Lucius: The Faultless Blade Read online

  Krysithius blinked, shaking the blurring from his vision as he pushed himself to his knees. He fought away the fugue coating his vertigo-skewed senses following the impact, though he kept the pain that came with it, hugging it close to himself like a carefully guarded secret. He knew the shock would pass quickly. Across the wars he had waged, this was not the first time he had experienced the pleasure of this manner of disaster.

  The crashed voidship loomed a few dozen metres all around him, filling a sky of pale viridian with columns of greasy smoke and rippling heat haze. He looked down, watching as waves of dull multicolour radiated out from his palms across the bizarre soil. He glimpsed the singed and broken bodies carpeting the ground, surrounded by auras of colour quickly fading to grey.

  He laughed as he realised the surface of the daemon world behaved like a mirror, though not one of silver and glass that displayed the surface reflection of those who stared into it.

  ‘This,’ he said to himself with a crooked smile, ‘is a mirror that reveals the soul.’

  Krysithius checked his helm display for squad markers. His eyes narrowed as he looked over a panel of amber and hollow runes that informed him that more than half of the brothers who had boarded the Pit Cur with him were dead. Ajennion lay a few metres ahead of him, impaled through the chest by a jagged length of shattered hull plating. Yintilas was slumped to his right, his charred corpse still bathed in chemical fire. Legion kindred who had raced laughing with him through the burning streets of the Throneworld, who had shared in tasting the glory of a thousand victories, lay twisted and still, their lifeblood soaking into the writhing sand of a daemonic backwater.

  Lost. Forgotten.

  And everywhere all around him were bodies and pieces of bodies. Burned, broken, crushed and pulled apart into ragged segments, slathered in blood, char and ash. Like precious stones scattered into an abyss, the treasure the Cohors Nasicae had been seeking was lost. There could be some mortals within the wreckage who still drew breath, but far more likely was that the only survivors of the Pit Cur were the slaves’ transhuman masters.

  Krysithius’ head snapped around as he heard the noise. From the heart of the wreckage came the clang of blades and the bark of savage war-cries. An undulating tide of crimson flowed out from the edge of the crashed conveyor, turning the soil the colour of fresh blood and rage. A moment later, armoured monsters of the same angry red appeared from the depths of its carcass.

  World Eaters began tearing their way free of the Pit Cur’s shattered superstructure. One, five, a dozen, more. Sparks leapt from their plate as jagged spars of iron scraped against them, stripping away ­scarlet enamel down to the bare ceramite. Their bodies glistened with blood and machine oil, their gauntlets clutching notched axes and dented bolters in white-knuckle grips. They howled out lunatic bellows through lipless mouths and brass vox-grilles, wet with blood and frothing madness.

  Krysithius staggered to his feet, cycling through his helm’s systems to only beam the surviving legionaries’ ident-runes onto his retinal display. His sword was gone. He reached down to draw the gladius he carried from the scabbard strapped to his thigh, only to find it lost as well, torn free in the crash. With a grimace he drew his bolt pistol, a weapon he found infinitely distasteful in comparison to the purity of a blade, and racked its slide.

  As the World Eaters began to claw themselves clear from the skeleton of the crashed vessel, he moved to kneel beside Ajennion’s body, reaching for the elegant sabre still clutched in the fallen legionary’s fist. He was slowly peeling his brother’s fingers back, prising the sword from his death grip, when the fallen warrior’s other hand seized his wrist in a clash of ceramite.

  ‘Brother,’ Ajennion choked, his voice choppy and laden with static. His scorched and ruined helm lolled as he struggled to raise his head. Cobwebs of sickly yellow and green wormed out across the sand beneath his pinned form. He released Krysithius’ gauntlet, ­fumbling weakly for his collar seals with the heat-fused claw his gauntlet had become.

  Krysithius’ eyes flicked up towards the mass of XII Legion beasts, milling for a moment at the foot of the crash in search of prey. They would spot him in a matter of moments, and then they would charge. Batting Ajennion’s hand aside, Krysithius tore the seals loose from his brother’s gorget and wrenched his helm free. He heard a soft, wet tear as much of Ajennion’s face came away with it.

  Ajennion coughed, spattering the raw and burned flesh of his face with blood. Black fluid oozed from countless rents and wounds across his skull, and his left eye, liquefied by intense heat, ran down his cheek in a pale gelatinous slick. Krysithius finally pulled the sabre from Ajennion’s grasp. He stood, silent for a moment, before levelling his bolt pistol at his brother’s head.

  ‘No,’ rasped Ajennion, reaching up with the claw. Krysithius hesitated.

  Ajennion bared his blackened teeth in an anguished grin. ‘Let me… savour this awhile.’

  Krysithius lowered the bolt pistol. They had long served together, having both been brothers of the same company in the days of the Legion. ‘Die well, brother.’

  Ajennion laughed, a low hiss of agony as he gasped for breath. ‘I have… made peace with what awaits me. The torment I have earned as my reward for this life.’ His right eye, milky and riven with blood, stared ahead as his head sagged back. ‘But leave me now, brother. Be gone… and let me rest.’

  The flickering web of colour shrank, drawing back towards Ajennion’s body as its tendrils turned ashen. Krysithius looked up as lavender runes pulsed at the edges of his visor, intricate Chemosian characters representing the handful of his brothers who were still alive. Urgent voices broke across the vox, calling out positioning reports and seeking to establish some manner of cohesion against the XII Legion horde that was now fast approaching.

  He spared a glance down at Ajennion. The ground around him was pale chalk. His face, little more than a bloodied skull, had gone slack. After centuries of brotherhood, sharing in the numberless debaucheries and excesses of the Cthonian Failure and the Legion Wars together, Ajennion had finally experienced something that Krysithius had not. There was only one of the Cohors Nasicae who had felt the fullness of death and returned to speak of it. The hilt of the sabre creaked in Krysithius’ tightening fist at the thought of him.

  A waspish zip hissed past Krysithius’ helm, and the ground at his feet exploded as the World Eaters drew close enough to bring their bolters to bear. He broke into a sprint, leaving prismatic boot prints that blinked cold after an instant in the sand as more mass-reactives screamed around him. He blink-clicked a rune on his visor, opening a vox-frequency to his remaining brothers.

  ‘Rally to me, brothers,’ he hissed. ‘If I am to die on this rock, the price is an ocean of Twelfth Legion blood. Let us join together and drink of it.’

  The Dreadclaw traced an arc of fire across the sky of the daemon world as it smashed into the surface. Its arrival sent clouds of sand heaving into the air, flashing across the spectrum of colours in the sunless sphere’s dim light. Heat rippled from its clawed hull as the boarding ramps swung down in puffs of swirling rose smoke. The carcass of the Pit Cur loomed ahead, less than half a kilometre distant.

  ‘Agony! Ecstasy! More!’ Lucius roared as he charged from the Dreadclaw, leading Cesare and the Palatine Blades towards the near clamour of battle. The other two drop pods launched from the Diadem hammered down on either side, disgorging their cargos of Cohors Nasicae, who flowed into step with their warlord. They numbered less than twenty, but fewer Legion warriors than that had exterminated entire civilisations and drowned star systems in pain and ruin.

  Lucius’ visor display detected movement at the edge of his auspex range, and he pushed himself harder. The sirens of battle were singing to him, their voices begging him to indulge. He revelled in the sharpened senses Cesare’s alchemical stimulant provided as it stung through his bloodstream, but knew that the effect would not
last for long. Lucius intended to push his senses to their limits before the bliss of the narcotic evaporated.

  A handful of ident-runes flashed onto Lucius’ retinas. He grinned. Krysithius had survived this debacle after all. His brother always had proven himself hard to kill. He and six others were all that was left of the Cohors Nasicae he had taken with him to raid for the World Eaters’ slaves – nearly half the warband. The Eternal sneered. If his brethren were to die, it would be by his command and no other. Krysithius would have to answer for that.

  After a few minutes’ sprint, as they finally drew near enough to see the fighting, Lucius’ smile broadened. He saw a ring of dirty red armour, thronging after a close knot of figures in violet plate standing upon a mountain of their dead. The ground beneath them was a riot of countless twisted colours, like a boiling warp storm bleeding up from the core of the daemon world. World Eaters scrambled over their own fallen, giving five of their own number to pull down a single one of the Cohors Nasicae. The thrashing swordsman disappeared beneath the sea of blackened horn and crimson ceramite, and another rune blinked out on Lucius’ visor as the XII Legion used their bare hands to tear him limb from limb.

  ‘Bolters,’ Lucius ordered with a sneer. He hated the command as he drew his own bolt pistol, the clawed fingertips of his gauntlet clacking against its ivory-and-silver grip. The few remaining artificers and weaponsmiths aboard the Diadem had modified the warband’s firearms into spectacular implements of war. They were enhanced to be louder, more powerful, and to provide drastically increased recoil to the shooter, but even so, to Lucius there was barely any satisfaction to be had in the act of killing from afar. Such tactics were the actions of cowards and rubes who lacked the elegance for bladecraft, and Lucius growled softly as he resolved himself to the fact that until he entered blade range his stimuli would be limited to the percussive kick of the ancient weapon as it bucked in his fist.

  A fusillade of mass-reactive death lanced into the XII Legion mob, an explosive staccato heartbeat as the shells crashed against armour and flesh before exploding an instant later. The former Emperor’s Children were peerless in the art of bladework, and while they disdained it they lacked nothing in the skill of marksmanship. Either oblivious through bloodlust or by simply failing to anticipate the possibility of their enemy being reinforced, the World Eaters were caught in the open. Bolt-rounds found the rubberised collars of ­gorgets and the gaps between armour plates, severing heads and sending orphaned limbs spinning into the air. Gales of poisoned crystal darts lashed out from the fluted barrels of needle rifles. Power packs were blown apart, immolating World Eaters in nuclear flame or bending them double beneath the weight of unpowered war-plate.

  It was not within the nature of the XII Legion to relent. No son of Angron would ever take a backward step, even if the pain engines buried in their skulls would have allowed them to. Rather than reel in the face of the storm, the World Eaters leaned into the barrage of bolts and needles, and embraced it.

  Barring a pack of determined legionaries seeking vindication for kinsmen lost to Krysithius and his survivors, the World ­Eaters charged at the incoming Cohors Nasicae en masse, bloody froth spraying from torn lips and the screaming teeth of their axes. Those with lingering scraps of sobriety from the bloodlust returned fire from their own bolters. Lucius felt the abrupt slap of fresh blood against his mask as the warrior next to him took a bolt through the eye, blowing out the back of his helm in a shower of gore and spinning skull fragments.

  The distance between the two warbands shrank to nothing. Tides of heliotrope and crimson boiled at their feet, rushing beneath them to entwine as the fallen angels smashed together in close combat.

  Lucius hurled his lash at the closest World Eater, snaring him around the shoulder of his sword arm. He snapped the whip back, feeling the legionary’s limb wrench from the socket as he was lifted from his feet. As he flew past the Eternal, his bellow of pained rage was halted by the blade of Lucius’ sword, flashing beneath his jaw and effortlessly parting his head from his shoulders. With a joyful bark, Lucius leaned aside as the corpse was sent spinning and crashing into its fellows. His blade whipped back, a silver blur, deflecting a chainglaive as the melee became a crush.

  Blood, shattered bone and broken armour flew through the air. Sand and dust rose in sweeping veils of bruised red, blanketing the fighting and fouling helmet filters. Vision dimmed to near blindness. Claret flooded the eyes, and the crash of war deafened as if they were making battle within a gigantic beating heart. The stench of hot iron, new blood washing over old, mingled and congealed with ozone, promethium and the spice of opened bodies.

  Lucius stabbed through ceramite and muscle, the power field of his sword shining. Its disruptor field clapped as it carved through sinew and gristle. The bound souls of his armour stretched with discordant shrieks as they bathed in transhuman blood. He heard a roaring bark of Nagrakali, muffled by the blood and the palsied scream of chainaxes missing half their teeth, before his head wrenched to one side. The focus was stolen from his vision for an instant, but his sword found the World Eater’s belly. He savoured the impact that shivered up his arm as it sank through his foe’s defences.

  Lucius could not see him but already he was twisting the blade, ruining organs and slicing the wound open wider. He wound his lash around his forearm, making a spiked cudgel of his gauntlet as he punched the World Eater down to his knees.

  Weakened fingers clawed at his chest. Lucius heard the breathless snarls of the berserker, who fought on regardless of the loops of viscera spilling out of his stomach onto the sand. Another punch from Lucius put a halt to the snarling. A third put him on the ground.

  A stomp from Lucius’ boot broke the World Eater’s skull open, and he scraped the eye-lenses of his mask clear with his gauntlet. The kill was exulting, but the Cohors Nasicae were being forced to fight the XII Legion way. Angron’s vile progeny excelled in a brutish, grinding slog, bereft of any grace or elegance, and the reality that they outnumbered Lucius’ warband three to one ensured that they would continue to dictate proceedings.

  ‘Where are the Rypax?’ he heard Cadarn snarl into the vox. The air had cleared slightly, allowing Lucius to glimpse his hulking comrade through the tumult. The purple-and-blue lacquer of the warrior’s shoulder pauldron was gouged and stripped away, laid bare to unrepentant gold and the twin axe icon that betrayed his former heraldry. ‘Where is the Talon Queen?’

  As if in answer, the sky itself screamed, demanding that all eyes turn to gaze upon what was coming.

  Her warlike, avian form split the sky in a scream of ramjet fury. Her hull of coral and shining platinum shimmered in the warp light, glistening like the scales of a fish leaping from the surface of the deep ocean. Across her nose, carved and tapered to the razor sharpness of a raptor’s beak, a hundred lifetimes of victories were inscribed over her skin in elegant Chemosian script. A sonnet of worlds put to the flame, Legions shattered and glories won within the material universe and beyond. One name stood out amongst the ledgers of mythic triumphs and vanquished foes, one name repeated again and again in shining gold.

  Talon Queen.

  Her spinal battle cannon roared. A section of the XII Legion lines evaporated, replaced by a smouldering crater littered with broken bits of armour and charred flesh. Chips of brass and crimson ceramite fell over the battle like jagged rain, gleaming with blood. Crackling spears of energy snapped out from the tips of her wings, fusing the daemonic soil into iridescent slicks, crystallising over dying warriors as though they were insects preserved within amber.

  After she had lanced down into the firmament of the daemon world, leaving the last burning remnants of atmospheric entry behind as trailing ribbons of pale fire, the occupants of the Talon Queen had crawled out from her crew bay to hang from beneath her downswept wings. They wanted to feel the wind tear at them, to hear its lashing cry, before they hurtled down to join in the bloodletting.
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  With a draconic roar of her engines straining their tolerances, the Talon Queen twisted into a snap turn, bringing her nose back to the sky, and leapt back up into the black. To the eye, the sudden force of the manoeuvre seemed to have shaken fragments of her hull loose, like a bird of prey discarding feathers. A cluster of dark shapes fanned out across the sky, rapidly growing into focus as they plummeted towards the surface.

  The air filled with screams, and Lucius started laughing.

  I.V

  While the Cohors Nasicae churned against the World Eaters in the shadow of the Pit Cur’s corpse, Cesare was waging his own battle.

  A battle he was losing.

  He had been losing it since Skalathrax, since Harmony, perhaps even since Terra. A solemn act even in the shining days of the Legion’s height, now the most sacred of the Apothecary’s duties to the fallen, had degraded from reverent ritual to nightmare. Another needless nail hammered into the coffin of the Emperor’s Children.

  The narthecium gauntlet on Cesare’s arm shivered, emitting a chittering insectile click from its integrated auspex. To the Apothecary’s disgust, the gauntlet had long since ceased to be a purely mechanical thing. It could hear the cries screaming out across the wreckage, from the spirits within the armour of the dead. From the brothers who were now the Apothecary’s harvest.

  Cesare squatted down beside the corpse of a legionary. The armour was scorched black, but had retained enough of its original barbed shape, along with a few small scraps of garish colour, to confirm that the warrior had been of the Cohors Nasicae. He rolled the body onto its back. It moved as a single, fused thing, thudding heavily to the dust.

  Stretching his fingers, Cesare set about his task to harvest his ­brother’s gene-seed. The saws and vibro-scalpels of his narthecium whined and scraped against the charred ceramite. The Apothecary gritted his teeth behind his helm, pressing against armour plates bonded together by the heat of the crash and atmospheric entry. Applying enough force finally split it like blackened eggshell. Digging his fingers in, Cesare pried the warrior’s gorget apart.