The Primarchs Read online

  Lucius gripped the hilt of the Laer sword as he saw Eidolon marching towards him along a connecting corridor. The Lord Commander hated him, and never passed over an opportunity to remind Lucius that he was not truly one of them. Eidolon’s skin was waxy and pale, pulled tightly across the distended orbits of his eyes. Wire-taut tendons throbbed at his neck, and the bones of his lower jaw moved with the liquid detachment of a serpent.

  His armour was painted in garish stripes of vivid purple and electric blue, the colours riotously applied in a striking pattern that owed nothing to any design of camouflage and made Lucius’s eyes strain to assimilate what he was seeing. Such vivid colourings were now the norm among the Legion, with each warrior striving to outdo his fellows in sheer extravagance and ostentation.

  Lucius had only recently begun to ornament his armour, its plates strikingly adorned with madly screaming faces stretched beyond all recognition. The inner face of each shoulder guard was notched with jagged metal teeth that pricked and scored his flesh with every movement of his arms. The depth and angle of each tooth was carefully chosen to inflict the most scintillating pains should he choose to wield his blades in anything other than the most sublime manoeuvres.

  Eidolon drew in a great sucking breath, the bones of his jaw seeming to writhe beneath the skin and link together before he spoke.

  ‘Lucius,’ he said, spitting the word at a pitch and cadence that sent an altogether pleasing clash of discordance into the swordsman’s brain. ‘You are an unwelcome sight, traitor.’

  ‘And yet, here I am,’ said Lucius, ignoring Eidolon and pressing onwards.

  The Lord Commander caught up with him and made to grasp his arm. Lucius spun away and his swords were at Eidolon’s throat in a blur of silver too fast to follow. The Laeran blade and his Terran sword rested to either side of Eidolon’s neck. With one flick of his wrists, he could decapitate the man. Lucius saw the relish in Eidolon’s face, the pulsing beat of the hawser-like tendon in his neck and the dilated black holes of his pupils.

  ‘I’d take your head like I took Charmosian’s,’ he said, ‘if I didn’t think you’d enjoy it.’

  ‘I remember that day,’ replied Eidolon. ‘I swore I’d kill you for that. I still might.’

  ‘I don’t think you will,’ said Lucius. ‘You’re not good enough. No one is or ever will be.’

  Eidolon laughed, the gesture opening his face up like a tearing wound.

  ‘You are arrogant, and one day the primarch will tire of you. Then you will be mine.’

  ‘Maybe he will, and maybe he won’t, but it will not be today,’ said Lucius, dancing away from Eidolon with graceful steps. It was good to draw his swords in anger and feel the gentle pressure of their sharpened edges resting on flesh. He wanted to kill Eidolon, for the man had been a thorn in his side for as long as he’d known him, but it would not do to rob the primarch of his most zealous devotee.

  ‘Why not today?’ demanded Eidolon.

  ‘It is the eve of battle,’ said Lucius. ‘And that’s the one day I don’t kill anyone.’

  2

  Mighty walls of pale stone had been defaced with a thousand splashes of paint and blood, and the great marble statues that supported the coffered dome of the roof no longer depicted the first heroes of Unity and the Legion. Now they were bull-headed representations of the old Laer gods, clandestine things whose heads were bowed or turned to the side as though keeping a delicious secret.

  Torn banners hung between fluted pilasters of green marble, the fabric shredded and scorched in the fires of the Legion’s rebirth. The floor of the Heliopolis was fashioned from black terrazzo, with inlaid chips of marble and quartz intended to render it into a celestial bowl reflecting the light from the great beam of lustrous starlight that shone down from the centre of the dome. That light still shone, brighter and more piercing than ever before, and the floor’s polish reflected it with dazzling intensity. Once, carved bench seats had run around the circumference of the council chamber, rising in stepped ranks towards the walls like the tiers of a gladiatorial arena.

  Those seats had been demolished, for none would now sit higher than the primarch of the Emperor’s Children, and portions of the rubble formed a plinth at the centre of the chamber, rugged and glistening like the graven idol of a primitive god. Upon this elevated platform sat a black throne of unrivalled magnificence, its surfaces mirror smooth and reflective.

  The throne was all that remained of the previous incarnation of the Heliopolis, its regal majesty deemed suitably noble for the primarch of the Emperor’s Children. Discordia blared from iron vox-casters; the screams of loyalists as they died on the black sand, the deafening cacophony of a hundred thousand guns, and the music of pleasure and pain intermingled. It was the sound of an empire’s violent death, the sound of a pivotal moment in history that would replay over and over again and of which the warriors forced to endure it would never tire.

  Perhaps three hundred legionaries filled the chamber, and Lucius recognised many of them from the great battle on Isstvan V: First Captain Kaesoron, Marius Vairosean, dour Kalimos of the Seventeenth, Apothecary Fabius, pouting Krysander of the Ninth and a score of others to whom he had applied derogatory labels. Some were old faces of the Legion. Others were those who had attracted the fickle notice of the primarch, while yet more were simply members of the Brotherhood of the Phoenix who had followed their betters.

  Like the Legion’s ships and name, so too would the name of their quiet order stand.

  Lucius moved through the press of bodies towards Julius Kaesoron, savouring the beautiful devastation of the First Captain’s features. An Iron Hand by the name of Santar had ruined Kaesoron’s face more thoroughly than Lucius could ever manage, and though Fabius had reconstructed much of his hairless skull, it was still a horror of vat-grown flesh stitched to fused bone, weeping orbs of milky blindness and burned scar tissue the colour of weather-beaten copper.

  As wondrous as Julius Kaesoron’s blessed transformations were, they were subtle next to those wrought on Marius Vairosean. Where the First Captain had received his ruined visage at the hands of the enemy, Marius Vairosean had been gifted during the rush of power unleashed by the Maraviglia. The captain’s jaws were rigid and locked open with barbed cabling, as though he was forever screaming. His eyes were red and raw, bearing the savage scars of the wire-wound sutures holding them open. Two great open wounds in the side of his head cut ‘V’ shaped gouges in his tapered skull where his ears had once been located.

  Both captains wore armour that had been wondrously embellished with spikes and draped with leathered hide stripped from the bodies that littered the parquet of La Fenice. Yet for all their gaudy finery and obvious mutilations, Lucius saw Kaesoron and Vairosean as relics of the past, officers of dogged loyalty who lacked the ambition or flair that would see a warrior burn brighter than a star.

  ‘Captains,’ said Lucius, layering just the right balance of respect and disdain into the syllables of their rank. ‘It seems that war finally calls us.’

  ‘Lucius,’ said Vairosean, giving him a nod of acknowledgement as his jaw cracked and its too-wide circumference formed words that were swiftly becoming almost impossible to give voice. Such implied insolence from Lucius should have earned him a bloody reprimand, but his star was in the ascendancy. Eidolon – a warrior with an eye for spotting the way the wind was blowing – had seen it, and Vairosean, ever the sycophant, knew it too.

  Kaesoron was not so easily intimidated and turned his cloudy eyes upon him. His expression was impossible to read, the ruin of his face making his true disposition a tantalising mystery.

  ‘Swordsman,’ hissed Kaesoron through the raw wound of his mouth. ‘You are a worm, and an ambitious worm at that.’

  ‘You flatter me, First Captain,’ said Lucius, meeting his hostile gaze with one of supreme indifference. ‘I serve the primarch to the best of my ability.’

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nbsp; ‘You serve yourself and no one else,’ snapped Kaesoron. ‘I regret not leaving you on Isstvan III with the rest of the imperfect ones. I think that I should kill you and be done with your flawed existence.’

  Lucius gripped the hilt of the Laer sword and cocked his head to the side.

  ‘It would give me great pleasure to let you try, First Captain,’ he said.

  Kaesoron turned away, and Lucius grinned, knowing Kaesoron would never openly follow through with his threat. Lucius would gut him in the opening moments of any duel, and the thought of murdering the First Captain sent a thrill of pleasure through his body.

  ‘Any word on where we are?’ he asked, knowing neither Kaesoron nor Vairosean would know and keen to expose their ignorance to those around them.

  Vairosean shook his head. ‘That is for the Phoenician alone to know,’ he said, the jagged notes of his voice like the braying discharge of his sonic cannon.

  ‘You have not been told?’ replied Lucius with a smirk as a line of hooded bearers carrying heavy iron casks on their backs snaked through the gaping portal of the vanished Phoenix Gate. To Lucius, they looked like ants bearing food to a hive. ‘I would have thought a warrior of your status would have been amongst the first to learn our destination. Have you earned the primarch’s ire?’

  Vairosean ignored the obvious barb and gave a nod of acknowledgement as Eidolon took position near Kaesoron like the glory-seeker he was. The First Captain had been one of Fulgrim’s closest companions in the old days, and though the Phoenician appeared to care little for past attachments, Kaesoron still commanded respect from most of the Legion.

  Most, but not me, thought Lucius with an amused smirk as he saw the light of ambition in Eidolon’s eyes. It was pathetic how the Lord Commander latched onto those the primarch favoured, and Lucius felt his contempt for the man swell to new heights.

  ‘Looks like Fulgrim is breaking out the last of the victory wine,’ he said with unearned bonhomie. ‘We only do that when we’re about to go into battle.’

  ‘Old Legion custom,’ spat Vairosean, his voice a wet, gurgling rasp.

  ‘We still drink to the victory to come,’ said Lucius, drawing his swords with a flourish, and careful to let the warriors nearby see the silver blade Fulgrim had gifted to him. ‘By the will of Horus or the Phoenician, it matters not to the lords of profligacy, we still drink.’

  ‘We should not honour who we were before our ascension,’ said Eidolon.

  ‘Not everything we were died on Isstvan,’ replied Lucius, amused at the blatancy of the Lord Commander’s ingratiating words.

  The casks of victory wine were deposited in a circle around the black throne in the column of blinding light. The smell was potent, bitter and like engravers’ acid. The gathered warriors leaned forwards as one to fully savour the acrid reek of the wine, fully aware of its symbolism.

  The blood surged in Lucius’s veins at the thought of going into battle once more. The forced inaction of the journey from the Isstvan system had chafed at him. He ached, needed, to feel hot blood sprayed from an opened artery, the visceral thrill of meeting a bladesman who might prove his equal.

  He tried to remember the names of swordsmen of note in those Legions still loyal to the Emperor, but could think of none who could match him. Sigismund of the Fists was a competent, if bluntly single-minded wielder of the blade, and Nero of the XIII could kill with something approaching flair, though he fought with more than a hint of rote in his swings. Other names drifted through Lucius’s memory, but as competent as they were, none of them had reached the sublime pinnacle of bladework that he had attained.

  ‘Perhaps it will be Mars at last,’ he ventured. ‘We have travelled far enough. Perhaps we are making ready to join the fleets moving on the Red Planet as Horus ordered.’

  ‘The Warmaster,’ said Eidolon, his taut skin wrinkling in childish adulation. ‘He knows my name and has commended me on several occasions.’

  Lucius knew better, but before he could contradict Eidolon’s fantasy a blare of noise erupted from the vox units strung between the pilasters. A glorious scream of birth and murder shrieked in dissonant anti-harmonies, like a million orchestras with every instrument out of tune. The sound was rapturous, a freakish blend of discordant music and howling voices raised in hideous adoration.

  A cascade of light fell from the dome, a glittering rain that shimmered with a light so bright that it was like a moment of atomic detonation. The Emperor’s Children howled as sensory apparatus mutilated by Apothecary Fabius flooded their nervous systems with powerful surges of bio-electrical spikes, pleasure responses and pain signals. Warriors convulsed at the cacophony of sound and light, dancing like madmen or victims of grand mal seizures. Some tore at their skin, others beat their neighbours, while others pounded their fists bloody on the floor while screaming inchoate curses.

  Lucius held his body rigid, fighting the sensations and receiving the pleasure tenfold, his deliberate resistance to the overload of sensation making it all the sweeter. Blood and saliva ran from his lips and he felt his bones and flesh vibrating in perfect symphony with the raucous madness of the spectacle.

  The Legion screamed with the delirious joy of it, but this was merely a prelude.

  A shape moved in the light, an angel of extermination, a god made flesh and the embodiment of all that was perfect in its expression of intemperance.

  Fulgrim dropped through the light like the brightest comet in the firmament, a hammerblow of tyrian war plate the colour of a bruised sunset. He slammed down onto the terrazzo floor, a billowing mantle of fiery golden scale spread at his shoulders like a pair of angelic wings. Hair like a snowfall cascaded from his noble crown, and his slender, aquiline features were tapered and elfin, though possessed of a haughty strength that none of the faded orphans of Asuryan could hope to match.

  Fulgrim had eschewed his gaudy facial paints and scented oils, his face now pallid and ethereal, like a corpse-wraith given form and clad in polished plate that gleamed with the sheen of the finest mirror. His eyes were black pits from which no light escaped or ever would and his mouth creased in a smile that spoke of secret knowledge that would sear the mind of any but a primarch were they to learn even a fraction of its scope.

  Lucius joined his fellow warriors in an orgiastic scream of welcome, a hymnal to excess, a chorus of pandemonium in praise of their liege lord. Just to be near the Phoenician fired the blood. Fulgrim stood and spread his arms to accept their devotion, tilting his head back as his full lips parted with the rapture of adoration.

  The discordia from the vox dropped in volume and Fulgrim finally deigned to cast his gaze out amongst his warriors. The golden cloak draped across his shoulders, and the glitter of silver mail beneath his wondrously moulded breastplate shimmered like a waterfall of stars. A scabbard of ebony, mother of pearl and smoked ivory bands hung from a belt of soft black leather embossed with a buckle of amber and black.

  The anathame.

  Lucius knew this sword well, and even though it now belonged to the most sublime warrior imaginable, he could not resist the thought of what it might be like to face such a weapon. Sensing the scrutiny, Fulgrim turned his obsidian eyes upon Lucius and smiled as though in recognition of some shared bond known only to them.

  Lucius felt the power of that gaze and fought to keep his suspicions from showing on his face. He grinned back at Fulgrim and sliced the blades of his swords across the skin of his forehead. Blood dripped into his eyes and he revelled in the bitter, rancid taste of it as it ran down the hundreds of grooves carved through the skin of his face to his waiting tongue.

  ‘My Children,’ said Fulgrim as the glorious madness receded. ‘I bring you bliss.’

  3

  Fulgrim basked in the adoration of his warriors for a moment longer before raising his arms for silence. His gaze was beatific, humbling, intoxicating and cruel at the same time. Not one amo
ngst his warriors failed to be cowed by that dread black stare. He circled the towering plinth upon which sat his throne, glancing up at its lofty magnificence as if in faint embarrassment that such a thing was meant for him.

  ‘You have been so patient with me, my sons,’ said Fulgrim, pausing at the foot of the plinth. ‘And I have been neglectful.’

  Hundreds of voices clamoured in denial, but Fulgrim silenced them with his upraised palms and a slyly deprecating smile. ‘No, it’s true, I have allowed no word of our destination to work its way down to my beloved children, leaving you in darkness. Can you forgive me?’

  Once again the Heliopolis was filled with wild cheering, a screaming din of sounds no mortal throat was ever meant to give voice. Warriors threw themselves to their knees; others beat their breasts and yet more simply screamed with wordless affirmation.

  Fulgrim accepted their praise and said, ‘How you honour me.’

  Lucius watched Fulgrim as he circled the raised throne, studying his every movement and gesture for some sign that this wondrous individual was someone or something other than he claimed to be.

  Clad in his battle finery, the primarch’s presence was intoxicating. Not vulgar, not garish, but simply perfect. As though, in ascending to the pinnacle of excellence, he had shed the need for any overt displays of his devotion to the Dark Prince’s creed. One look into his black eyes was enough to realise his infinite capacity for excess in all its forms. Fulgrim had drunk deep from a well of sensation and without its continual boon, life was grey and empty, bereft of joy and meaning.

  ‘I bring the wine of victory and the sweet caress of war upon which to gorge yourselves,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I bring you the symphony of war, the bliss of ecstasy and the rapture of a pain-filled death to our enemies. We have travelled far from the feast of fire at Isstvan, and I have decided that it is time to wet our weapons in the blood of our enemies.’

  A chorus of shrieking approval greeted Fulgrim’s words, and he accepted their love as though it was an unexpected boon and not what he had planned all along. The primarch waved his slender, almost delicate fingers at the centre of the chamber, and a shimmering holo sprang to life, a glittering representation of planets in their gravitational dance with a brightly burning star.