The spider-being disengaged from the ceiling, dragging its cabling and wires with it, and hit the ground, its bladed, slender limbs scrabbling for purchase. It launched itself at the First Acolyte, its forelegs rising to impale him once again.
Rolling beneath the stabbing limbs, which smacked into the wall behind him with colossal force, Marduk came up underneath the vile creature. He threw his body against the joint of one of the beast’s back legs, which buckled under his sudden weight, and it stumbled.
Marduk grasped the slender limb with both hands and pushed his knee against the joint, grunting with the effort. The muscles of his arms and back strained, and he felt the limb bending beneath his force, until with a final, sickening crack, he sheared the limb in two.
Black fluid ran from the hollow limb, and the creature sprang away from him, scrabbling and sliding on the smooth floor.
Holding the bladed limb in both hands like a sword, Marduk waited for the creature to spring. He risked a glance behind him, and could see no sight of the haemonculus, though a telltale trail of blood was smeared across the floor and past the strips that led into an adjoining room.
Sensing movement, Marduk ducked and rolled to his right, narrowly avoiding being impaled on two barbed forelimbs. He slashed with the hollow limb, shearing through two of the creature’s legs, which dropped to the floor, and more hissing, black fluid seeped from the creature’s wounds. It spun to face him and thrust the rear of its bloated abdomen forwards, stabbing it towards him from beneath its body. Liquid squirted from its grotesque spinnerets, and although Marduk managed to avoid the worst of it, a line of the foul substance sprayed across his right shoulder. His flesh began to hiss and bubble, but he stood before the creature with his makeshift blade in both hands, ignoring the pain.
The creature’s eldar torso writhed in obvious torment as ichor dripped from its severed limbs. Its blank face snapped towards Marduk, and it launched itself at him once more, bladed limbs flailing frenziedly.
The First Acolyte leapt to meet the beast, spinning the bladed limb around in his grasp so that he held it over his head like a spear. With a roar of animalistic fury, Marduk slammed the blade into the twisted eldar, the tip of the weapon piercing the flesh of its throat and driving on into its body behind its ribcage.
Bladed limbs hacked at his arms, tearing bloody strips of flesh from his bones, but the force of the creature’s momentum was its death, for it continued to push forward, impaling itself further onto its own bladed limb.
Its front legs collapsed beneath it, and Marduk stepped back, breathing heavily, blood running down his arms. The loathsome creature fell headfirst into the floor, its greyish lifeblood running from its wounds. It tried piteously to lift itself up again, but its legs gave way beneath it, and it crumpled in a heap on the floor at Marduk’s feet. He spat down onto the dying beast, and wrenched the bladed limb from its neck. Reaching down, he retrieved another of the creature’s severed, razor sharp limbs from the floor, and so armed, he followed the trail of blood left by the haemonculus.
With the tip of one blade, Marduk parted the strips of heavy, semi-transparent material that hung from the doorway leading from the circular room that had been his entire world for the gods knew how long. He moved cautiously forwards, eyes darting around him, seeking any threat or movement.
This room was larger than the first, and circular, and half a dozen chambers led off it, each partially hidden behind hanging, translucent strips. He could hear groans and muffled shouts from within those rooms, voices crying out from raw throats whose owners had clearly heard the sound of Marduk’s escape. Some of them sounded familiar, but Marduk ignored them, focusing his senses on finding the whereabouts of his twisted captor.
The centre of the room was bare except for a torturous bladed slab akin to the one he had just escaped from, with pale, thin lights shining down upon it. This table had a score of bladed arms extending from beneath it, but they appeared lifeless, or at least dormant. The room had dozens of hovering shelves and tables around its circumference, each one with strange perverse implements and objects arrayed upon it. The light was dim, pulsing faintly from the floor and the ceiling, but he could see the trail of blood on the floor clearly, and he quickly saw his wasted torturer crawling away from him, one hand still clamped around its bloody throat.
With a roar, Marduk leapt forwards, ignoring the pain in his tortured limbs. One of the eldar’s wasted, skeletal hands was reaching up towards a flickering rune that hovered before what Marduk took to be a sealed, circular portal, but before it could activate the doorway, Marduk stabbed one of the slender blades down into the back of its thigh and dragged it backwards. It gave a wet, gargling cry of pain as it struggled futilely against him.
Marduk knelt over his eldar tormentor, twisting the blade ruthlessly, feeling it grinding against the bone, and smiled.
‘How do you like the feel of that, xenos filth?’ he snarled.
The eldar did not answer, but the bladed arcs of the circular portal slid aside soundlessly, and Marduk shifted his attention to the new threat, leaping forwards and spinning the twin blades in his hands before he even saw what was coming.
There were two creatures, vaguely eldar in appearance but altered, like mutant versions of the slender xenos. One was a woman, her body covered in tiny scales that flushed an angry red, and the other was almost reptilian in appearance, with hundreds of shivering quills inserted into its flesh.
The first blade struck the woman in the side of the neck before she could react, nigh on decapitating her, and his second blade stabbed towards the other creature’s gut. Spines emerged from its wrists and it deflected the blow with a circular sweep of its arms. Then it threw its arms towards Marduk.
The First Acolyte swayed backwards, moving his body out of range of the creature’s touch, but the spines in its wrists shot forward. Marduk twisted, but even so one of the spines sliced a shallow graze across his side, shooting pain blossoming from the scratch.
The female creature was on its knees, holding its head in place so that it did not flop to the side. Its scaled body was covered in rich, hot blood.
Marduk backed towards the centre of the room, stepping over the prone form of the haemonculus, which had managed to knock a surgical implant to the floor and seal its neck wound with a spray of a synthetic skin.
The spined abomination, enraged by the harm done to what Marduk guessed was its mate, threw itself towards him wildly. Marduk’s blade swung up, swatting aside a pair of spines that were shot towards him. He rammed his weapon deep into the creature’s side, wrenching the blade up under the ribs to pierce the heart. It slumped to the ground, hissing in hatred and scrabbling at his flesh as it died.
Moving to his torturer, which stared up at him venomously, Marduk hauled it to its feet. Holding it upright by the scruff of its thin neck, Marduk moved towards the circular portal, intending to step into the corridor beyond.
Claws dug into his shoulders as the female creature, its horrific neck wound all but healed with astonishing swiftness, landed on his back. It bit deeply into his neck, and Marduk dropped both his captor and his weapon.
Reaching over his back, his hands brushing past something cold and smooth attached to the back of his neck, he grabbed the feral creature in his crushing grip, and threw it over his head towards the wall. It tore a chunk from his neck as he hurled it away from him, and he cursed as blood gushed from the wound. The creature spun in the air like a cat, and landed on the circular wall on all fours. It did not fall, but rather remained stuck there, staring at him with hate-filled eyes.
It skittered up the sheer wall and onto the ceiling, and raced across it towards him. When it was three metres from him it launched itself from the ceiling, reaching for him with outstretched claws.
Marduk stepped into the creature as it flew towards him, and slammed his fist square into its face. Its skull crumpled beneath the blow, and its limbs went limp as it flopped to the ground. Having seen its regenerative
powers already, Marduk gave it no chance to recover, and ripping the blade from the gut of its dying companion, he hacked completely through the creature’s neck and tossed its head to the far corner of the room.
Swaying with blood-loss that his enhanced physiology struggled to stem, the result of the torturous wounds covering his body, Marduk dropped to one knee. His hands reached up behind his neck, towards the alien device that he had felt attached to the base of his skull when he had hurled the she-bitch monstrosity from his back.
His hands closed around a smooth, coldly metallic artifice embedded in his flesh. His fingers gripped the device around its edges, and his agonised muscles strained as he sought to rip it away from his flesh. The pain was intense, and it felt as if he might rip a part of his mind away with it, but Marduk ripped the alien device from his neck with a powerful surge of adrenaline.
The force of Chaos hit Marduk like a roaring tidal wave, staggering in its power. The full force of the warp rushed to fill the emptiness of his soul as the null-field generator that kept the power of the immaterium at bay was ripped clear, and his body was suffused with the power of the dark gods once more.
His vision swam, and blood dripped down his back as Marduk stared dumbly at the black thing in his hands. Synthetic claws with patches of skin and hair still clinging to them rimmed the ovular shape.
Understanding came to him. The gods had not deserted him. This foul device had merely cut him off from its blessed presence. It was a form of null-field generator. Marduk hurled it away in disgust.
Burias stood alongside the Coryphaus, Kol Badar, on the foredeck of the Infidus Diabolus. The Idolator had docked with the mighty strike cruiser less than twenty minutes earlier, and Kol Badar had straight away ordered the warp engines of the ancient ship fired up, preparing to jump into the roiling ether and leave this cursed system behind.
It had been a tense flight from Perdus Skylla, for the damage done to the Idolator had meant that they had drifted, powerless, through the Imperial armada. At any moment, Burias had expected them to drift into the path of a broadside, and for the fragile shuttle to have been blasted to smithereens. Once clear of the blockade, they had drifted for tens of thousands of kilometres, until at last they had been drawn into one of the strike cruiser’s immense docking bays.
There had been unease as they had disembarked from the shuttle and it became clear to the waiting warriors that Marduk was not accompanying them. Refusing to address the Host yet, Kol Badar had ordered Darioq-Grendh’al confined to his spartan quarters, and stalked to the strike cruiser’s foredeck in preparation for warp jump.
Flickering screens of red light showed the relative position of the Imperial and tyranid fleets, and though the Imperials must have been aware of their presence, for the Infidus Diabolus had left the surging radiation of the system’s sun to come to meet the damaged Idolator, they had made little move to break their blockade to intercept them. A single cruiser with a host of escorts had formed a rearguard behind the bulk of the cordon, though it had made no hostile move towards them as yet.
Indeed, there was only one ship nearing weapon range, but the blinking screens relayed that this was nothing more than a passenger freighter, and scans had come back negative for weapon sweeps. It was of no consequence to the powerful strike cruiser.
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 m
ore 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.’
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