[Word Bearers 02] - Dark Disciple

by Anthony Reynolds - (ebook by Undead)

  Burias felt Drak’shal stir within him, and his eyes rolled back as he ventured inwards, to witness what had roused the daemon from its slumber.

  “Jump on my mark,” said Kol Badar, instructing the daemon-symbiotes that acted as the strike cruiser’s command personnel.

  Burias blinked as he came back to himself, and turned towards the Coryphaus, disbelief and dawning horror plastered on his face.

  “What is it?” asked Kol Badar, seeing the icon bearer’s face pale.

  “Marduk,” gasped Burias. “He is alive!”

  “Where?” growled Kol Badar.

  Burias’s eyes settled on the insignificant Imperial freighter.

  “There,” he said, stabbing a finger towards the blip. Kol Badar swore. The bladed fingers of his power talons clenched.

  “Hold jump routine,” the Coryphaus said at last.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Burias in a neutral tone. Kol Badar stared at him.

  “Bring us to heading L4.86,” said the Coryphaus, holding the gaze of the icon bearer. “Order the starboard gunnery crew to prepare weapons for firing.”

  Burias raised an eyebrow.

  “Is there a problem, icon bearer?” rumbled the Coryphaus. Burias licked his lips.

  “No problem, my Coryphaus,” he said at last.

  With fresh energy coursing through his body, Marduk rose to his feet, his eyes burning with the fire of devotion and belief. He stalked towards the pathetic figure of his torturer, who was vainly trying to crawl to safety, and lifted the skeletal eldar into the air.

  Hefting him like a rag doll, Marduk stepped through the bladed portal doors.

  The corridor was long and lined with hundreds upon hundreds of cells, each filled with piteous slaves. Many of them lay on their backs, with blank masks pulled over their heads that plugged into sockets in the walls behind them. They groaned and twitched as a barrage of terror was sent into their brains, while others were hooked up to all manner of torturous devices, while their cellmates looked on in horror. Marduk saw a naked human stretched backwards across a rotating wheel-like device, his hands and ankles bound and a slender blade poised in the air above. With each turn of the wheel, the man was brought fractionally closer to the blade, cutting into his flesh in a line from chin to groin. Other figures hung from insubstantial chains of light, bizarre apparatus attached to their heads by biting metal claws and their eyelids held forcibly open by tiny, black legs. A parade of horror passed before their eyes, and they thrashed around trying to escape their torment, but unable to look away as every debauched and horrific act imaginable was flashed directly into their retinas.

  None of the cells appeared to have bars. Indeed, nothing appeared to hold them within their confinement at all, and Marduk moved warily along the corridor, eyeing the tortured humanoid forms to either side of him. Few registered his passing, and those that did stared at him with hollow, despairing eyes.

  Marduk saw other cells filled with what could only have been the haemonculus’s experiments, wretched eldar grotesques that had been twisted and surgically altered into whatever form pleased the perverted creature. He saw some with additional limbs grafted to their bodies, others with feathers that protruded where hair ought to have grown, and others bent over backwards and walking on all fours. One of them saw him holding the torturer before him, and it screeched in outrage, frill-like flaps of skin flaring up on either sides of its neck and a tri-pronged tongue darting from its mouth. Others turned to see what had enraged it, and as one they wailed, gnashed their teeth and whimpered to see their master laid low.

  One monstrous grotesque opened its gaping mouth, the aperture spreading in four quarters that peeled back from its neck to its cheeks. It threw itself at Marduk, who spun towards it, but it slammed into an invisible barrier of energy that let off a stink of ozone and hurled it backwards.

  More of the inmates began to turn in Marduk’s direction, and he saw the hatred in the eyes of many of them as they looked upon the skeletal form of the haemonculus, helpless in Marduk’s grasp. They rose to their feet to witness his passing, lining up to form a twisted honour guard for him.

  One of the inmates, a human male, started calling to him, but Marduk ignored its cries, even as more of the wretched slaves began to holler, whoop and cheer, speaking a thousand tongues, both human and xenos.

  This one human was particularly insistent, running alongside Marduk within the confines of his dark cell, begging and pleading.

  Marduk paused, seeing a troop of eldar warriors moving towards him in the distance, clearly alerted by the ruckus.

  “Release me, I beg you, my lord,” cried the man, no more than a metre from Marduk, but separated by the invisible wall of power. Marduk glanced down at the wretch. The man had obviously not been in his confinement for long. He bore no obvious injuries, and his skin was relatively clean, in stark contrast to the filth-encrusted masses. More than that, his eyes did not yet have the hollow look of hopelessness within them.

  “Why?” asked Marduk simply, which gave the man pause. He licked his lips, and Marduk swung his head back the way he had come, seeing another troop of dark eldar warriors running lightly towards him.

  “I have a ship docked on this vessel! We could escape, you and I together!” cried the man as Marduk made to move on. He paused, and swung back towards the wretch.

  “What guarantee do you have that your ship is still here?” he asked quickly.

  “None,” admitted the man, matching Marduk’s fearsome gaze without faltering, “but how were you planning on getting off-ship?”

  Marduk swung his gaze around once more, seeing the eldar warriors drawing nearer from both quarters. The ones to his right were closer, and he saw several of them drop to their knees, raising weapons to their shoulders. Marduk lifted the haemonculus up in front of him for them to see, placing the blade of the spider-eldar’s limb upon its already blood-drenched throat. That gave the warriors pause, though they did not lower their weapons.

  “Things are not looking so good for you, friend,” said the man in the cell.

  “I am not the one in a cell,” said Marduk.

  “True,” said the man. “The cell controls for this section are behind you.”

  Marduk swung his head around to see a blank wall panel, though even as he looked upon it, glimmering runes of xenos origin flickered into being, hovering in the air a few centimetres from the wall.

  “Touch the middle one, the one that looks like a serpent,” said the man. “No, not that one, the one next to it. That’s the door release. I’ve seen the guards use it.”

  Marduk paused, indecision staying his hand. The man might be lying.

  “What have you got to lose?” asked the man, as if reading his mind.

  Marduk backed up to the control panel, his eyes flicking between the two groups of eldar warriors that had begun to edge forwards once more, just waiting for an opportunity to fire without hitting the haemonculus. His eyes drifted down to the eldar runes flickering in the air in front of the panel.

  “Release him,” Marduk growled into the haemonculus’s ear, tightening his grip on the skeletal creature. The eldar made no move, and Marduk pushed the blade more forcefully against its throat, drawing blood.

  The eldar reached out a long, bony finger, moving it towards the glowing runes.

  “No tricks,” said Marduk, “or I’ll have my own torture fun with you before anybody comes to save you.”

  The haemonculus’s finger paused just before it pierced the holographic image of a rune that resembled a jagged blade. Then it moved to the side and passed through the serpent-like rune, the one that the man had indicated.

  There was a descending hum, and the man reached out a tentative hand. There was no surge of power and no stink of ozone, and the man exhaled deeply, flashing Marduk a grin.

  “Thank you friend,” said the man. “My name is Ikorus Baranov.”

  Marduk ignored him. He was less than nothing to him, but the puny human�
��s words were enticing. How were you planning on getting off-ship?

  “Now the rest of them,” said Marduk. The haemonculus faltered, gargling something from its shattered throat, and Marduk pushed the blade deeper.

  Instantly, the haemonculus’s hand flickered over a series of rune images, and all the cell doors in the section powered down.

  At first, nothing happened. Then a hulking two-metre beast covered in matted fur staggered into the corridor. Throwing its head back, it gave a blood-curdling roar. The dark eldar guards fired, knocking it back a step. It roared again, and lurched towards the group of warriors. Barbed prongs that shimmered with arcane powers were fired into its flesh, and it fell to its knees as agony seared through its body.

  More and more of the slaves staggered from their cells, blinking their eyes heavily, as if believing that this was just another part of their torture. A broad shouldered, four-legged, centaur-like creature with a reptilian head lurched from its cell, which was barely large enough to hold its massive form. It hurled itself into one of the groups of eldar warriors, and two of them died instantly as it slammed their heads together, crushing their fragile skulls.

  Eldar warriors began firing as more slaves spilled from their confinement, and crackling electro-whips lashed out. Slaves shuddered and screamed as the whips struck them, sending shooting pains through their nervous systems, and others fell, their fears, terrors and nightmares coming to life before their eyes as hallucinatory venom surged through their veins.

  Other slaves fell upon each other, fists cracking against skulls and hands wrapping around throats as racial enmities surged to the fore and individuals driven out of their minds by their torments sought to slake their insane bloodlust.

  All was chaos along the corridor, and Marduk smiled broadly, relishing the surge of hatred, fear and anger that washed over him.

  “Which way?” he said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Dracon Alith Drazjaer stared at the curved, three-dimensional observation screen projected before him, watching as the hive fleet of the Great Devourer drew ever nearer. The bridge of his corsair flagship was dark. Reclining upon his throne, with its razor-sharp barbs rising around him, he scowled at the holographic images appearing before him.

  He saw the twin moons orbiting the giant gas planet, with the flickering ghost-image of his bladed ship pulling away from them. His ship was as one with the darkness, and had the voracious organism-ships of the Great Devourer not been encroaching, Drazjaer was confident that he could have preyed upon this system for years to come without detection.

  As the moons had finally completed their long arc around the gas giant and emerged into the light of the system’s dying star, the dark eldar ship had slipped unseen through the mon-keigh blockade. It was likely that none had even registered his ship’s presence, and those that had would have seen nothing more suspicious than a passenger freighter of their own design.

  He had plied his trade in this system for two months, relying on the mimic engines and shadow fields of his slave-ship to confuse the mon-keigh scanners, while his warriors raided the evacuating populations. Within visual range, the mimic engines would no longer be able to fool even the pitiful scanners of the mon-keigh, but still his ship would be almost impossible to pinpoint, thanks to the shadow fields that cloaked its presence, and it was easy to keep out of the visual range of the lumbering mon-keigh ships.

  It had proved a profitable and successful hunt, and thousands of souls were held in the torture decks below, ready for delivery to Commoragh. Still, it was not enough, and for the thousandth time Drazjaer cursed the very existence of the black-hearted lord of the Black Heart cabal, Asdrubael Vect. The tribute he demanded was extortionate. Drazjaer had hoped that raiding this one sector would have provided enough souls to please the vicious lord, and it had come close, but his time here was done.

  Within the day, the tyranids would have overrun the prey-moons. The mimic engines would not fool the hive-mind. It was time to move on, to continue his raids elsewhere, for to return to Commoragh without his full tribute was out of the question.

  Dismissing the observation screen with a thought, Drazjaer swung away from the console, which retracted smoothly into the floor behind him. He saw one of his Incubi guards waiting for him, head bowed.

  “What is it?” the dracon asked.

  “There is a problem on antitherea deck, lord dracon,” murmured one of the incubi, his voice distorted by his tormentor helm.

  With his screens down and completely confident that his mimic engines and shadow fields would be able to fool any of the mon-keigh vessels, Drazjaer did not see the Astartes stoke cruiser turning towards his ship.

  Marduk hacked a path through the press of inmates, slashing with the blade-limb and sending them reeling away from him, blood pumping from severed limbs. Those who fell were crushed in the rush to escape, and the man, Baranov, kept close behind him.

  The First Acolyte had the skeletal form of the haemonculus in a headlock, using his body as a shield in front of him, and he hacked the blade through the neck of another inmate, who turned towards him, froth spilling from his mouth. The guards were being overwhelmed by the surge of slaves and paid Marduk no mind as they fought for their lives, weapons spitting and torturous electro-whips snapping.

  “This way, I’m sure of it!” shouted Baranov, directing Marduk down a side corridor. The slave deck was a labyrinth of side-tunnels and holding cells, and everywhere was chaos as the slaves set upon their captors and each other with insane fury. Marduk had sworn that he would make the xenos scum suffer for the ignoble sufferings that had been committed upon his flesh, and he smiled to see the mayhem he had wrought.

  Marduk moved past dozens of cells. The wretched inmates still cowered within many of them, crouching in the corners, rocking back and forth, their heads in their hands, but it did not matter. Enough of the slaves were hell-bent on overcoming their captors to provide an adequate distortion.

  “There!” shouted Baranov, pointing towards what looked like a dead end. “That is where they brought me from.”

  Marduk swung down the corridor. A group of eldar warriors was backed up against its end, a circular, closed aperture behind them. A slave, a human, launched itself at Marduk, hands clawing for him, but the First Acolyte slashed his blade across its face.

  With the haemonculus held in a brutal headlock, Marduk broke into a ran, dropping his shoulder and barging his way through the crowd towards the far end of the corridor. Baranov struggled to keep up, running in his destructive wake.

  With a swat of his arm, Marduk slammed the first of the guards back into the wall, and slashed his blade across the neck of the second, blood gushing from the wound.

  Something stabbed into Marduk’s unarmoured back, and his body was jolted as his pain receptors flared, and his muscles twitched uncontrollably. He lost his grip on the haemonculus, who slumped to the ground in a bloody heap, and twisted around to see a trident sparking with energy jabbed into his flesh, held in the grasp of a blade-helmeted dark eldar warrior. He grabbed the haft of the weapon, sending flaring pain up his arm, and swung it upwards, sending the warrior wielding the weapon smashing into the low roof. The warrior released its hold on the trident, and Marduk turned and impaled another of its dark kin on its points.

  “Get the doors open,” he barked, spinning and decapitating another warrior with a sweep of his blade.

  “I’m trying,” shouted Baranov, his fingers flickering over the glowing rune of a side-panel.

  “Try harder,” roared Marduk, just before he was slammed back against the wall as a comscating arc of dark energy struck him square in the chest, fired from the snub-nosed rifle of another enemy.

  The eldar warrior was about to fire on him again, but stumbled as another slave slammed into his back, knocking the eldar off-balance and towards Marduk. The First Acolyte reared up with a growl, the flesh of his chest blistered and smoking, and slammed his fist up into the eldar’s chin, throwing hi
s full force behind the blow.

  The warrior’s neck snapped backwards with an audible crack, and Marduk positioned himself in a protective position in front of Baranov, ensuring that no one came near him. He saw the haemonculus clawing away from him on the floor, and at a whim he placed his still-armoured foot upon the skeletal eldar’s elongated cranium, pinning it to the floor.

  “It’s not opening,” said Baranov desperately. “It’s been locked down, or something.”

  “You can open it for me,” Marduk said to the haemonculus, exerting more pressure on the creature’s skull. It gurgled something, and Marduk bent down and picked it up by the scruff of its neck. His fingers completely encircling its neck, he held it half a metre above the ground. He pushed Baranov roughly aside.

  “Open it,” Marduk growled, and slammed the haemonculus’s head into the control panel for emphasis. Its nose broke, and blood splattered across the black panel.

  The eldar gargled something, but its voice was unintelligible, and Marduk slammed its face into the panel again.

  “Open it,” he hissed again, before slamming its head into the panel once more. Its face was a bloody ruin, its nose smashed, and blood and mucus was smeared across the deathly visage.

  “You’ll kill it,” warned Baranov, but the haemonculus lifted one of its claw-like hands, reaching blearily towards the panel.

  The eldar’s fingers stabbed at a series of runes and blade-arcs of the circular door slid open.

  An armed group of eldar warriors stood beyond the doors, a hundred slender rifles lowered towards him. At the centre stood a tall figure in glistening black, barbed and segmented armour, its pale xenos face staring at him with noble arrogance. He saw the long-haired bitch that had ensnared him at its side, and a milky-eyed creature, glowing blue runes carved upon its ebony flesh.

  “You… lose,” gargled the haemonculus, looking up at him in triumph.