‘I did do that, yes,’ Lukas said.
Grimblood ignored him, still glowering at Thymr. ‘You put a stasis bomb in his chest.’
‘He did,’ Lukas said, nodding. Thymr had set the bomb into the wound left by Sliscus’ blade, wiring its detonator to Lukas’ bio-rhythms. Not without some growling at first, of course. But he had seen the humour in it, eventually.
‘I don’t even know if it works,’ Thymr protested.
‘He doesn’t,’ Lukas added helpfully.
Grimblood glared at him. ‘Stop talking, Trickster. Stop talking now, before I rip out your other heart.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ Thymr said. ‘The bomb might go off.’
‘It might,’ Lukas said.
Grimblood turned his glare on the Iron Priest. ‘You said it doesn’t work.’
‘I said that I don’t know if it works.’ Thymr shook his head. ‘That isn’t the same thing.’ He frowned and looked at Lukas.
‘It’s humming,’ Lukas said, poking the scar tissue that was the only remaining sign of the invasive surgery that been carried out only a few hours before. He grinned. ‘It is supposed to hum, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ Thymr said, stepping back. Grimblood hesitated a moment, then followed suit. Lukas poked the scar again, and Thymr took another step back. ‘Stop poking it.’
‘It itches.’
Grimblood snarled in fury. ‘It itches because you stuck an explosive device into an open wound, you mangy, deceitful fool!’
‘Well, something had to go in there,’ Lukas said. ‘I was off balance.’
Grimblood snorted. ‘Serves you right. You stole my kill, Trickster.’ He grinned savagely. ‘Or tried to, at least.’ Still grinning, he pointed upwards. ‘What happened up there?’
Lukas’ smile faded. ‘I was overconfident. I forgot that a serpent’s bite can be poisonous.’ He looked away. ‘It won’t happen again.’
‘Did you kill it, at least?’
Lukas shook his head. ‘No.’ He smiled. ‘But he’ll remember me. What happened at the camp?’ Stuck in the apothecarium, he hadn’t heard much beyond the howls of triumph echoing through the Aett.
Grimblood grunted. ‘You missed quite a slaughter. The ones who didn’t manage to get to the webway portal now sleep on red snow. Not so many as we might have hoped, though. Too many escaped. And too many of our folk died unavenged.’
Lukas hunched forward, wondering if the pain he felt was entirely physical. He clenched his fists. Hetha and her people would be gone, if they had survived. But he had found them once. He would find them again, though perhaps not for several generations. He forced himself to relax. ‘What of the pups?’
‘Have they not visited you? Ungrateful whelps.’ Grimblood smiled. ‘Such is the way of youth.’ He shook his head. ‘You taught them well. They are alive. Some new scars, but they bear them with honour. They will be elevated to the Grey, soon. For their bravery.’ He peered at Lukas. ‘And yours. What you did took courage.’
‘And cunning. Don’t forget cunning,’ Lukas chuckled. ‘Seems the fire was wrong.’
‘No. It didn’t say when you would die, only that you would.’ There was no humour in Grimblood’s smile. Even so, Lukas laughed, after a moment of bewildered astonishment.
‘Oh, that is funny. You tricked me.’
Grimblood looked down at him. ‘It would have been a good death,’ he said finally.
‘I deserve better,’ Lukas said. He probed the inflamed flesh around his wound, wincing. The pain was worth it. He could feel the stasis bomb humming within him. Or perhaps it was growling, like a contented wolf. ‘And with Thymr’s help, I have made certain that when I die, I will be remembered as I am.’
Grimblood glanced at Thymr. ‘I knew it was a mistake to let you keep that thing.’
‘It’s a coward’s weapon, anyway,’ Thymr said. ‘Who better than him to have it?’
Grimblood sighed. ‘Perhaps.’ He looked at Lukas. ‘Perhaps that is the most fitting end for the Jackalwolf’s saga, whatever my hopes. A monument to hubris and courage in one.’
Lukas grinned. ‘See, Thymr? I told you he would get the joke, in his own time.’ He slapped Grimblood on the arm. ‘Cheer up, jarl. Hloja. Laugh!’
And Lukas laughed.
About the Author
Josh Reynolds is the author of the Horus Heresy Primarchs novel Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix, the Warhammer 40,000 novels Lukas the Trickster, Fabius Bile: Primogenitor, Fabius Bile: Clonelord and Deathstorm, and the novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio dramas Blackshields: The False War and Master of the Hunt. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written the novels Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows, Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden, Nagash: The Undying King, Fury of Gork, Black Rift and Skaven Pestilens. He has also written many stories set in the Warhammer Old World, including the End Times novels The Return of Nagash and The Lord of the End Times, the Gotrek & Felix tales Charnel Congress, Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen. He lives and works in Sheffield.
An extract from Lucius the Faultless Blade.
The Pit Cur cut a rattling dive through the maelstrom. She was an ugly craft, the core of a boxy mass conveyor swollen into a hulking monstrosity of oversized weapons batteries and crudely stacked armour plates wrapped around a bulbous cluster of warp engines. She bore none of the avian or oceanic grace that had inspired so many shipwrights as they had created the spacefaring vessels of mankind.
Her utilitarian form suited the ones who now called her solemn decks of adamantium and cold iron home. In the time since the ship’s capture by her current masters, the Pit Cur had been rendered into an effigy, her armour plating edged in brass and lacquered in crimson as if she had breached from an ocean of spilled blood, all in veneration to the God of War. The ship’s blackened engines burned hot, oblivious to the handful of smaller escort craft straining to keep pace with her as they clung to her flanks.
Riotous colour twisted and bloomed around the Pit Cur. Churning nebulae of half-formed hands and faces waxed and undulated, birthing clusters of light and tumbling raw matter into being and then destroying them just as quickly. Storms of incomparable scale appeared instantaneously, the feeding grounds for ancient intelligences of congealed passion who were ravenous for the chance to strip the souls from mortal flesh. Trillions of predators swam through the psychic syrup of accumulated sentient emotion, whispering promises and lies to any that would hear them.
The mortal crew of the Pit Cur shuffled in fearful silence through the dark arteries of their vessel, wary to keep themselves far from the masters who roamed the upper decks. They were slaves to towering demigods, enraged beasts clad in armour of brass and blood-red, a shard of transhuman shrapnel sent spinning upon the path of its own destiny in the wake of the XII Legion’s death at Skalathrax. Their path was erratic, guided by the aggression engines ticking into their minds with a ceaseless desire for butchery. Internal strife against their own brethren was as commonplace within their savage throng as the raiding and pillaging they committed across the storms.
Life was cheap aboard the Pit Cur, especially that of the mortals who had never seen beyond its slowly corroding halls. Theirs was a brutal existence, as unstable as the abused brains of their lords, though the ones who led their warband were not so blind as to yield all caution. For they plied the space between the real and the unreal, the realm that had been both their refuge and their prison since the failed siege of Terra. They were in the Eye of Terror, and danger lurked all around them, staring with a billion eyes both mundane and aetheric.
In this instance, danger took a familiar form.
The huntress slipped forth from the shimmering storms that wreathed Eyespace, sentient lightning clinging and licking at the pale lozenge of blue-and-gold light encasing her that was her Geller field. Where the Pit Cur was bulky and unsightly, a monument to uncouth
wrath and aggression, the huntress was breathtaking. She was an elegant spear of platinum and bleached mauve, a cityscape of fluted towers and cathedrals sculpted into a knife’s edge. Her hull was pockmarked and blackened by ceaseless war stretching back to the killing grounds of Isstvan, yet these scars did nothing to diminish the beauty of her sublimely regal form.
The huntress angled her bladed prow, adorned with the anguished effigy of a crucified eagle rendered in blemished gold, towards the Pit Cur, and leapt forwards on swift engines into attack range.
Alarms and warning klaxons rang out within the Pit Cur, scratchy and blaring in disunity from a combination of poor maintenance and overuse. Crew rushed through corridors stained in scarlet emergency lighting. Threadbare boots and rag-bound feet splashed through pools of blood running without source or end from the ceiling and walls to collect in the deck grating. Serfdom under the War God’s champions had dulled the horror of those still living to serve, and they jostled and shoved past one another to reach their appointed battle stations. The pale, spindly figures of lobotomised servitors dragged themselves to the enginarium and maintenance decks, while brutish vat-grown abhumans stomped towards the weapons batteries, slathering their chemically swollen arms with chalk as they made ready to haul enormous shells into the breeches of the ship’s guns. The walls around them shivered as the Pit Cur’s engines were pushed beyond their tolerances, the hull issuing a chorus of tortured metallic groans as she twisted her superstructure to face the approaching foe.
The escorts sailing with the Pit Cur, a pair of Idolator-class lance raiders and a single Infidel-class torpedo frigate that any reasonable commander would have decommissioned a century ago, peeled away from the larger vessel’s flanks and surged towards the huntress. Their commanders spread their meagre numbers in a wide formation, seeking to divide the invader’s fire and buy time for the Pit Cur to come about and bring her superior weapons batteries to bear.
Void conflict was a feat of mathematics and complex calculation, a precise dance conducted from a staggering distance. Battles where the opposing commanders were ever close enough to have made visual contact with one another were occasions of extreme rarity. The huntress had arrived practically on top of the Pit Cur and her escorts, immediately triggering the wail of extreme proximity alarms and impact klaxons across the bridges and command decks of every vessel. This choice of tactics was far from unexpected, however, for those who waged the Legion wars preferred engagements of a more intimate nature than those fought by conventional navies.
Migraine-bright spears of crackling light slashed out from the forked prows of the Idolator raiders. Smoke and bits of wreckage shook from the Infidel’s hull as it loosed a spread of torpedoes at point-blank range. Lances erupted across the huntress’ void shields in a corona of slick multicolour, while point-defence batteries along the hull of the purple-and-silver ship lit the void with streams of tracer fire. Golden ribbons of shells struck the incoming ordnance, reducing the torpedoes to small spheres of expanding fire that quickly shrank and guttered out to nothing.
Pinpricks of light gathered along the flanks of the huntress as her own lance batteries primed. Brilliant bolts of energy linked her to the three escort vessels for an eye-blink. The void shields of the smaller warships popped like soap bubbles as the concentrated beams continued on, slicing through armour as knives carve through flesh. Internal detonations boiled over the hulls of the escorts as their warp drives overloaded, blowing them apart in eye-aching bursts of spectral-blue plasma.
Men and women streamed into the storm from the warships’ ruptured hulls like blood spurting from lacerated flesh. Those not already dead would writhe in agony before joining those who were, either from the uncaring cold of the void, or at the hands of the Neverborn that roosted in the maelstrom’s tides. A lesson quickly learned by all of those who were banished to the Eye of Terror, both mortal and demigod alike, was that there were many fates worse than death. Those sucked out into the void did not wait long to learn the full extent of that truth.
Their killer had not even broken her stride. The huntress sailed with the easy, natural grace of a dancer through the clouds of spinning debris, which was all that remained of the escort craft and their thousands of crew, as she bore down upon her true prey.
Across the outer decks of the Pit Cur, mortal crew scurried out of the path of power-armoured giants clutching brutish chainaxes and glaives. Eye-lenses of crimson and dirty jade pierced the gloom from beneath the crests of their war-helms, and the waspish buzz of their active war-plate sent ripples through the blood pooled on the deck. Twitches and low growls issued from the warriors as the pain engines implanted in their brains punished calm and fed them frenzy. A low, coarse voice barked across the ship-wide vox, scratching from battered horns in guttural Nagrakali: ‘Gird your plate and ready your blades. Praise be to Kharnath! Praise to the War God! He has given us skulls to split and blood to spill.’
They had been made to be angels. Even more so than the Legions who bore that epithet within their own titles, more than the entirety of the Legiones Astartes who strode across the galaxy as the conquering Imperium of Man’s Angels of Death, only one Legion understood the true totality of such an ideal. To be angelic, to truly realise the intended vision of their creation, could only be fulfilled by achieving perfection.
Only one Legion had borne the name of the Emperor. Only one Legion had been chosen to wear the symbol of the Master of Mankind, the Palatine aquila upon their armour as their blood and iron forged His interstellar dominion. Only one Legion had ever been perfect enough to be called His Children.
The Diadem slid through the milky squalls of prismatic warp light, her void shields flickering as the last of her prey’s escort picket rained over her as shards of twisted wreckage. She rolled aside from the fire of the Pit Cur’s macro-cannon batteries, salvoes of shells the size of hive city tenements screaming harmlessly past as the ancient strike cruiser manoeuvred with stately grace. The heavily modified mass transport ahead of her listed from the recoil of her guns, unable to match the preternatural agility of the Diadem as she knifed into close range.
Lances and smaller weapons batteries linked the space between the two vessels in storms of fire as the Diadem dipped low and under the Pit Cur. While the heliotrope strike cruiser still lit the twisted void around them with the kaleidoscopic light of her intact void shields, the Pit Cur’s layered energy fields had overloaded, and clouds of broken weapons emplacements and shattered armour hung in loose orbit around her hull. Hundreds of crew bled out into the void from deck breaches, torn into the waiting arms of the Neverborn that chose the Eye as their feeding ground.
Slipping beneath the Pit Cur’s guns, the Diadem executed an immaculate roll, turning the anger of her lance batteries upon the mass conveyor’s sub-warp engine arrays. As her prey listed to a halt, trailing a sputtering tail of neon gases from ruptured propulsion drives melting to charred slag, the Diadem continued to roll. Splinters of dark lilac shot from her flanks before she burned her engines bright and blasted past the wounded Pit Cur. Like seeds scattered across a field, the tiny darts of boarding pods sank into the undefended belly of the conveyor and locked fast to her hull.
The majority of the World Eaters aboard the Pit Cur, as per standard tactics when repelling voidborne boarding actions, mustered to take up positions at sites of the greatest strategic importance. The greatest numbers deployed across her corridors were tasked with guarding the enginarium, upper decks and bridge against any invader seeking to wrest control of the ship from the warriors of the XII Legion.
The fallen angels locked within the boarding pods sought a different prize, however. The Pit Cur, a broken-down junker scarcely stitched together and barely suited for travel through Eyespace, meant nothing to them. Their eyes were locked on the true treasure aboard the heavy mass conveyer, the teeming masses packed into the blackness of its holding decks – mortals destined for lives of brutal
toil or violent deaths in the gladiatorial fighting pits of the Eaters of Worlds.
The fallen angels had come to free those wretches from the captivity of XII Legion shackles. Their liberators had an entirely different fate in store for them. A fate that was sublimely, excruciatingly worse.
Direnc clutched the length of rusted iron pipe to his barrel chest, the thunderous tremors around him crashing in concert with the pounding hammer of his heart. He had torn the pipe out from the wall of a long-abandoned maintenance duct four months ago, and since that time it had helped him in killing eight men and three women in the lightless expanse of the Pit Cur’s lower decks. Direnc had sought none of them out, but he had not had to. From murdering over debts incurred gambling in the fighting pits to struggling for the meagre supplies necessary to eke out a threadbare existence aboard the ship, killing was a way of life for those in thrall to the War God, from the lowliest slave to the Red Centurion who ruled the warband and the Pit Cur as its chieftain.
Rounded up with a dozen other slaves, Direnc had been herded into the depths of the ship, to guard against potential invasion. Most of the other slaves were armed in a similarly pitiful manner to Direnc, white-knuckled claws gripping sharpened bits of plasteel tubing or battered industrial tools. Looking around the near total blackness of the corridor in which he found himself, he wondered what the ragged collection of serfs could possibly do to stop any hostile demigods intent on cutting their way into the ship. Even against a single one of them, the slaves would do little more than serve as a meat shield to cake their boots.
Only one man present in the corridor was armed with anything that was ever originally intended to be used as a weapon. The overseer flicked nervous eyes from slave to slave, cradling the dented stock of a beaten combat shotgun against his hip. He had positioned himself behind the pack of terrified thralls, to serve more as a means of keeping them from fleeing than to repel any boarders himself.
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