Fabius Bile Primogenitor Read online

  ‘Exile agrees with you, brother.’ Arrian’s voice was soft. Softer than it ought to have been. As if it came from the mouth of some inbred outer-rim aristocrat, rather than a savage draped in skulls and chains. A considered affectation. Another way of chaining the beast inside.

  ‘I left of my own volition.’

  ‘And now you’re back.’

  ‘Is that going to be a problem?’ He would only have time for one shot, if that. Arrian was fiendishly quick, when he put his mind to it. Another memento of years spent wading in someone else’s blood, for the entertainment of a screaming crowd.

  ‘No.’ Arrian’s fingers tapped against the hilt of one of his swords. ‘I bear you no particular malice today.’ He reached up to stroke one of the skulls. The cortical implants dangling from it rattled softly.

  ‘And them?’ Oleander said, indicating the skulls. The skulls had belonged to the warriors of Arrian’s former squad. All dead now, and by Arrian’s hand. When a warhound decided to find a new master, bloodshed was inevitable.

  ‘My brothers are dead, Oleander. And as such only concerned with the business of the dead. What about you?’

  ‘I want to see him.’

  Arrian glanced over his shoulder. He looked down at his skulls, and tapped one. ‘You’re right, brothers. He’s watching,’ he said, to the skull.

  ‘Is he, then?’ Oleander said. He turned, scanning the desolation. When he turned back, Arrian was leaning against the archway. He hadn’t even heard the World Eater move.

  ‘He’s always watching, you know that. From inside as well as out,’ Arrian said. ‘Enter, and be welcome once more to the Grand Apothecarion, Oleander Koh. The Chief Apothecary is expecting you.’

  Chapter two

  The Grand Apothecarion

  Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the cavernous spaces of the shattered palace. Oleander and Arrian walked side by side through the entry halls, past defensive hard points. Urum had come under attack more than once since Bile had established his laboratories there. The two moved in easy silence. They’d never had much to talk about, even in better times. Now, Oleander could feel Arrian surreptitiously studying him. Sizing him up for the chopping block, perhaps. Arrian had always been the most loyal of all of them to Bile’s ideal, for reasons of his own. But then, what else could one expect of a warhound?

  ‘New sword?’ Arrian said.

  ‘My last one broke.’

  ‘You always were quite hard on them, as I recall. A Tuonela mortuary sword. A fine weapon for a fine warrior.’ Arrian cocked his head. ‘What are you doing with it?’

  ‘Spoils of war,’ Oleander said. ‘I had to shoot its owner.’

  ‘In the back?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Arrian laughed. The sound put Oleander in mind of a dull blade scraping across wet flesh. The Consortium, as their master called it, had always been an uneasy alliance at best. Its members were not brothers, save in the most figurative sense – they were all Apothecaries, but from different Legions and warbands. Drawn together by a shared desire to learn more of the arts of flesh and bone, of gland and organ, from the acknowledged master. The human body was a mystery that they were all desperately trying to solve, and so they came to sit at the feet of its greatest student, and learn all that he had to teach them.

  Some, like Arrian, had been here for centuries, even accounting for the way time moved in the Eye of Terror. Others stayed only for a few months, or even weeks. Some came to learn a specific lesson, others were sponges, absorbing all that their host knew. And some few learned nothing, and became a lesson themselves.

  But of all of them, Arrian Zorzi had always been the most dangerous. He smiled too easily, thought too quickly, for what he was. Those pain-inducing cortical nodes had only honed him into an even deadlier predator. Oleander longed to wipe the smile off the other renegade’s face, if only to find out what was hiding beneath it. Arrian was a monster who refused to admit it, and was somehow all the more monstrous because of it. Oleander restrained the desire, with some difficulty. Renewing old grudges wasn’t why he’d returned.

  He distracted himself by studying his surroundings. While the outer palace was all but empty, the inner was anything but. The diverse chambers here had once housed decadent feasts, bloody gladiatorial games and indulgent orgies. Now the labyrinthine warrens of unnatural construction were home to the various apothecaria and vivisectoria established by the members of the Consortium. The palace had become a bedlam of grotesquery, filled with the sounds, sights and smells of abomination. Screams, both human and otherwise, echoed through the vaulted corridors and along the rows of hermetically sealed operation chambers. As well as these, Oleander could hear the rattle of surgical tools, the hiss of pneumatic chem-pumps and the quiet murmur of voices engaged in debate and study.

  Faces peered at him from shadowed archways, their gazes by turns curious and baleful. He had not left under the best of circumstances. Many of those who came to Urum did so seeking some form of sanctuary. A safe place to indulge in their own depravity, abetted by one whose utter corruption far outstripped their own. And some of those, like the half-men outside, even worshipped their benefactor in a way. A cult of genius had taken root here, and those who abandoned it were viewed with disdain, if not outright hostility.

  Those laboratories closer to the outer palace were smaller, and the Apothecaries who had claimed them were the newest to join the Consortium. Oleander observed a cavalcade of horrors through the armourglass portholes set into the entryways. Crude surgeries and childish experiments filled these chambers. ‘To do is to learn,’ he said.

  Arrian glanced at him. ‘And to learn is to know,’ he said, completing the old phrase. It was a joke, of sorts. A rationalisation for the irrational. ‘You haven’t forgotten everything you learned here.’

  ‘I forget nothing.’

  Arrian chuckled. ‘For your sake, I hope so. You know how he likes his little tests.’

  Stunted mutants hopped and crawled along the corridors, giving the two legionaries a wide berth. They wore ragged cloaks which obscured their twisted forms and hissing rebreathers. They carried equipment to the various laboratories, or else acted as surgical assistants when necessary. Oleander kicked lazily at one when it drew too close. ‘Vat-born maggot,’ he said. The creature shrank back, whining.

  Arrian slid in front of him. ‘Cease. They are not yours to play with.’ His hands rested on the pommels of his falax blades.

  ‘It almost touched me,’ Oleander said. ‘I cannot abide being touched by something so… so utilitarian.’ He practically spat the word. The vat-born didn’t even have the distinction of being uniquely hideous. They all looked alike, sounded alike, even smelled alike. As if they had been stamped from a mould. It grated on his senses. Such banality was anathema to him.

  ‘And yet you frolic with the beasts outside,’ Arrian said.

  ‘At least they offer some variety.’ Oleander made a face. ‘I’m surprised there are any of them still left. Have you seen what they’re building out there?’

  Arrian shrugged. ‘We leave them to their own devices. They’ve begun to cobble together a crude society of sorts. They have wars, sometimes. It’s entertaining, in its way.’

  ‘And what does the master think?’ Oleander said. ‘Is he entertained as easily as you?’

  Arrian glanced at him. ‘The Chief Apothecary doesn’t think of them at all, Oleander. They’re meat, and of little use for anything save as an early warning system. Why are you back?’

  ‘I told you, I want to see him. And he obviously wishes to see me, else we would not be here. What about the others?’ Like any group, the Consortium had its fair share of favoured individuals. Those who had proven their use beyond a shadow of a doubt, or who were so deeply indebted to Bile that they could not refuse him. Oleander still wasn’t sure which of those described Arrian.

  ‘Skalagrim is leading an expedition to Belial IV – Chief Apothecary Fabius wishes to establish a second facility there,’ Arrian said. Oleander grunted in distaste. Skalagrim was a renegade twice over, and untrustworthy even at the best of times.

  ‘What about Chort?’ Chort took great delight in crafting new flesh-forms. Many was the warlord who had begged for a chance to hunt the inexplicable monstrosities Chort had devised. ‘And old Malpertus?’

  ‘Chort vanished a month ago, on some errand or other for the Chief Apothecary. Malpertus... died on Korazin,’ Arrian said.

  ‘Died?’ Oleander said. Malpertus’ face swam to the surface of his mind – hollow cheeks, filmy eyes and yellow teeth, worn to nubs. Malpertus hadn’t been his real name, and his armour had been scoured of all insignia. That alone had been enough to betray his true allegiances, as far as Oleander was concerned.

  ‘We were all very sad,’ Arrian said, sounding anything but. ‘Especially Saqqara.’

  ‘Saqqara is still alive?’ That was a surprise. Saqqara Thresh had led a Word Bearer kill-team to Urum. They’d been looking to deliver Bile’s head to the Dark Council for some unspecified slight. They’d failed, of course. Urum ate daemons as easily as it ate men, and Saqqara’s force had gone from impressive to pitiable in a few days. By the time the Consortium had struck, the Word Bearers had practically been begging for death.

  Only Saqqara had remained sound of mind and body, thanks to his skill with daemonancy; one of the reasons Bile had decided to spare the diabolist. Daemons were a fact of life in Eyespace, and it was no more than prudent to employ the services of one skilled in the art of their summoning and banishment, however unwilling.

  ‘You’d be surprised at how little a man like that wants to meet his gods.’
Arrian scratched his chin. ‘We caught him trying to cut the bomb out a few months ago. He’d got all the way to the meat by the time we stopped him.’

  Oleander laughed. Saqqara had been attempting to remove the chem-bomb Bile had surgically implanted between his hearts for years. When the bomb went off – it wasn’t a question of if – Saqqara’s body would be reduced to bubbling protoplasm. It was the most obvious of the modifications Bile had made to the Word Bearer. The Chief Apothecary claimed to have implanted a thousand and one contingencies into his most reluctant servant. Saqqara occupied himself trying to discover them, when he wasn’t attempting to stir up a rebellion amongst Bile’s followers.

  ‘What of Honourable Tzimiskes?’ Oleander asked as they ducked beneath a cracked archway and entered what had once been a garden. Now the only thing that grew here was a peculiar species of red weed. Beside the crumbled remains of what had once been a fountain stood a sextet of towering shapes, their once vibrant purple colours dulled by grime and neglect to a muddy bruise. Castellax battle-automata, he realised, the shock-troops of the Legio Cybernetica. Servo-skulls hovered about the war machines like flies, their auspex humming.

  ‘Does that answer your question?’ Arrian said. Oleander saw two familiar figures standing among the battle-automata. Both were legionaries, but one’s power armour was an older mark, and heavy. It was daubed in drab colours, save for the gleaming stylised iron skull emblazoned on one shoulder-plate. Tzimiskes Flay was an exile from Medrengard, as far as Oleander knew, though there was some debate on that score, as well as a substantial amount of wagering. Nonetheless, the Consortium welcomed all practitioners of the arts of the flesh, whatever their origins.

  As Oleander and Arrian drew close, one of the Castellax took a halting step forward and trained its bolt cannons on them. The barrels bobbed and rotated as internal targeting arrays calculated distance. Arrian slammed a forearm into Oleander’s chest. ‘Don’t move. They’re overeager. Endorphin pumps wired to their firing mechanisms, I think. Tzimiskes – brother – call your creature off.’

  Tzimiskes stared at them for a moment, as if considering the possibility of a live-fire exercise. Then, with a shrug, he opened the chassis of the agitated war machine, revealing the worm-pale features of a semi-human face within. The face was nestled in a web of wires, and its mouth opened and closed soundlessly as Tzimiskes fiddled with the internal mechanisms. It squalled in protest. The robot sank down to one knee and lowered its guns as the thing inside moaned petulantly.

  ‘Slave-brains,’ Arrian said. ‘He’s been growing them in his laboratorium, in the eastern wing of the palace. Better reaction times than standard battle-automata, or so some of the others claim.’

  ‘Ever the artisan, my brother,’ Oleander said, loudly. Tzimiskes turned and cocked his head, perhaps in greeting. Maybe just in acknowledgement. If he was surprised to see Oleander, he gave no sign. Not that Oleander had expected any sort of welcome.

  ‘You’re back,’ the other renegade said. ‘I thought you were smarter than that, Oleander.’ Saqqara Thresh looked much as Oleander remembered – pinch-faced and fang-mouthed. His crimson power armour had seen better centuries. There were few places on it not covered in lines of cramped, curling script, or adorned with blasphemous iconography. The lines of script were lifted from the ritual texts, hymns and cult doctrine that Saqqara and his brothers considered a suitable replacement for common sense. Suture scars marked his bare flesh, following the curve of his skull and the line of his jaw. Bile had surgically inserted numerous control implants, obedience nodes, and at least one miniaturised fragmentation detonator in the Word Bearer’s brain matter and jaw muscles.

  ‘And I thought you’d have blown yourself up by now, Saqqara. Looks like we were both mistaken. Still hectoring poor Tzimiskes, I see.’

  Saqqara smiled. ‘We were discussing the seventh and fifteenth tracts of Grand Apostle Ekodas, in his third address to the Dark Council. Tzimiskes is quite devout, for an Iron Warrior. Something you would know nothing about.’

  Oleander looked at Tzimiskes. As ever, he did not reply. To the best of Oleander’s knowledge, the Iron Warrior had never spoken.

  ‘Our silent brother is polite, if nothing else,’ Arrian said.

  ‘Another thing you would know nothing about,’ Saqqara said. Arrian smiled and stroked his skulls. Saqqara met his gaze and held it. There was no faulting the Word Bearer’s courage.

  ‘Come, brother. I have come a long way, and time is short,’ Oleander said, breaking the tension. ‘Is he still trying to provoke the others?’ he asked, as Arrian led him out of the garden. Inciting treachery was Saqqara’s sole avenue of resistance. Oleander suspected that Bile kept the Word Bearer around as much to weed out the foolishly disloyal as to summon the occasional daemon.

  ‘He’s been working on Tzimiskes for a while now. Like the proverbial bird and the mountain,’ Arrian said.

  ‘Probably hoping our silent brother will snap and unleash a horde of mechanical murder-machines on the rest of you,’ Oleander said. The inner palace was much as he remembered. The broad corridor, with its titanic pillars reaching up into the shadowed reaches of the roof above; the scattered remains of ancient statues; the faded murals depicting scenes from the history of Urum’s former rulers. There was a sense of sadness here, as much as one of horror. Broken grandeur was still grandeur.

  Oleander stopped before one of the murals. He studied the entwined figures, trying to discern where one ended and the others began. There were stains on the wall. Some old, most new. Blood and other substances. Oleander spread his fingers. The walls of the palace spoke, sometimes. When the wind was high and sand scoured the city. If you listened, you could hear the songs, the moans, the screams of those forgotten revelries. But he heard nothing now.

  ‘They’ve been quiet, since you left,’ Arrian said.

  ‘I was the only one who appreciated them,’ Oleander said.

  ‘We are here to learn the secrets of life, not listen to the complaints of the dead,’ the World Eater said. ‘You might have retreated into the past, but the rest of us have always moved ever forward.’

  Oleander laughed. ‘There is no “us” here. Only him. The rest of us are nothing more than raw materials yet to be rendered down.’ He looked at Arrian. ‘What has he taught you since I left, Arrian? What secrets have you learned?’

  ‘None I’ll share with you,’ Arrian said. His hands fell to the hilts of his blades. ‘Though I’d be happy to show you, if you wish.’

  Oleander shook his head. ‘Still loyal to a madman, after all these years.’ He looked back at the mural. ‘I wonder if that’s why he keeps you around. For a surgeon, you make a wonderful butcher, and you have little interest in building monsters. And yet here you are, as in favour as ever. Always at his beck and call.’

  Arrian said nothing. Trying to goad him was a fool’s game, although Oleander couldn’t help but try. It was like watching a tiger asleep in a cage, and knowing it dreamed red dreams. ‘Oh the beast I could make of you, brother,’ he said softly. ‘What beautiful horrors you would wreak then.’

  ‘No, brother. Never a beast. Never that,’ Arrian said. His voice was tight, and his face might as well have been a slab of stone. His hands twitched slightly, where they rested on the hilts of the falax blades. The chains wrapped about him creaked slightly, as if they were on the verge of snapping.

  The moment passed. Oleander inclined his head. ‘As delightful as this has been, I am ready to see him. Take me to him, Arrian.’

  ‘That is what I have been doing, brother. He is in his laboratorium, hard at work.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Himself,’ Arrian said. He turned away. Oleander hesitated a moment, and then followed. As they drew closer to the heart of the palace, the temperature dropped substantially. Cooling units chugged loudly in out-of-the-way corners, filling the corridors with a chill, counterseptic mist. Vox-casters and pict-recorders hummed and whirred atop support pillars and along the walls. Nothing went unseen or unrecorded in the Grand Apothecarium. Monsters howled somewhere in the dark. Once, Arrian waved Oleander to silence as the way ahead was suddenly blocked by indistinct shapes. They padded forward through the mist, eyes gleaming gold. The World Eater raised his hand and let the assortment of medicae devices built into his vambrace skirl to life. The shapes scattered as silently as they had appeared.