Kroeger didn’t know if that was praise or censure, and kept silent as Perturabo turned away, surveying the human wreckage of the bastion. The Iron Circle moved in perfect unison with the primarch, their shields held at their sides and their hammers hissing as spilled blood burned in the energy fields surrounding them.
Each automaton bore the heraldry of a Legion warrior, and their cold machine hearts were as loyal as it was possible to be. Perturabo had formed the Iron Circle in the wake of the attack on the Iron Blood; a self-sustaining unit of implacable killers, devoted servants and incorruptible praetorians all in one.
Kroeger winced as his injured arm flared with pain, and he curled his fingers into a fist. He heard the sounds of marching feet, bolter fire, iron on stone and the whine of aircraft engines from all directions. Clearly there was still some resistance left within the walls of the citadel, but the heart of it had been ripped out by Perturabo’s unexpected appearance. Kroeger turned his face to the sky, seeing a circling Stormbird with its rear assault ramp lowered. It gleamed silver steel, gold and black, its flanks buttressed and armed with racks of missiles and multiple sponson-banks of heavy bolters.
This was Perturabo’s latest transport, a heavy assault lander capable of carrying the Iron Circle while making an attack run into a hot landing zone with a high probability of making it out again. Where his brother primarchs liked to embellish their personal flyers with ornamentation and heroic names, Perturabo indulged in no such displays of ego-vanity.
Such craft were for battle and as one was destroyed another would be built.
‘Where is your warsmith?’ asked Perturabo, dragging Kroeger’s thoughts back to earth.
Kroeger spat a mouthful of blood-gummed dust before answering. ‘Triarch Harkor is with the guns, my lord. I expect he is on his way here now.’
‘No doubt,’ answered Perturabo, looking closely at him, as though seeing him from the first time. ‘You alone survived to reach the rampart?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Kroeger, seeing no need to mention Vortrax and Ushtor. If there was glory to be had, where was the sense in spreading it around?
‘Stand,’ said Perturabo.
Kroeger obeyed instantly, his body protesting at the interruption of its healing cycles.
Perturabo regarded him strangely, as though searching for something he couldn’t name, but which he sensed was there, hiding just out of sight like a seed in fertile soil, nourished though not yet ready to bloom.
‘Interesting,’ he said, leaving Kroeger to wonder what he meant.
Kroeger heard scaling ladders slamming against the walls and the screech of pneumatic lifters. Whatever protocols had empowered the defences appeared to have run their course with the death of the Imperial Fists, and it wasn’t long before Iron Warriors were clambering over the shot-blasted ramparts as victors instead of attackers.
A number of lightweight Thunderhawks screamed down to the hardpan of the interior precincts of the citadel as though making a combat drop. Assault ramps slammed down and the bulky forms of numerous Iron Warriors warsmiths emerged. Kroeger averted his eyes as he saw Warsmith Harkor marching towards him alongside Lord Forrix.
Harkor’s fellow triarch went bareheaded, and his vulcanised cowl was pulled back over his shaven scalp. Ribbed neural connectors lay flat across his skull like the woven braids of a feral world savage. Emerging from the same Thunderhawk as Lord Forrix came the towering figure of Warsmith Falk. Though his armour was superficially identical to that worn by Forrix, he was half a head taller, his physique the greatest among the Iron Warriors.
Last to emerge from his flyer was Toramino, master of the Stor-bezashk. Where the other warsmiths favoured the bulky protection of Cataphractii armour, Toramino was clad in a suit of burnished Mark IV Maximus plate. And where his fellow warriors were grimy and coated with a patina of this valley’s omnipresent red dust, Toramino’s armour was polished to a mirror finish, as though freshly unveiled by its creator in the Martian forges. A cloak of black mail cascaded from his shoulders like an oil spill, contrasting with the stark white of his braided hair.
The warsmiths approached their primarch with a degree of caution, for it was said that his humours had become ever more volatile and unforgiving of late. The rumours of how Warsmith Berossus had come by his horrifying injuries were still rife, and Kroeger didn’t envy them their exalted rank.
The warsmiths arranged themselves before the primarch, each dropping to one knee and hammering their right fist into their left palm.
‘From iron cometh strength,’ they said.
Perturabo stood Forgebreaker’s pommel on the broken stone of the ground, leaning forwards to rest his arms on its wide head. The gesture was intended to look relaxed, but Kroeger saw the simmering tension in the primarch’s body, like a taut cable at the very limit of its tensile strength.
Yes, he decided, better a foot soldier than a leader.
Forrix was not fooled by the apparent ease of their primarch. Though it had been many weeks since he had last laid eyes on Perturabo, he saw through the crack in the presented facade to the angry core within. Their lord was not a warrior who dealt with his subordinates with the easy familiarity some of the primarchs were said to enjoy. He glanced over at Harkor, his fellow triarch’s sycophantic features brimming with pride.
The Cadmean Citadel had fallen, and it appeared that Harkor’s Grand Battalion had been the one to finally break the Imperial Fists defences. Harkor’s thoughts would be turning to the honour that must surely accompany such an achievement, but Forrix saw this moment through a different lens.
Since Isstvan, Perturabo had become a giant of terrible rages and spontaneous violence, and Harkor was gambling that this humbling of Dorn’s sons would quench that molten anger. Yet as the silence between primarch and warsmiths stretched, even Harkor’s certainty of approbation began to falter. Only the creak of armour, the sigh of the suddenly quiescent wind, and the metallic rustling of the primarch’s cloak disturbed the emptiness.
‘I was specific in my orders, was I not?’ said Perturabo at last, slipping Forgebreaker back into its shoulder harness.
There could be only one warsmith intended to answer such a question, and Harkor rose to his feet, uncertainty making him an orphan amongst his peers.
‘My lord, I–’ was all he managed before Perturabo’s gauntlet took hold of his gorget and hauled him into the air. Though Harkor was encased in the heaviest battle-plate of the Legiones Astartes, Perturabo lifted him without difficulty until he was face to face with the steel blue of the primarch’s cold gaze.
‘Does Triarch Harkor now command the Iron Warriors?’
‘No, my lord,’ gasped Harkor. ‘You and you alone are master of Olympia’s sons.’
‘I see,’ said Perturabo, as if mulling this over. ‘And is Triarch Harkor aware of this?’
The choking warsmith nodded, his throat too constricted for words. A welded seam separated from the plastron and machined rivets snapped from their housing on the gorget. The power to crush such unbreakable plates was beyond imagining.
‘And yet he thinks to ignore my orders and devise stratagems of his own,’ said Perturabo. ‘An interesting interpretation of the chain of command, don’t you think?’
Harkor drew a breath as Perturabo’s grip loosened a fraction.
‘My lord, I saw an opportunity,’ he said between wheezing gasps. ‘A chance for victory.’
Perturabo nodded, as though he had known this all along, but did not release Harkor or lower him back to the ground.
‘Victory?’
‘The fortress is yours, my lord.’
‘Not through any design of Triarch Harkor,’ snapped Perturabo, turning towards the bloodied warrior standing behind him. Forrix didn’t recognise him, but he had the look of a killer, the kind of bare-knuckle brawler you’d want at your side in the hellstorm of a breach or the close-quarters bloodbath of a boarding action.
Perturabo dropped Harkor, and gestured to the warrior to
step forwards.
‘This is Kroeger, and he is all your grand plan saw to the ramparts alive,’ said the primarch, gripping the cratered curves of the warrior’s shoulder guards. ‘The lives of fighting men were wasted while you watched from a gun battery below. I expect more from my warsmiths, Harkor, especially one of the Trident. I expect discipline and loyalty, but most of all I expect an unbending obedience to the orders I have given.’
Forrix awaited the blow that would crush the life from Harkor, the way it had been mashed out of Berossus, but it never came. Instead, Perturabo reached out and took hold of Harkor’s shoulder guard with his left hand. With his right, he ripped the plastron from Harkor’s chest with a single wrenching tear. Sparks, cables and electro-conductive fluids drizzled from the damage. The breastplate clanged to the ground, but Perturabo wasn’t done.
Piece by piece, the primarch tore Harkor’s armour from his body, dropping the sundered plates at his feet like shed skin. Every component was ungently removed until Harkor stood, much reduced, in his torn bodyglove, with ruptured connector tubes and lank ropes of chem-shunts dangling where they had snapped.
‘You are unfit to wear this armour, Harkor,’ said Perturabo. ‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron. You have shown that you possess none of these qualities. You are the rust that eats at the metal, a failed cog that must be removed from the body of the machine before its damage spreads.’
‘My lord, please–’ began Harkor, but an icy glare from the primarch withered his tongue.
‘From this moment you are no longer a triarch,’ said Perturabo. ‘Each blade of the Trident needs to be as solid and unbending as the hand that wields it, and you are weak, Harkor.’
Harkor shook his head in mute denial as his world crashed down around him, and Forrix couldn’t help a small smile tugging at the corner of his thin lips. He had never believed Harkor worthy of a place in the Trident, but had wisely kept his opinion to himself.
‘You are stripped of all rank, and are now simply a warrior of the 23rd Grand Battalion,’ said Perturabo. ‘You will stand in the fighting ranks, a battle-brother like any other. Get out of my sight, you are dismissed.’
Harkor blanched at this terrible punishment, and Forrix wondered if he might attack Perturabo in his despair, but it seemed the disgraced triarch lacked even the spine for that final escape from shame. Harkor turned and marched away, a broken man whose every hope and dream of ambition had been crushed forever.
Perturabo returned his attention to his senior warsmiths, each one now smelling the sickly scent of opportunity. With Golg dead at Phall and Harkor disgraced, Forrix felt the strength of Toramino and Falk’s ambition.
‘It seems my Trident is two members short,’ said Perturabo, loosing a breath that looked like it had been held in his lungs for years. And with that exhalation, a burden seemed to lift from the primarch, as though the mordancy that had settled upon him after killing the boarders on the Iron Blood went with it.
Forrix rose to his feet, knowing that their obeisance was done.
‘We are ready to serve,’ said Barban Falk, standing with the rest of the warsmiths.
‘I am your humble servant, my lord,’ added Toramino. ‘Honoured veteran, proud son and trusted warrior.’
Perturabo smiled his mortician’s smile and said, ‘The Phoenician and his army of debauchers will be making planetfall within hours, and I need the Trident at my side when he comes. Forrix, who would you suggest as suitable replacements for your fallen comrades?’
Forrix had been waiting for this, and though there were many warsmiths in the IV Legion, only a very few had the will required to stand alongside the primarch. Dargron had perished in the last violent spasms of Phall and the primarch had despatched Varrek and his Grand Battalion to destinations unknown in the wake of that battle. Both had been groomed to be future triarchs, but Forrix knew what answer was required of him at this moment.
‘Warsmiths Toramino and Falk would make fine warriors of the Trident,’ said Forrix. ‘You wish strength and power at your side, and both possess such qualities in abundance.’
Perturabo nodded as though considering this answer.
‘On any other day I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly, Forrix,’ he said, looking to the sky with a throaty chuckle. ‘But today is not a day like any other.’
Forrix was unsure of the primarch’s meaning, and kept silent as Perturabo stood before Barban Falk and placed his hands upon his head in benediction. Though huge, even by Legiones Astartes standards, Falk was dwarfed by Perturabo’s bulk.
‘Barban Falk, you will become one of my triarchs,’ said Perturabo, and Falk hammered his fist into his palm once again. But if Toramino expected the same honour, his hopes of elevation were dashed by the primarch’s next words.
‘Toramino, you are a fine warsmith, but no one commands the Stor-bezashk like you,’ said Perturabo. ‘I want new blood in the Trident, a fresh voice to shake the dust from our complacency.’
‘My lord?’ said Toramino, his disbelief plain. ‘I do not understand…’
The primarch hauled to his side the bloody warrior who’d fought his way over the walls.
‘Kroeger will take command of the 23rd Grand Battalion,’ said Perturabo. ‘He will be the third blade of my Trident.’
THREE
New Blood
Cavea Ferrum
Sanctum
Perturabo decreed that they descend the mountain on foot, trudging through the broken flesh and burnt metal remains of Harkor’s abortive assault. It was an unsubtle message, but the Lord of Iron wasn’t known for his delicate ways. Yet, Forrix reminded himself, a lack of subtlety did not equate to the simplistic. Decades of war spent in blood-filled trenches and shell-stormed breaches had worn the sharper edges of Perturabo’s wit and sophistication blunt, but the alchemically wrought intellect behind the primarch’s sapphire gaze was not to be underestimated.
The primarch marched ahead of them, ringed by the heavy shields of the Iron Circle. His pace was unhurried; he wanted them to see the ruin of Harkor’s Grand Battalion, the thoroughness with which the escalade had been gutted by the Imperial Fists, and the price of disobedience. Compared to Berossus, Harkor had got off lightly. Was that a growing sign that Perturabo had emerged from the deep well of black thoughts that had shrouded him of late?
Forrix walked with Falk and Kroeger, the newest triarch yet to break his stunned silence following his elevation to the Trident. Toramino walked behind them, wreathed in bitter frustration and excluded from their presence by Perturabo’s unexpected promotion of Harkor’s warrior. If Kroeger felt the daggers the humiliated warsmith was plunging into his back with every glance, he was doing an admirable job of ignoring them.
The silent walk downhill hadn’t yet changed Forrix’s opinion of Kroeger; the man’s broken-boned face told him all he needed to know. Kroeger was a dulled weapon, a tool to be wielded by his betters. Had it been an act of wilfulness on Perturabo’s part to make him one of the Trident, or had his talent for recognising raw, malleable potential seen something in Kroeger beyond his brutality? Best to step warily around this one then, until his worth could be gauged.
Pioneer crews passed them on their way uphill, followed by cadres of black-robed tech-priests and their walking, crawling and floating palanquins. Outlandish beyond any sane requirements of function, they were abhorrent monstrous things, bulbous, many-limbed and empowered by uncounted forms of locomotion.
‘Vultures picking upon a corpse,’ said Falk with distaste.
‘The Pneumachina?’ asked Forrix.
‘Is that what they’re calling themselves now?’
‘So I hear,’ said Forrix, watching as a heavy, segmented construction engine moved uphill on tracked cog-wheels with a rippling peristaltic motion. Oil-slathered slaves crawled behind it, their emaciated bodies pierced with metallic ribbons imprinted with black and white lines of vari
egated thickness. Hooded adepts wearing smoke-belching backpacks that reeked of embalming fluids and curdled lubricants lashed the slaves with barbed flails, reciting nonsense numbers and atonal braying vocalisations.
‘Well, whatever they are now, it’s unseemly to desecrate a place like this.’
‘Desecrate?’ said Forrix with an indulgent chuckle. ‘This isn’t a sacred place, it’s a fortress of stone and steel, walls and bastions. Worse, it’s a ruined one.’
‘For now,’ said Falk. ‘When we’re done with Horus’s rebellion, I’ll return to rebuild it.’
‘It’s your rebellion too, warsmith,’ said Kroeger.
‘What did you say?’ said Falk.
‘I said it’s your rebellion too,’ repeated Kroeger.
Falk’s eyes narrowed, the blackness of his pupils expanding as he tried to read the subtext of Kroeger’s words. Forrix had to give it to Kroeger – voicing a dissenting opinion before a warsmith was a virtually certain route to death, either on the end of a power fist or in a swift reassignment to a forlorn hope.
‘And what did you mean by what you said?’ pressed Falk.
Kroeger frowned, as though confused by the question. Forrix realised it wasn’t that he didn’t understand Falk, simply that there was no guile to his words, only unvarnished truth.
‘The Warmaster’s cause is our cause,’ said Kroeger. ‘We fight as one or we will be defeated.’
Forrix laughed, the sound echoing from the blasted rocks of the mountain. ‘I think I see now why the primarch wanted you in the Trident,’ he said.
‘You do?’ said Falk. ‘Then you’re a better judge of character than me.’
‘Kroeger here is a plain speaker,’ said Forrix. ‘Aren’t you?’
Kroeger shrugged. ‘I speak as I find, warsmith.’
‘There are no ranks within the Trident,’ said Forrix. ‘When we three are assembled, I am simply Forrix. You are simply Kroeger.’
Forrix jerked a thumb at the towering Falk. ‘But he’s still Warsmith Falk. Even to me.’
Kroeger nodded, ignoring Forrix’s attempt to defuse the tension, and said, ‘So am I a warsmith now?’
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