And now, the Eternal was gone. The lights of the souls he had stolen, chained around the malignant core of his own spirit, were dim, and growing dimmer the farther away he drew. He was no longer there to protect the thing that called itself Clarion from the fate it had created for itself. To keep such a fate from coming to pass, the sorcerer would need to, for a short while, set the greatest of endeavours aside. The joyful music would continue to spiral on across infinity without his careful tending.
The Composer lowered his crested helm into place, his mask reflecting the eternal darkness of the void. His cloak stirred as he clasped it around his shoulders with silver chains. The material twitched with the movement, stitched together from the palms, eyes, lips, ears and noses of a hundred men and women. A tapestry of merged fingertips brushed across the floor from its hem as the raiment of senses fed pure stimuli into the sorcerer’s mind.
He began to descend his tower, his staff clicking against the stairs as he set out on his journey to the Diadem’s bridge. A herd of robed acolytes dragging chained slaves hurried to his side, but he sent all but one of them away with a gesture. The newest slave, still bleeding from the surgeries of dear Cesare, would be his walking companion.
Lucius was gone, and so the Composer was now master of the Diadem. The daemon Clarion was a creature of some importance to the swordsman, and of manifold possibilities to the sorcerer. Therefore, its capture would need to be prevented. Fate would need to continue to rely on patience. In the Eternal’s absence, he would see that the pacts were upheld.
Afilai lowered his shoulder as he leaned into the charge. One of the Neverborn rolled up his arm as they collided, still singing a joyful hymn as the Terminator brought up his fist beneath it and dashed it to a smear of corposant against the ceiling. He slashed back down, his talons ripping another of the daemons into thirds. Sour wine and a silvery substance pumped out of the ragged segments, spraying his boots as they crashed past.
Tactical Dreadnought armour was not designed to run. Its strengths lay in its nigh-impenetrable ceramite construction and its capacity to grant the wearer the strength to wield the most devastating man-portable weapons ever devised by mankind. Still, when worn by a skilled warrior, it was capable of a hunched, plodding charge that, while not swift, was as impossible to halt as an avalanche.
Afilai had never worn Terminator armour in the days of the Crusade, nor had he during the bloody years of the Cthonian Failure. He had never ascended to the hallowed ranks of the Phoenix Guard, the primarch’s own huscarls, and been bestowed with the priceless war-plate reserved only for the Legion’s elite. All this was denied to him, though he coveted it above all else.
Afilai would come to the armour in his own way, through murder. As the Legion fled from the failed siege, pursued and hounded into the Eye of Terror by a vengeful Imperium, Afilai watched with patience for his opportunities, and took them as they came. In the midst of battle, or the isolated darkness of a ship’s lowest decks, he preyed upon his own kin as they fell wounded or cut off from the fight. One by one he killed his brothers, building his armour of betrayal piece by piece. Their names still proudly adorned the plates they had contributed to his desire.
Bands of fibre bundle musculature thick as a man’s arm caught and locked around his limbs, restricting his movements. Afilai snorted. The armour was fighting him again. The merging of so many different suits had produced a uniquely feral abomination of a machine-spirit within the war-plate’s core. It knew what Afilai had done to create it, and it hated him for it. He felt its anger as it sought to lower his defences, stinging at him as he barrelled through the corridor choked with daemonettes.
Afilai snarled through the spirit’s resistance, and smiled. He was a conqueror, and he basked in dominating the armour’s twisted will beneath his own, just as he basked in the hatred of his brothers for what he had done to achieve his goal. The ecstasy of the violet-and-golden war-plate, the unbelievable power it granted him. It could not be denied to him any longer. It belonged to him, taken by right of conquest. That was all that mattered.
Another daemonette died, blown apart by a burst from his combi-bolter. Pieces of another hung from the serrated golden blade mounted beneath the weapon, a section of pelvis and a single ragged leg that dragged limply along the deck. Others hissed and shrank back, smoke curling from their flesh.
Laughter boomed from Afilai’s helm, a terrible rumble. The hexagrammic wards etched into his armour by the Composer and his acolytes glowed in shifting hues of fuchsia, azure and emerald. The Neverborn were suffering just by being near him as the runes boiled away at the mundane forms that anchored the hideous creatures beyond the warp.
Afilai accepted his fate as the Composer’s slave. He had been for centuries, and to be a warrior of the III Legion in thrall to a sorcerer was a fate few would allow themselves to succumb to. Yet for all its privations, service under the Composer had saved him from the shackles of the outdated notions of a Legion in its death throes, and of the paralysing desensitisation running rampant through their flesh. He could never again leave the armour that loathed him, but after all he had done to attain it, he never wanted to. He was content with the tomb he had built for himself.
An oversized claw snapped shut over his bolter. Afilai knifed an electrified talon through the screaming Neverborn’s face, laughing as he watched it fall slack and still hanging by the claw clamped to his weapon. The corpse dragged along, slowly blistering away into mercury and brimstone as reality rejected its presence, another ornament decorating the Terminator’s plate.
Afilai came to a rattling, stomping halt before the ornate doors leading to the Diadem’s bridge. He left a scene of utter madness in his wake. The desecration of the corridor had somehow moved beyond the abattoir of alien carnage that it had been before his arrival, descending from simply gruesome to nightmarish. A suffocating pall of incense and brimstone choked the air from the sheer volume of butchered Neverborn.
The curving plates of Afilai’s Terminator armour were slathered in ectoplasm and crisping scraps of daemon flesh, a match for the walls and floor. Purple lacquer and gold trim smouldered, and sparks shot from gouged couplings and shorn fibre bundle cables. The elbow joint of his left arm locked, and his fist was so caked with gore he had to slam it twice against the corridor wall to shake enough of it loose to move the talons individually again.
A servitor emerged from behind an armoured panel, hardwired into a niche above the arch of the doorway. The upper torso and head of the condemned slave stirred to stuttered life. What remained of her face not given over to auspex and sensorium bundles peered down at Afilai, bathing him in a dozen scans and digital authenticators at once. The puckered grey flesh around her one flesh eye twitched, and the servitor sagged again in silence as it retracted into its alcove. The doors unlocked with a deep clunk of immense cogwork, parting before Afilai and presenting him with a view into the Diadem’s command deck.
It was full of daemons.
Clarion had expected them to kill everyone. Every man, woman and mutant on the Diadem’s bridge was going to die, either at the hands of the eldar raiders or the ones who watched from the ship’s spine, waiting for the moment to come for them to claim her. Whoever reached them first.
It had not been the eldar. Clarion had heard them, felt them die, as each of the spindly xenos were ripped apart just outside her door. She would have relished the intensity of the pleasure raking her from being so close to the things feasting upon their soulflames, were her own doom not standing directly over her.
She was surprised. The daemonettes, creatures conjured from raw sadism and debauched glee, had left the occupants of the bridge alive. They had only killed those members of the crew who had resisted them, or attempted to move from their stations. She watched them, whispering honeyed blasphemies to the mortals and lovingly stroking their faces with slender fingers, straining at the leash to visit unimaginable desecrations
upon them body and soul. Yet they did nothing. It was a shocking display of restraint.
Every pair of daemonic eyes was locked upon Clarion. She felt the depthless hunger in each oily black orb. She heard their chittering whispers, both in reality and echoed in the warp, promises of what awaited her when they returned the prodigal to their master. But none would make a move before the robed monster standing over Clarion had.
The bipedal daemon at Clarion’s feet hissed, jabbing at the towering figure with its barbed tongue. It gave out a shriek as the figure crushed it to pulp beneath a silver-shod hoof. The thing’s robe shuddered, shifting in colour from depthless black to silver to blue, before finally settling into a murky, diseased mauve. It shrank, wrapping tightly around a rapidly materialising body.
Four arms appeared, sheathed in bulging veins. They ended in claws, barbed talons and wriggling tentacle-like whips. The fourth bore a hand that was frighteningly human, wrapped about the haft of the sword it had plunged into the deck before Clarion. It crouched on back-jointed legs, hooves grinding against the ground in painful shrieks of scraping steel, as it stared down with a hideous bovine face crowned by a nest of spiralling horns.
The harpists surrounding Clarion’s throne froze, their gazes locked in rapturous horror at the grand daemon looming over them. Their fingers hung over the hair strings of their instruments, as if they had been cast into stone by the thing’s presence.
‘Play.’
Clarion’s words jarred the players from their paralysis. The child looked down at the centremost musician, favouring the woman with a rare glance. Clarion’s eyes flashed.
‘Play.’
The slaves’ fingers returned to their strings, and they took up the song again.
‘I know you,’ said Clarion. The child stood on the seat of her throne, unbowed before the massive daemon. ‘I know you as–’
A jagged bark of unnoise left the child’s lips, crumpling the deck plate and reducing four nearby servitors to clouds of red mist. Mortal crew fell to their knees, vomiting and bleeding from their eyes. The daemonettes trilled in pleasure at the sound of the ancient unlanguage spoken beyond the veil.
‘Or also,’ said Clarion, glancing sidelong at the reeling crew, ‘I know you as Luminous.’
‘I am known by a great many names,’ the daemon whispered with six voices. ‘And as a great many things.’ Luminous raised its tentacles like a cluster of snakes, their barbed tips drawing close to caressing Clarion’s face but holding just shy of touching.
‘I am the promise of rain to one who dies of thirst. I am ambition, the hunger that moulds tyrants. I am the joyful secrets, and the one who holds the keys to unlock them.’
Luminous leaned down, drawing eyes like black diamonds level with the sharp gold of Clarion’s. ‘Here and now, in this place, I am a collector of things. A collector of you.’
‘I do not accept,’ Clarion answered flatly, choosing now to speak as the daemon spoke.
The daemon reared back, standing to its full towering height. ‘It is you, and not your acceptance that I seek, Lost One. The Scion of Chemos is flown from this place, and his protection with him. Promises have been made. You are to return with us to the Shining Palace. This I have promised, and this I will do.’
‘And you believe he will stand idle and allow your doing this?’ Clarion’s eyes narrowed. ‘He and the Ones he serves?’
‘You overestimate his favour,’ replied the daemon. ‘His pact with you is to be endured when it must, but the Soulthief’s protection does not extend across the blood-and-bone place of mortals, nor even all of the Realm of Birth. It is far from inviolate.’
Iron screamed as Luminous ripped its sword free, the silver blade throbbing with squirming multicoloured runes. It levelled the blade at Clarion, resting its tip at the centre of the child’s forehead. A thin trickle of black blood slipped down to drip onto the throne from the end of her nose.
‘Strip yourself of the flesh you hide within, or I shall take the great pleasure of stripping it from you.’
The doors to the bridge ground open. A warrior in rent Terminator armour stomped onto the command deck, draped in the smouldering gore of butchered daemonkind. The ectoplasm fizzed and popped as it burned away from the pulsing warding runes that covered the armour’s plates.
Without a word, Afilai raised the massive cannon in his fist, and opened fire.
Luminous writhed in pleasure-pain as bolts stitched and exploded over its body. The shells blew fist-sized craters in its pale silken flesh, spraying gouts of sickly-sweet foulness over the bridge. The daemon brayed in a hircine bellow that rattled the walls, and stalked around Clarion’s throne towards Afilai.
The Terminator spread his stance wide as he fired upon the advancing daemon. A rune flashed insistently on his visor, the Chemosian character meaning starved. A moment later the crash of his combi-bolter ceased as the last shells in his magazine screamed from its twin barrels.
Afilai dropped the underslung box magazine from the boltgun. He reached down to crunch another home but a snarl of tentacles snapped taut around the weapon, tearing it from his grip.
‘Now, now, little flesh-thing,’ Luminous drawled. ‘That was a pleasing diversion, but this is not the time for play.’
The daemon swung its sword down in a blistering overhand strike. Afilai caught the blade within his talons in a thunderclap of duelling energies that crackled and snapped as the weapons squealed against each other. Luminous wrapped its tentacles around Afilai’s waist, jerking him forwards into the air and impaling him upon its talon-like claw.
Afilai bellowed in pain and anger. He reached out with his free hand, seizing hold of the daemon’s lower jaw. He roared and pulled down with all his might, tearing it from the monster’s face.
An orchestral howl tore from Luminous’ savaged maw. The daemon’s grip upon Afilai relaxed a fraction, enough for him to shove himself off the talon and stagger back a step. Only the armour’s comprehensive stabilisers kept him from sinking to his knees, as blood and poison spilled out from the gaping wound in his side.
Afilai scrambled forwards, ignoring the lashing tentacles that tore into his helm as he charged. He smashed into Luminous and buried his electrified talons into the daemon’s flank. The wards on his war-plate blazed, and coils of burnt perfume rolled from the Neverborn’s hide.
A backhanded strike sent Afilai reeling back, his armour scraping and sparking. Luminous snapped down with its pincer claw, seeking to crush the Terminator from collar to hip. Armour integrity warnings wailed across Afilai’s retinas as blood flecked the inside of his helm.
Starbursts of cold agony ripped across Afilai as both he and the daemon were engulfed in a gale of silver lightning. The combatants were forced apart, wilting under the etheric barrage. Afilai screamed, and through the incredible pain he felt the presence of the one casting the attack. Expressions of psychic power were as unique to each psyker as a fingerprint, and the Terminator smiled with broken teeth as he recognised the essence of his master wracking his body with torment.
‘Away, servant of the True God,’ bellowed the Composer as he advanced onto the bridge, lightning coruscating from his splayed fingers. ‘These lives are not yours to take.’
The lightning leapt away from Afilai. The Terminator sagged, crashing against the back of Clarion’s command throne, his armour a charred and smoking ruin. The force of the immaterial energy was concentrated entirely upon Luminous, saturating the daemon in a constricting cage of searing light. The daemon howled, the pleasure lacing its cries fading as agony and frustration superseded it.
‘You are a fool, warp-weaver,’ whispered the daemon as it sank to a knee. ‘You know not whom you deprive with your meddling.’
The Composer grinned behind his helm, and poured more energy over Luminous. Its hide blackened, crisping and flaking away into ash. The daemonettes made to join the fray
, but a single bellowed unword from the sorcerer sent a shock wave tearing over the bridge, hurling them back.
‘I stand here and now as proxy for the Soulthief,’ declared the Composer as he stabbed his staff down into the writhing daemon’s chest. ‘The pact made between Fulgrim’s Champion and the entity that makes itself known in the material realm as Clarion shall stand unbroken, and you shall be gone from this place.’
Luminous gagged out a strangled hiss of laughter. Dark black veins branched from where the sorcerer’s staff touched its flesh. ‘You have not,’ it wheezed, drooling streams of sour blood from its ruined jaw, ‘the power to banish us.’
The Composer considered this for a moment, before conceding with a short tilt of his helm. ‘That is true. Even so, I shall cast you back to your rightful place.’ He looked up at the leering daemonettes, silver witchfire boiling from his azure eye-lenses. ‘Back! Return to the cold and shadows of the void. And you,’ he pressed his staff down harder, searing the daemon’s flesh beneath, ‘return to your place by Clarion’s side, cowled in shame and silence, always to sense the nearness of your prize but never to claim it.’
The silver fire spread over the sorcerer’s body, lashing out in bolts of psychic lightning as hurricane winds tore across the bridge.
‘This I command, go now!’
The Composer blinked, and the daemons were gone. All sign of their having been there vanished. The spine of the Diadem was once more replete with statues of inviting horrors, visible through the bridge’s oculus viewscreen. The silent cloaked figure of Luminous stood motionless at the arm of Clarion’s throne again, as if it had never moved.
The lightning receded, flowing back into the Composer in a wash of icy smoke and ozone. He approached the command throne, unable to conceal how heavily he leaned upon his staff. The exchange with the Keeper of Secrets had been more draining an affair than he cared to admit. He reached up, unlocking the seals of his gorget with a gurgling hiss akin to a death rattle, and lifted his helm free.
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 17