Word Bearers

by Anthony Reynolds

  It was perhaps the confidence of one who knew that the gods themselves sanctioned his actions that made warriors tremble before him, or perhaps it was the absolute belief in what he did, the fire of faith that burned within his soul or whatever of it was left, for it had long been pledged to the ravenous gods of Chaos. Whatever it was, Jarulek inspired fear, awe and devotion in equal measures. His words were spoken softly and deliberately, but on the battlefield his voice would rise to a powerful howl that was terrifying and inspiring to hear.

  Every centimetre of Jarulek’s exposed pale skin was covered in the hallowed words of Lorgar. Tiny, intricate script was inscribed perfectly across his flesh. Litanies and catechisms ran symmetrically down each side of his pale, hairless head, and his cheeks, chin and neck were sprawled with passages and curses. There was not a place upon him where you could place a data-stylus and not be touching the hallowed words of the great daemon primarch. Devotions, supplications, orisons, they extended over Jarulek’s lips, inside his cheeks and across his tongue. Not even his eyes had been spared, citations of vengeance, hate and worship scribed on the soft, glutinous jelly of those orbs. He was a walking Book of Lorgar, and Burias was in awe at his presence.

  ‘Lead the Dark Apostle forth, Icon Bearer,’ intoned Marduk. Six additional guards of honour stepped into place around Marduk and the Dark Apostle, and together with the pair accompanying Marduk they represented the eight points of the star of Chaos.

  ‘First, we worship,’ said Jarulek. ‘Then we kill a world.’

  ‘I risk my men in there, and I am told to forget all about it?’ spat Lieutenant Varnus. ‘There is some kind of cult organisation operating in Shinar, perhaps across the whole of Tanakreg. We are just getting close.’

  Varnus glared across the plain metal desk at Captain Lodengrad. The captain looked of middling years, but it was hard to gauge. He could have been forty, or a hundred and forty, depending on how much augmetic surgery he had been subjected to. Certainly he didn’t appear to have aged in all the time Varnus had known him.

  There were no features within the blank walls of the interview room other than the desk, the two chairs and the door. One wall was mirrored, and Varnus stood glaring at his tired and angry reflection. He knew that a trio of conjoined servitor twins stood beyond the mirror, recording and monitoring every movement made and every word spoken in the room. His heartbeat, blood pressure and neural activity were being analysed and recorded on a spooling data-slate, the details noted down by fingers ending in needle-like stylus instruments.

  ‘Sit down, lieutenant,’ said the captain.

  ‘You seriously want me to go back on patrol and just forget everything I saw in that damned basement?’

  ‘No one said anything about you going back to work, lieutenant,’ said the captain. ‘You disobeyed a direct order, and you struck a fellow enforcer.’

  ‘Oh, come on! If I had obeyed your direct order, sir, the whole place would have gone up in flames. And Landers is a loudmouth cur. He was questioning my order. And he reports directly to me, if I recall correctly.’

  ‘Sit down, lieutenant,’ said the captain. Varnus continued to stare at his own reflection. ‘Sit down,’ the captain repeated, more forcefully.

  ‘So what, are you going to kick me out? Send me back to work the damnable salt plains? Like before you recruited me?’ Varnus sat back down and folded his arms. ‘You knew what I was when you gave me this job. If you didn’t want that, then you should never have pulled me out of the worker-habs in the first place.’

  ‘Forget about all that, lieutenant. I’m not getting rid of you just yet. I’m just telling you to forget everything about what you saw in that basement. It is no longer our concern.’

  ‘Not our concern?’ exclaimed Varnus. ‘That was no group of isolated, small-time, hab-gangers, captain. The information they had was highly classified material: maps, plans, schematics. They had plans of the damn governor’s palace, for Throne’s sake! You know what would happen if they managed to get explosives within the palace? They could knock out the entire city’s power in one go, and what would happen then, captain? It would be bedlam: rioting, looting, murder. It would take a lot more enforcers than you have to put all that down. The PDF would have to be brought in. It would be absolute bedlam.’

  ‘Are you quite finished, lieutenant?’ asked the captain.

  ‘Um, let me think. No. No, I’m not actually.’

  ‘Well, hold onto those thoughts. There is someone here who may be able to answer them,’ said the captain, rising to his feet. Varnus raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m sick of listening to you, lieutenant. I’m going to get some caff. Wait here.’

  The captain walked to the door and knocked twice. The door opened a moment later, and he left the room.

  Varnus pushed his chair back and placed his feet on the table. He closed his eyes. He was so damn tired.

  The door opened a few moments later. Varnus didn’t bother to open his eyes. He sighed dramatically.

  ‘It’s Varnus, isn’t it? Lieutenant Mal Varnus.’ The voice was hard, and the lieutenant dropped his feet from the table, standing to look up into the face of the newcomer.

  The man was big, bigger even than Landers, and he was dressed in the severe black uniform of an Arbites judge.

  Throne above! An Arbites judge!

  The blood rushed from Varnus’s face, and he licked his lips.

  The judge walked around Varnus and sat down in the seat recently vacated by the captain. His jaw was thick and square, his nose flat against his face and his brow heavy and solid. In all respects the judge looked hard and unrelenting. His intimidating physical presence was further enhanced by heavy ablative carapace armour and by the severe black uniform he wore over it.

  ‘Sit down, lieutenant,’ he ordered forcefully, his eyes cold and dangerous, his voice deep.

  Varnus sat down warily.

  ‘What you discovered, it is not within the jurisdiction of local enforcers. It is within the jurisdiction of Imperial law, Arbites law.’

  Varnus frowned darkly.

  ‘However, I have been reading your record,’ continued the judge. ‘It was… interesting reading. The Arbites could use a man like you, lieutenant.’

  Varnus’s raised an eyebrow and pushed himself back in his chair. ‘Huh?’

  The judge pushed something across the table towards him. It was a heavy round pin, embossed with the aquila. He stared at it, and then looked questioningly into the eyes of the Arbites judge.

  ‘Tomorrow, come to the palace. I have matters to attend to there, but at their conclusion I wish to speak with you. Present this.’

  And with that, the judge rose to his feet, huge and imposing, and left the room.

  Varnus sat still for long minutes. Then he picked up the pin. He stood, and turned to leave, halting when he caught a glimpse of his own reflection. He snorted in amusement and left the room.

  The Infidus Diabolus left the roiling, familiar comfort of the warp, the realm of the gods, and burst into real space. Crackling shimmers of light, colour and sheet electricity ran along its hull as the last vestiges of the Empyrean were shaken off. The strike cruiser shuddered, its immense length creaking and straining as the natural laws of the universe took hold of it once more.

  Deep within the belly of the cruiser, Jarulek’s grand Host of the Word Bearers Legion joined together in worship of the gods of Chaos. It was a requiem mass, a celebration of the death that they would soon deliver, a promise of souls. It was a prayer in the darkness, a pledge of faith, an honouring of the very real, insatiable deities of the warp.

  The huge mass of the Infidus Diabolus was tiny and insignificant in the vast, cold darkness of the galaxy. But to the doomed world that it ploughed silently towards it was death, and it closed towards the blissfully unaware planet unerringly.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The palace of the Governor of Tanakreg was a sprawling fortress bastion that perched on a long dormant volcanic outcrop overlooking the city o
f Shinar, the largest industrial city on the planet. Shinar rolled out to the west of the fortress. Any other approach to the palace was impossible, for sheer cliffs hundreds of metres high dropped down from the bastion walls into the blackened, acidic oceans that dominated the planet’s surface.

  Varnus held onto the railing tightly as he stared out of the vision slit of the fast moving tri-railed conveyance. The compartment was packed with adepts of the Administratum whose access level allowed them to move around the city freely rather than confining them to their workstations. Soft-skins, he thought derisively. They were uniformly scrawny, wide-eyed and pale-faced, weakling specimens of humanity. Their faces and hands were unlined and soft. Most of the citizenry had a wind-blown harshness to their craggy faces, and eyes that were practically hidden from squinting against the salt winds for years on end. Indeed, most living on Tanakreg succumbed to salt-blindness by the time they reached forty standard Imperial years of age. Their skin generally looked like dried, cracked parchment, the moisture slowly sucked from their bodies by years of exposure to the harsh, salt-laced air.

  Varnus was full of scorn for the privileged soft-skins able to avoid the harshness of the land. Most of them had probably never felt the touch of the wind upon their skin. He glared at them occasionally, enjoying the uncomfortable shuffling it caused amongst the robed adepts. Though the compartment was densely crowded, the adepts left a good amount of space around Varnus, intimidated, he imagined, by the enforcer uniform. He was glad of the additional room. Shinar spread out beneath him as the tri-railed conveyance began its ascent to the palace.

  He marvelled at the view. From this angle, the city almost looked attractive. Throne above, but it was an ugly bitch of a city from every other angle, he thought. From here, the angled sails were just rising. The winds were coming. Every building within Shinar was constructed with a metal sheet sail that would slide out to protect the building from the worst of the salt winds. Those winds were devastating. They could reduce a newly constructed building to dust within years if not adequately protected. Even as it was, most of Shinar was crumbling away. But then, it was cheaper to build anew on top of the ruins of the past than to properly maintain what was already built. He had never understood how that worked, but he accepted it nonetheless.

  From his viewpoint, as the tri-rail climbed ever higher, the vision of a million sails rising in perfect unison was a deeply bizarre one. As the light of the blazing orange sun caught the sails, it looked for a moment as if the whole of Shinar was burning. Varnus shivered.

  Shinar spread out like a growing cancer, each week encroaching further out into the salt plains, clawing its way ever closer to the mountains, hundreds of kilometres to the west. Varnus was thankful that he did not still work those damnable salt fields. He was certain that he would have been long-dead, a dried, desiccated husk had he not been picked out from amongst the other hab-workers.

  The tri-rail came to a shuddering halt. A giant, tentacle-like satellite clamp reached out and fastened to the exterior of the conveyance, and the doors hissed open amongst blasts of steam and smoke. The adepts surged from the carriage, their reticence to be near Varnus apparently gone as they bustled and pushed past him, shuffling down the long corridor within the middle of the tube-like tentacle.

  Filing along amongst the bustling crowd, Varnus was half carried to a great, domed reception hall. Around a hundred other tentacle tubes spilled out their cargo of humanity into the vast hall. It was seething with people, almost all garbed in robes of various shades, from grey to dark brown, and every variety of off-white and puce in between.

  Looking up through the transparent dome-top, he could see the mighty walls of the bastion fortress, beyond which stood the palace proper. Those walls were immensely thick, some fifteen metres worth of reinforced plascrete. He could see half a dozen massive turrets, huge batteries of heavy calibre cannon pointing towards the heavens.

  Thousands of workers, Administratum adepts, politicians and servants were joining long queues. Bored palace guards armoured in regal blue semi-plate oversaw the masses as they filtered past servitors processing their data passes. Only once through the checking station could they pass on into any of the hundreds of offices, temples, shrines or manufactorums that were located in the volcanic rock beneath the palace. It was a city within a city. And built far beneath all of this were the giant plasma reactors that powered all of Shinar.

  With a sigh, Varnus joined the queue that he thought looked like it was moving quickest, though he knew it would doubtless turn out to be the slowest. He prepared himself for a long wait.

  ‘You are certain that the traitor will succeed?’ growled Kol Badar, his critical gaze watching the Legion’s warriors in the vast bay below. Led by their champions, hundreds of Word Bearers marched in orderly squads up the embarkation ramps and entered the bellies of the transport craft. Most were Thunderhawks, their hulls the familiar clotted-blood red, some were older Stormbirds, but there were dozens of others that had been salvaged or claimed by the Legion on their many raids from the ether. More than one had been discovered adrift in the warp, their crews slaughtered by the denizens of the realm when their warp fields had failed. The Infidus Diabolus had no need of such warp fields, the Word Bearers embracing the creatures of that unstable realm.

  ‘He will succeed,’ stated Jarulek flatly.

  ‘If the traitor fails then the enemy’s air defences will be fully operative. The Deathclaws will be annihilated.’

  Jarulek turned towards the towering form of his coryphaus, his eyes flashing.

  ‘I have said that the traitor does not fail. I have seen it. Board your Stormbird. Go kill. It is what you do well.’

  Governor Theoforic Flenske sighed and fingered the sugared sweetmeats on his tiny, porcelain plate. They were his favourites, and they normally gave him small moments of joy in his otherwise long, drawn out and exhausting days.

  He had always known that being governor of Tanakreg was going to be a stressful and thankless task, and was quite comfortable with that. He knew that he was admirably suitable for the role, and that he had best served the Emperor by taking on the position. He was utterly devoted to the Imperium, and was very happy to serve it as best he could. But this accursed bickering! It was going to be the death of him! He popped a sugar-coated nut into his mouth and closed his eyes briefly. It was a moment of escape. He crunched down on the nut, the sound echoing loudly in his head. He opened his eyes quickly, flicking his gaze around the table to see if anyone had noticed.

  Dozens of advisors, PDF officers, politicos, consultants and members of the Ecclesiarchy were sitting around the long table. This was a gathering of the most powerful individuals on Tanakreg, but for all their importance and rank they argued like children, and Governor Flenske felt a headache building behind his eyes.

  ‘Some cool water, my lord?’ asked a quiet voice at his ear. Flenske nodded his head, thankful as always for the attentiveness of Pierlo, his manservant and bodyguard. Each of the people sitting at the council table had a small team of aides standing to attention behind their high-backed, velvet seats, though these little coteries were each distinctly different from one another. Behind the colonel and his majors of the PDF were stern-faced adjutants, their uniforms crisp. Behind the jabbering politicos, bureaucrats, adepts and ministers were servitor lexographers that recorded their words, long mechanical fingers scratching their masters’ diatribes onto tiny rolls of unfurling paper, and punching holes in data-coils. Lesser priests and confessors stood behind the high ranking members of the Ecclesiarch, their eyes downcast. Kneeling at the side of the cardinal, who was sweating in the full regalia of his office, were a pair of shaven-headed women, their mouths sewn shut. They wore the aquila upon their chests, and bore seals of purity stitched into their pale robes.

  Sitting quietly at the table amongst the throng was the scarlet-robed Tech-Administrator Tharon. He wore a twelve toothed cog upon his breast, the symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and his right eye ha
d been replaced with a black lens piece that whirred softly as it focused.

  The Arbites judge stood with his back to the proceedings, looking out through the tinted, floor to ceiling plex-windows over the city spread out below. His arms were folded and he made no move, nor any comment, as the items on the agenda were discussed. Barring his helmet, he wore his full suit of carapace armour beneath his heavy black coat. A large autopistol was holstered conspicuously on his hip; there was no one within the palace with the authority to claim his weapon. His immobile presence made Flenske sweat, and the governor dabbed at his forehead, glancing over at the judge’s back every few moments. The presence of a member of the Adeptus Arbites spoke of serious matters indeed, but he had no idea what it was that the judge sought in his cabinet meeting.

  ‘Friends, please,’ he began, his trained and subtly augmented voice carrying out over the din. Despite his unease at the unexpected appearance of the judge, his voice was self-assured and practised. ‘Adept Trask, please summarise your point concisely. Leave out the rhetoric,’ he said, a generous smile upon his face. ‘It seems to irritate the colonel.’

  Polite laughter greeted his comment, and Adept Trask rose again to his feet, clearing his throat. He lifted a slate and began to read from it. The governor coughed markedly, interrupting the dull voice of the small man, who looked up from his slate expectantly.

  ‘A summary of your point, minister,’ said the governor, still smiling, ‘as in one that you can say out loud in less than an hour of our precious time, perhaps?’

  The adept did not know whether to be insulted or not, but seeing the governor smiling at him still, he gave a nervous smile of his own and flicked through the thick wad of papers on his slate. Moron, thought Flenske.

  ‘In… in summary,’ the adept began, ‘there have been seventy-eight raids across Shinar in the last three weeks, and two hundred and twelve insurgents have been detained by the enforcers. The situation is under control.’ The adept sat back down quickly.