Lucius turned his gaze upon his fellow captains. None marked his stare, for they could not tear their eyes from the downed primarch. Kalimos bled from numerous cracks in his armour, and Krysander’s breastplate was dented so deeply that the bone shield of his chest must surely be in fragments. Abranxe knelt by Heliton, holding the hanging fragments of his brother’s lower jaw in his hands. Vairosean’s howling mouth was spread even wider in a hissing grimace of triumph, and Julius Kaesoron stared at his fist as though unable to believe he had raised it in anger against Fulgrim.
None spoke. None knew what to say.
They had taken arms against their primarch and they had enjoyed it.
Apothecary Fabius broke the spell of their silence.
‘Fools!’ hissed the lifeless voice of the Apothecary. ‘You would stand gaping like landed fish until he awoke!’
Fabius turned away and made his way to the arched entrance to his necropolis of freakish surgeries. As he reached the edge of shadow, he turned back to the Legion captains.
‘Bring him below,’ said Fabius. ‘We have much to do.’
‘What exactly are you going to do, Apothecary?’ demanded Kaesoron.
‘I am going to exorcise the creature that has stolen the primarch’s flesh.’
‘How?’ asked Lucius.
‘By any means necessary,’ said Fabius with an odious grin.
12
It was the most terrible thing he had ever seen.
It was the most wondrous thing he had ever seen.
Fulgrim, the Phoenician, Lord of the Emperor’s Children, Master of the III Legion, bound with the heaviest of fetters, chemically subdued and laid naked on a cold steel gurney like a corpse bound for dissection. Fulgrim’s arms were thrown up above his head, his legs spread like the Vitruvian man of old.
Lucius’s eyes roamed Fulgrim’s pale flesh, the alabaster firmness criss-crossed in a web of surgical scars and incisions; knotted ridges that spoke of unknowable procedures and unspeakable experimentation upon the secret flesh within.
The delicious treason of this moment was something to be treasured, a wondrous sensation of the most terrible betrayal. Yet, for all that he called it betrayal, wasn’t it an act of loyalty to cast out the creature that had taken possession of their master’s soul?
Fabius circled the supine primarch, sliding needles as thick as Lucius’s little finger into Fulgrim’s arms and chest. Chem-shunts pumped powerful soporifics and muscle relaxants that would have dropped even the largest greenskin. Gleaming silver wires hooked to humming generators trailed from the primarch’s temples and groin, and from every point on his body where pain might be heightened.
The lights were kept low, as befitted this act of violation, and the only sound was the murmuring of the hooded null-wretches in each shadowed corner of the chamber and the wheezing breath of the machines Fabius had set up around his…
Lucius wanted to say patient, but the word that came to mind was victim.
Julius Kaesoron stood silently at the foot of the slab, while Marius Vairosean paced like a caged raptor. Lucius smiled at his discomfort. Vairosean had ever been the lackey and the blindly obedient slave. Caught in a quandary of obedience to something that might not be Fulgrim and the possibility of betraying his master, Vairosean’s mind must be alive with contradictory thoughts and fears.
Lucius almost envied him.
Fabius’s thrall-slaves had carried the mewling forms of Heliton and Ruen deeper into the labyrinth; flesh-vats and xenosalival-sutures already prepared for their treatment. Daimon was beyond help, his skull smashed to concave ruin by the primarch’s fist, but the rest of their treasonous band would survive. The thought sent a sliver of unease worming through Lucius’s brain, and he turned to Kaesoron.
‘Did you think we could do it?’ he asked.
‘Do what?’
‘This,’ said Lucius, gesturing towards the fallen primarch. ‘Capture Fulgrim. I wasn’t sure we could do it.’
‘You didn’t do it,’ pointed out Kaesoron.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look at you,’ hissed Kaesoron. ‘Not a mark on you, swordsman. You bring this matter to the brotherhood, and then step back and let us do the fighting for you.’
Lucius grinned, energised by Kaesoron’s anger. ‘What happened up there was a brawl. I fight with perfect grace, total immersion and fluid perfection. That was not a fight that required any of those qualities.’
‘More like you saw you couldn’t beat him.’
‘That too,’ added Lucius, ‘but there’s no shame in that.’
‘True enough,’ said Kaesoron, his capricious anger fading as quickly as it had come.
Marius Vairosean moved around the edge of the gurney, his stretched-out face making it impossible to read his expression. The captain of the Third had slung his sonic weapon over his shoulder, but the pulsing waves of hard-edged sound still rippled from its energised coils.
‘Daimon is dead,’ said Vairosean. ‘And Heliton died on the way down.’
‘And the Legion will be no worse off for their loss, if you ask me,’ said Lucius.
‘Ruen’s arm is shattered beyond repair,’ continued Vairosean, as though Lucius had not spoken. ‘Krysander and Kalimos will live, but they will play no part in… this.’
‘A small price to pay for subduing a primarch,’ noted Kaesoron, as Fabius approached.
The Apothecary wore his white hair bound in a long scalp-lock, which only served to render his already gaunt features more skeletal and emaciated. His eyes were black, and Lucius couldn’t remember if they had always been that way or had been changed to match those of the primarch. He wore a floor-length coat of flayed human skin, taken from the bodies of the dead on Isstvan V. Here and there, it was possible to recognise the features of a face, a mouth stretched in an endless scream of agony or eyes wide with horror at the sight of the skinner’s knife. Some of the faces seemed familiar, but Lucius knew that without the architecture of bone, every face tended to similarity.
Eschewing his chirurgeon device, Fabius favoured a belt of knotted sinew pierced through with metal loops, from which hung the tools of the excruciator’s art. Hooks, blades, spikes, pliers and barbs glittered in the half-light, but Lucius wondered if such banal instruments would draw screams from a being as powerful as Fulgrim.
‘We are ready to begin,’ said Fabius, drawing on a clicking pair of silver steel gauntlets.
‘Then let us be done with this,’ said Kaesoron. ‘If Lucius is right and there is something else concealed behind Lord Fulgrim’s face, then the sooner it is gone the better.’
They spread out around Fulgrim, each weighing the enormity of what they were doing against the potential for wonder and fresh sensation. That they had managed to subdue a primarch was miracle enough, but to drive out a creature of the warp…
Was such a thing even possible?
Lucius looked from face to face, understanding that no one gathered around the body of Fulgrim could answer that question. The Emperor’s Children had been a Legion reticent in employing Librarians. The genetic quirk that allowed a psyker to wield the power of the warp came about as a result of a genetic mutation, a flaw. And nothing that could be considered a flaw would be permitted within the ranks of Fulgrim’s Legion.
‘So what do we do?’ asked Kaesoron.
‘First, we wake him,’ said Fabius, stroking needle-tipped fingers over Fulgrim’s chest.
‘Assuming he doesn’t just break free and kill us all, what then?’ said Lucius.
‘We drive the creature out,’ said Fabius. ‘With reason, with threats and with pain.’
‘Pain?’ snorted Vairosean. ‘What pain can you administer that a primarch would feel?’
Fabius smiled his reptilian grin that promised a host of pains he alone knew and would be only too glad to demonstrate.
<
br /> ‘I know this body like no other,’ said Fabius, running his surgically-enabled digits over Fulgrim’s skin with a lover’s familiarity. ‘I know everything about how it was put together, the secret powers alloyed to its flesh and bone, the unique organs crafted for the creation of such a numinous being. What the Emperor created, I have broken down into its constituent parts and remade in a greater whole.’
The arrogance of Fabius was astounding, but Lucius felt himself warming to it. To have opened up the body of a primarch and gazed upon the wonders within was an honour few, if any, would have known, so perhaps it was arrogance born of knowledge.
‘Then do it,’ said Kaesoron.
Fabius nodded, though there was more amusement to the gesture than any real acquiescence. How long would it be, wondered Lucius, before Fabius’s arrogance lifted him from the chain of command entirely? Once so rigid and unbending, the Emperor’s Children adhered to the old structure in lieu of anything better, but even that was breaking down as its warriors put their own desires and whims above those of the Legion.
How long before we are little more than squabbling warbands fighting for our own self-gratification?
Lucius had no answer to the question, and nor did that lack trouble him overmuch. Whether any remnant of the old Legion survived their rebirth was a matter of supreme indifference to him.
Fabius clipped a fluid drip to Fulgrim’s arm and a shimmering crimson fluid sprinted along its length. No sooner had it entered the primarch’s body than Fulgrim’s black eyes opened and he blinked rapidly, like a sleeper suddenly awoken from a vivid dream.
‘Ah, my sons…’ said Fulgrim. ‘What is this new diversion you have for me?’
Fabius leaned over to speak in Fulgrim’s ear. ‘You are not Fulgrim, are you?’
Fulgrim’s eyes darted to the Apothecary, and Lucius caught the whiff of conspiracy in the glance. He leaned forwards and lifted Fabius’s hand from Fulgrim’s chest.
‘Lucius,’ breathed Fulgrim with perfumed breath. ‘Such a shame we were denied the caress of steel, don’t you think?’
‘I think you have been luring me into that fight for some time,’ answered Lucius.
Fulgrim laughed. ‘Was I really so obvious? It would have made for a sublime experience, Lucius. How can you say you are truly alive unless you have first tasted death? To rise anew from the ashes of one life and be reborn into another. To taste oblivion and then return, ah, now that is an experience not to be dismissed so lightly.’
‘I think death might sour of its charms in short order,’ said Lucius. ‘I think I will stick to the pleasures life can offer.’
Fulgrim’s face twisted in a pout of disappointment. ‘How short sighted of you, my son. No matter, you will reconsider in time, I think. Now, to the rest of you. Can you seriously believe I am not who I say I am when I tell you I am your master?’
‘We know you are not Fulgrim,’ said Kaesoron.
‘Then who do you believe me to be?’
‘A creature of the immaterium,’ said Vairosean. ‘A daemon spawn.’
‘A daemon?’ laughed Fulgrim. ‘And how else would you describe a primarch? Are you so naïve as to believe that all things named daemon are evil? Daemon or primarch, both are creatures fashioned from immaterial energies, hybrids of flesh and spirit brought into this world by unnatural means. If you knew anything of my creation then you would not bandy such words so carelessly.’
‘So you admit that you are a daemon?’ hissed Kaesoron.
‘Julius, my beloved son,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Have you become so eager for conflict that you consciously blind yourself to reality? I have already told you that by Marius’s dull definition, yes, I am a daemon! A daemon willed into creation by a being who seeks to win his immortality through storming the realm of gods by clambering over our corpses.’
‘It speaks with lies masquerading as truth,’ warned Fabius. ‘Like the horse of ancient Truva, it will send its falsehoods garbed in that which sounds pleasant to your ears.’
‘Then we should cut out his tongue,’ said Lucius, and he was rewarded by a flicker of unease in Fulgrim’s dark eyes. He saw anger, amusement and disappointment in that flicker, but which was the true emotion, he could not tell.
‘Marius,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Of all my sons, you were the last I expected to see here.’
The words dripped with anguish, but Marius Vairosean did not flinch from them. Ever since Marius had failed Fulgrim on Laeran, he had been the most devoted servant, ever eager to please and determined to obey any order without question. If Fulgrim hoped to appeal to that aspect of Vairosean, he was to be sorely disappointed.
‘My love for my primarch knows no bounds,’ said Marius, leaning forwards as though to spit in the bound primarch’s face. ‘But you are not he, and I will do whatever it takes to cast you from his body. No pain is beyond me, no suffering too great to make that happen. Do you understand, daemon spawn?’
Fulgrim’s face split apart in a wide grin.
‘Then enough talk, whelps,’ he said. ‘Let us begin our journey into madness together!’
13
Fabius began with that most ancient of interrogation techniques, the unveiling of his many devices of excruciation and explaining of the purposes to which they would be put. They ranged from mundane artefacts, such as any fashioner of metal or wood might employ – hammers, needle-nosed pliers, nails, welding torches, awls, planes and slow-bit drills – to more exotic implements of suffering. Nerve-splicers, organ-liquefiers, chakra-inflamers, marrow-augers and brain-stem impellents.
‘This last device is one that will give me great pleasure to use,’ said Fabius, hooking a number of metal barbs into Fulgrim’s spine. The gurney upon which Fulgrim lay had rotated about its long axis, revealing flagellated shoulders and a back that was a corrugated landscape of scar tissue and healing weals. Lucius saw an admirable devotion in the primarch’s flesh, a single-minded pursuit of pleasurable agony that only the true devotee of pain could attain.
‘What is it and what does it do?’ asked Kaesoron.
Fabius smiled, pleased to be able to elaborate on his tool of suffering. ‘It is a neural parasite I have engineered from gene-spliced xenos brain fluids and nanotech recovered from the Diasporex hybrid-captains.’
‘That doesn’t answer his question,’ snapped Marius.
Fabius nodded and tapped a long-nailed finger on the back of Fulgrim’s skull. Lucius frowned at the gesture, the implications of detachment altogether too complete. To Fabius, Fulgrim was simply another piece of meat upon which he could work his biological conjurations. The outcome of this betrayal would decide the future course of the Legion, but it was already simply a means to uncover some new biological quirk and a test of a new invention. Lucius’s feelings towards Fabius went from dislike to hate.
Fabius lifted an artefact that looked like the rear portion of a battle helm and turned it around in his hands. Thin spikes jutted from one side, each hooked to an array of injector shunts loaded with glittering silver fluid that rippled like expectant mercury.
‘Once placed upon the subject, nano-fluid is introduced to the subject’s body, whereupon it latches onto the brain stem and follows the neural pathways into the brain. The various xenos species employed in the creation of the serum were possessed of enhanced psychic potential, and the invasion of the brain chemistry allows the manipulator of the device to access any area of the brain and stimulate it as required.’
‘To what end?’ asked Lucius, though he had a good idea.
‘All things mortal are simply engines,’ said Fabius. ‘Mechanical animals of flesh and blood, but driven by essentially mechanistic imperatives. What we mistake for personality and character are simply expressions of response to stimuli. With a complex enough algorithm, it would be possible to exactly replicate a functioning machine persona that would be indistinguishable from a living creature
. Knowing this, we can stimulate certain areas of the brain, enhancing whatever aspects we choose while blocking others. I could dash the brains of a newborn infant against a wall in front of its mother and this device would see her delirious with ecstasy should I so choose. Or I could lightly touch a man’s chest and make him believe I was tearing his heart out with my bare hands.’
‘Then why the need for the other devices?’ asked Kaesoron.
‘As much as this device can make a man believe he is burning to death without so much as a spark being near him, there is a certain pleasure to be taken from a… simpler approach to pain,’ admitted Fabius.
‘On that at least we agree,’ said the First Captain.
‘So what are we waiting for?’ demanded Vairosean. ‘Let us begin and be done with this.’
Fabius gave a slow nod and rotated the gurney around once more. Fulgrim’s face was ruddy and Lucius could see he relished the prospect of their attempted rescue of the soul whose body he had stolen.
‘I remember that device,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Do you really believe it will work on a being like me? My consciousness is an order of magnitude greater than yours. It functions in realms beyond anything you can comprehend, its upper limits so great they cannot be contained purely in a cocoon of bone, and must exist in realms which only gods can access.’
‘We shall find out,’ said Fabius, insulted that his genius was being impugned.
‘Start with that one,’ ordered Kaesoron. ‘If we are successful, there must be a perfect body into which Fulgrim can return.’
‘My sons, you have been led to this like sheep to the slaughter,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Lucius brings you an idea that generates a flicker of interest in your dull lives and you seize it as a golden lifeline just so you can actually feel something. Have you learned nothing since our ascension? Non-conformity in thought and deed is the only vital life. Brotherhoods are for sheep-minds, and heresy is godly!’
‘Enough talking,’ said Lucius, snatching up a set of bladed pliers and sliding them over the middle finger of Fulgrim’s right hand. With one swift, even pressure, he severed the finger at the middle knuckle, and a squirt of blood pulsed from the wound before slowing to a drip.
The Primarchs Page 8
