“I don’t think so,” said Marduk, and slammed the haemonculus’s head into the control panel once more, this time with fatal force. Its skull crumpled.
He flicked his glance towards Baranov, whose face was pale as he stared out at the horde of enemy warriors before them.
“Stay close to me,” hissed Marduk.
Letting the dead figure of the haemonculus slump to the ground, leaving a smear of brainmatter across the control panel’s surface, Marduk lifted his head high and stared defiantly at the eldar, awaiting his fate as a warrior of Lorgar.
Blood covering his heavily scarred, naked torso, Marduk locked his eyes on the central eldar figure. This one was clearly the leader of the dark kin, and if he had any hope of escape, it lay in him. The arrogant bastard stood with his arms folded across his chest, blades gleaming down its forearms, a look of utter contempt and sardonic humour on his xenos face. Surrounded by over a hundred of his warriors, all with weapons lowered, the haughty eldar lord sneered down his nose at Marduk.
“This is the prey-slave that has caused all this disturbance?” he asked, enunciating the words in a perfect, old form of Low Gothic. “I am disappointed. It does not look like much.”
“I’ve still got the strength to rip your heathen head from its shoulders, xenos filth,” growled Marduk. “Come, face me alone, if you have the nerve.”
“Face you alone?” laughed the dark eldar lord. “You are far beyond any mon-keigh notions of honour, fool.”
“Coward,” snapped Marduk. “Even unarmoured you fear to face one of the blessed warriors of Lorgar.”
The fiery-haired wych that had ensnared Marduk stood alongside the eldar lord, and said something sharp in the twisted eldar tongue, her eyes flashing and her hand darting towards one of the blades strapped to her slim waist. Her intent was clear: she wished to face Marduk in her lord’s stead.
“Let your lapdog bitch fight,” urged Marduk, fixing his hate-filled gaze upon the wych. “I’ll tear her beating heart from her chest and laugh as I watch the life drain from her eyes.”
The dark lord snapped something sharp as the wych took a step towards him, sneering, and she paused.
“I have no wish to see you dead, prey-slave,” said the dark lord, “and I fear that Atherak will not hold a killing blow. You are less than nothing to me, one of a race that exists merely to be preyed upon. You have no right of challenge.”
Marduk’s muscles tensed in anger.
Having been stripped of his blessed armour, and with his flesh covered in the hellish wounds inflicted on him by the ministrations of the haemonculus, Marduk was but a shadow of his former self, but still his bulk and strength were impressive to behold. He advanced towards the arc of enemy warriors with his head held high, determined to face his fate defiant and proud to the end.
Marduk grinned, as he called the darkness forth.
Never before had Marduk felt such power as coursed through him now, and he felt the presence of the darkling god of Chaos, Slaanesh, surge into his being, almost shattering Marduk’s sanity with the full force of its potency.
Marduk had always honoured Chaos in all its guises, and had reproached those within his flock who had strayed too close to the worship of any of the infinitesimal deities of the immaterium in isolation. He had never felt the attentions of any single god upon him like he did now, and he struggled to maintain control as the Prince of Pleasure exerted its will upon him. He fell to one knee, clenching his eyes closed tightly, struggling not to be overwhelmed by the surging power that threatened to tear him apart.
Do not fight me, whispered a seductive voice in his mind, its power staggering. The voice was silken, though behind its whisper Marduk could hear a billion souls screaming in torment and ecstasy. The power of the words ripped through his soul, and a tortured groan escaped his lips.
It is not for you that I come.
In an instant, Marduk lowered his defences, allowing the full potency of Slaanesh to manifest within him.
“Get it out of my sight,” said the dark eldar lord, unaware of the power growing within Marduk. Arrogant fool, thought the First Acolyte, he still believes me to be contained by the null-field device.
Marduk’s face snapped up, his eyes a milky, pale blue with narrow slits in place of his pupils.
“I know what it is that you fear,” Marduk hissed in a voice that was not his own, and the dark eldar lord recoiled as if physically struck. “Your souls are mine!”
“The Great Enemy,” breathed the dracon in horror, speaking in the eldar tongue, though Marduk found that he could understand its words.
The First Acolyte pushed himself to his feet, feeling immeasurable power suffusing his body, and he lifted his arms out wide to either side, palms upwards. He could feel the panic and fear flow from the gathered eldar warriors, washing over him in a tantalising, delicious wave.
Marduk exhaled, and a pink mist rolled from his throat, filling the air with its heady, musky aroma.
“Kill it! Kill it now!” screamed the eldar lord, and a hundred weapons fired, as if his words had snapped his warriors from their horrified paralysis.
The air was filled with thousands of barbed splinters, lances of dark matter and comscating arcs of energy.
None of the shots struck his flesh as Marduk continued to exhale, the mist curling and billowing from his mouth. Splinters slowed as they came within centimetres of his flesh, dropping to the floor in their hundreds with a musical ring, and beams of dark matter fizzled and dissipated as they seared towards him. Arcs of energy flowed around his body, leaving his flesh unscathed.
The pale mist rolled across the floor, and the eldar recoiled, continuing to fire their weapons as they backed away.
“Come to me, my handmaidens,” hissed the voice speaking through Marduk.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Baranov threw himself backwards as the eldar began to fire, and stray shots sliced through the air around him as he scrambled back behind the doors leading into the slave deck. His heart beating wildly, he pushed himself backwards with his feet, so that he came to rest with his back up against the wall alongside the dead figure of the haemonculus. He stared down at the crumpled, unrecognisable face of the eldar.
Several slaves had been cut down by stray fire, and lay bleeding on the floor. One of them, a young woman, reached piteously towards Baranov for help, blood bubbling from her mouth like foam. Baranov kicked at her hand to keep her away. Behind her, the other slaves were streaming away from the open portal as more stray shots pinged off the walls. A splinter ricocheted off a wall panel and struck the woman in the eye, killing her instantly.
The Space Marine spoke, and Baranov reeled in horror, doubling over in pain. It felt like things were clawing inside him, and an intrusive stabbing pain gripped his guts. He vomited, emptying his stomach as the utter wrongness of the voice clawed at his sanity, and tears ran down his face as he spat yellow bile onto the floor.
Baranov sank to the floor, oblivious to the vomit and drool on his chin and down the front of his chest, his limbs shaking. The Space Marine spoke with the voice of a daemon, a voice of madness. Its words were alien and horrific to Baranov, like a deafening cacophony of screams and guttural snarls.
A sudden compulsion made him crawl forwards on his hands and knees to peer around the corner of the circular doorway, and though he fought the urge, his soul screaming, he could no more stop his movements than he could stop his heart from beating. With tears running down his face, and shaking his head in denial, Baranov looked around the corner.
The Space Marine was standing with his arms spread wide, his head thrown back, and pink mist was seeping from within him, billowing from the cuts upon his body and spilling from his eyes, nostrils and mouth. The mist rolled out across the floor before him, and the black-armoured xenos warriors continued to blaze away at the daemonic figure as they backed away from its touch, though their weapons did nothing.
Baranov thought he saw shapes within the mist, sensuous
bodies wrapped around each other in ecstasy, but he blinked his eyes and they were gone, nothing but contorting shapes formed by the roiling, pink smoke.
The mist coiled around Baranov’s legs, and he felt hands caressing his skin, which was at once arousing and repulsive. The musk entered his lungs and he felt instantly light-headed, as if his mind was addled with opiates, and his flesh tingled with sensation.
He saw that his first impression had been correct. There were figures in the mist, and they were rising like serpents, their bodies unfurling as they stood, their every movement fluid and supple beyond human capacity.
There were dozens of them: tall, slender figures not unlike the eldar in proportion, though the similarities ended there. They were neither male nor female, or rather, they were both simultaneously, and they moved with inhuman grace and suppleness, their bodies twisting and writhing. Baranov found that his breath was coming in husky gasps as he looked upon their unnatural forms.
The figures solidified, and Baranov was paralysed in horrified rapture. His soul screamed within him of the utter wrongness of what he was seeing, yet his body was responding to the hellish allure of the figures. He saw their faces, and they were angels, beings of incomparable beauty. Their hair writhed like nests of vipers, and their eyes gleamed with the promise of pleasure… and pain.
The daemon’s faces changed suddenly, the facade of beauty sloughing off as they opened luscious mouths, exposing needle-like teeth. Their eyes were as black as night and too large for their hellish faces, and Baranov realised that the daemon’s slender arms ended not in hands, but in elongated, serrated claws.
Then the killing began.
The daemonettes moved with impossible grace, matching and surpassing that of the eldar. Every sharp movement of the daemons ended in a spurt of blood, a killing thrust, a severed limb. Bladed arms slashed across jugulars, and slender claws snapped bones. Elongated, tri-forked tongues lapped lasciviously at spilled blood, and the daemonettes spun and pirouetted through the carnage, killing with every graceful, savage movement.
Baranov breathed deeply of the intoxicating musk as he began to hyperventilate, and his irises swelled into wide, staring discs.
A daemonette appeared out of the mist alongside him, running a slender claw along the inside of his thigh, drawing blood. A stinging tongue caressed his neck, and Baranov moaned.
Marduk laughed aloud, hacking left and right with his blade, severing limbs from bodies and relishing the unabashed terror of the eldar.
The daemonettes were tearing through the eldar, carving a bloody swathe through their panicked ranks. Dozens of the daemons were snuffed out of existence as their physical bodies were torn apart by the frantically fired weapons of the eldar, but more of them continued to appear from the heady musk, taking shape even as their sisters were cut down.
Marduk fought his way towards the eldar lord, who was backing away frantically, his guards closing around him in a tight-knit circle. The heavily armoured warriors slashed around them with curved-bladed glaives, scything through daemonettes screeching like banshees, their voices raised in piercing cries that were at once hauntingly beautiful and horrific.
One of the incubi was dragged down, bladed arms stabbing into its stomach and head simultaneously, and a pair of daemonettes danced towards the dark eldar lord, claws slashing towards him.
The dark eldar lord moved with blinding speed, catching the blows on his bladed forearms, turning them aside and snapping one of the claws clean off with a deft twist. The daemonette hissed as milky ichor dripped from the wound, and the eldar lord stepped in close, slashing the blades across its face, tearing its unholy flesh from ear to ear.
The eldar lord swayed back from a sweeping blow from the other daemonette, before leaping into air, spinning, and slamming first one foot and then the other into the daemonette’s face. Blades in his boots sliced through infernal skin, spilling more steaming ichor, and the lord stepped back as his incubi bodyguards finished the injured creatures, ripping them in two with powerful blows of their punisher glaives.
“I come for you!” roared Marduk, his voice still that of the daemon, as he slashed a path towards the dark eldar lord.
“It’s moving a little fast for a freighter, don’t you think?” commented Burias, looking with narrowed eyes at the flickering vid-screens on which the positions of the fleets blinked.
The Imperial vessel that Marduk was located aboard had moved swiftly as the Infidus Diabolus had swung towards it, altering its trajectory with a speed and manoeuvrability that seemed far beyond that of a simple freighter; indeed it came about to a new heading with a swiftness that was far beyond any Imperial ship. Despite its surprising swiftness, the sudden movement of the Infidus Diabolus would surely allow at least one barrage upon it before it slipped out of range.
“Targeting matrices locked on,” croaked seven daemon-servitor symbiotes in unison.
“Fire,” barked Kol Badar.
A moment later, Burias felt the reverberations through the Infidus Diabolus as a full broadside salvo was launched upon the curious Imperial freighter.
The eldar vessel veered to starboard as hundreds of cannon batteries unleashed their devastating fusillade, displaying a speed of manoeuvrability that a strike craft a tenth of its size would have envied. That brutal salvo would have torn through the void shields of any Imperial ship in seconds, and smashed apart its hull armour within moments, but the bulk of the shots went screaming past the shadowy outline of the dark eldar ship. Its mimic engines projected an outline that was vastly different to its actual proportions, fooling the targeting arrays of the Infidus Diabolus, and hundreds of tonnes of heavy duty ordnance roared past the ship, screaming wide of the mark.
Even with the naked eye, its exact position was impossible to discern thanks to it shadow fields, all light refracting and curving around its hull so that it seemed barely there at all.
Still, the weight of cannon fire was heavy and indiscriminate, and it tore through the bladed membranes of the back-swept vanes that rose like a ridge across the back of the dark eldar ship. Several barrages also slammed into its hull proper, wreaking terrible damage.
Even as the ship dived away from the Infidus Diabolus, slicing through the void like a knife, it returned fire, and stabbing lances of dark matter slammed into the Word Bearers’ strike cruiser.
A dozen broadside cannon batteries were destroyed instantly, and tens of hundreds of indentured slaves, chained together in long worker gangs, whose sole existence was to load and prepare the mighty weapons for firing, were dragged into the emptiness of space, where their organs imploded. Fire blossomed across the strike cruiser as its hull was compromised in a handful of places, though the flames almost instantly died as bulkheads isolated the crippled areas and the air within was sucked into space.
The Astartes cruiser fired again, correcting its aim now that the mimic engines of the dark eldar vessel had been nullified.
“Admiral!” shouted the flag-captain of the Hammer of Righteousness.
“What?” snapped Admiral Rutger Augustine. His knuckles were white as he clenched the railing before his view screen on the bridge of his flag-ship.
“That rogue freighter…” began his second in command, Gideon Cortez.
“What about it, Gideon? We are fighting a damn engagement here.”
“It’s… it’s not an Imperial vessel, lord.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The scans, they’ve been wrong. It’s a xenos vessel, sir. Eldar. They must have been transmitting a false signal that’s been fooling our sensors.”
Augustine swore. He had his hands full already with more than half his fleet engaged with the tyranids. The last thing he needed was for an eldar fleet to turn up. One never knew what their intentions were. Were they here to fight the tyranids for their own benefit? Or would they attack the Imperial fleet while it was engaged with the xenos foe?
“Is its disposition hostile?” he asked.
“Negative, sir, it is moving away from the fleet.”
“Well that is something at least. Ignore it. I have no wish to incur the wrath of the eldar. Not here.”
“There is something else, Rutger,” said Gideon, and Augustine could hear the reticence in his friend’s voice. It must be bad, he thought with a sigh.
“Go ahead,” he said wearily.
“The Adeptus Astartes cruiser has been identified. Its signature has been pulled from the archive banks of command central. It is the Infidus Diabolus, lord. Word Bearers Legion.”
“Traitors,” said Augustine. He cast his gaze heavenwards, and barked a humourless laugh. “Tyranids, eldar, and now traitor Space Marines. Perfect.”
“There is some good news, sir,” said Gideon.
“Oh?” replied Augustine.
“It would appear that the eldar and Chaos ships are engaging each other.”
Augustine shook his head.
“The Emperor works in mysterious ways,” he said.
Eldar were one thing, as often friends as foes, but a cruiser of traitor Space Marines? They were the enemy, and must be eliminated.
“Order the Implacable to move up in support of the eldar vessel,” order Augustine. “Order them to engage and destroy the Infidus Diabolus.”
Marduk stumbled as the entire xenos ship was rocked by a second series of impacts, and he cursed. He had to get off the ship.
He saw the female, flame-haired wych that had captured him cartwheel through the melee, her whip crackling through the air behind her, and three of the daemonettes screamed in fury as their earthly bodies were slain, disappearing into mist.
Another daemonette reared up behind her and rammed its claws through her slender, tattooed body. Marduk plunged his blade into the wych’s face, spitting her head on its length. Face to face with the daemonette, Marduk grinned. The daemon licked its teeth at him in response, and ripping its claws from the wych’s body, it spun lightly on its heel, claws singing through the air to decapitate another eldar, sending its head flying.
[Word Bearers 02] - Dark Disciple Page 31
