Lucius: The Faultless Blade Read online

  Backlist

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

  Space Marine Battles

  WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Prologue

  Part I

  I.I

  I.II

  I.III

  I.IV

  I.V

  I.VI

  I.VII

  I.VIII

  I.IX

  I.X

  I.XI

  Part II

  II.I

  II.II

  II.III

  II.IV

  II.V

  II.VI

  II.VII

  II.VIII

  II.IX

  Part III

  III.I

  III.II

  III.III

  III.IV

  III.V

  III.VI

  III.VII

  III.VIII

  Part IV

  IV.I

  IV.II

  IV.III

  IV.IV

  IV.V

  IV.VI

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Fabius Bile: Primogenitor’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  ‘The path towards damnation is not determined in the end sum of a life. The blackening of one’s soul is measured by degrees, from heartbeat to heartbeat. Perdition is not born in the din and fires of war, but rather within the silence of a solitary mind.’

  Fragment recovered from Pre-Unification Europan Opus,

  attribution unknown

  Prologue

  It was born in lust and unthinkable atrocity. Coalesced from the anguish and joy of a billion souls across a billion lifetimes, it swam in the afterbirth of a new god, shuddering from the screaming reverberations that echoed without end from the wound its arrival had torn in the fabric of the universe.

  From deep within this realm that joined real and unreal, it slipped out from the Sea of Souls, and onto the land of souls. It caressed the ­material void with questing tendrils. It was a whisper, a mellifluous zephyr that had tempted the ambition of kings and twisted entire worlds into writhing monuments of flesh, shrines for the master of pain and pleasure who was the Youngest God. It was honey and silver and the laughter and cries of aeons of sentient life. It was all of these things, and more.

  It watched the day and night pass over the empires of man, rising and falling, swelling and starving. It watched as they laid claim to the stars, and first drank from the cup offered by the realm of the gods. It watched as those who drank turned upon those who would not, and set their galaxy afire. Champions rose, and as a shining son was born anew within the cradle of the Dark Prince, it found the object of its desire.

  It watched as his hearts were pierced by midnight blades, and fate flew to pull him into the dark. A million denizens of oblivion waited across the veil, howling and slavering for the feast of his soulfire as the last of his life ebbed away. It moved closer, and in an instant it was there, looming over his stricken form, watching the lifeblood drain from his veins to grow cold and still. So long had it waited for this moment.

  The one born of lust and atrocity reached down, and smiled.

  Part I

  NUMB

  I.I

  The Pit Cur cut a rattling dive through the maelstrom. She was an ugly craft, the core of a boxy mass conveyor swollen into a hulking monstrosity of oversized weapons batteries and crudely stacked armour plates wrapped around a bulbous cluster of warp engines. She bore none of the avian or oceanic grace that had inspired so many shipwrights as they had created the spacefaring vessels of mankind.

  Her utilitarian form suited the ones who now called her solemn decks of adamantium and cold iron home. In the time since the ship’s capture by her current masters, the Pit Cur had been rendered into an effigy, her armour plating edged in brass and lacquered in crimson as if she had breached from an ocean of spilled blood, all in veneration to the God of War. The ship’s blackened engines burned hot, oblivious to the handful of smaller escort craft straining to keep pace with her as they clung to her flanks.

  Riotous colo
ur twisted and bloomed around the Pit Cur. Churning nebulae of half-formed hands and faces waxed and undulated, birthing clusters of light and tumbling raw matter into being and then destroying them just as quickly. Storms of incomparable scale appeared instantaneously, the feeding grounds for ancient intelligences of congealed passion who were ravenous for the chance to strip the souls from mortal flesh. Trillions of predators swam through the ­psychic syrup of accumulated sentient emotion, whispering promises and lies to any that would hear them.

  The mortal crew of the Pit Cur shuffled in fearful silence through the dark arteries of their vessel, wary to keep themselves far from the masters who roamed the upper decks. They were slaves to towering demigods, enraged beasts clad in armour of brass and blood-red, a shard of transhuman shrapnel sent spinning upon the path of its own destiny in the wake of the XII Legion’s death at Skalathrax. Their path was erratic, guided by the aggression engines ticking into their minds with a ceaseless desire for butchery. Internal strife against their own brethren was as commonplace within their savage throng as the raiding and pillaging they committed across the storms.

  Life was cheap aboard the Pit Cur, especially that of the mortals who had never seen beyond its slowly corroding halls. Theirs was a brutal existence, as unstable as the abused brains of their lords, though the ones who led their warband were not so blind as to yield all caution. For they plied the space between the real and the unreal, the realm that had been both their refuge and their prison since the failed siege of Terra. They were in the Eye of Terror, and danger lurked all around them, staring with a billion eyes both mundane and aetheric.

  In this instance, danger took a familiar form.

  The huntress slipped forth from the shimmering storms that wreathed Eyespace, sentient lightning clinging and licking at the pale lozenge of blue-and-gold light encasing her that was her Geller field. Where the Pit Cur was bulky and unsightly, a monument to uncouth wrath and aggression, the huntress was breathtaking. She was an elegant spear of platinum and bleached mauve, a cityscape of fluted towers and cathedrals sculpted into a knife’s edge. Her hull was pockmarked and blackened by ceaseless war stretching back to the killing grounds of Isstvan, yet these scars did nothing to diminish the beauty of her sublimely regal form.

  The huntress angled her bladed prow, adorned with the anguished effigy of a crucified eagle rendered in blemished gold, towards the Pit Cur, and leapt forwards on swift engines into attack range.

  Alarms and warning klaxons rang out within the Pit Cur, scratchy and blaring in disunity from a combination of poor maintenance and overuse. Crew rushed through corridors stained in scarlet emergency lighting. Threadbare boots and rag-bound feet splashed through pools of blood running without source or end from the ceiling and walls to collect in the deck grating. Serfdom under the War God’s champions had dulled the horror of those still living to serve, and they jostled and shoved past one another to reach their appointed battle stations. The pale, spindly figures of lobotomised servitors dragged themselves to the enginarium and maintenance decks, while brutish vat-grown abhumans stomped towards the weapons batteries, slathering their chemically swollen arms with chalk as they made ready to haul enormous shells into the breeches of the ship’s guns. The walls around them shivered as the Pit Cur’s engines were pushed beyond their tolerances, the hull issuing a chorus of tortured metallic groans as she twisted her superstructure to face the approaching foe.

  The escorts sailing with the Pit Cur, a pair of Idolator-class lance raiders and a single Infidel-class torpedo frigate that any reasonable commander would have decommissioned a century ago, peeled away from the larger vessel’s flanks and surged towards the huntress. Their commanders spread their meagre numbers in a wide formation, seeking to divide the invader’s fire and buy time for the Pit Cur to come about and bring her superior weapons batteries to bear.

  Void conflict was a feat of mathematics and complex calculation, a precise dance conducted from a staggering distance. Battles where the opposing commanders were ever close enough to have made visual contact with one another were occasions of extreme rarity. The huntress had arrived practically on top of the Pit Cur and her escorts, immediately triggering the wail of extreme proximity alarms and impact klaxons across the bridges and command decks of every vessel. This choice of tactics was far from unexpected, however, for those who waged the Legion wars preferred engagements of a more intimate nature than those fought by conventional navies.

  Migraine-bright spears of crackling light slashed out from the forked prows of the Idolator raiders. Smoke and bits of wreckage shook from the Infidel’s hull as it loosed a spread of torpedoes at point-blank range. Lances erupted across the huntress’ void shields in a corona of slick multicolour, while point-defence batteries along the hull of the purple-and-silver ship lit the void with streams of tracer fire. Golden ribbons of shells struck the incoming ordnance, reducing the torpedoes to small spheres of expanding fire that quickly shrank and guttered out to nothing.

  Pinpricks of light gathered along the flanks of the huntress as her own lance batteries primed. Brilliant bolts of energy linked her to the three escort vessels for an eye-blink. The void shields of the smaller warships popped like soap bubbles as the concentrated beams continued on, slicing through armour as knives carve through flesh. Internal detonations boiled over the hulls of the escorts as their warp drives overloaded, blowing them apart in eye-aching bursts of spectral-blue plasma.

  Men and women streamed into the storm from the warships’ ruptured hulls like blood spurting from lacerated flesh. Those not already dead would writhe in agony before joining those who were, either from the uncaring cold of the void, or at the hands of the Neverborn that roosted in the maelstrom’s tides. A lesson quickly learned by all of those who were banished to the Eye of Terror, both mortal and demigod alike, was that there were many fates worse than death. Those sucked out into the void did not wait long to learn the full extent of that truth.

  Their killer had not even broken her stride. The huntress sailed with the easy, natural grace of a dancer through the clouds of spinning debris, which was all that remained of the escort craft and their thousands of crew, as she bore down upon her true prey.

  Across the outer decks of the Pit Cur, mortal crew scurried out of the path of power-armoured giants clutching brutish chainaxes and glaives. Eye-lenses of crimson and dirty jade pierced the gloom from beneath the crests of their war-helms, and the waspish buzz of their active war-plate sent ripples through the blood pooled on the deck. Twitches and low growls issued from the warriors as the pain engines implanted in their brains punished calm and fed them frenzy. A low, coarse voice barked across the ship-wide vox, scratching from ­battered horns in guttural Nagrakali: ‘Gird your plate and ready your blades. Praise be to Kharnath! Praise to the War God! He has given us skulls to split and blood to spill.’

  They had been made to be angels. Even more so than the Legions who bore that epithet within their own titles, more than the entirety of the Legiones Astartes who strode across the galaxy as the conquering Imperium of Man’s Angels of Death, only one Legion understood the true totality of such an ideal. To be angelic, to truly realise the intended vision of their creation, could only be fulfilled by achieving perfection.

  Only one Legion had borne the name of the Emperor. Only one Legion had been chosen to wear the symbol of the Master of Mankind, the Palatine aquila upon their armour as their blood and iron forged His interstellar dominion. Only one Legion had ever been perfect enough to be called His Children.

  The Diadem slid through the milky squalls of prismatic warp light, her void shields flickering as the last of her prey’s escort picket rained over her as shards of twisted wreckage. She rolled aside from the fire of the Pit Cur’s macro-cannon batteries, salvoes of shells the size of hive city tenements screaming harmlessly past as the ancient strike cruiser manoeuvred with stately grace. The heavily modified mass transport ahead of her listed f
rom the recoil of her guns, unable to match the preternatural agility of the Diadem as she knifed into close range.

  Lances and smaller weapons batteries linked the space between the two vessels in storms of fire as the Diadem dipped low and under the Pit Cur. While the heliotrope strike cruiser still lit the twisted void around them with the kaleidoscopic light of her intact void shields, the Pit Cur’s layered energy fields had overloaded, and clouds of broken weapons emplacements and shattered armour hung in loose orbit around her hull. Hundreds of crew bled out into the void from deck breaches, torn into the waiting arms of the Neverborn that chose the Eye as their feeding ground.

  Slipping beneath the Pit Cur’s guns, the Diadem executed an immaculate roll, turning the anger of her lance batteries upon the mass conveyor’s sub-warp engine arrays. As her prey listed to a halt, trailing a sputtering tail of neon gases from ruptured propulsion drives melting to charred slag, the Diadem continued to roll. Splinters of dark lilac shot from her flanks before she burned her engines bright and blasted past the wounded Pit Cur. Like seeds scattered across a field, the tiny darts of boarding pods sank into the undefended belly of the conveyor and locked fast to her hull.

  The majority of the World Eaters aboard the Pit Cur, as per standard tactics when repelling voidborne boarding actions, mustered to take up positions at sites of the greatest strategic importance. The greatest numbers deployed across her corridors were tasked with guarding the enginarium, upper decks and bridge against any invader seeking to wrest control of the ship from the warriors of the XII Legion.

  The fallen angels locked within the boarding pods sought a different prize, however. The Pit Cur, a broken-down junker scarcely stitched together and barely suited for travel through Eyespace, meant nothing to them. Their eyes were locked on the true treasure aboard the heavy mass conveyer, the teeming masses packed into the blackness of its holding decks – mortals destined for lives of brutal toil or violent deaths in the gladiatorial fighting pits of the Eaters of Worlds.