From within the hold, the Composer smiled as he savoured the memory of the past hours. It had been a simple enough task, with Hakith teetering upon death as he bled out over the ship’s bridge, to reach within the dying sorcerer’s mind for the secret knowledge he had spent his life pursuing. Much of the strength and will of the Composer’s pawn had been poured into simply keeping his hearts beating. Little energy remained to erect any defences that would oppose the Composer’s probing.
Satisfaction bloomed deep within the core of the III Legion witch as he carved into Hakith’s consciousness. For centuries – or longer, who could say? – the sorcerer had watched his outcast cousin from afar, gently guiding Hakith’s efforts as he risked all to enter the eldar’s sanctuary network. To see his machinations bear such momentous fruit at such a fortuitous time was all the confirmation the Composer needed to feel that his place in the Great Song was in ascendance. His god was truly a loving god.
With Hakith’s body already broken, the Composer bent to the task of doing the same to his mind. He shattered the hastily conjured labyrinths of interlocking wards and desperate psychic defences shielding the mind of the Prosperine magos. He destroyed all that resisted him, before finding what he wanted and ripping it loose for himself.
Hakith died alone, in agony, with the secret that had defined his life stolen from him by those he had once called allies, in the days before they set the galaxy on fire. For the knowledge that Hakith had sought, the Composer sought as well. The sorcerer of the Emperor’s Children had seeded a dozen such legionaries who plied the Eye in search of the eldar webway, using his powers to track those who proved the most resourceful and productive in discovering the means to enter it. None knew that success would mean annihilation at the Composer’s hand, as Hakith had learned in his last, searing moments of life.
Once he had acquired what he sought, the Composer’s withdrawal from the doomed vessel had been swift. The lower hold beneath the Composer’s boots groaned with the force of mutants from the deep holds of the Diadem, along with as much of the crew of the Elypsis as he could enslave. The few survivors from the coven of lesser witches and sorcerers in Hakith’s thrall, gathered from across the Eye over centuries, had bent their knees to the Composer, subservient to the greater power he wielded. Those of mortal flesh he cast into chains, their bodies to be used to fuel his tower that he might better hear the music of the Youngest God. Those of the Legions and thin-blooded renegade Space Marines, he destroyed.
He had left those near to death, or those he deemed useless or undesirable, behind, to cower in the darkness for their last fevered moments of life before the last kiss from the Diadem’s lance batteries finished what was left of the vessel’s hull. Behind the exuberant face of his helm, the sorcerer closed his eyes. He let his consciousness wash over the newfound knowledge he had torn from Hakith’s psyche and etched onto his own.
If Lucius was truly within the webway, the Composer had now found the means to gain passage into it as well. This first step was accomplished, and so he turned the colossal focus of his intellect on to the next. The path before him was now laid clear.
Warpweaver.+
The Composer blinked, calmly setting his thoughts of the ancient eldar network aside. +Yes, Clarion?+
You were successful, then?+ The child’s voice was tense, an insistent pressure against his awareness. +You have the location we seek?+
I was, and I do.+
Where is the doorway?+ Clarion pressed. +Where is it to be found?+
I am surprised you cannot see that for yourself,+ sent the Composer, as the Talon Queen slowed to enter the Diadem’s landing bay. +We are already here.+
Confusion curdled the link between sorcerer and daemon, an emotion only infinitesimally separated from rage.
Be at peace,+ sent the Composer as the Talon Queen’s landing struts crunched down onto the embarkation deck. +I am aboard. I shall adjourn to my tower, and be your guiding hand.+
Direnc staggered down the assault ramp of the Talon Queen. His legs seemed to move of their own rubbery volition, following the sorcerer as he crossed the landing bay to head deeper into the Diadem. His hands moved numbly to his throat, sealing the clasps of his suit to withstand the sensual barrage of the warship’s upper decks.
His mind was still aboard the Elypsis. Direnc’s thoughts anchored him before the ship’s command throne, watching as two transhuman witches had fought without either of them raising a hand towards the other. He couldn’t get past the painful charge of the air, the biting cold.
More than anything, he could not rid himself of the sound the dying sorcerer had made as his new master was proven victorious. Calling it a scream would have been an unthinkable understatement, a term that would have done nothing to illustrate the horror the noise had made, both in Direnc’s ears and within his mind. It was as if sound had become flesh, and it was being flayed and burned alive. It shed dignity, humanity, becoming something animal, a cry planed away to the most fundamental suffering. It was a death rattle that rooted itself behind Direnc’s eyes, one that he did not feel he would ever be able to dislodge.
The witch’s screams clawed around Direnc’s mind as he followed the Composer into the ship, relentlessly careening from the inner walls of his skull. For the first time, he looked forward to the sonic and visual disruption of the upcoming corridors, daring to hope that it might numb him to the sound.
It was a manifestly terrifying thing, to watch a demigod die. To watch one be killed that way had been far, far worse. Direnc braced himself for the storm that flooded the Diadem’s veins, praying that he might lose himself in the currents, if even for just a moment.
With eyes of shining gold, Clarion stared into the warp storms raging outside the Diadem. She looked from the oculus to her tactical displays and auspex readouts, and back again. She knew that such things were unable to detect what they now sought to find, but such was the cost of habit.
Clarion was not accustomed to displays of faith or patience, and recent events had forced her to offer both. As a combatant commanding a vessel of the Legion Wars, the prospect of battle was an ever-present threat. And with her decks hollow of Traitor Space Marines to board enemy ships, and prevent others from boarding the Diadem herself, Clarion’s tension had risen beyond its normal, elevated state.
She did not trust the sorcerer who now led them. She did not like being led with riddles and veiled requests. Even after he had come to her aid and staved off the advance of Luminous, Clarion bristled at the influence of the witch, and the prospect of being in his debt.
But at this juncture, she had little other option. Clarion needed to find Lucius. That was all that mattered now. And if following the Composer was the only means to do so, then she would suffer him, and bide her time.
Clarion felt a shudder creep over her mundane flesh as the psychic connection was rekindled. The witch was back in his tower sanctum. Images sprang into what could be conceived of as Clarion’s mind, revealing a churning mass of boiling fire.
She looked to the oculus, seeing the same storm in the distance ahead of the ship.
What of it?+
Chart your course towards its centre.+
A stream of concepts flashed across Clarion’s awareness. She distilled them into navigational coordinates and approach vectors.
Clarion looked into the roiling hurricane of immaterial energies, twisting like a tumour in the warp. +That storm will unmake this ship.+
Have faith, daemon,+ the Composer replied.
Clarion’s sending was laced with bitter humour. +In you?+
In the fact that I have not devoted my energies these last weeks to the cause of our being shattered by a warp storm.+
Clarion scowled.
Your frustration is noted,+ sent the Composer. +But our aims are aligned in this, dear splinter of the True God. Now do as I say.+
Clarion felt
their connection sever in a migraine snap. She snarled, before turning to the runeboard on her throne’s armrest. Her tiny fingers clacked against the ivory keys in sharp clicks.
‘Navigation, come about to this heading. Engines, ahead full.’
A chorus of crisp affirmations issued from the crew as they went about enacting her commands. The Diadem thrummed around her as its plasma drives propelled it forwards towards the knot of surging unlight. The storm swelled in the oculus, slowly enveloping the whole of the viewscreen in its churning malignance.
Members of the crew began to shift at their stations. They flashed quick glances at overseers and deck officers. The hull gave a rattling heave as the outermost tendrils of the planet-sized tempest wracked the ship.
‘Continue course and speed,’ said Clarion, in a voice that brooked no discussion.
As they drew closer, the vast conflagration revealed itself to be not a single storm, but an agglomeration of many storms. Cyclones of daemonic entities the size of mass conveyers crashed against radiant clouds of light and squalls of blood-laced pus. Matter sprang into random being as the edges of the storms scraped against one another in cataclysmic thunderclaps that destroyed the new creations just as quickly as they had been birthed.
Turbulence gave way to a violent crashing as the Diadem plunged into the madness at the tempest’s heart. Alarms caterwauled across the bridge. Bridge crew had to shout to be heard over the tumult of the warship’s superstructure being shaken into its component atoms.
Clarion stared into the yawing maw of the storm as it swallowed them. The currents had grown harsh enough to hurl mortals from their stations. The Diadem wrenched about, cast against the conflicting tides. A titanic peal of thunder and a pulse of crackling light shot across the hull as the Geller field died. The overlapping alarms and sirens had congealed together into a nauseating barrage of distressed sound.
Clarion closed her eyes as her bridge was torn apart around her. She cursed the Composer for a fool, and herself as one for following him. She railed against the doom she had realised for herself. Such was the price of shackling her fate to that of mortal creatures.
A rising susurrus prickled at her mind’s eye. Clarion’s mundane ones snapped open as she listened to the growing voice within the dead child’s skull.
She heard the Composer begin to chant.
From the top of his tower, the Composer roared against the swarming bands of ethereal fire smashing against the dome of his sanctum. The abused wretches who clustered the inner surface of the dome wailed in horrid union, vomiting smoke and coloured mist. The veils of fog swirled around the tower, spiralling to its peak.
The Composer raised his staff in the air. Noise boomed and slashed from his silver mask as he uttered the sharp unwords of an incantation. He tore the barbed vowels from his mind, hurling them out into the storm that was voracious in its drive to consume the ship.
The shaking of the Diadem’s hull became the tectonic fury of a collapsing world. The senses were blinded by swathes of headache colour. They were deafened by fire and screams. The light of the Geller field shuddered, its surface crazing and shattering into shards of lightning that fell away into the storm of raw sentience around them. Fractures began to snap and cobweb across the dome, and hungry things of shadow and frenzy crowded around the cracks, desperate to claw their way inside.
The final segments of the incantation left the Composer’s torn and bleeding throat. The accrued knowledge of Hakith’s life, valuable beyond price and bought with the blood of millions, was spent in an instant.
And the Diadem disappeared.
III.VI
Lucius sprinted through the dust of the arena and the roaring of the alien crowd. Breath slashed in and out through his teeth. His hooves clawed shallow pits into the dry earth as he powered forwards, a second legionary of an unknown warband charging just behind him.
Sharp blurs of lurid colour shot around them. They took shape in flashes. Lucius glimpsed lithe taut musculatures in spiked armour, glinting with blades. The crowd roared their approval as the figures raced behind and above the Space Marines, somersaulting and kicking off the stone spears with the effortless grace of born predators.
‘Give me the sword!’ Lucius bellowed at the other legionary. Fabius had failed to return the Laeran Blade to him, and while he was armed only with his lash, the warrior running with him gripped a Legion power sword in his fist.
‘Not a chance!’ the other Space Marine said breathlessly. Lucius did not know how long the warrior had been fighting in the arena, but based upon the ruinous state of his armour, he guessed he had managed to survive for quite some time. The sword was most likely the sole reason for that.
‘Do you know who I am?’ barked Lucius. He ducked instinctively as the crowd’s cheers spiked. A brace of throwing daggers lanced just shy of his head. ‘Do you honestly believe that you can use that blade better than I can?’
‘I know who you are.’ The Space Marine skidded around a spear as a pair of spiked bolas snapped and entwined around it. ‘And I don’t care. This sword is my–’
The legionary cried out as he pitched forwards abruptly into the dust. Jeers and joyful shouts rained down from alien tongues. Lucius slammed his back behind the cover of a nearby bladed pillar, peering out one side to see what had happened. While the possibility was hilarious, he found the odds that the warrior had simply tripped over himself vanishingly slim.
The Space Marine’s body was gone from the waist down. A slurry of bleeding chunks trailed out behind him as he vainly clawed his way forwards with his hands. The air between two of the stone spikes where the warrior had fallen glistened with a hanging constellation of blood.
‘Monofilament wire,’ Lucius laughed. ‘Hard to see, but easy to feel, eh, brother?’ He stooped down and pried the power sword from the warrior’s grasp. ‘Saves me the trouble of killing you for this. Ah, the small blessings.’
‘Wait,’ the prone legionary rasped. He raised an arm, reaching up towards Lucius. A red blur flew between them. The arm was gone. Another passed in the opposite direction. His head was gone.
Sadistic applause crashed through the arena. Lucius backed away. His ego curdled at the thought that his new assailants would think to toy with him. Even more so that they had not targeted him first.
He spun the power sword in his grip to get the full measure of its balance. He thumbed the activation rune on its hilt. The layer of dust clinging to the blade fizzed and burned away as its disruptor field flashed to life. Worms of killing light crackled and danced along its length, bathing Lucius’ face in a shimmering blue hue.
New music began, and the crowds responded with a thunderous ovation. The blurs finally came to rest, crouching like gargoyles upon the tips of the stone spikes. Eldar gladiatrixes glared down at Lucius, eyeing him with barely restrained eagerness.
Hisses of their foul tongue darted from alien to alien as they conversed amongst themselves. Lucius cracked his neck, rolling his shoulders as he allowed the barbed strands of his lash to uncoil from around his arm. The lead eldar spat upon the ground beneath her, before snarling a challenge in thickly accented Gothic.
‘Prey,’ she hissed, spitting again.
The vox-bead in Lucius’ collar crackled. ‘Very good,’ Bile’s croaking tones itched across the channel. ‘We have reached the ideal conditions and shall now begin the introduction of the first compound.’
Lucius’ mind shifted to the trio of canisters now affixed behind his head, and the contents that sloshed within them.
‘This is a stimulant mixture classified as serpentin. You may be pleased to note that its principle components were derived from the cadavers of the very sort of eldar wyches you now find yourself engaged with.’
The stimm rack on Lucius’ back thrummed. A brass plunger depressed in the first canister, sending a measure of oily ochre fluid through the tubes of th
e synthetic vein network implanted in Lucius’ chest and into his primary heart. He felt a dull sting as the chemical leapt out into his bloodstream.
Lucius’ pulse quickened. His skin felt hot and damp. Sounds became clearer, and his vision sharper. The world around him seemed to slow. The almond eyes of the eldar took an extra moment to blink, before going wide in anticipation. He saw the bands of iron-hard muscle bunching in the legs of the aliens as they prepared to strike.
‘Prey,’ the wych hissed again, echoed crudely by her sisters.
‘Oh no,’ Lucius grinned. ‘You are quite mistaken, my lovelies. I am not being hunted by you. It is you who are being hunted by me.’
The lash flew out in an eye-blink. With a whip-crack of daemonic tissue, the closest wych was torn diagonally into four lacerated segments. The others pounced, gripping pistols and daggers, descending to the joy of the crowd.
A pair of the aliens struck at once, before their butchered sister had hit the ground. They shrieked as they whirled around Lucius, slashing and stabbing. Lucius wove around their attacks, seeing each incoming strike like the steps of a choreographed dance. He noticed each twitch of their shoulders, every shift in their hips that telegraphed the next cut. Lucius bided his time, letting them try, waiting until one of them allowed her frustration to boil over and unbalanced herself.
An instant later, one of the xenos did just that. The pit maiden snarled, putting all of her speed into a deep lunge for Lucius’ throat. Lucius felt the raw confidence of the blow resonating from the tip of her blade. He had the sense that the cut was a favoured technique of this particular eldar, a sort of signature that had ended many contests with many opponents lying dead at her feet. But here, she overextended herself to reach him. Her vision was coloured by a blistering blue, before it alternated rapidly between sky and ground as she crashed in pieces into the dust. Lucius spun, slashing through the second eldar’s legs at the knees, and burying the blade through her neck on the downswing as she fell.
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 22