Feat of Iron - Nick Kyme Read online

  Ferrus was too weak to unravel it. A febrile sweat lathered his forehead as he staggered the last few steps through the abattoir and into whatever further horrors awaited him. With the absence of the serpent, the hanging skulls had ceased to chatter and were truly dead once more. The breeze ebbed to nothing and they stopped swinging too, making it easier to avoid touching them. Even their features seemed less like his own, their aspects less daunting. A singular thought drove Ferrus now. Like a Medusan land-shark, he had to keep moving. To stop was to die.

  He managed three steps before he fell and darkness took him.

  The cool aura of the bone sanctuary was charged with indignant energy.

  ‘It is affecting you,’ said the Diviner.

  ‘It should not have been able to breach the ossuary road,’ answered the other.

  ‘Careful, I see Khaine manifesting in your mood. Step back upon the path.’

  The other was not ready to relent just yet. ‘My anger is well-founded. He was not meant to die. Not in here. Not from this.’

  The Diviner peered at the other intently. His gaze was contemplative and unfathomable.

  ‘And yet his life is threatened. You lace the waters of fate with enough blood and sooner or later sharks will circle.’

  ‘It should not be here at all.’

  ‘The bone roads we travel are far from secure. Ever since the Fall, you know that. Are you so surprised that something malicious has come?’

  About to object, the other’s humour changed from choler to melancholy.

  ‘What can be done?’

  ‘Release him and accept failure.’

  ‘We are too close for that.’

  The Diviner leaned back against a spur of arching bone and folded his hands upon his lap.

  ‘Then you have to let fate run its course and hope he can defeat that which you have allowed into your cage.’

  There was a pause that the Diviner did not choose to fill. He merely watched. The other was displeased, ruled by emotion and thwarted ambition. The Diviner did not need prescience to know what his companion was about to ask.

  ‘What do you see?’

  It smacked of desperation.

  ‘Nothing. Everything. I see a billion, billion futures and possible outcomes, some so infinitesimally different you could spend aeons looking for the variation and still not find it.’

  ‘That is not an answer.’

  ‘I advise you to propose a narrower question then.’

  ‘Will he die? Am I undone?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘Your meaning is needlessly cryptic.’

  ‘We are fighting a war of fate. We two are merely agents in this conflict. Through hubris you allowed the Primordial Annihilator–’ the other touched the spirit stone around his neck at mention of the name ‘–a piece of its essence, at least, into your cage and now it is trapped with your intended prey. Chaos has a way of clouding the path of fate.’

  The other sagged in his seat of bone. His hand trembled as he felt the protection and anonymity of their sanctuary start to fragment.

  A haggard face looked up at the Diviner through hollowed eyes. ‘How long before it finds us?’

  ‘Soon.’

  Santar knew the warriors bleeding through the shimmering energy shield.

  A wake of eldar bodies, the smashed detritus of what had come before together with the remains of their weapon platforms, lay scattered behind the Iron Hands. With Santar leading them, they had driven deep in the enemy defences and were on the cusp of assaulting the shield directly. It blazed before the Morlocks like an azure sun. Santar could almost taste the electric tang on his tongue. Its heat made him want to shade his eyes but he resisted the urge. One last obstacle was left to overcome.

  Still wraith-like, they did not appear as incorporeal as they had in the desert basin. Bone-armoured, clutching their curved singing swords, the eldar had sent their best warriors through the shield for them. Their hell-scream hit the Morlocks like a wrecking ball.

  Santar yelled through a barricade of teeth, ‘Take it!’

  His every bone vibrated. The teeth in his skull cracked with the effort of clenching them. Much more punishment and they would shatter.

  ‘I can shout louder,’ he promised the warrior bearing down on him.

  Santar advanced and turned his forward step into an attacking lunge.

  His lightning claw cut through the warrior’s blade and carried on into its sternum. Stepping over the eviscerated alien’s corpse, he found another.

  It leapt his diagonal swipe, weaved inside the counter-thrust and pirouetted alongside the first captain’s unprotected flank.

  Santar winced as a power-charged blade cut into his battle-plate but there it stuck, unable to penetrate further. An elbow smash, delivered without finesse, broke the eldar’s collarbone. An overhead slash would cleave the alien open, but Santar staggered when a second attacker mounted his back. He turned his ear from its hell-scream, reaching up to throw it off, when it jolted and fell.

  Half its head and helm were missing, ruptured by an explosive round.

  Tarkan’s icon winked once on the retinal tac-display.

  The sniper’s voice issued over the feed. ‘Glory to the Gorgon.’

  Santar finished the one with the broken collarbone, stamping on its prone form with his armoured boot. Then he wiped the blood leaking from his nose and gave a clipped salute he knew Tarkan would see. Unable to feint and attack as they had in the desert basin, the wraith-like warriors were finding the Morlocks a tougher prospect out in the open. There, the cohesion of the Iron Hands counted for more than agility.

  To his left, Santar saw Desaan shoulder-barge an alien into the air then swing up his bolter in his remaining hand to perforate it before it landed a ragged corpse. Santar thought he detected the trace of a smile when their eyes met briefly across the field.

  Desaan laughed. ‘Like shooting discus.’

  ‘Theatrics will avail you nothing, brother-captain… except perhaps an early grave. Kill them quickly. Give no quarter.’

  ‘Reparation will have to wait,’ Desaan replied. ‘It appears my enemies are all dead.’

  Alien corpses littered the ground, where the casualties amongst the Iron Hands were minimal. They had bloodied the eldar, but more were coming, leaping through the energy shield with athletic and deadly grace.

  ‘Here is your chance,’ said Santar, before leaning towards the vocal amplifier in his gorget and grating an order that resounded across the battlefront. ‘Consolidate. Iron as one.’

  Underfoot, the buried echoes of Ruuman’s payload could be felt. Seismic spikes registering on Santar’s retinal display confirmed it. A synchronised chrono flashed up in one corner of his vision at the same time.

  He cried, ‘Advancing!’

  Morlocks joined him at either shoulder, their Cataphractii war-plate touching, pauldron to pauldron.

  The wraith-like warriors broke against the implacable black wall of ceramite confronting them. Some fought and made small gains, and Santar would remember those who died later, but united the Terminators could not be denied. They rolled over the eldar elite in an unyielding wave. Caught between an energy shield that only allowed them out and the advancing legionaries, there was nowhere for the aliens to run and they were crushed underfoot.

  The eldar behind them answered with heavy, relentless fire from their gun platforms.

  Cannon impacts smashed into the Morlocks. A Terminator, it might have been Kador, was put on his back. Another, Santar couldn’t tell who, was speared through the chest and fell. The rest kept moving, weathering the barrage.

  ‘A light shower,’ said Desaan, barely audible above the storm.

  ‘We have less than a minute, brother,’ Santar told him.

  ‘More than enough, first captain.’

  Bullying their way forwards, the Morlocks reached the crackling edge of the shield.

  The eldar inside fell back, but kept up their fusillade of fire. Overhead
, Ruuman’s cannons and the tanks of the Army divisions pounded.

  Something else lurked behind the flicker-haze too, eldar clad in robes and wielding arcane staves.

  ‘Tear it down!’ roared Santar, warring with the ionised throb of the energy shield. ‘Hit it with everything you’ve got.’

  Thunder hammers and power-mauls, eviscerators and combi-bolters at point-blank range rattled against a field of glowing azure. Rippling violently, the shield bowed but did not break.

  The chrono in the retinal displays of all the Iron Hands veterans reached zero.

  Its terminus presaged a series of deep, subterranean detonations that split the surface open inside the shield as the mole mortar shells burrowing below exploded in a chain. Concussive bursts billowed upwards as the web the eldar had woven around the node was unpicked.

  Flickering initially as a cluster of minute interrupts stuttered across its curvature, the shield flared once and then failed.

  Santar was first across its threshold.

  ‘At them! Glory to the Gorgon!’

  Reaping into the gun platforms, the Morlocks barely noticed the brutal ordnance from the tank divisions as it hammered the node. Even without the shield to protect it, the bone edifice was resilient, but cracks began to appear along its length.

  It was a massacre, efficient not bloodthirsty, but slaughter all the same.

  A warrior with a crackling falchion emerged from the melee. Santar met it with his lightning claws, but felt a tightening in the servos of his bionic arm as he applied the killing stroke. His follow-up was slower too, as if pushing against inertia or the effects of high gravity. His legs were the same.

  He recalled the robed figures. A cohort of heavily armed alien warriors surrounded them.

  ‘Desaan, can you still see?’ Santar asked. Foes were coming at them from every angle, swinging pikes and blades, a rabble of carapace-armoured eldar soldiers and the cloaked ranger caste the Iron Hands had fought earlier. One of them thrust an energy spear at Santar, which he barely turned aside. Seizing the haft, he pulled the warrior towards him and bludgeoned open its faceplate with his fist. The body sagged and was still, but the eldar had left a score mark down the first captain’s flank.

  ‘Too close.’

  Another aimed a shuriken lance at his torso and blasted apart a section of armour plate. Santar swept his claw around to despatch it but felt the same drag that had slowed him a few seconds before.

  Recognising these sensations, he shouted, ‘Desaan, your eyes?’

  ‘My sight… is failing.’

  Darkness was boiling around the node, coiling from its tip in a thunderhead.

  Santar arched his neck to see a black cloud creeping down the side of the node and billowing towards them.

  ‘Throne of Earth…’

  Not again…

  Santar knew the carnage the storm and its curse of iron could inflict. Upon so many warriors conjoined with the machine, he dared not contemplate exactly how much.

  To his mind, there was little choice.

  ‘Hold advance, all companies.’

  Santar was caught, seized by indecision just as his bionics were frozen by the approaching darkness.

  ‘We must move forward,’ Captain Attar voiced down the feed. ‘First captain, what are your orders?’

  Taking advantage of the respite, the robed conclave of eldar was already re-establishing parts of the shield. It grew like an organic energy web behind the Morlocks. Shells and las-bursts from the heavy divisions caromed off the rapidly regenerating veil.

  Desaan gripped Santar’s shoulder guard. ‘We cannot stay here, Gabriel. Forward or back, which is it?’

  If they stayed, they could destroy the node, or at least slay the witches that had refashioned the shield, but they risked annihilation at their own hands or the hands of their brothers if they did.

  Tendrils of cloud, outriders of the dark veil, closed to within a few metres of the Iron Hands. They writhed like vipers.

  So close…

  ‘You saw what it did to us in the desert basin.’ Santar had made his decision. It tasted bitter as his mouth formed the words.

  ‘Fall back!’

  The retreat was slow and wearisome. Legionaries fought the mechanised parts of their bodies, and tried to stop outright rebellion. Some failed and had to be dragged by their battle-brothers. None at least were devoured by the storm, for to be lost to it was a death sentence.

  It boiled at the edge of the shield, shrouding what was left of the eldar inside, but reached no farther.

  Even from a distance Santar could feel the pull of the machine curse’s influence. Absently, his armoured fingers touched the gouges at his neck. The gorget had barely saved his life. He could still feel the prickling heat of his own lightning claw upon his skin, its electric stink in his nostrils.

  ‘So, what is our next recourse?’ Desaan had removed his visor and was standing beside the first captain, the two of them in close concert. Desaan’s scarred face was worse beneath the metal band he usually wore around his eyes; the skin swollen and ravaged. He reattached the visor to a pair of cranial implants in his temples and the device whirred back to life.

  ‘Functioning perfectly,’ he said, muttering rites of activation and purity.

  ‘So long as we stay out of the cloud,’ said Santar.

  The tempest rippled and undulated like a dark ocean, slowly and mockingly for all its seeming innocuousness.

  Santar stared at it. He was standing in a half-circle with his captains and their seconds, while the rest of the Legion waited farther back with their clan companies and looked on beleaguered.

  ‘The shield was breached and only partly regenerated,’ said Captain Attar.

  Ruuman’s barrage had ceased and the Ironwrought joined them from the high ground where the heavies still waited.

  Santar turned to him next. ‘What’s your assessment, Erasmus?’

  ‘The shield is constructed of kinetic energy but created psychically. Whether the xenos have some form of generator sympathetic to their abilities or another piece of fell alien technology, I can only theorise. As we’ve seen, it can be breached, but only through excessive force.’

  Desaan frowned. ‘What about the cloud? How do we breach that?’

  Ruuman turned his cold gaze on him. ‘Without suffering machine-death, we cannot.’

  ‘You think they can keep this up indefinitely?’ asked Captain Meduson.

  Desaan stared into the darkness, but could find no gap or weakness. ‘If our Ironwrought is right, while the storm persists there is no way for us to advance.’

  Santar’s knuckles cracked with cybernetic resonance.

  ‘I would very much like to summon the Fist of Iron and bombard this site from existence.’

  ‘Then do it, first captain,’ said Meduson. ‘We can further withdraw our forces and take the necessary cover in the deeper desert.’

  Ruuman shook his head. ‘Negative. The sensoria are unable to overcome whatever psychic baffles the eldar have in place. We are more likely to exterminate ourselves than level the node.’

  Desaan rubbed at his chin and frowned.

  ‘The shield is broken, but not down. The aliens’ defences are severely weakened. If we can get warriors behind the veil to kill whatever is creating it–’

  Henricos stepped up, interrupting.

  ‘I can get beyond that veil.’

  Desaan scowled. ‘You have a talent for intrusion, brother-sergeant.’

  A nod sufficed as apology from Henricos.

  Santar’s eyes narrowed. ‘I am listening. How can you enter the storm, brother? Unless you want to end up impaled on your own sword?’

  ‘Because a warrior of flesh has nothing to fear from it.’

  Henricos revealed the stump where he had detached his bionic hand.

  ‘It is safe,’ he said quickly. ‘I can fight without it.’

  A host of hard, reproachful glances fell upon the sergeant.

  ‘You d
ishonour the Iron Creed,’ said Santar. ‘That mechanised implant is part of rite and ritual. It is what makes us what we are.’

  ‘And what we are is confounding us, first captain. I am suggesting a different approach.’

  ‘One for which you’ll be severely reprimanded.’

  ‘I’ll bear whatever punishment is deemed fit.’

  Santar glared, fighting the urge to mete out that punishment immediately.

  ‘Even if it is death?’

  Henricos was stoic. ‘I can breach the veil.’

  ‘Alone?’ Attar sounded dubious.

  ‘No, not alone,’ Santar answered as he saw a unit of Army veterans approaching the conclave of Iron Hands officers. They looked on edge to be in the presence of the hulking warriors and kept together.

  Santar fought down his disdain and tried to see soldiers in the children before him.

  Their commanding officer was a hoary-looking colonel of the Savaan Masonites who knelt before the Iron Hands like a serf. Unlike some of his more nervous charges he did not tremble.

  Desaan glared at him from the mountainous summit of his Cataphractii war-plate.

  ‘Speak your name.’

  ‘Lords,’ said the man, his voice gravelly from smoking too much tabac or simple age. ‘I am Marshal Vortt Salazarian of the Savaan 254th, the Masonites, and I have served the Emperor’s Great Crusade and your Lord Gorgon for four decades.’

  Desaan touched the platinum stud embedded in his skull.

  ‘Do not speak to me of service, old man. What do you know of it?’

  Attar folded his immense bionic arms, whilst Meduson merely glowered. They each carried platinum studs and had each fought longer campaigns than most men had lifetimes.

  To his credit, Colonel Salazarian didn’t blink. Not once.

  ‘I meant no offence. We will accompany Sergeant Henricos into the storm,’ he said, licking his lips to moisten his dry mouth. The presence of Space Marines tended to have that effect on humans. ‘If you will allow us to, we will do that. It would be our honour.’

  Desaan scowled. ‘Flesh is weak–’ he said, but Santar raised his hand for silence.

  The Army veterans looked thin and feeble, even the grizzled colonel, but so too did the eldar and they had proven formidable.