Wrath of Iron

by Chris Wraight

  Nethata tried to shake such thoughts from his mind. He turned his attention back to the auspex readings. Even from the limited data he had, he could see that the remainder of the loyalist armour was destined for Heriat’s fate. Dozens of filtration towers had been taken down. Large sections of the hive walls had been demolished, setting off chain reactions within the spire that broke the atmospheric seals. Still, though, the defending gun positions were intact, and their rain of fire had barely lessened.

  They had done all they could. Nethata considered whether to issue the order for withdrawal, wondering whether his troops would still take his commands. With their final task achieved, he still entertained the possibility of escape, of getting back to the fleet and away from Shardenus before the vengeful clan could catch up with him.

  Even as he weighed his options, three new readings appeared on the extreme edge of his auspex range. One of the signals was very strange, like nothing he’d ever seen before. The other two were more familiar – Warlord Titans, heading towards the Capitolis at speed.

  ‘Lopi,’ he breathed, gauging the distance and trying to work out how long it would take them to reach the Capitolis. ‘At last. What has kept him?’

  ‘Did you say something, lord?’ asked the tank commander, turning round in his seat.

  Nethata put the auspex down and looked at him. The game wasn’t over yet; not quite.

  ‘We’re going back, commander,’ he said. ‘Full reverse, and then follow the coordinates I give you.’

  For a moment, the commander resisted. Just as before, he was unwilling to leave the fight.

  ‘I must protest,’ he said. ‘We are fully engaged.’

  Nethata ran a finger along the edge of the bolt pistol he’d been given by Heriat. It was a commissar’s weapon, a weapon designed to enforce discipline. He didn’t plan on using it, but it was nice to know he had it, just in case.

  ‘Protest all you want,’ said Nethata calmly. ‘Then follow my orders. I don’t care who drives this thing, but one way or the other I will rendezvous with those machines.’

  Telach fought for breath. Rauth had driven the daemon back, grappling with it in a brutal melee and pursuing it across the plateau. Telach had been left behind, broken in the wreckage. His cracked helm fed him a whole series of damage markers, though he could barely see them through the screen of blood in his one working eye. The pain where his arm had been severed was ferocious, even though more bionics had been ripped away than actual flesh.

  Amid all of that, though, Telach’s overriding emotion was dread – not for himself, but for the portal he had been unable to close. ‘More Iron Hands were emerging from the spire below, but Telach knew they would be able to do nothing against such an arcane threat. He dragged himself away from where his brother warriors charged into battle against the daemon-creature, hauling his broken body one-handed across the knife-sharp detritus of the plateau. All around him the elements whined, tearing at his broken armour and clogging the rents with hot ash.

  Despite the blood clotting over his eye, he could see it well enough. The witchfire at its rim was now raging like the world’s fire, red and angry. In the centre of the circle, the air itself was pulled back and forth, flexing like an amniotic sac. The creatures on the far side were obvious now, at least to one with his perception of the immaterium. Even as Telach watched, a clawed hand shot through the barrier, breaking into the universe of the senses in a cascade of multi-hued light.

  No time remained. His staff was broken. Summoning the rituals of banishment was beyond him. All he had was himself – his own soul, pregnant with psychic power even as his body collapsed into oblivion.

  He had always been prepared to make such a sacrifice. The likelihood of it coming down to such extremity had always been high.

  Telach crawled on, feeling the tangle of metal and rubble beneath him rake at his exposed body. Shattered fragments of his breastplate ripped away, torn from the carapace beneath and dragged from their connector nodes. A mix of organic muscle and bionic components fizzed and ripped, mixing blood and lubricant freely.

  The portal flexed further. Another inhuman arm reached through, gripping the rim and pulling it taut. The sound of hissing laughter broke across the barrier, growing in volume.

  Telach kept going. He was dimly aware of a rising crescendo of bolter fire. Some of it crashed into the portal itself, aimed by those who had no real conception of what they were shooting at. They couldn’t hurt it by mechanical means – if the thing had been susceptible to such damage then it would have been destroyed when the atomic had gone off.

  Only one power had the capacity to destroy the rift – the human mind, born out of a mortal cranium, locked in a skull of bone and steeped in psychic power. That, at least, was one organ the Iron Fathers had never tried to replace.

  Telach hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the sharp waves of agony that radiated through him. He tottered towards the portal, fighting to keep conscious, to keep one leg moving in front of the other. As he went, he began the process of unbinding.

  It was hard to do. Every discipline of a Librarian’s training focused on retaining control, of keeping the vast psychic potential within him under severe censure. Failure to do so resulted in the release of pure warp energy into the universe, creating vortices of unpredictability that threatened to destroy everything around their centre.

  He limped closer, feeling the last shreds of physical control leave him. His secondary heart gave out with a hot, agonising burst. His consciousness frayed at the edges, making it seem like he was stumbling down a long tunnel of blurring, overlapping images. He felt a storm of psychic power bursting out from his inner core, roaring up from the depths of his mind and crashing through the barriers he’d spent a lifetime erecting.

  The daemons on the far side of the rift saw him coming, and knew what he was doing. They clawed ever more frantically, trying to prise the last elements of the portal open, screaming obscenities and sending images of eternal torment directly into his reeling mind.

  By then Telach had reached the edge of the rift, and his mind had almost ceased to function. He was deaf to the physical world and immune to its sensations. He burned from within with a furious white fire, one that bled from his soul in a torrent of destruction even as it sucked at the burning rim of the rift.

  He was losing himself, dissolving into a rage of psychic essence, his very being dissipating into a flood of burning, consuming aether.

  Telach’s last act was to throw himself forwards, plunging into the swirling vortex of energies in an almighty blaze of full-spectrum light. He heard a massive explosion as if from far away, booming like the crash of surf on a distant shore. He felt the portal buckle and rupture around him, spinning apart as the energies of his dissolution reacted with it. He felt his own body ripped apart as the laws of the universe violently reasserted themselves.

  Then he heard a vast sound, roaring like thunder, before it died away. A sensation of falling overtook him.

  He passed through, rolling into nothingness.

  It went dark, and everything stopped.

  Then there was something like light, and something like time.

  In his last moments, Telach knew he had destroyed it. He knew that because the world of Shardenus had gone. The entire universe had gone. In its place was a shifting, swaying abyss of infinite possibility. He didn’t see it – he had no eyes left to see anything – but it persisted before him. He had awareness still, a measure of sentience, but nothing else.

  For a moment, it was staggeringly beautiful. He drifted amid its primordial majesty like a pearl tumbling across the face of the ocean.

  Then they came for him, howling out of the depths. He had frustrated them, and he was adrift in their realm.

  In its last seconds of existence, the soul that had been Telach knew what fate awaited it. It was exposed. It would be consumed, and its agonie
s would be as infinite as the pleasures of those that feasted upon it.

  But just then, for a fragment of what passed for time in that place, before the neverborn swam up out of the seething face of eternity to feed, it basked in the fading knowledge of what it had done.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Rauth swung his sword wildly, making no attempt to lend finesse to his blows. He launched his blade around him in huge, vicious arcs, leaving long trails of disruptor energy hanging in the air behind. With each blow, he took another step forwards. Stride by stride, he bludgeoned the daemon back.

  The creature staggered away from him, barely meeting each incoming thrust. Rauth hacked and parried with abandon, moving with terrible speed. His armour had taken a ferocious battering during the ascent and plates hung from their mountings like discarded trophies. The ceramite across his left leg had been ripped away, exposing linked steel pistons in place of flesh and bone. His storm bolter had long since been discarded, and now he fought like a warrior of ancient legend, sword in hand and with an aura of righteous fury blazing from his blade.

  As he pressed forwards, the familiar thunder of bolter fire broke out from behind him. Those of the claves who had survived the horrors of the interior were breaking out onto the plateau, loosing what ammunition they had at the retreating form of the daemon. They fired in constant torrents, each bolt slamming into the retreating creature and bursting through the lilac skin.

  If it had been intact and in the full glow of its unnatural strength such impacts would not have troubled it, but it had been mauled by the attacks of the four Librarians. The power holding its sinews together was unravelling fast, and every swipe of Rauth’s blade, every detonation from a reactive shell, dragged it closer to physical oblivion.

  It raged back, slashing at Rauth with its claws, lashing out with an equally ragged loss of control. Rauth grimaced as his right shoulder guard was shattered. His movements became even faster, propelled by hundreds of subcutaneous motors working in concert.

  Rauth whirled his blade round, building up momentum for a final, heart-bursting lunge. As he swung the blade into position, a massive explosion burst out from behind him. Jets of crimson fire shot across the sky, streaking far out above the wasteland below. The air seemed to shudder, as if the elements themselves had been ripped out of alignment before snapping back into place. The entire pinnacle rocked, and more crevasses opened across its jagged surface.

  Rauth was thrown onto his face, hitting the ground hard. He heard crashes and cracks as others of his contingent were similarly floored. A violent gale screamed across his body, tearing at the extremities of his damaged plate. Huge chunks of broken masonry and cracked metal were flung over the edge of the ruined spire-top, catching fire as they tumbled through the engine-hot atmosphere and disintegrating into rains of flaming dust.

  He knew then that Telach had destroyed the rift. In its absence, the winds of Shardenus howled and raced.

  Rauth rolled over heavily, powered by his damaged armour, knowing the danger. The portal was gone, but the daemon remained. He looked up – and stared right into its face.

  The creature hung low over him. It had been wounded badly by the sudden withdrawal of its ethereal support. Its patchwork face ran with dark blood. Under the skin was a whirl of latticed light, throbbing and pulsing like electrical currents in a cogitator housing. The wind tore at it, lifting up the edges of its broken skin. Its eyes were filmy and its jaw hung slack.

  It staggered, almost losing its footing. One of its arms was limp, riddled with bolter wounds and bleeding torrents of virulent blood. Huge chunks of flesh, steaming with heat and plasma, had been gouged from its bloated torso and lay on the ground, slopping in pools of bubbling fluids.

  As Rauth lay prone beneath it, the daemon drew its lone claw back, keeping the tips of its blades pointed at the Iron Hand’s torso.

  It was coming apart. Soon it would be hurled back from the mortal plane and into temporary oblivion, but it clung on, persisting in the world even as its physical shell collapsed around it.

  ‘I would have made this world a paradise,’ it said, its voice choked with blood and saliva.

  Rauth struggled to move, but the daemon kept him pinned.

  ‘You have ensured it remains a hell. Perhaps you are proud of that.’

  The creature’s face twisted into disgust. It looked repelled, not just by Rauth, but by everything, by the whole edifice of ruin around it, by what the galaxy, what its place within it, had become.

  ‘We are both sick, son of Ferrus,’ it said, ‘but only I know it.’

  Then it plunged its claw down, fast as a bolt-discharge. It ploughed through Rauth’s breastplate, breaking open the ceramite and driving through it. The metal talons travelled straight through Rauth’s chest and out the other side, cutting and tearing as they went.

  Rauth’s back arched. The daemon grinned savagely, and twisted the blades.

  ‘Enjoy this,’ it said. ‘Feel your hearts burst.’

  Then Rauth’s own blade shot up, plunging deep into the daemon’s flickering, weeping neck. The power field over the sword detonated in a lashing corona of energy. The daemon screamed, and tried to withdraw.

  Rauth wouldn’t let it. He surged to his feet, keeping his sword extended, pushing it deeper into the creature’s unholy flesh. The daemon’s claws broke off as it wrenched away, torn free of the gauntlets and remaining lodged in Rauth’s chest. The Iron Hand fought on regardless, ignoring the metal protruding from his torso and working his own weapon again with heavy, crushing strokes.

  The daemon lost its footing, crashing down hard against the serrated plateau. Rauth pursued it mercilessly, hacking at its flailing limbs, carving into the juddering flesh and smashing apart the remnants of its ancient armour.

  Finally, he stood over its heaving chest, gazing down at the obscene scrawls on its crushed battle-plate. The daemon-creature looked up at him, surprise and hatred written across its otherworldly face.

  Rauth gripped his power sword in two hands, feeling its power thrum along the metal edge.

  ‘You forget who you’re fighting, son of Fulgrim,’ he said, drawing the weapon high. Despite himself, despite all that had happened, a crooked grin spread across what remained of his face. ‘It’s a long time since I had hearts.’

  Then he plunged the blade down, severing the daemon’s head from its neck in a single, terrible blow. Its animating spirit was banished, expiring with a sharp, acrid snap that spun out from where the blow fell. Its grotesque body, hacked and impacted by a thousand blows, slumped into stillness. Blood still ran from the gashes across its frame, bubbling softly as it sank into the charred metal beneath.

  Rauth looked down at the carcass. He could hear the sounds of his warriors making their way over to his side. He ignored them.

  The daemon’s face was shrinking away, dissolving like flesh in acid. The sutures came loose, freeing up flaps of skin and exposing firmer, older flesh beneath. For a moment, before the last of the gaudy, rouged-streaked embellishments fluttered away, something like elegance was revealed – a taut, aristocratic visage, cruel and intelligent.

  There were some in the Imperium who might have recognised that face. Some lords of the Ordo Malleus might have identified the features of one who had been First Captain of the III Legion, who had fought alongside gods in the age of wonder when the Imperium was forged, who had strode across the bloodied plains of Laeran, of Isstvan, of Terra, and who, after the ruin of a traitor’s hopes, had been slowly changed by the wearing horror of the Eye. They might have known what hopes had once been placed in him, how admired and feared he had been, and just how far into madness he had fallen at the end.

  Rauth knew none of that. He watched his enemy disintegrate, taking neither pleasure nor pity from the spectacle. The creature’s words lingered in his mind, troubling him for some reason that he found hard to pin down.


  We are both sick, son of Ferrus, but only I know it.

  Then the face was gone, collapsed into blood and muscle as its animating spirit dissipated.

  Dozeph Imanol drew alongside him. The sergeant of Clave Prime had taken a massive wound to the head on the charge up through the centre of the spire, shearing his helm casing away and revealing a bloodied skull beneath. On his return to Medusa, no doubt the entire cranium would be replaced by metal.

  ‘Did you discover its name?’ he asked.

  Rauth shook his head.

  ‘What does it matter?’ he asked.

  He limped away from the corpse. As he went, he pulled the creature’s claws from his chest, dislodging a host of flickering, crackling bionic parts as he did so. The loss of them was not entirely trivial – his helm display was blank, and he’d lost filtration through his vox-guard – but he could live without them for the time being. His three mechanical heart-analogues, each one placed in a different location within his armour and protected by multiple layers of adamantium binding, still beat firmly.

  He looked around him, waiting for his breathing to return to a more sustainable level. Telach was gone. A lone Codicier had survived but looked to have sustained heavy injuries. Less than thirty warriors of Raukaan had made it to the summit, and all of them had been similarly ravaged by the ascent through the spire. They stood silently, waiting for their next set of orders.

  None of them said a word. There were no cries of victory or defiance.

  Rauth limped over to the edge of the plateau. Far below him he could see the remnants of Nethata’s tank columns slowly withdrawing across the wasteland, still suffering under fire from the Capitolis walls. Clearly traitor forces still remained within the hive, and the fighting was not yet over. Of the daemons, however, there was no sign.

  ‘What are your orders, lord?’ asked Imanol, his voice crackling with distortion.

  Rauth looked back over to where the rift had been. Its guardians were destroyed. Those mutants that remained would be hunted down, chamber by chamber, before the entire Capitolis was purged with flame.