Lucius: The Faultless Blade Read online

  ‘Something to say, brother…’

  Clarion turned, her gold eyes flicking back in a sidelong glance. ‘What?’

  Lucius was leaning over the table, knuckles flat against the polished metal, eyes staring glazed and unfocused into the dancing screeds of hard light. His mouth slowly moved as the words came out in a soft murmur, barely even a whisper. None of the bridge crew, caught up in their duties, heard it. But Clarion did.

  Clarion leaned forwards in her throne, looking closer. The hulking robed figure standing on the other side of her, half hidden in shadow, remained silent and unmoving, avoided by all. The child watched the warlord as his words drifted away and his eyes refocused. Lucius straightened, as if waking from a dream, lifting a hand to brush a trickle of dark blood from his nose. He looked down at Clarion, into shining eyes that stared into him with the undisguised fascination of a magos studying a pinned laboratory specimen.

  A warning throbbed insistently from a console in one of the sensorium pits, triggering a series of reports to flow up with practised precision through the levels of the bridge crew. A deck officer approached Clarion’s throne, halting a respectful distance from it with his eyes averted.

  ‘Report,’ ordered Clarion, still staring at Lucius.

  ‘Mistress.’ The deck officer cleared his throat, involuntarily smoothing the faded white of his uniform. ‘We have received reports that one of the forward prow airlocks has been opened.’

  Clarion joined Lucius in looking at the deck officer. ‘Are we being boarded?’

  ‘No, mistress,’ answered the officer, failing to mask his own unease. ‘It has been opened from the inside.’

  The corridor was abandoned.

  Its position on the Diadem, just behind the armoured spear-tip of her prow and far from the palatial discordance of the upper decks the legionaries prowled, meant that only senior crew and emergency repair teams had any business walking its dark and barren length. The aching cold of being so near the outer hull guaranteed few ever travelled it at all. What little light there was came from the weak pulse of amber lumen panels set into the walls, their anaemic glow failing to pierce the perpetual twilight.

  The walls shook with a resounding clang of ceramite clashing against iron, like a bell falling from a church steeple. The noise ­rippled down the corridor and back in jarring echoes before bleeding away to silence. Another clash took its place, followed by another. And another.

  Strained snaps and popping couplings wove between the tolls as the warrior pulled his armour from his body before dropping it to the deck. Irreplaceable pieces of artificer-crafted war-plate, forged upon Mars in a time now relegated to myth and reforged in the bathing madness of the Eye, left indents in the steel mesh deck as they slipped forgotten from his fingers and thudded to rest. Interface needles caught and held for long seconds before tearing free, leaving his flesh raw and bleeding in the frigid air. He could not feel it.

  The warrior pulled the ridged cowter, lacquered in violet and gold, free from its place anchored over his left elbow. The armour was of such exquisite craftsmanship that this piece alone was worth more than the tithes of some Imperial worlds. He did not look down as he discarded it behind him.

  His hand reached up to the wall, stroking its pitted surface through the clawed gauntlet he wore. The metal shrieked as his talons raked slowly across it, the grating sound failing to reach him as he tore the iron with casual disinterest. After a trio of dry hissing pops of armour locks unsealing, the gauntlet fell from his hand, joining the trail of priceless detritus left in the warrior’s wake.

  Stripping away the form-fitting body glove beneath his armour, the warrior strode to the end of the corridor. He walked bereft of any wargear, but for the clawed boots and greaves on his legs, and the spear he bore at his side in a tight grip. It was a relic among relics, the symbol of the chieftain of the warrior cult he led. The cult he had watched be destroyed.

  The Rypax was devastated. From a force of close to two dozen Raptors, now they were six. The latest battle against the XII Legion had bled the cult of irreplaceable individuals, Raptors the warrior had reaved the stars with for centuries. These deaths, galling as they were, the warrior could accept. The brothers stolen by the daemon world itself, he could not. Half of their number had fallen in the flight from the battle, swallowed up by the roiling earth beneath or incinerated in the burning skies above.

  The warrior could no longer feel the touch of the divine. The god he and his cult had prayed to on the eve of each bloodletting, the deity they venerated by giving birth to rapturous pain with their claws and blades in acts of fevered battle worship, had withdrawn its favour. Numbness and restlessness spilled into the void its absence left, making the Raptors aimless and cold even upon the field of battle. The deaths of so many of the Rypax, falling into the maw of a world conjured into being by the warp itself, was all the sign the warrior needed to know that they had truly been abandoned.

  The Rypax had committed some affront to cause the Dark Prince’s displeasure, and for that they had been forsaken. To save those few who remained, their chieftain turned to the old ways.

  The warrior could not hear the wail of warning sirens as the inner airlock ground open, the slab doors peeling aside on ancient tracks. He did not feel the depthless sting of the vacuum as he stepped into the airless industrial lift that led to the warship’s skin. He could not feel the blood begin to freeze in his veins.

  Vispyrtilo’s sins had rendered him and his cult barren to such sensations. He gripped his spear tighter as the lift ground higher, bearing him closer to the tempest above. He would repair the rift caused by their transgressions. He would win back the favour of the Youngest God.

  Even if the price to be paid was the teeming choirs of the Neverborn devouring his soul.

  I.IX

  Three menial servitors and five mortal crew would lie dead by the time Lucius reached the prow airlock. Most of their deaths had gone completely unnoticed by the Eternal as he sprinted through the spinal thoroughfares that threaded the Diadem’s upper decks. He had locked eyes for an instant with a thrashing, screaming man in the passage beneath the main sensorium towers, watching the mortal’s panicked frenzy for an eye-blink as he barged him out of his path. He felt the human’s disgustingly fragile ribcage wrap around his vambrace and rupture before the man was hurled away to crash with clumsy, boneless weight to the deck.

  Two more had died to his lash, unable to get clear of Lucius fast enough and thus forfeiting any chance of their continued survival. A woman screamed as the whip stole her legs. A servitor, oblivious to the events unfolding around it, was eerily silent as it was pulled apart to clear the passing warlord’s way.

  Lucius swore, his legs a blurred pair of pistons beneath him as he charged on. As soon as the report had come to the ship’s bridge, the Diadem had initiated the emergency protocols to engage its Geller field. The protective barrier had been deactivated after the brief confrontation with the XII Legion ship so that the Diadem’s contingent of hereteks could provide the towering generators with needed maintenance and supplications to their machine-spirits.

  Vispyrtilo’s actions would draw the Neverborn to the Diadem like moths to the flame. Raising the Geller field now, even under emergency conditions, would take time they did not have. Lucius was not blind to the existence of the daemons that already dwelt and hunted in the darkest corners of the Diadem, but unless he stopped the Raptor, the entire ship would be overrun.

  The claws of his boots scraped gouges into the deck plate as he skidded around a corridor junction. Lucius arrived at the airlock to the primary spinal tower mounted on the forward prow, the blood of mortals and servitors drying over him in a thin crust. Standing as silent praetorians around the bulkhead were the shattered remnants of the Rypax.

  The five Raptors crouched, armed with bolt pistols, blackened power swords and cracked power talons. Three squatted upon
the deck, while the other two leered like gargoyles, hanging from the ceiling by their hooked boot talons. Since their return to the Diadem none of them had removed or seen to their armour, which still showed the thorough ruination the battle upon the daemon world had inflicted on them. The contoured panels of the ancient ceramite suits sparked and groaned with abused servos as they stood sentinel over the doorway.

  The Raptors had collected the pieces of Vispyrtilo’s armour from where they had been discarded upon the deck, stacking it with all the care and reverence of a makeshift shrine in a corner by the airlock bulkhead. The last survivors of the Rypax would bear it back in funereal silence to their roost, before the time would come for the new master of the cult to be chosen.

  Would the Raptors resort to infighting to solve their crisis of succession, Lucius thought, with so few of their number left? Even with all that had transpired, he doubted that the threat of extinction would stay their claws from bloodshed. Especially when the prize was the Rypax cult itself.

  Lucius began to walk towards the snarling Raptors. He adopted a measured pace, confident and deliberate, and he put a smirk upon his lips that he did not feel. The Rypax reacted, the hanging two growling and levelling bolt pistols while the three upon the deck activated the crackling power fields of their blades. Killing light flashed in intermittent flickers from the damaged weapons, throwing harsh shadows upon the walls. The Rypax cult was unambiguous with its posturing: they would not act in aggression towards Lucius, but they stood unquestionably to deny his way.

  ‘We cannot allow you passage,’ cawed one of the Raptors. The warrior’s head, encased in a mask wrought into the visage of a screaming daemon, inclined slightly with a scrape of chipped ceramite. ‘Fulgrim’s Champion that you are.’

  ‘What has been done cannot be undone,’ another continued, his broken armour webbed in violet lightning in deference to his past among the VIII Legion. The only other inkling of his Nostraman origins was the Raptor’s gauntlets, still stained in sinner’s red.

  ‘What has been done must be done,’ said a third from his hawkish helm. The name Zhousu adorned one shoulder pauldron in worn Khorchin script, etched deep into war-plate scorched down to the ivory borne by the sons of the Khan.

  Their voices were shrill and grating, issuing from ruined helm vocabulators and throats abused by centuries of unnatural screams. Lucius closed his eyes briefly, repressing the murderous irritation boiling from his hearts, and bared his indulgent smile wider.

  ‘Brothers,’ Lucius purred, spreading his arms wide in benediction. ‘Put your weapons away. Perhaps you have forgotten how to address the one who now stands before you. The one your own leader bends the knee to.’

  Lucius lowered his arms, resting his hand casually on the pommel of the Laeran Blade. ‘Perhaps you have forgotten that I could kill every one of you without even sullying my father’s blade on your filthy, perfidious hides.’

  ‘That may be so,’ admitted Kyoras, one of the last three Rypax to have come from the Emperor’s Children, from his place on the ceiling. ‘But it is the fate of our lord who lies beyond this door, not yours.’

  ‘Perhaps you would like to join him?’

  Kyoras did not rise to Lucius’ baiting, giving a single grating, sparking shake of his helmed head. ‘The Youngest God must be appeased. We must make an offering if we are to receive His blessings once more.’

  ‘And you believe that allowing the commander of my Raptor cult to be flensed apart by the Neverborn will return His love to you?’

  ‘We have nothing left to give.’ Kyoras’ voice was a scratchy whisper from behind his mask. ‘Nothing but ourselves, and the last of the Eagle Kings is the greatest of us. We offer such a sacrifice as this not to lift the curse upon the Rypax alone, Eternal One. We do this for the Cohors Nasicae. We do this for you.’

  Lucius’ false smile soured to a grim line. A tic twitched at his left nostril as his eyes narrowed. His voice was low, a growl barely above a whisper.

  ‘I. Am not. Cursed.’

  Kyoras’ bolt pistol did not waver. ‘Reality exists unconcerned of whether you believe it or not, Eternal One. Look around you. Our ability to make war on any level above base piracy has vanished. Our brothers stumble aimlessly across this ship, their stares distant, their nerves unable to send the sensation they crave riding through their bodies. They can only be brought to feel through the machinations of your Apothecary’s potions, and even then it can do little more than remind them of what they have lost. To continue upon this path is–’

  ‘Insane.’

  Lucius turned at the voice behind him. The icy light of a power field bathed Krysithius in an instant of stark light, his face hard and set. A second flash showed the remains of the Cohors Nasicae, leaning against the walls of the corridor behind him, waiting to watch what was about to transpire.

  Despite himself, despite everything, Lucius could not help but allow a cruel bark of laughter to pass between his teeth.

  ‘Something to say, brother?’

  Sheets of grey ice cracked and shattered from the walls of the lift travelling up the prow spinal tower as it ground to a halt. The portal iris twisted open, greedily swallowing down whatever thin wisps of atmosphere had remained within the small iron cage. Warp light, a thousand unknowable shades of red and purple and black, washed over Vispyrtilo’s face.

  The face of the Rypax chieftain shone, glittering brightly in the unholy light. On the night he had usurped the mantle of Eagle King, Vispyrtilo had taken the platinum circlet worn by his former master to the forge refineries deep within the heart of his warship. In the searing fires of its cauldrons, he melted the symbol of command that had existed since the dawn of the Wings of the Phoenician, rendering it down into a pool of molten silver liquid. Standing before the assembled might of his warriors, Vispyrtilo poured the liquefied platinum, drop by drop, over his face.

  He had revelled in the agonising bursts of pain that exploded over him as the metal ate into his flesh, filling the air with the scent of charred meat. His skin puckered and pinched around the platinum tears as they cooled and hardened. After a handful of moments, Vispyrtilo looked down across the gathered legionaries from a face pitted with gleaming stars.

  His message that night had been clear for all to see. The mantle that he had stolen could never be taken away from him. When he died, so too would the Wings of the Phoenician. He would be the last Eagle King.

  The tears of embedded platinum radiated the ephemeral light ­bathing the Diadem as Vispyrtilo staggered through the iris. Feeling the soft rumble through his boots as the doorway coiled closed behind him, he activated the magnetic locks with resonant clunks he could not hear within the tainted void. With a slow, deliberate pace, he began to march to the edge of the minaret.

  The mag-locks in his boots made the journey feel as though Vispyrtilo were trudging through thick sucking mud. Where an unaugmented human would have died of asphyxiation or exposure to the void’s undiluted radiation, Vispyrtilo was able to survive. The legionary’s genhanced physiology retained a higher reserve of oxygenated blood in his veins, while his three lungs were protected from swelling to rupture in the face of no external pressure by his black carapace. Still, he felt the last lingering heat flee from his flesh as the cold drank it away, and his tongue tingled as the moisture of his saliva began to boil.

  The Raptor’s pallid flesh took on an ashen grey tint, gradually freezing solid. The muscles and tendons of his limbs started to tighten and shrink in the airless cold, restricting his movements to a stunted shuffle. His head began to swim as the first signs of oxygen starvation manifested.

  Only a few steps more.

  The soulflame of anyone who set foot upon the hull of the Diadem in the open waters of the Eye would have been a beacon to the Neverborn from the second they emerged onto her iron skin. Faint shapes began to whirl around the prow of the III Legion warship, the barest t
races of ancient intelligence and endless hunger. Without the searing anathema light of the ship’s Geller field, the denizens who prowled the immaterial wound in reality swam closer, driven on by their ravenous thirst for mortal spirits.

  Vispyrtilo saw the daemons coming for him as he reached the edge of the minaret. He raised his spear, knowing that the movement tore nearly every muscle and tendon in his arm though he could not feel the pain of their rending. He placed the weapon’s golden tip against his chest, and slowly drew it from his right shoulder to his left.

  Dark gems of claret spilled out into the building storm of psychic energy. The Neverborn lunged for it like the predators of some primordial ocean. They caressed the spilled blood with the transient impressions of claws wrought from unclean light.

  Vispyrtilo drove the butt of his spear down to the deck of the minaret beside him. His consciousness began to ebb, his vision closing like the merging doors of the lift. He snarled, forcing his eyes to remain open even as they froze solid. He would be no flawed sacrifice. He had to be awake when they took him.

  He lifted his chin, and bared his throat to their storm.

  The Raptor lord stood unmoving as daemons swam around him, thin ghosts of shadow and thought. Vispyrtilo felt their eyeless gaze wash over him as they circled, their passage hypnotic as they drew closer and tighter around him. Tighter.

  The last Eagle King prepared himself for the eternity of horror and unceasing agony that he had offered to Slaanesh in exchange for his returned favour. He could see nothing but the sheets of congealed sentient emotion that surrounded him. They snapped and fought amongst themselves, before one emerged to rear over him.