Dark Imperium Read online

  ‘Enough!’ said Guilliman. He drew the Gladius Incandor in his right hand. The Hand of Dominion sparked into life on his left, an oily field of blue light encasing its massive robotic fingers and underslung boltguns. Raising the flat of his blade to the muzzle of his helm, he saluted his brother. He thumbed a switch, and a sheath of energy covered the blade to match that of his fist.

  ‘You are staying?’ said Fulgrim. ‘No dramatic teleportation? No strategic withdrawal? You actually want to fight someone you cannot hope to beat? Well, well, well, you are beginning to surprise me, Roboute. I never thought you had it in you. Perhaps you are not so boring after all.’

  ‘Honour demands I slay you.’

  Fulgrim stretched out his arms. Blades rose from nothing, sprouting from his clenched fists, black vapours boiling off their metal as they were forced into being. The swords were mismatched in form, and every one a different pastel hue. Bright poisons dripped from their edges.

  ‘Honour will get you killed.’ Fulgrim raised his own blades to his face, the edges ringing off one another. There was no mockery to the salute. ‘So it is, brother. We come to the end. With you dead, our other brothers will follow, one by one. The Imperium cannot last without your guidance. It is you who holds the whole crumbling thing together.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Dull as you are, you were among the best of us. I almost feel sorry to kill you, if only because you will not see the triumph of the true powers of the universe, and know the liberation they bring.’

  Swift as a striking viper, Fulgrim attacked, all four blades driving down at his brother primarch so quickly that they did not seem to pass through the intervening air. Guilliman caught them on the edge of the Gladius Incandor. Its field generator smoked at the effort of halting them. The resulting eruption of energy threw both primarchs backwards.

  Fulgrim attacked again. Guilliman cried out as one blade found its way past his parries and left a smoking groove in the ceramite around his left arm. He would not win this fight.

  ‘Thiel, Andros,’ voxed Guilliman. ‘Now.’

  There was a sound like a sigh that turned into a rumbling groan. The Heliopolis boomed with conflicting resonances, and the Phoenix Gate exploded inwards, showering the room with gobbets of molten bronze. The Ultramarines of the First and Second companies came charging in, bolters firing at the daemon primarch battling their lord.

  ‘At last! Your true colours,’ said Fulgrim. ‘For all your talk of honour, you will not face me alone.’

  Angered, he rained a flurry of blows down on Guilliman, driving the primarch back up one step, then two. The bolts aimed at the daemon primarch were turned aside by diabolical art, and he stood in the full face of the Ultramarines’ attack.

  ‘My sons are here to greet yours,’ he said. ‘Let them join the revel.’ Parrying Guilliman’s attacks with insolent ease, Fulgrim threw back his head. His jaws opened wide enough to swallow a man whole, and he let out a shrieking ululation.

  From the far side of the Heliopolis, a harrowing, discordant noise answered the call of the daemon primarch. From the upper tiers of the Heliopolis’ seats marched the twisted warriors of the Emperor’s Children, many bearing sonic weapons from which came the thrumming of destructive music.

  ‘Now, we shall see whose children will survive!’ snarled Fulgrim, and came at his brother. Guilliman countered and parried, his mighty gauntlet batting aside Fulgrim’s swords as his own hunted through the cage of steel Fulgrim wove with his four blades, seeking out the tainted flesh behind.

  Fulgrim snarled as the tip of Guilliman’s gladius nicked his skin. Rising up on his tail, he swept down with his swords in quick succession. Guilliman’s weapons found them all, turning them aside with economical movements. Nevertheless, he was sorely pressed. He had fought daemons of every kind on many worlds and bested them all. Fulgrim, however, was an unholy blend of primarch and daemon. In him, the energy of the warp was married to the wisdom of ancient sciences. He was part material god, part immaterial daemon lord, and his power was great.

  Guilliman cut and feinted, using the Hand of Dominion to catch the sword wielded by Fulgrim’s lower-left arm. The unholy metal of the blade cut into the thick ceramite of the gauntlet, and corrosive poison spattered the Armour of Reason, eating into it with smoking ferocity.

  Pain somehow afflicted Guilliman through his armour, as if his war-plate itself were hurt. A spicy agony burned up the nerves in his arm from his interface sockets. He gritted his teeth and twisted the gauntlet. Energy crackled and banged, and the sword snapped in two. Ichor pumped from its hollow innards. Strings of flesh tore free as Guilliman cast the broken tip aside. Fulgrim screamed as if his limb had been ripped off, and he recoiled. Guilliman fought against his own pain to slash hard with the Gladius Incandor, cutting deeply into Fulgrim’s swordless arm.

  ‘How dare you!’ Fulgrim screamed, rearing back. He lunged at his enemy and crashed bodily into him, knocking Guilliman from his feet. The Invictarus Suzerains thundered down the steps to join their lord, forming a shield wall about him as he scrambled up, but Fulgrim slithered into them, barging them from their feet and slaughtering them contemptuously, his swords lopping limbs off with every strike.

  ‘You will die!’ shouted Guilliman, and he surged past his last bodyguard as Fulgrim’s swords punched through the Space Marine’s shield, armour and body. He swung hard with his gauntlet, but Fulgrim was too quick and weaved to the side; the Hand of Dominion punched down and into the marble steps, pulverising three of them.

  Guilliman span around, anticipating Fulgrim’s next strike, but the daemon had gone.

  He searched for his brother in the conflict. Their two armies had met, and their struggles filled the Heliopolis side to side. His warriors and the Emperor’s Children were intermingled, the blue armour of the Ultramarines dotted within a sea of clashing colours and battleplate decorated with the stretched skins of the dead. Cones of sound visibly tortured the air, blasting Guilliman’s warriors from their feet. Blood fountained from breathing grilles as dying Space Marines coughed up shattered internal organs. A knot of white-helmed Terminators stood back to back, dealing death to any traitor that strayed near, while a wall of Ultramarines Second Company brothers advanced, guns booming, pushing back insane warriors.

  War was everywhere, desperate and wild. The situation in the void was mirrored within the Heliopolis. His men were outnumbered. They would die.

  First theoretical, Guilliman thought. Fulgrim is a prime evil in this world. First practical, I will kill him.

  Second theoretical, he countered, you are angry. Second practical, you will throw your own life and those of your men away for nothing. You have failed in this campaign. Retreat.

  A memory of Konor Guilliman, his adoptive father, flashed in his mind.

  ‘Control your humours,’ Konor had told him. ‘You are mightier in every regard than any man, and that includes your passions. Master them, or you will fail.’

  Temper. There was always his temper. For most of his life, Roboute Guilliman had kept his emotions in check, but there had been notable occasions when he had lost his head. At Calth, and when Sotha was attacked. Or when he had arrived late to Terra. Or the early days of the Scouring… He would add this day to that record. Beneath his commanding exterior, Guilliman was seething with fury.

  ‘Fulgrim!’ he bellowed. ‘Face me!’

  A whip-fast motion flickered to his side. Fulgrim sped through the melee, coming from the left. Guilliman barely had time to raise his sword before Fulgrim crashed into him, snarling incoherently, knocking him backwards.

  ‘You hurt me, you corpse-master’s lapdog.’ The last vestiges of Fulgrim’s humanity melted from his face as it transformed into a mask of pure hatred. ‘No one hurts me. No one beats me!’

  He wrapped his tail around his brother primarch, constricting him with such force that his armour plate began to crack. Casting aside one sword, Fulgrim rea
ched down and grasped Guilliman’s head.

  ‘You wanted to face me, so face me!’ he said, wrenching free Guilliman’s helmet, exposing his naked flesh to the air.

  The stink of his corrupted brother made Guilliman gag. His head swam as the daemon primarch’s scent invaded his nose and throat, unmoderated by his battlehelm’s systems.

  ‘Pathetic!’ cried Fulgrim. He uncurled, flinging Guilliman aside. His wounded arm was already healing, crackling warp energies working in tandem with his primarch’s physiology to make him whole again. He conjured swords from poisoned mists to fill his empty hands and flew at the Master of Macragge.

  Guilliman staggered upright, gasping. Every breath poured more of Fulgrim’s lethal perfume into his lungs, a poison so potent that it taxed his superhuman body. He parried, and parried again, but he could land no counterstrike and was forced back up the stairs.

  A blow flung his arm wide. He never saw the blade that cut him coming.

  A cold kiss across his throat, followed by searing agony. Arterial blood sprayed from his ruined neck. He clamped his hand to the wound, but it gaped beneath armoured fingers, and the blood would not stop. Poison crawled in where his blood flooded out. Already it affected him, numbing his lips first and making his eyes heavy. With supreme effort, Roboute Guilliman raised the Gladius Incandor for the last time.

  ‘How?’ he mouthed. His vocal cords were severed. Blood spilled from his mouth in place of words.

  ‘I see the mark of Kor Phaeron’s athame.’ Fulgrim swayed as he approached. ‘He could never turn you, but the cut he inflicted is a scar on the warp that could never heal. It is as great a weakness as your rectitude.’ Fulgrim smiled with lips coated in poison paint. ‘Or I should say was. Here the Avenging Son meets his end.’

  He smashed at Guilliman’s sword so hard it flew from his limp grip into the heaving battle. Fulgrim raised his swords for the killing strike. ‘Say hello to father for me.’

  A storm of fire blasted down the stairs, bolt-rounds streaking by, followed by burning streams of plasma. Fulgrim screeched. The unearthly field that shielded him shrieked and flickered, splitting his image. He screamed as a blaze of incandescent gas pierced his protection and burned his side.

  ‘The primarch! To the primarch!’ roared Captain Andros in anguish.

  Guilliman sank to his knees, unable to speak. His perceptions became fragmentary. Warriors in blue threw themselves at the reeling daemon prince, only to be carved up into red chunks in in mid-air.

  His sons tossed their lives away to spare a few drops of his blood.

  Names and faces flashed through his mind, so many bold and honourable men cast down by betrayal. His brothers unwittingly corrupted or undone by personal failing. Others slain. His sons, dying in battle. So many of his sons…

  A roaring blackness encroached. He fell, but he hit nothing. It felt like floating. A perfumed ocean lapped at him. Joy rode upon its waves.

  Lies, he thought. Lies! I cannot die!

  Guilliman forced open his eyes. He was on his back, looking up at the ceiling, his limbs deliciously numb. A treacherous pleasure thrilled his mind as the poison worked on him.

  Captain Andros was at his side. A wall of blue ceramite surrounded him.

  ‘Now, damn you all! Now! Emergency teleport! Emergency teleport!’ shouted Andros, his bolter barking.

  He is panicking, Guilliman thought. Andros is panicking.

  The howling thrum of sonic weaponry tore away the last of Andros’ words, and his head vanished in a mist of red. Chained explosions boomed around Guilliman. Part of the wall of men guarding him was knocked down. A body sailed through the air, the Ultramarines blue of its power armour cracked open and stained red. Battle roared. A dozen bolters fired near his feet as desperate hands dragged and pulled, hauling him up the steps towards the ruined Phoenix Gate. His armour caught on the corpses of his sons, each knock a spike of agony in his ruined neck. Blood poured down his windpipe into his lungs, making him splutter feebly. He was going to drown in his own blood.

  ‘Retreat! Retreat!’ called a voice. ‘The day is lost!’

  Thiel? thought Guilliman. Is that you?

  He could hear Fulgrim’s silken, daemonic laughter drawing nearer.

  How many Ultramarines have died to save me?

  An instrument chimed, louder than the bleating alarms of Guilliman’s battered armour.

  ‘They have locus lock, my lord,’ someone else said, close enough that Guilliman felt their breath on his ear, though he could not turn his head to see him. ‘We will have you safe soon.’

  Guilliman tried to place a face to the voice. He knew many of his sons, but this one eluded him. His mind was filling with black fog.

  ‘We’re losing him!’ said the voice, rising in panic. ‘Where’s the teleport? Get us out of here. Get us–’

  Thiel, thought Guilliman. Definitely Thiel.

  A flash of blinding light and the bang of air displacement stole Roboute Guilliman away from the blades of his brother.

  Time hung, caught between an instant and an eternity. Guilliman ceased to be. For a moment, there was peace.

  ‘–out of here!’

  Another roar, and the needling discomfort of rematerialisation. Guilliman was thrust back through the veil into the world of men, and he fell to the teleport deck with a resounding clang, jarring his wound. Fiery poison sketched out his circulatory system, thrusting the realisation of his own mortality upon him.

  He was going to die.

  In his final moments, Guilliman began to panic. He did not fear his death, but what it meant for the Imperium.

  Andros had been right. And now Andros was dead.

  I cannot die, he thought. I cannot die! I will not!

  He exerted his formidable will to keep his body alive.

  A fruitless effort.

  His dispassionate nature did not desert him, not even at the very end. As he railed against his fate, he rationally noted the failure of his organs, the dark ring thickening about his sight and the pleasurable pain that faded into a numb bliss creeping towards his hearts. It was as if he were reviewing progress reports on the construction of new public buildings.

  Faces crowded around the narrowing well of his vision. Helmets were cast aside to reveal harrowed faces.

  They mourn me already, he realised. I am dead. I cannot die now, not now. There is too much to do. Too much, too much. What will Russ do without me, or the Khan? Too much…

  Ultramarines shouted for their Apothecaries. Something tugged at his ruined breastplate. A white gauntlet flashed past his dimming eyes. The cool relief of drugs pushed back the exquisite burn of Fulgrim’s poison for a breath, but they could not stop it and it surged back anew. His pulse slowed. Coloured spots whirled around his eyes.

  ‘Father,’ he mouthed. Poisoned blood frothed at the gash in his neck. ‘Father, who will guide them now?’

  ‘What is he saying?’ cried an anguished voice. ‘What does he say?’

  Father, thought Guilliman. Save me.

  His hearts quivered one last time, drawing themselves in for a further beat that would not come. The voices of his sons sounded far away.

  Darkness enveloped him.

  His hearts relaxed.

  The flow of blood ceased.

  He stood upon a precipice. A roaring, terrifying sea of souls haunted by the laughing of mad gods churned all around, red and ugly.

  ‘Father!’ Guilliman shouted, his voice free from the prison of his flesh. His sons could not hear him now, but he was heard.

  There was a cold, golden light, and an end to pain. The roaring sea vanished. Sorrow engulfed his soul.

  Roboute Guilliman was no more.

  The immensity of the void is impossible to understand; the layered infinities of the empyrean even more so.

  Only death can encompas
s them both.

  Part Two

  Crusade’s End

  The 41st millennium

  Chapter Four

  Guilliman Lives

  Roboute Guilliman drew in a deep breath, then another.

  He lived.

  Blood rushed around his massive frame. Air passed in and out of lungs four times the size of a baseline human’s, gusty inhalations and exhalations that moved with the power of tides.

  Death had come. For ten thousand years he had slept, his body preserved in stasis upon his home world of Macragge, until a century ago when Archmagos Belisarius Cawl, aided by the alien aeldari and a saint said to be the personification of the Emperor’s will, had awoken him to a galaxy tormented by war.

  Traitors from Horus’ time had emerged from the Eye of Terror, a wound in reality where the warp bled into realspace. By destroying ancient alien technology, their leader – Abaddon the Despoiler, one-time lieutenant of Horus – had caused the Eye of Terror to spread across the galaxy as the Cicatrix Maledictum, a great warp rift that had cut the Imperium in two.

  To Guilliman, the dire state of the Imperium was a horrifying surprise. He awoke from death to find himself fighting a war he thought he had won a hundred centuries before. There was no hope in this world. There was no promise. The Emperor’s plans had failed completely, and suffering was the lot of all men. The galaxy was worse than ever before. Only during the long dark times of Old Night had humanity stood so close to the brink. He was all that remained of the old dream, the last feeble light in descending night.

  Since then he had led. He had fought. He had bled. But he had not slept. He could not, even had he the desire to – the Imperium was dying. In sleep’s place, he retreated to his private quarters, to the Chamber of Reflection, and meditated there when he was weary.

  Death had disturbed his being in several ways. Sleep was one casualty.