'The Imperium is my father's folly,' he continued. 'I try to believe in it because I want it to be true, just like I wanted my great buildings to be true, and the perfect societies that would use them to exist. But they cannot be. There is no such thing as perfection. Humanity is too chaotic to accept true order.'
His facade of iron cracked. All the pain he had suffered - the isolation, the sense of abandonment that had dogged him all his life, the awful knowledge that he was a hawk among fowl that must restrain itself, the rejection of his brothers, the disregard of his father - was all concentrated in that moment. A single tear dared to roll down his cheek and was immediately resented - not only for the weakness that it showed, but because Perturabo wanted to cry for the broken dream, but he could not. The dream was what should be mourned, yet he could only cry only for himself.
'Wanting something to be does not make it so,' he murmured. Calliphone nodded. 'You are weak. Badly forged iron looks strong but is brittle as a dried reed. You never understood. People cannot be forced to live to an ideal, they must be led. People are messy, and more complicated than your most profound calculations. You would build a perfect world, realising at the final moment that its greatest mar were the people living within it. Now you would destroy them to save your creation. You are a marmoreal god, 'Bo, a tomb lord. You cannot achieve the impossible so you rage like a child, and now you have unleashed this horror upon us because you can accept no compromise.' A heavy shell exploded near the palace, shaking the windows.
'People do not listen,' said Perturabo. 'They do not know what is good for them.'
'People do not bow to you without love, without respect! Great tyrants rule with the blessing of their people, effective ones through fear. But no tyrant ever achieved anything through indifference. You have sulked your way to damnation. You refused to accept the love of the people. You were given the approbation of a god and an army to conquer the stars, and your first act was to decimate your Legion.'
'They had failed,' he said, clenching his fist.
'Failed to do what? Be the best? You waste your men to prove a point that needs no proof, and then grow angry when no one notices and praises your self-sacrifice. Your petulance has cost this planet whole generations of its youth, bringing your Legion up to strength again and again. You have been an absent king. You have not seen the empty schools, the haunted mothers, the husbandless women.'
'My brother Curze did worse,' said Perturabo. 'I have come to set things right, not to destroy everything as he did. This punishment for treachery must be borne, but I will rebuild Olympia.' 'Comparing yourself to the worst of your brothers to excuse the enormity of your own crimes,' said Calliphone. 'Listen to your words! Setting things to rights would be to cease recruiting and to hear the grievances of the people with forgiveness in your heart. Not this… massacre! You slaughtered the delegation that came to see you, brother. In that moment you lost You lost everything. This was a good place once. Bellicose and unfair, but it had its measure of beauty and nobility. You have destroyed all that. Why, brother?' 'I have other brothers now, my true siblings. I am not yours.' Calliphone wept, her tears tracking through the dust caking her face. 'And do they care for you as your family here did?' she asked.
'Dammekos never cared for me.'
'No, he only adopted you into his household, and raised you as his son.'
'A calculated risk. He used me for his own ends.'
'He reached out to you over and over,' she retorted. 'You are blind as you are selfish. All wrapped up in yourself, in your own brilliance, in your difference!' Her voice changed, becoming quiet.
'I cared for you.'
'What of it?' he said coldly. 'What good did the affection of mortals ever do for me?'
'You always thought yourself superior to those around you.'
'I am,' he said plainly. 'Look upon me, foster sister. I was made by the Emperor of all mankind, one of twenty sons forged to conquer the galaxy. You are withered, yet I am young. Of course I am superior.'
Calliphone threw up her hand and looked away. 'What happened to the man I knew who wished for no more war? The boy who drew such wonderful things?'
'Nobody wanted them,' he said. 'The Emperor uses me for the most thankless tasks. My men are thrown against the worst of horrors, given the most gruelling roles. We are divided, our talents ignored, our might reduced to splitting rock. My father ignores me. My men go unsung. Our triumphs are unremembered. My brothers mock me as my men bleed. Nobody cares.'
'Is that so?' she said. 'Let me present a different hypothesis to you, brother. Use that fine mind of yours to judge its worth. Here is my version of the story - the Emperor of all mankind came here and found a son whom he valued. He saw an indomitable will, with unshakable determination. He recognised that you would not give up, that you would rise to best any difficulty, that the tedious to you is as necessary a challenge to overcome as the glorious, and neither are to be shirked. Seeing these qualities in you, your father set you difficult tasks, not because he saw no value in you, but the exact opposite - he can trust no one else to get them done.'
'That is not true,' said Perturabo, though the acid of uncertainty began to eat at him. 'He underestimates me. They all do.'
Calliphone went on. 'For a long time, I thought you a fool to follow the Emperor. After all, he is a tyrant like all the rest. Look what he has done to you, I thought. He has brutalised you, and your wars have brutalised your home. But the truth is, brother, I have followed your campaigns carefully, and I noticed a pattern that disturbed and then alarmed me. Always you do things the most difficult way, and in the most painful manner. You cultivate a martyr's complex, lurching from man to man, holding out your bleeding wrists so they might see how you hurt yourself. You brood in the shadows when all you want to do is scream, 'Look at me!' You are too arrogant to win people over through effort. You expect people to notice you there in the half-darkness, and point and shout out, 'There! There is the great Perturabo! See how he labours without complaint!' 'You came to this court as a precocious child. Your abilities were so prodigious that nobody stopped to look at what you were becoming.' She got shakily to her feet. Exoskeletal braces whirred under her skirts.
'Perturabo, this will anger you, but you never truly grew into a man.'
'I am not a man,' he said. 'I am far more.'
'In those words is the poison that spoils your potential. It is not the Emperor who has driven this world into rebellion. It is not he who has held it back. It is you and your woeful egotism. Let me tell you, my brother, you who affects to despise love so much yet must certainly crave it over all other things, you are the biggest fool I have ever met.'
With a cry of anger, Perturabo lunged forwards and grasped her by the throat. He raised her up until she was level with his eyes. She grabbed weakly at his wrist. Her mouth gaped for air.
'I am far from a fool, sister,' he said. 'I wished for more from life. I hoped to build a better world for people. I have found that there is only brutality. Whether the court intrigues of the tyrants or this war to conquer the stars, it is all the same. Violence is the constant of human existence.'
'It need not be…' she choked. 'That is the violence… within you… speaking…'
'No, no, no,' he said soothingly. 'I know my own limitations. My temper does not cloud my judgement, it focuses it. Humanity is venal and fractious. It can never be governed as one. Everything else is an impossible dream. There is no peace. There is no goodness.'
He stroked away the hair from his sister's face with one hand as he strangled her with the other.
'And in such a flawed universe, there can be no mercy for traitors.' She choked, trying and failing to speak. Coldly, Perturabo squeezed the life from her.
'You have lived long enough.' She kept her eyes locked with his as he throttled her. Even as her clawing hands became more desperate, and a dreadful clicking sounded in her throat, she stared into his soul. What he saw reflected in her eyes was not fear, nor loathing, but pity. With a last minor effort, he crushed her neck. Her eyes rolled back to show the whites and she judged him no more He stared at her in hatred a moment, wavering on the brink of tearing her body to pieces. But a sob escaped his mouth unexpectedly, and he gently lowered her back into her throne. Her head lolled on its broken neck. Warning chimes peeped insistently from the augmetics concealed in her skirts. A trickle of blood ran from her mouth. Appalled at what he had done, Perturabo turned away. Dancing flamelight drew him to the windows of the palace. Ancient, cloudy glass blocked his view, so he methodically punched it out. Muffled weapon's fire became the hellish noise of a city's sack.
Lochos burned.
