Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia

by Guy Haley

  She kept her eyes locked with his as he throttled her. Even as her clawing hands became more desperate, and a dreadful clicking sounded in her throat, she stared into his soul. What he saw reflected in her eyes was not fear, nor loathing, but pity.

  With a last minor effort, he crushed her neck. Her eyes rolled back to show the whites and she judged him no more He stared at her in hatred a moment, wavering on the brink of tearing her body to pieces. But a sob escaped his mouth unexpectedly, and he gently lowered her back into her throne. Her head lolled on its broken neck. Warning chimes peeped insistently from the augmetics concealed in her skirts. A trickle of blood ran from her mouth.

  Appalled at what he had done, Perturabo turned away.

  Dancing flamelight drew him to the windows of the palace. Ancient, cloudy glass blocked his view, so he methodically punched it out. Muffled weapon’s fire became the hellish noise of a city’s sack.

  Lochos burned.

  Flames leapt from every roof. The bombardment had ceased, though Perturabo had not noticed when, and screams had taken the place of the racket of shells and rockets. Sound conveyed the story of Lochos’ death. He heard weeping, cries for pity, isolated gun fire. But it was the noises the buildings made as they died that affected him the most. Stone cracked in the heat, suddenly fracturing. Roof beams collapsed with noises like human sighs, sending dancing clouds of cinders skywards. Pantiles shattered with musical, earthy tones. The mix of burning wood and flesh lent the air an acrid savour.

  Through gaps in the palace’s curtain wall he saw brief vignettes of suffering. A band of blood-smeared citizens ran amok in the streets, their eyes white in the crimson covering their faces. His own warriors worked their war of extermination methodically. A line of civilians linked by chains, new slaves for his armies, were led past by a warsmith. There was a woman weeping on the pavement on the other side of the road, clutching a body in her arms. Fires blazed in the windows behind her, and she and the corpse were caked in pale brown ash. Tears made tracks down her cheeks as cleanly as carved lines. Perturabo could not hear her weeping over the din of pillage. A civilian daubed with a crude Iron Warriors skull advanced on her slowly, and he slashed off her head with his sword.

  This was all Perturabo could see of his actions’ consequences, a small gap in the fortifications he had surrounded himself with. He wondered if he would care more if the view were broader. The numbness inside him said not.

  Molten lead and gold ran in metallic rivers from the guttering of burning buildings. The fire leapt to devour more of his old home ripping through dry buildings. No fire tamers came to put it out. The third and fourth precincts were entirely ablaze and smoke rose already from the fifth and first. The second precinct spat sparks upwards, as if dragons prowled the narrow streets.

  Beyond Lochos, the sky was tainted with the fires of other realms. Columns of smoke marked the locations of sacked cities. Alongside the threads of white and brown, black columns rose from pyres where the bodies of millions were turning from flesh into ash. Lives gone not even their physical traces would remain, only handfuls of bone fragments and dust.

  Something broke in Perturabo then; a neglected but essential component of himself gave way.

  Not in his body, whose workings he understood well enough, but in that numinous part of his being some might call a soul. He experienced it as a physical sensation, as surely as if a tendon had broken in his leg. No physical collapse came from it, but a rush of emotion instead. There was pain there and bewilderment, but there was something else that he had never felt before. Or perhaps he had, but had bottled it up so well that he no longer recognised the feeling. It took a moment for him to find the word.

  He had thought he had felt shame after the rare defeats he had suffered or the times he had been confronted by other petty failures. But what he had thought of as shame he knew now as shallow, wounded pride that had served only to spur him on to anger. This was something else, something total. It overwhelmed him. The devastation he had made of his adopted home took on a terrible clarity, as if his senses, dulled by years of brutal siege warfare, had been sharpened anew so that he might appreciate what he had done.

  Blood. There was the smell of so much blood.

  ‘I have become Curze,’ he said hoarsely. ‘His excuse was insanity. What is mine? My temper?’

  He sagged against the window, his weight so great the blocks shifted under his grasp and the glass he had not yet broken cracked. He thought of what his brothers would think. He saw Calliphone was right, that he had stood aside and expected to be feted, becoming angry when he had not been. Falsely interpreting his brothers’ lack of praise for hatred of him, he had viciously set himself to proving himself worthy of their opprobrium.

  How he had succeeded.

  ‘The Emperor will never forgive us this,’ he whispered to himself. ‘The Emperor will never forgive us. The Emperor cannot forgive us. Ever.’ He repeated this over and over again, like he were a neophyte given the secret chants of the Legion for the first time Perturabo had found a new Unbreakable Litany.

  Forrix found him like that hours later, after nightfall. The first captain entered through the broken gates, a cohort of Dominators behind him.

  ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘the city is ours. As you commanded, those suitable for service as serfs have been taken. We are in the process of testing appropriate youths for induction into the Legion. Four-fifths of the population are enslaved or dead. The Twenty-Ninth Grand Battalion is in the process of constructing the warning pyre so—’

  ‘Stop,’ said Perturabo hoarsely. He turned a haunted face lit by the capering light of the city’s death upon his first captain. His cheeks glistened. ‘Enough.’

  Seeing the look upon his primarch’s face and the tears coursing down it, Forrix turned back to his Dominators. ‘Leave us. Now.’

  The Terminators dumped from the hall.

  ‘My lord,’ said Forrix, going to his primarch’s side. Encumbered by his cataphractii plate, he nevertheless forced himself to kneel.

  ‘Forrix, what have we done?’

  Forrix looked up into Perturabo’s face. He had never seen him look that way. Not once, in all his years at the Lord of Iron’s side, had he ever seen Perturabo express doubt.

  ‘I have done as you asked, my lord, without question, as you have ever expected.’

  Perturabo looked out of the window, disappointed. ‘That is not what I asked.’

  Forrix remained on his knees, but the primarch had nothing more to say to him. After five uncomfortable minutes, he stood. He muted his vox-grille and opened a channel to the Iron Blood.

  ‘Send a Thunderhawk to these coordinates immediately. We are done here. Olympia is ours again - may they never forget it. The primarch wishes to return to the fleet.’

  ‘See how it bums,’ whispered Perturabo. ‘This was not the action of an honourable man. I have slain my foster sister and destroyed my own world. I swore an oath to the Emperor that I would spread his message and bring the worlds of mankind back into the fold of Terra. By this action, I have defied his edicts and come close to breaking my oath, for what iteration of Imperial law allows this, when the issue might have been resolved through diplomacy? Their rebellion was my fault, and how did I react?’ His voice dropped further, and he gripped Forrix’s pauldron. It buckled under the primarch’s frightening strength. ‘I am lost, my son. What have I become?’

  Forrix did not know what to say. The same abyss that was consuming his master beckoned him. There were cracks in the Lord of Iron that no man other than Forrix, perhaps, might see. But they were apparent to the first captain, and they frightened him.

  Forrix stood indecisively a moment, then came to a rapid decision. He re-engaged his vox grille.

  ‘What is done is done, my lord, my primarch. We must leave - the others cannot see you like this.’ His voice became more forceful. ‘My lord, you asked the impossible of your warriors, and they have delivered you this world without complaint and in the m
anner you demanded. If they see you doubtful like this, it will shake them to the core.’

  ‘Tell me not all of them did as I bade unquestioningly,’ said Perturabo.

  Forrix hesitated. ‘There were a few rebellious elements, my lord.’ Perturabo smiled thinly, as if this were a good thing.

  The first captain continued. ‘They have been dealt with. Please, attend to my words. You must return to the fleet.’

  Perturabo blinked, coming back to his senses. ‘Yes. The Iron Blood,’ he said distractedly. ‘First, convey my orders. The reaving will stop immediately. Leave the survivors we have not taken. Let them rebuild.’

  ‘Some of the Legion will not be easily restrained.’

  ‘Stress that the order is mine, and that they will be slain if they do not obey,’ said Perturabo. ‘What is a little more blood, after all?’

  ‘As you command, my lord.’

  ‘Offer amnesty to those who will serve us as auxilia. There has been enough taking of freedom.’

  The howl of an approaching Thunderhawk grew to a thunderous din outside The ancient windows vibrated in the stone. Harsh white searchlights played over the shattered courtyard outside.

  ‘Come now.’ Forrix held his hand out. Perturabo grasped it gratefully, then released it.

  ‘You are the most faithful of all my sons,’ the primarch said. ‘The most faithful.’

  ‘Come now,’ repeated Forrix.

  Together they left the palace and boarded the craft. The Thunderhawk’s engines roared again, fading into the night. Darkness returned to the halls of Lochos, inhabited now only by dust and silence and the ruined bodies of a daughter, her father and a broken man’s dreams.

  SIXTEEN

  FATHER

  849.M30

  MOUNT TELEPHUS, OLYMPIA

  Once more, Perturabo climbed. His life up to that point faded into inconsequentiality. His works of art and science, his time at Lochos, the conquest of Olympia - they all seemed unimportant. They were activities undertaken to while away a long vigil until this sole matter of importance could be addressed.

  Finally, after years of waiting, his father had come.

  Perturabo climbed hand over hand, rapidly and without due care, ripping his skin on the razored rocks of Mount Telephus. Its pristine snows, untouched by human tread, gleamed above, but they could not outshine the figure that stood at the top of the cliff. Perturabo stared into his brilliance, weeping for the glory. His tears froze upon his skin, coating them in ice that cracked when his cheeks moved.

  ‘Father!’ he cried.

  The glowing figure said nothing, but awaited him silently below the peak of the mountain. Though his view should often have been obscured by the overhanging crags of the undimbable peak, Perturabo could see his father no matter where he was.

  He did not care how. He could see his father.

  He was certain that it was him, more certain than he had ever been of anything in his life. From the moment the lights came down from the sky two nights ago and settled upon Telephus, he was sure that his true maker had arrived. Others said the Black Judges had come for their tithe, or that the gods had returned to judge the world, but Perturabo knew with unshakable certainty who it was.

  Father.

  He had left the palace at Lochos the same day without provisions and taken an aircraft for Telephus. There was nowhere for the light flitter to land, so he had crashed it down at the base of the towering mountain and set out on foot. Through terraced fields, then sparse forest, onto the prickly meadows that grew beyond the treeline, and finally onto bare rock. Almost eight thousand metres, and he had not stopped.

  He looked upwards. The star maelstrom was gone.

  For the first time Perturabo was free of its scrutiny.

  He was not at peace not yet. His hearts thundered with nervous energy. His mind crowded itself with a hundred different possible outcomes of this meeting. Anxiety turned most of them bad. He feared he would not be recognised, or that he would be deemed unworthy, or that he would find his father cruel, or that he had been wrong and it was not his father after all. Positive possibilities dwindled under the weight of his paranoia, inherent to him but honed by years of life among the Olympians. He had lost count of how many plots he had foiled against his life. There was a chance this miracle was but the latest.

  His need to know sped him on. Infused with a frantic, almost destructive energy, he climbed at a speed that would have burst a mortal heart, passing far into air that would have starved the lungs of a normal human being. Telephus was so high that altitude sickness and a lack of oxygen afflicted even him, and he ascended in a state close to delirium, taunted by the mocking words of unseen beings.

  He reached a broad ledge. Behind him, all of Olympia spread out, the lesser mountains like sycophants crowded around the majesty of Mount Telephus. Sparing no look for the view, he ran across the loose rock of the ledge, imprinting it for the first time with human footprints. A cliff of ice reared up ahead. Without stopping he scrambled upwards, his clawed hands punching holes into the rock face when no handholds existed. The cold burned his flesh. His fingers became numb. Like tools of raw iron isolated from his body, he used them to haul himself upwards. His breath seared his lungs. His limbs trembled with lactic-acid build-up even his marvellous body could not purge.

  Coloured dots danced around his eyes. He reached upwards, throwing his weight after his hand by pushing hard with his feet. He had been climbing too fast and too dangerously, all so he might fulfill his need to see his father. This time his fingers found nothing to grab onto, and he overbalanced.

  With an incoherent shout, Perturabo fell backwards, finally defeated.

  But he did not fall. An armoured hand grabbed his wrist, and though it was a hand of standard human size - not gargantuan like his own - a great strength was hidden within it.

  Perturabo looked up, straight into the face of the shining figure, and he cried out in fear and wonder. His mind was laid bare. A presence as crushing as the collapse of a mountain bore down on him.

  The light faded. Perturabo was standing upon solid ice over nine thousand metres in the sky, where the air thinned to blackness and stars shone all day long.

  The man’s face, previously hidden by the light of his majesty, cleared. Features emerged from the radiance, until Perturabo saw his face and body clearly. A man, mighty and godlike in power, but a man for all that, stood before him. His smile was broad in a flawless face.

  +My son,+ he said. His lips remained in that sincere expression of pleasure, the like of which Perturabo had never seen on the calculating faces of the Olympians. No words passed his lips, but still he spoke. +I have found you.+

  ‘I…’

  Perturabo swayed. The pressure of his father’s mind was immense. The much-feared star maelstrom was nothing compared to this power. Perturabo’s deepest thoughts were dragged out into the light of his soul and read as easily as words on paper. He looked down at the man, then fell to his knees with all humility, a quality which, until that moment, he had not known in himself.

  ‘Father.’ Kneeling, Perturabo was still taller than the man, but he was left in no doubt that this strange visitor surpassed him in every way.

  ‘I am the Emperor of Terra and of all mankind,’ said the man, now speaking aloud. His voice was calm and full of the promise of great things. ‘You are Perturabo.’

  ‘I am, I am!’ said Perturabo. ‘You know me!’

  The Emperor laid a hand on his shoulder. Warriors in tall helms and golden armour were arrayed behind the Emperor. They watched him closely.

  ‘You are as dauntless as I intended you to be.’ The Emperor looked out over the world, as if he could see the smallest detail from their lofty vantage. ‘And you have achieved much.’ His smile broadened with delight. ‘I see a world at peace, filled with mighty castles and marvellous devices. We have much to talk of, and I can teach you a great deal. I sense the hunger in you for knowledge I think you and I have many nights of discussion a
head of us.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Perturabo. ‘Please!’ He was struck near dumb by wonder.

  ‘Will you offer me your allegiance? Will you join with me and pledge yourself to humanity’s service?’

  The warriors in gold tensed. Their weapons pointed at Perturabo.

  Ordinarily this insult would have sent him into a towering rage, but Perturabo’s arrogance, until then immutable as iron, melted and was swept away, and he answered meekly.

  ‘I want nothing more! I swear that I shall serve you faithfully for all time This I pledge.’

  The Emperor looked at him with an expression of infinite wisdom. Deep in his eyes, sorrow lurked. Perturabo wished more than anything to banish that sadness, if he could.

  ‘Then rise, my son.’

  The sadness was hidden away again, so that Perturabo doubted he had ever seen it, and was ashamed he could impute such an emotion to so perfect a being.

  ‘Your road will be hard, but few are worthy of it,’ said the Emperor. ‘I have many tasks for you, the indefatigable, the indomitable, the unrelenting. You shall be my Lord of Iron.’

  Perturabo cried out in unabashed joy. Finally, he felt acceptance without caveat. Love radiated from the Emperor for his found son. Perturabo basked in it. For the first time, he felt a sense of true belonging.

  ‘And may it forever be so,’ said Perturabo.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Pharos and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

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