[Word Bearers 03] - Dark Creed Read online

  Ostorius kept moving, closing on another servitor. He executed a perfect kill with a thrust to its chest, before turning and dropping to one knee to perform a disembowelling thrust on another, a blade whipping just centimetres above his head. The last of the active servitors came at him and he rose to his feet. Sidestepping a vicious slash, he swung for its neck. His blow was turned aside and the servitor lunged, its reflexes and strength augmented with clusters of servo-muscles.

  With a deft circular motion of his sword Ostorius turned aside both blades as they jabbed at his chest and braced himself, lowering his centre of gravity. Fusing, he lifted his shoulder into the servitor’s midsection. The weighty mech-organic lifted off the ground and was sent staggering backwards. Ostorius dispatched the machine with a brutal blow to the head.

  “Pause combat,” said Ostorius before the combat servitors could come back online. He went to the side of the training cage and replaced his sword and combat shield on a weapons rack. Wiping a hand across his sweat-slick head, he glanced across the array of weapons before choosing a heavy double-ended polearm. It had an axe-blade at one end and a curving crescent-moon blade at the other. Ostorius swung it around him with deft flicks, gauging its weight and balance.

  “You come to train, brother?” he said, though he paid Aquilius little attention, continuing to take practice swings with the polearm.

  “No, Proconsul.”

  “You come to watch me train?” Ostorius looked through the cage at Aquilius for the first time. His left eye was augmetic and he bore several long scars that distorted his lips into an ugly sneer. His left ear was missing, replaced with an internal augmetic. He was a brutal-looking warrior, intimidating in appearance and manner.

  “No, Proconsul.” Aquilius always felt so young and inexperienced next to his senior Proconsul and fought against the heat rising in his cheeks. “I came to check that all is well,” he said, diplomatically. “You didn’t make inspection this morning. I was concerned that something was the matter.”

  “Recommence combat, threat level eight,” commanded Ostorius. The four training servitors jerked, back into motion, circling him again. “I had other matters to attend to,” he replied, raising his voice above the mechanical din of the servitors. Aquilius glanced down at the date-slate readout upon the command pulpit.

  “You have been training for seven hours and twenty minutes.”

  “A battle-brother can never train too much, Coadjutor,” growled Ostorius. The younger White Consul bristled at the implication.

  “I train as many hours per day as the Codex stipulates,” he said. “I would train more but for the duties and demands of my office.”

  Ostorius spun, sweeping the legs from under one servitor before smashing another to the ground with an emphatic blow to the head.

  “I judged that you were capable of conducting this morning’s inspection without me,” said Ostorius, parrying a swift blow before kicking the servitor away from him with a heavy boot. “Or was my belief in you misplaced?”

  Aquilius bit his tongue, accepting the rebuke without complaint.

  “Proconsul, there are matters that demand your attention,” he said, humbly, looking down at the data-slate in his hands. He was forced to raise his voice above the escalating clamour inside the training cage. “Nine more regiments returning from the Thaxian Cluster are due in over the next two hours—six infantry, two armoured, one artillery. There are also military dispatches from the Assembly that require your attention, and depositions to be viewed from the Daxus moon conglomerate. Mechanicus emissaries from Gryphonhold that await…”

  “Aquilius,” barked Ostorius, knocking the last of his opponents down with a series of stabbing thrusts.

  “Yes, Proconsul?” said Aquilius, looking up from his slate.

  “Not now.”

  Ostorius exhaled when Aquilius had left. He knew his dark mood had nothing to do with his Coadjutor. Aquilius was merely doing his duty—he had no right to belittle him. Indeed, he had less than no right; as Proconsul, it was his place to mentor Aquilius.

  Not for the first time, Ostorius questioned why he had been removed from his beloved 5th Company and dispatched to the Boros system. Every battle-brother served as a Coadjutor in the years after rising from the rank of neophyte, but only a selection of veterans were chosen to act as Proconsuls. To be chosen was a great honour, and a requirement of those harbouring ambitions to become a sergeant or captain within the Chapter. Nevertheless, it was not something that Ostorius had ever desired.

  He had no wish to be a sergeant, let alone a captain. He was a warrior, and desired to be nothing more than that. He was Company Champion of the 5th, and that was all that he ever wanted to be. Protecting his captain in the midst of battle, that was his duty. That was what he had trained for and that was what he was good at, not governing some wealthy bastion system or trying to be a suitable role model for a young White Consuls Coadjutor.

  Ostorius lifted a heavy, double-headed hammer from the weapons rack.

  “Recommence combat, threat level nine.”

  The training servitors powered up once more.

  Thirty years, Ostorius thought. In the life of a Space Marine, thirty years was nothing.

  To Ostorius, it felt like an eternity.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Soaring almost fifty metres high, the observation portal of the Sanctum Corpus offered an unobstructed view up the length of the Crucius Maledictus. The castellated superstructure of the hulking battleship looked like a city, as if an entire quadrant of Sicarus had uprooted and taken flight. Scores of buttressed cathedrals rose above its hull, replete with spires, glittering domes and grotesque statuary. Multi-tiered banks of defence cannons and gun turrets, half-hidden within ten-storey alcoves, protruded like bristling spines along its flanks.

  The battleship was forging through the roiling madness of the warp, parting the pure stuff of Chaos before its sweeping, skulled prow. A handful of the other ships of the redemptive crusade could be seen off to the port and starboard, though the immaterial realm through which they sailed blurred their ancient hulls. Daemons of all size and shape swam along in their slipstream, an ever-changing escort of the infernal.

  Talons scraped against the outside of the observation portal, and sticky tongue-like protuberances slobbered against its surface. A flock of kathartes flew past on feathered white wings, angelic and glowing from within. Only in the aether did they appear in their true form. When they crossed into realspace, they appeared as skinless harpies, not these beautified creatures of elegance and deadly allure.

  Even the majestic view of the warp in all its infernal glory could not appease Marduk’s frustration and growing anger.

  “This is an insult,” snapped Dark Apostle Belagosa from across the gaping Sanctum Corpus chamber, putting voice to Marduk’s thoughts. “He goes too far.”

  Belagosa was a tall, gaunt figure. In an act of devout faith the Apostle of the 11th Host had clawed out his own eyes centuries ago. Nevertheless, he turned in Marduk’s direction. Those empty eye sockets still were far from blind and bled red tears down his cheeks.

  “Patience, brother,” said Dark Apostle Ankh-Heloth of the 11th Host. He spoke from behind the barbed lectern of his own pulpit, his voice a hoarse whisper. “I’m sure that Grand Apostle Ekodas will not—”

  “Grand Apostle,” spat Sarabdal. The holy leader of the 18th Host stood with his arms folded. “Such hubris. It is a slight on our order than he affects such airs.”

  “It was the Keeper of the Faith himself, revered Kor Phaeron, that bestowed the title, honoured brother,” said Ankh-Heloth.

  A severe-looking warrior with a cruelly barbed, black metal star of Chaos Glorified hammered into his forehead, Dark Apostle Ankh-Heloth’s flesh was a living canvas upon which he had performed his grisly, sacred arts. He bore numerous cuts and welts, the angry disfigurements evidence of ritual flagellation. Older scars lay beneath the fresher wounds. Marduk guessed that the Dark Apostle rubbed poi
sonous balms and liniments into his self-inflicted cuts in order to hamper the regenerative qualities of his Astartes physiology, for many of his wounds were open and raw. Such practices were not uncommon within the Legion.

  “He can call himself what he likes,” said Belagosa. He gestured to Ekodas’ empty pulpit. “But when will the most honoured and revered Grand Apostle decide to grace us with his presence?”

  Ekodas’ rostrum was ringed with balustrades and spiked railings. It was far larger than those of the other Apostles, and occupied the central position of dominance in the Sanctum Corpus. Held aloft on skeletal arches, it extended thirty metres from the wall opposite the towering viewing portal, giving it an unobstructed view over and beyond the lesser rostrums. Clouds of incense billowed from the maws of hideous gargoyles carved into its underside.

  The octagonal Sanctum Corpus chamber was a vertical shaft that dropped away into darkness. Over a kilometre from top to bottom, it bored right through the centre of the mighty battleship. The Apostle pulpits were at its very top, just fifty metres beneath the glittering red-glass dome at its peak. They protruded over the seemingly bottomless chasm from vertebrae-like pillars set at the corners of the chamber.

  Though the chamber was around eighty metres in diameter, the sheer height and depth of the Sanctum Corpus made it feel oppressive, even with the gaping viewing portal in its front wall. The walls were lined with books, codices and leather-bound holy writs.

  Tens of millions of sacred works were crammed into alcoves and stacked upon shelves, with no apparent semblance of order or cohesion. Ancient, dusty tomes filled with Lorgar’s teachings and scripture were piled in perilous heaps, and tens of thousands of annals and holy texts were stuffed into every crevice. They were all bound in human or xenos skin of various hue and texture. Many of these priceless books had been penned by the proselyte scribe-slaves of Colchis long before the launch of the Great Crusade, in time immemorial; before the blessed Primarch Lorgar had come to Colchis, before even the rise of the hypocritical and fraudulent False Emperor.

  Fresh volumes were constantly added to this staggering conglomeration of the Legion’s knowledge and wisdom, new tomes bearing more recent teachings and devotional scripture. Outside Sicarus, the scriptorium of the Crucius Maledictus was the greatest repository of the Word Bearers’ holy teachings in the universe.

  Loathsome archivist-servitors, wasted cadavers held aloft by humming suspensor impellers, floated up and down the endless rows of holy tomes, lovingly tending their allotted sections.

  Huge, spider-web-like arches stretched up between the bookcases towards the domed ceiling above the conclave of Apostles. Ten thousand skeletons were fused into those arches, their contorted spines calcified with the marble structures. Their skulls were thrown back in voiceless agony, and they held their skeletal arms up in silent appeal to the gods. In their open palms was a thick candle of blood-wax. Twenty thousand glittering flames cast their light down upon the gathered Apostles.

  “I’m sure Grand Apostle Ekodas has no wish to keep us waiting long,” said Ankh-Heloth.

  “Just long enough to impress upon us that it is in his power to make us wait,” said Marduk.

  “Barely elevated past First Acolyte and already he passes judgment on an honoured member of the Council,” hissed Ankh-Heloth, glaring at Marduk across the open space of the Sanctum Corpus.

  “Better to see things as they are than to accept them blindly,” said Sarabdal.

  “Speak your meaning,” said Ankh-Heloth.

  “I mean,” said Sarabdal, “that our newest brother Apostle speaks what we were all thinking. I grow tired of Ekodas’ games.”

  “I am sure that the honoured Grand Apostle has no intention of angering his devoted brother Apostles,” said Ankh-Heloth.

  “Ever the sycophant,” said Belagosa. “Your grovelling at Ekodas’ feet is quite pathetic.”

  “You cannot goad me into breaking the truce of Sanctus Corpus,” said Ankh-Heloth. “You speak nothing but poison and bile.”

  “Brother Belagosa has a point,” said Sarabdal, mildly.

  “Oh? Please enlighten me,” said Ankh-Heloth.

  “You are a puppet,” said Sarabdal. “Nothing more than Ekodas’ pet, and the 11th Host is nothing but an extension of his own. Like a dog, you grovel whenever your master deigns to throw you his scraps.”

  The dull humming of the archivist-servitors’ impellor motors reigned over the chamber. Belagosa was grinning broadly now, and Marduk too found it hard to hide his amusement as the blood drained from Ankh-Heloth’s face. His entourage had gone very still.

  “These are not my words, of course,” said Sarabdal mildly, pretending not to have noticed the effect on the incensed Dark Apostle of the 11th Host. “Just… what I have heard said.”

  “Who says such things?” hissed Ankh-Heloth.

  “Everyone knows you are Ekodas’ whipping boy,” said Belagosa, relishing Ankh-Heloth’s incandescent rage.

  Marduk had heard through Jarulek, his one-time master and the previous holy leader of the 34th Host, of the dubious manner in which Ankh-Heloth had come to power. Jarulek had told Marduk that while it was the Council of Sicarus that had instated Ankh-Heloth as the First Acolyte of the 11th Host, this was only at Ekodas’ insistence. Less than a decade later Ankh-Heloth ascended to the position of Dark Apostle after his predecessor was killed under circumstances engineered, many believed, by Ekodas.

  Marduk smirked, thinking of how he himself had come to power.

  “Something amuses you, Apostle?” said Ankh-Heloth, staring venomously. His body was quivering with rage.

  “Of course not, honoured brother,” said Marduk, his tone mocking. “Such obviously slanderous rumours against one weaken us all.”

  “We all know that the only reason we suffer your presence on this crusade,” spat Ankh-Heloth, “is because you have in your possession the device that Jarulek unearthed. Let’s hope it was worth the trouble.”

  “That is the only thing that you’ve said here that has made any sense,” said Belagosa.

  “Agreed,” said Sarabdal.

  Marduk swallowed back his fury.

  “I have fought and bled to attain and unlock the secrets of the Nexus Arrangement, dear brothers,” said Marduk, glaring at the other three Apostles. He clenched the barbed railing of his pulpit with such force that he threatened to tear it loose. “Tens of millions have died in order that it came to me. Worlds have perished. It will win us this war, and when it does, it will be I who shall reap the rewards. In time, you will all bow your heads in deference to me, hearken to my words.”

  Belagosa laughed, deep and rumbling. Sarabdal looked amused at the outburst.

  “Tread warily, Marduk,” warned Ankh-Heloth. “An Apostle can fall from grace very quickly if he does not learn to respect his betters.”

  “His betters?” snarled Belagosa, quickly turning back on his favoured target. “And you include yourself in that mix? Marduk may well be nothing more than a whelp, but remember it was not so long ago that you yourself were a lowly First Acolyte, Ankh-Heloth. I can still remember when you were first inducted into the Legion. Even then you were a self-aggrandising worm.”

  Ankh-Heloth turned his cold eyes on Belagosa. His entourage, standing in the shadowed alcove behind his pulpit, was tense. Ankh-Heloth’s hulking Coryphaus clenched his hands into fists, the ex-loaders of his gauntlet-mounted bolters chunking as they came online. The warrior resembled a hulking primate, his back hunched and his augmented arms grossly oversized.

  Belagosa’s honour guard responded in kind, the daemons within their bodies straining to break from their bonds, just waiting for the trigger word from their master that would release them.

  “You go too far, Belagosa,” hissed Ankh-Heloth. “But I shall not be the one to break conclave peace, as much as you might wish it.”

  “Still the coward,” said Belagosa.

  “Enough!” snapped Sarabdal, forestalling Ankh-Heloth’s reply. “This b
ickering demeans us all.”

  Of the four Apostles present, it was Sarabdal who had led his Host the longest, Sarabdal who had been groomed to become Dark Apostle of the 18th by none other than blessed Lorgar himself. Raised in the scriptorums of Colchis, Sarabdal had been little more than a child when he had taken part in the brutal Schism Wars that fractured the Covenant, the dominant religious order of the feudal planet. Impressed with the youngster’s fanaticism and fiery demeanour, Lorgar had taken the boy under his wing and once reunited with his Legion, had personally chosen Sarabdal for indoctrination into the Word Bearers. Few Dark Apostles garnered more respect than Sarabdal, and Belagosa and Ankh-Heloth fell into sullen silence at his rebuke.

  It was a formidable gathering of might here in this chamber, Marduk thought, and a slight smile touched his lips.

  Between them, the four Dark Apostles commanded the loyalty of over five and a half thousand Astartes warriors. Together with the might of Ekodas’ Grand Host, that number swelled to over nine thousand. Add onto that the battle-tanks, Dreadnoughts, daemon-engines and assault craft of the five Hosts and the number was swollen further.

  Over a million fanatical cultists of the Word accompanied the Hosts, brainwashed men and women crammed together like cattle in hulking slave vessels. These pitiful wretches were subjected to an endless torrent of maddening warp-noise by floating Discords. After months and years of such unceasing abuse, their free will and resistance had long been broken, and they were now true devotees of Chaos. Of little tactical worth, they would be herded into the guns of the enemy, across minefields and sacrificed by their Astartes masters, and they would do it willingly.

  Last of all, the fleet was accompanied by a single bulk-transporter of Legio Vulturus, a grim vessel twice the size of the Crucius Maledictus. Within its cavernous stasis hold resided a full demi-Legion of god-machines: twelve of the most potent war engines ever constructed on the forgeworlds of the Mechanicum. As part of the Ordo Militaris wing of the Collegia Titanica, they had fought in nigh on constant battle since the start of the Great Crusade. The Legio Vulturus had declared their allegiance with the Warmaster Horus, turning their guns against their brethren mid-battle, wreaking terrible havoc among the Legios Gryphonicus and Legio Victorum, destroying nigh on forty battle engines in that one unexpected engagement. This particular demi-Legion of Vulturus had fought alongside the Word Bearers since the start of the Crusade, and many within the XVII Legion credited Krebus himself with turning them to the cause of the Warmaster.