Feat of Iron - Nick Kyme

by Warhammer 40K

  Alike and yet so different were the Gorgon and the Drake.

  Ferrus followed the breeze, hoping it would lead to some fissure he could crack open and use to rejoin his Legion. It took him from the vast cavern into a wide gallery that still had the essence of some submerged kingdom of Old Earth. Columns punctuated a long, dark processional and soared to a tall ceiling that was lost in shadow. Underfoot the earth was dark. The odour of crematoria ash and burned flesh pervaded. A mortal man might have been unsettled by it, but Ferrus was far removed from such flesh-born weakness.

  Black sand…

  The thought came unbidden as he looked down at his armoured feet.

  Just like in the valley.

  ‘A tomb or mausoleum, perhaps,’ he considered aloud. But there were no crypts, not even a reliquary, yet the gallery stank of death.

  Slivers of reflective obsidian, black like the earth, shimmered in the light of luminous crystals as he passed through the gallery. He caught sight of something, or rather a piece of an image, in the glassy rock. A massive conflagration burned in its fathomless darkness, and something else… It was familiar, yet alien.

  Like grabbing the broken fragments of a dream, Ferrus could not hold it steady long enough to see it clearly. Whenever he stopped to get a better look, the obsidian merely reflected his face back at him, dour and displeased.

  Perhaps it was another quirk of the light and geology of this place. Certainly, there was something unique about it.

  Ferrus resisted the urge to unsheathe Forgebreaker and smash the stone asunder, knowing it would achieve nothing, and fended off the desire to vent.

  He would not be so easily goaded, and doggedly pressed on.

  He was about to leave the long gallery when something else pricked at the primarch’s senses.

  Ferrus could hear… weeping.

  A trick of the wind perhaps? He could feel no breeze, yet the sound carried easily enough.

  It was a mourning song, something so baleful that it seeped into his marrow and made his limbs leaden. Grief was not something the primarch had ever experienced. It pained him to lose his sons in battle but that was a risk inherent in the purpose for which they had been bred. He could accept it. He had never felt true loss and yet now it crept upon him, a simulacrum of the real thing. Images filled his mind of his brothers slain or close to death, the skeletal corpse of his father.

  ‘What is this?’

  Wrath supplanted grief as Ferrus realised he was the victim of further alien witchery. He defied it, forced strength back into his body only for the plaintive lament to metamorphose into something else, something worse. Death cries haunted the air, as if whatever revenants lingered in this grim place relived their final moments before the end.

  ‘Come out!’ Ferrus demanded, seeking out the witch that was haunting him with its sorcery. ‘Reveal yourself or I shall tear this chamber apart to find you.’

  His challenge was met by the low grind of distant engines, the ear-splitting crescendo of mass gunfire and the feral shout of warriors. Thousands of war sounds crashed together in terrifying cacophony, bent towards murder and death. A theatre of battle evolved around the primarch, one to which he could only listen – and even then from a great distance, perhaps through time itself. Ferrus did not need to bear witness to it to know wherever or whenever this was meant to be, it was hell.

  As the illusory war ground on, he discerned a voice that made his blood run as ice.

  The sound that escaped the primarch’s lips was a rasp, ill befitting a lord of battle.

  ‘Gabriel…’

  He stopped, tried to listen harder, hoping that closer interrogation would put the lie to his suspicions, but the din abated and silence filled the chamber in its place.

  Breathing, low and fast. Chest heaving beneath war-plate forged by a demi-god’s own hand. The sudden stillness surrounding him brought fresh and unwelcome disquiet to Ferrus.

  The smallest step, tentative and wary, brought the return of hell in his mind. Another and the cries grew louder. One more and they were near deafening.

  ‘Gabriel!’

  Ferrus glowered at the darkness, searching every column, every shadow for a sign of his first captain. Frantic and incredulous, acting in a way he did not recognise… In his tortured mindscape, Gabriel Santar was being brutally murdered.

  Others followed… Desaan, scorched to ash by atomic flame; Ruuman, stabbed to death by half a dozen spatha blades; even Cistor, the Master of Astropaths, spitting blood and locked in a convulsive death spasm… A thousand dying voices screamed as one.

  Ferrus hit earth and realised he was on his knees. Assailed by the apocalyptic visions, he raised silvered hands to his forehead in an effort to push them down. ‘Impossible…’

  He had seen something in his waking dreamscape, something so terrible he could barely countenance it, let alone give it voice.

  A lesser being might have broken then, but he was the Gorgon and possessed of mental strength few credited him with. Guilliman knew it and had said as much when the two had occasion to speak alone. The cobalt and black were a potent mixture, an unbendable alloy.

  Doggedly, he rose, one foot then the other. Only determination that could see mountains unearthed and monsters bested single-handed could unravel such potent sorcery. His back was heavy, so too his arms.

  I have borne heavier weights.

  Wrath provided fortitude. It became the molten wellspring from which Ferrus drew his strength with fists clenched full of rage.

  He roared at the shadows.

  ‘Lies! You show me these falsehoods and expect me to believe them. What is it meant to achieve? Are you trying to drive me to madness?’

  His last words echoed back at him, over and over.

  I will endure. My will is ironclad.

  Gritted teeth pulled Ferrus through the horror of seeing Gabriel’s tortured death over and over. It washed over him in a desolating wave. Every one of his loyal Morlocks, their murders folded into a massacre without end.

  Ripped from its strappings, Forgebreaker hummed in the primarch’s grasp with barely restrained violence. It wanted to be unleashed but like its master was frustrated. Tangible enemies were painfully absent.

  ‘Afraid to face me?’

  The darkness had no answer to the challenge, save for the droning of the war unending.

  Fire blazed in the Gorgon’s peripheral vision; the slivers of obsidian were alive with it. The significance of the imagery was lost on him.

  He had but one recourse remaining.

  Broken apart by Ferrus’s fury, part of the wall disintegrated. The glassy rock shattered as it struck the ground but there was no fire, no death screams released from its destruction.

  A second blow hewed a column in half and he leaned aside to avoid its crash, like a felled and crystalline tree brought down to the earth. It was not a rampage, rather a keen and precise assault. Ferrus moved with purpose, chose his blows carefully and observed their aftermath. He was searching for a breach in the glamour he could exploit. Having spent a lifetime trying to excise it from his mind and body, the Gorgon was adept at finding weakness. So he moved, and slowly left the gallery and its horrors behind.

  As he neared the end of the chamber another sound joined the battle noise, lurking just beneath it in a sub-frequency that only a primarch could hear. Sibilant, it carried the low susurrus of something viperous and serpentine.

  Eyes watching, cold and reptilian eyes…

  Something was hunting him. He caught the flash of a tail, the impression of scales mirroring the reflected fire from the slivers of obsidian.

  Fury surrendered to calm. He was not some headstrong pup to be goaded with tricks.

  I am the Gorgon. I am Medusa.

  The susurrus returned, louder this time. Behind him. Ferrus’s heart stilled as he strove to pinpoint the sound. It had no origin, everywhere and nowhere. In his mind’s eye, he spun around to face his nemesis and split another chunk of the gallery with Forg
ebreaker’s might.

  Instead, he lowered the hammer head and let it drop to the ground with a dull thud of metal.

  ‘Do you see strings attached to my limbs?’ he asked the shadow, hefting Forgebreaker onto his back.

  ‘I thought not,’ said Ferrus after a short pause and walked slowly from the gallery.

  The bloody images and the roar of war did not follow.

  Grainy lumen light stripped back the darkness but revealed little of the chasm except for skittering native fauna.

  Santar had found an aperture in the desert rock large enough to accommodate his bulk, a widening crack into the subterranean world that had seemingly swallowed his father whole. But there was no sign. His voice echoed coldly across the feed. ‘Negative.’

  It was one of many dead ends.

  He knew that fifty legionaries, broken into smaller search squads, were scouring the basin and the desert beyond it. Thus far, to no avail. Despite their efforts, they were no closer to finding the primarch.

  Half his focus on the auto-senses data streaming across his retinal lenses, Santar stared at the sun. The burning orb had returned more fearsome than ever since the dispersal of the witch-cloud. Memories of the psychic attack on the Legion were slow to fade. He flexed his bionic arm, half expecting it to defy his neural commands. It did not.

  He took off his battle-helm and let the heat hit him.

  ‘A changing world…’ he thought aloud. Opening up the feed, he spoke to Desaan. ‘How can someone like the Gorgon just disappear, brother?’ Santar surveyed the plain. It was vast and undulating, but littered with rocks and caverns. Even with a fleet of Stormbirds, he doubted they would find their quarry.

  ‘Every metre of this basin has been mapped and searched. What did we miss?’

  ‘Anything through your visor’s sensorium?’

  There was a click in the feed as Desaan rechecked.

  ‘Residual energy readings, but nothing we could follow. Nothing that makes any sense.’

  After a pause he asked, ‘Could he truly have fallen?’

  It was only with half-hope that Santar had ordered the search. Deep in his core, he knew his lord was gone and would only be found again when he wished, or rather willed, it.

  Impotence was not a feeling the first captain relished.

  ‘No. He has been taken and I want to know why.’

  Santar was about to continue when he switched channels to receive. Meduson was requesting a report and providing a status update as to the battle group’s progress.

  On the sickle-shaped ridgeline overlooking the basin, the first of the Army divisions marched into view. They were slow but stalwart, foot soldiers leading an armoured column of tanks. Mechanicum outriders ranged the flanks alongside the still-functioning Sentinels.

  The hour was later than he realised.

  ‘Confirmed,’ he sent back to Meduson. It felt like choking on gravel. ‘We are inbound with Army divisions. Hold the line and await reinforcement.’

  Santar switched channels again, and growled into the feed.

  ‘Regroup.’

  Desaan was the first to return.

  ‘Meduson?’

  Santar nodded. ‘They’ve found the node.’

  Desaan snorted his derision. ‘Glorious day. Are we leaving?’

  ‘You already know the answer to that, brother-captain.’

  ‘Why does it feel like we are abandoning him?’

  Others were joining them as the fifty legionaries came together again. Only Tarkan and three other snipers were absent.

  ‘Because we are.’

  Desaan scowled but was wise enough to hold his tongue.

  ‘Brother Tarkan…’ said Santar. He was looking past the edge of the desert basin and its confluence with the greater plain where the warriors from the Iron Tenth had ranged. ‘We are leaving.’

  Tarkan’s response was unexpected.

  ‘I’ve found something, Lord Santar.’

  Another cavern lay beyond the gallery’s archway.

  A vast subterranean auditorium, much larger than its predecessor, opened up before Ferrus. Its vaulted ceiling was lost to darkness, though he discerned a hairline crack at its apex.Splitting the gulf in two was a narrow bridge of rock, its natural supports shrouded in shadow. Endless black stretched below, a fatal drop.

  Ferrus sneered at the ignominy of it.

  He followed the path of stone with his eyes, traced its wending trajectory through the darkness until it reached a wider plateau. From there climbed a stairway, its steps narrow and steep.

  Before he realised, Ferrus was standing at the foot of the stairs looking up.

  Monolithic statues lined its ascent, like the ones in the first cavern only much, much larger. Each one was wearing patrician robes, their hands across their chests, fingers laced in the shape of an aquila. Only their faces differentiated them. Totemic masks hid their true natures, or perhaps revealed them. Ferrus had a sense that both could be true.

  His silvered gaze was drawn to one as he took a first step. It had a scalp of thrashing serpents, like the gorgon of ancient Mykenaean myth. He reached out to it even though the statue was much too far away to touch.

  Another had the skeletal aspect of Death itself, hooded and gripping a scythe that cut into its bony brow. The visage of a third was split in half, like Janus of old Romanii legend. Two masks, not one, gazed at the primarch. But it was a mistake to think of Janus as having only two faces, for he had many.

  Ferrus saw an effigy of a bestial and snarling hound, and felt his anger rise as he passed it. Behind it was a stoic drake, its crest a living flame. A heraldic knight stood alongside its much darker twin, one with a shield, the other a mace.

  Leathern wings unfolded from the back of one statue. Its chiropteran mask was hard to discern from its human face, suggesting a singular lack of humanity.

  There were others: a horse with a wild flowing mane, a bird of prey, a noble human countenance crowned by a laurel wreath, a lion beneath a monk’s cowl.

  The processional was comprised of twenty statues in all. Some were familiar to him, others less so and did not appear as he expected. They had subtle differences, even aberrations that Ferrus found disturbing. Only two were completely unknown to him, their masks scratched and near obliterated.

  One, the last, stood across the stairway and glared down at him, and he looked up to regard it.

  Unlike the others, this one had its arms outstretched as if in invitation to embrace him. It wore robes, but they were finer, more ostentatious in the mason’s design. His mask was beautiful, almost perfect were it not for the angular eye slits and the scalloping on the faux cheekbones.

  ‘Fulgrim…’

  He hadn’t intended to speak his brother’s name aloud, but now that he did, Ferrus recognised the titan towering over him.

  Memories of Narodyna rushed back in a nostalgic flood, but there was bitterness there, even mockery. Did the statue smile? The mask appeared to be unchanged and yet there was the slightest curl to the edges of its mouth. A desire for retribution turned his silvered hands into fists of their own volition. It seized him without cause, without reason, but prompted such wrath, such a sense of… betrayal?

  Ferrus shook his head, as if to banish a lingering dream.

  More witchery, he thought grimly, deciding he would inflict particular injury upon his alien persecutors, when his sibilant shadow returned.

  It was not so obvious this time. It came enfolded in the breeze or the yawning of old stone as it resettled in its foundations. There was more, something only a being such as he could discern, twisted between the layers of susurration. The meaning of it was difficult to unpick from the colliding elements of non sequitur encoded into the shadow’s hissing cadence.

  It was a word or phrase, but one that remained an enigma for the moment.

  The hunter was behind him; Ferrus heard the scrape of its scaled body against the lowest steps. Swallowed by darkness, there was nothing to see below, but it was
there. Ferrus imagined it waiting for him, the slow rise and fall of its body, its tongue tasting the air for his scent. It was a patient and mercurial hunter. It would strike when the moment was right, when its prey was unaware of its presence.

  ‘I can be patient too, my belligerent traveller,’ he told it quietly, and was surprised at his own calm.

  Ferrus sighed ruefully. Perhaps some of Vulkan’s pragmatism was rubbing off on him.

  The stairway went on farther and he had no time to linger. Nor did he wish to. Death lurked here, he felt it in the chill air and the slow ossification of his bones. If he stayed long enough it would find him.

  As Ferrus hastened up the next flight of steps he tried to put the image of Fulgrim from his mind, the way the statue made him think of betrayal and the hunter following in his wake. He realised then that he had not fallen into any chasm.

  This was not the desert.

  It was somewhere else, somewhere other.

  ‘What am I looking at, Tarkan?’

  Santar and Desaan were standing by the sniper and two other Iron Hands from the Tenth. Tarkan’s battle-brothers were silent, their sighted bolters low-slung.

  Tarkan himself was crouched near the ground and pointed out an indentation in the sand with a gauntleted finger.

  ‘An impression,’ he said, tracing the indentation’s outline. ‘Here.’

  ‘A footprint,’ offered Desaan, running the mark through the spectra in his visor. To the untrained eye it was merely another undulation in the desert.

  ‘Several,’ Tarkan corrected him, gesturing to a number of marks that ran back from the first. ‘Trail ends here,’ he added, looking up at Santar. The sniper’s retinal lenses were sharp and cold, like his aim. His bionic eye clicked and whirred as it readjusted.

  ‘Where did it begin?’ asked Santar, trying to follow the footprints to their origin point.

  ‘Back in the desert basin, I’d estimate.’

  ‘Father’s?’

  Tarkan nodded slowly.

  The boot mark they’d discovered was large and deep. It was only by virtue of its size and impact that the sand hadn’t already obscured it beyond the sniper’s expert recovery.