by Guy Haley
Perturabo did none of that.
He lay on his specially made feasting couch, scowling at the frivolity. He wore the expression of an accountant forced to attend the grand celebrations of his bankrupt king. He would be totting up the cost of every fruit and each joint of meat. He had stopped telling Dammekos how many of the poor their feasts would feed, but he had not stopped thinking about it. The tyrant had hoped he would throw off his sullen nature just for one day, but he had known it for a vain hope.
Time to get this over with, thought Dammekos.
Perturabo was never going to fit the image of an Olympian man, and Dammekos was beginning to see there was no point trying to make him. Nevertheless, he dreaded the little speech he would have to make now more than many others he had delivered.
The Tyrant of Lochos stood. The music came to a flourished halt and a fanfare of iron carynxes blared hard notes from mouths cast as angry divine faces.
‘Today is my foster-son’s name day!’ said Dammekos.
There was a broad cheer from the assembled nobility. Though not well liked, Perturabo was well respected, and wine and fear can both make a man shout more loudly.
‘He has dwelt among us here at Lochos now for ten years, and although his birth date remains as mysterious to us as so much about him, we reckon it is now his sixteenth birthday, on this, the anniversary of his coming to us. He is evidently a man, after all!’ There was another cheer. No one could doubt that was the truth. Perturabo was a giant, taller and more heavily built than any man in Olympian history, with the face and beard of a thirty-year-old general. ‘Now he has come of age, our gift from the gods. It is time for him to choose the name he will be known as forevermore.’
Perturabo had been staring unblinkingly at him all the way through this speech. Dammekos turned and looked straight into that cold stare of his, mustering what semblance of warmth he could in the iciness of Perturabo’s regard.
‘Foster-son. Before you choose, there is another tiding I must bring to your attention. I have decided that you shall be adopted into my family formally. This is a sign not only of your great promise as a man…’ Dammekos wetted his lips. His voice became strong, edged with iron. He would make this stubborn boy see. ‘But also of the great love we hold for you in our hearts! My son, I salute you!’
Dammekos raised his goblet and drank. The nobles followed suit with scattered cries of support. Perturabo raised his goblet a fraction, his eyes never once leaving Dammekos’ own, and took a small sip. Calliphone smiled affectionately at her new brother, and touched his arm. Herakon scowled. Andos dapped politely.
‘Now stand!’ said Dammekos. ‘It is time for you to choose your name!’
The crowd began a chant.
‘Name! Name! Name! Name! Name!’
They banged their drinking vessels of priceless conductive metals on the dining tables and stamped their sandals upon the marble floor. Through the thunders of their approbation, five priestesses wafted their way through the crowd. They were covered from head to foot in sheer black silks that billowed and clung to their nakedness beneath. Gold masks of Hephone, homed goddess of life, covered their faces. The only part of them that was visible was their eyes. Their leader carried a silver knife and a golden bowl.
They stood before Perturabo, whose head, even while he reclined upon his massive couch, came to their shoulders.
‘Stand!’ commanded the priestess. Silence fell across the hall.
Very deliberately, Perturabo put his goblet aside and rose to his full, imposing height. The priestesses, agents of the divine though they were, appeared as children before him.
Two priestesses lifted Perturabo’s hand over the lead priestess’ golden bowl. She pressed the knife to his palm and looked up into his thickset face.
‘You come of age. Choose your name, and by blood it will be sealed.’
Perturabo stared at her.
‘What name will you choose, my son,’ prompted Dammekos, ‘to be remembered in the hallowed annals of our family?’
Perturabo looked across the hall. ‘A thing has a nature unto itself. That nature is immutable. It might be changed temporarily by heat, or alloyed with another element to create a third. It might be wrought and changed in form by the application of force or of chemicals. Stone can be cut and made into walls. Silver and gold might be smelted and combined into electrum. Iron can be forged into weapons or ploughs. Water might be heated to steam.
‘But the stone remains stone. The silver and gold can be separated by acid. Iron can be remade, or might rust into powder, where it nevertheless remains iron. Steam condenses back into water. Nothing changes it nature. You expect me to take a name to honour one of your ancient heroes. Eidrachos, perhaps, or Rakator. I cannot assume these names or any other, for I am not them. I am Perturabo. I was made to be Perturabo. As I boy I was Perturabo, and as a man I shall remain him. My name is me, and I am my name.’
He looked down at the woman. The knife was shaking in her hand.
‘Cut me,’ he commanded her, ‘and release Perturabo’s blood, for my name is Perturabo.’
Herakon was smiling unpleasantly. Dammekos saw Calliphone mouth ‘Oh, Perturabo’ at him.
Unsure, the priestess looked to Dammekos for guidance. Perturabo was no Olympian name. A tense quiet fell across the hall.
The tyrant concealed his disappointment behind a light smile. ‘He is within his rights to choose his own name. My son is not like the rest of us. If he is Perturabo, then he is Perturabo. To my son, Perturabo!’ he exclaimed.
The response was muted. ‘Perturabo!’ the nobles said back.
The priestess made a swift slash across Perturabo’s hand. Blood welled from the wound, which then quickly closed. A single spotted fell into the cup.
‘Then I name you Perturabo,’ the priestess said.
She and her acolytes withdrew.
Perturabo glowered still, but Dammekos thought he saw, in the instant before the giant sat, the slightest smile upon his lips. A flash of a thing, gone before it arrived, like a fish rising in the water.
EIGHT
IRON AT BAY
999.M30
GHOLGHIS, THE VULPA STRAITS, SAK’TRADA DEEPS
Dantioch was drowsing in the catalepsian sleep when the alarms sounded. Both hemispheres of his brain jolted into full wakefulness, but he suffered a brief dissociative moment as their operations meshed before he could respond properly. His reactions were slowing.
‘Gatekeeper, report.’
The vox crackled like it was five hundred years old, blurring the words of the gatekeeper. ‘Warsmith, you must come to the operations centre immediately. The enemy is back, and in numbers I cannot calculate.’
‘Vastopol, are you on duty?’ asked Dantioch. Vastopol was the 14th Grand Company’s warrior-poet, and as such excused watch duty.
‘Ardendus is afflicted my lord,’ responded Vastopol. ‘His gifts are failing, according to Apothecary Malzor. I offered to take his watch.’
‘I’m on my way.’
A garrison under siege slept in its armour; Dantioch had minimal preparations to make He snatched up his helm and bolter from his arming stands, slammed the door release and ran out into the corridor.
So Ardendus’ implants were failing. He wasn’t the first. One after another, their Emperor-given organs had started to malfunction. He had warriors whose sight was blurred, others whose joints locked or muscles weakened, and those who could not keep their rations down. Night after night, the hrud poured through the system in ever greater numbers. Since the primarch’s victory on Gugann, the trickle had become a flood. Every passage left his men weaker. Soon, he was sure, they would begin to die of old age as the mortals had.
Mortals, he thought. They were all mortal now.
Alarms blared throughout the fortress. The tramp of armoured feet hurrying to battlestations echoed along every corridor. The air thrummed with the sound of heavy machinery powering up the weapons batteries and void shielding. His ears,
attuned to the moods of mechanisms, picked out irregular rhythms in the workings of the titanic engines. The machines suffered as much as his men.
The left leg of his own armour clicked with every third step, a slow wearing of components he would not be able to replace. The Iron Warriors were experts in supply and the fortress housed massive stores of parts, but these too were affected by the ageing effects of the hrud and had decayed at the same rate as those in use. Two days ago he had opened a brittle case of replacement fibre-bundles, the data-stamp signifying the manufacturing date to be no more than four months past, only to find the items within useless.
‘We have indications of a major temporal vortex occurring in the southern sky, warsmith,’ voxed Vastopol. ‘Multiple minor incursions on fifteen levels.’
Dantioch’s helm chimed as Vastopol inloaded the data.
‘I will go to the eastern wall-walk so I may observe the celestial phenomenon myself. Stand by for my orders.’
‘Be on guard, warsmith. We are registering multiple contacts along that route.’
Dantioch hailed his warships in orbit - fourteen of all classes. The ships were built to last and weathered the nightly wash of entropic energies well. Their crews were another matter. Though the hrud ships could not contend with the Imperial vessels, each close-range encounter left corridors littered with geriatric crewmen. Like the garrison, the fleet’s strength was being bled from it second by accelerated second.
‘Another night begins, brother-captains,’ Dantioch voxed. ‘Engage at distance. Do not approach within the foe’s temporal umbrella. We have lost too many men already.’
Without waiting for a reply, Dantioch closed off the line and brought up an overlay of the fortress on his helm visor, searching for nearby squads. ‘Sergeant Zolan. You are close to my position, loin me.’
‘As you command, warsmith,’ voxed Zolan.
Dantioch quickly went over his grand company’s disposition. He had worryingly few legionaries left: just over three hundred remained on the planet out of the five hundred he had brought with him. There had been over two thousand penal auxilia troopers embedded in his force, but the majority of them had perished in their first encounter with the hrud, ageing to living skeletons in seconds, then crumbling to dust before his eyes.
He had dispatched the rest of the fleet to Krak Fiorina on the far side of the straits under Captain Chalx’s command. He could only assume he was now dead, along with Warsmith Kalkoon at Stratopolae. Both had reported hrud incursions within days of the migration beginning. Astropathic communications had fallen silent soon after.
Dantioch gave orders as he ran, commanding that the guns be ready, ordering repair teams to the southern wall, rousing his men to war so that all of them were prepared for what was to come. He came to a T-junction in the corridor. Cut six weeks ago, it had been perfectly angled, clean grey stone. Now it was pockmarked and crumbling.
Wherever the hrud had been, they left their marks.
In the beginning the hrud were so few that Dantioch had been able to use the damage they left to calculate the extent of their entropy fields’ influence at one point five metres. He understood now that these had been wayfinders, some kind of scout.
Perhaps their migration fleets used the Gholghis System for the same reason that Perturabo had commanded the warsmith to take it - the straits it guarded were a corridor through the unstable stars of the Sak’trada Deeps. These small suns burned with cold volatility, pumping out unexpected bursts of high-energy particles.
But why the hrud appeared in so many numbers in his fortress, why they came off their ships at all, why they flooded through the short run of the watercourse - all of that was inexplicable. No one knew how the hrud travelled, or why their presence had such a catastrophic impact on space-time. It could be the hrud were deliberately targeting the fortress as they fled, in retaliation for the warrens cleansed during compliance. It could be the Iron Warriors were merely in the way of their unguessable migration routes. Both theories might be correct, or both wrong. There was no way to tell. The hrud were as mysterious as they were troublesome.
Zolan’s squad fell in beside him, six Space Marines where once there had been twenty.
‘Be ready,’ said Dantioch. ‘There is a major incursion building.’
‘Yes, warsmith,’ said Zolan. His anger of a few days before was gone, replaced by the steely vigilance of an Iron Warrior facing enemies at the walls.
They came to the Portis Majora leading onto the eastern battlements, where the fortress extruded itself from the mountain into Gholghis’ hard landscapes. A smaller let-way was set into the gate Dantioch was reaching for the press panel when he saw rust spreading across the metal. A terrible cold burned his hand through his gauntlet, and he snatched it away.
‘Back!’ he shouted.
Space-time quirked. He had been told by Techmarine Tavarre that the effects of the hrud on the surrounding environment bore some resemblance to those recorded at the very edge of a singularity event horizon. Dantioch had not yet been close enough to either a hrud or a star vortex to test that hypothesis.
Half a dozen boltguns rose together. Dantioch kicked at the door release, his own bolter up. His foot passed through the temporal field bleeding through the door, and his flesh tingled.
The door juddered open unhealthily. A single hrud blocked the way. It was taller than a mortal, though not so tall as a legionary. Its shape was obscured by the oily swirl of time bent out of true. Through gaps in its distortion field, Dantioch glimpsed the filthy robes the being wore, along with the hint of a weapon in its clawed hands and a face set with bulging eyes occupied by pupils so large the entire surface was black.
His men fired the instant the door was cleared. The hrud smacked its free hand into something attached to its side and time slowed to a crawl. Dantioch could see each individual bolt moving through the air, slower than projectiles fired into the ballistics gels used in the weapons ranges in the forge. Many misfired, the propellant charge in their rears sputtering out. Of the handful that penetrated the thing’s protective field, none hit their target. They vanished in flashes of displaced reality as the very fabric of the universe twisted around them.
The hrud’s weapon discharged with a hiss. A bolt of flickering plasma took one of Zolan’s men in the chest. He burned inside his armour, flailing as his flesh was consumed. His helm lenses shattered, releasing black smoke and twin streams of bubbling liquid that rolled down his cheeks.
Dantioch dropped his bolter and snatched out his power sword. The hrud lunged for him. The touch of it was death itself, and he felt the life run from his body as it was drained of vitality. He convulsed with pain and stumbled backwards.
There was a cry from behind.
‘Protect the warsmith!’
Two Iron Warriors threw themselves at the thing. It screamed hideously, and Dantioch reeled back. His power armour was scorchingly hot.
The legionaries cut down the hrud quickly. Its entropic field blinked out, affording them a glimpse of its bizarre alien physiology - the flexible arms and legs, the long neck, a baby-like face with superfluous mandibles - before it dissolved into a stinking puddle of matter.
One of the Space Marines who had saved Dantioch staggered back into the line The other lay dead on the floor. His helm was corroded through, and the face beneath was as desiccated and wasted as an ancient mummy’s.
Dantioch’s armour pinged and creaked as it cooled. There was a patina on the bare ceramite of his arm. When he clenched his fist, his bones ground against each other and his muscles ached.
He motioned his men on, and they passed into Gholghis’ freezing night.
The world’s hydrological system was minimal, so the sky was clear. No moon orbited Gholghis to soften its darkness; the stars alone provided illumination. However, this night they were drowned out by a bright wheel of actinic light turning in the sky. Oppressive energy poured from it, sapping the strength from the legionaries. A headache gripped Dantio
ch’s skull, but he forced himself to observe, to see what he might report to his primarch, no matter the cost to himself.
Dark patches moved over the vortex’s fluid surface: the ships of the hrud, a fleet of them, enough to waste a star system by their presence alone.
‘To the battlements,’ he said painfully. ‘Move!’
Gholghis shuddered to a tremor. Earthquakes and stellar outbursts always accompanied the xenos’ major incursions. The cliff above the fortress wall-walk was a dizzying pattern of black crevices and dark-grey ridges. It curved round to meet the wall, where a door was set into the rock. Above it rose the solid, blocky silhouette of the watchtower bastion.
The Iron Warriors staggered on under the deadly shine of the phenomenon. Their suits pitted. Their limbs weakened. They reached the parapet ten metres away from the door a hundred years older than when they had left the fortress.
‘It has never been this bad,’ gasped Zolan. ‘There must be millions of them up there.’
‘The plain! Look onto the plain!’ shouted one of the legionaries, and there was a note of panic in his voice.
Out on the dusty wastes, there was a painful shimmer of the same quality as the vortex in the sky, a silvery curtain of light that had the look of a pict whose colours had been reversed to negative. Through the curtain’s undulations came a horde of hrud, so many that they appeared to be more a liquid that poured itself over the plain rather than a body of individuals. Their entropic shroud tortured the atmosphere into a frantic dance. At its edge, carbon snows fell as gas condensed out of the sky; towards the middle, the air shimmered with heat.
The hrud moved as silently as an army of ghosts, advancing on the void shields of the fortress. The guns housed in the wall’s embrasures activated, barrels acquiring targets and preparing to fire. The thrumming of powerful generators made the stones rumble.