If you’d like to read more about Lucius: The Faultless blade, check out this quick interview with the author Ian St. Martin.
As the title suggests, Lucius: The Faultless Blade by Ian St. Martin features Lucius the Eternal, Champion of Slaanesh, in a surprisingly rare non-Heresy outing for such a well-known 40k character. Set at an unspecified point pre-Gathering Storm, it sees Lucius and his dwindling warband – the Cohors Nasicae – at low ebb, much reduced from their glory days and forced into making decisions and alliances they would normally prefer not to make. Lucius himself is plagued by the voices of those whose bodies he’s usurped after having perished at their hands, struggling to maintain a grip on his mind and his warband.
It’s immediately interesting to delve into the psyche of a character like Lucius, who St. Martin portrays as teetering on the verge of breakdown. Anyone familiar with the character will expect plenty of action and bladework, and this doesn’t disappoint – nicely developing some of the themes exhibited in Lucius’ Heresy-era depictions – but what’s most interesting is getting inside his head and seeing how an immortal, genetically-engineered monster might cope with increasing mental degradation and growing schizophrenia. Therein lies the oddity of this book, because while that concept is explored in interesting ways, Lucius is only one of a rather large cast of characters, many of whom are heavily involved in the story.
Normally you might expect a large cast of remarkably well fleshed-out characters to be considered a positive, and in many respects here it absolutely is. Various members of the warband get quite extensive page time, a particular highlight being the creepy child-like daemon piloting his ship, not to mention a mortal slave – Direnc – whose spiralling reliance upon scarily manipulative narcotics adds a powerful human viewpoint to the story. Some readers may not like how much these characters take away from Lucius though, as he’s frequently absent from fairly large chunks of the story. Objectively speaking the multiple characters and plot arcs add complexity and interest to the overall story, but they do take away a little from the idea of this really digging into Lucius’ character.
Aside from that the pacing is good throughout, the action is entertaining but not overdone, and the plot remains consistently interesting and thoroughly enjoyable. There’s perhaps one character arc too many, but despite a slight sense of over-complication everything comes together nicely in the end. Meanwhile St. Martin’s take on Slaaneshi excess, likening it to the psychological burden of substance addiction, is probably the most interesting and well thought-out depiction yet. Inevitably readers will hold this up against other relatively recent Chaos champion-focused novels, perhaps unfairly, and in comparison it feels like more of a setup novel than a deep character exploration, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Considering how little we’ve seen of him before in his 40k incarnation it’s good to get a proper introduction to not just Lucius but his warband as well, and hopefully we’ll see more of them in future.
