Lucius: The Faultless Blade

by Ian St. Martin

  Lucius now hung chained to the wall of a simple cell in the depths beneath the arena. Thyndrak stood in the doorway of the cell. She had yet to enter, as though his presence projected some invisible barrier. Her slanted eyes narrowed as she cast their venomous glare upon him. Upon his endless smile.

  ‘For one who has become defined amongst his vile kindred for expiring,’ said Thyndrak, her words hissing out in Gothic from the centre of an ornate collar, ‘you certainly have proven quite troublesome to kill.’

  ‘If only your kindred could say the same.’

  Thyndrak smirked. ‘You are an animal. Entertainment.’ She stepped into the cell, leaving the shadows of her Incubi praetorians behind in the passageway. ‘The crowd is amused by the bloodshed you provide, and they will be amused by the bloodshed when you die. To them you are nothing more than a passing fancy, as you are to me.’

  A stiletto slipped from the sleeve of the eldar’s jacket and into her hand. She traced artful patterns in the air with it. ‘There is not a single one of my champions not clamouring for the release of bleeding you out.’

  Thyndrak came to a halt in front of Lucius. The stiletto gleamed in the wan light of the cell, before she rested its tip at Lucius’ throat. ‘I wonder if perhaps I should just dispense with you here.’

  After a moment’s silence, bellowing howls of laughter reverberated from the walls of the cell. Tears streamed down Lucius’ face as his lunatic glee stole his breath.

  A stinging blow from Thyndrak snapped his head to the side. Lucius spat blood onto the floor, still laughing.

  ‘Ah, I understand now,’ said Lucius as his hilarity subsided. ‘You really don’t know who I am, then. Do you?’

  ‘I know enough,’ Thyndrak snarled. ‘Place trust in this, mon-keigh – you will die here, as my slave, for nothing more than a fleeting moment of my pleasure.’

  Any trace of mirth vanished from the Eternal’s face. ‘Well, then you may place trust in these words – if you do not care for me alive, then you really will not like me when I am dead.’

  III.VIII

  Choosing who would be the first of them had been the hardest. The eyes wide, the hands straining against rattling shackles, the first man to die sought in vain to shield himself. He had screamed out in a panicked lilt of a tongue Direnc did not understand. Did it matter? Had Direnc been of the mind to do so, he would have easily parsed the meaning in the shrieks.

  The first impact sent a tremor up his arm. It failed to stop the screaming, only accelerating it. It took three more before only the thudding wetness of the dull blade echoed from the tower walls.

  Blood made the machete slick in his hand. He looked to the next one. She was young, a maiden not long beyond childhood. Things warred within Direnc’s mind like crashing tides of acid. He staggered, hesitating.

  Then he tasted it upon the air. The musk. Its ecstasy promised to envelop him, and take him far away from here.

  Shaking, he sucked it into his lungs. The world went away, and Direnc began dancing.

  The girl at his feet rose to meet him, her chains melting into an exquisite dress of silk and flowers. Direnc smiled as he took her in his arms. The walls resounded with music that rolled high into the arched rafters of the grand ballroom.

  Laughter and honeyed conversation joined the flowing melodies, as pairs of ornately dressed nobles wove about each other in a traditionally orchestrated dance. Direnc felt the softness of his frock’s material as it brushed against his skin. A curl of auburn hair ­tumbled between the girl’s eyes as they twirled, belying the illusion cast by her powdered wig.

  The music shifted. Its proper and reserved notes were swept away by a rousing score in a rising tempo. Direnc spun the girl away, locking arms with a nobleman and spinning about as they laughed. He changed partners, again and again, the music swelling to ever louder and more beautiful heights.

  The dance concluded to jubilant applause by all within the ballroom. A manservant presented Direnc with a bottle of sparkling wine, drawing men and women to him with crystal flutes outstretched. The cork shot from the bottle with a spray of golden foam. It splashed over everyone to howls of laughter. Direnc felt giddy as it dripped from his chin.

  Another maiden called out to Direnc from a few steps away. He looked to her, matching the sparkle of her smile with his own. The other dancers stood across from one another, linking arms to form a tunnel of grinning faces. Direnc laughed, chasing after the girl as she stopped beneath the steeple of joined hands. He crawled after her, finally catching up and hauling her down giggling to the polished marble floor.

  The other dancers collapsed around them, rolling in contented mirth. Wine and amasec spilled across the floor, men and women uncaring as it soaked their finery. The air was warm and sticky, spiced with exotic scents.

  Direnc laughed, playfully bringing the walking stick he had been handed down and – slashing – it against the girl’s crown. She stifled a smile, collapsing with mock hurt into his lap. Her body twitched with silent laughter.

  A bright sting surprised Direnc as he blinked a trickle of wine from his eye. He swept it away with his fingers, looking down at the – blood – coating their tips. A sudden chill began to set into his limbs.

  The gently rolling laughter curdled around Direnc. The fine vestments and elegant gowns of the partygoers greyed and crumbled away to torn rags. The walls quaked, priceless artworks shattering and crashing to the floor as they warped into a dome.

  Direnc’s senses recoiled in horror. All he could hear were choking sobs, and a steady rumbling thrum through a floor that was rapidly becoming a mesh of steel and dark iron.

  The Composer removed his helm and looked down at the slave as he sat giggling in the centre of a massacre. The bodies of forty men and women lay open around him, hacked into uneven pieces. In the mortal’s lap was the last of them, a young woman, still twitching with the blade of the machete embedded in her skull.

  The sorcerer had enjoyed the screams. He had relished the animal panic that had taken hold over the slaves at the end. He understood the handful of languages they spoke, the frenzied things that they cried out at their deranged killer as they frittered away their final moments. The things they promised, such impossible things, for just a little more time.

  As much as he loved it, his favourite moment was just now coming into bloom. The moment when reality reasserted itself. The moment when Direnc woke up.

  The Composer listened. It was shock at first, a shallow gasp for air as the artifices of the ambrosia collapsed. Direnc flailed and kicked the girl’s corpse away from him to flop clumsily onto the deck. The gravity of the act sank in, poisoning the lie that he had seen, and whatever remained within Direnc’s stomach was purged out onto the deck. The man bawled, a choking breathless sob of utter despair. He slid to the floor, knees to his chest. His screams became primal, a wracking dirge of hate and desolation.

  For the Composer’s ears, it was the sweetest of music. Already he could feel something coming from the dark. A presence, cold and ancient, drawing near like a weary traveller huddling towards a fire for warmth.

  ‘That will do, little one,’ whispered the Composer. He bent down and took Direnc’s head in his hands. Gently, the sorcerer kissed the slave’s brow, savouring the electricity that stitched across his lips as he tasted innocent blood.

  ‘That will do perfectly.’

  Clarion ordered the Diadem forwards, such as it could be within the blackness. She listened to the reports as they arrived from the hunter-killer cadres. What remained of them, anyway. Mutant blood had spilled in torrents, but the ship was excised, at least on parity to what it had been before. There were always things that lived in the vessel’s shadows.

  A chill ran over her mundane flesh. Clarion glanced down at her arm, amused by the rare presence of gooseflesh prickling its surface. Whatever the witch was doing, it had brought something new to t
hem, from the depths.

  As if on cue, the Composer’s mind meshed with the daemon child at the helm of the Diadem.

  Lower the Geller field.+

  Part IV

  FAULTLESS

  IV.I

  Lucius hung his head in the darkness of his cell. The archon had left him hours ago, leaving him to the relentless tide of howling from the stolen souls bound inside him. In the aftermath of Fabius’ compounds and the highs they had raised him to, the lows of their withdrawal dragged him to even deeper depths.

  True weakness hammered at his flesh, beyond the numbness of before. He felt as though his control were slipping. But to what? To be replaced by what?

  What king lies in chains, defeated by foes he cannot see?

  Lucius’ head snapped up. He scanned the stone cube of his cell. Its emptiness did nothing to calm him. He could not be certain if the voice had come from without, or within.

  Is it perfection to take divinity and squander its gifts?

  The voice wove between the screams. It mirrored their scorn, but bore none of the hopelessness of the bound. It dripped with assurance, almost tranquil as it watched Lucius crumble from the inside.

  Do you even know why you were chosen? Do you know the ends that fate possesses for you?

  Lucius thudded his head back against the wall. The voices quivered as he crashed it back again, and again.

  Yes, loosen your hold further.

  Lucius gritted his teeth to swing his head back again. The corded muscle stood out on his neck. His head refused to move. Lucius looked down, seeing his hands flex and slowly ball into fists without him moving them.

  Only time remains, and yours is fast approaching. So very, very close.

  Lucius felt the voice withdraw like a blade sliding from his heart. He gasped, raking in lungfuls of the cold air of the cell. He regained his senses slowly, but enough to hear the soft footfalls of alien armour approaching the door.

  A frail measure of relief flooded through Lucius. The killers were always quietest in battle. The door to his cell swung open. Eldar entered, two of them unshackling his bonds while the others surrounded him and led him back by the edges of their blades to their blood-soaked showground.

  He could already hear the jarring, keening music. Thousands of xenos revelled above his head, slavering for the carnage to come. Lucius walked the passageway, glancing at the tinted panes of inky water flanking him. He saw the slightest movements from the shapes within, the barest hint of activity bubbling up to disturb the surface.

  The doors to the arena lift opened in a whisper of impossibly smooth alien machinery. Lucius’ gaolers walked him to the centre, and departed from him. He rose, the noise of the arena swelling as he drew closer to it.

  The cancerous lights sprang over him like daybreak through a storm of poison. The thronging masses surged in their disorienting orbital amphitheatre, howling for blood and pleasure. Hatred and abuse washed over Lucius, but not without something new. Something he had gained from them more and more with each victory here.

  Fear.

  The lift slowed to a halt, reforming with the stone floor as though it had always been part of it. Lucius stepped forwards, his first thought going, as always, to finding a blade. His lash unfurled, a movement that came as easily as stretching his limbs.

  A thudding crunch struck the stone behind Lucius. Another hit followed just ahead of him, and another to his left. The impacts sounded all around the swordsman, overlapping in a short stuttered crash of iron against rock.

  Lucius crouched. There was no time for him to seek a blade. He would have to resign himself to whatever these new opponents carried, after he had torn it from their corpses.

  A low thrum, almost beneath hearing, flooded the area. It itched at Lucius’ eyes, and set his teeth on edge. He straightened, relaxing his posture. It was a sound he knew as intimately as the beat of his own hearts.

  Hunched, predatory shapes materialised from the dust. They swayed from side to side with a grace at odds with the weight of the ­rumbling thruster packs upon their backs. Lucius heard the soft rustle of a cloak of human flesh, cut to resemble feathers.

  The last of the Eagle Kings emerged to stand before Lucius, leading the remaining warriors of the Rypax in his wake.

  ‘Kindred,’ Lucius greeted Vispyrtilo and his Raptors. ‘It so pleases me to lay eyes upon you all once again.’

  The crowd’s cheers spiked, uncaring of the betrayal they committed against their own race’s ambush. Like shadows descending with the fall of the sun, eldar advanced in flittering sprints from cover to cover, a twisting tide of knives and barbed war-plate. Lucius pushed the endless screaming as far from his thoughts as he was able, snorting the nosebleed that inevitably followed into the dust. He grinned as he spread his arms to his fellow Cohors Nasicae.

  ‘They have gathered us here in a beautiful reunion, my brothers. Let us show them the severity of their mistake.’

  The Composer had nearly reached the summit of his tower when he felt the Geller field of the Diadem extinguish. His own power waxed without the barrier’s interference. He stretched out his thoughts, scanning through the abyssal dark in search of the thing that would lead them to the Dark City.

  It took only moments to find it.

  Direnc seized and jerked in the sorcerer’s grip. His cries of despair had stolen his voice. Now only a wet heaving pushed between clenched teeth. The slave’s eyes were screwed shut, so he did not see the shining pinprick of light as it appeared, like the tiniest of holes punched into a curtain.

  The Composer stopped as he reached the top of his spire. He sighed. It was beautiful, to feel the Neverborn as it carved through the ripples of his thoughts, drawing nearer and growing brighter.

  ‘I can take this pain from you,’ whispered the Composer, looking down at Direnc as the light grew blinding. ‘All of the suffering you have endured, it can all be swept away. Would you like me to take it from you?’

  Direnc crushed into himself tighter. His heart felt as though it were being wrenched apart, as despair began to grind against his resurgent hunger. Ever since he had first tasted the mist, what seemed a lifetime ago aboard the Pit Cur, it had sunk through to his marrow. It held on to him so tightly that he could not remember not having it, not feel it gnawing at him like a pit that could never be filled. He forgot why he felt it, only that he did.

  All beings experience hunger, that persistent reminder of mortality. The blooming hollow inside all, which affirms that only by taking from without and devouring within can we extend our coil. Hunger is universal for those who are destined to die. As they feed, they pay the incremental bribes that forestall its coming.

  Direnc’s was a sentient, living hunger. A void that shifted and changed, unknowable and perpetually infinite. A void that only yawned wider when addressed, when fed. A torture that only swelled with each of his efforts to sate it.

  It had come in whispers first, but before long it sounded like him, because it was using his voice. It narrowed his existence to the hunger.

  This hunger took Direnc, making itself a part of him, growing and spreading and stripping away what he used to be. He choked as he thought of the things he had done to make it go away. He had become someone else, someone doing… horrible things. The first time Direnc realised it, it had scared him. He was not able to recognise who he was, and for a handful of moments, he floated between who he had once been, and who he was going to become.

  When he tasted the mist, it numbed the hunger, and he could breathe again. But it did not last. It never lasted. The next time, and the times after that, he would not stop, because he did not care. He did not care what he broke, or what he took. He did not care about what he did, or who he did it to, to make it feel like that hunger was receding, just for an instant. He had become a monster, happily, for just a moment of having his head above water.

 
By the end, it had ceased to be separate from Direnc. It had grown and developed into something that wore him. In the end, the hunger was all that was left, and nothing could release him from it. Direnc felt his teeth crackle as he ground them to dust.

  A strangled whine was all that managed to scrape past his lips.

  The Composer nodded once, slowly. It was all the consent he required. ‘It shall be done.’

  The sorcerer raised Direnc up, like the newborn child of an ancient king displayed before the eyes of a gathered kingdom. The plates housing the screaming wretches peeled aside over their heads, giving an unobstructed view through the dome of the growing sun hurtling towards them. Blood jetted from Direnc’s eyes as he opened them, seeing an impression of boiling tongues and teeth as a falling star descended.

  Direnc realised, in the last instants before his consciousness was immolated, what the true lure had been. It was a daemon spun in the ether from pain. It had not been the pain of the butchered slaves that had drawn it here. It had been his own.

  Direnc flew from the Composer’s grasp as the daemon flowed through the crystal dome and swarmed into his flesh. Deep blue fire burned from his eyes, spilling out from his screaming mouth to envelop him. What had once been a man was scoured away, reduced to a vessel of bone and meat for an ancient intelligence born from aeons of mortal suffering.

  The daemon hung suspended above the Composer. Its limbs spread out until they were cruciform, locking beneath invisible chains as the sorcerer bound it to his will. It made no effort to resist his mastery. The feast of Direnc’s anguish wholly occupied its attentions.

  ‘Show me the currents of the Youngest God,’ commanded the witch. ‘The river of torment that binds Him to those who ushered in His birth.’