Dark Apostle

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.

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 vox-blasters 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.