Lucius: The Faultless Blade

by Ian St. Martin

  Lucius’ mask of scar tissue twisted, wrinkling as the facets of Fabius’ ship assailed his senses. The air was as dense and wet as primordial jungle. It reeked of chlorine and flesh smoke, so thick it coated his tongue. Everywhere the swordsman looked he saw a cavalcade of monstrosity, either preserved behind glass collection vessels or shambling through the embarkation deck as the creatures went about their tasks. He felt the sub-vocal whine of pict- and vox-recorders itch at his inner ear, always watching, listening and documenting every moment to be catalogued and studied at a later date.

  Despite the overwhelming press of horrors, Lucius detected only the barest pittance of the warp’s touch. The repugnance surrounding him and the Cohors Nasicae was born not of the immaterium’s influence, but from the mind of a single man. Of all the twisted scenes Lucius had beheld, within the Eye and across all of the nine defeated Legions, only Fabius was capable of rendering such abomination so sterile.

  The crash of a bolt-weapon firing brought Lucius into a fighting crouch. He pivoted, looking behind him while still keeping Fabius in the corner of his eye.

  Cesare stood over the bisected corpse of one of Bile’s creations, spirals of fyceline curling from the barrel of his bolt pistol. The mutant was still trying to claw itself desperately towards him, even as it bled out across the deck. It had been drawn to the Apothecary, breathing out a croaking giggle born of the lingering traces of ambrosia it had scented from Cesare’s war-plate. The foul wretch continued sniggering even as it died.

  ‘Ah, Cesare.’ The Primogenitor’s thin lips curled in an unpleasant smile as he looked past Lucius. ‘Perfect, unmarred Cesare.’ He beckoned to see the face that lay behind the Apothecary’s helm. ‘Come, my boy, let us see what time has made of you.’

  Cesare remained unmoving for a time, the fingers of his left hand twitching and tightening around the grip of his bolt pistol. Fabius’ eyes bored into him, darkly hypnotic. The horrid grin grew wider.

  Finally, Cesare relented. With a muted clunk, he mag-locked his bolt pistol to his thigh, before reaching for his collar seals and pulling his helmet free.

  Fabius’ smile vanished as he saw his face. ‘Still perfect,’ he said, his words soaked in disappointment. ‘By remaining changeless, you have changed, Cesare.’ He gestured out dismissively towards Lucius and the rest of the warband. ‘You have allowed the taint into yourself, as surely as they have, slipping in through gaps your will could not repulse it from.’

  ‘Do not seek to throw stones here,’ hissed Cesare. ‘Do not seek to lecture me of madness.’

  ‘Madness?’ Fabius straightened, as if struck. ‘A strange term for a prodigal son to speak upon his return. Are you truly so departed from your time amongst my Consortium that you have given in to such delusion?’

  ‘Enough,’ growled Lucius, interjecting himself between the two fleshsmiths. ‘I did not cut my way out from the Eye to listen to a lover’s quarrel, Fabius.’

  Bile gave a dry chuckle, a noise closer to him attempting to dislodge a parasite from his throat than any sign of amusement. Lucius winced as he gazed upon the husk his brother had become. The armour he wore seemed disproportionately large for his head, which looked no better than a skull dipped in yellowed wax. He appeared as though he were less its wearer, and more the parasite who had devoured the legionary from the inside.

  ‘Do not look that way at me, Lucius,’ rebuked Fabius. ‘Surely a man of your arrogance surrounds himself with enough mirrors to behold what you yourself have become?’

  Lucius bit back his temper, willing down the disgust that came surging up his throat from the Primogenitor’s presence. ‘Let us be about our business, then.’ He offered a liar’s insincere smile. ‘I require the means to replenish my ranks. Flesh stock, equipment, gene-seed.’ Lucius looked back at Cesare.

  The Apothecary stepped forwards, replacing his helm with a click of closing seals. His voice once more became a machine’s snarl. ‘We would require–’

  Fabius held up a forestalling hand. ‘In time, brothers.’ The unpleasant smile returned to his cadaverous face. ‘I have the materials you would need, if the proper exchange was to be made.’

  The smile on Lucius’ lips tightened as he gritted his teeth. ‘Then by all means, name your price, brother.’

  Fabius tutted at the swordsman. ‘Ah, but it is not my price to name. I am but an intermediary in these negotiations.’

  Alarm flushed through Lucius. The words, and the deception they implied, coursed through the Cohors Nasicae. Hands tightened around weapons. The Rypax hissed, flooding their talons with lightning.

  ‘The party I represent is not yet here,’ said Fabius. ‘But they shall join us momentarily.’

  Clarion–

  Agony pulsed through Lucius’ brain, driving him to one knee. It felt as though a hatchet of ice had been buried in his skull. Dark blood pattered against the deck, streaming from his nose and eyes.

  ‘I would advise against that,’ said Fabius. ‘I have gone to some lengths to ensure that such forms of communication are, for the time being, quite impossible. I’m afraid your vessel will have to determine its own fate, when your true partners arrive.’

  Bile leaned down, the arms of his chirurgeon whirring and clicking like the limbs of a demented spider. ‘And a word of caution, Lucius. Their methods of negotiation may prove to be…’ He pondered for a moment, searching for the right word. ‘Exotic.’

  The pain blossomed across Lucius’ body, bright and sudden and without any of its usual pleasure. He snarled through it as he surged to his feet, the Laeran Blade shining as its power field activated. The hulking mutant brute bellowed a warning at the swordsman, who skidded to a halt as his eyes stared past Fabius Bile, his hideous menagerie and the energy field separating the interior of the ship from deep space.

  Lucius stopped as he felt the tell-tale rumble of the ship’s warp drive engaging beneath his boots, and saw shadows detach themselves from the darkness of the void.

  II.VII

  They appeared in silence and darkness, like oil sliding over moonlit waters. Their forms were slight and barbed, all bladed edges like ritual daggers. They knifed effortlessly through the void, the smaller shapes of escort craft impossibly keeping pace with their larger brethren where those of Imperial origin would have quickly been left behind. At no point did they ever sail in a straight line, but rather in a dizzying ballet of overlapping parabolic vectors and graceful rolls as they swarmed towards the Diadem.

  Clarion’s first warning was not of the newcomers’ approach at all. Her first cause for alarm occurred when the vessel Lucius and the warband were aboard abruptly translated into the warp. Such a sudden entry into the Sea of Souls threw the void into a frenzy of disrupted energies that crashed against the Diadem’s flanks like storm-tossed currents.

  Alarms filled the air of the strike cruiser’s bridge, and crew hurried between consoles to angle the ship away from the worst of the temporal disturbance. The Diadem’s iron bones groaned and creaked as she came about, still rattling from the ripples of savaged space. The vessels advancing upon her remained invisible to Clarion’s notice, apart from a sudden hunger that stabbed unexpectedly into her mind, until, as one, their weapons opened fire.

  Streams of dark energy lashed at the Diadem, which lit the night with strobing flares as her void shields burned. The strikes came from all directions, orchestrated in a display of coordination no human mind was capable of. Retaliation burst out across the strike cruiser’s hull as her defensive batteries fired, hurling ordnance at everything and hitting nothing. The attacking vessels simply melted away into the void, reappearing hundreds of kilometres distant as they strafed her again.

  Clarion gripped the arms of her throne with tiny hands as the bridge rocked under the assault. ‘Shields holding!’ a bridge officer cried, bent over a display and reading a strip of inked vellum as it spilled from the lips of a servitor. She
heard the tension in the older man’s voice, clear as music. Adrenaline spiced the sweat prickling his brow. Most of the warship’s multilayered energy barriers had been stripped away, collapsing in the face of the ceaseless barrage. It would not be long before they failed altogether.

  One of the raiders flashed by the vantage of the main oculus. It appeared for an instant, a thin stiletto blade set into blackened bone. Its weapons arrays savaged the forward shields protecting the Diadem’s prow, before it blinked away along its impossibly fluid dance.

  Clarion recognised the ship as it melted into the blackness. She recognised the weaponry that was ravaging her own vessel in a firestorm of shadowed energy. She finally understood the hunger she was feeling, and why she could not stop her shell of flesh from drooling.

  The gates of the Dark City had opened. Eldar. They were being attacked by dark eldar.

  Direnc awoke to the sound of screaming.

  A hundred voices and more howled their anguish into the air, each cry erupting like thunder beneath the slave’s skull. Migraines that blurred his vision with their intensity tore at his brain, flaring from the apertures of raw surgical wounds where the Apothecary’s machines had anchored themselves to him. The pain was unlike anything he had experienced before, ripping up his guts with nausea, but it was nothing compared to the feeling of loss.

  He could feel the barest traces of the ambrosia as it left his body through his sweat. Its absence hit him in savage, relentless pangs. Just enough of the concoction remained to remind him of the feeling he could never again live without. He had felt so calm with it, so tranquil, and now every nerve was raw. The crushing loneliness he had felt for so long aboard the Pit Cur returned a thousandfold. Anxiety and panic warred with despair for control of his thoughts.

  It was then that the servitor dropped him. His limbs filled with acid, and stars burst before eyes he screwed tightly closed. His ears rang with the screams as he joined them with his own, a perverse echo of the torment he felt inside.

  ‘No.’

  Direnc opened his eyes. The voice somehow cut through the walls of misery, clear as if the word had been spoken in a silent room. He craned his head up, feeling his teeth chatter as an electronic thrum itched at his flesh.

  A monster stood over him, clad in a mismatched suit of purple ceramite. The thing was massive, even larger than the demigod Apothecary. He carried a gigantic double-barrelled firearm in one fist, the other ending in a series of electrified talons that hissed and spat lightning as they scraped against each other. Skulls and the helms of demigods from armies Direnc had never seen rattled from the spiked golden trophy racks that rose from his shoulders.

  The slave recognised the armour. He had seen a small number of the priceless suits in his service to the Eaters of Worlds. A pair of crackling sapphire eye-lenses stared down at Direnc from the monstrous Terminator’s tusked helm, the same eye-aching blue of the energy that webbed his lightning claw.

  Yet he was not the one who had spoken.

  ‘No, no, no,’ came the voice again. Direnc dared to break eye contact with the Terminator, peering past him to a figure standing at a pulpit halfway up the tower that dominated the chamber. As if emerging from some spell, Direnc finally noticed the horrors that lined the walls, the butchered things that were giving voice to the screams.

  The figure continued on, either oblivious to the slave’s horror, or uncaring of it.

  ‘This will not do at all. You are holding back, I see it clearly.’ The figure stepped down from the pulpit, descending the staircase that spiralled around his tower. The light of torches revealed him as another of the demigods, although this one wore the trappings of sorcery upon his ancient war-plate. A dark staff clicked as he stepped down each stair, and the sorcerer smiled at Direnc with a face that was sickening in its bizarre, androgynous beauty.

  ‘You feel your pain as if it were the ultimate, the worst you could endure. But that is a lie born of ignorance and kept by fear. There are layers to pain, little man-thing. You scrabble at the surface yet you leave the hidden depths locked away and untouched. That is where the true treasure, where the real music sung from the lips of the divine, lies.’

  The Composer strode past the Terminator, who stepped aside the way a hound makes space for its master. He released hold of his staff, which remained hanging suspended in the air beside him as he lowered to one knee and took Direnc’s head in his hands.

  ‘Fear not, a journey of rapturous self-discovery awaits you. You shall find your place in the Great Song, and I shall be your guide.’

  Direnc was frozen. As much as he yearned to turn away, desperate to close his eyes, he could not break the Composer’s gaze. Physical contact with the sorcerer was mesmerising, as if he were pulling Direnc into a higher state of being with his touch alone.

  Abruptly the Composer withdrew his hands and stood. Direnc sank to his hands and knees, breathless. It felt as though a crushing weight had reasserted itself onto his shoulders. He could barely lift his head.

  ‘Afilai?’

  The Terminator turned in a snarl of servos, looking up at the Composer where he stood gazing at the void after returning to his pulpit.

  ‘Yes?’ Afilai’s voice was the bass rumble of tank tracks crushing stone.

  ‘There are intriguing developments coming to pass.’ The Composer looked down, his eyes lit by sudden fire. ‘Be ready.’

  It took several minutes for Clarion to compose herself before she was able to give the first orders to her crew. Once the realisation of the attacker’s identity was made clear, she was perplexed she had not seen it earlier. Though their sleek vessels darted and swam around the Diadem with infinitely inhuman grace, the child could sense the spirits of every one of the aliens dwelling beneath their hulls of darkened wraithbone. They were jagged, starved things, desperate to inflict the suffering necessary to stave off their own fate. The fate of being lovingly devoured for ecstatic eternity by the sacred choirs of daemons in thrall to the Prince.

  Daemons like Clarion.

  The thought gave her pause. Once more she glanced sidelong at the figure looming at her side, silent and ever-present. She and Lucius had become separated, and the panic of what that promised sowed dread, and a thin stirring of pleasure, in the child’s mind. She was not willing to make good upon such a promise, and therefore the dark eldar must die.

  ‘Lances,’ said Clarion, her voice soft and terrible like a madman’s cradle song. The crew hurried to acquire targeting solutions, struggling to maintain them long enough for the weapons to prime and fire. The dark eldar warships were anaemic, spindly things, disappearing into a scud of shadow and interference at one location only to reappear a moment later to open fire.

  Clarion trusted in her crew. The men, women and mutants who populated the command deck of the Diadem were the absolute cream of former III Legion officers and highly specialised slaves taken in raids by the Cohors Nasicae. Those who were found to be incapable of performing their duties to her standards did not live long enough to experience the extent of her displeasure, being either killed on sight or discarded below to be used as raw materials for the fanatical tortures of the Composer or the Apothecary Cesare’s experiments.

  Clarion watched as one of the smaller raiders drifted too close to the Diadem, indulging in a strafing run that stitched across the length of her port flank. The combined anger of two lance batteries speared into the xenos craft, liquefying its fragile superstructure. It detonated in a flash of violet smoke, reduced to a cloud of spinning fragments like shattered black glass.

  A cheer went up across the bridge. Clarion allowed it, but did not share in their delusion. She had partaken in enough void duels, against fleets of xenos and Imperial ships alike, to recognise fortune when she saw it. They had been lucky to catch the xenos in its moment of greed. The others would not be such easy conquests.

  But they were drawing closer. A casu
al glance to the tactical hololith projecting from her throne’s armrest told her that. Would they try to enact boarding actions? There were no legionaries aboard to defend the crew and vital areas of the ship from slaughter and destruction. If allowed aboard, packs of dark eldar raiders would rampage through the Diadem like a cancer, butchering thousands and dragging any who survived to a far darker fate in their twisted cities.

  Against sense, against reason, Clarion silently begged them to try. Even just a handful of them, she prayed. Just a few moments of their bodies touching the skin of her ship, breathing her air into their inhuman lungs. The mere thought of Commorrites spilling inside the Diadem’s veins flushed her mundane form with fever, even if it guaranteed her own doom.

  Clarion ignored the melancholy. Her mind was focused entirely on the taste of eldar blood on her tongue, the smell of their sweat. It was sweeter than the sweetest nectar, and worth any price. They just needed to get closer.

  ‘Into them,’ she ordered, tapping in a series of course corrections to disseminate to her crew. ‘Get us into them.’

  ‘But mistress,’ an officer said, approaching her throne in protest, ‘our engines are straining to their tolerances simply trying to keep pace with them. A vessel of our tonnage cannot match the–’

  A hard snick cut through the air, silencing the man. He froze, convulsing, a thin trickle of blood and brain matter sliding from the centre of his left eye where a slender talon of purple bone had punched in clear through his skull. With a flick of her wrist, Clarion withdrew the talon just as quickly, the claw melting back into the soft ivory of her finger. The officer dropped to the deck like a puppet with cut strings, twitching for a few moments before he went still.