Baroque pleasure barges and anti-gravitic craft ringed the edge of the stadium, as Commorrite aristocrats surrounded by slaves and courtiers took in the spectacle from where they lounged upon exquisite couches crafted from undying tortured flesh. Acrobats flew and vaulted through the air between the barges in colourful costumes, duelling and slashing at each other with daggers and bladed lances.
Lucius’ eyes were drawn past the rippling sails of the alien pleasure craft, the Eternal lost for a moment as he absorbed the spectacle surrounding him.
Commorragh, the black heart of the dark eldar realm, filled the sky like a mound of shattered blades. The blackened spines of towers burst across its surface in all directions, their foundations swallowed by a dark metropolis of flesh markets and sprawling industrial dungeons. The skies were thronged with vessels of all sizes, flitting and drifting between the bladed edifices of shipping nexuses and extravagant floating palaces.
Billions of its denizens lived, breathed and murdered within the dagger cathedrals of the poison city and the endless slums that sprawled beneath them. The combined energy of an entire race was devoted to perfecting the art of extracting the most complete and utter suffering from those taken in their raids across the real space beyond the webway. Yet this was but a single node of the impossibly vast city, one that rooted itself across countless passages of the webway like a virus. And the satellite arena Lucius stood upon was but one of hundreds filling the black sky around the dark eldar’s lair.
Lucius made his way forwards through the perpetually shifting forest of immense spikes. With a thought, his lash uncoiled from the meat of his right arm in a crackle of separating tendons. The Laeran Blade had been taken from him, and his eyes darted from corpse to corpse, seeking a replacement.
The cheers of the revolving crowds spiked as he entered a clearing. Despite his situation, enslaved and trapped in an alien gladiatorial arena, Lucius grinned, beaming at the praise his presence mandated. His smile quickly soured into a scowl, when he realised that the praise was not for him.
In a flat depression at the centre of the arena’s bowl, free from the press of the spikes, a pair of monstrous creatures were locked together, ripping each other apart atop a mound of eviscerated dead. One was vaguely saurian in aspect, its scaled hide crested with sharpened ridges of red bone. It heaved and clawed against an insectile monstrosity that tore into its flanks with half a dozen snapping claws.
The cheers had risen when the reptilian creature trapped its opponent’s bulbous head in its jaws, and ripped it free in a spray of brackish brown fluid. Even headless, the claws of the dying creature fought for several agonised moments, ripping bleeding rents into the hardened flesh of its killer. Lucius arrived in time to see it fall twitching to join the others on the mound.
The victorious beast turned in Lucius’ direction immediately, the trio of wide nostrils at the centre of its skull flaring. It clambered down the pile of corpses on all fours, sending limbs and broken pieces of armour scattering and tumbling in its wake. Four diamond-shaped, glossy black eyes fixated upon Lucius with predatory focus.
‘Now,’ Lucius whispered, flicking his gaze across the thronging masses of eldar. ‘Now, you will cheer for me.’
The beast charged Lucius. Its forelimbs, swollen with bands of iron-hard muscle, dug gouges into the stone as it pounded towards him. He clenched and unclenched his left fist, irritated at the absence of a blade in his hand. He was a consummate killer, whether he wielded the most sophisticated weaponry or nothing more than his bare fists and will, but a blade was the truest extension of him, the implement most pleasing to his soul.
With a blade, Lucius could accomplish wonders.
For now, until he found a sword or reclaimed his own, his lash would have to do. He hurled the weapon forwards, the individual strands uncoiling from around one another like clawed tentacles. Venom wept from the tips of the barbs, hissing and spitting as it flecked across the ground.
The reptilian beast shuddered just before the whip made contact. With a snap of bone and tearing flesh, it became four creatures, identical smaller simulacrum of the original beast. Lucius’ attack snapped against empty air as the monsters trilled and rounded upon him from all sides.
Lucius snarled as he caught one of the leaping beasts on his vambrace. Foul spittle that stank of rotting meat rained upon his face from its snapping jaws. Lucius sneered and spat a gobbet of phlegm into the creature’s eyes in return. The monster wailed as the acidic saliva spread and ate into the flesh of its face. The reddened bone of the thing’s skull showed through the coiling fumes of decomposing meat as it reeled back. Lucius caught it in mid-air, seizing it by its barbed tail, and dashed its head open against the ground.
Two more of the creatures scrambled onto Lucius’ back, and the crowds roared as he spun to dislodge them. One of them was flung loose as he whirled about, crashing into the dust. Lucius tore the second from where it was biting at his gorget, and sent it flying into the first with a snap of breaking bone.
Lucius turned to search for the last of the creatures, only to find his vision filled by a maw of gnashing jaws. The beast launched itself into Lucius’ chest, sending him sprawling back. Stars exploded across his vision as his skull cracked against one of the monolithic stone spears littering the arena floor.
Gauntlets slick with the blue ichor that passed for these creatures’ blood, Lucius wrestled with the last beast, keeping its fangs a hand’s breadth from his throat. The faces upon his armour rippled as the creature’s claws raked over them for purchase. He clamped his fingers around its snout, smiling as he felt bones crush in his grip, and thrust his hips up.
Lucius swung the creature over his head, smashing it against the spear and impaling it upon the bladed spikes that studded its length. Blackish-blue filth squirted over Lucius as he rolled aside and stood. He brought a gauntlet to his face, scraping the gore away and spitting it from his teeth in disgust.
‘Vile,’ Lucius sneered. He walked over to the two beasts he had thrown against one another, finding them twitching and scrabbling at the dirt. He brought his hoof down onto each of their skulls, pounding them flat to ensure their irritations to him were at an end.
The revolving audience erupted at the brutality, while pockets of gamblers argued and murdered each other to settle debts. Lucius spread his arms wide, soaking in their cries, and strode over to the heap of dead. He pulled aside corpses and parts of corpses, rooting through their remains and tossing wrecked armour and broken weapons to either side, until he found what he was looking for.
It was a hooked blade, not unlike the ceremonial khopesh swords favoured by the erudite pseudo-warrior sons of Magnus the Red. Its haft was more than twice as long as those he was accustomed to wielding. Its edge was chipped and pitted from use against heavy armour, the steel brittle from the onset of the corrosion that comes from being bathed in blood time and time again.
Simply put, it was an ugly, rusted piece of scrap. Lucius could hardly bring himself to call it a weapon at all, and on any other day, in any other circumstance, he would not have insulted his gauntlets by forcing them to feel its weight. But needs must.
Lucius sighed, and spun the weapon expertly in his left hand, rolling the blade’s worn haft between the back of his gauntlet and his palm.
‘Feel honoured, you ugly and discarded thing. With you, for this gawking filth, I shall perform miracles.’
A crashing thud behind Lucius sent him into a fighting crouch. He spun on his heel, rolling his wrist to find the balance of his new blade. As the dust cleared from the figure beneath, he relaxed a fraction.
‘Hello, brother,’ said Lucius. ‘Welcome to the alien death circus.’
Cadarn groaned out a curse as he hauled himself to his feet. Dust flittered from his armour as he shook his limbs out before walking to join Lucius.
‘Hail, Eternal.’ The traitor Executioner’s eyes flicked
between Lucius’ new sword and the mound of dead. ‘If that is the best you could scrounge, I cannot imagine the treasures awaiting me. I am overjoyed.’
‘Yes, and I promise to hold the grandest of celebrations to honour your joy another time,’ said Lucius.
Cadarn scowled as he kicked through the detritus. ‘There’s not a piece of steel here I would even deem fit to piss on.’
‘Language,’ chided Lucius, looking up into the braying crowd of eldar watching them. ‘Hurry up and find something you can use. The mob is growing restless for blood, which means they shall likely be sending something horrible to try to kill us very soon.’
‘Pray, brother,’ snarled Cadarn. ‘Pray whatever they send carries weapons.’
What came did not carry weapons. From tunnelled pits beneath the arena floor, eldar beast masters unleashed wave after wave of hideous creatures, monstrosities hunted from across the galaxy or forged from deep within their dungeon laboratories. Things whose hides wept acid and tore across the ground on great rending claws assailed Lucius and Cadarn. Swarms of airborne predators struck from the skies, forcing the warriors to fight back to back to repel them.
In time, a knee-high barricade of butchered monsters ringed the two Traitor Space Marines, a cross section of the most dangerous predators the galaxy had to offer. Cadarn and Lucius stood ready, their armour gouged by claws and slathered in alien gore. Lucius spun and cracked his lash to break away the dried and calcified blood that caked and stiffened its tendrils. The blade he wielded had proved resilient enough to withstand the dizzyingly elaborate strikes he had executed to dispatch the beasts. Cadarn had resorted to tearing the limb from a beast covered in gnarled exoskeleton, and had wielded it like a bludgeon against the past three waves that had been set loose against them.
‘A silo of Cesare’s ambrosia,’ Cadarn hissed, ‘for but one of my axes.’
Lucius ran his blade across his vambrace, scraping the gore from its weathered edge. He spun it once, ridding it of the last gobbets of filth, and spread his arms to the masses.
‘Is this all you have?’ Lucius roared, stopping to gather up the corpse of a skinless hound creature by the scruff of its neck. ‘Beasts and animals? You bring us here to be pitted against your dregs and strays? This is no insult to us. You insult yourselves!’
Lucius’ words antagonised the Commorrites thronging the arena. They screamed insults and curses down in their vile tongue, hurling refuse and drinking chalices that fell short and plummeted through the gap between them and the arena, down into the abyss of the webway. Fights broke out between the most animated members of the audience, having no other recourse to salve their rage than to leap upon their closest fellows and stab them to death with crystal daggers.
A braying burst of noise like the call of a Titan ripped across the arena. The crowds fell silent, thousands of alien eyes transfixed on the immense pleasure barge that dominated an entire side of the stadium’s edge. Beneath rippling solar sails at the tip of the craft’s stern Thyndrak, Archon of the Kabal of the Last Hatred, emerged to stand upon a terrace and look down upon the events with her own eyes. Serpentine bodyguards and heavily armoured dark eldar sellswords, their so-called Incubi, flanked her on both sides.
Lucius’ eyes narrowed as he saw two more join her. Fabius Bile, his coat of flayed skin rippling and snapping in the wind, came to stand beside the archon. Lucius could see the expression of irritated impatience upon the Primogenitor’s withered face, no doubt enduring such spectacles in order to secure the secrets he had bartered away Lucius’ freedom to obtain. Despite himself, Lucius’ teeth clenched in anger as he saw Cesare standing a step behind his former, and seemingly now current, master.
‘Are we boring you?’ The archon’s voice thundered from every horn and speaker across the stadium. Her words were enough to send the dust whipping across the stone like fleeing wraiths. ‘Are the fruits of my beast masters’ hunts proving a waste of our privilege to witness you?’
Lucius’ blood ran cold. A tic tugged at the flesh beneath his right eye. Cold, oily sweat broke out across his brow as his pupils shrank to the point of vanishing.
Cradled in the eldar’s hands was a sword. The sword. She was holding the Laeran Blade.
‘Perhaps we can find something more sporting for you, mon-keigh.’ The archon smiled, and music began to ebb over the arena. The crowds surged and protested at the falling sound.
Lucius was not listening. He could not have heard it even if he had wanted to. The voices within his head ravaged his mind in a conflicting, rising throb. They coiled together, a deafening shriek of incoherent damnation, before a single voice whispered through the roar.
Does he wield the blade, or does the blade wield him?
The iron haft of Lucius’ scavenged sword squealed before snapping in two in his fist.
‘Oh no,’ sighed Cadarn as he saw the blade in her hands.
The ground beneath their feet heaved. A great circular lift, set in the ceremonial centre of the arena bowl, began to descend, with Lucius and Cadarn at its centre. The disc of broken rock began to glide down a sinuous black tunnel, deeper into the eldar gladiatorial satellite.
Cadarn glanced at Lucius. The swordsman’s gaze remained locked upwards, though it had lost any focus. His jaw worked in twitches, mouthing silent words without sound. A single line of deep claret spilled down from Lucius’ ear, sliding along his jawline to drip from his chin.
‘Brother?’
Lucius’ irises tightened. A rattling breath sawed from his lungs. It seemed to Cadarn that only at that moment did he register the change in their surroundings.
‘My sword…’
Cadarn moved to take a step closer to Lucius, but thought better of it. ‘What?’
The Eternal straightened, and dropped his broken sword. It was only then that Cadarn relaxed his posture, and allowed his own weapon to fall from his grasp into the dust.
‘We need to get onto that ship,’ said Lucius in a low, even tone. ‘I’m going to get my sword back, and then I am going to use it to cut that alien whore’s spine out.’
III.III
The sorcerer’s name was Hakith.
Cast out into exile amidst the anarchy of the servile wars between the broken Legions of the Eye, Hakith had abandoned his Legion, his brothers, his primarch, as they had abandoned him. In the cataclysms the Legions wrought as they ground against each other within their prison realm, sorcerers of his ability could name their price amongst the rival warlords and warring chieftains within the internecine maelstrom of the Legion Wars. The power to shape the warp as a weapon was always in demand, as the defeated sought to finish for themselves what those loyal to the Imperium of Mankind had begun on Terra. Bitterness and failure had shattered the armies that once marched upon humanity’s ancestral home beneath the banner of Horus Lupercal, and so Hakith journeyed from fragment to fragment, warlord to warlord, selling his witchcraft.
Hakith did not seek the base desire of plunder, nor could he bring himself to care for power, for slaves or entire worlds to rule within the realm where the Great Ocean and reality mixed. His tastes were of a more esoteric nature, and there was only ever one price for his services. The very transgression that had seen him cast out of Sortiarius in the first place, before the blood of Prospero’s murder had had the time to dry upon his armour.
Secrets.
Even before the culmination of Ahriman’s towering arrogance, his so-called Rubric, had been cast, there had been purges amongst the ranks of the Thousand Sons. The trauma of Prospero’s destruction, and the tearing dislocation inflicted when their father Magnus the Red had spirited the Legion away to the Planet of the Sorcerers, had succeeded in shattering the usual veneer of haughty calm and confident superiority that had come to define the philosophical warriors. The increasing regularity of the onslaught of rampant mutations twisting them body and soul, the flesh change, had fractured
the brotherhood further, as more and more succumbed to it and degenerated into monstrous abomination.
Trust had died, left as one of the millions of casualties upon the blood-caked sands of Tizca with the rest of the innocents. Brotherhood waned, and in its place the Legion frayed in insularity. Secret covens formed like tumours. The warrior mages of Prospero cloistered themselves away within the monolithic vaults and towers their minds had conjured upon their new home, hoarding their knowledge and the power it granted.
Hakith had stolen a brother’s life for but a pittance of such knowledge, and for that he was banished. Yet he was but one of the diaspora from Sortiarius. Some, those favoured by fortune to be either impervious or resistant to the flesh change, simply gathered their closest disciples and left, melting into the apocalyptic wars that arrived with the other fallen Legions as they were scoured into the Eye’s perdition.
Secrets, knowledge, these things were Hakith’s desire, the single devotion of his mind. As he travelled and made war for the warbands within the Eye, he began to discover secrets of a plane that would come to obsess him. A network, ancient beyond reckoning, that rested between reality and the warp. Used by the eldar xenos as both thoroughfare and refuge, it was a place of profound mystery, rumoured to possess paths across the galaxy and beyond, the gates protecting stores of unfathomable knowledge hidden away from all. To enter such a place, one could not simply make a door. One had to find a way within, behind the webway’s invisible doorways.
Hakith focused all of his efforts towards finding these doorways. He burned cities and destroyed entire armies for the smallest scraps of information. Obsession consumed him, and over centuries, and on into millennia, so far as time could be considered a measurable concept within the Great Ocean, with painstaking effort, he began to map the webway. His search was rife with peril, as the information he earned led as often to the traps of affronted warlords as it did to revelation. Those scraps of knowledge that proved fruitful led, time and again, to dead ends, regions of emptiness or the shadows of true doorways, forever sealed by the xenos who plied its labyrinthine tunnels.
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 19