The staff clicked against the polished stone steps as the figure made his way down the staircase that wound around the edge of the tower. In his wake, the heavy blast shutters on the outside of the chamber peeled back into their housings, revealing the poison currents of Eyespace through a dome of crystalflex. The wailing spiked as the raw empyrean washed over the wretches covering the walls, dragging their torture to new heights and flaying away whatever pittances of sanity they still clung to as they screamed.
‘Nobody summons Lucius,’ snarled the Eternal, the haft of his sword creaking under his tightening claws.
‘Of course not,’ said the other Space Marine, his pale features adopting the very image of conciliatory contrition. He danced lightly down the steps of the tower, gently placing his helm upon a silver pulpit that stood halfway down its length.
‘Ah.’ He closed his eyes, beaming as he basked in the blood-curdling screams tearing through the chamber. ‘Such songs they sing today.’
He gestured up towards the crystal dome that was all that separated them from the roiling currents of the warp storm’s fury. ‘Here we stand, bathed in the light of infinite possibility and endless creation.’ He leaned over the edge of the pulpit towards Lucius, a conspiratorial smile upon his face. ‘I heard rumour that Vispyrtilo ventured out into its tides with only his spear. How he was not flensed away by the molten storms is nothing short of miraculous.’
Lucius snorted. ‘Tell that to him.’
The sorcerer gave a short bleat of light, lyrical laughter. ‘He and I must converse soon. I imagine we would have so much to discuss.’
Lucius said nothing, his face twisted in anger at the jovial witch’s presence. The screams were inciting the voices caged within his mind, inspiring them to new heights of helpless rage. The sorcerer seemed not to notice it, the smile never leaving his thin lips.
‘Tell me,’ he asked, his voice shedding some of its exuberance to become soft and measured, ‘do you still dream?’
‘I do not sleep,’ answered Lucius, irritation bleeding into his voice to render it clipped and harsh.
‘But you do dream,’ he pressed. ‘Do you still dream of Terra?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Do you dream of Sigismund?’
The unconquerable battlements are aflame. The Templar stands surrounded by the firestorm, alone with his blade drawn to face him. A sword of midnight reflects the blazing pyre of the hopes and dreams of the human race.
Hanging strings of blood and drool link Lucius’ teeth as he grins. The tips of their blades are as close as can be without touching, radiant silver against depthless black. Both weapons are stained scarlet with the deaths of ones they had once called kinsmen.
‘It’s finally here, isn’t it?’ Lucius grinned wider. ‘The moment we both dreamed about.’
‘That…’ Lucius clenched his teeth. ‘That did not happen.’
Didn’t it?+
‘Get out,’ Lucius hissed. He snorted the beginnings of a nosebleed onto the deck, leering up at the figure standing at the pulpit. ‘Doesn’t it harm you?’ the swordsman asked, tapping a maddened tattoo with a claw to his temple hard enough to draw a thin trickle of blood. ‘Poking around in there?’
‘Yes,’ the other whispered. ‘For one with the sight, to even look upon you for any longer than a moment is an act that elicits great pain.’
‘Then why do you do it?’
The sorcerer looked away for a moment, his shining eyes suddenly hooded and tired, thoughtful in contemplation. ‘The answer to that question is… complicated.’ He turned back to look down at Lucius, though not directly at him. ‘You would not have the patience to hear it.’
‘Nor have I the patience for you now.’
‘That answer is fair enough.’
The doors to the spire-top chamber ground open once more, admitting the pearl-armoured form of Cesare within.
‘What fresh hell is this?’ demanded the Apothecary, loathing curdling his words into an acidic hiss. The Apothecary had arrived armed. His bolt pistol filled his fist, loaded and primed to fire.
Lucius made to have his brother holster the weapon, before remembering his own blade was still bare to the freezing air. Pushing a breath through his teeth, he sheathed it. Lucius locked eyes with Cesare, giving him a barely perceptible nod, and the Apothecary relented as well, mag-locking the pistol to his thigh.
‘Brother, why was I summoned to the lair of this bastard witch?’ Cesare sneered up at the figure. He turned the glowing eyes of his helm to Lucius, the extractor of his gauntlet deploying with a bladed snick as he raised an accusing finger towards the sorcerer standing at the pulpit.
‘This self-proclaimed Composer?’
‘Why, because our leader requested it, of course,’ replied the sorcerer, smiling wider at the brief flicker of uncertainty that needled Lucius’ features. ‘Something has happened, which he believed you would find to be of great interest.’
Cesare came to a halt beside Lucius, casting a sidelong glance at the swordsman as the Composer continued.
‘We have received a message.’
II.II
She brought a finger to his lips, and the whole world disappeared.
It was the lightest touch, a grazing caress that just barely settled upon Direnc’s skin, but she may as well have set his flesh on fire. The rolling hills surrounding the two of them shrank away, stretching into an indistinct blur. The only thing in existence was he, and the pair of green eyes that swallowed his mind.
They were flawless, hypnotic and the most purely beautiful things he had ever seen. Direnc imagined they were gateways, twin portals to verdant forests filled to bursting with life and joy. The slave would have given anything to live within such a place, his entrance granted with the radiant key of a kiss.
The finger, slender and pale as milk, withdrew its touch. Direnc’s heavy brow creased in confusion, only for his frown to melt away with her smile. The girl turned, her auburn hair dancing a gentle orbit around her blushing face, and she darted forwards up the hillside. Laughter trailed behind her, sweet as music.
Direnc ran after her, hearing the alien bark of laughter pass from his own lips. It was such a heavy, brutish noise by comparison, but it seemed to cause the maiden no distress. It came honestly from the thrall of the XII Legion, and he knew that the girl could sense that as he followed after her.
With long, powerful strides, Direnc quickly caught up to the girl. She yelped, eyes shining as she spun and leapt into his arms. The sudden weight unbalanced the slave, and the two tumbled together down the side of the hill, their laughter intertwining as they rolled. Their joyful shouts only grew as they came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, half concealed within the swaying ocean of soft grass.
Redness flushed Direnc’s face as they settled. Human sexuality was not entirely alien to those who served amongst those who failed at Terra, even if intimacy was. The World Eaters had enforced a rigid breeding doctrine to ensure the mortal populations of serfs aboard their fleets was maintained, even as they raided and pillaged those of the other fallen Legions and those belonging to their own kin.
Direnc himself had been selected, his size and robust constitution passing him through the eugenic trials of his masters to participate, though the cold, inhuman process established by the Apothecaries of the XII Legion had left much to be desired. The acts were sterilised and distant, devoid of any warmth or humanity. They were more akin to surgical procedures than any means of conveying love.
With a start, Direnc realised how different his lot in life had become. After growing to adulthood in the dark aboard the Pit Cur, mired in the blood and hatred and violence of life in service to the Eaters of Worlds, he had inexplicably found a Legion of masters who seemed to demand nothing from him but happiness. He should have railed against that, suspicious of the ease of it all, but it was all so intoxicat
ing.
There was glory in worship to the War God. Blood and skulls meant honour, they meant victory. But here, in this place, in the shadow of another of the divine pantheon, there was joy. Real joy. A bliss that, as Direnc looked down into the maiden’s eyes, he wanted more than any conquest that could be won upon a battlefield.
Direnc leaned his head down fractionally, and the girl raised her own. The eyes of devastating green closed, and their lips touched.
‘What message?’
Cesare’s question mirrored Lucius’ mind. Some manner of somnambulance had brought him here, yet he could not fathom how, or to what end. Had the Composer truly alerted him as he claimed? The sorcerer knew better than any of the precariousness of his position aboard the Diadem, and that Lucius was all that prevented any of the rest of the Cohors Nasicae from leaving him flayed and crucified upon the gantries of the upper decks.
Hatred was one of the few lingering things that sustained the life of Lucius the Eternal. He had wrought wonders through such hate, yet this ignorance that clouded him, the loss of control, twisted acid through his veins like nothing ever had before. It reminded him all too well of the place beyond, in those times he had been defeated.
It reminded him of dying.
‘A powerful missive,’ replied the Composer to Cesare. ‘Sent from across the realm of the Gods through the minds of eighty-three souls gifted to relay it, meant for the ears of the Eternal alone.’
Lucius spat onto the deck, watching the gobbet of phlegm hiss and pop as it ate into the metal. ‘I care not, just tell me the damned message.’
‘As you wish,’ said the sorcerer obsequiously. ‘I have not heard the message, and chose instead to contain it within the final conduit of its sending for you to give audience at your pleasure.’
The Composer rapped the tip of his staff against the floor, the clack somehow carrying through the screams that coated all other noise. A buzzing chitter arose from the top of the crystal dome. An insectoid construct emerged, not unlike the mechanisms clutching the wailing slaves who lined the walls. It stuttered down to the pulpit on chattering suspension orbs, clutching the frail body of an elderly man in its pincers of smoked glass.
The man was frozen in the midst of a terrible scream, his worn and lined features locked in an image of pure terror. Silver thread was pulled taut across eye sockets made vacant when he had been ritually blinded as a child. The stitching gleamed in the torchlight, glittering behind a field of sorcerous energy like diseased smoke, caging the man within a moment in time.
The Composer nodded once, and the construct lowered down before Lucius and Cesare. Its pincers spread wide with a sibilant rush, dispelling the field of psychic energy and dropping the man to the deck with a dull crash of bony limbs. He lay there, shivering, drawing shallow, rasping breaths through blackened teeth.
Lucius stared down at the stricken astropath sprawled at his feet. He pinched his nose with a sigh of impatience. The strands of his lash uncoiled from one another, questing the barbed hooks at their tips over the psyker’s prone form of their own accord.
The astropath shot into the air, his lungs straining with a rattling wheeze. His back arched, breath feathering out in freezing puffs as he began to levitate.
‘Hrmmmm…’ His wheeze became a groan, became a wail. Became a scream. The misty clouds of breath darkened into ribbons of oil-black smoke, sinking and coiling around his body like a nest of waking serpents. His voice began to break, stuttering as his vocal cords tore.
An incomprehensible torrent of babbling gibberish poured from the bleeding lips of the astropath. Broken teeth tumbled to clatter against the deck, rimed in blood-ice and scraps of crumbled gum. His body alternated between thrashing and locking in place, his limbs bending in obscenely unnatural directions as the bones snapped and stabbed through his waxen flesh.
With a great heave of his emaciated frame, the astropath vomited a cloud of hissing black ooze into the air. The tar-like substance boiled and spun, compacting into a sphere. Lucius tore his gaze from the ghastly scene for a moment, seeing the rapt joy writ upon the Composer’s face as he watched the act unfold.
The sphere of bubbling filth stretched and flattened into a disc, hanging in the air by a trickle of the vile fluid that sprouted from the astropath’s rambling lips. Its surface grew flat and still, like the face of a black mirror, before gaunt, unpleasant features started to protrude from it.
After a handful of heartbeats, a haggard countenance had fully emerged from the disc of fizzing midnight. It was human, but only in the broadest and most generous of terms. It clashed with impressions of the god-like power of one elevated to the ranks of the Legiones Astartes, while simultaneously bearing the sallow, malnourished aspect of a skull dipped in clotted wax. Even in the warped simulacrum of dark sludge, though, one feature was undeniable.
His eyes.
Twin orbs set into sunken sockets stared unblinking from a hatchet-faced brow. They glittered with dark amusement, an insatiable hunger for knowledge, and something more. More than anything, they displayed cruelty. An endless capacity to inflict unimaginable suffering smouldered in the depths of those eyes, a willingness to sacrifice any and all necessary to achieve his own ends.
When the face spoke, it spoke through the astropath’s lips, though its own voice was heard as surely as if the man stood before Lucius in the Composer’s sanctum himself.
‘Brother of mine,’ said a voice scraped raw by centuries spent plying the depths of the darkest sciences hidden within the universe. ‘I so detest reliance upon such methods of communication and therefore to frame a message to you in terms you are capable of understanding, I shall be brief. I require your presence, with immediacy. I offer parley in exchange for it. It has been a not insignificant amount of time since our last…’ – the voice paused, the next words bearing a more bitter edge than before – ‘…meeting, but the incidents of our mutual past are of no interest to me. If I know you, and I do, you will require what I have: flesh, and the means to create more of it. So come to me, and you shall have it.’
The face shuddered, losing its shape as it sank back into the churning sludge. Filthy water began to trickle and stream from the astropath’s body as the psychically charged ice caking it thawed.
With a gurgling hiss, the face melted away into the dripping glob of blackness, leaving nothing behind but the lingering impression of relentless, unkind eyes boring into space.
‘I will await you.’
The blackness vanished in an instant, collapsing into a gust of sparking ozone and foul-smelling smoke. Untethered from the unnatural energies keeping him aloft, the astropath collapsed. The body of the tortured psyker exploded as it struck the deck. The flesh boiled away to ash, stuck fast in filthy patches to a shattered skeleton. His scream lingered on the air for several moments after he died, before crumbling away into the others.
‘Shame,’ remarked the Composer as he descended from the pulpit to the base of the tower. He nudged the mound of ashen bones with his boot. ‘I rather liked that one.’
‘I know whose voice that was,’ said Cesare.
‘All of us do,’ replied Lucius.
‘Him,’ the Composer said, tasting the word with a flourish of a smile. ‘Much time has passed since I last saw our brother. He roots his conviction so deeply in his precious, infallible science, unable to see the notes of the Great Song weaving through his every formula, every invention.’ His smile bloomed further, the guttering torchlight glittering from his diamond teeth. ‘It is ever the blindest of us who claim the greatest insight.’
Cesare bristled. ‘Take care of the poison that oozes from your forked tongue, sorcerer.’
‘Ah yes,’ beamed the Composer. ‘As a master goes, so too does his protégé. But certainly, Apothecary, you bear no touch of the divine. The one who has sailed these blessed stars with us for so many centuries without bearing ev
en the slightest sign of age. The one who battles as fervently and ferociously as the rest of his brothers, yet has never seen the perfection of his features marred by so much as a single scar. The one who refuses to see the celestial links that allow his miraculous concoctions that nourish his brethren to transcend impossibility and become reality.’
The sorcerer leaned forwards, hands gripping the haft of his staff. ‘No, Cesare, the Youngest God loves you. His is a love for you that runs so purely, and so deeply that He heaps such gifts upon you even while curses and denials are all that He receives in return.’
A low bass noise scratched out from behind Cesare’s teeth. The ceramite of his gauntlets creaked and squealed as his hands balled into trembling fists. Behind the mask of his helm, a branch of veins throbbed at his temple, twitching in concert with the elevated thunder of his heart. The Composer could feel the Apothecary’s rage curl the air around his ivory-armoured bulk like decaying flower petals sloughing from the bloom.
It took several seconds for Cesare to marshal the calm to reply. ‘I grow weary of this place.’ He jabbed a reproachful fist at the Composer once more. ‘Pray to the mass of interdimensional filth you prostrate yourself before that you do not find yourself alone beyond these doors, witch. For if it is I who finds you there, I will pull that diseased tongue of yours out from you through a place you will not enjoy.’
‘That,’ said the Composer as he favoured the Apothecary with another effortlessly radiant smile, ‘is what you might think.’
Afilai gave another rumbling chuckle from behind his tusked helm. Cesare turned his glare upon the hulking Terminator, before spinning on his heel and storming from the chamber.
The Composer gave a contented sigh. ‘Our dear Apothecary. He is the oldest of us, yet he bears a puerility that is the equal of his face.’
‘He is of no concern to you,’ scowled Lucius, still staring at the incinerated astropath.
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 11