‘I cannot,’ said Fabius. ‘Any mortal body would be destroyed long before we could ever reach the point where a daemon would lose its grip. But a primarch’s body should survive long enough for us to reach a tipping point where the pain will be sufficient to drive it out.’
‘Then perhaps the time has come to use the neural parasite device,’ said Marius. ‘The thing you crafted from the Diasporex hybrid-captains.’
Fabius nodded in agreement, and Lucius saw the Apothecary had been waiting for just such an opportunity. Bending low, he placed the half-helm upon Fulgrim’s skull and attached thin lengths of clear plastic tubing to the silvered metal. The tubing coiled across the floor to a humming machine that looked to have been designed by creatures that bore no relation to humanity. It pulsed with a complex series of lights and sounds that existed in realms beyond the auditory perceptions of mortals, and Lucius watched as the iridescent mercury-like liquid pulsed eagerly along the clear tubing and into the primarch.
‘This had better work,’ said Kaesoron, jabbing Fabius in the chest. ‘If you have spoken false, none of your foetid elixirs will stop me from killing you.’
The sparkling liquid entered Fulgrim’s body, and the gasp of a sensualist who has at last discovered some sensation as yet unimagined escaped his full lips. Fulgrim’s eyes snapped open and he looked about himself like a dreamer awakening from golden memories of half-remembered friends and old loves.
‘Ah, my sons,’ he said, as though the pain of his torture was little more than the gentle caresses of butterfly wings. ‘Where was I?’
Blood sheened his flesh like a crimson gown, and the sharp tang of roasting meat oozed from his every orifice. Heat radiated along the silver needles jutting from his body, and his pelvis was bent up at an unnatural angle by the expansion of the macabre device of Marius.
‘You were talking of good and evil,’ said Lucius, taking hold of the plain wooden handle of his awl and pushing it in deeper.
‘Oh, you wield that spike like a master craftsman,’ said Fulgrim. ‘You are as skilled with a smaller weapon as you are with a larger.’
‘I practise,’ answered Lucius.
‘I know,’ said Fulgrim.
‘Is it working?’ Kaesoron asked Fabius, as he manipulated holographic dials and liquid gauges with sub-dermal xeno-haptics.
‘It is,’ confirmed the Apothecary. ‘I can alter the biochemistry of his mind to see what I want him to see, feel what I want him to feel. His mind will be ours to command soon.’
Fulgrim laughed, then burst into tears, his body convulsing in agony before shuddering with the greatest pleasure. He screamed at invisible terrors and licked his lips as flavours beyond imaging flooded his sensory perceptions.
‘What is happening to him?’ said Marius.
‘I am assuming control,’ said Fabius, clearly relishing this chance to manipulate so magnificent a physical specimen of supra-engineered perfection. ‘His mind is more complex than you can possibly imagine, a million labyrinths twisted within one another. It is no small matter to learn its connections.’
‘Master it swiftly,’ ordered Kaesoron.
Fabius ignored the threat in Kaesoron’s voice and made myriad alterations to the composition of the liquid and the operation of the machine. Too complex to follow, Lucius had no idea what the Apothecary was changing or how it might affect the primarch. Every vein on Fulgrim’s body stood taut on the surface of the skin, and it was clear the primarch wasn’t allowing Fabius to take control without a fight.
A thousand emotions and sensations warred across Fulgrim’s face, and Lucius envied him the touch of Fabius’s machine. What might it be like to allow another’s hand to guide his mind through a universe of sensation? But just as quickly as he imagined such a journey, he knew he was too self-absorbed to allow anyone else to take control of his flesh.
At last Fulgrim’s body relaxed, sinking back onto the gurney with a contented sigh of relief. His limbs settled on the cold metal and Fabius gave a triumphant grin that exposed his yellowed teeth and glistening, serpentine tongue.
‘I have him,’ he said. ‘What would you have me do, First Captain?’
‘Can you force it to speak truthfully?’
‘Of course, a manipulation of no consequence,’ Fabius told him.
Lucius frowned at the swiftness of Fabius’s assurance, wondering at the ease with which the Apothecary appeared to have mastered what he had described as being nigh impossibly difficult. He slid the awl clear of Fulgrim’s body and moved around the gurney to stand next to Fabius. Vitae Noctus or not, he would kill Fabius if it emerged that he was lying to them.
The faces on the Apothecary’s long coat flexed as though rising and falling on a gelid tide, and their mute howls implored Lucius to end their suffering. The swordsman ignored them, calculating where best to stab with the awl if he needed to kill Fabius.
The Apothecary seemed oblivious to Lucius’s presence, and worked his fingers over the alien device like a maestro at the keyboard of a templum organ. Fulgrim danced a jig on the gurney, and his face twisted into a delirious smile as he felt what was being done to him.
‘Oh, my sons…’ breathed the primarch. ‘You want the truth? How artless of you. Do you not realise that the truth is the most dangerous thing of all?’
‘Your time here is at an end, daemon,’ snarled Marius. ‘You have no place among our Legion. You are a thing of evil.’
Fulgrim laughed and said, ‘Oh, Marius, you insist on calling me a thing of evil, but such a word is meaningless unless you understand the truth of what good and evil represent. Very well, you wish the truth? I will give it to you. If you accept that the universe is constantly moving towards its final state of perfect complexity, and that this is its inevitable destination, then anything that hinders this process must be defined as evil. By the same logic, anything that promotes this ongoing journey is surely good. I am moving towards that perfect complexity, and by hindering my ascension you are acting in the cause of evil. Alone in this chamber, I am the only thing that is good!’
‘You seek to dull our wits with absurd talk of the nature of the universe and good and evil,’ hissed Marius. ‘I know evil, and I am looking at it.’
‘You are looking at yourself, Marius Vairosean,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Have you not seen the truth of it yet?’
‘The truth of what?’
‘The truth of me!’
Lucius stepped away from the gurney as Fulgrim’s biceps swelled with sudden power and his right arm tore free of the restraints that bound him to the gurney. An instant later, his left arm was free and the primarch sat bolt upright, tearing loose the needles piercing his skin and ripping free the bio-monitors Fabius had attached at the beginning of their tortures.
Fulgrim kicked Marius away and tore loose the opened device the Third Captain had worked upon with a sigh of regret. It fell to the floor of the Apothecarion with a wet clatter, and rolled like a viscous flower of red-stained iron.
‘A pity,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I was beginning to enjoy that.’
The primarch swung his legs from the gurney, breaking the bonds securing his ankles and thighs with no more effort than a child might throw back its blankets upon waking. Julius Kaesoron lunged forwards to hold Fulgrim down, but he was swatted aside with a casual backhanded gesture. Fabius backed away, but Lucius stood his ground, knowing there would be no point in running.
He saw how blinded they had been, how naïve. How could they have believed that they had the power to subdue a primarch? They had succeeded only because Fulgrim had desired it, had wanted them to come to this point. The Phoenician had seen the doubts in his warriors and had led them to this place, to this moment, in order to reveal his true nature.
Fulgrim turned to face him and smiled. In that instant, Lucius saw the truth of everything Fulgrim had said and done since Isstvan. He saw recognition in Fulgrim�
��s eyes, and dropped to his knees.
‘Begging, Lucius?’ said Fulgrim. ‘I expected better from you.’
‘Not begging, my lord,’ answered Lucius, with his head bowed. ‘Honouring.’
Julius Kaesoron struggled to his feet, his fist bursting to life with shimmering arcs of purple lightning. Marius Vairosean swept up his sonic cannon, his mouth widening in preparation of unleashing a barrage of sound and force that would kill everything in the room.
‘You know now?’ said Fulgrim.
‘I know,’ agreed Lucius. ‘I should have always known you would never surrender your will to another. If I would not, why should you?’
‘What is it talking about, swordsman?’ demanded Kaesoron. ‘Have you betrayed us to this daemon-thing?’
Lucius shook his head and chuckled at Kaesoron’s blindness to a truth that was now surely self-evident. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have not, for I was wrong.’
‘About what?’ said Kaesoron, fist raised to strike.
‘About me,’ said Fulgrim, answering for him.
‘This is Lord Fulgrim,’ said Lucius. ‘Our Lord Fulgrim.’
14
Like the final player in a tragedy delivering his last soliloquy before the curtain falls, Fulgrim paced the stage of La Fenice with an actor’s relish. Lucius watched him with a practised eye, seeing the fluid ease of his perfect motion and wondering how he could have failed to spot its truth for so long. Clad once more in his purple-pink war plate, the Phoenician was a sight to set the mind afire, a warrior god of perfect proportions and light.
No traces of the wounds or indignities he had suffered in the Apothecarion were evident, and Lucius marvelled at the incredible power wrought into the primarch’s form that he could endure such horror and bear no ill-effects. Truly, Fulgrim was a god worth devotion.
First Captain Kaesoron stood shoulder to shoulder to Lucius, but Marius Vairosean set himself apart from them, his shame causing him to distance himself from their shared guilt. It was guilt only he felt, for Lucius had no regrets over their actions. They had acted to save their primarch, and – if he was honest – scratch a nagging itch to push their experiences to another level. There could be no guilt over that, not if any of the wonders they had been shown since Isstvan III were to be taken at face value.
Kalimos and Abranxe had joined them, amazed to hear of what had transpired in the Apothecarion, a revelation to which they alone in the galaxy were privy. Krysander stood erect with difficulty, and Ruen held to the wounded captain, his shoulder wrapped in vat-flesh as his augmetic bones knitted with his wounded physiology.
Lucius watched as Fulgrim paused beneath the dull portrait that graced the wall opposite the Phoenician’s Nest, a secret smile that conveyed a lifetime’s meaning in a slight upward tilt of his lips.
‘You were right to suspect I was not myself,’ said Fulgrim, finally deigning to face them. ‘The killing of the Gorgon was an act that severed my last tie to a lost life, a past that means nothing to me now. And no act of such magnitude is free of consequence.’
Fulgrim squatted on the stage, as though reliving the moment of Ferrus Manus’s death. His fists clenched as he stared into the middle distance, and Lucius saw the bloody parade of Isstvan V come alive in his eyes.
‘I was vulnerable,’ said Fulgrim, standing and resuming his pacing of the stage. ‘A servant of the Dark Prince took my flesh for its own amusement. It was an ancient thing, a needy, capricious thing that revelled in its stolen prize, and for a time I allowed it to retain possession of my body while I learned of it and its powers. I think it hoped I would be crushed by the death of my brother…’
Fulgrim grinned, staring at his hands as though they were still bloody from the slaying of the Iron Hands’ primarch.
‘It should have known better. After all, it had started me down the road of self-indulgence and a life free of inhibitions or guilt. What did I care for one more betrayal? Manus was already a fading memory, a ghost who recedes with each passing moment, and everything I learned from it only made me stronger. In time, it was a simple matter to reclaim my body and cast it into the prison it had crafted for me.’
Lucius tore his gaze from his magnificent primarch and lifted his head to the portrait. Its lines were no less insipid, its colours no less bland, but knowing its truth now, Lucius saw the ageless pain of an immortal, inchoate being trapped forever in unending stagnation. To a creature of infinite possibility, there could be no greater torment, and his admiration for his primarch’s brilliance soared anew.
‘So now you know the truth, my sons,’ said Fulgrim, dropping from the stage to walk among them. He spread his hands and touched them all as he walked past them. ‘It is no easy thing to serve a master who demands so much of us and grants us so much in return. We must go further in our desires than any other, experience all things, even those distasteful to us. No sacrifice, no degradation and no bliss will exist beyond our reach. I have such sights to show you all, my sons. Secrets and power thought beyond comprehension, truths buried since the dawn of time and a route to godhood that will see me burn brighter than a thousand suns!’
Fulgrim spun on his heel as his warriors cheered his words. He basked in their adoration and their devotions made him shine like the star that allowed them to live. At last he lowered his arms and swept his gaze over them all, benevolent and paternal, stern and unflinching.
‘I have much to do before deigning to join Horus Lupercal on Terra’s muddy soil,’ said the Phoenician. ‘My first task is to join with my Olympian brother, and yoke his builders and donjon keepers to my purpose.’
‘What purpose?’ asked Julius Kaesoron, daring the primarch’s wrath with a question.
Fulgrim ran his hands through his virgin-white hair and smiled, though Lucius saw this was a momentary indulgence. Further questions would not be tolerated. Not now, in the primarch’s moment of glory.
‘We have a city to build,’ he said. ‘A glorious city of mirrors; a city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.’
Lucius felt his pulse quicken at the idea of such a city, a metropolis where every structure, tower and palace would throw his image back at him a thousandfold. At last he saw the attack on Prismatica for what it was, the gathering of raw materials to raise this astonishing architecture of reflections.
‘A city of mirrors,’ he whispered. ‘It will be wondrous.’
Fulgrim took a step towards him and cupped the swordsman’s face like a lover.
‘It will be better than wondrous,’ said Fulgrim, leaning down to kiss Lucius on each scarred cheek. ‘For in the heart of its million reflections I will meet the gaze of the Angel Exterminatus and the galaxy will weep to behold its terrible beauty!’
FEAT OF IRON
Nick Kyme
~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~
The X Legion ‘Iron Hands’
Ferrus Manus, Primarch
Gabriel Santar, Equerry and First Captain
Vaakal Desaan, Morlock Ninth Clan Company Captain
Erasmus Ruuman, Morlock Thirteenth Clan Company Ironwrought
Shadrak Meduson, Tenth Clan Company Captain
Bion Henricos, Tenth Clan Company Seventh Sergeant
Xenos Personae
Lathsarial, Eldar Farseer
‘The Diviner’, Eldar Farseer
‘What does it matter why he fell?’
‘When the fall is all there is, it matters.’
– Farseer Lathsarial answers a student of the Path
Wrought of Iron
It was not supposed to be like this. This was not his idea of how the war would play out. He had envisaged it differently.
Glorious, vindicating… vengeful.
I was not meant to fail here.
He had not expected to be last. He hated to be last. It irritated, like the itch around his neck.
No mat
ter how he oiled the skin beneath his gorget, or the method he used to affix its clasps, the itch persisted.
Like a blade across my throat…
From his first ironclad footfall onto the desert, it had been there. A dark reminder of something as yet unfulfilled, a promise his supposed executioner had yet to make. Sand was everywhere, endless oceans of undulating grains stretched all the way to the blurred horizon, bleached white by an oppressive sun. In his dreams, the sand was black.
Such moribund thoughts brought an unworthy declaration to taut lips.
‘I am the equal of my brothers,’ he muttered to a darkness that deigned not to answer.
‘And the better of some,’ he added. Still the uncaring shadows paid no heed.
Always it came down to this singular truth, ever since he had split the darkness upon a trail of fire.
‘I should be first.’
The interior of the landship and his strategium chamber were black, much like his mood. The blunt refrain of a thousand hammers rang through the armoured flanks, as the tracks that provided motion to his leviathan pounded the desert in relentless syncopation. Beyond the constant din echoed the dull report of heavy ordnance. It reminded him of the forge and its fuliginous depths, of the Anvilarium aboard the Fist of Iron. How he longed for the solitude of its appended reclusiam at that moment. With creation and function came peace. With mental fortitude came strength and the banishment of weakness.
Weakness was a thing to be abhorred. It had no place in the new Imperium.
As the hololith flickered into life, revealing a nascent image in grainy grey resolution, he recognised it was the weakness within that he loathed the most. It wasn’t a malady, a social or psychological deviancy that he railed against; rather it was merely flesh and all its inherent limitations.
I will be as iron.
Focus turned the grainy hololith into two figures.
Ferrus Manus glowered at them both from the dimly-lit shadows. For him and his forces, the campaign of One-Five-Four Four was not going well.
The Primarchs Page 10