Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 5

  The legionary’s flesh was pallid and burned, stinking of carbon and roasted meat left to spoil. It was a reek that was as normal to Cesare as clean air, perhaps more so. He levered his dead brother’s head back, pressing the tip of his reductor under the jaw.

  He rolled aside just as a shadow spilled over him.

  A World Eater, mangled and jabbering in agonised delirium, leapt drunkenly for Cesare. The XII Legion warrior’s left arm was gone halfway between elbow and shoulder, and he had seen fit to push a jagged length of wrecked hull plating into the wound to use as a makeshift blade. Blood still ran freely down the fire-blackened iron, dripping in stuttering drops as the legionary’s arm trembled with pained fury.

  Cesare ducked a horizontal slash aimed for his throat and spun on his heel to pirouette from the diagonal return strike. The crown of dreadlocked cables sutured into the World Eater’s skull sparked with disrepair, clusters of the frayed connections hanging loose at his temples and dripping vile dark fluids from torn housings. Cesare leapt back from another pain-addled attack, and lifted his narthecium as his opponent charged again.

  A burst of rose mist swirled around the World Eater, stopping him in his tracks. The son of Angron stood for a moment, eyes twitching and blinking out of sequence. Cesare had exposed him to an aerosol variant of the ambrosia narcotic he had formulated for the warband. While used most often to provide short-term treatment and enhancement for his brothers upon the battlefield or in extremely diluted doses to pacify and inebriate slaves, the cloud Cesare released from his gauntlet was pure and unadulterated. For one not accustomed to its properties, even one of the Legions, it carried the potential to be fatal.

  Cesare watched the Butcher’s Nails in the World Eater’s head squirm and smoke as conflicting waves of agony and bliss wracked the legionary’s brain. Heavily damaged, the pain implants were losing out to the overwhelming ecstasy of the Apothecary’s compound. Drooling, psychotic laughter bubbled from the World Eater’s lips as he clawed at his face with his remaining hand, digging into the flesh and stripping it away in greasy ribbons. He scraped his ersatz blade arm down his armour, delighted by the discordant squeal of it against the pitted ceramite. He sank to his knees, back arcing and trembling with peals of uncontrollable, hysterical glee.

  The laughter ceased when Cesare shot him in the head, blowing out the back of his skull with a wet snap of tearing bone. The Apothecary’s face never shifted from its cold mask of indifference. The blood fountaining from the World Eater coated the daemonic ground, drawing Cesare’s eye. It was a vibrant, bright red. Inhumanly bright, even. An incredible, dazzlingly pure red, more red than anything Cesare had ever seen in his life.

  The Apothecary snorted, driving the trace wisps of ambrosia out of his helm, and turned back to crouch down over his fallen brother. For a moment he could not recognise who it was, the armour and the body within had been burned so thoroughly, but at last it came to him.

  Lubalia. The Apothecary shut his eyes for a moment. His blade would be missed. Cesare replaced his gauntlet beneath the corpse’s jaw, and fired the reductor.

  With a moist pop, a lump of pinkish-grey flesh shot into a glass cylinder upon the narthecium. Cesare inspected the organ, before his eyes shot wide. He tore the cylinder free from his gauntlet, hurling it away to shatter on the ground.

  The earth glowed beneath Lubalia’s discarded progenoid. A ­puckered lamprey mouth snapped from the glistening flesh of the organ, emitting a shrill, breathless shriek. Thin fronds slithered from the mass, slowly thickening into tendrils. The organ trilled, beginning to pull itself across the ground.

  Cesare stomped down, crushing his brother’s gene-seed to pulp. The lambent pulse beneath his boot ebbed as he ground Lubalia’s legacy to the Legion into a ruined smear of softly hissing corposant.

  The Apothecary snarled. Another brother tainted with corrupted gene-seed. Another warrior who could never be replaced. This was the true cost of the Cthonian Failure. The Warmaster, a thousand curses upon his name, had borne the lightest burden for the disaster he had orchestrated, as had the throngs of his bastard sons purged by the III and the other Legions on the path to imprisonment within the Eye. The punishment for the Sons of Horus was light compared to those who survived, as Cesare had. To watch as his Legion, and the dregs that now remained of it, withered away into decayed, twisted shadows of the perfection they had once achieved.

  Could Cesare even remember how long his kindred had been swimming out here within the Eye? How long? How could one measure the extent of his purgatory in a place where time was meaningless? He could only measure it in deaths. Brothers lost to battle. To betrayal. To madness. And fewer and fewer of those like himself remaining, fighting the battle to keep even the cruel caricature that they had become alive.

  Cesare’s pearlescent helm rose as he heard the screaming figures descend. A thin, resigned smile nudged his lips, but failed to reach his eyes. There would be much more of his battle to fight now.

  The Rypax had arrived.

  In the days of the Legion, the Emperor’s Children were the only of the eighteen gifted with the Palatine aquila, the personal heraldry of the Emperor Himself. The Master of Mankind had bestowed the ­honour of His golden eagle upon them, and the Legion treated it with the reverence reserved for a gift only the truly perfect could ever hope to possess. None revered it more than the Wings of the Phoenician, the elite assault companies of the Emperor’s Children.

  As the first sparks of the Cthonian Failure were lit, the fanatical devotion of the Wings of the Phoenician for the nascent Imperium of Man was met with the sword, as their ranks were purged nearly to extinction upon the virus-soaked killing grounds of Isstvan III. Those few who remained carried the same obsession and fanaticism as their butchered brethren, yet they had turned it inwards towards themselves. As the Legion changed, they too changed with it, becoming a bestial and insular brotherhood who isolated themselves from their other kin, called into battle to terrorise populations and crack only the most formidable bastions.

  The touch of the Youngest God, and the purgation of the Eye, would only advance their transformation. Savagery and cruelty saw their ranks planed away to the blades of foes and each other, until only a handful remained. Yet even in such a small number, they were no less devastating to behold.

  Hurtling from the heavens to the crush of the battle, at the centre of the tempest bearing down towards their waiting blades, was the final master of the Wings of the Phoenician. His Legion name had been forgotten, cast aside when he had torn the mantle of leadership from his predecessor, whose blood stained his face and claws, and drew it about his shoulders. He was Vispyrtilo, the last of the Eagle Kings, and chieftain of the Rypax.

  Whereas the bulk of the Cohors Nasicae warband was, with a few exceptions, still comprised largely of Emperor’s Children legionaries, the Rypax Raptor cult was a multifaceted riot of Legions, renegades and traitors of all kinds. Fulgrim’s sons flew down beside Night Lords, Word Bearers and Iron Warriors, their original Legion colours perverted in garish excess or cast aside altogether in favour of the warband’s. Their ranks were swelled with Raptors of the Flawless Host, Violators and Angels of Ecstasy renegades. Even fallen Space Marines of the White Scars and Brazen Claws Chapters were among their number, their oaths to the Imperium forsaken as they embraced Slaanesh and became members of the Rypax cult.

  Twenty metres from the surface, they released a sonic scream of such ear-splitting volume that the force of it arrested their own freefall. The unnaturally amplified wall of bladed noise smashed down into the battle. Armour split. Blood was whipped into mist. Legionaries were hurled indiscriminately from their feet. Bruise-coloured sand whipped up in a spreading crown beneath them as the announcement of their arrival punched craters into the earth, before they angled down to dive.

  The Rypax struck like meteors. Lightning talons and powerblades slashed World Eaters apart. Meltaguns blasted a
t point-blank range, and jets of warpfire shrieked from twisted flamers. All the while the blaring screams tore from their warped armour and from the grilles of their fanged helms, howling a single name. The name of their king.

  Vispyrtilo hurled his golden spear down ahead of his dive, ­impaling a World Eater through the throat. The Rypax chieftain slammed into the legionary with the talons of his boots while wrenching his spear free, the relic weapon clattering from a silver chain that bound it to his forearm. His free hand ended in crackling lightning claws, darting forth to pull out eyes and entrails. A cloak of human flesh, cut and shaped to resemble a mantle of feathers, whirled around his jump pack as he took to the sky once more.

  Lucius howled with glee, pulling his helm free and revelling in the black blood that trickled from his ears due to the cries of his Raptors. While the World Eaters still outnumbered them, Lucius’ warband were now able to prevent themselves from becoming surrounded and torn apart by the edges of XII Legion blades. A few flicks of Lucius’ wrist took the hands from a charging berserker, whom he nimbly sidestepped as the warrior lunged to tackle him. Another few flicks took the World Eater’s hamstrings and he collapsed. A Raptor whose armour was wrought in a perversely twisted parody of the White Scars’ heraldry crouched onto the World Eater’s back. Stinging hawkish laughter hissed from the Raptor’s vox-grille as he slowly tore the legionary’s head from his shoulders before firing his jump pack to return to the air.

  The fighting around Lucius had grown to a crescendo, but now blurred to distant silence as he spied a lone figure, looking down upon the battle from where he stood atop the crashed superstructure of the Pit Cur. Even from a distance Lucius could see the regal bearing of command in the way the warrior carried himself. His armour bore as much crude ornamentation as any warlord of the XII Legion, but what arrested Lucius’ attention most was the restraint. To hold back from wading into the battle, against the whims of their Butcher’s Nails, told Lucius that this was a warrior he had to fight. His eyes fell upon the massive twin-bladed axe held loosely in the World ­Eater’s grip, setting his mind afire with possibilities.

  Lucius had sent forth his warhost to raid the XII Legion for slaves, not deigning to debase himself with the task of dispatching the Blood God’s dogs and the degenerate rabble who followed them. But that primordial crone Fate had intervened to bring him here. Staring up at the XII Legion champion, a true kindred angel fallen to darkness, ignited Lucius’ obsession. He might prove to be an amusing diversion. A challenge, however brief, to his endless boredom. Perhaps even a perfect kill.

  Lucius ignored an explosion as one of the Rypax’s jump packs overloaded, showering him with shrapnel and gore. His sword fanned left and right, hacking aside the churning warriors in front of him as though he were clearing a path through the dense flora of deep jungle. His eyes never left the waiting champion atop the crashed ship’s spine, and his mouth watered in anticipation of the kill.

  Krysithius killed the last World Eater atop the mound of dead with a blade thrust through the vox-grille of the warrior’s helm. He pulled his sword free, and watched the corpse tumble down to the ground. The swordsman gritted his teeth as he flexed his arm, wrestling with the grinding stiffness of shorn cables in his armour’s fibre bundle musculature and the bone-deep weariness that blanketed his limbs after hours of unrelenting close-quarters combat.

  Two of his brothers were left beside him at the hill of the dead’s summit. Gundleon sank to a knee, bleeding badly from an axe blow that had stripped away most of the left side of his face. Even his transhuman physiology, and the unnatural resiliency gifted to those subservient to the primordial powers of the warp, had failed to staunch the sheets of dark crimson pouring down his war-plate. The surface of this daemon world would likely be the last thing ­Gundleon would ever see.

  The other, Andaroth, bore as deep and comprehensive ruin to his armour as Krysithius, but remained unbowed. The Eye had touched him deeply, and the jagged rents in his plate quickly began to fill with a silvery, bone-like substance, joining the other ridged scars that crisscrossed his armour like lightning. Andaroth grinned at Krysithius with needle teeth framed by a hairless face of slick, purple-tinted skin. He reached up, slathering his face with spilled blood, and released a shuddering breath as its metallic bouquet filled his nostrils.

  Krysithius turned from his brother and began picking his way down the heaped forms of broken World Eaters. His clawed boots slipped and scraped against their ruined red ceramite, some still emitting the buzzing tick of power plants left to go cold from starvation or catastrophic failure to their internal systems. Every few steps he would stumble over the corpse of a brother, the very images of suffering and brutality as the sons of Angron had taken them apart a piece at a time, and more often than not by hand. Purple stumps of limbless and headless bodies were intermingled amongst the red and dirty bronze. Here a clawed gauntlet with scraps of torn meat poking from its edges. There a section of a skull, bashed open and ripped apart by chain teeth, with part of the face still attached.

  Krysithius leapt the last bit, striking the ground with a puff of multi-coloured dust. Andaroth slid down the mound with an elated shout, coming to a graceful halt with a flourish beside his brother swordsman. The sound of cracking and crashing rang behind them as Gundleon thudded to the ground on Krysithius’ left. He did not rise.

  Andaroth approached Gundleon, nudging his prone form with the tip of his boot. He turned and shrugged at Krysithius with an uncaring smile before gesturing to the battle with his envenomed blade.

  ‘Shall we?’

  Krysithius spared a look at Gundleon. The sand beneath him was ashen. The swordsman could not hear his brother breathing or the beating of his hearts. He flexed his sword arm again. Gundleon’s armour was in even worse condition than his own. There was nothing of value remaining on his corpse, even for scavengers.

  Looking back up, Krysithius watched Andaroth lope towards the battle alone, blade raised high and a song on his stained lips. All of the Cohors Nasicae had embraced the touch of the Dark Prince, but Andaroth had dived deeper than most, discarding almost everything he had once been as one of the III Legion’s finest Palatine Blades in order to become something most of them considered greater. There were some who clung to the old ways, like their melancholy Apothecary, but they resigned themselves to living in the past, morose and alone. Warriors like Andaroth, like Krysithius, saw only the future, and how they might better serve their own pleasures. Because when one serves himself, he serves Slaanesh.

  Krysithius watched as Andaroth disappeared into the twisting smear of blood and blades, and ran to join him.

  I.VI

  ‘What is the matter, cousin? Scared of a little blood?’

  Lucius gave a sharp, cruel smile as he approached the warlord of the World Eaters atop the broken spinal battlements of the Pit Cur. The noise of the battle below resounded with screams and crashing weapons. The unnatural air of the daemon world amplified the din as it bore it aloft, as though the winds themselves were fighting and dying all around them.

  No reply came from the World Eater, who remained still as a statue as he looked down upon the fighting. From a distance, part of Lucius questioned for a moment whether the warrior was dead. He had seen it before, legionaries who were kept upright after dying in battle, frozen in place by locked or malfunctioning armour.

  He quickly dispelled the idea. He could feel the tiny soft tremors of XII Legion battleplate, and could taste the acrid tang rolling off the warrior’s active reactor pack. He could hear the shockingly even drumbeat of the World Eater’s hearts, and the faint click of implants dreadlocked into his skull, beneath the snarling visage of a Sarum-pattern war-helm.

  No, not dead, thought Lucius. Just ill-mannered.

  Lucius scooped up a lump of broken rockcrete from the crashed ship’s skin and whipped it at the World Eater. The warrior’s gauntlet flashed up, catching it a hand’s spa
n from his face. The XII Legion champion turned his head slowly to regard the swordsman. His only reply was to crush the rockcrete in his fist, opening his hand again to allow streams of silver dust to fall from between his fingers.

  ‘Ah,’ said Lucius. ‘There we are. I would hate to think you were ignoring me on purpose.’

  The World Eater turned, the cloak of brass mail hanging from his shoulders scraping against the hull beneath him. When he spoke, it was in low, distracted tones, scratchy through his helm-grille.

  ‘I recognise you.’

  Lucius tilted his head. The voice was soft by XII Legion standards, measured in a way the swordsman had rarely heard from the Eaters of Worlds. His eyes pored over the son of Angron, scanning over the sharp glyphs carved into the red ceramite, before recognition blossomed.

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ replied Lucius with a pleased whistle. ‘You were at Skalathrax. Beautiful bygone days, they truly were. I heard talk of you.’ Lucius pointed at the World Eater with his sword. ‘The “Red Centurion”, they called you. I heard you were good. I felt some regret in not having occasion there to find out myself, but it seems that Fate conspired against me. I am delighted to see that she has come around, and reunited us for just such a celebration.’

  ‘Celebration,’ said the Red Centurion, looking back at the battle. Lucius could not determine whether the softness of his tone was from weariness or disinterest, but whatever the cause, he found the warrior’s uncharacteristically apathetic air irritating.

  Lucius clenched his fist, feeling the faint prick of cold needles against his fingertips. The effects of Cesare’s ambrosia were beginning to ebb. Already he could feel the bright sharpness of the world around him starting to dim. The voices were rising in volume, their cries buzzing like a stirring swarm of locusts. He had wanted to take his time with this, to enjoy himself, but needs must. He needed to kill this Red Centurion, and he needed to kill him now.