‘Kneel,’ commanded Marduk, and the gathered warriors dropped to their knees instantly. He placed his fingertips upon the forehead of each champion in turn, murmuring a benediction. He felt heat radiate beneath his fingers, and the smell of burning flesh rose. The imprint of his fingertips remained on each champion’s brow, five searing points where the skin had blistered away to the bone.
Having completed the ritual, Marduk turned towards the remainder of the Host, gathered in silence as they witnessed the blessing. He saw yearning and jealousy in the eyes of the warrior brothers who had not been chosen to accompany him. Their champions would castigate the coteries not chosen, and when next they entered the field of war, they would fight with redoubled ferocity.
‘Look upon your chosen brothers and feel pride, my brethren,’ roared Marduk, spreading his arms out to each side. ‘Glory in their successes as if they were your own, for they fight as representatives of you all. Pray for them, that your strength may buoy them in the days to come, for they will return victorious or not at all. In the true gods we place our trust.’
Burias slammed the butt of his icon onto the floor once more, and the Host as one hammered their fists against their chests in response, the sound echoing through the docking bay.
Turning back towards the chosen thirty, Marduk dropped to one knee and drew forth his serrated khantanka knife. Thirty other blades were drawn instantly. Each warrior of the Host carried a sacred blade, and it was with his own khantanka knife that each warrior brother had been blooded when first inducted into the Legion. Each khantanka blade was individual, fashioned by the warrior it belonged to, and it was said that the true essence of the warrior could be read in its design.
Marduk’s blade was curved and serrated, while Kol Badar’s was broad and heavy, bereft of ornamentation. Burias’s blade was masterfully fashioned and elegantly curved, and its hilt was fashioned in the shape of a snarling serpent.
‘Gods of the ether, we offer up our blood as sacrifice to your glory,’ growled Marduk, cutting a deep vertical slash down his right cheek. The gathered warriors echoed his words, mirroring the First Acolyte’s action. Blood ran from the wounds, running down the faces of the warriors before the powerful anti-coagulants in their bloodstreams sealed the wounds.
A pair of murderous kathartes flickered into being high above, the skinless daemons circling down over the congregation, borne upon bleeding, leathery wings, and settled upon the Idolator to witness the ritual.
With his sacred blood dripping from his jaw and onto his armour, Marduk carved a horizontal line across his cheek, bisecting the other cut to form a cross.
‘Garner us with strength, and let your dark light flow through our earthly bodies,’ intoned Marduk as he made the incision. Again, his words and actions were replicated by the chosen thirty, and more of the kathartes flickered into being, breaching the skin between the real and the warp.
‘We give of ourselves unto you, oh great gods of damnation, and open ourselves as vessels to your immortal will,’ said Marduk, making a third cut that bisected the other two diagonally.
‘With the letting of this blood, we renew our pledge of faith to the Legion, to Lorgar, and to the glory of Chaos everlasting,’ said Marduk, completing the ritual and making the final cut upon his face, forming the eight-pointed star of Chaos upon his cheek.
A flock of thirty-two kathartes had gathered atop the Idolator, silent witnesses to the conclusion of the ritual. They kicked off from their roost, and circled low over the heads of the Host, blood dripping from their skinless muscles, and their hideous faces contorted as they screamed. Then they scattered, filling the air with their raucous cries, and one by one they flickered and disappeared, rejoining the blessed immaterium.
Again Marduk raised his arms up high, and his vox-assisted voice boomed out across the docking bay.
‘The portents bode well, my brothers, and the true gods have blessed this venture; let us go forth, and kill in the name of Lorgar.’
‘For Lorgar,’ echoed the Host, their voices raised, and Marduk smiled.
‘Let’s get this done,’ snapped Kol Badar, and the thirty warriors boarded the Idolator. Darioq was brought forth from a side-door, having been rightly excluded from bearing witness to the khantanka blooding ritual, and was marched towards the waiting transport ship. Marduk had allowed him to reconstruct his servo-harness armatures, though he had ensured that the weapons systems of the unit had been stripped, and had personally branded an eight-pointed star upon his hooded forehead.
The First Acolyte was the last to enter the transport ship, and the engines roared as the boarding ramp slammed shut behind him.
‘Gods of the ether, guide us,’ he whispered to himself.
The three Firestorm-class frigates of Battle Group Orion sent their sweeps out in front of them, searching in vain for the suspected Astartes vessel. Every scan came back negative, and attempts to locate the ship through astrotelepathic means proved equally fruitless. It was as if the ship had never existed.
‘It could be a ghost-image from a jump a thousand years ago,’ remarked the captain of the Dauntless, the lead ship of the patrol. ‘There is nothing out here.’
With reports of the escalating engagement with the tyranid hive-ships coming in and eager not to miss out on the hunting, the captain ordered the frigates to come around and rejoin the rest of the battle group.
Unseen and invisible in the radiation field of the red giant, an Imperial-class transport vessel blasted from the hangar decks of the Infidus Diabolus and began to make its way across the gulf of space, heading towards the Imperial blockade and the moon of Perdus Skylla beyond.
CHAPTER FOUR
Marduk felt his anger rising as he stared out at the Imperial armada. He could see dozens of ships, ranging in size from immense battleships bristling with weapons to small civilian transports. The warships were long, inelegant vessels with thick armoured prows, like the ironclad ships that he had once seen ploughing the oceans of the Imperial world of Katemendor, before that world had been put to the sword. Cathedral spires rose behind the giants’ command stations, immense structures that housed thousands. Marduk clenched his fists in hatred as he looked upon the giant twin-headed eagle effigies at the tops of the spires, and snarled a benediction to the gods of Chaos.
They glided by the vast and silent Imperial ships, and Marduk stared at the immense cannon batteries, torpedo tubes and lance arrays. If the enemy suspected them, they would blast them to pieces in an instant, and nothing could be done to stop them. The shields of the transport vessel were enough to protect it from showers of small meteors and other space-born debris, but a single broadside from even the smaller battle cruisers would easily overpower them, and the ship would be ripped apart.
‘This is insanity,’ said Kol Badar.
‘Have faith, Coryphaus,’ said Marduk mildly, masking his own unease.
At the dawning of the Great Crusade, before the Warmaster Horus had led his divine crusade against the Emperor of Mankind, the Legion had been outfitted with hundreds of Stormbird gunships, impressively armed and armoured transport ships that doubled as attack craft. Borne within the Stormbirds, the Word Bearers had sallied forth from the docking bays of their strike cruisers, bringing the word of the Emperor to the outlying planets on the fringe of the empire. As the crusade ground on, many of the Stormbirds were replaced with the newer Thunderhawk gunships, which were less heavily armed and had a smaller transport capacity, but had the benefit of being quicker and cheaper for the forge-worlds to manufacture.
With the advent of the crusade against the Emperor, the Adeptus Mechanicus forge-worlds that had thrown their weight behind the warmaster produced more of the Thunderhawks for his Legions, and the Stormbirds were all but fazed out within the XVII Legion. However, with the shocking defeat of Horus, and the subsequent retreat to the Eye of Terror, the majority of the forge-worlds that supplied the Legions of Horus were virus bombed, and thus the Word Bearers Legion had no way of
replacing its lost attack craft.
Few original Stormbirds remained in service within the 34th Company Host. Those that remained had had their hulls patched and repaired a hundred times. Many of the original Thunderhawks were still serviceable, though they had been altered and modified over the millennia to fit the needs of the Host and as a response to limited manufactory facilities.
The flotilla had also been increased with vessels stolen from enemies. One Thunderhawk gunship, a new model fresh from the forge-worlds of Mars, had been claimed from the loyalist White Consuls Chapter, out on the fringe of the Cadian Gate, and an ancient, near fatally damaged Stormbird that had been claimed from the cursed Alpha Legion in a raid upon one of their cult worlds was currently being refitted for use.
As well as these original Astartes-pattern attack craft, there were dozens of recommissioned civilian transports, assault boats, refitted cargo ships and auxiliary vessels that had been captured by the Host, rearmed and armoured for use as makeshift assault craft. These had all been modified and refitted by the chirumeks of the Host, and some of them barely resembled their original model.
Marduk and his hand-picked entourage of Word Bearers were aboard one of these salvaged and refitted vessels as they made their way towards the Imperial moon of Perdus Skylla.
It was an ugly brute of a ship, a squat, stub-nosed vessel that the Host had crippled and boarded centuries earlier. Dubbed Idolator by its new owners, it had been part of a small convoy used by smugglers running the blockades of Imperial space, rogue traders that had been circumventing Administratum taxes on the outskirts of the Maelstrom. The Infidus Diabolus had scattered the convoy, emerging from the darkness behind a shattered planet and ripping two of the ships apart with full broadsides. The Idolator had been crippled with lance strikes, and a single dreadclaw had been launched from the Infidus Diabolus. The boarding pod latched onto the hull of the Idolator like a limpet, cutting through its armour with ease, and a boarding party of Word Bearers, led by Kol Badar, had stormed aboard. The crew were slaughtered, and the reeling vessel claimed by the Host.
Marduk stood with Kol Badar looking out through the curved blister portal of the bridge of the Idolator. Behind them, serfs of the Host were guiding the ship to its destination, directing it in towards the Imperial moon. They had once been men, but their humanity had all but abandoned them. Their flesh was stretched and covered in vile, cancerous blemishes and the hands of the pilots had become fused to their controls. Tears of blood ran down their cheeks.
The bridge was dim, the only light coming from the crimson-tinged sensor screens, bathing the room in a hellish red aura.
The Coryphaus glared balefully out at the Imperial vessels, and he clenched and unclenched the bladed fingers of his power talon unconsciously.
‘If they realise what we are, all the faith in the warp will not save us,’ he snarled.
‘They will not,’ said Marduk calmly. ‘We are but another transport vessel, aiding the evacuation efforts.’
‘Such deception is beneath us,’ said Kol Badar. ‘It belittles the Legion. We are the sons of Lorgar; we should not need to conceal ourselves from the enemy.’
‘Were we to have an armada of our own, I would joyfully engage them,’ said Marduk, ‘but we do not. Have patience, Coryphaus; we will take the fight to the cursed Imperium soon enough.’
One of the Imperial cruisers, not one of the larger vessels by any stretch, though it dwarfed the Idolator, rotated on its axis and moved above them, throwing them into deep shadow as it blotted out the system’s dying sun. Its port weapons batteries came level with them, and Kol Badar hissed.
The cruiser continued to turn, and its weapon arrays slid away from the Idolator. They passed beneath its mass, and though hundreds of kilometres of empty space separated the two ships, it seemed that every intricate detail of the cruiser could be made out. It felt close enough that Marduk had but to reach out his hand to touch it, and he wondered if people aboard it looked even now upon the Idolator. Did any of them realise that their mortal enemy was passing beneath them so close?
The shadow of the cruiser passed, and Marduk nodded his head to the Coryphaus. Kol Badar barked an order, and the Idolator turned onto a new bearing. The engines were fed more power, and the ship pushed through the blockade of the Imperial cordon and began to power towards Perdus Skylla.
It looked so insignificant from here: a tiny white moon circling in the orbit of a green gas giant.
‘Five hours until planetfall,’ said Kol Badar, consulting a glowing data-slate built into the command array of the bridge.
‘See that the warrior brothers are ready. I want to move out as soon as the landing is made,’ said Marduk, not looking at the Coryphaus.
Kol Badar’s lips curled back, and his ancient eyes burrowed into Marduk’s face.
‘What?’ asked Marduk, turning to face the larger warrior brother. ‘I am your master now, Kol Badar. Be a good dog and do as you are told.’
Kol Badar struck with a speed that belied the bulk of his Terminator armour, wrapping his power talons around Marduk’s throat, his eyes blazing in fury.
Marduk laughed in his face.
‘Do it,’ he barked. ‘Do it, and be cursed by Lorgar.’
Kol Badar released Marduk with a shove.
‘Know your place, Kol Badar. Jarulek is dead. This Host is mine now, mine alone,’ said Marduk. ‘Just as you are mine.’
‘The Council of Sicarus will repudiate your claim over the Host,’ growled Kol Badar. ‘They will strip you of your brotherhood, flay the flesh from your bones and have your eyes burnt from your sockets. Bloody and blind, you will be cast out into the corpse-plains, where the souls of the condemned will torment you, and the kathartes will strip the muscles from your limbs. You will wander in agony for ten thousand years, unable to die, your mortal body a wretched shell, your soul stripped and gnawed upon by the denizens of the darkness. All this awaits you, Marduk. Such is the punishment for one who plots against his Dark Apostle.’
‘Jarulek groomed me as a sacrifice,’ said Marduk, ‘and I know that you were party to his schemes, but I do not hold a grudge against you for that; you were following your Dark Apostle’s orders. The gods of Chaos chose for Jarulek to fall, however, and for me to flourish. They abandoned him in favour of me.’
‘You fear to return there, and that is why we have not gone back,’ said Kol Badar.
Marduk laughed, genuinely surprised.
‘I fear to return there? I think not, my Coryphaus. I yearn to return, but I will not return without the secrets of the Nexus unlocked. I thought that you merely wanted me to return a failure, with a lifeless hunk of xenos metal, with no knowledge of what it did or how it is activated. I had no idea that you thought that the council would punish me. Punish me?’ Marduk laughed. ‘The council will honour me.’
‘You are a dreamer and a fool, then,’ said Kol Badar, turning away.
Marduk moved in front of the Coryphaus, standing in his way. He stared up at the older warrior, the light of fanaticism in his eyes.
‘Look into my eyes, Kol Badar, and tell me that the gods do not favour me. Ever since we left Tanakreg, I have felt their favour upon me. My skin is crawling with their power. I can feel it writhing within me.’
Something moved beneath the skin of Marduk’s face.
‘I am the favoured of Lorgar, and the council will embrace me. Tell me that you do not see the gods’ favour upon me. Even you, who can barely feel the touch of the warp or the gods, must surely sense my growing favour. Tell me that you cannot.’
Kol Badar clenched his jaw, his eyes blazing with fury, but he did not speak. Marduk laughed softly.
‘You do sense it then,’ he said, as the Coryphaus stalked past him. Kol Badar barged his shoulder into Marduk as he passed, knocking the smaller man aside, but Marduk merely laughed again.
The Coryphaus turned at the doorway.
‘Maybe you could trick the council,’ he said, ‘but you have to make it
there alive first.’
The armoured nose of the Idolator glowed red hot as the ship screamed down towards the surface of Perdus Skylla.
‘Unto those who in ignorance and stubbornness refuse the Word, bring the fires of hell. Sunder their flesh, and burn them of their impurity. Take vengeance upon them for their failings, and teach them the weakness of their false idols,’ roared Marduk, the vox-amplifiers built into his skull-faced helmet booming his words through the enclosed space of the transport. ‘Thus spoke Lorgar, and so it shall be done. Open their veins that the truth might enter them. Cut upon them and let their blood flow. With holy bolter and chainsword we shall slaughter the unbelievers, and usher the word of truth into the world!’
Strapped into their harness restraints, the warriors of the Host roared their approval as the G-forces assailed them, the words of their holy leader fuelling their hatred and religious fervour.
‘No mercy, no remorse,’ barked Marduk. ‘Such things are for weaklings. We are the faithful, Lorgar’s chosen! None shall stand against us. Give praise to the gods of Chaos as you kill. Death will be our herald, and all who look upon us will know fear.’
The Idolator broke through the upper atmosphere of Perdus Skylla, streaking down through the darkness like a fiery comet from the heavens.
‘Let us pray, brothers of the Host, and let the gods bear witness to our eulogies and bless us with their holy strength,’ bellowed Marduk. ‘Great powers of the warp, guide the arms of your servants that they might let the blood of your enemies in your honour. Gird us with the strength and fortitude to do your bidding, and let our faith protect us from the blows of the faithless. Let your dark light shine upon us, filling us with purpose and belief. With thanks, we give ourselves unto you, pledging body and soul to your glory, for now and for time immaterial. Glory be.’
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