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Perfection and Pain – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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PERFECTION AND PAIN

Jude Reid

‘Explain to me exactly what you mean by “gone”.’

Marduk Tamaris of the Emperor’s Children, knight-commander of the Perfecti and oathsworn bladesmaster of the Radiant Phoenician himself, kept his voice to a silken growl. Even so, the force of his anger was enough to drive the wretch before him to his knees.

‘My lord – your forgiveness – there was nothing we could do–’

‘Stand when I address you.’ Tamaris fixed the cowering thrall with the full glare of his helmet’s lenses, lifted him by his matted hair and suspended him at eye level. ‘Explain to me exactly how this came to be. You had been granted a great honour. The sacred charge of my warship’s trophy chamber. To see to its care. To attend to the treasures within.’

The thrall managed a nod that was barely distinguishable from the trembling that shook his body.

‘And yet’ – Tamaris turned the man’s head to regard the bulkhead door that led to the gutted trophy chamber, pressing the sweating face against its armaglass window – ‘I find the treasures taken.’ He pressed harder, and the man’s nose broke with an audible crunch. ‘And you without the loyalty to die in their defence.’

‘Kill the wretch and have done with it, Tamaris.’ A loud sigh from behind him told Tamaris that Venakhar, his Apothecary and second-in-command, was already weary of the interchange. ‘The chamber is breached, your trophies stolen by filthy, reiving xenos. I doubt he can tell you more.’

Tamaris ignored him. He turned the flailing thrall in his grip and glared at the bloody ruin of the man’s face. ‘You have failed me,’ he said softly, waiting as the look of terror faded from the wide and glassy eyes, until the bubbling, agonal gasps of breath slowed and ceased. ‘Take that failure with you to the grave.’ He let the useless carcass drop from his hand, and turned to face his brothers. ‘You too have failed.’

Tamaris waited for the words to find their mark, for the wounds of shame to open on his brethren. He was a warrior with perfection inches from his grasp, first amongst the Perfecti, themselves amongst the finest of the warbands of the III Legion.

They were failures, every one of them.

Himself included.

‘How, then, would you have us atone?’ It was Nathair who spoke, the eldest amongst the warband, the forked tips of his tongue protruding from his lipless mouth as he hissed out the words. His eyes were entirely black, bereft of sclera or iris, featureless as the void beneath the hairless dome of his skull.

Tamaris shook his head with slow and deliberate contempt, and activated his helmet’s vox-unit. It came to life with a piercing burst of static that sent a faint tingle of pleasure through his ear. ‘Shipmaster.’

‘My lord.’ Shipmaster Adagayle’s voice came through the vox-system in an eerie harmony, as though many voidfarers were speaking rather than one. The shipmaster had been an ambitious officer in the Imperial Navy before setting off on the path to glory, her soul traded away one grudging sliver at a time. Now each one of those cuts had formed a razor-toothed mouth on her flesh, providing a constant echo of her speech and filling any silence with whispered and blasphemous truths. Fear was an emotion that Tamaris no longer felt, but the unwelcome intimacy of the shipmaster’s lisping, sinuous voice in his ear made his flesh creep. ‘The reiver vessel is in full retreat. I have weapons locked on and ready to fire. The bombardment cannon–’

‘No. No cannons.’ The seeds of a plan were germinating in his mind. ‘Bring us into torpedo range.’

‘Yes, lord.’ The wet eagerness in Adagayle’s voice revolted him. ‘We stand ready to breach their hull at your command. To spill them into the void like ruptured viscera–’

‘Ready my boarding torpedo.’ He cut the vox-link, the slavering whispers of obedience lingering in his ear for seconds after the connection should have been severed, and drew himself to his full height. ‘I will take back what was stolen.’

‘You intend to go alone.’ Nathair’s tone was carefully neutral.

‘I do.’

‘You are aware of the risks of such an action, my lord.’ The unspoken question hovered behind the words like a ghost.

‘I am aware of your failure!’ Tamaris spat the words like a bolter spitting shells. Already his mind’s eye was flooding with visions of battle – of blood, of death, of the chance to avenge this insult a hundred times over. ‘Be grateful I do not offer you the opportunity to compound it.’

From inside his adamantine coffin, Tamaris counted steady seconds, feeling the cold of the void give way to searing heat as the boarding torpedo’s melta array blazed into life. A series of shuddering impacts shook the world around him, jarring even in the protective confines of his armour, the absolute blackness beyond his visor yielding first to blood red, then a blazing crimson, then the golden fires of dawn. The scream of metal on metal joined the hiss of liquefying armour as the torpedo’s teeth chewed and churned at the xenos vessel’s hull, boring deeper like a flesh-grub into an open wound, taking bite after bite in a vain attempt to satisfy its hunger. Soon it would unleash an equally ravenous creature that would devour the ship from within–

No.

Tamaris stopped that thought firmly in its tracks. He was no burrowing grub, no unhatched and flesh-hungry maggot driven to devour by instinct alone. He was a warrior of the III Legion, as much a weapon of war as the blade he wielded. The death he brought to this vessel would be a measured thing, a precise and perfect thing.

And its time had come.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Kevin Chin.

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ISBN: 978-1-83609-134-9

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