Eye of Terra by Various

Author:Various
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2016-02-05T15:53:56+00:00

Ironfire

Rob Sanders

Idriss Krendl wanted to destroy something beautiful.

The Iron Warriors warsmith was ugliness incarnate. He had once been a specimen of genetic perfection, blessed with the grim visage of a conqueror – the face of his father. That had been before Lesser Damantyne, before the Schadenhold.

Before Barabas Dantioch.

Krendl had taunted his brother for being a cripple, an imperfect reflection of their primarch. It seemed that the galaxy was not without cruel irony when Dantioch had sent Krendl back to their father as a broken warrior. By the time Krendl’s reinforcements had arrived, Dantioch was long gone. He had left Krendl buried alive, barely breathing, beneath a mountain of rubble. The Schadenhold had fallen and had decimated armies – Space Marines, even the god-machine, Omnia Victrum.

But not Idriss Krendl. Shattered and smashed but still alive, the warsmith had been recovered from the remains of the fortress. He had been saved by his gene-engineered gifts, his body entering a state of torpor. But when chemical therapies and auto-suggestion brought him back to the agonies of the present, Krendl found himself to be a monster. A cripple and an affront to the Iron Warriors about him – a son imperfect, whose every breath shamed their father. But the warsmith survived this indignity – for Idriss Krendl would not be destroyed.

‘So, that is it?’ Victrus Krugeran said as he reached the crest of the dune. The siege-captain wore the tattered livery of the Dodekatheon: the Brethren of Stone, those who knew what it was to create and destroy. As one of Perturabo’s favoured, Krugeran had been placed in possession of two of the Legion’s most powerful siege guns, Eradicant and Obliteratus. This honour had been tarnished somewhat by the fact that Krugeran had been placed in Idriss Krendl’s charge.

‘That is your target, siege-captain,’ Krendl told him.

The two Iron Warriors stood unmoving, wind-blown sand grains collecting in the crooks and ridges of their dun battleplate. While Krugeran’s suit was silver trimmed with chevrons and greening gold, Krendl wore armour of sullied chrome.

It was more than just armour. Like some ancient torture device, the suit was shot through with metal rods and skeletal screws that held his broken bones in place. The plate was covered in rivets and bolts, large and small, that gave it a studded or spiked appearance. The brute bionics of his limbs sighed and vented steam, while his head was encased in a cubed wire cage threaded through his shattered skull. The full half of his face had not been saved, and the patchwork of stapled flesh gave way to a grisly crater.

Over his plate Krendl wore the ragged mail cloak of a warsmith – a rank he now held in name only. The 14th Grand Company had been wiped out on Lesser Damantyne and his flagship stolen by the traitor Barabas Dantioch. He had commanded one thousand Iron Warriors intended for the primarch’s glorious march on the Throneworld. Now he had but a handful of battle-brothers attached to Krugeran’s battery section and its associated divisions.

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