The Tallyman
Anthony Reynolds


 	The bridge of the Infidus Diabolus was silent. Nothing moved within its crowded, claustrophobic confines. The servitors hard-wired into the controls and consoles were dormant, their eyes – those of them that still had them – blank and staring. Drool dripped in long ropes from gormless, grey lips.

 	Long shadows stretched across the lifeless bridge. The lumen strips overhead were uniformly dark, and even the dull green glow of data-screens were absent. Every monitor was blank. The only light on the bridge came from the unearthly ochre-tinged sky beyond the occulus.

 	On one of the consoles, a small blister-light began to flash red. A legless servitor, suspended from the ceiling by a mass of ribbed cables, shuddered and convulsed. Its cataract-ridden eyes rolled back into its head.

 	It had no mouth to speak of – its lower jaw was missing, and a mass of tubes and wires protruded from its throat, coiling up into the ceiling – but the vocabulator box upon its chest crackled with distortion as it awoke from dormancy.

 	‘Locator beacon activated,’ it croaked. It was an ugly sound, dry and rasping, though still recognisably human in origin. 

 	‘Locator beacon activated,’ it repeated, speaking into the silence, speaking to no one. 

 	‘Locator beacon activated. Locator beacon activated.’

 	Marduk, Dark Apostle of the 34th Host, knelt in prayer to the Dwellers Beyond, seeking guidance, when he felt her presence nearby. He rose from the depths of his meditations, bringing his spirit-form back from its rangings. There was the familiar jolt as his hell-promised soul became anchored within his flesh body once more, meshing into every fibre of its being. 

 	Reality asserted itself. He felt the pull of the ship’s artificial gravity upon him, the beat of his primary heart within his chest. He breathed deeply, taking the blood-incense deep into his lungs. Behind the cloying, aromatic smoke, there was the scent of exotic spices, crushed wildflowers and moist soil. Behind that was the stink of the warp, an electric tang that he could taste on his tongue.

 	‘Hello, Antigane,’ he said. There was no answer. He’d not been expecting one.

 	He opened his eyes. One was the dark mahogany common amongst those born of Colchis. The other was a burning red orb, the pupil a jagged black sliver.

 	He knelt before his personal shrine, jutting off his cell and arming chamber. An ancient eight-pointed octed taken from Davin was before him, its rough stone surface stained black by the blood of sacrifices.

 	She was close. The smell of wildflowers and spices had grown stronger, and his skin was now tingling, as if the air was charged. There was an uncomfortable scratching in the back of his mind. A drop of bright red blood splashed onto the flagstones before him. He reached up and wiped the blood from his nose. It was always this way with her.

 	Still kneeling, he turned.

 	She was standing there in the shadow of the arched entrance to his shrine, utterly motionless. At a glance, one might have mistaken her for a child. She stepped from the shadow and that illusion was shattered, for while she inhabited the body of a child of perhaps four years of age, she was something distinctly other.

 	Her cowled face was a shuddering blur, like the screen of a wildly shaking, faulty pict-viewer. Even to try to focus on her features made his head begin to throb. The scratching in his head intensified.

 	Marduk did not ask how she had entered his sealed chambers, nor how she had escaped her cell once again. It seemed it was impossible to hold her.

 	‘Was there something you wanted, little augur?’ Marduk said, not even attempting to keep his irritation from his voice. 

 	The Infidus Diabolus had been marooned here above this daemon world on account of Antigane – or rather, on account of Marduk having stolen her from her previous caretaker, the Death Guard captain Nargalex – and he was beginning to wonder if taking her had been wise.

 	He had not expected her to answer, but she did, speaking directly into his mind with the voice of all the augurs that had come before her. The force of her pulsed into his mind, staggering him and turning the blood dripping from his nose into a torrent. 

 	The Tallyman calls.

 	‘Are you well, my lord?’ asked Sabtec. The warrior’s cold eyes were narrowed. 

 	‘I’m fine,’ said Marduk. ‘Who is it?’

 	They stood on the darkened bridge, before one of the cogitators that he had brought back to power. A blip on the screen blinked insistently.

 	‘I don’t know,’ Sabtec said. ‘Everyone is accounted for. But there is also this.’

 	Sabtec tapped a series of commands onto a console screen, and a snippet of a vox message began to play. It was a garbled mess of sounds infused with static. Amidst it all was a buzzing drone, like a swarm of insects, a scratching sound and a distant, mournful bell. But behind all of that, there was something else…

 	‘Repeat that,’ said Marduk.

 	They replayed the snippet again, applying a series of aural-scrubs to eliminate some of the background slush. Now, a single voice could be heard in the midst of the intruding sounds.

 	‘…taken. Nahren is dyi… done… Epidem… no… don’t, don’t…’

 	Both Marduk and Sabtec recognised that voice instantly, though they could make no sense of the fragments of his speech.

 	‘Enusat,’ said Marduk.

 	Sabtec and his 13th Coterie had been chosen to accompany Marduk to the surface of the foetid jungle world. How it was possible for the First Acolyte of the Host to be down there the gods only knew – he’d been lost aboard the Vox Dominus before the Infidus Diabolus had been pulled into this noxious hell-dimension – but it was undeniable that it had been his voice on the vox, and the Legion locator beacon was blinking insistently upon the screen of the auspex built into Sabtec’s heavily modified bolter.

 	‘How is the Coryphaus?’ asked Sabtec.

 	‘Getting worse,’ said Marduk. Kol Badar had been pierced by a blade wielded by the Death Guard Nargalex, and his condition had rapidly deteriorated in the days since.

 	Sabtec nodded his head gravely. ‘And the witch?’

 	‘I have sealed her within her cell and set a dozen guards, for all the good it will do,’ said Marduk. ‘Are your men ready?’

 	‘They are,’ said Sabtec.

 	‘Let’s do this,’ said Marduk.

 	The Invisus shot from the belly of the Infidus Diabolus, engines roaring as the snub-nosed shuttle flew out into the yellow, poisonous atmosphere beyond the embarkation deck’s integrity field.

 	Scores of ships of various size and origin hung in low orbit out there, listing like drowned corpses. They were lifeless, those vessels, and all in various states of decay. Some were Imperial, while others were clearly xenos in origin. For others it was impossible to say, so overgrown were they, covered in fungal growths and thick lichen and vines that hung down hundreds of metres from their hulls. Reaching tendrils lifted up towards them from the decaying jungles below. Some battlecruisers and cargo ships had already been ensnared from below, becoming one with the rotting canopy.

 	‘Where in the name of the Urizen are we?’ asked Sabtec. Marduk had his suspicions, but did not voice them. Not yet.

 	The Invests began angling down, towards the surface of the daemon world, closing in on the Legion locator beacon. It dropped through titanic ravines, through a miasma of acidic gas-clouds, past immense trees bleeding blood-sap from wasted boughs, down, down, down towards the darkness of the forest floor.

 	On Sabtec’s order, the daemon-infused shuttle did not touch down for fear of being unable to lift off once more. It hovered some ten metres off the forest floor, held aloft by the down-thrust of its powerful engines, the pilot wary of the sticky-fronds of vast carnivorous plants unfurling towards it. It was far enough. The Word Bearers dropped the rest of the way, each of them landing in a crouch.

 	Marduk landed last, crashing down to the earth within a protective circle formed by Sabtec’s 13th. He landed in low hunch, balancing himself with one hand to the wet groundcover. In his other hand he held his crozius arcanum, his massive, spike-headed mace and the symbol of his holy office. He stared around him from behind the grimacing visage of his skull-faced helm, his armour completely sealed against whatever toxins plagued the air outside. The Invisus lifted away, engines screaming, veering off over the canopy and disappearing from view.

 	It was unnaturally hot, and rivulets of water ran down the Word Bearers armour plates. Swarms of insects clouded the air, many of them bloated to the size of a man’s head, with glossy-sheened wings and reflective compound eyes. The wet, spongy mulch underfoot writhed with worms and beetles. Bigger things crashed through the branches overhead, sending down flurries of rot, soil, and maggots. The Word Bearers scanned the undergrowth, bolters tracking for potential threats.

 	‘How close are we?’ asked Marduk.

 	‘Hard to say,’ said Sabtec. ‘The atmospherics are playing havoc with my auspex. But not far. Perhaps an hour.’

 	It was longer. 

 	It felt like they’d been cutting their way through the foul, rotting jungle for weeks, but it could only have been hours. At times the undergrowth was so thick they had to burn a path with the squad’s flamer. They’d lost vox-contact with the Infidus Diabolus, but continued on, honing in on the blinking beacon.

 	Finally, they were close.

 	They scrambled up an overgrown incline and half-climbed, half-dropped down through a collapsed dome that might once have been the apex of a temple but had long been claimed by the fecund, rotting jungle. 

 	They took up position, crouching behind overgrown stone balustrades. The 13th were exceptionally well-drilled, instantly securing a perimeter, covering all angles of approach.

 	Below them, in the hollow of what might have been the temple’s nave, a creature that was not human worked.

 	It was a repulsive, bloated thing of dead, rotting flesh. Its skin was the colour of a month-old corpse left to rot in water. A single curved horn protruded from its forehead. Its arms and legs were spindly and wasted, but its belly was disproportionally distended. In places, its dead flesh was torn, exposing diseased muscle, bone and organs.

 	It was hunched over a rotting writing table made from bones, worm-riddled wood and twisted branches. Its bulbous head was down as it concentrated on its work, scratching at a huge book opened before. Periodically, it dipped its twisted stick of a pen into a black inkwell filled with squirming things. It muttered under its breath as it worked, a deeply sepulchral and completely unintelligible, monotonous drone. It sounded as if it were counting.

 	‘The Tallyman…’ breathed Marduk.

 	Great piles of books bound in leather formed teetering pillars around the daemon, each pile slowly being subsumed into the earth. Pale fungal growths clung like limpets to them, and even from here, Marduk could see the insects and worms writhing within the bound pages.

 	Beside the daemon was a large abacus, taller than one of the Legiones Astartes. In place of counting beads there were skulls. Marduk recognised human, eldar and ork skulls. A few of the others were less familiar. Every few breaths, the daemon reached out with a spindly, cancer-ridden arm and clicked those skulls along the rods that impaled them before turning back to his work. 

 	Sabtec pointed. Marduk nodded, his expression within his skull-helm darkening. There was a helmet of the XVII Legion upon the abacus, acting as one of the counting pieces.

 	Nearby was a twisted hourglass. While the sand was clearly falling, it did not appear to empty the top half, nor ever fill the base.

 	It took a moment to realise the Tallyman was not alone. The ground around the feet of the daemon’s desk and scabrous chair was undulating with movement. At first Marduk thought that he sat in the centre of a befouled pond rippling with whatever things lived below the surface, but he saw now that he was mistaken.

 	Surrounding the Tallyman were hundreds of tiny, waddling daemons, bloated pustules the size of a man’s head, each with tiny arms and legs, oversized mouths, and twisted branch-like horns. They shifted and struggled against each other, trying to get close to the Tallyman, pushing and pulling at their comrades. They were completely silent, however, as if unwilling to disturb his work. For its part, the Tallyman appeared completely oblivious to the tiny, fighting daemons.

 	Sabtec presented the screen of his auspex to Marduk. It showed the blinking red light of the locator beacon. They were right on top of it.

 	All that could be heard from below was the scritch-scratch of the daemon’s nib on parchment, the creak and groan of the rotten trees pressing in upon the crumbling temple, and the low muttering of the Tallyman.

 	Sabtec lifted his bolter, customised for long-range sniping. He locked his sight’s targeter upon the hunched daemon, aiming at the base of its skull.

 	‘No,’ said Marduk. ‘We are in a place holy to the Plague Father. Possibly the Garden of Nurgle itself. It would not be wise to raise his ire.’

 	‘The Garden of Nurgle?’ Sabtec breathed, lowering his weapon.

 	‘I believe so,’ said Marduk.

 	A dull moan issued up from an unseen place below. It was a groan of unutterable pain and torment, and it was most assuredly of human origin. The Tallyman paused, glancing up at something out of the Word Bearer’s eyeshot, something located underneath the overhanging lip on which they crouched. The daemon tutted, before turning back to its work.

 	Without a word, the Word Bearers inched their way around the edge of the dome, until they were granted a view of what had made that pitiful sound.

 	Marduk had been expecting Enusat, and while it was a Word Bearer – or rather it had once been a Word Bearer – it was not his First Acolyte.

 	He was strung up on a wooden frame, his arms and legs outstretched. His limbs were still encased in deep red plate, each section incised with holy scripture, but his body and head were bare. The power armour had been peeled off him like the shell of a beetle.

 	That exposed flesh was foully bloated and disease-ridden, bulging with tumours and cancerous growths to such a degree that he looked barely human. His neck was swollen, one of the glands in his throat having expanded to such an extent that it looked akin to the repulsive daemons cavorting around the base of the wooden frame upon which he was pinned. His face was a misshapen ruin, his eyes swollen and leaking milky fluid, his lips blackened with plague, his swollen, mucous-lined tongue lolling from his mouth. 

 	But that was not the worst that had been done to him. He’d been opened from neck to belly, his fused ribcage splayed back like cage doors and his skin and flesh pinned back onto the wooden support-frame, exposing his inner organs. Both his primary and secondary heart were on display, beating fast.

 	His internal organs were disease-ridden and blotchy, with lumpen growths within them, their surface slick with filth.

 	Things were crawling inside his chest and stomach cavity, nestled amongst his organs – worms, larvae, beetles and at least three of the repulsive, pustule-like daemons. Flies surrounded him, laying more eggs in his exposed flesh.

 	It was Narhen, the Dark Apostle of the Third Host. How he was alive was beyond understanding.

 	‘What do we do?’ asked Sabtec.

 	‘There’s nothing to be done for him,’ said Marduk. ‘He belongs to the Grandfather now. We go.’

 	Using hand signals, Sabtec ordered his warriors to pull back.

 	‘Wait,’ said Marduk. He pointed towards a mound next to Nahren, squirming with diminutive plague daemons. ‘What is that?’

 	Sabtec sighted along his scope for a long moment, before lowering it.

 	‘That,’ said Sabtec, ‘is First Acolyte Enusat.’

 	Marduk walked towards the hunched figure of the Tallyman. The 13th had dropped down to the ground floor of the templum with him, and they fanned out around him now, bolters raised, aiming at the daemon. It had not yet noticed them, intent on its work.

 	The tiny daemons around the Tallyman spotted them first. One of them pointed with a tiny, stick-like arm and let loose a piercing squawk. The Tallyman’s pen slipped, a blot of ink spurting from the nib, and it looked up in displeasure. More of the tiny plague daemons were screeching now, scrambling back away from the approach of the Word Bearers.

 	The Tallyman turned towards them, and Marduk saw its face for the first time.

 	It was repulsive. It had no nose, merely a pair of filth-clogged slits, and a singular, misshapen eye, weeping pus and with flies clustered at its corners, peered at them from beneath the curving horn jutting from its forehead. Its wide gash of a mouth gaped open as it saw them, exposing a graveyard of rotting tusks and chisel-like teeth. Worms writhed in its throat.

 	Its eye widened and it spluttered and choked in outrage at its work being interrupted by these interlopers. 

 	Behind it, Dark Apostle Nahren’s bleary, infected eyes turned towards them. He tried to speak, but nothing came forth except a low moan. At his feet, the sea of tiny daemons swarmed protectively towards the Tallyman. They tumbled off the mound that was Enusat, exposing him to view. He was on his knees, his arms bound behind his back. His armour was pitted and blistered, his joints and exposed cabling covered in rust and verdigris. He wore his helm still, and lifted his head, seeing Marduk and the 13th. He tried to rise, but fell sidewards.

 	The tiny plague daemons swarmed around their master, jabbering and spitting at the approaching Word Bearers. They clambered over one another, pushing and shoving, forming a living carpet of foulness around it. They continued to pile in, grabbing its chair with tiny filth-encrusted claws and lifting it above their combined bulk.

 	Holding the Tallyman aloft, the mound of tiny daemons rolled forwards. The Word Bearers came to a halt, the Tallyman looming above them, held unsteadily above the mass of daemons. 

 	‘Why do you interrupt my work, mortal?’ asked the Tallyman, its corpse-voice deep and droning. If a cadaver could speak, this was the sound it would make. It was the voice of death itself.

 	‘Mortal, mortal,’ the tiny daemons holding the makeshift palanquin intoned, speaking as one.

 	Marduk bowed his head in respect. ‘I come to bargain for the life of that warrior, old one,’ he said, gesturing towards his First Acolyte, Enusat.

 	‘You are a dead thing walking, pledged to another,’ said the Tallyman. 

 	Another, another.

 	‘You have nothing to offer me,’ said the daemon. 

 	Nothing, nothing.

 	Marduk was momentarily wrong-footed.

 	‘Pledged to…’ he said. ‘I do not know what you mean.’

 	‘Begone! I have spoken, and so it shall be. I must return to my work.’

 	Begone, begone!

 	With that, the Tallyman turned away, borne aloft upon its rolling heap of daemons.

 	‘Halt!’ bellowed Marduk, infusing his voice with the power of the warp. ‘Do not turn your back to me, daemon!’

 	The Tallyman glanced back.

 	‘You have no power over me, dead-thing,’ it said. ‘Not here. Not in the Garden. Away. I am done conversing with you.’

 	Marduk snarled and drew his bolt pistol, levelling it at the back of the Tallyman’s head.

 	‘I thought you said not to anger them?’ said Sabtec in a low voice.

 	In answer, Marduk squeezed the trigger.

 	The bolt hit the Tallyman square in the back of its malformed skull. The detonation blew out the front of its face in an explosion of blood, pus and rotten bone. The shot hurled the Tallyman from its chair, as if it had been yanked away from the Dark Apostle by an invisible cable. The tiny daemons screamed in anguish and outrage.

 	‘Go!’ shouted Marduk. ‘Get Enusat.’

 	The 13th broke into a run, angling for the First Acolyte. One of them squeezed off a burst of burning promethium into the apoplectic mass of tiny toad-like daemons, which screamed and wailed as they erupted, sizzling and popping. The warrior sprayed the line of flame left and right, consuming them.

 	Still, there were thousands more, and they rolled and waddled towards the Word Bearers, tiny eyes lit with maliciousness and hatred. One of the 13th was borne to the ground by their sheer weight of numbers, disappearing instantly beneath a wave of biting and clawing daemons.

 	The 13th’s bolters were coughing death, and their blades were wet with slime and filth as they carved a path towards the First Acolyte. Marduk struck one of the ball-like creatures with his crozius, sending it flying, its putrid flesh blackened by the sharp discharge of energy.

 	The Tallyman was not done, however. It pushed itself up from the ground. Its face was a ruin, a gaping crater of blood, mucous and filth, but still it rose, just as one of the 13th ran past. It grabbed the warrior by the helmet, lifting it off its feet. A jagged blade dripping with corruption formed in its other hand, coalescing into existence from a mass of repulsive flies. It rammed the blade through the Word Bearer’s body. The Tallyman lifted him high into the air, then hurled him away. By the time he landed he was already dead, his body transformed into a shrunken, diseased husk.

 	Marduk pumped three shots into the Tallyman, turning to fire upon him as he ran by. The bolts detonated in its rotten flesh, blowing great rents in its body, but doing nothing to slow it.

 	Sabtec was the first to Enusat’s side. With the crackling blade of his sword, he cut away the bindings holding the First Acolyte’s arms and legs. He helped him to his feet, rusted armour groaning in protest.

 	Marduk stared up at the pitiful figure of Nahren, crucified upon the rotting wooden framework.

 	‘Kill… me…’ the Dark Apostle moaned.

 	A dull, sonorous bell began to toll. Deep bellows and the sound of huge things crashing through the trees beyond the temple followed.

 	‘We have to go!’ shouted Sabtec.

 	The Tallyman was closing in, wading steadily through the heavy weight of fire the 13th were pumping into it. Nothing would slow its implacable advance.

 	‘We have to go now!’ said Sabtec.

 	Marduk nodded. Another of the 13th had joined Sabtec, supporting Enusat between them. The flamer washed over the daemons once more, keeping the tiny ones back. Nahren’s eyes followed the Word Bearers as they left him.

 	At the arched entry to the temple, Marduk turned back, taking Sabtec’s long-ranged bolter from him. He pressed the stock of the bolter to his shoulder, aiming carefully. He fired just one shot. Nahren’s head disappeared in a red mist, ending his torment. The Tallyman bellowed in fury.

 	‘Marduk,’ said Sabtec.

 	The Dark Apostle turned.

 	Huge daemons the size of buildings were emerging from the jungle, uprooting trees in their path as they came to answer the Tallyman’s doling bell. They were foul things, immense versions of the tiny daemons that had infested the inside of the templum. More tallymen – scores of them – appeared around these behemoths, staggering towards the stairs atop which the Word Bearers found themselves. These daemons dragged blades dripping with poison behind them, and their lipless mouths snarled up at them in hatred.

 	But that was not what Sabtec was drawing his attention to.

 	Outside the arch, standing atop the mouldering stone stairs, stood Antigane.

 	She reached out to Marduk with one of her tiny, child’s hands.

 	Come with me.

 	There was no other option. The daemons were all around, and closing in.

 	Marduk took the augur’s hand.

 	Everything changed.

 	There was a wrenching sense of dislocation, a blinding light, and then they no longer stood upon a daemon world beneath a putrid, yellow sky. They were no longer within the Garden of Nurgle.

 	They stood now upon an irradiated wasteland, a shattered world of ruin and dust. A dying sun, flickering blue and purple, burnt in the heavens overhead.

 	A ghost of a smile curled at Marduk’s lips. He knew this place. He’d been here before.

 	‘Where are we?’ asked Sabtec.

 	‘This,’ said Marduk ‘is Calth.’