Aximand followed Zenonius into the antehall. The walls were sheer, the height of the hall impressive, though the floor plan was a small, square area with a central fountain. The top was open to the sky, so that sunlight could lance down and illuminate the quiet space, the polished floor, the clear water, the calyx and tulip carvings of the fountain’s main figure.
Blood spattered the floor, and pooled around crumpled figures and broken weapons. Bloody handprints marked the edges of the fountain bowl where men had struggled to prop themselves up as their last breaths escaped. On the intricately carved walls, jets of blood had left long, pressure-pattern arcs, huge horsetail fans or fern-frond spatters. Some stretched five or six metres up the sheer walls.
Aximand prowled forward. The place was almost tranquil. The din of fighting outside, muffled by the walls, sounded more like the grumble of a distant storm. Zenonius moved ahead, pausing to finish a wounded Compulsory. Amindaza stepped into the light on the far side of the ante-hall, blade sizzling with frying blood. He had entered via one of the other doorways. Two Compulsories and a Precinct docent rushed him, and he turned to greet them with his sword.
Aximand could hear breathing again. It was close now, closer than ever before, closer than a pulse beat in a man’s brow. The breathing, the sense of presence, had followed him out of his dreams and into his daily life. It had got closer and closer, until it was hovering at his shoulder. Now it sounded as though it were sharing his helmet, as though there were two heads in the one helm. Aximand stopped breathing for a moment to see if it was just some acoustic trick, an echo of his respiration.
Silence.
He was about to breathe again when it started, quiet but close, slow and clam, like the hushing of a gentle sea.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Say again!’ Amindaza crackled over the vox.
‘Specify, sir?’ Geraddon linked.
‘Nothing, nothing!’ Aximand answered. ‘Continue.’
Foolish, so foolish, to let it better him like that. To make him speak of it, to speak out loud. He was only talking to himself, to a trick of his mind. He was only talking to his fear.
And fear, like dreams, was something an Adeptus Astartes was not supposed to have.
He knew fear, and he knew the fear would go the moment he could identify the stranger, the moment the intruder’s face became plain to him. Little Horus Aximand wasn’t afraid of anything except the unknown.
A Compulsory charged him from the brown shadows, a lance in his hands. The blade-tip twinkled with blue light, a photonic edge.
Aximand sidestepped, swung his shield, and put the man on the floor. The blow cracked the Compulsory’s bodyshield and broke his arm. He yelped. Aximand was about to put his foot on him and finish the job when two more came at him. Faster now, more urgent, he rotated, scooping Mourn-it-all around in a backwards stroke that snipped the blade-heads off the lances stabbing at him. The blunt hafts cracked and bent against his ceramite armour. His sword ripped one man apart, opening his shield and eviscerating the body inside. He kicked the other backwards, crunching man and energy cocoon into the ante-hall wall. The impact grazed the stone, and caused chips to fly out. Stepping in, Aximand put his blade through the man’s chest. Mourn-it-all punched through the shield shell, the man, and the wall behind him. The Compulsory was pinned there for a second, like an insect specimen on a felt pad, his body-shield flickering and blinking as it shorted out.
Aximand yanked the blade out, and the man collapsed at his feet.
The breathing had drawn so very close.
Aximand stepped forward, through a tall archway, into one of the main Mausolytic Halls. The space was vast, and the air was radiant with yellow light. It was like stepping into heaven. The thin, quiet, shrouded dead of Dwell were suspended all around him in clear glass tubes, supported horizontally in columns of light. A million bodies, framed in light and glass and gravimetric energy, united in cybernation.
Zeb Zenonius of Bale tactical squad lay dead on the floor. He had been split open like a piece of shellfish.
The sight should have put Aximand on guard, on the highest pitch of readiness and alertness. But the breathing was louder than ever and, despite his transhuman instincts, he tried to see where it was coming from.
So the first blow took him by surprise. His attacker struck from the side. Only by fluke did Aximand’s shield take the brunt of it. The attacker’s sword split the shield, and cut into Aximand’s forearm beneath. Aximand staggered backwards, outraged and surprised.
Outraged by his distracted error.
Surprised by the vast strength of the being assaulting him.
Aximand rallied, blocking with his sword. He was face to face with a Legiones Astartes, a flesh-spare brute whose glossy black armour was laced with augmetic systems and stark white insignia: a senior captain of the Tenth Legion, the Iron Hands of Medusa. For a moment, Aximand thought it was Shadrak Meduson himself. The warrior had the stature of a warleader, and bore the sigils of the Sorrgol Clan. But visual tagging via visor display identified his foe as Bion Henricos, Meduson’s favoured lieutenant. Henricos’s sword was a long blade of augmented-function Medusan steel.
They whirled down the cybernation hall like dancers, trading blows. Henricos represented a greater challenge than all the Compulsories Aximand had doomed that day, combined. The Medusan’s skill was formidable. His augmetic strength far exceeded Aximand’s. His speed was breathtaking.
For a thrilling instant, Aximand wondered if he was, at last, experiencing transhuman dread for himself.
They fought their way towards the centre of the hall, where a great bio-stasis generator stack rose like a temple altar, gilded and covered with angelic figures. The glass-packed bodies radiated out from it, stack upon suspended stack. Huge white statues, demi-gods shrouded in long capes, bright as snow, knelt in obeisance before the central block.
The silvered-black armour of the Iron Hands warrior gleamed like slicked oil in the Precinct’s weird light. His blade moved like a ribbon of light. Aximand got around the expert guard, and delivered a glancing blow with his hilt that cracked the chest plating of Henricos’s wargear. Henricos responded by planting his feet, locking their blades in a rigid cruciform, and shoulder-barging Aximand.
Little Horus lurched backwards and crashed into the nearest row of cybernators. Glass sleeves shattered, and showers of fragments flew up and caught the light like spring petals. Cybernation tubes cannoned into one another, cracking and disintegrating. Some were pushed clear of the gravimetric support fields and fell, smashing on the polished metal floor. Power relays shorted out. Desiccated bodies tumbled out into the air like bundles of roots and twigs.
Bion Henricos crunched over broken glass and dry bones to get at Aximand. He shoved suspended glass sleeves out of his way. There was a bitter stink of resins and preserving spices. Aximand struggled to get up. Flickers of energy, dark and unhealthy, were flaring like troubled synapses out from the disrupted area of the Mausolytic array. The coloured bursts writhed and fired out into the serene, golden layers of the undamaged structure. Odd harmonics, like the low moaning of a thousand voices relayed by a low quality vox signal, filled the hall.
Henricos reached Aximand. Mourn-it-all cut him across the eyes, shattering one lens unit, and raked a gouge down his stomach and hip. Henricos struck with a swing that would have severed Aximand’s head if he had been a hand-span closer. He drove the Medusan warleader back across the carpet of ancient, pulverised glass and mummified scraps. His next blow wounded Henricos in the thigh. Something silvery, like liquid mercury, sobbed out.
Henricos put him on the ground. Aximand wasn’t quite sure how he’d been hit, but the impact rattled his brain inside his skull and filled his mouth and nostrils with blood. He was face down, groping for his fallen sword, concussed and dazed and vulnerable.
He looked up, wondering why Henricos
hadn’t finished him. Amindaza of Tithonus was locking swords with his opponent. Amindaza had fought his way into the Hall, and Geraddon wasn’t far behind. The loud and repeated discharge of weapons from outside the entry space suggested that the assault had washed into the main area of the Precinct, and that the Compulsories were in retreat.
Amindaza had been wounded on his way into the Hall, and his arm was slow. His arrival and interception had saved Aximand, but it had also doomed Amindaza. Henricos was a far superior swordsman. Before Aximand, dazed and spitting blood, could get back up, Henricos had delivered a blow that split Amindaza from his left shoulder to his right hip. He was simply bisected, diagonally, in one stroke. The sections of him fell hard, messily, in an apocalyptic release of blood.
Geraddon flew at him, and Henricos knocked him aside. Geraddon smashed into another row of caskets.
Aximand put Mourn-it-all through Henricos’s spine so that the tip shattered the aquila on the Medusan’s breastplate.
Henricos fell to one knee, and then onto his face. Aximand knelt on his back and cut his helmet off. Henricos’s pale face was turned to the side, cheek to the floor, the white skin flecked with beads of dark red blood.
‘Pray this death takes you, traitor,’ said Aximand. ‘Other deaths would be less forgiving.’
Henricos gurgled something.
‘What?’ asked Aximand, pressing his blade against the neck of the Iron Hands warleader.
‘You are not the trophy we hoped for,’ Henricos whispered.
‘Trophy?’
‘Knew we couldn’t beat you, wanted to hurt you instead. Thought... thought he would value the Mausolytic Precinct above all, and lead this segment attack personally.’
‘This was supposed to be a trap for Lupercal?’
‘May he burn forever.’
Aximand laughed.
‘But your master is a coward and a traitor,’ murmured Henricos, ‘and all he sends is you.’
‘It would appear I’m quite enough,’ replied Aximand. ‘What did you hope to do?’
Henricos gurgled.
‘I said, what kind of trap is one flesh-spare warrior?’
Henricos did not reply. All the life had drained out of him.
Aximand rose, and kicked the corpse.
Geraddon had got back up.
‘What was he saying?’ he asked.
‘Nonsense,’ Aximand replied. ‘Simply nonsense. He was desperate.’
‘It was supposed to be a trap,’ said Geraddon, ‘so why was he alone?’
The sound of breathing had come back. Aximand turned slowly and realised that it was simply the background noise of the Mausolytic Hall, the slow, throbbing murmur of the cybernation system. It was the pulse of the sleeping dead.
He felt like a fool. When the operation was over, he would meditate. He would clean his mind of the fears and dreams that had accumulated. He would purify his thoughts and expel his weaknesses. To serve the Warmaster, he needed to be an even-tempered weapon.
He had let himself slacken. It was time he recommitted his mind and made himself truer to the image of Lupercal.
Aximand opened the vox, and took stock. Large portions of the Precinct were in Sixteenth Legion hands. Grael Noctua reported the West Hall and the approaches secure. Aximand ordered squads forward into the East Hall, to his position. He ordered all access ways closed.
He looked at the cybernation array around them. A little damage had been done, but not too much. The facility was essentially intact, and a little pressure applied to Dweller technadepts would soon have repairs completed.
The huge white statues of shrouded demi-gods, bright as snow, that had been kneeling in obeisance around the central great bio-stasis generator stack were gone.
‘Wait–’ Aximand began.
The White Scars killteam rushed them. The five killers of the Fifth Legion had thrown off the white cloaks they had used for concealment. They had used chalk dust or some funereal powder to mask the crimson edges of their armour. Their helms were crowskull, the Corvus pattern. It seemed Lev Goshen had been badly mistaken. The White Scars did have the patience to wait. What on the open field was fast hit and run became, in city fighting, stealth and swift ambush.
Grael Noctua’s warning had been shrewd.
The first one was on him. It was Hibou Khan. Aximand identified him from his rank and company pins. This was the practice of burkutchi, to ‘cut the head’. The term came from the Chogorisian art of hunting with eagles, the great akwilluh, using the birds to draw out and isolate the bull leader of a herd. Once the bull was dead, the herd was broken.
It had been their intention to decapitate the Sixteenth. Thwarted, they were going to make do with other prey: other bulls, junior bulls, company captains.
Aximand smashed Hibou away, and broke the White Scar’s blade on Mourn-it-all’s edge. Another Scar lunged in. Aximand parried and heard Geraddon cry out as two blades punched through him. Aximand drove his sword down through the cap of the next snow-white crowskull helm that came at him. Suddenly, not all the red decorating the White Scar wargear was scarlet lacquer. He reached for his bolter.
Gunfire ripped through the Mausolytic Precinct. More White Scars and renegade Iron Hands had sprung their trap. Squads of Aximand’s company were meeting both, bolter to bolter. Fighting on, out-numbered, Aximand slew another White Scar, blasting his bolter point-blank through an eyeslit. He yelled over the link to Noctua and his lieutenant captains to close the fight down.
To be on alert that their enemy was hunting captains as trophies.
To be aware that they weren’t facing Tyjunate Compulsories or Chainveil anymore.
They were facing Adeptus Astartes transhumans.
Hibou Khan had got back on his feet. To replace his own, broken sword, the White Scar had snatched up the long blade of Medusan steel that Henricos had wielded. His first blow notched Mourn-it-all, his second beat Aximand’s guard.
His third blow caught Little Horus vertically at the cheek, in a line that began just over the right eye-piece where his Mournival mark was displayed. The bonded ceramite of his helm didn’t even seem to stop the Medusan weapon.
Aximand fell. There was a great deal of blood suddenly, and he couldn’t properly account for its source. He saw something on the etched steel floor in front of him.
It was the visor and snout section of his own helmet, the entire faceplate. It had been sheared off, peeled cleanly away, as though shaved by an industrial slicer.
And it was not empty.
The reattachment left a scar. It set the character of the face differently, altered the seating of the muscles. Somehow, the wrongness, the imperfection, made him more like Horus, not less.
Noctua brought his squads into the East Hall in a rapid counterstrike, and broke the burkutchi. Hibou Khan was denied the opportunity to finish the job. Most of the loyalist Space Marines were driven back out into the lap of Lev Goshen and his Terminator squads.
Hibou Khan fled, leaving twelve men of Aximand’s company dead by his own hand, and earning himself a place on Aximand’s death list.
A new helm was forged for him, with the half-moon above the right eye. The armourers were already busy graving Mournival marks to the helms of Grael Noctua and Falkus Kibre. When Aximand was shown the pieces of his old headgear, he saw that the blade had sliced his half-moon mark in half.
Had he been a man prone to superstition and belief in omens, he might have read bad things into this. But he was not afraid of change. He was not really even a man.
Under the surgeon’s knife, in stasis sleep, he had dreamt one final dream. The identity of the faceless intruder had ultimately been revealed. Aximand had been slightly apprehensive that the intruder’s face would turn out to be his own, or one just like it, and that lengthy psychological work would be required as a consequence.
It was not. As they restored his face, he dreamt the face of the other.
It was the face of Garviel Loken.
When Aximand woke, he felt a measure of happiness and relief. A man could not be afraid of the dead, and Loken was dead, and that fact would not change.
Not that he was afraid of change. Change was, he always insisted, part of his ruling character.
‘The melancholic humour is protean,’ he said. ‘It possesses the quality of autumn. It is transformative. It makes me the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. I was made to clear away this world ready for renewal. To change the order of things. To cast out the false and enthrone the true. This is my purpose. I am not afraid.’
Then again, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was invincible.
The Iron Within
Rob Sanders
The iron within. The iron without. Iron everywhere. The galaxy laced with its cold promise. Did you know that Holy Terra is mostly iron? Our Olympian home world, also. Most habitable planets and moons are. The truth is we are an Imperium of iron. Dying stars burn hearts of iron; while the heavy metal cores of burgeoning worlds generate fields that shelter life – sometimes human life – from the razing glare of such stellar ancients.
Empires are measured in more than just conquered dirt. Every Iron Warrior knows this. They’re measured in hearts that beat in common purpose, thundering in unison across the void: measured in the blood that spills from our Legiones Astartes bodies, red with iron and defiance. This is the iron within and we can taste its metallic tang when an enemy blade or bullet finds us wanting. Then the iron within becomes the iron without, as it did on what we only now understand to be the first day of the Great Siege of Lesser Damantyne…
Age of Darkness Page 26
