Fulgrim (11 page)

The crackling blades of the Phoenix Guard surrounded Fulgrim, their long halberds keeping the Laer at bay as they forged their way towards the temple at the far end of the valley. He could see the massive form of Brother Thestis at the primarch’s side, holding the great Legion standard of the Emperor’s Children high. The eagle atop the pole blazed with a white gold light in the glow of the moon, and the purple cloth of the banner rippled like silk in the wind.

Julius saw at once that his primarch was surrounded and shouted, ‘Warriors of the First, to the Phoenician!’

T
HE LORD OF
the Emperor’s Children struck out at his foes with mighty strokes of his sword, each terrible blow slaying one of the Laer. None could stand against him and live, so when the traitorous thought arose that this fight was not going according to plan, it came like an assassin in the night.

His Phoenix Guard fought like the heroes they were, golden blades killing anything that dared come within range of their deadly halberds, and brave Thestis valiantly held the Legion standard high, chopping apart any enemies that came near him with his long blade. All around them, Laer were dying, cut down by deadly sword strikes or gunned down by disciplined, precisely aimed bolter fire. A strange pink musk drifted across the battlefield and clung to his ankles, its scent fragrant and not at all unpleasant. The screams of the towers drowned out the screeches of the Laer, and Fulgrim could not remember a more frenetic battlefield.

He had never before experienced such a riot of colour and noise, and what purpose it served, he could not fathom. The rearing temple appeared to be the centre of the cacophony. Tears in its fabric, like windows, were the source of the loudest screaming, and from them more of the pink musk seeped into the air. The structure was perhaps three hundred metres in front of him, but without more of his warriors, he saw that it might as well have been three hundred light years.

Another treacherous thought came to him as his sword clove a Laer warrior from head to tail, that perhaps they had been drawn into this hellish valley deliberately. The pink coral of its walls and the jagged spires that lined the ridges of its summit reminded him of a plant he had seen in the humid swamps of Twenty-Eight Two that feasted on the great buzzing insects of the jungles by luring them into its leafy jaws before snapping shut and digesting them.

Only the warriors who had accompanied him on the
Firebird
fought with him, and though they fought bravely, they were being dragged down one by one, and such a rate of attrition could have only one outcome. He scanned the slopes of the valley for any sign of his battle companies. He punched the air as he saw Julius Kaesoron and the warriors of the First fighting their way through the press of slithering, screeching Laer warriors towards him.

Terminator armour gave each warrior the strength and power of a tank, and though Fulgrim had loathed these inelegant suits of armour at first sight, his heart leapt to see them now.

‘See now the mighty First!’ shouted Fulgrim. ‘Push on my brothers, push on!’

Brother Thestis surged forward, holding the Legion standard with one hand and cutting his way through the Laer with his sword. Fulgrim leapt to join him, protecting his faithful standard bearer’s flank as the Phoenix Guard rallied to the banner.

‘Follow the Phoenician!’ Julius Kaesoron shouted, behind him, and Fulgrim laughed with the sheer joy and artistry of the fighting as the warriors of the First smashed into the Laer. Apothecary Fabius had said that the Laer were chemically modified to move towards perfection, but they were a poor shadow of the perfection embodied by his Legion.

As he punched his fist through a Laer warrior’s skull, Fulgrim tried to imagine what heights he and his warriors could scale were they to embark on a similar path, and how proud his father would be when he saw what wonders and marvels they had wrought.

A hissing Laer warrior hacked its weapon into the shoulder guard of his armour, the blade sliding clear and its tip scoring a line across his golden helm. Fulgrim cried out, more in surprise than pain, and thrust his sword through the alien’s jaws.

He forced himself to concentrate on the fighting and not the glories the future held, seeing that yet more of his warriors were pushing into the valley through burrow holes in the coral. He frowned at their lateness, for his plan had called for an overwhelming strike delivered to this temple in perfect concert. Somewhere things had gone awry and many of his warriors had been delayed. The sudden thought troubled him greatly and his mood darkened.

As more and more Emperor’s Children poured into the valley, Fulgrim and the Legion banner pushed deeper into the frenzied ranks of the Laer, the temple now tantalisingly close. A flaring sheet of green fire shot out and Fulgrim threw himself to the side. He felt the heat of the alien weapon, but shrugged off the pain where it had caught him, and turned to face the threat. The Phoenix Guard had already slaughtered his attacker.

‘The banner falls!’ shouted a voice, and Fulgrim saw Brother Thestis on his knees, his body a flaming statue as the deadly alien fire consumed him. The Legion standard slipped from Thestis’s dead hand and toppled towards the ground, the cloth of the banner blazing where it had caught light.

Fulgrim leapt towards Thestis and snatched up the banner before it landed, raising it high with one hand so that all the Legion might see that it still flew. Fire rippled across the fabric, destroying what a hundred weeping women had created for the beautiful Primarch of the III Legion, in its unthinking hunger. The eagle’s claw heraldry emblazoned upon the banner vanished in the flames, and Fulgrim felt his fury rise at this fresh insult to his honour. Burning scraps of cloth fluttered around him, but he saw that the eagle atop the banner pole remained untouched by the fire, as though some greater power protected it from harm.

‘The eagle still flies!’ he shouted. ‘The eagle will never fall!’

Fulgrim’s warriors roared in anger at this violation done to their banner and redoubled their efforts to destroy their enemies. Hard bangs of bolter fire sounded beside Fulgrim, and he turned to see Julius Kaesoron gunning down a pair of winged Laer warriors that swooped towards the blackened banner. The Phoenix Guard formed a protective cordon around him as Fulgrim marched over to the Terminator captain, the glittering eagle still held high.

‘Captain Kaesoron!’ cried Fulgrim. ‘You are late.’

‘I apologise, my lord,’ said Kaesoron contritely. ‘Finding a path through the coral proved to be more difficult than we imagined.’

‘Difficulty is no excuse,’ warned Fulgrim. ‘Perfection must overcome difficulty.’

‘It must, my lord,’ agreed Kaesoron. ‘It will never happen again.’

Fulgrim nodded and said, ‘Where are Captain Demeter’s Second?’

‘I do not know, my lord. He has not answered any of my vox hails.’

Fulgrim turned from Kaesoron and returned his attention to the battle. ‘I shall need you and your warriors to break open that temple. Follow me in.’

Without waiting for acknowledgement, Fulgrim set off at a brisk jog through his Phoenix Guard, who formed up around him as he took the eagle once more into the fight. Missiles and shells slammed into the temple and massive chunks of coral smashed down into the valley, crushing the Laer that gathered around its base.

With Fulgrim at their head, the Emperor’s Children formed a fighting wedge that speared through the Laer. Closer to the temple, the aliens fought with a violence that bordered on the insane, the pink musk wreathing their bodies in a filmy gauze, and their screeching cries like those of the banshees of ancient myth. They attacked with no thought to their own defence, and Fulgrim swore that some were simply hurling themselves onto his blade. Dark blood and howls of what he would later swear were pleasure ripped from their bodies with every stroke.

The gnarled spires of the screaming temple towered above him, the wide arched entrance like the mouth of an undersea cave. Huge chunks of blasted coral lay scattered around, and scores of snaking Laer bodies slithered around them, their multiple arms bearing curved blades, which crackled with blue flames that shone brightly in the mist that poured from the shattered temple.

The Emperor’s Children hammered into them, and the battle was as bloody as it was brief, the Laer fighting with inhumanly quick strikes of their lethal blades. Even the armour of the Terminators was not proof against such weapons, and more than one of Kaesoron’s First lost a limb or his life to their unnatural energies.

With more and more Emperor’s Children pushing into the valley, there could be no stopping their advance, and they slashed through the alien warriors that stood between them and the yawning cave mouth of the temple.

‘We have them now, my children!’ shouted Fulgrim.

Holding the shining eagle banner in one hand and his golden sword in the other, Fulgrim fought his way into the temple of the Laer.

J
ULIUS
K
AESORON HAD
killed with the fury of one of Angron’s warriors, the shame of the primarch’s rebuke driving him to undreamt of heights of reckless courage to once again prove his mettle. He had lost count of the Laer he had killed, and now the darkness of the temple enfolded him as he followed the golden eagle borne by his primarch into the heart of the black coral structure.

The darkness was like a living thing, swallowing light and sound as though jealously guarding it. Beyond the temple, Julius could still hear the cramp of explosions, the rattle of gunfire, the clash of blades and the nerve shredding screams of the towers, but with each step he took, the sounds diminished as though he were descending into an infinitely deep pit.

Ahead of him, Fulgrim strode onwards, unaware or uncaring of the effect the darkness of the temple was having on his warriors. Julius could see that even the normally implacable Phoenix Guard were uneasy in this place, and no wonder, for the primarch himself had declared that it was a place of worship.

The idea of such things was as repugnant to Julius as the idea of failure, and the thought that he stood in a fane where loathsome aliens had offered praise to false gods stoked the fires of his hatred. The warriors who had fought their way into the temple spread out as they followed their leader, swords raised or bolters at the ready in case some new threat lay within the place that the Laer had fought so hard to defend.

‘There is power here,’ said Fulgrim, his voice sounding impossibly distant. ‘I can feel it.’

The Phoenix Guard closed ranks around the primarch, but he waved them away, sheathing
Fireblade
and reaching up to remove his eagle-winged helmet before handing it to the closest of his bodyguards. Though the Phoenix Guard retained their helmets, a great many other warriors reached up and followed their primarch’s example.

Julius did likewise and released the catches at his gorget, lifting the close-fitting helmet clear of his head. His skin was clammy with sweat, and he took a deep breath of air to clear his lungs of the stale, recycled oxygen of his armour. The air was hot and scented, a cloying musk drifting from holes in the walls, and he was surprised to feel a little lightheaded.

The darkness of the temple began to lift as they penetrated deeper, and Julius could hear what sounded like frantic music from up ahead, as though a million demented orchestras were playing a million different tunes at once. A flickering, multi-coloured glow pierced the gloom where Julius believed the source of the discordant music to lie. Even at this distance, Julius could feel the cold breath of air that spoke of a much larger space ahead, and he picked up his pace, marching in heavy, ponderous strides to draw level with his primarch.

As Julius entered the cavern, he felt as though a smothering blanket he had not known existed was suddenly pulled from his skull, and he clapped his hands to his ears as a cacophonous flood of sensations assaulted him with a surge of light and noise.

Blazing light filled the immense space within the temple, leaping from wall to wall, and riotous noise echoed in a deafening thunder of sounds. Fantastical colours wheeled in the air, as though the light were somehow caught in the humid, aromatic smoke that snaked through the chamber. Monstrous statues of what Julius assumed were the gods of the Laer ran around the circumference of the temple, massive bull-headed creatures with multiple arms and great horns curling from their skulls. Numerous barbed rings pierced their stone flesh and each god’s chest was sheathed in layered armour plate that left the right breast bare.

Wild murals covered every centimetre of the walls, and Julius stiffened as he saw that hundreds of the Laer writhing on the chamber’s floor, the horrid, dry susurration of their bodies the most hideous sound imaginable. He made to shout a warning, but saw there was no need, for the serpentine bodies were hideously intertwined in what looked like some form of grotesque sexual congress.

Clearly, whatever power had driven the Laer defending the temple into a manic frenzy did not extend to those within it. They sprawled in languorous repose, their glistening, multi-hued bodies pierced in the same manner as the statues, and their sluggish movements suggesting the effects of a powerful narcotic.

‘What are they doing?’ asked Julius over the din. ‘Are they dying?’

‘If they are, then it seems to be a very pleasurable death,’ said Fulgrim, his eyes fixed hungrily on something in the centre of the chamber. Julius followed his gaze, seeing that the slithering Laer surrounded a circular block of veined black stone, embedded within which was a tall sword with a gently curved blade.

The handle was long and silver, its surface patterned like the scales of a snake, and its pommel was set with a winking purple stone that threw off dazzling reflections.

‘They were protecting this,’ said Fulgrim, his voice sounding distant and faint to Julius. His eyes stung with the smoke, and he could feel the beginnings of a powerful headache as the noise and light continued to batter at his senses.

‘No,’ whispered Julius, knowing, but not knowing how he knew, that the Laer had not offered praise in this temple, but had been in thrall to it. ‘This is not a place of worship, it is a place of dominance.’