the humans. Marduk too felt the urge to step forward and slaughter the weaklings, but he knew that
they had their uses. Borhg’ash trembled in his hands, wishing to kill more.
“Which one here speaks for you?” asked Marduk. The cultists looked around at each other, and
finally one man stood and stepped through the other cultists to approach.
“I do, lord,” said the man, his head held high.
Marduk raised his bolt pistol and shot the man in the face. Pieces of skull, brain matter and
blood splattered over the remaining kneeling cultists.
“Lower your eyes when looking upon your betters, dogs, or I shall ask Burias-Drak’shal here to
remove them.” Marduk snarled.
“Now, who here speaks for you?” he repeated.
A shaven-headed woman in beige robes stepped forwards, her gaze lowered. “I do, my lord,”
she said in a shaking voice.
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“What is the fourth tenant of the Book of Lorgar, dog?” asked Marduk dangerously, fingering
the trigger of his bolt pistol.
The woman stood in silence for a moment, and Marduk raised the pistol to her head.
“‘Give up yourself to the Great Gods in body and of soul,’” she said quickly. “‘Discard all that
does not benefit their Greatness. The First thing to be discarded is the Name. Your Self is nothing to
the Gods, and your Name shall be as nothing to You. Only once you have reached Enlightenment
shall you Reclaim you Name, and your Self. Thus spoke Great Lorgar, and thus it was to Be.’”
Marduk kept the pistol raised to her head. “What is your name?”
“I have no name, my lord,” the woman replied instantly.
“If you have no name, what then shall I call you?”
The woman faltered for a moment, biting her lip hard, acutely aware of the bolt pistol held a
centimetre from her forehead.
“Dog,” she whispered finally.
“Louder,” said Marduk.
“Dog,” said the woman. “My name to you, lord, is dog.”
“Very good,” said Marduk, lowering his pistol. “You are all dogs, to me, and to all of my noble
kind. But perhaps one day, with faith and prayer and action, you will rise in my esteem.
“Arise, dogs. Gather your arms, and prove yourselves. Walk before your betters. Joyfully take
the bullets of our enemies, so that not a scratch need mar the holy armour of the warriors of Lorgar.
Such is a noble sacrifice. Lead forth, dogs.”
Jarulek stepped carefully through the carnage, the script covered orbs of his eyes taking in all the
details of the slaughter wrought by his warriors. Bloodied and broken corpses lay sprawled
throughout the palace. The fortress-like was enormous, and every living soul within it had been slain
or was in the lower atrium on the ground level in shackles. He had sent the cultists out into the city,
to spread panic and misery amongst the populace, and to hunt down the last remnants of resistance.
He didn’t care if they succeeded or not: Kol Badar and the bulk of the Host were fast closing on the
city, and they would smash any final resistance utterly.
The Dark Apostle was pleased with the attack. The palace had been taken with few casualties
and the kill-count was exceptional: a good sacrifice to the gods.
Picking his way carefully up the nave of the heretical temple, he felt hatred as he raised his gaze
to the towering, granite statue of the aquila that dominated the back wall. Both of the heads of the
two-headed eagle had been smashed by his zealous warriors, and the tips of the wings reduced to
dust.
Dozens of clergy members were nailed to the defiled aquila, thick metal spikes driven through
their flesh and bone, and into the stone.
The First Acolyte, Marduk, stepped forwards to greet him. He joined the fingers of both hands
together, making the stylised sign of Chaos Undivided, and bowed his head. When he raised his
head, he was smiling broadly, exposing sharp teeth: the row of smaller, razor sharp incisors in the
front and the larger, ripping teeth behind.
“We left them alive, mostly, Dark Apostle,” he said. “I thought that might please you.”
Jarulek too smiled. The intense hatred that the Word Bearers had for the Imperium of man was
as nothing compared to the exquisite hatred that they reserved for members of the Ecclesiarchy. He
stepped closer to the debased aquila statue, looking up at the priests, who were groaning in agony.
Rivulets of blood ran down the statue, funnelled by the carved eagle feathers, and Jarulek placed a
finger in the crimson liquid. He raised the finger to his inscribed lips and licked it with the tip of his
script covered tongue.
“It does please me, First Acolyte,” he breathed. He stepped back, hands on his hips, as if he were
appraising and admiring a favourite piece of artwork. “Yes, it pleases me very much indeed.”
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“Then there is this pair,” said Marduk. Two men were dragged forward and forced to their knees
with heavy hands upon their shoulders. They both kept their eyes low, not daring to look up at the
Word Bearers around them. One wore a red robe, his bionic eye buzzing softly as the lens rotated.
The other, the larger of the two, wore a robe of plain cream. Both had exposed their left shoulders,
showing the leering daemon face of the Latros Sacrum tattooed upon their flesh.
“The one on the left disabled the air defence turrets,” said Jarulek, not taking his eyes off the
priests impaled upon the statue. Marduk looked at the man. His left eye had been replaced with a
mechanical augmentation.
“While the other,” said Jarulek, “ensured that the Cultists of the Word gained access to the
palace. I believe that he was the bodyguard of the governor of this backwater planet. Was that not
so?” he enquired, turning his face towards the man.
He nodded his head, wisely not speaking out loud.
“I have seen your faces in my visions,” remarked Jarulek. “And in my visions of what is yet to
come, your face is there, treacherous adept of the Machine-God. But I regret to inform you,
bodyguard,” he said calmly, “that yours is not. It would seem that your part in this venture is
complete.”
The man stiffened, but did not raise his head.
“But you are not yet to be made a sacrifice to our gods. No, you are not yet worthy of that
honour,” said Jarulek in his velvet voice. “Take him down to the atrium to join the slave gangs. He
can spend the last weeks of his life in service to the gods, aiding the construction of the
Gehemehnet.” The man was dragged away.
“You, administrator, you are to stay close to me. But first, you must remove that abomination
that you wear upon your breast,” said Jarulek, pointing at the twelve toothed cog upon his chest. The
man instantly removed the metal plate from around his neck and held it in his hands, not sure what
he was meant to do with it now that it was removed.
“First Acolyte, take the accursed thing and see that you perform the Rituals of Defilement upon
it,” said Jarulek. Marduk took the metal emblem, his face curled in disgust.
“It is no god, you know, that your erstwhile brethren pray to,” remarked Jarulek
conversationally.
“My… my lord?” questioned the administrator. Marduk paused as he was turning to leave, a
snarl on his face for the man daring to speak in the presence of the Dark Apostle. Jarulek raised a
hand to halt the blow that Marduk was about to deal the cowering man.
“They are coming, you know, coming here, your erstwhile brethren,” said Jarulek, almost to
himself, seeing the waking vision as it overlapped with his surroundings. “Yes, they come soon.
They fear that we will succeed where they failed.”
Jarulek came out of the vision, and saw that Marduk had paused, looking at him. That one’s
power is growing, he thought.
It was sometimes possible for one of powerful faith to experience, albeit considerably weakly,
the visions that another experienced. How much had he seen? he wondered briefly, before
discarding the thought.
It mattered not. What was to come was to come, and nothing could change the prophecy.
34
CHAPTER SIX
Days and nights blurred together into one long, nightmarish, pained existence. Varnus was plucked
from death and his wounds had been tended by the horrific chirurgeons that served the Chaos
Legion, even as he fought against their administrations.
They had borne him from where he had lain after the Chaos Lord had hurled him off the
battlements, and placed him on an icy, steel slab. He was restrained with thick binding cords of
sinew. Bladed arms had cut into him, and long, needle-tipped proboscises had plunged into his flesh.
He screamed in agony as the skin and muscles of his shattered leg and arm were peeled back, and
the splintered bones reset before being sprayed with a burning liquid. His veins burned with serums,
and his eyes were held open with painful spider-legged apparatus, for what purpose he knew not,
unless it was for him to witness the infernal chirurgeons at work.
The skin of his forehead was delicately peeled back from his skull, and a burning piece of dark
metal in the barbed shape of an eight-pointed star was inserted there before the skin was returned to
its position and stapled back into place.
A collar of metal the colour of blood was wrapped around his neck and soldered shut, and he
was taken to join the tens of thousands of other slaves that the Chaos forces had rounded up once the
occupation of Shinar had been completed. Heavy, spiked chains connected Varnus’s collar to two
other slaves. They too bore the mark of Chaos beneath the red-raw flesh of their foreheads.
He had found that within a few days he was able to walk, albeit with considerable difficulty and
pain. He was made to work day and night, his efforts directed by horrifying, hunched overseers,
garbed in skintight, black, oily fabric. The faces of the overseers were, thankfully, obscured by the
same black material, though how the creatures were able to see was beyond him. Grilled voxblasters
were positioned where the creatures’ mouths should be, and their fingertips ended in long
needles. Varnus had felt the pain of those needles when he had stumbled one night, and the pain that
they caused was far in excess of what he imagined a slaver’s whip would deliver. The overseers
stalked along the lines of slaves, their hunchbacked gait bobbing and awkward.
But far more terrifying than the overseers were the Chaos Marines. Whenever Varnus glimpsed
one of them he was overwhelmed by the scale of the monsters and the pure aura of power and dread
that they exuded.
The sense of oppression never lifted. For days, the sky was largely obscured by the immense
shape of a titanic Chaos battle barge hanging in low orbit, plunging most of the city into darkness.
Enormous landing craft were in constant movement between the Chaos ship and the ground,
ferrying Emperor-knew what down to the planet. Then one day it was gone. Not being able to see
the battle barge of the Chaos forces in the atmosphere was a small blessing amid the horror that was
Varnus’s existence.
The great red planet of Korsis could be seen both day and night, getting increasingly larger as its
orbit drew it ever closer to Tanakreg and the time of the system’s conjunction of planets.
Varnus had watched as an area somewhere in the region of a hundred city blocks was levelled
by heavy siege ordnance. In a short flurry of brutal devastation, hundreds of buildings had been
demolished with ground shaking force. Dust had rushed across the landscape for hundreds of
kilometres all around, Varnus guessed. He no longer knew if it was day or night, for the air was
thick with dust and foul, heavy, black smoke that left a residue on every surface.
35
Giant, smoking, infernal machines had been brought in to push aside the debris of the
demolition, and along with thousands of slaves, Varnus had been forced to follow in the wake of
these mechanical beasts, clearing away the smaller rubble that the machines missed. His hands had
bled, and chirurgeons moving through the lines of chained Imperials had sprayed them with a dark,
synthetic coating, stemming the bleeding, but not the pain.
Monstrous, polluting factories, foundries and forges were constructed, vast, vile places filled
with acrid black smoke, heat and the screams of those being “encouraged” by the overseers and their
needle hands. Titanic vats of superheated, molten rock were fed with the rubble of the demolished
buildings, and what looked like bricks, though bricks on an insanely large scale, were being created
in gigantic, black, metal moulds.
The corpses of those killed in the defence of Shinar were dumped in giant, stinking piles, and
more bodies were pushed there by huge bulldozers, black smoke belching from racks of exhausts.
Varnus thanked the Emperor that he had not been assigned to one of the slave gangs forced to strip
those corpses naked before they were deposited in vast silos. He had no wish to learn what
abhorrence the enemy had planned for the bodies.
Other worker teams were busy in the centre of the vast open space that had been cleared,
working with smoke-belching machinery, drilling down into the earth, creating a vast hole over a
kilometre wide that sank lower into the planet’s crust with every passing day.
The destruction of the city was not, it seemed, complete, and on what Varnus guessed was his
second week of hell, more demolitions began. The rabble created from the demolitions was brought
to the smelteries in cavernous vehicles and upon the backs of thousands of slaves. Varnus
completely lost track of time as he dragged and hauled twisted metal, chunks of rockcrete and stone
to the vast smelteries, there to be turned into ever more giant blocks.
A sudden weight pulled at the collar around Varnus’s neck and he was hauled back a step,
almost dropping the chunk of rock he was bearing. He tried to keep moving, but there was a dead
weight on the chain attached to his collar, and he glanced around fearfully, trying to see if there was
an overseer nearby. Seeing none, he turned around and saw that the man behind him had fallen.
Swearing, Varnus dropped the stone he carried to the ground and hobbled to the fallen slave, trying
to pull him to his feet.
“Get up, damn you,” he swore. The punishments exacted upon the entire worker gang if one of
their number slowed their progress were harsh. The man didn’t move. “By the Emperor, man, get
up!”
Sudden, wracking pain jolted through his nervous system, and he heard the rasping voice on an
overseer. There was a slight delay as whatever fell language the overseer spoke was translated into
