The Primarchs

by Edited by Christian Dunn

  Alone in the entire galaxy, he knew something that no other did.

  Yet even Lucius knew he could not act on this alone.

  Galling as it was to admit, he would need help.

  ‘The quiet order,’ he whispered. ‘I will call the Brotherhood of the Phoenix.’

  9

  They gathered in the upper reaches of the Pride of the Emperor, in an observation bay that laid the immense starscape before the mortals who dared traverse its unimaginable gulfs. The Brotherhood of the Phoenix had not assembled since Isstvan, its members too involved in their own gratification to bother with the affairs of others.

  Which was not to say that the observation deck went unused. Those who imbibed the toxically hallucinogenic cocktails brewed by Apothecary Fabius found enlightenment in its infinite vistas, and many indulged their freshly awakened carnal hungers with vicarious feasts of flesh and blades. Discarded bodies and torn heaps of broken glass lay strewn throughout the bay, and the occasional moan issued from a jumbled pile of clothing and leather restraints.

  It had been a place of quiet reflection, where a warrior could meditate on the means by which he might draw closer to perfection, but now it was an arena of depravity, depthless horror and indulgences beyond all constraints of morality. No one came here to better themselves, and the grand ideals and debates once bandied back and forth were now forgotten echoes, remembered by none and actively flouted by many. If anywhere on board the Pride of the Emperor could be said to embody the utter desolation of the Emperor’s Children it was this place.

  They arrived in ones and twos, intrigued enough by Lucius’s summons to come in hopes of some diversion interesting enough to amuse them for a time. That he – so uninterested in any notions of brotherhood – had issued such a summons was reason enough to appear, and by the time he judged it wise to begin, Lucius counted twenty warriors before him.

  It was more than he had expected.

  First Captain Kaesoron had come, as had Marius Vairosean and, more importantly – if Lucius’s suspicions were confirmed – so had Apothecary Fabius. Kalimos, Daimon and Krysander were here, and Ruen of the Twenty-First. Heliton and Abranxe came also, and several others whose names Lucius had not bothered to remember. They regarded him with mild amusement, for he had always been held in faint contempt by the order. Lucius struggled to hold his temper in check.

  ‘Why have you called us here?’ demanded Kalimos, his downcast face stitched with rings and toothed hooks. ‘This brotherhood has little meaning for us now.’

  ‘I need you to hear something,’ said Lucius, staring at First Captain Kaesoron.

  ‘Hear what?’ bellowed Vairosean, deaf to how loud he spoke.

  ‘Fulgrim is not who he claims to be,’ said Lucius, knowing he had to snare their interest early. ‘He is an impostor.’

  Krysander laughed and the skin of his face cracked with the force of it. Others joined in, but Lucius’s anger was mitigated by the fact that he saw Kaesoron and Fabius narrow their eyes in interest.

  ‘I should kill you for those words,’ snarled Daimon, swinging a heavy, spike-headed maul from its shoulder harness. A monstrous weapon, one impact would crush any foe unlucky enough to be on the receiving end.

  Ruen circled around behind Lucius, and he heard the whisper of an assassin’s dagger being drawn. He tasted the bitter tang of the toxins on its blade, and licked his lips.

  ‘It sounds preposterous, I know,’ said Lucius. His life hung on the line here. It was one thing to defeat a handful of Phoenix Guard, quite another to take on twenty captains of the Legion. He grinned at the thought of such a fight, even as he knew he would not survive it.

  ‘Let him speak,’ said Fabius in sibilant tones. ‘I would hear what the swordsman has to say. I am curious to see what has made him think like this.’

  ‘Aye, let the whelp speak,’ said Kaesoron, moving to stand beside Daimon.

  Marius Vairosean unlimbered his sonic cannon, its destructive potential filling the observation deck with a bone-rattling bass note as he worked his scarred fingers over the harmonic coils.

  The rest of the brotherhood spread out around him, and even as Lucius appreciated his mortal danger, he felt wonderfully alive. Krysander ran a hooked tongue over his lips, his black eyes like those of the primarch, as he slid a red-bladed dagger from a flesh-sheath cut into the meat of his bare thigh.

  ‘I’ll have your skin, Lucius,’ said the warrior, licking stagnant blood from the blade.

  Kalimos unhooked a coiled whip from a beringed belt at his waist, its entire length barbed with the gleaming razor teeth of a carnodon and tipped with an Inwit pain amplifier. It writhed like a snake, pulsing with an intestinal motion as it wrapped itself around its wielder’s leg. Abranxe drew two swords from shoulder scabbards, as his blood brother, Heliton, slipped hooked cestus gauntlets over his fists.

  They circled him in ever-decreasing rings, elaborating on the violations they would wreak upon him for wasting their time. Each captain sought to outdo the other in the depths of horror he outlined, and Lucius forced himself to ignore the barbs.

  ‘Speak, Lucius,’ said Kaesoron. ‘Convince us that we have all been lied to.’

  Lucius stared into Kaesoron’s eyes, meeting his dead gaze, and hoping he had an ally in the First Captain.

  ‘I don’t have to,’ said Lucius. ‘Do I?’

  ‘You are foolish if you think I won’t kill you, swordsman,’ replied Kaesoron.

  ‘I know you can kill me, First Captain, but that’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Then what did you mean?’ growled Kalimos, cracking his whip and leaving a bloody line carved into the deck plates.

  Lucius scanned the faces around him. Some were as they had been before Isstvan, perfect and patrician, while grotesque flesh masks or androgynous porcelain harlequins hid many others. Still more were disfigured with gouged wounds, repeated burns, chemical scars or multiple piercings.

  ‘Because you already know, don’t you, First Captain?’ said Lucius.

  Kaesoron grinned, no mean feat for a man with little remaining of his face he could call his own. The look of gleeful madness Lucius saw in his eyes confirmed the suspicion that had begun to form on Prismatica.

  Kaesoron already knew that Fulgrim was not who he claimed, but one ally among these warriors would not save Lucius if he could not convince the rest.

  ‘You must have seen it, brothers,’ said Lucius as Daimon began swinging his maul around his body in tight arcs. ‘The Phoenician speaks, but it is not his voice. He tells of our glorious battles like he wasn’t even there. He barely remembers the war against the Laer, and the victories of which he does speak sound like he reads them from a history book.’

  ‘Old wars,’ sneered Ruen, tasting the poison on his blade. ‘Wars won in another’s name. What do I care how they are remembered?’

  ‘Who I was is forgotten,’ said Heliton. ‘Only what I am now is important.’

  ‘A bad dream from which I am awakened,’ added Abranxe. ‘If the primarch forgets it too, so much the better.’

  Lucius drew his sword as the ring of warriors tightened on him. Heliton slammed a spiked fist into his shoulder. Hard enough to hurt, not enough to provoke a reaction. Lucius curbed his natural instinct to take the bastard’s head. Kalimos’s whip cracked, and Lucius grimaced as it scored a red line at his shoulder, leaving a white tooth embedded in the plate.

  Ruen’s dagger licked the groove cut by Kalimos’s whip, and Lucius felt the nerves in his shoulder spasm as the viral toxin bathed his nerves in fire. He staggered, seeing bright colours dance before his eyes.

  ‘I saw the portrait in La Fenice,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘It’s him. It’s him before the massacre.’

  He sensed a pause in the captains’ murderous attentions, and let the words pour from him in a stream of rabid consciousness.

  ‘Y
ou all saw it, the glory of its life,’ he said. ‘It was Fulgrim as he was always meant to be, a shining avatar of perfection. A celebration of his transcendent beauty. It was everything we aspire to be, a vision we were compelled to worship. It was all that we beheld of beauty and true gratification and bliss. I have seen it, and that vision is gone. It’s as though they’ve swapped places, like twin souls displaced by unnatural means.’

  ‘If we do not follow the Phoenician then who has commanded us since the battle on the black sands?’ demanded Kalimos.

  ‘I do not know, not for sure,’ said Lucius. ‘I don’t understand it all, but the power we saw in the Maraviglia… I saw it take the flesh of that mortal singer and rework it like wax before a flame. You all saw it. The power Fulgrim showed us makes soft clay of flesh, and who is to say what limits it has? Something else came through at Isstvan, something powerful enough to overcome the mind of a primarch.’

  ‘Lord Fulgrim called such beings daemons,’ said Marius Vairosean. ‘An old word, but an apt one. They scream in the nights we travel between the stars, and scratch at the hull of the ship with nightmares and dark promises. They make glorious music in my skull.’

  Lucius nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A daemon, that’s it. You all saw what they could do in La Fenice. The powers they have. Lord Fulgrim has such powers now. I saw him unleash a curse upon a Mechanicum battle engine on Prismatica. Its shields were down, and without even touching it, he caused every living thing inside it to grow and mutate in a storm of flesh that ripped the war machine apart from the inside. Lord Fulgrim was mighty, but even he wasn’t that powerful. Only the Crimson King has such powers.’

  ‘Lord Fulgrim is no sorcerer!’ cried Abranxe, lunging at Lucius with his swords extended. Lucius batted away the clumsy attack, and his riposte gave Abranxe a neat scar on his cheek for his trouble.

  ‘I didn’t say he was,’ said Lucius, dropping into a defensive crouch, ‘Listen, we knew the Warmaster was treating with such things, but this is a step too far.’

  Kaesoron pushed the other captains aside and gripped Lucius by the edges of his breastplate. ‘You think Horus Lupercal is behind this?’ he snapped.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ said Lucius. ‘Or maybe Fulgrim went further than any of us thought he ever could.’

  Kaesoron glanced over at Fabius, who had remained impassive throughout the unfolding drama. The First Captain drew a curved gutting knife and placed the tip of the blade against the pulsing artery at Lucius’s neck. Sensing bloodshed, Daimon’s hands slipped down the length of his hammer’s shaft in preparation for a crushing blow.

  ‘What say you, Fabius?’ demanded Kaesoron. ‘Is there any merit to the swordsman’s words, or should I kill him right now?’

  Fabius ran a hand through his thin white hair, his pinched features belying the strength in his limbs. The hissing, clicking chirurgeon machine that squatted at his back like a parasite reached over his shoulder, caressing Lucius’s cheek with a slender blade. Lucius felt its feather-light touch, the blade so sharp that he only knew he had been cut when the blood ran over his lips.

  The Apothecary’s dark eyes glittered with amusement, and he nodded thoughtfully as though weighing the outcomes of a trial by combat where the fighters were equally matched.

  ‘I too have seen things that have given me cause to wonder what our beloved primarch is becoming,’ said Fabius, his desert-parched voice like the hiss of a snake’s belly on sand.

  ‘What manner of things?’ said Kaesoron.

  ‘A change in the composition of his blood and flesh,’ replied Fabius. ‘It is as though his molecular structure has begun to dissolve the bonds linking its constituent parts into a cohesive whole.’

  ‘What could cause such a thing?’

  Fabius shrugged. ‘Nothing of this world,’ he said with a grin of dreadful appetite. ‘It is quite fascinating, you understand. It is as though his form is preparing for some great ascension, a wondrous shedding of a redundant form as his flesh is remade into something extraordinary.’

  ‘And you never thought to mention this?’ asked Lucius, still very much aware of the blade at his throat. Just by speaking, he caused its monomolecular tip to pierce his skin.

  ‘It was too soon to speak,’ snapped Fabius. ‘I do not pause in my observations as you would not pause in the midst of a duel.’

  ‘You mean you believe him?’ asked Marius Vairosean, his stretched face unable to hide the revulsion he felt at the thought of their master’s body being hijacked by another. Marius had ever been the loyal lapdog of the primarch, unquestioningly following his orders and never once doubting their course.

  ‘I do, Vairosean,’ said Fabius. ‘My research is unfinished, but I believe that another entity resides within the Phoenician and prepares to transform him into some new image.’

  Lucius took grim pleasure in his vindication as the First Captain’s knife was removed from his throat. The circling captains paused in their threatening dance, shaken and enthralled that the wild claims of the swordsman had been backed up by no less a figure than Fabius.

  Kaesoron lowered him to the deck and released his grip.

  Lucius found it grimly amusing that it had been their very loyalty to Fulgrim that had seen them cast as traitors in this rebellion. Blind, unquestioning devotion to one luminous being had been the origin of their damnation in the eyes of the Imperium. The irony was not lost on any of them.

  ‘How long before this transformation occurs?’ asked Kaesoron.

  Fabius shook his head. ‘It is impossible to say for sure, but I would expect this pupating stage of development to be rapid. Indeed, the change in physicality might already be under way. It could be too late to stop it.’

  ‘But it might not?’ said Lucius.

  ‘Nothing is certain,’ admitted Fabius.

  ‘Then we have to try,’ stated the First Captain. ‘If Fulgrim is no longer master of his own body then we have to get him back. We are his sons, and whatever has claimed his flesh must be captured and cast out of his body. Lord Fulgrim is our gene-father and I take orders from no one but him.’

  A charge of febrile excitement swept through the gathered captains, and Lucius let out a shuddering sigh. He had convinced the others of his suspicions while keeping his blood inside his body and his head upon his shoulders.

  ‘So, a pertinent question…’ said Lucius. ‘How do we go about capturing a primarch?’

  10

  The Gallery of Swords was a place where the exhibitionists of the Emperor’s Children liked to display their latest flesh masterpieces. Devotees of Apothecary Fabius, hoping to attract his notice, would drape their latest confections of macabre living art from the bull-headed statues that lined the grand processional of the Andronicus.

  The towering granite-hewn heroes of the Legion, warriors who had cut the first histories of the Emperor’s Children into the meat of the galaxy, were no longer recognisable as human. Their lovingly-carved faces had been recut, defaced and shaped anew into forms pleasing to the lurid aesthetics of the Legion. Leering grotesques kept watch on those who passed beneath them, and all who gazed upon them felt the wondrous horror of their debauched expressions.

  Apothecary Fabius made his lair beneath the Gallery of Swords, a sprawling medicae complex that had been transformed from a place of healing, research and excellence into a shadowed labyrinth of excruciation, screams and nightmarish, inhumane experiments.

  Fulgrim swept into the Gallery of Swords with Julius Kaesoron at his side, majestic in a long robe of cream fabric, with silver embroidered stitching running along the hems and collar. A sword belt of mirrored discs encircled his waist, the golden hilt of the anathame never far from Fulgrim’s hand.

  The primarch’s white hair was pulled back into a long scalp-lock woven with mother of pearl and held in place by a circlet of golden laurels. His sculpted chest was bare, and the pale skin b
ore numerous ridges of scar tissue from the last treatments and enhancements worked upon him by Fabius.

  Even though Kaesoron was encased in his spiked and flesh-wrapped Terminator armour, Fulgrim still stood head and shoulders above him. Clad in naught but his finery, Fulgrim was still a warrior to be feared.

  The primarch stopped beside one statue that had suffered particularly at the hands of the Legion’s craftsmen. He smiled up at the graven image of a reptilian bull’s head. The warrior’s armour had been cut with blessed symbols, and a trio of hollowed out bodies hung from barbed nooses, one from each outstretched arm, and another from its neck.

  ‘Ah, Illios, you would not know yourself now,’ said Fulgrim, with wistful nostalgia. ‘I remember the day you first drew sword alongside me as we forged the alliance of the eighteen tribes. We were young then, and warriors who knew nothing of the wider world.’

  ‘Do you wish he were here with us now?’ asked Kaesoron.

  Fulgrim laughed and shook his head. ‘No, for I fear I would have to kill him. He was always so unbending, Julius. He was a man with an unbreakable code of honour from the elder days, I do not think he would have appreciated the enlightenments we have received.’

  The primarch took a wistful look at the statue of his former blade brother and a strange expression passed over his alabaster features. Kaesoron’s eyes were no longer able to perceive the world as they once had, but even he could see the light of dark memory in the primarch’s eyes.

  ‘How naïve we were, old friend,’ mused Fulgrim. ‘How blind…’

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘Nothing, Julius,’ said Fulgrim, marching towards the end of the gallery.

  ‘How did Lord Commander Illios die?’ asked Kaesoron.

  ‘You know the answer to that, Julius. Your introspections on perfection would have required you to memorise the victories of our past.’

  ‘I know, but to hear it from your lips is always a sublime experience.’

  ‘Very well,’ smiled Fulgrim. ‘Apothecary Fabius will not mind if we are a little late.’