Fulgrim

by Graham McNeill

  Fulgrim said, ‘You do our Legion proud, Eidolon, and all your warriors will be lauded for the part they played. The names of your dead will be engraved upon the walls of the processional way beyond the Phoenix Gate.’

  ‘You honour us, Lord Fulgrim,’ said Eidolon, once again taking his seat.

  Fulgrim nodded in agreement and said, ‘Lord Commander Eidolon’s courage in the face of adversity is an example to us all, and I urge you to pass on his words to your warriors. However, we are here to plan future glories, for a Legion must never rest on its laurels and live off past glories. We must always push onwards towards new challenges and new foes against which we may once again prove our superiority.

  ‘We find ourselves in a region of space where little is known, and we pierce the darkness with the light of the Emperor. There are worlds here that crave the illumination of Imperial Truth and it is our manifest destiny to provide it. We draw near to one such world, and I hereby designate it Twenty-Eight Four in honour of the conquest to come. We will talk more of what I expect from every one of you later, but for now, enjoy the victory wine!’

  With those words, the Phoenix Gate was flung open and an army of menials in simple chitons of pale cream entered the Heliopolis bearing amphorae of rich wine and heaped trays of exotic meats, fresh fruits, soft bread, sweetmeats and extravagant pastries.

  Tarvitz watched in amazement as the procession of exquisite food and wine was set out on trestles around the edge of the Heliopolis. It was traditional for the Emperor’s Children to toast a victory before it was won, such was the surety of their way of war, but such a lavish feast seemed an excessive display of hubris.

  He joined the other captains as they made their way over to the trestles and poured a goblet of wine, keeping his gaze averted from Eidolon for fear of revealing his misgivings at his retelling of the War on Murder. Lucius moved alongside him, a sly grin creasing his handsome features.

  ‘Trust the lord commander to put a spin on Murder, eh, Saul?’

  Tarvitz nodded and checked to make sure that no one could overhear his reply. ‘It was certainly an… interesting take on events.’

  ‘Ah, who cares anyway?’ said Lucius. ‘If there’s glory to be had, better it comes to us than the damned Luna Wolves.’

  ‘You’re just bitter after Loken beat you in the training cages.’

  Lucius’s face darkened and he snapped. ‘He did not beat me.’

  ‘Seems like I remember you flat on your back at the end of it,’ pointed out Tarvitz.

  ‘He cheated when he punched me,’ said Lucius. ‘It was supposed to be an honourable duel of swords, but the next time we cross blades I will have the best of him.’

  ‘Assuming he doesn’t learn any new tricks along the way.’

  ‘He won’t,’ sneered Lucius. Tarvitz was again struck by the sheer arrogance of the swordsman, feeling the balance of their friendship tipping further away from him. ‘After all, Loken’s a base born cur, just like the rest of the Luna Wolves.’

  ‘Even the Warmaster?’

  ‘Well, no, of course not,’ said Lucius hurriedly, ‘but the rest of them are little better than Russ’s barbarians, uncouth and without the poise and perfection of our Legion. If anything, Murder proved our superiority to the Luna Wolves.’

  ‘Our superiority?’ said a voice. Tarvitz turned to see Captain Solomon Demeter standing behind them.

  ‘Captain Demeter,’ said Tarvitz, bowing his head. ‘It is an honour to see you again. My congratulations on capturing the bridge of the Diasporex command ship.’

  Solomon smiled and leaned in close. ‘My thanks, but I’d keep such sentiments quiet if I were you. I don’t think Lord Fulgrim was too pleased the Second stole his thunder, but that’s by the by, I didn’t come over here to hear how wonderful I am.’

  ‘Then why did you?’ asked Lucius.

  Solomon ignored the insulting tone of Lucius’s question and said, ‘I was watching you, Captain Tarvitz, as Eidolon told the tale of Murder, and I get the feeling there might be more to it than we heard. I think I’d like to hear your version of what happened, if you take my meaning.’

  ‘Lord Eidolon described our campaign as he perceived it,’ said Tarvitz neutrally.

  ‘Come on, Saul, you don’t mind if I call you Saul do you?’ asked Solomon. ‘You can be honest with me.’

  ‘I’d be honoured,’ said Tarvitz honestly.

  ‘You and I both know Eidolon’s a blowhard,’ said Solomon, and Tarvitz was taken aback by his fellow captain’s bluntness.

  ‘Lord Commander Eidolon,’ said Lucius, ‘is your superior officer. You would do well to remember that.’

  ‘I know the chain of command,’ snapped Solomon, ‘and as ranking captain, I am your superior officer. You would do well to remember that.’

  Lucius nodded hurriedly as Solomon continued. ‘So what really happened on Murder?’

  ‘Exactly what Lord Commander Eidolon said happened,’ said Lucius.

  ‘Is that true, Captain Tarvitz?’ asked Solomon.

  ‘You dare call me a liar?’ demanded Lucius, his hand twitching towards his sword, a weapon forged in the Urals by the Terrawatt Clan during the Unification Wars.

  Solomon saw the gesture and turned to face Lucius, squaring his shoulders as though in expectation of a fight. Where Captain Demeter was taller than Lucius, broader in the beam and undoubtedly stronger, Lucius was the more slender of the pair and was certainly faster. Tarvitz briefly wondered who would prevail in such a conflict, but was thankful that such a thing would never be tested.

  ‘I remember the first time you came here, Lucius,’ said Solomon. ‘I thought you had the makings of a great officer and a fine warrior.’

  Lucius beamed at being so remembered until Solomon said, ‘But I see now that I was wrong. You’re nothing but a lickspittle and a sycophant who has failed to grasp the difference between perfection and superiority.’

  Tarvitz could see Lucius’s face turn purple with anger, but Solomon wasn’t done yet. ‘Our Legion strives for purity of purpose by modelling itself on the Emperor, beloved by all, but we should not strive to be like unto him, for he is singular and above all others. Its true our doctrines sometimes make us seem aloof and haughty to others, but there is no purity in pride. Never forget that, Lucius. Lesson over.’

  Lucius nodded curtly, and Tarvitz could see that it was taking all of his self-control not to let his temper get the better of him. The colour drained from his face and Lucius said, ‘Thank you for the lesson, captain. I only hope I can give you a similar lesson someday.’

  Solomon smiled as Lucius bowed curtly, and turned on his heel to join Eidolon.

  Tarvitz tried to hide a smile.

  ‘He won’t forget this, you know,’ he warned.

  ‘Good,’ said Solomon. ‘Perhaps he might learn from it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ said Tarvitz. ‘He’s not a fast learner.’

  ‘But you are, eh?’

  ‘I serve to the best of my abilities.’

  Solomon laughed. ‘You’re a tactful one, Saul, I’ll give you that. You know, I had you down as a career line officer when I first saw you, but now I think you may go on to do great things.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain Demeter.’

  ‘Solomon. And once this meeting is over, I think you and I should have a talk.’

  THE SURFACE OF Twenty-Eight Four was the most beautiful sight Solomon had ever seen. From orbit, the planet’s surface appeared peaceful; the land plentiful, the oceans a clear blue and the atmosphere flecked with spiral patterns of clouds. Atmospheric readings showed the planet had a breathable atmosphere, untouched by the pollution that choked so many Imperial worlds, turning them into nightmarish visions of an industrial hell, and electromagnetic surveyors reported no signs of intelligent life.

  Detailed surveys would need to wait for the planet’s official compliance, but aside from what looked like the ruins of a long vanished civilisation, the planet appeared to be completely
deserted.

  In short, it was perfect.

  Four Stormbirds had touched down high on the rocky cliffs at the mouth of a wide valley. A majestic range of mountains towered above them, their soaring peaks capped with snow despite the temperate climate. As the gritty dust of their landing dispersed, Fulgrim had led his warriors onto the surface of the next world to be brought into the fold of the Imperium.

  Solomon stepped down from his Stormbird and looked around this new world with great hope as Julius and Marius disembarked from their aircraft. Lord Fulgrim marched alongside Julius, and Saul Tarvitz followed behind Marius. Astartes spread out to secure the perimeter of the position, but Solomon already knew that such measures weren’t necessary. There was no enemy to fight here, no threat to overcome. This world was as good as theirs already.

  As soon as his auto-senses confirmed that the atmosphere was breathable, he removed his helmet and took a deep breath, closing his eyes at the simple pleasure of breathing air that hadn’t been through a multitude of filters and air scrubbers.

  ‘You should keep your helmet on,’ said Marius. ‘We don’t know for certain that the air is breathable.’

  ‘According to my armour’s sensors it’s fine.’

  ‘The Lord Fulgrim hasn’t taken his helmet off yet.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you should wait until he does.’

  ‘I don’t need Lord Fulgrim to tell me the air’s breathable, Marius,’ said Solomon, ‘and since when did you become such a worrier?’

  Marius did not reply, but turned away as the rest of the warriors disembarked from the growling Stormbirds. Solomon shook his head and tucked his helmet into the crook of his arm, as he strode over the rocks to stand at the edge of the cliffs that overlooked the land far below.

  Beyond the mountains, the landscape swept out before him in a vast swathe of green. Thick forests blanketed the lower slopes of the mountains, and a startlingly blue river flowed lazily along the bottom of the valley towards a far distant coast. Across the valley, he could see one of the tall ruins the orbital cartographer had indicated rising from a cluster of overgrown ferns. From here, it looked like one half of a great archway, but there was no sign of the structure it had once been part of.

  From his vantage point, Solomon could see for hundreds of kilometres, the glitter of far-away lakes rippling on the horizon and wild beasts grazing on the plains far below. The wondrously fertile land of Twenty-Eight Four undulated into the mist shrouded distance and birds circled in the clear sky above.

  How long had it been since they had seen a world as unspoiled as this?

  Like many of the Emperor’s Children, Solomon had grown to manhood on Chemos, a world that knew neither day nor night, thanks to a nebular dust cloud that isolated the planet from its distant suns. A perpetual grey twilight through which the stars never shone was all he had known, and his heart leapt to see such a beautiful, cloudless sky.

  It was a shame that the coming of the Imperium would forever change this world, but such change was inevitable, for it was a matter of record that it had been claimed by the 28th Expedition in the name of the Emperor. Within days, Mechanicum pioneer teams and prospecting rigs would descend to the surface to begin the colonisation process, and exploitation of its natural resources. Solomon knew he was just a simple warrior, but as he looked into the eye of the world, he dearly wished there was some way for mankind to avoid such wanton destruction of the landscape.

  With the light of science and reason they brought with them, could the Mechanicum not find some way to harness the resources of a planet without bringing the inevitable fallout of such industry: pollution, overcrowding and the rape of a world’s beauty?

  Such concerns were beyond Solomon and made no difference to him, for if this planet was as deserted as it appeared then they would move on soon, leaving a garrison of Lord Commander Fayle’s Archite Palatines to protect the soon to be developed world of the Imperium.

  ‘Solomon,’ shouted Julius from the side of the Stormbirds.

  He turned away from the stunning vista and made his way back to the assault craft.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Get your men ready,’ said Julius. ‘We’re going down to take a look at that ruin.’

  THE INTERIOR OF La Fenice had changed markedly over the last two months, reflected Ostian as he nursed another glass of cheap wine. Where once the place had possessed a faded bohemian chic, it now resembled some monstrously overblown theatre from a more decadent age. Gold leaf covered the walls and every sculptor on board had been commissioned to produce dozens of pieces for the multitude of newly erected plinths… almost every sculptor.

  Artists painted frenziedly, colouring mighty frescoes on the walls and ceiling, and an army of seamstresses worked on the creation of a mighty embroidered theatre curtain. A vast space above the stage had been left for a great work that Serena d’Angelus was supposedly working on, but Ostian had seen nothing of his friend for weeks to verify this fact.

  The last time he had seen Serena had been over a month ago and she had looked terrible, a far cry from the fastidious woman he had, if he was honest, begun to fall a little in love with. They had exchanged only a few words of greeting, before Serena had hurriedly and clumsily excused herself.

  ‘I have to go and see her,’ he said to himself, as though the act of saying the words aloud would make their realisation more likely.

  A troupe of dancers and singers cavorted on the stage to a cacophonous racket that Ostian hoped wasn’t supposed to be music. Coraline Aseneca, the beautiful remembrancer and actress who had denied him the chance to visit the surface of Laeran, stood centre stage. The true architect of that misfortune strutted like a martinet before the stage, screaming and yelling at the dancers and choral singers. Bequa Kynska’s blue hair waved around her head like alien seaweed, and her dress flailed as she raged at the incompetence of those around her.

  To Ostian’s eye, the effect of what was being done to La Fenice was grotesque, the excess of the design rendering the overall aesthetic into a confused jumble of sensations. At least the bar area was still intact, the crazed interior designers not yet having the courage to try and shift several hundred surly remembrancers from their perches for fear of inciting a full scale riot.

  A great many of those remembrancers gathered around the huge figure of an Astartes named Lucius. The pale-faced warrior regaled his audience with tales of a planet he called Murder, telling improbable tales of the Warmaster and Sanguinius, and of his own mighty deeds. Ostian thought it rather wretched that a mighty warrior such as an Astartes should seek so obviously to impress the likes of those that filled La Fenice, but he kept such thoughts to himself.

  In the past, La Fenice had served as a place of relaxation, but the constant hammering, blaring ‘music’ and caterwauling from the stage had transformed it into a place where people simply came to complain and curse the fates that had seen them excluded from the process of its renovation.

  ‘You notice it’s all the folks that went down to Laeran that got to work on this place?’ said a voice at his elbow. The speaker was a bad poet by the name of Leopold Cadmus. Ostian had spoken to him on a few occasions, but he had, thankfully, managed to avoid reading any of his poetry.

  ‘I had, yes,’ said Ostian as a shouting team of labourers tried to guide a lifter servitor in the placement of a libidinous statue of a naked cherub.

  ‘Bloody disgrace is what it is,’ said Leopold.

  ‘That it is,’ agreed Ostian, though he wondered what part someone like Leopold had expected to play in the work going on.

  ‘I’d have thought someone like you would have been a definite to do something,’ said Leopold, and Ostian couldn’t miss the jealous edge to his statement.

  He shook his head and said, ‘I’d have thought so too, but looking at what they’re doing to the place, I think I’m well out of it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ slurred Leopold and Ostian realised the man was drunk.

>   ‘Well I mean, look at it,’ he said, pointing towards the paintings along the nearest wall. ‘The colours look as though a blind man has chosen them, and as for their subject matter, well, I’d expect some nudes in a theatre, but most of these are virtually pornographic.’

  ‘I know,’ smiled Leopold. ‘It’s wonderful isn’t it?’

  Ostian ignored the remark and said, ‘Listen to that bloody music. I loved Bequa Kynska’s work when I first heard it, but this is like a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws. As for the sculptures, I don’t know where to start? They’re crude, obscene and there’s not one of them I’d consider finished.’

  ‘Well, you are the expert,’ said Leopold.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ostian, shivering as he remembered hearing that same sentiment recently.

  It had been an ordinary day, the high-pitched tapping of his hammer and chisel filling the studio as he sought to render his vision into the stone. The statue was slowly coming to life, the armoured body of the warrior taking shape within the marble as Ostian had chipped away all that wasn’t part of the form he had seen in his mind. His silver hands roamed the marble, the metriculators within his fingertips reading the stone to unlock the secret fault lines and stress points hidden within its mass.

  Each stroke of the hammer was finely judged, delivered with an instinctive feel for the shape he was creating and a love and respect for the marble he worked with. From a slow beginning, where anger had been motivating his hammer blows, a new calmness and respect for his vision had softened his attacks on the marble, and he found the serenity that came with the satisfaction of seeing something beautiful emerge.

  As he stepped back from the marble, he became aware of a presence within his chaotic studio. He turned to see a giant warrior in purple and gold plate armour, carrying a great, golden-bladed halberd. His armour was ornate, much more so than was common for an Astartes. The warrior’s helm was winged and the frontal visor had been fashioned to resemble the countenance of a great bird of prey.