Legion of the Damned

Chapter Six Cemetery World

The Empyredrome was situated atop the bridge tower, commanding one of the best views the strike cruiser could offer. A large caged sphere of reinforced, psi-matrix-attuned crystal, it was known to the Adeptus Astartes and the bonded crew as the Magna-Cubile or ‘Great Nest’. This was understandable given that it was the private immaterial observation chamber for the Angelica Mortis’s Navigator, Alburque Ustral-Zaragoza III. It was all the more appropriate for the fact that the Navigator housed his psyber-eagle, Arkylas, in the drome.

The huge bird was a beauty of bronzed feather. Its wicked talons gripped a sturdy perch frame and its beak was a chrome-plated nightmare. Like the House internuncia who attended upon the Navigator in their claret hoods and robes, Arkylas was blind. The seeing were not tolerated within the chamber. With the Navigator’s warp eye open, exposing all in the Empyredrome to its lethal gaze, only those who had had their eyes removed were truly safe.

Zaragoza’s throne was set on a labyrinth of rails that took him – with the aid of internuncia muscle – to the crystal plate of the drome, where a perimeter of lens-arrays, specula, magnocular spyglasses and telescopes decorated the perimeter. The Navigator himself was neurally plugged into the chair and sat amongst a nest of runescreens, brass pict-monitors and hololithic displays, which his freakishly long digits and fingernails seemed to perpetually dance across.

‘Check me,’ Zaragoza instructed three calculus logi – lobotomised internuncia. The Navigator shot a stream of warp dilation and velocidratic equations at the hooded attendants. One by one, the internuncios confirmed the Navigator’s calculations as accurate. Satisfied, and not a little impressed with himself, Zaragoza settled back into his throne and clicked his spindly fingers. An internuncio came forwards with a polished metal platter and dome. Removing the dome, the servant revealed a dead rat, recovered from a trap in the vessel bilges. The Navigator picked the vermin up by its tail. With a pendular motion, Zaragoza tossed the dead meat at Arkylas.

Despite being blind, the psyber-eagle snatched the rodent out of the air with predatory grace. It never failed to give the Navigator a thrill. ‘Did you see that beak?’ he marvelled, pointing at the magnificent bird. The hooded vassal didn’t respond. Zaragoza grunted. ‘Of course you didn’t,’ he said to himself. He clicked his fingers to the other side of the throne and another blind servant came forwards with a tray bearing a decanter of amasec and a crystal glass.

The internuncio poured his master the drink and Zaragoza was about to take it when the deck about them began to vibrate. Trinkets and instruments fell from their racks and the servant spilt the amasec. Arkylas flapped its wings.

‘My lord.’ An internuncio came forwards. He wore a vox-headset arrangement around his darkened hood. ‘Corpus-Commander Bartimeus for you from the bridge. He demands to know the source of this turbulence.’

‘He’s not the only one,’ Zaragoza said absently. The Navigator screwed his eyes tight shut and opened the weeping slit of the third that sat in his forehead. The Empyredrome, like Arkylas and the internuncia, was still there – it had just faded to transparence. The Navigator drank in a vista of insanity. About him, with the strike cruiser and even the Empyredrome mere ghostly outlines, the sea of souls raged. A transdimensional medium, it appeared as a polychromatic ocean, viewed simultaneously from above and below. It was unrivalled in its expanse and drama, and through his third eye the Navigator could observe its deranged seascape.

In the ethereal distance Zaragoza could see the heavenly light of the Astronomican, a silvery beacon of serenity in the fermenting pandemonium of the warp. Its beatific beams reached out across the psychic universe, drawing the Navigator to them and filling his being with an angelic chorus of indescribable bliss. It was only by the good grace of the Astronomican that Zaragoza could navigate at all. Much closer, like a puce glower in the warpscape, the nightmarish region of the Eye of Terror broiled and spumed its malevolence, threatening to obscure the Astronomican and swallow the heavenly beacon whole.

Zaragoza looked out beyond the strike cruiser’s prow, beyond the existential static of the Geller field and the glint of warpreal entities impressing themselves on the bubble of reality enveloping the Excoriators ship. There was a psysmic tidal wave of raw immaterial energy rolling towards the Adeptus Astartes vessel for as far as the Navigator could see. The Angelica Mortis was heading bow-on for the monster with little hope of evasive course correction beyond dropping out of warp space and continuing at sub-light speed – which Bartimeus would not hear of. The vessel had encountered numerous smaller displacements on its journey to St Ethalberg. As they had pushed on to Certus-Minor, along the ethereal equivalent of the Andronica Banks and out into Hinterspace, the immateriology had grown increasingly agitated and unsettled. This was not what Zaragoza had come to expect in the region, which was usually relatively free of such stormy conditions.

Strangely, it was not the wave that bothered Zaragoza. The Angelica Mortis had been on the etherwave’s inclining approach for some time, and it was the Navigator’s plan to hold course and either have the sturdy Adeptus Astartes strike cruiser ride the beast out or punch straight through the maelstrom’s churning crestface. The Navigator had observed hundreds of vessels on their voyage seemingly lose their nerve and run before the gargantuan swell. Zaragoza had commented to Bartimeus, however, that such numbers and configurations appeared to him more like disbanded patterns of planetary evacuation than flotillas and convoys directed from their courses. In the presence of such evidence Zaragoza felt a little uncomfortable pressing on. He was an experienced Navigator from a House with long service record with the Adeptus Astartes. But he did not know what was causing such an immaterial phenomenon, and could have no way of knowing if an even larger wave lay behind the first.

Squinting down with one of his other eyes, Zaragoza scanned data from a runescreen detailing readings from the Angelica Mortis’s ethervanes.

‘The Von Diemen Rip currents,’ Zaragoza mumbled to himself, ‘the Pherrier circumpsyclone, Wallach’s Rapidity, the Cascade Borgnino, the Paracelsus Gyres…’ The Navigator’s face creased with confusion. ‘Readings all nominal to profile.’

The Navigator frowned, lost in thought. His thin eyebrows slowly rose. Throwing a lever, Zaragoza sent the throne spinning around so that it was facing aft of the vessel. ‘There you are,’ he announced and held out a spindly hand. A waiting vassal pressed a pair of psyoccular magnoculars into his hand, which the Navigator proceeded to put on. At another hand motion the two other hooded servants put their backs into moving the throne along its rails and up to a large brass telescope. Through both the psyoccular and spyglass arrangement Zaragoza studied the object that had so singularly grabbed his attention.

The Navigator had seen it several times before but at much too great a distance to identify its nature, class or dimensions. It had been barely more than a fuzzy blur in the maelstrom of Chaos and could literally have been anything. It also seemed to appear and disappear, leading Zaragoza to believe it might be some colossal beast of the warp or a daemonic entity attempting to breach the interdimensional barriers of reality. On each of these occasions he had made a note in the translation log but had not deemed it important enough to alert Corpus-Commander Bartimeus. The Excoriator was a blunt instrument and not one for extraneous detail. With the vessel at closer range, Zaragoza knew different now.

The Navigator stared at the object in awe. The etched grid-lens gave him an idea of its true proportions. Snatching up a communications cable hanging beside the throne, Zaragoza screwed it into one of the many mind-impulse ports decorating the back of his head like craters upon a moon’s surface.

‘Translation log entry,’ the Navigator said, prompting a blind vassal to appear beside him with a data-slate. ‘Unknown vessel identified emerging from the Osphoren Flux on an identical course to our own. Vessel signature in absence, but the architecture is distinctive and, along with its size, bears the hallmarks of an ancient vessel. Dimensions are… difficult to measure with this equipment. However, I can confirm that it is the largest vessel I have ever seen and, even with these instruments and at great distance, I estimate that it must be six or seven hundred cubic kilometres. Larger than Lentigo, the largest of the Escharan moons.’ The internuncio inputted the log entry.

Zaragoza shook his head. The explanation for the turbulence and agitation in the region now became obvious. The Angelica Mortis was caught in an immaterial confluence created by the etherwave before them and the psysmic swell being driven before the colossal vessel to their aft.

‘Open a vox-channel with the bridge,’ Zaragoza ordered the nearby internuncio. ‘Inform Corpus-Commander Bartimeus that empyreal conditions are likely to worsen, but that I have detected the source of the turbulence. Tell him I am sending a pict-capture. Tell him that he’s not going to believe it.’

Certus-Minor. Cemetery world.

The venerable Gauntlet had made a high-velocity insertion, leaving the Angelica Mortis in good company with the defence monitor Apotheon, a fat necrofreighter and a small gathering of sprint traders. Coming in low and deep, the Thunderhawk tore up the serene surface of one of the great lakes across which it passed. Behind its tail the gunship threw up a continuous fountain of spray, but below the craft the silvery waters reflected a mirror image of the Gauntlet’s underbelly and banking flank. Like all of the Excoriators’ Thunderhawks, the Gauntlet retained her scars, each bolt-hole, las-blast and impact crater in her ivory plate repaired but preserved and annotated with a date and location. As the oldest of the Fifth Company gunships, the Gauntlet bore her battle scars with pride and distinction, even if, when pressed, the Excoriators within admitted to the knocks and rattles of her advancing age.

Lifting her nose slightly, the Gauntlet cleared the satin surface of the lake. Beneath the Thunderhawk extended an expanse of crafted stone. Grave markers, tombstones and statues of every crafted tradition, built almost one on top of the other, crowded the landscape with barely a scrap of precious cemetery world earth between them. Vaults, mausolea and private crypts sprouted from the sepulchrescape, dwarfed only by the ancestral tombs and necropoli of noble families. Kicking up a storm of grit and dust, the Gauntlet fell in line above an arterial lychway. The cemetery sectors and burial grounds were cut up by a necroplex of labyrinthine lychways that allowed access to individual plots and charnel houses. The crossroads of these stony procession ways were furnished with cenoposts and shack hamlets, housing sextons, grave fossers and hearsiers, along with their families.

Pulling up, the gunship began lowering its landing gear. Before the Gauntlet was the only metropol the cemetery world boasted. Grave dust and burial space existed at a premium on Certus-Minor and sprawling cities were considered a funereal waste. This was why Obsequa City had been built tight and tall. A cluster of steeples and spires betrayed the city’s Ecclesiarchical purpose, with lofty cathedrals competing for sky with basilica towers, shrines and citadel-sacristia. Nestled at the heart of the devotional architecture and adorning the metropolis like a crown was the roof-dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum – the largest and tallest building in Obsequa City. The vaulted mausoleum housed the preserved bones of Umberto II, former Ecclesiarch and High Lord of Terra. Taking in the breathtaking detail of the colossal dome with a banking pass, the Gauntlet began to rotate and descend. The Thunderhawk dropped down into the only level and open space in the city. Crowded by requitaphs and chapel belfries, the Umberto II Memorial Space Port was little more than a small landing plaza for mortuary lighters and hump shuttles.

With its gear on the ground, the Gauntlet’s tactical bay ramp lowered and Squads Cicatrix and Castigir filed out with weapons drawn. They fell to immediately securing the area around the Thunderhawk. Kersh had ordered vigilance upon arrival. With knowledge of damned monuments to dark gods and cultist activity on the cemetery world, the corpus-captain wasn’t taking any chances. For all the Excoriators knew, heretics could have possession of the space port and be waiting for the Space Marines in ambush. Nobody in the Fifth Company wanted a repeat of Ignis Prime and the Kruger Ridge.

Kersh stepped out onto the level rockrete. The dizzying heights of bethel towers and cathedrals surrounded the landing plaza, extending upwards on a steep incline like a miniature hive. Kersh looked back down at the pict-captures he was holding. As Ezrachi followed, the Apothecary’s leg sighing in hydraulic rhythm, he too held a capture in his ceramite fingertips.

‘What am I looking at?’ the aged Excoriator asked.

‘Psyoccular image captured from the Empyredrome,’ Kersh replied as the pair of Space Marines strode across the plaza. ‘Aft orientation. Censor-cropped by Chaplain Shadrath, in the interests of spiritual licentiousness. Rendered to full magnification.’

Behind them, the Chaplain himself, Epistolary Melmoch and Techmarine Dancred followed. Ezrachi passed the pict-capture to the Librarian and took another from Kersh. From the tactical bay rumbled the tracks of a mobile weapon. The quad barrels of a Thunderfire cannon emerged, followed by the chunky brutality of its itinerant chassis. Its armour plating bore the colours, scarring and annotations of the Excoriators Chapter, the Cog Mechanicum and a name: Punisher. Following the Techmarine like a hunting dog, the cannon’s machine-spirit drove the heavy metal beast on down the ramp. Dancred gave both it and a miserable servitor-loader an instruction in lingua-technis, prompting both drone and weapon to follow.

‘This can’t be a vessel – not if these reticles are anything to go by,’ Ezrachi commented.

‘Bartimeus’s Navigator thinks it is,’ Kersh said.

‘Could this not be some great beast of the warp?’ Melmoch asked. ‘They, for example, look like wings to me.’ He passed the pict-capture to Brother Dancred. The Techmarine’s gearface formed a clockwork scowl and the Space Marine slowed to a stop.

‘That is a vessel,’ he confirmed. ‘Something ancient, abominable and glorious. The Imperium hasn’t made vessels of this size and design for thousands of years.’

‘Again, Bartimeus’s Navigator concurs. It’s probably some mangled hulk that’s been lost in the warp for an eternity. I’ve despatched the Impunitas to observe our translation point from a dwarf moon on the edge of the system. They will inform us of any new arrivals.’

Brother-Contego Micah moved past with heavy, purposeful steps. Micah was the Fifth Company’s freshly promoted champion. His predecessor had lost his life defending Corpus-Captain Thaddeus on the Kruger Ridge. Micah was young for his position but a cool, impassive Excoriator. He was a gifted marksman and took the responsibilities of company champion seriously. Micah seemed just as unhappy about Kersh’s promotion as everyone else in the Fifth, but had studied his corpus-captain’s orders and their mission brief and had volunteered practical propositions regarding the company’s caution and security on Certus-Minor. Like many of his brothers, he was determined that the Excoriators would not fall to the predations of the Alpha Legion again – even if that meant keeping Zachariah Kersh alive. Micah held his combat shield out in front of him, resting it on a cradle attached to the chunky barrel of the champion’s boltgun. Leading the way with the gun shield and the muzzle emerging from its ceramite cleft, he assumed position on point, putting himself squarely between his corpus-captain and possible enemies.

‘The hulk is not our concern,’ Chaplain Shadrath hissed from behind Kersh.

‘How I wish that were so, Chaplain,’ Kersh said, stopping and turning. The Excoriators came to a halt on the landing plaza. ‘Like you, I am eager to be on to Rorschach’s World. Company protocol is clear on this, however. We are bound by reclamation treaties with the Adeptus Mechanicus and Ordo Xenos Carta Contagio. Any hulks appearing within Imperial space must be investigated.’

‘There are priorities…’

‘There are,’ Kersh agreed with an edge, ‘but I have reports of pirate attacks from the sprint trader Avignor Star, an astrotelepathic blackout and Alpha Legion activity in the region to consider. And that on top of the prospect of a space hulk and the taint of Chaos on this Ecclesiarchy world. Our talents are superhuman, Chaplain Shadrath – not supernatural. We cannot be everywhere at once.’

‘Corpus-captain,’ Brother Toralech interrupted. The Space Marine brought a ceramite finger to the side of his helm. ‘The Gauntlet has relayed a vox-message from the Angelica Mortis. Corpus-Commander Bartimeus requests permission to take the cruiser out of low orbit to commence battery practise.’

‘Denied,’ Kersh answered simply. ‘The Angelica Mortis will hold her position.’ The Scourge glowered at Shadrath before turning and striding across the plaza. The towering Toralech relayed the response, resting the shaft of the billowing company standard against the rockrete and the long barrel of his flamer against a battle-scarred pauldron.

As the Excoriators strode across the landing plaza, hearsiers paused in their unloading of sarcophagi from mortuary lighters to watch the giants go by. A delegation of priests and their accompanying honour guard of defence force Guardsmen approached from the Memorial Space Port gate.

‘Salutations, great warriors,’ the priest announced, his eyes to the ground. He bowed his mitre, his vermillion robes flapping in the breeze. ‘I am Vasco Ferreira, the Pallmaster General. We received word – the last in a long time – from his grace Cardinal Pontian of St Ethalberg that assistance was coming. We had not dared hope that the Emperor’s Angels themselves would–’

‘Pallmaster,’ Kersh stopped him.

‘My lord?’ the priest replied fearfully.

‘You have a superior?’ the corpus-captain asked.

‘I answer to the pontifex,’ Ferreira said, ‘as all God-Emperor-fearing people do on Certus-Minor.’

Kersh softened his words with a vague smile. ‘Take us straight to him, please.’

‘Of course, your magnificence. A thousand apologies,’ Ferreira said.

With the Pallmaster General leading the way, the Excoriators were flanked by members of the Certus-Minor Charnel Guard, dressed in flak, robes and feather bonnets. They were sombre figures, all in black and carrying long, ceremonial lasfusils. The solemnity continued as the Adeptus Astartes were escorted out of the gate and up through the winding alleyways and steep steps of the cemetery world city. About them walls reached for the ivory skies and the incline became increasingly precipitous. In adjoining naveways and alleys, as well as at archways and fenestra, the Excoriators encountered gathered Certusians. The cemetery worlders looked on with sober reverence and wonder. They remained a silent sea of gaunt faces, the Ecclesiarchical baseborn: vergermen, foss-reeves and vestals. Occasional preachers punctuated the torturous route, making the sign of the aquila and offering blessings.

Across a small square, at the top of the city, the Excoriators were confronted with the colossal archway-barbican of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum. The pillars of the stately sepulchre were thick and tall, and the darkness of the threshold beckoned pilgrim and cleric alike. Two Sisters of Battle, garbed in the midnight-blue sheen of ceramite and hugging belt-fed heavy bolters to their breasts, flanked the entrance. Standing tall before the arch was a baroque nightmare, a penitent engine housing a wretched, emaciated repentant. Crucified across the walker, the unfortunate seemed at peace. Kersh shuddered to think of the carnage the reformite could wreak, with its caged limbs, mounted chainfists and heavy flamers.

Modest, by comparison with the mausoleum, was the Obelisk or official palace residence of the Pontifex-Mundi. The palace was positioned opposite the mausoleum, across the devotional square, and it was here that Brother Dancred had Punisher and his attendant servitor remain. The ecclesiarch’s reception chambers were housed beneath an enormous bell in the palace belfry, and from his balcony, the pontifex could command a view not only of the domed roof of the mausoleum but also the receding steeple-skyline of Obsequa City. The palace chambers were dark and dour, and Kersh noticed the retinue of priests and affiliates haunting its shadowy recesses. Pallmaster General Ferreira peeled off and joined their ranks. Amongst their number Kersh also spotted the sickly glow of his revenant’s eye, peering out from the crack in its benighted helm. The ethereal presence watched and waited with immutable patience.

Pontifex Oliphant stood in the balcony, his crooked figure cutting a silhouette into the pearly sky. Turning with half a smile, the ecclesiarch proceeded to limp with difficulty across to the entering Excoriators. As Kersh came closer he realised that the pontifex suffered from some kind of paralytic affliction. Half of Oliphant’s kindly face was stricken in a mask of horror, and he dragged the deadweight of one leg behind him like a second thought and allowed his arm to dangle uselessly by his incapacitated side. He wore only simple robes and sandals, with little of the ceremonial paraphernalia the corpus-captain had come to expect from the Ecclesiarchy. He even forwent a mitre. Instead, Kersh noted the thin hair plastered across the pontifex’s forehead and the beads of sweat trembling on his brow. Even standing seemed like an ungainly effort.

‘Pontifex,’ Kersh said, offering an armoured gauntlet. Close up, Kersh could see that Oliphant was quite young for his position, despite his old man’s carriage and obvious infirmity.

‘Angel,’ Oliphant said, clutching but one ceramite finger of the proffered hand with his own weak digits. Kersh felt the ecclesiarch rest against his mighty frame and saw the momentary relief on his half-frozen face. ‘Our prayers have been answered. I knew you would come. The God-Emperor sends us the sons of Dorn. A true blessing.’

‘Pontifex,’ Kersh began, ‘I am Zachariah Kersh, corpus-captain of the Fifth Company. I bring good will from Chapter Master Ichabod of the Excoriators Chapter. He has secured assistance for this cemetery world through your guarantors at St Ethalberg.’

Oliphant went to speak but wavered suddenly. Thinking the ecclesiarch was going to fall, Kersh grabbed him by the shoulders.

‘The pontifex’s throne,’ Ferreira called and two sallow cenobites wheeled a rolling chaise to Oliphant, although it looked to Kersh more like an invalid’s carriage than a throne. Depositing the pontifex in the chair, the Scourge stepped back.

‘The Emperor’s blessings on you both,’ Oliphant said to Kersh and Ferreira.

‘Pontifex,’ the Excoriator continued, ‘I have been brief with your deputation and with your indulgence I will be brief with you. There is but one of our calling for every world in the Imperium and Certus-Minor is currently graced with a half-company of the Adeptus Astartes.’

Oliphant attempted a twisted smile.

‘We are but a tiny part of the Imperium and we wish no imposition,’ the pontifex said.

‘It is no imposition, pontifex,’ Kersh said, ‘but our enemies are legion and spread across the segmentum like a bloody smear. We would like to be of service and then be on our way.’

‘Of course,’ Oliphant said. ‘I shall introduce my clerics to you later. Perhaps I might convince you, corpus-captain, to receive the God-Emperor’s benediction with us on the morn. The suns will rise on Saint Barthes’s Feastday.’

‘I think that unlikely, pontifex.’

‘Just a blessing then, to consecrate your efforts here and protect you and your Angels in the prosecution of the God-Emperor’s will. After all, does not the God-Emperor fight on our side?’

‘Our bolters protect us under such circumstances,’ Kersh told the pontifex. ‘And as I indicate, we are unlikely to be planetside when the sun rises. If there is an evil here then we shall not dally in its destruction. Further evils wait for our bolt-rounds and blades on other worlds, and we are not in the habit of keeping the Emperor’s enemies waiting.’

‘Well,’ Oliphant said finally, holding on to a weak smile, ‘we shall see, sir. Let me instead introduce you to three of our flock charged with cemetery world security. I think they are best placed to advise you on our problems.’

Three figures stepped forwards from the shadowy gathering around the edge of the chamber. ‘May I introduce High Constable Colquhoun of the Charnel Guard, Palatine Sapphira of the Order of the August Vigil and Proctor Kraski of the enforcers.’

‘Honoured to be serving beside you,’ Colquhoun said crisply. He gave a grim but reverent salute to the rim of his feather bonnet before returning his black-gloved hand down beside the tapered barrel of an officer’s laspistol. Palatine Sapphira, conversely, had a pout of positive dislike crafted into her uninviting features. Her slim, cobalt power armour sported two chunky Godwyn-Deaz-pattern bolt pistols at the thighs and an ermine cloak that hung from her shoulders. She compulsively fiddled with a silver aquila hanging around her neck and burrowed into the Excoriator with her dark eyes.

‘The pontifex has overplayed our part, I’m afraid,’ she told Kersh with a voice of steel. ‘My mission here only looks to the preservation of Umberto II’s remains and the security of the Memorial Mausoleum.’

Kersh had encountered the Order of the August Vigil before, on the genestealer-infected shrineworld of Alamar, where Sisters of the order had been charged with safely evacuating the bones of Saint Constantine in advance of planetary Exterminatus. Their Order Minoris specialised exclusively in the security of Ecclesiarchical relics and sites of Cult significance.

Unlike the immaculate Guard officer and Battle Sister, Kraski was a grizzled veteran. An arbitrator in the senior years of his life, he was charged with keeping order and upholding Imperial Law with a small team of enforcers on the tiny cemetery world. His ragged beard moved to the motion of his jaw working on a vile slug of chewing tobacco, while the smashed lens of a bionic eye stared back at Kersh with blind obsolescence. His enforcer carapace was scuffed and blistered, while the black fur of his greatcoat was dusted with the sandy, Certusian earth. Sitting slung across one of his shoulders, however, was the gleaming barrel and pump-mechanism of an oiled and lovingly maintained combat shotgun.

‘Words are for poets and priests,’ Kraski told the Excoriators, pushing the plug of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue. ‘I’ll take you straight to the Exclusion Zone and there you can see the work of evil first-hand.’

The Scourge nodded. ‘After you, proctor,’ he said with solemn appreciation. The corpus-captain had the feeling he was going to like the arbitrator.

The maid Marika knew only her holy duties. As a vestal it was her privilege to escort the Lord High Almoner about the narrow passages and crooked stairwells of Obsequa City. The Lord High Almoner had a sacred responsibility: the redistribution of wealth. The Adeptus Ministorum taxed Certusians on the Imperium’s behalf and its demands were harsh. Maid Marika very much enjoyed her role, amongst two trains of her sister vestals, accompanying the Almoner during his ceremonial act of virtue, pressing coin back into the hands of the poor and needy.

Marika gently swung her incense burner back and forth on a silver chain, allowing the fragrant mist to billow about her and behind the Lord High Almoner’s train. A sweet indication of their passing that hung in the air and reminded common Imperials that the God-Emperor still had a charitable thought for them. The incense often made Marika light-headed and the virgin indulged this, walking about the sheer city streets in a dreamy daze.

As she crossed St Lanfranc’s corpseway, at the rear of the train, she became enveloped in a cloud of incense and stopped by the cobbled crossroads to rub her watery eyes. As both the smoke and tearful blur cleared she was struck by a vision. Marching down the corpseway were demigods in plate, the giants of legend and antiquity, only immortalised for common Imperials in the stonework of cathedral architecture. Marika could not believe her smoky eyes. The Adeptus Astartes. On Certus-Minor. Her gaze fell from the scars on their immortal faces, across the scars decorating their ancient ceramite and down to their dread weaponry. The cavernous muzzles of handheld cannonry. Sheathed blades of unimaginable keenness, honed to death-dealing perfection. Thick digits. Broad hands. Housed in ceramite and throbbing with the God-Emperor’s own murderous strength.

‘Maid Marika!’

Fury – untold. An awakening.

The Adeptus Astartes were gone. The vestal stood alone and had done for some time.

Chancellor Gielgus ventured through the perfumed smoke that cloaked the alleyway. ‘Marika, where in Terra have you been?’ he scolded. ‘The train is stopped. The poor are waiting. The High Almoner is furious.’

As the chancellor approached he could hear the whoosh of the incense burner swinging around at speed. Finally, he came upon the silhouette doing the swinging. ‘Stop that, child,’ he ordered. The Maid Marika was still but for the blazing arc of the incense burner, which was pouring out smoke. As he came closer, stroking his beard, the chancellor said, ‘What has come over you?’

Something was wrong with her face. As he neared and the mist between them became thinner, he could see that the vestal’s eyes were blank orbs of unseeing red. ‘Marika?’

Chancellor Gielgus only heard the beginning of a wrath-fuelled screech. The silver incense burner broke its searing orbit and smashed down on the top of his skull. Brained, the old man fell to the gutter, only to have the demented vestal fall upon him again and again with bludgeoning blows from her flailing burner. His stymied calls for mercy – and then help – went unanswered, as through the smoke the blood sprayed and the Maid Marika became as one with her unnatural rage.

Braughn Menzel rested his boot against the blade of the shovel and forced the tool down through the sandy earth. The cutting crunch of the spade filled the fosser with a strange satisfaction. There was nothing like the sound of sharpened plasteel slicing through cemetery world earth. The gravedigger needed something to keep him going. His shoulders burned and his back ached. The grave was unfinished and he would have a hundred more to dig before the end of the week. The mortuary lighters brought an unending supply of the dead from necrofreighters down to the Certusian surface. The prestige of spending just a century in the same precious earth as Umberto II drew cadavers from light years around. Senior officers of the Guard, Imperial Navy commanders, the inbred swine of hive-world Houses, merchants, Navigators, planetary nobility and devoted members of the Ecclesiarchy itself were all buried in Certus-Minor’s sacred topsoil. On the other side of the cemetery world Braughn’s opposite toiled, digging up coffins and sarcophagi for shipment back to the families following the expiry of the lease. An unending cycle of inhumation and exhumation on a planetary scale.

Tossing the dirt up and over his shoulder, Braughn came to a stop. He rested against the shovel’s stalwood shaft. Sometimes Braughn allowed his sons Yann and Otakar to watch the mortuary lighters at work when they should have been digging with him. At thirteen and fifteen there was precious little excitement in their lives, and the best that they could hope for was recruitment into the Charnel Guard and the possibility of one day travelling off-world with an Imperial Guard regiment. There would be no watching for lighters today – not with word that the Emperor’s Angels had come to Certus-Minor. The boys had caught a glimpse of the Space Marine gunship as it left Obsequa City and thundered overhead bound for the Great Lakes. Braughn little expected his sons’ eyes to leave the sky for the rest of the day.

He reached over the side of the grave and took a plas bottle from beside the tombstone. Yann had brought mule’s milk from their shack at the cenopost. His mother had corked it with a rag which Braughn proceeded to extract before squeezing the liquid into his parched mouth. He gulped down the sour milk with relish before wiping his mouth with a dusty sleeve. An odd noise grabbed his attention, a dull, metallic thud.

‘Boys?’ Braughn called. When no answer came, the fosser kicked a toe grip into the grave wall and grabbed the edge of the tombstone in an effort to haul himself out of the grave. Halfway out of its depths Braughn looked up to see his youngest son Yann laid out in the cemetery world grit. Braughn felt his heart drop. ‘Yann!’ he yelled miserably. The side of the boy’s head had been caved in and his lifeblood was leaking into the earth. The fosser tried to scramble out of the grave. ‘Otakar!’ Braughn called with fearful urgency. Turning his head, the fosser found his eldest son stood behind the tombstone. He held his shovel above his head like an axe. His eyes were blood-blind and hollow. ‘Son…’

The shovel came down and sliced the fosser’s head from his shoulders. The head bounced and rolled through the dust until it came to rest beside Yann’s body. Braughn’s body fell back into the hole and came to rest, twitching in the depths of the grave. Looking from the butchered body of his father to that of his dying brother, Otakar Menzel radiated a hatred his heart had never known. Taking his shovel in both hands, he stomped through the dust, heading for home, where his mother would be waiting with mule’s milk and a smile, and the boy’s bloodlust would find new expression.

Aloysius Mosca felt the abbot’s thin staff-sceptre jab his back-flesh. Mosca had not volunteered for the prayer cordon. The chaplain of his cell-block had ordered recompense for an incident at the barracks armoury. He had been part of a team of fraters assisting in the thrice-blessing of reserve ammunition and weaponry for the Charnel Guard defence force. Every lasfusil, stubber, powerpack and individual bullet required consecration, and above the instruments of death and destruction, Mosca had found himself in a dispute with a fellow frater. The dispute had become heated in the silence of the barracks armoury and Mosca had hit out with the palm of his hand. It was not intended as a strike or an assault, but the frater who fell and gashed his head against a mortar rack did not view it that way and reported Mosca to the chaplain. Assignment to the prayer cordon had been the chaplain’s idea – a part of Mosca’s spiritual probation.

Like thousands of others – some probationers, some volunteers – Mosca had been marched along the Great Eternity-East lychway. When the cavalcade arrived at the bleak Fifth-Circle cenopost and the miserable hovel-hamlet of Little Pulcher, Mosca and his brothers were blindfolded and led arm on shoulder to the shores of Lake Serenity. He could hear the rhythmic drone of the drainage pumps in the distance. Turning their backs to the lake they were instructed to retain their blindfolds and link hands with one another. Mosca could only imagine they were creating an unbreakable circle of prayer around the damned artefact that had been discovered below the drained surface of the lake. There had been low whispers and tattle of such a find in the fraterhouse and in the cloisters. Gossip only to match rumours of grave robbery, diabolists and disappearances out on the lonely lychways of the necroplex and burial ground provinces beyond.

Abbots walked around the inside of the circle issuing threats and jabbing encouragement as the cordon alternated between communal prayers spoken aloud to hymnals and liturgies sung to the pearlescent skies.

‘Sing, you wretch,’ the Abbot behind him ordered. ‘I want the God-Emperor himself to hear you.’

Mosca recognised the voice. A deep, baritone menace belonging to a fat bastard Mosca remembered from the Progenary. He also remembered the beatings he received at the pudgy hands of the priest and the rattan cane he used on the backs of the choristers’ legs and hands.

Mosca’s eyes moved about under his blindfold. His mouth, moments before full of bombast and lines from ‘Exalted God-Emperor, the Shepherd of Souls’, fell to silence. Lips curled. Nostrils flared. Teeth gnashed together on the gristle of long-forgotten hatreds. Mosca released the hands of the choristers to either side. One had crushed his palm with a pious grip; the other had been moist and slippery with some penitent shame.

Tearing the blindfold from his contorted face, Mosca revealed the blood-brimming rage of his eyes. Reaching down into the folds of his cassock robes and dust cloak, the cemetery worlder found the hot euphoria of a rough handgrip and trigger. Backing away, Mosca brought the brute length of a heavy stubber – thrice blessed and liberated from idleness in the barracks armoury – from concealment. Turning and hugging the flared muzzle of the brute to his body, the chorister yanked frenziedly on the trigger.

The barrel danced this way and that under the recoil and Mosca’s unpractised aim, but at almost point-blank range the stubber’s bullets punched through the pig-priest’s back. With his white vestments blanching red, the abbot crashed to the floor. Like a rider trying to tame a bucking mule, Mosca brought the chugging weapon around and sent a hailstorm of lead into the presented backs of the choristers. As the massacre unfolded the cordon began to break up. With cemetery worlders screaming, falling and being blasted from their feet, Mosca spun around to present his death-dealer to fleeing choristers on the other side.

Roaring his hatred – his being filled with white-hot insanity – Mosca felled the running choristers, the juddering barrel of the heavy stubber showering the panic-addled crowds with bullets. Like trees before the axe they fell, before their scrambling steps could carry them to the cover of headstones and cemetery statues.

With the choristers dead and the cordon broken, Mosca turned to bathe in the hate-wrought radiance of the unholy monument he’d been securing. Through a blood-filtered gaze, he drank in the scale and magnificence of the thing. It called to him and fed his fury with its dread architecture. Pointing his weapon to the sky, Mosca fired once more. With the belt feed of the weapon dancing a diminishing jig, he sent bullets rocketing for the heavens in honour of carnage and annihilation. He didn’t notice the poor marksmanship of Charnel Guardsmen flashing about him – the single bolts of their lasfusils flying past. He was lost to the moment and lost to the monument, until a lucky shot found him – burning out the back of his skull and bringing peace to a mind devoid of reason.

Chapter Seven The Beckoning

‘Give me a circle of the target,’ Kersh requested.

‘Affirmative.’

The Gauntlet banked slightly against the setting suns. At an open airlock situated in the flank of the Thunderhawk, Kersh, Melmoch and Dancred looked down on the abomination. Nobody spoke. Micah, the Scourge’s new shadow, waited nearby. In the tactical bay behind them, Proctor Kraski chewed tobacco while High Constable Colquhoun relayed instructions to his Charnel Guard vox-operator and Pallmaster General Ferreira leant against the compartment wall clutching his stomach and covering his mouth. Beyond, Chief Whip Uriah Skase and Squad Cicatrix primed their weapons and offered thanks to the primarch.

Below the Gauntlet were the still waters of Lake Serenity. On the distant shoreline of the lake drainage plants boiled off the fresh water, releasing clouds of steam from fat funnels up into the atmosphere. The waters had receded as such from a shallower inlet, revealing a monstrous monument that had been hidden beneath the lake’s crystal surface. A hideous multi-sided pyramid, the monument appeared like an eight-pointed star from above. It was a dirty cream colour impacted with silt and draped with scraps of freshwater weed. About the gargantuan artefact, Kersh could make out the thin circle that made up the prayer cordon, with temporary Charnel Guard heavy weapon emplacements situated at intervals beyond.

‘Put us down beyond the cordon,’ Kersh ordered.

‘Affirmative, corpus-captain.’

With the gunship’s landing gear scraping down between the headstones of freshly dug graves, Kersh jumped from the airlock. About him, in the drained earth reclaimed from the lake, fossers had already gone to work with their shovels and masons had put the finishing touches to the gravestones adorning the neat, rectangular pits. Peering into the nearest empty grave Kersh spotted an odd arrangement of pipes running between the headstone and the grave bottom. Wire cables ran down the side of the pipes and up into the stone of the marker.

Proctor Kraski came up behind the corpus-captain.

‘What are the pipes for?’ Kersh asked the enforcer.

‘Mistakes happen,’ Kraski informed him nonchalantly. ‘Thousands of stasis caskets and sarcophagi arrive here every day from Imperial worlds across the sector: hive-worlds, cardinal worlds, garrisons and so forth. Occasionally people are interred accidentally – sometimes even on purpose.’

‘Buried alive?’ Kersh marvelled.

‘Without power and a stasis field, dead bodies rot in the sacred earth. Those buried alive might ordinarily have an hour or two of air, screaming for their lives below the ground where no one can hear them.’ Kraski turned his head and spat a stream of tobacco and saliva behind his back. ‘It is cemetery world practice to fashion all headstones with a safety mechanism: an air source and wire cords leading to small bells, set by the masons in the decorative detail of the gravestones.’

‘All the graves have these mechanisms?’

‘It’s an ancient custom.’

Marching around the Thunderhawk’s nose, the Excoriators and their guides made their way towards the prayer cordon. The choristers were blindfolded and had little idea that it had been an Adeptus Astartes gunship that had landed in their midst. They also had little idea that as abbots broke the chain and moved several choristers to one side, the Emperor’s Angels walked among them.

Beyond the cordon, Kersh strode into shallows, splashing down into the emptying lake. Fresh water lapped about his armoured ankles. The cordon lined the shore but the receding waters were still reasonably deep about the abominate structure. The Excoriators strode towards the damned object, with Skase and his squad kicking up fountains as they filed forwards in a canopy formation. Kraski, Colquhoun and Ferreira made headway a great deal more difficult, especially since the Pallmaster General was retching into the shallows following his first flight by Thunderhawk.

As the Scourge approached he saw that the huge pyramid was constructed of human skulls. Each was a brick within the horrific structure, cemented together with lake silt and sand. Kersh’s boot tapped against something in the water. Kneeling down, the corpus-captain grasped the object and brought it to the surface. In his gauntlet Kersh held a cracked human skull. Rolling it over in his ceramite glove he examined the dome of the cranium. A symbol or design had been daubed in red paint on the top, a cross run through with three parallel, horizontal lines. Kersh tossed the skull over to Melmoch who caught the macabre object, drawing a scowl from the Pallmaster General.

‘Bodies,’ Brother Micah called from a position ahead. Using the barrel of his boltgun he lifted a mesh of tangled bones and shredded clothing. The shallows closer to the monument were a mantrap carpet of twisted skeletal remains. Lifting his weapon higher, Micah angled the bones around. ‘They all seem to be wearing these,’ the company champion said. From his muzzle dangled a lead cloak on a chain, wrapped around the vertebrae of an unfortunate’s neck. The Pallmaster General looked up from his retching and narrowed his eyes.

‘How did you discover this aberration?’ Kersh put to the cemetery worlders.

Colquhoun directed their attention to the funnels of the distant drainage plants. ‘In order to maximise plot space and extend the burial grounds, Lake Serenity had been marked for land reclamation. As the water levels fell, the top of the structure made itself known.’

‘What about the skulls?’ Kersh said. He turned to Proctor Kraski. ‘That’s a lot of heads to go missing.’

‘They’re not cemetery worlders,’ the arbitrator said, spitting a stream of tobacco-stained saliva into the shallows. ‘The murder rates are impeccable here. Until last month, I only had four murders on my slates for last year, global total. Two, the cycle before that.’

‘What about last month?’ Kersh enquired.

‘Thirty-seven,’ Kraski said.

‘There are a lot more than thirty-seven skulls here,’ Dancred said. Behind him, Punisher had rolled down the Gauntlet’s opening bay ramp and trundled through the shallows to take position beside the Techmarine.

‘We have occasional robberies,’ Kraski said.

‘Robberies?’

‘Grave robberies,’ the enforcer confirmed. ‘Mostly fossers – having a hard time meeting Ministorum taxes. You have to catch the ghouls in the act because the cunning bastards re-bury the bodies and therefore the evidence. Did catch a couple of lost souls out here a few months back. Took a ceremonial sword from a Guard officer’s casket shipped from the Kallistan garrison world. Took the officer’s head, as well. After I introduced them to my power maul they confessed that looting the graves is prolific in the martial grounds…’

‘Areas set aside for military burials?’ Kersh queried.

‘Yes,’ Kraski replied, ‘which is unusual, since the ghouls are more likely to make good on the trinkets of some hive-world spirestress than the casket of a Navy commander or Guard brass.’

‘What of the decapitation?’

‘Put in an exhumation request,’ Kraski told the Excoriator before spitting. The enforcer and Pallmaster General Ferreira exchanged a hard look. ‘But it was denied. We liaised with the Charnel Guard and organised extra patrols but nothing came of it.’

‘Melmoch?’

The Librarian seemed lost in the monument’s warped design. ‘Epistolary Melmoch!’ Kersh repeated.

‘Eight points,’ Melmoch replied. ‘The dread star of the Ruinous Powers. Two pyramids, sitting one within the other, eight sides to face, eight corners to turn. Eight – the Blood God’s integer.’

Kersh had fought the Blood God’s servants. Crazed cultists. Berserkers. Renegade Space Marines of the Goremongers Chapter. Even princes of the Rage Lord’s daemonic pantheon. They had all shared the same unrelenting desire to spill the Scourge’s blood.

‘What is the monument’s function? Is it some dark gateway?’ Kersh put to the Librarian.

‘No,’ Melmoch replied. ‘Not a gate. A throne.’

‘A throne… of skulls?’

‘A throne to be taken,’ Melmoch said. ‘An invitation issued. A beacon beckoning.’

‘A beacon for what?’ Kersh asked.

‘I have no idea,’ Melmoch told him honestly. ‘Proctor, all the surrounding remains seem to be wearing these cloaks. What are they used for?’

‘It’s part of an Ecclesiarchical practice,’ Kraski said. ‘I know little of it.’

The Excoriators turned on Ferreira.

‘Lead capes,’ the Pallmaster General confirmed. ‘They are a form of punishment. Penitents volunteer to bear the considerable extra weight as part of their rite of atonement. They are a metaphor for the tardiness of their wearer’s spiritual progress.’

Melmoch looked back at the knotted remains in the shallows. Kneeling he plunged his gauntlet into the water and retrieved a rusty blade. Scanning his eyes across the glassy surface, he found a second and a third, all simple knives, pitted and brown.

‘Melmoch?’ Kersh prompted. ‘Opinion?’

‘Corpus-captain, I think that it is entirely possible that the monument is a reasonably recent construct. These bodies probably belong to cultists devoting themselves to the Blood God and his murderous ideals. As the proctor indicates, graves are robbed and skulls are taken. The martial burial grounds are targeted because the Blood God favours the skulls of warriors for his throne. The caskets are reburied to avoid suspicion in the same way that the monument was constructed in secret on the lake bed.’

‘Breathing apparatus. Heavy equipment. That is a significant undertaking,’ Dancred reminded the Librarian.

‘More than you know,’ Melmoch said, standing upright with the knives in his gauntlet. ‘The monument has been entirely constructed by hand. Each skull added to the submerged structure would be a one-way ticket for its bearer. Each cultist would wear a lead cape and take a blade with them. The lead would take them to the bottom, where they would add their grave-robbed gift to the throne. They would then slit their throats and baptise the unholy monument in the murk of their offered blood. Murder – of the self.’

Nobody said anything for a few moments.

‘Macabre,’ Dancred said finally.

‘Committed,’ Melmoch replied.

‘Futile,’ Kersh concluded. The Scourge bit at his mangled lower lip. He looked about the Excoriators and cemetery world significants, then took in the ghastly monument with an all-encompassing stare, from top to dreadful bottom.

‘As every Excoriator knows, it is a great deal easier to destroy than it is to create,’ Kersh said. ‘We’ll widen the exclusion zone and have the Angelica Mortis obliterate it from orbit.’

‘Completely out of the question,’ the Pallmaster General suddenly piped up. There was a new-found edge to his voice – an imperiousness that Kersh hadn’t heard him use with the Excoriators before. ‘The cemetery world’s sacred earth will not be tainted with violence and bombardment.’

‘It already seems tainted,’ Kersh returned. ‘That is why we’re here.’

‘It would cause untold damage to the surrounding plots and tombs…’

‘We can calibrate the warhead,’ Techmarine Dancred informed him.

‘What if you miss?’

‘We’re the Adeptus Astartes, Pallmaster,’ Kersh barked back. ‘We do not miss.’

‘I’m sorry, corpus-captain,’ Ferreira said. ‘But I cannot allow that kind of an intervention.’

‘It is a Ruinous artefact,’ Chief Whip Skase called across with venom. ‘We do not need your authorisation to destroy it.’

‘Corpus-captain,’ High Constable Colquhoun interjected. ‘I’m as eager to be rid of this abomination as you are, but the Lord Pontifex will not sanction an orbital attack on Certusian soil. There must be another way. Please, my lords.’

‘If you don’t want our assistance,’ Skase threatened, ‘then you can keep the damned thing. The Excoriators have duties to attend to elsewhere…’

‘Skase…’ Kersh said. The chief whip looked from Ferreira and Colquhoun to the corpus-captain. ‘What about that?’ Kersh nodded at Dancred’s itinerant Thunderfire cannon. Punisher had rolled through the shallows to take position dutifully by the Techmarine’s side. ‘Could we demolish the monument rather than obliterate it?’

‘Unbelievable,’ Skase concluded in the background.

‘The Thunderfire cannon can deploy subterranean ammunition designed to destabilise and disorientate,’ Dancred said, his face whirring and clunking. ‘Directional salvoes combined with strategically placed demolition charges from the Charnel Guard armouries – in prodigious amounts, of course – might topple the structure.’

‘That will take days!’ Skase fumed. The squad whip wanted off the cemetery world as soon as possible to continue the hunt for the Alpha Legion.

‘Can it be done?’ Kersh asked, looking at the sheer size of the monument.

‘I can demolish the structure, but then what?’ Dancred asked.

‘Then we bring in the flamers and meltas,’ Kersh confirmed, ‘and wipe any evidence of the thing from the face of the planet.’

‘The Charnel Guard could–’ Colquhoun began.

‘The Charnel Guard will maintain the prayer cordon until we have destroyed this thing of evil. Only Adeptus Astartes are to work within the cordon to reduce the risk of contamination.’

‘As you wish, my lord.’

‘Brother Dancred will oversee the monument’s demolition,’ Kersh instructed. ‘Squad Cicatrix will provide security and destroy all remnants of the structure once it is down.’

‘You would have us waste more time on this miserable little world?’ Skase accused.

‘Chief Whip Skase, the eradication of Chaos is not a waste of our time. It is the purest expression of the purpose for which we were bred and I’ll have you not forget that,’ Kersh bit back.

‘You question my courage,’ Skase seethed, advancing on the Scourge.

‘Increasingly,’ Kersh spat.

The two Excoriators splashed through the shallows at one another and their ceramite would have clashed had it not been for Brother Micah getting his bolter and combat shield between them. Shoving Skase back with the shield, Micah also put his shoulder against his corpus-captain’s chestplate. Two of Skase’s squad grabbed their leader by the arms and attempted to haul him back.

‘It’s the monument,’ Melmoch called. A calm descended on the scene. Skase and the Scourge’s twisted faces fell and the pair looked at the Epistolary. ‘This is its dread influence. It demands blood, spilt in its name.’

Kersh looked to Skase and then nodded slowly.

‘Squad Cicatrix will return with me to Obsequa City,’ the corpus-captain ordered. ‘Squad Castigir will have the honour of destroying this thing of evil. Chaplain Shadrath will return with the squad to monitor the operation for corruption.’ Kersh turned and began to stomp his way back through the darkening shallows towards the waiting Thunderhawk. ‘Come,’ he commanded. ‘We are wasting time. The chief whip was at least right about that.’

I have a new-found respect for my former commanders. Squad Whip Thanial; Brother Erastus; Corpus-Captain Tobiaz, Corpus-Captain Phinehas; Chapter Master Ichabod. All were great Adeptus Astartes and I feel that I can live up to their warrior example. How any of them survived the trivialities of command, however, I know not. On the battlefield, I have seen mortals exceed the cruel limitations of their bodies. I do not hold them in contempt or exercise a prejudice for such handicap. They, however, exceed the cruel limitations of my attention and interest. They can talk for hours of nothing. You would think a short existence would breed a brevity in their number, but no.

I sit here, at the long stone table of the pontifex, with the great and the good of Certus-Minor and more food than an army could eat. Ezrachi sits at my side. Beyond Melmoch, he is the only one of our number I thought to afflict with this intolerable duty. The Librarian was acting strangely – a little absent – and with glazed eyes had requested to remain in his allocated cell. The pontifex, crippled down one half of his body, has a palace menial cut his portions and bring fork from plate to mouth. The gaggle of priests at the table devour their portions with relish and I’m sure the feast is the finest quality the Adeptus Ministorum kitchens can produce. But like the conversation, I have no stomach for it. On backwater swillholes and death worlds I have eaten things that would make a grox retch. Here, I do little more than push the fine fare around my plate and then push the plate itself to one side. All the while, Pontifex Oliphant and his clerics jabber incessantly.

Oliphant seems a good man. He doesn’t make my skin crawl like the cardinal world husks we found on St Ethalberg, but I find the boundless benevolence of his devotion difficult to endure. Every statement must be qualified with a prayer. Every act is worthy of Holy Terran grace. The pontifex showers me and my Excoriators with compliments and blessings, and prattles his priestly interpretation of the God-Emperor’s will. I am glad I did not include Brother Melmoch in such company. I would be ill-disposed to such blind slanders falling from Adeptus Astartes lips.

My mood sours. I do not feel myself and I indulge my baser feelings with a mask of a face. A frozen frown of unmistakable contempt which grows with every word from the ecclesiarch’s crooked mouth.

Oliphant has dragged himself to his feet. With one shoulder held higher than the other he offers a twisted toast. The menial prises the pontifex’s fingers open and slips a goblet of wine into his trembling clutch.

‘To our saviours, the Adeptus Astartes,’ he begins, and as he does so is joined by his legion of priests. ‘May the God-Emperor smile on their efforts as He does our own. Let Him look out across His holy realm and watch over them as they carry out His will. Let Him bless their endeavour with His divine favour. Let Him lend them the strength to do what is right and cleanse our sacred earth of this foul contagion. In good faith we live in expectation of success and the failure of darkness. After all, does not the God-Emperor fight on our side?’

I think of the Ruinous monument. Of the thunder of Brother Dancred’s efforts on the horizon and Squad Castigir waiting with meltas and flamers to scour it from the planet surface. The throne of skulls calls to us. I can feel its malign influence in my intolerance, the flex of my muscles and the edge in my voice. It reaches out for the warrior in me like some final furious defiance. The last pollutive gasp of a proud evil about to take its fall. I think of Skase. His hatred and that of his brothers. Shadrath’s scorn. The loathing of the squad whips. The bright fire of Joachim’s fraternal allegiance. The cold fury in Ishmael’s eyes.

This is an insufferable position for all. If I were but a squad whip in this company I would share their anger and indignation, and like Uriah Skase, I would make my displeasure known. It is my honour that hangs in the balance. My standard lost. My vendetta to prosecute with the filth Alpha Legion. I marvel that my own Excoriators cannot see the pain I share with them. As corpus-captain, however, my gaze must be broader. The Fifth Company’s hearts beat to a mutinous rhythm, and like the race to the runner, our time on Certus-Minor only serves to amplify the defiant thunder in their chests. It would be easy to excuse this as some malignant influence of the Chaos artefact. I am their corpus-captain and I know better. I cannot find it in myself to thank Chapter Master Ichabod for this duty, or see the wisdom in his orders. In a galaxy overrun with mankind’s enemies, I fail to see the significance of a single cemetery world. My Excoriators need to exorcise their grief through the blessings of battle. Only in the crash of their bolters and the fall of their enemies can the Fifth Company find itself once again.

Oliphant talks still but I am no longer listening. He spits his prayers and blessings to the God-Emperor through his palsied lips, but his feeble words are drowned out by my silent rage. Like the pontifex, the priests are on their feet with goblets in their hands. Their gathering dims the chamber. They feel like a curtain about me, shutting out the world. I long to be free and for a terrible moment my hand drifts for my weapons.

Then I see it. My spectre. My revenant. My madness – sat at the other end of the table. The dead thing fixes me with the unnatural life force glowing in a single eye. It stares down the table at me like a lance beam from the rent in the being’s helm. Then, in an action that chills me to the core, the revenant takes up a goblet from the table and holds it up to toast me also.

My vision blurs. The deep black armour of the spectre blotches and runs into everything else. The clerics take their wine and then, depositing their cups on the tabletop, begin to clap their appreciation. A silent applause. The chamber shrinking. Their forms in shadow growing. Then, beyond them I see others. A gallery of shadows. Shapes in midnight plate. Indistinct but obviously armoured. Pauldrons. Helmets. Optics burning with otherworldly intelligence. They are everywhere. Row after row. An army of revenants. A host of darkness. Everything becomes an inky blackness, like being trapped deep under an ice-covered lake. Through an opening – distant and darkening – I see only Oliphant, deific praise still escaping his lips.

Before I know I’ve done it, my fists come down. The stone table jumps, the impact of my assault sending a quake down its entire length. Goblets dance. Plates and cutlery leap and rattle. Red wine spreads like blood from wounds across the table, pitter-pattering off the edge and onto the floor. I am on my feet, towering above the frozen gathering. They are simultaneously shocked and terrified. Rooted to the spot. Even Oliphant has stopped. Light has returned to the chamber. The revenant is gone and so has his company of lost souls.

‘Enough,’ I say. The word is mine, unlike the wave of anger upon which it rides. ‘The Emperor is flesh and he is blood. He lives and breathes. His sons honoured this, as do his sons’ sons. When will humanity, from whose ranks the Emperor emerged, recognise this? Priests… what do they know of the Emperor’s will? Priests, who take history – the truth of deeds long done – and use it to peddle lies and expectation. Who are you to offer hope? Vague promises of sanctuary and intervention, designed to distract humanity from the misery of an Imperial existence? The Emperor is a powerful man – but he is not all-powerful. If he was, do you think he would allow his people to languish as they do under threat of torment, poverty, hunger and death? As a man he is father to us all, not some omnipotent god to feed your desire to be loved and assuage your mortal fears. As a father, he does his best – as he always has – to protect his children. He reaches out to smash, with a righteous fist, those that seek to harm you. We are that fist.’

My own fists are buried in the cracked stone of the tabletop. I don’t really know to whom I am talking. Oliphant? The absent Melmoch? Myself? I lean at the gawping priests, my arms straight and shoulders hunched. I turn to look at Ezrachi, seated by my side. He is more the politician than myself, but I know that as an Adeptus Astartes, the priestly prattle rankles him also. His face is hard but not cast in the kind of disapproval I have come to expect from the Apothecary. My own face falls from fury to consternation.

‘The Darkness,’ I mumble. It is neither statement nor question. Ezrachi’s crabby brow furrows. The Apothecary is suddenly on his feet.

‘Please excuse us,’ Ezrachi says bowing his head. ‘Pontifex, gathered dignitaries. The corpus-captain’s duties demand his attention.’

The pontifex, a good-natured smile still somehow plastered across his half-paralysed face, nods reverently back, an act mimicked by the stunned priests about the table. With that, Ezrachi gets me out of the chamber.

Accompanied by the sibilance of his bionic leg, the Apothecary helped Kersh to the ground floor and the square before the pontifex’s palace.

‘It’s returning. I’m sure of it,’ Kersh said.

‘I severely doubt that,’ Ezrachi told him, ‘but I’ll do some tests.’

‘I told you before, I’m seeing things that are not there.’

‘Symptomatic of sleep deprivation. I can give you something for your sleeplessness. Even an Adeptus Astartes must sleep some time. We should not forget the monument. We have little idea of its malign influence. Melmoch tells me that it is corruptive and had a strange effect on both you and Skase. The Ruinous Powers delight in their mind tricks and we should not discount it.’ Kersh nodded slowly. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to alert the Chaplain just yet. I shall summon Melmoch for a second opinion.’

Outside, one of Certus-Minor’s long nights had fallen. All three of the cemetery world’s suns were absent from the sky. Brother Micah stood sentry on the palace door nearby a pair of Charnel Guard. He had been waiting. Upon seeing Kersh slumped against the aged Apothecary, the young champion was prompted to ask, ‘What’s wrong with the corpus-captain?’

‘You protect him,’ Ezrachi said with annoyance, ‘Let me treat him, eh?’

‘Brother Toralech is trying to relay an urgent message from Corpus-Commander Bartimeus, but can’t get a vox-link,’ Micah informed the Apothecary.

‘As you can see, the corpus-captain isn’t answering his vox-bead right now,’ Ezrachi replied sardonically.

With Micah under one ceramite shoulder and Ezrachi the other, the pair of Excoriators took Kersh across the square in the great shadow of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum. The journey downhill on cobbles, with the weight of the stumbling Scourge between them, was difficult. In the darkness of an alleyway the Space Marines heard screams and the echo of running footsteps. Gunshots followed. With his free hand Micah brought up his bolter and combat shield attachment, but Ezrachi pulled both Kersh and the company champion into the deeper darkness.

‘It’s local business. Let the cemetery world authorities handle it,’ the Apothecary insisted. ‘I don’t want anyone to see the corpus-captain like this.’ The three Excoriators held a hidden vantage point at a corner. Silent and still the Space Marines watched a servant girl, a common drudge, run for her life past them. Micah risked a brief glance around the corner. Heavier footsteps followed and close after he saw a thick-set foss-reeve bounding up the alleyway like a man possessed. As the reeve rounded the corner, Micah stepped out and shouldered the cemetery worlder into the opposite wall. Striking the masonry, the reeve hit his head and then tumbled to the cobbles, rolling shoulder over shoulder down the alleyway until he came to rest in a gutter. Ezrachi’s lip curled.

‘He didn’t see anything,’ Micah said before leading the two of them back down the alley.

It was the company champion’s responsibility to protect the corpus-captain at all times and even Ezrachi had to admit that the young Excoriator had done an excellent job of memorising the steep maze of lanes, passageways and alleys back down towards the Umberto II Memorial Space Port. The path was an escape route from the palace to the hermitage Ezrachi and Chaplain Shadrath had arranged for the Excoriators to use as a planetside dormitory.

As the Adeptus Astartes passed a dirge-cloister, they observed members of the Charnel Guard and a pair of Kraski’s enforcers gathered outside an emporium. The Excoriators with their superhuman hearing could hear stifled screams and growls of intimidation from within. The enforcers kicked in a flimsy door and entered with their shotguns raised. The Charnel Guard followed in their ceremonial gear and with their long lasfusils. There was a sudden rush and a cacophony of threats, followed by the inevitable bark of the enforcers’ weapons. The flash of lasfusils filled the narrow casements.

‘What on Terra is going on?’ Micah posed.

‘Come on!’ Ezrachi urged and the Excoriators pushed on along the final few alleyways. About them, against the backdrop of night, the city seemed alive with anger, shrieks of alarm and the occasional crack of stub-fire.

‘Shouldn’t we alert the Chaplain?’ Micah asked as they approached the hermitage.

‘Not the Chaplain,’ Ezrachi insisted.

‘Who then?’ Micah pushed. ‘Bartimeus? The chief whip? This is why we have a command structure.’

Micah stopped. Ezrachi didn’t wait for him. Taking the full weight of the barely conscious Kersh onto one shoulder, the Apothecary dragged the Scourge with him along the cobbles.

‘You can debate the directives for command with me later,’ Ezrachi called behind him. ‘For now, help me get your actual commanding officer inside.’

‘Apothecary.’

‘What?’ Ezrachi barked. When Micah didn’t appear beside him or even reply, the Apothecary stopped and made an ungainly one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn. Micah stood in the middle of the alleyway, his boltgun slack in his grip. The Excoriator was staring up past the belfries, spires and steeples of the city and into the open night sky. Ezrachi did the same. There, hanging above the cemetery world like a drop of blood, was the bulb-head of a comet. A crimson comet, whose tail trickled after it, smearing the heavens with gore. Ezrachi had heard of the crimson comet. The worst of omens, it brought death in its wake to entire worlds, for along its pilgrim path blazed the Blood God’s servants, unimaginable in number, with an unquenchable thirst for slaughter. The Cholercaust had come to Certus-Minor and with it had come inescapable doom.

Chapter Eight Fallen Star

Lord Havloc nestled in his command throne – an object that had become as much part of him as he had the Traitor battle-barge Rancour. Pincering a strip of ancient flesh between a pair of black talons, Havloc peeled it from his grotesque shoulder. His infernal face – a mangled snout of sabre-tusk and red, reptilian scale – twisted with repugnant hate. The lord of the Rancour had long felt disgust for his previous, weakling form. He let the strip dangle and drop beside the flesh-throne before examining the bone-scabrous daemonhide beneath.

About the creature the darkened bridge of the battle-barge extended, a nightmare of brasswork and chain. Gouts of flame routinely erupted from the grille floor, beneath which a gladiatorial slave-pit extended for Havloc’s pleasure. The roar of murderous intention and resulting death-shrieks that rose from the pit competed with the excruciating struggle of the Rancour’s ancient engines. Catwalks and elevated gangways led from the throne pulpit across the open space to the banks of rancid cogitators and runescreens, manned by half-mad emaciates and wretched captives that had proven themselves in the pit. The blood-smeared slaves were manacled to their stations and sat in their rags, staring glaze-eyed at their stations, reliving some past horror aboard the Rancour.

Dominating the far end of the bridge were the gargantuan lancet windows, cracked and misted with old blood. Through them the deep darkness of space was visible. One celestial object dominated, however. In the main lancet screen, perpetually held in a set of cross hairs by the mechanical course corrections of brass automatons, was the gory miasma of the Keeler Comet’s tail. With ancient orders and angelic masks, the automatons maintained the Rancour’s course heading, its torpid pursuit of the crimson comet across the stars.

Behind the mangled blasphemy of the battle-barge’s stately dimensions a colossal fleet extended. Like a growing stain on the empty void, the Cholercaust continued to grow. Daily, vessels of all descriptions joined the Ruinous armada. Some were warships, eager to join the Blood Crusade and prove themselves worthy of Khorne’s favour. Others had been led there under the command of killers and champions, whose carnage-clouded visions had revealed to them a slaughter without end, a patron-pleasing brotherhood of the barbarous. Others still were captured freighters, traders and heavy transports, swarming with the surrendered slave-stock of sundered worlds, Imperial innocents whose fate now lay in the Blood God’s claws and whose depraved treatment aboard the seized vessels led them down Khorne’s doomed path.

Silhouetted in the comet’s tailsmear, a Traitor Astartes stood before the lancet screen in the studded extravagance of archaic Tactical Dreadnought armour. The figure was a vision of red and brass, spiked like an undersea urchin and draped in skull and chain. His helm was a sculpted representation of monstrous jaws swallowing a bronze globe whole. Held beside the ceramite hulk, one in each gauntlet, were a pair of ugly chainaxes. The Traitor Terminator rested their shafts on the mesh-decking and allowed their chunky belligerence and barbed outline to hang over his grotesque helmet. Lord Havloc might have been commander of the Rancour and leader of the crusader fleet, but Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh – World Eater and Skull Champion of the Blood God – led the Cholercaust once the berserker armies of Khorne stepped out onto the soon-to-be blood-drenched earth of Imperial worlds. He stood like a statue, unmoved in his silent fury, watching the Keeler Comet’s haemorrhaging bulb bleed out across the cosmos, leading the Blood Crusade fleet across the stars to its next planetary victim.

On the bridge the air was thick with rage, heat and the haze of blood, pierced only by the Blood God-honouring screams of the dying. Devil-mutants and fang-faced bestials armed with serrated flails drove a chained train of fresh captives out onto the pulpit-mezzanine. There, before the horror of Havloc’s daemon form, the slaves shrieked their terror, emptied their bladders and begged for a mercy that would never come. With an imperceptible narrowing of his yellow, serpentine eyes, Lord Havloc gave successive orders for execution.

Like his glorious deity, Havloc the Cold-Blooded had a special loathing for the meek and yielding. The Blood God drank deep in the fury of the sword’s swing, the thunder of flesh-pulping gunfire delivered at point-blank range and the seething malice of murderous thoughts. These the Chaos entity drew upon, whether carried out by the depraved champions of his hateful cause or enemies, worthy in their violent desires and bloody intent.

A monstrous hulk lumbered forth, an obscene fusion of what had been a man and machine. Weapons protruded awkwardly from stone-hard flesh which had in turn grown cancerous and rampant across the thing’s armour and helmet. Two holes had been punctured in the tissue of the mask to allow the thing to see, and the eyeholes continually bled and crusted.

Released from his bonds, a fat slave threw himself down before Havloc’s feet – cloven hooves that had long been fused to the base of the throne. The hulk snatched up the pleading captive by the head with an embedded power claw. Its other arm was a flesh-cradle for the broad disc of a spinning buzzsaw, which with an effortless swipe, cut the slave’s screeching head and shoulders from the rest of his thrashing carcass. Lord Havloc and his followers were baptised in the blood of the slaughtered. Depositing the decapitated head in a net of rotting skulls hanging off the hulk’s back, the brute kicked the rest of the butchered corpse off the side of the pulpit-mezzanine. The body tumbled into a crowded den of flesh-hounds below, initiating a short-lived daemonic frenzy. This the hulk repeated with two further submissives until before Havloc came a spitting whirlwind of a girl. Her chains jangled and her feet flew as she attempted to thrash her way out of imprisonment. The Chaos lord licked his lips with a thick, forked tongue. He nodded and a bestial released her from her bonds.

From the back of the throne, Havloc spread a large pair of black, leathery wings. The girl spat at the Rancour’s commander and, free of her shackles, came straight at the beast. Havloc relished her mindless fury – her lack of fear and desire to kill. Flapping his wings in front of him, Havloc sent a wall of foetid air at the girl. Running and kicking, the spirited slave was blown from the grille of the pulpit-mezzanine. She tumbled with a half-caught scream before hitting the floor with a sickening crack. The scream came fully-formed this time. The slave was squirming around on the blood-slick floor of the gladiatorial arena below. A shattered tibia had sheared up through her knee.

‘That should slow her down a bit,’ Lord Havloc hissed, emerging from behind his retracting wings. Howls of furious delight rose from the audience as another slave was freed from a holding cage. Snatching a crude flensing blade from a hook on the rusting pit wall, the gore-speckled defending champion swept down on the girl.

The howls and shrieks of the berserkers on the bridge suddenly seemed to combine into one horrific roar. Flames thrashed to greater heights and the corroded metal of the deck began to vibrate, causing fragments of grit and shattered skull to dance, and blood to steam from its agitated surface. Umbragg took to one ceramite knee. The damned all spoke as one.

‘Havloc…’

Even the Chaos lord bowed his head and lowered his wings, as though the voice was everywhere and its owner looking down on him from above.

‘My lord,’ Havloc grizzled, with fear and fire fighting within him. ‘Great Pilgrim, the Right Claw of Khorne, Chosen of the Brazen-Fleshed. What is thy bidding, my merciless master?’

‘I lead,’ the cacophony of spite continued, ‘the Cholercaust follows. To what part of the doomed Imperium does the crimson comet – the physical embodiment of the Blood God’s will – take us next?’

‘Under your ruthless leadership, Great Pilgrim – back to Terra, to the crumbling walls of the corpse-Emperor’s palace and the Eternity Gate. For your murderous amusement, the War-Given-Form has blessed your path with a faith world. A planet of the dead, where the corpse-Emperor’s cultcubines minister to the galaxy’s silent majority.’

‘A planet of the dead, indeed,’ the Pilgrim boomed through the mouths of the mob. ‘Hone your blades, my slaughterkin, for shortly they shall taste priest-flesh…’

I dream.

For the longest time I have lived a nightmare. My eyes have been half open to events unfolding about me while behind them a macabre puppet show has played. To be neither awake nor asleep. A mind-breaking combination of both. It is custom to pinch oneself – to test if one is awake. I need no such test to know I am finally asleep. To know I am in the cradle of the unconscious. The world about me has that punch-drunk quality, the distant resonance of the unreal.

I walk the surface of the cemetery world. The sandy Certusian earth crunches beneath my boots. Through my helmet optics I zoom in on a crenulated horizon. A sea of gravestones and masonry markers extends before me. Above, the ivory sky broils and bubbles in the distance. Then, like an atomic explosion, a mushroom cloud vomits forth from the heavens and billows thunderously for the surface. There is no sound – only doom. The creamy cloud spumes and rages, swirling black, then red and gold as a swirling wall of flame overreaches the blast wave and the inferno hits the ground.

I turn and run. Armoured footfalls pulverise the grit beneath my boots as stride for stride my plated form attempts to outrun the conflagration. As the firewall of destruction billows furiously across the necroscape behind me, I feel my progress slowing. Even in full battle-plate I could make the horizon, but it is not the distance, nor the extra weight of ceramite that impedes me. I hurdle gravestones and will myself on, but as the flames engulf the world behind me, my boots sink deeper and deeper into the grave dirt. The soil has lost its consistency and I have run myself down into a quagmire. The earth – black, sodden and heavy – pulls me down into the ground itself. It oozes up my greaves, splatters plate and swallows cabling. With my legs and arms churning the morass, I see shattered bones, earth-stained skulls and rotten remains in the mire about me. Even a smashed stasis casket surfaces for a moment, like a sinking ship, before disappearing back into the depths.

With every movement my ceramite sinks further, and within moments I am up to my helm in cemetery world dirt. I turn to see the bank of flame – an unstoppable inferno of fire and fury that has scorched the Certusian surface clean – erupting upon my position. The most primal of instincts takes over, and before I know it, I have dived down below the quagmire and into an underworld of darkness, grit and death. My optics turn black. I desist in my armoured struggles and allow the cemetery world to take me down, while above the earth hardens, as the inferno bakes the ground with the heat of its righteous fury.

Kersh opened his eyes. The vague recollection of a dream misted his mind like a taste water wouldn’t wash away. He felt smothered yet calm and took a moment to savour several deep breaths. He allowed his head to roll to one side. A form sat by his bunk crystallised into focus. Bethesda, his personal serf and absterge, was watching him. Her mask of tension broke with relief and she smiled. The curl of her lip was simple and sweet, and Kersh found that he was actually quite glad to see her.

She turned and called ‘lord’ lightly at the dormitory door. It opened slightly and Kersh saw Micah’s face in the crack. His expression became a grin.

‘It’s good to see you, sir. I’ll send for your Apothecary, plate and bondsmen.’

Kersh nodded and went to sit up. The hermitage slab made a harsh bunk, but the Scourge had known worse. He had been stripped of his warrior’s plate and lay in his clean but blood-stained robes, bearing the venerated symbol of the Stigmartyr. As was custom, the cream of the garment was fresh but the spiritual work of ‘the purge’ was forever allowed to stain the material.

Putting the soles of his feet on the cold stone of the hermitage floor, Kersh felt something fall from his chest. On the flags beneath him, the Excoriator found a liquid-crystal wafer. He picked it up. It bore an illustration: a single eye, unflinching, open and glinting with predatory intention. The Space Marine felt some unease looking at the disturbing image. It was as though the card itself was watching him. Below the illustration, inscribed in High Gothic, was the title Magnus Occularis. The Scourge’s brow creased with confusion.

‘Did Melmoch leave this?’ Kersh asked. Bethesda shook her head.

‘Your armour, sir?’ Micah said as Kersh strode past and out into the dark hermitage thoroughfare. The company champion’s thoughts were always centred on his commander’s safety. The dim light of struggling candles illuminated the glower on the Scourge’s face.

‘The plate can wait,’ Kersh murmured, advancing up the cloister past the heavy doors of private dorms and hermitories. The corpus-captain came to a silent halt outside one. The ferruswood door was slightly ajar. Beyond, Kersh and Micah could hear the savage crack of a ‘purge’ at work. Kersh recognised the knotty face of Chief Whip Skase’s lictor. The serf himself was stripped to the waist and his body slick with the effort of mortification. Edging around, Kersh could also see the pool of blood gathering around the purged. Dorn’s Mantle had not been so much donned as spread across the floor. Both Skase’s seneschal and absterge were employed with mops and buckets, attempting to stem the flood. Against the wall stood the chief whip himself, stoic and immovable – like a statue – his mangled back cut to ribbons.

Pain and endurance were their genetic heritage and through the spilling of blood, Demetrius Katafalque had taught them that spiritual communion with the primarch could be achieved. In the cold remove achieved by Excoriators during the hot agony of purgation, Rogal Dorn had answers for each of them. Kersh had seen Excoriators punish themselves as such before. He had done so, cloaked in the shame of losing the Chapter Stigmartyr and failure to protect his Chapter Master. It led to a dark place. The long journey from Samarquand had taught him that his flesh had a greater purpose in Dorn’s eyes; that beyond the spiritual unity of the Mantle lay only a labyrinth of needless suffering in which to lose oneself forever.

Kersh was so struck by the spectacle – the simultaneous sadness for and anger towards the hurting Skase – that he did not even acknowledge Ezrachi’s hydraulic approach. Others in the dormitory had, however, and a figure behind him promptly closed the hermitory door.

‘Have Toralech relay a message to the Chaplain,’ Ezrachi ordered Brother Micah. ‘Inform him that the corpus-captain is conscious and demands a report.’

Micah nodded and peeled off into the shadows.

‘I ordered a cessation of ritual observance,’ Kersh growled at the ferruswood door.

‘And Chaplain Shadrath enforced it,’ said the Apothecary. ‘You’ve been out a few days.’ Ezrachi turned the Scourge’s face towards him before dazzling the Excoriator with some medical instrument that sent a flickering beam between his eyes. Since the dull, scratched surface of a ball bearing sat in one socket, Ezrachi focused his attention on the corpus-captain’s remaining eye.

‘Days,’ Kersh marvelled. ‘The company…’

‘Shadrath will make his report. Be still.’

Kersh allowed the Apothecary his rudimentary medical tests.

‘It’s not healthy,’ Kersh said looking back to the door, but the Apothecary brought his attention back to the beam.

‘I’ve spoken to Skase,’ Ezrachi said. ‘Right now I’m more worried about you.’

‘Was it a relapse of the Darkness?’

‘No,’ Ezrachi said with some certainty. ‘I just don’t think you were sleeping. Even an Adeptus Astartes must sleep some time. I can give you something for that. You must tell me if you begin suffering the delusions you spoke of.’

‘You think I’m hallucinating?’

‘I should have listened. My apologies, corpus-captain. We must accept the possibility that the catalepsean node is still malfunctioning. It might require further surgery. It is certainly more evidence for the likelihood of the Darkness having a genetic rather than spiritual cause.’

‘Well, thrilled as I am to help you solve a medical mystery,’ Kersh told him, ‘just fix it, will you?’

‘I need the surgical bay in the apothecarion – on board the Angelica Mortis. I’m happy, however, to submit a report indicating that you’re fit for duty.’

‘I suppose this recent incapacitation has further cemented ill-will towards my command amongst the Fifth.’

‘The rank and file hate you with a passion,’ Ezrachi told him with brutal honesty. ‘Nothing has changed there. Events, however, have overreached us.’

‘Explain.’

‘Follow me.’

The Apothecary led Kersh up a spiral staircase of stone and dust. In the awkwardness of full plate, Ezrachi found that he had to angle his pauldrons to ascend, while the globes of the Scourge’s muscular shoulders merely brushed the staircase walls. A door at the top of the twisting steps opened out into a narrow balcony. Below them the tiled roofs of the hermitage extended; above, a small bell tower reached for the darkness of the cemetery world sky. Stars glimmered in the heavens, and on the horizon, the Eye of Terror’s distant, heliotropic haze besmirched the depths of the void. It was not the warp storm’s horror that held the corpus-captain’s attention.

‘Katafalque’s blood,’ Kersh said, the oath carried off on the light breeze. Above Certus-Minor, the sky had been cleaved in two, a gore smear trailed across the starry firmament – like that a wounded soldier might make, crawling for his life. Instead of a soldier, the haemorrhaging bulb of a crimson comet blazed the bloody path. ‘The Keeler Comet…’

‘Destruction follows in the wake of the comet,’ Ezrachi told him. ‘It is more than just an omen. If the crimson comet appears in a sky then the world to which that sky belongs is doomed to fall.’

‘Stop talking like a prophet and give me specifics. Specifics I can kill.’

‘We’ve been out of segmentum, but Shadrath claims intelligence is patchy. The comet leaves no witnesses to its passing,’ the Apothecary said.

‘No survivors?’

‘Some claim the comet eats worlds whole,’ Ezrachi replied, ‘others that it is responsible for some kind of rift or daemonic incursion. The Imperial Navy reports sightings of an armada trailing its tail, a Blood Crusade called the Cholercaust. The Exorcists, the Grey Knights and our cousins the Fists are rumoured to man a cordon at Vanaheim – to prevent a crusader advance on Segmentum Solar.’

Kersh’s eyes drifted down to the planet surface. Beyond the city, the necroplex of grave markers, statues and mausolea extended before being swallowed by the darkness.

‘How long until dawn?’

‘Two, perhaps three hundred hours standard. The cemetery worlders call it the Long Night.’

‘We’ve got to send word to Vanaheim,’ Kersh said. ‘We need to alert the Viper Legion on Hellionii Reticuli. The Cadians…’

‘This world’s problems have already begun,’ Ezrachi said, pointing behind the corpus-captain. Turning, Kersh took in the rising spires and towers of Obsequa City with the dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum topping the cathedralscape like a crown. Smoke streamed from various fires across the city while tiny sparks of las-fire could be seen flashing across the streets below. Amongst the chaos, Kersh could make out large crowds in the streets. A mortuary lighter made an unsteady take-off and blasted past the belfry at full throttle. Kersh could imagine the panic and pure havoc created on the cemetery world at the appearance of the crimson comet. Kersh made for the stairs.

‘I presume an evacuation has begun,’ the Scourge called behind him.

‘With necrofreighter captains auctioning space in their empty holds to the highest bidders,’ Ezrachi said with obvious disappointment. ‘The ruling classes and many of the priests simply abandoned world. There was little in the way of haggling – speed being of the essence.’

‘The pontifex…’

‘Remains,’ Ezrachi said. ‘He claims he won’t leave his people or sacred Certusian soil. There are, of course, many thousands of scribes and labourers without the coin to secure a passage off-world.’

‘What about the Sisters?’

‘Umberto II’s remains are too fragile to transport,’ the Apothecary explained. ‘With or without the pontifex, the Order of the August Vigil have orders to protect the Ecclesiarch’s bones. I think we can rely upon them to do that, but little else.’

Kersh stormed out of the stairwell and out onto the hermitage thoroughfare.

‘My battle-plate,’ he roared up the cloister at his serfs. ‘Do you know anything about this?’ Kersh asked, holding out the crystalline wafer he’d been holding. Ezrachi took it. ‘It was placed with me as I slept.’

‘From the Emperor’s Tarot. Members of the Librarius use them,’ the Apothecary told him. Ezrachi squinted at the card. ‘The Great Eye,’ he read.

‘Give it back to Melmoch,’ Kersh ordered.

‘It wasn’t Melmoch,’ Ezrachi said. As the Scourge continued marching up the cloister, the Apothecary stopped. He opened a nearby door and called, ‘Kersh!’

Scowling, the Scourge returned and looked in through the open door. It was the small sanctuary chamber Ezrachi had converted to a temporary apothecarion. Epistolary Melmoch lay upon a hermit’s slab, arms across his chest.

‘Is he…’

‘No,’ Ezrachi interjected as the two Excoriators entered the room. ‘But he is out cold. He breathes but fails to respond to drugs or stimuli.’

‘What happened?’ Kersh asked as Bethesda and Old Enoch began running in pieces of plate from the rack outside.

‘He was found like this,’ Ezrachi replied. ‘I believe it might have something to do with this,’ the Apothecary said, picking up a small, ornately decorated urn from a dormitory shelf. He handed it to the Scourge who examined it with interest. ‘It was reported stolen from the Memorial Mausoleum by the Sisters but found here with Melmoch.’

‘What is it?’

‘The Palatine was short on detail but I gather it is used in an annual, ceremonial capacity to dust the Ecclesiarch’s shrine. The material inside the urn is formulated from a by-product of the Emperor’s metabolism, if you believe that. The dust particles are impregnated with negative psychic energy, so I’m told. For all I know there could be bread crumbs inside, but for the fact that the Palatine and her Sisters were almost on the verge of charging down the hermitage door to recover it and the effect exposure has had on Melmoch here.’

‘Why would he do that to himself?’ Kersh asked as his serfs worked fast about him.

‘This is nothing. Ever since the comet appeared, witchbreeds have been dying,’ Ezrachi told the corpus-captain.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Astropaths hanging from cloisters, Navigators stepping unsuited into airlocks. All kinds of insanity.’

‘What about the Angelica Mortis?’

‘Zaragoza’s dead. That bird of his went mad and tore his throat out,’ the Apothecary said.

‘Something wrong with the pet?’

‘Or with Zaragoza,’ Ezrachi said. ‘Who knows? Shadrath recalled the Angelica Mortis back to the cemetery world. She has the sprint trader Avignor Star under her guns. The captain wishes to leave with the last of the great and good, but the trader carries the only remaining Navigator. Commander Bartimeus is under orders to destroy her if she attempts to leave. With the pontifex’s chief astropath, Melmoch and this Navigator are the only psykers left on or around the planet.’

‘Chaplain Shadrath has been in command?’ the Scourge asked.

Ezrachi nodded. ‘He charged me with your care and completed the destruction of the Ruinous monument.’

‘The monument,’ the corpus-commander repeated, looking down at the Librarian. ‘Melmoch said it was a beacon.’

‘Well, now we know what it was beckoning,’ the Apothecary said.

‘Why didn’t Shadrath just leave?’ Kersh asked. ‘That’s what he wanted.’

‘He had no orders to leave,’ Ezrachi insisted. ‘I told him your symptoms were likely to be short-term. He restricted his commands to the execution of your wishes and precautionary measures. The Gauntlet sits on the rockrete, fuelled and ready to go. The strike cruiser awaits your order to leave. We are leaving, aren’t we?’

Kersh’s mind seemed elsewhere. He was looking down at the small urn.

‘We should return this…’

‘Kersh!’ Ezrachi said. ‘We’re leaving, yes?’

‘You would have me abandon one of the Emperor’s worlds at the sight of an omen in the sky?’ Kersh grizzled.

‘Whatever is ending worlds in the wake of the Keeler Comet, I fear we are too few a number to dissuade it from taking this tiny planet of the dead,’ Ezrachi barked back. ‘We have a ship. We have a Navigator. We should alert the cordon at Vanaheim. There – shoulder to shoulder with our brothers – we can make our stand.’

‘We have an astropath – you said it yourself,’ the corpus-captain persisted. ‘And we have a message for him to send. The Viper Legion are nearest.’

‘There is an astrotelepathic blackout for light years around,’ Ezrachi shot back.

‘Then he shall have to double his efforts!’

‘Kersh, don’t do this.’

‘Do what, Ezrachi? Carry out my Chapter Master’s orders?’

‘Our purpose here is fulfilled. Events are unfolding on a larger canvas. We must make a run for Vanaheim–’

‘We are Excoriators,’ Kersh seethed. ‘Attrition fighters. Our gene-kindred fought before the walls of the Imperial Palace. We are not heralds and harbingers. We are Excoriators and this is the Imperium beneath our feet. We stand our ground and we fight, whatever the odds. As though this were the palace itself. I have failed my Chapter Master. I will not fail my Emperor.’ The two Space Marines burned into each other with searing eyes as Kersh’s serfs pressurised his seals and attached his weapons to his belt. ‘And neither will you.’

Ezrachi looked away as Brother Micah appeared at the doorway. The champion looked unsure of himself amongst the heated exchange. The corpus-captain turned to the young Excoriator. ‘Have word sent to Chaplain Shadrath. Tell the Chaplain I need him and Brother Toralech at the pontifex’s palace, immediately. We shall meet them there.’ Micah nodded. ‘You too,’ Kersh added before looking back at the livid Apothecary. ‘And you.’ Ezrachi looked down and nodded gently. ‘We have words and deeds for Pontifex Oliphant and his chief astropath.’

Chapter Nine Harbinger

Before the Obelisk Ecclesiarchical palace – which served Erasmus Oliphant as both pontifex and planetary governor – two groups of Excoriators marched out of the darkness towards one another. Kersh was flanked by his Apothecary and Brother Micah, who walked a little out front with his bolter and combat shield attachment held out before him. Chaplain Shadrath had with him the Fifth Company’s standard bearer, Brother Toralech, holding his banner proudly above them. A little way behind them, Second Squad Whip Ishmael and Brother Levi – from Squad Castigir – marched across the cobbles. The two Excoriators were helmetless and scorn was etched into their sour faces.

‘I won’t offer my gauntlet, brother, for fear you would not take it – and that would only shame us both,’ Kersh opened aggressively, ‘but I thank you for the care you have given to the Fifth in my absence and my existing orders.’

Shadrath came to a halt. His half-skull helm remained fixed on the corpus-captain but did little to acknowledge the appreciation.

‘I did no less than Katafalque expected,’ Shadrath said finally.

‘And no more,’ Kersh admitted.

‘What are we doing here?’ Ishmael spat, the veteran’s face contorting itself around the expression of disgust.

‘Our duty, Brother Ishmael,’ the Scourge informed him. ‘Which I am not about to debate here. The Adeptus Astartes is not a democratic institution. Neither is the Emperor’s Imperium – I’ll have you remember that. You and your Excoriators will do as you’re damn well ordered.’

Ishmael and Levi exchanged dark glances.

Twin columns of Charnel Guard jogged across the plaza carrying the lengths of their lasfusils and in the full sobriety of ceremonial dress. A helmetless lieutenant led them across to the palace doors, replacing the powerpack in his taper-barrelled pistol.

‘What is it, lieutenant?’ the Scourge demanded to know.

‘We’ve been summoned by the High Constable, my lord,’ the dour officer replied.

‘Go,’ Kersh ordered his Excoriators, who had little trouble reaching the palace doors before the Guardsmen. With Ishmael and Toralech flanking the archway, Brothers Micah and Levi kicked aside the heavy doors and led the group into the small palace and up through the Obelisk’s stairwells. Before the reception chambers and beneath the great belfry, the Space Marines found High Constable Colquhoun barking orders to a gathering of his Guardsmen. Some were stationed at the bronze doors of the pontifex’s reception chambers, calling through the thick metal. Others had the long barrels of their lasfusils pointed at the aperture, while a small group had toppled a masonry statue at the High Constable’s instruction and were trying to batter the doors down.

‘Thank the God-Emperor,’ Colquhoun said at the appearance of the Adeptus Astartes.

‘What’s happening?’

‘The pontifex has been in there for many hours. We thought he was at prayer,’ the High Constable confessed. ‘When planetary business necessitated a disturbance I tried to enter myself.’

‘Locked?’

‘There is no lock. They must be blocked from the other side.’

‘Anyone in there, beside the pontifex?’ Kersh asked.

‘Only his chief astropath,’ Colquhoun confirmed. The Scourge pursed his grizzled lips.

‘Toralech, Ishmael,’ the corpus-captain ordered.

As the Charnel Guard and their improvised ram retreated, the squad whip and the hulking standard bearer put their ceramite shoulders to the bronze. As the Space Marines pushed against the metal with superhuman might, the doors began to give. With a screech they parted slightly, at which Ishmael put his eye to the crack. ‘Barricaded with masonry,’ he reported.

‘What?’ the High Constable exclaimed.

A sulphurous tang stung the Scourge’s nostrils.

‘Do you smell that?’ he asked. As he snorted he detected the otherworldly odours of ozone and scalded reality. The same reek he experienced on the battlefield when the witchbreeds of the Librarius brought the full force of their warp-drawn powers down on the Emperor’s enemies.

‘Warpstench…’ Shadrath snarled.

‘Pontifex!’ Ezrachi boomed through the gap in the bronze. When no sound returned, Kersh stabbed a finger at Brother Micah and then at the stone wall.

‘Shoot it out!’

Pulling the bolter into his shoulder, the company champion hammered the masonry with diamantine-tip precision. As the dust cleared, a ragged circle in the wall was revealed, as well as a peppering of holes that had broken up the masonry within. Like a torpedo, Kersh launched himself at the wall. Punching through the crumbling stone, he dived through the opening. Rolling across a pauldron and the curvature of his pack, the Scourge landed back on his feet. With dust cascading off his armour, he unclipped his chainsword and brought the short, falchion-shaped weapon out in front of him. Gunning the Ryza-pattern blade to life, he waved it from left to right like a flaming torch in the darkness of a cave. Beyond, the throne room appeared in a state of considerable disarray.

Rolling into a covering position, both Micah and Levi followed their corpus-captain through, bolters up and scanning the chamber.

‘Oliphant!’ Kersh called above the chug of the company heirloom.

Shadrath and Ezrachi stepped through the wall with Squad Whip Ishmael bringing up the rear. Toralech waited by the opening with the standard in hand and his bolter pointed through the hole. ‘Spread out,’ the corpus-captain called, prompting the Excoriators to advance through the pontifex’s reception chambers and throne room.

‘Kersh,’ the Apothecary called, drawing the Scourge’s attention to the small mountain of masonry that had been ripped out of the walls and ceiling and piled before the bronze doors.

Sweeping through the wreckage of the darkened chamber, the Excoriators moved in on the throne room. As Kersh led the way with the idling chainsword, flanked by the gaping muzzles of Micah and Levi’s bolters, the Space Marines found a robed form slumped in the ecclesiarch’s throne.

‘Pontifex?’ Kersh called. When the figure didn’t reply, the corpus-captain shouted, ‘Ezrachi!’

The Apothecary moved up behind the group as they advanced on the throne. The remaining Excoriators gathered at the door, ready to provide cover fire. Levi moved in and pulled the figure’s head back. Slipping the hood off, the Excoriators found themselves looking into the empty sockets of the pontifex’s chief astropath. Ezrachi moved in.

‘Unconscious,’ the Apothecary confirmed. ‘Like Melmoch.’

‘Listen!’ Kersh said, shutting off the chainsword’s brutal motor. The remaining Excoriators, who had been moving through the expanse of the throne room, froze. As they scanned the chamber, they heard a distant murmur.

‘It’s coming from outside,’ Ishmael said. Kersh joined him on the pontifex’s balcony, squinting through the darkness. A narrow ledge ran along the four sides of the Obelisk, running under the balcony, a decorative rather than a practical structure. Peering through the murk along it, the Excoriators caught a glimpse of fingers, clasping the corner of the building with bone-white desperation. A figure was somehow situated out on the ledge. As a fearful face edged around the corner, peering at the Excoriators, the figure released a howl of relief and urgency.

‘Oliphant!’ Kersh cried. ‘Ishmael–’

But the squad whip was already over the balcony balustrade and stepping down onto the narrow ledge. ‘Ezrachi,’ the corpus-captain called, as he craned his head back around into the reception chamber. The Apothecary left Brother Levi with the comatose astropath and made his way up the steps.

‘He’s coming around,’ the Excoriator announced as the astropath’s head came up. Instead of empty sockets, a pair of dark orbs – black as midnight and sizzling with blank hatred – rolled over in the psyker’s skull. Momentarily transfixed, Brother Levi watched as twisted horns of charred bone sliced their way out of the man-puppet’s gaunt flesh.

‘Daemo–’ Levi began, but the thing before him exploded in a bloodstorm of shattered skull and brain. An elongated cranium blasted out of the back of the astropath’s head, while daemonfangs burst through his forehead and neck, swallowing his face whole. In its place a visage of infernal flesh appeared: primordial, bestial and depraved. Willowy, lurid limbs and talons erupted from the palms and soles of the astropath’s own and the daemon grew, wearing the puppet’s body like a garment over its horrific and emaciated torso. Pinpricks of immaterial life, like keyholes into a furnace, burned through the inky incomprehension in the monster’s eyes. In one savage motion, the daemon seized Brother Levi by his pauldrons and enveloped the Excoriator’s head with the cage of its jaws. Snapping down, the beast sheared Levi’s head from his neck and swallowed, leaving the Space Marine’s power armour to fountain gore from the neckbrace.

With his attention split between the throne room and the ledge, Kersh was slow to react. The first he truly understood of the danger was the sight of his Excoriators lifting their weapons at the far end of the throne room. The Scourge felt a shockwave of rage and hatred spread through the chamber like a red mist that could be felt but not seen. All Kersh saw was the cavernous muzzle of Shadrath’s bolt pistol thrust at him and the Chaplain lean into a firing position.

Kersh snatched his own Mark II piece from his holster only to see Brother Micah slam the Chaplain’s arms aside with his shoulder.

‘The corpus-captain!’ he yelled.

Before the Scourge could take aim a florid blur shot across the entrance to the balcony. The corpus-captain got the impression of something spindly and daemonic, all horns, claws and blasphemous flesh. Kersh thrust a palm back at Ishmael on the ledge, the squad whip having the exhausted pontifex under one arm. By the time he turned back, the creature had bounded halfway down the chamber on its gangly legs. Both Micah and Chaplain Shadrath’s gunfire had now been unleashed, blasting its way up the precious Ecclesiarchical relics that adorned the throne room wall. Kersh brought his own to bear, trapping the beast between two converging arcs of .75 calibre hell.

Clawing a foothold in the masonry, the daemon vaulted up through the beams of the chamber ceiling and into the great belfry above. The clangs of its ungainly movements could be heard against the metal of the Obelisk’s bell. As the Chaplain indulged a slick reload of his pistol, Brother Micah sidestepped across the chamber towards his corpus-captain, dribbling bolt-rounds at the ceiling beams. These were joined by the judicious crash of the Apothecary’s pistol and the fully automatic hurricane of fire from Toralech. The standard bearer had been drawn in by the sound of gunfire and held his banner upright like some religious artefact, ready to repel the infernal beast with faith alone.

‘Hold your fire!’ Kersh ordered, bringing even Toralech’s chattering bolter to a halt. The Excoriators listened to the ring and scrape of the thing’s talons on the bell. Kersh’s eyes widened as the potential calamity of the situation crystallised in his mind. ‘Fall back!’ the corpus-captain roared, but by then the calamity was already in play.

The Obelisk’s Great Bell crashed down through the ceiling beams from the belfry above. The colossal instrument descended on a furious cloud of masonry dust and debris, clanging and pealing its thunderous way down through the throne room floor. Kersh watched in horror as Chaplain Shadrath, Toralech and Brother Micah all disappeared, carried down with the bell as it made its cacophonous descent through the different floors of the Obelisk. Once again, Kersh was treated to the hazy impression of the daemon, clinging to the bell crown and riding the instrument down through its path of destruction.

Ezrachi had been fortunate not to have been caught in the path of the object, but now with the demolished throne room floor collapsing under him, the Apothecary had little choice but to make a clumsy bound for the balcony. The Excoriator’s hydraulic leg wouldn’t entertain the speed such a manoeuvre entailed and Kersh watched the marble floor fall away beneath the Apothecary.

Dropping both pistol and chainsword, Kersh threw himself down and half over the crumbling floorspace. Marble disappeared beneath his chest also, leaving only his legs and armoured midriff spread awkwardly across the balcony. With one of the Scourge’s gauntlets clutching for a handhold, the other shot for the falling Ezrachi. His ceramite fingertips clawed their way around the edge of the reductor adorning the Apothecary’s armoured wrist. Ordinarily, Ezrachi would use the sacred tool to extract gene-seed from fallen Excoriators. As the Apothecary dangled from his corpus-captain’s grasp it became clear that the instrument had saved him from falling. Holstering his pistol and getting his gauntlet to the Scourge’s arm, Ezrachi gave Kersh a glare of crabby exertion before hauling himself up the ceramite plating of his arm and shoulder. Swinging his bionic leg up and onto the balcony edge, the Apothecary used his powerful hydraulics to do the last of the heavy lifting.

As the two Excoriators lay on their chestplates looking down through the devastation the bell had punched through the different levels of the palace, they heard Colquhoun’s Charnel Guard hit the stairs and make their way down towards the ground floor.

‘The casualties…’ Ezrachi began, getting to his feet. Kersh snatched up his pistol and chainsword.

‘Let me at least kill it first,’ the Scourge shouted as he gunned the chainblade to serrated life. ‘Call for the Gauntlet,’ Kersh ordered, ‘and get the pontifex off that ledge.’

With that, Kersh turned and dropped off the side of the balcony. As the Great Bell had fallen, taking out floor after floor, it had left behind a narrow rim of masonry on each level, keystones and structural girder-stumps protruding from the exterior wall. Bounding from one to the other, dropping whole floors and spiralling his way down through the wreckage, Kersh went after the daemon.

A thick cloud of dust rose to meet him about halfway down, indicating that the bell had finally reached the ground floor of the palace. With the powdered masonry and final resonance of the instrument hanging in the air it became increasingly difficult to make the footholds out. When what looked like a snapped support strut turned out to be nothing, the Scourge fell the remaining three floors. Hitting the uneven floor of debris and stone carnage, Kersh felt the hydraulics of his power armour groan and protest. Springing back and rolling, he assumed a combat stance in the miasma of dust. Kersh could make out little but the ghostly outline of the toppled bell and mess of ropes, cords and pulleys left by the falling instrument, hanging in the haze like vines in a jungle mist.

‘Shadrath… Micah… Toralech. Respond.’ The vox-link fed back only static.

The beast was suddenly upon him.

Launching itself over the bell, with a shattered length of girder clutched within its infernal talons, the daemon howled its inhuman desire to end the Scourge. The potent length of a slack, bestial tongue swung from the creature’s maw. The chainsword raged in Kersh’s hand.

The corpus-captain followed the savage motion of the girder with his sword. Kersh ducked the first swing – a manoeuvre that had every right to take his head from his shoulders. A second and a third danced in an arc of pure wrath, flying for the Excoriator time and again. Attempting to keep his focus and composure amid the supernatural speed of the strikes and the primeval roaring and hissing of the thing, Kersh sidestepped across the uneven ground. He leant back out of the path of the shattered end of the girder as it descended, his throat a hair’s breadth from the razor tip of the metal support strut. A roll to the left took him away from the improvised weapon, and the daemon had to content itself with the lump of palace masonry it pulverised instead. A sudden backslash, riding on a crest of spite, found the Scourge, smacking his backpack and slamming the Excoriator into the wall.

Kersh swung straight back with the raging teeth of his chainsword, clipping the tip off the retracting girder. Clasping the weapon like a lance, the daemon charged at the Excoriator. Kersh batted the metal away with the flat of his sword, allowing the girder to skewer the stone of the wall right beside him. The Scourge accelerated the chain on his weapon to an insane screech before cutting down through the girder’s thickness. Again the creature retracted the strut only to have Kersh follow, pressing his advantage. The beast rewarded its opponent with a series of strikes designed to cut the Adeptus Astartes in two, but each one met with the Scourge’s serrated blade and the immovable arms of the Excoriator behind it. The girder’s length was cut down again and again, forcing the creature to step back up the bell. With just a stump remaining of the daemon’s weapon, Kersh brought up his pistol. By the time the Mark II delivered its death-dealing blast, however, the monster had flipped back behind the bell, leaving the girder to fall to the uneven floor and fat bolt-holes in the metal of the bell.

Fuelled by the creature’s retreat, Kersh stormed across the demolished architecture. A lightshow cast ghostly patterns through the swirls and eddies in the dust. The Scourge immediately recognised the semi-automatic whoosh of the Charnel Guard’s lasfusils and the High Constable’s calm and routine instruction. The beast had retreated straight into the fearful Guardsmen, waiting in formation at the bottom of the stairs.

Kersh would have stormed into the hail of las-bolts himself if it hadn’t been for the company standard, resting in the rubble. Toralech’s hand was still clenched around the banner pole, despite the fact that the hulking standard bearer’s body was a twisted mess of bone and ceramite, half buried in the wreckage. Kersh spat and swore. Suddenly a gauntlet snatched at his boot. Spinning around, Kersh saw a partially buried Excoriator. Looking from the lightshow to the gauntlet, the corpus-captain slammed his Mark II and his chainsword down in the rubble. Heaving pieces of stone off the Space Marine, Kersh found himself looking down at the cracked, half-skull face of Shadrath’s helm. The Chaplain had been buried in masonry and the rim of the Great Bell rested across the smashed ceramite of his chest.

‘Hold on,’ Kersh told the Chaplain and rested his pack against the metal of the bell. Hooking his fingers around the rim, the Scourge pushed with his legs.

From the stairwell beyond, Kersh could hear the disciplined fire of the lasfusils break up and the screams of Guardsmen echo about the ruins of the palace. Heaving upwards, the corpus-captain lifted the colossal weight of the bell slightly, allowing the rim to clear the buckled chestplate of the Chaplain. Kersh heard Shadrath take a laboured breath, then the sounds of slaughter. The beast was among the Guardsmen, tearing and gutting its way through the Charnel Guard with hateful ease.

Within moments the thing was back. Down on all fours, the daemon charged at Kersh. It smouldered with the scorch tracks of las-bolts that had found their mark, and steamed with the blood of the Guardsmen it had butchered. Kersh held his ground as Chaplain Shadrath squirmed his way out from under the Great Bell. At the last moment, Kersh released his grip. The bell came back down on the Chaplain’s pauldron, trapping his arm and causing the Excoriator to grunt in pain and exertion. The daemon hit the metal of the instrument with the dome of its elongated cranium – its twisted horns ringing against the surface. Snatching the relic-gladius from his belt, the Scourge allowed the weight of its bulbous pommel to carry the blade around with centrifugal certainty before slashing down through the beast’s willowy arm.

Kersh’s stroke took off the limb at the elbow. But though such a loss might have given most enemies pause for thought, the daemon seemed oblivious. It spat its gall and fed its rage with a blinding counter. Using the dribbling stump of the same limb, the monster smacked the gladius out of the Scourge’s grip with bone-ringing force. Pushing itself off the bell with its hind-talons, the daemon blazed at the Excoriator. Slamming the length of its skull against his chest and midriff, the beast ran the corpus-captain into the opposite wall. Stone crumbled and masonry fell as the creature butted the Space Marine repeatedly into the unforgiving surface. Kersh tried to reach for the hilt of his remaining gladius – the only weapon he had left – but was forced to grab on to the monster’s horns in order to prepare himself for the next brutal impact.

Twisting the hydraulic sinew of his armoured wrist, Kersh broke off a length of the fiend’s horn and thrust it into the thing’s hideous visage. The reaction was immediate. Its head came up and its jaws flashed open, wider than the Scourge thought possible. Gagging under the creature’s gorebreath, Kersh once again grabbed the torturous cage of horn that protruded from the daemon’s skull, forcing it back. As the Excoriator fought to force the monster back, the slack length of bloodlustful tongue suddenly became solid and sharp, like a speartip. Kersh intuitively craned his head out of harm’s way, as the tongue shot out like a slaughterhouse groxgun. Puncturing the wall, the repellent tongue retracted. The Scourge threw his head the other way, only to have the devilish tip nick the side of his head and impale the brickwork.

Out of nowhere Kersh heard the familiar crack of a bolt pistol. The beast seemed to arch and screech its vexation before rocketing away, allowing several rounds to pluck at the stone about the Scourge. Falling to a crouch, Kersh saw that Chaplain Shadrath – his shoulder still trapped beneath the Great Bell – had got his other gauntlet to the corpus-captain’s Mark II pistol. The daemon was back down on all fours, bounding this way and that, causing each of the Chaplain’s unsteady shots to narrowly miss. Leaping up onto the side of the bell once more, it forced the instrument down with its infernal weight, causing the Chaplain to gasp and drop the weapon. Pinning his wrist to the floor with one wicked hind-talon, the beast reared its other above Shadrath’s cracked helm in readiness for the kill.

The ruins were suddenly filled with the clamour of bolt-fire. Brother Micah, masonry dust still cascading from his plate, took several determined – if shaky – steps around the Great Bell. His combat shield attachment was buckled but his bolter raged fully-automatic fury at the beast. The creature let loose an inhuman wail as the bolt-rounds plucked at its daemonflesh. With its stump and talons held out as an instinctive shield, and its digits and claws blasted off by the barrage, the monster backed away from the advancing champion.

As Micah’s half-spent magazine ran dry, the mauled beast turned to find the Scourge standing behind it. The Excoriator stood tall and held a large chunk of ruined masonry above his head. His face was a strained mask of fury and physical effort. Smashing the small boulder down on the creature’s long head, Kersh watched the daemon stagger back. Shaking dust, grit and rock fragments from its hellish form, the beast seemed momentarily dazed. Fearless and foolish, the Scourge ran at the monster, wrapping his arm around its neck, grabbing it by its repulsive tongue and clutching its head to his armoured side. He felt the spirit of his plate protest against such close proximity to the Chaos daemon. Kersh was beyond caring, however. Holding the beast in an armlock, the Scourge pummelled the beast with his other fist.

Kersh felt his being expand to accommodate the pure rage coursing through him. A natural gene-bred hatred of the Emperor’s enemies, growing into something unnatural and monstrous. Fighting the warp-sired thing had given rise to something ugly and uncompromising within the Scourge, a primal thing beyond his Adeptus Astartes training and the cool conduct of battle. A feeling that superseded strategic frustration and a Space Marine’s bottomless desire to win. Anger, indiscipline, anarchy. A lack of control that could only be described as bloodlust. Kersh became a ceramite chalice, spilling over with hot, mindless fury.

Spitting curses and oaths, beating and punching the monster, Kersh’s actions were no longer his own. His eyes remained fixed on the rubble through which his boots and the monster’s hind-talons stumbled. An image flashed before the Scourge’s eyes. A momentary flicker. A memory, seared into the Space Marine’s unconscious.

The crystalline wafer he’d found on his chest. The Emperor’s Tarot card. The Magnus Occularis. The single, unflinching eye, its doom-laden orb staring through the Scourge and filling him with the chill sensation of a feeling equally unnatural in an Excoriator. Fear. Kersh remembered the Darkness. Dorn’s gift. Dorn’s curse. A galaxy undone. A future alone. Kersh could not see the revenant but he sensed he was there. Just like he had been in the living nightmare of the Darkness. The Scourge felt his heart freeze within his chest. A benumbing emptiness that extinguished the fires of wanton wrath gutting him like a burning building.

At once, Kersh was himself again. The fury gone. The spite steaming away before a Space Marine’s singular purpose. The Scourge became aware once more of the monster in his grasp. The threat. The need to act. Kersh dragged the daemon over to the knotted carnage of the Great Bell’s pulley system. Snatching a length of bell cord, the Scourge looped the thick rope around the daemon’s macabre skull. As he released the beast he felt furious life return to its blasted limbs. Two remaining talons scraped across the ceramite of his shoulder plate before Kersh got to a second rope and began pulling arm-over-arm for his life. The daemon flew skywards, its legs swinging back and forth like a doll’s, its neck and bulbous head snug in the improvised noose. It gagged, spat and hissed its brute vehemence. The Scourge held the beast there for a moment, taking no little satisfaction in the monster’s spasmodic thrashing.

‘Kersh!’ came a call from above. The corpus-captain began an almost torturous return to his senses. It was Ezrachi. Kersh felt a tremble on the air. The welcome quake of a Thunderhawk’s engines.

Two figures approached through the dust and mist. In one hand Brother Micah trained his reloaded boltgun on the snared beast. With his other he held up Chaplain Shadrath, freshly extricated from beneath the bell’s crushing weight. Shadrath held the company standard in his fierce grip. They too stood entranced by the monster’s jigging and twitching. Patting the Chaplain’s plate, the company champion allowed Shadrath to lean against the battered standard and brought his weapon into his shoulder. Micah angled the sights of his bolter up at the daemon. Kersh saw the fire in the champion’s eyes.

‘Save it,’ the corpus-captain commanded, before adjusting his vox-channel. ‘Gauntlet, this is Kersh.’ The Scourge returned to his ropework, hauling the beast up through the rock dust and gloom. ‘Target lock, palace interior.’

The three Excoriators watched the daemon disappear above them. Kersh feverishly worked the bell cord, feeling the creature’s livid desperation through the length of rope. The line suddenly went slack. Simultaneously the roar of heavy bolters echoed through the ruins and the haze above flickered with a steady stream of firepower.

A mangled form tumbled through the murk, striking the Great Bell and sending a thunderous death knell reverberating through the palace. The Excoriators looked down at the smoking remains of the daemon at the foot of the instrument. Whatever murderous, immaterial life had flowed through the daemonflesh had now left it. The corpse was black and shredded, punched through with bolt-rounds and mauled beyond grisly recognition.

‘Are you wounded?’ Micah put to his corpus-captain.

‘No, but you are.’

‘Are you all right?’ the champion pressed.

‘I am now,’ Kersh told him, stepping over the infernal remains. Walking across the rubble, Kersh reclaimed his weapons.

‘What do you want me to do with it?’ Shadrath hissed.

Before leaving the chamber Kersh stopped and turned, taking one final look at the smouldering daemon. It was already beginning to lose its tenuous grip on reality, the red flesh bubbling and spitting. A bronze steam rose from the infernal corpse – its corporeal presence beginning to ebb away – threading through the smoke and slaughter. The Scourge would take no chances.

‘Burn it,’ Kersh told the Chaplain and left.

Chapter Ten Necroplex

Brother Omar gunned the bike’s throttle. The vehicle bucked with obedience, its machine-spirit hungry for the road. As a neophyte, Omar’s flesh had yet to be worthy of the lash, and no dents, rents or craters marked his carapace – his armour bearing the ignoble sheen of battle virginity. With the fat tyres of the bike tearing up the grit of the lychway and his dark robes flowing behind him, Omar surged up along the column cavalcade.

With the appearance of the blood comet in the Certusian skies, cemetery world society collapsed. The wealthy and educated fled. Merchants sold their stock. Scribes and scriveners left their quills in their ink. Priests abandoned their flocks. Anyone with ears and coin had packed what they could carry and joined the crowds gathered about the mortuary lighters and hump shuttles on Memorial Space Port rockrete. Their ears were ringing with tales of the Keeler Comet and the death of worlds that followed in its wake. Their purses were soon emptied by greedy freighter captains whose crammed vessels hung in low orbit like last chances.

Such fear felt alien and craven to Omar – as it did to all Excoriators. As a Scout and brother of the Tenth Company, he was young enough to remember the doubts and uncertainties of childhood. Back beyond his years of psycho-surgical enhancement and cult instruction. A time when fathers ruled and a mother’s embrace was everything. A time of nightmares, when darkness felt full of dread and danger.

Brother Omar remembered and he felt for the cemetery worlders left behind. Like children, the remaining Certusians seemed haunted by their ignorance. Their existence had been the Emperor’s word, delivered daily through priestly lips and the reassuring drudgery of a hard day’s labour with teat or shovel. Now they had neither. Newborns went unfed and the dead unburied. There was only blind panic. Infrastructure had swiftly broken down and early fears for basic requirements such as food and safety found expression in petty tyranny, violence and murders of seeming necessity.

It was for this reason that Corpus-Captain Kersh gave Squad Whip Keturah and his Scouts orders to ride out. To blast along the lychways and crow roads of the necroplex, across the sea of grave markers and stone sculpture, and through cenopost communities. In the absence of the Emperor’s words, the corpus-captain thought it important that common Imperials had the example of the Emperor’s flesh to comfort them. Even in such dark times, the sight of a hulking Adeptus Astartes – even a Scout – drew eyes and minds. Demigods walked among them.

Partly to escape the violence, raiding and looting that had swiftly engulfed the hamlets and foss-parishes, and partly because they knew no better, cemetery worlders began to move in ragged convoys on Obsequa City. Herd instinct had led the Certusians to do this, and as lychways intersected, the crowds and pilgrim processions grew larger and longer. This too had been encouraged by Corpus-Captain Kersh, who had too few Excoriators and Charnel Guardsmen at his disposal to defend a world from what might follow in the blood comet’s wake.

Omar, like his brother neophytes, had been instructed to ride across the tiny world, stopping briefly in each cenopost hamlet he rode through to order Certusians to move on to the capital. Obsequa City was designated a planetary holdpoint, to be further fortified by honoured members of the Fifth Company, and like a rescue vessel, the city took in as many as needed shelter – crowding the cells and domiciles of those who had escaped off-world and creating a tent shanty on the open and now empty expanse of the Memorial Space Port. It had taken Omar several days to reach the grave-lined shores of Lake Sanctity on the far side of the planet, and from there onwards he found that he was riding along the teeming lychways with the cavalcades rather than against the current of cemetery worlders. Omar had ridden amongst them all, vergermen and their families, gravediggers, foss-reeves, pallbearers and vestals, attending to the old, the sick and orphaned. Shabby masses, their rags covered with grave dust, pulling carts and carrying all they owned in the world.

The strategy was not popular amongst the members of the Tenth. Brother Kush had been briefly seconded to Squad Cicatrix during training rites on board the Angelica Mortis. There he had been exposed to the full hatred the Excoriators First Squad felt for their new commanding officer. Kush, in turn, had brought these opinions to his brother neophytes, who had swiftly begun to revel in similar derision of the unfavoured Scourge, his loss of the Chapter Stigmartyr and his affliction with the Darkness. The Scout dormitory had soon became a forum for a kind of hollow boasting and scorn that Omar tried his best to avoid. When Squad Whip Keturah had delivered orders to break out the bikes and take to the lychways, Omar had been secretly relieved. After Keturah had left, Kush and several other Scouts had questioned the wisdom of the Scourge’s strategy. Omar had listened but said nothing. Kush claimed Kersh’s seeming concern for mere mortals was further weakness in the flawed commander – labelling it hesitation and cowardice when faced with the prospect of actual battle on the Vanaheim Cordon or Rorschach’s World.

As Kush and his brothers went to leave the dormitory they had found the squad whip standing in the corridor. Keturah had run a hand through his silver mane and fixed them all with the cyclopean intensity of his bionic eye. Omar had withered under his gaze, but again opted for silence.

‘I know there are mixed feelings about the corpus-captain amongst the Fifth Company,’ Keturah finally said in steely syllables. ‘No such confusion exists in this company. Do you understand? When you are corpus-captain, you can debate deployment and strategy. Until then you will follow orders without discussion. Is that clear? Zachariah Kersh has had more broken bones than you have bones all together. He’s spilled more blood than entire companies have ever seen and has recent scars older than you. For Throne’s sake, he won the Feast of Blades. He has wielded the sacred Sword of Sebastus – the primarch’s own weapon. Above all, he’s your commanding officer. And mine. Show some respect.’

‘But, whip…’ Kush had began.

‘Brother Kush,’ Keturah had said calmly, ‘you will take a vow of silence in regards to this matter or I will have the Apothecary sew your mouth shut for the duration of this mission. Do we have an understanding?’

Kush nodded. ‘Yes, squad whip.’

‘Until I say otherwise,’ Keturah had told Kush, ‘you are forbidden from donning your shoulder carapace and gauntlets. Shed your field smock and cloak also. Cuirass and faulds only. I want your brothers to see the shame of your unspoilt flesh, to see your lack of battle scars and, by extension, your lack of judgement in this matter.’

‘Yes, squad whip.’

After Keturah had left, Kush honoured his word to the squad whip. His lips said nothing. But they didn’t have to. His eyes – burning with defiance and meaning – did the talking.

On the lychway before him a throng had gathered, making it difficult for Omar to ride. There was light ahead and some isolated screams, prompting some Certusians to turn around and start pushing their way back through the oncoming crowd. Clutching at the brakes, the Scout brought his machine to a gravel-crunching halt. Turning, Omar took the bike out along a narrow walkway, leading between gravestones and statues, alongside a crypt belonging to some hive-world House or family. The swarm of cemetery worlders on the lychway seemed to have come to a stop at a cenopost ahead, and Omar gunned the bike down a slender pallbearer’s track, riding up several burial mounds and clearing a line of gravestones in order to reach another track. This brought him out at the cenopost, a small collection of shacks and permanent hovels. These were built around the necroplex crosslyches and intersections dominated by a simple block cenotaph, carved in the semblance of the Adeptus Ministorum’s symbol and inscribed with prayers and blessings. It also bore the hamlet’s name. Little Amasec.

Immediately, Brother Omar saw the reason for the cavalcade’s halting. The ground about the bike’s chunky tyres was mushy and both bodies and body parts lay strewn across the crossroads in pools and puddles of blood. Several hovels were on fire, while a tiny market and a nearby brewhouse were beginning to take, streaming with smoke and filling the air with a murky haze. Omar rode around and between the bodies. Beyond the cenotaph the slaughter continued, and as the Scout idled the bike up to the far end of the hamlet he could see the lychway beyond littered with bodies. Cemetery worlders pounced upon, beaten, torn, bitten and ripped apart. A cavalcade just like the one Omar was riding along.

Parking the bike, Omar dismounted. Taking several squelchy steps out onto the lychway, cloaked in haze, the Scout squinted through the darkness. Something was moving up ahead. A dark shape making its way along the road towards Little Amasec. A man in rags. He slipped and stumbled amongst the bodies, several times having to pick himself up.

‘What happened here?’ Omar called, demanding an answer. The man did not reply, though. The dark shape’s head seemed to suddenly angle. He looked up at the Excoriators Scout, framed in the burning village, before breaking into a run.

The neophyte’s brow furrowed. ‘Answer me, Certusian,’ he ordered. The man ran on. He was unarmed but something in the cemetery worlder’s gait told the Scout that he was not running to him but at him. As the figure closed and the cenopost flames flushed his features, Omar saw the madness in his face. Mindless, animal fury. With teeth bared like a snarling mongrel and sunken, bloodshot eyes, the cemetery worlder came at him.

‘Halt!’ Omar ordered, but the boom of his voice did nothing to the wretch. He came straight at him, leaping at the Excoriator as one might scale a statue. Omar’s boot came out in a simple but brutal front kick. The Certusian’s face cracked and he flew back towards the floor. With his shoulders striking flat into the grit, the man slid a little way through the gore before coming to a chest-heaving stop. Omar spun around and put the heel of his other boot across the madman’s neck, positioning his toe-tip against his chin.

The Certusian’s nose was now but a bloody crater in his face. Omar knew such a kick could have killed the mortal and should at least have knocked consciousness from him. There he was, however, spitting up teeth and gobbets of tongue that he’d bitten off. Something primal within the wretch would not let go, and before the Scout knew it, the lunatic was scratching and tearing at his boot like a rabid dog.

Brother Omar had heard of unfortunates afflicted with xenos infections and the infamous Zombie Plague, but the wretch seemed to demonstrate no evidence of alien contamination or living death. Inside his scrawny ribcage a lean heart beat with rage; blood boiled through his veins; his eyes crackled with single-minded, murderous desire. Nor was the cemetery worlder enthralled or possessed by some denizen of the warp. His wrath was all his own. Omar could only reason that the Keeler Comet, blazing its bloody path through the Certusian skies, had some part to play in the strange phenomenon.

Looking up, Omar’s enhanced vision detected further movement in the darkness. Smoke swirls and shadow overlapping shadow that betrayed the presence of more figures in the gloom. A horde of maniacs, blank and spent, wandering about the grave stones and cemetery fields, spleen-fired to instant rage by the sight of the Excoriator. He heard the unintelligible, glottal rasp of bestial intention and watched the first of the psychotics break ranks. They streamed towards him through the smoke – one, then two; ten, twenty, many more. The lychway was suddenly swamped with the running wretches, accompanied by others, scrambling across the gravestones, statues and stone sarcophagi of the burial grounds.

Omar snorted. Words would be of little use here. Twisting his foot, he broke the neck of the wretch beneath his boot. The man’s limbs suddenly spasmed and then fell. Satisfied that the maniac was dead and not some necromantic puppet, the Scout stomped back to his bike. Slipping his combat shotgun from its holster on the bike subframe, Omar worked the pump action. The weapon was a work of squat inelegance. From the brute curves of its stock, through the angularity of its breech and barrel and the yawning darkness of its muzzle, the shotgun was a monster. Bringing the stock to his shoulder, the Scout brought the weapon up to face the oncoming horde.

The first wretched specimen, a gaunt-faced fosser, simply vanished in the path of the blast – turning into a bloody smear on the darkness. This did not dissuade a feral vestal, who surged past the gruel before Omar took her legs out from beneath her with a second shot. A hearsier lost his head to the shotgun, followed by three further cemetery worlders cut to ribbons by fat pellets of scattershot. Brother Omar worked the pump-action on his weapon, calmly hammering the front line of the fast-advancing mob. As the shotgun clunked its emptiness, Omar brought his eye out from behind its sights to watch the second wave of maniacs run through the remains of the first and fly at him. From over his shoulder the Scout heard screams. These were not the shrieks of shock members of the cavalcade had made upon discovering the carnage at Little Amasec. The cavalcade was under attack.

Thumbing shells into the breech of the shotgun, Brother Omar backed towards his squat-set vehicle and re-mounted. Thumbing the gimbal lock on the handlebars, the Scout pulled the triggers on both grips. The belt-fed boltguns mounted on the front of the bike jerked to rhythmic life.

Omar swept the next line of gall-fevered crazies, aiming low and chopping through knees and groins with his automatic fire. The wretches tumbled and fell, creating a hurdle upon which much of the next wave faltered, falling themselves. Omar swept back across the line. The maniac cemetery worlders had looked up at the Excoriator with red eyes and hatred as they scrambled to pick themselves up. The Scout replied with bolt-rounds to the head as one by one, along the line of the prone and fallen, he split skulls and blew off faces. A verger, still wearing his cocked-hat and smashed spectacles, cleared the corpse mound with a half-naked hearsier close behind. Twisting the handlebars, Omar cut the pair in two with a savage stream of bolt-fire.

With the first few waves of maniacs put down and the darkness beyond giving birth to an unending horde of murderous unfortunates, Brother Omar secured the gimbal lock on his handlebars and revved the bike’s heavy engine. Wheel-spinning around and spraying the livid masses with blood and grit, the Scout tore back across the crossroad at the source of the screaming. A curtain of sodden cemetery world earth followed the bike as Omar shot across Little Amasec, swerving shacks and hovels before blasting through the black and burning remains of the cenopost’s tiny market. With flames licking at his wheels, Omar hit the crowded lychway.

The cavalcade of Certusians were fleeing. Some were heading into the deserted hamlet but most were climbing for their lives across headstones and graven sculptures. Like a spooked herd they had bolted off the lychway together, away from a roaring horde of degenerates who were scrabbling across the crowded cemetery architecture on the other side of the road like animals. Several fossers tried to stand their ground with picks and shovels, but went down under sheer savagery and weight of numbers. With the fossers having their eyes gouged and throats torn out by their fellow Certusians, Omar resolved to give the escaping cavalcade every chance to get away from the berserk and blood-crazed.

As the cemetery worlders he was escorting were melting into the burial grounds, Omar had the luxury of the lychway largely to himself. Clutching at the triggers and with muzzles flashing, the Excoriator cut down the degenerates throwing themselves mindlessly across the road at the fleeing cavalcade. Bodies and body parts bounced off the Scout and the front of the bike as he surged through the bloody mist he was creating. Slamming home the brakes, Omar turned and skidded around, taking the legs out from two more crazies. As the bike came to a stop, he slid his shotgun from its side-holster and began blowing growling wretches from the prone forms of the felled fossers. The neophyte was too late to save the gravediggers, however, the fevered degenerates having already ripped their victims’ bodies to shreds.

Holstering the emptied combat shotgun, Omar surged up the lychway at the hordes spilling out onto the grit. Once again the Excoriator let rip with his twin boltguns, cutting a gory path through the mob and providing a barrier of explosive firepower behind which members of the cavalcade could flee for their lives. The neophyte thought about voxing for assistance. One of his brother Scouts could not be more than an hour’s ride away. He also considered calling for one of the Fifth’s Thunderhawks to provide air support and an evacuation for the fleeing cavalcade of cemetery worlders. He discounted the thoughts almost immediately. He would not be a burden to his squad, his whip or his company. The cavalcade’s safety had fallen to the Scout and the Scout alone. The wretches about him were mindless savages; they were great in number but only mortal, and they were his enemy to vanquish.

Rather than the Certusians, the seething rabble were now very much intent on venting their quenchless wrath on the Space Marine. A whippet-like child leapt from an angelic statue with thoughtless abandon, landing on the Excoriator’s shoulders and clawing into his carapace and face with her sharp nails. The momentum almost unbalanced the Scout who took to snatching at his back with one hand. This cut his firepower in half. Although the single, mounted boltgun continued to acquit itself in ploughing through the lean bodies of the savages, it failed to stop a stonecutter who dashed his head with the opportunistic swing of a recovered shovel or a pair of madmen running an abandoned cart into the path of the oncoming bike.

The bike’s front wheel began to waver, and with only one hand on the handlebars and blood streaming down into his eyes from the gash on his forehead, Brother Omar strayed onto the burial ground verge. The bike smashed through two headstones before striking a sarcophagal monument at high speed. Omar flew off the bike and over the stone architecture. He felt his legs pass over his shoulders and the back of his head smack through the top of another grave marker. The Scout finally struck the base of a saint’s statue with a bone-quaking jolt before coming to rest, upside down – his head askew and shoulders on the ground, while his back and legs rested against the side of the plinth.

Taking a few moments for himself, Brother Omar blinked sense back into his being. He could see the broken body of the crazed child nearby. She had not survived the crash. Shapes were moving in the darkness about him. Blood-mental savages, intent on slaughter. Within seconds the Excoriator was buried in pummelling fists, eye-scratching claws and stamping boots. There were lank bodies everywhere. The horde – like a school of predatory fish or a flock of raptors, redirecting their path – were upon him.

The frenzy continued. Rolling around and getting his boots firmly on the ground, Omar pushed for the sky. Degenerates rained about him, tumbling from the blood-furious mound they had formed. Shaking a ragged usher from his shoulder, Omar brought up his bolt pistol – freshly drawn from his belt. Single bolts thudded through the foreheads and faces of the savages. He spun around, felling the mob gathered about him. As a chorister scrambled to right himself, the Scout shot his jaw off before turning and grabbing the usher – who had flown back at the Excoriator with his bad teeth bared – burying the bolt pistol in his stomach and sending the last of the bolts through the unfortunate.

The pistol was empty, but it had bought him a few moments. In the distance, Brother Omar could hear fresh screams of the dying. The screeches and calls for help were coming from the cavalcade, who had escaped the horde that had come down on him but had seemingly ran into another, prowling the necroscape and moving in like wolves on the commotion at the cenopost. Omar couldn’t imagine how many groups of cemetery world refugees had wandered into the bloodbath trap that was Little Amasec.

There were degenerate Certusians everywhere, in front and behind. Omar had stirred up a nest of stingwings in announcing his bombastic resistance with the shotgun and bike. Wretches from both the burial grounds and the crossroads were coming at him. All Omar knew was the gnashing of blood-stained teeth and the thuggish barrage of fists and feet that the mob threw at him. The savages even came from above, with maniacs so desperate for a piece of the Scout that they climbed up the backs of their compatriots and leapt at him. Taller than all of them, Omar commanded a view of his enemy, a sea of madmen and mayhem as far as he could see into the darkness. Omar was angry at himself. He’d underestimated the mortals’ numbers.

He had no time to reload the pistol; besides, he needed a weapon that took life at a faster pace and didn’t rely on ammunition. Brother Omar unsheathed his combat knife. Neophytes trained with the honourable gladius but were not deemed worthy of an Adeptus Astartes blade until they attained the rank of Space Marine. With its clip point, cross guard, machete-length and cleaver-like cutting blade, a ‘Scout’s-only-friend’ – as Squad Whip Keturah called them – was still a graceful taker of lives.

Brother Omar slashed and hacked through the wall of rabid flesh. He clipped heads and limbs from torsos; he cut blades from shovels and improvised clubs in half; he sliced, speared and stabbed, gutted and butchered his way through the horde. His cloak was heavy with gorespill and the ivory sheen of his Scout carapace was stained claret-red with the sheer volume of blood gushing, spraying and spurting about him. Wiping blood from his eyes all he could see were further faces, screwed up with malice presenting eyes that glinted murder.

Omar’s blade suddenly hit something solid. Something that didn’t slice like flesh or merely tug at the blade like cleaved bone. The Scout had swung with all his superhuman might and struck stone. The combat blade had cut into the corner of a gargoyle-encrusted vault, a small building in the shadow of which the melee had raged. Surrounded as he was, the ringing up his arm was the first the neophyte had known of the crypt entrance. When a flick of the wrist failed to retract the broadness of the blade, Omar tugged on the hilt with both hands. The stone refused to surrender the blade, however, and once again the degenerates closed in. Teeth sank through his field smock and into the flesh of his arm, while his carapace back presented the savages with an irresistible opportunity. The Scout soon felt the weight of scores of the maniacs on him, and looking up, watched more scrawny shadows tumble down to join them from the vault roof.

Releasing the blade, Omar snatched at the wretches and tossed them away. Others he brained with his fists and tore limb from limb. Stumbling about like a hunchback under the sheer weight of crazies with their teeth and nails in him, the Scout began to buckle. A wretched specimen bit into his ear and ripped it off, prompting the Space Marine to clench his head in one fist. Omar took the degenerate’s skull and hammered it into the crypt wall, pounding it until it shattered, crumbled and spilled its insides like an egg. The masses moved this way and that about him, each blood-mental savage wanting Adeptus Astartes blood on their hands.

Omar suddenly lost his footing, the ground seeming to disappear beneath him. Falling onto his back with literally hundreds of squirming and thrashing degenerates, the Scout came to the conclusion that he had tumbled into a hole. A freshly dug grave. A common enough sight on the cemetery world. There, with teeth in his thigh-flesh, arms and bloody face – with murderous hands around his neck, tearing at and under his shredding carapace – Brother Omar, Scout Marine and Excoriator, realised his fate. To be buried alive in mortal flesh and to be slowly clawed and mauled to his death.

Chapter Eleven By the Blade

Zachariah Kersh stood atop the tower-steeple of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Sepulchre. It was much higher than the tiny hermitage tower of the Excoriators’ dormitory. It had the second tallest spire and the best vantage point in the city. The tallest – the Obelisk – had suffered too much structural damage during the Scourge’s battle with the daemon, and Pontifex Oliphant had given the order for his Ecclesiarchical palace to be carefully demolished. The colossal dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum commanded the best view in the city, but Palatine Sapphira of the Order of the August Vigil had forbidden use of the sacred site as a strategic consideration, the building and the remains of the Ecclesiarch and High Lord of Terra within rendering the ground holy. It wouldn’t have taken Kersh much to countermand the Sister and force his agenda, but he needed the Adepta Sororitas onside and so allowed the Palatine the illusion of a refusal.

From a maintenance portico, with a pair of magnoculars to his one useful eye, Kersh surveyed the declining roofline of domes, cupolas, spires, monuments and bell-gables that gave Obsequa City its distinct Ecclesiarchical character. Kersh looked out across the darkness, dialling through the optical spectra of the device. A thermographic representation of the city bleared into view. There were fires everywhere. Running battles between psychotic mobs and the Certusian Charnel Guard could be seen in the streets, the telltale glares of las-fire revealing the true scale of the problem. Kersh could hear the bark of enforcer shotguns even in the streets nearby and imagined Kraski’s men putting down fellow Certusians with scattershot and bitterness.

Out across the expanse of Necroplex-South, Kersh could see the throngs of cemetery worlders, with simple lanterns and flaming torches dotted through their numbers, pouring into the city along arterial lychways. Kersh had sanctioned the strategy but that wouldn’t have mattered. With the reports he was receiving regarding the nightmarish barbarism afflicting the burial ground communities, the corpus-captain had fully expected common Certusians to flock to the seeming safety of the planetary capital. Whether this was due to the spiritual sanctity they expected the relic-remains of the Ecclesiarch to provide, or the simple security offered by stone walls and thick narthex doors, was unclear. They had arrived in their thousands, and continued to do so. Much of the Charnel Guard were engaged in urban pacification and hastily organised ‘Misery Squads’ – so called for their unhappy duty of hunting and putting out of their misery cemetery worlders who had succumbed to the gall-fever and become a danger to themselves and other citizens. This left few ceremonial Guardsmen to man the city Lych Gates and process the stream of Certusian refugees. In response Kersh had despatched the Fifth Company’s serfs and bondsmen – including his own – to take charge of the admittance and temporary housing of the masses in the crowded city.

Kersh tracked the powerful lamps of a Scout bike surging up along the columns of cemetery worlders towards the city. Lifting the magnoculars at the roar of engines overhead, he watched the Thunderhawk Impunitas pass above the city and bank. With all three of the company’s remaining gunships now repaired and at his disposal, Kersh had ordered one standing by on the rockrete of the Memorial Space Port, one to remain with the Angelica Mortis in orbit and one to maintain constant airborne patrols of Obsequa City and the surrounding necroplex.

Lowering the magnoculars, Kersh turned his head. Beneath his boots he could feel the supernatural cooling of the stone. He heard it cracking and blistering. Behind him stood the revenant in its ghoulish black plate, rippling with the rachidian contours of rib and bone. It waited like a thing eternal, as though it had all the time in the universe.

‘Ready?’ the Scourge said finally and disappeared through the maintenance arch followed by his solemn and silent haunter.

Down in the basilica nave, surrounded by pillars crafted in the baroque likeness of Imperial saints, and under the stained-glass gloom of the God-Emperor sat upon the Golden Throne in lead-lined representation, the corpus-captain had called a gathering. Kersh walked past Erasmus Oliphant, the young pontifex holding his crippled side awkwardly in the simple throne his frater menials had brought in for his comfort. Palatine Sapphira stood by his side, flanking the throne with two of her cobalt-plated Sisters, each armed with their distinctive Godwyn-Deaz-pattern bolters. Behind them huddled a small group of confessors, priests and deacons who were either too loyal to their pontifex to flee, or had been too late to arrange passage off-world with their Adeptus Ministorum colleagues. Kersh heard the hurried scuff of boots on the polished marble floor of the basilica, noting a shabby and tired-looking Proctor Kraski and Colquhoun’s replacement, Lord Lieutenant Laszlongia, enter the chamber via a side-arch.

With the mortals to his back, the corpus-captain stepped out before his Excoriator brothers. Kersh had assembled the significants of the Fifth Company, as well as the silver-haired squad whip of the Tenth Company Scouts, Silas Keturah. The whips of Squads Cicatrix, Castigir and Censura all stood in assembly, with squad second whips standing behind them. Uriah Skase held himself with unusual stiffness, his shoulders reclined, chestplate thrust forwards and fingers interlaced behind his back. Kersh wasn’t fooled by the chief whip’s seeming respect and attention. The Scourge had seen the stance before and had indeed indulged in it himself. It came from a rawness and sensitivity of the back, where flesh itself had been flayed during the worst of ‘the purge’s’ attentions. As Kersh suspected, Skase had continued to punish himself – pushing ritual observance beyond its primarch-communing function and into the dark realms of a shame-cycle and flagellation for flagellation’s sake. Whips Ishmael and Joachim demonstrated no such deference, pretend or otherwise, and instead busied themselves with furtive glances and conspiratorial mutterings between themselves and the second whips.

Kersh stood, anger slowly building in the tautness of his scarred face as he waited for the squad whips to present themselves to their corpus-captain. While they did, with insolent tardiness, the Scourge’s eye fell across Ezrachi and the skull-helmed Chaplain Shadrath on the opposite side of the nave. Keturah was with them. Last in line was Techmarine Dancred with his Thunderfire cannon, Punisher, which seemed to follow him everywhere. Only the Librarian, Melmoch, was missing. Brother Micah, the company champion’s young face a nest of cuts, stitches and bruising, took his position at his corpus-captain’s side. Beside him was Brother Novah, Brother Toralech’s hasty replacement as company standard bearer. Young, like Micah, but quiet and uncertain, Novah held the battered and tattered standard of the Excoriators Fifth Company in one hand. Micah had assured Kersh that he was a first class warrior, and having originally fought in the same squad as the champion, was one of the few brothers he could trust. In the darkness of the aisle, the armoured revenant melted into the shadows.

‘Brothers,’ the corpus-captain began, ‘I have gathered you here to share my resolutions, so that we may commit to a course of action and see it through.’

‘Rumour has it,’ Skase interrupted, his voice echoing about the basilica’s columns, ‘that we are abandoning our pursuit of the renegade Alpha Legion and pointlessly garrisoning this pile of grave dust.’ Murmurs of assent proceeded from the Excoriators about him.

Kersh would not be drawn.

‘Chief whip, I have called members of this company to order and you will respect that.’

‘I only–’

‘Hold your tongue, damn it!’ Kersh roared at him. ‘When I want your insights I will be sure to ask for them. In the meantime you will act in accordance with your rank and responsibility, sir.’

The chief whip tensed and bridled, but Kersh saw Ishmael grab at his wrist. Skase shook free of the squad whip’s grasp but remained silent, his jaw rigid with anger and eyes glistening.

With similar difficulty, the corpus-captain continued.

‘The Angelica Mortis confirms that the Keeler Comet has passed Certus-Minor. I think we can assume that the comet’s infernal influence is responsible for the mayhem and bloodshed on the planet surface. The cemetery world will pass through the comet’s tail in the next eighteen hours, however, and only the Emperor knows what might happen then. Long range sensors and pict-scans confirm that an enemy armada has reached the outskirts of the system, trailing the comet at sub-light speed. We can assume this to be the Cholercaust Blood Crusade. We have little intelligence to go on in respect of the armada’s numbers or composition. I won’t lie to you. No world has survived the Cholercaust’s attentions. The dead tell no tales. Estimates vary wildly from fifty to a thousand vessels. The Imperial Navy has verified sightings of cruisers belonging to the World Eaters…’ Kersh allowed confirmation of their dread enemy to sink in before continuing. ‘So we can assume Traitor Legionaries to be at the head of their numbers.’

The clockwork whir of Brother Dancred’s face preceded the Techmarine’s contribution. ‘You intend the Fifth Company to remain on Certus-Minor?’

Kersh paused.

‘I do, brother.’

A ripple of discontent washed through the squad whips and their seconds. ‘Corpus-Commander Bartimeus’s estimates place the Keeler Comet on a trajectory for the Segmentum Solar. We cannot afford the Blood Crusade’s further progression, nor allow its strength to grow by another conquered world. Not with Ancient Terra as a possible future target.’

‘What about the Vanaheim Cordon?’ Squad Whip Joachim ventured, his young eyes boring into the corpus-captain.

‘Be under no illusion,’ Kersh told them all, ‘the decision to stay is mine and mine alone. I will not surrender this part of the Emperor’s Imperium, no matter how small, to the Ruinous Powers – nor will I abandon the Emperor’s subjects, those who we were bred to protect, to torment and certain slaughter. This is, of course, largely academic. We have no astropath to call for reinforcement and without a Navigator, we cannot reinforce the Vanaheim Cordon with our own numbers.’

‘The Avignor Star?’ Ezrachi asked.

‘Their Navigator is dead,’ Kersh informed the Apothecary. ‘He inexplicably started bleeding from his mouth, his ears and his eyes. The ship’s surgeon tried his best but the Navigator could not be saved.’

‘The Angelica Mortis could make short-range jumps,’ Dancred said.

‘Yes,’ Kersh agreed. ‘And I have spoken with Corpus-Commander Bartimeus on the matter, but I have another destination for the strike cruiser. In the meantime, we have to face the reality of an imminent attack. With our number we can only afford to hold one strategic location and the city is our only real option. Pontifex Oliphant and I have arranged the recall of all Certusians from burial grounds and communities across the planet surface. They have made and continue to make their way here under the instruction of the Tenth Company Scouts. Whip Keturah, I believe you still have a number of your contingent outstanding.’

Silas Keturah fixed his corpus-captain with his single bionic eye.

‘Brothers Taanach, Omar and Iscarion are still outstanding,’ Keturah reported. He nodded his acknowledgement to the Techmarine beside him. ‘Brother Iscarion reported issues with the vitality of his vehicle’s machine-spirit.’

‘I will apply the necessary oils and benedictions,’ Dancred assured the squad whip.

‘Taanach and Omar have made no vox contact,’ Keturah informed the Scourge. ‘Which is unusual.’

Kersh nodded his agreement. ‘Go out with the Impunitas. Find them, Silas. We will need every brother in the dark hours to come.’

‘You have a battle plan?’ Ezrachi asked.

‘One that was good enough to serve our ancestral brothers and parent Legion at the walls of the Imperial Palace,’ Kersh told him. ‘Brother Dancred will oversee the demolition of all buildings on the city exterior.’ The Scourge paused, turned and looked at the young pontifex. He expected the ecclesiarch to offer some objection regarding the ancient lineage of the buildings or the holiness of the ground upon which they were to be collapsed. Oliphant hesitated and then nodded. The pontifex had seen up close the monstrous enemy that the Excoriators would be facing. ‘We’ll assume that an attack could come from any and all directions. The necroplex itself will impede large vehicles and slow the progress of mass charges on the city. There our bolters will do their worst.’

Several Excoriators nodded in grim appreciation. ‘Rubble mounds from the collapsed architecture will provide cover and elevation for our shooters, but more importantly an unbroken perimeter obstacle for our assailants should we have to fall back to the next line of buildings.’

‘What about the remaining citizenry?’ Oliphant asked through one side of his mouth.

Kersh hesitated. ‘The city is small but we simply do not have enough Excoriators, Charnel Guard and Adepta Sororitas to hold the line alone,’ he said.

‘You don’t have any Adepta Sororitas,’ Palatine Sapphira informed him with cool conviction. ‘My Sisters and I will be in the vault below the Memorial Mausoleum with the relic remains of his Reverence, Umberto II.’

‘I need your bolters on that perimeter.’

‘You can’t have them. I’m sorry.’

The Excoriator and Sister looked hard at each other.

‘You will be when we’re overrun by the enemy.’

‘You have your orders, corpus-captain, and I have mine.’

‘My orders invariably focus on saving the living.’

‘I’m afraid mine don’t,’ Sapphira told him harshly. ‘That many might fall today is regrettable, but nothing compared to the comfort and spiritual fortitude Umberto II’s sacred bones will give to future billions. See, corpus-captain – you must worry about the living but I must look to the yet to live.’

Kersh’s lip curled. He would get nowhere with the Sisters of the August Vigil.

‘The cemetery worlders will have to provide the extra coverage,’ Kersh said with regret.

‘And how do you propose they do that?’ Palatine Sapphira came back at him. Her voice was cold and cautious.

‘We will arm them from the city auxiliary armouries,’ the corpus-captain returned.

‘Impossible, that’s–’ Oliphant piped up, half out of his throne and tripping over his words.

‘Heresy,’ said Sister Sapphira, supplying the word for him. ‘That would break the Decree Passive. Should we survive the oncoming Cholercaust, we would all simply be executed for treason of faith.’

Kersh nodded, recalling his time at St Ethalberg.

‘Which is why Laszlongia would recruit them as Charnel Guard conscripts. They would be probitors, whiteshields – under the command of the lord lieutenant and the pontifex only in his role as planetary governor.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Sapphira said after a short pause. ‘It still smacks of insidiousness.’

‘I’m not asking you to like it,’ Kersh bit back. ‘And I’d simply call it expedience.’ He looked to the freshly promoted leader of the Certusian Charnel Guard.

‘My lord, you want to draft the citizenry into the ceremonial defence force?’

‘No,’ Kersh told him. ‘That’s what I want you to do. I’m sure under the severity of the circumstances, the Departmento Munitorum would hypothetically approve such measures.’

Proctor Kraski seemed to consider the proposal. The grizzled arbitrator finally said, ‘These here cemetery worlders are mainly diggers and labourers. Many can’t read and write anything beyond the most basic prayers. You’ve got a lot of women and children. None of the men have any combat experience.’

‘Would they know which end of a lasfusil was the most dangerous?’ Kersh put to the enforcer.

‘I expect so,’ Kraski said, chewing on his tobacco.

‘Well as long as they point that end in the general direction of the enemy, I’ll be happy.’ The Scourge looked from Kraski and the lord lieutenant to Oliphant. ‘The women and children can form a prayer cordon inside the perimeter.’

Pontifex Oliphant’s gaze moved about the floor. The ecclesiarch looked deeply unhappy and as though he were going to vomit on the basilica floor.

‘The Sister is right. The Decree Passive is not an obstacle to be circumvented. It is the God-Emperor’s law.’

‘Whether you designate them so or not,’ Kersh told him, ‘the Certusian people are your defence force. When the enemy attacks, they will have to fight for their lives. All I’m asking is that they also fight for everyone else’s. Pontifex, does not the God-Emperor fight on their side?’

The pontifex searched his soul and looked up at the dull stained-glass window above them. ‘Yes,’ he said tightly and left it at that.

‘These backwater wretches against the damned berserkers of the xiith Legion?’ Skase said with ill-disguised scorn. ‘You might as well offer them up on an altar to the Blood God yourself.’

‘There is another consideration,’ Ezrachi said, eager to take Kersh’s attention off the provocative Skase.

‘Apothecary?’

‘With so many losing their minds to this gall-fever, is it wise to indiscriminately arm the population?’

‘Do we know anything more of this madness?’ the corpus-captain asked.

‘Only that it isn’t physiological,’ the Apothecary replied. ‘And it doesn’t seem transmissible like a virus or infection. It is a malady of the mind. Men are no more susceptible than women, young no more than the old. All we do know is that the mental transformation from Certusian to savage is unpredictable, swift and that the first symptom is usually murderous bloodshed. I suspect it is some psychological condition brought on by the comet, but that is not for me as Apothecary to say.’

‘The lord lieutenant here is simply going to have to exercise his judgement. I suppose a cure is too much to hope for?’

Ezrachi grunted. ‘The same as for life, a bolt-round, administered to the heart or brain.’

‘What about our number?’ Kersh asked.

‘Beyond reports of brief visions and disturbed sleep, we seem unaffected. This is probably due to cult observance and psychoindoctrination, but again, I can’t know. I can run further tests.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ the corpus-captain said. ‘I have a different duty for you to perform.’

‘Sir?’

‘Without delay I want you to begin extraction rites and harvest mature progenoid glands from all Excoriators with at least ten years’ service to the Chapter,’ the Scourge said gravely. The announcement was met with an immediate wall of shock, discontent and objection from the company whips and their seconds.

‘Kersh?’ Ezrachi said, falling out of formality.

‘We are facing an enemy infamous for its intolerance of survivors.’

‘You prepare for our failure,’ Squad Whip Joachim accused.

‘We are attrition fighters. We battle with the best but prepare for the worst. If we are faced with failure – and by Katafalque’s blood, I hope that we are not – then we should meet our doom knowing that our legacy lives on through the genetic heritage we bequeath. We do this in the best interests of the Chapter and not ourselves. I do not ask this of you, Dorn does – so that the Imperium’s future, as well as its present, might be secure.’

‘How would we do this?’ Ezrachi asked bleakly.

‘You would transport the collected gene-seed to the Angelica Mortis and oversee its safe storage and containment. The sacred seed would then travel on to the forge-world of Aetna Phall.’

‘Aetna Phall?’

‘It’s nearby,’ Kersh explained, ‘and reachable through the series of short warp jumps Brother Dancred alluded to.’

‘That will take months, this close to the Eye,’ the Apothecary informed him.

‘Yes,’ Kersh agreed. ‘But the Adeptus Mechanicus will appreciate the importance of the cargo and have the resources to see it on to Eschara. You would, of course, be there to impress such necessity upon them.’

‘You want me to accompany the seed?’

‘Our only Apothecary?’ Ishmael scathed. ‘And the company strike cruiser? This is madness.’

‘It is time you fully appreciated the nature of the foe you face,’ the corpus-captain told the squad whips gravely. ‘The Blood God’s servants do not orchestrate and strategise. They have no knowledge of failure – only success or the eternal darkness. They do not wound and incapacitate, attack and withdraw. Victory, both personal and galactic, is everything to them. They live for the death of their enemies and think on nothing but their blades steaming with warrior blood. There will be little for Apothecary Ezrachi to do here, once the fighting begins a-proper. As for the Angelica Mortis – what do you think the Cholercaust will do with her? The Chaos armada will crush the cruiser like a ration can. Which is why Corpus-Commander Bartimeus and the good Apothecary will see our future safely to the Mechanicus forge-world.’

‘I have heard enough,’ Chief Whip Skase told the Scourge. ‘It seems like you have our decimation pretty well planned out – from your decision that we should remain on this deadrock, to trapping us here without orbital support or transportation.’

‘My lord, the Adeptus Ministorum monitor Apotheon and several system ships remain,’ Pontifex Oliphant reminded the Excoriator, but Skase ignored the ecclesiarch.

‘Does this strike anyone else as particularly suicidal?’ the chief whip continued. ‘Is this the quality of tactical advice you gave to the Chapter Master on Ignis Prime? Haven’t the Alpha Legion made us pay deeply enough for your failures? Was Ichabod and the loss of the Stigmartyr not enough for you?’

‘He’s corpus-captain,’ Silas Keturah called coldly from the other side of the nave, ‘by Ichabod’s order.’

‘And was not Horus made Warmaster by the Emperor’s?’

The basilica fell to silence before the heretical suggestion of the chief whip’s statement.

‘You stand here,’ Kersh rumbled, stepping forth, ‘in this holy place, casting aspersions, feeding your fury and sowing the seed of discord in this company…’

‘If the Fifth had been mine, we would already have your lost Stigmartyr back in our possession and our plate would be speckled with traitor blood.’

‘And I think that you’d either be standing on Rorschach’s World scratching your head or in a pool of your own blood after walking into what even a child could see to be an obvious trap,’ Kersh bawled at him. ‘The Alpha Legion are serpents. They only allow you to know what they want you to know. You cannot trust such intelligence. It is either an ambush or a ruse to draw us away from our true duty.’

‘This is not our duty!’ Skase growled.

‘Yes, it is,’ the Apothecary interjected. ‘You were not there on St Ethalberg. We are bound by ancient pacts and promises, as was our Chapter Master. We serve Quesiah Ichabod and must honour his word, as you must honour your corpus-captain’s.’

‘Words…’ Skase marvelled. ‘You talk about words and dusty tracts. I’m talking about our Chapter’s honour and the blood of our enemies on our blades.’

‘Make no mistake,’ Kersh told the chief whip. ‘They are one and the same. What we fought in the palace was our enemy. Some kind of daemonic harbinger, heralding the bloodshed to come. You would have us run from that? Flee to safety, leaving mere mortals to face the servants of the Dark Gods alone? What would that do for our Chapter’s honour?’

‘You twist my words, Kersh – for you have no honest ones of your own. I will not take lessons in my Chapter’s honour from the likes of you. The Scourge, who failed his Chapter Master, who surrendered our beloved Stigmartyr to the enemy and routinely surrenders himself to his shameful affliction. And while Dorn himself curses you with his Darkness, Chaplain Shadrath runs the company by proxy.’

‘You go too far, Uriah,’ the Chaplain hissed.

‘We have not gone far enough,’ Skase insisted vehemently. ‘We need leadership. Not the fatalistic fantasies of a coward, unworthy to wear Katafalque’s symbol and colours. A failure, who wishes to sacrifice this company on the altar of his guilt and bring the taint of the Darkness to us all.’

‘Skase–’ Shadrath began.

‘I think that the last time I allow you to question my courage,’ Kersh told him through gritted teeth.

‘Well think on, Scourge,’ Skase shot back, taking a step towards the corpus-captain. ‘I demand Trial by the Blade.’

The vaulted chamber echoed with Skase’s challenge.

‘The corpus-captain has more than proved himself in the Feast,’ Ezrachi shouted.

‘Not to me,’ the chief whip said, slapping his boltgun against Ishmael’s chestplate to take. ‘And not to this company – who were denied representation due to our commitments on Vieglehaven – clearing up the Scourge’s mess. Perhaps the other attendant Chapters were easier to impress.’

Brother Micah stepped forwards to present himself, the company champion’s eyes fixed on Skase and hungry for battle.

‘Micah, no,’ Kersh said softly, laying a gauntlet on his shoulder.

‘This Excoriator has forgotten himself and his proper station,’ the young Micah replied, not taking his eyes off the chief whip. ‘Let me put him in his place.’

Kersh shook his head.

‘This is an act of sedition,’ Ezrachi warned. ‘A mutinous revolt against the authority of your corpus-captain.’

‘I plot no more insurrection than the Warmaster’s lieutenants did when they refused to join his ranks and fought for their distant Emperor,’ Skase told the Apothecary. ‘Besides, I encourage nothing more than company fealty in my squad. This is a personal grievance. As such, I have the right – as Excoriators and Dorn’s Fists before me – to settle such disputes through the solemn contestation of a duel. My face will attest to the honour I have taken – and in my youth given – in such rituals.’

‘You would do this now, with the arch-enemy at our gates?’ Kersh said, shaking his head.

‘And now so would you,’ Skase told him, unsheathing his bolt pistol and handing it to his second whip. ‘For I see my accusations hit home. It would be a dishonour to bear them, Scourge. You must fight me.’

Chaplain Shadrath turned his half-skull face to Kersh, who slowly nodded without looking at him.

‘This is insane,’ Ezrachi erupted.

‘I must send for the blades,’ the Chaplain hissed. Such duels were usually fought with ceremonial weapons retained in the company chapel-reclusiam. Kersh drew his Mark II pistol and unhooked his chainsword, giving them to the Apothecary and Brother Micah.

‘No need,’ the Scourge said walking forwards. ‘We’ll contend with what we have.’

Skase nodded his approval and drew his oiled gladius.

‘My lords,’ Oliphant called, getting to his feet. ‘You cannot shed blood in the–’ but Proctor Kraski put a hand on his shoulder and shook his grizzled head.

‘The Rite has been invoked and it has been answered,’ Chaplain Shadrath said, moving down the nave as Excoriators backed between pillars to give the combatants more room. From the shadows, the revenant watched with patient interest. ‘Trial by the Blade. As all Excoriators are equal in Dorn’s image, first blood goes to the victor, when blood is drawn from that image. Brothers will indicate their understanding.’

Kersh drew his relic-blade, taking several practise swings with the gladius. Both corpus-captain and chief whip acknowledged the Chaplain by kissing their right gauntlets.

‘Begin,’ Shadrath told them.

Skase was an ivory blur as he leapt at the Scourge with sword held high. As the blade came down, Kersh feigned a parry, only to slip out from under the cleaving motion. As Skase’s gladius chipped the stone of the basilica floor, Kersh slapped the back of his head with the flat of his relic blade.

‘You will have to do better than that, brother,’ Kersh told him.

The needling comment had its desired effect. Skase came back at him, his gladius glinting its arcs and curves in the candlelit gloom of the basilica. Kersh remained poised, deflecting the blade’s optimistic dance and arching his neck left and right to avoid the venomous stabbing motions the chief whip used to punctuate his spite-driven attacks. Indulging a towering parry, Kersh held the seething Skase at full stretch. Bringing up his left fist, he hammered his chief whip across the jaw before slashing back across his cheekbone with the knuckles of his gauntlet. Skase was battered back, sword in hand, but immediately brought his own fingertips to his face. Stepping closer, Chaplain Shadrath leant in to check for any evidence of blood, but there was none.

‘Proceed,’ the Chaplain barked, backing away once more. Kersh brought his blade in low, but the chief whip battered it aside with an angry grunt. The assault gained in furiousness and before long Skase’s bladework began to lose its discipline. His lip wrinkled into a dogged, hate-fuelled snarl, and his gladius chopped and swept – demonstrating little interest in its target, the Scourge’s duel-scarred face.

‘Come on, meat!’ Kersh called.

Backing from the onslaught, his relic blade barely managing to turn his opponent’s aside, Kersh crashed through iron candelabra and shouldered a stone saint from his pedestal, sending him smashing simultaneously to Oliphant’s horror and the floor. Rounding a column, the Excoriators committed further blasphemies on the pillar-representation of Saint Proulx. Razored edges sparked off crafted stone as the two Space Marines fought for the advantage. Eventually the rhythmic slashing broke and the Scourge’s blade smacked Skase’s into the pillar, pinning the weapon. Kersh’s ceramite boot found the chief whip’s exposed side. The bone-shuddering impact took Skase off the ground, his gauntlet slipping free of his sword hilt and his armoured body clattering across the flags of the nave.

The Scourge ran down on the unarmed Excoriator, eager to end the needless conflict. As the whip shook his head and lifted his face in momentary confusion, Kersh swept in to deliver a duelling scar that Skase would never forget.

Further clattering distracted the Scourge. Before him, gliding across the polished basilica floor, clinked Ishmael’s blade. Squad Castigir’s whip had drawn and slid his own gladius to his battle-brother, and before Kersh knew it the metal of the blade was scraping his ribs. Skase’s thrust from the floor, combined with the force of Kersh running down on the blade had created force enough to slip the sword tip between two ceramite plates and puncture up through the Excoriator’s black carapace. The clash had barely begun, however. Kersh instinctively wrapped a fist around the blade, preventing it from penetrating further. Skase was now on his feet, his face contorted with loathing and the physical effort required to drive the sword home. The whip had little trouble wrapping his gauntlet about Kersh’s fist, which in turn had gone momentarily limp around the grip of his gladius. The two held each other in a feverish grip, paralysed like the statues about them, with their brothers looking on.

His craggy face creased with concern, Ezrachi moved in, but the Scourge shook his head stiffly, bringing the Apothecary to a pause. Skase’s eyes burned with the knowledge that he held the advantage, and Kersh saw the satisfaction ripple across his features as he tried to twist his blade within the Scourge. The gladius screeched against the ceramite of Kersh’s artificer armour. The corpus-captain fought the compulsion to cry out as the blade’s length tore through his black carapace.

‘Sir!’ Brother Micah implored.

‘No!’ Kersh croaked with brutal defiance.

The Scourge’s arm came once more to life, surprising Skase and wrapping around the chief whip’s neck like a constricting serpent. The two fell in a messy embrace, Skase still holding on to both the Scourge’s clutched sword and the weapon buried in his corpus-captain’s midriff. The Excoriators rolled, roaring like animals, their plate clashing and the vaulted chamber filling with intermittent gasps of pain and exertion. They were soon tumbling back and forth, with plate and limb slapping through a gathering pool of the Scourge’s blood. The desperate struggle painted carnage across the basilica floor, with Kersh’s hold finally slipping on his own gore and off Skase’s armour.

The pair rolled, Skase’s blade turning inside the corpus-captain’s torso. Kersh went over the chief whip and ended up with his back resting against the foot of one of the nave’s many columns. Skase sat astride the bleeding Scourge, the corpus-captain’s relic blade held between them. The chief whip’s other hand still held its feverish grip on the gladius gutting his corpus-captain. Only Kersh’s own pulverising hold on the blade prevented further tragedy. Skase snarled and pushed, forcing Kersh’s own blade towards him. Leaning back against the pillar and into his pack, the Scourge quickly ran out of room to manoeuvre and could only watch the oiled length of the weapon edge towards him with cut-throat keenness.

‘Chaplain!’ Ezrachi called out.

‘The conventions are clear,’ Shadrath hissed, both Excoriators closing in with the rest of the gathering. ‘First blood from the face.’

Skase’s face quaked with the furious desire to win. He knew he had the Scourge and couldn’t help a maniacal grin spreading across his ugly features.

‘Do it, Uriah!’ Squad Whip Ishmael roared from beside the column. He was joined in similar encouragement by Joachim and the squad seconds.

Skase’s eyes flashed between Ishmael and Kersh; between his friend and his enemy. Unthinking, Skase leant into the thrust, putting his weight and hatred behind it. The blade shrieked through the corpus-captain’s fingers. Kersh grunted as the gladius cross guard struck plate and the blade punched through his body and out his armoured back.

With his eyes wide open and his hand free, the Scourge grabbed the back of Skase’s head. Ishmael and the seconds feasted on their corpus-captain’s silent suffering and took the manoeuvre to be a death-grasp, a spasm of desperation.

‘Let me take him,’ Brother Micah called desperately – like a loyal hound, straining at his chain. Blinking and straining, Kersh shook his head.

Looking down on the gutted Scourge, Skase’s mask began to fall. He hated Kersh, with every ounce of his being. He wanted to fight him. He wanted to best him. He didn’t want to kill him. His knees resting in Kersh’s blood, with a sword buried in his corpus-captain’s flank – that was what he seemed to have done.

Skase suddenly felt his head thrust forwards. Kersh’s relic blade glimmered between them, still clutched by the pair. With the Scourge’s gauntlet grasping the back of his skull, Skase felt an irresistible pull forwards. Releasing the hilt of the gladius he reached out to stop himself, only to slip as his bloody gauntlet failed to find purchase. He finally slapped his palm against the stone column and pushed back, but it was too late. Kersh’s blade remained rigid between them, held in their desperate hands. The Scourge’s lip came up, showing bloodied teeth as he forced the chief whip’s face towards the relic blade’s edge. As they stared across the mirrored surface of the blade, spitting hatred at one another, the Scourge twisted Skase’s head, the back of his tonsured scalp firmly in the corpus-captain’s grip.

Kersh suddenly relented, allowing Skase to pull his head back a little. The chief whip’s own natural inclination to relax followed a millisecond after, as the Scourge knew it would. Pulling Skase’s head to the side, instead of forwards, the Scourge ran the Excoriator’s already disfigured face along the blade’s razored edge. The sword sliced through flesh, muscle, cartilage and scored bone. Kersh flung him to one side, this time Skase rolling through some of his own gore.

The Excoriators looked on in stunned silence. Oliphant and the other mortals present gawped in fear and horror. Leaning against the pillar, Kersh tried to kick against the blood-slick floor. He was trying to get on his feet and when he failed, settled for simply angling the point of his relic blade at the squad seconds, Joachim and Ishmael – whose own blade still impaled the corpus-captain.

Ezrachi slapped the Chaplain on the pauldron and advanced on Kersh, but wild-eyed and skewered, the Scourge turned the tip of the gladius towards the Apothecary. Prompted by Ezrachi, Shadrath hissed at the Fifth Company Excoriators.

‘Stand down!’

After a moment’s hesitation, their stabbing glares fell to the floor. ‘The Trial is at an end. Honour has been both given and taken. First blood to the corpus-captain. Let it be recorded that at this time and in this place, he was the victor. To the bested, we honour his scars as he now honours his opponent with vindication.’

Silas Keturah was down on his knees, his carapace speckled with Skase’s blood. The silver-haired Scout squad whip had torn Skase’s loincloth from his belt and used it like a rag to staunch the bleeding. Kersh had cut the chief whip’s face in half and the blood loss was considerable. The gathering looked to the prone Skase, with a bloody cloth to his face, to respond as the trial dictated. Keturah whispered proceedings into the chief whip’s gore-blocked ear. Skase tensed. His gauntlets became fists. He squirmed before finally becoming still. Keturah put his ear to the sodden cloth. Finally, the faint murmurs of the smothered Skase could be heard. Silas Keturah raised his head. His cheek was bloody.

‘The chief whip renounces his claims,’ the Scout announced.

All eyes came back to the skewered Kersh. The Scourge had managed to get to his feet and clutched at the weapon imbedded in his side. Still leaning against the pillar he jabbed the tip of his own relic blade at the surrounding Excoriators.

‘You think this a game?’ he bawled. ‘Is it not enough that there are thousands of degenerate maniacs at the system’s edge, baying for Imperial blood? Must we spill each other’s?’

The Scourge’s harsh words echoed around the basilica. ‘The fight is out there! This might be a pile of grave dust, but it is the Imperium, beneath our feet. I for one will not allow the Ruinous Powers principality here. They must take the air from my lungs, the blood from my body and the steel from my heart first. Now you will renounce your weakness – as your chief whip has. You will do as your corpus-captain has asked – as your Chapter Master has asked. You will fight here as though it were our Escharan home world or Ancient Terra beneath your boots. For if you don’t, it very soon might need to be. You will give up your gene-seed or I will cut it out of you myself, that Excoriators more worthy than yourselves might take your place in the coming storm. Do you understand me, brothers?’

Kersh held their gaze before slipping and faltering slightly. Ezrachi dared wait no more.

‘Kersh, you’re bleeding to death,’ Ezrachi said, sweeping in. He pushed the relic blade to one side and began attending to the grievous wound in the Scourge’s side. The corpus-captain winced as the Apothecary manipulated the blade that sat snug in his flesh. The Scourge still held his own towards the gathered Adeptus Astartes.

‘You want to see blood?’ he told them finally. ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place. You will see plenty of your own and each other’s, if you continue as you are. The World Eaters will see to that. Make no mistake, they will ensure it.’

Kersh glared at his Excoriators. ‘Dismissed’.

Chapter Twelve Wound Within A Wound

With Brother Micah under one arm and the Apothecary under the other, Kersh was helped to a tablet bunk in the hermitage. Ezrachi had set up one of the sanctuary chambers as a temporary apothecarion.

‘I’m all right,’ the corpus-captain had insisted moodily.

‘You’re bleeding like a stuck pig,’ Ezrachi had carped back. Sat on the stone tablet, with Ezrachi and one of his Helix-serfs exploring the wound and gathering instruments, the Scourge looked over to the only other occupied bunk in the apothecarion. The Epistolary, Melmoch, lay unconscious on the tablet, his chest rising and falling rhythmically. Bethesda entered the chamber, light on her toes, with concern and urgency in her eyes. ‘Steel yourself, it’s going to hurt.’

In one practised motion, the Apothecary withdrew the gladius skewering the Scourge’s side. Kersh winced but remained silent. ‘Probably not as much as when it went in though, eh?’ Ezrachi chuckled, handing the bloody sword to Micah.

‘My lord?’ Bethesda said, but the Scourge was lost in thought.

‘He’ll live. As usual,’ the Apothecary reassured her. ‘Now make yourself useful, child, and get your master out of his sacred plate.’

This the absterge fell to immediately. Brother Micah turned the gore-smeared blade over in his hand.

‘Don’t you have anywhere else to be?’ Ezrachi said with irritation. ‘You could return that to Ishmael. I’m sure he’ll be needing it again soon enough.’ When Micah didn’t answer, the Apothecary added, ‘You think on the Trial? You think you would have done any better?’

‘The corpus-captain won the duel. How could I do any better than that?’ Micah said unhappily.

‘Good answer,’ Ezrachi replied, busy at work on the gushing wound.

‘He’s angry I didn’t let him champion my cause,’ Kersh said absently, still looking at Melmoch.

‘I am your champion,’ Micah said.

Kersh winced again. ‘You can take the next blade destined for my belly. How’s that? For now, I need you to find Brother Novah. Send him to me. I have orders to distribute. I need you out there. Ensure my orders are being followed. Oversee the beginning of the demolition. Work with the lord lieutenant and the Charnel Guard. I want recruits processed and armed. Establish emplacements, fire arcs and kill zones around the city perimeter. I want this city ready to defend itself. That is the cause – the company’s cause – that I wish you to champion.’

‘What of our number?’

‘The Fifth Company’s tactics will be more fluid and responsive to the nature, number and orientation of the threat presented. We need to expect anything. Go do your duty.’

‘Yes, corpus-captain,’ Micah replied. The champion stabbed the bloody gladius into a hermitage bench. ‘Brother Ishmael can collect this himself,’ he said with distaste, adopted his helmet and left.

As Bethesda stripped the Scourge of his plate, Ezrachi worked and his serfs stitched and stapled Kersh’s insides back into some sense of order. The puncture in the black carapace, which fused his ribs together like a chestplate beneath his flesh, was harder to remedy. As the Apothecary completed the brief surgery and closed up the wound with a corkscrew needle, he gave the Scourge his report.

‘I’ve administered growth hormone and applied a bonding agent – a surgical resin – to prevent further tearing along the carapace. The pain will fade over time. The resin will take an hour or so to set, so do your best to remain still.’

Bethesda held up the abdominal plate of ceramite through which the gladius had punched. ‘Take that to Brother Dancred,’ Ezrachi instructed.

‘He has better things to do,’ Kersh said suddenly. ‘As do you, Apothecary.’ Bethesda hesitated.

‘Ask him for a temporary patch,’ Ezrachi said. ‘As I have performed on its wearer. The detail and artistry can wait – as indeed it does on the corpus-captain himself.’

‘Where’s Skase?’ the Scourge demanded.

Ezrachi raised an eyebrow. ‘Is he to be punished?’

‘No,’ Kersh said.

‘He stabbed his commanding officer during a duel, an act it would not be unreasonable to characterise as treasonous or even an assassination attempt. He has dishonoured himself…’

‘Then that will be punishment enough,’ the Scourge shot back. ‘That and a duty on this doomed world. Dishonoured or not, I can’t spare a chief whip.’

‘But I am to be spared such a duty?’

‘Answer me. Where is Uriah Skase?’

‘Being just as stubborn as you,’ the Apothecary said. ‘He probably has one of his squad stitching him up right now. You know how Excoriators are about their duelling scars. They’re probably making a right grox’s ear of it. You did, of course, almost cut his entire face off, so perhaps I’d better go check on him.’

‘Fine,’ the Scourge said. ‘Begin with Skase and Squad Cicatrix. I want this company’s gene-seed harvested and you off-world in the next five hours.’

Staring hard at the Scourge as his serf collected his instruments, Ezrachi nodded silently and then made for the exit. At the door he turned.

‘You know, Kersh. Just because you got me into this mess, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to provide me a way out. Getting the seed to safety is a noble pursuit, but so is sharing the risk here and keeping it alive and well in you and your brothers.’

The Scourge turned to him. ‘Aetna Phall. Then, Eschara. You leave with this company’s legacy in five hours, Apothecary. I suggest you begin.’

Ezrachi’s crabby lips curled in a weak smile and the Apothecary left.

Kersh sat there for a while in the peace and quiet of the hermitage sanctuary. His side ached. His mind whirled. Was this what the Emperor wanted for him and his Excoriators? Was this his duty? Or was he needlessly damning the brothers under his command to certain slaughter? He thought of the worlds on the Keeler Comet’s path, and the Space Marines who must have been caught up in the trap sprung by its malign influence. The decision to run or fight. Was he fighting simply to avoid further accusations of cowardice or weakness? Was the Cholercaust his self-inflicted punishment – as Uriah Skase indulged the guilt of failure on Veiglehaven and the loss of his brothers, was he too castigating himself? As Skase had made himself live the excesses of the lash, was Kersh dooming himself and his brothers to a battle they certainly could not win? Or was he so desperate to win back his Master’s love and trust after the affliction of the Darkness that he saw the Blood God’s disciples as a test to be passed? Not the falsehood of games and trials, represented through the Feast of Blades or an honour duel. Would Kersh only be worthy to stand by his Chapter Master’s side when he had faced the War-Given-Form and enough enemy blood had been spilt?

Holding his torso and slipping down from the tablet, Kersh took several steps and stretched his side a little. Perhaps real Adeptus Astartes captains knew nothing of the questions he’d asked himself. Perhaps in them, doubt was a distant memory of the past. He had presented a mask of confidence to his men; seemed sure in his orders – even in the face of their questioning; tried to earn his corpus-captaincy in word and deed. Yet, Zachariah Kersh felt the crushing uncertainty of fate spinning on a coin about him. Events were unfolding, irrespective of his unseemly doubts and out of his control. The mortals called them demigods, but in the harsh silence of that lonely moment, Kersh felt the emptiness of insignificance – deep like the darkness of space, a vast oblivion in which his fighting spirit guttered like a candle flame and unimportance was complete. Kersh felt cold and alone.

Standing as he was, he noticed for the first time an object on Melmoch’s chest. Like that the Scourge had woken to find upon himself, the object was a card – a crystalline tarot wafer used by witchbreeds to present portents, divine futures and shed light on facets of the Emperor’s will. Standing over the comatose Epistolary, Kersh picked up the card and turned it over in his fingers. On it was the representation of a colossal, rune-inscribed bell tower, imposing and ancient, with the dilapidated majesty of Terran hives stretching out beyond. The words Campana Spiritus-Perditus underscribed the illustration, but Kersh knew the image well. Every Adeptus Astartes did. It was the Bell of Lost Souls on Ancient Terra, housed in the Tower of Heroes, known to toll its doom-laden lament only at the death of true heroes of the Imperium.

Kersh felt cold. The unnatural absence of heat in the air. Looking up he saw the revenant, standing on the other side of the tablet, looking down at the psyker. With a sickening pause, the being looked up at the corpus-captain. Its teeth chattered in its macabre maw, and through the rent in its helm, the Scourge felt the attention of an eye within the bald socket of the thing’s skull, glowing an otherworldly red.

‘So this is you,’ Kersh said, presenting the tarot wafer. The horror merely stared back, never speaking, never acknowledging its hauntee with word or deed. ‘What does this mean?’ the Scourge demanded. The revenant merely stared at the Excoriator. ‘I want to know what this means, you sorry-looking, good-for-nothing fiend.’ Again, the phantom did not respond. It simply watched the fury building within the corpus-captain with grotesque fascination and icy patience. Kersh turned away. He looked at the card and then back at the revenant. He half expected it to be gone as was its frustrating habit, melting into the ether of reality. It remained, however, standing over the unconscious Librarian.

‘False prophet,’ Kersh told it with growing bitterness. ‘At first I thought you a bad dream – a resonance of the Darkness. Something I’d brought back. Then some manifestation of surgical error, a hallucination or insanity earned through drill and scalpel. For a moment I allowed myself the comfort of thinking you had answers. That you were ghosting me for a reason I would come to understand. Some sign of a greater scheme. Surely, proof that I truly have lost my mind. Now I just think I’m damned. Come to the notice of some pollutive entity or spirit that delights in tormenting me with its dark attentions. Do my struggles entertain you, wraith?’

The being looked down on Melmoch with ghoulish serenity before staring back at the seething Scourge. It reached out with a single, bony digit – protruding from a broken ceramite fingertip – and pointed to the tarot card in the Excoriator’s hand. Colour began to bleed from the wafer, until atom by atom the card disintegrated before Kersh’s eye, streaming away on some perverse, immaterial breeze.

‘More dark riddles? Could you be any more cryptic, you bastard thing?’

The hand that had been holding the card became a fist and the raw tension in the Scourge’s arm, a blow. Several stitches snapped in Kersh’s side as the Excoriator launched his attack, throwing a punch at the being. As the fist flew, Kersh winded himself against Melmoch’s stone tablet. His knuckles met no resistance, however. Instead of ceramite and bone, the Scourge’s fist hit agitated nothingness, the spit and crackle of soul-static and shadow. What horrified the corpus-captain more was the fact that the armoured phantom actually seemed to be there and it was his own fist and arm that had assumed a ghostly translucence. Instinctively withdrawing his hand and clutching it to his chest, the Excoriator was relieved to find that it had re-assumed its corporeality. It was flesh and blood once more.

The candles about the chamber suddenly died to glowing wick-tips. The sanctuary became thick with a darkness that even the Space Marine’s enhanced vision struggled to pierce. Even the revenant in his midnight plate could not be seen. Then, like a targeter, the wraith’s lurid red eye cut through the murk, fixed on the Excoriator. Before the Scourge, appeared an unnatural light. The phantasmic outline of the legionnaire flickered and danced with the auric flame of ethereal damnation. Kersh watched, entranced by this being of the beyond. Not noticing that the very darkness itself had been set alight, but the mere offending presence of the thing. The gilded flames took and spread, swamping the corpus-captain in an immaterial inferno. The soulfire blazed to brightness, enveloping the revenant in light and immersing the Scourge in cool, blinding brilliance.

When Kersh opened his eye the chamber had returned to blackness. The candle wicks reassumed their glow before igniting once more. The temporary apothecarion, including the still form of Melmoch, seemed untouched by the ethereal firestorm, but the ghoulish revenant was gone. The Scourge stumbled across to his bunk and leant against the stone tablet, probing his stitches with fat fingers.

The sanctuary door opened and Ishmael entered. The squad whip met Kersh’s blank gaze before walking over to the hermitage bench, his face dark like a burgeoning storm. Standing next to Melmoch, Ishmael grasped the hilt of his blood-smeared sword and plucked it from the ferruswood surface of the bench. He seemed to stare at the gladius for a moment.

‘Thinking about finishing what your blade started, Squad Whip Ishmael?’ the Scourge called over his shoulder, his words barbed and accusatory. After a short hesitation, Ishmael looked around at the Scourge. A decision was made.

‘Melmoch’s awake,’ the squad whip replied.

‘What?’ Kersh said, still with an edge to his voice. The whip’s response had caught him off guard.

‘Brother Melmoch,’ Ishmael told him, his eyes still slits of insolence, ‘is conscious.’ Kersh approached the stone tablet. Indeed, the Librarian’s eyes were fluttering open and staring glaze-eyed at the ceiling. ‘Corpus-captain,’ Ishmael acknowledged in a low voice before slipping out of the sanctuary.

‘Melmoch,’ Kersh greeted the Epistolary as he stood over him.

The Librarian sat up, leaning back on his arms. He licked his lips.

‘I’m thirsty,’ he said. It was a statement, but Kersh, still clutching his side, poured a small bowl of water from a ceramic pitcher and offered it to the psyker. Taking the bowl, Melmoch drank deeply, allowing rivulets of water to stream down from the corners of his mouth. ‘The apothecarion?’ he asked. Kersh nodded.

‘You’ve been out a while, brother.’

‘I heard voices,’ Melmoch said. Kersh felt himself tense.

‘Brother Ishmael was here…’

‘Whooh,’ Melmoch said, dropping the empty bowl and reaching for his head.

Crunching through the shattered ceramic, Kersh put a hand on the psyker’s shoulder. ‘What is it? Is it your gift?’

‘Yes,’ Melmoch moaned.

‘Is it compromised?’

‘Quite the opposite,’ the psyker told him, his face criss-crossed with lines of pain and tension.

‘You have the skill?’

Melmoch’s eyes opened wide and bright, and he spoke. His gaze was piercing to the point of discomfort and his words echoed around the inside of Kersh’s mind.

‘There is pain here like you would not believe. Not in this body but in the very fabric of existence. The dull agony of our savagery is a galactic affliction. The hot blood of ill will and the mindless brutality of our species sustaining its insatiable desire. Our kind were bred to trade in such currency. With each bolt and blow we feed the beast. Here and now…’ The Librarian trailed off. His eyes momentarily glazed before searing back to focus. ‘Here and now – this time and this place is a wound within a wound. An injury internal, like a bottomless pit discovered in the deepest trench.’

‘You speak of the Cholercaust.’

‘The screams,’ Melmoch marvelled. ‘The never-ending shrieks of slaughterlust, fear and rage, layered, echoing, bleeding into one another like a spiritual static. The starvation of reason – food for a god.’

‘Melmoch, I don’t–’

‘It speaks through me, but to us all. You can hear it in the drawing of a blade and the clunk of a firing mechanism. You can feel it in your face and fingers – in the snarl and the fists you make when you want to end an existence. It’s there – in the back of your mind, finding expression in the necessity of violence. It calls to you, shredding your nerve and urging the wanton abandon that every being craves – building, bubbling, brimming. Threatening to spill over into glorious reality where both power and blood flow.’

‘The gall-fever,’ Kersh agreed.

‘The futility of fighting fire with fire. A spiral of degeneration. The War-Given-Form. It will stop at nothing until we have all become the instruments of its boundless wrath. So much hate.’

‘Is that why you took this from the Ecclesiarch’s shrine?’ Kersh asked, dipping his hand into a belt pouch and extracting the small urn the psyker had used to put himself out. The Librarian immediately flinched in its presence. ‘All of the witchbreeds are dead. Navigators, astropaths – everyone.’

‘The Skull Taker knows we’re here,’ the Epistolary said, not taking his eyes off the orb container with its agonising contents: the God-Emperor’s psi-negative essence, dust of the divine. ‘It knows our gorestink, the copper tang of our blood. We are candles in the darkness to such an entity, flaring every time we lay our lands on a weapon or indulge our spite. It hates the witch most of all. A loathing beyond your all-too-human unease and disgust. The witch’s soul burns bright. The witch is a coward who shuns the unthinking urgency of the hand and whose agency is the warp. That is why the witch dies first at the Blood God’s hand. I needed to douse that flame, to retreat into the darkness and gather my strength – or, Adeptus Astartes or not, I would have shared the same fate as the unfortunates of whom you spoke.’

‘Melmoch,’ Kersh said, trying to get the psyker to focus. ‘I need to know if you can reach beyond the screaming – beyond the influence of the Cholercaust and this cursed comet.’

‘You wish me to send an astrotelepathic message?’

‘Yes. Several. Can you do that?’

Melmoch got down from the stone tablet and steadied himself. ‘I can try.’

‘We need to appraise the Vanaheim Cordon of our status,’ Kersh said, ‘and the Terran-bound trajectory of the Keeler Comet. Their contingents must hold station. We cannot afford the Cholercaust to slip by into Segmentum Solar.’

‘And the others?’

‘Long range, narrow-band requests for reinforcement to the Viper Legion on Hellionii Reticuli,’ the corpus-captain instructed. ‘The Novamarines at Belis Quora and the Angels Eradicant stationed at Port Kreel.’ Melmoch went to interrupt but Kersh had more for him. ‘And a subsector, wide-band appeal for assistance. There were rumours the White Consuls were moving out of the Ephesia Nebula. We could get lucky.’

Melmoch looked hard at the Scourge.

‘Of course, I will do all that you ask. You must know – the magnitude of the enemy force we are facing…’ The Librarian didn’t have the words. ‘Even if we were reinforced, the time it would take for another contingent to reach us – the Cholercaust will be gone and our corpses will have been long stamped into the grave dust.’

‘A little optimism too much to expect?’ Kersh said.

‘Optimism’s a little hard to come by,’ Melmoch said. ‘I’m only being realistic about our chances.’

‘Does not the God-Emperor fight on our side?’ Kersh asked. Melmoch’s brow furrowed, surprised at such a reference from the corpus-captain.

‘He does,’ the Epistolary replied suspiciously.

‘Then I suppose you had better take it up with him.’