'My lord?' said Kol Badar. Always he had fought at the side of the Dark Apostle. He was his champion, his protector. To allow the holy leader to face some unknown enemy without him was unthinkable. The life of a Coryphaus who allowed his master to fall in battle was forfeit. The Council would see him dead were Jarulek to fall.
'What I go to face is not for you to be a part of,' hissed Jarulek, his voice low, his eyes resolute. 'This is one battle that you cannot win, Kol Badar, and it is one foe that you cannot face.'
Doubt plagued the Coryphaus.
'My place is at your side, my lord,' he said. 'You would take the wretched whelp with you, but not me?'
'I am telling you that, for now, your place is not at my side. Hold the line here. The Anointed need you. This battle will not be easily won. Await my return.'
'As you wish, my lord,' said Kol Badar, fuming. The Dark Apostle stepped in close to him, looking up at him with eyes ablaze with faith.
'If we both return, then you may kill Marduk, my Coryphaus. Your honour will be fulfilled.'
A surge of pleasure ran through Kol Badar at the Dark Apostle's words and he smiled beneath his quad-tusked helmet. At last his hand that had once been stayed was free of constraint. At last, he would kill the whoreson whelp, Marduk.
'We shall hold, my lord. I await your return with great expectation.'
'The blessings of the dark gods upon you, my Coryphaus.'
'And with you, my lord. May the gods be at your side as you walk into darkness.'
Kol Badar watched as the Dark Apostle and the First Acolyte descended the stairs. The panels of the gateway slid aside soundlessly and the pair of Word Bearers stepped inside, disappearing into the inky blackness as if consumed. The panels flicked back into place. There was no way of following them now, he thought. He just had to wait and hold off these forsaken corpse-machines long enough for him to be able to kill Marduk.
He rejoined his warriors, racking the underslung mechanism that activated the meltagun attached to his bolter.
'They are gone, Coryphaus?' asked Burias as he fired his bolt pistol into the head of an enemy, knocking it back a step.
'They are, Icon Bearer. The fate of the Host hangs in the balance.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The panels slid shut behind them, cutting off all noise of the raging battle, and they stood in absolute darkness. Not a sound pierced the pitch-black night that descended on them. The silence was heavy, claustrophobic and dense. Marduk was utterly blind. Never before had he experienced such all-encompassing darkness.
He felt lost, adrift, his connection to the warp severed, and he panicked for a moment as his head reeled as if with vertigo, though it was impossible for him to experience such a sensation.
Marduk wobbled, though his senses came back to him in an instant, and his faculties returned. He saw a dim light, though perhaps it had only just begun to shine. It reached out towards them from below, a slowly pulsing beam.
He looked at Jarulek beside him, whose face showed tension and wariness.
'It felt as though we just travelled an infinite distance in the blink of an eye,' said Marduk quietly, unwilling to break the oppressive silence. The gateway they had come through was sealed shut, though the sun icon emblazoned upon it glowed dimly with light. He pushed against it, but it would not budge. As the pulsing light increased, he saw that the black stone wall in which the gateway was positioned rose impossibly high above them. They stood on a bridge of black stone that seemed to hang in the air. There were sheer drops to either side, and it was joined by dozens of black staircases. These in turn were linked to other bridges, gantries and platforms, all formed of black stone and all hanging in the air without any clear support. 'This place is insane,' he hissed. 'It is madness.' Marduk had encountered many landscapes and worlds that most would consider maddening within the warp, where the rules of the physical world held no sway, but here he felt no touch of Chaos. Far from it, this place felt like it actively kept Chaos out. It was sterile and lifeless, devoid of any touch of the warp.
'Is it some trick of the Changer?' asked Marduk, speaking of Tzeentch, the lord of the twisting fates and one of the greater gods of the Ether. He knew as he spoke that it was not, for even the great Changer of the Ways would surely be unable to create such a place, so cut off from the essence of magic.
'Far from it, First Acolyte,' said Jarulek. 'This is the antithesis of the Great Changer and indeed of all of Chaos.'
'And what you seek is here, in this place? It would seem that anything here would be better destroyed than utilised.'
'Much can be tainted and changed by Chaos, Marduk. Turning an enemy's weapons against them is the greatest strength that we have.'
'And you have foreseen this place in your dream visions?'
'This place, no. It has always been hidden from my sight. I foresaw our entrance through the gateway, but never what transposed beyond it, only what occurs afterwards.'
'You have seen our return from this place?'
'Sometimes. The future is fickle and unclear. In some twists of what may come to pass we return with our prize. In others, we do not and the Anointed are destroyed. The guardians assailing them return to their eternal rest. In others I have seen just myself return. In others, just you.'
'I would not abandon you here, Dark Apostle,' said Marduk. Jarulek chuckled.
'We need to move,' he said.
'Which way?'
'Down.'
It seemed that they had been walking for days on end, or perhaps it had been but minutes. Marduk was not sure anymore. This place was maddening in its power to disorient, and he had long since lost a sense of his bearings. They had walked down stairways only to find themselves walking up, had crossed straight walkways only to find themselves somehow turned around and walking back the way they had come, and more than once they had descended staircases only to find themselves higher up than they had been before the descent.
'This place affects our connection with the blessed Ether,' said Jarulek.
'It does,' replied Marduk. 'It is as though this place muffles it. I can still feel it, but it is distant, and faint.'
'It is an unholy place,' said Jarulek. 'What do you feel from your daemon-blade?'
'I feel… nothing,' said Marduk, placing his hand around the thorn-covered hilt of his chainsword. There was none of the tingling sensation that usually announced the essence of the daemon Borhg'ash merging with his own. There was no indication of its presence at all.
'It is as though the daemon has escaped its binding, but that is not possible.'
They continued their descent towards the slowly pulsing light below. After what seemed an age, they could discern a circular platform beneath them, though it was certainly not the bottom of the expanse. Marduk wondered if there truly was a base to this maddening place, or if it extended forever. Or perhaps if they continued down they would find themselves back where they had started.
Shaking his head, he concentrated upon the circular platform. It seemed that it was covered in silver waters that rippled with movement. As they descended, he realised that it was not liquid.
Thousands of tiny, crawling insect creatures swarmed away from the Word Bearers as they stepped down from the last of the maddening steps onto the slick, black, circular platform. The creatures scuttled away on metallic, barbed legs, making a sound like gentle ocean waves crashing, as their metallic carapaces scraped and millions of tiny metal legs scrambled for purchase. Their glistening carapaces were dark and the smallest of them was no larger than a grain of sand.
Marduk bent and grasped one of the larger, scuttling beetle creatures, lifting it up between his thumb and forefinger for closer inspection. Dozens of glowing green eyes were arrayed upon its segmented head and its wickedly barbed mandibles clicked as it tried vainly to bite him. Its eight-spiked legs kicked and pushed at him,
