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Kol Badar watched as the Dark Apostle and the First Acolyte descended the stairs. The panels of the gateway slid aside soundlessly and the pair of Word Bearers stepped inside, disappearing into the inky blackness as if consumed. The panels flicked back into place. There was no way of following them now, he thought. He just had to wait and hold off these forsaken corpse-machines long enough for him to be able to kill Marduk.

He rejoined his warriors, racking the underslung mechanism that activated the meltagun attached to his bolter.

'They are gone, Coryphaus?' asked Burias as he fired his bolt pistol into the head of an enemy, knocking it back a step.

'They are, Icon Bearer. The fate of the Host hangs in the balance.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The panels slid shut behind them, cutting off all noise of the raging battle, and they stood in absolute darkness. Not a sound pierced the pitch-black night that descended on them. The silence was heavy, claustrophobic and dense. Marduk was utterly blind. Never before had he experienced such all-encompassing darkness.

He felt lost, adrift, his connection to the warp severed, and he panicked for a moment as his head reeled as if with vertigo, though it was impossible for him to experience such a sensation.

Marduk wobbled, though his senses came back to him in an instant, and his faculties returned. He saw a dim light, though perhaps it had only just begun to shine. It reached out towards them from below, a slowly pulsing beam.

He looked at Jarulek beside him, whose face showed tension and wariness.

'It felt as though we just travelled an infinite distance in the blink of an eye,' said Marduk quietly, unwilling to break the oppressive silence. The gateway they had come through was sealed shut, though the sun icon emblazoned upon it glowed dimly with light. He pushed against it, but it would not budge. As the pulsing light increased, he saw that the black stone wall in which the gateway was positioned rose impossibly high above them. They stood on a bridge of black stone that seemed to hang in the air. There were sheer drops to either side, and it was joined by dozens of black staircases. These in turn were linked to other bridges, gantries and platforms, all formed of black stone and all hanging in the air without any clear support. 'This place is insane,' he hissed. 'It is madness.' Marduk had encountered many landscapes and worlds that most would consider maddening within the warp, where the rules of the physical world held no sway, but here he felt no touch of Chaos. Far from it, this place felt like it actively kept Chaos out. It was sterile and lifeless, devoid of any touch of the warp.

'Is it some trick of the Changer?' asked Marduk, speaking of Tzeentch, the lord of the twisting fates and one of the greater gods of the Ether. He knew as he spoke that it was not, for even the great Changer of the Ways would surely be unable to create such a place, so cut off from the essence of magic.

'Far from it, First Acolyte,' said Jarulek. 'This is the antithesis of the Great Changer and indeed of all of Chaos.'

'And what you seek is here, in this place? It would seem that anything here would be better destroyed than utilised.'

'Much can be tainted and changed by Chaos, Marduk. Turning an enemy's weapons against them is the greatest strength that we have.'

'And you have foreseen this place in your dream visions?'

'This place, no. It has always been hidden from my sight. I foresaw our entrance through the gateway, but never what transposed beyond it, only what occurs afterwards.'

'You have seen our return from this place?'

'Sometimes. The future is fickle and unclear. In some twists of what may come to pass we return with our prize. In others, we do not and the Anointed are destroyed. The guardians assailing them return to their eternal rest. In others I have seen just myself return. In others, just you.'

'I would not abandon you here, Dark Apostle,' said Marduk. Jarulek chuckled.

'We need to move,' he said.

'Which way?'

'Down.'

It seemed that they had been walking for days on end, or perhaps it had been but minutes. Marduk was not sure anymore. This place was maddening in its power to disorient, and he had long since lost a sense of his bearings. They had walked down stairways only to find themselves walking up, had crossed straight walkways only to find themselves somehow turned around and walking back the way they had come, and more than once they had descended staircases only to find themselves higher up than they had been before the descent.

'This place affects our connection with the blessed Ether,' said Jarulek.

'It does,' replied Marduk. 'It is as though this place muffles it. I can still feel it, but it is distant, and faint.'

'It is an unholy place,' said Jarulek. 'What do you feel from your daemon-blade?'