Word Bearers

by Anthony Reynolds

  A wide perimeter would be quickly secured, the rapidly deployed Elysians establishing strong points along their line with quickly dug-in heavy weapons. More troops would rappel to the surface and smaller, breakaway transports would detach from the massive bulk of the main ships on the descent, dropping in heavier support to bolster the perimeter defences: rapidly moving Sentinel walkers and Chimera infantry transports bearing cargos of specialist Elysians.

  Havorn had no doubt that the landing was proceeding smoothly and as planned, and a glance at the data-slates being updated every few seconds with fresh information confirmed this. The perimeter had been established well within the usual expected time-frame, and Sentinels were already scouting beyond the landing zone, seeking out possible threats invisible from the air.

  The pict-image flickered again, but it was clear that the last of the mass transports had landed. Dust rose around the ships as their immense weight was lowered onto the earth. Havorn could imagine the rumbling beneath the feet of the men already on the ground as the ships landed and their titanic cargo-doors dropped open.

  He raised a hand to his long, greying moustache. Landings were always stressful; the mass transport ships were such tempting targets. He was pleased, though somewhat surprised, not to have had any sightings of the enemy. That was a blessing. A shudder of revulsion ran through him as he thought of the foe that his soldiers would soon be facing.

  Chaos Space Marines, the most dangerous and hated of foes: traitors and betrayers who had turned their backs on the light of the Emperor and sold their souls to devils and eternal damnation.

  The Space Marines, were the most elite warriors of the Imperium, each genetically modified to become giants among men, perfect machines of death with bodies created to withstand wounds that would kill a lesser man ten times over. In every respect they were superior to regular warriors. They were stronger, tougher and faster. Add to that the awesome protective and strength enhancing properties of their power armour, their unparalleled training and the best weapons that the adepts of Mars could construct, and you had the most powerful fighting force in the galaxy, and the most dangerous.

  The Space Marines were meant to be the warrior elite of humanity that brought stability to the galaxy with bolter and sword in the name of the God-Emperor of mankind. But more than half of their number had turned their backs on the Emperor, embracing the sentient darkness and malice of the Empyrean.

  The Elysians were soon to face these accursed traitors on this dead-end planet. His men would be fighting the genetically modified monsters, the results of a deadly experiment gone horribly wrong when they turned upon the Emperor. Havorn had fought alongside loyalist Adeptus Astartes many times, and their involvement in those wars had ensured that tens of thousands of Imperial Guardsmen had lived, but he would never trust them as he would trust any of his men.

  Why are we on this accursed planet? he fumed, his face impassive. He was not one to question orders from the Lord General Militant, but he resented being left in the dark as to the reasons. Still, it mattered little. The enemy was here, and wherever it raised his treasonous head, the snake must be cut down. It was just that Havorn knew that this world must be of some hidden importance for the 133rd and the 72nd, in their entireties, to have been drawn off from the Ghandas Crusade to retake it; important, but not important enough, it seemed, to have drawn one of the loyalist Space Marine Chapters to the world.

  Tanakreg was a backwater planet dominated by black, acidic seas. There were only two main landmasses on the world, and only one of those was inhabited. An inhospitable and desolate land dominated by salt plains and high ranges of mountains, it seemed to Havorn to be a planet that the hated forces of Chaos could damn well keep if they wanted it so much.

  The Planetary Defence Forces had been overwhelmed contemptuously quickly, a fighting force of two hundred thousand soldiers, defeated within days by a force that could not have been more than three thousand. But those three thousand were Astartes, he reminded himself, and he surmised that traitors on Tanakreg had aided them. It sickened him that people could turn on their own like that.

  ‘Brigadier-general,’ said Colonel Boerl, ‘the perimeter is secured and primary bulk transports landed. The secondary perimeter is being established and will be operational at any moment.’

  ‘Thank you, colonel,’ said Havorn. He turned to the representative of the Mechanicus.

  ‘Techno-Magos Darioq, you may order your own transports to descend, if you wish,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, Brigadier-General Ishmael Havorn,’ replied the magos in his mechanical monotone. ‘I will leave you now to return to my ship, to oversee the landing.’

  Gyro-stabilisers hummed as the magos turned to leave. His footsteps were slow and heavy, clanking loudly on the metal-grilled floor plates of the command station aboard the battleship. Clearly, his legs were either augmented or had been completely replaced with bionics in order to bear the colossal weight of the harness. Mechadendrites floated freely around him, and a small, wheeled contraption, joined to the Tech-Adept by ribbed cables and wiring, trailed behind him. The floating servo-skull hovered in the room briefly before following its master from the command station.

  ‘A word, before you leave, Tech-Adept,’ said Havorn. The red-robed, towering figure turned around slowly.

  ‘Yes, Brigadier-General Ishmael Havorn?’

  ‘I am intrigued; what is it about Tanakreg that interests the Mechanicus so? It is rare to see such a gathering of Martian power.’

  ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus supports the armies of the Emperor in all endeavours, Brigadier-General Ishmael Havorn. The Adeptus Mechanicus wishes to support the battle against the enemy on this planet c6.7.32.’

  ‘You bring with you a force the likes of which I have never seen on a battlefield before; why is it that this place, of all the planets in the galaxy, is of such particular interest to the Mechanicus?’

  ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus supports the armies of the Emperor in all endeavours, Brigadier-General Ishmael Havorn. The Adeptus Mechanicus wishes to support the battle against the enemy on this planet c6.7.32.’

  ‘That does not explain a thing and you damn well know it,’ said Havorn, his voice rising. ‘What I am asking is why?’

  ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus supports–’ began the techno-magos, but the brigadier-general cut him off.

  ‘Enough! Leave my command station and my ship, and see to your damned landings.’

  ‘Thank you, Brigadier-General Ishmael Havorn,’ said the techno-magos.

  The brigadier-general’s face was hard as the Adeptus Mechanicus priest left. Then he swore loudly and colourfully.

  The Chaos infested, polluted atmosphere was killing him. The foul smoke from the infernal machines spewed into the skies, and Varnus’s breath was heavy and wet with fluid. Several times he had thought he had felt things crawling within his lungs, and he had hawked and coughed until blood had run from his tortured throat. Then the cursed, black-clad overseers had inflicted pain on him, stabbing him with their needle claws, and he had writhed with agony.

  His eyes were weeping constantly, and a painful, mottled rash had developed around his neck and wrists. The eight-pointed metal star beneath the skin of his forehead pained him, and he imagined that the hateful thing was fusing to his skull, becoming a part of him. The thought was sickening.

  The broken bones of his arm and leg had healed well, however, and though they still pained him, he had almost regained his full range of movement.

  He wiped the back of his mortar encrusted hand across his eyes as another layer of immense stone blocks slammed into place, the sound booming out over the ruined city of Shinar. The tower was being erected at a ferocious pace, one layer of the huge bricks at a time. Giant, insect-like cranes swung around and lowered their cables to the ground to grasp the next round of blocks in their barbed claws, belching smoke and dripping oil.

  Varnus stared into the booth of the closest crane with his sleep deprived, exhausted ey
es. The pilot of the machine may once have been human, but was far from that now. It hung suspended within its cabin prison by dozens of taut wires and cables hooked painfully through its skin with vicious barbs. Ribbed pipes extended from its eye sockets and from its throat. Its legs had atrophied to a point that they were little more than withered stubs protruding from its torso, and with long, skeletally thin fingers it plucked at the wires suspending it. He tore his eyes away from the foul sight.

  A sharp note sounded across the worksite, and black-garbed overseers prodded thousands of slaves forwards, off the scaffolds and onto the top of the stone slabs. Varnus and Pierlo stepped onto the wall of the round tower, and waited for the mortar hose to swing in their direction.

  Other slave teams within the shaft of the Chaos tower toiled far below. Though the tower was only around thirty metres from ground level, the inside of it had been drilled down into the core of the earth twice that distance, and Varnus felt a surge of vertigo pull at him. Every time he looked over that edge, he had an impulse to hurl himself over, but he resisted these urges. He would fight death for as long as he was able; he wanted to be alive to see the Chaos forces utterly destroyed. He believed fervently that help would come to deliver Tanakreg from this hated foe.

  Other slaves had not been able to stop themselves leaping from the walls of the tower, but it gained them little. The chains that linked around the slave’s necks were bolted to the scaffolds at intervals and those slaves that slipped, or hurled themselves off the edge, seeking an escape from their hellish existence, ended up dangling against the inside wall of the tower. Normally, they would drag a handful of other slaves with them. It was not usually enough to kill them. The only chance a slave had was to throw himself with as much force as he could muster and pray that his neck snapped. Still, if he survived, the punishments at the needle-clawed hands of the overseers were severe, and meted out not only to the instigator, but to all those who were dragged over the edge with him. Such was the fear of these punishments, that any slave that looked as if he might try to end it all was restrained by his fellow captives and forced to continue with his servitude.

  The thick weight of the mortar hose swung into position above Varnus with much hissing and steaming of pistons, and Pierlo and he reached up, pulling the hose across so that it hovered above the middle of the stone block. Thick, gruel-like mortar began to emerge in congealed lumps from the end of the hose, slowly at first, then faster, piling in the centre of the stone block. A deep pile of the foul substance was deposited before the hose, clanking and steaming, swung away from them to a pair of neighbouring slaves. Varnus and Pierlo dropped to their knees to spread the mortar evenly across the surface of the stone with their hands.

  The mortar that held the stones in place smelt foul and was a sickly shade of pink. Varnus tried not to look too closely at the disgusting substance after he had found human teeth in it some time earlier.

  That was where the dead of Shinar ended up, he had realised with horror. They were ground up into a thick paste, bones and all, and turned into this foul blood-mortar.

  He was smeared in the stuff, from head to toe, and he tasted the hateful, metallic tang of it on his tongue, and smelt its repugnant stink in his nostrils.

  A Discord hovered nearby as the slaves worked, its tentacles hanging limply as it blared a hellish cacophony of sound from its grilled speaker. An evil collection of voices chanted something in a language that Varnus hoped never to understand amidst the garbled, daemonic sounds, bellows and sibilant whispers that blasted from the infernal thing. Varnus, he imagined a voice whispering sometimes amidst that din, his quietly spoken name almost hidden beneath the garbled, Chaotic roars and screams. Not a moment went by when the slave’s eardrums were not assaulted by the insane sound. Kill him, he heard a reasoned voice say, in amongst the jumbled shrieks, horrified moaning, ceaseless chanting and the drone of static that was emerging from the Discord.

  Varnus and Pierlo finished smearing the blood-mortar across the top of the stone slab just as another sharp note rang out, and they hurriedly stepped back onto the scaffold. Shrieks of agony rang out from those slaves that had been deemed too slow as they were disciplined by the overseers.

  The slaves held onto the metal spars of the scaffold as it shook. The outside wall of the tower was not perfectly smooth, but rather was slightly stepped, each block overlapping the one below by half a hand-span. After every twenty layers of stones were laid, the mechanical scaffold would climb those narrow steps, pistons steaming as the spider-like legs of the framework pulled it further up the growing structure. It was an ingenious creation, Varnus had been forced to admit, though he hated it to the core of his being.

  Varnus squatted atop the shuddering structure, holding on tight. Pierlo grinned at him, his eyes lit up feverishly. He guessed the man was losing his mind, for he almost seemed to be enjoying the hellish work. It took almost ten minutes for the framework of the scaffold to reposition itself, and it was the only real break that the slaves got until the shift rotation. The Discord blared its hateful sound.

  ‘So what was it that you did before?’ whispered Varnus. He knew his fellow slave’s name, knew that he had lived his entire life in Shinar and that he had fathered no children. But he did not know what the man had done before the occupation. It was almost as if the man had been avoiding the subject, and Varnus had been waiting for this moment to ask him directly.

  The blood-mortar smeared man looked away. ‘What did you do?’ whispered Varnus again, more forcefully. Betrayer, he thought he heard amidst the horrific sounds blaring from the speaker of the Discord.

  ‘I was a manservant and bodyguard,’ Pierlo said, his eyes flicking left and right madly, and it suddenly clicked where Varnus had seen him before.

  ‘I have seen you before,’ he said. Pierlo looked around sharply, his eyes blazing with unnatural heat. He shook his head vigorously.

  ‘No, I have,’ said Varnus, ‘in the palace, right before the explosion.’ Kill him. Betrayer.

  Varnus shook his head and held his hands over his ears, moaning, trying to get the sound of the voices out of his head. This place and that damned Discord were driving him insane. Pierlo was not the only one losing his mind.

  ‘You okay?’ he heard Pierlo ask dimly, and he nodded his head.

  ‘Someone will come,’ Varnus said to himself. ‘Someone will come to liberate Tanakreg.’

  Pierlo giggled hysterically, shaking his head. ‘No one will come. We will die here and our souls will join with Chaos.’

  Anger filled Varnus suddenly, hot and quick. ‘Don’t say such things! The Emperor’s light will protect us in the darkness.’

  ‘Chaos calls us, brother. Can’t you hear its voice?’

  The Discord blared its monstrous sound.

  Kill him.

  Varnus closed his eyes tightly, and rocked back and forth slightly, trying to blot out the hideous din.

  ‘Someone will come,’ he said to himself. He felt the hated symbol embedded in his forehead writhe. He imagined that feelers from the vile thing were pushing through his skull, entering his brain.

  He prayed to the Emperor, his mouth moving silently, but the harsh, discordant babble of the Discord seemed to get louder. The sound of the deep voices chanting within the noise pounded at his eardrums.

  Someone will come, he thought. They had to.

  A hiss of pain emerged from Marduk’s pallid lips as the chirurgeons removed the vambraces of his power armour from around his forearms with their spider-like, long, metal fingers. Patches of skin were ripped from his flesh as the curved armour plates were removed, and pinpricks of blood covered the areas of the skin that remained. Tiny, barbed thorns lined the inside of the vambrace; Marduk and his sacred armour were slowly becoming one. It was not uncommon amongst the Legion.

  The hunched chirurgeons scraped and bowed before him, and shuffled off to place the bloody pieces of ceramite armour on a purple, velvet cloth alongside his gauntlet and under-glove. Mar
duk clenched his fists before him, looking at the translucent, bloodied and pockmarked musculature of his arms. They seemed almost unfamiliar to him.

  Kol Badar led the morbid, monotonous chanting of the Host, and it carried across the open ground, accompanied by the pounding cadence of giant, piston driven hammers striking great metal drums. The roars and hellish screams of the heavily chained, restrained daemon engines mingled into the din of worship. Throughout the city, the sound of the ritual would be blaring from the daemon amps that accompanied the slave gangs.

  Jarulek stood atop the altar, his blood-slick arms raised high as he rejoiced in the sound of worship washing over him. Burning braziers lit the altar and thick clouds of incense rose from the maws of bestial, brazen gargoyles. In the distance behind him was the Gehemahnet, the tower rising at a rapid pace. A hundred slaves knelt along the front of the altar, adding their own music to the cacophony of sound. They were restrained, their wrists bound to their ankles behind them, and they stared out at the gathered congregation of Word Bearers, their faces twisted in terror, anguish and despair.

  Jarulek walked behind the line of kneeling slaves. He grasped the hair of one, pulled his head back and slashed his throat with a long, ceremonial knife. Already, hundreds of throats had been cut with that knife that day. The slave gasped, a wet, gurgling sound, and his lifeblood sprayed from the wound. He was pushed off the front of the altar by a pair of Word Bearers honoured to have been chosen for the duty, and the bound, dying man fell amongst the bloodless bodies piling within the metal trough at its foot. Hunched overseers dragged another slave forward to take his place, and Jarulek stepped to the next victim, swiftly cutting his throat, and he too was pushed from the altar.

  The blood of the sacrifices ran down the inside of the trough and drained into a catchment where it pooled before being pumped through a twisted pipe that extended out to a large basin positioned before Marduk. It bubbled as it was filled with the warm lifeblood, and he dipped his bare arms into it.