by Guy Haley
‘You shall perish, little emperor,’ said Qaramar, ‘and the Imperium with you.’
‘I think not,’ said Guilliman.
Roboute Guilliman waited for Qaramar to come screaming at him, then he leapt. He cleared six metres from a standing start, arms and legs wheeling as he fell towards the daemon’s back. Qaramar turned its flayed skull around to snap at the Imperial Regent. Only at the last second did Guilliman grasp the Sword of the Emperor in both hands and drive it down through the beast’s back, piercing its mechanical heart.
Qaramar screamed, its wings thrashing. Guilliman leaned back on his sword, making the daemon rear up higher in the air. Power built in the sword, and it glowed incandescently, until light burned in every rent and orifice of the daemon’s body.
‘Now, my lord, leap!’ shouted Tigurius.
Guilliman kicked back off the daemon, jumping sideways as it crashed, body aflame all over, through the tear in space and time.
‘Close the rift!’ ordered Tigurius.
A shock wave boomed through the cathedral, blasting out its remaining windows and bringing down another portion of its weakened walls. The remaining lesser warp-born wavered like mirages and disappeared, their droning count fading moments later. The shouts of men replaced the sounds of the battle as the wounded were given succour, and more warriors came rushing into the cathedral.
‘It is done,’ said the primarch. ‘Espandor is free of Mortarion’s witchcraft. Its cleansing may begin.’
Guilliman put up and sheathed the sword. The fires went out, plunging the cathedral back into darkness, but a certain sanctity remained. By the Emperor’s own blade, Guilliman had driven back the baleful influence of Chaos. He could not deny the effect. He could not have defeated an enemy like that without the weapon.
Godlike, he thought.
Mathieu sank to his knees. ‘Praise be!’ he whispered. Tears ran down his face.
‘You are still alive?’ said Guilliman with mild surprise.
‘The Emperor protects. The Emperor protects!’ Mathieu said, partway into a religious fugue. ‘As you fought and others died, I was unharmed! Praise be, praise be! The Emperor has touched this place.’
Guilliman shrugged. Combat over, he was weary. The emptiness inside him seemed deeper for his encounter with the daemon. His hearts laboured, and his scar itched. ‘He remains potent, even now.’
‘I can feel His love for humanity,’ said Mathieu. ‘I can feel it all around me!’ He hesitated in his rapture. ‘Tell me, oh lord regent, truthfully – does the Emperor love us, my lord? Do not say I am wrong!’
The Emperor loves no one man, thought Guilliman. He cannot afford affection – that is the honest practical for the impossible task that faces the Master of Mankind. He did not love His sons, He does not love men, but He does love mankind. I find it hard to forgive Him. Did His solution have to be built on lies? Lies upon lies?
Mathieu’s question pushed Guilliman deeper into melancholy. More than anything, he yearned to speak with his foster father Konor one more time. He had been a noble soul, one who could be trusted. A true father.
Had you not died before the Emperor arrived in Ultramar, would I have abandoned you as quickly as my brothers abandoned their adoptive families? he asked himself.
He knew the answer to that, and it shamed him. No one is immune to the effects of such power, he told himself, but that did not make the truth any more palatable.
He understood. He knew what his father wanted to achieve, and why. Facing things like Qaramar brought it home to him time and again. Knowing what opposed mankind made him see the utility of lies. Could Guilliman honestly say he loved all the men who called himself his sons? He barely knew them, especially now – Cawl’s blasphemous hordes in particular. They, too, were a means to an end. He and his ‘father’ had that in common. The mantle of rulership was weighty, and moulded the man that bore it.
I never wanted to be a tyrant, thought the primarch. Perhaps my father did not wish to be so either. History has roles for us that cannot be denied. We are but pieces on the board of eternity.
‘My lord,’ said Mathieu into the primarch’s silence. ‘Please tell me, does the Emperor love us?’
We are so much more like you than you ever intended, thought Guilliman. You gave too much of yourself to us. Without realising, in your arrogance, you made yourself a father in truth. We are your sons, in every way. Did you see that?
‘My lord?’ said Mathieu
‘The Emperor loves us all,’ lied Roboute Guilliman. He looked over the broken statue and the few remains of the clock. ‘Now leave me be, Mathieu. I must consult with the tribune and the tetrarch.’
Guilliman left Mathieu kneeling in the dust, and went to the gates of the cathedral where Tribune Colquan, Tetrarch Felix and the rest gathered. Upon the steps outside, he unlocked his helmet, revealing his face to Espandoria Tertio’s muggy day. He breathed air free of taint other than that of honest decay. The Plague God’s influence had receded. He closed his eyes, and let the sun dry the sweat on his skin.
‘It is done,’ said Guilliman. ‘We leave Espandor tonight.’
‘What are our plans, my lord?’ asked Colquan.
‘The Genesis Chapter, the Aurora Chapter, the Knights Cerulean, the Mortifactors and sundry other elements are to remain here to purge the daemonic infestation in the far west, and slay the remainder of the Death Guard. The rest of our army will withdraw and redeploy. Mortarion is not here. His web of evil is disrupted. The forces left are a delaying tactic, nothing more. There is no more reason for me to remain.’
‘Where do you think he might be?’ asked Colquan neutrally.
‘Parmenio,’ said Guilliman without pause. All his careful winnowing of data had suggested either Espandor or Parmenio as Mortarion’s base of operations. If Mortarion was not on Espandor, he would be on the other. ‘He is on Parmenio.’
‘You are sure?’ asked Felix.
‘I am sure. It is hard to reckon our actions here a victory, but we have taken the first steps to assuring we will win. Let Mortarion feel at ease, and think I cannot find him, nor dislodge him from Ultramar. He is about to be disabused of this misapprehension.’
Guilliman smiled grimly.
‘On Parmenio, I will make him see the truth.’
With those words, the primarch passed from the cathedral and into the ruins of Espandoria Tertio alone, his soul laden with sorrow.
About the Author
Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Pharos, the Primarchs novel Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dante, 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.
An extract from The Eye of Medusa.
‘With this link, I bind you to my clan.’
‘To my clan.’ Echoes of gears and metal.
Kardan Stronos barely heard the words of the litany. They had become inseparable from the shriek of bone planes and laser scalpels. Every tiny bone vibrated to its own share of the agony, and only his fundamental genetic hardening kept him conscious of the process at all.
‘Is there pain?’ The voice of the tech-priest, Artisan Adept Sabeq Rawl, was perfectly level. Stronos was equally fastidious in answering, the question as much a component of the ritual as the pain.
‘Pain is of the flesh. From this day onward, I am iron.’
The words they spoke were Reket, the dialect of the mortal Garrsaki clansmen and the ritual tongue of their iron overlords. It was a language of few words and constraining syntax, colourl
ess and harsh, enforcing the terse, inexpressive speech of its wielders. The differences between it and other Medusan forms were sufficient to make its usage under the present circumstances a challenge. As was the intent.
‘The flesh cannot speak with the clarity of machine to machine,’ said Sabeq. ‘It communicates its needs through the code-language of pain.’ Stronos felt the ceramite outer casing of his upper backplate adeptly unscrewed and detached, servomuscular bundles shrinking from their first taste of the Alloyed’s meagre atmosphere. ‘What about…’ Then came the sharp jab of a spinal probe between the mechanisms and into the marrow. ‘Now?’
Stronos’ gasp perished midway up his throat, and he swallowed his cry with an effort. ‘Barely.’
‘Good.’ Impossible to be certain, but the priest sounded impressed. ‘The sensation you are feeling now is your spine passing instruction to your pain centres that the graft has been integrated successfully. Congratulations, Lord Stronos – you are of the clan.’
‘Of the clan.’
There was a chittering whir as hook limbs passed over the back of his neck, anointing the new implant with oils, machining them into the gloss with an array of rotable scrubbers.
Stronos winced, the area still raw, and fixed his gaze firmly forward.
The cell was small, iron grey, the minimum necessary for the physical existence of a transhuman being. Elevation to the rank of sergeant brought the privilege of single quarters, an archaic custom for his needs were few, but tradition was tradition, and the single cot was the one on which he sat. The occasional spasm of his muscles, and the artisan’s insect-quick shifts in position, brought sympathetic creaks and groans from its frame. The current placement of his hands, laid one atop the other over an ironbound incunabulum in his lap, played a large part in his outward stoicism. Not the hands so much as the book itself, his iron core, all his body’s weaknesses pouring into its worn binding and creased parchment.
‘With this link,’ said Sabeq, withdrawing his implements, then gimballing in close enough to Stronos’ neck to physically blow on the polished surface, a ritual benediction to fortune. ‘I bind you to my clan.’
‘To my clan.’
Unconsciously, Stronos dialled through his bionic eye’s spectral bands, the muscles of his cheek clenching and releasing to an ingrained rhythm, matching the acuity of his organic eye to the augmetic as he flicked from wavelength to wavelength. Iron Father Verrox had laughed it off as a tick, one that often manifested under duress or in the build up to a deployment, but to Stronos it was the very definition of physical deficiency. That it arose from a desire to expunge his body’s weaknesses did not repudiate it. Realising what he was doing, he stopped, the final transition from red to infrared leaving his flesh eye behind, staring into a pall of excavated bone as three heat wraiths materialised from the corners of the cell. They were hulking, black, visible only by the dim yellow corona that outlined their armoured frames, patches of fiery white around power packs and partially disengaged armour seals.
They bore witness.
One amongst their number stepped forward. His name was Jalenghaal. Stronos did not know him except by name and honour roll. He stopped half a metre before Stronos’ cot, and there triggered the manual release of a sectional plate from his power armour’s girdle band. For any Iron Hands battle-brother of a certain age, the removal of armour that they had long ago ceased to consider distinct from their own increasingly augmetised frames was a labour of hours, if not days, one that demanded use of a forge and a team of servitors. Jalenghaal and his brothers would have devoted many days prior to Stronos’ arrival in preparation for this ritual. Sabeq’s dendrites flicked expertly around Stronos’ front, swifter than either eye could track, to strip him of the corresponding piece.
‘With this link,’ Jalenghaal intoned, flat and without cadence as he presented the slab of black armour. Corpuscular attachments and tentacled bio-circuitry probed the air for the ligand sites of a Space Marine’s black carapace. ‘I bind you to my clan.’ The emphatic use of ‘my’ sounded an uneven note in the otherwise monotone purr of the Iron Hands brother’s words.
It was instantly forgotten as the armour plate slotted into Stronos’ prepared harness perfectly, his armour’s systems snarling at the influx of foreign data. He gasped, overwhelmed, as command protocols, tactical runes, and much, much more exloaded from the other Iron Hands brother and splayed across Stronos’ bionic eye. They hovered in view, like dripping steel, and in the blink of an eye Stronos knew Brother Jalenghaal.
‘By your iron, am I bound,’ Stronos managed to utter, and remembered to blink-click the ritual confirmation to Jalenghaal’s helm display.
In silence, the Iron Hand stepped back, and the second presented himself.
When it was completed, Stronos heard the territorial growl that emanated from his armour’s intelligence core, a surly welcome to a quorum of ten.
He had studied the customs of Clan Garrsak in preparation for his transfer and swift elevation, his fascination genuine, but the power of their bonding took his breath away. It was as though the individual identities of ten battle-brothers had been subsumed into a gestalt being, its mind noospheric, its view from a plane above its constituent sum. This being had a name.
Clave Stronos.
‘It is done.’ Jalenghaal stood tall against the wall, an autopsy in monochrome of dull black ceramite and sleek plasteel bionic. For all his machine detachment, his impatience was as audible as the power hum of his systems.
‘Almost,’ said Sabeq. ‘I need only add rank insignia and ident wafers that the Omnissiah might know it.’
‘The Alloyed approaches Thennos’ orbit,’ said Jalenghaal. ‘Brothers muster.’
‘A fact to which I am cogent.’
‘Then give me a time frame, adept.’
A ripple of mechadendrites, a shrug. ‘The armour’s spirit demands its due, and yours must recognise clan-brother and commander.’
It was in the nature of the Iron Hands to challenge their superiors, for in such challenges were weaknesses exposed, but at that Jalenghaal fell silent. The bonds of clan went deeper than Chapter, deeper even than the shared gene-link to the primarch.
In times like these, it was the one bond of brotherhood that remained stronger than iron.
With the ritual essentially over, Stronos allowed his muscles to relax; his hands parted from the book in his lap.
The Canticle of Travels was the only surviving text describing Ferrus Thennos’ early life on Medusa. This volume, written and annotated by the paramount Voice of Mars some time in the early centuries of M33, was the oldest version of the collected stories still in existence. The forgotten adept’s anonymous opus, bringing the Omnissiah’s enlightenment to the old legends, was the cornerstone of doctrinal thought from Medusa to Mars, and anywhere else that two Iron Hands collided. This copy had seen more action than most Imperial Guardsmen, and was better read. The pages were dog-eared, the las scorch across the lower spine earned on Furios Minor when he had still borne the book with him into battle.
It had been a gift from a friend, and Stronos had few enough of those.
He closed his flesh eye and massaged his forehead with the knuckles of his gauntlet until the dizziness receded. ‘Iron Captain Draevark has apprised me of the situation on Thennos. The ships of my former clan are uplink-capable.’
The stereotype of the thuggish warrior of Vurgaan was as old as that of the
robotic butcher of Clan Garrsak; Stronos found the cultural idiosyncrasies fascinating, but the allusion to the caricature raised a death-rattle chuckle from Lurrgol.
Stronos glanced up to address the whipping tendrils of Artisan Rawl. ‘Perhaps we might dispense with the abjuration of rejection and the ancillary rites of inscription until after the initial deployment.’
‘Your forgechain shows me that you have undergone the rite more than once before. I see you have learned from the experience.’ Rawl bowed his mechitinous head-section. ‘Very well. The machine-spirit would welcome a late arrival to your first battle even less than it would a rushed blessing. Oh, for the purity of a warrior’s calling.’
‘Iron is not dug pure from the ground,’ growled Jalenghaal. ‘It is made pure.’
Lurrgol and Burr nodded in agreement.
The artisan hooked a bloodied extensor over Stronos’ shoulder and gestured for the servitor, hidden in somnolence behind the fog of counterseptic and bone. At the artisan’s unspoken override, the lobotomised bio-construct started towards the cot. Its necrotised room temperature biology had hidden it from Stronos’ infravision until then. A neat square of blood vessels and bone had been dug out of its brow. The flesh there had borne a binharic ident-brand containing Stronos’ clan, clave, and personal authentications. All now former. It too would eventually require re-baptism that the Omnissiah might know it.
The servitor presented the adept a tray of implements, which he selected from, replacing drill bits and nozzle heads as he dutifully blessed the currently nameless servitor. Then he returned his attentions to Stronos’ armour, hyper-fine laser sculptors erasing rank and squad insignia and replacing them with new ones. Stronos felt the artisan’s sculpting tools hover uncertainly over his battleplate’s more glaring imperfections.
Scratch marks in Juuket, the barbaric dialect of Clan Vurgaan, recorded the many worlds on which he had fought. Strings of spent shells and power casings recalled particularly impressive kills, the trophies hanging from his armour like threaded beads.