Death Speakers

Andy Smillie

Darkness greeted Chaplain Agrata as he entered the reclusiam. As was tradition, the lumo-candles and electro-braziers had been extinguished. There could be no light until the truth was illuminated by the Recountance. Chaplain Devak and Chaplain Karan awaited him at the far end of the chamber, the dark gunmetal of their armour conspiring with the shadows to render them almost invisible. Only the red glow of their optics gave away their position on the pulpit.

Agrata’s armoured boots echoed on the cobbled floor as he joined them.

‘You’re late.’ Devak was the eldest of the trifecta. Age had torn any trace of humanity from his voice.

‘I was consecrating my blade.’ Out of respect, Agrata kept his annoyance from his tone. There was no formal hierarchy within the Death Speakers. There were three, and always three. Each was as important as the other. Yet it was hard not to feel a measure of deference to Devak.

‘Are you prepared?’ asked Karan, his voice laden with feral power, like a mighty tide crashing against the rock-face.

‘I am.’

‘Then let us begin.’

At Devak’s instruction the three Chaplains reached into the bronzed vessel positioned on the lectern, sifting through the ashen remains of Sixth Company’s fallen to retrieve a lumo-candle.

‘Honoured dead.’ Devak began the Recountance, twisting the base of his candle so that the tip sparked into flame.

‘Your deeds will be tallied,’ continued Karan, lighting his candle.

Agrata lit his candle and finished the catechism. ‘Your name remembered.’ Coiling the chain of his rosarius around his hand, Agrata clenched his fist. ‘It is my sadness, and my honour, to begin the recounting of Brother-Captain Jahnu Marut, warlord of the Sixth Company, mortally wounded in the Sargassion Reach battling the forces of Empyrion’s Blight, the plague sons of the Archenemy.’

Agrata paused. He had recounted the deeds of the Executioners’ fallen for almost a century. He had spoken the truths of hundreds of the Chapter’s heroes who had been claimed by battle. But until now, he had never spoken the history of a warrior who had yet to die.

‘Captain Koryn will extract us once our mission is complete.’ Marut had to shout to be heard over the roaring of the drop pod as it thrust them towards Belvasa’s surface.

‘And if the Ravens cannot reach us?’ Sergeant Rudra was harnessed to Marut’s right, an ornate power axe held across his lap.

‘Then our names shall be remembered.’ Marut grinned, though his face held no humour.

Rudra’s reply was lost to a cacophony of noise as the drop pod crashed through the domed ceiling of Belvasa’s central palace. A heartbeat later, its ferrite petals slammed to the ground, disgorging the Executioners attack force into the palace. Marut was first out, spitting a raft of curses, the long braids of his hair whipping free as he tore his twin axes through the bodies of the foe.

‘Their heads or your lives. For the Emperor, kill them all!’ Marut bellowed Sixth Company’s battle cry and charged onwards, bisecting a hulking mutant from groin to shoulder as he powered across the hallway.

The palace had once been the jewel of the sector, a multifaceted building constructed to showcase the wealth of Belvasa’s ruling classes. Now, it was a blight construct, a diseased architecture that dripped with ichor and poison. Pillars of pustules sprouted from the marble floor, which pulsed underfoot with thick veins of translucent flesh.

Lebbeous Sacar sat atop a throne of gibbering wretches, fleshy meat-sacs that had once been human, bent double by Nurgle’s touch.

‘Trespassers!’ Lebbeous’s voice was like warm treacle as it bubbled from his throat. Steaming ichor dripped from his mucous-riven maw, dissolving portions of his bulbous torso. Corroded armour fragments studded the fold of his bloated carcass. Buried under a web of taut flesh, a shorn pauldron still displayed the livery of the Death Guard.

Flanked by Rudra and his assault squad, Marut hacked his way up a set of gore-slicked stairs towards Lebbeous, his twin axes bathing him in putrid filth as he carved apart the Death Guard’s warriors.

‘Lebbeous Sacar, I have come for your head,’ Marut growled as he closed on his prey.

Lebbeous gurgled in laughter, sending a wash of viscous fluid spilling from his lungs to dissolve a pair of his hunched attendants. ‘An irony, then, that I shall take yours, Space Marine.’ The Death Guard rose from his flesh-throne, convulsing as a stream of bile erupted from his mouth to engulf the Executioners.

Marut pulled one of the larger mutants to him, sheltering behind its bulbous form. To his right, Brothers Chaten and Datta died as the corrosive expellant ate through the ceramite of their armour and liquefied their flesh.

‘Rudra, guard my rear. His head is mine.’ Marut dropped the dissolving mutant and charged Lebbeous.

The Death Guard met Marut’s axes with two blades of sharpened bone that erupted from the meat of his forearms.

Marut snarled as Lebbeous turned aside blow after blow. The Death Guard was faster than he had any right to be. Marut could feel himself slowing, his arms tiring as the fog of pestilence surrounding around Lebbeous leeched the vitality from his bones. He did not have long. Roaring in frustration, Marut sacrificed his defence to shear off Lebbeous’s right forearm and bury an axe in the meat of the opposite shoulder. If the wounds troubled Lebbeous, it didn’t show.

The Executioner winced, stifling a cry as one of the bone blades drove through his armour and up into his ribs. Letting go of his weapons, Marut grabbed hold of one of the armour segments lodged in Lebbeous’s chest. Feeling his primary heart beat its last, Marut pulled himself onto the bone blade, impaling himself further until his face was a hand’s span from Lebbeous’s. He had to fight to stay conscious as the Death Guard’s noxious breath permeated his skin. A foetid stench of rank copper and decay ruined Marut’s olfactory senses and forced blood to run from his nostrils.

‘Your head or my life.’ Marut drew a length of monomolecular wire from his vambrace and looped it over Lebbeous’s head, ripping it through the Death Guard’s neck and beheading him.

‘Brother-Captain Jahnu Marut, warlord of Sixth Company, mortally wounded on Belvasa,’ Agrata concluded.

‘Captain Koryn of the Raven Guard pledges oath to this account,’ said Karan.

‘Then this Recountal shall be recorded as truth,’ Devak finished, placing his palm over each of the candles in turn, extinguishing them.

Darkness held sway for a moment before the vaulted reclusiam doors ground open, bathing the chamber in the harsh light from the Castagion’s bridge. A single unarmoured figure stepped over the threshold and knelt.

‘I have come to die, Death Speakers.’

Captain Marut’s voice rumbled into the chamber, resounding like thunder against the vaulted walls as the doors closed behind him.

‘Illuminate.’ Agrata snapped the command and strode towards the captain. Above him, a flock of psyber-cherubs drifted from the chamber’s rafters to light the central brazier. A ghoulish union of stillborn infant and dark technology, the cherubs acted as attendants to the Death Speakers. Any beauty the babes had once possessed was overshadowed by the distended, obsidian skulls that sat between their shoulders in tribute to the skull helms worn by their masters, and the eerie clicking of the mechanical wings that kept them aloft.

Agrata stopped an arm’s length from Marut. The captain was badly wounded, the right side of his torso marred by a dark, pulsating bruise that spread from his ribs up across his shoulder and face. His left arm hung limply by his side and his eyes were pools of cancerous yellow.

Agrata growled, appalled by the stench of the sickness wasting Marut. He could almost taste the disease ruining his captain’s innards. The Death Speaker drew his crozius, flicking its activation stud to send a flicker of charge arcing along its axehead. Agrata raised the weapon and hesitated.

‘If you do not kill me,’ said Marut, ‘Chandak or Prasad will. They will challenge me for leadership of the company, and I will lose.’

‘That is the way of things, captain,’ said Agrata. ‘Perhaps it would be for the best.’

‘They are not ready,’ Marut snarled. His eyes blazed with a strength that belied the weakness of his body. ‘The Headhunters will not find glory under their charge.’

‘An axe cannot kill if there is no one to wield it.’

‘You three. You Death Speakers shall lead until another proves themselves worthy.’

‘Our duty is to–’

‘Do not lecture me on duty, Chaplain. I did not come here for a sermon. Do as I command and kill me.’ Saliva flecked Marut’s mouth as he got to his feet. ‘Do it. Kill m–’

Agrata sliced his crozius through Marut’s neck, pivoting with the stroke so that he heard, rather than saw, the captain’s decapitated body slump to the floor.

Sheathing his weapon, Agrata turned to look down on Marut’s corpse. He stood a moment, feeling his chest rise and fall, calming his hearts as they beat in protest against the weight of his actions.

‘The Emperor calls, my axe obeys.’

Whispering the rite of execution, Agrata retrieved a vial of incendiary from a recess in his thigh and smashed it over the captain’s remains, watching as the white flame scoured away his warlord. Stooping low, the Death Speaker scooped up a handful of Marut’s ashes.

‘Honoured dead. Your deeds have been tallied, your name remembered.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hailing from Glasgow, Andy Smillie is best known for his visceral Flesh Tearers novellas, Beneath the Flesh and Flesh of Cretacia. He also has written a host of short stories starring this brutal Chapter of Space Marines and a number of audio dramas including Deathwolf and From the Blood.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

© Games Workshop Limited 2013. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy logo, The Horus Heresy eye device, Space Marine Battles, the Space Marine Battles logo, Warhammer 40,000, the Warhammer 40,000 logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated brands, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer 40,000 universe are either ®, ™ and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2000-2013, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world.
All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78251-140-3

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at

blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at

www.games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 You attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.