Blood spilled out from the bottom of the mask, where it had flowed in a steady torrent from the Composer’s eyes, ears, nose and mouth to pool around his collar seal. It pattered down his breastplate, staining his robes and triggering whorls of esoteric colour across the fabric. The cloak of senses around his shoulders twitched, its fringes scorched and blackened. He arrived beside the ornate chair of silver and onyx, and winced.
Clarion writhed on the seat, the soft violet tint of her flesh soured into jaundiced amber. It appeared as though the child were drowning in thin air. The Composer straightened, looking back at Afilai and at the sigils that still glowed with stuttered pulses across his ruined war-plate.
‘Light and sound,’ the sorcerer hissed, thumping the butt of his staff into the Terminator’s side. ‘Do you have any inkling how many wards I have carved into your wretched hide? Stand away from her, you lurid golem!’
A rumble like gears slipping scratched out from between the shattered tusks of Afilai’s helm. He staggered to his feet, every dense plate catching and scraping against its fellows, every joint spitting fountains of dirty sparks. He lurched drunkenly, swinging around to drag himself towards the ornate doors leading out of the bridge.
Clarion gasped. The yellowing of her flesh receded as distance from the hulking Terminator grew. The Composer looked away as the child collected herself. He reached out instinctively with his mind, as easily as straining to hear a distant sound. His second sight washed over the crew, sensing their apprehension at his presence, their ignorance and their hatred.
A crooked grin split the sorcerer’s lips. They were more at ease in thrall to a Neverborn wearing the flesh of a child than being in the presence of one who practised the Art. He paid them no heed.
Clarion moved to the edge of her throne. She stared down at the deck before her, and the pulped remains of Incitatus. The steaming bits of mashed flesh were wrapped around the impression of a massive hoof, left when the daemon Luminous had stomped it to death.
The beast served no practical purpose to her. It possessed no intelligence beyond the base, primal drives of an animal, though one a mind not born of the warp would never be able to perceive fully. Nevertheless, Clarion enjoyed the presence of the creature. Perhaps a lingering trace of the child she stole, an uncharacteristic sentimentality.
Touching a hand to her nose, Clarion gathered a drop of her blood onto her fingertip. She held out her hand, turning her palm down. The drop of blood welled as gravity tugged it slowly from her skin.
In the instant before it dropped, the tiny black gem of inhuman life froze. It fell like a seed into the lump of meat at the foot of Clarion’s throne. And like a seed, it split within the organic matter of the corpse, taking root with a million black filaments.
Muffled snaps and slick gushes issued as the remains shuddered and drew together. They swelled, severed arteries reconnecting, contused flesh being drained of haemorrhages. Once a crushed ruin, within moments Incitatus returned to resplendent form.
The daemonic creature trilled. It circled the foot of Clarion’s throne, its needle tongue darting from its snout. The child ran a hand over its spine, and looked back to the sorcerer standing with her on the bridge.
‘What now?’ Clarion rasped. Her voice was still ragged, barely able to marshal a whisper.
The bulkhead parted, framing the cowering figure of a slave at the threshold. The man’s eyes, visible behind the thick goggles of his environmental suit, were wide in horror, unable to look away from Afilai as the Terminator trudged past without a word. The Composer looked back at Direnc, and smiled.
‘Now? We continue to sing, my dear, and through the Song we shall find our taken lord.’
Part III
THE CARNIVAL
OF THORNS
III.I
He never dreamed.
A dream requires sleep to house it, to anchor its imagery within a mind, and he could not remember the last time he had truly tasted sleep. Ascension into the ranks of the Legion promised him eidetic recall, yet in spite of the genetic restructuring of his second birth, he could not remember. His memory had crumbled away with time, moments of Chemos and the early years amongst his Legion kin growing dim and indistinct. More and more, they were being replaced by the flickers of lives that were not his own. It was the cost of his eternity, the burden that was uniquely his amongst the endlessly varied and twisted marks of entropy endemic to those who breathed and warred within the Eye.
He was not certain if he was dreaming now. He concluded it to be as likely an answer as any other, and in truth he didn’t much care. He was here, and now, and that was all that mattered to him.
He knelt within a swirling mist, his surroundings blurred and depthless. Twice he had attempted to stand, and twice the irresistible weight of an unseen force had prevented him from rising. Sudden pressure in the core of his being forced his back to arch as he vomited a stream of blackness into the air. The oily fluid separated into ragged shapes that ghosted away and slid around him in the haze, just out of sight and beyond his reach.
The shapes circled, changing to become hungry things with grinding teeth. They scratched at him with low whispers of his name.
Lucius…
For the third time, Lucius fought to bring himself upright. The pressure lessened, and he staggered to his feet, only to feel nothing beneath them. Vertigo coated his nerves in freezing oil, and he hung as if suspended in deep water. The shapes drew closer. Lucius could hear their laughter like needles over his skin.
Lucius blinked. His skin.
He was not wearing his armour. The ancient shell of warped ceramite and anguished faces, its surface always rippling and straining and cracking, was gone. It had been so long since he had been without it, he had forgotten what he looked like beneath it.
Pallid grey flesh was all that remained, as brutal and slab-like as any of the Legions. Tracing over it was a cartograph of ruination in thousands of scars, many intertwined and conglomerated in order to be wrought into the sigil of the Youngest God in glistening purple contusions. The interface ports that had studded his limbs and spinal column were gone, and in their place were clenching lamprey mouths and bleeding eyes. His legs were blackened below the knees, ending in cloven hooves of bare auburn horn.
More than ten millennia had passed in the mundane universe, and fathomless epochs within the Eye, since Lucius had been without his war-plate. It was as much a part of him as his twin hearts or his iron-hard bones. Treachery and the touch of the divine had merged it with his flesh, forged and reforged from the imprisonment of the souls that screamed into his mind every moment.
Except now. Here in the realm of his dream, Lucius’ killers were gone. A cold silence lingered in the swordsman’s mind, feeling cavernous with only a single intellect contained within it. It was that realisation that triggered the shapes to draw nearer, close enough that their faces resolved from the shadows.
Champions of the shattered Legions. Warrior kings, aliens and assassins. The snarling face of a Fenrisian berserker, a thin-blooded descendant of the Legion of Russ. All of those who had bested Lucius in combat, who had drained him of his blood and cut his spirit from his mortal shell, crowded around him. At the centre of them all, looming as beautiful and terrible as the day they had duelled, so many lifetimes ago, stood the Lord Commander himself.
Cyrius.
Lucius strained against his invisible bonds as his killers smiled, fangs lengthening from beneath their lips. Cyrius’ eyes began to shine, brightening with painful light. His killers collapsed back into ropes of black oil, rushing over Lucius’ body like undulating chains of pure darkness. Cold fire lanced into the core of his being as the liquid shadow ate into his pores. More and more of them soaked over him, until only Cyrius remained standing before Lucius.
Cyrius’ face rippled, as though the incorporeal flesh were nothing more than a mask worn by
some raw hatred, as the stinging fire from his eyes grew blinding.
Soon, Cyrius whispered. The killers had coated Lucius’ entire body, and began swirling around his neck. Their inky fluid surged over his face. They spilled between his clenched teeth and raced down his throat. Lucius felt the touch of Cyrius’ hand through the writhing dark against his cheek, hot as a glowing brand.
But not yet.
Lucius’ eyes snapped open, and the riot of screams assailed him as they always did. The crack and squeal of abused ceramite filled his ears, and he glanced down to see his armour as it was again. Yet there was nothing beneath his feet.
A drop of nearly one hundred metres yawned beneath Lucius, ending in a swaying field of floating corpses. Drowned men, women and xenos stared up at him, dangling in mid-air as if held aloft by the churning waves of an invisible ocean. Lengths of barbed brass chains were shackled around their throats, keeping them just beneath the surface of the phantom sea. The abyss from which the chains reached out was inky black and immeasurably deep. The dead watched Lucius with bulging eyes, each one frozen in their final screaming moment of panic and desperation.
Barbed tendrils encircled Lucius’ chest and stretched his arms out to his sides in a cruciform manner. The tendrils clenched and sweated, and they reeked of the spice of xenos. Despite this, they were neither alive nor machine, but something different altogether. There was a melding of the living with the synthetic at work here. Someone, or something, had created them.
Lucius looked to either side of him. His brethren of the Cohors Nasicae hung at intervals all around him, suspended by the same tendrils trailing down like diseased tree roots from the darkness over their heads. The legionaries twitched and stirred in a forced slumber, their skulls and throats studded with bladed intravenous feeds injecting chemical cocktails into their veins to induce sus-an comas.
Lucius searched amidst the comatose Traitor Space Marines hanging like fruit upon the vine. He spotted Andaroth, Krennance and Cadarn, Vispyrtilo and the rest of the Rypax. He was able to find every brother of the Cohors Nasicae. All except for Cesare.
There were more legionaries hanging beyond Lucius’ warband, stretching out into the distance. They spanned more than a dozen separate warbands and raiding cults, but all of them bore the same garish and twisted colourings upon their armour, and every suit displayed, in varying degrees across the spectrum of reverence and devotion, the mark of the Youngest God. Every one of them was a warrior of the Emperor’s Children, or a renegade in league with them.
Lucius glanced back down. He wondered for a moment what would happen to him, were he to fall. The answer came to him, provoking a dry chuckle.
I would starve.
‘Do you like my hanging gardens?’
The voice was a serpent’s hiss, dripping with poison yet regal and lyrical. The words were formed in a clipped, unnatural accent that did nothing to diminish the mellifluousness of their delivery. It was a voice like a razor wrapped in sheer silk. A voice that drank pain for succour.
She appeared in Lucius’ view, standing upon a hovering plinth of blackened bone and dark crystal. She was a vision in toxic alabaster, her flesh having never known the nurturing light of a sun beyond the rare occasions when she quested outside her labyrinthine refuge to raid for flesh. Slanted, coal-rimmed eyes beheld the Eternal, bright with cunning and malicious intelligence. Dark sable hair threaded with crimson dye was scraped up in a tight scalp lock over a circlet of the same dark crystal she stood upon. Contoured plates of segmented armour sheathed her inhumanly tall, slender physique, inked with elaborate and revolting patterns that flowed and writhed upon the dark surfaces. They framed a fist-sized pendant of a skull pierced by three splinters of bone, set at the centre of her chest and carved from wraithbone as white as untouched snow.
A withered, androgynous slave of a species Lucius could not identify cowered in chains on the plinth at her side. It carried a long, slender device in its grimy claws, holding one end of it up in front of her lips. She spoke again, her words twisting through the device and rendered into Gothic with a sibilant hiss.
‘My contemporaries find it a touch theatrical, but what is life without art?’
‘Hello, little god-maker.’ Lucius bared his cage of needle teeth in a smile at the dark eldar.
The air was filled with the low shriek of anti-grav engines. Eldar in spiked carapace suits swept down around Lucius, tearing through the air on angular bladed skyboards. The aliens whooped and jeered at Lucius as they spun in increasingly tighter circles around him, brandishing hooked glaives and serrated daggers.
‘Pay them no mind,’ said the eldar, raising an arm and throwing back the shoulder of her cloak of dark fur and flayed skin. With a gesture the hellions came to a halt, glaring at Lucius with undisguised hunger. ‘They are always eager to sample the newest additions to my menagerie.’
‘So let them.’
Lucius’ head was swimming so thoroughly that at first he didn’t realise that it was he who had spoken. Proximity to so many of the eldar was an intoxicating thing, the strangled beat of their withered hearts, their cloying black scent sinking through to his marrow. ‘Let me taste their flesh, their blood. Slaanesh will relish the flavour of their souls.’
‘Your god?’ The eldar laughed like a serrated blade scraping over glass. ‘Your idiot race does so amuse me, the things it bends the knee to in worship.’
‘I would not go so far as to call myself devoted,’ said Lucius, still baring his predatory grin. ‘But one needs no faith to see how the Youngest God’s love for you transcends all others, the ones who ushered forth His birth. I have received… gifts from Him, and what kind of monster would I be if I did not unite your souls with Him in thanks?’
The Commorrite mistress considered his words for a moment. ‘Ah yes, gifts… Tell me, the one of your race I barter with, trading flesh for secrets – the Manflayer. He has told me of you. The one your rabble calls “Eternal”. He tells me of your gifts. He says you live, despite tasting the embrace of oblivion time after time.’
She reached up, holding just shy of stroking a clawed fingertip across Lucius’ cheek. ‘Death refuses to hold you. You die and yet you rise. And on. And on. I exchanged many secrets to acquire you. I wish to learn how.’
‘Cut me loose,’ said Lucius, leaning forwards until the tendrils bit deep into his armour. ‘Feed me that little wretch of yours and I will tell you in privacy.’
The eldar smirked, withdrawing her hand. She ran her fingers across the skull of her slave, carving gashes into its flesh with the crystal claws that tipped her gloves. ‘It is a miserable thing, is it not? That is so, but it is not wholly useless to me.’ She gestured at the device the wretch held. ‘I would not deem to debase myself by speaking in the gutter tongue of your kind.’
Lucius ran his tongue over his fangs. ‘When you speak like that, the way your face moves, I can’t help myself but to think of how I’ll shudder, when I eat your eyes.’
He tilted his head.
‘If you want, I’ll eat them one at a time. Would you like that? Would you like to watch me?’
If the words had any impact upon the eldar, she gave no outward sign. She remained unfazed, her stare still half-lidded in arrogant contempt. ‘Your race has always been infantile, in a clumsily belligerent and repellent way. I often forget how recently it was that you first crawled out from the primordial ooze of your first world. If you wish to show me rather than tell, it is of no consequence,’ she said as she rested a claw tip between Lucius’ eyes. ‘The answers I seek are within you somewhere.’
She sank her nail into Lucius’ face, drawing a trickle of dark blood to spill over the claw and patter onto her boots. Lucius gasped with the transcendence of her touch, as the tendrils fastened around his body began to loosen. The eldar mistress grinned as she withdrew her hand, and Lucius dropped away into the dark.
‘I am Thyndrak, Archon of the Kabal of the Last Hatred, and I shall enjoy learning just how much of you I will have to cut out to find them.’
III.II
Lucius never hit the invisible waters crowded with the floating dead. At the exact moment he was to strike their surface, a wrenching knot of dislocation wracked him. He had experienced its like before, through teleportation beacons and gateways slashed open into the raw warp, but never as seamlessly as this. It was like taking up a new blade for the first time, and finding it with impossibly perfect balance.
He crashed down onto a floor of gouged, flexible stone. The air that filled his lungs was different. It was no longer the cold and cloyingly sterile atmosphere of the eldar’s hanging gardens, but hot, and heavy with the tang of fire and the spice of the spilled blood of a cross section of species. His ears recoiled in a moment of shock as they were bombarded by the frenzied roar of thousands and thousands of alien throats.
A jagged, roughly circular landscape of blackened rock stretched around Lucius, broken at all angles by barbed spears of bladed stone and metal that ranged from three to fifty metres in length. Bodies littered the ground, or were impaled upon the spears, in various states of ruination and decay. They represented humans, various xenos breeds and even warriors of the Legiones and Adeptus Astartes. Lucius glimpsed that, with only a few exceptions, all of the demigod corpses bore the heraldry of the III Legion.
Vast blocks of tiered seats floated and revolved around the bowl of broken stone, brimming with throngs of dark eldar. The aliens screamed and jeered down upon the arena as they bickered and gambled amongst themselves. The cheers would spike in localised sections of the floating audience as arguments boiled over into bloodshed and the bodies of the slain were hurled over the sides to fall the fathomless distance below.
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 18