Still, the sensation of a second voice in his mind had become an entirely routine phenomenon over the years, a manifestation — he had long ago assumed — of his innermost instincts and desires. He recalled wondering briefly — years ago — whether everyone enjoyed the same inner monologue of lusts and ambitions, like a whispered mantra in their skulls, then decided quickly that he didn’t give a grox’s-arse what anyone else felt or thought. He was above that.
If the cartouche was of little practical use, then at the very least it had awoken within him an interest, a grim appeal to study and unravel the legend of Tarkh’ax which, through the years, manifested with burgeoning strength until he’d plundered every resource; collected a secret library of material including even a skin-bound copy of the Liber Maelignicus; opened paths of communication with black astropaths across the galaxy that left his own message-dispatching psykers gibbering and deranged; and made contact with every dubious cult and coven within the system. At some point academic interest became professional obsession, and without even recalling the moment that spiritual inertia had been overcome, he was plunging headlong towards realigning his worship and becoming deeply embroiled in the plan to release Tarkh’ax from his torment. The eldar, it transpired, had overestimated the morality of Dolumar’s eventual settlers.
He returned his mind to the present.
The cowled things to either side of him, twisted forms only vaguely suggested by the awkward shadows of their robes, continued their chanting without hiatus. If they were aware of his pause, or even of his presence, they gave no indication of it, heads bent downwards and voices thick with the effects of physical mutation. Each one stood upon a major apex of a seven-pointed star— the fifth extremity of which he himself occupied — surrounded by an ocean of inscriptions and runes on the floor.
Severus stared at each chanting shape in turn, silently offering veneration to every priest’s patron god. To be considered worthy of inclusion within the dark rites that would free Tarkh’ax was an honour above and beyond his expectations.
The representative of Old Grandfather Nurgle to his left, supplicating to its mouldering god of pestilence and decay, was a withered shape leaning heavily on a gnarled cane, dressed in tattered robes of bilious green and brown. Its voice was thick with moisture and clotted saliva and it paused frequently to cough, splattering a viscous red-black paste across the floor. Flies orbited the lugubrious figure in an orgy of decaying stinks.
To its side, resplendent in a patchwork robe of rainbow hues and glimmering jewels, a priest of Slaanesh gestured grandly and hissed in a reed-thin voice. Worship of the hedonist god of pleasure and pain quickly aroused a sense of numbness in his followers, exposure to the vilest and most raucous of experiences deadening the senses to all but the most riotous of gratifications. Thus the Slaanesh priest dressed in a melange of clashing hues and bright-edge patterns, dragging knives across its exposed arms every few moments in an attempt to feel, groaning in ecstasy at every dimly experienced moment of discomfort.
At the next point of the star was a bulky priest of the Blood God, Khorne. Draped in butcher’s robes of black leather and studded chains, waving a polished cleaver with every sorcerous gesticulation, the gravel-voiced figure created an impression of raging impatience, as if the very idea of spell-chanting was a tedious impediment to the far more rewarding pursuit of carnage and blood spilling. Given the semi-cleaved heads and limbs it had carefully arranged around itself, Severus guessed it was more than adept at both.
And finally, to his immediate right, a sorcerer-devotee of Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways, spread-eagled its limbs and glowed with power. Besides the mirrorglass mask concealing its facial features, not one part of the figure’s form was permanent. Its fingers writhed and melted together, forming claws and blades and osmotic leech-mouths; its arms boiled with under-skin turbulence, a shifting landscape of scales and hair and suckers and spines; its legs churned with polymorphic fluidity from state to state and its voice was a transient chorus of tones: soft becoming hard, rasp becoming trill. Everything about it characterised constant unending change. As befitted Tarkh’ax’s status as a child of Tzeentch, the sorcerer-priest occupied the central apex of the star, channelling energy zealously.
Together, the four heretic-priests (surrounded to various degrees by acolytes and familiars and items of power) wove an energy web of fluctuating colours and sounds — a boiling lance of power to shatter apart the daemonlord’s imprisonment and unleash him at last upon reality.
Severus glanced at his wrist piece and smiled.
“...forty minutes...”
The last two points upon the star, minor vertices to be sure, but more than enough for his purposes, were occupied by his prisoners. Secured with wrist-constricting chains to immovable stanchions, Fleet-Admiral Constantine and Aun’el T’au Ko’vash were the unwitting conduits of horrific energies. A pale violet corona surrounded each one, unnatural flames coruscating across their bodies. Constantine’s voice had given out a little over ten minutes ago, warp-be-praised; his screams and curses were growing tiresome. By now, Severus was pleased to note, his very flesh was beginning to shift, mutations bubbling through his body like clots of blood hulking painfully along veins and arteries, eyes rolled back into his head.
Coming along nicely, he thought.
The tau, by comparison, was an entirely disappointing subject. Around his skull the energies seemed to boil and flex, hunting impotently for some foothold of emotion or excess with which to work. Impervious to psychic persuasion, a living embodiment of focus and calm, the ethereal was proving to be a very difficult creature to corrupt. Severus rather suspected that, when he arrived, Tarkh’ax would deem the tau race unworthy of Chaos’s more insidious attentions and choose to obliterate them instead.
He shrugged mentally. At least he’d tried. Glancing at the clock again with growing impatience, Severus took a breath and resumed the sonorous chant that would, as night fell across the pit’s entrance far, far above, release his new lord and master.
The land speeder hacked and coughed its way through the industrial quarter of Lettica, its dented prow trailing a long beard of black-purple smoke, dipping every few moments to grate noisily against the street before lurching upright again.
For Captain Ardias, accustomed to the clipped Codex-standard precision of Ultramarine behaviour, it was hardly a dignified mode of transport. Passing through hotly contested zones of violence — human and tau bodies mingling with those of Chaos warriors, gunfire and grenade blossoms marking every street corner — he grimly attributed the lack of pernicious fire aimed at him to the astonished amusement with which enemies and allies alike regarded him as he passed.
Like them, he considered the continued functioning of the land speeder something of a minor miracle, and hissed thankful prayers to Guilliman, the Emperor and whatever unknown techmarine had originally built the chassis. Despite the dents, sparks, smoke-belching fissures and various red-blinking warning icons, received at the ungentle end of the enormous bomb blast, the hovering contrivance delivered him safely to the shadow of the district’s central hangar with no more damage than a thumping headache and a wounded sense of pride. He was in no mood for tolerating xeno-contact when he arrived.
The blood-caked tau with the dented helmet, unexploded bolter shell still lurking within, watched him approach along the street with arms crossed, a healthy distance between his slouched position and the vast hangar.