Lucius: The Faultless Blade

by Ian St. Martin

  ‘Agony!’ the Faultless thundered.

  ‘Ecstasy!’

  ‘More!’

  Lucius raised his sword to join his voice with that of his army. The Bloodthirster was quickly immolating away to nothing beneath his boots. Lucius shifted, almost stumbling as his knees locked. He fought to hold back the thing wrestling beneath his flesh. He could not hear the cheers of the Faultless before him, only the screams of imprisoned killers formed into a blade wielded by a single voice.

  ‘Agony!’

  ‘Ecstasy!’

  …more.

  Epilogue

  The Diadem’s bridge thrummed, the rumble of its plasma heart and the soft murmurs of its crew the closest the command deck ever came to true silence. Lucius had stood upon the bridge for hours, staring into the oculus at the coiling ruinscape of the Eye, watching the ghostly dance of hololiths as they parsed the space around the strike cruiser for threats that were inevitable to find them.

  Lucius drank in the silence for one more beat of his hearts, before he broke it.

  ‘Why do you remain?’ he asked, looking to the massive seat at the centre of the command dais beside him. ‘Why come back for me?’

  Clarion stood upon the ornate seat of her command throne, her child’s body still not even reaching his gorget.

  ‘Because of you,’ she replied, with the smile that always reached her golden eyes. ‘You, Lucius. You fall, you rise, you continue on, refusing to believe your failures until once more they strike you down. You return, slowly diminishing, but unwilling to stop, unwilling to succumb. You are your race, Lucius. You are humanity, and as with the rest of your kind, I delight in your dance, all the way to its end.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Lucius asked, without a trace of the baiting malice that usually soaked his words. ‘The child whose flesh you stole, her spirit, does it still exist?’

  Clarion’s smile flattened into an introspective line of violet. ‘No,’ she answered softly as her eyes turned back to the oculus. ‘She has been silent for a very long time.’

  ‘There is a holiness,’ said the Composer, ‘to our inhumanity.’

  The cancerous constellations of the Eye of Terror swirled about the dome of the Composer’s sanctum. The sorcerer had begged Lucius for an audience. The Eternal chafed at the request. He knew the witch had sensed the change in him.

  ‘Our creation marked the death of one world, and the beginning of another. Even in the cinders of Unification, even before we saw our father, we so resembled our patron. And like the primitive rites of old, children were sacrificed to give birth to the Perfect Legion. Like the title Fulgrim would eventually adopt, every brother of the Third Legion was a phoenix, older than the interstellar kingdom we would fight to create, and now bleed to destroy.

  ‘A single warrior of the Legiones Astartes can destroy a city. With time, a world. An entire Legion can destroy star systems. A united Legion bent to a single pursuit, one goal in every mind, every heart, the end sought in every deed, is a terrifying thing. What single purpose can drive such a force?’

  Lucius looked at the sorcerer. ‘Perfection.’

  The Composer nodded. He stroked a flask hanging from his belt, where the bound essence of what had once been a tortured slave was held. ‘But what happens when you reach perfection? The achievement of what is so widely considered impossible. What happens when you get there, and discover that perfection is not the end? When you learn that perfection is only the turning of a key, a signal sent to a higher place that you are worthy of being told the truth of the universe?

  ‘Enlightenment is not found outside of you. Real truth is inside of you, and always has been. To find it, you must cut away everything, lower and deeper until you reach the bottom. Once there is nothing left, all that remains is the truth. That is what is happening to you, Eternal. You are on the cusp of discovering the real truth.’

  ‘I remember,’ Cesare said quietly. ‘I remember that we used to love their screams, what felt like a lifetime ago.’

  The Apothecary stood beside Lucius on a gantry, looking down at the mass of slaves taken by the Cohors Nasicae in their last raid, the pillaging of an industrial asteroid bastion of the Iron Warriors. ‘Now I barely hear them, and the other desperate noises they make that sometimes come close to sounding like words.’

  The Apothecary looked down at the terrified humans. ‘They aren’t people, they never were. All they are is meat and tubes, and the basis of what we will need to feel again.’

  Lucius joined him looking down from the catwalk. ‘And there is never enough.’

  Is this what they had become? What he had become? Reavers, thieves, monsters. Unable or unwilling to see anything in front of them, incapable of doing anything but stripping the pain out of these animals that looked like him, just so he could feel for a while. The brevity of his sensations was only exceeded by the depths of depravity to which he sank to achieve them. The horror he inflicted for a moment’s glimpse of what he had been before.

  ‘We used to hold this galaxy in our hands,’ said Cesare, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘What are we now?’

  The recollections blended together, years ago against hours ago, warping as they collided. The mirrored walls of Lucius’ sanctum reasserted themselves, his scarred visage reflecting back at him. Lucius shook his head, trying in vain to clear it. It was disorienting, experiencing memories that seemed as though they belonged to other souls, when he knew that they were his own. To be a voyeur of his own past, looking in from the periphery at something he could no longer touch.

  But I can.

  The pressure in Lucius’ head hardened to a lancing blade of pain. It was an agony unique as a heartbeat. The exact same pain he had felt in the eldar archon’s cell, beneath the arenas of Commorragh.

  ‘What are you?’ Lucius asked. He looked down from the mirrored wall at his gauntlet, feeling the ghost of a tremor ripple over the pallid flesh of his hand beneath the ceramite shell.

  You should already know that.

  The mirror exploded, coming apart in a reflective burst around Lucius’ fist. Shards of glittering silver rained over him as they cascaded to the ground, snagging and lacerating his flesh. He heard nothing, but felt the presence’s laughter itching in his thoughts.

  I am your desire. I am that which you seek, what you claim to be but will never achieve. The goal towards which you have cast yourself, flesh and blood and spirit all. I am the achievement you can never attain, and the ideal you shall never be. The aim you shall never realise, but I am.

  Lucius looked down, seeing his own grinning face staring up from every sliver of shattered glass.

  I am Perfection.

  About the Author

  Ian St. Martin has written the Warhammer 40,000 novel Deathwatch and the short stories ‘City of Ruin’ and ‘In Wolves’ Clothing’ for Black Library. He lives and works in Washington DC, the US, caring for his cat and reading anything within reach.

  An extract from Fabius Bile: Primogenitor.

  Oleander Koh strode across the dead city, humming softly to himself.

  The dry wind scraped across his garishly painted power armour, and he hunched forward, leaning into the teeth of the gale. He relished the way it flayed his exposed skin. He licked at the blood that dripped down his face, savouring the spice of it.

  Oleander’s demeanour was at once baroque and barbaric. It was fitting, given that he had left a trail of fire and corpses stretching across centuries. His power armour was the colour of a newly made bruise, and decorated with both obscene imagery and archaic medicae equipment. Animal skins flapped from the rims of his shoulder-plates, and a helmet crested with a ragged mane of silk strips dangled from his equipment belt, amongst the stasis-vials and extra clips of ammunition for the bolt pistol holstered opposite the helmet. Besides the pistol, his only weapon was a long, curved sword. The sword was Tuonela-made, forged
in the secret smithy of the mortuary cults, and its golden pommel was wrought in the shape of a death’s head. Oleander was not its first owner, nor, he suspected, would he be its last.

  Unlike the weapon, he had been forged on Terra. As Apothecary Oleander, he had marched beneath the banners of the Phoenician, fighting first in the Emperor’s name and then in the Warmaster’s. He had tasted the fruits of war, and found his purpose in the field-laboratories of the being he’d come to call master. The being he had returned to this world to see, though he risked death, or worse, for daring to do so.

  He had been forced to land the gunship he’d borrowed some distance away, on the outskirts of the city. It sat hidden now among the shattered husks of hundreds of other craft, its servitor crew waiting for his signal. There was no telling what sort of defences had been erected in his absence. And while he’d sent a coded vox transmission ahead, asking for permission to land, he didn’t feel like taking the risk of being blown out of the sky by someone with an itchy trigger-finger. The few occupants of this place valued their privacy to an almost lunatic degree. But perhaps that was only natural, given their proclivities.

  His ceramite-encased fingers tapped out a tuneless rhythm on the sword’s pommel as he walked and hummed. The wind screamed as it washed over him. And not just the wind. The whole planet reverberated with the death-scream of its once-proud population. Their delicate bones carpeted the ground, fused and melted together, though not from a natural heat. If he listened, he could pick out individual strands from the cacophony, like notes from a song. It was as if they were singing just for him. Welcoming him home.

  The remains of the city – their city – rose wild around him, a jungle of living bone and wildly growing hummocks of rough psychoplastic flesh. The city might have been beautiful once, but it was gorgeous now. Silent, alien faces clumped on wraithbone walls like pulsing fungi, and living shadows stretched across the streets. Eerie radiances glistened in out-of-the-way places and tittering, phosphorescent shapes skulked in the broken buildings. A verdant madness, living and yet dead. A microcosm of Urum, as a whole.

  Urum the Dead-Alive. Crone world, some called it. Urum was not its original name. But it was what the scavengers of the archaeo­markets called it, and it was as good a name as any. For Oleander Koh, it had once simply been ‘home’.

  Sometimes it was hard to remember why he’d left in the first place. At other times, it was all too easy. Idly, he reached up to touch the strand of delicate glass philtres hanging from around his thick neck. He stopped. The wind had slackened, as if in anticipation. Oleander grunted and turned. Something was coming. ‘Finally,’ he said.

  Gleaming shapes streaked towards him through the ruins. They shone like metal in the sunlight, but nothing made of metal could move so smoothly or so fast. At least nothing he’d ever had the misfortune to meet. They’d been stalking him for a few hours now. Perhaps they’d grown bored with the game. Or maybe he was closer to his goal than he’d thought. The city changed year by year, either growing or decaying. He wasn’t sure which. Perhaps both.

  The sentry-beasts were low, lean things. He thought of wolves, though they weren’t anything like that. More akin to the sauroids that inhabited some feral worlds, albeit with feathers of liquid metal rather than scales, and tapering beak-like jaws. They made no noise, save the scraping of bladed limbs across the ground. They split up, and vanished into the shadows of the ruins. Even with his transhuman senses, Oleander was hard-pressed to keep track of them. He sank into a combat stance, fingers resting against the sword’s hilt, and waited. The moment stretched, seconds ticking by. The wind picked up, and his head resounded with the screams of the dead.

  He sang along with them for a moment, his voice rising and falling with the wind. It was an old song, older even than Urum. He’d learned it on Laeran, from an addled poet named Castigne. ‘Strange is the night where black stars rise, and strange moons circle through ebon skies... songs that the Hyades shall sing...’

  Prompted by instinct, Oleander spun, his sword springing into his hand as if of its own volition. He cut the first of the beasts in two, spilling its steaming guts on the heaving ground. It shrieked and kicked at the air, refusing to die. He stamped on its skull until it lay still. Still singing, he turned. The second had gone for the high ground. He caught a glimpse of it as it prowled above him, stalking through the canopy of bone and meat. He could hear its jagged limbs clicking as it moved. His hand dropped to his pistol.

  Something scraped behind him. ‘Clever,’ he murmured. He drew the bolt pistol and whirled, firing. A shimmering body lurched forward and collapsed. Oleander twirled his sword and thrust it backwards, to meet the second beast as it leapt from its perch. Claws scrabbled at his power armour, and curved jaws snapped mindlessly. Its eyes were targeting sensors, sweeping his face for weakness. Oleander stepped back and slammed the point of his sword into one of the twisted trees, dislodging the dying animal.

  He prodded the twitching creature with his weapon. It was not a natural thing, with its gleaming feathers and sensor nodes jutting from its flesh like spines. But then, this was not a natural world. The sentry-beast had been vat-grown, built from base acids, stretched and carved into useful shape. Idly, he lifted the blade and sampled the acrid gore that stained it. ‘Piquant,’ he said. ‘With just a hint of the real thing. Your best work yet, master.’

  Oleander smiled as he said it. He hadn’t used that word in a long time. Not since he’d last been here. Before Urum’s master, and his, had exiled him for his crimes. Oleander shied away from the thought. Reflecting on those last days was like probing an infected wound, and his memories were tender to the touch. There was no pleasure to be had there, only pain. Some adherents of Slaanesh claimed that those things were ever one and the same, but Oleander knew better.

  He kicked the still-twitching body and turned away. Something rattled nearby. The sentry-beasts made no noise, save for that peculiar clicking of their silvery carapace. More of them burst out of the unnatural undergrowth and converged on him. Foolish, to think there were only three. Excess was a virtue here, as everywhere. ‘Well, he who hesitates is lost,’ he said, lunging to meet them. There were ten, at least, though they were moving so swiftly it was hard to keep count.

  Beak-like protuberances fastened on his armour as he waded through them. Smooth talon-like appendages scraped paint from the ceramite, and whip-like tails thudded against his legs and chest. They were trying to knock him down. He brought his sword down and split one of the quicksilver shapes in half. Acidic ichor spewed upwards. He fired his bolt pistol, the explosive rounds punching fist-sized holes in his attackers.

  All at once, the attack ceased. The surviving sentry-beasts scattered, as swiftly as they had come. Oleander waited, scanning his surroundings. He’d killed three. Someone had called the others off. He thought he knew who. He heard the harsh rasp of breath in humanoid lungs, and smelled the rancid stink of chem-born flesh.

  Oleander straightened and sheathed his sword without cleaning it. ‘What are you waiting for, children?’ He held up his bolt pistol and made a show of holstering it. ‘I won’t hurt you, if you’re kind.’ He spread his arms, holding them away from his weapons.

  Unnatural shapes, less streamlined than the sentry-beasts, lurched into view. They moved silently, despite the peculiarity of their limbs. They wore the ragged remnants of old uniforms. Some were clad in ill-fitting and piecemeal combat armour. Most carried a variety of firearms in their twisted paws – stubbers, autoguns, lasguns and even a black-powder jezzail. The rest held rust-rimmed blades of varying shapes and sizes.

  The only commonality among them was the extent of the malformation that afflicted them. Twisted horns of calcified bone pierced brows and cheeks, or emerged from weeping eye sockets. Iridescent flesh stretched between patches of rank fur or blistered scale. Some were missing limbs, others had too many.

  They had been men, once. Now they were
nothing but meat. Dull, animal eyes studied him from all sides. There were more of them than there might once have been, which was something of a surprise. Life was hard for such crippled by-blows, especially here, and death the only certainty. ‘Aren’t you handsome fellows,’ Oleander said. ‘I expect you’re the welcoming party. Well then, lead on, children, lead on. The day wears on, the shadows lengthen and strange moons circle through the skies. And we have far to go.’

  One of the creatures, a goatish thing wearing a peaked officer’s cap, barked what might have been an order. The pack shuffled forward warily, closing ranks about Oleander. It was no honour guard, but it would do. Oleander allowed the mutants to escort him deeper into the city. While he knew the way perfectly well, he saw no reason to antagonise them.

  Their ranks swelled and thinned at seemingly random intervals as the journey progressed. Knots of muttering brutes vanished into the shadows, only to be replaced by others. Oleander studied the crude heraldry of the newcomers with some interest. When he’d last been here, they had barely known what clothes were. Now they had devised primitive insignia of rank, and split into distinct groups – or perhaps tribes. Perhaps the changeovers were due to territorial differences.

  Whatever their loyalties, they were afraid of him. Oleander relished the thought. It was good to be feared. There was nothing quite like it. The beasts who surrounded him now were more human-looking. They were clad in purple-stained rags and armour marked with what might have been an unsophisticated rendition of the old winged claw insignia of the Emperor’s Children. It amused him. They likely had more in common with the men they aped than they could conceive. Both were far removed from their creator’s intended ideal.