Dark Apostle

muzzle of his combi-bolter through the hole, he unloaded his clip inside the tank. The bolt-rounds ricocheted around the enclosed space deafeningly and there were screams from within.

As if feeling Marduk's gaze, Kol Badar turned towards him, and pointed at the First Acolyte with one of his crackling power talons. The message was clear: your time will come.

I welcome that time with open arms, thought Marduk, flushed with anger and bitterness.

The Imperial forces were being butchered. Despite their efforts to drive against the traitor Legion, they were making no ground. Worse, they were losing ground, being slowly pushed back by the fury of the Chaos Space Marines' resistance.

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 demi-cohort 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 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.

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 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