In the central concourse, an immense circular pavilion and one of the largest single spaces on board the Diadem, where once a victorious III Legion had celebrated the birth of betrayal in the massacres of Isstvan, they would find it.
A thousand mutants of the ship’s herd clans awaited their advance, gathered in a phalanx of crude wargear and blood-dyed pennant rags. They brayed out primal war-cries, rattling their primitive weapons against armour that harkened back to the simplest ages of human conflict.
There was no period of manoeuvre. No dressing of battle lines, or exchange of posturing and indecipherable taunts. The Legion of Khorne simply did not slow, pouring into the pavilion and smashing against the mutants without any change in pace or direction.
The blood of semi-humans was flung into the air, splashing against the stone floor to mingle with the ectoplasm of creatures that bore no connection to reality other than the butchery that had formed them. Blades of brass and divinely sculpted talons clashed with ones of bone, rough iron and knapped flint. Cries of rage, cries of pain, entreaties to the divine to witness the deeds of those who made battle in their names, all soaked the air like a roaring ocean.
Here and there, a daemon would fall, collapsing and crumbling from reality. Even a handful of the World Eaters tasted their second and final death, sinking and going still beneath the weight of a dozen slain mutants. But the outcome of the contest had never been in doubt. Those who had orchestrated it had never intended it to be.
The Children of the Emperor descended upon the Khornate horde from all sides. Garish hues of purple-and-blue power armour shot through the crimson in a thunder of ceramite boots and crashing bolters. The Rypax smashed down screaming from above. The Kakophoni of the Lucid Circle parted their lips in song. They made the air into their weapon, their voices sweeping away their foes in clouds of aerosolised gore and metal reduced to the granularity of fine sand.
Afilai ploughed into the wall of red flesh and brass like a battering ram. Unlike the last daemons to have tasted the edges of the Terminator’s talons, there were no distractions to muddy the slaughter. No offers dripped from painted lips, rich with poison and lies. These Neverborn were of a decidedly more direct breed. They offered only roars of furnace rage and the inculcating cuts of their ephemeral blades. Afilai’s war-plate blazed with the light of his etched runes of warding, curdling daemonic flesh before his weapons had even made contact.
Those who warred in the name of Slaanesh let out a piercing cheer as Lucius entered the fray. The Eternal vaulted through the air from a marble balcony, the Laeran Blade a sliver of captured lightning in his fist. His lash unfurled before him, seeking limbs and throats.
Lucius danced through the maelstrom of blades, his veins still stinging with the after-effects of the serpentin and tyrphous that yet lingered long after their use. There was but a single dose of the third mixture, so he held that in reserve. Unlike so many of his brethren, he did not need the narcotics to fill the void where skill should lie. Speed and anger drowned out the screams in the Eternal’s head, allowing him to devote his full energy to fighting a dozen duels at once. It was the closest he could come to any kind of serenity.
Daemons fell beneath the Laeran Blade. The heads of XII Legion half-monsters were torn free by the barbed shredding caress of his lash. He allowed his eyes to work independently of his limbs, searching through the churning mass of warring Space Marines.
Until he found the one he had been seeking.
The distinctive armour had morphed into something organic and riddled with bronze spines. The crested Sarum-pattern helm had fused with the skull beneath it, becoming a living death mask, its jaw elongated and crowded with crooked fangs. The chainaxe that had been borne into a thousand wars had merged into one arm, while the other shone as a thing of molten white brass that ended halfway up its length. At the spot where Lucius’ blade had severed it.
‘Come, cousin!’ Lucius levelled the Laeran Blade at the bestial thing that shared the Red Centurion’s flesh. ‘We have business to finish, you and I!’
The sensations of the battle surrounding them withdrew, as Lucius’ focus narrowed to the single foe standing before him. The other combatants drew back, and they became an island in a sea of battle. Recognition finally sparked within the bleeding eyes sunk into the Red Centurion’s skull. A crippling roar ripped from its throat in two voices, one real, one unreal. They were twinned for a single purpose, to destroy Lucius and claim his skull for Khorne.
The two warriors charged at the same moment. The stimulants of Fabius Bile stinging Lucius’ blood pushed already superhuman speed and reflexes into a plane beyond anything he had ever brought to bear. The Laeran Blade sang in his hand as he slashed it down.
The Red Centurion punched up with his chainaxe arm. The weapons collided, energised steel straining against screaming teeth in a shower of blood and sparks. The power of the blow sent Lucius staggering back.
The instant they had touched, the full unbridled rage of the daemon within the World Eater breached Lucius’ mind. His senses were plunged into a depthless ocean of hate. His vision swam, his balance needled by vertigo.
Lucius barely swayed aside from a blistering slash of the twin chainblades as the Red Centurion pressed the attack. He whipped his lash towards the World Eater’s helm. The berserker caught the barbed tendrils on his arm of molten brass. Lucius screamed as the whip wrapped around the burning limb, the flail blackening and popping as the cords of muscle seared.
The Red Centurion wrenched Lucius forwards, simultaneously swinging down with an overhand slash from his axe. Lucius leaned into the pull, at the last second catching the axe upon his shoulder guard. The teeth blitzed into the armour, spraying blood and chips of ensorcelled ceramite. Lucius roared, and stabbed up, driving a thrust of the Laeran Blade through the World Eater’s throat. Black blood like boiling oil sprayed from beneath the Red Centurion’s jaw. Lucius tore himself free, and spun in a whirlwind slash that nearly split the possessed legionary in two at the collar.
Lucius stumbled back, hissing breath between his teeth as he watched the Red Centurion fall to his knees. The legionary’s head and neck flopped in a rip of tearing cartilage and a gushing flood of gore. The berserker fell back on his haunches, limbs slack, and died.
The victory should have been a soothing balm to Lucius. Another conquest, and the final resolution of a kill he had once been denied. But instead it rankled him. It seemed too quick, too anticlimactic.
Too easy.
His unease bloomed as his conviction was proved right. The Red Centurion’s body began to glow. Heat radiated from it in bracing waves. The ragged gash beneath the World Eater’s head shivered as teeth the length of swords punched through in the horrific birth of a snapping maw.
Lucius stepped back, bringing his sword up as a dread lord of the immaterium used the corpse of the Red Centurion to enter reality.
IV.VI
The very avatar of bloodshed took form before Lucius’ eyes. It was war incarnate, a titan of murder and rage. The entire spiked bulk of the Red Centurion’s corpse had snapped and rearranged just to form the horned abomination of its head. Limbs the size of legionary bodies that ended in bleeding talons connected to a rippling barrel chest sheathed in brass scales, set above a pair of crouching back-jointed legs. The leathery veils of wings sprouted from its back. Its flesh was white, the blinding phosphor glare of molten brass, licked by flames of the deepest tourmaline red.
It was a Bloodthirster. A grand daemon, general in the dread legions of Khorne.
Lucius flung himself to the side as it roared out a lance of screaming flame. The stone it touched melted into a stripe of fizzing slag. Legionaries on both sides screamed as it immolated them in living fire.
Every strike of its black talons rent the substance of the material universe. Its blows birthed holes in reality, crackling tunnels leading into the madness of the Sea of So
uls. Any beings they struck were obliterated, hauled into the warp by billions of grasping hands.
The daemon’s power forced Lucius onto the defensive almost immediately. The best he could accomplish was to deflect its blows, preventing them from tearing him in half and casting the severed hunks into the warp. The sheer weight of the blows robbed Lucius of any thoughts of riposting, forcing him to commit all of his strength into every redirection.
The Bloodthirster did not speak. Its tongue was not one to utter the language of mortal words. But Lucius heard its voice in every parried strike, every barely dodged sweep of its scything claws. It rang in Lucius’ head, not words, but images and sensations that approximated the greater daemon’s enraged intelligence.
Death. Hate. Fire. It spoke through its violence. Die. Die. Die!
The Rypax charged the greater daemon as one. They leapt into the air, a chevron of violet ceramite soaring on wings of fire with Vispyrtilo at their tip. Seeing them, the Bloodthirster turned, squaring its scalding bulk up with the Raptors.
Vispyrtilo readied his spear. He drew it back, to hurl into the throat of the beast.
The Bloodthirster slashed through the air. Its talons tore a hole in reality.
A gaping maw into the depths of the warp opened in the face of the last Eagle King. The Rypax blasted forwards. They were moving too fast to change their course.
The Raptors slipped through the inside of the etheric wound. It swallowed them. Vispyrtilo saw the danger at the last instant. He twisted in mid-air, swinging his lightning claw around the lip of the gash in reality as though it were the edge of a precipice. The wound connecting to the ether began to shiver and collapse. With a thunderclap, the portal snapped closed behind the Rypax, dissipating into a cloud of ice crystals. A sliver of metal glittered in the air as the tip of the Raptor chieftain’s talon clattered to the deck, coated in dissipated electricity and hoarfrost.
The loss was a cold blade in Lucius’ gut. The Rypax had been at his side since Skalathrax. They were irreplaceable. But they had bought him the precious seconds he needed to activate his stimm rack. He made ready to inject himself with the last compound. It was use it, or fall.
Lucius remembered the Primogenitor’s words:
‘It is bylestim. The dust of an extinct and forgotten eldar craftworld, laced into the blood of the things you insist on calling daemon. There has not been a single test of its component elements that did not result in the death of the subject, and it has never been tested after full synthesis. It is a substance of a power even I do not fully understand. Should you survive its use, I would be quite keen to learn of its properties.’
Lucius keyed the pressure plate on his vambrace. The brass plunger sank down into the third canister of the stimm rack mounted behind his head. The first and only dose of pure bylestim ever synthesised, thin and hued the deepest green, joined with his blood in freezing sparks.
The furnace heat engulfing Lucius vanished. Frost rimed his armour, flaking and steaming away from proximity to the monster of Khorne’s blood-soaked choirs. Sensation came flooding back into his body, invigorating his flesh. More than ever he felt transcendent. He felt divine.
Lightning licked out as Lucius spun his blade in his hand. He had never cared much for defence. He preferred to attack.
Lucius flowed around the daemon’s talons, a blur of quicksilver grace. He had never felt faster, sharper, more in control. The battlefield revolved around him, waiting to be remade as he saw fit. He spun behind the claws of the Bloodthirster, inside of its guard, and struck.
The Laeran Blade flared as it sheared one of the beast’s horns from its head. Lucius beamed. Victory flared in his breast. He made ready to strike again, before a fist of ice closed over his heart.
Lucius staggered to one knee. He fought to stand, to move, but his body refused to obey his commands. He felt it, more than he ever had before, uncoiling from inside the deepest part of him. It was ice, and shadow. It had been so patient. It had waited for so long, just beneath the surface, growing stronger. Bolder. Lucius felt it drink his synapses, leeching the bylestim from his blood, using the warpborne essence of it to take control. Taking, taking. It wrested hold of his muscles, drawing them into cramping, locked knots around his bones.
Paralysis gripped Lucius, cementing him in place. His world darkened beneath a monstrous shadow as the Bloodthirster’s pounding tread brought it over him. Blood-pinked foam flecked from the Eternal’s lips as he heard the voice laughing behind his eyes.
Yes, it cooed. Die, Lucius. Die and come to us.
There was a blinding flash. The Bloodthirster recoiled from over Lucius, bellowing in pain and anger as it was assailed by a jagged net of silver lightning. The Composer stepped forwards, bent double as he emptied his power and channelled it through the tip of his staff to cast his attack.
‘Whenever,’ the sorcerer hissed. ‘Whenever you have a spare moment, Lucius.’
The Bloodthirster straightened. It leaned into the surging lightning and roared. The tip of the Composer’s staff exploded, hurling him back to smash against the far wall in a twisted heap of smoking armour.
Lucius pushed himself to his knees, feeling ligaments snap from that small movement alone. The Bloodthirster turned its blistering gaze back down upon him. Agony ripped at the Eternal’s soul as he felt the screams building and building in power. Lucius readied himself, feeling the wrath of his killers become a physical force breaking open his skull. He bore the pain, preparing for the moment, exceedingly rare due to the threat it courted, where he would use their unceasing siege to his advantage.
‘You will not use me,’ Lucius snarled. ‘It is I who use you!’
Lucius relented, relaxing the crushing hold his will held over his bound killers for a fraction of a second. Every wailing maw that strained against his cracking armour shrieked, releasing their pent up malevolence in a deafening crescendo. The Bloodthirster staggered back as if struck by a thunder hammer.
With every remaining ounce of energy still in his body, Lucius leapt forwards into the air. His arm swung. The Laeran Blade flashed.
Lucius fell on his shoulder as his leap carried him over and behind the greater daemon. He rolled and spun about in an exhausted crouch. He brought up his blade to try to deflect the desolation of the Bloodthirster’s reply. It was a blow that never came.
The daemon turned to Lucius in heavy, lumbering steps that rattled the stone floor. Its flesh of white liquid metal hazed the air around it. With a sound like a tolling bell, it fell to one knee. The snarling horned knot of its head shuddered, glaring down at Lucius, and tumbled free of its shoulders.
Lucius sprang back as the decapitated Bloodthirster pitched forwards, smashing down and ploughing a fizzing crater into the stone. A gurgling gasp of furnace breath burst from the stump of its neck. The daemons and World Eaters balked at the noise as though it were a clarion call, as they witnessed the fall of their champion.
Many of the horde stood their ground and fought. They refused to be cowed, and went to their oblivion taking many of Lucius’ warriors with them. But most, and nearly all of the daemons, clawed open rifts in the freezing air and retreated back into the madness of the Great Eye’s deepest tides.
Lucius felt a pressure in his head. Unlike the dozens of others that crowded behind his eyes, this presence was welcome.
‘It is gone, isn’t it?’
It is, master,+ sent Clarion. +The daemon ship has vanished. What did you do?+
Lucius gritted his blood-pinked teeth as he rose to stand, against the stinging protest of tearing muscles and savaged armour plate. He looked at the army of Emperor’s Children upon the killing ground the pavilion had become. His army.
For the first time in a long time, Lucius’ smile was genuine as he whispered to the daemon in his head.
‘I won.’
Lucius stood triumphantly upon the Bloo
dthirster’s still burning shoulders. While his ego basked, the greater part of him sagged. The last battles had left their mark on him, and even he was not impervious to weariness. A reluctant dread clouded his victory, as he saw there were no longer any enemy alive. No more duels to fight.
Nothing more to distract his mind.
The bylestim withdrew like a physical blow. Lucius struggled to mask it as it stole the breath from his lungs. It left him feeling hollowed out, his core knotted with sickness. Surviving Traitor Space Marines congregated in a semicircle around him, the sigils and names upon their war-plate scoured by flame and drowned beneath immaterial blood. Lucius held the daemon’s head high before his assembled warriors, and with an effort he fought not to show, threw it to the ground.
‘The Cohors Nasicae is dead,’ he proclaimed, speaking from behind his façade with a strength he did not feel. ‘The lords you pledged your fealty to, the oaths you once swore, they are done. Here and now, you stand as my Faultless. Children of the False Emperor, children of Fulgrim, children of the Youngest God. And when we are standing in the ashes of all who would stand against us, it will be us who shall decide what perfection is.’
A booming cheer ripped up from the throats of the Space Marines. Fists punched the air and clashed against breastplates. Lucius’ name reverberated from the charred walls of the concourse. His mind latched on to the praise, his enthusiasm rising with theirs.
‘Agony!’ Lucius roared. ‘Ecstasy! More! Sensation will be ours again, and I will deliver it to you. That is our crusade. That is the purpose our blades will cut to, and the blood of our enemies will spill for. We will defeat the deadness of our flesh, if we must take our victory from the Phoenician, from the very grip of the gods themselves, we will do it!’
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 27