The Diadem bared her fangs. Spears of energy leapt out from her lance batteries, obliterating the dense formations of fragile xenos vessels. More took their place. This engagement would be different than the last had been. The Commorrites would board en masse, filling Clarion’s decks with thousands of alien murderers until there was not a single soul left to draw breath.
We are coming, master,+ sent Clarion. +Ruin follows, close behind us. There is little time.+
Your arrival has provided us with the opening we need, Lucius’ thoughts echoed over Clarion’s. Draw as near as you are able – we will be ready when you are.
As soon as the lift came to a halt, Lucius sprinted into the corridor beneath the arena. Its walls shook with the tremors of the rebelling Space Marines above. He could still hear the ringing of cheers, the crowds believing in their arrogance that the escape was all part of some elaborate performance. Lucius ran faster, his hooves clanging against the floor.
He skidded to a halt. Behind him and in front of him were the walls of crystal cells, filled with dark water. Lucius stared into their depths, seeing the familiar shapes inside. They responded to his presence, the black waters beginning to boil.
Lucius smashed the pommel of the Laeran Blade against the first pane. It shattered in a rush of frothing black water. The dark current receded from the hulking figure that had stood imprisoned within its depths. It ran from ornate war-plate of mauve and precious metals, from jewelled horns sculpted into the mouths of screaming angels.
The warrior took a ponderous step, his armour squealing from the motion after so long spent locked in stillness. The second step displayed a quickly recovered grace. His war-plate thrummed like an insect hive.
Lucius stood his ground as the legionary swung the sonic amplifier cannon bolted to his forearm up, levelling it at the Eternal’s chest. Raw noise itched from the fluted barrel of the cannon, primed to be released with the force to shatter ceramite and liquefy flesh. It held for a handful of heartbeats, before the warrior lowered it.
A low intake of breath caused Lucius to brace for what he knew was coming. The Kakophoni screamed. Weaponised sound blasted from every horn and speaker-grille on his armour, ripping out from him in a sphere of discordance.
Every cell shattered. Black water and shattered crystal flooded the corridor in a gushing tide. Eleven other Noise Marines stepped out from their prisons. Slowly, they looked to their brother, and then their gaze settled over Lucius.
Feedback crackled from the vox-grilles that studded every surface of their armour like gilded barnacles. They pulsed, glowing sharply with an arrhythmic violet light. The same light came from their eyes.
The twelve Kakophoni formed a circle around Lucius. The black water trembled around their boots. After a moment, one of their number stepped forwards to stand in front of him.
‘For the rest of the Lucid Circle,’ the Noise Marine uttered in a soft vox charged with static, ‘I pass greetings to Lucius the Eternal.’
The fact that the legionary had spoken caught Lucius off guard. ‘You still speak?’
The Noise Marine nodded slowly, a single time. ‘I am Kathodos. Of the Circle, I have felt the least of the Youngest God’s holy voice, and so I am permitted to speak. The others speak only in war, and their voices are those that shatter mountains.’
Lucius remembered the warrior’s name. Kathodos had been Captain of the 318th Company in the days of the Legion, imbued by the primarch with power and command over hundreds of Space Marines. Despite the additions to and transformations of their war-plate, none of the insignia markings upon the armour of the other Kakophoni indicated any of them being above the rank of sergeant.
And Kathodos was the least of them. It brought a smile to Lucius’ face. How time changes all things.
‘We are servants of the True God,’ said Kathodos, as if anticipating Lucius’ thoughts. ‘Our souls are His to hold, and to order as He decides. His favour has gone to those whom He wills it to, and in the amount He wills it. Our pasts mean nothing, only His song.’
Lucius scoffed. The Noise Marine’s zealotry reminded him of the Composer, raving away in the madness of his tower. ‘How did you come to be here?’
‘I had…’ Kathodos paused. ‘I still serve under the beneficence of the Carnation Prince, Sardar Eynzilium. What you see of the Circle is what remains of the delegation of his Golden Host. We were envoys, our screaming holy throats the representation of the might of the Sardar.’
‘And what of Eynzilium?’ Lucius studied the Noise Marine. ‘What has become of him?’
Kathodos lowered his head a fraction. ‘I know not of the Carnation Prince’s fate, nor of the wider Golden Host. The Lucid Circle was dispatched by the Sardar. We took the Oblivion’s Call and sailed to treat with the Primogenitor, and we lost contact after we were betrayed and brought to this place.’
‘How long have you been here?’
Kathodos hesitated, drawing one hand into a slow, distracted fist in a squeal of scraping ceramite. ‘I know not that either. As within the Afterbirth, I measure it in the deaths of brothers, and by that metric we have endured here for the time to shed the lives of eight.’
Lucius looked around him at the Lucid Circle. ‘Will you come with me?’
‘Our fates do not end here,’ Kathodos replied. The other Noise Marines hefted their sonic cannons. ‘We will walk with you, Lucius the Eternal. You are the blessed son of the Joyful Prince. Until the time we return to the Golden Host, our voices are yours.’
Lucius made to turn, to move back down the corridor from where he had come. He hesitated. He felt the pull of the way behind him, of the chamber at the end of the passageway. He turned to Kathodos.
‘Go to the surface,’ said Lucius. ‘There are others of the Third – find them. I shall rejoin you shortly.’
Kathodos inclined his head. The Lucid Circle turned as one, the walls reverberating with their feedback as they marched out of sight. Lucius turned, and sprinted the other way.
IV.IV
‘What do you want, Lucius?’ Bile did not bother masking his irritation at the interruption, nor did he deign to turn from the archives he was engrossed in pillaging. A series of great twisted cylinders towered over Fabius in the darkness of the gladiatorial satellite’s lower depths, pulsing with dark eldar rune script. The Primogenitor pulled reams of narrow black papyrus from the cylinder, scanning the runes impressed upon them rapidly before swallowing them. ‘I have already released our kindred from their bondage for you. I feel that has more than satisfied my end – in my mind our bargain is concluded.’
‘Concluded?’ Lucius rounded on Fabius. ‘You would not have the distraction you required to raid the xenos’ secrets without me. I upheld our arrangement, unlike you. You promised me an army, Fabius.’
A click drew Lucius’ attention. Cesare stood across the chamber. His armour’s still functioning ident-rune had led Lucius to both the archive and Bile. He levelled his bolt pistol at the Eternal’s head.
‘I promised that you would leave this place with more warriors than you arrived with.’ Bile gagged down another length of papyrus and snorted. ‘You did not arrive here with very many, Lucius. In any case, the technology within the stimulant system I have grafted to you alone is of far greater worth than any army. If that is a necessary consolation to salve your misplaced ego, then consider it so.’
Cesare still had not lowered his bolt pistol. Bile paused in his ransacking to flick his sallow eyes at the Apothecary, before rolling them in tired exasperation. ‘Put it down, Cesare,’ he scolded, as if addressing an unruly child. ‘If he did not bother to include you in our compact, it is hardly my affair.’
Cesare looked back at Fabius, then to Lucius. The pistol wavered in his grip. The Apothecary exhaled, his amber eyes cold with anger, and lowered the weapon.
Lucius bit down his own temper. He had subjected himself to th
is humiliation, degrading himself by languishing under alien chains, for a little over two hundred Traitor Space Marines. It was a force that could carve out a respectable fiefdom in the Great Eye, that was true enough. But it was not the thousand or more he had convinced himself he would come to possess. It was not the strength of numbers that would match his towering ambition.
‘The next time we meet, brother,’ Lucius sneered, levelling the point of the Laeran Blade at Fabius’ back, ‘I will remember your exceeding generosity. I promise you that I will repay it in kind.’
Bile did not bother looking up from the archive as he set himself to the task of stealing every scrap of secret knowledge he could from the repository of the arcane compiled by the Dark City’s Haemonculi fleshcrafters. Such a task would take centuries, and centuries he did not have. He pushed another ribbon of the archives past his lips. The Apothecary’s massively self-altered omophagea surged to work, deciphering the alien’s esoteric, sensual manner of recording their secrets, passing it directly into his mind as though they were his own memories.
Lucius turned away to stalk from the laboratory. He stopped at the threshold, looking back over his shoulder.
‘Are you coming?’
Cesare looked at Lucius, rooted to the spot. He glanced at Fabius, expecting some challenge.
‘Just go,’ muttered Bile distractedly. ‘No one ever truly leaves my Consortium, Cesare. Until the day you return to me again.’
Cesare’s lip curled. He unhooked his helm from his belt, fastening it over his head. The Apothecary followed Lucius from the chamber, whispering in a vox-altered rasp just before leaving.
‘Until that day.’
For the first time, light came to the Dark City. A sentient firetide roared through the blackness. Things of indescribable beauty, rife with mutilation, melted and swam alongside barely realised forms of snapping bone and grasping fingers. Base collections of animal reactions filled the gaps between ancient intelligences that delighted in playing voyeur to the follies of the flesh realm. The Diadem’s meagre bounty of spirits was utterly forgotten by them all, compared to the dizzying feast that thronged the eldar satellite arena.
The Commorrite stadium collapsed into a riot. Raw pandemonium ensued. Aliens shrieked in terror as they clawed against the masses of their fellows, all desperate to escape. Their own numbers choked the doorways and kept any from escaping. Their shared fear doomed them all.
The roaring daemonic maelstrom smashed down, washing over the satellite in a boiling flood of poisoned sentience. A corona of unlight, the blink of what was at once a psychic star and a black hole. A shock wave that tore over the winds of the warp. Tens of thousands of eldar evaporated in an instant. The warp sang as it gorged upon more eldar souls than it had at any single point in aeons.
For all its fury, for all the life it stole in its inexhaustible hunger, it could not last. Devouring the arena’s spiritual harvest depleted the hordes of Neverborn, and most dissolved back into the warp immediately after the last soul had been claimed. The strongest of their number would remain a little longer, thrashing and wreaking delighted havoc over the attack ships that stood between them and the greater metropolis.
They left a silent city in their wake. Swathes of the outer realm of the dark eldar haven were rendered devoid of mortal life. Ships hung in the void, rudderless with only ghosts to walk their halls. Pleasure palaces echoed emptily, every stone seeded with corruption, yet for the first time in millennia bereft of music crafted by the torturer’s blade.
The greater centre of Commorragh was not directly endangered, yet it had never felt under a more existential threat. It withdrew into itself, a den of murderers and liars who set aside their plots and tortures to avoid what they had believed themselves safe from. No other concern could trouble them.
It was all the diversion the Diadem needed, once it had accepted the Talon Queen and the small convoy of shuttles streaming from the crumbling arena in her wake, to take her flight from the webway.
The Composer guided the strike cruiser away from the edges of the dark eldar realm as it recoiled from the Neverborn assault. While gaining entrance into the webway had been a process of centuries, once within its thoroughfares it was a far simpler task to find the means to leave it. Simple as knowing that the passages that led back to the Eye were the ones most thronged with daemons.
The prow of the Diadem smashed into a tunnel writhing with countless swarms of daemonkind. Immaterial fire obscured it from view as the Geller field savaged the hordes of claws and screaming faces. Clarion sank the ship deeper into the thrashing mass, watching without her eyes as the blast shutters on the command deck locked closed for the sanity of the crew.
Lucius arrived on the bridge just as the Diadem broke clear of the ancient network, emerging back into the familiar turmoil of the Great Eye.
Hanging in the churning tides, a vessel awaited them. It was a bloated tick of spines and brass, unmistakable in the hostility it waited to unleash.
‘What is that?’ asked Lucius.
‘That,’ said Clarion coldly, her angelic features twisting into a snarl, ‘is the Pit Cur.’
IV.V
‘Impossible.’
Lucius’ denial did not destroy the blazing ship. His disbelief did not shatter it into impossibility. ‘It was destroyed, along with the daemon world it crashed upon. How could it still exist? How could it find us here?’
Clarion silenced the klaxons with a hiss to her bridge crew. ‘The god of war and blood seems not to be finished with us. The Eaters of Worlds have been sent against us as puppets, but blessed ones. I feel the rage of them, even from here. It is a thirst for vengeful bloodletting and the manipulation of the divine that has led them here.’
‘Could the daemons from the webway have brought them here?’ Lucius glared at the growing warship in the oculus.
‘Possibly,’ replied Clarion curtly, annoyed to have to divide her attention from her crew as they rushed to prepare for the coming void battle. ‘There are many thousands of ways this could have come to pass, Eternal. Yet there is not a single one of them that changes the fact that we must ready our teeth for war.’
Lucius turned, striding from the bridge. ‘Brothers,’ he spoke into his vox, his words echoing in the ears of every Traitor Space Marine aboard the Diadem. ‘Arm yourselves, and stand by to repel boarders.’
The two ships filled the void with weapons fire as they drew close. Batteries of lances and torpedo volleys from the Diadem were matched by slugs of burning etheric energy vomited from the elongated brass skulls that burst from the Pit Cur’s warped superstructure like fractured bones. Hatred smashed against decadence, grace against conquest.
Gone was the sluggish mass conveyor weighed down with weapons platforms and crude armour plates. The reborn Pit Cur that took its place was a muscled hulk of brass and flame, charging through the Eye’s currents like an enraged bull.
‘Can you not hear it?’ Lucius’ vox crackled as he moved through a darkened corridor, his lip curling in a sneer as the Composer’s voice filled his ear. ‘While they have rejected their place within the Song, they scream out the part they play in its verses, sagas of rebellion and suffering against the True God.’
‘Cease your riddles,’ Lucius growled. ‘If you know how this came to be, speak, or else be silent.’
See…+
The vision entered Lucius’ mind like a fiery hatchet blade:
In spite of Lucius’ beliefs, doom had not been the fate of the XII Legion shard they battled upon the daemon world. He watched, disembodied, as the Cohors Nasicae withdrew, leaving the World Eaters to die upon the crumbling madness of the imploding planetoid. The sons of Angron railed against the oblivion swallowing them. Their tongues turned to the Skull Throne for deliverance.
Lucius watched the World Eaters thrash as the planet vanished, casting them adrift within the living currents of t
he warp. He heard them cry out into the Eye for their patron. For salvation. And, for their souls, they were granted the blessings of Kharnath. He, Second of the Pantheon, divine opposition to the Lord of Joy, infused their bodies, and set them at the head of a full choir of his children of blood-red flesh and brazen blades. Khorne remade their vessel – and their bodies – in His own image, and set them on the path to seek out their vengeance against those who were pledged to Slaanesh.
Lucius came to a halt in the corridor, throwing an arm into the wall to balance himself as the vision dissipated. Blood drummed the deck from his nose. He blinked, and his vision smeared. His eyes were bleeding too.
There were names for what these World Eaters had become. Possessed. Secondborn. Blessed Sons and Etherslaved and daemon-meshed, and a thousand other titles whispered in awe and curses throughout the Broken Nine.
What they were called mattered not. No one appellation, no matter the heights of its reverence or the fury of its damnation, could fully convey what they were. All that mattered was that they were. And that they were coming.
There was no boarding action as it had been done in the days of the Cthonian Failure and continued to be done by those in thrall to the Throne of Lies. No brace of torpedoes swollen with shock troops darted across the void to sink into the Diadem’s flanks. There was no daring gunship assault, braving the storm of point-defence cannons. Nor came an attack via teleportation, delivering elite warriors to storm inside the ship from behind its greatest defences.
Great rents in the fabric of reality were slashed open in the corridors and chambers of the Diadem. From theses gashes in real space spilled the roaring daemons of the Blood God. Entities born of the most horrific atrocities, of man’s inhumanity towards man, surged out, gripping primeval weapons of brass and black iron in their claws.
Behind the daemons, things of blackened crimson shell that had once been ceramite charged forth. Fell warriors of the XII Legion, resembling the Eaters of Worlds in only the broadest of ways, pressed inside the Diadem. They spared no attention for the scant mortal crew who had failed to hide from them. While their patron cared not from whence the blood flowed, enough of the World Eaters’ minds remained within their warp-wrought forms that they did. They wanted battle. They hungered for the blood of warriors.
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 26