Lords and Tyrants Read online

  I bow in return. ‘It is good to see you, lord Chaplain,’ I say.

  I notice then that he carries his power maul, the thing he called a crozius. It looks different to me – smaller, as if cut down somehow. Perhaps I damaged it. I know how much the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes venerate their weapons, and so the thought troubles me.

  ‘This is Argent,’ Erastus says, hefting the heavy piece as if it weighs nothing. ‘It has been in the Chapter for a thousand years. For an outsider to handle it, even to touch it, earns the wrath of us all.’

  He is still severe. Perhaps he knows no other way to be.

  ‘I did not know,’ I say, wondering why he has come here to tell me this.

  ‘We protect that which is precious to us,’ he says. ‘But we also understand what is truly significant. Take it, and observe what has changed.’

  I receive the maul again, and then see truly that it has been heavily adapted. It is shorter, lighter, its power unit truncated and the bone casing modified. Even then I struggle to hold it steady, and my armour-encased arms ache.

  ‘Why have you done this?’ I ask.

  ‘Because it is yours now,’ he says.

  I cannot believe it. I move to give the weapon back, unable to accept such a gift.

  ‘If you spurn the offer,’ Erastus warns me, ‘it will be a second insult, one I will not overlook.’

  I look down at the crozius. The detail on its shaft is incredible. It is a thing of beauty as well as power. The gesture overwhelms me, and I do not have the words for it.

  ‘You do me too much honour,’ I say at last, and it seems like a weak response.

  ‘I have only just started,’ he says, standing back and regarding me critically. ‘You hold it as if it were a snake. Grip the handle loosely. I will show you how to bear it without breaking your bones.’

  It is then that I know why he has come. He will instruct me in how to wield it, and I understand then that it will henceforth become my own weapon, the one I shall carry in preference to all others.

  It will hurt. I will damage the healing process by doing this. Tur will be angry, for he desires me back in service within days.

  None of that matters. I do as I am bid, then look to the Chaplain. I do not know if such a thing has ever been done before. My soul fills with joy, and I determine to make myself equal to the gesture. Perhaps that will be my purpose now – to live up to this deed, to ensure that Argent is used as it ought to be used, for the glory of Him on Earth.

  That would be a fine ambition, I think, one worthy of my high calling.

  ‘Show me,’ I say then, hungry for the knowledge.

  LUCIUS: PRIDE AND FALL

  Ian St. Martin

  Just a fraction of an inch, the tiniest miscalculation, and he would miss.

  Concentration edged his brow, framing eyes that took in a scene that had arrived before him a thousand times before. Speed and attention to detail were paramount, and all would be for nothing were he to make a mistake here. He gripped the tools of his trade, ancient implements that had gone almost completely unchanged over the course of mankind’s history, ones that had served with him for so long they felt as natural to him as the hands that held them.

  A din wailed around him from all directions. The edges of his sight sparkled with glaring flashes of light, his hearing filled with the squeal and crunch of clashing metal. Once, it had been disorientating, but experience had long since pushed it all to the back of his mind, shrinking it to a dull rumble whose distraction would not rise high enough to challenge his focus.

  The world shrank to his target. He had to be quick – more just like the one before him were coming in a seemingly unending procession. He drew a breath and held it, everything else vanishing as he found an opening and brought the metal in his hand to bear.

  ‘Shift end!’

  Tobias looked up from his place on the assembly line, wiping the sweat from his brow with a grimy work glove. The flat circle of machinery he had finished soldering shivered as it moved away down the thick carpet of segmented rubber, the new wiring assembly gleaming from its mechanisms after its installation. He smiled at his contribution and looked up to the ceiling. The chronograph flashed, an industrial whistle blared twice, and the crew of coverall-clad manufactorum workers rose from their stations.

  A cluster of sharp pops brought a grimace to Tobias’ face as he stood. He took a moment to stretch, fighting against the crooked posture earned by two decades working over that very assembly line. Age made its mark upon a man in many ways, and none were clearer to Tobias than in his back.

  ‘Return to your domiciles,’ the flat voice of the overseer droned from tinny speakers that ringed their section of the factory. ‘Praise the Emperor, and thank Him for thy rest. The next work shift for assembly group 39.821-EpsilonAA23 shall commence in five hours, fifty-three minutes time.’

  Tobias joined the line of exhausted workers filing off the factory floor. He pushed his goggles up onto his forehead, and brushed bits of metal from the coarse beard that hung to his chest. He surrendered his lathe and other tools to the equipment station flanked by a pair of armed guards. After passing through three separate checkpoints, where specialised servitors with scanners in place of arms panned his body to ensure he left with none of the factory’s materials, he walked through the exit and stepped out into the street.

  ‘Come on, then,’ called out Solk from where he stood with a gaggle of other workers. ‘Boys are getting a drink!’

  Tobias grinned, like he always did, and shook his head to decline the offer, like he always did. The others laughed, tossing a few good-natured barbs his way, before heading off towards the work camp’s canteen. Tobias moved down the streets as the sodium lightposts flickered to life, moving as quickly as his aching joints would allow him. The only sky above the camp was a ceiling of hewn rock, but he knew from the standardised chronograph that it was getting close to sunfall.

  If he hurried, he would make it just in time to see a sight that made all his labours worth doing.

  Half an hour later, Tobias pushed the thin plastek door to his hab-chamber aside, closing it softly behind him and hanging his worn cap on the hook he had screwed into the wall. The single room domicile was cramped, with a low ceiling and walls covered in stained vinyl. A threadbare kitchenette occupied one corner, a cot and a shrine to the God-Emperor another. The sole source of light came from a cracked lumen strip in the ceiling, which buzzed and sputtered intermittently as it sipped power from an aging generator.

  Sitting at a low table, one that rocked from a broken leg he had patched back together more times than he could count, Tobias saw what he had been waiting all day to see.

  The girl’s eyes went bright. Her mother set her down, and she ran towards Tobias as he went down to one knee, arms spread wide. The child’s lips parted, and she drew breath to call out her father’s name.

  ‘Lucius!’

  He heard the name, but listened to the warning in the tone. He pivoted on his heel, feeling the static of an energised blade crackle over the scars covering his face. His own sword came up, moving so quickly the blade lost its shape, like mercury. The impact shot up his arm as the tip punched through layers of iron and cogwork, and then into the withered, vital flesh beneath. The sword was withdrawn before the truncated cognitive routines that had replaced his attacker’s mind registered that it had been struck.

  The alien steel was steady in his hand, as if forged to be there, its edge already thirsting for the next. And the next. All of this occurred in the time it took for him to blink.

  Lucius spun away with fluid grace as the combat servitor came crashing down. What little that remained of the female convict wired into its core was dead before the cyborg hit the ground. A thin curtain of dust rose from the impact, rising on the wind to disperse into a cold and lightless sky.

  He heard the voice agai
n, coming from a face painted in lilac and gold leaf. ‘Cutting it close,’ Krysithius chuckled, hefting his sword towards the Eternal in mock salute. ‘You’re losing your touch.’

  Lucius stared at Krysithius, his marred green eyes cold. He flung out his arm, hurling his lash at his brother. A barbed tentacle snapped a hand’s breadth over the renegade Space Marine’s head, decapitating another of the cyborg soldiers as it poised itself to strike at ­Krysithius’ back.

  ‘Am I?’ said Lucius, before hauling back the lash with a whip crack.

  Tobias woke with a start. He clamped a hand to his mouth, stifling a cry and breathed deeply through his nose. Once his heartbeat had steadied, he swept back the clinging locks of his hair pasted to his brow by cold sweat.

  Gingerly, he sat up, careful not to wake his wife and daughter sleeping next to him. He swung his legs over the edge of the cot and stood, moving slowly through the dark to the washbasin next to the kitchenette.

  Vestiges of the nightmare clung to Tobias’ mind. Half-formed images of bleeding things and inhuman screeching. And laughter. They faded as he splashed water against his face.

  Tobias did not know what the nightmare meant, or if it was supposed to mean anything. He sighed as he knelt before the shrine to the Emperor, lighting a votive candle that bathed him in its soft, tiny light. His eyes fell over the holy iconography in worn plastek, drifting to the frayed regimental patch set beneath it from his service in the planetary militia. Most of the manufactorum workers were veterans of the planet’s conscripted defence force, but nothing he had seen out on the rim chasing pirates was a match for the monstrosity that had filled his sleep. He sighed, trying to rid his mind of it all. Sometimes a man just had bad dreams.

  Tobias flinched as a hand rested upon his shoulder.

  ‘Grace,’ said Tobias, his eyes meeting hers before flicking back to the cot. ‘Did I wake her?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ his wife answered with a warm smile. ‘Are you okay? You look pale.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Tobias, trying to push the last lingering images from his mind. ‘Just a dream.’

  Grace took his hand in hers, and Tobias smiled, his fear banished as they began to pray.

  To his credit, Krysithius recovered well. He chuckled again to mask his discomfort, the sound a twisted, unwholesome noise that whistled from between his filed silver teeth. Krysithius turned and threw himself back into the fighting, hunting for something deadly enough to be worth the expenditure of effort to kill.

  Lucius spent a moment to survey the battlefield, such as it was. The surface of, well, whatever the planet was called – he had not bothered to learn it – was barren rock, a coarse, worthless exterior laid over what the Diadem’s scanners had revealed to be an equally worthless core. The neighbouring worlds of the system, however, possessed depths laden with vast mineral wealth. Cobalt, osmium, tungsten and myriad others were apparently buried just beneath their crusts, sufficient deposits for the Adeptus Mechanicus to garrison a maniple of battle servitors in-system to ensure that it was they who would reap the benefits of their exploitation.

  The economics of interstellar mining was one of a long list of subjects Lucius found severely uninteresting, but the value of such materials was hardly lost on him. There were countless cabals of the Dark Mechanicum within the Eye of Terror who would pay greatly for such raw, untainted resources.

  But to Lucius, they were nothing. The prize Lucius sought was not the minerals, nor the automated mines that extracted them, but here on this desolate rock. Just beneath his feet lay a vast arcology whose factories, teeming with workers, processed and made use of the other worlds’ bounties. The slave decks of the Diadem had gone hungry of late, both for skilled labour and those used by the warband for pleasure, and the continued existence of his Cohors Nasicae was threatened until they were filled to bursting again. And once the gaggle of lobotomised puppets that opposed him had been dispatched, Lucius would be free to go beneath this world’s bleak skin and ensure they were.

  A wail of jet turbines brought Lucius’ attention to Vyspirtilo. The lord of the Rypax was perched atop the prone body of a combat servitor he had felled with his spear. Scraps of metal and gouts of oily machine lubricant flew around the Raptor chieftain in a bizarre swirl as his claws defiled the android, searching for flesh or the marrow within bones with all the desperation of a drowning man fighting for air. Unsatisfied, he tore his spear loose and leapt back into the air with a frustrated screech, leaving in a spray of diluted blood and hydraulic fluid.

  Lucius had not witnessed the Eagle King speak in years. He wondered if he ever would again beyond animal screams, and felt a pang of regret at the thought. Vyspirtilo had the most beautiful voice.

  The most beautiful eyes Tobias had ever seen watched him as he left the domicile, just as they did every morning when he departed for his shift. He put on his cap, careful not to show the sleeplessness of the past nights in front of his daughter, and slid the door closed behind him.

  Tobias took a wheezing breath as he left the tenement building. The wheezing became coughing, and the coughing retching as he vomited a glob of black slime onto the street corner. Tobias’ breath caught in his throat, his eyes wide as he watched the ooze hiss and bubble on the rockcrete. Vertigo weakened his knees and blurred his sight. He panted, holding a hand out to steady himself against the wall until his vision cleared.

  ‘Tobias?’ said a voice from behind the reeling factory worker. He dragged a hand down his face and turned, seeing a group of his fellows, Solk at their fore. ‘You all right, brother?’

  ‘Fine,’ he lied. ‘Long night, that’s all.’

  Solk chuckled. ‘I guess you do your drinking at home.’

  ‘Right.’ Tobias forced a laugh. ‘Go on ahead, I’ll catch up with you.’

  The workers made off down towards the factory. Tobias gasped. His skin felt burning hot to the touch. He pulled up the sleeve of his jacket, and gagged as he saw the dark lines of his veins threading through flesh that had gone deathly pale. He had to breathe, to just take a moment to collect himself.

  The chronograph on the street corner chimed. Tobias sighed, groaning as he pushed off from the wall. He had to hurry. The call for the start of his shift would come in just a few minutes.

  Just a few minutes had passed since they had arrived on this planet, and Lucius was already starting to notice the number of combat servitors beginning to dwindle. He had only allowed a small number of the warband to accompany him on this raid. Too many of the Cohors Nasicae in a battle of this size and things could have easily spiralled out of control. Lucius intended to leave with the prize he sought intact, or at least as intact as possible.

  He was sowing a path of destruction through the fighting, using his lash to swing a servitor about like a massive flail, when an ear-splitting buzz assailed his ears. He released the ruined servitor, which collapsed in pieces as his lash uncoiled from around it, and turned in the direction of the noise.

  He was confronted by a cohort of skitarii. These were different than the standard robed infantry of the Adeptus Mechanicus, spindle-limbed and clad in suits and masks of red leather. They bore sonic weapons, claws and flat-bladed swords that emitted a crackling buzz that played delightfully against Lucius’ eardrums. He knew them, if not by experience then by reputation, as Sicarians. The Mechanicus’ assassin caste.

  ‘Ah!’ Lucius exclaimed, his smile widening as he spun his sword with relish. ‘Blessings of the Youngest God be upon you, I was beginning to think this was going to be boring!’

  The Sicarians moved with flawless synchronicity as they blurred over the ground towards him. The air trembled around their weapons. They attacked as one, like fingers joined to make a fist.

  Two of Lucius’ warband intercepted them, one striking from above with a pair of glittering sabres while a Havoc set himself in a crouch as he brought his heavy bolter to bear. The skita
rii assassins did not break stride. Two split off from the cohort, their claws and swords nearly impossible to see as they carved the airborne Chaos Space Marine apart until he crashed to the ground as a series of component parts. Another blurred around the cacophonous firing of the heavy bolter, dragging its energised blade through the links of the cannon’s ammunition chain. The mass-reactive rounds detonated in a string of flaring explosions that travelled upwards to the magazine contained within the warrior’s backpack. The ammunition reserves exploded, blowing the Havoc apart into a rain of gory mist and broken armour segments.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Lucius. The skitarii reformed, and he leapt into the midst of them. His mind had gone wandering thus far, hardly occupied by fighting second-rate opposition. For these mechanical killers he might actually need to stay focused.

  Tobias fought to concentrate. Sweat streamed from his brow, soaking his hair and face. His fingers trembled with his tools as the machinery stopped before him on the assembly line.

  The lathe slipped in his grip. It spun from his hand, bouncing against the floor with a discordant ring. The workers on either side of him looked up from their own stations. Tobias heard the plodding footsteps of the overseer nearby, and his heart sank.

  The servitor clanked to a halt, turning its cold, empty gaze upon Tobias.

  ‘Request for clarity – why is there inefficiency present at this workstation?’

  ‘Forgive me, overseer,’ said Tobias. He fought to keep from coughing again, but the pain leaked out in a wheeze that coated his words.

  The servitor straightened. A red laser beamed out from its right eye, scanning over Tobias’ face.

  ‘Query – are you experiencing illness or debilitation?’

  ‘No, overseer,’ Tobias answered quickly.

  ‘Notice – I am administering direct intravenous stimulant.’ The servitor jabbed a syringe into Tobias’ neck, injecting a cocktail of amphetamine chemicals into his bloodstream. ‘Notice – decrease of productivity is unacceptable. Report any occurrence or worsening of symptoms and submit to mandatory medical evaluation immediately should illness or debilitation occur.’