Ferrus was dead to him and would rather die than join the new galactic order of the Warmaster. He had hoped it would not come to this, but he knew that there was no other way this drama could end.
Ferrus lay insensible, his hands glowing with the wrath of the Fireblade's unmaking. His brother moaned in pain at the destruction he had wrought, and Fulgrim pushed himself to his feet as his brother groaned at the horror of what had transpired within his sanctum.
Fulgrim leaned down and took up his brother's warhammer, a weapon he had poured his heart and soul into, a weapon that had been forged for his own hand in a time that seemed as though it belonged to another age.
The weapon felt good, and he hefted it easily over one shoulder as he stood triumphantly over his brother's recumbent body. Ferrus propped himself up on his elbows and looked up through blood gummed eyes. 'You had best kill me, for I'll see you dead if you do not.'
Fulgrim nodded and raised Forgebreaker over his head, ready to deliver the deathblow.
The mighty warhammer trembled in his grip, though Fulgrim knew that it was not its weight that made it do so, but the realisation of what he was about to do. The darkness of his eyes met with the blazing silver of his brother's, and he felt his resolve waver in the face of the murder he was about to commit.
He lowered the hammer and said, 'You are my brother, Ferrus, I would have walked unto death with you. Why could you not have done the same for me?'
'You are not my brother,' spat Ferrus through the blood of his ruined face.
Fulgrim swallowed hard as he sought to summon the strength to do what he knew must be done. He heard a dim voice, a faraway whisper that screamed at him to crush the life from Ferrus Manus, but its entreaties were drowned by the memories of the great friendship he had once shared with his brother, for what could compete with such a bond?
'I will always be your brother,' said Fulgrim, and swung the hammer in an upward arc that connected thunderously with Ferrus's jaw. Ferrus's head snapped back and he collapsed to the floor of the Iron Forge, rendered unconscious by a blow that would have sent a mortal man's head spinning through the air for hundreds of metres.
The voice in his head screamed distantly for him to finish the killing, but Fulgrim ignored it and turned away from his brother. He kept hold of the hammer and made his way to the gates that led back into the Anvilarium.
Behind him, Ferrus Manus lay broken, but alive.
The great gates to the Iron Forge swung open and Julius saw Fulgrim emerge bearing the mighty warhammer, Forgebreaker. Gabriel Santar also saw the weapon Fulgrim bore, but was not quick enough to realise its import until Julius turned and shouted, 'Phoenician!'
Instantaneously, the warriors of the Phoenix Guard swung the crackling blades of their golden halberds and beheaded the Morlocks they stood next to with chillingly perfect symmetry. Ten heads clattered to the floor, and Julius smiled as Gabriel Santar and the astropath spun in horrified confusion. The Phoenix Guard closed the noose on the centre of the Anvilarium with measured strides, their bloodied blades extended before them like those of executioners.
'In the name of the Avernii, what are you doing?' cried Santar as the gates of the Iron Forge closed behind Fulgrim with a hollow boom. Julius could see that the First Captain of the Iron Hands was itching to draw his weapon, but did not do so in the certain knowledge that his death would follow as soon as he reached for it.
'Where is Ferrus Manus?' demanded Santar, but Fulgrim silenced him with a shake of his head and a sly smile of pity.
'He is alive, Gabriel,' said Fulgrim, and Julius hid his surprise at this news. 'He would not listen to reason and now you will all suffer. Julius…'
Julius smiled and turned to Gabriel Santar, lightning sheathed claws sliding from the gauntlets of his Terminator armour. Even as Santar saw what must inevitably happen next, it was too late as Julius hammered the crackling blades into his chest and tore them downwards. The energised claws tore through Santar's armour, ripping through his chest cavity and exiting in a gory spray of blood at his pelvis.
The First Captain of the Iron Hands collapsed, his lifeblood flooding from his ruined body, and Julius savoured the delicious aroma of electrically burnt flesh.
Fulgrim nodded appreciatively and opened a channel to the Pride of the Emperor.
'Marius,' he said, 'we will be making our way to the Firebird, and could use something to keep the 52nd Expedition's ships busy. You may open fire.'
TWENTY
A Difficult Voyage
Isstvan III
Perfect Failure
Dark currents and swirling colours, unknowable beyond the gates of the empyrean, flowed around the Pride of the Emperor and her small complement of escorts as they forged a passage through the warp. Fulgrim's flagship bore fresh scars of war, but for all that her hull was imperfect, her magnificence was undimmed. The guns of the Iron Hands warships had left their marks upon her once pristine hull, but the shots had been fired in spite and futile defiance, for the broadsides fired by Fulgrim's warships had caught the Iron Hands completely by surprise.
The battle had been short and one-sided, and though the vessels accompanying the Pride of the Emperor were few in number they had inflicted crippling punishment on those of their former allies, and disrupted their ability to respond in any meaningful way.
Much to Marius Vairosean's disappointment, Fulgrim had called a halt to the attack before the destruction of the Fist of Iron was complete. Leaving the crippled X Legion's fleet becalmed, the ships of the Emperor's Children had disengaged and made the translation into the immaterium to rendezvous with the forces of the Warmaster once more.
Initially, things had gone as smoothly as could be hoped for, but barely a week into the journey to Isst-van III, storms of fearsome power erupted in the warp, tsunamis of unreality that crashed around the vessels of the 28th Expedition and smashed one to destruction before the few surviving Navigators had managed to fight their way through the storms and guide the ships to relative safety.
Moments prior to the first maelstrom of force, terrifying shrieks of agony and terror had echoed the length and breadth of the Pride of the Emperor's astropathic choir chambers. Alarums had sounded, and one entire chancel was blown clear of the vessel by the force of the psychic forces unleashed, forks of purple lightning dancing across the hull before null-shields and integrity fields had contained the breach. Hundreds of telepaths were dead, and those wretched ruins of flesh that survived were reduced to babbling, moronic psychotics. Before their elimination, those that retained some form of communication spoke of terrifying, galaxy changing forces unleashed, a world devoured by a monstrous, creeping death, fires that reached to the heavens, and the ending of billions of lives at a single stroke.
Only Fulgrim and his coterie of most trusted warriors understood the truth behind these forces, and the feasting and carousing that greeted the news plumbed new depths of insanity. The Emperor's Children revelled in the Warmaster's strength of purpose with the abandon that was now commonplace in the Legion.
As the revelries of the Astartes continued, the preparations for Bequa Kynska's Maraviglia reached new heights of wonder and decadence, with each rehearsal discovering new and undreamt of raptures to include. Coraline Aseneca trod the boards nightly as she trained her voice to replicate the sounds recorded in the Laer temple, and Bequa's symphony soared passionately as she sought to encapsulate its power in musical form. As part of her quest, she developed new and outlandish musical devices, their melodies as yet unheard and unknown. Such was their scale and form that they more resembled weapons than instruments, monstrously oversized horns like missile tubes and stringed mechanisms with long necks like rifles.
La Venice became a magical place of music and art, with the remembrancers working on the decor and embellishments of the theatre, excelling themselves as they strove to create a venue worthy of staging the Maraviglia.
Fulgrim spent a great deal of time in La Venice, offering his insights to the art
ists and sculptors, and every suggestion was followed by frantic bouts of creativity as they were immediately implemented.
Fragmentary scraps of information trickled in from Isstvan III, and it was eventually discerned that the Warmaster's first strike against those whose loyalty remained with the Emperor had failed to wipe them out completely. Instead of viewing this as a setback, it appeared that the Warmaster had taken it as an opportunity to blood his loyal warriors and complete what had begun with the war against the Brotherhood of the Auretian Technocracy.
Warriors from the World Eaters, Death Guard and Sons of Horus were at war in the fire wracked ruins of a murdered world, hunting down and destroying the deluded fools who believed they could oppose the Warmaster's will.
Even now, declared Fulgrim, Chaplain Charmosian and Lord Commander Eidolon would be earning the Warmaster's plaudits as they displayed the battle perfection of their beloved Legion. When the killing on Isstvan III was done, the chaff would have been cut from Horus's force, and they would be a sharpened blade aimed at the heart of the corrupt Imperium.
But the reunion of Fulgrim and Horus was to be delayed it seemed.
With the death of the majority of the astropaths, communication with the 63rd Expedition was problematic to say the least, with the shattered sanity of those left alive making the precise exchange of information between the two fleets virtually impossible. The Navigators could not discern a course through the warp not wracked with heaving currents and battering storms, and declared that it would take at least two months to reach Isstvan III.
Fulgrim chafed at such delays, but even a being as mighty as a primarch was powerless to quiet the tempests of the immaterium. In the enforced wait, he studied more of the writings of Cornelius Blayke, coming upon a passage that lodged like a splinter of ice in his heart.
He tore the page from the book and burned it, but its words returned to haunt him as the dark voyage through the warp continued:
"The phoenix is an angel: the clapping of whose wings is the roar of thunder.
And this thunder is the fearful note that heralds the cataclysm,
And the roar of the onrushing waves that will destroy paradise."
The sculpture was almost complete. What had begun many months ago as a gleaming white rectangle hewn from the quarries at Proconnesus on the Anatolian peninsula was now a towering, majestic sculpture of the Emperor of the Imperium. Ostian's workshop was almost tidy, only the tiniest chips and flakes of marble drifting to the floor, for the last stage of his statue's journey was being wrought with files and rasps of greater and greater fineness.
It had been said that the point of a journey was not to arrive, but to savour the experiences along the way. Ostian had never understood that aphorism, believing that only the end result made the journey worthwhile.
To anyone else, the statue would have been finished some time ago, but Ostian had long ago realised that only in these final stages could be found that which would breathe the final life into the statue. At this crucial stage, a true artist would find the last twist of genius that lifted a statue from a thing of stone to a work of art.
Whether that was in one last imperfection or a human understanding of the frailty of life, he didn't know and didn't want to know, for Ostian feared that if he ever examined his talent too closely he would be unable to piece it back together again.
In the months since their journey to the Callinedes system (a pointless venture if ever there had been one, for the 28th Expedition had tarried barely a week and fought in only one battle as far as he could tell) he had kept himself more or less confined to his studio and the sub-deck where meals were served. La Venice had become a place of lewdness, where people who should know better drank too much, ate too much and indulged their every sordid appetite without regard for the mores of civilised behaviour.
The last few times he had visited La Venice, he had been shocked and revolted by its appearance, the artwork and statuary taking on an altogether more sinister aspect as the primarch lent his vision to the final details of its renovation. Wild, orgiastic gatherings, like the debaucheries of the ancient Romanii Empire were now a frequent occurrence, and Ostian had chosen to stay away rather than be outraged on a daily basis.
The one time he had been forced to set foot in it since he had shared a drink with Leopold Cadmus, a man who, along with almost every remembrancer who had not journeyed to Laeran, appeared to have departed the 28th Expedition, he had seen Fulgrim directing Serena d'Angelus as she completed a great mural on the ceiling. Its proportions were monstrous and its subject matter a vile concoction of writhing serpents and humans engaged in unimaginable excesses.
Serena had spared him a brief glance, and he was ashamed as he remembered his harsh words to her when he had last visited her. Their eyes had met and, for a moment, he had seen a look of such anguished desperation that he had wanted to weep when he later recalled it.
Fulgrim had turned as though sensing his presence, and Ostian had been shocked rigid at the primarch's appearance. Brightly coloured oils rimmed his eyes and his silver hair was bound up in ludicrously tight plaits. The faint lines of what looked like tattoos curled on his cheeks, and his purple robe laid much of his pale flesh bare, revealing an inordinate number of fresh scars and silver rings or bars piercing the skin.
Ostian was transfixed by Fulgrim's dark eyes, the madness and driving obsession he had seen in his studio magnified to terrifying proportions.
The memory chilled him and he retuned his attention to the marble. Perhaps the remembrancers that had vanished from the 28th Expedition to greener pastures had the right idea, though a suspicious voice in the back of his head worried that some darker reason lay behind the sudden lack of dissenting voices.
Even the thought of such a suspicion was enough, and Ostian resolved that as soon as he found the spark of humanity that brought the statue to life, he would request a transfer to another expedition. The flavour of the 28th had become sour to him.
'The sooner I'm out of here the better,' he whispered to himself.
Though he could not know of it, Ostian Delafour's sentiment echoed Solomon Demeter's almost exactly, as he stared over the bombed out ruins of the Choral City and the Precentor's Palace. The desolate, fire-blackened landscape stretched out before him as far as the eye could see, as close to a vision of hell as he could ever imagine. This had once been a beautiful world, the obliterated perfection of its architecture in stark contrast to the rebellion that had fomented within its gilded palaces and the treachery that played out in its blackened remains.
A dark shroud had hung over Solomon ever since the battle on the deep orbital of the Callinedes system, though the reason for Julius and Marius's abandonment of the Second was now horribly apparent. He had seen neither of his brothers following the battle, and within hours he and the Second had been in transit to the Isstvan system to rendezvous with three other Legions to pacify the rebellious world of Isstvan III.
The heart of the rebellion was centred on a city of polished granite and tall spires of steel and glass known as the Choral City. Its corrupt governor, Vardus Praal had fallen under the influence of the Warsingers, rogue psykers that had supposedly been wiped out by the Raven Guard Legion over a decade ago.
Initial attacks on the Choral City had washed away many of Solomon's feelings of unease, the release of his anger and hurt in bloodshed reassuring him that things were as they should be, and that his earlier misgivings were no cause for concern.
Then Saul Tarvitz had arrived with an incredible tale of betrayal and imminent attack.
Many had scoffed at Tarvitz's warning, but Solomon had immediately known the truth of it, and had fought to make his brothers realise their danger. As the monstrous scale of the betrayal sank in, the Sons of Horus, World Eaters and Emperor's Children had raced to find shelter before the deadly viral pay-load struck the world intended to be their tomb.
Solomon had watched in horror as the first streaks of light lit up the sky and th
e detonations covered the skies in thick starbursts of deadly viral agents. The screaming of the city as it died haunted him still, and he couldn't even begin to imagine the horror that must have filled the minds of those who watched as the Life Eater devoured the flesh of their loved ones, before reducing them to disintegrated hunks of rotted, dead matter. Solomon knew how deadly the Life Eater was, and he knew that within hours the entire planet would be a charnel house.
Then the firestorm had come and razed the surface bare of any signs of its former inhabitants, burning them to ashen flakes on the wind as it destroyed all in its path and howled across the surface of Isstvan III in a seething tide of flame. He shut his eyes as he remembered the underground bunker that had sheltered both himself and Gaius Caphen from the viral attack finally yielding to the molten heat of the firestorm. The roar of the fire had been like that of some ancient dragon of legend come to devour him, and the agony as his armour melted in the heat and seared his flesh was still fresh in his consciousness.
Trapped beneath the rabble, they had called for help, but no one had come, and Solomon had wondered whether they were the only survivors of the Warmaster's treachery. On the third day, Gaius Caphen had died, his injuries finally claiming him as sunlight filtered into their prison of rabble.
Eventually Solomon had been found by one of the Sons of Horus, a warrior named Nero Vipus: barely breathing, but clinging to life with the tenacity of one who refuses to die until he has had his vengeance.
The first month of the battles that followed the failed viral attack had passed in a blur of agony and nightmares, his life hanging in the balance until Saul Tarvitz had come to him and promised that he would make the traitors pay for their betrayal.
Seeing the fires of ambition finally lit within the young warrior had galvanised Solomon, and his recovery had been nothing short of miraculous. An Apothecary named Vaddon had found time, between treating the wounded, to bring him back from the brink, and as the war ground onwards, Solomon found his strength returning to the point where he was able to fight once more.
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