by Nick Kyme
Kor Phaeron was all but spent. His rage was becoming impotent and bitter. ‘These are... the lost and the damned...’ he managed. ‘They are nothing... to us...’
He saw the massive horned beast kill another of his retinue, one of the mortal servants from the Infidus Imperator.
‘That one... That one must die! Kill it, Nemkhar!’
‘By your will, lord,’ the Gal Vorbak warrior replied, and he thundered through the melee, smashing the enemy from his path, making for the great beast. It saw his approach, and turned to meet him, hefting its axe.
But the beast swung too wide, and Nemkhar sprang onto its broad back, talons digging into flesh. It dropped its weapon and grabbed him, but Nemkhar had a hold of his prey now. Its end was inevitable. He wrapped his bladed arms around the base of its skull and twisted. Its bull-like neck was as thick as a Contemptor’s torso, but Nemkhar’s strength was far beyond that of a mortal being.
The beast fell, its vertebrae broken, and the enemy horde’s will to fight was gone. What had been a battle became a slaughter.
Moments later, it was over.
More than thirty of the foe were dead, yet three of the Word Bearers’ mortal slaves had also fallen, and the one noble warrior of the Legion. Kor Phaeron looked upon the survivors: Nemkhar, Marduk, Burias, Koshar, Dol Ashem.
So few.
The haggard-looking human attendants and serfs huddled together, the gaunt hierophant Gemiah Daemos and the wordsinger Aklion among them. He’d not bothered to learn the others’ names. They meant little to him.
Half a dozen Word Bearers, and twice that number of mortals, were all that remained. Their number was being whittled down by the daemon world that should have been their sanctuary.
Kor Phaeron scowled and shrugged Marduk away. The Master of the Faith should, by rights, be long dead. Too old for the extensive surgery and gene-manipulation required to make him a full-blooded Space Marine, Kor Phaeron had nonetheless undergone extensive and painful augmentation to allow him to serve as Lorgar’s First Captain.
His heavily modified suit of Terminator armour – the Terminus Consolaris – had helped extend his lifespan far beyond that of a normal man, before his mastery of the warp had rendered it unnecessary.
Even so, he should be dead.
His primary heart was gone, torn from his chest by Roboute Guilliman, the thrice-accursed primarch of the Ultramarines. Kor Phaeron clung to life now only through sheer bloody-minded determination and the stubborn, unshakeable strength of his faith. The power of the Primordial Annihilator infused him, worming through his veins and leaking from the corners of his eyes like black vapour.
After Calth, he had fled into the warp aboard his flagship. Escaping the vengeance of the XIII Legion and the eventual destruction of the Infidus Imperator, the gods had apparently delivered him here only to die a lingering, drawn-out death at the hands of Sicarus’ daemonic inhabitants.
Wheezing, he limped to Nemkhar’s side. The Gal Vorbak warrior rose to his feet, bone-blades withdrawing into his flesh.
The Master of the Faith’s gaze was drawn to the crumpled form of the monster at Nemkhar’s feet. Its neck was broken, its head twisted almost completely around, but it was not yet dead. Its gold-flecked eyes blinked in alarm, and pale blood leaked from slack lips.
Nemkhar gestured to the thing. ‘Its life is yours, my lord.’
‘A powerful sacrifice,’ he replied, lowering himself to one knee with some difficulty. He drew his unholy ritual blade and held it to the beast’s throat. ‘May the Octed receive this offering and hear my prayers. Grant me the strength I require.’
But before he could act, Kor Phaeron felt a surge of etheric power in the air, and the beast began to convulse. A face grew within the shuddering meat of its broad chest, pushing out with the dull crack of shifting bones.
The face was aristocratic, with high cheeks and thin lips. A third eye opened upon its forehead, and it turned to look up at Kor Phaeron.
‘I am Larazzar, the Voice of Change and Ruler of the Nine Clans. Already you have killed five of my champions, False Speaker – now my favoured and eldest son, Orox’i’nor, lies dying at your feet. This is a great insult.’
Kor Phaeron scoffed. ‘We are the true Bearers of the Word. We have nothing to fear from you.’
‘I will see you eat the words you bear, truly. Great shall be your suffering.’
The face sank back into broken flesh, and the beast finally lay still.
Skinless daemons, raw and bloody, descended on leathery wings to feed on the carcasses of the fallen. Marduk glanced around.
‘What now, my lord?’
In the distance, jagged red lightning split apart the sky, and Kor Phaeron narrowed his eyes.
‘We move,’ he hissed.
It was impossible to gauge the passage of time. No sun rose or fell on Sicarus – the world appeared to exist in a perpetual magenta glow, the sky burning in a hellish maelstrom. They might have been there for a matter of days. It might have been years. Every moment blurred together into an endless, waking nightmare. One moment, they spied a great tower of twisted rock in the distance, then it was already behind them.
What was certain, however, was that they were being hunted.
Marduk scanned the horizon. ‘I see them, master. They are closing fast.’
‘How many?’
‘I can’t be certain. Too many for us to face.’
Kor Phaeron trudged on. ‘Have faith, Marduk. The Octed will show us the way forward.’
Even as he spoke, a cliff face loomed out of the magenta haze ahead. With no frame of reference, neither its scale nor its distance could be discerned. He glanced back. Their pursuers hurtled across the hellish landscape at tremendous speed. None touched the ground, yet they kicked up great lines of dust and debris in their wake.
Some rode in gilded chariots that sliced through the air, pulled by sleek daemonic entities limned with blue fire. Others stood upon the back of blade-fringed discs, or were borne by nothing more substantial than roiling blue witch-fire.
Nemkhar sneered. ‘Let me face them, my lord.’
‘It would be your death, brother,’ Marduk warned him.
‘I am a soldier of faith. To die in service of the gods and the Legion would be a great honour.’
‘No,’ said Kor Phaeron, shaking his head. ‘You are the last of my chosen Gal Vorbak. Your place is by my side.’
Nemkhar bowed his head in deference to the Master of the Faith. ‘By your will, my lord.’
A haze the colour of haemorrhaging blood rolled across them, momentarily obscuring the looming cliffs. When it cleared, a single robed figure leaned upon a crooked staff less than twenty paces away.
The Word Bearers raised their weapons, though this apparition made no threatening move towards them.
‘Greetings, Bearers of the Word. I have been waiting for you.’
‘We don’t have time for this...’ Kor Phaeron muttered. He nodded to Marduk, and the acolyte squeezed the trigger of his bolt pistol.
The figure wavered like the image on a pict-viewer disrupted by static as the shot passed through him. He disappeared, then re-materialised several metres away, completely unharmed.
He pushed back his deep hood with one gnarled hand to reveal an old, weather-beaten face framed by long, braided white hair. His forehead and cheeks bore ritual scars, and Kor Phaeron felt an itch in the back of his skull as he looked upon the symbols.
There was something familiar in their shape...
‘Who are you?’ Kor Phaeron demanded.
‘I am the eighty-seventh reincarnation of the prophet Jepeth. Your appearance was foretold.’
‘Foretold by whom?’
Jepeth seemed to ignore the question. ‘Come. The Kairic Adept Larazzar seeks your end, but not all the clans have yet been subjugated to her will.’
‘What do you gain by helping us?’
‘A future. We are all children of Sicarus, together.’
Mardu
k stepped forwards, impetuously. ‘Why should we trust you?’
‘Because I have foreseen your future,’ the prophet replied. ‘I have seen you reunited with your golden lord.’
There were gasps from the Word Bearers and their mortal followers. The dark-light within Kor Phaeron surged, like a flame before the bellows. ‘What know you of our primarch?’
Once again, Jepeth did not answer directly. ‘We must be swift. Will you follow?’
Hunger burned in Kor Phaeron’s empty chest. He nodded.
Jepeth smiled. ‘Good.’
The old prophet struck the ground with his staff, and they were suddenly standing at the base of the vast, towering cliffs, reaching many hundreds of metres into the sky. There appeared to be no way through, however. The rock before them formed a solid wall.
‘Not all is at it may first appear on Sicarus,’ Jepeth said, picking his way through the group. ‘Such has ever been its way...’
The prophet tapped the cliff face with his staff, and it rippled like the surface of a wind-blown lake. A narrow crack was revealed where none had existed before.
‘Come. My people await you.’
They delved deep into the darkening chasm, following behind the old prophet as he led them along its twisting route. Kor Phaeron looked back. The entrance was still there, in the distance, and at the same time it was not. The image of the crack was superimposed over solid rock, like two overlapping realities.
The stone to either side of them was worked with inscriptions and pictograms showing warring nations, fire raining from the sky, and men with the heads of beasts.
‘Master...’ breathed Marduk. ‘Look.’
One wall was covered with images of warriors in heavy armour, standing taller than men. While they were crude and worn by the passage of time, the distinct shapes of the pauldrons and helmets were instantly recognisable. One of the giants bore a book from which flames sprang, and while much of the mural’s colour had long since faded, it was still possible to see that, once, they had been painted a deep blood-red.
Jepeth did not turn. ‘As I said, we have been waiting for you.’
‘For how long, old one?’ Kor Phaeron asked.
The prophet shrugged. ‘My first incarnation painted these prophecies.’
‘My brothers and I did not always wear red…’
The old man shrugged again.
‘In my waking dreams,’ he began, as though explaining something he did not even fully understand for himself, ‘I always saw you as you are now. You walk a preordained path to glory.’
Kor Phaeron scowled. The thought that every choice he had made over the centuries was predetermined was not one that sat well with his ego or his faith. Still, while prophecy was not something to be followed blindly, nor something that could be guaranteed, true prophecy was also not to be underestimated.
The trick was in knowing which prophecies to believe.
He loomed over Jepeth. He could smell the cancer in the old man’s bones, sense his flesh rotting slowly from the inside out. Aging was a vile, hateful thing. Kor Phaeron’s own imperfect body was a constant reminder of that.
The Black Cardinal took a wheezing breath, pushing his resentment deep within himself. He’d been doing it for so long, it came as easily as breathing.
‘Lead on,’ he growled.
It was an eerie sight that greeted the Word Bearers when they finally emerged from the rock. A series of chasms intersected in a steep gorge open to the sky. The sheer cliffs were carved with stairs and primitive dwellings.
The inhabitants, the Children of Sicarus, crowded the gorge, standing in windows and doorways. Thousands of them watched in silence as the prophet Jepeth led the Word Bearers towards the middle of the settlement. The only sound was the echoing wind and the vaguely unsettling whisper of bone-chimes.
Most of the people were robed and daubed in umber, their faces and arms tattooed with cult symbols and patterns that Kor Phaeron knew well. The similarity to those of the True Faith of Colchis was undeniable.
Marduk looked to the sky. A burning chariot pulled by daemonic entities circled overhead, accompanied by a host of lesser daemons that left burning blue fire in their wake.
‘How has this valley remained hidden?’ he wondered aloud.
In a flash of crimson lightning, Kor Phaeron saw an illusion of a cavern roof far overhead, at once there and not. He felt the touch of the warp upon this place. ‘Wards and magicks. Only a powerful seer could penetrate them.’
‘Could you?’
Kor Phaeron glared at his acolyte.
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Nor could any within our Legion, save Lorgar Aurelian himself.’
Jepeth took them towards a rock spire in the centre of the gorge. It rose for a hundred metres, with carved stone stairs climbing to its peak.
‘The Fane of the Blessed,’ he announced reverentially. ‘This is where the prophecy is housed. Come.’
The crowds began to whisper as the Word Bearers approached the spire. They reached out for Kor Phaeron, straining to touch his massive, armoured form. Nemkhar growled, but the Master of the Faith waved him off.
‘Hold, Nemkhar. They will not harm me. Look at them. They revere us as gods...’
‘Not gods,’ Jepeth corrected him. ‘Saviours.’
The whispers grew into scattered cries. They openly praised Kor Phaeron, some falling to their knees and weeping with happiness.
‘Why do they thank me, prophet?’ he murmured.
‘It is in recognition of what you will do, my lord. The Children of Sicarus offer thanks for the salvation you bring.’
The six Word Bearers and Kor Phaeron’s human servants climbed the stone steps, leaving the crowds behind. The enemy chariot streaked once more across the sky, scouring the land below.
Jepeth pointed upwards. ‘The Kairic Adept Larazzar searches for you still, but she cannot breach our illusions. She knows of the destiny I have predicted, and seeks to prevent it from coming to pass.’
‘What does she care for your dreams and divinations?’
‘Your arrival signals her end, Bearer of the Word. She knows this, just as she knows the Children of Sicarus will play a part in her demise. Long has she sought the destruction of my people, in the hope of cutting the strands of fate that will lead to her fall.’
Kor Phaeron considered these words for a long moment. ‘Show me this prophecy.’
They continued until they came to a terraced platform. A smaller carved stairway rose up inside the fane. Jepeth stood aside, gesturing Kor Phaeron forwards.
He hesitated for only a moment. ‘Nemkhar, with me. The rest of you remain here.’
‘As you will it,’ the Gal Vorbak warrior replied.
Marduk stepped to his master’s side. ‘My lord, I will join you as well.’
‘No, Marduk. Stay here. Be watchful.’
Kor Phaeron climbed painfully after Jepeth, with Nemkhar at his back. The entrance to the fane was not meant for their armoured bulk, and both were forced to stoop.
Inside, all was darkness.
‘Khor-ignis,’ Jepeth whispered. At the prophet’s word, sconces burst into flame.
Kor Phaeron took in the details of his surroundings – it was a claustrophobic, circular room, lined with columns chiselled in the likeness of leering daemons. Every centimetre of the walls was engraved with writings and pictograms.
Jepeth gestured for them to proceed deeper into the shrine. Scowling, Kor Phaeron strode forwards, ducking his head beneath an archway of skulls and entering the inner sanctum.
His attention was instantly drawn to a shallow iron plate standing atop a pedestal. A knife lay upon the plate, and the Black Cardinal felt a surge of etheric power within him as he looked upon it.
He gasped. ‘It cannot be...’
Jepeth laughed softly. ‘You know this weapon.’
Kor Phaeron lifted the dagger. It was a ritual knife, with a curved, tapering blade and a coiling, serpentine hilt. ‘This is the ritual at
hame I gave to my adopted son, back on Colchis. It belongs to the lord of the Seventeenth Legion – the Aurelian, Lorgar! How did it come to be here?’
‘It was left in preparation of this day.’
‘Left by whom?’
Jepeth gazed vacantly back at him.
Nemkhar was staring at the images to the rear of the shrine. ‘My lord…’ he called out.
Still holding the athame, Kor Phaeron joined him, squinting.
Pictograms recounting everything that he and his warriors had done since arriving on Sicarus covered the wall. The images were simple things, yet the likeness of Kor Phaeron and each member of his retinue was unmistakeable. There was Nemkhar, his body swollen with the daemon sharing his form, his arms ending in claws and bone-spines; and Marduk, his armour swathed in the robes of an acolyte; the novitiate Burias, and the others.
Kor Phaeron’s eyes flashed as he stared upon his own representation, with its age-lined face and sickly demeanour, and the heavy book chained at his waist.
He saw their battles with daemonic entities and warbands of Chaos. He saw the death of Orox’i’nor, and the enemy pursuing them across the surface of the daemon world. He saw Jepeth, the image of the prophet leaning on his staff, and their approach to the carved city where they now stood, all protected by a grand illusion from the Kairic Adept, Larazzar, whose minions had pursued them. She wore blue armour, and coiling flames held her aloft.
Kor Phaeron skipped ahead, moving to the final sequences. They showed Word Bearers leading the Children of Sicarus through a portal of fire, to be met on the other side by a golden-skinned giant bearing a spiked mace.
‘When will we rejoin the primarch?’ Kor Phaeron demanded.
Jepeth kept his distance. ‘For the final battle.’
Nemkhar clapped a gauntlet to his chest. ‘We will stand alongside him on Terra!’ he cried.
‘It has been foretold,’ said the prophet, simply.
But Kor Phaeron could not fully comprehend what he was seeing. ‘Tell me how this will come to be. Tell me!’
‘You already know. You hold the key to that future.’
Kor Phaeron looked back, searching for an answer. He came to one particular image, and his eyes narrowed.