Blood cascaded down Fulgrim's throat, and his eyes widened with genuine surprise. Lucius felt a fleeting moment of bitter disappointment and venomous jealousy at the thought of a merely competent swordsman like Abranxe landing such a blow. But no sooner had the blood begun to flow than it stopped, and Fulgrim took hold of Abranxe by the neck and hurled him away.

'A good move, Abranxe,' said Fulgrim with a rasp of gratification. 'I will remember it.'

Kalimos cracked his lash, its toothed length wrapping around Fulgrim's left arm. The carnodon teeth tore into his flesh, and squirts of blood sprayed from the wounds. As Kalimos hauled on his lash, Julius Kaesoron stepped in and delivered a thunderous left hook with his crackling fist. Augmented with strength enough to tear apart a battle tank, Kaesoron's blow drove Fulgrim to his knees, but before he could strike again, Kalimos jerked on his lash as Krysander plunged his dagger between the primarch's shoulder blades.

Fulgrim closed his fist on the gnawing lash and gave what appeared to be no more than a gentle tug. Kalimos was plucked from his feet and spun around the primarch, slamming into Krysander and sending the pair of them crashing to the ends of the gallery. Kaesoron swung again, but Fulgrim was ready for him, blocking the blow with Daimon's maul and thundering a naked fist into his face. Kaesoron dropped with a grunt, but Fulgrim made no move to finish him.

'Now Lucius, strike!' shouted Fabius, and the swordsman cursed the Apothecary as Fulgrim spun to face him. The primarch dropped the maul and drew the glitter-sheened blade Horus Lupercal had gifted him aboard the Vengeful Spirit.

'Now we come to it, swordsman,' grinned Fulgrim, swaying on his feet.

Lucius saw the pale complexion of his primarch was ashen and spat to the deck.

'This would be no contest worth making,' he said. 'Ruen's venom and your wounds render it meaningless.'

Fulgrim spread wide his arms and took stock of the blood dripping from his body. 'This?' he said. 'This is nothing. Come at me with the blade I gave you and we will settle this question once and for all, yes?'

Lucius cocked his head to one side, meeting the primarch's maddened gaze and seeing a truth he knew was as unshakable as it was inevitable.

Even in his wounded state, Fulgrim would kill him.

And Lucius wasn't ready to die, not for this.

Before he could consider the matter further, Julius Kaesoron rose up behind Fulgrim and slammed his energised fist down on Fulgrim's skull. A blow that should have pulped its victim's head to a smeared red ruin merely drove Fulgrim to the ground. The Phoenician shook his head and his bloody rictus grin put Lucius in mind of the deathly iconography he had seen carved into Isstvan V's ruins.

As Fulgrim sought to push himself to his feet, Marius Vairosean jammed the end of his sonic cannon into Fulgrim's neck and unleashed a barrage of squalling harmonics that filled the gallery with ear-bleeding noise. Lucius cried out in pain, and Fulgrim's eyes rolled back in their sockets as he let out a groan of what sounded very much like delirious pleasure.

The sword fell from the primarch's hand, and he toppled to the cracked flagstones with a heavy thump. Lucius looked up, blinking away bright spots of light from his vision and hearing what sounded like a million bells clanging at once. He stood a few metres from Vairosean, so he couldn't begin to imagine the effect the blast must have had on Fulgrim.

The surviving captains picked themselves up from the ground and formed a ring of dazed warriors around the fallen god. It had been a battle like no other, the warriors of a Legion turning on their own primarch, and the enormity of what they had done was not lost on them.

Lucius did not know what to feel. He had been cheated of his duel with Fulgrim, a duel he felt in his bones he would have lost. But some secret instinct told him that he would yet get his chance to test his blade against the primarch's alien weapon and yet live to speak of it.

Lucius turned his gaze upon his fellow captains. None marked his stare, for they could not tear their eyes from the downed primarch. Kalimos bled from numerous cracks in his armour, and Krysander's breastplate was dented so deeply that the bone shield of his chest must surely be in fragments. Abranxe knelt by Heliton, holding the hanging fragments of his brother's lower jaw in his hands. Vairosean's howling mouth was spread even wider in a hissing grimace of triumph, and Julius Kaesoron stared at his fist as though unable to believe he had raised it in anger against Fulgrim.

None spoke. None knew what to say.

They had taken arms against their primarch and they had enjoyed it.

Apothecary Fabius broke the spell of their silence.

'Fools!' hissed the lifeless voice of the Apothecary. 'You would stand gaping like landed fish until he awoke!'

Fabius turned away and made his way to the arched entrance to his necropolis of freakish surgeries. As he reached the edge of shadow, he turned back to the Legion captains.

'Bring him below,' said Fabius. 'We have much to do.'

'What exactly are you going to do, Apothecary?' demanded Kaesoron.

'I am going to exorcise the creature that has stolen the primarch's flesh.'

'How?' asked Lucius.

'By any means necessary,' said Fabius with an odious grin.

12.

It was the most terrible thing he had ever seen.

It was the most wondrous thing he had ever seen.

Fulgrim, the Phoenician, Lord of the Emperor's Children, Master of the III Legion, bound with the heaviest of fetters, chemically subdued and laid naked on a cold steel gurney like a corpse bound for dissection. Fulgrim's arms were thrown up above his head, his legs spread like the Vitruvian man of old.

Lucius's eyes roamed Fulgrim's pale flesh, the alabaster firmness criss-crossed in a web of surgical scars and incisions; knotted ridges that spoke of unknowable procedures and unspeakable experimentation upon the secret flesh within.

The delicious treason of this moment was something to be treasured, a wondrous sensation of the most terrible betrayal. Yet, for all that he called it betrayal, wasn't it an act of loyalty to cast out the creature that had taken possession of their master's soul?

Fabius circled the supine primarch, sliding needles as thick as Lucius's little finger into Fulgrim's arms and chest. Chem-shunts pumped powerful soporifics and muscle relaxants that would have dropped even the largest greenskin. Gleaming silver wires hooked to humming generators trailed from the primarch's temples and groin, and from every point on his body where pain might be heightened.

The lights were kept low, as befitted this act of violation, and the only sound was the murmuring of the hooded null-wretches in each shadowed corner of the chamber and the wheezing breath of the machines Fabius had set up around his...

Lucius wanted to say patient, but the word that came to mind was victim.

Julius Kaesoron stood silently at the foot of the slab, while Marius Vairosean paced like a caged raptor. Lucius smiled at his discomfort. Vairosean had ever been the lackey and the blindly obedient slave. Caught in a quandary of obedience to something that might not be Fulgrim and the possibility of betraying his master, Vairosean's mind must be alive with contradictory thoughts and fears.

Lucius almost envied him.

Fabius's thrall-slaves had carried the mewling forms of Heliton and Ruen deeper into the labyrinth; flesh-vats and xenosalival-sutures already prepared for their treatment. Daimon was beyond help, his skull smashed to concave ruin by the primarch's fist, but the rest of their treasonous band would survive. The thought sent a sliver of unease worming through Lucius's brain, and he turned to Kaesoron.

'Did you think we could do it?' he asked.

'Do what?'

'This,' said Lucius, gesturing towards the fallen primarch. 'Capture Fulgrim. I wasn't sure we could do it.'

'You didn't do it,' pointed out Kaesoron.

'What do you mean?'

'Look at you,' hissed Kaesoron. 'Not a mark on you, swordsman. You bring this matter to the brotherhood, and then step back and let us do the fighting for you.'

Lucius grinned, energised by Kaesoron's anger. 'What happened up there was a brawl. I fight with perfect grace, total immersion and fluid perfection. That was not a fight that required any of those qualities.'

'More like you saw you couldn't beat him.'

'That too,' added Lucius, 'but there's no shame in that.'

'True enough,' said Kaesoron, his capricious anger fading as quickly as it had come.

Marius Vairosean moved around the edge of the gurney, his stretched-out face making it impossible to read his expression. The captain of the Third had slung his sonic weapon over his shoulder, but the pulsing waves of hard-edged sound still rippled from its energised coils.

'Daimon is dead,' said Vairosean. 'And Heliton died on the way down.'

'And the Legion will be no worse off for their loss, if you ask me,' said Lucius.

'Ruen's arm is shattered beyond repair,' continued Vairosean, as though Lucius had not spoken. 'Krysander and Kalimos will live, but they will play no part in... this.'

'A small price to pay for subduing a primarch,' noted Kaesoron, as Fabius approached.

The Apothecary wore his white hair bound in a long scalp-lock, which only served to render his already gaunt features more skeletal and emaciated. His eyes were black, and Lucius couldn't remember if they had always been that way or had been changed to match those of the primarch. He wore a floor-length coat of flayed human skin, taken from the bodies of the dead on Isstvan V. Here and there, it was possible to recognise the features of a face, a mouth stretched in an endless scream of agony or eyes wide with horror at the sight of the skinner's knife. Some of the faces seemed familiar, but Lucius knew that without the architecture of bone, every face tended to similarity.

Eschewing his chirurgeon device, Fabius favoured a belt of knotted sinew pierced through with metal loops, from which hung the tools of the excruciator's art. Hooks, blades, spikes, pliers and barbs glittered in the half-light, but Lucius wondered if such banal instruments would draw screams from a being as powerful as Fulgrim.

'We are ready to begin,' said Fabius, drawing on a clicking pair of silver steel gauntlets.

'Then let us be done with this,' said Kaesoron. 'If Lucius is right and there is something else concealed behind Lord Fulgrim's face, then the sooner it is gone the better.'

They spread out around Fulgrim, each weighing the enormity of what they were doing against the potential for wonder and fresh sensation. That they had managed to subdue a primarch was miracle enough, but to drive out a creature of the warp...

Was such a thing even possible?

Lucius looked from face to face, understanding that no one gathered around the body of Fulgrim could answer that question. The Emperor's Children had been a Legion reticent in employing Librarians. The genetic quirk that allowed a psyker to wield the power of the warp came about as a result of a genetic mutation, a flaw. And nothing that could be considered a flaw would be permitted within the ranks of Fulgrim's Legion.

'So what do we do?' asked Kaesoron.

'First, we wake him,' said Fabius, stroking needle-tipped fingers over Fulgrim's chest.

'Assuming he doesn't just break free and kill us all, what then?' said Lucius.

'We drive the creature out,' said Fabius. 'With reason, with threats and with pain.'

'Pain?' snorted Vairosean. 'What pain can you administer that a primarch would feel?'

Fabius smiled his reptilian grin that promised a host of pains he alone knew and would be only too glad to demonstrate.

'I know this body like no other,' said Fabius, running his surgically-enabled digits over Fulgrim's skin with a lover's familiarity. 'I know everything about how it was put together, the secret powers alloyed to its flesh and bone, the unique organs crafted for the creation of such a numinous being. What the Emperor created, I have broken down into its constituent parts and remade in a greater whole.'

The arrogance of Fabius was astounding, but Lucius felt himself warming to it. To have opened up the body of a primarch and gazed upon the wonders within was an honour few, if any, would have known, so perhaps it was arrogance born of knowledge.

'Then do it,' said Kaesoron.

Fabius nodded, though there was more amusement to the gesture than any real acquiescence. How long would it be, wondered Lucius, before Fabius's arrogance lifted him from the chain of command entirely? Once so rigid and unbending, the Emperor's Children adhered to the old structure in lieu of anything better, but even that was breaking down as its warriors put their own desires and whims above those of the Legion.

How long before we are little more than squabbling warbands fighting for our own self-gratification?

Lucius had no answer to the question, and nor did that lack trouble him overmuch. Whether any remnant of the old Legion survived their rebirth was a matter of supreme indifference to him.

Fabius clipped a fluid drip to Fulgrim's arm and a shimmering crimson fluid sprinted along its length. No sooner had it entered the primarch's body than Fulgrim's black eyes opened and he blinked rapidly, like a sleeper suddenly awoken from a vivid dream.

'Ah, my sons...' said Fulgrim. 'What is this new diversion you have for me?'

Fabius leaned over to speak in Fulgrim's ear. 'You are not Fulgrim, are you?'

Fulgrim's eyes darted to the Apothecary, and Lucius caught the whiff of conspiracy in the glance. He leaned forwards and lifted Fabius's hand from Fulgrim's chest.

'Lucius,' breathed Fulgrim with perfumed breath. 'Such a shame we were denied the caress of steel, don't you think?'

'I think you have been luring me into that fight for some time,' answered Lucius.

Fulgrim laughed. 'Was I really so obvious? It would have made for a sublime experience, Lucius. How can you say you are truly alive unless you have first tasted death? To rise anew from the ashes of one life and be reborn into another. To taste oblivion and then return, ah, now that is an experience not to be dismissed so lightly.'

'I think death might sour of its charms in short order,' said Lucius. 'I think I will stick to the pleasures life can offer.'

Fulgrim's face twisted in a pout of disappointment. 'How short sighted of you, my son. No matter, you will reconsider in time, I think. Now, to the rest of you. Can you seriously believe I am not who I say I am when I tell you I am your master?'

'We know you are not Fulgrim,' said Kaesoron.

'Then who do you believe me to be?'

'A creature of the immaterium,' said Vairosean. 'A daemon spawn.'

'A daemon?' laughed Fulgrim. 'And how else would you describe a primarch? Are you so naive as to believe that all things named daemon are evil? Daemon or primarch, both are creatures fashioned from immaterial energies, hybrids of flesh and spirit brought into this world by unnatural means. If you knew anything of my creation then you would not bandy such words so carelessly.'

'So you admit that you are a daemon?' hissed Kaesoron.

'Julius, my beloved son,' said Fulgrim. 'Have you become so eager for conflict that you consciously blind yourself to reality? I have already told you that by Marius's dull definition, yes, I am a daemon! A daemon willed into creation by a being who seeks to win his immortality through storming the realm of gods by clambering over our corpses.'

'It speaks with lies masquerading as truth,' warned Fabius. 'Like the horse of ancient Truva, it will send its falsehoods garbed in that which sounds pleasant to your ears.'

'Then we should cut out his tongue,' said Lucius, and he was rewarded by a flicker of unease in Fulgrim's dark eyes. He saw anger, amusement and disappointment in that flicker, but which was the true emotion, he could not tell.

'Marius,' said Fulgrim. 'Of all my sons, you were the last I expected to see here.'

The words dripped with anguish, but Marius Vairosean did not flinch from them. Ever since Marius had failed Fulgrim on Laeran, he had been the most devoted servant, ever eager to please and determined to obey any order without question. If Fulgrim hoped to appeal to that aspect of Vairosean, he was to be sorely disappointed.

'My love for my primarch knows no bounds,' said Marius, leaning forwards as though to spit in the bound primarch's face. 'But you are not he, and I will do whatever it takes to cast you from his body. No pain is beyond me, no suffering too great to make that happen. Do you understand, daemon spawn?'

Fulgrim's face split apart in a wide grin.

'Then enough talk, whelps,' he said. 'Let us begin our journey into madness together!'