Eldar blood splashed Lucius’ face, its inhuman tang the sweetest perfume. More of it sizzled and popped as it cooked off the blade of his sword, wreathing him in alien bloodsmoke, a primal incense. He bellowed a cruel laugh as he postured invitingly for the other gladiatrixes to attack.
A howling wych leapt in, rounding upon Lucius’ flank. He flung his arm out, ensnaring her head with his lash. Lucius hauled his arm back, sending her flying towards him. His hoof kicked out into her chest, tearing her head free in a welter of gore.
Lucius kicked out again, punching his hoof through another eldar’s torso. He drove its iron-shod horn through the alien’s spine and into the ground as he stomped down. After dragging the xenos along with him for two strides, he twisted and wrenched his leg free. The xenos spent her last moments clawing uselessly at his greave, lips stretched wide in a scream she no longer had the lungs to give.
Pain arrested Lucius’ attention as splinters of black crystal stitched up his sword arm. He lowered his shoulder into the salvo, savouring the caustic agents in the shards that set his newly reinvigorated nerves aflame. He charged, smashing into the eldar and sending her spinning into a spike. She bent around the stone spear, rolling down from it into the dust in a boneless heap.
Lucius’ blood was fire. It raced through his veins, burning away the numbness that clung so fiercely to him body and soul. The sharpness of it, the focus, was intoxicatingly exquisite.
A dagger skittered across Lucius’ blade as he swept down a thrust aimed for his left eye. He snapped his head forwards, caving in his assailant’s face with a headbutt. A crackle at the edge of his hearing warned him of the segmented whip flashing out to ensnare his sword arm. He anticipated it, leaning back and smiling as its barbed length took another advancing eldar in the throat. His own lash snatched hold of the whip-wielder’s limbs, and wrenched them free of her body in all directions.
The crowd watched as the Eternal tore their champions apart. They shrieked in shock and anger, but Lucius could not hear them. He was too busy laughing.
Lucius counted his kills, referencing back to the number of pit maidens that had confronted him. Unless more had flocked into the arena, it should only leave one left. The crowd lulled and then shouted out with excitement. Lucius grinned.
The eldar had sprung perfectly from concealment, vaulting over the top of one of the bladed pillars to hurtle towards Lucius, the tip of her dagger hunting for the crown of his skull. But Lucius wasn’t there. He was already rolling away.
‘The crowd has betrayed you!’ Lucius taunted. He spun, slashing out with the power sword across the space where he had just been standing.
With a frustrated snarl, the eldar changed directions in mid-air. She looped an arm around an adjacent pillar and swung around it, using the momentum of the spin to shoot towards Lucius like a sling stone. The Eternal stabbed out with his sword. The eldar landed on the blade and smashed a spiked boot into Lucius’ skull.
The arena exploded with noise. Lucius trapped the alien’s leg between his neck and shoulder pauldron. His assailant crunched in tight, her dagger flashing. Lucius caught her forearm and crushed it in one smooth motion. Pain suppressants and a lifetime of fighting in the arenas of the Dark City could not keep the wych from crying out in agony as the bones of her arm were reduced to shards and powder.
Lucius rammed the tip of his power sword up. A soft clap of ozone pealed from the disruptor field of the energised blade as it punched through armour, flesh and bone, emerging through her chest in a burst of frying blood. The alien writhed, fighting to push herself off the blade.
Lucius stooped over the last of the wyches as she finally fell. A scream and a twist cut the air as he pulled her head from the smoke and dust swirling about his knees. Lucius held the still bleeding trophy aloft, raising it to face the immense barge where he knew the archon would be watching.
Lucius held the stump over his head, letting the pattering stream coat his tongue, before throwing it to the ground. ‘What else do you have?’
For a moment, one that had lasted millennia, there was only darkness and silence.
The next moment, there was the Diadem, tearing through that fragile peace, her hull aflame and drowning in daemons. Separated from their connection to the raw warp that mixed and warred with reality in the Eye, the lesser daemons disintegrated, unable to anchor themselves in this new blackness. The dark crushed down upon the ship and its ethereal attackers, swallowing swathes of the Neverborn.
In mere seconds only the strongest and most malicious entities remained rampaging across the warship. They writhed and howled as the Diadem’s defensive guns blasted chunks from hides of gleaming fire and burnished scales. Talons of condensed primal rage and sentient blades of molten brass crashed down upon the hull, ravenous and desperate to drink the soul flames tantalisingly out of reach beneath the dense armour plating.
A rumbling thrum built from deep within the core of the vessel. Motes of static linked into chains of blue lightning across its superstructure. The daemonic host screeched in disjointed unity as the Geller field reignited, vaporising the Neverborn or blasting them clear of the Diadem to spin and fall into the limitless abyss that surrounded them. The last of them, a heaving mass of spine-ridden fat and quivering tentacles, screamed with the voice of children as the combined effects of the field and the fire from the warship’s spinal battlements finally succeeded in prying it loose.
Clarion watched the final daemon become dislodged and twist away into the void from her throne on the ship’s bridge. Though she had no physical necessity to, she breathed in, tasting the blood and smoke spicing the air. The child savoured the acrid bouquet, as the gelatinous monstrosity of the Plague God was lost from the gaze of the oculus.
Glancing down at a deck officer, she uttered a command to disperse cadres of mutant hunter-killer teams throughout the ship. The thing that wore the child knew her own kind. She was hardly fool enough to believe that none of the Neverborn that had attacked them had succeeded in wriggling their way inside.
The mutants at her disposal were no equal to the Legiones Astartes by any measure, but they were capable enough shock troopers, and they were numerous. They would sweep the Diadem, deck by deck, purging all they found with flame and tooth and claw. Most of them would die doing so, but that was an irrelevance, and far beneath Clarion’s care. There were always more available to harvest from the foetid darkness of the lower decks. These creatures lived simple lives of violence, sharpened into effortless killers by the endless crucible of clan wars. They were ever eager to serve, to both spill and to give of their own blood in service of the divine.
It came as a grudging surprise to Clarion that there was a ship to purge at all. Though she was disinclined to credit the sorcerer, he had held up his end. They had survived. They were beyond the torrents of the Eye now, and had arrived in the place between realities.
The Diadem had reached the webway.
The transdimensional network used as a sanctuary of the eldar xenos yawned out before Clarion through the oculus, bound to a form yet depthless in a way no mortal mind could grasp. She could taste that unease as it impressed itself upon the crew. Their environment impelled a sense of inverted claustrophobia upon their psyches, a crushing and vast emptiness that reduced them to motes of meaninglessness in ways even the void could not.
Clarion saw beyond the seeming endlessness of the tableau. She was of the ether, and her senses were not bound to the base chronology that so enslaved mortal life. She perceived the hidden depths concealed within the darkness, the lingering trails left behind by the essences of ancient things and forgotten civilisations. She could still hear the songs of eldar, millennia dead. Songs of creation, of triumph and radiant joy, and songs of despair, war and heartbreak.
In her existence, Clarion had only a passing experience of the webway, but enough to know that this was but one facet of its infinite vari
ety. The eldar used its thoroughfares to connect the shards of their fractured species, from paths barely negotiable by a single man to the sprawling abyss the Diadem now found herself within. There were entire sections of the ancient network closed off or abandoned. Tunnels vast enough to accommodate the passage of full battlefleets were wholly given over to the Neverborn. They packed every inch of them in uncountable screaming hordes, the way parasites crowd and swell to infest a dying creature’s intestines, as the tides of Chaos further cemented their hold over the eldar’s final refuge.
Somewhere in this labyrinth were the poison cities of the Commorrites. Somewhere, there was Lucius.
We have arrived, warpweaver,+ sent Clarion. +How do you propose we find him?+
When it came, the sending was redolent with the toll that dragging the Diadem into the webway had taken upon the Composer. The sorcerer would carry the wounds he had earned doing so, both in body and soul, for the remainder of his life. Clarion was not beneath smiling at the depth of the witch’s suffering.
Forwards, my dear. And leave that to me.+
III.VII
Why?
The same word repeated, over and over. A question, tormenting Direnc’s mind. A question he had no answer for.
Why couldn’t I have just stayed asleep?
The slave’s thoughts went back to the ivory demigod, manipulating the brains of a dying man. He thought of himself, waking from a dream he never wanted to leave. A dream where for the first time, he’d found joy. He had found peace.
There was no place that was further from there than where he was now. Direnc squeezed his eyes shut when the storm took the Diadem in its jaws. He felt the ship coming apart. He watched things materialise from the swirling incomprehension smashing against the dome of the Composer’s tower. They had not got inside, but they had taken his mind, and left only madness in its place. Only the question.
Direnc had been desperate to rid himself of the death-scream of the demigod psyker, but now he begged for its lesser pain. Nothing could eclipse the torment rending his thoughts. When they entered the webway, the daemonic attack waned, only to be replaced by silence. Nothing to compete with his own internal strife.
The Composer had sagged against his pulpit when they cleared the warp storm, visibly drained from the effort. It took several minutes before he had recovered enough to move. From his place chained at the sorcerer’s feet, Direnc watched the Composer go to each of the howling wretches adorning the inner surface of the dome. He drank in their screams, drawing the flensing of their souls into himself for strength, until nothing remained but ash sloughing from cracked bones.
After one, he could stand straight. After three, he no longer needed his staff for support. After ten, he was levitating. Vitality sparked and orbited his robed form like fireflies.
The Composer returned to the top of his tower. Direnc shrank away from his approach. His bonds chilled, the black iron crusting with frost as the Composer unlocked the manacles around Direnc’s hands, feet and throat.
‘Take heed, mortal,’ said the sorcerer as he loomed over Direnc. ‘There is but a pittance of our entire species that has ever beheld the inner workings of the webway. You are now amongst them. Do you not recognise the gifts that I heap upon you?’
A ringing crack arrested Direnc’s attention as the butt of the Composer’s staff bit against the floor. ‘Think of the magnificence of the events that I have permitted you to experience. Consider the favour that I have shown towards you in allowing it. The sheer splendour of it all.’
The Composer sank down into a crouch with a snarl of ancient armour. He drew his joyful silver mask level with Direnc. ‘You have been given much, no? And yet I have asked nothing of you. Nothing in return for all of these gifts. Perhaps you have struggled, suffering to find the means to demonstrate your thanks. You are thankful, are you not?’
Direnc trembled. He tried to work his jaw, but terror held it clenched. The pain spiked, crashing across him harder than ever.
‘Good!’ The Composer rose in a single, fluid motion. He turned, striding down the steps of the tower and gesturing for Direnc to follow. The slave staggered to his feet, following a respectful distance behind the witch.
‘Despair no more, for there is indeed something you can do to repay my munificence. We have come to this place,’ the Composer said, spreading his arms out wide towards the fathomless black that showed through the dome, ‘this marvellous realm, to find our lord. But this place is vast, and has many dangers for those who do not know the way. To find our way, we must understand the nature of whom we seek, and the nature of the beings that have erred so manifestly in entangling him.
‘You see, the eldar of the Dark City, where our Eternal lord now dwells, exist in a fashion that differs from their kin who ply the void in their vast ships of bone and spirits. Those xenos are reunited in the love of the Youngest God at the moment where they shed their mortal coil. Those of Commorragh, however, feed our Prince of themselves in a continuous trickle each and every moment they draw breath. In their ignorance and fear, they are desperate to delay their union with the divine. That is why they must inflict suffering so urgently, to offer the anguish of their prey in proxy for their own essences.’
The Composer and Direnc reached the bottom of the tower. The sorcerer rapped the tip of his staff against the floor three times. Afilai emerged through a side passage, his armour restored to gleaming resplendence. The hulking Terminator led a train of slaves behind him. Direnc recognised the ruddy brown rags swathing many of the men and women, identifying them as those taken from the burning decks of the Elypsis.
‘Through the steady flow of essences, the xenos form an unbreakable bond with the Prince,’ said the Composer as he stroked the face of one of the slaves. ‘There exist entities within the ether that can see these rivers of agony as clearly as the light from a flame. All we must do is find one of these Neverborn, and bind it to our purpose. We shall hunt the ones who hold the Soulthief, and this being will lead us to them.’
The Composer looked back at Direnc. ‘Do you want to help me find this creature?’
Direnc struggled to respond. He could barely concentrate. The pain stitched nausea through his insides, almost bringing him to his knees.
The Composer withdrew a vial from his belt. His voice conveyed his smile, even through his mask. ‘No? Even for a taste of this?’
Direnc’s world dropped away, shoved aside by an electric buzzing hunger as he saw the ambrosia. All else faded but him and the contents of the vial. He had to have it. It was the one thing – the only thing – that could save him from his pain.
‘Please!’ Direnc begged, unable to look away from the powder. ‘Please let me have it, I have to have it!’
‘And I want to give it to you,’ the Composer answered fervently. ‘But my charity has reached its limit. This is a gift that you must earn.’
Direnc shook. Spittle flecked from his lips.
‘Luring the daemon we seek to us is a simple enough task,’ said the Composer. ‘It is a creature of betrayal, forged from fratricide. It is the murder of innocence incarnated. And there is no better lure for such a thing than that which constitutes itself.’
The sorcerer gestured to the group of prostrate slaves. ‘It would of course be easy for me to do this, but it would be the butchery of cattle. It would barely qualify as murder, an unpalatable enticement to its hunger. Do you see?’
Direnc could not think. He could barely breathe. The rush, the euphoria. He could not hope for those any longer. All he wanted was to claw himself back to who he had been at the start. His bloodshot eyes bulged, as if they could somehow take the vial of ambrosia from the Composer’s palm if he just stared hard enough.
‘The more you help me, the more of this you shall get.’ The Composer shook the vial as he leaned forwards. ‘Do I have your interest?’
‘Yes,’ Direnc
finally managed to stammer. He felt something within him die with the word. Something irreplaceable. ‘Give, g-give me a gun, I’ll do it.’
The Composer slowly shook his head. ‘This is an exceedingly primeval daemon, little one.’ He produced a simple machete the length of Direnc’s arm, a hacking blade that would not have appeared out of place in the grip of a death world jungle primitive. ‘They so delight in the arcane and the theatrical. In order to suit its tastes, our methods must have a more antiquated flavour to them.’
The Composer pressed the machete into Direnc’s trembling hand. ‘Make them feel it.’
‘Hello, little god-maker.’
Every time the archon came to Lucius, his greeting was the same. The same words, and the same smile.
His confinement had changed. After he had overcome the threats of the arena on eight separate occasions, Thyndrak had grown tired of returning him to her hanging gardens. The rest of his brethren were now roused from their induced slumbers to participate in the grandest battles as the end of the gladiatorial period drew close. Each time she brought Lucius back, dripping in the lifeblood of her prized beasts and champions, her gardens rang with praise of his name. She resented what had now become a victory parade for the one they called ‘Eternal’, fresh from another conquest as he was put back in his chains.
Their chorus, the fervour of it, had become an unforeseen – and unsettling – development to her attendants and viziers. Though she would never show the weakness of it herself, she shared their rising disquiet. And so she had chosen to isolate Lucius from the hanging gardens. No longer would he bask in the procession amongst his kin, fuelling an already intolerable delusion of grandeur.
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 23