Eidolon: The Auric Hammer, page 8
The monster’s mouth twisted into the semblance of a smile, and it raised the weapon.
‘Death to His foes,’ it repeated, and brought the hammer down.
Eidolon looked down at the slurry he had reduced the soldier to, poking at the human detritus with one boot before turning away.
The galaxy teemed with prey, with precious little toys the gods had prepared for them, yet they broke so easily. From Isstvan to Terra, humanity was an eternally frail disappointment. Eidolon despaired that he had ever been so weak and fragile. If he had not ascended, would he have lived the same short and stunted life, content to die for his family’s honour rather than be offered up as a sacrifice to the Emperor?
Unity made me what I am, but it could just as easily have broken me…
He turned away from the shattered corpse and looked up at the centrepiece of the city’s petty veneration. One of the columns had already been struck by missile fire, crumbling away, half of it jutting from the pavilion like a shattered spur of bone. He stalked forward, turning the hammer’s weight over and over in one hand.
The statue of Fulgrim looked down at him, seeing him with the same dulled metal eyes and simpering praise as it spared for Eidolon’s simulacrum. He stepped towards it, reaching out one clawed hand to draw his fingers along the lines of the sculpture.
He remembered when it had been raised. The finest artisans of the fleet had toiled for weeks to craft something worthy of the Phoenician’s image.
I wanted to commemorate the occasion… Eidolon’s gene-father whispered from out of memory. The generations to come must see the faces of those who liberated them. We raised them up, my son. We gave them unity.
His hands clenched around the haft of Glory Aeterna and he raised it in one sharp motion. He snarled as he brought it down. Metal splintered and buckled. His own once-perfect face shattered under the blow. Features deformed and ran as the fielded hammer struck it. The metal melted and pooled as he destroyed the shadow of his former self.
Eidolon growled and then paused, leaning his hammer into the molten wreckage and steaming shards, the air wafting with atomised metal. He turned and looked at Fulgrim, his gauntlets still locked around the hammer’s haft.
It would be so easy. To destroy your legacy as well. Perhaps mine will suffice for now.
Eidolon turned away from his father’s idol in disgust and surveyed the burning city. He had dropped into the heart of it, to honour the reconsecration of the square and smear its ashes upon the heart of his old pride. Around him, other elements of the Third Millennial were deploying. Malakris’ men whooped with savage joy as they lunged from the gunships or burst from the barbed cocoons of the Kharybdis and Dreadclaw assault craft. One of the Dreadclaws impacted hard against a central spire, claws scrabbling for purchase as its melta-cutters and drills began to incise their way into the city’s flesh.
They were murdering a culture. Bit by bit. Action by action, they were forcing a civilisation’s face into its own rancid blood. They were killing the future.
The human race’s fate was a single, drawn-out scream, milked from lungs already choked with their own deaths.
They were still illuminators. They still brought the light and promise of what was to come. Just as the aeldari had realised what they were bringing into being.
Eidolon let himself laugh. That had been their end. The death of all they had been. Humanity might well follow them to that grave. Perhaps he was ensuring its end, even now. Digging the charnel pits for worlds he would never know. People he would have no kinship with.
When Terra was theirs…
When Terra is ours…
Then what?
He paused. There was nothing here that could truly hurt him. Not yet. He could hear the roar of sonic weapons upon the walls as the Kakophoni unleashed themselves. He fancied he could even hear the clatter of blades as Vocipheron’s aesthetes sated their martial pleasures. Duels would be ringing out across the burning city. A fine dirge to wing the mortal chattel to their deaths or their enslavement.
Perhaps, if he listened then he would hear the Cthonians as their own attack vectors swept in, the whoops and jeers of ganger savagery, elevated to the transhuman. There was an ember of nobility somewhere in Eidolon’s heart that still recoiled at their very existence.
When this world burned and all had been taken to slake the appetites and needs of the III, then he could dwell on such things. Eidolon knew in his heart that they would have their place above all the others, even if it took ten thousand years to attain it.
‘Perhaps I will deal with you later, father,’ he said to the statue, before he turned and began to idle towards the waiting command centre. ‘I have other matters to attend to. I have a world to murder.’
NINE
whispers of ruin
Listen.
The voice whispered from every corner, every shadow and flicker of flame. It danced through the dying city like a promise, and only those blessed of the Legion were entitled to hear its song.
Listen.
Malakris’ claws had been gore-slicked when he began to kill. He had taken to the fray with the weapons unpowered, cleaving through mortal soldiers with minimal effort. He enjoyed watching as they died, eyes wide with pain and shock, denied the quicker death that power-fielded weapons would convey.
Occasionally he stopped to lap at the blades, his dark tongue slipping out to drink the lives of his victims. Each one had its own subtle bouquet. The hints of a life lived, the spice of mortal fear and panic. Who was a drunk or an addict. Which of them carried a genetic poison that would one day blossom to the fore – as a toxic legacy for their children or the blossoming canker from within.
Malakris tasted their being, their very souls, through their spilled blood. He laughed as he killed. He had always enjoyed the act. He would not deny it now. Murder had become as easy to him as breathing, a reflex, an afterthought.
His armour clicked and clattered as he moved. He had taken time with the Techmarines and the Mechanicum to augment it. Now it truly fitted him. It moulded to him, bound to him as the second skin it ought to be, its barbs biting into his flesh and incising him in ways that generated the most exquisite pain.
Listen!
He paused in his revels. Las-fire pattered uselessly off his armour as he strode onwards and finally ignited his claws. Unclean light stained the air as the defenders rushed in closer. Malakris was bored now. The world offered very little challenge to him. He might as well have allowed the Kalathesians to have their fill.
He took his time with them, letting the Wallsmen achieve some paltry easy hits. A pivot that brought him into the line of fire. A false recoil here, a faltering step there. It was all theatre in the end.
They charged him now, the brave fools. Malakris raised one clawed hand at his head and saluted them. A missile streaked from overhead, and he sidestepped it, the detonation jostling him to the side. The fire rendered him as a black void before the eyes of the soldiers, a looming shadow, barbed and ominous, lit only by the hellish conflagration and the murderous flare of his own claws.
‘This is the inferno you have made for yourselves!’ he called, broadcasting aloud now. ‘The Lord Commander Primus’ pleasure is upon you, and I am his red right hand!’
‘For the Emperor!’ someone screamed in desperation, and the charge continued on. He watched them as they surged forward, their fatigues muddy brown and their breastplates dull steel, like a flash-flood of brackish water. Moribund little creatures. They had built their high walls and were content to cower behind them, becoming merely a part of the stonework. They might as well have been entombed living within the great defences, brick and mortar for a future already dead.
The officers knew that they would not kill him alone, and so the first waves were mere Army troopers. Lasguns firing. Bolts straining to pierce his armour. He could see they were already overcharged, their cells burning out so very quickly. Guttering candles in the cruel dark.
Bayonets glinted in the firelight as the soldiers surmounted ridges made of broken paving stones, tripping over the uneven edges, vaulting across toppled columns. Malakris wondered at the arithmetic they had undoubtedly employed. How many human-standard soldiers it would take to lay low a single legionary.
More las-fire pattered against his armour. A solid shell struck the side of his helm, staggering him for an instant. He growled and let his claws click together. They were nothing, and yet their sheer determination was a wearying thing.
He lunged forward into the thick of them. Even well prepared, they were still shocked at his movements. He took pleasure in the transhuman dread flashing across their faces, even if only for a moment. They were committed now. Both of them locked together. They could fight the monster suddenly amongst them, or they could die.
The blades at the ends of the enemy guns sought his flesh, blunting and breaking against his armour. Heavier weapons found him. Bolter emplacements and plasma guns turned the air to fire and shrapnel around him. Stone shattered and burned. Dust and sand became glass in the sudden heat, even as the enemy dead were atomised or flash-seared. A heavy bolter shell cracked against his breastplate and drove him back. He felt something hot run down the inside of his armour, and he relished the creeping sensation.
The stink of cooked human meat filled his nostrils, even through the filters of his raptor-faced helm. He roared and the sound boomed out over the battlefield in a wave. Amplified, but not to the dizzying heights of Eidolon or his Kakophoni. Enough to wrong-foot and intimidate, not to break bones.
‘Now,’ he signalled.
The scream of jet thrusters cut through even the din of battle as the other members of his squad tore overhead. The assault legionaries howled into the melee, chainblades roaring and bolt pistols snarling. Men came apart in welters of gore, opened from crown to groin, bisected outright, heads and limbs cloven free as they set about their bloody work.
‘Well baited, captain!’ voxed Rykan Bail, his second. A finer devotee of the paths of pain he had yet to encounter. ‘The vermin scatter! We should chase them into their holes, dig them out and crucify them for the amusement of the men! Pin them screaming upon the walls as a warning to all the others! Flense them living and–’
Malakris cut off the stream of suggestions, content to relish his own murderous pursuits. One of the Wallsmen was crawling away from him, his legs broken by the landings. The man was dragging his body along, clawing onwards through the wreckage, his fingertips reduced to bloody stumps. Malakris moved after him, watching him like a child would observe a wounded insect.
Listen!
The voice was purring at the back of his mind again, insistent and direct, so very familiar. If he focused, he could finally know who it was that spoke to him with such absolute authority. The commanding presence that haunted him, that spoke in his dreams and his waking hours. That urged him towards greater and greater excesses.
He reached down and seized the mortal by the head, lifting him up bodily. He began to squeeze. He felt the armoured helm crack and fall away. He felt flesh part and bones break. He could practically taste the marrow as it was released from the thin shell of the man’s skull. Then the raw brain meat fell out and away, cooking to dust against the power-fielded claws.
He let out a ragged sigh of satisfaction. His flesh crawled with contradictory emotions, his nerves saturated in obscene pleasure. His soul was singing, caged in his own body, pounding alongside his hearts within the plate of his fused ribcage.
Malakris looked up suddenly.
A shadow stood silhouetted against the burning skies, cloak fluttering in the sudden rush of furnace winds. He knew its shape. He knew its intent. It was Eidolon, impossible as it seemed. Gesturing with one clawed hand, the light behind him making him seem to burn with black flame, caught in the killing breeze.
Malakris bounded up the rise and stared over the edge. Below them the Sons of Horus marched, their ranks maintaining far more cohesion than the broken warbands of the III. Most of their shots found their mark with a crude efficiency.
Methodical. Clinging to their orders as if they could protect them from the flood. The voice was eager at his ear again.
All it would take was the slightest of gestures, the most miniscule of efforts, and there could be a sacrifice worthy of his ascension.
They do not deserve your majesty or might. Show them what you can be. Do what must be done. In my name.
‘I’m listening now,’ Malakris breathed, his eyes rising skyward as the gunships of the XVI hurtled overhead. ‘I’m listening, lord.’
They died like cattle and there was no sport in it, no joy.
Even the officers had put up little to no fight, and Vocipheron despaired of it. Was this the calibre of men they had left in their shadow? Curs who set their subordinates against the Legion? Who would sacrifice countless others to save their own selfish skins?
He fought through the burning ruins that had once been a military scholam, the seared remains of desks and parchment stirring at his feet. Ashes clung to everything, both the flaking detritus of burning wood and the oily soot of atomised bodies. Vocipheron had paused amidst the horror to clean his blade, its edge clotted with blood and flesh, depositing it in a wet pile at his feet. He tossed aside the rag that had once been a uniform and let it burn.
Let it all burn.
He winced away from the thought, alien and sudden as it had come. He was not some craven Destroyer, to obliterate the world merely so he could say he had won. Leave that to the vulgar Legions, the mad and the depraved. He would not count himself amongst their number. He would burn himself before he descended to such a depth. Yet the thought was insistent and pervasive. The world yearned to burn, to be destroyed and remade. Only from the ashes could the phoenix truly arise. Chemos had been a dead cradle, and yet Fulgrim had brought it life once more.
‘With me!’ he called. More of his chosen blades rushed to join him, hurling themselves over rough-hewn barricades. Toppled columns lay across the great avenues, hewn down like dead trees to stymie the advance of a Legion force. Already they were stained and smeared with blood and viscera, patterns emergent within the bloodshed.
Vocipheron forged on, out of one barracks and into the vastness of an auditorium hall. His vox crackled as the other, more distant warriors of his unit, his Blade-sworn, reported in. Fighting their individual wars, the lonely pursuits of the duellist.
‘No true challenges yet,’ huffed Alef Catragani, one of Vocipheron’s comrades-in-arms. ‘It is like fighting mere recruits. Give me the Sons of Horus any day, or even Malakris’ rabble.’ He looked askance at Vocipheron. Like his master, Alef maintained discipline of the flesh. He was unscarred and his hair tumbled down his shoulders in a great spray of ivory. ‘You should be ending your rivalry in blood. The captaincy could be yours, if you would but seize it.’
‘A fine undertaking in a warzone,’ he grumbled. ‘There will be time enough for that later. I will give him a gutter death, just as he deserves, but in my own time. By my blade.’
Alef shrugged and staggered away, intent on finding worthier prey. Vocipheron’s instructions had conveyed an impressive independence in his men. As it should be.
They had been raised up by his own hand. Chosen from the ranks of the Third Millennial for their martial skill and absolute detachment. Free from the wider taint of the Legion, spared from the worst excesses. He had killed those who did not meet his high standards and expectations himself, blade to blade.
Vocipheron did not consider himself a Lucius or a Cyrius, or any of the other masters of the blade whom the Legion spawned in multitudes. Too many laid claim to such lofty heights, measuring themselves against external standards instead of focusing upon the purity of the craft. Even if he could never best them, he knew that he had dedicated himself utterly to his chosen path.
He brushed his free hand along the surface of his armour, fingers tracing along the gilded cracks in his plate. Every wound was honoured and repaid, every slight avenged. When the deeds were done, he would prepare and melt the gold himself, working it into the armour along with the ceramite sealant.
He was becoming art.
A battle cry cut through the smoke as one of the officers finally committed herself to the game. Vocipheron smiled. He wore no helm, so the woman could see the face of the man who would end her. The other warriors fell back, silent and grinning.
He brought his sabre up, the gilded hilt sparkling in the half-light.
‘Well met, daughter of the Imperium. I am Vocipheron, blademaster of the Third. I would have the honour of your name before I end you.’
She spat at the ground. There was blood on her pale cheeks and in her dark hair. The light of her own powered blade cast her in a pool of illumination, as though singling her out for his attention. The woman stood tall and lean, a soldier’s build. A professional, though not a challenge.
‘Cerel, fiend.’ She practically hissed the words at him. ‘I stand as a captain of the Wallsmen.’
‘While you still had walls,’ he allowed, softly, almost gently. Her face twisted with anger.
‘Why would you do this? You once liberated and defended this world. Now you tear it down in a single night of bloodshed and madness.’
‘I wish you could understand,’ he said, and was surprised to find he meant it. ‘The Emperor’s lies have set this galaxy in chains. They will be broken. World by world and wall by wall. All the way back to the Throneworld and the Palace.’
‘You’ll be stopped. Perhaps not here, but you will not succeed.’
