The Primarchs

by Edited by Christian Dunn

  Fulgrim howled, but whether it was in pain or pleasure Lucius could not tell.

  Fabius snatched the pliers from Lucius with an angry scowl.

  ‘Excruciation is a precise and meticulous art, a stepped pyramid of pain,’ he said. ‘To randomly cut and maim is the work of amateurs. I will have no part in such butchery.’

  ‘Then stop talking and get on with it,’ said Lucius. ‘Because it sounds to me like you’re stalling.’

  ‘The swordsman has a point,’ said Kaesoron, looming over the Apothecary. Clad in his Terminator armour, Julius dwarfed Fabius, and the Apothecary nodded in acquiescence.

  ‘As you will it, First Captain,’ said Fabius, turning to his instruments. ‘We shall begin with the pain of fire.’

  Lucius felt his pulse race as Fabius lifted a cutting torch from the bench, snapping the igniting mechanism three times before the flame caught. Used to cut through sheet steel, the flame sharpened to a cone of blue-hot light as Fabius adjusted the gas flow.

  Julius Kaesoron leaned over Fulgrim and said, ‘This is your last chance, daemon spawn. Get out of my primarch’s body and you need not suffer.’

  ‘I welcome suffering,’ said Fulgrim with bared teeth.

  Kaesoron nodded, and Fabius brought the flame down on the sole of Fulgrim’s foot.

  The flesh curdled, running like molten rubber as it withered beneath the incredible heat. Fulgrim’s back arched and his mouth stretched wide in a soundless scream as the veins and sinews at his neck lifted from his skin like colliding tectonic ridges.

  Lucius watched bone rise from the melting skin as it peeled back, emerging white and gleaming for an instant before turning black. Marrow burned with a rich, fatty hiss, and the scent of seared flesh was a rich, gamey texture in the back of the throat. Lucius had smelled and tasted human meat before, but compared to that poor feast, this was an epicurean delight.

  He saw the smell was having a similar effect on the others.

  Kaesoron’s molten features softened their hard edges, and Vairosean held himself upright only with an effort of will. Only Fabius appeared unaffected, but Lucius guessed he had already savoured many sights and smells of a primarch’s body in his explorations of its divine biology. Fabius played the flame over Fulgrim’s foot until all that remained below the ankle was a blackened mass of fused bone and boiled marrow that drooled to the tiled floor of the Apothecarion.

  Julius Kaesoron took hold of the charred bone. ‘This suffering can all end,’ he said, regaining his composure with remarkable swiftness. Lucius licked his lips, still savouring the wondrously rich and flavoursome taste of Fulgrim’s seared flesh.

  Fulgrim looked up at Kaesoron with a taut smile and said, ‘Suffering? What do you know of suffering? You are a warrior who fights where I tell him to fight, a tool to achieve my desires, nothing more. You do not suffer and should not speak of it to those who do.’

  ‘I choose not to suffer,’ said Kaesoron. ‘A man can be strong enough to master his feelings so that it is impossible to make him suffer. To suffer pain and indignity is a loss of control. It is to admit to human weakness. I am strong enough to deny suffering.’

  ‘Then you are a bigger fool than I took you for, Julius,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Where do you think strength comes from if not suffering? Hardship and loss is what grants you strength. Those who have never known true suffering cannot have the same strength as others who have. A man must be weak to suffer, and by that suffering he will be made strong.’

  ‘Then you will be made mighty when we are done with you,’ promised Vairosean.

  Fulgrim laughed. ‘Pain is truth,’ he said. ‘Suffering is the sharp end of the whip, not suffering is the end of the whip the master holds in his hand. Every act of suffering is a test of love and I will prove this to you by enduring all the pain you can inflict upon me, because I love you all.’

  ‘These are not Fulgrim’s words,’ snapped Kaesoron. ‘They are honeyed lies to weaken our resolve.’

  ‘Not true,’ said Fulgrim. ‘All the truths I have learned since taking the life of my brother have shown this to be indisputable. All things in this grand universe are linked to one another by invisible threads, even those things that appear as opposites.’

  ‘How can you know that?’ said Lucius. ‘Lord Fulgrim was a lover of beauty and wonder, but he was hardly a philosopher.’

  ‘To be a lover of beauty and wonder one must be a philosopher of the heart,’ said Fulgrim with a disappointed shake of his head. ‘I have gazed into the secret heart of the warp and know that all existence is a struggle between opposites; light and darkness, heat and cold, and – of course, pleasure and pain. Think of ecstatic pleasure and unimaginable pain. They are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is possible to suffer without feeling pain.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Kaesoron, ‘but what is your point?’

  ‘What you can learn from pain – that fire burns and is dangerous – is a lesson learned only for the individual, but what I have learned from suffering is what unites us as travellers on the road of excess and grants us entry to the palace of wisdom. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle, one is meaningless without the other. But in the final analysis, real suffering can only be measured by what is taken away from us.’

  ‘Then we are suffering now,’ said Vairosean. ‘For our beloved lord is lost to us.’

  Lucius turned away from Vairosean’s mawkish sentimentality and frowned as he looked upon the ruination of Fulgrim’s foot. The flesh had been burned away, yet it appeared as though a thin, translucent film was forming over the bone, which had begun to lose the solid, vitrified look that had been burned onto it. Like a snake that had recently shed its skin, the filmy texture of Fulgrim’s foot was oily and new, raw and yet to assume its final form.

  ‘Look,’ said Lucius. ‘He’s healing. You have to keep up the pressure.’

  Fabius transferred his gaze from Fulgrim’s face to his healing foot with academic interest, while Kaesoron and Vairosean each took up an instrument of excruciation. The battle captains took position either side of Fulgrim and turned their devices upon the bound primarch. Kaesoron crushed knuckles with crimping pliers, while Vairosean worked a flesh plane across Fulgrim’s chest, peeling back long strips of skin with each caress.

  ‘Ah,’ grinned Fulgrim. ‘Truly the burden of happiness can only be removed by the balm of suffering…’

  Lucius smelled Fulgrim’s blood and longed to take up an awl or hammer, but the look in the primarch’s eyes stayed his hand. The tortures inflicted by Kaesoron and Vairosean would have reduced a mortal to frothing madness, but Fulgrim appeared to be enjoying the experience.

  Their eyes met and Fulgrim said, ‘Go on, Lucius, take up one of Fabius’s devices. Make my flesh scream!’

  Lucius shook his head and crossed his arms for fear that he might do as Fulgrim wished.

  ‘Are you sure?’ smiled Fulgrim. ‘You know better than these fools that it’s the temptations you don’t succumb to you’ll later regret.’

  ‘True enough, but I think that any creature powerful enough to take control of Fulgrim’s body is powerful enough to endure any amount of pain and suffering without real effort.’

  ‘How insightful of you, my son,’ said Fulgrim. ‘This is… mildly diverting, I will admit, but pain to me is no more than an irritant. The pain you can inflict, anyway.’

  Kaesoron paused in his mutilations and looked up at Fabius. ‘Is it speaking the truth?’

  Fabius circled the gurney, reading the signs of Fulgrim’s biorhythms with increasing puzzlement. Lucius was no Apothecary, but even he could see the readouts confirmed that they might as well have been reciting poetry for all the effect it was having on the primarch.

  Vairosean hurled away his flesh-plane, and a glass cylinder mounted in a shadowed alcove shattered. Noxious fluids s
pilled onto the floor of the Apothecarion, smoking like acid and bearing an unidentifiable mass of pulsating organs grafted to a vaguely humanoid host. Whatever it was, its convulsions lasted only a moment before its wretched existence was ended.

  Fabius knelt beside the glistening remains and shot a poisonous glance at Vairosean.

  Marius ignored the Apothecary’s anger and took hold of Fulgrim’s head, leaning down as though to kiss him. Instead, he slammed Fulgrim’s head down on the gurney and loosed a howl of grief-stricken rage that sent Lucius and Kaesoron flying.

  The sound reverberated around the chamber like the sonic boom of a low-flying Stormbird, shattering every piece of glass in the room. Broken shards tumbled to the tiles in a thousand sharp tinks.

  ‘You are a creature of evil!’ yelled Vairosean. ‘Begone or I will tear the head of this body from its shoulders. I would see Fulgrim dead before allowing you to possess it a moment longer!’

  Lucius picked himself up, his senses reeling from the aural assault as Fabius launched himself at Vairosean and hauled him away from Fulgrim.

  ‘Fool!’ cursed Fabius. ‘Your careless anger has just ruined months of experimentation.’

  Vairosean shrugged off the Apothecary’s anger and balled a fist, ready to pound Fabius to pulped blood and bone.

  ‘Marius!’ shouted Fulgrim. ‘Stay your hand!’

  Decades of ingrained loyalty froze Marius Vairosean to immobility, and Lucius was reminded of the iron grip of innate authority possessed by the primarchs. Even he, no respecter of authority, felt himself cowed by the primarch’s words.

  ‘You call me evil, but how do you decide what is good and what is evil? Are they not simply arbitrary terms coined by Man to justify his actions?’ said Fulgrim. ‘Think of how one measures good and evil and you will see that what I am, what I am becoming, is a thing of perfect beauty. A thing of goodness.’

  Lucius approached the steel slab and looked down upon the primarch, sensing that his words were profound on a level he could not yet understand, but upon which his future might depend. He lifted an awl with a long hooked tip and worked it into Fulgrim’s chest, through scar tissue that had not fully healed. Fulgrim grimaced as the metal pierced his flesh, but Lucius couldn’t decide on the emotion behind the primarch’s expression.

  ‘So what are you becoming?’ he asked.

  ‘You ask the wrong question,’ answered Fulgrim as Lucius worked the awl into him, inch by steel inch.

  ‘Then what’s the right one?’

  Marius and Julius leaned in as Fabius spat curses at the months of lost work that swilled and frothed around his feet.

  ‘The right question is what does the universe move towards? And that can only be answered by understanding where we came from.’

  Marius followed Lucius’s example and selected an instrument of torture from the collection of devices Fabius had laid out. He turned the pear-shaped device around in his hands, twisting a metal cog handle that gradually spread the leaves of the pear apart. Satisfied, he returned it to its original shape and moved down the gurney to place the device between the primarch’s legs.

  ‘We come from Terra,’ said Marius. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  Fulgrim smiled indulgently and said, ‘No, Marius. Further back than that. As far back as it is possible to go.’

  Marius shrugged and worked his device into position with a series of grunts as Julius lifted a series of silver wands, some long, some short, but all tapered to sharpness at one end. One by one, Kaesoron pierced Fulgrim’s body with seven needle-tipped wands, running in a line from the crown of his head to his groin. It was clear Kaesoron was no stranger to the apparatus as he attended to his work with a craftsman’s diligence. Lucius wondered if he had chosen poorly in comparison to these instruments of agony, but decided that he liked the simplicity of the awl as he pressed it deeper into Fulgrim’s unknown organs and inhuman biology.

  Fulgrim watched Kaesoron with the attention of a proud master watching his student take flight for the first time without instruction. The primarch shook his head as Kaesoron stood erect and said, ‘Your positioning of the Swadhisthana chakra needle is slightly off, Julius. Perhaps due to the intrusion of Marius’s implement. A little higher might be better.’

  Kaesoron bent to check and readjusted the needle as he saw that Fulgrim was correct. Without a word of acknowledgement, he ran a series of copper wires from the end of each needle to a thrumming bank of generators. With a flick of the switch, a deep bass note of power filled the chamber and arcing sparks of high voltage energy hummed from the wires.

  Fulgrim’s jaw clenched and caged lightning danced in the black vortices of his eyes. His skin darkened and Lucius smelled the electric tang of a body burning from the inside out.

  Enduring enough pain to last innumerable mortal lifetimes, Fulgrim resumed speaking.

  ‘This universe began in simplicity, with an event of such rapid expansion that it cannot ever be measured. In the first fractional moments of its existence, the universe was a place of such staggering simplicity that we cannot even begin to imagine it. But over time, those simple elements began to cohere, to come together in ever more complex forms. Particles became atoms, and atoms became molecules until they grew in complexity to form the first stars. Those newly-birthed stars lived and died over millions of years and their explosive deaths fuelled the birth of yet more stars and planets. You and I, we are luminous beings fashioned from the hearts of stars.’

  ‘Poetic, but what does that have to do with good and evil?’ asked Kaesoron as he manipulated the current through the silver needles, intrigued despite himself. Lucius was surprised, for he had always thought the First Captain had little interest in anything other than the gratification of his own desires or how he could wreak the greatest pain upon an enemy.

  ‘I am getting to that,’ promised Fulgrim, and Lucius had to remind himself that they were in the midst of torturing him and had not come to listen to a lecture on the substance of the universe. He wanted to speak out, but Fulgrim’s words held him fast.

  ‘None of this coming together is random,’ explained Fulgrim. ‘It is all part of the universe’s nature, its tendency towards complexity. Ah… yes, that is most exquisite, Marius, another turn of the screw! Now, as I was saying, all things are part of this cycle of building and coming together, from the lowliest organism to the highest functioning sentience. Given the right circumstances, everything will tend towards becoming something more beautiful, more perfect and more complex. It has been this way since the beginning of this universe’s lifespan, and that nature is as inescapable as it is inevitable.’

  Lucius nodded and turned the awl in a wide circle within Fulgrim’s body. ‘And where does this all lead? What lies at the end of this journey from simplicity to complexity?’

  Fulgrim shrugged, though it was impossible to tell whether it was a conscious gesture or the result of the current broiling his bones. ‘Who can say? Some have called it godhood, others Nirvana. For want of a better term, I call it perfect complexity. It is the ultimate aim of all things, whether they are aware of their role in the universe or not. Now the question of good and evil is inextricably linked to this ongoing journey to perfect complexity. And the answer is simple.’

  Fulgrim’s words trailed off as his back arched and a line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. Lucius wanted to believe it was his penetrative awl pricking Fulgrim’s spine that was the cause of the pain, but with all three warriors working their excruciating arts it was impossible to be sure.

  Fabius circled the gurney, monitoring Fulgrim’s vital signs with growing alarm.

  ‘You’re killing him,’ he said, urgently. ‘One of you must stop.’

  ‘No,’ said Marius. ‘The pain will drive the daemon-thing out. It will relinquish its hold on Fulgrim before it allows itself to die.’

  ‘Simpleton!’ snapped Fabius. ‘Do
you think such things as daemons fear the destruction of their mortal hosts? Its essence will simply cohere in the warp once you have destroyed the physical vessel.’

  ‘Then what are we doing here?’ demanded Lucius, releasing his grip on the awl and taking hold of Fabius by the throat as he again sensed conspiracy to the Apothecary’s solicitousness towards Fulgrim. Lucius tightened his grip on the Apothecary’s windpipe, exerting enough pressure to make the man’s eyes bulge.

  ‘You cannot harm this daemon,’ gasped Fabius, ‘but if you can cause it enough pain, it might be possible to force it to release its hold.’

  ‘Might? Possible?’ said Kaesoron. ‘You speak without certitude in all you say.’

  Lucius felt a sharp pressure at his groin and looked down to see a coiling armature of rusted metal and sinewy gristle protruding from the skinned-meat coat of Fabius. A hypodermic filled with cloudy pink fluid had pierced the flexible joint at his thigh, and the needle was buried an inch into the meat of his leg.

  Fabius gave a viper’s grin and said, ‘Lay a hand on me again and the injector will have filled you with enough Vitae Noctus to slay a battle company.’

  Lucius released the Apothecary only with great reluctance, feeling the cold metal of the needle withdraw from his body. As much as he wanted to lash out and break Fabius’s neck, he couldn’t keep the grin of near death from his face.

  Fabius saw the grin and said, ‘It is always amusing until the elixir hits your system. Then it is sublime for six heartbeats. Then you are dead, and the world of sensation is over. Remember that the next time you feel the need to vent your anger upon me.’

  Kaesoron pushed them apart and said, ‘Enough. We have a task at hand. Apothecary, can we drive this daemon out with pain? And give me a straight answer.’

  Fabius answered without taking his eyes from Lucius, and Lucius met his hostility with a calm insouciance he felt sure would irritate the Apothecary.