Go,+ sent the Composer.
Go?+ Clarion’s response to the witch’s vague sending was bladed. +Go where, mortal?+
Follow the suffering,+ answered the Composer, radiating urbanity and calm. +Or conversely, move away from the tide fast approaching us.+
Clarion felt it, like the charged air of a sky set to be ravaged by storms. A roaring deluge of daemonkind, a raw typhoon of immaterial malice, appeared in the distance, tens of thousands strong. It looked like a blighted sunrise, breaking out over a dark horizon off the Diadem’s port side.
Whichever you prefer, my dear.+
Clarion winced, severing the communion in irritation. It seemed the witch had drawn far more than the single daemon to them. ‘Come about,’ she ordered, setting her crew to tear their fearful gaze from the oncoming tide and back to their stations. ‘Divert power from lances and shields and funnel it to the plasma drives.’
A gleaming ribbon of migraine-red light lanced out from the blackness, coming to a rest just above the Composer’s tower. It was invisible to those who lacked the sight, and thus hidden from the senses of the mortal crew. But Clarion saw it as clearly as the agonising flare of the Anathema’s Astronomican.
‘Direct heading,’ Clarion tapped in a series of coordinates. ‘Follow that path.’
By the howling ether, Lucius had missed seeing the Rypax work. The way they flew through the stabbing waves of eldar, slicing and tearing flesh in their beautiful rending dance, was transcendent. It was especially true of Vispyrtilo. He was an artist in the truest sense, while bearing all of the noblest and most ferocious traits of an apex predator conquering those who dared to challenge his supremacy over them. Never once did he stop moving, his spear a whirling blur around him, his claws drowning in wash after wash of Commorrite blood.
Art inspires artists. And so the rampage of the Raptor cult and their warrior chieftain fuelled Lucius as he constructed his own masterpiece in broken alien flesh. A stolen eldar longsword was his instrument, and though a tiny thing in his hand, he used it to accomplish wonders.
Vispyrtilo screamed, a concentrated blast of killing sound that reduced a trio of Kabalite warriors to clouds of mist. More of them rushed through it, dappling the beetle-black of their carapace armour. On they charged, riding the discordant tones of the arena’s music.
Hexegys, once of the VIII, now of the Rypax, flew just over the aliens’ advance, stealing heads and spitting them upon his lightning-soaked talons. Zhousu breathed out roaring streams of liquid fire from the flamers housed in the palms of his gauntlets, laughing as he bathed the eldar in immolation. Kyoras and Melinias smashed down into knots of Commorites, scattering them to the dust and ripping apart any within reach with the screaming teeth of their chainswords.
Lucius swept his blade down, deflecting the curved bayonet of a warrior’s splinter rifle, and stepped into a thrust up into the alien’s throat. The tip of the sword punched out the top of its head. Lucius kicked the shuddering alien away, decapitating another with a lightning horizontal slash.
The foul music reverberating through the arena abruptly changed, raising the hackles on Lucius’ spine. A singer appeared, standing upon a hovering platform over the arena. Her scalp was topped by an elaborate helm, a gorgon’s crest of serpentine sonic amplifiers that sent her voice screaming through every horn and speaker across the stadium. She began a new song, leading a horrid choir of what passed amongst these eldar as musicians in a melody like breaking glass and shrieking metal.
The crowd erupted at the singer’s words. Lucius had learned enough of the poison tongue of the Commorites to parse the last verse’s meaning. Like any xenos language, it translated poorly into Gothic.
Greed-pull of abyss. Cut across the throat of the night-black.
Gravity. Flight.
The stone of the arena floor broke into segments, like a vast puzzle coming apart. Individual chunks rose and fell and orbited each other, all to the ovation of the crowd. The eldar clung to the railings and banisters of the revolving amphitheatre’s segments. They pressed themselves as close to the edges as they dared without courting the infinite fall beneath them. They held their long slender hands outstretched towards the bloodshed and madness, like starving men and women surging at the barricades of a food riot.
Lucius lowered his centre of gravity, digging his hooves into the moving rock. The Rypax leapt into the air on columns of fire from their jump packs, coming down to settle on the most stable islands in the shattered landscape. Many of the eldar did not share in their fortune. They screamed as they plummeted between newly formed chasms or were flung from sections that spun or inverted entirely, spinning away into the abyss below.
A whirring filled the air. The crowd shrieked in a boiling outburst of ecstasy. Lucius looked to the skies, and the tiny bladed shapes that began to materialise from them.
That was when he heard the Hellions roar.
IV.II
The Diadem tore through the webway, riding atop the bow wave of a burning tide of the Neverborn. The vast plasma engine arrays of the strike cruiser burned past their tolerances to keep just ahead of the rushing prismatic storm. She was a tiny sliver of violet, racing from a daemonic sunrise.
The webway changed a thousand times during their flight, in a thousand different ways. The Diadem crossed veins of the ancient network that defied mortal perception. Tunnels where they seemed to travel inches in days, and light years in seconds. Through the skies of what looked to be worlds of a hundred climates, from frigid vertical planes of moving tundra to floating jungles teeming with incomprehensible life. They shot through a lattice of interlocking crystal fractals that spanned the width of a star system, so fragile that the slightest disturbance would shatter its incredible geometry to destruction.
All fell to the daemons that followed in their wake. Biomes of primordial beauty that had formed before the birth of the eldar race were soured and festered with blight. Beasts that no mortal eye had witnessed became twisted and corrupted into foul spawn.
The Neverborn obliterated the serene realm of crystal with a crash like reality itself collapsing. The work of aeons, formed and shaped by the hands of an unknown creator or by the randomness of nature, was undone in seconds. The cumulative beauty of all existence was diminished in that moment, as it fell into shards of ruin and nothingness.
Clarion ignored the pangs of the lattice’s annihilation, the vague sense of loss that emanated through her and every soul aboard the Diadem. Such cosmic melancholy could not challenge her attention for the path they hurtled along. For the sheer spectacular wonder of what she was seeing.
The link between the souls of the dark eldar and Slaanesh, a spiralling river of incredible cruelty, anguish and suffering, was all-consuming for Clarion to behold. The spiritual pulse of an entire xenos race, flowing to the embrace of the God of Pain and Pleasure. She had never pitied mortals more in all her existence, to lack the eyes to see such splendour, such grace. The monumental sensation of billions and billions of sentient lives, devoted solely to inflicting pain upon all they encountered.
The river of torment only grew broader, deeper, fresher, the further the Diadem travelled. Clarion cared nothing for the horde of daemons trailing behind them, nor of the destruction that was wrought in their wake. They were nearing the Dark City.
There they would find the Eternal One, and oceans of eldar blood.
The numbness bit at Lucius. He looked to the pressure plate on the underside of his vambrace, the mechanism to control his stimulant rack. His mind wandered to the second of the chemical cocktails the Primogenitor had given to him.
Fabius had told Lucius that it had been derived from the adrenal glands of a xenos breed bioform that had only just appeared in the outermost reaches of the galaxy. It has yet to make its presence fully known, but when it does… Bile had said with a rasping laugh …that will be a singularly fascinating time. The Pri
mogenitor had called the serum ‘tyrphous’.
A press of the pad sent the oily claret compound into the injection system, and then into Lucius. He did not feel it enter his blood, as he had with the serpentin. In fact, he did not feel anything different at all.
Nothing happened. Lucius felt no rush of sensation, no building heat or sharpening of his senses. The Hellions were close enough for Lucius to see the severed heads hanging from their belts, yet his limbs were still leaden with numbness.
The dark eldar raiders blurred around the legionaries, riding their bladed skyboards in a spiral that drew tighter and tighter. Hexegys leapt from his floating section of the shattered arena, firing his assault pack and smashing into one of the riders in a tangle of blades and curses. The Commorites lost all semblance of cohesion as they attacked like a swarm of hornets.
Lucius ducked a cut from the hooked blade of a glaive that sang like a drowning man as it blurred past. The rider, barely more than a child by the standards of his race, hooked the weapon about one of the spikes protruding from another floating section, sending the xenos slingshotting around and back at Lucius with blinding speed. Lucius crouched, waiting as the eldar hurtled close enough to see his ritually filed teeth, and hurled his lash.
The whip ensnared the Hellion, plucking the rider in mid-air from his skyboard. The anti-grav mount spiralled erratically without its pilot’s control, smashing into another portion of the arena in a booming fireball. Lucius slammed the eldar against the ground and stomped down upon his head. His hoof crushed the alien’s skull flat, spraying the Eternal’s face with hot blood.
The tyrphous came on hard enough to make Lucius gasp. His flesh came alive. The pupils of his eyes dilated to glistening pools of oil ringed by the thinnest circle of bloodshot green. The entirety of Lucius’ mind was bent around a single impulse, a hunger the likes of which he had never known.
He needed to kill more eldar. He needed to kill them all.
Lucius ceased to think. He just reacted, killing again and again as if in a trance. Eldar Hellions fell in screaming agony, to his blade, his lash, his bare hands and teeth. The stimulant drove him on, faster and sharper, compelling him with a yawning void in his core that would destroy him if he did not fill it with a legion of butchered eldar.
The lash bridged the gap between hovering chunks of stone, and Lucius swung from platform to platform, killing anything that came near him. He pushed on, travelling in one direction, towards the edge of the arena.
The archon’s pleasure barge loomed before him. Lucius clenched his lash around a Hellion, using the eldar to propel himself out of the arena, over the panicked crowds and towards the barge. He had grown tired of the eldar and their blood games. It was time that he ended this charade.
It was time to get his sword back.
Commorragh. The Dark City. Haven of the dark eldar, deep within the secret expanses of the webway.
Clarion did not need auspex or sensorium returns to tell her it was near. She was a fragment of Slaanesh. The trail of suffering had swollen into a raging torrent, a river overflowing its banks. Clarion could feel the essences of billions of eldar, the overwhelming number of soulflares just out of reach. She could see the vague impression of their outermost satellites. The Diadem had arrived at the frontier of the Commorrite realm.
‘My mistress,’ called out the Master of Auspex. ‘Confirmed contacts. Multiple xenos raiders are inbound, moving at speed.’
Clarion did not hesitate. ‘Withdraw the power diverted from engines and bring the void shields back online,’ she ordered, her golden eyes watching her tactical hololiths fill with sigils representing dark eldar warships. ‘Ready all weapons. Lances?’
‘Ma’am?’
‘You may fire at your pleasure, as soon as targets come within range.’
IV.III
A trio of Incubi blademasters, hired praetorians of the archon, surged up to meet Lucius as he crashed down upon the barge’s main deck. The Eternal was fighting them before he rose to stand. His blade parried and countered one eldar as his lash stymied another and he dodged the assault of the third.
There was no unity to their attack. These were not wolves, pack animals that coordinated to dominate a larger prey. They were mercenaries, single fighters that relied upon their own skills with a blade and nothing – and no one – else.
Had they struck him in concert, the Incubi might have pushed Lucius to the brink of defeat, or at least driven him away from their charge. They were exemplary, their craft honed to a brilliant edge, and fast as quicksilver. United, they would have been a terrible foe. As individuals, they were an amusing challenge, but nothing more.
It lasted seven clashes before the first eldar fell. The alien crashed to the deck, trying in vain to stymie the slopping discharge of his guts with arms that no longer had hands. Decreased by a third, the potency of the other two visibly diminished. Lucius could focus a greater share of his murderous attention on each of them, reducing the prospect of their survival from slim to non-existent.
The second would die screaming, eventually, as Lucius crushed him in the grip of his lash and pitched him into the abyss. The third paused, shoulders heaving from exertion, before leaping at Lucius, its silver glaive flashing high. The eldar came crashing down behind the Eternal, blood spurting from the stump where its head had been moments before.
A deep rumble drew Lucius’ attention. He looked back over his shoulder, and then turned to face the deck railing overlooking the stadium. The broken shards of the arena ground contracted, rapidly reforming into their bowl of cracked earth as though triggered by some failsafe.
Legionaries fell down from the sky, thudding into view from every direction. Garishly lacquered and overly elaborate power armour snarled and ground as warriors of the forgotten III Legion came together, killing the forces of eldar that sought to prevent their escape. Amidst the colours of distant warbands, Lucius noted those of the Cohors Nasicae at the centre of the carnage.
Thyndrak, Archon of the Kabal of the Last Hatred, sat upon a throne rendered from tortured human bodies suspended from the ceiling and riddled through with brass armatures. Courtiers and slaves scrambled from her side, fleeing the audience chamber in horror. Her cold face was utterly calm as the head of the last of her Incubus bodyguard thudded to her feet.
‘Quite resourceful,’ the eldar grinned imperiously. She looked down at the low table beside her, where the Laeran Blade rested upon a cushion of flayed flesh. Her grin failed to waver as the crimson ropes of Lucius’ lash snapped around the blade and threw it back into the Eternal’s hand.
‘Tell me,’ said Lucius, savouring the weight of his beloved sword once more as he spun it around his wrist, ‘because I really am quite curious. What precisely did you expect to happen when my dearly perfidious brother brought me here? Did you truly believe that I would be content to serve out the rest of my days as your sport? Did you truly believe that I would not kill every single one of you, and hurl this satellite down into your little cesspool of a city?’
Lucius advanced. Caged lightning sizzled across the length of the Laeran Blade. ‘You have no idea what you have unleashed upon yourself. I relish death. It holds no power over me, eldar, because it holds no mystery. I have drunk from the well of oblivion, time and again. I have bathed in chemical fire within the shattering bones of a warship as its reactor split and gave birth to a momentary star. I have felt the edges of fourteen blades as they sundered my hearts. I have drowned at the bottom of a world of endless ocean. I have tasted the most potent poisons this reality and the ones beyond can produce. I have been executed, assassinated, vaporised and ground to mulch.
‘Yet here I stand. Against the very forces that set and order reality, here I stand. Undefeated. Unbowed. Eternal. What can you possibly offer, to threaten me?’
Lucius slashed. The Laeran Blade screamed as it carved through Thyndrak, splitting her in ha
lf across the shoulders. For an instant, the halves floated, separate, before crackling back into solidity.
‘And do you think me stupid enough not to prepare for such an eventuality?’
Lucius snarled at the hologram, a perfect simulacrum of the archon, projected doubtless from kilometres away.
‘I have not been aboard this vessel for some time, mon-keigh,’ Thyndrak smirked. ‘Perhaps your mind will come to the realisation given proper time, but we are creatures of cunning. I did not rise to become archon without preparing to survive every betrayal, every potential outcome. Including this.’
Lucius glared down at the preening alien, his temper fraying.
‘This arena is but one of many,’ the archon laughed. ‘It means less than nothing to me. As do you, as do your primate kindred. You were all but a single piece of a single plot, one of hundreds I spin simultaneously. So take your silly little blade. Take your rabble and go. I have grown bored of you.’
A distant explosion jarred Lucius from the projection. He spared it another second before he moved from the throne room to the balcony of the barge. His eyes pierced the distant gloom. He saw a swarm of Commorrite attack ships, orbiting about a proud sliver of violet and silver.
Master.+
Lucius grinned. ‘Hello, Clarion.’
Clarion stood upright on her throne, the flaring discharges of weapons fire drawing out the violet branches of the veins in her too-pale cheeks.
Dark eldar reavers swarmed out from the jagged fist of Commorragh, hornets drawn from a shaken nest. They closed with effortless lethality, narrowing the gap between the Diadem and their rolling, coiling advance in moments. The space filled with slashes of killing light. The void shields of Clarion’s warship flared with rippling kaleidoscopic light, the illumination doing nothing to penetrate the seemingly infinite abyss of the webway passage.
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 25
