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.
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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
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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 more 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.”
Marduk paused, indecision staying his hand. The man might be lying.
“What have you got to lose?” asked the man, as if reading his mind.
Marduk backed up to the control panel, his eyes flicking between the two groups of eldar
warriors that had begun to edge forwards once more, just waiting for an opportunity to fire without
hitting the haemonculus. His eyes drifted down to the eldar runes flickering in the air in front of the
panel.
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“Release him,” Marduk growled into the haemonculus’s ear, tightening his grip on the skeletal
creature. The eldar made no move, and Marduk pushed the blade more forcefully against its throat,
drawing blood.
The eldar reached out a long, bony finger, moving it towards the glowing runes.
“No tricks,” said Marduk, “or I’ll have my own torture fun with you before anybody comes to
save you.”
The haemonculus’s finger paused just before it pierced the holographic image of a rune that
resembled a jagged blade. Then it moved to the side and passed through the serpent-like rune, the
one that the man had indicated.
There was a descending hum, and the man reached out a tentative hand. There was no surge of
power and no stink of ozone, and the man exhaled deeply, flashing Marduk a grin.
“Thank you friend,” said the man. “My name is Ikorus Baranov.”
Marduk ignored him. He was less than nothing to him, but the puny human’s words were
enticing. How were you planning on getting off-ship?
“Now the rest of them,” said Marduk. The haemonculus faltered, gargling something from its
shattered throat, and Marduk pushed the blade deeper.
Instantly, the haemonculus’s hand flickered over a series of rune images, and all the cell doors in
the section powered down.
At first, nothing happened. Then a hulking two-metre beast covered in matted fur staggered into
the corridor. Throwing its head back, it gave a blood-curdling roar. The dark eldar guards fired,
knocking it back a step. It roared again, and lurched towards the group of warriors. Barbed prongs
that shimmered with arcane powers were fired into its flesh, and it fell to its knees as agony seared
through its body.
More and more of the slaves staggered from their cells, blinking their eyes heavily, as if
believing that this was just another part of their torture. A broad shouldered, four-legged, centaurlike
creature with a reptilian head lurched from its cell, which was barely large enough to hold its
massive form. It hurled itself into one of the groups of eldar warriors, and two of them died instantly
as it slammed their heads together, crushing their fragile skulls.
Eldar warriors began firing as more slaves spilled from their confinement, and crackling electrowhips
lashed out. Slaves shuddered and screamed as the whips struck them, sending shooting pains
through their nervous systems, and others fell, their fears, terrors and nightmares coming to life
before their eyes as hallucinatory venom surged through their veins.
Other slaves fell upon each other, fists cracking against skulls and hands wrapping around
throats as racial enmities surged to the fore and individuals driven out of their minds by their
torments sought to slake their insane bloodlust.
All was chaos along the corridor, and Marduk smiled broadly, relishing the surge of hatred, fear
and anger that washed over him.
“Which way?” he said.
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CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dracon Alith Drazjaer stared at the curved, three-dimensional observation screen projected before
