Lucius: The Faultless Blade Read online

  –Nothing.

  The experience of such sensations, when even the slightest pain could swell his being with pleasure, was now a thing consigned to memory. Memories of when the screams and rending of flesh, of that belonging to other souls equally as much as his own, had driven him to deeper, transcendent debaucheries beyond excess, and beyond sanity. But that was a time that had long since passed him by.

  The swollen pits that had once been ears did not react to the ­pittance of his own bloodshed, as they strained to enthral his mind with symphony.

  Dozens of undulating faces covered the walls, shrieking a ululating lament of ceaseless torment. They were the shackled essences of men and women, kings and slaves, champions, aliens and those touched by the Dark Gods themselves. All were murderers. All shared in the same perdition. They thrashed, rolling and pressing in vain attempts to win their freedom like creatures eternally drowning within tar pits. The captive souls screamed in an endless choir of the damned, each wailing the dirge of their own individual torment to meld into a discordant song of anguish.

  Glistening creatures writhed upon the floor before the throne. Some were human, some were not, and then there were others who had once been born as men and women, but had renounced the boundaries of their race to become something more. They moaned and hissed, clawing and cutting and coupling, their every action perpetrated to satisfy the desire of drawing the ecstasy of sensation from flesh. Their softer, warmer cries melted into the howls from the walls. Their song was mellifluous to him, beautiful.

  Perfect.

  Master.+

  The third call triggered a twitch of irritation at the corner of his raw-lipped maw. The presence of other minds within his during his time of succour sparked his ire. A low noise welled up in his throat, the beginnings of a snarl, as the dreamlike state he had been savouring in solitude was disrupted. The sender knew that she had won his attention, and his anger, and thus was brief.

  A king of blood and bronze has revealed himself.+

  She spoke with an angel’s voice, unspoiled by age or the ugliness that came with time’s passage.

  The field of battle now bears the weight of one worthy of the Eternal’s blade.+

  The snarl softened at the revelation, smoothing into a pleasured coo. Filed teeth glittered as the lips peeled back from them in a ­savage grin.

  The faces shrieked all the louder, spiking in a hopeless crescendo as they melted from the walls, exposing the bloody frescos and sweat-soaked tapestries beneath as they slid down with a sickening slowness to the floor. They were dragged towards the enthroned figure, captives in an angler’s net being hauled in for harvest. For a moment they pooled quivering beneath him, before slipping upwards, wrapping themselves around muscular limbs and a torso rapidly resolving into form and definition.

  A hiss of pleasure-pain passed from the figure as the jelly of bound souls hardened into segmented plates of baroque armour, continuously emitting a cracking, splitting noise as the faces upon its surface bobbed and wailed their futile cries. The figure braced himself internally as the calm solitude of his mind was shattered.

  Dozens of voices cried out behind his eyes. Pain, despair, pleading and rage all mingled and overlapped inside his skull as the stolen howled their torment within his mind. They begged him for deliverance, swore vindication or taunted him in their despair, scratching and needling and ringing in a never-ending discordance of the damned.

  The figure rose to his feet. The cavorting fiends upon the floor ceased their debauchery, fleeing from him in terror. Ropes of muscle the red of raw meat unspooled from his right arm. Spines and hooked barbs burst forth along the twitching mass, drooling sickly venom that sizzled as it pattered to the floor. The glistening lash stretched across the ground for a moment, before drawing back and coiling around the right forearm of the figure.

  He reached out with his left arm, and an attendant wretch ­waddled to his side on its knees. The slave made a simpering, choked sound, its lips quivering around the hilt of the sword sheathed in its throat. Its master took the blade’s grip in his clawed gauntlet, sparing its bearer the briefest of glances, which drew a gasp of elation from its bleeding lips.

  With a single smooth motion, he drew the sword. Without the daemonic essence locked within the weapon to sustain it, the vassal’s abused flesh withered. It grew pale and ashen, and webs of dark veins branched out across its trembling face. The figure flicked his wrist in irritation and severed the slave’s head. The crowd of fiends dived upon the still-twitching corpse, tearing into it to feed their perverted desires, while their master turned the sword slowly in the candlelight.

  It was a scimitar of brilliantly shining silver, far older than the dead Legion of the warrior who now wielded it. It had been given life in the forges of a breed of depraved xenos the Emperor’s Children had rendered extinct during its early conquests, but despite this it was a blade of rapturously exquisite craftsmanship, and a Legion relic beyond all compare. Religions and cults had arisen and spread across entire worlds, and even amongst the figure’s own warriors, in worship of the sword.

  It had been wielded by the Phoenician himself before it had passed from the primarch’s hands to its current bearer, and in that time it had drunk deeply of the lifeblood of both gods and men through millennia of resplendent bloodletting and war without end.

  Fully armed, the figure rolled his neck with a string of wet pops. He stepped down from the dais and passed from the chamber, his boots – clawed ceramite layered over cloven hooves of midnight-black horn – squelching as they strode across overlapping sheets of thick carpet, soaked through with blood and other, more vile fluids.

  A deafening chorus of noise buffeted the warrior as the bulkhead slid aside. The muscles of his face twitched from the vibrations, and his eyes watered as they adjusted to the blinding barrage of multicoloured light stabbing out across the corridor. He had been aboard the ships of the other broken Legions, both during the great failure of the Cthonians and afterwards in the wars across the Eye. Their vessels were cold, dark and silent things, little better than tombs. Not so within the armadas of those who had once been the III Legion.

  The corridor was empty, save for a lone warrior in armour of silvered pearl veined with lilac who stood waiting for him on the other side.

  ‘Cesare,’ he said to the pearl-armoured demigod, his fatigue laid bare in the resonant tones of his voice.

  The warrior reached up, his gauntlets bulky with drills, probes and bladed instruments designed to accelerate both the mending and rending of flesh. The pop of gorget seals went unheard in the clamour, as did the serpentine hiss of equalising air pressure as he lifted his helmet free.

  ‘Lucius.’

  Cesare’s face was flawless, devoid of the scars that his brothers had earned in battle or inflicted by their own hands. He swept back a shock of dark hair from eyes of deep amber, his pale features set as always in a cold and morose stare.

  The Apothecary appeared impossibly youthful for one who could claim the truest extent of their former Legion’s namesake. In the dying days of the Unification Wars upon ancient Terra, when the last of the false Emperor’s foes stood at the mercy of His vaunted Thunder armies, the vanquished had shown their submission in a fashion derived from the most primitive rites of mankind’s ancestry. As a token of their defeat, they offered to their conqueror neither their wealth nor their lives, but their legacies.

  The children of the last noble families of Europa were laid at the Emperor’s feet, coated in the ashes of the old world whose death would give rise to the Imperium. These were the first of those who would become the perfect Legion, and like the adopted epithet of the primarch with whom they would reunite, each of them was a phoenix, older than the interstellar kingdom they would both fight to create and bleed to destroy.

  Cesare was one of those children. He had watched the Legion fall, rise and fall again. He had fough
t against the Laer, and taken part in the purges upon the killing fields of Isstvan. He had elicited the screams of the Throneworld as the other Legions hurled themselves against the walls of a cause that had been lost long before the siege had ever begun. He bore witness to what the Emperor’s Children had once been, and what they had now become.

  ‘What has happened?’ asked Lucius.

  ‘Krysithius has boarded the Twelfth Legion conveyor we have been hunting, though it seems he has encountered some… complications.’

  Lucius scoffed. ‘What has that sybarite done this time?’

  ‘It appears that a daemon world manifested close enough to drag the conveyor down into its orbit.’

  ‘A… planet?’ asked Lucius.

  Cesare replied with his own raised eyebrow.

  Lucius held out a forestalling hand.

  ‘After this long here, why would I ever question that?’ He grimaced, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘How much of the warband did he take with him?’

  ‘Twenty,’ answered Cesare. ‘Ajennion, Lubalia and Krennance’s squads boarded it with him.’

  Lucius nodded, though the answer provided little in the way of information. A squad was a relative term within the Cohors ­Nasicae. They formed erratically, those who saw it benefit their own self-interests coalescing around a favoured swordsman, and disbanded just as quickly when they soured of taking his orders. Other than Lucius, undisputed at its head, there was little established order within the warband.

  ‘What of the Rypax?’ asked Lucius.

  ‘They are still aboard,’ Cesare replied. ‘Vispyrtilo would not spare any of his Raptors without your leave.’

  Lucius grinned wider. Sweet, loyal Vispyrtilo.

  ‘Normally I would say we cut our losses and wash our hands of this fiasco,’ said Lucius. ‘But our lower decks grow hollow. If there is anything still alive from their holds on the surface, we must go down to extract it.’

  ‘And to recover our brothers, of course.’

  Lucius glanced sidelong at Cesare, still grinning. ‘Of course. We shall rescue our noble kindred, as well as anything else still alive. You need the raw materials for your work, brother. We all rely upon you ever so much.’

  Cesare did not respond, his face remaining a cold mask.

  ‘I had thought this errand beneath me,’ sighed Lucius. ‘But such is my reward for trusting in an incompetent. Once again it is left to me to drag something of a remedy out of this disaster. I only hope there are enough of the Blood God’s dogs left who survived the crash. It has been some time since I have broken a sweat.’

  The pair stopped at a junction in the corridor, painted by sweeping lumen fans in waves of fuchsia and sapphire light.

  ‘Go down to their lair and rouse the Rypax,’ commanded Lucius. ‘The rest of our brothers will proceed to the drop pods. Let us go get what we came for.’

  Lucius was the last to lock himself within the Dreadclaw. He joined the circle of Cesare and four Palatine Blades already secured in their harnesses, their number leaving half of the thrones within the pod empty. He hauled his own restraints down over his cracking, moaning war-plate as the boarding ramps of the Dreadclaw sealed like a closing fist. Lucius flicked his gaze over his brethren from behind his mask of porcelain and platinum, blinking away targeting reticules as he studied each in the wan light.

  Lucius’ kindred went forth to battle in the mismatched armour of scavengers, one of many cold realities for those who waged the endless Legion Wars within the Eye. Despite their suits being of several marks and patterns, his brothers had made the plundered wargear their own, the ceramite lacquered in each warrior’s vision of the royal purple and gold of the old Legion. Some, Lucius noted, had even managed to impart the patchwork and asymmetric armour with a measure of elegance. A few of their number still bore the burnished Palatine eagle across their breastplates, lovingly defiled and ritually scarred. They looked sluggishly from one of their kindred to the next, raking across the dark interior with the electric blue of their helmet lenses.

  The Dreadclaw lurched as it rose into the air on links of dense black chain, swaying as massive winches hauled it into position to be fired towards the surface of the daemon world from the Diadem. Lucius looked across the pod at his restless kinsmen, before turning to Cesare, locked into place beside him.

  ‘Well, brother mine?’ Lucius purred, gesturing to the other occupants of the Dreadclaw. ‘What do you have for my beloved kindred on the cusp of this most glorious of battles?’

  A low sound issued from the Apothecary’s vox-grille, not quite a snarl, not quite a sigh. He reached down to his webbing, producing a handful of thin vials from a bandolier across his chest. The Palatine Blades leaned forwards at the sight of the pale violet fluid within them, their restraint harnesses creaking as they snapped taut.

  ‘This is among the last of what remains to us,’ Cesare warned. ‘We must be restrained in its usage until I can replenish our stock of the compound. And I won’t be able to synthesise any more of it without recovering sufficient materials.’ He snorted. ‘If there are even any left to recover after this.’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Lucius, barely listening as he plucked one of the vials from Cesare’s hand. The Apothecary would have advised the Eternal to wait until just before battle before indulging to avoid losing its effects in the middle of combat, but knew full well the uselessness of the act. Lucius waved the slender cylinder from side to side, chuckling as the other warriors tracked it hungrily. Leaning back, he slotted the vial into an interface port on his gauntlet, and injected its contents into his bloodstream.

  With a ragged gasp, Lucius was transported back in time. Back to when his nerves were afire with glorious sensation, where every slice of his blade and every scar he received sent him staggering with overwhelming, rapturous pleasure. Gone was the numbness that withered his eroded synapses, freeing him to accept with open arms all of the gifts of the Youngest God.

  Lucius almost cried out in bliss as his helm cracked back against his restraint throne. Waves of honey-rich joy radiated out from the heathen­ war drums of his hearts and raced across his flesh. The voices screaming at him grew muted and distant as his focus returned. His senses sharpened, like a veil being lifted after a lifetime mired beneath its haze. The smells of his surroundings returned, a bouquet of iron and ozone, oil and lapping powder. He tasted his own sweat, and the lingering traces of blood that still clung to his tongue.

  He heard Cesare speak with preternatural clarity, his ears attuned like never before, from the resonant vibrations of his vocal cords and the blood singing through his transhuman veins to the individual components of his armour as they clicked and whirred in their ceramite shell.

  ‘Shall I distribute the rest to our brothers, Eternal?’

  Lucius broke into a low giggle as he savoured the slickness of his lips peeling back from his teeth. ‘By all means, my cherished brother, please do.’

  The other Space Marines clawed and strained, reaching for Cesare as he tossed the remaining vials to them. Catching them in shaking gauntlets, the legionaries jammed them into their armour. Within an instant their lethargy was gone, replaced by steady calm and razor focus.

  One warrior, his gauntlets seized with spasm, fumbled his vial. The cylinder spun from his grasp, glittering as it fell to the floor of the pod and shattered. The legionary froze, silent as the contents of the vial spread around his boots.

  ‘Rubitaille, you idiot!’ snarled Cesare.

  ‘No,’ stammered Rubitaille, his helm twitching as he alternated between Cesare and staring at the pool of pale violet and broken glass. ‘No. I need ambrosia. No!’

  Rubitaille’s harness groaned as he thrashed, flailing his arms and clawing at the floor. Lucius heard a soft scraping from the inside of the legionary’s helm. He was trying to lap up the stimulant through his mask. So desperate was he for the clarity, th
e warming of numbed senses granted by the narcotic, that he did not realise how he debased himself.

  The others, too set into their own state of narcotic concentration to notice, ignored him. Of all the things lost to the III Legion during its fall, pity had been among the first to disappear. Rubitaille screamed, a mechanised shriek from his helm, an exasperated howl of futile rage that drowned out the deep metallic clunks reverberating from the walls as the Dreadclaw prepared to launch.

  The child’s voice returned to Lucius’ mind, flitting back like cool oil behind his eyes.

  May the splendour of the Pleasured One’s bounty still thy heart with ecstasies, my master,+ sang the angelic voice.

  Lucius tilted his head back, lost in the beauty of the rumbling drop pod and his brother’s frenzy. He closed his eyes and basked in it. The screams were like music, an exquisite symphony as the Dreadclaw fired, hurling the warriors of the Cohors Nasicae down into glorious battle.

  ‘May it be so, Clarion,’ said Lucius the Eternal, laughing as he went forth to war.

  I.IV

  A city of the stars smashed itself to ruin against the earth. The Pit Cur struck the surface of the daemon world with the cataclysmic force of a cyclonic torpedo. Had its reactor not been reduced to embers, cold and starved by neglect and the restless predations of its crew; had its hull been anything more than rattling scrap, or its prow angled towards the surface rather than enduring a sidelong fall as it was hauled down by the planet’s gravity well, it could have hit with the potency to crack continents. The abrupt nature of the world’s appearance, combined with the mass conveyor being halted in the void with its main drives sundered, had robbed the crash of any significant momentum. Even the surface of the world itself intervened, flexing like a sponge and swallowing the energy of the impact before dissipating it out in a thunderous aurora into the void. The collision was still severe enough, however, to shatter the vessel against the face of the planet, transforming it into a twisted mountain of warped battle­ments and broken iron bones.