The Martyr's Tomb by Marc Collins

Author:Marc Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2023-05-22T14:04:42+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

the dead’s due

gifts from the god

as the heavens burn

Weryn watched another of the prophets, his brethren, collapse face down into the stinking mud and be trod underfoot. Seven had died now. Seven holy souls offered up to the hunger of the masters in the long march towards the walls. Even as the Titans had fought and died he had been there, watching, observing the losses forced upon the Children by the hateful enemy. Yet now the machines were dead and little lay between the cult and their prize.

He had not imagined that it would be like this – never once in his most fevered of dreams. It was to have been a joyous thing to be liberated; they would be spared the predations of uncaring institutions. They would reign at the right hand of the Grandfather. Looking down at the husk which had once been his friend and colleague, Weryn could scarcely visualise that promised paradise now. He reached down with a pale trembling hand and turned her body over.

Weryn gasped. The prophet had been reduced to a twisted husk – her skin blackened and shrunken, her eyes gone. Her limbs were broken, twisted at impossible angles by pure psychic spite. He looked up, through the ranks of advancing cultists and Astartes, and beheld the architect of woe.

Pustrus hung suspended in the air, thin strands of lightning connecting him to the ground. His pale and drawn skin writhed with internal motion as worms and maggots squirmed out of his wounds and dappled down his ruined armour and the robes of human skin which swaddled him. When the sorcerer turned his gaze towards Weryn it was hollow and hungry. He grinned emptily, tongue lolling around broken and stunted teeth.

‘You feel it, don’t you, little prophet? The pull of the Grandfather’s love?’

‘I feel…’ Weryn said breathily. ‘I feel weak.’

‘Because you are,’ Pustrus laughed. ‘You are all weak little things. Playthings to be used and discarded as we see fit. And you accept it because the god wills it, and because the Pilgrim has promised you salvation. So you grovel and beg, you plead and you expire. More mulch for the Garden. By your sacrifice is the veil weakened, by their deaths are the instruments of the god summoned, and by your labour shall the False Emperor’s temples of lies topple down to rubble.’

‘We’re just men,’ Weryn whimpered. His skin was crawling with the by-blow energy of Pustrus’ great working. He could feel his bones weakening beneath the sorcerer’s gaze as something coiled and uncoiled within his guts. If he looked away he would die, but if he continued to gaze upon the numinous being of rot and ruin then he knew he would vomit.

‘Just men…’ Pustrus tilted his head as he weighed the words. ‘Yes, yes you are. But in an age long lost to memory and myth the primarch came to us. He took those who were just men and he gave them purpose. He led them, but it was men who toppled the fortresses of the Overlords and gave hope to their fellows.

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