‘Into them,’ repeated Clarion, her voice taking on an inhuman depth that sent tremors rattling through the deck. The crew scurried to obey her command.
Clarion watched as the man’s shade peeled away from his body. She smiled at its screams as the spirit was torn into the realm beyond by thousands of invisible hands. ‘Feast well,’ she purred to the hunger setting upon him.
‘Incinerate that,’ she said, gesturing to a nearby servitor, her voice returning to that of the young girl whose flesh she had stolen.
‘Compliance.’ The cyborg shuffled over to the throne, dragging the corpse away and leaving a thin dark stain behind it upon the decking. She lost herself in the sight of the mortal’s soul being flayed by sentient storms, before a series of sharp crashes across the Diadem’s hull returned her attention to the present.
She blinked. That was no weapon strike, the impact different from the crackling hammer blows of the xenos’ energy weapons. This was a sharper, cutting sound, like the bite of a starving beast.
‘Mistress!’ a mutant brayed through a mouthful of malformed teeth. ‘Many cries across the skin-side layers, enemy blades come inside!’
Boarding parties. Clarion’s eyes flashed wide, white pupils swelling until there was only a thin ring of gold separating them from the depthless black of her sclera. The void battle forgotten, she panned the angle of the oculus viewscreen, aiming it down along the spinal battlements of her warship.
The tops of the spires and towers, the crenellated peaks and exquisitely wrought turrets, were empty. Every one of the twelve hundred and ninety-six statues, their gaze eternally locked upon the Diadem’s bridge, was gone.
There was no room for pleasure in the cold sea of Clarion’s dread. A rustling of dark robes drew her attention to beside her throne as the towering figure moved. A sinewy arm of deep violet, bulging with bands of iron-hard muscle, raised a silver blade from behind the mantle.
The bridge rang with the pure, almost musical clang of steel as it embedded into the deck, directly in front of Clarion’s throne. The robed figure moved to loom over the child, the barest hints of a twisted face staring down from the depths of the cowl.
Is it today, Lost One? the thing’s voice boomed out, wet and teeth-crackingly loud. Its breath was hot, and reeked of cinnamon and spoiled milk. Is this the day we take you home?
II.VIII
As the snares of the trap sealed shut around him, Lucius anticipated a tumbling dive through the warp. He expected a protracted flight back to whatever distant moon or dead world Fabius and his repulsive Consortium had infested while in allegiance with the degenerate xenos. But the Primogenitor’s vessel departed from the immaterium almost as soon as it entered. One moment the Sea of Souls burned around the ship in all of its maddening glory, and then reality swallowed them again as they returned to the void.
Lucius blinked. No, not the void. Somewhere after the wound of the ether closed behind them, they passed through into another realm entirely. Staring through the energy field of the docking bay, his eyes were confronted by pure blackness, infinitely deeper than the noise and light and radiation the mundane galaxy possessed. He began to glimpse something, coalescing from the dark like a yawning tunnel of unimaginable scale, before the blast shutters screeched closed.
Lucius and the Cohors Nasicae were trapped within the eldar webway. Even if he managed to murder Fabius – he allowed himself a moment to savour the image of the fleshsmith’s skull being crushed to ruin in his grip – he had no way of reaching Clarion and the Diadem. No way of telling where in the eldar’s labyrinth of crumbling shadows they were, or how to escape.
The voices of his killers made a crashing storm of screams, so intense he felt as though his head would explode. Then, just as the clamour became unbearable, it was silenced.
Do you believe that you inspire them?
Lucius blinked, and the screams started anew. He heard Cesare bark a warning through the din, but too late. Instinct spiked his blood with adrenaline, but too little of it reached his lethargic nerves. His senses were too dull, too weak. He turned, just in time to see the skull-topped sceptre wielded by Fabius as it smashed into his temple. The weapon bore the name Torment, and it was true to that name.
Inconceivable agony exploded across Lucius’ skull. It twisted and swelled, surging down his body like wildfire. In the time since the III’s shattering, Lucius had known well to stay far from the touch of one of Bile’s favoured weapons. He had personally seen it kill legionaries and warp spawn with the slightest touch. Even as a devotee to the twin passions of pleasure and pain, Lucius had no desire to taste its power.
He tasted it now. It was bright, stunning and singularly overwhelming in its intensity. Another blow struck him in the chest, impossibly flaring the pain further, enough to drive Lucius to one knee.
‘Exquisite, is it not?’ Lucius could not see Fabius through the bands of red and black lacing his sight, but he could hear the smile of cruel amusement in the Primogenitor’s voice.
He blinked through tears of viscous ichor, seeking out something to anchor himself to amidst the blur. He saw indistinct shapes, his brothers, slumping to the deck, riven with toxic needles and scuds of caustic gases. He saw the Rypax attempt to break loose, their movements clumsy from the narcotic attack, as they were buried underneath dozens of leaping vat-grown monstrosities. Strange machines locked the stunned legionaries inert within their armour, powerless to resist as they were sealed away into stasis caskets lining the walls.
‘And so it’s come to this,’ Lucius hissed through bleeding teeth. ‘Selling your own brothers to xenos. What scraps of their vile ways did they promise you for this betrayal? You were always an honourless cur, Fabius.’
‘Honour?’ Fabius scoffed bitterly. ‘I have no use for such a delusion, you should know that.’ He sank into a crouch before Lucius. The Eternal’s senses had returned a fraction, enough to hear the purr of his betrayer’s war-plate, and more. He heard Bile’s heart give out a stilted, arrhythmic beat, squeezing blood through failing organs choked with tumours. He smelt Fabius’ flesh as it rotted away over his bones.
Bile lifted Lucius’ chin with the head of Torment, and he hissed as agony exploded up his jaw and into his skull. ‘It intrigues me, that you of all people would speak of honour, as though you are someone who has ever possessed it. Honour, sentiment, these are meaningless to me. Knowledge, methodologies and materials, these are things that I can use. This is what I will gain in exchange for you and your pitiful little band.’
The last things Lucius remembered before the pain stole his consciousness were feeling the Laeran Blade slip from his fingers, and the words of the brother who had betrayed him.
‘There is no place for honour here, brother. Honour’s only use is filling graves.’
Tall, slender things danced along the corridors of the Diadem, as cold and bladed as the ships they had emerged from. Contoured plates of dark and twisted carapace sheathed their lithe musculatures. They clung to the shadows as they ghosted along the lower decks, their movements repulsive in their fluidity.
The weapons they bore complemented them as surely as if they had been extensions of their own bodies. Long tapered rifles were clutched in spiked gauntlets. Eager hands were filled with segmented lashes and thin crooked blades whose edges drooled hissing venom.
The raiders proceeded with confidence as their beetle-black forms flowed from shadow to shadow. Like poison, they stabbed deeper into the Diadem’s innards, killing any who crossed their path safe in the knowledge that none of the vessel’s transhuman defenders were aboard to oppose them. That prize, the true prize, had already been taken.
The mistresses who commanded the raiders knew well of the frustrated hunger that wracked them as the violence they had hoped to inflict was supplanted by the mon-keigh fleshsmith’s subterfuge. They felt it just as keenly themselves. And so they had let their cadres of murderers loose from
their leashes, to indulge. Now all that fell to them was the joy of butchery to their black hearts’ content, until the crude iron veins of the warship resounded with the music of mon-keigh screams.
And resound they did. Everywhere the children of the Dark City found the crew members of the Diadem, they took them apart with a horrid patience whose attentions bordered on the loving. The slaves of the Cohors Nasicae were no strangers to the appetites of the torturer, for most of their number willingly followed their masters in worship of the Prince of Pain and Pleasure. But even they were things of mortal flesh and blood and mind, and subject to the limits of each. The desperate joy displayed by the Commorrites as they flayed alive men, women, children and mutants pushed them far beyond any of their tolerances as they were left to die skinless and crucified along the walls.
The aliens were thorough in their atrocity. With each patient cruelty they pushed back their own damnation as they hastened that of those they found. They revelled in every drop of anguish they excruciated, though a marrow-deep fear kept them from the darkest of the ship’s depths.
There were lightless places within the Diadem, cold and writhing places of fluxing reality that were home to shapeless things that wore shadow for flesh. They whispered and beckoned, promising infinite delights for the race whose decadence birthed a god of Chaos, if they just hazarded closer to their darkened fiefdoms.
The dark eldar skirted away from their liars’ songs. They had come aboard the Diadem as hunters seeking prey. They would not allow those roles to be reversed.
In time, the raiding parties marshalled together. They had had their pleasure within the mon-keigh vessel, pillaging the lower decks and gorging themselves on agony. They had tortured and mutilated the body; now the time had come to ascend, and cut the head from the beast.
Unlike the squalor of the ship’s black depths, the upper decks of the Diadem rendered any approach by stealth an impossibility. The sound of the aliens’ movements was stolen by the deafening shrieks of discordant wailing from every corridor and archway, while the dazzling assault of shifting light robbed them of any shadows where they might take refuge or prepare an ambush. Their situation being as it was, the Commorrites opted for speed, flying down the halls in a headlong sprint for the ship’s bridge.
They encountered far fewer crew along their path. They would pause briefly to eviscerate the huddled forms of mortals they found, encased in bulky environment suits to resist the madness of their surroundings. The raiders detested the shells of dense rubber worn by the mon-keigh immensely. The muzzled helms that covered their faces muffled their screams away almost to nothing.
At last, they drew close to the command deck. The leaders of the raiding parties had each taken part in the sacking of vessels of this kind before, and thus were able to summon intimate knowledge of their construction from memory. Just a few passageways more, and they would find the nerve centre of the warship.
As another heavy bulkhead rolled aside in a rumble of clumsy hydraulics, the dark eldar skidded to a halt. They arrived to stand in a corridor plunged into utter darkness, unsettlingly silent after the gauntlet of light and noise they had passed through. It was beyond any natural darkness, the visors of their elongated helms powerless to pierce it. They crouched as they slipped forwards, blades and splinter rifles held tight in readiness.
A flicker of light flashed over the corridor as a cluster of sparks leapt from a stuttering lumen strip. The blood of the raiders froze, inhumanly pallid skin blanching even paler at the sight before them. It had appeared for a fraction of a second, yet remained in each eldar’s mind, etched by terror.
The entire passageway was filled with repulsive, sensual figures. The instant of light glistened from silky, lithe flesh, from seductively inviting grins, and from the gnarled surfaces of monstrously jagged claws. They were things of glass, silver and stone no longer. Events had drawn them down from their vigil upon the battlements of the Diadem. Now they were in the corridor, standing between the raiders and the bridge.
The Commorites hesitated. Fear radiated from their stick-thin forms, carrying over the air like perfume for the smiling things watching them. A howl of pure exultant glee tore from the lips of the nearest of the creatures.
Come, sweet morsels… It spoke without speaking, purring with a voice like honey and ashes. Its grinning form was given frightful animation as it gestured invitingly with a clawed pincer. We are a reflection of the Prince’s love for you. Come now, let us taste you. We will carry you to Him, to be embraced forever more.
A withering fusillade of black crystal shards was the answer the raiders gave. The vox-horns and stablights of the corridor snapped back into action in a disorienting riot of light and sound. The daemonettes sang with breathless elation as they melted around the storm of projectiles, capering along the walls and ceiling with the same ease as they did upon the deck. It was a matter of moments before they were upon them.
Claws snapped shut, severing heads and limbs. Screamed curses in the serpent’s tongue of Commorragh tore from alien helms as the daemons lovingly caressed their faceplates before stealing their eyes. Any blow or shot landed by the raiders did nothing but energise the Neverborn further, whipping them into a frenzy of delighted violence.
The last of the raiders, a female clad in a barbed gladiatorial carapace, gave a wordless cry as the daemon attacking her pulled her close. The laughing thing’s embrace crushed the life from the eldar, and she toppled with graceless, boneless ease to the ground with it still atop her. She died cradled in the arms of the Neverborn, listening to its whispers welcoming her into the eternal reward that her ancestors’ deeds had wrought into her inheritance.
The corridor had been transformed into a charnel house. The bodies of butchered xenos covered every surface, reduced to wet chunks of meat and tattered ribbons of flesh. The air was thick with the spicy reek of burst corpses, mingling with the repulsive incense that bled from the Neverborn harpies as they draped themselves in entrails and danced in pools of eldar blood. Each was an uneven, infinitesimal shard of the Child, playing in the bones of His parents.
The deck shook with tremors from beyond the bulkhead. The daemonettes cooed, pressing their flesh against the grating to soak in the jarring vibrations, as the tremors grew more intense. The Neverborn looked back towards the doorway, their steaming bodies slathered in alien gore.
The bulkhead rumbled open, framing a hulking, hunched figure that stood in the frenzied light of the corridor beyond like some mechanical primate god. The immense suit of ancient Terminator armour he wore growled like a tank’s engine, snarling with every movement. A pair of eye-lenses flashed in blistering blue, shining in the dark. He took a step forwards, sending another reverberation through the deck, strong enough to dislodge scraps of alien flesh that hung from the ceiling and walls.
‘And so,’ Afilai boomed from his tusked helm, ‘it appears you greedy little things have stolen from me the pleasure of exterminating these pests myself.’
Lightning danced along the Terminator’s talons as he swung his combi-bolter towards the smiling daemons, levelling it at a giggling fiend crouched inside a mutilated eldar’s ribcage.
‘For that, I shall require recompense from you.’
II.IX
The Composer stood at the peak of his tower, calmly watching as the dark eldar warships skirted languidly about the Diadem like sharks carved from black crystal and malice. The hull had stopped its rattling, shrieking dirge after the xenos had ceased their attack. There was only a single reason for them to have done so.
Though he did not count premonition as one of his greater gifts, it would not have taken a mind adept in clairvoyance to predict what had just come to pass. The vessel of the Legion’s foremost Apothecary had flown, taking Lucius and the warband with it. The trap his erstwhile brother had crafted was simple, yet exacting and ruthlessly efficient. So efficient, in fact, that its swift and succ
essful execution bore an almost practised air.
For a moment, the Composer speculated upon how many other fragments of the Emperor’s Children had been lured into the same deception. How much of the Legion had Fabius ensnared for the aliens in what he was certain the former Chief Apothecary would refer to as ‘an exchange of materials’? How many brothers had he cast into the pits of the Dark City to feed his own excessive hunger for knowledge?
A tingling pressure crept up the sorcerer’s spine, drawing him out of his thoughts and returning his mind to the moment. It was a uniquely piquant sensation, one that could mean only one thing. There were eldar on board.
The Composer smiled, vindicated in his decision to send Afilai to guard the bridge. The brute was an inelegant tool, certainly, but he had his uses. His strength and fury had ended the lives of brothers who had sought to kill the Composer on seven separate occasions. Those gifted in the Art were ever hated by what remained of the Legion, despite their indispensable utility as voidseers. And while he was more than capable of rendering his fratricidal brethren to mounds of ash himself, he relied upon his immensely armoured protector to see to such mundanities, while his superior mind remained devoted to the true work.
The Song. The transcendent hymn that encompassed all creation and destruction, all life and death. The song of Chaos, and of the universe itself. The Composer had tapped into the music of the Youngest God, and shouldered the burden of its care, adding notes and movements to the infinitely screaming tapestry.
The Composer knew what the eldar’s presence upon the Diadem would trigger, and what it would mean for the daemon that commanded it. The thing was bound to Lucius’ protection, and those seeking the daemon would not act against one so blessed by the Prince. Proximity to the Eternal was sufficient to stay their seizure of the one they sought. For so long had they waited, desperate to drag their quarry back for the judgement of the Great Choirs the thing wearing a child’s flesh had transgressed against.
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 16
