Lords and Tyrants Read online

  ‘Yes, overseer.’ Tobias’ teeth chattered from the effects of the injection.

  Lucius howled in glee as he slammed another narcotic into his veins from his suit reserves. The Sicarians’ weapons were good, he gave them that. His armour was covered in incidental scrapes and gouges that would have easily sundered standard-issue power armour. Lucius’ attackers had no way to know that while he was many things, he was far from standard. The six faces pressing against his war-plate’s surfaces wailed, and the armour cracked and shifted as the scars shrank away to nothing.

  A claw sliced just shy of Lucius’ face, wrapped in a shimmering skin of waspish sound. The frequency at which they resonated changed with every instant, testing and retesting to determine an intensity capable of slicing the Laeran Blade – or Lucius’ spine – in half. He did not let them live long enough to find either.

  Lucius bifurcated the claw-wielding skitarii with a clean strike through its midsection. Two more of the Sicarians died, slashed to ribbons by a downward slash from the bladed tails of Lucius’ whip. Another flew past, clattering to the ground as the Eternal sidestepped its attack and decapitated it. A lightning series of cuts and thrusts reduced the last of them to trembling corpses with neither limbs nor heads.

  A sudden sickness soaked through Lucius, as though he were standing too close to the Diadem’s Geller field generator. He staggered as something crashed into him from behind, scrambling across his shoulders. Slender, bird-like limbs sought purchase between the plates of his armour. Lucius snarled, throwing himself into a somersault to dislodge it. A figure in long crimson robes landed softly upon the ground before him in a crouch, looking upon Lucius with clusters of whirring blue eyes.

  It was another of the Mechanicus’ clade killers. This one emitted a warbling aura of interference from the antennae that sprouted from the armoured dome of its head. The destructive wavelengths crashed over Lucius, burning his flesh, causing blood to stream from his nose and ears, and filling his eyes with stinging tears.

  It was glorious.

  Lucius reached out, ensnaring the Infiltrator with his whip, and drew the assassin closer.

  ‘Papa?’

  Tobias could barely make out Grace as she buried the child’s face into her chest and carried her away from where he lay shivering on the cot. His vision tunnelled sharply as he curled into a ball, gripping the thin sheet over him so tightly his knuckles cracked.

  Death was a fact of life for those who toiled in the factory. Men falling ill, to mould or rustlung or plain exhaustion was far from uncommon. Tobias had seen more than one of his friends carried from their stations by the overseers, to be provided with ‘medical treatment’. None of them had ever returned.

  This was something different. It was as though Tobias’ nightmares had infected him with fever. They were no longer content to remain in his dreams, hauling themselves out into his waking life. Tobias gritted his teeth against the pain, a marrow-deep agony that filled his guts with razors.

  ‘Tobias?’ said Grace, tears streaming down her face as she cradled their child.

  Tobias squeezed his eyes shut. For days, people had stopped being recognisable to him. All he could see were horrible, skinless things that grinned with broken fangs.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ sobbed Grace. ‘Tell me what to do.’ Tobias could just hear her voice as she pleaded to the shrine in the corner of the room. ‘Deus Imperator, please, I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Oh,’ hissed Lucius as the lash tightened around the Infiltrator’s chest. ‘We didn’t count on that, did we?’

  He squeezed the barbed coils tighter and tighter. Blood and oil began to weep from every crack and seal on the skitarii’s domed head. Diodes and lenses shattered. With a sharp bark, Lucius drove the tip of the Laeran Blade through the skitarii’s head. The giddiness of its interference mechanisms ceased as the mortal parts within its shell died.

  More of the Infiltrators advanced, a wall of distortion rippling out before them that dulled even Lucius’ preternatural perceptions. He sniffed away a nosebleed and made ready to attack, when a shadow fell over them.

  Lucius leapt back as a blurred red shape hurtled down into the skitarii from the sky. He recognised the distinctive rounded shape of a Kastelan battle robot just before it made impact. Bits of rock and smoky thunder filled the air from the booming crash. Lucius stared into the aftermath of the blast, wind clawing at his face and armour, and watched as a silhouette enveloped in crackling mauve lightning appeared through the pall.

  The Composer stepped forth from the veil of smoke and dust. He raised his palm, lifting the smoking battle robot over the Infiltrators. Lucius saw many of the rail-thin skitarii had survived, now twitching and clawing to drag themselves away. The Composer lowered his hand and smashed the Kastelan down into them again, leaving nothing behind but a crater filled with mounds of sparking wreckage.

  ‘Loathsome,’ said the sorcerer, the derision in his tone at odds with the beatific faceplate of his silver helm. ‘To those of us who are blessed to hear the Song, theirs is a truly vacuous contribution.’

  Another shadow, one much taller and broader, detached from the smoke beside the Composer. Afilai stopped a short distance behind and to the side of the sorcerer he protected, the bulky servos of his cobbled-together Terminator armour clanking as he swept his storm bolter across the area. Dirty light drooled from the bloodied talons of his lightning claw.

  The Composer ignored his slave and raised his staff to Lucius in earnest salute. ‘Hail, Eternal One!’

  ‘Find your own things to kill,’ spat Lucius. He regretted allowing the witch leave from his prison atop the Diadem. Were he not eternally shadowed by his Terminator-clad pet, more of the warband would be working to kill him than the enemy.

  With no further bloodshed available to occupy their attention, the gaudy killers of the Cohors Nasicae formed up in loose ranks behind Lucius. He could feel the eagerness dripping off them, the hunger. Their prize loomed within reach.

  With the skitarii butchered, the path down into the arcology was now clear. The defences had been broken, and nothing would be waiting for them but token militias cowering behind hastily erected barricades. Now the taking of flesh could begin in earnest.

  ‘With me!’ roared Lucius, waving his warriors forward as power blazed across the Laeran Blade. Then he was charging ahead, moving so effortlessly and so swiftly that he barely noticed the piece of shaped iron he brushed against with his hoof.

  Lucius experienced the world in a blur.

  A burst of light and sound.

  Silence, and the feeling of weightless spinning.

  The earth and sky alternating.

  Earth. Sky. Earth. Sky. Earth.

  Blackness.

  Death swallowed Lucius, just as it had before. And then the screaming began.

  Tobias could only hear screaming now. There was no other sound than the din of agony that howled from behind his eyes. Black ropes bulged and squirmed beneath his flesh, his veins aflame with poison. He ­stumbled through the streets, his mind knowing not where his body was carrying him.

  Twisted, inhuman faces leered down at him at every turn. He recoiled as they jostled and shoved him away, their shouts and curses muted by the shrieking.

  Tobias burst into the factory, his arms flailing as black ooze streamed from his eyes. He stumbled blindly through a corridor, moving towards the sound of machines. He collided with a doorframe and was bowled over, collapsing at the entrance to the assembly line.

  The workers who witnessed Tobias fall called their fellows and ran to his aid, ignoring the shouted warnings from guards and overseers. Screams and cries of alarm sent them staggering back from their friend’s stricken form.

  A revolting wet tearing sound filled the air as Tobias’ skin split into flayed ribbons, spraying everything around him with an oily mist of blood. The flesh be
neath was discoloured, the deep red of it morphed to an unsettling shade of purple that glittered with an oily sheen like an insect’s carapace. His skeleton snapped as it reformed, some bones elongating far beyond that of a normal man, others splintering and sharpening into alarming spikes.

  The workers fled from what Tobias was becoming. His body writhed in bone-breaking convulsions, a lump of meat that twisted as its wet, slick noises changed to those of a cracking, squealing shell.

  Limbs burst out from the mass: arms and armoured fists holding weapons that condensed into being from blood and shadows; legs ending in cloven hooves. Tobias’ skull collapsed, his face never halting in its cries as it receded and was drawn tight over a rapidly forming breastplate of purplish-pink armour. In its place another skull breached the quivering knot of transformation, skinned with hairless consumptive flesh that was covered in hideous overlapping scars. A savage maw grinned as it was filled with needle teeth and a vile, reptilian tongue. Two sunken pits twitched, fighting the blood and mucus gumming them as they strove to take in the world once more.

  The eyes opened, and the screaming that had filled the assembly line was overtaken by laughter.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Lucius, rising with a grunt to tower over the group of stunned factory workers. ‘I am truly beautiful to behold. The worm giveth birth to the butterfly.’

  The Eternal watched with amusement as a servitor approached, scanning him with an eye-mounted laser and raising a hypodermic needle.

  ‘Notice – I am administering–’

  Lucius put his fist through its face, not deeming the android worthy to taste the edge of his sword. It crashed to the floor in sparking pieces. Men and women cried out, sprinting away in panic.

  Lucius’ head was swimming. He was underground, in a large industrial space, but this was not the planet where he had died. This was somewhere new. He could be halfway across the galaxy for all he knew. Such had happened before.

  Lucius laughed at the idea, wondering at the cosmic joke he had been set to play upon the galaxy. The stabbing sense of dislocation and confusion waned. He ran his mind through the inventory he had learned to perform on the previous occasions he had expired, knowing from experience that it would allow him to quickly return his mind to fine form. He flexed his limbs, spun his sword and blinked the blood from his eyes after an instant to savour its sting. His mind retraced memories, grand triumphs and duels won. These thoughts anchored him, centring him as he reasserted control and ownership over his body.

  Another ritual awaited, he thought with a grin. Lucius looked down, scanning the handful of wailing faces straining against the crackling plates of his armour until he found his newest pet.

  There. The seventh and newest addition to his growing menagerie. This one was gaunt and sickly, though in fairness none of the caged souls who had become bound upon Lucius’ war-plate could be described as exemplars of good health. The man’s lips were locked in an agonising rictus, teeth bared within a scraggly beard. It was hardly the face of a bloodthirsty champion or peerless master assassin. It was not even one of the Legions.

  Lucius had never seen him before. Every other time, he had fallen before his killer at sword’s length, face to face. This was new.

  ‘Hello,’ Lucius smiled at his new screaming soul. ‘I’m not yet certain how we both came to this, but don’t worry, we have an eternity to get to know each other.’

  The man screamed inside of Lucius’ head. It was an incomprehensible dirge, jostling and merging with the others. For a rare moment, there and quickly gone, Lucius believed that he could make out was he was saying. It almost sounded like names.

  Lucius took stock of his surroundings, bloodshot green eyes flicking here and there. It was then that Lucius realised where he was. He was standing in the centre of a munitions factory. He thought back, retracing his memories to the last moment he could recall, before the blackness of death had engulfed him.

  A landmine. By Ruin, it had been a damned landmine.

  Such a revelation galled Lucius, on a great number of levels. He couldn’t fathom which was worse – that he, the greatest champion of the entire galaxy, should meet such an end, or, equally infuriating, that such a creature as this would dare to derive satisfaction from its miserable existence.

  ‘You were proud of this?’ Lucius glared down at the wailing visage of Tobias. Of all the Ruinous Powers that could have bestowed their blessings upon him, Lucius had to have been chosen by the one that possessed a sense of humour. He wondered how many of the Cohors Nasicae he would have to kill before any word of this embarrassment was quashed forever.

  Anger ticked out from a vein on Lucius’ temple. His teeth creaked within snarling jaws. This simply would not do. Not at all.

  A casual flick of Lucius’ wrist sent his lash flying out, a barbed tendril snapping around the leg of a fleeing munitorum worker. The man cried out as he crashed to the ground, tearing at the deck plating as the whip hauled him back until he left crimson streaks upon the dark, indifferent metal.

  Lucius lifted the man up off the ground, suspending him upside down by his leg, raising him until they were at eye level. He played the blade of his sword over the worker’s body, delighting at each recoil and the pathetic, animal noises that squealed from the man as its cutting edge came just close enough to split flesh.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Lucius, grinning at the tiny arcs of electricity from the Laeran Blade singeing the man’s grubby uniform and even grubbier skin, before he extinguished the power field down to bare alien steel.

  ‘Please.’

  Lucius chuckled. ‘That’s not my name! Though so many of you mortals seem to think so.’ He read the crudely stencilled patch on the man’s coveralls aloud. ‘Solk,’ declared the Eternal with mock triumph. ‘See? I have made the effort to learn your name.’

  The man moaned, squirming and struggling to look away.

  Lucius tutted with disappointment. ‘No, no, no, little man,’ he leaned forwards. ‘Look at me. Look. At. Me!’

  The roar froze Solk, who looked at Lucius with glazed eyes. His body went limp, save for the slightest trembling that shook every inch of him.

  ‘You don’t,’ Lucius sighed, appearing reflective for a moment before his face was creased once more by his lunatic grin. ‘That’s fine, I forgive you for your ignorance.’ The worker named Solk suddenly became very aware of the bizarre sword in Lucius’ hand. His entire world became that blade, pearlescent and covered in swirling, painful runes, as its shimmering edge was lifted to rest just beneath his jaw.

  ‘I am going to teach you,’ whispered Lucius. ‘I will teach every last one of you who I am. I am going to carve my name into this world, and no one will ever be able to forget what I am about to do here.’

  The worker gasped, the sound quickly becoming a gurgle as a casual caress of the blade opened his throat. Lucius discarded the dying man, his victim immediately forgotten as he broadened his focus outwards. He smiled as he tasted the fear upon the air of the world he was about to slaughter.

  ‘My name is Lucius.’

  WHISPERS

  Alec Worley

  Marcus Amouris bounded up the steps of the village shrine and appealed for calm as the Thunderhawk circled overhead. The ship’s sudden appearance, materialising out of the early morning mist like some mythological bird of prey, had interrupted the tribe’s dawn rituals and driven them into a panic. Mothers screamed, racing from the doorways of their huts to retrieve awestruck children from the storm of leaves and dirt churning beneath the transporter’s powerful turbines. The menfolk had already gathered into a mob, brandishing hunting mattocks as they beat their chests and bellowed challenges at the hovering vessel. The village shaman huddled on his knees, absorbed in frantic prayer to his obsolete deity.

  Marcus tried not to smile. He always savoured this moment, when the scales finally fell from the eyes of the con
verted and they beheld the glorious light of the Emperor for the first time.

  ‘People of the Sundered Claw,’ he bellowed, his weathered robes snapping in the booming downdraught. ‘Your faith in me this season has been rewarded.’

  He had mastered the nuances of the local dialect within weeks. His genius for languages had not dimmed in the years since he was an orphan boy, studying at one of the holy academies of the Schola Progenium.

  His strident voice caught the ears of the tribe’s chieftain, a brute almost the size of a greenskin and flanked as always by his two hulking champions. The chieftain raised his ceremonial mattock – the Sundered Claw itself, its head fashioned from the talon of some prehistoric beast – as he roared for silence. All who heard it ceased their clamour and stood, squinting into the wind, all eyes on the Imperial missionary as he continued.

  ‘The curse upon your sacred forest shall soon be lifted,’ cried Marcus. ‘Your noble hunters shall be preyed upon no more.’

  He gestured with a flourish towards the Thunderhawk, as though he had conjured it into existence. ‘Did I not promise an end to your famine? Did I not promise deliverance?’

  The ship continued to circle the village, surveying the scene below. Its thrusters tore the mist into curling shreds, revealing the peninsula of low hills that opened to the south, then whipping the branches of the fathomless pine forest that otherwise enclosed the village like a bulwark.

  ‘Your honoured ancestors called the same god by many names,’ said Marcus. ‘The Grey Father, Cloudbearer, Ward of the Forest. But he has answered my prayers, granted me a portion of his command, because I know his true name.’

  Marcus looked out over a sea of starving, enraptured faces, gazing at him like children spellbound by a campfire tale. Marcus welcomed the force of their attention. He absorbed their devotion like warmth, feeling something nourished deep within him.