But that was soon to change.
The earth shuddered with each step of the Exemplis. It rose out of the gloom like a colossus of
the ancients, a towering behemoth of awesome power. The mountains shook to their foundations as
thousands of tonnes of metal slammed into the hard, salt packed earth of the flooding valley with
each titanic step.
Those legs alone were mighty bastion fortresses, complete with battle cannon batteries and
crenellated walls from which soldiers could pour fire into the foe. Within each leg was a demicohort
consisting of Hypaspists and the elite biologically and mechanically enhanced Praetorians.
But the leg bastions were the least of the weapons of the Exemplis.
Heaving some of the most powerful weapons ever conceived by the Adeptus Mechanicus, entire
traitorous planets had surrendered at the mere appearance of the Exemplis. With weaponry the size
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of towering building blocks, each capable of demolishing cities and laying rain to armies, the
Exemplis had been in operational use by the Fire Wasps of Legio Ignatum since the time of the
Great Crusade.
The plasma reactor, burning with the contained energy of a sun, roared with terrifying power as
a fraction of its energy was siphoned into the giant weaponry of the god-machine.
The Exemplis was one of the last remaining Imperator Titans of Legio Ignatum of Mars and was
worshipped by the adepts of the Cult Mechanicus as an avatar of the Omnissiah. With thundering
steps, it strode to war once more against the traitors that had turned their back on the Imperium of
Man.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
There was something distinctly wrong about the tower, something far more perverted and unearthly
than Varnus could truly conceive. It was almost as if it was a sentient being, that it had thoughts and
ambitions of its own, and that these thoughts and ambitions were seeping into the slaves that
laboured over its living form.
It was large on an unfeasible, maddening scale, and continued to rise hundreds of metres into the
sky with every passing change of shift. It was so high that were it not for the vile, living re-breather
masks that had been attached to the slaves’ faces, they would start to struggle for oxygen in the
increasingly thin air, not to mention the noxious fumes that blanketed the shattered city. The smog
fumes seemed inexorably drawn towards the tower, and they circled it lazily.
At times, the tentacles of the creature burrowed deeper into his skull, wriggling and twitching
agonisingly. It could not be removed. He wondered if it could ever be removed, even under surgery,
and he had seen more than one slave die while trying to tear the thing from their face. They ended
up choking to death, blood seeping from their ears and eyes as the powerful, leech-like tentacles
burrowed through their brains, seeking solid purchase, and the tubular, living pipes that ran down
their oesophagi clenched shut.
The appearance of the slaves was drastically altered by the foul masks; they looked more like
devotees of the dark gods than Imperial citizens, and Varnus realised that he too must resemble one
of the hated ones.
The work on the tower was never-ending and the slaves were worked at a brutal pace, the
overseers viciously punishing those that failed to meet their exacting demands. It was as if the whole
operation had gone into overdrive, that there was a looming deadline fast approaching and the tower
had to be completed. There must have been around two hundred thousand slaves working atop the
walls alone, he estimated, and many more hundreds of thousands working down in the sink-hole that
disappeared inside the shaft of the tower, burrowing ever deeper into Tanakreg’s crust, down into
the depths of the planet. All told, he estimated that there must have been a million slave workers
toiling over the construction at any one time. More crane engines had been constructed, and along
with thousands of slaves, they were strengthening the base of the tower, making it thicker with
additional layers of bricks even as the tower soared up towards the heavens. In addition, they began
work on a massive spiralling walkway, wide enough for a battle tank, that coiled its way around the
exterior of the tower. It was a mammoth undertaking, but one that progressed at an astonishing pace.
There must have been dire sorceries involved, for the tower had already surpassed the height of
the greatest construction that he had ever heard of, and logic dictated that it simply could not rise
higher without toppling, or collapsing beneath its own weight. But rise higher it did, defying the
laws of the material universe.
Although he loathed the monstrous tower as he hated his overseers and captors, he could not
help but have strange paternal feelings over the mass of rock and blood mortar. It was a repulsive
moment of self-awareness, but the actions of the other slaves, particularly the ex-bodyguard and
manservant, Pierlo, who he was chained alongside, had alerted him to it.
There had been an incident two work shifts earlier. Was that two days past? Two hours past?
The man Pierlo, Varnus had ascertained, was barely holding a grip on his sanity. He had
overheard the man whispering to himself, having one side of a conversation that only he could hear.
The living, black module that was attached to his face strangely distorted his voice, making it
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guttural, thick and oddly muted. In fact, it sounded uncannily like the voices of the cruel overseers.
Varnus knew that his voice had undergone a similar change.
As he talked quietly to himself, Varnus had noticed that the man was tenderly stroking the stone
beneath him, as if he were petting a beloved family salt hound. It was unnerving, but since he heard
voices constantly through the blaring cacophony of the Discords, he thought little of it. At least he
had so far resisted the desire to talk back to those voices.
As Pierlo stroked the harsh stone, Varnus had heard a wailing cry and had swung around to see
the commotion. A block of stone, one of the millions that made up the growing tower, was being
lowered into position, but through some mishap, it had not been positioned correctly. It had crushed
the legs of three slave workers and was teetering on the brink of tipping off the high wall. One of the
spider-limbed cranes strained as it tried to reposition the stone, but it was clear that it would fall.
Pierlo and several other slaves had risen to their feet, crying out in horror, and Varnus felt a pang of
anguish and terror.
The stone slipped in the claws of the crane and dropped over the outside edge of the wall,
spinning and smashing against the stones below. A hundred tonnes of rock, it tumbled end over end,
down and down, before disappearing in the low hanging smog clouds. The men whose legs had been
shattered wailed, but not in pain. They clawed their way to the edge of the wall, their legs twisted
horrifically beneath them, as they watched the descent of the block, eyes already brimming with
tears of loss.
Pierlo had fallen to his knees, crying out to the heavens. Varnus’s stomach churned, and he felt
such a hollow loss within his chest that he thought he would weep. He shook his head as he realised
what he was thinking, but the pain remained. All around the tower, slaves cried out in anguish.
He also knew that this was no doubt some further degradation of his sanity, for how else could
he imagine that a construction like this had self-awareness? But of that he was convinced. The tower
had been distraught when the stone had fallen and the slaves that had tended it had picked up that
emotion. It was the kind of feeling a parent has when its child is in pain but cannot be helped.
He hated the tower, but when the time for the shift change came, he found it difficult to leave.
The ride down the rickety, grilled elevator that climbed down the narrow steps of the tower on
mechanical spider legs was hard, and the pain of separation was strong, even though it repulsed him.
Other slaves cried out and wept openly, pushing their hands out through the grill to touch the stone
of the tower, often losing a finger in the process.
Sleep was still no respite for Varnus, as every time he closed his eyes he revisited the hellish
landscape of skinned corpses. Only now, there were towering buildings made out of the corpses,
huge edifices that reached to the roiling heavens. From these buildings came the tolling of bells and
the sound of monotonous chanting. He awoke covered in sweat, and instantly the pain of separation
struck him; he longed to be back atop the tower, working.
Discords blared and told him that the tower had a name. They told him that it was a
Gehemehnet. He did not know the word, but it felt right.
It seemed to him that the Gehemehnet breathed, and that he could feel the pulse of its massive
heart reverberating through the stone beneath his touch.
He prayed to the Emperor when he thought such things, but it was increasingly hard to
remember the words of worship that had been drummed into him by the priests of the Ecclesiarchy.
He looked at Pierlo as the man worked, smearing the blood mortar across the stone face. The
man’s robes had fallen open and there was something underneath, a shape on the man’s shoulder
that even the lumps of congealed mortar could not hide.
“What’s on your shoulder?” he hissed, his voice alien to him.
Pierlo looked up in irritation, as if rudely interrupted mid-conversation. He pulled at his tattered
robe, covering up the mark, and continued with his work, head down.
Varnus risked a glance around and saw that there was no overseer anywhere nearby. His mind
feverish and the din of the Discord blaring, kill him, Varnus scrambled over to the slave and grabbed
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at his robe. Pierlo clawed at his hands, trying to fend him off, but Varnus ripped the robe from the
man’s shoulder.
There was a symbol there on the meat of his shoulder, a symbol that he recognised, for he had
seen it hundreds of times every day. It was embossed on the sides of the spider cranes and it was
stamped into the foreheads of some of the head overseers. He had seen it on the shoulder plate of
every cursed traitor Space Marine on the planet. It was a screaming daemon’s face and he knew
exactly what it proclaimed.
“You are one of them!” he hissed. Instantly the pieces fell together in his mind. He had seen the
man leave the meeting room in the palace just moments before it had exploded. He was one of the
traitor insurgents that had aided the forces of Chaos.
Pierlo’s face twisted hatefully as the two scuffled. Dully, Varnus heard the yells of other slaves,
but he paid them no heed. All he could hear was the pounding of blood in his head. This bastard was
one of those who had opened the door to the invaders. Hatred swelled within him. His hand snapped
out towards Pierlo’s face, fingers spread like claws.
The man was no stranger to unarmed combat and he grabbed Varnus’s hand as it came close,
twisting his wrist painfully. Pierlo’s other hand slammed into his solar plexus, fingers extended, and
all the breath was driven from him. He sank to the stone. Where Pierlo was of high birth, and had
clearly been trained in the arts of combat, Varnus had learnt how to brawl on the streets of Shinar,
and he knew that fighting as an art form and fighting tooth and nail for daily survival were two very
different things. Varnus had suffered countless beatings in his youth as a hab-ganger and had dished
out far more. Even when he had tried to go straight and had secured a job on the salt plains, he had
fought in bare-knuckle brawls at night to supplement his meagre income. All that had changed when
he had been recruited into the Shinar enforcers, but his skills had come in just as useful there.
Varnus surged up suddenly, landing a fierce blow to Pierlo’s chin, quickly followed by a vicious
swinging elbow that connected sharply with the man’s head. He reeled backwards, about to fall off
the wall and probably drag Varnus and half a dozen other slaves with him. Varnus grabbed the
thick, spiked chain, yanking the man back onto the stone and straight into a knee that he slammed
into Pierlo’s groin.
As Pierlo bent forwards in pain, the ex-enforcer drove the point of his elbow down onto the back
of his head, dropping him to the stone. Pierlo was motionless, but Varnus had not finished there. His
hatred suffusing him, he made a loop with the spiked chain and hooked it around Pierlo’s neck,
placing a foot on the back of the man’s neck. He crossed the chains in his hands and strained,
pulling on the chain with all his strength. Though Pierlo wore the same blood-red metal collar as all
the slaves, the chain bit deeply around his throat, cutting off his breathing as the spiked barbs sank
into flesh. Blood ran from the man’s throat, mixing with the mortar atop the stone.
Pain jolted him as the needles of the overseers plunged into his flesh, but he didn’t care. His
muscles bulged as he hauled on the chains one final time before the searing pain the overseers
delivered made him collapse, twitching and convulsing, to the stone alongside Pierlo.
In his mind’s eye he saw the sky running red with blood. He knew that Gehemehnet was
pleased.
He smiled as he looked into the dead eyes of the traitor.
The earth shook, and as Marduk ripped his chainsword from the guts of a Guardsman he raised his
head to pierce the gloom. Rain still lashed the bloody battlefield, but he sensed, as much as he felt,
something approaching, something huge.
Lightning flashed, silhouetting a shape that Marduk had initially mistaken for a mountain. This
was no mountain though, for it moved inexorably forwards, and the earth shook as it took another
laborious step.
With a curse on his lips, Marduk’s gaze rose as the immense shape of the Titan was revealed.
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It was like some ancient, primeval god from an antediluvian age that continued to stalk the lands
long after its kin had passed into myth and legend.
Its metal hide was pitted and scored by wounds that it had suffered during the battles it had
waged over its ten thousand year lifetime. It’s leering, dull metal face was fire scorched and scarred,
though its eyes still burned with red light. Within that metallic cranium sat the Princeps and his
Moderati, psychically linked to the Titan. They felt its pain as their own and experienced savage joy
