To fight such a warrior would be the true test of Lucius’s skills, for, as much as he liked to believe himself to be unbeatable, he knew that was not the case. There was no such thing as an unbeatable warrior, there would always be someone faster or stronger or luckier, but instead of fearing to meet such an opponent, Lucius ached for it.
His reflection advanced and retreated with him, matching him movement for movement, and no matter how fast his attacks, how lightning quick his ripostes, he could never breach his mirrored defences. His swords moved with greater and greater speed, each attack faster than the last. He moved quicker than any other living swordsman, his blades forming a shimmering sphere of silver around his body, an intricate sword dance that would have been madness to interrupt.
‘So self-involved, swordsman,’ said Julius Kaesoron, emerging from behind a jagged stump of crystal. ‘You would be left behind here?’
Lucius stumbled, his swords clanging together with a resonant clang of lethal edges. His Terran blade squealed in protest as the Laeran edge notched it with a gleeful shriek of metal on metal. Lucius turned his stumble into a spin and both blades whistled as they cut the air and came to rest on the First Captain’s throat.
‘That was not wise,’ he said.
Kaesoron batted the blades away, and laughed with a gurgle of frothed fluids in his throat. He turned his back on Lucius and gestured towards the ruined Mechanicum facility, where the last of the container shuttles hauled its heavily laden bulk from the blasted rock of the planet’s surface.
Almost nothing remained of the crystal forests, the horizon stripped bare and the silos torn down as they were emptied. Marius Vairosean’s screaming squads blasted what little was left standing to shredded atoms with jangling blasts of interlocking blast waves of disharmonious sonics. Soon it would be as though this place had never existed.
Lucius jogged after the First Captain. ‘You think I wouldn’t kill you, Kaesoron?’ he asked, angered at the warrior’s casual dismissal of his threat.
‘You are a viper, Lucius, but even you’re not that stupid.’
Lucius wanted to snap at Kaesoron, but he knew it would be pointless to antagonise the man. The First Captain would leave him behind without a second thought, and barely a glimmer of emotion.
‘The primarch has been thorough,’ said Lucius, sheathing his swords and watching the last container shuttle ascend on a rippling haze of struggling engines. ‘What does he want with it all?’
‘The crystals?’
‘Of course, the crystals,’ said Lucius.
Kaesoron shrugged, the matter of no consequence to him. ‘The primarch desired them, so we took them. What he intends to do with them is of no interest to me.’
‘Really?’ said Lucius. ‘And you call me self-involved.’
‘And you do care?’ countered Kaesoron. ‘I think not. Your world begins and ends with you, Lucius. Just as mine concerns only what will allow me to taste the greatest bliss and darkest raptures. We exist to gratify all our desires to the extreme edges of sensation, but we do it in service to a power greater than any of us, greater even than any primarch.’
‘Even the Phoenician or the Warmaster?’
‘Luminous beings they are, but they are mere vessels for a power older than you or I can imagine.’
‘How do you know this?’ asked Lucius.
‘There is wisdom in suffering, swordsman,’ said Kaesoron. ‘Isstvan V showed me that. The bliss of pain and the ecstasy of agony are how we offer our devotions. You have not known true suffering, because you are weak. You still cling to notions of what we were, not what we have become.’
Lucius bristled with anger at Kaesoron’s casual dismissal of his own pain and talents, but said nothing, eager to learn more of what the First Captain had to say.
‘The Lord Fulgrim has known the greatest pain this galaxy has to offer and he knows the truths at its heart,’ said Kaesoron, and Lucius detected a change in his rasping tones, a tremor of doubt. ‘Since… Isstvan he has shown me such sights as I would never have dreamed, pain and wonder, rapture and despair.’
Was it possible?
Did Kaesoron suspect the same as he?
Lucius risked a sidelong glance at Kaesoron, but the warrior’s skull had been so thoroughly mangled and rebuilt that it was impossible to read his features. A thunderous crash of atomising metal washed over them as the last silo toppled to the ground, and its destroyers shrieked as the deafening noise drove spikes of pleasure through their brains.
Marius Vairosean marched towards them as a last Stormbird dropped through the streaked corona of a rainbow sky. Lucius wanted to find the sky beautiful, to be moved by the vivid colours and the rarefied blends of hues he had never seen.
He felt empty, and wanted nothing more than to leave this world. It had nothing left of interest, and anger touched him at the thought that he was bereft of stimulation.
‘A grand finale,’ said Marius, the words mangled by his overstretched jaws. Lucius wanted to ram his swords into Vairosean’s chest, just to feel something. He resisted the urge only with difficulty.
‘I despise this place,’ said Lucius, wanting nothing more than to be gone from this mundane rock of a world.
‘I have already forgotten it,’ said Kaesoron.
7
The dream still clung to the ragged edges of his consciousness, its lingering dread and burdensome suspicions hanging like an albatross from his neck. The corridors of the Pride of the Emperor were never silent, the echoes of screams drifting from one end of the ship to the other in a constant choir of debauched indulgences. The majority of these screams were of pain, but many were of delight.
It grew harder and harder to tell which was which with the grey passage of days.
Yet this area of the ship was abandoned and forgotten, like a dirty secret a man might hope will go away if only it can be ignored for long enough. No light or music or screams filled this wide hallway, no disjointed pavanes of misery, and no fleshy tributes to masterful excruciation. It felt like this place didn’t exist, as though it was out of joint with the rest of the ship.
Lucius turned a corner and found himself before the great arched doors to La Fenice, and here the illusion of abandonment was dispelled. Six warriors stood before the doors, clad in scored armour of blues, pinks and purples. They wore tattered cloaks of gold weave that hung in asymmetrical waterfalls from the spikes worked into their shoulder guards, and crimson raptors surged from ruby flames on their breastplates.
All six carried golden-bladed halberds, the edges of which crackled with a faint haze of killing light. A flesh-masked warrior stepped towards him, the blade of his halberd spinning to face him. Lucius watched the warrior’s movements, calm, assured and smooth. He was unafraid of Lucius, which marked him out as being particularly stupid.
‘Phoenix Guard,’ said Lucius with a grin of relish.
‘Entering La Fenice is death,’ said the warrior, his voice muffled by the skin mask.
‘Yes, I’d heard,’ replied Lucius amiably. ‘Why is that, do you think?’
The Phoenix Guard ignored the question and said, ‘Turn around, swordsman. Leave here and you will live.’
Lucius laughed, amused at the sincerity if not the seriousness of the threat.
‘Really?’ said Lucius, resting his palms on the pommels of his swords. ‘Do you think you and your friends can stop me from getting inside?’
The rest of the Phoenix Guard spread out, forming an arc of killing steel around him.
‘Leave now and you live,’ said the warrior before him.
‘Yes, you said that, but here’s the thing,’ said Lucius. ‘I want in there, and you aren’t going to stop me. Trust me, it will give me great pleasure to take the six of you on at once, but I think that might be a rather one-sided experience by the end.’
Lucius saw the attack comin
g in the Phoenix Guard’s eyes.
Energised carbon steel clove the air, but Lucius was already moving.
Lucius ducked below the sweep of a halberd and the Terran blade leapt to his hand. Its tip plunged into the groin of the flesh-masked warrior. Lucius gave a savage twist and the blade cut up through his opponent’s femur and hip to remove his leg. Blood gouted from the wound, and the warrior fell with a cry of mingled pain and surprise. Lucius darted to the side, his Laeran blade cutting into the flank of the warrior to his right. Armour parted before its alien metal and the warrior’s guts looped out as though eager to be free of his flesh.
Altered organs heightened every sensation, and Lucius laughed with the vividness of his surroundings. The darkness became multi-faceted, the smell of blood a heady cocktail of unnatural chemicals and biological agents, the gleam of dim light from flashing weapons like the explosive fanfare that marked the end of the Great Triumph. His breath sounded impossibly loud, his blood like thundering rapids, and his opponents came at him with what seemed like deliberate slowness.
A halberd stroked his shoulder, and Lucius rolled with the arc of the blow. He sprang to his feet, blocked the return cut, and rolled his wrists around the weapon’s haft, stabbing the blade through the Phoenix Guard’s helmet. The warrior dropped without a sound and Lucius swayed aside from a scything halberd blow intended to cleave him from skull to pelvis.
Lucius counterattacked with blistering speed, his first cut removing the warrior’s blade, the second opening his throat. A third blow all but severed the head, and he threw himself flat as another spiked halberd stabbed for the space between his shoulder blades. He came to his knees, swords crossed before him to catch the blade as it descended. The strength behind the blow was awesome, far in excess of his own, but Lucius twisted his blades to drive the blade down into the deck. Steel shrieked as the crackling blade tore up the decking. Lucius thundered his fist into the Phoenix Guard’s helmet, cracking the visor and drawing a grunt of pain from within. The warrior lost his grip on the halberd and blocked a dazzling cut to the neck with his forearm.
Lucius’s blade severed the arm at the elbow, and he spun inside to ram the Laeran blade through the warrior’s chest. His victim fell with a gurgling cry, grabbing Lucius’s wrist and dragging him down with him. Lucius was pulled to the deck, but kept the momentum of his tumble going as the last Phoenix Guard’s halberd swung for him. He twisted in the air and landed lightly on the balls of his feet, leaving the blade trapped within the Phoenix Guard’s chest.
Armed only with his Terran blade, Lucius dropped into a theatrical en garde position, keeping his sword high and moving the tip in tiny circles. An old trick, but the Phoenix Guard was not a subtle warrior, and Lucius saw his foe’s eyes follow the motion of the blade. Lucius leapt forwards, feinting right as the warrior realised his mistake. A clumsy block swept around, but Lucius had already altered the angle of his thrust. The Terrawatt clans of the Urals had forged the blade in the days before Unity, and its edge had never failed him.
Until now.
The tip of the blade caught the broken nub of an eagle’s wing on the warrior’s plastron, and the impact sent a jolt of force along the sword. It snapped, and the tip sprang back at Lucius in a spinning arc of razor steel. Even Lucius’s preternaturally swift reactions could not save him, and the shard sliced a deep furrow from his left temple to his lower jaw.
The pain was so sudden, so blissful and so wonderfully unexpected that it almost killed him as he took a moment to savour it.
Given a reprieve from death, the Phoenix Guard thrust his halberd towards Lucius. The tip kissed the metal of Lucius’s war plate, but that was as close as it came to the swordsman’s skin. Lucius hacked the weapon’s haft in two with his broken sword and waved an admonishing finger.
‘That was careless of me,’ he said with a faintly embarrassed sigh. ‘Imagine being killed by a sluggard like you. I’d never live it down.’
Before the warrior could reply or lament the loss of his weapon, Lucius spun inside his guard and executed an exquisitely aimed decapitating strike that sent the Phoenix Guard’s head spinning across the chamber.
Lucius bent to retrieve the Laeran sword, twisting the handle back and forth to ease the pull of flesh. The blade slid clear and he tore the mask of dried skin from the first warrior’s face, curious to see what someone who thought he could fight him and live looked like.
It was an unremarkable face, and in the flat planes of its features, he saw Loken’s mocking grin. Lucius’s good humour evaporated in an instant, and he stood with a grimace of bitter memory. He stamped down on the warrior’s face. Once and the bone broke, twice and the skull cracked. Three times and it caved in, a wet crater of pulverised brain matter and skull fragments.
Angry now, Lucius cleaned his sword on the dried rag of skin, his mood changing like the wind as he held up the skinned face before him like an actor upon the stage.
‘Trust me, you’re better off,’ he said, gesturing to the broken skull of the warrior from whom he had taken the flesh mask. ‘He was an ugly bastard, that one.’
He tossed the face aside, making his way to the arched doors of La Fenice.
They had once been adorned with gold and silver leaf, but were now virtually bare. Frantic madmen, desperate to relive the beautiful horrors of the Maraviglia, had worked their hands to bloody nubs of bone in their attempts to gain entry. Lucius saw fragments of splintered fingernails embedded in the doors and plucked a few from the wood, enjoying the thought of how it must have felt to have them ripped from the nail bed.
‘What do you hope to achieve?’ he asked himself.
He had no answer, but the days since the Legion’s departure from Prismatica had only intensified his desire, his need, to see what lay behind the sealed doors to the abandoned theatre. This was disobedience on a grand scale, and the very illicitness of the venture was reason enough to seek it out.
The killing of the Phoenix Guard made withdrawal a moot point anyway.
Lucius pushed open the doors and entered the abandoned theatre.
8
He drew a lungful of stagnant air as the darkness enfolded him like a midnight lover. It tasted of metal and meat, dust and age. La Fenice had once been a place of magic, but without any breath of life to sustain it, the theatre was little more than an empty shell, bereft of any hint of joy. Lucius struggled to recall the wondrous anarchy that had once filled this place, the stark violence and manic copulation that had filled its parquet and gallery boxes with a celebration of all things visceral.
His memories of the event were grey and dull, like faded echoes instead of the glorious moment of awakening he wanted to remember. The stage was splintered and stained with blood, the walls daubed with smears of reeking fluids and hung with rotted vines of organs that had no place outside of a human body. The songbirds that had trilled from gilded cages were gone, the golden footlights extinguished and the bodies he had expected to find sprawled in decomposition were nowhere to be seen.
Who would have taken them and for what purpose?
A number of answers presented themselves – for pleasure, for dissection, for trophies – but none seemed likely. Lucius saw no drag marks, simply stained outlines where the bodies had lain, as though they had been drained of substance by something within this room, something that could draw strength from the presence of so much death.
Lucius moved through the echoing vastness of the deserted theatre, his steps carrying him with unerring inevitability towards the centre of the parquet. Above him was the Phoenician’s Nest, and he cast a wary glance upwards as he felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten in anticipation of danger. He felt as though malevolent eyes were upon him, but every sense told him he was alone in here.
His gaze was drawn up to the only spot of light in La Fenice, and Lucius was not surprised to find that the portrait of Lord Fulgrim bore no resembla
nce to the glorious piece of artwork that had presided over the Legion’s rebirth. As it appeared in his dreams, the portrait was a work of insipid blandness. To the prosaic senses of mortals, it would have been a masterpiece, but to a warrior of the Emperor’s Children it was a lifeless piece.
At least that was what Lucius believed until he met the eyes of this painted Fulgrim.
Like staring deep into an abyss that looks back, Lucius saw a dreadful anguish there, a bottomless well of agony and torment that took his breath away. His mouth fell open in a wordless exhalation of enjoyment to feel such exquisite pain. What manner of being could feel such despair? No mortal or Adeptus Astartes could plunge to such unknowable depths of wretchedness.
Only one such being could know such horror.
Lucius met the eyes of the portrait and knew in a heartbeat the nature of the being held captive within its golden prison.
‘Fulgrim,’ he breathed. ‘My lord…’
The eyes pleaded with him, and his entire body shuddered with the ecstatic knowledge he now possessed. His heart beat furiously in his chest, and a giddy sense of vertigo staggered him as he struggled to comprehend the sheer scale of the deception worked upon the Emperor’s Children.
Giddy with excitement, Lucius made his way from La Fenice in a fugue state, barely conscious of his surroundings. The enormity of what he now knew filled him like a supernova, the furthest edges of its illumination making his limbs tremble as though an electric charge filled his veins.
He staggered like a drunk through the doors of the theatre, and dropped to his knees as he began to exert a measure of control over his body. Lucius blinked away a confusing mass of light and colour from his eyes as the world around him became more real, more solid and more filled with vibrant possibility.
The Primarchs Page 5