He landed on the White Consul Terminator’s storm shield clawed feet first, and clutched at the top of it with the talons of his left hand. Barbed claws hooked around the edge of the storm shield, dragging it low even as the stink of scorched flesh filled the air. With his free hand, the Icon Bearer slashed at the Chapter Master, thirty-centimetre talons raking across his gorget.
The White Consul slammed the haft of his thunder hammer into Burias-Drak’shal’s face with staggering force, dislodging him from his shield. The Icon Bearer dropped to the ground, landing on all fours. The Chapter Master moved after him, hammer crackling with arcs of electricity.
Burias-Drak’shal leapt backwards, talons scratching deeply into the marble slabs beneath him as he scrambled to avoid the hammer blow. The head of the White Consul’s weapon slammed into the marble slab with a sharp crack of discharging power. Stone splintered beneath the strike.
Burias-Drak’shal caught the next blow with a taloned hand, halting it mid-swing, his warp-spawned musculature straining to keep the weapon at bay. The Chapter Master smashed his storm shield into him, knocking him backwards.
Moving with surprising swiftness, the White Consul followed up on the momentarily stunned possessed warrior and struck a brutal blow towards his chest. Burias-Drak’shal tried to sway aside, but the hammer caught him on the shoulder. There was an explosive, percussive shock, and he was thrown to the ground. When he came back to his feet, his left arm was hanging uselessly at his side. His shoulder pad had been torn loose, and his plate armour underneath was sundered and leaking red-black ichor that hissed as it dripped onto the marble underfoot.
Within seconds the possessed warrior’s arm was healing, but he was in considerable pain.
When it came, the end of the fight was brutal and abrupt. A hammer blow ripped one of Burias-Drak’shal curving horns from his head, and hot daemon-blood sprayed from the wound. A droplet struck the Chapter Master in his left eye, burning into the retina, and for a fraction of a second the White Consul turned his head away, eyes closing reflexively. That was all the opening that Burias-Drak’shal needed.
Ducking beneath the Chapter Master’s backhand swipe he leapt in close, talons ramming into the warrior’s side. He could not penetrate the thick armour, but using the momentum of the blows, he swung his mutated body up around the heavier Marine’s back like an ape, coming to rest in a crouch atop the White Consul’s broad shoulders, the claws of his feet digging deep.
Stabbing downwards with all his might, he punched the talons of his left hand through the top of the Chapter Master’s skull, killing him instantly. With a tremendous crash, the warrior fell.
Burias-Drak’shal mounted the Chapter Master’s chest in an instant, pounding at the already dead warrior’s face over and over. The White Consul’s skull collapsed beneath his blows, even super-hardened Astartes bone unable to withstand the sheer brutality Burias-Drak’shal unleashed upon it.
‘Enough,’ said Marduk, finally.
Breathing heavily, the Icon Bearer rose to his full height. The blood liberally coating his face matched the colour of his armour. He lifted both arms high into the air and threw his head back, howling his victory to the heavens, that the gods might witness his triumph.
Aquilius and the other White Consuls heard that cry as they reached the bottom of the temple stairs. The young Coadjutor made the sign of the aquila. Atop the stairs, the hateful silhouette of the Dark Apostle could be seen. More than one of the veterans seemed ready to run back, but Librarian Epistolary Liventius forestalled any such rash move.
‘More Traitors moving in,’ warned one of the veterans. Rhinos and Predators were rolling up the boulevards and causeways leading into the square, threatening to box the White Consuls in.
The Librarian held for a moment and put his hand to his face. He pulled it away to find splashes of crimson coating the fingertips of his gauntlets. Trickles of blood flowed from his nostrils.
‘Liventius…?’ said Aquilius.
‘I sense something.’
‘More of the enemy?’
‘No. This is something… new. I’ve never felt a presence like this before. Let’s move. Now, brothers,’ said Liventius.
Aquilius cast one last glance up towards the top of the stairs.
‘Let him not have died in vain,’ he said. ‘Everything rests with Proconsul Ostorius now.’
Any lesser man would already have been dead.
Ostorius was a bloody ruin, his body broken and his face unrecognisable. One eye was swollen shut, and his nose had been broken in three places. His left cheekbone was fractured and splinters of bone pressed through his flesh. His skull was cracked and leaking. Blood and spit dribbled from his mouth, and he spat a handful of teeth out onto the deck floor as he pushed himself unsteadily back to his feet once more.
His left arm was broken and hanging useless at his side. Nevertheless, he still clasped his power sword in his right hand. He lunged at his foe, the tip of his sword stabbing for the Word Bearer’s heart.
With a dismissive backhand slap, his attack was knocked aside. A thunderous open hand strike hit Ostorius square in the face. A chopping blow to the side of the White Consul’s neck sent him crashing back to the floor.
Grand Apostle Ekodas was completely unscathed, though his hands were covered in blood. He stalked back and forth as he waited for Ostorius to pick himself up.
Again and again, Ostorius got up, attacked and was knocked down. The circle of Word Bearers watched impassively as their lord dismantled the White Consul piece by piece, breaking bones and rupturing organs at will.
At last, Ekodas tired of his sport. He caught Ostorius’s arm as he launched a weak overhead strike. Spinning in behind his opponent, Ekodas wrapped an arm around his neck.
‘All over now,’ said Ekodas in Ostorius’s ear. The brutalised White Consul’s unfocussed gaze lingered on the Nexus Arrangement.
With a violent twist, Ekodas broke the Proconsul’s neck.
Marduk’s eyes were narrowed as he watched the pitiful cluster of White Consuls and Guardsmen scurrying across the square below.
‘Take them,’ he said, and the warriors of the 34th Host broke into a charge, leaping down the steps in pursuit.
They were halfway down when the heavens exploded.
Like a star going supernova, the Kronos star fort detonated in an almighty explosion that lit up the planet below in blinding, harsh white light.
‘What in the name of the gods?’ breathed Ashkanez.
Something changed in the quality of the air. Marduk could feel it even within his hermetically sealed armour. It was as if the air were suddenly charged with electricity, making the thick, matted hairs of his cloak stand on end.
A hot wind blew down from above, sending eddies of dust and ash spinning across the square. The heavens had began to roil like an angry whirlpool, clouds of ash, smoke and toxic pollutants swirling madly. Directly overhead, they began to spiral in an anti-clockwise direction, as if a cyclone of tremendous proportions were brewing. It looked like a giant maelstrom, a vortex that began to rotate with increasing volatility. Marduk felt unease begin to form within his gut. His natural response to such an unfamiliar emotion was aggression and violence, and fresh combat drugs were pumped through his veins, flooding his system.
‘Are we doing that?’ growled Burias, once again holding his revered icon in his hands, the daemon pushed back below the surface.
‘No,’ said Marduk. ‘I feel no touch of the warp here. None at all. It is… something else.’
Whatever it was, it began descending into the atmosphere.
And it was huge.
BOOK FIVE:
RETRIBUTION
‘We are all eternal, my brothers. All this pain is but an illusion.’
–Dark Apostle Mah’keenen, scrawled in blood on the eve of his sacrifice
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
At first it was nothing more than a shadow in the heavens, obscured by the crimson miasma hanging in the at
mosphere of Boros Prime. It blotted out the twin suns, casting darkness as deep as night across the city below. It loomed large, seeming to spread from horizon to horizon, and it was got nearer.
At first, Marduk thought perhaps it was a battlecruiser crashing down to earth, a casualty of the ongoing war in orbit above Boros, but he saw that this shape was bigger than that, larger even than Ekodas’s flagship, the immense Crucius Maledictus. The star fort itself?
The spiralling downwind intensified and a gap in the centre of the maelstrom appeared. This break in the cloud cover should have afforded those upon the surface of Boros Prime their first unobscured glimpse of the sky since the arrival of the Word Bearers. The angry welt of the Eye of Terror should have been visible across the heavens, but something blotted out the view. Blue skies should have been visible within that growing gap, but all that could be seen through it was darkness, an enveloping emptiness that seemed to swallow all light.
It was the underside of a vessel so vast as to put the largest battlecruiser to shame, yet Marduk knew instantly that this was not the falling Kronos star fort. Whatever this vessel was, it had destroyed the orbital bastion, utterly and completely. The rotating clouds continued to part before it. As it descended ever closer, eerie glowing green lights lit up along its black underside. Marduk felt a spike of trepidation.
The last of the clouds were sent fleeing over the horizon, and the xenos vessel was finally fully revealed. It must have been easily fifteen kilometres across, and it cast its shadow over the entire city. The dull glow of the obscured suns framed it like an eclipse, giving all those below a sense of the vessel’s shape.
It was an immense, perfectly geometric crescent, curving like a sickle-blade, and it hung in low atmosphere, an executioner’s axe ready to fall. Something so large should not have been able to descend so close to the planet’s surface without being dragged down by the planet’s gravity, no matter how powerful its engines were. Yet still it descended.
The energy it must have been exerting to resist the pull of gravity and keep its immense bulk from crashing to earth was beyond imagining, far in excess of anything that could be fathomed by a human mind. Nevertheless, while the fierce downwind continued to buffet the city below, they were hardly of the scale that Marduk would have imagined necessary to keep such a structure aloft. Indeed, there appeared to be no blazing engines burning with the heat of a thousand suns upon the vessel’s underside at all.
How it was controlling its descent was beyond his understanding, and yet in defiance of all natural law and rational thought it continued to penetrate the low atmosphere, drawing steadily nearer the surface of Boros Prime.
The immense xenos vessel was so utterly black that it seemed to absorb the light, and this darkness made the glowing green lines that spread across its underside in alien, geometric patterns all the brighter. Tens of thousands of glowing hieroglyphs could be discerned upon its sheer underside, symbols that might have been some form of inhuman picture writing consisting of lines, circles and crescents. One symbol was larger than the others – a circle with lines of differing lengths projecting from it, like the stylised beams of a sun.
Marduk had seen this symbol before on an Imperial backwater planet called Tanakreg. There, it had appeared upon the sheer obsidian flanks of an alien structure deeply embedded in the rock of an evaporated ocean floor. He knew what manner of beings resided within: undying constructs of living metal, devoid of fear, compassion or mercy, unfettered by mortal concerns. They were a deadly foe, nigh unstoppable, and his blood ran cold as he realised for what purpose they had surely come here.
‘Call in our Stormbirds,’ ordered Marduk as he reached the bottom of the Imperial temple’s stairs. His voice was tense. ‘Have the Infidus Diabolus readied. I want full and immediate extraction. Now.’
‘What new horror is this?’ breathed Coadjutor Aquilius, eyes wide, pausing just before he dropped down into the sub-tunnels that would lead into the lower levels of the Temple of the Gloriatus.
Librarian Epistolary Liventius too was looking up. His face was grave.
‘Come, brothers,’ said the Librarian at last.
Moving warily, weapons at the ready, the cluster of wounded White Consuls and Guardsmen ducked their heads and moved into the tunnels. The heavy blast-doors slammed behind them with grim finality.
Kol Badar’s eyes were locked on the immense shape hovering low in the atmosphere overhead. He had offered no argument to the Dark Apostle’s order to abandon this world. Marduk knew that he too recognised the nature of this vessel hovering oppressively over the city. Marduk heard the crackle of vox-traffic as the Coryphaus began ordering the evacuation.
‘Master?’ said Ashkanez, scowling darkly. ‘What is this? We are going to abandon all we have fought for?’
Ignoring his First Acolyte, the only member of the 34th Host who had not fought on Tanakreg, Marduk began barking orders, commanding his forces to pull back and regroup, ready for extraction.
‘Master!’ said Ashkanez more forcefully. ‘We must finish what we started! The sons of Guilliman cannot be allowed to live!’
Marduk continued to ignore him.
‘This world is not yet ours,’ growled Ashkanez. ‘We cannot make extraction before Grand Apostle Ekodas gives us leave to commence the–’
The First Acolyte was silenced as Marduk spun around suddenly and clamped a hand around his throat, snarling. The broad features of Ashkanez flared with anger and for a moment Marduk thought – even hoped – that his First Apostle would strike out at him, but the stony mask of composure fell across Ashkanez’s features once more, and the First Acolyte lowered his gaze.
‘No, this world is not yet ours, and nor will it be, not now. You have no comprehension of what that is,’ said Marduk, gesturing up at the immense shape looming ever larger in the heavens, ‘nor of what its appearance portends. We leave now. Ekodas be damned.’
‘So the Imperials have unexpected reinforcements,’ said Ashkanez. ‘What does it matter? We must finish the Consuls while they are weak and vulnerable.’
‘Ignorant fool,’ said Marduk. ‘These are no Imperial allies.’
He released his First Acolyte with a shove, sneering.
He saw Ashkanez glance over Marduk’s shoulder, and only then did he register the hulking presence of someone standing threateningly close behind him. With a glance he saw it was the berserker Khalaxis, exalted champion of 17th Coterie. The big warrior’s chest was rising and falling heavily, and his ritualistically scarred face, framed by matted dreadlocks, was contorted in a bestial snarl.
‘Is there a problem, Khalaxis?’ growled Marduk, glaring up into the champion’s red-tinged, frenzied eyes. He was amongst the tallest warriors of the Host, and Marduk came barely to his chin.
Out of corner of his eye, Marduk saw Ashkanez glance skyward, then back at Khalaxis. The First Acolyte seemed indecisive for a moment, then gave a brief shake of his head – reluctantly, it seemed to Marduk.
‘Move away now, brother,’ said Sabtec, stepping protectively in front of Marduk. The champion of the hallowed 13th had his hand on the hilt of his sword.
The massive exalted champion refused to back down, still glaring over Sabtec’s head at Marduk, violence written in his gaze. Marduk was very aware of the immense chainaxe clasped in the towering warrior’s hands and blood-rage that Khalaxis clearly held only barely in check.
‘Khalaxis,’ snapped Ashkanez.
With a last threatening glare, the berserker swung away, stamping off to rejoin his Coterie.
‘Do not be too hard on Khalaxis, my lord,’ said Ashkanez. ‘His choler was in the ascendant. He meant no disrespect.’
‘When we get out of this, you and I are going to have… words, First Acolyte,’ said Marduk.
Ashkanez bowed his head in supplication.
‘As it pleases you, my master,’ he said, his tone neutral.
Marduk saw Burias smirk.
‘Assault shuttles inbound,’ confirmed Kol
Badar.
Marduk glanced across the expanse of the square. The White Consuls were long gone now. Ever since Calth, the desire to kill and maim the sons of Guilliman, to destroy all that they stood for, had consumed him. Now he was allowing these gene-descendants of the Ultramarines to escape him, but he swallowed back his hatred, for there were issues of more pressing importance that demanded his attention. Namely, keeping himself alive. His gaze ventured skywards once more.
On Tanakreg, a xenos pyramid of ancient, inhuman design had sat deep within an abyssal trench located far beneath the acidic oceans of that backwater planet. There it had resided for countless millennia, dormant and lifeless. Its location had been revealed after the oceans had been boiled away by the actions of the 34th Host, under the leadership of Marduk’s predecessor, the Dark Apostle Jarulek. Marduk, Jarulek’s First Acolyte, had been amongst those that had penetrated the alien pyramid, descending into its claustrophobic interior. It was a tomb, Marduk had realised, and by penetrating into its dark heart, the Word Bearers had awakened its guardians from their eternal slumber.
It had been there, deep within the alien crypts of the xenos pyramid, that he had entered the inner sanctum of a being the ancient apocrypha of the Word Bearers named the Undying One. This being was unimaginably ancient, a thing that Marduk suspected was as old as the heavens themselves. There in the Undying One’s insane realm, a place far beyond his understanding where distance and time seemed as malleable as living flesh, Marduk had discovered the Nexus Arrangement, the potent piece of alien technology that had made this attack on the Boros Gate sector possible. There too, Marduk had left his master, Jarulek. The Dark Apostle had turned on him once his usefulness had passed, but it had been Marduk that had emerged triumphant.
Marduk had long plotted Jarulek’s downfall. It might not have happened the way he had planned, but it mattered little. Jarulek had perished, and Marduk had escaped from the Undying One’s maddening realm, taking with him his prize, the Nexus.
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