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Lucius: Pride And Fall – Ian St. Martin

About the Author

A Black Library Publication

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 light posts 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 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 again, 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 a myriad of others were apparently buried just beneath their crust, 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 sight he had ever seen watched Tobias as he left the domicile, just as they did every morning when he left 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 get 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 skitarii 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’ back, 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.’

‘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 with the power blazing 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 beneath 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 and raising him up by his leg 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.’

Lucius 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.’

About the Author

Ian St. Martin has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Deathwatch and Lucius: The Faultless Blade, and the short stories ‘City of Ruin’ and ‘In Wolves’ Clothing’ for Black Library. He lives and works in Washington DC, the US, caring for his cat and reading anything within reach.

A Black Library Publication

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Adrian Smith.

Lucius: Pride and Fall © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Lucius: Pride and Fall, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-816-7

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.