Fabius Bile: Clonelord Read online

  The Vesalius waited amid the inner circumference of the network, its hull bathed in periodic sensor sweeps as the mindless drones that controlled the orbital arrays scanned it for any sign of treachery. He had been allowed to bring no one with him. No bodyguards, not even an assistant. For the moment, his ship still belonged to Alkenex – or Eidolon, rather. It seemed unlikely that was going to change in the near future.

  He distracted himself with a vitals scan. Information slid across the inside of his visor. The chirurgeon gave an almost petulant hiss as it found nothing wrong with him. The degeneration had not yet started, but he could feel it, like the phantom ache of a missing limb. A kernel of rot, waiting for the right moment to flourish and consume this body as it had all of the others.

  In a way, the anticipation of the inevitable pain was less bearable than the pain itself. Even hale and healthy, he second guessed every movement, every flutter of his heart or unfamiliar sensation that passed through him. He knew from long experience that if he pushed himself to the edge of his capabilities, the degeneration would flourish that much quicker. Moderation was his only ally – conserve, conserve, conserve. Hoard his strength like a miser, so that he might eke a few more centuries out of the corpus he wore.

  It was a process of diminishing returns. The degeneration began earlier with every new body. Soon, this one would begin to break down, as all the others had. He would need stimms and opiate mixtures to maintain his equilibrium until it was time to seek new flesh. But not yet. A few decades, perhaps a century. He had some time. Time to complete his work. Time, perhaps, to find a cure.

  He’d thought – hoped – the aeldari would have one. Though they had since degenerated, they’d once had a knowledge base far in excess of humanity’s own. He’d picked the bones of their extinguished empire, but to no avail. So far, nothing had worked. His experiments with wraithbone cultivation might yet reveal something of use, but he held out little hope. The best he could do was buy time – just a few more centuries, to perfect his New Men. To give them the best chance of survival.

  And now, to add insult to injury, he had to deal with this interruption. He did not fear for his life, such as it was. But the time – he was losing time. He pushed the thought aside and turned his attentions back to the hololithic projection. The gunship shuddered slightly as it pierced the stratospheric veil and dropped into a sub-orbital trajectory.

  Harmony was a broken world. It was but the ghost of the hellish paradise it had once been. The projection showed that parts of the crust had separated from the core, and the planet shuddered with massive, intermittent, tectonic upheaval like a wounded animal, bleeding fire into the void. Striated scar lines marked its circumference – the rad-blasted remains of once-mighty Mechanicum city-states. But it was the largest wound in the world’s hide that attracted Fabius’ eye. ‘Canticle City,’ he muttered.

  ‘Not so beautiful, now,’ Alkenex said. He sat across from Fabius, his sword across his knees. His warriors sat to either side of him, their eyes never leaving Fabius. He wondered what they thought he was going to do, trapped aboard their vessel as he was.

  ‘It was never beautiful. It was barely passable, at the best of times.’ Fabius watched the ruins of the city swell in the hololithic feed, as the gunship descended through the fiery atmosphere. Proximity alarms sounded every so often, and he heard the faint thud of autocannons. Sporadically, there came a sound like the rattling of claws across the hull. There was more than dust in the skies of Harmony.

  Targeting runes flashed across the projection, alerting the gunship’s passengers to the fact that their descent was not unobserved. ‘Contact,’ echoed the voice of the servitor hardwired into the pilot’s compartment. ‘Transmitting verification codes.’ The hollow voice cascaded over the vox-link, accompanied by a brief blurt of binary gibberish.

  ‘Have we come all this way only to be blown out of the sky?’ Fabius’ grip tightened on Torment’s haft. His hearts sped up, straining slightly in their traces. He called up a bio-readout, studying his vitals as they scrolled along the interior of his helmet’s visor with a dispassionate eye. Still strong. No discernible fluctuations. There would be, soon enough. But for the moment, he was strong enough to walk away from a crash landing.

  ‘Your ending will not be so gentle, Spider, of that you can be sure,’ Alkenex said. ‘But no, Eidolon is simply cautious. We have enemies, after all. Thanks to you.’

  Fabius snorted. ‘I had some help, in that regard.’

  Alkenex sat back and said nothing. Even when they’d landed, he said nothing. He merely gestured for Fabius to stand. They trooped out of the gunship and down into the dust of a dead world. They’d landed in a cleared plaza, surrounded by barely functioning sentry-guns, which whirred and clicked, tracking every movement. Everything was red. Not like rust or blood, but the dull, sore red of inflammation. The atmosphere was in upheaval, and there was still dust in the air, several millennia after Abaddon’s assault.

  Canticle City spread out around them, an uneven spillage of ruined structures, rippling outwards from the upright hulk of a warship. The Tlaloc’s shadow cascaded across the ruins, carried by the solar wind, which stripped the ruins of colour and strength. The Tlaloc had been a mighty vessel, forged in the fires of the Great Crusade. What was left of it rose an impossible distance above what was left of the city, tall enough to reach the heavens.

  Up close, the warship did not resemble what it had once been. It was simply a wide, high tower of jagged metal and buckled hull plates, ­rising over the districts it had toppled with its arrival. Whole structures had been uprooted and hurled in all directions, or else obliterated in their entirety. Towers and defence emplacements lay scattered about like toppled gravestones. Clouds of dust and water vapour collected about the ship at odd points, obscuring whole sections. Flocks of things that were not quite birds roosted in the high places, and their discordant song drifted down to those below.

  A shanty town had sprouted in the impact crater, and overflowed the walls of gouged crust and soil. Despite Abaddon’s best efforts, life yet persisted here, and in the remains of the once-proud Mechanicum city-states. The Mechanicum had abandoned Harmony not long after the Emperor’s Children, leaving it to the lost and the dead.

  Like the spear that had killed it, the city had been magnificent – an ever-expanding work of art. Minarets of bronze and gold topping towers of black jasper and lapis lazuli, heavy with gilded vox-casters wrought in the shape of singing daemons, rising above slab-roofed cathedral-communes. He remembered the sound of pilgrims arriving at the great southern gates in their thousands, their voices raised in hymns of praise to malign gods. The omnipresent whine of Mechanicum flyers, flying precise routes between the cities of their masters and their masters’ masters.

  Now, the only sound was… static. The harsh rustle of impact-scrambled frequencies against the electronic frame of the vox network. Abaddon’s spear had disrupted more than just the physical – it had ruptured the ether itself. Snatches of old signals and panicked messages from the day of the attack intruded on the vox-link, making internal communication all but impossible.

  Despite this, Alkenex and his warriors moved in assured silence. They formed a phalanx about Fabius, trapping him in a cage of ceramite. They followed a straight avenue, into the heart of the ruin. At intervals, they were met by decaying combat-servitors, which lurched from broken doorways to scan them with hazy, sputtering sensors, before retreating into the dark. These were not the only guards, though they were the only obvious ones. The enhanced auspex in Fabius’ battleplate detected a dozen power armour signatures, moving all about them, out of sight. He said nothing. Let them think him blind and deaf, if they wished. He might need the advantage, sooner or later.

  The deeper they went into the ruins, the more abstruse it all became. Creeper-vines of pale, pink flesh clung tight to structures, and sullen, gawping faces were slathered across walls, eyes roll
ing blindly in drooping sockets. Half-formed Neverborn scratched and clawed at their surroundings, attempting to free themselves. Their efforts only grew more agitated as Fabius and the others drew close. A musky mist seeped between buildings, and indistinct shapes danced within it, entreating the Space Marines to join them.

  ‘Entropy,’ Fabius said, making the word sound like a curse.

  ‘Perfection,’ Alkenex replied. He reached out and tore a pink creeper from an archway. Something that might have been blood spurted from it and dripped down. ‘You planted the seeds of this garden, fleshcrafter. One would think you would appreciate it more.’ He tossed the wriggling creeper to Fabius, who caught it.

  A brief scan revealed a familiar signature on its genetic pattern. ‘This came from one of my flesh-vats,’ he said. ‘How curious.’

  ‘The things you create do not die easily, Spider. There are plenty of them, still howling down there in the dark. Perhaps we will toss you to them, before the day is out.’

  Fabius said nothing. The creeper clung tenaciously to life, squirming in his grip like a serpent. Tiny, circular mouths dotted its underside, and these flexed abominably. The chirurgeon took a sample, as it was programmed to do, and he tossed the writhing lump of meat aside. Now that he knew it was there, he saw more signs of his handiwork scattered about the ruin. Strange growths of fibrous meat, squeezing up through the cracked pavement; malformed creatures, simian-like and primitive, watching from the high places; and the biological sensory nodes, observing and recording all that passed beneath them, though the repository for those recordings had long since been destroyed.

  His facilities on Harmony had been extensive – larger even than those on Urum. By the end, nearly two-thirds of the city’s substructure had been given over to his needs. In his absence, some of it had obviously done as he designed it to do – persist. He felt a curious sort of pride. He had made his mark and it endured, despite the best efforts of his enemies.

  ‘There,’ Alkenex said. Fabius looked up. The structure, or what remained of it, looked familiar, even at a distance of several centuries. It sat close to the impact crater, and had obviously been nearly destroyed by the Tlaloc’s arrival. That it had not collapsed in on itself spoke to the surety of its construction.

  Fabius was escorted through a labyrinth of broken archways and semi-intact walls, all open to the red skies. Mutants huddled in the shadows, warming themselves before burning oil drums, watching the newcomers with dull eyes. Fabius could hear the rumble of many augmented voices echoing through the crumbling stones.

  ‘I thought I was here to meet Eidolon,’ Fabius said as they navigated the maze.

  ‘Eidolon wishes to see you,’ Alkenex corrected.

  ‘And that’s different, is it?’

  ‘Much.’ Alkenex stopped. Turned. ‘Now hold your tongue, lieutenant commander. Be silent, until someone asks you to speak.’

  Fabius made to reply, considered and gave a terse nod. Not so much due to the threat, but out of curiosity. This had all the elements of the opening to a performance. His armour’s sensors had detected several scrambled pict-feeds being fed back from the optic scanners of the servitors that had accosted them. Someone was watching every move they made, and had been since they’d arrived. He could almost smell the anticipation on the air.

  The sounds slipping from the maze’s centre had grown in volume. A roar of voices, like hounds baying at the scent of blood. Alkenex’s pace quickened and Fabius was forced to hurry to keep up with him. Around him, Alkenex’s warriors did the same, moving swiftly, laughing, singing, one panting like a dog.

  At last, they came to an archway higher than all of the others. The great steel doors were covered in lewd carvings, shaped by the hands of daemon-possessed artisans. The carvings seemed to flex and writhe as the two abhuman slave-beasts crouched beneath them moved to force the large doors open.

  The doors swung inwards, ancient hinges screeching in protest. Beyond the doorway, there was only ruin and red sky. The heart of the structure, burst open and hollowed out like a gutted corpse. Alkenex stepped through, and a rumble of voices swept down and back through the doorway, as if in greeting. Fabius was herded through by Alkenex’s warriors, a condemned man on his walk to the gallows.

  ‘Behold, for I have brought thee a king with a head of gold,’ Alkenex roared. ‘Behold, the prodigal brother, returned to the embrace of kin and kind.’ He turned lightly, arms spread. Fabius squinted against the harsh glare of the sputtering lumens strung from the cracked heights of the makeshift amphitheatre.

  A howl, almost solid in its force, went up. The sound buffeted him, threatening to drag him under. There were Kakophoni above, and worse things besides. Massive, twisted shapes that could only exist where the warp bled over into the hard corridors of reality. They stood above him, crouched on broken walls, or standing atop shattered columns. All wore robes of pristine white, threaded with gold, over their battleplate. Hoods covered their heads, and in some cases, they wore golden masks wrought in the image of leering, androgynous daemons. Others glared down at him, their faces unhidden. He did not recognise them.

  All save one. A crude throne had been crafted atop the most stable section of ruin – a dais of substructure and heat-warped rebar – and upon it sat the Lord Commander Primus of the Emperor’s Children. Eidolon, Master of the Eternal Song, and the Auric Hammer. Eidolon, Firstborn of the Kakophoni, and First Vizier to the Phoenician. Eidolon the Headless, Eidolon the Reborn. He accrued titles the way a gambler accrued debts.

  Eidolon had not changed much in the centuries since Fabius had last seen him. His battleplate was a chemical-scarred riot of colour, its facets carved into suggestive shapes. His mangled scalp was shorn smooth, save for a single cascade of colourless, brittle hair that ­tumbled across the ornate vents and amplifiers wired into his armour. His face looked as if the flesh were too loose to hang properly on a skull that was no longer structurally sound, and his eyes were opaque orbs. Power cables studded his head and throat, feeding back into his armour, and these sparked and twitched like serpents. His thunder hammer rested across his lap as he sprawled back in the throne.

  ‘Hello, brother,’ he called down, his voice a harsh, reverb buzz. ‘Welcome home.’

  ‘I would say that it is good to be back, but we both know that’s a lie,’ Fabius said. As he spoke, the audience fell silent. He pushed past Alkenex and stepped fully into the light of the lumens. ‘What is this? Why am I here?’

  Eidolon heaved himself to his feet. A movement that should have been awkward due to his bulk was anything but. There was an unnatural grace there that spoke of great changes within him. Fabius studied the Lord Commander Primus and wondered how much of the warrior he’d once conspired with was left in that husk.

  ‘You are here because I wished it. Because we wished it.’

  ‘And who is we?’ Fabius made a show of looking around at the masked and robed figures. Most were in power armour, though there were a few who were not. Some were more – and less – human than the Chaos Space Marines they stood among. Sensor baffles were mounted among the ruins, preventing him from identifying anyone by their armour-signatures.

  ‘Surely poor Kasperos mentioned us to you, before you so cruelly betrayed him to the eldar,’ Eidolon said. Given the state of his face, it was hard to tell if he was smiling or not, but Fabius suspected that he was. ‘Kasperos Telmar was a true and faithful brother, unlike you, Fabius. And he paid the price for trusting you – a price most of us have paid, at one time or another.’

  ‘Is that what this is, then? A gathering of those who feel wronged by me? If so, I’m surprised that there aren’t more of you. Our brothers were ever quick to take offence over the smallest of slights.’ A mutter swept their ranks, and he wondered how many of them had known he would be here. Hands fingered weapons. He knew only Eidolon’s authority prevented some among the masked congregants from attacking him.
/>   Eidolon chuckled and the air hummed with static. ‘Our membership is more exclusive than that. We are the remnants of a once-proud Legion. The masters and commanders of an army like no other, broken on the reefs of your hubris. We are the Phoenix Conclave, and we rose from the ashes of the fire you set, Lieutenant Commander Fabius.’

  Another growl of voices, low and steady. Fabius frowned. Every eye was upon him. He could feel the heat of their disdain. ‘One more name, added to an already unsteady pile of titles and sobriquets. It means nothing to me.’

  ‘But it should,’ Eidolon said. ‘And it will. We rise, like the Phoenix, and spread our wings over the Eye and all that it contains. We see and understand our place in this galaxy with perfect clarity.’

  ‘Clarity? I see no clarity here. Only childish obfuscation and ritual.’ Fabius swept Torment out, indicating the masked figures all around him. ‘Illuminate me, Eidolon. Tell me why I am here. Not to join whatever revels you have planned, I think.’

  Eidolon planted his hammer on the ground. ‘And you would think wrong. Our father Fulgrim sleeps, and in his sleep, he sent to me a messenger. A lovely creature, who danced so pleasingly and in her dancing, passed to me a message from our father.’

  Fabius hesitated. ‘What was her name?’ he asked, thinking of what Igori had told him earlier, about her own dreams. Was this another of Melusine’s games – or something more sinister?

  Eidolon smiled and sank into a crouch on the edge of the dais, leaning on the haft of his thunder hammer. ‘I do not know. But she told me to gather those who still have the courage of their convictions. Those who still burn with the old fire. Those who still know yearning, who still seek perfection.’