Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 7

  Without conscious thought, his gauntlet curled into a fist, crushing the shard. If the Cohors Nasicae were to survive, they would need a guiding hand stronger than the lunatic they now followed. God-touched or not, Lucius the Eternal had brought them nothing but ruin.

  The thought of their leader sent Krysithius’ eyes poring over the assembled warriors as the Talon Queen’s main engines spooled up to full power in a fiery shriek. Ever since he had become the Eternal following his first resurrection, Lucius’ armour had failed to emit a reliable transponder code, but Krysithius could not find his smug, fanged visage among the survivors. The only brother not on the crew deck of the Thunderhawk was Cesare, yet he was aboard. Krysithius could detect the Apothecary below him, surrounded by the smear of huddled heat signatures given off by the slaves he had collected in the lower deck. At least they had managed to gain something from this disaster.

  Could the Eternal be gone as well? Had Lucius fallen in battle to the enemy, or had he been swallowed up by the daemon world as it unmade itself? Could fortune have truly favoured Krysithius so?

  The Talon Queen shuddered as she began to rise, buffeted by the tumultuous death rattles of an entire world. The swordsman felt his hope, a feeling so delicate and rare within the Eye, rise with her. He would step forwards and fill the void in leadership. He would drag the Cohors Nasicae back from oblivion, as any true son of the Phoenician would. He would reforge his brothers and together they would–

  A thick ropey appendage smacked against the hydraulic piston of the assault ramp, anchoring itself on razored barbs. The plasteel hissed and spat as acidic venoms ate into its surface. The lash wrapped itself tighter around the piston, coiling more and more of itself around it, before a clawed hand snatched hold of the lip of the assault ramp.

  A form of cracked purple armour, riven with howling faces and drenched in blood, hauled itself up the ramp as the Talon Queen leapt into the sky. Lucius uncoiled his lash from around the piston as the assault ramp rose to seal itself. Krysithius felt a tooth crack in his jaw as he leered at the figure now standing in the soft crimson light of the Thunderhawk’s crew bay. Chips of enamel caught in his throat along with his hope.

  ‘No, brother!’ Lucius implored, his hand shooting out with mock sincerity towards Krysithius to forestall him from rising. ‘Please, do not dream of exerting yourself. I was quite all right dangling over all of that, and you look so very, very tired.’

  Lucius strode past Krysithius, ignoring the murderous glare boring into his back. He spread his arms wide to match his grin as he looked at his warband.

  ‘So, my brothers, how was everyone’s battle?’

  But for the shrill rumble of her engines, the flight of the Talon Queen was silent as she knifed free from the bonds of the daemon world. The storms had stolen much of the paint from her hull, and there had been more than one occasion where the Thunderhawk was forced into relying on intricately dramatic manoeuvres on the part of her pilot to avoid being dragged down and dashed against the planet’s undulating crust. The blackened skin of the ancient gunship shimmered as she shot through a bubbling nebula of gas and dust, closing in on the waiting shape of the Diadem, hanging serenely amidst the turbulence of the Eye.

  Aboard the Thunderhawk, the silence pervaded with grim insistence. Two more warriors, the Brazen Claws turncoat of the Rypax and Rubitaille, one of the foremost of the Palatine Blades in the halcyon days of the Legion, died on the way to the strike cruiser. Opportunists had stripped the armour from Rubitaille’s flesh while it still bore warmth, before Cesare had clambered up from the lower deck and driven the scavengers away so that he could extract his gene-seed. The surviving Rypax crouched in a protective circle around the dead Brazen Claw in the rear of the crew bay, hissing and brandishing blade and claw at any who dared draw near. They would remain as such until landing, safeguarding the corpse for their own death rituals conducted back in the shadows of their roost.

  Krysithius stared at the plundered corpse of Rubitaille as the dour Apothecary did his work. His eyes fell over the dead warrior’s greaves, the armour broken and smeared with blood and oil. He realised that it had been Rubitaille whom he had helped to board the Talon Queen in the moments before their flight. He considered for a moment whether the fate of being abandoned on the surface would have been preferable to the defilement that had been so callously visited upon a sworn battle-brother and veteran of the Siege of Terra.

  His ruminations did nothing to quell the smouldering furnace of his anger.

  ‘Something to say, brother?’ asked Lucius with the same baiting edge he always used when speaking to Krysithius. The Eternal smiled with his black needle teeth as he cleaned the gore and muck from the Laeran Blade their father had given him so long ago. What would the primarch think, Krysithius glowered, to see his champion now?

  Would he be repulsed? Or would their father be so much worse that there would be no room for judgement?

  A resonant clang sent a shudder through the occupants of the Talon Queen as the Thunderhawk touched down upon the Diadem’s landing bay. The assault ramp began to lower with a hydraulic hiss, and the battered warriors of the Cohors Nasicae stood to file down onto the strike cruiser’s deck. They passed Lucius and Krysithius, sitting across from one another in silence at the mouth of the ramp.

  The Eternal’s eyes of bloodshot green never left Krysithius, just as the cruel smile never left his lips. The seconds seemed to stretch, congealing and hardening into infinity. Krysithius clenched his fists, drawing them away from the position they had held without his notice, over his holstered weapons. The swordsman stood, turning without a word as he strode down the Thunderhawk’s assault ramp.

  Lucius watched him go, the smile still clinging to his lips but drained of its venom. His eyes lingered over Ajennion’s sabre as it swayed softly from the scabbard chained to Krysithius’ hip. That blade was going to leave its scabbard one of these nights, thought Lucius, and soon.

  Rising, he cast a look over his shoulder at the Talon Queen’s crew bay. Cesare had wrapped Rubitaille’s corpse in silver linen, ready for the Apothecary’s retrieval after he had brought the newly won slaves down to the lower decks. The aisle of the bay was slick with blood that glittered wet and dark in the glow of emergency lights, filling the confined space with a spicy transhuman reek.

  His brothers’ blood. Lucius frowned for a moment, curious at the sudden thought. He did not remember when the feeling had left him, or if he had ever possessed it from the start, but he simply could not bring himself to care. The legionaries of the Cohors ­Nasicae were his blades. When a blade breaks in battle, when it ceases to be useful, it is thrown aside by the one who wields it, who then finds another to replace it.

  Lucius snarled away a rising pulse from the voices that stung at his thoughts. He exhaled, telling himself to focus his attention on the deep clang of his boots as he stomped down the Talon Queen’s boarding ramp, but found he already stood at the bottom of it. He thrashed his head, collecting himself as he walked across the polished black decking. Crews of twisted menials scattered from his path as he made his way to the ship’s bridge.

  He had broken many blades recently. There were few left in his possession that could serve their purpose. It was perhaps time, he thought, to find some more.

  I.VIII

  He opened his eyes; nothing but darkness greeted them. Not the lightlessness of night, or of a ship’s unpowered corridors, but true, depthless dark. For a moment of panic that stung his mind with its acid touch, he believed with grim certainty that they had taken his eyes. He blinked rapidly, nearly gasping with relief when he felt the intact spheres as he fluttered his eyelids over them. Slowly, painfully, he closed them again, putting all of his effort into slowing the oily rolling he felt within his head, and controlling the breath that misted out from between his chattering teeth.

  Direnc remembered nothing of what had brought him to this blackness. Hi
s last thoughts, individual broken images that flickered and flashed through his mind as though they were being projected by a faulty pict feed, were of the strange planet his ship had crashed down upon, tearing itself apart at a tectonic level. He remembered staggering to his feet, and his world eclipsing in the face of a wide eye of silver gunmetal.

  The demigod. The memory plunged ice into Direnc’s veins. The demigod belonging to the warband that had destroyed his ship and butchered her crew. It had taken him.

  Adrenaline stung his blood, boiling the ice away. While he was still blind, Direnc’s other senses returned. He smelt the cold, stale breath of air pushed from ancient rescrubbers. Iron and spice stroked his tongue with a distant caress, and he felt cold iron shiver beneath his bare feet in tune to the distant thrum surrounding him.

  He was on another ship. The demigod’s ship. But why?

  Direnc could not conceive of an answer that was anything short of terrifying. He had learned of the broken remnants of the III Legion in the barest snatches of his master’s conversations. The Pit Cur had even run afoul of their like before, though it had been little more than a skirmish between two small schools of vessels too distracted by their own disrepair to give battle. He had never seen the Emperor’s Children before the crash, and if even a fraction of the things his lords had said had any truth, the wisest course he could take would be to find the surest way of snapping his own neck.

  For the first time since regaining consciousness, Direnc attempted to lift his arm. The limb refused him, as did the others as he tried them. He felt no shackles or irons around them, no chains binding him in place, yet he could not move. The only thing he could feel was the phantom itch emanating from the stump where his hand had been. Panic began to eat back into the XII Legion serf’s mind, dripping down the back of his skull and dancing along his spine.

  More than anything, though, Direnc felt withdrawal. Every waking thought ended with the teasing recollection of the rosy vapour that had engulfed him aboard the Pit Cur. It was torturous, failing to remember anything of the exact sensations other than the absolute bliss they had gifted upon him. Direnc’s nerve endings were shot without its touch, triggering tics and an anxious restlessness that only exacerbated the distress needling his psyche from his paralysis.

  A deep clunk sounded from somewhere around Direnc, causing his teeth to clench involuntarily. Though he could not feel it, he was certain his skin was crawling, as if a vibrating piece of machinery were hovering just above it. A modicum of his vision returned, enough for him to glimpse a willowy figure standing over him.

  It was inhumanly tall and thin, a hairless androgynous thing sheathed in a body glove of shining black rubber. It peered down at him, smiling a smile that was too wide with a mouth that had too many teeth.

  The figure raised a hand up to Direnc, its soft flesh pale as milk. Its palm was open, holding a small mound of pinkish powder. Direnc’s tongue felt thick and heavy, his mouth dry as he tried to choke out words.

  ‘W–’

  His words were stolen by a soft hiss that muted all other sound. The androgynous creature breathed out, softly throwing the rosy dust into Direnc’s face. The powder billowed over him, warm against the frigid air as it wrapped itself around his body. It felt like silk, and the serf released the breath he had been holding to allow it passage within him.

  It had barely brushed his nostrils before he was gasping. Direnc lurched forwards, greedily inhaling as much of the musk as he could. It was the same joyful mist that he had tasted upon the Pit Cur, only somehow more. The cold vanished, and the stale recycled air with it. Perfume took its place, sublimely potent and yet subtle at the same time. The deep thrum of engines faded away, along with the musical giggling of the creature, as a sweet, bright chirping plucked at his ears.

  Direnc slowly opened his eyes fully and found that, after a few blinks to clear his vision, he was no longer blind.

  He was in a garden.

  Direnc was sitting upon a low overstuffed couch skinned in deep scarlet silk. It was soft to his touch, so soft it felt as though he would sink into it forever. He realised with a start that he was pressing against its plush surface with his hand, the hand he thought he had lost in the crash. He held it to his face, marvelling at its smooth, undamaged flesh, before he turned his gaze to his surroundings.

  Everything around him was lush and green. Flowers swelled on vines with a riot of spectacularly tender blooms. A stream of water, not the rust-thickened leakages of corroded ductwork but glittering, crystal clear water, chuckled as it wound through the greenery. There was more vegetation in this small garden than Direnc had seen in his entire life.

  Small shapes flittered hither and yon amongst the blossoms, their plumage representing every colour of the spectrum. They hovered with easy grace, drinking of the nectar that glistened from the flowers, before darting back to the air in a blur of gently flapping wings. It was from the tiny beaks of these creatures that the singing was coming. Direnc had never seen a bird before, nor had he heard their birdsong. Such things had been confined to the few shattered picts and mouldering tomes left in what had once been the Pit Cur’s libraries, the few that had survived being casually destroyed by the masters or burned for warmth by the mortal crew. In the face of survival, they had been an irrelevance, but now he understood the full measure of what they were.

  For an indeterminate period, Direnc simply sat staring. He drank in the splendour around him, the rapturous press of nature upon his senses. He was so lost to it, so deeply distracted, that it took him some time before he realised he was not alone.

  The child stared down at the daemon world, eyes of black and gold narrowed in a porcelain angel’s face. She hated the world. She really, really hated it.

  She sat upon a throne of onyx and silver built to accommodate a legionary’s dimensions in the cool expanse of the Diadem’s bridge, glaring at the curdled sphere that dominated the oculus viewscreen. She hungered to destroy the warp-spawned planet, to rain cyclonic torpedoes down onto its surface and pull its continents apart with planet-cracking ordnance strikes. Its birth had stolen her prey, dragging the vessel called the Pit Cur down with its invisible greed to ruin her against its ugly crust. She had learned the ship’s name in the scream of her guns, roaring in feeble defiance as they hammered uselessly at the Diadem’s shields, before the child had sunk her claws into her quarry’s bulging iron hide.

  Before the planet had appeared. It had taken a kill from her. It was a thief, and deserved annihilation.

  She watched the seismic anarchy erupting across the planet’s surface, and her perfect features were twisted by a scowl. The world was collapsing from within, its death a matter of months or moments away, but inevitably by its own transient edifice. Within the birth wound of the Lord of Dark Delights, where thought could form anything into reality, the only impossibility was constancy. The daemon world’s suicide brought its affront full circle, robbing the child of even the shallow vindication she would have gleaned by murdering it herself.

  The child sighed softly. The light of tactical hololiths reflected like moonlight from skin the colour of fresh snow. Only the barest hints of violet were visible branching underneath it, and they twisted as her face stiffened in an expression of refined irritation. Despite the ravaging the warband had sustained on the ground, her void hunt had proved to be manifestly unsatisfying. The Diadem’s spirit ached to prowl, and her mistress shared the warship’s urge to seek out fresh, more challenging prey.

  A rumbling clunk from behind the child’s throne sounded as the main bulkhead rolled open. Noise and twisted light burst into the calm of the command deck, drowning out the melodies of the robed minstrels who knelt in a semicircle at her feet. The bulkhead sealed, and once more the liquid susurrus of their harps wound unchallenged through the perfumed, indigo-lit air.

  A lithe serpentine creature caressed the arm of her throne, rising from avian back-
jointed legs and tasting the fragrant air with flicks of a dark tongue from its long tapered snout.

  ‘Be still, Incitatus,’ she whispered to the daemonic animal, running short, slender fingers over its head. The daemonic creature cooed in subservience, its sealskin flesh rippling in swirling waves of purple and blue. It circled for a moment, its snout bobbing from side to side, before it lowered itself down to rest beneath her feet.

  Heavy footsteps, yet possessed of considerable grace, fell behind her, drawing close. The child plucked a translucent sliver of candied fruit from a gilded dish offered by another prostrated servant, enjoying the flavour as it burst across her taste buds. The slave scurried away from its mistress, head lowered, careful to avoid any contact with the massive cowled figure that stood beside the child’s throne. She chewed slowly, savouring the sweetness slowly melting away, as the footsteps stopped beside her.

  ‘Lucius,’ she greeted him, dabbing at her dark lips with a silk kerchief.

  ‘Clarion,’ replied Lucius. ‘How is my ship?’

  ‘You reek of battle,’ said Clarion with envious hunger. The ancient presence within that kept the child frozen in agelessness smiled through her lips. ‘I can see the lives of the ones you killed by the smell of their blood on you. I can hear their names. Would you like me to tell them to you?’

  Lucius smiled. ‘Another time, my dear.’ His eyes turned to the oculus. ‘What of the currents here? Did any other vessels happen upon us in my absence?’

  ‘No,’ Clarion pouted. She gestured with a tiny hand at the tactical hololiths that projected the region of Eyespace surrounding the ­Diadem. The cones of hard light curled and deformed as they refreshed, unable to truly display the realm where the material and immaterial universes met, yet still performing their functions well enough to be of use. A single crystal-blue icon, representing the III Legion warship, hung inert at the centre of the display, with no other contacts in sight. ‘We picked this region specifically for the fact that, for the meantime, there is nothing here, but that could change at any–’