Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia

by Guy Haley

  ‘From Kardis, then where?’ asked Calliphone.

  Perturabo stared down at his troops as his lord went among them, examining their uniforms and weaponry. They were technically Dammekos’ troops, but the proprietorial way he walked between their lines rankled the future primarch.

  ‘There are other elements that can be made into even mightier weapons,’ he said after a pause. Perturabo measured his words carefully, unsure of how much to reveal. ‘Elements with a certain quality of fissility. Rare elements. The ancients stripped this planet of most of its resources. They were disproportionately interested in fissile elements. If I can acquire enough, I will build a weapon of such awful potency that it will end war on Olympia forever.’

  ‘Really?’ she said archly. ‘You are so clever.’

  As with so much human interaction, Perturabo was impervious to humour when he was thinking deeply, unless he felt overly mocked and his temper came into play. When he used humour, it was rarely spontaneous, but deployed like a weapon in a planned attack.

  He continued, deadly serious. ‘In the Hidden Library I learned much that you would be wise to read.’

  ‘You’re so pleased with digging up that old ruin,’ she said. ‘Seven years ago now. It’s time you found yourself a new achievement to crow about.’

  ‘You dismiss it too lightly.’ Still he watched Dammekos. ‘You should read the books I found there.’

  ‘Who says I haven’t?’ she said coyly. Perturabo finally turned to face her. She plucked a grape from a bunch with her lips. ‘The information you recovered from the city has revolutionised life here Anyone with half a mind should read it, and I have.’

  He smiled at that, pleased. ‘Dammekos does not approve of wise women.’ He never called the tyrant father.

  Calliphone made a little face of unconcern. ‘You are not the only secretive one in our family, though you do it so well.’

  Perturabo was thoughtful. ‘It is true that court life breeds a certain reticence. You would have thought my nature would have been a natural fit for circumstances here, but instead it sets me even further apart from you.’

  Calliphone threw a grape at her foster brother’s head. ‘If anything, ‘Bo, your problem is that you exemplify the worst of our Olympian virtues! Introspective, secretive, paranoid and superior.’

  It was all true, though she meant it without malice. ‘Bo was another thing he allowed her. No other would dare to shorten his name.

  He smiled at her guardedly. Of all his relatives at court, she was the only one he had anything approaching a friendship with. But he did not trust her, and so true affection remained tantalisingly out of reach. Theirs was a common bond formed by adversity. Both were secretly rueful it was so, for both craved real companionship. However, neither could do anything about it, and so like all in Lochos, they played the parts expected of them in the great tragedy of life.

  ‘Will it work?’ she said. She poured a second cup of wine for him, making a show she didn’t care. Her cup would be thimble-sized in his enormous hands, so she filled one for him large enough to be used as a bucket.

  ‘Yes, of course it will. I have a strategy. It cannot fail. Dammekos thinks I will do all this for Lochos, but I am not doing it for this city. I go to war for Olympia. There are other worlds than this one, Calliphone, and we are vulnerable while we are divided. What if the Black Judges return, or others? We must be ready.’

  ‘The Black Judges are a legend,’ she said. ‘The dark brothers of the gods. They watch over us, so the priests say, in return for the blood of the young.’

  ‘You know they are no legend. A visit from them is well overdue.’ She shuddered. ‘I prefer to pretend they are not real.’

  ‘Pretend or not, you cannot deny their existence.’ He walked from the balustrade and took his wine from the table ‘Even if you could make a case for their non-existence you must agree it would be better to stand united and ready to repel them, just in case.’

  ‘You are spinning unattainable dreams, brother,’ she said. ‘You are mighty, but such as the Black Judges would crush you even if you had every satrapy and city state by your side.’

  ‘Maybe’ he said. He drained his goblet. It was five times the size of hers, but no matter how much he drank, he was never affected by the alcohol. ‘Better to dream and fail than honour this poisonous status quo. Whoever I am, I was made for more than such a petty realm as Olympia.’

  ‘You are beginning to believe your own legend.’

  ‘I do not think for one moment, my little sister, that I am born of the gods.’ He looked upwards past the edge of the awning. Threads of smoke from Olympia’s industries rose into the sky, rolling over where warmer air interfaced with colder layers, leaving the high heavens clear. Behind the matchless blue, he could discern the queasy revolution of the star maelstrom. He looked at it as long as he dared, defying its baleful presence. ‘But I am not from Olympia, of that I am sure.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, bringing the discussion to a close. She lifted the ewer. ‘Empty. You drink so much! I am fetching myself some more wine.’

  Perturabo made to rise. ‘Let me go.’

  ‘Oh no!’ she said, smiling. ‘You are not to be gallant. You are going into battle tomorrow. I will play servant.’

  They had no one in attendance Servants and peons could not be trusted, all knew that, but Perturabo went further than most by having none himself and demanding the servants of others be absent when he visited - another oddity that set him apart from his peers.

  Calliphone went through the archway into her apartments. Perturabo looked out over the city. His war machines rumbled as their engines turned over. The smell of burning hydrocarbons wafted up from below. For a brief moment, he knew contentment. The most peaceful moments preceded war. He did not yet have the self-knowledge or the courage to acknowledge that he anticipated the coming violence. One day he would admit that killing calmed his troubled heart, and it would sorrow him.

  A small noise made Perturabo move from the couch.

  ‘Calliphone?’ he called.

  There was no reply. He listened carefully. Tiny scuffing noises came from inside, the sounds of a silent struggle.

  Perturabo ran through the archway into her apartments without a moment’s delay. A masked warrior had his foster sister about the throat, a knife pricking under her jaw. Two others stood at his side; their swords drawn.

  ‘Take one more step, and your sister dies.’

  ‘Behind you!’ she screamed.

  Perturabo turned to see two men leap at him from beside the pilasters of the arch. One he swatted with a backhand that sent the man crashing into a cabinet of ornaments with his ribs shattered. The second plunged his knife in the meat of Perturabo’s shoulder. He grunted at the pain and stepped back, wrenching the weapon from the assassin’s grasp. Coldness spreading from the wound indicated poison, and he wavered slightly. The knifeman leapt back, drawing a solid slug pistol. He fired three shots into Perturabo’s chest as he advanced.

  They did not slow him in the slightest.

  He reached for the man, who swung recklessly for his head.

  Grabbing his assailant’s skull in one hand, Perturabo picked him up and swung him around like a flail. His feet, flung out by the rapidity of the motion, kicked one of the swordsmen in the face, sending him reeling. The second swordsmen struck with his blade. Perturabo blocked it, and it bit into his forearm. Perturabo kicked at the man, breaking his femur so hard that his leg folded backwards. The swordsman screamed and fell.

  With a twist of his wrist, Perturabo broke the neck of the man whose head he gripped and threw him aside. His body hit the wall halfway to the ceiling, smearing it with blood. The poison made Perturabo woozy, but there was no toxin on Olympia that could fell him. The remaining swordsman charged, screaming war cries of the Thanatoi murder cults. Perturabo sidestepped his blow and punched him so hard that his face caved in.

  That just left the assassin holding Calliphone.

  �
�Not one more step!’ said the man. ‘Your life for hers.’

  Perturabo’s superhuman system was already shrugging off the effects of the poison and closing up his wounds.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Your life for hers.’

  He plucked the knife buried in shoulder and cast it with such speed that the assassin had no time to react. It hit him so hard that the hilt buried itself deep in his eye socket and the point burst from the back of his skull. Calliphone pushed his arm aside so that he would not cut her throat as he fell. She rubbed at her neck. ‘That one still lives!’ she managed.

  The swordsman with the broken leg was crawling backwards, grasping his shattered limb with his good hand, agonised breath coming sharp through his teeth.

  ‘Did you think that you might best me, Perturabo, in combat? That five of you would be enough?’

  Perturabo bent down and grabbed the man by his jerkin and hauled him up. Holding him with one hand he ripped the mask away from his face, revealing the tattooed face of a Delchonian.

  ‘Who is behind this?’ demanded Perturabo. ‘Who?’

  ‘I won’t talk,’ said the Delchonian.

  ‘Whoever was paying you, it was not enough. You would be wise to renounce your oaths of silence.’

  The man spat full in Perturabo’s face Bloody saliva slid down Perturabo’s cheek. Rage screamed into his mind, and his reason fled.

  Perturabo cast the mask down and began choking the swordsman. The man’s face went crimson and his tongue bulged from his mouth.

  ‘Who is behind this?’ repeated Perturabo. ‘Who? Who?’

  The man gurgled. He might have being trying to talk, but if the noises he made were words, they were incomprehensible ‘You will get nothing from him that way,’ said Calliphone She grabbed Perturabo’s arm and pulled. She might as well have tugged at a mountain. ‘Stop. Save him for the torturers. Let them draw out the truth!’

  Perturabo was not listening. The pounding of his pulse in his ears drowned out his sister’s words. Dark fury had him. His face was tight with it.

  ‘Perturabo!’ Calliphone shouted.

  He looked down at her with a twisted face and she backed away from his fury. Slowly, he came back into himself. The assassin hung limply in his grasp, his throat a bloody ruin. Perturabo’s fingers had sunk so deeply into the dead man’s neck that he gripped his spine. Perturabo dropped the corpse.

  ‘I am… I am sorry,’ he said, swallowing heavily. ‘The danger to us, to you. I… I lost my temper. You were right. We should have kept him alive.’

  ‘We’ll never know who sent them now,’ she said.

  ‘Not in any useful time frame’ he said. ‘It could have been anyone. Dammekos, your brother…’

  ‘Perturabo!’ she said, genuinely shocked. ‘You cannot say such things.’

  ‘Is it not the Olympian way to present the iron facade to hide the fractures within? Your own brother would use you to get at me. You know he would.’

  ‘You cannot prove that. That is a supposition too far, even for you. And father? How could you say that?’

  Perturabo looked away. ‘Who planned this is of little consequence. Do you see? The power games of the satraps and the tyrants must stop. True peace will come only when our world is united.’

  ‘Which you would secure through force and treachery.’

  He looked over the scattered bodies of the assassins. ‘Treachery your people have taught me well enough. It is only through war that war will end and peace will come.’

  ‘Oh my brother,’ she said. ‘I fear war will find you no matter where you go.’

  ‘They won’t surrender - you know that, Perturabo,’ said Miltiades.

  Perturabo’s lips parted and he breathed out with displeasure. His hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. ‘Use my title - Warlord of Lochos.’

  ‘Really? Come on,’ said Miltiades. ‘I’ve known you since I plucked you off that cliff.’

  The two of them stood high on a bluff overlooking the Kardikron Pass, the only way into the Vaulted City. Heavily defended by sue sets of walls each hundreds of metres high, the road made its unhurried way to the city gates of Kardis, seat of the Tyrant of Kardikora. They watched, surrounded by their staff, as Perturabo’s tanks growled their way towards the first wall. The heavy plates of Perturabo’s thick siege armour rasped as he looked down on his lieutenant.

  ‘Firstly, I remember that I climbed that cliff on my own,’ he said. ‘Secondly, you are a soldier in my army now, optio, and you will use my rank when you address me.’

  Miltiades worked his jaw and spat. He was getting old. His initial unease at being in Perturabo’s presence had worn away through exposure. He no longer feared him, and was of such an age he had no fear of death either.

  ‘You don’t have to climb every mountain by yourself, warlord! Miltiades said pointedly.

  ‘I can only rely on myself. Nothing else is certain in life but one’s own strength. If I relied on the strength of others, then how could others rely on my strength? I am the superior being. I must support you. So yes, I do have climb every mountain myself.’

  ‘Others made those things.’ Miltiades pointed at the tanks, black on the hard white glare of the sunlit road. ‘Others are the soldiers in your army. No peak stands alone, not even the tallest. All are parts of mountain chains, and so it is with men. It doesn’t matter how much of a genius you are, Perturabo, you can’t build every fortress with your own hands.’

  ‘I am like no other man,’ said Perturabo. He returned his attention to his tanks. They had almost reached the Guardian of Kardis, a giant drum tower bristling with guns which stood at one end of the first wall.

  The two men were silent for the moment.

  ‘Besides,’ Perturabo added, ‘I can think of three peaks that do stand alone on this continent.’

  Miltiades grinned. ‘Pedantry is a poor argument! My point is still valid. You will always have to rely on others. You cannot take Kardis on your own, if you can take it at all.’

  ‘I can take it, and I will,’ said Perturabo firmly.

  The tanks rumbled forwards, two abreast. Smoke puffed from the Guardian’s long-range batteries. A second later, the sound of their discharge reached Perturabo and Miltiades, a little noise like a cough that rose to a sighing rumble Plumes of earth heaved up from the road a few metres short of the tanks. The armoured vehicles continued forwards.

  ‘They’ve ranged their guns well,’ said Miltiades. ‘They’ve had plenty of practice to get it right. Can we claim the same? Your marvellous landships are going to take a battering.’

  ‘You do not allow for my understanding that fact and preparing for it.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Thicker armour. Better metal. More powerful engines. You’re going to be eating those words soon enough,’ said Perturabo. He narrowed his eyes. A tank was hit directly. It rolled onwards, trailing fire from its armoured surfaces. Perturabo gave a curt nod to his orderlies. A flag bearer stood to attention at the edge of the cliff and raised two pennants.

  A round exploded from the diff below them. ‘They’ve seen us,’ said Miltiades.

  ‘That doesn’t mean they can hit us,’ snarled Perturabo, annoyed now by the man’s constant gainsaying.

  The orderly waved his flags in a stiff pattern, the fabric snapping in the cool mountain breeze. A handful of moments later, the distant thunder of artillery echoed up at the pass. The air whistled with the passage of shells. They banged into the side of the Guardian, the walls of the great tower erupting with stone and fire. The tower guns continued their barrage of the approaching tanks.

  ‘I admit, they do move fast,’ said Miltiades, watching the tanks. ‘Better than steam. Why won’t you tell me what you are doing? You can’t break the tower with bombardment. I don’t care how powerful you’ve made the guns.’

  ‘Watch. Learn,’ replied Perturabo. ‘You will understand along with everyone else what you are dealing with soon enough.’

  Now the tanks wer
e in range, cannons on the wall joined fire with those of the tower. Men lining the parapet shot armour-killing rockets from crude shoulder launchers. These were made as counter to more primitive steam-driven vehicles, but they were fired in great numbers. One of the tanks exploded, finally giving in to the pounding the tower and walls were meting out to them. The tank following shunted its burning carcass aside in increments until it was leaned up against the steep slopes of the road. Several of them were wreathed in fire now but still operational. Another stopped dead, black smoke gouting from the round hole punched through its top armour.

  The tanks arrayed themselves around the low gate of the first wall and began to pound it at point-blank range with their hull-mounted cannons. Sectioned cannon barrels recoiled like telescopes slamming shut Exhaust gases vented from muzzle ports, fogging the valley.

  Perturabo watched impassively. Men were dying there, it was true, and more than the ritualised customs of war prevalent upon Olympia would ordinarily allow, but his plan would work. Shells rained onto the fat drum of the Guardian. They were landing close to his tanks, but he had sighted the pieces himself, and given detailed and strict instructions to his artillerists, the famed Stor-Bezashk of Lochos. For the moment, they were adhering to the letter of his commands, and every shell they flung slammed into the tower.

  Miltiades had at last fallen silent. Perturabo knew he was thinking about the thickness of the Guardian’s walls, and how well designed the massive steel gates of the pass fortifications were. He was probably close to voicing those thoughts. Perturabo really wished he wouldn’t. He wanted the old warrior to do more than watch; he wanted him to see his worth, to see how his plan would overcome their old ally and open the continent to the domination of Lochos. He did not want his opinions on failure.

  Perturabo admitted to himself that he wanted to impress Miltiades. He resolved to push such emotions away in future. They were distracting, and therefore dangerous.

  The tanks were obscured by a haze of dust, smoke and fire, but the hollow ringing of shells on the steel gate continued. Perturabo ran through his calculations again. The gate was almost a metre thick, and made in one piece in the mills of the Kontoros. It was lipped all the way around and on both sides by perfectly fitted stone. The wall masonry was carved and set in such a way that each part locked into the other, the pressure of the stone itself making a whole from many components.