Lucius: The Faultless Blade Read online

  At Clarion.

  A deeply repressed memory surfaced in her mind, sending a shiver that under any other circumstance would not have been entirely unpleasant down the spine of Clarion’s flesh form. The inert creatures watched her, as they had watched her for every moment since she had come aboard the Diadem. She suddenly felt the ragged breath of the indistinct figure towering at her side more acutely than usual. Eyes – or something like them – that never left her back. With a tap at her runeboard, Clarion sent the oculus grinding back to its ordinary alignment.

  ‘Auspex,’ said the child. An aging woman in a faded Legion uniform of cream and mauve piping stepped towards the dais.

  ‘My mistress?’

  ‘Sweep the area around us, full spectrum.’ Clarion’s golden eyes narrowed. ‘Find me something to kill.’

  Lucius lurched down the corridors of the Diadem. He kneaded the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying for just a moment to lose himself in the clashing harmonics screaming from the vox-horns lining the walls. Their blaring shrieks rushed over his armour like storm wind, hard enough to rattle the teeth in his jaws, but they were a distant background noise to the surging roar boiling behind his eyes.

  The captive souls bound into Lucius’ armour were growing louder. The helpless screams and venomous curses of his killers were becoming clearer, sharper, as though they were coming from right behind him. Since he had left the corridor at the prow of the ship after killing Krysithius they had assailed him with rising intensity, louder than they ever had before.

  ‘Shut up,’ he snarled, shoulders rising and falling in a breathless pain he could not savour. He pressed his fingertips into the wall, punching indents into the steel with his juddering claws. His temples throbbed with heat, his skull feeling primed to swell with their jeering curses until it burst.

  ‘Shut up!’ Lucius thundered a fist into the wall, sinking halfway up his vambrace into its surface. The metal squealed and screamed as it tore, lost in the noise of the ship and the lamentations of his mind.

  ‘Brother?’

  Lucius turned his head, watching as Cesare appeared from around a corridor junction. The pearlescent armour of the Apothecary gleamed in the disorienting dance of the stablights, giving it the impression of a mirage as he approached.

  ‘Are you unwell?’

  Lucius wrenched his arm free, dropping the shards of metal clutched in his fist to rattle against the deck plating. ‘It is nothing. My armour, a slight malfunction.’

  Cesare’s head tilted. ‘You have had no need of the artificers aboard this ship in all the centuries that we have dwelt upon it.’ His voice could not mask the coldness of his tone, even through the lion’s purr of his helm’s vox-speakers. ‘Another gift from the warp’s generous benefactors.’

  ‘And yet here I stand, still awaiting the moment they favour me with the gift of patience,’ Lucius snarled as he pressed his fists to his eyes. ‘What do you want, Cesare?’

  Lucius’ brother answered him by holding up a canister of clear crystal. A ruined lump of shredded meat hung in a wash of sloshing amniotic fluid, bleeding into its greenish tint and trailing gossamer tendrils of silvery flesh and fat.

  ‘Krysithius’ gene-seed,’ said Cesare, his admonishment undisguised. ‘Or what is left of it. While I understand the necessity to make examples for the others from time to time to maintain order, choosing to deconstruct them to the point where harvesting intact progenoids is rendered impossible only serves to weaken us even further than we already are.’

  Hissing out a breath, Lucius withdrew his hands from his face to leer at the Apothecary. ‘I speak of a distinct lack of patience, and this is the time you choose for lectures?’ The Eternal snorted derisively. ‘It was no loss.’

  ‘He was foremost of the Palatine Blades,’ Cesare pressed. ‘His sword drew the blood of the Throneworld, and it proved the difference in a hundred battles since we were exiled to rot away here in the dark.’

  ‘And if his legacy were truly that of the Legion’s legend,’ Lucius smiled, ‘then he would not have lost.’

  ‘His legacy is of manifestly no interest to me,’ said Cesare. ‘The continued survival of our bloodline is.’

  In an instant Lucius had his fingers wrapped around Cesare’s ­gorget. Tiny squeals sang as his crystal claw tips gouged the ceramite.

  ‘There is no bloodline to save, Cesare,’ Lucius hissed. ‘That time is over, and long over. There is no past, there is no future, there is only now, and for eternity. So cease this maudlin obsession with a past that our time here has rendered meaningless.’

  Lucius grabbed the side of Cesare’s helm with his free hand, dragging his masked face towards his own until they were just shy of touching. ‘The past cannot be undone, my sweet brother. It cannot be changed or altered, only forgotten. But right now?’ Lunacy stained the Eternal’s lips in a predatory grin. ‘Oh, the now can be made into whatever we choose, and so can we. Now, my brother, look now.’

  A shuddering tremor passed over Lucius, and he released the Apothecary. The surgical blades in Cesare’s narthecium slotted back into their ports in the gauntlet as he lowered his arm. Lucius turned away and paused for a moment, tics tugging randomly at his scarred features, before he looked back at Cesare. ‘How goes your work?’

  The Apothecary swallowed, repressing the sting of combat stimulants his armour had injected into him in response to his adrenaline spike. ‘The compound’s elements are being gathered according to my schedule,’ he replied. ‘Since so many of the warband did not return from the surface, barring any unforeseen complications I should be able to synthesise enough ambrosia for close to all who do remain.’

  Cesare sneered behind his helmet. Ambrosia. The bastardisation of his feat of alchemical artistry by coating it in the nonsense of mythological antiquity spiked his already bitter disposition. Lucius did not notice it in his voice, barely listening.

  ‘And the Rypax? What of Vispyrtilo?’

  Cesare sighed, conceding to another sporadic change of subject. ‘He endures. The void inflicted a shockingly minor degree of trauma to him as he stands, though what effects may manifest from his deluded little trek in the long term, physical or psychological, we will have to wait to discover.’

  Lucius grunted. ‘He reassumed his mantle?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Cesare. ‘The Night Lord challenged him, apparently vowing to take the crown from his face.’ A flicker of gallows amusement tinged the Apothecary’s words. ‘For the sake of the warband it did not end in one more brother’s death, though it did require nine hours of suturing him back together in the apothecarion to the tune of insistent Nostraman aspersions against the honour of my birth mother to keep that particular eventuality from coming to pass.’

  Lucius gave another noncommittal grunt. His face was slack and unfocused, as if his mind were far from where his body stood, lost to the melody of a song that only he could hear. The cogitating mechanics of Cesare’s gauntlet began to tick and thrum around his fist.

  After several seconds, Lucius seemed to reassert enough of his focus to return to the present moment. He pointed to the canister in Cesare’s hand. ‘If that is useless to you, send it to the Rypax as my gift to them.’ He snorted. ‘Perhaps they would care to devour it and gain our late brother’s courage.’

  ‘Courage,’ murmured Cesare. ‘Taken from a warrior who died ­choking on his own blood.’

  ‘No, my brother,’ said Lucius as his indulgent, lunatic smile returned to his lips again. ‘As someone who was killed by the Youngest God.’

  The Eternal turned his back on Cesare, walking away down the corridor. ‘Now leave me be, Apothecary. Your incessant melancholy throws my humours out of balance.’

  Cesare watched Lucius disappear into the stark bands of coloured light and rippling waves of sound. He glanced down, reading the results of his narthecium’s passive scans as they spilled ove
r the datascreen of the gauntlet in screeds of sharp green runes. He released another sigh, his eyes turning back to the now empty corridor.

  ‘Out of balance, indeed.’

  Part II

  CAGED

  II.I

  Weeks passed, or perhaps months. The Sea of Souls was ever anathema to the linear passage of time, and the Eye was curdled with enough of its taint to render the same effect upon those who dwelt within its twisted depths.

  With no commanding interference from any of the legionaries to fetter her, Clarion was free to indulge in the hunt. She guided Diadem on a prowl through Eyespace like a coiled serpent, aching to strike. She raided and reaved, bloodying her claws as she sacked pirate bastions and the backwater fiefdoms of renegades and lesser traitors.

  Though she was the match of any two ships of her own class and nearly any single vessel in the Eye beyond the capital ships of the Despoiler’s dread fleets, the warship of the Cohors Nasicae held back from any engagement that would have pit her against the blades of another of the fallen Nine Legions. The listless demigods living within her veins only departed from the upper decks of the strike cruiser to board and loot the husks of Clarion’s prey, stripping anything of value clean from their steel bones like carrion feeders. Slaves and salvage were taken, added to the Diadem’s holds with whatever meagre flesh and raw material could be scavenged. Whilst all of this transpired, the leader of the warband was nowhere to be found.

  Lucius had withdrawn from the rest of the Cohors Nasicae, sequestering himself within his chambers. No one had been granted entry for an audience with the Eternal, but for new tithes of slaves taken in the raids. Others claimed to see him roaming aimlessly through the abandoned expanses of the Diadem’s lower decks, grating the icy air with conspiratorial whispers. Rumours ran rife throughout the warband, speculating upon the state of their commander.

  Even in a host containing some of the most deviant traitors, murderers and psychopaths within the Eye, his increasingly erratic behaviour was proving unsettling. Still, there was not a single one of them who contemplated issuing the challenge to assume control, let alone disturbing their lord’s seclusion. The smell of Krysithius’ blood still lingered hot and recent, a reminder that held fast enough to the air aboard the Diadem to penetrate even their bleached senses.

  There was one son of Fulgrim aboard who could still hear the butchered swordsman’s screams.

  He made his sanctum at the top of the highest tower that rose from the strike cruiser’s spinal battlements. The august circular chamber had been designed to accommodate the Diadem’s delegate from the Navis Nobilite, and indeed it had acted as the home for a scion of Terra’s great Navigator houses for the first several centuries she had sailed the void. The mutant lady who had guided the Diadem through the immaterium had served the III Legion with skill and distinction, during the days of the Great Crusade and on the fiery path to the Throneworld beneath the banner of the first Warmaster. The titanic strain of the craft’s flight from the failed siege, compounded by the prolonged and harried retreat from the wrath of a vengeful Imperium to exile within the Eye of Terror, proved in the end to have been simply too much for her soul to endure.

  With her death, the Diadem was left without a Navigator. Such a loss was tantamount to a death sentence within the constant storms of Eyespace, and the III Legion warship seemed destined to join the fate of countless others that had been lost since the promise of Horus’ rebellion soured into the Cthonian Failure. In their desperation, the fractured remnants of the Emperor’s Children that would one day form the Cohors Nasicae turned to someone who, in any other time, they would have crossed blades against one another to win the pleasure of skinning alive.

  Lucius exhaled, an instant of confusion lancing his mind as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. He heard the rumble of hydraulics and turned, watching a lift hatch as it ground closed behind him. Recognition took hold a second later, and he realised where he now stood, if not how he had arrived there.

  His ceramite-shod hooves scraping against the deck plating, Lucius came to a halt before an ornate gateway. Stretching to twice a Space Marine’s height, its surface of intricately engraved platinum had long lost its lustre. Blooms of soft corrosion teased over etchings of great birds of prey, their intertwined wings of lightning and balefire now dulled by a sheen of ashen grey. Despite the assault of time and ill-maintenance, the exquisite craftsmanship of the artisans in depicting the noble creatures was still starkly present in the flickering light of ensconced torches set into the wall on either side.

  Lucius reached up and thudded a fist into the centre of the doorway. The clang of ceramite clashing against metal washed over the swordsman and resounded down the corridor behind him. A moment later, the deck beneath Lucius’ boots shivered, and the gateway began to part down the middle. The doors swung ponderously inwards, and the warlord stepped into the grand chamber within.

  Lucius was greeted by a chorus of screams. Men and women lined the walls, clutched in the grip of horrid, spider-like constructs of crystal and tarnished silver. Their limbs, hair and, in some cases, their skin had all been removed, leaving them as little more than twitching husks of abused meat and terrified, pleading eyes that shone wetly in the rose-hued light of torches. Worms of jade energy stitched over their raw flesh, provoking screams of pain that impossibly grew louder and more agonised as their suffering was continually eclipsed by fresh torment.

  The constructs moved to different sockets across the walls in a chilling dance, arraying their captives’ howling bodies in shifting sickening patterns. They formed disorienting runes that itched at Lucius’ flesh and brought stinging black tears welling in his eyes. The mouths of the victims, pinned back and stretched open by the machines’ dagger claws, bled frost and corposant as they fed their ceaseless cries into the staring faces of elaborate masks of porcelain and tarnished gold. Conduits of tubing trailed from the painted grins of the masks, glittering with warp frost as they linked and intertwined like a spider’s web around the spiralling tower at the centre of the chamber.

  A monolith of purple ceramite war-plate stood in silence at the foot of the twisting tower. The deep royal lacquer was edged in shining gold that had become darkened to bronze by patina. Racks of sharpened lances rose from its shoulders, heaped with impaled skulls. The shattered helm of a First Legion champion held pride of place, the scorched green trophy still bearing half of its ornamental crest, a ­single wing of blackened ivory that curved elegantly from its temple.

  The wargear was asymmetrical and mismatched, the tell-tale of the scavenger. Each individual plate bore a different name in golden Chemosian, revealing the identities of the III Legion elite who had been the original bearers of the immense pieces of Tactical Dreadnought armour. They had been heroes of the Emperor’s Children all, murdered by the greed of the one who now wore it as his own.

  The Terminator’s great tusked helm was bowed, the crystal-blue eye-lenses dark and cast down at the floor. Lucius took another step forwards, feeling the unnatural cold of the howling air abrade the scar tissue criss-crossing his face. His eyes rose to the apex of the tower, searching the darkness at its peak.

  A rumbling tremor joined the turbulent air as the Terminator’s generator awakened. The teeth-aching thrum of standard Legiones Astartes power armour was a whisper in comparison to the massive suit, enough to send ripples through the pinkish flames of the torches and rattle the skulls above its shoulders. The helm ground up on snarling fibre bundles, its eyes flashing a brilliant ice blue as they settled upon Lucius.

  ‘Hail, Lucius,’ bellowed the Terminator, lowering the bulk of his torso in mockery of a bow.

  ‘Do not speak to me, thief,’ replied Lucius without turning his eyes upon the hulking warrior.

  A chuckle like tank treads crunching over gravel issued from the tusked helm of the Terminator. ‘A curious insult, from the one our own brothers name Soulthief.�
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  ‘You are no brother of mine,’ snarled Lucius. ‘Those days ended with the murders of the kinsmen whose armour you wear.’

  The Terminator spread his arms wide, the lightning talons tipping the fingers of his left hand bathing in a flash of azure lightning. A low snort barked from his helm, like a hound snuffing the air. ‘And yet I can still smell the scent of our fair Krysithius upon our father’s blade. Again, curious.’

  ‘Enough.’ The Laeran Blade was in Lucius’ hand, its point dazzling in the rolling light of the torches as he levelled it at the Terminator. ‘I did not come here to suffer the words of a thief and a murderer. You exist here, drawing breath in exile with the one you serve, only because I allow it. Do not make that cause for my regret.’

  The golden serrated blade slung beneath the twin-linked barrels of the Terminator’s combi-bolter swung down and away from Lucius, the loose belt of mass-reactive shells hanging beneath its ammunition box clattering against the dense plate of the hunched behemoth’s thigh. ‘Then why have you deemed to grace those so unworthy with your presence, Eternal?’

  ‘Because, Afilai,’ came a voice from high above, ‘I asked him to.’

  The Terminator’s posture took on an air of slack submission, like a puppet left to hang by its strings. Lucius looked back to the peak of the tower, though he did not yet return his sword to its sheath.

  A figure appeared, his form lithe and svelte in spite of the bulk of his Legiones Astartes power armour. Robes of cream and iridescent silver hung over the suit of curved ceramite, its hue continuously shifting between bleached lilac to rose to deep, fathomless black. He was bareheaded, a horned helm resting in the crook of one arm, its mask a flawless face frozen in a gasp of beatific joy rendered in shining platinum. A staff of horn and black crystal filled his other hand, topped with a cluster of skulls dissected and exploded only to be reknit into a single, horrific whole of mismatched eyes and gaping jaws.