Word Bearers

by Anthony Reynolds

‘I am humbled to be in the presence of such noble soldiers as yourselves,’ said the Coadjutor. ‘You have given all that I could have asked of you, and more, and I have faith that you shall continue to do so. I salute you, men and women of the illustrious 232nd.’

  An adjutant of the Coadjutor stepped forward bearing an exquisite, ornate regimental standard. A golden aquila gleamed atop the standard pole above the ornate crosspiece of carved bone. The banner itself was tightly furled and affixed with studs. The adjutant dropped to one knee and offered the standard to the commander of the 232nd, who gestured for one of his younger officers, the regiment’s overawed aquilifer, to step forward and take the standard.

  ‘It was with great sadness and regret that I learnt of the loss of the 232nd’s standard during the Daxus Offensive on Thraxian Minor,’ said the Coadjutor. ‘I had my own personal artificers construct this replacement. May it serve your regiment faithfully.’

  With a nod of encouragement from his Legatus, the regiment’s young aquilifer began to release the studs of the standard with shaking hands. With a flourish, he lifted it high in the air, allowing the banner to unfurl. A tapestry of such beauty was unveiled that it brought a gasp from the regiment. The glorious image of a winged saint, the martyred Ameliana – the regiment’s official patron – was emblazoned in gold and silver thread upon a field of blue. In the upper left corner was the unit’s regimental insignia, along with the four-dozen campaign badges of the regiment’s long history. The names of every Legatus that had led the regiment into battle since its founding – all three hundred and seventy-four of them – were picked out in silver thread on the back of the banner.

  Verenus had not known exactly what to expect when meeting one of the revered Consuls face to face, but seeing such humility in one so far above the humble ranks of Guardsmen such as he was certainly not it.

  The next few minutes passed in a blur as the Coadjutor was introduced by name to each of the 232nd’s officers. Suddenly the White Consul was standing before Verenus. Few men were the equal of Verenus’s height, but he felt like a child as he looked up into the broad face of the Space Marine.

  The Coadjutor offered his hand, and Verenus clasped forearms with him. It was like gripping the arm of a statue. He could feel the terrifying strength in the Space Marine’s grip.

  Finally, the Space Marine saluted the 232nd, and made his way back to his shuttle. Awestruck, Verenus watched the golden Aquila lander ascend towards the Kronos star fort, like an angel returning to the heavens.

  Aboard the Aquila, Brother Aquilius drummed his fingers on his armrest.

  ‘Where was the Proconsul?’ he said.

  ‘Regretfully, I am unable to say, Coadjutor,’ said Aquilius’s heavily augmented aide.

  Aquilius took a deep breath.

  ‘The banner was a nice touch,’ he said a moment later.

  ‘I thought that it would be appropriate, Coadjutor. It seemed to be appreciated.’

  ‘It was. Thank you.’

  The White Consul peered out through the narrow portal beside his seat. Kronos star fort filled his view.

  Even several hundred kilometres out, the space station was immense. It rendered the tiny gold lander utterly insignificant. Aquilius could see a dozen Imperial Navy vessels of Destroyer-class and higher docked there. Even the two battlecruisers of Battlegroup Hexus, Via Lucis and Via Crucis, each more than three kilometres in length, were dwarfed by Kronos.

  ‘Would you like me to run through the day’s remaining commitments, Coadjutor?’ said his aide.

  Aquilius’s gaze lingered on the massive launch-bays and banks of gun-batteries lining the space station’s heavily shielded flanks.

  ‘Coadjutor?’ said his aide, offering the Space Marine a data-slate.

  Aquilius turn away and nodded.

  Two hours later, his mind numb from meetings with bureaucrats and Ministorum adepts, Brother Aquilius walked the length of a brightly lit corridor, deep within the heart of the Kronos star fort. He came to a halt and pressed his palm against a matt-black sensorii tablet. Blast-doors opened with a hiss in response, and he went into the training chambers.

  The stink of perspiration and ozone was heavy in the air.

  Moving to the third and only occupied training cage, Aquilius stopped. He glanced down at the data-slate readout on the control pulpit, and pursed his lips.

  From the cage came a high-pitched squeal of discharging energy as a training servitor was dispatched.

  The warrior within moved with a subtle blend of power and grace. Every strike flowed into a parry or another blow, his every thrust precise and deadly. He displayed an astounding economy of movement, with no unnecessary flourish or extravagance. He fought with combat shield and sword, and his head was lathered in sweat. Four training servitors circled him, their blank-helmed heads and swift-moving bodies blurred by their humming shield-units. Bladed arms cut through the air as they sought to land a blow against the sublime swordsman. Programmed to complement each other, the training servitors attacked as one.

  Far from being dim-witted protocol mech-organics, these training servitors were vicious combat models, their aggression heightened with stimms and Rage injectors.

  Aquilius knew the damage they could inflict with those slashing blade-arms – he carried more than a few scars from their touch – and he watched the Proconsul with a mixture of respect, awe and frustration.

  Until twenty-one months ago, Veteran Brother Cassius Ostorius had been Company Champion of 5th Company. He had held the post for forty-seven years, having been inducted into the White Consuls three hundred and thirty-four years earlier.

  When Aquilius had first learned that he would be serving as Coadjutor to Veteran Brother Ostorius, he was overjoyed. Ultramar-born, and one of the White Consuls’ most respected warriors – arguably its finest swordsmen – Ostorius had been Aquilius’s idol as he rose from the neophyte Scout to fully fledged battle-brother.

  That enthusiasm had waned significantly in the subsequent months.

  With enviable skill, Ostorius turned aside a slashing blade with his combat shield. Spinning, he deflected a second and a third blow coming in at him from different angles and cut his sword across the face of one of the training servitors. Its shield registered the hit in a blaze of electricity and the servitor stepped backwards stiffly, powering down.

  Ostorius kept moving, closing on another servitor. He executed a perfect kill with a thrust to its chest, before turning and dropping to one knee to perform a disembowelling thrust on another, a blade whipping just centimetres above his head. The last of the active servitors came at him and he rose to his feet. Sidestepping a vicious slash, he swung for its neck. His blow was turned aside and the servitor lunged, its reflexes and strength augmented with clusters of servo-muscles.

  With a deft circular motion of his sword Ostorius turned aside both blades as they jabbed at his chest and braced himself, lowering his centre of gravity. Rising, he lifted his shoulder into the servitor’s midsection. The weighty mech-organic lifted off the ground and was sent staggering backwards. Ostorius dispatched the machine with a brutal blow to the head.

  ‘Pause combat,’ said Ostorius before the combat servitors could come back online. He went to the side of the training cage and replaced his sword and combat shield on a weapons rack. Wiping a hand across his sweat-slick head, he glanced across the array of weapons before choosing a heavy double-ended polearm. It had an axe-blade at one end and a curving crescent-moon blade at the other. Ostorius swung it around him with deft flicks, gauging its weight and balance.

  ‘You come to train, brother?’ he said, though he paid Aquilius little attention, continuing to take practice swings with the polearm.

  ‘No, Proconsul.’

  ‘You come to watch me train?’ Ostorius looked through the cage at Aquilius for the first time. His left eye was augmetic and he bore several long scars that distorted his lips into an ugly sneer. His left ear was missing, replaced with an internal augmetic. He w
as a brutal-looking warrior, intimidating in appearance and manner.

  ‘No, Proconsul.’ Aquilius always felt so young and inexperienced next to his senior Proconsul and fought against the heat rising in his cheeks. ‘I came to check that all is well,’ he said, diplomatically. ‘You didn’t make inspection this morning. I was concerned that something was the matter.’

  ‘Recommence combat, threat level eight,’ commanded Ostorius. The four training servitors jerked back into motion, circling him again. ‘I had other matters to attend to,’ he replied, raising his voice above the mechanical din of the servitors. Aquilius glanced down at the date-slate readout upon the command pulpit.

  ‘You have been training for seven hours and twenty minutes.’

  ‘A battle-brother can never train too much, Coadjutor,’ growled Ostorius. The younger White Consul bristled at the implication.

  ‘I train as many hours per day as the Codex stipulates,’ he said. ‘I would train more but for the duties and demands of my office.’

  Ostorius spun, sweeping the legs from under one servitor before smashing another to the ground with an emphatic blow to the head.

  ‘I judged that you were capable of conducting this morning’s inspection without me,’ said Ostorius, parrying a swift blow before kicking the servitor away from him with a heavy boot. ‘Or was my belief in you misplaced?’

  Aquilius bit his tongue, accepting the rebuke without complaint.

  ‘Proconsul, there are matters that demand your attention,’ he said, humbly, looking down at the data-slate in his hands. He was forced to raise his voice above the escalating clamour inside the training cage. ‘Nine more regiments returning from the Thaxian Cluster are due in over the next two hours – six infantry, two armoured, one artillery. There are also military dispatches from the Assembly that require your attention, and depositions to be viewed from the Daxus moon conglomerate. Mechanicus emissaries from Gryphonhold that await…’

  ‘Aquilius,’ barked Ostorius, knocking the last of his opponents down with a series of stabbing thrusts.

  ‘Yes, Proconsul?’ said Aquilius, looking up from his slate.

  ‘Not now.’

  Ostorius exhaled when Aquilius had left. He knew his dark mood had nothing to do with his Coadjutor. Aquilius was merely doing his duty – he had no right to belittle him. Indeed, he had less than no right; as Proconsul, it was his place to mentor Aquilius.

  Not for the first time, Ostorius questioned why he had been removed from his beloved 5th Company and dispatched to the Boros system. Every battle-brother served as a Coadjutor in the years after rising from the rank of neophyte, but only a selection of veterans were chosen to act as Proconsuls. To be chosen was a great honour, and a requirement of those harbouring ambitions to become a sergeant or captain within the Chapter. Nevertheless, it was not something that Ostorius had ever desired.

  He had no wish to be a sergeant, let alone a captain. He was a warrior, and desired to be nothing more than that. He was Company Champion of the 5th, and that was all that he ever wanted to be. Protecting his captain in the midst of battle, that was his duty. That was what he had trained for and that was what he was good at, not governing some wealthy bastion system or trying to be a suitable role model for a young White Consuls Coadjutor.

  Ostorius lifted a heavy, double-headed hammer from the weapons rack.

  ‘Recommence combat, threat level nine.’

  The training servitors powered up once more.

  Thirty years, Ostorius thought. In the life of a Space Marine, thirty years was nothing.

  To Ostorius, it felt like an eternity.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Soaring almost fifty metres high, the observation portal of the Sanctum Corpus offered an unobstructed view up the length of the Crucius Maledictus. The castellated superstructure of the hulking battleship looked like a city, as if an entire quadrant of Sicarus had uprooted and taken flight. Scores of buttressed cathedrals rose above its hull, replete with spires, glittering domes and grotesque statuary. Multi-tiered banks of defence cannons and gun turrets, half-hidden within ten-storey alcoves, protruded like bristling spines along its flanks.

  The battleship was forging through the roiling madness of the warp, parting the pure stuff of Chaos before its sweeping, skulled prow. A handful of the other ships of the redemptive crusade could be seen off to the port and starboard, though the immaterial realm through which they sailed blurred their ancient hulls. Daemons of all size and shape swam along in their slipstream, an ever-changing escort of the infernal.

  Talons scraped against the outside of the observation portal, and sticky tongue-like protuberances slobbered against its surface. A flock of kathartes flew past on feathered white wings, angelic and glowing from within. Only in the æther did they appear in their true form. When they crossed into realspace, they appeared as skinless harpies, not these beautified creatures of elegance and deadly allure.

  Even the majestic view of the warp in all its infernal glory could not appease Marduk’s frustration and growing anger.

  ‘This is an insult,’ snapped Dark Apostle Belagosa from across the gaping Sanctum Corpus chamber, putting voice to Marduk’s thoughts. ‘He goes too far.’

  Belagosa was a tall, gaunt figure. In an act of devout faith the Apostle of the 11th Host had clawed out his own eyes centuries ago. Nevertheless, he turned in Marduk’s direction. Those empty eye sockets still were far from blind and bled red tears down his cheeks.

  ‘Patience, brother,’ said Dark Apostle Ankh-Heloth of the 11th Host. He spoke from behind the barbed lectern of his own pulpit, his voice a hoarse whisper. ‘I’m sure that Grand Apostle Ekodas will not–’

  ‘Grand Apostle,’ spat Sarabdal. The holy leader of the 18th Host stood with his arms folded. ‘Such hubris. It is a slight on our order than he affects such airs.’

  ‘It was the Keeper of the Faith himself, revered Kor Phaeron, that bestowed the title, honoured brother,’ said Ankh-Heloth.

  A severe-looking warrior with a cruelly barbed, black metal star of Chaos Glorified hammered into his forehead, Dark Apostle Ankh-Heloth’s flesh was a living canvas upon which he had performed his grisly, sacred arts. He bore numerous cuts and welts, the angry disfigurements evidence of ritual flagellation. Older scars lay beneath the fresher wounds. Marduk guessed that the Dark Apostle rubbed poisonous balms and linaments into his self-inflicted cuts in order to hamper the regenerative qualities of his Astartes physiology, for many of his wounds were open and raw. Such practices were not uncommon within the Legion.

  ‘He can call himself what he likes,’ said Belagosa. He gestured to Ekodas’s empty pulpit. ‘But when will the most honoured and revered Grand Apostle decide to grace us with his presence?’

  Ekodas’s rostrum was ringed with balustrades and spiked railings. It was far larger than those of the other Apostles, and occupied the central position of dominance in the Sanctum Corpus. Held aloft on skeletal arches, it extended thirty metres from the wall opposite the towering viewing portal, giving it an unobstructed view over and beyond the lesser rostrums. Clouds of incense billowed from the maws of hideous gargoyles carved into its underside.

  The octagonal Sanctum Corpus chamber was a vertical shaft that dropped away into darkness. Over a kilometre from top to bottom, it bored right through the centre of the mighty battleship. The Apostle pulpits were at its very top, just fifty metres beneath the glittering red-glass dome at its peak. They protruded over the seemingly bottomless chasm from vertebrae-like pillars set at the corners of the chamber.

  Though the chamber was around eighty metres in diameter, the sheer height and depth of the Sanctum Corpus made it feel oppressive, even with the gaping viewing portal in its front wall. The walls were lined with books, codices and leather-bound holy writs.

  Tens of millions of sacred works were crammed into alcoves and stacked upon shelves, with no apparent semblance of order or cohesion. Ancient, dusty tomes filled with Lorgar’s teachings and scripture were piled in pe
rilous heaps, and tens of thousands of annals and holy texts were stuffed into every crevice. They were all bound in human or xenos skin of various hue and texture. Many of these priceless books had been penned by the proselyte scribe-slaves of Colchis long before the launch of the Great Crusade, in time immemorial; before the blessed Primarch Lorgar had come to Colchis, before even the rise of the hypocritical and fraudulent False Emperor.

  Fresh volumes were constantly added to this staggering conglomeration of the Legion’s knowledge and wisdom, new tomes bearing more recent teachings and devotional scripture. Outside Sicarus, the scriptorium of the Crucius Maledictus was the greatest repository of the Word Bearers’ holy teachings in the universe.

  Loathsome archivist-servitors, wasted cadavers held aloft by humming suspensor impellers, floated up and down the endless rows of holy tomes, lovingly tending their allotted sections.

  Huge, spider-web-like arches stretched up between the bookcases towards the domed ceiling above the conclave of Apostles. Ten thousand skeletons were fused into those arches, their contorted spines calcified with the marble structures. Their skulls were thrown back in voiceless agony, and they held their skeletal arms up in silent appeal to the gods. In their open palms was a thick candle of blood-wax. Twenty thousand glittering flames cast their light down upon the gathered Apostles.

  ‘I’m sure Grand Apostle Ekodas has no wish to keep us waiting long,’ said Ankh-Heloth.

  ‘Just long enough to impress upon us that it is in his power to make us wait,’ said Marduk.

  ‘Barely elevated past First Acolyte and already he passes judgment on an honoured member of the Council,’ hissed Ankh-Heloth, glaring at Marduk across the open space of the Sanctum Corpus.

  ‘Better to see things as they are than to accept them blindly,’ said Sarabdal.

  ‘Speak your meaning,’ said Ankh-Heloth.

  ‘I mean,’ said Sarabdal, ‘that our newest brother Apostle speaks what we were all thinking. I grow tired of Ekodas’s games.’

  ‘I am sure that the honoured Grand Apostle has no intention of angering his devoted brother Apostles,’ said Ankh-Heloth.