Lucius: The Faultless Blade Read online

  ‘Yes.’ Lucius unwound his lash, allowing its tip to wriggle and squirm beside his boot. ‘Celebrating your final moments, before the hounds of the War God you love so much spend the rest of eternity shitting out your soul.’

  The World Eater sighed, not quite a laugh and not quite a growl, rendered into a waspish rasp through his helm. He triggered a rune on the haft of his axe. The weapon’s motor chugged into life, belching ribbons of black smoke as twin tracks of monomolecular teeth began to chew the air in opposite directions. All the better to rend flesh with. For all of the XII’s barbarism, Lucius had to admit they were adept in designing effective weapons.

  ‘I heard you died,’ said the World Eater. ‘Upon Celpsys.’

  ‘I did,’ grinned Lucius. ‘And also on Dontul, and at the Forrange Reef, and a dozen or so other places whose names I cannot bring myself to care to remember.’

  ‘You seem eager,’ murmured the Red Centurion, turning the jade eye-lenses of his helm upon Lucius again, ‘to die here in this place as well.’

  Lucius’ grin widened. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry yourself overmuch about that, cousin.’

  The two began to circle. Lucius exaggerated his movements, taking extended strides and weaving his sword in front of him with ­casual grace. His eyes took in everything about the Red Centurion: the methodical shuffle of his footwork, the spread of his weight across his boots, how he leaned, breathed and reacted. Even without clashing blades, Lucius knew his opponent was as good as he had heard, keeping his defences compact and not allowing the swordsman to draw him into unbalancing himself. He moved with such calm and forethought that Lucius began to question whether he was really a World Eater at all.

  The idea lasted less than a heartbeat.

  With a roar from deep within his barrel chest, the Red Centurion leapt at Lucius with an overhand slash. A crack from his lash high against the chainaxe’s haft robbed momentum from the blow, and Lucius sidestepped the screaming teeth while sweeping the head of the axe down with the edge of his sword. A brutal reverse strike clashed the axe against Lucius’ blade, and he drank in the juddering impact tremor that clawed up to his shoulder before spinning away.

  The Red Centurion refused Lucius any distance. He pressed forwards constantly, crowding the swordsman with hacking strikes and sweeping cuts. Lucius wove around the blows, only bringing up his sword to block when he had no choice. Broken and blunted chain teeth clattered to the charred hull plating around them after each clash.

  Lucius beamed. This was a true opponent. It had been so long since anything even remotely challenging had come his way, inspiring him to make use of the skills he refused to gift upon the dregs that were so often pitted against his Cohors Nasicae. He really wished he had killed this champion on Skalathrax, to bask in the adoration of his Legion, but that was not what happened there, and there was no going back after what took place upon those ice fields.

  A blistering slash aimed for Lucius’ throat sent him darting back a step. He flung his lash outwards, coiling it around the axe and hauling it down. The Red Centurion lunged forwards with a punch, causing Lucius to twist to dodge it as he thrust.

  The blade struck the Red Centurion’s helmet crest, fashioned from dark bronze into the sigil of his god of war and blood, shearing it away in a jet of sparks. Lucius pulled the blade back, slicing into the fibre bundles along the World Eater’s neck. Another roar ripped from his helm as he tore his axe free, pushing the churning teeth forwards towards Lucius’ gut.

  Lucius plunged his sword down between the two warriors, ­showering both combatants with sparks as chain teeth ripped across his blade. A headbutt staggered Lucius for an instant, and he barely swayed aside from an overhead slash aimed for the crown of his skull. A riposte from Lucius cut across at neck level, but the World Eater caught the blow on his vambrace, turning it aside and shoving him back.

  A dust storm whipped up from the ground in twisting clouds of stinging sand. The two combatants were blurred to silhouettes in the etheric squall, their essences leaking into the storm to clash in ­rippling waves of crimson and mauve. Lucius drank in the bite of the whipping grit as it assailed him, plucking at the scars covering the exposed flesh of his face. The World Eaters warlord gunned his chainaxe, swinging through the gales at the swordsman’s faint impression.

  The Red Centurion’s veneer of calm was a memory now. He was lost to the song of the Nails. The implants gouged into his mind, using pain to push him deeper and deeper into berserker fury. Lucius could see the tics and tremors running rampant over the World Eater, even through the churning winds. He could hear the haft of the warlord’s axe creak as he gripped it tight enough to leave indentations in the iron. Just as the storm obscured the World Eater’s vision, rage clouded his mind, suffocating all else beneath a tide of bloodlust.

  It was then that Lucius attacked.

  Lucius exploded forwards, his blade moving faster than eyes could follow. He slashed and stabbed, melting into the storm like a violet blur around the Red Centurion. The sword shone in diamond-bright flashes as it bit deeply into the World Eater’s armour. Sparks illuminated the duel briefly as they showered from splitting ceramite plates.

  A slash across the lead leg buckled the World Eater. Another behind the same knee dropped him. The Red Centurion swung his axe around himself in blind arcs, as if it were a torch to dispel darkness. Lucius flashed past him, and the axe spun away to clatter against the ground, along with the hand that had wielded it.

  The silt within the storm lit like molten gold wherever the Red Centurion’s blood touched it. It spiralled through the air like narrow flocks of fireflies before falling to the hull of the ship, where it blackened to ash. The World Eater dragged a short gladius from a sheath strapped to his shin, and was making to rise into a crouch, when the tip of a sword appeared beneath his jaw.

  ‘This was an amusing diversion,’ purred Lucius, pressing the blade against the flexible armour that would fail to protect the Red Centurion’s throat. Ribbons of multicolour curled around the silver edge amid the howling storms, never touching its pearlescent surface. ‘I thank you for it, cousin. I shall savour the look on the faces of your mongrel horde when I toss your head down at their feet.’

  Now the time had come. A time that had come so many times before. Lucius standing over a defeated enemy, a smirk of exuberant triumph twisting his ruined features. A simple flick of his wrist, a modicum of effort, and the head of the XII Legion warlord would roll free from his shoulders. Lucius would catch it easily in his hand, lifting it high above the fray beneath him for his followers to adore, and his enemies to despair. He would bask in both in equal measure.

  Lucius ran his tongue over his teeth, savouring the moment, and twisted his wrist.

  The blade did not move. It stayed resting against the World Eater’s throat, and no cut was made. No sacred gasp as airways and arteries were opened into the air, no transcendent splitting notes of flesh peeling apart as head separated from neck.

  Lucius’ smile soured into a sneer. His brow furrowed, lip curling in anger as he fought to control his own sword arm. Still it defied him, refusing to move.

  Worms of trembling numbness bloomed in his fingertips, spiralling up his arm as the limb rebelled against him. The swordsman snarled, releasing his lash to hang loose as he clamped his other hand over his wrist. The muscles of his sword arm locked tight, sinews pulling taut and constricting the bones in crushing seizure.

  A stink like roasting hair rolled up Lucius’ palate and flooded his nostrils. His vision narrowed, the way ahead stretching into a long corridor slowly filling with oily water. Sound ceased, replaced by a shrill ring that fluttered his eardrums, and the swelling screams of the captive killers within his mind. Vertigo stole the balance from his legs.

  A cold hammer blow sprang Lucius’ world back into focus. A gasp burst from between his teeth as the Red Centurion’s gladius punched into his side.
The wide bronze blade sank in to the hilt, driving through armour and black carapace and beneath Lucius’ fused ribcage to lacerate the organs within. The World Eater wrenched the weapon free, and greasy black ichor spurted down the violet of Lucius’ war-plate in stuttered bubbling jets.

  Lucius staggered back, his arm still locked stiffly out in front of him. The exterior of the Pit Cur began to rattle and shake beneath his boots. The twisted faces pressing up from the surface of his armour shrieked in a horrid chorus of disunity, filling his ears to join his mind with their overlapping syncopated screams.

  The fury of the storms corkscrewed around Lucius and blasted outwards, ripping across the surface of the daemon world. Tectonic tremors threw the embattled warbands from their feet. Rents across the earth split open like gaping fanged mouths, swallowing warriors into depthless chasms.

  With a breathless hiss, Lucius finally reasserted control over his arm, lowering the blade as a scream of tearing metal ripped upwards from beneath him. The hull plating fractured, squealing as it was pulled apart by unnatural geological forces. A yawning abyss stretched open before Lucius, dragging him back as the crashed ship was torn in half.

  ‘No!’ Lucius screamed, watching as the wounded form of the Red Centurion rose to his feet from across the spreading rift. The World Eater’s head, the kill, it had all been his. He had been victorious. His blood boiled at the thought that another might cut the warlord’s thread in his place.

  Something had intervened to thwart the glorious triumph that was Lucius’ by right. He had experienced similar sensations before, moments where he lost control. In the past they had been minute tugs at his limbs or an icy numbness creeping over his flesh, but it had never been this severe, never enough to arrest him so completely.

  Lucius pressed his palm to his temple as the screaming in his head grew louder, louder, louder. The hull beneath him heaved, nearly throwing him from his feet. Plates of dense armour twisted and tore like foil. The hull of the Pit Cur was being ripped to pieces the way a corpse is quartered by a pack of carrion hounds, as the daemon world tore itself apart. He looked down at the wound in his side, the gash already closing beneath a crust of dried blood. Spitting a ­gobbet of clotted ichor and hissing phlegm from between his teeth, the swordsman turned his eyes up to look into the sky.

  A blade-sharp form was cutting down from the abused heavens on contrails of jade and azure fire, diving into the roiling maelstrom ravaging the planet’s surface. The Talon Queen was coming for what remained of the Cohors Nasicae, and she would not wait for long.

  Lucius spat again. With a thought, his lash coiled around his forearm, and he kicked himself off the Pit Cur’s superstructure. He spread his arms as he dived through the twisting veils of dust towards the ground. The soil exploded in neon mandalas as he landed and began running across the disintegrating surface, towards where the Talon Queen was circling to land.

  He was finished with this world.

  Direnc woke to watch the death of a world he did not remember landing upon. A bizarre alien landscape stretched out before him as he dragged himself from beneath a section of warped deck plating. The very earth flashed and sparked in a myriad of exotic colours around anything that lived and moved. An open sky swept overhead, displaying the maddening procession of the Eye’s currents like a lunatic’s parade. The ground quaked with macrotremors, shaking what little remained upon the skeleton of the Pit Cur loose to fall ­tumbling from her bones.

  Pain flared over his lacerated flesh as he groaned with the effort of pushing himself to his knees. Placing his weight forwards, Direnc stumbled and fell awkwardly onto his side. He looked down at his left hand. There was nothing there, nothing but a knob of gnarled flesh at his wrist, encrusted in a thick black film of dried blood and ash.

  Nausea bloomed at the top of Direnc’s stomach, and the oily chill of shock crawled across his bruised and grimy skin. He did not remember anything of the last several hours. He did not remember a crash, or arriving in this place. His memories had stopped when he fell into the embrace of the mist in the lower decks of the Pit Cur.

  The memory of it lanced a pang of longing through his brain unlike any he had ever before experienced. He could not recall just what the mist was like; trying to do so felt as if he were trying to grasp smoke. He knew only that it was transcendent and pure, and that nothing in his life was more important than getting back to it. Looking around him, he knew that such a beautiful, perfect thing was absent here in this twisted, burning place.

  That was when Direnc noticed the bodies. His senses seemed to snap back all at once. His nostrils stung with carbon, iron and charred fat. Smoke reddened his eyes and sent tears trailing down his dirty cheeks. He heard the crackle of flames, the groan and crash of iron, and his eyes were filled with the corpses of his fellow slaves as far as he could see. He felt his body trembling, a weak echo of the ground that shivered beneath him in brilliant colour as the planet thrashed.

  The ground was quaking so loudly that he did not even hear the demigod approaching. He turned his head, seeing a giant clad in war-plate of shining pearl webbed with veins of deep purple standing over him. One of the giant’s hands was a gigantic gauntlet of drills and cutting tools. The other held a boxy silver pistol that was bigger than Direnc’s head.

  ‘Life.’ The giant’s voice was like a soft avalanche filtered through a cloud of wasps, low and measured but unable to mask the undeniable threat the demigod exuded by its very presence alone. Slowly, it raised the pistol, levelling it at Direnc. ‘Or death?’

  The serf’s blood ran cold. Despite the furnace heat of the crash site his teeth would not cease chattering. He stared into the barrel of the pistol, a wide black eye that swelled to encompass his entire world. Everything else, all sights and sounds and smells, faded away into the background in the face of the doom promised by the cold iron circle.

  ‘L-life,’ Direnc managed to choke from behind a terror-locked jaw, the act of speaking the word feeling as though it were the heaviest weight he had ever lifted.

  The demigod remained inhumanly still, unaffected by his answer. The pistol did not waver from the head of the prostrate slave. It was at that moment that Direnc noticed the huddled crowd of dazed men and women behind the legionary’s armoured bulk, fear keeping them silent and compliant for their new master.

  With a soft purr of armour servos, the demigod lifted the pistol, taking its barrel from between Direnc’s eyes as the serf rose shakily to his feet.

  ‘Life.’

  I.VII

  Krysithius crouched as the ridgeline he stood upon shot a hundred metres into the air. The planet was fracturing and reforming all around him. Mountain ranges reared up to scrape at the heavens before collapsing into depressions so deep it was impossible to see their ends. Warriors on both sides of the still raging battle ­tumbled away down the ridge’s steepening sides, disappearing from the swordsman’s sight into rushing curtains of dust and smoke.

  More runes blinked out on Krysithius’ visor display, and the warrior seethed behind his helm’s faceplate. The entirety of the Cohors Nasicae, including the Rypax, had been committed to the madness of this slaving raid gone wrong, and the warband was bleeding itself white. He slashed across his body, splitting the armour of a World Eater’s plastron with Ajennion’s sabre and thundering out a kick that pitched the axe-wielding berserker from the ridge.

  The scream of ramjets cut through the whirling tempest of multi­coloured sand tearing over the daemon world’s surface. Krysithius looked up, seeing the majestic silhouette of the Talon Queen approach. The venerable Thunderhawk swung wide overhead, bleeding her forward momentum with hissing thrusters in her nose, while servitor-manned ventral turrets spat bursts of fire into the World Eaters from the barrels of heavy bolters.

  Piercing stablights sliced through the gale, guiding the surviving Cohors Nasicae as they fell back from the unstable planet and the XII Legion brutes
still thronging its surface. Krysithius skidded down the ridge towards where the gunship was settling, thudding to flat ground and taking off at a sprint.

  The Talon Queen sank to a hover as her forward assault ramp came down, her thrusters howling and burning the ground beneath her to blackened ash. Legionaries jostled and shoved past one another to get inside. Krysithius caught a brother who had begun to fall beside him, his legs savaged by bolter fire. He seized his kinsman by his armoured collar, hauling him along as he stomped up the ramp. The booming report of the heavy bolters was deafening, their strobing barrels illuminating the dust storms with flickering flares of fiery death. The Talon Queen’s lascannons fired, a flash of eye-aching brilliance that reduced a squad of World Eaters to mounds of dissipating carbon sludge.

  Krysithius released his brother at the top of the assault ramp, pale sparks weeping from his elbow joint, and sank into a restraint throne as the other warrior dragged himself the rest of the way, trailing blood and machine oil from his shattered armour. He looked down the aisle of the Talon Queen’s crew bay, at the ragged collection of warriors that was all that remained of the Cohors Nasicae. Far more than half their number was gone. Such catastrophic losses would threaten the continued survival of any warband within the Eye, where threats abounded in every storm and dark corner of the semi-immaterial realm. Sinking from the fighting strength of nearly sixty legionaries to barely above twenty was a blow few forces could recover from, and nothing less than a total disaster.

  This cannot go on. The thought rang in Krysithius’ mind as he dragged a hand through his hair. His fingers grew slick with blood and oil, catching on shards of bone and ceramite that matted his locks. Not all of which had belonged to the World Eaters. He picked a sliver of purple and gold from his scalp, peering down to see the symbol of the III Legion in the palm of his hand, shattered and charred.