the wall alongside the dead figure of the haemonculus. He stared down at the crumpled,
unrecognisable face of the eldar.
Several slaves had been cut down by stray fire, and lay bleeding on the floor. One of them, a
young woman, reached piteously towards Baranov for help, blood bubbling from her mouth like
foam. Baranov kicked at her hand to keep her away. Behind her, the other slaves were streaming
away from the open portal as more stray shots pinged off the walls. A splinter ricocheted off a wall
panel and struck the woman in the eye, killing her instantly.
The Space Marine spoke, and Baranov reeled in horror, doubling over in pain. It felt like things
were clawing inside him, and an intrusive stabbing pain gripped his guts. He vomited, emptying his
stomach as the utter wrongness of the voice clawed at his sanity, and tears ran down his face as he
spat yellow bile onto the floor.
Baranov sank to the floor, oblivious to the vomit and drool on his chin and down the front of his
chest, his limbs shaking. The Space Marine spoke with the voice of a daemon, a voice of madness.
Its words were alien and horrific to Baranov, like a deafening cacophony of screams and guttural
snarls.
A sudden compulsion made him crawl forwards on his hands and knees to peer around the
corner of the circular doorway, and though he fought the urge, his soul screaming, he could no more
stop his movements than he could stop his heart from beating. With tears running down his face, and
shaking his head in denial, Baranov looked around the corner.
The Space Marine was standing with his arms spread wide, his head thrown back, and pink mist
was seeping from within him, billowing from the cuts upon his body and spilling from his eyes,
nostrils and mouth. The mist rolled out across the floor before him, and the black-armoured xenos
warriors continued to blaze away at the daemonic figure as they backed away from its touch, though
their weapons did nothing.
Baranov thought he saw shapes within the mist, sensuous bodies wrapped around each other in
ecstasy, but he blinked his eyes and they were gone, nothing but contorting shapes formed by the
roiling, pink smoke.
The mist coiled around Baranov’s legs, and he felt hands caressing his skin, which was at once
arousing and repulsive. The musk entered his lungs and he felt instantly light-headed, as if his mind
was addled with opiates, and his flesh tingled with sensation.
He saw that his first impression had been correct. There were figures in the mist, and they were
rising like serpents, their bodies unfurling as they stood, their every movement fluid and supple
beyond human capacity.
There were dozens of them: tall, slender figures not unlike the eldar in proportion, though the
similarities ended there. They were neither male nor female, or rather, they were both
simultaneously, and they moved with inhuman grace and suppleness, their bodies twisting and
writhing. Baranov found that his breath was coming in husky gasps as he looked upon their
unnatural forms.
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The figures solidified, and Baranov was paralysed in horrified rapture. His soul screamed within
him of the utter wrongness of what he was seeing, yet his body was responding to the hellish allure
of the figures. He saw their faces, and they were angels, beings of incomparable beauty. Their hair
writhed like nests of vipers, and their eyes gleamed with the promise of pleasure… and pain.
The daemon’s faces changed suddenly, the facade of beauty sloughing off as they opened
luscious mouths, exposing needle-like teeth. Their eyes were as black as night and too large for their
hellish faces, and Baranov realised that the daemon’s slender arms ended not in hands, but in
elongated, serrated claws.
Then the killing began.
The daemonettes moved with impossible grace, matching and surpassing that of the eldar. Every
sharp movement of the daemons ended in a spurt of blood, a killing thrust, a severed limb. Bladed
arms slashed across jugulars, and slender claws snapped bones. Elongated, tri-forked tongues lapped
lasciviously at spilled blood, and the daemonettes spun and pirouetted through the carnage, killing
with every graceful, savage movement.
Baranov breathed deeply of the intoxicating musk as he began to hyperventilate, and his irises
swelled into wide, staring discs.
A daemonette appeared out of the mist alongside him, running a slender claw along the inside of
his thigh, drawing blood. A stinging tongue caressed his neck, and Baranov moaned.
Marduk laughed aloud, hacking left and right with his blade, severing limbs from bodies and
relishing the unabashed terror of the eldar.
The daemonettes were tearing through the eldar, carving a bloody swathe through their panicked
ranks. Dozens of the daemons were snuffed out of existence as their physical bodies were torn apart
by the frantically fired weapons of the eldar, but more of them continued to appear from the heady
musk, taking shape even as their sisters were cut down.
Marduk fought his way towards the eldar lord, who was backing away frantically, his guards
closing around him in a tight-knit circle. The heavily armoured warriors slashed around them with
curved-bladed glaives, scything through daemonettes screeching like banshees, their voices raised in
piercing cries that were at once hauntingly beautiful and horrific.
One of the incubi was dragged down, bladed arms stabbing into its stomach and head
simultaneously, and a pair of daemonettes danced towards the dark eldar lord, claws slashing
towards him.
The dark eldar lord moved with blinding speed, catching the blows on his bladed forearms,
turning them aside and snapping one of the claws clean off with a deft twist. The daemonette hissed
as milky ichor dripped from the wound, and the eldar lord stepped in close, slashing the blades
across its face, tearing its unholy flesh from ear to ear.
The eldar lord swayed back from a sweeping blow from the other daemonette, before leaping
into air, spinning, and slamming first one foot and then the other into the daemonette’s face. Blades
in his boots sliced through infernal skin, spilling more steaming ichor, and the lord stepped back as
his incubi bodyguards finished the injured creatures, ripping them in two with powerful blows of
their punisher glaives.
“I come for you!” roared Marduk, his voice still that of the daemon, as he slashed a path towards
the dark eldar lord.
“It’s moving a little fast for a freighter, don’t you think?” commented Burias, looking with narrowed
eyes at the flickering vid-screens on which the positions of the fleets blinked.
The Imperial vessel that Marduk was located aboard had moved swiftly as the Infidus Diabolus
had swung towards it, altering its trajectory with a speed and manoeuvrability that seemed far
beyond that of a simple freighter; indeed it came about to a new heading with a swiftness that was
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far beyond any Imperial ship. Despite its surprising swiftness, the sudden movement of the Infidus
Diabolus would surely allow at least one barrage upon it before it slipped out of range.
“Targeting matrices locked on,” croaked seven daemon-servitor symbiotes in unison.
“Fire,” barked Kol Badar.
A moment later, Burias felt the reverberations through the Infidus Diabolus as a full broadside
salvo was launched upon the curious Imperial freighter.
The eldar vessel veered to starboard as hundreds of cannon batteries unleashed their devastating
fusillade, displaying a speed of manoeuvrability that a strike craft a tenth of its size would have
envied. That brutal salvo would have torn through the void shields of any Imperial ship in seconds,
and smashed apart its hull armour within moments, but the bulk of the shots went screaming past the
shadowy outline of the dark eldar ship. Its mimic engines projected an outline that was vastly
different to its actual proportions, fooling the targeting arrays of the Infidus Diabolus, and hundreds
of tonnes of heavy duty ordnance roared past the ship, screaming wide of the mark.
Even with the naked eye, its exact position was impossible to discern thanks to it shadow fields,
all light refracting and curving around its hull so that it seemed barely there at all.
Still, the weight of cannon fire was heavy and indiscriminate, and it tore through the bladed
membranes of the back-swept vanes that rose like a ridge across the back of the dark eldar ship.
Several barrages also slammed into its hull proper, wreaking terrible damage.
Even as the ship dived away from the Infidus Diabolus, slicing through the void like a knife, it
returned fire, and stabbing lances of dark matter slammed into the Word Bearers’ strike cruiser.
A dozen broadside cannon batteries were destroyed instantly, and tens of hundreds of indentured
slaves, chained together in long worker gangs, whose sole existence was to load and prepare the
mighty weapons for firing, were dragged into the emptiness of space, where their organs imploded.
Fire blossomed across the strike cruiser as its hull was compromised in a handful of places, though
the flames almost instantly died as bulkheads isolated the crippled areas and the air within was
sucked into space.
The Astartes cruiser fired again, correcting its aim now that the mimic engines of the dark eldar
vessel had been nullified.
“Admiral!” shouted the flag-captain of the Hammer of Righteousness.
“What?” snapped Admiral Rutger Augustine. His knuckles were white as he clenched the railing
before his view screen on the bridge of his flag-ship.
“That rogue freighter…” began his second in command, Gideon Cortez.
“What about it, Gideon? We are fighting a damn engagement here.”
“It’s… it’s not an Imperial vessel, lord.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The scans, they’ve been wrong. It’s a xenos vessel, sir. Eldar. They must have been
transmitting a false signal that’s been fooling our sensors.”
Augustine swore. He had his hands full already with more than half his fleet engaged with the
tyranids. The last thing he needed was for an eldar fleet to turn up. One never knew what their
intentions were. Were they here to fight the tyranids for their own benefit? Or would they attack the
Imperial fleet while it was engaged with the xenos foe?
“Is its disposition hostile?” he asked.
“Negative, sir, it is moving away from the fleet.”
“Well that is something at least. Ignore it. I have no wish to incur the wrath of the eldar. Not
here.”
“There is something else, Rutger,” said Gideon, and Augustine could hear the reticence in his
friend’s voice. It must be bad, he thought with a sigh.
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“Go ahead,” he said wearily.
“The Adeptus Astartes cruiser has been identified. Its signature has been pulled from the archive
banks of command central. It is the Infidus Diabolus, lord. Word Bearers Legion.”
“Traitors,” said Augustine. He cast his gaze heavenwards, and barked a humourless laugh.
“Tyranids, eldar, and now traitor Space Marines. Perfect.”
“There is some good news, sir,” said Gideon.
“Oh?” replied Augustine.
“It would appear that the eldar and Chaos ships are engaging each other.”
Augustine shook his head.
“The Emperor works in mysterious ways,” he said.
Eldar were one thing, as often friends as foes, but a cruiser of traitor Space Marines? They were
the enemy, and must be eliminated.
“Order the Implacable to move up in support of the eldar vessel,” order Augustine. “Order them
to engage and destroy the Infidus Diabolus.”
Marduk stumbled as the entire xenos ship was rocked by a second series of impacts, and he cursed.
He had to get off the ship.
He saw the female, flame-haired wych that had captured him cartwheel through the melee, her
whip crackling through the air behind her, and three of the daemonettes screamed in fury as their
earthly bodies were slain, disappearing into mist.
Another daemonette reared up behind her and rammed its claws through her slender, tattooed
body. Marduk plunged his blade into the wych’s face, spitting her head on its length. Face to face
with the daemonette, Marduk grinned. The daemon licked its teeth at him in response, and ripping
its claws from the wych’s body, it spun lightly on its heel, claws singing through the air to
decapitate another eldar, sending its head flying.
Marduk whipped the blade free, spraying blood in a wide arc and spun to his right, slashing it
across the helmet of another warrior, the slender xenos limb slicing through the armour with
consummate ease.
Another barrage struck the eldar ship and Marduk stumbled again, cursing.
Darts spat into Marduk’s chest, and he hissed as debilitating pain wracked his body for a
moment, before the power of the warp within him surged, and he felt the pain recede. One of the
dark lord’s guardians stood before him, and more darts were fired from the tip of its backwardscurving
helmet, which resembled a scorpion’s tail.
Marduk lifted a hand, the movement guided by the power of Slaanesh surging within him, and
the darts were halted in mid-air. With a quick motion, Marduk sent them slicing off to the side,
where they took an eldar in the face.
The bodyguard darted towards Marduk, swinging its glaive with surprising swiftness, forcing
him to leap backwards to avoid being cut in two. There was no time to launch a riposte, for the eldar
danced after him, its return blow striking towards his neck.
Marduk met the blow with one of his own, but the glaive sheared through his blade as if it were
not there, and though Marduk swayed to the side at the last moment to avoid the killing blow, the
blade smashed into his shoulder, sinking deep into his flesh.
Grabbing the blade with one hand, keeping the eldar from pulling it clear, the First Acolyte and
the eldar were momentarily locked together. Marduk stood half a head taller than the slender
warrior, and over twice his weight, but the eldar was swift, despite its heavy armour.
The eldar’s foot snapped out, hitting Marduk squarely in the throat. Again, the eldar snapped a
kick to his neck, but this time the Word Bearer met its force with his arm, clubbing down hard on
the leg as it rose towards him.
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The eldar gave a reptilian hiss of pain as its leg was broken, its armour crushed beneath the
blow. Instantly, Marduk ripped the glaive from his shoulder and whirled it through the air. He hit the
