Legion of the Damned

Chapter Thirteen Heavenfall

Brother Omar stumbled through the mist. It was as though the clouds were too tired to take their own weight and had settled like ephemeral behemoths on the necroscape. Thick and noxious, the miasma stank of evil, threaded through as it was with a dull spectrum of unnatural colour, like oil spreading through water. Above the Excoriators Scout, the overcast sky – all but indistinguishable from the burial ground-hugging mist – glowed with atmospheric agitation. It was as though the heavens were alight. It was a bad sign. Certus-Minor was passing through the tail of the comet, Omar presumed.

The neophyte was a mess. His carapace was but a feral worlder’s loincloth, shredded and hanging in tatters about his waist. His muscular torso glistened with his own blood, decorated all over as it was with nicks, bites and slices. A ragged strip from his long-abandoned cloak served as a bandana to keep the gore from his eyes, and his recovered combat blade dangled loosely from his exhausted grip like a machete. With only a primordial will to live sustaining the Excoriator, Omar had crawled up through the bodies, breaking bones and crushing skulls with his bare hands. With the roaring masses swarming about him, the Scout’s combat blade had been knocked free. Too much of a temptation to the bloodthirsty wretches, the razor-sharp weapon had been picked up and used on the Scout, slashing him feebly across the shoulder. Back in the Excoriator’s possession the weapon did its worst, however. Recalling training exercises on Cretacia, the Scout cut through bodies like death world jungle. For hours Omar had hacked back and forth, putting one foot in front of the other, leaving a trail of slaughter through the howling crowds. This, in turn, fuelled the frenzy further as maniacs descended upon the twitching corpses of the decapitated and limbless, finishing them off with god-pleasing ferocity.

Eventually, Omar reached the periphery of the horde. Continuing to cut a path to freedom, he staggered into the fog and left the screams of fury and death behind him. Mind-numb and blood-drenched, the Scout tried to orientate himself, settling on a seemingly arterial lychway in the assumed direction of Obsequa City. The neophyte was fairly sure that it was the same road upon which he had ridden out; but in the swirling fogbank, and surrounded by grave markers, statues and mausolea that all looked the same, he could have been walking in entirely the wrong direction.

A rumble and a quake beneath his feet brought the Excoriator back to his weary senses. Lifting his head and squinting, Omar could make out little. Through the murk of the mist he saw momentary streaks of fire giving the impression of something falling from the heavens. This was soon lost in the obscurity, until the Scout felt the further tremor of impacts through the soles of his gore-splattered boots.

Lifting the combat blade with one muscle-torn arm, and his knees in an attempt to galvanise his sluggish legs into a run, Omar advanced in the direction of the sound and sensation. Through the fog Omar began to make out a glow, then the flicker of small fires. Before long he found himself at the edge of a small crater, the impact zone a site of incandescent earth and destruction. Gravestones and the coffins that had been buried beneath them had been churned up and lay smashed amongst the debris of shattered bone and masonry. Moving on, the Scout encountered several more glowing craters, the undoubted sites of meteoric impact, rock, ice and ancient metals falling away from the comet and raining to the Certusian surface from its streaming tail.

Something did not seem quite right to the Excoriators Scout. Each of the impact craters was strewn with remains and coffin fragments. At the centre of each lay a single casket. They were untouched by the crash and steaming quietly in the night. Some were all but buried, while others lay across the bottoms of the craters. Climbing down into a hot trench, Omar inspected the fourth such object he had encountered. Unlike the flimsy stasis caskets used in the Certusian burial services, it was tall, broad and baroque. It stuck upright out of the ground at the bottom of the crater and was crafted from some dark, adamantine alloy. It was decorated with fretwork and ornamental art; Omar could make out some kind of bird, embroiled in flame.

Working his way around the object – which despite being surrounded by glowing, razed earth, was strangely cool to the touch – the Scout discovered Chapter designations and battle honours. Damage to the metal sarcophagus had obscured the name of the Chapter but did reveal its Founding as the unfortunate Twenty-First. Its honour roll was one a First Founding Legion would be proud of, including the Apostatic Wars, the Great Malagantine Purge, the Golgotha Castigations, the Battle of Lycanthos Drift, the Second Scouring of the Black Myriad and the Badabian Tyranicide.

Nestling the tip of his combat blade between lid and sarcophagus, Brother Omar twisted the weapon and broke the pressure seal. The object gave a loud moan of relief and the Scout proceeded to prise open the top half of the lid. Swinging open, the lid bounced on its chunky hinge, presenting a dark interior. An empty interior. Looking deep inside, Omar found nothing. No remains of the Adeptus Astartes battle-brother he expected to find within. On the inside of the lid the Scout discovered a simple plaque identifying a gene-code in symbol and number, a name, rank and company dictum. Brother-Sergeant Attica Centurius, Honoured First Company: In dedicato imperatum ultra articulo mortis. ‘For the Emperor beyond the point of death.’

Something screamed overhead. Closing the lid and crouching, Omar looked up at the hazy sky. There were more streaks blazing across the firmament. Many more. It was as if the filthy heavens had opened and fire was falling to the cemetery world surface. The Scout felt the first impact through the floor and the cool alloy of the sarcophagus. Then a second and a third. They were close and getting closer. Soon they were almost continuous, with objects rocketing down from the sky and thunderbolting into the burial grounds. At first Omar had thought it a meteor storm, the full wrath of the comet brought to bear on the planet surface. He had even considered the barrage a further heavenfall of the mysterious sarcophagi. The Scout didn’t relish being beneath either as they rained from the sky at searing speed.

Then he heard it. Something indescribably horrible announcing its arrival through the fog. Not a meteorite or an empty sarcophagus. The Excoriator climbed out of the crater and began a low walk to the lychway. There were other sounds now. An ungainly flapping overhead. The gargle-hiss of something hatching to the neophyte’s right. The tremble of footfalls, colossal and closing from behind. A screech close by that went straight through the Scout and caused his eyes to bleed. Omar’s stealthy advance turned into a march, and the march into a run. He no longer felt the agony in his arms and the weight in his legs. Horrors were raining about him, things infernal and impossible. Brother Omar ran into the darkness, crunching along the gravel track that he hoped to the Emperor would lead him to Obsequa City, his battle-brothers and a loaded boltgun.

The Scourge stood atop the masonry scarp. Techmarine Dancred admitted to having little trouble demolishing the exterior walls, chapels and habitations – ancient and already crumbling as they were. Now these buildings were a perimeter of steep stone wreckage, providing Obsequa City’s defenders with protection, elevated fire arcs and a workable, if ramshackle, battlement upon which to station heavy weapon emplacements and themselves. Conversely, it presented an assaulting enemy with a tiring and time-consuming climb, hopefully giving the Charnel Guard and their recent recruits opportunity to riddle their attackers with las-bolts.

Kersh had instructed the Techmarine to demolish a second row of buildings and a third in concentric circles around the exterior of the city. In the two interior masonry mounds, the corpus-captain had ordered narrow rat-runs excavated by hand at intervals along the impromptu battlement. These in turn were imbedded with the last of the armoury demolition charges, with screw-lever detonators situated at the rat-run end. Kersh fully expected to order strategic retreats and planned on the rat-runs giving the Certusians and Excoriators the ability to pull back to a waiting secondary and tertiary palisade if overwhelmed. The demolitions would then collapse the runs after use, preventing enemy troops following and forcing them to embark on another las-slashing climb, giving the fleeing cemetery worlders and Charnel Guard time to set up carried weaponry in new emplacements.

The shattered-stone parapet swarmed with fearful Certusians, men, mostly, who had been selected by the lord lieutenant to bolster the ceremonial numbers of the Charnel Guardsmen on the perimeter. Some had been armed with auxiliary lasfusils from the defence force armouries, while others had to contend with scuffed and dusty remnants from storage – autoguns and stub-service carbines. Rough emplacements boasted heavy stubbers, battered incinerator units, mortars and the occasional autocannon. Where firearms weren’t available, improvised weaponry in the form of picks and shovels were carried in the sweaty palms of grave fossers and hearsiers.

Punctuating the line of cemetery worlders were the Charnel Guard themselves. The dour Guardsmen were dressed in dusty black flak, swathed in sable cloaks and aiming their single-shot lasfusils over the rubble palisade. Their ceremonial duties had ill-prepared the Guardsmen for the kind of meat-grinding battle ahead, the Certusian soldiers better versed in the rites of death than the art of dealing it to the Emperor’s enemies. Kersh bit at his mangled bottom lip and watched a lance-lieutenant straighten a Guardsman’s cloak and dust off his shoulder when he should have been modulating the beam-focus on his lasfusil.

In a rough gun emplacement nearby, Kersh spotted his personal serfs. Amongst the rubble, Oren was leaning into the stock of a brute autocannon. Old Enoch was stacking ammunition crates behind the weapon, while Bethesda spoke to several unarmed Certusians whose duty it was to run further ammunition to the emplacement. When the assault began, a good deal would rest on the ability of the heavy weapons to keep firing. That was why in the main Kersh had ordered Chapter serfs to take responsibility for the emplacements. They were more likely to hold their nerve in the face of the enemy and do their duty. As the absterge turned she pointed out the Scourge to the cemetery worlders she was addressing – no doubt to bolster their faith and confidence. She risked a brief smile at her master which Kersh saw but didn’t acknowledge. As she turned back he saw the powerpack, looped cable and chunky las-pistol attached to the belt of her robes. It was Bethesda’s job to keep the supply line running. An emplacement without ammunition was an invitation to disaster.

The night air was still and an evil-smelling fog bank was rolling in across the burial grounds, reducing visibility and range. Peering along the battlement with the keen sight of his remaining eye, Kersh saw Brother Micah. The company champion had not been happy about being away from the Scourge’s side, but the corpus-captain had insisted he needed a spread of experience and loyalty around the perimeter. Micah had had to settle for the next section along, barely a sprint away along the ruin palisade. He brought up a fist to the sky and then kissed it, which Kersh proceeded to mimic.

The city was strangely quiet. Along Kersh’s section of the perimeter there was tension and dread etched into the face of every Certusian the corpus-captain settled his eye on. Women, children and a sparse sprinkling of remaining preachers ran back and forth between the city centre and the perimeter line, up and down the vertiginous, cobbled cuttingways and alleys with water, food and ammunition.

The thousands not employed in such service were gathered in the cramped cloisters, quads and plazas about the Memorial Mausoleum, holding a candlelight vigil with Pontifex Oliphant and creating a prayer cordon around the resting place of Umberto II. The Memorial Mausoleum’s vault – where the ancient remains of the former High Lord of Terra and Ecclesiarch resided – was deep enough, it was said, to survive an apocalyptic strike by an asteroid. It was there, the safest place on the planet, that Kersh had intended Oliphant to hide.

This, after the corpus-captain had argued at length with Palatine Sapphira and, with grave reservation, that the Sister of the August Vigil had consented to allow a small number of significants to occupy the sacred chamber. She had been worried about body heat elevating the tiny vault’s temperature above a preservative optimum. Oliphant had undone the corpus-captain’s hard work with the Sister, however, insisting that he share the same fate as his people. Kersh had been angry at first, but had been secretly impressed with the cripple; he had never observed such concern in a priest or planetary governor before. The Excoriator was at least a little reassured that the pontifex had chosen the Memorial Mausoleum as the site of his flock’s gathering, under the dispassionate gaze of the Sisters of Battle, stationed about the mausoleum with their primed boltguns.

The city between the limits and the heights was all but empty. Citizens ran supplies down blood-splattered streets as Proctor Kraski and his enforcers herded the last of the city-based hordes and fire-lighting crazies into tight alleys and cul-de-sacs. There they went to work with their combat shotguns, putting the mobs out of their degenerate misery. Kersh could hear the howls and screams of rage and death echoing about the city’s lofty walls, tunnels and winding stairwells. In the tallest towers and the busy architecture of the most elevated rooftops, Scout Whip Keturah was stationed with Squad Contritus, watching and waiting – the empty streets below and the misty necroplex beyond the perimeter line falling under the constant sweep of their magnocular scopes.

Keturah had returned early from his search. Two of his Scouts were still missing, but when fireballs started tumbling out of the unnatural sky and thundering into the burial grounds, the Scout whip had abandoned the sweep – unwilling to risk the Thunderhawk Impunitas in the hellstorm. Kersh had ordered the remainder of his Scouts stationed about the perimeter with the other Excoriators, in small groups. At ease, the corpus-captain expected the sight of the Angels and aspirants to reinforce the nerves of the Guardsmen and cemetery world militia. In battle he expected them to remain loose and flexible – holding ground but clustering as the rapidly-changing circumstances of battle changed. Where the line was breached – and the Scourge was confident that it would be – he needed his Adeptus Astartes to swiftly move in, destroy the threat and repel the enemy advance.

Standing with him on the palisade was Squad Whip Ishmael and a member of Squad Castigir, Brother Kale. The Excoriators whip paced up and down, barking the impetuous orders of a tyrant down on the line. Under the eyes of the Adeptus Astartes the Certusians hurried to meet his booming expectations, but they little understood what the Excoriator was talking about. Kale looked on, his flamer resting in his grip, his eyes on the ominous bank of mist that hung in the night air like a curtain of dread. Beyond was the darkness and the graveyard expanse. There was something new out there in the burial grounds. Something weird and unnatural. They all knew this because they could hear strange noises rolling out of the still obscurity. Kersh listened to the enemy, the approach of the host. He could hear wet rasping, the chitinous clickety-click of movement, the horrible cracking of metamorphosis, chuntering, hissing, shrieking and what sounded like the song of some dying ocean behemoth layered over everything else. There were muffled voices, too, close yet distant, speaking to no one and everyone in a dark tongue that was neither human nor xenos but otherworldly and entrancing.

When Impunitas had returned with reports of orbital bombardment further south, beyond the Great Lakes, Kersh feared the worst. Obsequa City would not survive a pounding from the void and Kersh’s meagre defences had not been designed with such remote engagement in mind. The Scourge thought he could rely on the Blood God’s servants to meet them blade to blade. They were not known for their prosecution, or even tolerance, of such long-range warfare. Kersh’s experience of the berserker factions had taught him that beyond the ancient warships of the Traitor Legions, the War-Given-Form favoured simple cultships. The Cholercaust armada would likely be made up of armed freighters, fat transports and plundered system ships, loaded to piratical proportions – ready to disgorge their savage cargos of human detritus in a swarm of battered lighters, barges, haulage brigs, tugs and hump shuttles, all reinforced and outfitted as simple drop-ships.

Corpus-Commander Bartimeus, in his last vox-transmission from the departing Angelica Mortis, confirmed the Cholercaust’s approach from the system’s edge. No one vessel, however – not even the bastardised sprint traders and void-clippers ahead of the armada, straining at the leash and burning out their sub-light engines with bloodthirsty impatience – had reached the system core. Kersh had urged the strike cruiser on with its precious cargo of gene-seed and intelligence, instructing Bartimeus to assume an escape vector towards the cemetery world’s bleak sun, hopefully masking the vessel’s signature in the stellar static.

The Scourge thought on Ezrachi and the brusque corpus-commander. He had felt the Apothecary’s absence immediately, having come to value if not always appreciate the grizzled veteran’s advice. Kersh knew that the Excoriators of the Fifth would also miss the Angelica Mortis, the strike cruiser being their only hope of exodus. A lifeline cut. Their home, gone. The corpus-captain knew that the thought of the warship carrying the company’s genetic future to safety would console some of the Space Marines, but for some the sore loss of the Angelica Mortis would only be drowned in the hot distraction of battle. For that reason, Kersh willed their enemy on.

It was Melmoch who had provided the answer to Kersh’s questions. What was the nature of the orbital bombardment? If not the Cholercaust, then what was out on the burial grounds, haunting the mist and chilling Certusians to the bone with its weirdness, wailing and nonsensical whispers? The Librarian told him that the Keeler Comet was no ordinary astral body. It was no longer a simple amalgam of ice, rock and metal plummeting through the void, enslaved to an orbit and the long chain of gravity. It had punched through the Eye of Terror and had changed, its nature abnormal, its purpose warped. Like a claw, tearing at the very fabric of reality, the blood comet had opened rents in time and space, tainting the darkness and creating an immaterial breach through which the raw essence of the warp could bleed. The Epistolary told Kersh, pointing up at the unnatural flux of the sky, that he suspected the comet’s tail was such a rift, and that the unfiltered insanity of the warp was pouring out into the void before falling towards Certus-Minor with gravitational certainty to streak down through the cemetery world’s atmosphere. Trying to reassure the Scourge, the psyker hypothesised that weak entities and warpforms might burn up on descent, and that the grip other such creatures had on reality might be weakened by such a scorching. What horrified Kersh further was Melmoch’s belief that anything resilient enough to survive planetfall and impact would be suitably difficult to kill.

‘Anything?’ Kersh asked.

‘Nothing,’ Kale replied. He held an auspex out before him, scanning the thick murk. ‘No movement, no heat signature, no emissions.’

‘Well, there’s clearly something out there,’ Ishmael bit back. The squad whip was wearing his lightning claws and watching searing energy arc between the polished surfaces of his talons.

Minutes passed. Kale continued to sweep the necroplex but detected nothing. Ishmael took out his impatience on the already terrified mortals on the battlement. Then Kersh heard it. In the distance. Along the perimeter. Amongst the sibilant cacophony emanating from the mist. The rhythmic chatter of a heavy stubber.

‘Corpus-captain,’ Kersh’s vox-bead crackled. ‘Enemy contacts.’ It was Brother Novah. Kersh had stationed the newly-promoted standard bearer with Chaplain Shadrath some way to the east. The chug of the stubber could be heard much clearer over the vox-channel, and the corpus-captain also detected the ragged whoosh of lasfusils and the Emperor-pleasing crash of boltguns through the static. ‘The chief whip, Brother Dancred and the lord lieutenant – all reporting enemy contact, sir.’

Kersh visualised the tiny city, tinier still since Brother Dancred’s demolitions. He considered the relative locations of the reports. It seemed initial assaults were coming in from the north and east.

‘What about Joachim, the Epistolary, Second Whip Scarioch?’

‘Nothing, my lord.’

Then Kersh heard the isolated reports of nervous trigger fingers. Behind a collapsed cloister-pillar two Charnel Guardsmen had punched several holes in the fog bank with their lasfusils. The single bolts faded into the mist and the lance-lieutenant fell on the two soldiers with harsh and equally nervous words. The Charnel Guard officer was cut off in mid-stream by the chudder of a stub-carbine and the deeper crash of Oren’s autocannon. Vague suggestions became shadows and shadows rapidly became horrific threats coming out of the mist at the battlement. The night sizzled to life as a hail of poorly aimed las-bolts lanced the miasma. The autocannon and a heavy stubber further up the palisade gave better accounts of themselves – the cannon in particular chewing up the advancing forms before they had even had a chance to make themselves known.

Kersh unclipped his chainsword and held the barbed tip of the silent weapon out beside Ishmael. He’d hoped the squad whip might return the battle-brotherly gesture and tap the back of his lightning claw against the weapon. Ishmael just gave the Scourge a look of sour disgust, slapped on his helmet and started advancing.

‘Sir,’ Kale called. Kersh didn’t know if the Excoriator had seen his squad whip’s snub. The Space Marine held up the auspex. ‘I’ve got nothing.’

Kersh grunted. Enemies that eluded the scanners were not good news for the Excoriators.

‘If you can see it and it moves, burn it,’ Kersh told Kale. Re-attaching the auspex to his belt and adopting his helmet, the Excoriator ran up the perimeter, adjusting the nozzle aperture on his weapon for a blanket burn.

Firing the chainsword to life, the Scourge gunned the weapon to shrieking lethality. Slipping his own helm over his head and firing the pressure seals, he watched monstrous forms swoop, bound and scuttle from the fog. As the warp-spawned swarm grew, more of the immaterial creatures made it through the gauntlet of the las-fire. Kersh watched the autocannon and heavy stubber continue to do good work, ripping up etherforms and blowing what appeared to be limbs and appendages from the fearless horrors. The storm of las-fire that had greeted the first appearance of the entities immediately began to thin, causing Kersh to march forwards. It was as he feared. As more of the myriad monstrosities revealed themselves, common Certusians had shifted from panic-stricken trigger pumping to mind-scalding horror. The cemetery worlders and a number of Charnel Guard proceeded to gawp at the spectacle, their fragile minds overwhelmed by the impossible vision unfolding before their eyes. Some recoiled and slammed their backs to the battlement ruins, refusing to believe what they were seeing. Others fell to weeping and vomiting. Many simply could not take their eyes of the gut-curdling sight of the warp-spewed nightmares and froze up, clutching their silent weapons uselessly to their chests.

Several flying beasts corkscrewed their haphazard way through the streams of heavy weapons fire and dissipating curtain of las-bolts. Their repugnance even stirred deep-buried feelings of disgust in Kersh, looking as they did like giant insects that had been turned inside out. They swooped in low over the battlement on deformed multi-wings. Ishmael ran at the monsters, leaping off a shattered arch and reaching for the open night sky with his lightning claws. The talons crackled and steamed as the first beast flew straight into them. The creature sliced into an ugly mess on the rubble behind the squad whip before raining skywards in a shower of immaterial dissipation. Ishmael landed and, risking a swift look over his shoulder, brought up his bolt pistol and hammered several rounds into a second oncoming glider.

A third fiend rolled into a spin with its ragged wings, bypassing Ishmael and coming at Kersh. The Scourge feinted right and then turned back, sweeping down with the angry teeth of the chainsword. The weapon chugged through a large wing and tore a rent down the monster’s flank, causing it to stream entrails across the crumbling masonry and smash its remaining wings in a crash-landing. The corpus-captain watched the mess stream into a cyclonic scattering of dark emotion and wastage. Bethesda ran forwards from her position protecting the ammunition supply line. Holding the chunky laspistol in both hands like a carbine, cable trailing to the humming powerpack on her belt, the absterge lanced the downed entity with automatic las-fire.

Following Ishmael to the palisade, Kersh saw the squad whip roar savagely down the line of militia and Charnel Guardsmen. As encouragement to keep firing, the Excoriator stepped up onto the parapet and blasted single bolts from his pistol down the steep rubble of the battlement, plugging the swollen abdomens of obscene scuttlers.

‘Fire, you worthless wretches!’ Ishmael bawled, stabbing the talon-tips of a lightning claw down the line in accusation. ‘Fire or I’ll make you wish you had, you merelings! I’ll feed you to these beasts to give the rest something to aim at!’

A wall of insanity came at the battlement. Spindle-limbed arachnid-maws that jumped from gravestone to gravestone. Fleshy urchin-like beings that rolled across the ground on pneumatic spines, spearing all in their path. Osseous shafts growing out of the mist and impaling Guardsmen, before violently projecting hydric stalks of cartilage into the bodies of nearby victims to create a reticulated network of skewered bodies. Conical torsos, twitching with single-clawed stumps and slimy mouths that stream-vomited corrosive bile all about them. Blooms of floating cephalogeists, draping their victims in manes of life-sapping tentacles. Voracious, protoplasmic absorbers. Beasts that were claws and nothing else. Cancroid growths that spread across the ground, rocky surfaces and living tissue with sickening speed. A carpet of larval horrors that escaped the worst of the suppression fire and wriggled up through the loose rubble. Kersh saw cemetery worlders tearing at their own faces as the glassy elvers slithered into ears, mouths and eyes before writhing and exploding in a bloody, reproductive shower of empyreal birth.

Kersh fought through the spray of ichor and gobbets of warpflesh. He sawed through bestial nightmares and chopped limb-things from corporeal entities that simply grew back. He took the head from a Khymeric carnivore before cleaving the helical tusk from a screamer that swooped at him on triangular, pectoral wings. The Scourge booted aside a spongy mass of stubby eye-stalks before stamping down on the disappearing tail of a slinking gorgopede. He cut a fat, serpentine fluke from the lance-lieutenant’s back only to find that it had already eaten his head and had been pushing down into his body. The air was thick with death. The battlement was swamped with horror. Immaterial entities – hungry for souls – were everywhere, and the Scourge was enveloped in a whirlwind of blade-banished dissipation as monstrosities about him died and departed reality.

The Scourge didn’t know how long he had been fighting. The sea of spawn had just kept coming – monsters buzzing above, crawling over and slithering through the flesh-mounds of the slain. He had barely been allowed a moment’s independent thought. His superhuman body had been enslaved to necessity – arching, reaching, barging and slamming his way through the havoc. The chainsword shimmered in his grip, so hot was the weapon in its constant state of carnage. Over the vox-bead he’d heard a similar story from around the entirety of the perimeter. He thought he’d heard reports of cemetery worlders and Charnel Guard abandoning their posts in mind-numbing terror. He’d heard of Second Whip Azareth and Brother Lemuel’s sections pushed back to the second perimeter battlement and Techmarine Dancred’s completely overrun.

Suddenly the path ahead of Kersh was clear. Misshapen entities became even more so as they dissolved into a blur of cannon-blasted mess. The corpus-captain thought of Oren, the moody serf proving himself behind the stock of the heavy weapon, feverishly twisting the autocannon’s length this way and that on its squat tripod, mulching otherworldly miscreations in tight, controlled sweeps. Through ichor-spattered optics Kersh could see Kale doing his worst with his flamer. The Excoriator was holding part of the palisade all by himself, indulging in broad burns that sanitised the tainted rubble and roasted a labyrinthine network of bodies, shot through with the explorative shafts of a bone monster – gargling, corrupted Guardsmen and all. Brother Micah was working his way down to him, sweeping a swarm of spindly spider-creatures from his path with conservative bolter blasts while bludgeoning his way through the spiny legs of a larger chitinid with his barrel and combat shield attachment.

From what the Scourge could see, the autocannon emplacement with Brothers Micah and Kale were the only contingent holding the battlement. The cemetery worlders had fled through the rat-run, back towards the city. Some of the Charnel Guard had held their ground but had been overwhelmed by warp entities that stripped their flesh and picked their bones. Spinning around, Kersh ducked beneath the legs of a fang-faced strider. The thing had been charging at him and had snapped at the corpus-captain with an elongated jaw, malformed and twisted with surplus teeth. The Scourge heard who he thought was Micah over the vox, but couldn’t make out what the company champion was saying. Kersh flicked out his wrist and brought the raging tip of the chainsword up, shearing off one of the strider’s gangly legs.

Peering through the mist, the corpus-captain spotted Ishmael down amongst the gravestones of the necroplex. The squad whip was fighting like a cornered cat, his lightning claws flashing through warpflesh, slicing and stabbing.

‘Ishmael!’ Kersh yelled, but the Excoriator was too far out. Looking along his faltering section of the battlement and then down at the struggling squad whip, Kersh came to a decision. ‘Pull back!’ he yelled across the thunder of the autocannon. Riddling ground-hugging abominations with automatic las-fire, Bethesda covered the retreat as Oren and Old Enoch began separating the cannon from its mount and running the length of the white-hot weapon down the rat-run. Kale provided a wall of flame behind him and started to back towards the evacuation route.

The Scourge clambered up onto the parapet and cut his way through a conjoined monstrosity of legs and torsos. With every skidding step down the flesh-littered scarp his chainsword took an existence. A gossamer-winged whip-tail landed on his helmet from behind and proceeded to dig at the ceramite with its slender pincers. Snatching the thing by the tail, Kersh threw it into the rubble-strewn floor and crunched it underfoot. With a tiny etherquake, the thing became scraps of ash and nothingness. Through the throng of mayhem the Scourge watched the squad whip fight deeper and deeper into the immaterial ranks. The flood of malformed horror continued to roll in from the darkness of the burial grounds, washing up with mindless, soul-ravenous insanity against the rocky battlement. With unreal forms dying about them, the Excoriators were enveloped in curtains of warp essence that streamed for the night sky in torrents of instability.

‘Ishmael!’ Kersh managed as he sheared off limbs and plunged the shredding tip of the chainsword through warp-sculpted bodies. As the corpus-captain pushed deeper through the ranks, so did Ishmael. The Excoriator wouldn’t be stopped. He seemed only to exist for the killing. He responded to no entreaties – vox-transmitted or otherwise – and seemed completely unaware of his tactical vulnerability, leading a one-warrior spearhead through the ether-swarm. His lightning claws were an electrical storm sweeping through the plague of madness. His motions were decimate yet disturbing in their automotronic fervour – like the Excoriator was killing for the sake of it and had little idea of where he was.

‘Squad Whip Ishmael, respond!’ Kersh called across the vox-channel but only heard a continuous, guttural growl across the channel in response. Already, the swathe of destruction the squad whip had cut through the chaos was closing up. He saw the arc of a lightning claw blaze in the distance. Like a swimmer forced down below the waves, the Scourge was suddenly swamped by warp effluence. There was monstrosity everywhere. Things were on his back. His boot was held fast in the mantrap jaws of some scuttling beast. Claws and jaws of abominate designs and dimensions snapped at his armoured form, and he was forced to hold up an outstretched gauntlet to block a stream of bile jetting at his faceplate and obscuring his optics. In his ears he heard Brother Micah over the vox, but he couldn’t tell if the champion was talking to him.

Kersh found himself faltering. There were beasts all around and the sheer weight of creatures climbing upon his shoulders – and the weight of the entities crawling up onto their backs – forced the Scourge down onto his armoured knees. His hands hit the ichorial mire that was the cemetery world earth, and for the first time in hours the raging shriek of the chainsword chugged to a full stop. In amongst the forest of bestial legs, lying across a carpet of half-slain freakery, was a form Kersh recognised. Splattered from head to foot with blood, both black and fresh, and with carapace tatters decorating his stabbed and sliced flesh, one of Keturah’s neophytes was slowly crawling across the landscape of carcasses. Half dead already and all but indistinguishable from the dissipating cadaverscape, an Excoriators Scout had made it back through the horror of the immaterial incursion.

‘Excoriator!’ the corpus-captain called, but the only response the Scout could make was to crane his head upwards and roll over onto his back. Kersh saw for the first time the full extent of his injuries. Four cavernous puncture wounds decorated his stomach – equidistant and gushing with the Scout’s own blood. The unmistakable wound of a lightning claw. In his battle-blindness, Ishmael had gutted a brother Excoriator and slashed him down the face with a disfiguring swipe of his sword before moving on to his next victim. The squad whip had not even halted in realisation. He was lost to the kill.

Through his mauled face the Scout looked up at his corpus-captain. ‘S-s-sir…’

‘Save it,’ Kersh told the neophyte. ‘I’m getting you back to the city.’

Roaring with exertion the Scourge got back to his feet. Abominations fell from his shoulders and the sickening mass of soul-sucking aberration about him instinctively backed away. It was not enough to save them from the monomolecular fury of Kersh’s chainsword as he whirled around, tearing through bodies in a three-hundred-and-sixty degree arc of serrated savagery. This alone, however, was not enough to save the Scourge. He had fought too far into the maelstrom and had been claimed by the current of interdimensional madness. Etherspawn were everywhere and it was all Kersh could do to decapitate, disembowel and clip appendages from the twisted screechers about him and the fallen Scout.

Bodies began to fall about him. Things that looked like heads and pulsing abdomens began opening up in sizzling plunks of light and ethereal fluids. The curtains of insanity parted and Brother Micah appeared, protecting himself from a warp-stew-spitting cluster-bud with his steaming shield attachment before hammering back with a mulching burst of bolter-fire. Bizarre forms reaching out for the champion thudded and dropped as covering fire from the nearest of the city belfries and tower tops cut a fresh path through the army of confusion. All about him, the monstrous dead lost their forms and shot for the heavens in bursts of twisting ephemera. Kersh could imagine Squad Contritus on their bellies, their sniper rifles resting in the cradles of bipods, their eyes to their magnocular scopes, dropping abomination after abomination, working their way through to the corpus-captain. The Scourge had little doubt that their orders came from the company champion.

‘Micah!’ Kersh called, grabbing one of the Scout’s outstretched hands. Cutting through the long neck of an oncoming freak thing with a bolter blast, Micah rested the weapon in one arm and took the Scout’s other bloodied palm with his free gauntlet.

‘We’ve got to go – now!’ Micah roared. A sudden tremor beneath the corpus-captain’s boots convinced him not to question the champion’s wisdom. It was followed by a second, third and fourth. As the two Excoriators ran, dragging the moaning Scout behind them through the morass of bodies, Kersh got the impression of something above them. Something unnatural in form and colossal in size was striding towards the city on impossibly spindly legs. Every time one of the behemoth’s cloven feet hit cemetery world soil, the ground beneath the Excoriators bounced and quaked.

‘Go-go-go!’ Micah urged as the Space Marines stormed across the carnage of the necroplex and up the scree-slope of the rubble battlement. About them enemies closed in and dropped, heads and bodies lanced through with sniping las-bolts. Those monstrosities making it through had an introductory blast from Micah’s boltgun or a flesh-shearing swipe of the corpus-captain’s chainsword to greet them.

Kersh heard the staccato of gunfire. Squinting up through the ethereal mist, the corpus-captain saw the twin twinkles of heavy bolters in the sky. Their sound was drowned out by the air-shuddering moan of the gargantuan entity above them.

‘It’s the Gauntlet,’ Micah called between strides and bolt-blasts, indicating that he had called the Thunderhawk in. The Space Marines ran on, dragging the wounded Scout. Kersh heard the familiar crash of the Thunderhawk’s battlecannon. Both the Scourge and his champion involuntarily ducked their helmets as the gunship swept in low and over their heads. Peering up Kersh could see the after-inferno of the explosive shell that had ripped into the flank of the beast above. Watching the Gauntlet’s engine triplex blaze away, Kersh felt the heavens rumble with otherworldly agony. The colossal aberrant had taken the shot like some megafaunic giant of the plains, only to totter on its willowy legs and fall similarly so to the side. As the mist began to churn and rush about them, the Scourge slowed and slid down onto his knee, prompting Micah to do the same. The mist suddenly changed direction and came back at them as the monster’s dimensions pounded into the necroplex. Kersh was almost knocked from his crouch by the impact as a sea of bestial screams erupted and were suddenly silenced by the pulverising weight of the colossus. The etherquake was palpable, the hideous wash of unreality rolling about them as so many creatures died.

Kersh and Micah were back on their feet, hauling the Scout up and over the battlement. Above them the abomination’s spindly leg quivered. It terminated in a webbed hoof that seemed to point to the dome of the Memorial Mausoleum like an instruction to its warp spawn kindred. On the parapet the Excoriators could see that the freakish invaders had taken the perimeter as their own. Only a rent-armoured Kale stood at the entrance to the rat-run, his flamer blazing billows of promethium about the approach – roasting anything that made a scuttle or arachnoid stride for the bolt-hole.

Along the palisade Kersh could see the indescribable horror of the behemoth’s head. Its malformed skull had hit the battlement and pounded straight through the masonry and shattered rockcrete. As Kersh and Micah closed on the flame-streaming Kale, he heard the bark of Oren’s autocannon reassume its flesh-mangling orison. The serfs had successfully fallen back to the second perimeter and the heavy weapon was even joined by the optimistic flash of the occasional lasfusil, fired blindly from the parapet. Kersh was glad of the autocannon’s accompaniment. Below the second concentric battlement the Scout sniper cover fire couldn’t reach them. The gibbering hordes had made effective use of the dying behemoth’s fall, however, crawling up behind and over their warped cousin and giving the heavy weapon little open ground to acquire the advancing insanity.

Something Brother Micah assumed to be dead suddenly erupted in tentacles. The champion sidestepped the elastic reach of the first few, but dragging the injured Scout gave little room for manoeuvre and one of the thin appendages wound itself viciously around his leg. Pulling away from the horror, Micah plugged at it with single shots from his bolter, but a second grappler wrapped itself around the weapon. The tentacle around the champion’s leg bled some kind of caustic revenge from the feeler’s hook-suckers and the ceramite began to sizzle and smoulder. Micah yelled out in frustration and it took the gnashing teeth of Kersh’s chainsword to slice the tentacles from their beast-host. As Micah ripped the remainder of the appendage from his leg and bolter, the Scourge buried the tip of his sword in the creature’s thorax, gunning the barbed chain to full shredding majesty and despatching the monster.

The Excoriators ran. The horde closed.

Bolting down through the rat-run, the steep sides of the second battlement threatening to cascade down upon them, Kersh and Micah pounded on – the Scout Marine’s blood-drenched and ragdoll body pulled behind them. Kale backed into the gap after them, the flamer’s incessant inferno even more devastating and concentrated within the rat-run’s narrow dimensions. Charred skeletal obscenities propelled themselves through the wall of flame only to end up on the carpet of scorched and sky-streaming remains that other freak creatures sprang through to get to the Space Marines.

The Excoriator’s flamer chugged dry, and Kale threw the deadweight of the weapon at the nearest rawbone ganglefiend. The Excoriator’s bolt pistol cleared his belt holster. Still backing away, Brother Kale blasted furiously at the onrushing abominations. An absorber gushed its gelatinous way up the rat-run – it too enhanced by the bolt-hole’s funnelling narrowness. The amorphous spume-form soaked up the pistol’s defiance before swallowing Brother Kale whole.

Kersh and Micah ran on, forcing their armour’s spirits to greater feats of fibre-bundled athleticism. The rat-run exit beckoned. Kersh saw Bethesda at the opening, the screw-handle detonator in her slender hands. The Excoriators heard an appalling roar of agony but could not stop. As the Adeptus Astartes exploded out of the rat-run, the Scourge’s absterge twisted the detonator. Strategically planted demolition charges along the length of the bolt-hole fired, demolishing the gap and collapsing the run. Tonnes of rubble and fragmented masonry cascaded down, blocking off the escape route and burying the freakish abominations chasing the Excoriators.

As the dust cloud settled, with the autocannon hammering above them, Kersh surveyed the scene. Everyone, from the limping Micah to Bethesda to the Charnel Guardsman hiding down behind the remnant of a shattered spire, looked aghast. Turning, Kersh looked down on the miserable Scout he’d pulled out of the horror of the necroplex. He was glaze-eyed, twitching and mumbling to himself. Also, half of him was missing.

The absorber’s clotted immateriality had gushed up behind them and had swamped the Space Marine Scout’s legs and abdomen. Digesting them like it had Kale, the creature had left half an Excoriator. For a few moments that seemed like an eternity, nobody spoke.

‘Find something you can use as a stretcher,’ the Scourge said to Bethesda, ‘then have a team of runners take him up to his Tenth Company brothers.’

The absterge bolted off to carry out her master’s orders. Kersh’s eyes fell on the terrified Guardsman. ‘You,’ the Scourge said in a tone that blistered with fury and disappointment. ‘Get on that perimeter, now…’

The Charnel Guardsman snatched up his lasfusil in numb dread and ran back up the palisade to take his position on the battlement.

Hobbling around whilst slapping a chunky magazine into his boltgun, Brother Micah turned to the Scourge. The company champion kissed his fist in honour of Dorn.

‘You ready?’

‘No,’ Kersh answered honestly, but followed the Excoriator up towards the autocannon emplacement, leaving behind the neophyte in his pain, shock and mumbling torment.

Chapter Fourteen Syzygy

I wish this were a dream.

The horror of the warp was visited upon Certus-Minor. The cemetery world was flash-fried in the insanity of battle as the planet’s unfortunate orbit passed through the tail of the Keeler Comet. The unfiltered dross of Chaos – gathered like scum at stagnant borders between our reality and its own – pouring through the rift and raining down on this tiny part of the Imperium.

We fought for twenty hours straight, knee-deep in abomination, holding our nerve and retaining our sanity amongst the madness of raw havoc taken form. The Fifth Company held its ground and earned great honour in the field of battle. If the shoreline of dead flesh is anything to go by, decorating the city perimeter, the odds were appalling. For twenty hours the heavenfallen swept down on us, drawn unthinking to Obsequa City like a lighthouse of soulfire, hungry for our humanity. We fought like we had never done before, our superhuman bodies pushed to their limit. Hearts thundered blood around our bodies. Reactions crackled like lightning. Eyes only saw enemies. Arms burned numb defiance – living extensions of our blessed blades and bolters. We took life without strategy. Technique and the art of battle were mere memories. We killed through necessity, for behind every enemy entity lay another and another, and it was all we could do to survive.

In the twentieth hour of bloodshed the aberrations stopped. Numbers of the warped began to dwindle. The masses thinned and our efforts became easier. We pushed the monsters back to the first perimeter, and on the lost battlement we decimated their remaining number. This was no battle tactic. The beasts had simply spent themselves in mindlessly assaulting the city. There were no more to kill because we had killed them all.

Although the Fifth Company has achieved a great victory over Chaos, it was not without cost. Brothers Ebenezar, Tycharias, Moliath, Ashkelon and Techmarine Dancred have lost their lives to the horde. Their bodies are laid out as custom dictates, with all the horror of their battle wounds on display. Tycharias particularly is a mess. Dancred is a butchered carcass of Adeptus Astartes flesh and twisted, claw-mauled hydraulics, electrical systems and bionic framing. The Techmarine fought bravely, but his position on the line was overrun and the abominations pushed on into the city. Members of Squad Contritus were instrumental in holding the invasion back – their sniping talents put to the test as the steep streets of the Saint Bartolomé-East district became wall-to-wall Chaotics. The Excoriators Scouts thinned out the misshapen mass with precision fire, giving Skase and several of his Squad Cicatrix brethren time to redeploy and push the monsters back. It took several bombing runs by the Thunderhawk Impunitas to fully sanitise the vicinity of hellspawn and their taint, however, leaving the district a derelict waste.

Whereas my Excoriators have upheld their proud tradition of attrition, I must accept responsibility for the failure of almost everyone else. I ask too much of the cemetery world’s common humanity. Without the weakness of Imperial citizenry there would be no need for the Adeptus Astartes, and nothing has made this clearer than the manner of the Certusian retreat. History records the accomplishments of all-too-ordinary men: the war for Armageddon, the Euphrassic Massacres and the numerous Black Crusade honours of battle-hardened Cadians. Our species can be strong and our spirit beyond measure. This is what is celebrated in the myth and legend of song and saga. But for every Imperial citizen who has ever held their ground in the face of the xenos invader, the heretical traitor or Chaos marauder, a thousand have fled. It is in the fear and dread of those thousand that the Imperium’s doom is written. Men, women and children in whose trembling hands weapons turn to water. The faint-hearted majority who run for their lives in the expectation that others will save them. Perhaps the Adeptus Astartes are to blame for this. The Imperium’s strength is its weakness. The existence of demigods turns common men into bystanders. They catch a glimpse of the divine and consider themselves beyond the calculus of fate. The Emperor’s Angels will save them. They are witnesses to the clash of good and evil in the galaxy, failing to recognise that it is upon their collective shoulders that the destiny of an empire resides.

For all my gene-bred superiority and Angel’s arrogance, I find it hard to blame them. I am more than human and yet, on the dark fringes of my understanding – lapping against the bedrock of my warrior heritage, my training and experience – I feel it too. The vertiginous, ice-water plunge of fear, simple and pure. The irrational and almost irresistible desire to run, to take oneself away from the source of danger and disgust. How common humanity manages to steel itself for such a storm of chemistry and emotion is an everyday miracle in itself. That most fly when I need them to fight is regrettable. Unlike Skase and Joachim, spitting their curses and bawling remonstration at fear-wrought statues of Certusian cowardice, I cannot find it in myself to hate these mortals. My sacrifice is my own. I do it for the Emperor and not for them. In truth, I feel nothing for their survival. We share nothing like a brotherly bond – although amongst the Fifth that too has been sadly lacking. Should they survive, neither they nor their progeny will go on to change the Imperium. Their continued existence means only one thing to me: the denial of enemy victory. I suspect that the gall-fever and the madness of an immaterial incursion are simply intended to soften us for the body blow. The Cholercaust is coming. The Ruinous Powers wish to take this world and its people from me. They will be denied. They will fail. I will ensure it.

With Brother Novah I stalk the smouldering ruins of Saint Bartolomé-East. A crater and fireball-ravaged remnants are all that remain. With the Fifth Company battle standard held high, Novah crunches through the scorched rubble. He scans the battered landscape for any signs of corruption with his boltgun while relaying orders back and forth over the vox-channels.

‘Second Whip Scarioch has been confirmed as missing.’

I nod. Novah continues. ‘Second Whip Etham repeats his request to go out and search for Brother Ishmael.’

‘Denied,’ I snap back. ‘Ishmael is lost. Tell Etham that Squad Castigir is his responsibility now and he needs to start acting like it.’

‘Brother Simeon is up at the Memorial Mausoleum as instructed. He reports burning bodies in the plaza. It looks like the Sisters opened fire on the crowd.’

‘The Sisters?’

I stop and consider Palatine Sapphira. It would be hard to imagine the stoic Sister succumbing to the frenzy and torching Certusians for sport.

‘They claim they were attacked.’

‘By ether-filth?’ It seemed unlikely that rift forms had penetrated that far into the city, even from Saint Bartolomé-East.

‘Cemetery worlders,’ Novah replies.

The gall-fever. The city churning. I shake my head. The influence of Chaos within and without the perimeter. In the wake of the initial assault, abandoned by many of the cemetery worlders and up to my helmet in immaterial filth, I had little time to consider the consequence of mass desertion. While I was fighting for my life and the lives of others, hundreds upon hundreds of wild-eyed Certusians were running uphill towards the spiritual safety of the Memorial Mausoleum. Out of their minds with fear, militiamen, members of ammunition supply chains and terrified Charnel Guardsmen fled screaming from the unleashed horror of the warp and the desperate gunfire barely keeping it at bay. For some – their minds broken – the screams would have turned to howls and anguish, and then anger. The line between fear and fury is one easy to cross in the fragile, erratic mind of a mere mortal. With the gall-fever firmly taken root, the cemetery worlders would have torn into the thousands at prayer about the walls of the great Mausoleum, some deserters still with weapons in hand.

Faced with unreasoning mobs of murderers – men intent on slaughtering all, even their own friends and families – I can imagine that Palatine Sapphira had little choice but to order her flamer-wielding Sisters to torch the rabid interlopers.

‘Have Brother Simeon set his serfs to organising labour parties from the cemetery worlders,’ I order Novah. ‘I need them to move bodies – they should be good at that.’

As we search through the charred remains of cloisters and chapels, I outline to the standard bearer how I want the bodies of dead defenders and penetrating spawn moved from the battlements and dumped outside the perimeter. I order the last of the city’s promethium barrels tipped out across the cadaver mounds of the fallen – a fuel-soaked hillock of flesh, both Certusian and immaterial – surrounding the perimeter.

The orders keep coming. Command structure and a sense of purpose nourish the aftermath of battle. Having stood amongst the killing fields of innumerable conflicts, I know that disbelief, shock and a sense of fatalism are soon to set in, combated only by leadership and labour. Without hard work the mind is allowed to dwell – on horrors experienced, the odds of survival and the futility of resistance.

I instruct Lord Lieutenant Laszlongia to reorganise his Charnel Guardsmen. I am now only interested in men who have proved their worth. Men of strong mind and spirit who held the line. Men who now know what they are facing and have the resolve to kill it. I order Laszlongia to recover weapons and ammunition and, with my Excoriators, re-establish themselves on the exterior perimeter. The blood-splattered battlements are ours again. For how long I cannot know.

The Impunitas hovers above the desolation and I feel the sights of her heavy bolters watching over me and the company standard. The Gauntlet I have despatched off across the necroplex to ensure that deadly pockets of auspex-defying entities do not haunt the mist. A second wave of abominations at this point would be tactically unlikely, based upon their presented behaviour, but prematurely devastating to corpse trains and combat-unprepared perimeters.

‘What of the Cholercaust – estimated time of planetfall?’ I put to the standard bearer. As we approach a seemingly resilient structure amongst the shattered and soot-stained landscape of destruction he achieves vox contact with the only vessel remaining in orbit around Certus-Minor. All other system ships departed under the protective wing of the Angelica Mortis with only the Adeptus Ministorum defence monitor Apotheon left behind.

‘The Apotheon confirms the first of the armada’s vessels breaching the asteroid field and entering the system core.’

‘How long?’

‘At present speed the advance vessels should reach Certus-Minor in a little under eight hours standard,’ Novah tells me. I imagine the lonely defence monitor holding station above the cemetery world with her tiny engines, the reinforced shielding of her bulbous Voss prow, her grim batteries of fat cannon and the underslung length of her powerful lance quad, nestling beneath the vessel’s armoured keel.

‘My compliments to the commander and cleric,’ I say, and mean it. The Apotheon has the best view of the Cholercaust in the system. They know what is coming. To hold position and charge weapons ready for engagement in the face of such suicidal odds is nothing short of adamantium nerve. ‘Tell him to ignore the cultships and freighters. Any damage his vessel can visit upon Traitor Astartes cruisers, frigates and gunships on the approach is most welcome.’

I think about wishing the captain luck but the words die on my lips. The Apotheon will be a boarder-ravaged wreck soon and the captain will shortly be dead. Since he knows this, it seems ridiculous to extend even the vaguest of optimistic wishes.

Novah spots something charred and leathery flapping in a depression nearby and moves off to plug the surviving thing with bolt-rounds. I advance up the smoking steps of the building before me – the only one in the immediate area not to have fallen in the bomb blast. Its exterior is cracked and scorched, but symbols in the stonework above the iron doors identify the building as the precinct house of the enforcers.

Putting a boot to the metal doors I enter cautiously. The inside of the building is untouched, protected by the thick walls of the precinct exterior. A perfect place for some otherworldly horror to hide from the Impunitas’s bombing run. The armoury is empty and a breeze from the open door disturbs vellum pages on the desks in the scriptoria. They float to the floor where they promptly begin to blotch and soak up blood recently spilt there. Several enforcers lie there also, one without a head and two others with ragged holes blown through their carapace and chests. Moving through the deserted precinct house, past the chastenoria, a booth-verispex and the provostery, I move down into the dungeon. An empty combat shotgun lies abandoned on the stairs. Here the cells are empty, bar one.

Sitting on a bench, behind thick adamantine alloy bars, is Proctor Kraski. The enforcer’s scuffed armour is ripped and blasted, while his head leans to one side and his mouth is open. Tobacco juice dribbles from the corner of his mouth and down through his beard, pitter-pattering on the polished cell floor. Something crunches under my boot and lifting it I find a key, clearly thrown out of the cell by Kraski after he locked himself in.

‘Proctor,’ I call, my voice bouncing unsettlingly around the cell block. Clutching the bars with my gauntlet, one power-armoured tug forces the simple lock and I step inside the cage. Grabbing Kraski by his shaggy hair I lift his head up. ‘Proctor,’ I call at him again. His eyes have rolled over white but seem to quiver a little as though he is fitting. Suddenly I find out why.

In the open mouth I see something horrible looking back out at me. Several spindly legs erupt from between the enforcer’s tobacco-stained teeth. An arachnoid being slips its tiny abdomen out of the opening and runs along my arm and across my armoured chest. All legs, the beast had crammed itself inside Kraski’s skull and devoured the contents.

Recoiling with revulsion, my pack slams into the bars of the cell. I knock the monstrosity onto the floor where it clearly considers scrabbling back at me. Dipping my hand into my holster I soon dissuade it with several floor-pulverising blasts from my bolt pistol. The horror scuttles across the floor and up the stairs before I’m even out of the cell. Holding the Mark II in both hands I smack my pauldrons into walls, aiming around corners – expecting the thing to jump at my face. The ground floor of the precinct house confronts me with a fresh nightmare of hiding places, but a swift staccato of bolt-rounds outside persuades me that the beast has fled the building.

Shouldering my way through the iron doors I see Brother Novah waving me to follow with the battle standard as he jumps from one piece of smouldering rubble to the next. I catch up with him at the boundary of destruction, where even a chapel-cryptia had weathered the bomb blast.

‘In here,’ Novah hisses, angling his bolter at a hole in the wall. Advancing through the brick-blasted opening, bolt pistol held before me, I creep into the darkness of the chapel-cryptia. Lowering the battle standard to get it inside, Novah follows. The interior – usually lit by candles – is a nest of shadows. A stained-glass portal above admits only gloom, and the centre of the chamber is dominated by a sunken stone stairwell down into a crypt. About the chapel are plinths bearing coffins of weathered stone, the brittle lids of which bear raised representations of minor Imperial saints. One is ajar.

Jabbing my Mark II over at the coffin, Novah and I move quietly through the chamber. We both freeze as our sensitive hearing picks up on a scuffling within the coffin. With Novah’s bolter aimed at the stone box, I count us down with ceramite fingers from three to one. Tearing off the lid with one hand I thrust my pistol into the darkness with the other.

There is a scream, which neither of us expect, and my finger twitches against the Mark II’s trigger. There is a young girl inside – alive and terrified; a dirty-faced cemetery worlder, hiding in the coffin. I hold my gauntlet up, as much an indication to her that we are no threat as an order to Brother Novah not to shoot. The foundling lets rip again with another shrill scream.

Following her eyes I see that she is looking at the battle standard and the rift-spider running down its shaft. Novah’s response is immediate. He smacks the banner against the floor, propelling the thing down into the darkness of the crypt.

‘Down!’ I yell at the shrieking child, prompting her to duck back into the stone coffin. Aiming my pistol down the steps I thumb the weapon to automatic and illuminate the thick darkness with a stabbing stream of firepower. The monster vaults straight back at me from the murk of the crypt, forcing me to drop the weapon. With my gauntlets out in front of me I hold the warp-strong thing at bay as it scrabbles for my face. ‘Novah!’

‘Do it!’ the standard bearer shouts.

Grasping one of the creature’s legs I swing it around, smacking its thrashing body against the chapel wall before hooking its obscene form back around and smashing through the stone torso of a nearby statue. Knocked senseless but still very intent on crawling into my skull, the thing spasms in my grip. I toss it into the air above the crypt where Brother Novah shreds the abomination with a precision burst of bolter-fire. With a reality-searing pop the creature vanishes and a light shimmer twirls for the roof. After a moment or two of silence, Novah says, ‘Are you all right, sir?’

I nod in response and walk over to the stupefied child. She looks up at me with blank, fearful eyes. Plucking her delicately from her hiding place in the coffin, I hand her to Novah who holds her in the crook of his elbow, beneath the Fifth Company’s battle standard. Pushing open the ferruswood chapel-cryptia door with the muzzle of his bolter, I hear him call in the end of our sweep of the demolished district.

I recover my pistol and re-holster the weapon. I find myself staring at the open stone coffin, its frail lid now shattered pieces on the floor. I think of the girl hiding within – the surreal nature of the moment we discovered her. Peering inside I can see something in the bare bottom of the coffin and I pick it out. It’s a crystalline wafer, a card from the Emperor’s Tarot. I look about, searching the shadows for the revenant, but he is nowhere to be seen.

I turn the card over in my fingertips. The wafer bears the image of a stellar eclipse – a moon covering all but the coronal ring of a distant sun – as viewed from an aligned planetoid. Under the representation is a single word: Umbra.

I feel the ghostly flutter of inspiration pass through the pit of my stomach – a sensation usually reserved for moments of inventive daring in combat, seconds before I wrong-foot my opponent with an unexpected slice of the blade or wholeheartedly commit to some bold and unpredictable manoeuvre. A sensation that has saved my life many times and taken the lives of my enemies many more. I am held there in the moment, stunned witness to the birth of an idea so audacious that it brings an involuntary smile to my mauled lips.

I am there, smiling grimly at the wafer, long enough for Brother Novah to return. He has vox-messages.

‘Corpus-captain,’ he says, still holding the mortal child. ‘Squad Whip Joachim for you, sir. He requests that you and Epistolary Melmoch meet him in the Sepulchre Square. He says it’s important.’

‘Fine,’ I reply. Then add, ‘Vox back Brother Simeon. Inform him that I am on my way up to the Memorial Mausoleum. Tell him I want to see the pontifex. Tell him…’ I hesitate. ‘Tell him it’s important.’

Chapter Fifteen Cessation

His name had been Scarioch. He had been a brother Excoriator, a member of Squad Censura and a squad second whip. Hours before, it had been enough for him to serve his squad whip, to honour his company and fight for his Emperor. Katafalque’s words had been his guide and Dorn’s deeds his example. He had been an Adeptus Astartes – an Angel of the Imperium.

All this was nothing to him now.

He-Who-Had-Been-Scarioch now only thought in shades of red. He felt only a feral injustice – a hatred for everything he had been, for order and discipline, for honour and instruction, for spiteful subservience. For the first time the Space Marine felt the full potential of his superhuman form. He enjoyed the torrent of unbridled strength coursing through his bulging veins, brawn pumped to slabs of stone, the senses of a death world predator and the thunder of hearts in his chest.

The Space Marine felt only the beginning of the end. He had become something else, something new and powerful, something that lived only for the end of others. The crack of skulls. The whisper of razored edges through soft flesh. The thud of blades buried in bodies. The spurt of sliced jugulars. The snapping of necks and spines. The sighs and gasps of the dying. The splash of footsteps in pools of spilt blood. All this He-Who-Had-Been-Scarioch could feel just beyond his aching fingertips. He desired nothing more than to make these murderous fantasies fact and his inability to enact the blood-lush nightmare only fuelled his building rage further.

They had done this to him, his so-called brothers. The killing, the slaughter – it had to continue. The craven Angels of the corpse-Emperor failed to see this. Dastards all, they had mobbed him like cowards, holding him down and prising the steaming sword from his hand. Not before the Scarioch-Thing had broken a few more jaws and noses with his brow and flailing knuckles. When he would not soothe to the lullaby of their weakling words and fraternal entreaties, they cut the cable-fibres of his armour and stripped him of his pack power-plant. They stretched his arms behind him and bound his wrists behind a cloister-pillar, using the bent length of a nearby railing bar.

The berserker thrashed against the deadweight of his plate. The pillar groaned. The metal of his bindings squealed and contorted. The raging Angel strained and struggled against his captivity. His teeth clenched and his gums oozed blood. The whites of his eyes were thread-shattered and deep red while his Adeptus Astartes flesh ruptured with the mosaic distension of bruising and exertion.

About him, forgotten brothers paced and stared, infuriatingly out of reach. Some clutched boltguns and pistols – cowards shrinking behind their killing machines. The Scarioch-Thing thought he could smell their fear. Their weakness appalled him and fed the fires of his hatred. They looked down on him with an apoplexy-stirring mixture of superiority and sadness. Their pity gunned the engines of wrath booming inside his chest. More intolerable weakness. Blood stormed through his veins – the sacramental essence of the War-Given-Form. He no longer had words. His mouth opened and serpentine hatred leaked from his spoiling soul.

The Emperor’s meek-seed had plenty to say, but their words seemed distant, almost unintelligible. He-Who-Had-Been-Scarioch detested them all.

Joachim – but a battle-virgin compared to him – who had been elevated to whip. Melmoch the mutant with his witch-ways. Brother Boaz, who had bested him once in the practise cages and had never allowed him to forget it. The disgraced chief whip, Uriah Skase, who had failed so completely when demanding Trial by the Blade. And Zachariah Kersh, Scourge of the Fifth Company, the warrior who failed his Chapter Master, surrendered his standard and dropped his blade. Him, the Scarioch-Thing hated the most.

The Excoriators looked at Scarioch.

‘He is taken,’ Melmoch said. ‘The gall-fever has him.’

‘You seem awfully eager to write him off, witchbreed,’ Joachim shot back. ‘Perhaps you suffer the fever, too.’

‘His soul is but a plaything for the Ruinous Powers now,’ Melmoch replied.

‘Like yours?’

Melmoch let the goading insult wash over him. ‘Is that what you would want for your brother?’

‘Skase?’ Joachim urged.

‘Can’t we just keep him secure?’ Brother Boaz offered.

‘Like a caged animal?’ Melmoch asked.

‘Until the fever passes…’

‘This will not pass,’ the Epistolary told him. ‘He is the Blood God’s now. The first of our kind to fall to his hunger.’

‘He’s not the first,’ the Scourge said with regret. ‘Ishmael is lost to us, also.’

‘We don’t know that,’ Skase growled back.

‘You know what must be done,’ Kersh said.

‘Skase…’ Joachim pleaded.

He-Who-Had-Been-Scarioch seared into the chief whip with his bloody, anathemic eyes. The words exchanged around him boiled his blood with their meaninglessness.

Uriah Skase brought up his bolt pistol. The damned Excoriator looked up the length of its chunky barrel at his chief whip.

‘I’m sorry, brother.’

The Scarioch-Thing snarled.

Skase fired.

Kersh entered the square. There were people everywhere. All of the small plazas, dirge-cloisters and devotional quads were swamped with cemetery worlders. The throngs parted for him, Adeptus Astartes as he was, even though the Certusians had precious little space and what little they had they had devoted to blankets, shroud tents and tiny shrines. Like pilgrims, the Certusians had gathered in the shadow of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum, thousands of them. Despite their need and number, the distribution of water and food was orderly and the atmosphere dour and reverent. Many of the cemetery worlders were at prayer and those who weren’t bowed their heads respectfully as the corpus-captain moved through the parting crowds.

With Excoriators and the remaining Charnel Guard holding the city perimeter, and Squad Whip Keturah’s Scouts haunting the towers and belfries of Obsequa City, creating a city-maze of kill zones, common Certusians had been forced to make do with the harsh stone of the squares and the cobbles of the tight esplanades for beds. Kersh walked through them all: women and children, the old, the sick, Oliphant’s remaining priests and the droves of newly arrived menfolk – those who could not cope with the horror of the front line and had fled their stations on the perimeter during the initial assaults. The Excoriator saw what exposure to the madness of the warp did to ordinary mortals. Some men rocked like infants, others couldn’t stop weeping while others had gone mute. Some were babblers, incessantly speaking of the horrors they had seen, while others had simply crawled under a blanket and had not come out.

‘The pontifex?’ Kersh put to a preacher carrying a water-satchel and distributing drinking water.

The priest directed him to the next plaza where the scene was altogether different. Kersh nodded to a Sister of Battle in full armour and hefting the bulk of a heavy flamer. He couldn’t help wondering what havoc the scorched nozzles of the weapon might wreak on the city perimeter. Beyond, Kersh began to get an idea. The plaza was stained with soot. Smoke drifted from blast marks, and macabre cages of incinerated bodies decorated the blackened stone where the roasted bones of tightly-packed mobs had melted and warped into giant works of demented art. Amongst these scenes of charred horror, parents attempted to comfort their children, and cemetery worlders tried to concentrate on their devotions.

Framed in the imposing architecture of the Memorial Mausoleum, Kersh found Pontifex Oliphant hobbling between the still smouldering remains, administering last rites to the dead. Several soot-smeared labourers with picks and saws had the unenviable duty of separating the merged forms while stone-faced vestals carried coffins across the plaza and tried their best to fit the twisted skeletons inside. Kersh noted that the Sisters of the August Vigil had stationed themselves about the crowds as well as on the nearby porch-barbican. A meltagun-wielding shadow in cobalt power armour watched the proceedings impassively from nearby.

‘Corpus-captain,’ Oliphant greeted him, the ghost of a smile on his slanted lips.

‘How are you coping, pontifex?’ Kersh asked.

Dragging his slack leg and shoulder, the ecclesiarch turned. ‘Don’t worry about me, corpus-captain. I have my life, which is more than I can say for these unfortunate souls here.’

Kersh bit at his bottom lip. ‘Pontifex,’ the Excoriator began uncomfortably. ‘I want to apologise for your losses here–’

‘Corpus-captain, please…’

‘No,’ Kersh pressed. ‘The strategy was mine and it failed. Certusians abandoned their posts and fled back through the city where my Scouts had no orders to fire upon them.’

‘You could have had no idea…’

‘I could have and I should have. It takes a particular breed of man to face the arch-enemy, to hold his nerve and keep his mind. There are sights men in their multitude were not meant to see. Evils that should remain unknown. Horrors to which humanity should not be subjected. Beings in whose presence mortals succumb to madness.’

‘What of those that are more than mortal? Are you immune to such experiences?’

‘No, pontifex, we are not,’ Kersh told him honestly. ‘But it is the purpose for which we have been bred and we do not shirk from it.’

Oliphant watched two vestals carry away the black, encrusted remains of a heat-warped skeleton. Kersh saw him lift one young woman’s face with one of his grim smiles.

‘I was conducting the prayer vigil. The people, patient and in great number, gathered in the open spaces around the Mausoleum. We gave thanks to the great Umberto II – whose spirit watches over us on this darkest of nights – and the God-Emperor, whose servants are never far away.’ Oliphant gave the Excoriator a meaningful stare, confirming to the corpus-captain that he was referring to the Adeptus Astartes. ‘We were engaged in our prayer cordon when our number were surprised by shouting from the streets beyond. Forgive me, corpus-captain, but at first we thought the enemy might have bypassed your insufficient number. When wives saw their husbands, and children their fathers, the crowd rejoiced. Until the killing started. I will not describe the bitter spectacle – not in the presence of the dead for whom we would wish nothing but an eternal peace. Many died, and in the mayhem it was impossible to tell murderer from victim. In the end, Palatine Sapphira ordered her Sisters to take blunt but decisive action to put an end to the atrocity. They cleansed the afflicted crowds with holy flame and…’ the pontifex struggled, seeming not to have further words for the description, ‘…that was an end to it.’

‘Pontifex,’ Kersh said, seeing the pain on the man’s face: his physical infirmity, the grief he felt for his people, and the spiritual agony he suffered at having such carnage taint the sacred earth of his cemetery world. The Excoriator felt it only fair to prepare the ecclesiarch for the truth that more was coming. ‘Let me speak plainly, as a warrior. What you have seen is but the beginning. The comet’s malign influence has turned your people against themselves and further bolstered the enemy’s number. My Epistolary suspects that the horrors we have witnessed thus far are merely immaterial overspill, the detritus of the warp, bleeding through into our existence. The Cholercaust is yet even to arrive. When it does, it will make what we have seen so far seem like nothing. An invasion made up of countless cultists, the Blood God’s daemonkin and, worst of all, our Traitor brothers – the World Eaters. They are Angels insatiable in their thirst for slaughter, unparalleled in their desire for wanton carnage. They were and unfortunately still are amongst the best the immortals have to offer on the battlefield. They head a Blood Crusade that has never known defeat – that has sundered hundreds of Imperial worlds – and they will kill everything on the surface of this planet.’

The ecclesiarch’s half-smile began to fall.

‘You are saying that defeat is certain. That you can’t protect us…’

‘I’m not sure anyone can,’ Kersh told him honestly.

‘But, I heard you tell your Angels–’

‘They are warriors,’ Kersh said, shaking his head. ‘They need to hear that. We are sustained by our faith.’

‘Faith in yourselves…’

‘Yes,’ Kersh nodded. ‘But to you I offer solemn truths. We are few in the face of legion. My men and I will fight for you. We will fight with the last of our strength, with but a single breath in our lungs and a single drop of blood left in our bodies. But when we fall – and we will, for the equations of battle are cold and certain – your people will be put to the blade.’

Oliphant’s head began to bob gently with dark understanding. Then he looked at the Excoriator with warm eyes and his simple smile.

‘You have your faith,’ he told Kersh, ‘and I have mine. You remember, when we first met, I said that I knew you would come?’

‘I do.’

‘He came to me, corpus-captain.’

‘He?’

‘The God-Emperor…’

‘Pontifex, with respect, you would not be the first cleric to claim to have experienced a divine visitation,’ Kersh said softly.

‘I know not whether I were dreaming or awake,’ Oliphant continued, staring off into the distance. ‘The God-Emperor came to me. Glorious in His corpse-lord’s plate – black as the depths of space – yet impossible to look upon, like a sun or the fierce glare of some bright star.’

Kersh couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

‘You have seen this?’

‘Many times,’ Oliphant confirmed, his gaze still fixed some way distant. ‘Before you arrived. And since. It is how I knew His Angels were coming. That help was on its way. That we were destined for the Adeptus Astartes’ protection.’

‘You see him still?’

‘From time to time,’ Oliphant smiled. ‘He walks among us. He is in the corner of the eye, in the shadows, waiting to reveal His true purpose. It is His mysterious way.’

‘I don’t know what that is,’ Kersh told him honestly. ‘But I don’t think it is your God-Emperor.’

‘We shall see, sir,’ the pontifex said. ‘He will reveal Himself to you in due course.’ Kersh grunted. ‘The God-Emperor fights on our side, Angel. Have faith in that.’

Kersh thought of the Emperor – now all but a corpse on his sarcophagus-throne.

‘Pontifex,’ the Scourge said. ‘The Adeptus Astartes live for victory and the Great Dorn has shown us that there are many kinds. Stood amongst the corpses in the Imperial Palace, with the Emperor – all but dead – returned to the safety of its thick walls, the primarch would have felt little desire to celebrate victory. Walking from the deathtrap of the Eternal Fortress – a survivor of Iron Warriors ingenuity and the Iron Cage – Dorn would have felt no jubilation. These were not victories in a traditional sense – those to which mortals aspire when they see demigods crafted in stone and bronze, and hear of the exploits of heroes. Demetrius Katafalque, in the Architecture of Agony teaches us that these were victories, that frustration of the arch-enemy’s desires and the impediment of evil is a kind of victory. That in a galaxy perpetually at war – in an existence of continuous slaughter – survival is victory.’

‘What are you saying?’ Oliphant mumbled, entranced by the Excoriator’s words.

‘Do you trust me, pontifex?’

‘I do, Angel.’

‘And do your people trust you? Will they do as you ask – no matter how strange and daunting the road you ask them to take?’

‘They are my flock. I am their shepherd. The God-Emperor shows me the path that I might lead and they follow.’

Kersh looked around at the crowds of cemetery worlders. He imagined the Certusians in their thousands and thousands, huddled about the Memorial Mausoleum. He took a deep breath and nodded slowly to himself.

‘Gather your flock, pontifex,’ the Scourge told him finally, ‘and as many shovels as you can lay your hands on. Your people take the crow road tonight…’

Sister Sapphira rose from the baptismal waters of the communal font. Rivulets of holy water cascaded down and around the curves of her purified flesh. Droplets splashed against the surface of the pool and then spattered the cool floor of the chancery as the palatine stepped out into the towels and attentions of her Sisters.

She stood there in silence as members of her mission proceeded to dry her and dash her with consecrated ash from an itinerant stoup. All the while, incense burned from globes suspended from the ceiling and prayers were whispered by the attending women. As Sapphira’s limbs, torso and bust were bound with sackcloth ribbon, Sister Klaudia – wearing her cornette and ceremonial robes – read from Saint Severa’s Articles of Faith and Flame and offered blessings to her palatine and superior.

Sapphira felt the sting of the baptismal bath, replaced by the chill of the chancery air, in turn replaced by the raw irritation of the sackcloth. The chamber-candles flickered, allowing the shadows to momentarily encroach. About the chancery pillars and devotional stonework of the entrance-archway, the palatine thought she saw movement. The Sister’s spine became host to an irrepressible shiver and her bare flesh pimpled. Her nightmare had returned. A giant in midnight plate. An emissary of death. A vision of netherworld insanity.

It had haunted her. She could feel its presence, like a predator stalking its prey. A thing of the beyond, come to test her faith. She had sensed it while at devotion, during lonely sentinel duty and down in the consecrated vault, where she attended upon the sacred bones of Umberto II and her obligations of protection and preservation. She had even awoken to the nightmare watching her sleep in her private cell. From the darkness Sapphira saw the glow of unnatural life, the radiance of an eye watching her through the rent of a battle-smashed helm. It was the horrid attention of that eye and visions of the ghostly warrior that drove Sapphira to hope that her own eyes deceived her. She prayed to Saint Severa and Umberto II for guidance, and had almost begged confession of Pontifex Oliphant. She could not bring herself to confide in her Sisterhood – especially at a time of such uncertainty. With the discovery of the Ruinous monument and the arrival of the Adeptus Astartes, there never seemed to be an appropriate time to admit her affliction, and Sister Sapphira had taken refuge in the regularity of baptismal baths, consecrational dustings and blessings.

The light of the all-seeing eye dimmed as two Sisters in the slender, cobalt plate of their calling entered the chancery. It had been the breeze accompanying the Sisters’ entry to the mission-house that had initially guttered the candles. The first cradled a heavy flamer while the second held a meltagun to her breast. Presenting themselves before their palatine, the pair of dominiate Sisters placed their weapons on the floor and rose, taking off their helmets. Sister Klaudia concluded her blessings and stepped aside to acknowledge Sister Lemora and Sister Casiope.

‘Sisters,’ Klaudia acknowledged. ‘With what justification do you disturb the palatine?’

‘The Adeptus Astartes have visited the pontifex,’ Casiope reported, nodding first to Klaudia before addressing her superior.

‘And?’ Sapphira prompted.

‘The cemetery worlders are being moved from the city centre and out onto the necroplex,’ Sister Lemora confirmed.

‘The necroplex?’ the palatine marvelled. ‘Out beyond the perimeter?’

‘Yes, my lady.’

‘Insanity.’

‘Yes, my lady.’

‘Palatine,’ Sister Klaudia said. ‘I fear the Excoriators are not to be trusted.’

‘They are the Emperor’s Angels, Sister,’ Sapphira reminded her. ‘You think them corrupted?’

‘I think they’re Dorn’s savages,’ Klaudia told her honestly. ‘They fight like dogs amongst themselves and this Scourge that leads them is detested and distrusted even amongst his own kind.’

‘What do you think?’ Sapphira put to the other two Sisters.

‘They are gene-breeds, engineered for battle,’ Lemora said. ‘I think they’ve probably settled on using the Certusians as cannon fodder.’

‘You?’

‘The cemetery worlders are not my concern,’ Casiope told her. ‘We are the Sisters of the August Vigil. Our first duty must be to Umberto II’s sacred remains. The Cholercaust is here. Planetfall is imminent. It’s time to withdraw to the vault.’

Sapphira remained silent for a moment, her eyes searching the darkness. She turned to Sister Klaudia.

‘Begin preparations to garrison the vault,’ the palatine told her. Klaudia nodded in satisfaction. ‘Back to your posts,’ she said to Lemora and Casiope. ‘I will see the Scourge and determine the Adeptus Astartes’ intentions. My armour!’ she called, and the Sisters surrounding her peeled away to recover their palatine’s plate.

Chapter Sixteen The Apotheon

‘Commander!’

Lieutenant Heiss knocked again briskly on the cabin door. She looked at the matt reflection of herself in the scuffed metal. Even in such a surface she could see her auburn curls and freckled face. ‘Commander,’ she called again. ‘We’ve had a vox from the surface. New orders from the Adeptus Astartes.’

Heiss had been on the bridge of the Adeptus Ministorum defence monitor Apotheon when the message had been received. She had never spoken to an Emperor’s Angel before and would have been more anxious but for the vision of approaching destruction that dominated the lancet viewscreen.

Below the thick-set monitor, the cemetery world of Certus-Minor turned slowly. With cloud-cover the colour of soured milk and a surface mostly made up of graven stone, the small planet looked vulnerable and alone in the depths of the cosmos. Apotheon held station above a glassy lake near the north pole, watching over the Ecclesiarchy world like a pugnacious watchdog. The monitor had been the only vessel to remain, with the necrofreighters and transports long gone and even the system ships fled. But dread and the crushing weight of responsibility only really settled on the lieutenant when the Adeptus Astartes strike cruiser Angelica Mortis departed on a course for the Adeptus Mechanicus forge-world of Aetna Phall.

The Apotheon had remained on station, a silent observer as the Keeler Comet had approached. Heiss had then witnessed the second strangest thing she had ever seen in her relatively sheltered life. Above Certus-Minor the comet changed course. It was as though the blood-red ball of ice, rock and metal had simply changed its mind and turned, heading away from the planet on a different trajectory. When Commander Vanderberg asked her to calculate a new destination, the cogitator had offered the Vulcanis system as the most likely heading, with Ultrageddon and Voss Prime possibilities. One thing the cogitator was certain about, however, was that the Keeler Comet’s present course would take it into Segmentum Solar and on towards Holy Terra.

The strangest thing Heiss had ever seen had been the tail following the comet, a sanguine stream of dust and gas, the middle of which was a glimmering fracture. It appeared to Heiss like the comet nucleus was a zipper, opening a breach in the unstable fabric of reality behind it. She had watched as swarms of otherworldly beings bled through the haemorrhage, before being pulled towards the nearby cemetery world by the planet’s gravitational field. She had taken some solace in the way the distant beasts seem to streak towards the planet, burning up like meteorites on a fiery entry, but vox-casts from Obsequa City reported heavy fighting, confirming that much of the daemonkin swarm had found its way to the surface to test the defenders.

‘Commander Vanderberg!’ Heiss called. When again she heard nothing behind the cabin door, she pulled the plunger beside it. The bulkhead gave a hydraulic wheeze and the heavy door yawned open. ‘Sir, forgive my trespassing, but we have orders from the Adeptus Astartes… Sir?’

Heiss took a brief look around the cabin. The commander’s bunk was empty, as was his private chartroom. The first the lieutenant knew of Vanderberg was the sound of her boot in the commander’s blood. Vanderberg was sat at his ferruswood writing desk. The Apotheon’s log sat on the desk surface next to a data-slate bearing a message to the commander’s sister on Scintilla. He had got no further than, ‘My Dearest Greta…’

‘Commander…’ Heiss mouthed as she edged around. Vanderberg’s eyes had rolled over but his face was just as baggy and kindly as ever. His arms had fallen down by the side of the ferruswood chair, and both wrists still dribbled with the captain’s life. Stepping forwards into the pool of blood, Heiss kicked the surgical kris Vanderberg had used across the floor. The lieutenant reasoned the commander had probably taken it from the ship’s small infirmary. Placing her fingers against his neck, she failed to find a pulse.

Heiss stood there for a moment, uncertain. Then, slowly she turned and walked out of the cabin, leaving bloody footprints behind her. As her strides took her towards the bridge they became quicker and more determined. There was very little to do about the situation. The commander was dead. She was the only other commissioned officer on board the ship and the Adeptus Astartes had issued orders.

Walking onto the bridge, she found Midshipman Randt where she had left him, looking stricken and uncomfortable in command of the bridge under such dire circumstances. Padre Gnarls stood by the captain’s throne in his preacher’s robes, the gangly priest looking like a gargoyle thanks to his bald head and hooked nose. All Adeptus Ministorum vessels carried a padre as a requirement, and although Gnarls could be uppity and meddlesome, Heiss was glad to see him on the bridge where he was a calming influence. Beyond were a number of the monitor’s bridge staff and ghoulish servitors.

‘Thank the God-Emperor,’ Randt blurted as Heiss entered. ‘The Adeptus Astartes still await the commander’s confirmation.’

‘Confirm the order,’ Heiss called across the bridge with confidence, before sitting down in the commander’s throne.

Gnarls frowned and stood behind the throne before leaning in close.

‘Where’s the commander?’ he asked with his hooked nose over her shoulder. Heiss looked over at Randt, who was busy confirming the Excoriators’ orders with the planet surface.

‘Vanderberg’s dead,’ Heiss told him simply, without looking at the priest. ‘By his own hand.’

Gnarls started to say something, but stopped himself and nodded slowly. He moved around to the other side of the throne, pulling his vestments about him.

‘Obsequa City confirms,’ Randt announced. ‘We are no longer to observe. The Apotheon is ordered to disrupt the enemy approach and landing. We are to favour cruisers and gunships over freighters and cultships.’

‘Acknowledge the order,’ Heiss said to him. ‘And wish them luck. Send our regards to the pontifex. Inform him that the Adeptus Ministorum defence monitor Apotheon will do the God-Emperor’s work in the heavens and that we shall remain on this vox-frequency for as long as we can. Apotheon out.’

Heiss looked up at Gnarls, who gave her another, unhappy nod.

‘It’s down to you now,’ he told her simply, which was probably the nicest thing he’d ever said to her.

‘Helm, set an equatorial intercept course and accelerate to ramming speed.’

‘Aye.’

‘Mister Randt, open channels with the portside and starboard gun-decks, as well as the keel lance section. Have the enginseer informed that the lance is about to fire.’

‘Yes, lieutenant.’

‘Padre Gnarls…’

‘Yes, lieutenant?’

‘Would you be so good as to join the boatswain and help organise the repelling parties. I will keep Apotheon out of the enemy’s grasp, but should they grapple us I would like all airlocks and exterior bulkheads welded shut and barricaded from the inside. If they want in, let’s at least force them to cut their way in.’

‘I would be happy to represent your interests amongst the repelling parties, lieutenant. May the God-Emperor be with you.’

‘And with you, padre.’

With that the preacher left the bridge to seek out a weapon and the boatswain.

As the defence monitor’s reinforced Voss prow dropped, the approaching Cholercaust fleet filled the lancet screen. It was colossal, larger than any Imperial fleet Heiss had seen gathered, and she had seen a few, having served on a Navy cutter above Ultrageddon as a young ensign. It held no tactical configuration, with vessels spread far and wide like an ugly smear across the darkness of space. Smaller vessels didn’t bother to keep station on their larger counterparts and cruisers held no formation at all. The armada’s shape and organisation was merely a result of the fastest vessels, and most fervid, engine-overloading captains, streaking out in front, while the swarm of fat freighters, berserker-laden giga-tankers, renegade Guard transports and Traitor Astartes vessels formed a miasma of frustration, hatred and rage behind. About the fleet swarmed sub-light gunships, brigs, tugs and small system ships, each carrying their own blood-crazed crews and killers. Behind the armada trailed a tail of wrecks and burn-outs: damaged, crippled and engine-cored vessels that still burst at the bulkheads with murderous hordes but were forced to either limp on behind the main fleet or be towed by other craft.

The Cholercaust had arrived and it was ready to disgorge the insane, the bloodthirsty and the daemonic on the tiny cemetery world that was its prey. The defence monitor’s feeble engines pushed the heavily-armoured vessel towards ramming speed; Heiss had the Apotheon come at the tip of the approaching fleet from the pole.

‘W-w-where’s the commander?’ Randt put to Heiss. The midshipman expected to see his captain on the bridge during such a serious engagement.

‘The commander is indisposed,’ the lieutenant called back. ‘Now, ready lance!’

‘Lance charging,’ the midshipman answered.

‘Find me a target, Mister Randt,’ Heiss ordered, and watched as the defence monitor’s runebank spat out a list of trajectories. Heiss couldn’t imagine what the monstrous Chaos captains called their vessels now, but the list of missing, stolen, surrendered, mutinous and captured merchantmen that made up the Cholercaust’s vanguard streamed across the screen. ‘Magnify,’ Heiss called. A lancet screen blinked before closing on the approaching rush of vessels. The flanks of the ships displayed faded names and designations: the Aurigan, Coquette, the Trazior Franchise, Sunpiper.

‘Cultships, Mister Randt,’ Heiss told him. ‘Seized freighters packed with Chaotics and volunteer degenerates, no doubt.’

‘I have a target, commander,’ Randt told her. ‘A positive identification. Frigate, Spite, Goremongers Space Marine Chapter.’

‘That’s more like it. Target that renegade Adeptus Astartes escort.’

‘Enginarium reports lance charged. Awaiting your order.’

‘Mister Randt?’

‘Target lock: thorax and batteries.’

Heiss stared at the Traitor Angel vessel. She tried to imagine the superhuman mayhem and chaos on board. Beings who if before her on the battlefield would be twice her size, brimming with the insatiable desire to kill; who would mindlessly end her in the space of a blink. She clutched the arms of the captain’s throne.

‘Fire.’

The lancet screen flashed retina-scorching white. The Apotheon’s mighty lance, underslung along the length of the defence monitor’s keel, answered the call. A thick beam of pure energy erupted from the Adeptus Ministorum vessel, crossing the vanguard of the colossal fleet like a cannonball across the bow. As Heiss and the bridge crew looked on with wide eyes and hope in their hearts, the beam seared straight through the traitor frigate. Their aim was perfect. The thorax section of the vessel vaporised and, as the sizzling beam of energy flickered and died, both the command decks and swollen engine column of the Adeptus Astartes vessel fell away in different, void-tormented sections.

A cheer exploded across the bridge, and even Heiss found herself on her feet.

‘All right,’ she called. ‘Focus. Mister Randt, have the lance charged for a second target.’

Heiss felt the Apotheon follow the path of the beam, on a collision course for the enemy armada. Her second target was a portly Imperial Guard transport, the traitor vessel decorated with feral world petroglyphs and indigenous art. Her third, a monstrous vessel that appeared a mind-scalding fusion of metal hull and red daemonflesh. The horror-ship took the Apotheon’s fury straight in its bloated abdomen of an engine column. Instead of disintegrating like the Goremongers frigate, or exploding like the traitor transport, the possessed vessel began to ripple, tremble and spume – like a wounded wild animal suffering violent death-throes. When the lance beam punched straight through the mutant-ship, the thing started vomiting globule-clouds of zero-gravity blood. It snatched out with hooks, claws and tentacular appendages, entangling nearby cultships, before tearing them apart in void-drowning fury.

With the Adeptus Ministorum defence monitor plunging down the cemetery world’s ivory curvature and cutting pack leaders in two with its brutal lance, Heiss and her crew were making themselves known to the Cholercaust fleet. Tempted by the prospect of first blood, bastardised raiders and the cannibal crews of piratical marauders surged towards the Apotheon. Heiss pushed the monitor’s feeble engines to their limit. The vessel crossed the blood-thirsty bows of the enemy ships and presented the gaping muzzles of its waiting battery of cannon.

‘Fire as you bear!’ Lieutenant Heiss commanded. At Midshipman Randt’s relaying of the order the starboard battery began a ragged, punishing barrage. Laser blasts thundered down the lengths of Chaos raiders and slaughtermen. Light and fire blazed its way through the oncoming vessels, torching warrior-cramped compartments from their prows to their sterns. ‘Give the order to fire at will,’ Heiss told Randt as the Apotheon completed its first broadside. The bridge crew watched a myriad of vandalised brigs, gunships and cutters punch through the debris field of spearhead derelicts and wreckage. Streaking out from them were a swarm of smaller vessels still – hump shuttles, fortified life-rafts, launches and assault boats, all packed with homicidal thugs, honed blades and hull-cutting equipment.

‘Lieutenant…’

‘Give Padre Gnarls and the boatswain the order, prepare to repel boarders,’ Heiss said tightly.

‘Lieutenant!’ Randt shouted. Heiss saw it. A Khornate cultship. A heavy transport – wall-to-wall with the Blood God’s murderous acolytes – passing across their own Voss prow section. It was all happening so fast. The lance. The continuous, crashing gunfire of the battery. The impending boarding action. The armada without end, Chaos vessels passing behind and about the lone defence monitor. The ships would be on an unswerving course for Certus-Minor – where from low orbit the Cholercaust fleet would launch an apocalyptic landing, its Thunderhawks, drop-ships, pods, lighters, barges, carriers, haulage skiffs and junkers numerous enough to black out the stars. From this nightmare ramshackle of craft a vast army of insane blood-crusaders would spill. Cultists, Chaotics, daemons and Traitor Angels. Uncountable. Unstoppable.

The lieutenant’s lip curled. ‘Are we at ramming speed?’

The young Randt looked at her grimly.

‘Almost, lieutenant.’

‘I want to hit her amidships, do you understand, Mister Randt?’ Heiss said. The midshipman nodded. Heiss stared at the fat transport towards which they were streaking with the queasy certainty of a torpedo. Heiss licked her lips. ‘I want to break her back…’

Chapter Seventeen Unto Dust

The shovel bit into the cemetery world grit. Woodes Sprenger had been a grave fosser his whole life. Under his sweat-soaked shirt and dust-coat he was tough and lean; he handled his spade with speed and a working man’s determination. Tossing earth up out of the grave with hypnotic rhythm, the fosser’s blade finally hit metal. Scraping off the rusty surface of the stasis casket, Woodes kicked footholds into the side of the grave and used the tip of the shovel to prise open the coffin.

The stench of stale death rose to meet the Certusian. He coughed and covered his mouth. Reaching up for his gas-lamp by the graveside, Woodes brought it down to explore the coffin’s contents. This was borderline sacrilege for the grave fosser, whose job – like thousands of others – was to bury the dead sent to reside in the sacred cemetery world earth and dig up caskets whose tenure had expired to make way for further cadaver arrivals. Only the wealthy and advantaged could afford a plot on Certus-Minor. They were buried, the stasis-field generators on their sarcophagi deactivated and removed, and the dead allowed to rot in peace – as cemetery world custom dictated. Common fossers never went into the coffins – only grave robbers ever did. In this way, breaking the seals and prising open the casket went against every fibre of Woodes’s spiritual being, and he would not have been doing so – even given the dire circumstances on Certus-Minor – unless the pontifex himself and the Emperor’s Angels had given the order.

Inside the casket Woodes found the remains of a woman. A desiccated skeleton buried in the copious material of an extravagant grave gown. Woodes expected that she was spire nobility from some distant hive-world. The bones of her fingers were adorned with the precious metal and stone of rings, and the vertebrae of her neck were a tangled nest of priceless jewellery. The empty sockets of her skull leered up at the grave fosser and Woodes coughed again. Leaning in close, Woodes checked the system of wires running down the depth of the grave between the sculpted tombstone and the casket. Pulling the wire cord, Woodes set off the mournful peal of the bell positioned in the decorative detail of the marker.

Against the tombstone Woodes saw his weapon, the autorifle he’d been issued – with the scuff-scratched stock, crescent clips and long barrel shroud. The noisy weapon that had saved his life and those of others during the first battlement assaults. With Donalbain he’d held his ground, despite wanting to run from the terror and madness with his fellow fossers and Certusians.

Climbing out of the grave in a well-practised motion, Woodes picked up a small stone from the surrounding soil and posted it through the mouth of a cherubim crafted in the stone. He heard the tinny clatter of the stone as it fell down through the metal pipe connecting the tombstone to the casket and providing it with an air source.

Checking such safety mechanisms was usually the verger’s duty. Personally, Woodes had only been present at one premature exhumation. It had been in the Asphodel-East field close to where Woodes had lived. He had been summoned from his shack by Father Deodat, a passing preacher who had heard a bell from the lychway. Father Deodat, Woodes, Donalbain and several other fossers from the cenopost searched for the marker and sent for shovels before proceeding to dig up the grave on the preacher’s orders. The bell rang incessantly, and within the casket the cemetery worlders found an Imperial Guard officer – a dragoon in full dress uniform – who had been buried with his plumed helmet and gleaming sabre. The officer had been confused, claustrophobic and out of his mind with fear. In the darkness of the sarcophagus his frantic fingers had found the wire cord, and after an experimental pull had produced the chime of the bell, the Guardsman had proceeded to ring it in the hope that someone would discover him.

Woodes never saw the Imperial Guard officer again. Father Deodat informed the fosser, however, that the officer had told him that he’d been part of an eradication force sent to the jungle world of Yasargil to exterminate the k’nib infestation there. The last thing the officer recalled was being stung by a hanging creeper and reporting to the camp infirmary. Deodat hypothesised that his subsequent paralysis was taken for death, and that the colonel’s body had been stasis-shipped from Yasargil to Pyra and from his home world to Certus-Minor. As the alien toxin wore off, the dragoon found himself confronted with the horror of being buried alive.

Nearby, Woodes heard the spade of his brother-in-law Donalbain crunch through the earth. Shovelfuls of dirt flew up out of a grave and landed in a neat pile next to the crisply cut hole. Donalbain was a fosser like Woodes and lived in the same cenopost hamlet.

‘This is insane…’ Woodes said to himself. He looked about him in the darkness. Nearby, cemetery worlders were dragging carts bearing barrels of promethium through the mounds of bodies that surrounded the city perimeter like a hillock or new battlement. The miserable teams pulled their carts through the corpse-piles of daemon insanity, pumping plungers and spraying the fallen nightmares with precious fuel.

‘It’s what the pontifex ordered,’ Donalbain said. Woodes hadn’t noticed the silence of the fosser’s shovel. Donalbain was taller than his brother-in-law and portlier around the belly; he’d worked up a significant sweat digging the grave so quickly. The Certusian noticed an Excoriators Space Marine stood upon the perimeter battlement, Obsequa City reaching up behind him. The Adeptus Astartes warrior watched them from the continuous mountain of rubble, casting his helmeted gaze up and down the line at other cemetery worlders hard at work clearing the dead and warped flesh of immaterial entities, and digging up graves. Donalbain shuddered. He had no idea how effective the Space Marine’s enhanced vision was in the darkness or, indeed, how good his hearing was. ‘The Angels ordered it also, so get back to work.’

Woodes thought of the thousands of graves being dug around the battlement perimeter. Graves that were situated where the necroplex met the city limits. Graves that had witnessed the worst of the fighting so far and been hidden beneath the daemon creatures storming the city as heavy gun emplacements and the blessed weapons of the Emperor’s Angels had ripped through them. ‘Insanity,’ he said again.

He watched two figures approach, picking their steps carefully through the gravestones, ichor-soaked earth and mangled bodies of the spawn-monstrosities. The first was his wife, Goody, dressed in her bonnet, shawl and fleece boots. Her face was soot-stained, tight and grim, but in that moment, with the grave at his feet and the shovel in his hand, she had never looked better to him. Goody had her arm around their daughter, Nyzette, and her delicate hand over the young girl’s eyes. She did not want the child to see the horror of the warped bodies through which they trudged. The child clutched a home-made rag doll of Saint Astrid to her. Woodes’s chest ached for the both of them. As they got closer, he walked to them, embracing both in his sinewy arms.

‘Papa!’ Nyzette said as she felt his lips against her forehead. He kissed Goody, holding both her and the child close to him – feeling a fearful passion for his wife that he hadn’t felt for a number of years.

‘Woodes…’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he told her. ‘You will be safe and you’ll be together. That’s the important thing.’

‘Papa, stay with us,’ the young girl chided.

‘I can’t, my little blessing.’

‘No, papa…’

‘You must be strong and stay with your mother. You will hide and be safe, but papa must fight – you know, like he did before, when you and mama stayed with Aunt Merelda up near Great Umberto’s tomb.’

‘Papa!’

‘Peace, child. I will be with him,’ Donalbain said, smiling as he came up behind them. Goody moved from her husband’s embrace to her brother-in-law. The large fosser looked down at her. ‘Where’s your sister?’

‘Merelda’s on her way down with the boys,’ Goody replied before returning to the arms of her husband.

‘Have you got everything?’ Woodes asked her as Donalbain picked up Nyzette.

‘Everything the pontifex instructed us to take,’ Goody replied, taking a sling bag from her shoulder. She pulled a roll of blankets from the bag and as she did caught a glimpse of the open grave behind Woodes, the open coffin and the skeletal woman within. ‘Oh, Holy Throne,’ she exclaimed, clasping her mouth with her hand.

‘Don’t look at it,’ Woodes said, taking one of the blankets and covering the desiccated cadaver.

‘Can’t we remove it?’ Goody said, horrified.

‘Not without arousing suspicion,’ Donalbain said, angling the child’s head away. ‘Besides, disturbing the grave is desecration enough. Removing the body before the end of tenure? That’s sacrilege. The pontifex would not hear of it.’

‘What else have you got there?’

Goody opened the bag to show her husband the meagre rations of food she’d managed to collect and the water satchel she’d filled from one of the city’s holy fountains. She also had a small, pack-powered handlamp and a bunch of black lilies. The flowers grew along the Certusian lakeshores and were used for decorative arrangements during burial ceremonies. Goody aimed to use them to mask the musty grave-stench of the coffin. Woodes caught sight of a small knife. A stiletto shearing-blade, hidden amongst the death-blooms. He caught Goody’s eye and nodded bleakly. If events did not unfold according to plan, with silence from above and provisions spent, the blade would become the most essential of her gathered items.

Woodes looked at his wife, her gaunt but beautiful face. He took her again in a tight embrace. Over her shoulder he saw Donalbain nod. Woodes’s eyes drifted skywards to the darkness, knowing that they had little time, that the enemy would not wait. Looking down he saw that there were now several Excoriators stood on the rubble battlement looking down at them. The Emperor’s Angels were still like statues in their scarred plate, impassive and beyond the concerns of mortal men.

‘All right,’ the fosser said finally, feeling Goody’s slender body against his own. ‘Quickly, into the casket.’ Helping his wife down into the grave and taking his child from her uncle, Woodes kissed Nyzette and passed the terrified child down to his wife stood in the coffin. Goody smiled – a gesture, under the circumstances, so telling in its strength and generosity that it brought tears that streaked the fosser’s gravedust-smeared cheeks. The mother and child curled up around one another in the space allowed by the sarcophagus occupant. Using the slingbag as a pillow and a second blanket for warmth, the terrified pair looked up at Woodes and Donalbain. ‘Remember,’ Woodes began, ‘only ring the bell when you hear others. Wait as long as you can. You cannot alert the enemy to your presence.’ His wife nodded.

‘You stay alive,’ Goody told them. ‘Both of you.’

‘I will see you soon,’ Woodes promised. And he meant it.

Moving around to the other side of the grave, Donalbain used his shovel to close the lid. Resting the tip of the blade against the rusty lid he pressed down and re-sealed the casket. Woodes tapped on the top of the coffin with his own shovel and was rewarded with a knock in return.

With Donalbain looking for Merelda and his own young ones, the two cemetery worlders began tossing sacred Certusian earth down onto the casket and into the hole. With each disbelieving shovelful, Woodes shook his head. He could not fully reconcile in his mind the fact that he had just buried his own wife and daughter alive. That all about him, fathers, husbands, brothers and sons were doing the same for their loved ones.

The only thing that kept his arms moving and the shovel blade slicing through the mound of soil was the knowledge that they would all be safer below ground than above it when the Cholercaust arrived. That they would hopefully be spared the wanton butchery of the Chaos degenerates. With their families as safe as they could make them, the disturbed earth patted down and the promethium-soaked, misshapen daemon-forms dragged back over the burial site, Woodes snatched up his autorifle. Making the sign of the aquila, he knelt down in front of the grave marker. It bore the name Erzsebet Dorota Catallus. He would not forget it. An ice-water determination built in the pit of his stomach. A cold fury he held in reserve for the bastard invaders who were bringing death and destruction to his tiny part of the Imperium. Carrying their weapons and shovels, the cemetery worlders began to make their way back up towards the battlement, to take their positions and ready themselves for the carnage ahead.

I have been watching for a while. This is what it is to lead. A moment’s inspiration, the hot quake of an idea or strategy in the privacy of the mind. Abstraction given form through word and order, followed by the rapid shift of men’s hearts. Even Angels, who need to be led no less. Loyalty. Pride. Trust. Action. Before your eyes, command becomes reality. What you saw in the orderly, bloodless theatre of the mind unfolds in the drawing of blades and the priming of firing mechanisms. It rapidly devolves into a nightmarish version of your imaginings, replete with deadly, unseen movements, fears that find their form. That’s what it is to lead, to dip the toe of one’s boot into the calm, crystal waters of possibility, but to march on as you find yourself up to your helmet in the raging torrent of your brothers’ blood.

Standing atop the perimeter battlement, I survey the killing fields. A sea of obscene bodies swallowing up the graven architecture of mausolea, tombstones and statues. Out there, amongst the past chaos of battle, are the cemetery worlders. Those it is clear I am here to protect. The duty I was bred to perform. A little of the Emperor’s burden taken on my shoulders. What had been the silent insanity of a strategy in my mind is now consigned to history. I told Pontifex Oliphant and for his sins the ecclesiarch lent his words to my own. Thousands of cemetery worlders, ordered to bury their Certusian kin alive. The brief spark of mortal existence, burning brightly under the ground, where blood-soaked minds would not think to look for them.

For a moment I think my revenant returned. I have not seen his ghastly form in a little while. Where he haunted the shadows, there is now but empty darkness. His bale eye gazes upon some other unfortunate, for it no longer looks upon me. I should feel reassured. While I had grown accustomed to the being’s attentions and fell presence, it was either the manifestation of an unnatural existence or some symptom of a fractured mind. Neither were particularly attractive prospects and I should feel relieved at the thing’s absence. Still, I find myself looking. In the gloom of the Long Night; in the reflection of glass darkly; in the corner of my eye.

I feel brother Excoriators about me. They, I know are there. Immortals on the rubble palisade. Like me, come to watch what common men will do at the word of an Angel. With the slice and cut of shovels through gritty earth on the air, we watch – silently impressed. It can’t be easy to dig a grave for your loved ones. Less easy still to fill one containing them.

‘Anything?’ I ask.

Melmoch is beside me.

‘No astrotelepathic communication,’ the Epistolary answers. ‘Nothing from the hosts and destinations to whom I appealed. I can only reason that the comet’s malign influence is too much of a barrier for my skill.’

I nod. ‘Thank you for trying,’ I say as we watch the cemetery worlders go about their solemn task. ‘You think the dust will mask them?’

The Epistolary considers the question.

‘This place is saturated with death,’ the Librarian concludes. ‘The earth is sacred and overpowering in its purpose. We see what we expect to see. The enemy will see a cemetery. He will taste loss. He will smell the stench of death. The Blood God’s servants are warriors all. Their unthinking art is murder. Their weapon of choice is carnage – not the shovel. I think our charges safe.’

I nod my acknowledgement and appreciation of the Epistolary’s support.

‘What if no one survives?’ Chief Whip Skase asks grimly, his mind soaked with bloody thoughts.

‘Then we lose,’ I answer – a statement of the obvious. ‘We get to rot above the ground while those we sought to protect – the Emperor’s subjects – are left to do so below us. That is why we must fight. Fight and survive. The Blood God’s disciples have come here to battle, and we will give them one. In doing so we shall take their eyes off the prize – their intended slaughter of innocents and through this the sundering of this world. We fight to win, but if we lose, I want to go to my death knowing that our enemy will leave sated and swiftly move on. Like a poor marksman, the Blood God will have missed his target and his followers would have failed him. Certus-Minor will not be some deadrock, bathed in slaughter and left behind by the Cholercaust like a cautionary tale. The cemetery worlders will live and the Imperium shall know it. The continued beating of mortal hearts shall give other worlds hope. They shall know that the Cholercaust can be beaten. It will put fire in their bellies and belief in their hearts. Perhaps we will not stop the Blood Crusade here. Perhaps we will not survive. But if we fail, we do so in the hope that others – both mortal and immortal – will succeed. Let that be our legacy.’

Brother Micah comes up behind us with the Fifth Company’s Chaplain. Shadrath gives me the dread gaze of his half-skull helm.

‘Brother Novah has word from the commander of the Apotheon. The defence monitor has engaged the enemy. She reports a vast Chaos fleet – vessels without number. The Blood God’s warriors and minions. Their landing is under way. The Cholercaust is here.’

‘The pontifex?’ I ask.

Micah and Chaplain Shadrath part. Behind them is a Sister of Battle in cobalt plate, a boltgun in her slender gauntlets and a pair of bolt pistols at her hip. Palatine Sapphira of the Order of the August Vigil.

‘Pontifex Oliphant is safe,’ Sapphira tells me. ‘He is down in Umberto II’s vault with as many of his remaining priests and attendants as we could accommodate.’

‘A kindness,’ I return.

‘The pontifex told me of your plan,’ the Sister reveals. ‘A kindness on your own part, corpus-captain – if a macabre one. My Sisters thought your interest in the Certusians lay only in feeding them as fodder to the enemy.’

‘I’m happy to disappoint them.’

‘The vault door is thick and crafted from adamantium. It should resist all but the most determined assault. I have garrisoned the vault with a squad of my Sisters, under a trustworthy subordinate. I offer myself and the rest of my mission in defence of the city, where the holy work of the God-Emperor might be done.’

I hold out my gauntlet and take her own.

‘You are most welcome, Sister,’ I tell her. ‘We are honoured to share the burden with you.’

Shadrath steps forwards, looking up into the sky.

‘Chaplain?’

Carefully, he takes off his half-skull helmet, revealing his face. It is the first time I have gazed upon his features. The shock of white hair, the unsmiling mouth and the implacable lines of almost elemental determination are the primarch’s own. Like Demetrius Katafalque before him, Shadrath had been blessed with the features of the Emperor’s truest Angel. I follow his gaze to see the flash of gunfire in the sky overhead, the searing burn of the Apotheon’s mighty lance.

‘Let’s to our posts,’ Chaplain Shadrath rumbles, his eyes still on the deep expanse of the heavens above. ‘Rogal Dorn waits for us at the Eternity Gate.’

We nod and walk slowly away, with the Chaplain’s words still ringing in our ears. We are silent, for we have no words to better them.