"Storm of Iron" - читать интересную книгу автора (MvNeill Graham)TWOThe bone-bladed knife scraped a clean furrow through the ingrained blood on the heavy vambrace, the dried crust gathering on the curved rear of the blade. Larana Utorian dipped the blade in the bucket of warm water beside her and returned to her task. Once again, Kroeger had returned to the dug-out with dried blood caked across his armour and without a word to her, had indicated that she should remove his armour and clean it for him. Each piece was heavy, almost too heavy, and were it not for the wheezing mechanical arm Kroeger's butcher-surgeons had grafted to her shoulder she would have been unable to lift his armour clear. The black-steel metalwork of the mechanical arm was nauseating to look at and the feel of its corrupt bio-mechanical components worming their way through her body made her want to rip it from her shoulder. But the writhing black tendrils of synth-nerve had forged an unbreakable bond with her own flesh and she could no more remove it than she could stop her heart from beating. A heavy steel frame carried the individual components of Kroeger's armour, each moulded breastplate, cuissart, greave, vambrace and gorget precisely arranged so that it resembled some gigantic, disassembled mechanical man. Virtually every surface was stained with gore and the stench of decaying matter made her want to gag every time she looked at the armour. She bent to her task once more, scraping yet another clean furrow in Kroeger's armour. Tears ran down her cheeks as she cleaned the armour of a monster, knowing that tomorrow she would be performing the same task again. Why Kroeger had not killed her was a mystery and every day she found herself almost wishing that he had. And every day she found herself hating herself for wanting to live. To toil in the service of such a beast was to play handmaiden to a daemon itself. And this was a capricious daemon; there was no way she could predict its moods and behavioural mores, no way to know Kroeger's reaction to anything she did. She railed against him, beating her fists against his bloody armour and he laughed, throwing her aside. She acquiesced to his desires and found him surly and brooding, picking at old scars and licking his own blood from his hands - he refused to allow his wounds to clot - as he glared at her with contempt. She hated him with a fiery passion, but so wanted to live. There was no way to know how to behave to stop Kroeger killing her. She scraped the last of the blood from the vambrace and put aside the bone knife, taking up an oily rag and polishing the silver of its surface until it shone. Satisfied that the heavy piece of armour was as clean as she could manage, she rose to her feet and hung it upon the armour frame. As she hung the vambrace in place, she found her eyes drawn again to the sight and stench of the interior faces of Kroeger's armour. She polished and cleaned the exterior of his armour, but she would not touch its interior surfaces. Coated in a loathsome, creeping horror, these internal surfaces looked like flensed hunks of rotten meat, their putrid surfaces undulating as though imbued with some foul internal life. Yet for all its vile appearance, the armour exuded a hateful attraction, as though it called to her on some unknowable level. She shivered as she removed the next piece of armour from the frame, the rounded elbow guard. This piece was not so heavily stained and would not take long to clean. She picked up her knife again she glanced furtively to where Kroeger's weapons lay upright on an ebony and silver rack. A massive, toothed sword, its hilt carved in the shape of an eight-pointed star and quillons tipped with stabbing spikes. Beside that, an ornate pistol with a skull-mouthed barrel and bronze plated flanks. The magazine alone was bigger than her forearm. She shook her head: Kroeger never allowed her to clean his weapons, and the one time she had offered had been her last. He had backhanded her lightly across the face, cracking her cheekbone and loosening teeth, saying, 'You will never touch these weapons, human.' Bitterness rose with her tears and she cursed herself for wanting to live, for serving this creature of evil, but she could see no other way. She was powerless to do anything except play house-pet to a madman who bathed in gore and revelled in slaughter. Her hate for Kroeger was a bright flame burning in her heart and she felt that if she did not let it out it would eventually consume her. Her eyes were once again drawn to the armour and she swore she could almost hear distant laughter. First light was breaking across the mountains as Honsou watched the slave gangs haul the last components of an artillery piece's gun carriage over the lip of the promontory. He noted with satisfaction that there were a few slaves with the blue jackets of the enemy within their numbers. It seemed as though there were a few yet able to serve the Iron Warriors. Forrix stood beside him, a head higher in his Terminator armour, surveying the slow progress below on the plain. Between the booming explosions of artillery fire from the two bastions and the central ravelin, the saps were advancing from the extended parallel, but they were doing so cautiously, moving forward under the protection of heavily armoured sap-rollers, low, wide-bodied behemoths crawling slowly forwards to shield the workers who dug the saps. 'The Warsmith is displeased,' said Forrix, sweeping his arms out to encompass the works below. Honsou turned to face the pale veteran, his brow wrinkled in puzzlement. 'But we have proceeded with great speed, Forrix. In less than two weeks we have captured this outwork and our saps are almost close enough to the citadel that we can link them into a second parallel. Scarcely have I seen a siege progress with such haste.' Forrix shook his head. 'There are matters afoot that require we make even better speed, Honsou. The Warsmith wishes us to be done with this place within ten days.' 'Impossible!' sputtered Honsou. 'With the second parallel not yet complete? The batteries here will take another four days at least to prepare, and it will probably take several days for them to effect a breach in the walls. And I do not believe we will be able to make a practicable breach without the establishment of a third parallel and bringing up our siege tanks. All this will take time, you know that better than anyone.' 'Nevertheless, it must be done.' 'How?' 'By any means necessary, Honsou. Time is a luxury we do not have.' 'Then what do you suggest?' 'That we push the saps forwards with greater speed, build more sap rollers, throw slaves and men at the digging, so that the mounds of corpses will shield the diggers from the Imperial artillery,' snapped Forrix suddenly. 'That will be difficult, Forrix,' said Honsou slowly. 'The Imperial gunners are proving to be uncannily accurate with their fire.' 'Indeed they are,' mused Forrix, staring at the mountains surrounding the plains. 'Almost too accurate, wouldn't you say?' 'What do you mean?' 'You are sure you killed everyone in the places you attacked before the invasion?' 'Aye,' snarled Honsou, 'We left nothing alive.' Forrix returned his gaze to the mountains and sighed. 'I think you are mistaken, Honsou. I believe there is still someone out there.' Honsou said nothing and Forrix continued. 'Send Goran Delau back to the places you attacked and if there are any signs of survivors, have them hunted down and killed. We cannot afford to be slowed further by your incompetence.' Honsou bit back an angry retort and simply nodded stiffly before marching away. The heart was a notoriously hard organ to burn, but the blue flames curling from its roasting muscle tissue were well worth the effort thought Jharek Kelmaur, sorcerer to the Warsmith and Wielder of the Seven Cryptical Magicks. The darkness of his tent was wreathed in ghostly shadows cast by the burning heart and moonlight pooling at its entrance. He rubbed his hands across his tattooed skull, spreading his arms before the blazing organ. Though his eyes were sewn shut, he stared into the flames, seeing spectral images, beyond the ken of mortal sight. They flickered in and out of focus as his magicks sought to shape the power bestowed by this latest offering into a useable form. He opened his mind to the glory of the warp, feeling the rush of power and fulfilment that came each time he communed with the immaterium. As always he felt the scratching, insistent presence of innumerable astral beasts that clawed at any intrusion into their realm, their mindless thrashings drawn by his presence. Such formless phantoms were of no consequence to him, it was the other, mightier creatures that lurked in the haunted depths of the warp that were of more concern. He felt the warp-spawned energies flow through him, channelled and intensified by the carven sigils on his gold and silver armour. Symbols of ancient geomantic significance helped contain the powerful energies he drew within his flesh, and though his physique was enhanced, he knew that the power he was tapping could destroy him in an instant were he to lose control of it. The power raced along his fragile nerve endings, dispersing throughout his body and a luminescent green fire built behind his eyes, spilling out from beneath the stitching, and gathering like emerald tears on his cheeks before billowing out in a noxious cloud of glittering fog. The fog twisted and spiralled, though no wind disturbed it, coiling from his mouth and eyes before slipping around his shoulders like a snake. Questing tendrils of green light slithered from the sorcerer and waved through the air to reach into the flames of the burning heart, the flames hissing and sputtering with greater ferocity as they consumed it. Fleeting images flashed before Kelmaur's eyes: the rock of Tor Christo, a hidden chamber in its depths, a disc of bronze that shone like the sun and, enfolding it all, a slowly spinning cog wheel, its surface cracked and blemished. As Kelmaur watched, the cog suddenly erupted with brown, necrotic threads of rust, each one spreading rapidly through its structure until it crumbled to dust. As quickly as the vision had appeared, it vanished, to be replaced with one of a spear of white light arcing through the darkness, its brilliance fading as it travelled before it was in turn replaced by a warrior in yellow power armour, his weapons trained directly at Kelmaur. As he watched, the warrior turned his weapon towards the sorcerer and pulled the trigger, the barrel exploding in brilliant light. Jharek Kelmaur screamed and collapsed to the floor of his tent, blood leaking from every orifice in his head, and pounding pain thundering against the innards of his skull. He groggily pushed himself to his feet, steadying himself against the iron tent pole. He moved unsteadily to a long, cot bed and sat on its edge, rubbing the heels of his palms against his inked temples and taking deep breaths. It was the same as before, but with each passing vision, the intensity grew stronger and he knew a crucial time of confluence was approaching. He had to divine the meaning of the visions, though he feared he knew the answer to the second apparition. As the Iron Warriors had attacked the spaceport, he had sensed a psychic signal reach out from the planet, too quick for him to block, yet surely too weak to be received by its intended recipients. But Kelmaur was afraid that others may have heard it, and if they grasped its significance, might already be on their way to this planet now. He had not told the Warsmith, and trusted that his master's war-captains would be able to complete the destruction of the citadel before whatever aid was coming to Hydra Cordatus arrived. He had despatched the battle barge His cabal of acolytes had spoken of mind whispers on the planet that were not theirs, and how this could be was a mystery to Kelmaur. It would take great cunning to have evaded detection by the And if so, where had it gone and what had it done in the intervening time? Paranoia, his constant companion, held him tight in its grip and his mind was alive with all manner of fearsome possibilities. Should he tell the Warsmith of his suspicions? Should he deal with it on his own? Should he feign ignorance? None of the options were particularly appealing and Kelmaur was filled with a dreadful foreboding. As to the first vision… well, that he was more sure of. He turned as a low moan sounded behind him. He smiled grimly, staring into the face of Adept Cycerin. The former priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus that Kroeger had almost killed in the attack on the spaceport was chained, naked, to an angled trestle, part surgical table and part engineers' workbench. His missing hand had been replaced with an augmented bionic gauntlet, its pulsating black surface daubed with ancient symbols of power. Encircling the wrist was a broad, spiked bracelet with curved talons embedded deep in the flesh above the gauntlet. A modified form of the Obliterators' techno-virus seeped from the talons, slowly working its way around Cycerin's body. Eruptions of mecha-organic components appeared all over his flesh, their form fluid, yet angular. His flesh seethed with the workings of the virus as they integrated themselves with his organic matter. Jharek Kelmaur smiled humourlessly and rose to go to the twitching priest of the Machine God. The changes wracking his body must have been painful, but the adept's face gave no sign of it. Instead his features were twisted in rapture and obscene pleasure. 'Yes,' whispered Kelmaur. 'Feel the power of the new machine fill your flesh. You have great work ahead of you.' Cycerin opened his eye, the pupil a dilated black, its internal surfaces alive with crawling, newly-birthed circuitry. He smiled and nodded towards the pulsing gauntlet. 'More,' he hissed. 'Give me more…' |
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