murder, how there had been little honour in the initial drop to the planet’s surface, and the death and frantic nature of the combat against the loathsomely quick megarachnid warriors. It had been brutal, intense and bloody work, and many good warriors had met their end beneath its raging, bruised skies. Thanks to Eidolon’s mistakes, there had been precious little glory won until the Luna Wolves had arrived and brought their strength to bear.

  Then Sanguinius had come, and Tarvitz smiled as he once again pictured the awesome sight of the Warmaster and the Lord of the Angels fighting side by side, bestriding the horrific battlefields of Murder like gods of war unbound. That had been glorious, and the victories they had gone on to win had redeemed their honour.

  ‘Perhaps Lord Commander Eidolon will favour us with a tale of battle,’ said Vespasian.

  Tarvitz looked over to his lord commander as he stood with a curt bow. ‘I shall, if you desire to hear it.’

  A chorus of cheers responded in the affirmative, and Eidolon smiled
. ‘As Lord Fulgrim said, we won great glories upon Murder, and I humbly thank you, my lord, for allowing us to go to the rescue of our brothers of the Blood Angels.’

  Tarvitz blinked in surprise at Eidolon’s words, for he remembered well the fact that no one had dared use the word “rescue” at the time, for it had been deemed improper to openly suggest that the Blood Angels had needed rescuing. ‘Reinforcement’ was the word they had been encouraged to use.

  ‘Upon arrival at One-Forty Twenty, it was clear that the master of the 140th Expedition, a man named Mathanual August, had not the vision to command the action. Upon learning of the imminent arrival of the Warmaster, I led our forces to the surface of Murder to secure landing sites and begin the rescue of the Blood Angels forces, August had unwisely committed in piecemeal actions.’

  Tarvitz had been surprised at Eidolon’s earlier words, but was shocked rigid at this blatant twisting of the facts. Yes, Mathanual August had drip-fed his expeditionary forces into a danger zone until they were all gone, but it had been no notion of nobility that had motivated Eidolon’s decision to drop onto Murder before the arrival of the Luna Wolves, rather a desire not to share the glory with the Warmaster’s elite.

  Eidolon went on to tell of the initial battles and the subsequent destruction of the megarachnid, taking great pains to emphasise the Emperor’s Children’s role in the final victory, while minimising the parts played by the Luna Wolves and the Blood Angels.

  When he had finished it was to rapturous applause and pounding of the table as the assembled warriors lauded the honourable victory and feats of arms of Eidolon’s command. Tarvitz looked over to Lucius to try and discern some reaction to Eidolon’s blatant reinvention, but the cool features of his friend were unreadable.

  ‘A fine tale,’ acknowledged Vespasian. ‘Perhaps later we might hear of the heroism of your warriors?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Eidolon grudgingly, but Tarvitz already knew that such tales would never be heard in this company. The lord commander would never allow anything that might contradict his version of the events on Murder.