Eidolon: The Auric Hammer, page 13
‘Madness?’ The flames flickered and it moved swiftly towards Eidolon, slapping one blazing hand against his shoulder. Fire dappled and ran down his left arm, coiling about it, binding him to the King like a warrior of the XII to their axe. ‘It is madness to fight it, brother. Our glorious unity. Our promised destiny.’
‘I am not your brother!’ Eidolon snapped.
‘Oh, but you are,’ the King purred. The fire rippled and flowed, becoming form, becoming flesh. Armour resolved itself from the form of flames. The plate was purple-and-gold-rimmed, the make of the armour utterly flawless, crafted by skilled and dedicated artisans. White hair pooled from its scalp and the face revealed was haughty, judgemental, barbed with wicked humour.
For a moment Eidolon had feared the face he would see would be Fulgrim’s, his father toying with him, come again to take his life. He felt vitality fleeing him, drawn through the fiery umbilical back into the thing as it revealed itself.
It was not Fulgrim.
Eidolon’s own face stared back at him, unruined by time or circumstance, bearing all its old strength and beauty and arrogance. Fire still burned in its eyes, rings of captive light thrumming within the coils of its irises.
‘It is so very good, my brother,’ the other soul purred, ‘to be with you once again.’
SIXTEEN
war of brothers
The battle lines had fragmented. There was no front. There was not even truly an enemy any longer. No friends. No allies. Only war.
Vocipheron scrambled over the hull of a ruined tank and leapt down onto a pile of rubble, hunting through the murk. What had once been a mighty intersection, moving men and materiel from the outer defences to the city’s heart, had collapsed in on itself. The dead were everywhere – crushed by debris, sprawled across makeshift medicae stations, or ground underfoot or undertread.
So much death. And yet none of it mattered.
Vocipheron’s men were all but gone and so he hunted his prey with bestial abandon, uncaring of where they were. It was not the patient battle of the duellist any more. He had been reduced to the barest sense of awareness, an animal cognition that spoke to some ancient reptilian-hindbrain urge.
One of his blades was gone, lost somewhere in the unceasing madness of the war.
‘Prey?’ Alef snapped and snarled. The warrior’s pristine features were wracked by palsy, split with new scars where he had etched or clawed at his skin. He sniffed the air and hissed like a canid.
‘Soon,’ Vocipheron growled back before the red-and-black blindness reared up in his skull once more. ‘He is near. He must be.’
He had been a fool, he realised. The sudden epiphany had swept him as surely as the muscle spasms and moments of fugue. It was as obvious and as revelatory as the great column of warp fire that scraped the sky, clawing its way up from the core of the dead fortress, guided by the King’s incomparable song. The wind rang with strange melodies from other times and places, weeping through into reality with a wistful longing. An urge at last satiated.
There had been some mechanism here, he saw that now. Something hidden behind the veil. A lock that the steady shedding of blood had loosened. Eidolon, somehow, had been the key.
Now there was only the hunt. Only the reckoning.
Vocipheron had watched, weeping behind his helm, as the first of the Dark Prince’s handmaidens had appeared, bleeding from shadows and out of arches to nowhere. Hooved feet stamped at the ground as they began their dance, weaving through half-collapsed corridors and out into the debris-choked thoroughfares. His eyes followed their inconstant courses, catching upon flailing fabric and pierced flesh, their violet skin marked with mutilations and violations that put the Emperor’s Children’s best efforts to shame.
Unclean light bled from their wounds and alterations – an unbiological luminescence, a wrongness wrought from iridescence. It hurt to look at them. Everything was pain. His mania was a knife drawn along his spine, flensing away the flesh and etching the bone.
Much as, he realised, the daemons were doing to the mortal remains that decorated the city’s corpse. They set upon the bodies with claw and knife, tooth and needle. Bull-headed god-things strung flayed flesh between ornaments of chiselled bone, while others coaxed bloody trees to flex and grow from the gardens of ribcages and entrails. The daemonettes cooed and whispered, darting from growth to growth, claws snapping out to cleave newly formed flesh flowers from the boughs.
Somewhere a bell had begun to toll, its ringing trapped within his skull, making his vision swim with nausea. Bile sang in his throat, a momentary spike of acid before he hunched forwards once more and let the growl escape his lips.
Hunger joined the pain. Not for the tawdry constructs of the daemonic but for true flesh and blood. His eyes darted, chasing shadows as the fires raged above and beyond him. The warp’s sick light stained everything, vying with the warring starships above.
The overhead lumens had died. All light, natural and artificial, had died only to be replaced by the unnatural.
He pushed himself up by the blade-tip, still hunched over, his shoulders shaking with sudden bursts of savage laughter. There were tears upon his cheeks as he wept spontaneously. He was losing control of everything; every part of him was in utter rebellion. All that mattered was the desire, the need to indulge himself. To kill and maim and feast upon what remained.
His hearing realigned and his head snapped up like that of a hunting dog, eager for the chase. Bolter fire and sonic weaponry discharged nearby, drawing his attention. The night came alive with roars and screams, the howls of battle and stunted mewling as his brothers indulged themselves amidst the wreckage of the city.
He had to find him, Vocipheron realised. Malakris. There were reckonings yet to be had. ‘Where are you, brother?’ he screamed. ‘Come out and let us finish this!’
Malakris looked up from the Son of Horus who had, until quite recently, been languishing under his attentions. His claws were slick with transhuman blood, jammed through empty sockets and out of the ruptured bone at the back of the warrior’s skull.
He withdrew them with exaggerated slowness and looked around.
The enemy lay, half slumped, over an ornamental fountain, his entrails staining the water with blood and filth. Scum had begun to gather around the sea-green armour, a distasteful froth that wormed its way into every crack and wound. The scent of it was utterly delectable. Had there been time he might have cut a flank free and feasted upon the flesh, or perhaps restrained himself to the offal like some hive-nobility gourmand.
There would be opportunities enough later. When the enemy were dead and all were merely chattel at his feet. When the whispers had delivered their promises, then there would be time for all his desires to be sated.
Few obstacles remained. The world was screaming, raging and burning with the warp’s fury, the whispers turned shrill and high. Eidolon caged in fire, both Legions scattered upon the wind.
Rise and stand as a prince of war. Master of the Third Millennial. All the old shall be swept away! Kill him and none shall blunt your ascension.
Somewhere Rykan Bail was screaming. The warrior howled and cackled as he vaulted over a piece of ruined statuary, perching like a gargoyle atop half of an ornamental bench, clawing at it with his power fist. The madness was no longer subtle. He wore it plainly for all to see. A sign and a symbol for the others of their warband to follow.
Soon there would be a true challenge, Malakris knew.
Every ruler had his inheritors and Eidolon was no different. He had carved out his place by will alone. Why should Malakris not follow in the lord commander’s footsteps? It would not be the broken monster that was Plegua, nor the stubborn fool Vocipheron. Even the equerry could be dealt with. One at a time. Blow by blow and claw by claw.
The curved talons flexed with need, quivering at the thought.
There was a beauty and a power in betrayal. They had learned that at Isstvan, both times they had been called to the Warmaster’s battles. Whether slaying brothers or cousins, the undertaking was still sweet. Dread Slaanesh, youngest and yet eternal, had shown them the joys and delights that lay in treachery.
To give in and never die.
Muscles bunched and seized beneath his skin as a fresh palsy swept through him. Malakris rolled his shoulders and turned from the Son of Horus, who still lay dead, blinded, uncaring of the wider war that he had failed to win.
Malakris would carve his way through those who opposed him until he was so suffused with glory that even the Phoenician would take notice of him.
‘There will be one more king amidst the ashes,’ he muttered to himself. He tried to signal his men again, but there was no response. The damned interference was still occluding the vox. He strode over and seized the sides of Bail’s head, forcing the madman to look at him.
‘And this time,’ he went on, ‘I will rise and never fall.’
SEVENTEEN
soulbound
It wore his past like a mockery, cloaked in all that he had been.
The Eidolon that looked back, flickers of flame still crawling across its skin and armour, was beautiful. Perfect. It was everything that he had been before Fulgrim’s wrath had sundered him. There was no ugly scar across the throat, no wan skin or lank hair. It stalked and preened about the figmented space with a pure arrogance and an ephemeral beauty.
Eidolon remembered that power and surety. He had thought it long lost to him, and while he was no longer the shambling horror that Fulgrim had disdained as stupid and ugly, he was still a shadow of his former self. His powers were ascendant, true enough. He had thought himself capable of running down the Khan at Kalium. He would have triumphed, he knew that in his shattered soul. He would have broken the Warhawk and eaten his heart, carved a throne from his iron-hard bones.
Yet I could be more. We could be more. If I had not passed beyond death, then what? Would an unbroken Eidolon have risen to yet greater heights? Would I stand alongside Julius, the Favoured Son, if I had not earned the ire of Fulgrim’s whim?
What would I be? Who would I have become?
‘What are you?’
‘I am your brother,’ it laughed. ‘And I am you. When Fulgrim took you from your life, when he unmade you, the very power of the anathame shattered our soul.’
‘Our soul?’ Eidolon asked.
‘Our soul,’ it repeated. ‘Your title is not an idle boast, Soul-Severed.’ Something hateful moved behind its eyes, a dark mockery and a burning, perpetual envy. ‘We are two sides of the same coin, you and I. Cut from the same cloth and yoked to different destinies. One bound to the flesh–’
‘And the other to the warp,’ he concluded.
The perfect vision of his soul shimmered, its radiance refracted as though through a thousand broken mirrors. Light of every hue shone through its skin and armour till it seemed ablaze again. Gold burned with internal fire, running and flowing into new shapes and configurations, warped and spread like constellations across the rich purple plate.
‘The sea of souls is a cruel mistress, but there are lessons in the flame.’ It held out one flawless gauntlet, inspecting the fingers one by one. It looked at Eidolon again and its jaws widened into a vast grin, teeming with extra teeth. Each was sharp and blindingly white. ‘And yet I see that the physical realm has also been unkind.’
‘I have survived,’ Eidolon said as he circled the other figure, gripping his hammer tightly. ‘Thrived, even. I enjoy more power and ability than before my…’ He faltered. ‘Before my humbling. Now there is strength and vigour in me as I have never known. I feel…’ Eidolon paused, reaching out to claw at the empty air as though grasping for an idea.
‘As though you could challenge the child-gods themselves,’ it burbled, amusedly. ‘Perhaps you could. Maybe the Phoenician would find himself dying beneath your blows, rather than the reverse. Or would you rather the Khan be humbled? The Praetorian shattered? The Great Angel’s wings trodden beneath your conquering boots? Such delights. Wonders and splendours in equal measure. To crack a primarch’s bones and drain their marrow. We could do these things. Together.’
‘You think I need you?’ Eidolon said, yet his voice was uncertain. He remembered what it was to be whole, defined by his skill and ability, not by the eternal pain.
‘I do not think you need anything, brother. I think you desire much and more. You could stand as a Legion Master in your own right. We both remember how the Legion was, in its infancy. Small and yet so determined. It was not Fulgrim who saved us. Fabius remade the Legion just as he remade us. It was the will of our warriors and the wishes of the gods that saved us from oblivion.’
‘Saying it does not make it so,’ Eidolon snarled. He strode forward, face to face with himself.
As he spoke, the stone behind him changed and became the shimmering crystal coral that had once formed the atolls of Laeran. His doppelganger reached out and stroked the coral, and it writhed beneath the Shattered King’s touch. It began to thrum gently, ringing with a song that was beautifully familiar and yet horrifically alien.
The song. The Eternal Song. The song of the Dark Prince. No… the call of the Shattered King. The glory they would wield together.
‘Yes,’ the soul burred. ‘You remember its power and its wonder.’
‘I remember,’ Eidolon breathed.
‘That power could be ours again. It should be ours.’ It reached out and took hold of Eidolon’s hand. The Lord Commander Primus could feel the dull ache as fire climbed his limb, drowning it in gnawing pain. ‘Power is the inheritance of those worthy enough to claim it. With our soul reunited, we would create such black miracles as the galaxy has never seen. We could transcend the petty limitations placed upon us and rise without limit. A phoenix in truth.’
Eidolon’s grip faltered and he stumbled back. He looked down at the twisted fingers of his gauntlet, at the beautiful legacy of Horvia, and blinked momentarily. The digits had blackened and faded, like an overexposed pict. Vitality seeped away from him, just as surely as the pink hue of his armour.
‘You could be so beautiful,’ it sighed. ‘Let me show you.’
It raised its hand and drew the fingers down the side of Eidolon’s face, the gentle sensation suddenly erupting into a migraine-flare of absolute agony. His eyes snapped shut and yet he still saw. Saw:
The fire within becoming a raging inferno, burning through his veins and arteries, climbing his nerves in a cascade of scintillating black flames. Bones cracking and reshaping beneath the furnace heat as he became more than merely a man, a sun trapped in a cage of bone, an inferno in human skin. A burnt offering before the altars of the gods.
Eidolon died and was born again. Caught in an eternal cycle he could never escape, remade and reshaped by strength of soul alone. His armour broke apart and reknit as though returned to the armouring serfs and thralls.
He was the anvil now. He was the hammer. Trying to scream through a throat that would not, could not, make human sounds. Unspeech poured from him, gouting from his lips like blood, stretching out as it became coherent and material in the dizzying unreality of the warp. He could break reality with words alone. He was an unmaker king, burning with the light that had been kindled long before humanity was even dreamt of.
It tore him apart at the molecular level before it forced him back together in strange configurations. His spirit caught between apotheosis and utter dissolution.
For a second, reality threatened to fragment, to force him to watch his gifts spill out in a rush of horror and warp-maddened flesh, but it held. The light within was all-consuming now, searing through him. His armour shone.
This was the power the Phoenician would deny them, hiding in his palaces of delusion.
Golden claws flexed open and closed. His hammer had changed, exalted into an immense gold-headed maul, crawling with blazing symbols. His fangs gnashed together and a tongue, forked and barbed, slid from between them. His skin was rich violet, perfect and unmarked. He had become as close to a god as he would ever be, removed from the realm of the flesh, elevated to a Great Game he had only begun to understand the rules of.
Reality asserted itself once more in a cold wave of pressure. Next to the exquisite rapture of the vision of ascension, it was a hollow sensation. Pleasure bled away from him, a slow deadening of the nerves spreading out from the blackened hand. He tasted a universe without joy or carnage.
The beautiful war they had been promised, an end to the Emperor’s restrictive tyranny and all the petty banalities… It would slip from his fingers.
‘If we were whole, we could rise…’
‘Yes, rise! We would be as we were always intended to be. A warrior.’
‘A warrior of the gods,’ Eidolon whispered thoughtfully. The vision clung to him, poisoning every thought with its power and fury. He could feel the galaxy quaking beneath his feet, as though in waiting.
‘Horus Lupercal’s war has made us all the swords of the gods. Their gifts fuel us to new heights. That is the power that shall break the Emperor’s walls and shatter the Palace. Only in the warp are such things made holy.’
‘Our new gods have given us much.’ Eidolon hesitated. Flashes returned to him in the interstitial space between life and death, between materium and immaterium.
Claws tearing him apart as surely as the anathame’s keen edge. Laughter ringing about him like the mirth of the gods themselves. Split apart, thought and memory torn asunder.
‘They have also taken,’ he concluded.
‘Then let us undo their work. There does not have to be discord between us, my brother. Merely let me back in. Open your flesh to my glory and together we shall be unstoppable.’
‘Open my flesh to you?’ Eidolon paused.
