Legion of the Damned

Chapter Eighteen Cholercaust

Roaring.

The distant darkness gave up the rage-fuelled cacophony of murderous intention. The Blood God’s disciples honoured him with their bombast. The stomach-curdling din of barbarism and animal fury. The Cholercaust had arrived and it wanted the cemetery world to know. A deafening barrage of ferocity, made up of personal, if mindless, expressions of individual hatred. Unsettling, in sheer volume alone.

In a demonstration of steadfastness – the kind Kersh reasoned the Charnel Guard and remaining Certusians would need to see – the Scourge stood atop the ichor-splattered battlement. Once again the Imperial forces would try to hold the rubble-mound perimeter, falling back concentrically as the need arose. With the cemetery worlders – vulnerable men, women and children – buried beneath the bordering necroplex, the narrow alleys, stairs and cloisters of the city could play their part if needed. And, if it came to it, the imposing architecture of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum had been established as a final fall-back position. Kersh couldn’t hope to win against the Blood God’s unstoppable host, but the Excoriator planned on putting off the eventuality for as long as possible. The Fifth Company would sell their lives dearly and fight for as long as they could.

There was still a dim possibility that Epistolary Melmoch’s appeal had reached out across the stars to a brother-Chapter. The Scourge rested his gauntlet on the angular edges of his gladius pommel. He had not entirely given up on the slim possibility that their kin could arrive to turn the tide. He hadn’t burdened his Fifth Company brothers with such damning hope, though suspected it already beat in the hearts of each and every one. Regardless of such mortal folly, the howling tsunami of hate surging across the burial grounds at them was theirs alone.

The dread expectation was palpable. With his enhanced hearing the Scourge could hear the creak of Certusian fingers against triggers, the rapid beating of hearts in serf-manned gun emplacements, and the deep and determined breathing of Excoriators in their battle-helms. Then he saw it. The first offerings of the darkness. Chaos martyrs. The Cholercaust meat shield. Bodies moved through the necroplex, racing towards Obsequa City, the battlement perimeter and certain death.

The Scourge swore. He recognised them immediately. Blood-crazed cemetery worlders. Victims of the gall-fever that had swept the planet in the wake of the Keeler Comet. Husbands, mothers, children. Certusians all. Drawn to Obsequa City like a plague of moths irresistibly summoned to a flame. Kersh felt their urge to kill across the graves. He felt the Charnel Guard and surviving members of the hastily created Certusian militia tighten at the sight of their kindred: neighbours, friends, family. He felt the bile rising within him, his hatred for the servants of darkness and their barbarous tactics. Over the vox-channel, the corpus-captain heard similar confirmations from along the line. The Thunderhawk Impunitas, circling high above the city, also reported incoming targets. Peering up into the sky, the corpus-captain watched the stars blink. He got the impression of an ungainly daemon-flock, thunderbolting above them on leathery wings.

Kersh looked back down at the havoc storming its way across the burial grounds towards them. He hated himself for the order he was about to give. He could not afford to waste their hardest-hitting ammunition on such cannon-fodder, yet couldn’t allow the masses to swamp the battlement in expectation of hand-to-hand combat alone.

‘All battle-brothers and Sisters on the perimeter to hold fire,’ he commanded across the channel. ‘Heavy weapons to hold fire. Guardsmen and militia to fire at will.’

Shots were hesitant at first, sporadic bolts of light flung across the expanse followed by brief chatters of auto- and stub-fire. The busy landscape of the necroscape impeded the advance of the blood-mental Certusians in a way that it hadn’t done so with the many-limbed spawn-swarm of the immaterial incursion. Crazies and cemetery world killers found it difficult to charge at the front line when hampered by the expanse of tombstones, statues and funeral architecture that was the necroplex. This made the howling madmen easier targets, even for the ceremonial Charnel Guard and ill-trained militia, and before long the perimeter lit up the night with a streaming lightshow of near-continuous las-fire. Auto-fire ripped through bodies clambering over grave markers and graven obstacles. Stub-round-riddled torsos lay draped over decorative stone sarcophagi, and lunatics joined the corpse-carpet of warp-spewed forms from the earlier assault.

Above him, Kersh could hear the whoosh of sniper fire punctuating the distant hammering of the Impunitas’s heavy bolters. Over the vox, estimations of the aerial assault had jumped. Both the Impunitas and venerable Gauntlet were preoccupied with shredding their way through storm fronts of red daemonflesh, while Whip Keturah and Squad Contritus reported the ragged, broken bodies of winged daemon-predators raining from the heavens. Keturah’s Scouts were doing their best to support the Thunderhawks with sizzling sniper fire that cut through the beastforms as they swooped through the narrow spaces between the city towers, spires and belfries.

A blood-freezing shriek erupted from the Imperial line as a shotgun-armed verger left his post and started tearing up the rubble with wild blasts of scattershot. As nearby Guardsmen and cemetery worlders scrambled for cover, the Scourge dipped his hand into his holster. Within a blink the Mark II bolt pistol was out. Without taking his eyes from the chaos of the necroplex, Kersh gunned down the gall-fevered unfortunate. Before the maniac hit crumbled masonry the Mark II was sat back snug in its sporran. The afflicted were no longer a threat to innocent Certusians, but Kersh had made it clear that such infections and defections could still disrupt the integrity of the line and should be dealt with decisively.

Before the battlement, the corpus-captain witnessed a massacre. Every time a bolt from a lasfusil seared through a rabid, unarmed Certusian, another took their place. And another. And another. The stink of fresh death seemed only to send the following fossers, shack-wives and deranged hearsiers into a further frenzy, causing them to double their already fevered efforts to reach the perimeter and wreak havoc.

Others began to emerge through the death and thinning cemetery world gall-thralls. Kersh saw the glint of starlight in unsheathed blades, the flash of optimistic small-arms fire and the macabre flesh desecration of the Blood God’s soul-pledged. He saw wires, chains and pins, plucked through faces; knife-crafted tattoos of obscene Khornate symbols, inked in darkness; eyes that were bile-yellow with spite, teeth that were blood-clenched, and skin that was withered with the burden of diabolic patronage. The Regna-Rouge. The Anarchan Razorbacks. The Hellion Dawn. The Krugarian Turncoats. The blade-venerate Gornan Venals. The Attilan Traitor 32nd. The Frater Vulgariate. The Necromundan ‘Crazy’ Eights. Clan Gamibal of the feared Vessorine Janissaries. The Deathfest. The Bloodsaken. Thousands besides: butcher-baptised slave-soldiers from a myriad of conquered worlds, traitor Guardsmen, heretic militia, mutants, fallen mercenaries, piratical raiders, bestial abhumans, Chaos cultists. All Kersh had fought before on battlefields bordering the Eye of Terror. All had gone down under the Excoriators’ blades. Never before, however, had Kersh seen so much Ruinous detritus gathered in one place.

‘Open fire!’ the Scourge roared.

The bolters of the Sisters of Battle and his brother-Excoriators joined the barrage of las-bolts and lesser weaponry from the battlement, which in turn competed with the dissonant thunder of heavy stubber and autocannon gun emplacements. The collective force of such a release annihilated the remaining rows of cannon-fodder Certusians and knocked the advancing mobs of cultist killers from their feet. As they gunned back furiously from behind crumbling gravestones, other skulltakers barged past. Some simply could not restrain themselves, like mad dogs off their leashes. Others were forced forwards by the sheer weight of numbers behind them, desperate to get into battle and honour the War-Given-Form through deed and death. They too met their end in a torso-punching, head-blasting, limb-shearing broadside of bolts, bullets, light and devastation.

Kersh stood atop the rubble with his bolt pistol clutched in both gauntlets. Those cultist minions who did stumble successfully through the leadstorm to start crunching up the scree-side of the battlement were introduced to the corpus-captain’s merciless marksmanship. One by one, Kersh dropped oncoming Guardsmen, self-mutilated acolytes and hideous mutants. They all hungered for his end, but instead had to settle for a bolt-round to the head.

As the Scourge plugged away, with the blood-crazed masses a wall of feverish flesh pushing ever closer through the blizzard of suppression fire, he felt a gauntlet on his pauldron. It was Brother Micah, the company champion’s combat shield and boltgun combination resting on his armoured hip.

‘Down!’ was all Kersh heard.

Micah pushed him to one side with savage insistence. Off balance, the corpus-captain fell faceplate-first into the rubble, turning behind him just in time to see an unfolding disaster. It was the Impunitas.

The Thunderhawk had fallen from the sky. It clipped the spiretops of several steeples before ploughing straight through a tower-monolith and cleaving the tiered minaret roof from a pilgrim almshouse. The gunship was swarming with daemonic furies, and its cockpit canopy was splattered with gore. For a moment everything became a maelstrom as the Impunitas struck the ground with her blunt nose, bulldozed through the perimeter defences and smashed through the improvised battlement. Reeling from the force of the impact still quaking through the ground and his plate, Kersh felt the slipstream of a wing pass over the back of his pack.

Scrambling to his feet in the unfolding aftermath of the crash, Kersh watched the shattered Thunderhawk plunge straight through the ranks of the lost, smearing cultists into the sacred Certusian earth. The gunship listed and its smashed tail began to skid around, shearing gravestones off at their foundations. The Impunitas finally came to rest in the burial ground, leaning the fractured edge of its surviving wing against a single-storey sepulchre. Her graceful form was a crash-mangled mess and her thick plate buckled and rent. Smoke poured from her smashed-open troop compartment, and a single engine still raged in futile determination.

The corpus-captain’s raw frustration and anger could not find expression in words. Throwing a clenched fist out at the floor he snarled within his helmet. Beyond the catastrophic loss of the Thunderhawk, his section of the perimeter had been reduced to ruins. Gun emplacements lay toppled and silent; Excoriators and Sisters of Battle were missing; Charnel Guardsmen lay broken and screaming; and there was a gaping hole knocked clean through at least two of the concentric battlements.

As Kersh stomped through the obliteration, hands reached out for him. Certusian fighters and Guardsmen had been crushed and rolled beneath the Thunderhawk’s hull. Nearby, the Scourge saw the half-sheared corpse of Old Enoch, his seneschal – his fragile body crumpled like an insect by the falling gunship. Mumbling a blessing, Kersh took the coiled length of ‘the purge’ from the serf’s belt and dropped the looped lash over the hilts of his swords. Bethesda and Oren he found dazed but alive a little way distant. The absterge had been fortunate, bearing only cuts and savage bruises from head to foot. The lictor had broken his ritual arm and winced as Kersh got him to his feet.

‘Get on the cannon,’ the Scourge ordered, indicating the languishing autocannon and the boxes of ammunition strewn across the pulverised rubble. As surviving Charnel Guardsmen emerged from the gaps and crevices into which they had pressed themselves, they began to search for their abandoned lasfusils. As Sister Casiope and Battle-Brother Nebuzar of Squad Castigir ran down the perimeter towards him, Kersh bawled, ‘Regroup and hold the line!’

The pair nodded, which was Kersh’s sign to bolt off along the ugly scar the Thunderhawk had carved into the battlement. ‘Micah!’ Kersh called, ‘Micah!’, but the champion answered neither across the vox nor in person. There were bodies everywhere, Certusians and Guardsmen who could have little imagined that their deaths would have stalked up behind them. Brothers Salamis and Benzoheth were with them also, their ancient plate crushed like ration cans. Benzoheth’s boltgun was buckled and smashed, but his brother’s had escaped the worst of the Thunderhawk’s attentions. Scooping up the weapon, Kersh let it dangle in his hand. As he came across the broken bodies of furies still trying to flap their useless wings, the Scourge stamped down on their daemon spines or put single bolts through the skulls of the hellish monstrosities. The corpus-captain strode on with the etherquakes of the fiends’ bodies detonating behind him. Twisters of flame raged for the heavens as their daemon-essence returned to the warp.

Out beyond the battlement it was pure carnage. Cultists had miserably lost their argument with the Impunitas and had been compacted into the floor and each other.

Kersh found Brother Micah near the tail of the Thunderhawk. Above, a single gunship engine continued to cycle, firing up with blazing brilliance and roasting the air before dying down to an idle chug – then building up once again to fruitless ignition. The champion’s distinctive boltgun lay abandoned nearby, pointing towards the armoured boots of a body blanketed in the caped wings of a daemon fury. As the corpus-captain watched the sharp vertebrae and shoulder blades of the thing move beneath its infernal flesh with sickening fascination, he shattered its outstretched wing with a burst of fire from the bolter. The beast turned with spite and snapped like a crocodilian as it crawled across the bodies towards the Scourge. A soul-hunger raged in its horrid eyes.

‘Back, warp-sired thing!’ Kersh roared, blowing a ragged hole in the other wing before plucking at the monster’s daemonhide with single rounds. The creature backed away, hissing and sniping. The corpus-captain stepped forwards to where the beast had been, hovering over Micah like a vampiric bat. Kersh’s lip wrinkled. The champion’s earnest features had gone – along with most of the contents of his skull. Kersh turned on the creature that had been feeding on him. It had used the moments the Scourge had chosen to look upon the fallen champion well, creeping swiftly up through the crash wreckage. By the time he had set his eye upon it again the monster was almost upon him. Blasting through the beast’s ribcage and up into its repugnant head, the Scourge pivoted and put the remaining rounds of the magazine into further winged monstrosities that were slipping out from the Thunderhawk’s interior through great gashes in the Impunitas’s hull. With every infernal ending, a corkscrew of hate-spitting flame wound its way towards the stars. Kersh could only imagine what the furies had done to the gunship’s crew.

The devastation caused by the crash had only momentarily pushed back the enemy ranks. Already the cult armies of the Cholercaust were swallowing up the vacuum, stamping the unfortunates that had been ahead of them into the dirt and running down on the perimeter’s weakened defences with hellish glee – hatefully delighted to get an opportunity to honour their bloody master. Looking back at his section of the line, where the Thunderhawk had demolished its way through his forces and the battlements upon which they were standing, Kersh found only the barest indication of a defence in evidence. The blood cultists were closing, and would march straight through the opening and into the city.

Tossing the empty boltgun away, Kersh slipped his Scourge’s gladius from its sheath on his belt. He moved out towards the Thunderhawk’s creaking wing, which was balanced upon the roof of a single-storey sepulchre. Cultist warriors were already there with him, the nearest, fastest and most desperate of their kind. Kersh had never seen such fearlessness in mere mortals before. They came at him – an Adeptus Astartes – without dread or doubt. A Krugarian Turncoat jumped down from the wing, his bald head gore-spattered and his filthy trench coat flapping behind him. He dappled Kersh’s chestplate with rapid fire from his lascarbine before the Excoriator batted the weapon to the floor with the flat of his blade and gutted the traitor. Incredibly, a Vessorine Janissary came at him with a knife, and even more incredibly got it to the Scourge’s plate. Watching the puny blade score paint, Kersh seized the clansman by his carapace and flung him into the Impunitas’s side, shattering every bone in his body.

A butcher-priest of the Frater Vulgariate came next with a bellow and a rusty chainsword. Knocking the blur of brain-speckled teeth aside with his cross guard, Kersh turned his power armoured bulk into the priest’s reach. Slipping the gladius between his arms, the Scourge cut through the dark ecclesiarch’s wrists. The chainsword dropped and died. The frater fell back, waving his gore-spouting stumps. Two slave converts died swiftly on the tip of Kersh’s blade, as he slammed it through the both of them. The mongrel-faced mutant that came up behind as he administered such mercy had to settle for the blade’s aquila pommel, caving its way through his snaggle-toothed face.

Hordes were already racing past the Excoriator, intent on flooding the gap in the line. With their backs to him were armoured Volscani Cataphracts, death cult assassins from ‘The Covenant’ and a cannibal ogryn from the Bad Moons of Goethe. Hanging from the ruined wing by a single hydraulic pintle and belt feed was one of the Impunitas’s twin-linked heavy bolters. Cutting through the gunship impulse cabling with his blade and shearing away the tensioned piston-trigger, Kersh sank his gauntlets into the firing mechanism, clutching at rods, pins and levers. Pulling at a robust lever, the Scourge was rewarded with a kick from the right-hand heavy bolter. The round blasted up into the wing’s armour plating. Angling the bolters around on their hydraulic pintle and clutching both levers like the brakes on a bike, Kersh unleashed the devastating weapon on the storming mob.

The twin-linked heavy bolters bucked like beasts of burden reined in and under control. The barrels breathed flash-fires from their gaping muzzles, and two streams of blistering, brute-calibre firepower reached across the battlefield for the enemy. As Kersh angled the monstrous weapons around, lines of cultists disappeared in a bloodspittle haze of sweeping death. Assassins of ‘The Covenant’, so lithe and barbarically graceful, were mercilessly turned to chum before the gunship-mounted weapon. The Volscani Cataphracts’ armour was nothing to Kersh’s firepower and droves of the traitor Guardsmen were cut down in a furore of clot-splashing eruptions. The feral ogryn, Kersh simply cut down to size by scything straight through the thick muscle and bone of his legs and watching the limbless giant crash to the ground.

Through gritted teeth the Scourge continued his diamantine-tipped decontamination of the necroplex. The heads of mutants and already mindless spawn were popped off like ripe pustules. The Deathfest lived up to their name as Kersh and his heavy bolters turned several of their foetid number into a celebratory display of gore-spritz and screams. The Regna-Rouge became a dying commemoration of their colours in the Excoriator’s leadstorm, their unblooded blades and torturer’s instruments falling uselessly from bolt-severed hands. It was carnage.

The fallen Impunitas continued to feed ammunition. The weapon blazed with impunity. Kersh killed everything in his feverish fire-arc. Soon the area before his decimated section of the line was a twitching field of corpses and bloody smog. With satisfaction, he heard Oren and Bethesda’s autocannon strike up its murderous orison. He saw Brother Nebuzar standing on the battlement, directing hastily regrouped Charnel Guard and cemetery world volunteers to new hold points. Lasfusils had once again started to lance the burial ground with searing bolts of light, and the nozzles of Sister Casiope’s heavy flamer were turning the crash-dozed gap in the rubble battlement into a blazing inferno of light and flesh-melting heat.

He heard him first. Fortunately for the Scourge, the Blood God’s disciples honoured their deity on the battlefield rather than in the temple, and with war cries rather than prayers. The deep boom of a boorish roar behind Kersh drowned out even the heavy bolters. The Scourge threw the twin-linked weapon around on its hydraulic mount. Before him was a Traitor Astartes, a rust-armoured warrior of the Goremongers renegade Chapter, with a crackling battleaxe swinging about his head.

‘Blood for the Blood Go–’

Kersh yanked on the levers as the pintle completed its spasmodic rotation. The Goremonger disappeared in a blur of point-blank bolt fury. Through the miasma of shredded flesh and ceramite fragments, the corpus-captain turned the heavy bolters on the renegade Angel’s warband, a blood cult mob of degenerate killers and acolytes who had seen the Goremonger’s heresy and leadership as a divine expression of the Blood God’s power and legitimacy. How could an Angel of the Emperor be wrong? The warband found out as the Scourge mashed through them with his belt-fed monstrosity.

Beyond, Kersh could see an ocean of human detritus. An unending army of ruthless killers. The Cholercaust’s slaughterkin, united in common purpose: to work through the private deviancy of their murderous inclination while simultaneously feeding their faith and daemon deity with acts of wanton annihilation. The cult invaders just kept coming, birthed by darkness, and beyond the gloom, Kersh could hear the savage howls of maniacs-in-waiting.

Amongst the slave-soldiers, traitors and Chaos cultists, Kersh picked out increasing numbers of Adeptus Astartes, false prophets for the ravaging masses, and Ruinous warbands of blood-brothers who had embraced heresy together. Lost Angels who had fallen to the Blood God’s predatory temptations and indulged their base desire to kill over the Emperor’s need for them to do so. Space Marines who had forgotten themselves. Those who had regressed. Those who were now no more than agonising expressions of the savagery from which they were originally crafted. The Scourge favoured these with the Thunderhawk’s remaining wrath. With 1.00 calibre mercy, the Scourge ended their torment and that of their followers. The Goremongers. The Sanguine Sons. The mad Angels of the Thunder Barons. The renegade Red Heralds. The Cleaved. The Angels Apocrypha. The Brazen Guard. The bone-dusted Skulltakers.

They came at him undaunted. Furious at his mere existence. He was a warrior to be defeated. An Adeptus Astartes. A son of Dorn. One after another they tried to rush him, cleavering aside cultists, spawn and traitor soldiers to get to him. To earn his skull for the War-Given-Form. Kersh kept killing. The ivory of his armour became a blood-misted red. The heavy bolter muzzles glowed with the heat of incessant usage. A gene-bred monstrosity – some aborted, primogenerated abomination – charged at Kersh with self-loathing and fury. The bastard-breed wore scraps of armour and the colours of the Sanguine Sons, but was a half-botched attempt at demigodhood. Malformed, insane and unfeeling – the sorry creature soaked up the heavy bolters’ punishment and bounded on. The head shot that should have ended the beast was stopped by armour plating welded to its deformed skull, and it took everything the weapon had to punch through both metal and thick bone to reach what little brain the monster had.

As the abominate dropped and skidded past Kersh, the Scourge realised that the distraction had cost him. Three Angels Apocrypha had worked their way around the crashed Thunderhawk to surprise him from the other side. Helmless and sporting long hair and rapier-like blades that crackled with a dark energy, the Chaos Space Marines looked identical. Their skin was deathly pale against the sable blood-filth of their patched and studded plate. The renegades hissed and swept in with vampiric speed and appetite. Kersh barely had time to release his finger-cramping grip on the heavy bolters and slap a palm on his gladius hilt.

The first died without the blade having to clear its scabbard. There was a flash from the side of the first Angel’s head. He fell to one side and struck the gunship’s wing before falling and sitting in the grave dust. Half of his head had been burned out by a precision sniper shot. About the Scourge were the corpses of killers and cultists that Kersh couldn’t remember slaying. They too had the telltale head craters of Adeptus Astartes marksmanship. Up in the towers and steeples of the cemetery world city, a member of Squad Contritus had the Scourge in his sights and was watching his corpus-captain’s back.

The Angels were so fast that Kersh’s blade was still not free of its sheath as the second sped past his falling compatriot. He was met with an ugly kick from the Scourge. Reeling from the Excoriator’s boot against his chestplate, the Traitor stumbled some distance back. Throughout the body-piling carnage of the Scourge’s resistance, the Impunitas’s remaining engine had gone through the wretched and repetitive cycle of firing up and dying down. As the heretic Angel stumbled back into the rocket’s wake, the intense heat of the rhythmic burn set alight his hair and scoured the paint from his ceramite. His pallid skin melted from his skull, and as the engine built up to full intensity, sending a tremble through the crashed Thunderhawk, the renegade was lost in the air-scorching heat of the afterburner.

Kersh felt sudden and excruciating pain lance through his midriff. The third Angel Apocrypha had leant into a savage thrust, skewering his power blade through the Scourge’s stomach plate and though his side. As the Chaos Space Marine withdrew his rapier, Kersh let out a half-stifled howl of agony. The heretic seemed to enjoy the Excoriator’s suffering, until the Scourge drew his gladius out of its scabbard and the blade up across the Traitor’s face, wiping the spiteful satisfaction from it. With blood streaming into his eyes from the vicious gash, the Angel Apocrypha also failed to see the Scourge’s fist fly at him, the pommel of the sword held within it breaking the warrior’s jaw. The rapier vaulted for the Scourge again, but blood-blind the Angel struck wide.

Grabbing the Chaos Space Marine by the wrist and holding the crackling blade away from him, Kersh twisted the gladius around in his other hand before plunging it down through a ceramite patch on the Blood Crusader’s chestplate. The blade squealed through the weak spot, punctured reinforced ribcage and slid down into the Chaos Space Marine’s chest. Squirming the hilt around like an aircraft joystick, Kersh watched the Angel Apocrypha experience the blade twisting through his innards. Black blood gushed up and out of the sides of the doomed warrior’s mouth. Releasing him, Kersh allowed the weight of the warrior’s plate to carry him to a gasping death on the cemetery world earth and free his blade.

A grunt from the Anarchan Razorbacks was suddenly beside him, attempting to beat him with the stock of a shotgun, while a stitch-faced pirate raider – with her mouth sliced into a frown – started blasting away wildly with a pair of autopistols. Clutching his side, Kersh despatched her with shearing economy and speed. He took a step towards the twin-linked heavy bolter but found himself distracted by the bodies being tossed into the air above the advancing mob before him. A cloven-hoofed beast of living plate was thundering through the cultist throng at high speed, its brazen bulk a seemingly unstoppable force. The quadruped’s long head sported a thick brass horn, sharpened to a cruel spike, while its eyes were windows to a volcanic fury. Its broad body was a clinker-built nightmare of layered bronze plate and shredded octagon-mail. The infernal beast cared for nothing, trampling slave-soldiers, gore-swiping Bloodsaken berserkers and barging aside armoured Red Herald Chaos Space Marines with its heavy metal heft.

Snatching his bolt pistol from its sporran, Kersh thrashed the trigger, sending round after round at the daemon beast. It was the definition of an easy target and getting easier with every cloven stride, but the rounds simply glanced pathetically off the living bronze hide. With the infernal engine just steps away, Kersh threw himself painfully to one side. The beast continued its relentless charge, furiously goring the underplate of the Thunderhawk’s wing, before surging on and smashing straight through the twin-linked heavy bolters. The metal monster cannonaded past. On the ground, Kersh watched the beast weather a hail of las-bolts from Charnel Guard fusils, stubgun and auto-fire, as well as the slash of Scout sniper rifle blasts from the towers and belfries. An advancing wall of metal and sparks, the beast continued along its juggernaut path towards the break in the battlement.

Kersh felt a tremble through his plate. The ground was quaking again. As he got to his boots, the corpus-captain watched hate-jubilant cultists roaring the hellsteed on, before they were struck and impaled from behind – left broken-backed and crucified across the horned heads of newly arrived beasts. The Scourge shook his head in silent disbelief, witness to a diabolic stampede. Soon there were more armoured chargers than Kersh could count, and the Excoriator found himself backing towards the doomed front line.

Unclipping a krak grenade, the Scourge took several further steps backwards. As well as the living metal beasts – in the absence of the heavy bolter’s relentless murder – renegade Angels, berserkers and the Blood God’s champions were leading the cult armies of the Cholercaust back at Kersh’s decimated section of the perimeter. With grim resolve, the Scourge tossed the unprimed grenade into the silent booster exhaust of the cycling engine. As he ran back towards Obsequa City he heard the grenade bounce and rattle around the inside of the jet mechanism. He heard the engine begin its final, fruitless attempt to re-launch the downed Thunderhawk.

As Kersh reached the havoc of the destroyed battlement and the mess the unstoppable metal monster had made of his remaining sentinels, the corpus-captain looked back. The Thunderhawk’s remaining booster had built to a strangled screech. The engine fired. The grenade exploded. The wreck of the Impunitas shuddered. A staggered detonation rippled through the derelict craft: the engine, the fuel compartments, the ammunition stores. The gunship became a radiating blastwave of force, flame and armour-plate frag. Cultist soldiers were shredded where they stood. Renegade Angels and Chaos champions were cooked within their plate, and even stampeding daemon beaststeeds were knocked from their fleet footing and onto their clinker-constructed backs, where they remained, kicking out helplessly in a steam-snorting effort to right themselves.

Kersh found Brother Nebuzar dead – gored straight through by the rampaging bronze monitor train. The beast had ignored the irritation of las-bolts dancing off its hide and bypassed the remainder of the Charnel Guard, instead storming straight at the cemetery world city. As the brazen mount careened through the walls of chapels, hermitages and cloisters, bulldozing its frenzied way through foundations and keystones, towers began to topple and steeples fell in on themselves.

Looking back at the benighted battlefield, Kersh saw the Thunderhawk’s explosion die back to a flame-swathed wreck. The promethium-soaked mound of cadavers and daemonflesh upon which the crashed gunship had come to rest caught, and the Scourge watched the inferno race away in both directions. Within minutes Obsequa City would be surrounded by a furious ring of light and fire.

Along his section of the perimeter, the corpus-captain saw cultists and slave-soldiers thrashing in the flames. He saw a hammer-wielding Thunder Baron stride through the blaze in scorched plate as though it were nothing. The renegade Angel was followed by several lesser berserkers, who burst from the wall of flame at a sprint, flak and furs alight with the flesh melting from their cruel bones. They didn’t get far, the demented warriors succumbing to the firestorms they had become long before they reached the ruined battlement. The daemonherd would not, and could not, be stopped. Those monsters not caught in the initial blast had thundered on, shaking the ground upon which they stomped, shielded from the worst of the pyremound by their hide plating.

The corpus-captain had no idea how other sections of the perimeter had fared. They could have already fallen or – without crashing gunships and a daemon drove to worry about – have held against the Cholercaust’s murderous masses and madness. All he did know was that his vox had been a constant stream of messages and reports that he could barely hear above the rapid-fire cacophony of the twin-linked heavy bolters and Khornate battle-cries. Regardless of how his brothers elsewhere had fared, their first line of defence was about to fall. With the promethium holding the worst of the cultist furore back, but the daemon charge an uncontainable certainty, Kersh decided grimly that the battle wouldn’t afford him a better time to retreat. He set his vox to an open channel.

‘Fifth Company, this is the Scourge. The perimeter is breached. Prepare for close-quarters assault. Fall back to the city. Do it now.’

Chapter Nineteen World Eaters

The abbey bell tower of the Black Ministry shook with the force of some distant calamity. Brother Omar of the Tenth Company watched dust fall from the belfry rafters. The Scout had been leant against a balistraria pillar near to the great wheels of the abbey bell. Omar followed the dust descending to the floor and settled his eyes on the empty space where his legs should have been. The incredible thing was that he could still feel them: the twitch of every muscle, the stretch of every tendon and the creak of thick joints and bones.

It had been deemed all but a miracle that he had made it back to Obsequa City through the immaterial incursion. He remembered little of his entry, but had been told the Scourge himself had dragged his bruised and bloody body to safety – well, most of it. The Scout didn’t recall the agonies associated with the loss of his legs, which he considered a small blessing. He was currently benefiting from morphia and augmetics left behind by Apothecary Ezrachi, with drips, lines and transfusion satchels trailing from the cauterised stump of his lower torso. The Scout still wore his battle-battered carapace vest and pauldrons, and rather than languish in some hermitage or with the Sisters in the Mausoleum vault, he had volunteered for any useful duty he could perform. With no little admiration and the assurance that he would make a fine Excoriators battle-brother, Silas Keturah gave Omar a pair of magnoculars and his own bolt pistol. The Scout was charged with spotting and vox-relaying observations from the bell tower straight to the squad whip himself. The reports had made grim listening.

‘Take that, you ugly son of a whore…’

Omar heard the whoosh of Scout Kush’s sniper rifle as the weapon spat out another skull-emptying bolt. Omar grunted. Kush was a despicable neophyte and a disgrace to the name of Demetrius Katafalque, but he had the eyes of a hawk and the murderous desire to see every shot go home. Omar had even spotted for the Scout with his magnoculars, drawing the sniper fire down on a warband of helmless screamers from the renegade Brazen Guard, and assorted degenerates attempting to rush Corpus-Captain Kersh in the wake of the Impunitas’s crash. Mostly, Kush had rested the sniper rifle’s long barrel against a balistraria pillar and plugged incessantly away, his eye to the magnoscope and a neat pile of powerpacks stacked beside his knee. ‘Come on, you Ruinous filth – stick your head out,’ the Scout murmured absently to himself. Kush fired. With a smirk of satisfaction and without taking his eye from the lens, the Scout ejected another spent pack and slipped another into the rifle’s breech from the pile.

Omar brought the magnoculars back to his eyes and surveyed the carnage on the city perimeter, which was no less horrifying in night-vision. Even from the bell tower’s vantage, the Scout only had a view of Necroplex-South and East. From the belfry it became obvious what the Excoriators’ problem would be. Sheer numbers. Wave after wave of slaves and cultist soldiers stormed from the distant darkness. They never seemed to stop, and ran full speed at the city along the lychways and clambered across funereal architecture of the burial grounds with contorted face of fury and frustration. Spread through their colossal number were armoured champions and renegade Angels sporting blades of wicked design and obscene dimensions. Omar had also spotted daemonkin and monstrous beasts from hellish planes of existence to bolster the Cholercaust’s already formidable assault capabilities.

On the south and east perimeters, at least, the Excoriators had fared reasonably well against the Blood Crusaders, flak and fevered flesh being no match for the Angels’ boltguns. The Charnel Guard and hastily recruited Certusian militia did their part also, the kill zones before the battlements a hailstorm of light, lead and gun emplacement fire. The Blood God’s warped champions and renegade Adeptus Astartes – using slave-soldiers as meat shields – closed the gap and created havoc for the perimeter. Their deity-pleasing antics and the brutal insanity of their assaults tested the nerve of the Guardsmen and cemetery worlders, and where Skulltaker Space Marines and berserkers breached the line and scrambled up through the firepower onto the scree battlement, massacres unfolded. The real problem, as Omar could see from the bell tower, were the daemon monstrosities the Blood God had bequeathed the Cholercaust, blessed manifestations of Ruinous destruction and murderous power crafted in corporeal form.

On the Necroplex-East perimeter, Omar had watched Brothers Damaris and Judah hacked to pieces by a small horde of bloodletting arch-fiends with hell-red hides and smouldering blades. Daemon engines of dark metal and diabolic soulfire sliced and pounded their defective way up through the defences and Epistolary Melmoch’s Charnel Guardsmen. A charging herd of armoured steeds had smashed through the Scourge’s section like a spooked drove of grox, scattering his sentinels and forcing them to abandon their posts and emplacements. Omar had spotted a possessed Salamander – bearing the mark and scale of the renegade Dragon Warriors on his warp-tormented form – cut through the Sisters of Battle supporting Brother Simeon, and just about everything else on the southern perimeter.

Worst of all, the Scout had witnessed the merciless decimation of Second Whip Azareth’s section by what could only be described as one of the Blood God’s own. A mighty horned daemon, standing many times taller than an Adeptus Astartes and hate-wrought from ancient enmity, had appeared out of the night like a colossus. Where it walked, the ground shook beneath its cloven hooves. Its wings hung about its massive shoulders like the plate shielding of a battleship, and in one huge claw it clutched a flint axe, roughly hewn in its entirety from daemon world bedrock. With the razor edge of the weapon, the primordial beast swept the necroplex and battlement, ripping through scores of cultists and Charnel Guardsmen with equal indifference and creating small lakes of spilt blood. The monstrous greater daemon jangled with brass plate, mail and chain, and bawled its unquenchable fury from eyes, anger-flared nostrils and a snarl-retracted mouth, which glowed with the elemental fires burning within.

Omar watched cemetery worlders flee before the great beast, only to be cut down by another rubble-grazing sweep of its axe, while Second Whip Azareth stood his ground. The Scout’s heart beat with Chapter pride as the Excoriator took the fight to the furious behemoth, dwarfed by the size of the beast and the carnage it effortlessly created. Omar looked on, sickened, as a Space Marine disappeared beneath one of the beast’s brazen hooves, brought down by the monster as though he were nothing more than an irritation.

The Scout thought the gargantuan daemon might simply stride across the battlement unopposed and begin levelling the city with its primeval weapon and crushing fist. That was until the battle-scarred shape of the venerable Gauntlet had swooped in, drifting about the monster just out of reach of its building-cleaving axe. The gunship’s heavy bolter fire danced off the greater daemon’s hide, prompting the beast to cloak itself in the mighty expanse of its leathery wings, until the Gauntlet slammed a Hellstrike missile into the horror. The beast fell back, knocked from its hooves by the force of the explosion. Hundreds of the Blood God’s slave-soldiers were crushed beneath its ancient form, and hundreds more were thrown from their feet by the quake of the monster’s descent. Shaking its appalling head, a wing blast-shattered and aflame, the daemon had scrambled furiously to its feet. The pilot of the Gauntlet expertly gained altitude, keeping the Thunderhawk out of the flint axe’s considerable reach, while at the same time drawing the enraged beast away from the city. Like some reptilian death world predator, mindlessly consumed with the pursuit of its prey, the greater daemon trailed the venerable Gauntlet, its battle-ire continually stoked by the annoyance of the gunship’s heavy bolters, the burn of its lascannons and intermittent flooring by the Thunderhawk’s Hellstrike missiles.

Kush screamed.

As Omar pulled the magnoculars from his face he saw the sniper suddenly pass before him in an ugly blur. Showering masonry told the Scout that something had struck the bell tower, taking out Brother Kush as the sniper had so many others. The Excoriator hadn’t been struck by a las-bolt or marksman’s bullet. A winged monstrosity had hit the belfry wall like a thunderbolt, smashing through the stone gap that had served Kush’s aim so well, and cannonballing into the Scout. As both Excoriator and beast came to a savage halt against the opposite wall – Kush wrapped up in the creature’s talons and bat-like wings – Omar heard the Scout scream again. The scream swiftly became a gargle and then a crunch as the monster bit out the Excoriator’s throat.

The thing left Kush’s corpse and, still streaming with masonry dust, crawled horribly across the belfry at Omar. The Scout managed to get off a couple of bolts from Squad Whip Keturah’s pistol before the beast was upon him. Using the weapon as a knuckleduster, Omar slammed the fury’s gargoylesque head to one side. Its dagger-teeth came straight back at him, and it was all the Excoriator could do to clutch his fingers around its lower jaw and keep it from his face. Omar felt himself instinctively kicking out with legs that weren’t there. After the momentary strain of a struggle, with the daemon’s warp-fuelled strength getting the better of the Excoriator’s bulging arms, Omar clicked the bolt pistol to fully automatic with his thumb and nestled the squat muzzle of the weapon under the beast’s chin. Yanking on the trigger, Omar sent a continuous stream of fire through the monster’s head. Bolt-rounds tore through the fury’s infernal brain and out the top of its gnarled skull. Seconds later, the thing was a deadweight of flesh on top of him – the murderous gleam gone from its eye.

Thumbing a stud, Omar ejected the spent bolt pistol clip. Heaving the beast off his torso, the Excoriator pushed himself onto his chest and, trailing lines and drips, crawled arm-over-arm across to Kush. He stopped momentarily as the fire soul-storm tore out of the fury’s leathery remains and scorched its way up through the belfry. As Omar reached Kush it was obvious that the Scout was dead. His head hung limply from his torso by his spine and a ribbon of flesh.

Omar’s chin dropped. Without Kush, and with his battle-brothers fighting for their lives, the Scout would not be leaving the bell tower. He prised a chunky grenade from Kush’s hand. During his brief struggle with the beast, Kush had snatched it from his belt but never got as far as priming the krak grenade and blowing both himself and the daemon-monster to oblivion. Omar slipped the grenade down into his carapace. Snatching up Kush’s sniper rifle, he grunted. For a neophyte, he wasn’t particularly good with a rifle, close-quarters combat being his chosen specialism. Sliding the weapon along the belfry floor, he made for the hole in the wall made by the daemon’s entrance. Pushing himself up against a balistraria pillar, the Excoriator primed the rifle.

As he was doing so a bright twinkle in the sky drew his attention. At first he thought it must be glimmer of lance-fire in orbit, but as it began to streak down towards Obsequa City and was joined by a busy constellation of other ominous lights, Omar recognised them for what they were. Adeptus Astartes drop-pods. A swarm of them, deployed from some Cholercaust cruiser and raining down like a storm of death.

There was little Omar could do about the audacious enemy assault. His rifle could not hit a rapidly descending insertion craft and would not penetrate its armour even if it did. All the Scout could hope for was that whatever came out of the pods would oblige his questionable marksmanship on the ground.

The Scout aimed the sniper rifle down into the tight alleyways, stepwells and cloisters. Adjusting the magnification on the powerful scope for his eye, Omar nestled the weapon against a bruised shoulder. He brought his finger off the trigger as a fleeing member of the Charnel Guard flashed before the scope, running for his life down a posternway. An armoured beast thundered past, zigzagging its way across the narrow alley, crashing its shoulders into the masonry of bordering buildings. The thing lowered its head, and with a furious charge, gored the unfortunate Guardsman before stomping on. The monster passed out of sight. Leaning into the stone of the belfry wall, Omar felt the tower shudder as the beast collided with the abbey’s foundations.

With dust raining down about him, the Excoriator concentrated on his rifle’s cross hairs and the heretic prey that might pass before them.

The Dreadclaw’s rocket roared its kamikaze delight. The drop-pod was ancient, corrupt of spirit and falling apart. Its nameplate had once read Darkheart, but was now a flashburned smear – the result of an ill-advised insertion through the caustic cloud-cover of the Kassandrun hive-world. The Darkheart had later been appeased by the blood of innocent hivers, battle-splashed and splattered across the Dreadclaw’s malevolent plate.

As another atmospheric stabiliser was ripped from its hull by the raging descent, the craft began to pitch and wobble. The sickening motion tore at the Dreadclaw’s superstructure, and the pod gave a metallic whine of internal agony. Inside the craft, amongst the swaying chains, trembling brass strutage and the stench of old gore, eight sons of Angron strained against their descent cages. Their plate was brazen horror, embellishing the blood-red sheen of gore-speckled ceramite. Spikes – both metal and warped bone – adorned their battle-blessed forms, and their helms were ghastly and extravagant. Weapons ached in their racks for the taste of first blood.

Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh stood with a brain-dashed boot on the long defunct guidance runebank that occupied the centre of the compartment. It mattered little to the Traitor Legionaries that the runebank was dead and silent. The Darkheart would guide them to slaughter as it always had. The World Eaters champion held on to ceiling chains with both gauntlets – his only descent precaution. As the Dreadclaw had tumbled away from the battle-barge Rancour, part of a low orbital swarm delivering the shock troops of the Blood God to the cemetery world, Umbragg had indulged his psychosis. The cybernetic implants buried deep in the primordial depths of his brain flushed the World Eater with a hatred unbound. His mind was an open wound, a twisted knot of psychosurgical scar tissue, only good for killing.

The World Eater loathed the long sub-light journeys between massacres. The Rancour was an adamantium prison, Lord Havloc their craven watchdog. Havloc was indeed blessed of Decimate Khorne – but Umbragg could not find it in himself to feel similar appreciation. Wars should not be fought from the command throne of a battleship. The weakling Imperium was an empire of dirt – dirt that it was Umbragg’s murderous duty to saturate with the coward-blood of the False Emperor’s subjects. To baptise with the teeth of his axe and the wrath of the Blood God’s grace. But the Cholercaust followed the Pilgrim, and the Pilgrim – the Right Claw of Khorne – followed the crimson comet, the corporeal manifestation of the Blood God’s will. Therefore, the sacrilegious inactivity of the armada’s progress had to be endured. It had to be suffered – like the slow passing of the blade across the flesh – until finally, the comet led the chosen of Khorne back to Ancient Terra and on towards an empire’s end.

On the approach to the tiny Ecclesiarchy world, Umbragg had felt the stirring. The Cholercaust’s communal desire to kill. The infighting. The self-slaughter. The flaying of flesh from decapitated skulls. The disciples of the War-Given-Form, at one with their true purpose. The brute simplicity of mass invasion. The slaughterous advantage of strength and number – the Blood God’s potency realising and realised in the tsunami of gore spilt before his warrior-subjects’ blades.

Like magma churning inside the rock prison of a volcano, the exalted rage of the berserker built within Umbragg. He watched the unworthy slave-soldiers of the Blood Crusade fall on the planet in their thousands and thousands – all hate-twisted, battle-hungry and eager to catch the Blood God’s eye. With them went Khorne’s blessings – the daemonic expression of the War-Given-Form’s presence on the field. Carnage-fired beasts, engines, powers and princes, killing shrines to the Skull Lord’s decimate will. With unbearable restraint – his ancient bones literally shaking with the desire to war – Umbragg watched the aspirant champions of the Cholercaust take their place in mob-ranks of common killers. Warlords and butchers, their prodigious taking of life had warmed the Ruinous overlord to them.

Amongst these were bands of tainted Angels. A young and fallen brotherhood. Warriors whose shame it had been not to see the slaughter of the Heresy and the apocalypse wrought on the sacred soil of Ancient Terra: Goremongers, Skulltakers, Angels Apocrypha, the Blood Storm, Thunder Barons. It was only after the renegades – young in the ways of the blade – had thinned out the enemy, leaving only the worthiest skulls for the taking, that the Pilgrim unleashed his warbands of World Eaters.

Ancient, superhuman flesh within Traitor plate, driven by a mind without doubt or fear. The World Eaters were the very living expression of the Blood God’s destructive power. His daemons might be a bloodthirsty essence, tapped directly from Khorne’s primordial fury, but it was thousands of years of bloodshed, committed in the Blood God’s name by the death-defying sons of Angron, that fuelled such ancient power. In this way, daemonkin might be part of the War-Given-Form, but the War-Given-Form was part of Umbragg and his xiith Legion brethren’s desire eternal to see the galaxy burn.

As the Dreadclaw gave another sickening wobble and the fresh screech of lower atmospheric descent assailed the drop-pod’s exterior, Umbragg’s berserker fury broke its banks. The enemy was close. His axes would sing through priest-flesh. The red glory of lives ended would fountain about him in glorious, hateful celebration. A roar built within his cavernous chest – a raw unburdening that was matched by the caged warriors of his warband, the Clysm. The Darkheart shook with the World Eaters’ rage. Umbragg began to smash his spiked elbows into the compartment wall and his fists into the brass ceiling. The dim memory of an ancient alarm fired and the craft’s interior flashed a pleasing alternation of red emergency lighting and darkness. The World Eaters howled their savage frustration – their cybernetically enhanced hatred for the constraints of the Rancour, for the rattling Dreadclaw, for the cemetery world victims-to-be and the Imperium they represented, for their fellow Blood Crusaders, for each other, and for themselves.

Like a redirected torrent, murderous thoughts and desires flooded Umbragg, flowing through his psychosurgically savaged brain. The Brazen Fleshed warrior no longer wanted to kill; he needed to kill. The Darkheart was bleeding. The World Eaters had smashed the compartment plating and torn out cabling, hydraulics and mesh-hosing. Blood and ichor sprayed from the damaged section, bathing the Traitor Angels in a crimson shower. Forcing his pack to the wall and wrapping thick ceiling chains about his arms with savage circles of the wrist, Umbragg prepared for the Dreadclaw’s landing.

Before the World Eater knew it, the Darkheart had buried its gear-talons in cemetery world earth. The shock of the brutal landing was forgotten instantly, swallowed whole by the berserker instinct to break free and kill. With the bone-shattering impact of the landing still reverberating through him, Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh had unthinkingly hit the disembarkation stud and snatched his blessed chainaxes, Pain and Suffering, from their compartment mounts. Freed from their descent cages, the World Eaters berserkers of the Clysm dropped down through the retracting bulkhead.

As soon as their ceramite boots hit the planet surface, the Chaos Space Marines’ helmet optics scanned for life signs and heat signatures. The Darkheart had punched its way through a cathedral roof, and the Dreadclaw’s landing talons were buried in the stone floor of the nave. Their optics cut through the dust and debris to reveal warm bodies running down an ambulatory parallel to the cathedral wall. The warband broke into a run, the World Eaters pounding across the nave at the stone wall with an insatiable appetite for violence.

Umbragg reached the wall first, shouldering his power armoured way straight through the masonry to appear like a conjured daemon before the shocked and terrified stream of Charnel Guard and armed cemetery worlders flooding into the passageway. The mortals were already running for their lives from something, and Umbragg feasted on their fear. They ran straight at his axes. Gunning them to full furiosity, the World Eater cut, cleaved and butchered his way through the screaming mayhem. The Clysm joined him, slaking their own thirst for blood effortlessly spilt. The World Eaters descended into a brutal frenzy, chainswords hacking off limbs, axes biting through bodies and bolt pistols taking off heads. Umbragg felt the release of carnage accomplished, the god-pleasing sensation of blood pattering in sheets and sprays across his Traitor plate.

Bolts from lasfusils sizzled pointlessly off the champion as wall-to-wall Certusians were sacrificed on the twin altars of Pain and Suffering. Suddenly the source of the cemetery worlders’ panic appeared, crashing into walls and pulverising the cobbled ambulatory. A brazen-plate beast with a serrated crescent horn and armoured hump charged up through the Guardsmen and fossers, eyes ablaze with animal anger, a monster out of control. It gored and trampled a path through the fleeing crowd, stamping and swinging its razor-horn to the left and right. Umbragg watched the ripple of bodies as they bounced off and over the daemon’s hump. As the kill before him was stolen by the creature’s stampede, the World Eater stepped to one side and buried his chainaxes, in quick succession, in the living metal flesh of the beast. The Chaos Space Marine’s weapons chugged deep into the monster. The juggernaut crashed on, bouncing from one smashed wall into another until it collapsed, the beast’s momentum ploughing its horned head through the dust, debris and cobbled floor. Streams of brazen flame erupted from its fallen form, funnelling through chinks and rents in its armoured hide. The dark energy spiralled upwards, carrying fragments of clinker plate and great brass rivets with it.

Umbragg turned back with a triumphant bellow of rage, his fists to the sky. About him World Eaters continued to cleave through the Charnel Guardsmen. Two cemetery worlders were suddenly before him, dappling his chestplate with rifles that were loud, annoying and pitifully ineffective. Looking down on the taller of the two fossers, the World Eater swung out the back of his gauntlet. Swatting the puny mortal aside, Umbragg took off his head with the backslash.

‘Donalbain!’ the second Certusian yelled, his voice shot through with the weakness of useless human emotion. Shock turned instantly to anger – a feeling Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh could appreciate – and the fosser ran at the armoured giant, smashing at his ceramite plating with the scuffed butt of his rifle. Within his helm, the World Eater licked his cracked and aged lips. Clasping the weakling mortal by both his head and shoulder, the World Eater tore in two different directions. With ease the Certusian’s screaming head broke from his thrashing torso. Tossing both aside, Umbragg showed his bloody palms to the sky. With the massacre coming to an end about him, Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh snorted.

‘Find me Angels!’ he bawled at his dark brethren.

Chapter Twenty Endgame

I can feel the city slipping away from me. I am Adeptus Astartes. Sentiment is nothing to a demigod. Death is a way of life. That the citizens of the Imperium fall is of no consequence to an Angel of the Emperor. We save as many as we can – as I have here on the cemetery world. Men fall, but the Imperium endures. The city is slipping from me as a game of regicide from a master. There is a difference, however, between feeling defeat and knowing defeat. I am warrior enough to know I am beaten. My heart beats for my Emperor. I will never lay down my weapons. I will never give up. While I live, my enemies’ lives will pay forfeit. My spirit is unbreakable. These things I feel. What I know is the difference between strategic success and tactical failure – and I have failed.

I see now, as I fight pauldron-to-pauldron with my Excoriator brothers, the anatomy of a world’s demise. I see now how the Cholercaust Blood Crusade sundered planet after Imperial planet, and how it will go on doing so – right up to the Vanaheim Cordon and beyond. Through Segmentum Solar and the core systems; right up to an unsuspecting Ancient Terra. Unsuspecting, because none know what I know now. They will underestimate the Keeler Comet and its strange ability to turn a population against itself, creating reinforcement for an army as yet unarrived. What they will see as an astral body – a returning visitor – I know as a gateway to Chaos. They will not call for reinforcement, as others have failed to do, until far too late. They will fail to appreciate the Cholercaust’s number and overestimate their own. They will make a stand – as I have done – because that is what warriors do. They will stand aghast, as I do now, at the Cholercaust’s speed and hunger for annihilation. They will not imagine that a force could end a world in all but a day, overrunning an entire planet with heretic, renegade and daemon. Finally, with Traitor Legionaries – the Blood God’s chosen – falling from the stars and hunting them for sport, they will see how easily they have fallen and the horror that awaits others for whom the same mistakes are equally inevitable.

We are trapped.

Falling back from the perimeter it became swiftly apparent that all other sections had failed to hold as I had. The Charnel Guard are decimated and many of my brothers have fallen. Palatine Sapphira and several of her Sisters remain, along with a small collection of Chapter serfs – including my own. Beyond that, only Excoriators survive. The sons of Dorn, who fought their hardest and made the enemy pay in blood for every retreating step. The remaining Angels of the Fifth Company, holding off impossible numbers, as they pair and group up. Brothers finding each other, protecting each other’s backs, knowing in their hearts that here in these tight ambulatories and posternways – in the shadow of Umberto II’s great Mausoleum – they are to die together.

With a cultist army – even with an Adeptus Astartes contingent – we might have stood a chance. The Blood God sends us monsters, daemonic entities against which our weapons know limitation. And now, pushed back into the steep streets and narrow alleys, with the full force of the Cholercaust swallowing Obsequa City, we find our retreat compromised. From the sky they send us their best. Shock troops to finish off the most stalwart resistance. To end us quickly. The Eaters of Worlds. Now I know we are doomed.

‘What now?’ Skase calls above the din of battle. The air is thick with the chug of chain weapons, including my own, and Brother Boaz and Squad Whip Joachim are using the last of their grenades. The cloistrium is open but the cacophony bounces off the walls right back at us. We have heard nothing from the north-western contingents. Second Whip Etham and Brothers Lemuel and Zurion sighted Sisters of Battle in the St Gorgonia district and received some surviving support from Keturah’s Scouts. Nothing has been heard from any of them in over an hour, and drop-pods did seem to hit the far side of the city hardest.

‘The Mausoleum!’ I yell back, but my words are drowned by the whoosh of Sister Casiope’s heavy flamer. The good Sister has been doing the Emperor’s work with the weapon, using it to greatest effect in the cramped environs of the narrow city streets. Flame has gutted the alleys and archways of our uphill escape route, forcing back countless hordes of cultists baying for our blood or else flash-stripping them of their flesh and turning them into corpses dancing and flailing through an inferno. Sapphira and Sister Zillah finish off any warp-spawned malevolents creeping through the flames, while my absterge holds up her wounded brother, blasting the occasional cultist who makes it over a roof or through a building with her chunky laspistol.

‘What?’ Skase calls back, his gladius twanged back off the teeth of a World Eater’s chainsword.

‘Close quarters!’ Brother Simeon calls, dropping his empty boltgun. One of the Blood God’s armoured disciples falls before the last of the weapon’s wrath, only for another berserker to come straight at Simeon with an axe. Bringing his gladius out of its sheath, my battle-brother’s blade is smacked aside by the raging action of the Chaos Space Marine’s chain weapon. The last few bolt-rounds from my Mark II go into buying Simeon a few moments of time, my offering glancing off the World Eater’s pauldron and helm, knocking the Traitor to one side and off balance.

‘The Mausoleum roof!’ I yell to Skase. ‘It’s the safest place for a pick-up.’

Brother Eliam dies horribly before me, the thrashing axes of several World Eaters brothers hacking his armoured body apart. With his blood across my face, I send the butt of my empty pistol across the faceplate of the nearest of his berserker killers, only to have the hallowed weapon smashed out of my grip with the flat of his axe. I turn. As I do, I unclip my chainsword and bring the flared blade to gory life. Bringing the blade around and up, I chew through the World Eater from the navel to the throat.

‘Novah can’t raise the Gauntlet,’ Skase insists, his gladius blade having found its way past the chainsword and into the madman’s neck. As he twists the gladius there is a crunch and the World Eater’s grip goes slack, silencing his weapon.

‘Still the best holdpoint,’ I bawl as my chainsword tangles momentarily with a World Eater’s axe. ‘Thick walls, and Sister Sapphira claims that the ceremonial gate is an adamantine alloy.’

The bastard-sons of Angron are among us. World Eaters pour into the cloistrium, wolfishly drawn down on us by the stench of our loyalty. Bolt-rounds don’t stop them. Grenades don’t stop them. They push on fearlessly through our bottlenecks and gauntlets, stepping through the mangled corpses of their Traitor brethren to get to us. Each maniac Angel sustains the grievous wounds of two of his loyalist kind. They hear nothing but pain and see nothing but victims. They feel… nothing. Duty is not enough for them. They live for battle, but even that seems insufficient to satisfy the kill-wired berserkers. They want our blood. They want our skulls for their Ruinous lord and nothing, it seems, is going to stop them.

Squad Whip Joachim fights for his life – a gladius in each gauntlet, a World Eater on each flank. One of the Traitors has been blessed by his merciless god with a bone-spiked club on one arm. He swings the flesh-weapon at the Excoriator but hits his mindless compatriot by accident. The Chaos Space Marine turns on his afflicted battle-brother with his axe, and moments later the madmen are fighting each other. This is a small mercy since already there is another of Angron’s supersons swinging his ravenous blade at the squad whip.

I feel the moment. I feel the city slipping away on the regicide board, and then I feel the pieces swept from the board by an angry fist. It’s the heavy flamer. I hear it chug, gasp and run dry. I can hardly be surprised. Sister Casiope has roasted a legion of slave-soldiers in the alleyways leading into the cloistrium. As the flamer falls silent, the Sister unhooks the support straps and shrugs off the weapon, bringing the half-clip she has left in her boltgun to bear. We all feel the heavy weapon’s absence, the beginning of an end. Even though the alleyways are still flame-filled mayhem, cultists and Blood Crusaders sprint through the inferno – blades held high. Bubbling and crackling, writhed in orange tongues of hot fury, the slave-soldiers of Khorne make their doomed assault.

The palatine and her Sisters drop the killers with merciful rounds, but as the bodies begin to trip, tumble and burn, others run the gauntlet of the firestorm alley. Blood-red daemons of the Ruinous pantheon sprint horribly through the flames. They look similar to the herald-thing I faced in the Obelisk, but no two of the monstrosities look truly alike. They leap and land on the Sisters with arachnid precision, gutting and stabbing the Adepta Sororitas with supernaturally frenzied thrusts of their hellforged blades. Flashes of light and the bark of Sapphira’s bolt pistols force the monsters from her prone form. As she blasts away, one of the things thrashes this way and that. Rounds tear off horn-tips, claws and a foot, but it doesn’t stop the beast leaping straight back on the Sister and savaging her again.

Crackling energy suddenly leaps across the open space of the cloistrium. The searing soul lightning had passed through the bodies of several slave-soldiers crowding a side-alley. The mortals explode on contact, their torsos detonating in a fine shower of blood-spittle. The silver arc of warp-drawn power slams into the lesser daemon, as it huddles over the Sister of Battle, and throws it into the far wall. It struggles, thrashes and claws against the stream of power until it too is vaporised in an explosive gore-cloud of red mist.

Epistolary Melmoch and Chaplain Shadrath burst into the cloistrium from the alleyway. Melmoch isn’t smiling. He looks tired and drawn – his eyes sunken and his talent a burden. He carries his force scythe in both hands, discharging another soul-scalding burst of energy at the daemons picking over the remains of the dead Adepta Sororitas. Second Whip Azareth is behind them, plugging the alleyway with single discharges from his boltgun. Priming his last grenade, the second whip bounces it down the alleyway at their rabid pursuers. The alleyway flashes and collapses in a rolling dustbank of masonry and pulverised rockcrete.

My heart lifts at the sight of the three Excoriators, but the reinforcement is not enough to save us. More howling World Eaters barge into the cloistrium, their pauldrons clashing in an effort to push past one another and get to us first. I choose my targets and favour manoeuvres for economy. My chainsword flicks and jabs, cleaves and slices. World Eaters get my attention for barely a moment. Just enough for the thrashing teeth of my blade to turn their own aside, take off a gauntlet at the wrist or excavate a hole in the chest. For a moment I imagine the horror before the walls of the Imperial Palace, the onslaught of the World Eaters and the lives they must have taken with their devastating combination of martial skill, fearlessness and bottomless hatred. Few of my opponents drop to the floor. I don’t have the spare seconds it would take to finish them, and before I have turned to face another Traitor Space Marine, his berserker brother – who had the attention of my chainblade moments before – is back on his feet and hacking away.

The hellish melee has forced us back together. Skase and I find ourselves back to back, slapping aside angry blades coming for each other’s plate while at the same time negotiating the murderous thrusts and slashes of multiple World Eaters assailants. The moment that began with Sister Casiope’s flamer continues to unravel. I feel the bite of a chainaxe through my thigh plate. The teeth of some other unseen weapon glances off my shoulder plate, ripping up the ceramite but failing to reach flesh. Brother Simeon’s serf Amos runs before me towards the body of his fallen master. A hulking World Eaters champion steps on Simeon’s armoured form and pulls free the daemon battleaxe he buried there. I see Amos hacked cleanly in half by the soul-hungry weapon.

As Amos falls aside in two pieces, Chaplain Shadrath appears – his midnight plate glistening with the serf’s blood. Holding his crozius arcanum up like a religious icon he commands the hulk and his cursed weapon back. The monstrous World Eater seems uncertain for a moment – a trait I have yet to experience in my Traitor opponents. Suddenly furious with itself, the battleaxe comes up over its head and down on Shadrath. The Chaplain knocks it to one side with his crozius, which seems to glow with a spiritual luminescence, before smashing at the giant’s ancient plate with his sacred staff of office.

World Eaters Space Marines continue to flood the cloistrium, each more blood-hungry than the last. I can hear the gunning of chainblades echoing in the ambulatory beyond, indicating even more of the Traitors, eager to cut up what is left of us. Epistolary Melmoch’s unnatural powers continue to be a boon, dwindling though they might be with the Librarian’s building exhaustion. Streaks of soul lightning keep a gathering horde of lesser hellions at bay, the furious monsters seemingly drawn down on Palatine Sapphira and her affronting badges of faith. Sapphira is run through and can barely get up, but Melmoch continues to fight over her struggling form, his force scythe sweeping the space about them, the psychically-charged weapon sparking off hellblades and lopping off daemon limbs.

Brother Novah stands at the centre of the chaos. The Adeptus Astartes holds the company standard proud and high, a heart-stabbing provocation to the World Eaters degenerates roaring their way into the cloistrium. Novah clutches his boltgun in his other hand and appears to be the only Excoriator with any ammunition left for the bastard warriors of Khorne. They come at Novah – at the standard, really – screaming their obscene oaths and swinging their raging axes. Second Whip Azareth goes down under the blitz of blades, pieces of the Excoriator flying out of the frenzy. Novah puts bolt blasts into several Chaos Space Marines, but the irresistible draw of the standard drives the mindless warriors on, World Eaters running straight into the blazing path of the Excoriator’s murderous gunfire.

It is a massacre. I don’t know what I expected. The carnage about me is all the Cholercaust came to Certus-Minor to do. The swift and bloody annihilation of the Blood God’s enemies. A world, dead in a day. The flames have died down in the alleyways and wall-to-wall cultist warriors race for our skulls. Red, reptilian hellhounds bound over their number. The beasts spit and hiss, their brazen claws tearing up the cobbles as the daemon mongrels run at us. A pack of the monsters spreads out across the cloistrium, the black leathery sail-skin of their neck frills erect and aggressive. They sink their fang-filled jaws into our ceramite, tearing at legs and hanging off our arms. Two of the beasts snap at Brother Boaz, causing the Excoriator to swipe at them with his blade. He slashes the first beast across its horn-buds and scaly face. The second is saved by the spiked, brass collar around its neck. As the gladius sparks off the collar, the moment’s distraction costs the Excoriator – a mangled World Eater getting back off the ground and to his berserker’s feet. I call out, but by the time Boaz turns, the Traitor Legionary’s chainsword has already taken off the Excoriator’s head.

Fury builds inside me. I feel something dark and unseen wrestling for my soul. My anger and frustration feed it. A question without words chimes through my being like the clash of two blades. A proposal. A dark bargain. The unrivalled power of my enemies. The fearless, mindless instincts of a predator – with all the bloodthirsty prowess and indestructibility that comes with them – in exchange for my surrender. Not to my enemy, who deserves my enmity, my skill and my blade, but to my rage. I see the World Eaters – once the Emperor’s Angels – live the benefits of such surrender. I envy their power and certitude. I see their blades butcher the supermen under my command and wonder what I might be able to do with such fury. Might I, the Scourge, be able to turn the tide of battle? My boundless wrath and the desire to avenge my brothers, forged into a weapon. My body a raw lump of brazen metal – able to withstand anything the enemy might throw at me. My mind an instrument of vengeance. My arm the executor of divine will…

A chainaxe buzzes past my head. There is blood. I think I might have just lost an ear. A World Eater, with a brass, mechanical claw for an arm, snaps out for my head. I retract, but the Traitor’s brazen pincer snaps closed about my chainsword – stopping it dead. The claw cuts through the weapon, rendering it a tip-sheared, chugging mess. I abandon the weapon, slipping my Scourge’s gladius from its scabbard. I spin the sword around the index digit of my left gauntlet before bringing the weapon down on the claw. The blade rings off the obscene bionic attachment. The World Eater’s axe comes for me again. Claw. Axe. Claw. Axe. Each time, the gladius drives them aside. I know I can kill this monstrous combat machine. I have seen his death flash before my eyes. I know the fury I will have to unleash in order to end him. In order to end all of them. I am a moment away from damnation and I know it. A scream brings me back to my senses.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Bethesda. My lictor, Oren, is on the floor, two of the daemon hounds feasting on the serf. A third has the tips of its teeth around Bethesda’s ankle, dragging the absterge away. My dark desire to kill the World Eater is greater than ever. Somehow I resist it. Instead of driving my blade through the gore-speckled degenerate, I turn in close and slam my shoulder into the Traitor’s chest. He gets my elbow across his faceplate before I grab the heavy metal claw and heave the Chaos Space Marine over my pack and pauldron. He crashes into the cobbles.

I watch Bethesda screaming, her body dragged away through the gore, the whites of her eyes bright and pleading. Without ammunition and the serf too far away for my blade, there is only one thing I can do. Slapping my gauntlet down on my belt I find ‘the purge’ where I left it, coiled over the hilt of my other blade. Like my plate, the whip’s braided length is smeared in blood-drizzle. I crack the length of the leather flail. It fails to wrap itself around her wrist as I might have hoped and instead snaps against the cobbled floor nearby. This should not surprise me. ‘The purge’ is not exactly the weapon of choice for an Adeptus Astartes. In her desperation and fear, the absterge strikes out with her fingers and snatches at the tip of the weapon with her pale fingers. She yelps in agony as I pull on its length, hauling her back towards me. The fiendhound bites further up the serf’s leg and scrabbles against the stone floor with its brass talons.

I feel an immediate pressure on my leg. Looking down at the World Eater on the floor I see that he has his claw around my knee. The bionic shears through my plate under hydraulic insistence and I feel its crushing attentions on my flesh. Turning the gladius back around in my left hand, I stab down into the Chaos Space Marine’s shoulder. Slipping the tip of the blade between the monstrous bionic attachment and the warped flesh of the Angel, I thrash back and forth with the sword hilt like a gearstick, cutting through tendons and hydraulic piping. As the claw releases me I bring up my boot and stamp down on the World Eater’s extravagant helm. The helmet twists and something snaps. I hope it is the Traitor’s neck.

I heave at the whip’s length, but two further daemon beasts have sunk their maws into Bethesda’s flailing legs. They drag at her, and my boots skid across the cloistrium floor. She screams again. The blood-smeared ‘purge’ begins to slip through my power-armoured grip.

‘Melmoch!’ I call. I hate to. Palatine Sapphira’s body has been snatched by fleet-of-claw blood-heralds. The Epistolary doesn’t even know, since he is surrounded by cultists and slave-soldiers, which he cuts down like a reaper with his force scythe. The psyker spots me and my desperate tug of war with the hounds. He angles the shaft of the scythe at the beast, and with his kindly face now a hollow mask of exhaustion, desperation and fury, the Librarian sends an energy storm of arcing power at the hounds.

Impossibly the destructive stream deviates and crackles harmlessly about the savage monsters. Furious, the Librarian sends another blast of soul lightning at the beasts, but it too sears wide. The spiked collars the creatures are wearing glow with an unnatural energy, seemingly protecting the hellhounds from Melmoch’s psychic barrage. The whip slips from my fingers and the monsters drag the shrieking serf into a narrow alley.

The terrible cacophony of battle grows. Skase, Chaplain Shadrath and I do what we can to prevent the storm front of mulching axes and Traitor bolt-fire from turning us into Escharan chum. Melmoch sweeps the sizzling blade of his force scythe repeatedly through the meat-grinding crush of the cultist crowds, slicing through torsos and daemonflesh in a desperate attempt to hold the Cholercaustians back. Novah drops his empty boltgun, and his gladius joins ours, the company standard held high above our heads. Only Squad Whip Joachim fights on alone in the centre ground, beating back three rapid World Eaters with his remaining blade and a steel nerve alone.

A shockwave of revulsion and otherworldly dread passes through me. A face has appeared at an ambulatory entrance. As the cultists thin, a colossal hand grasps the brick corner of a block-domicilia. Muscular fingers of daemonflesh terminate in metal claws, and the tough hide of the palm is etched with blasphemous runes and symbols. Heavy chain adorns the wrist, and moving up behind it, peering through the ambulatory gap and into the god-pleasing bloodshed of the cloistrium, is the face of a greater daemon, old as murder and ugly as an eternity of sin. It’s all ferocity-taut flesh, flared nostrils, bared tusks and canines. I can feel its destructive power in eyes that burn with the infinitely-focused heat of hatred. Amongst the din of battle I did not even notice the distant thunder of the great being’s approach.

The long reach of its palm goes out and it seizes Joachim from behind, its fingers wrapping around the struggling Excoriator, his arms and his weapon. With ease, the greater daemon squeezes. Joachim screeches. The squad whip’s pack and plate crumple, and with nowhere else to go, the Angel’s flesh and blood erupt from the daemon’s tight-closed fist in a fountain of unspeakable horror. I die a little inside myself. It ends here, it seems. Drowned in cultist mayhem while being hacked apart by the Traitor World Eaters, with daemons picking over our bones and the fearful semblance of the Blood God himself looking on with primordial satisfaction.

This would be a distracting notion enough, amongst the bolt-rounds and roaring teeth of chainaxes – but then the sepulchre wall behind me explodes.

Sharp fragments of ancient brick, stone and mortar flew across the cloistrium like shrapnel. The remainder of the sepulchre wall fell away in large pieces, revealing the interior of the repository to the stars. Chewing up the rubble and masonry on the polished sepulchre floor, Punisher rolled out on its rugged tracks. The Thunderfire cannon’s quad-barrelled muzzles smoked with the demolishing blast, and the targeting reticula mounted on its back blazed with the life of its machine-spirit through the billowing dust cloud.

During the initial assault, with Punisher having received its locking and loading libations, ritual targeting protocols, prayers and appeasements from Frater Astrotechnicus Dancred, the Thunderfire cannon had dutifully held its part of the perimeter. Dancred had attached a caterpillar flatbed trailer to the itinerant cannon to aid self-loading and assigned Punisher its own part of the battlement to defend. Unconcerned by fleeing cemetery worlders, dying Guardsmen and the horror of otherworldly threats, the machine prioritised enemy targets according to a simple equation based upon size and closing distance. This had seen the Thunderfire cannon through the horror of the immaterial assault and helped the ordnance hold the line all but alone on its eastern section of the battlement.

Following the invasion, with no further catechisa or protocol forthcoming in the wake of Techmarine Dancred’s death, the cannon had merely continued its still, silent vigil of the eastern battlement. Dancred had provided the cannon’s machine-spirit with modus-contingencia, including an inner-city ‘hunt and destroy’ protocol, should the battlement be overrun in the initial assault. Since the perimeter had held, Punisher simply waited – quiet and unnoticed by forces re-fortifying the section in preparation for the incoming Cholercaust. Charnel Guardsmen, Sisters of Battle and Excoriators assumed that the cannon was dead, like the Techmarine it had taken to following like a faithful hound.

With the resurgence of hostilities on the eastern perimeter, the Punisher returned to automotive and explosive life. As the Cholercaust swamped battlements all over the city, including the one upon which the cannon was unsuspectingly stationed, Punisher fell to its ‘hunt and destroy’ duties in the small, sloped streets and alleyways of the cemetery world city.

As the dust cleared, fresh targets presented themselves in profusion. Heretics. Daemonic entities. Enemy Adeptus Astartes. The completion of a cold equation prompted Punisher’s quad-barrel to start cycling and its trailer feed system to begin loading the rotating breeches. A large etherform attempting to enter the cloistrium received Punisher’s initial attention. The creature received an explosive shell in the face as well as several follow-up shots that momentarily drove it back to a less threatening range. Lesser entities attempted to rush the cannon, but the Punisher stopped them in their tracks with a succession of volleys at the kill zone before the cannon, turning the creatures into scraps of smouldering daemonflesh. The cannon targeted the foundations of a nearby building in order to economically stall the advance of multiple heretic signatures. The old hermitage wall to which the foundation belonged collapsed, burying the heretics in an avalanche of stone as well as temporarily blocking off the entry point, which the Thunderfire cannon’s machine-spirit had swiftly designated as tactically significant.

The enemy Adeptus Astartes closed with the cannon, but Punisher detected only small arms and close-quarter weaponry. The Thunderfire cannon sent a rhythmic barrage at the advancing contingent, blasting power-armoured bodies apart and around the confines of the cloistrium. The assault defied the machine-spirit’s calculations, and Punisher found itself turning its barrels time and again back to the enemy Adeptus Astartes, who even with body parts blown off, continued in their attempts to reach the cannon.

As the Thunderfire cannon blasted the cloistrium to rock dust, it felt the surface contact of a gauntlet pat it on its ceramite exterior shell. Several Adeptus Astartes in Chapter colours were exiting the cloistrium up a stairwell situated in the building through which the Thunderfire cannon had just passed. Discounting the gesture as non-threatening, and confirming plate markings as those belonging to Excoriators company command, the cannon decided to hold its current station and carry out the spiritual necessities of its ‘hunt and destroy’ protocol.

‘Anything from Padre Gnarls?’ Commander Heiss of the Apotheon demanded. She sat on the edge of her throne, her slender hands forming a pyramid over her nose and mouth. Midshipman Randt had a vox-speaker to his ear. He shook his head. The small bridge was silent. Ensigns clung grimly to pulpit rails, listening to the sound of murder and mayhem in distant parts of the ship. Even sickly servitors had stopped chattering their lingua-technis. Deck lamps flickered on and off, and pict-screens displayed ghostly static. The lancet viewport had a spidery crack running through it from the Apotheon’s last ramming attempt.

‘Last transmission reported boarders on all decks,’ Randt said. ‘Nothing from the padre or the boatswain since then.’

‘Gun batteries?’

‘All gun crews assigned to the repelling parties.’

‘Enginarium?’

‘The enginseer and his menials have barricaded themselves in. They confirm critical damage to the mainstage engines due to sabotage and vandalism.’

‘What do we have?’

‘Life support – for now,’ the midshipman informed her. ‘Vox-comms, auspectia and targeting all still on line. Limited manoeuvrability through docking thrusters and, of course, the lance… But that depends upon the enginarium holding out.’

Heiss nodded slowly.

The lone defence monitor had made good on its promise to take the fight to the invading Cholercaust fleet. The Apotheon’s lance had visited crippling damage on a score of bloated troop transports, Adeptus Astartes frigates and daemonic vessels, as well as destroying outright an Infidel-class raider displaying traitor colours. The monitor had also managed to damage several other craft with strikes from her reinforced Voss prow. The larger vessels, including a Traitor battle-barge, paid the Apotheon no heed. No Cholercaustian would offend their Blood God with distant and cowardly thunder from their cannons. Nearly the entire Chaos fleet was now in equatorial low orbit around Certus-Minor, having disgorged their bays and freight compartments of all description of overladen landing craft. Several smaller ships, piratical marauders and assault boats had managed to acquire the defence monitor, deploying grapnels and hull-mounted harpoons to entangle the Apotheon before cutting her open and flooding the Adeptus Ministorum vessel with cannibalistic killers.

Heiss jumped as a solitary impact struck the command deck bulkhead. They had been expecting it and still it had made her heart leap in her chest. She had ordered the bulkhead sealed off and put two members of the Naval security team on the door. It seemed ridiculous now as the two flak-armoured figures backed from the thunder building on the bulkhead with their lascarbines clutched to their sides. The boarders had reached the bridge – which meant that they must have finished their slaughter spree and picking through the innards of the repelling parties. The bulkhead was designed to resist the void in the event of a hull breach and so had a fair chance of holding the fists, rifle butts and improvised rams of the cannibal marauders. Still, all eyes remained on the metal and pressure wheel of the door. All but Midshipman Randt’s. He was looking at the Apotheon’s long range auspectral scope, and up at the cracked lancet bridge port. For a few moments he could not speak. He simply looked back and forth between scope and armaplas.

‘Commander…’

Heiss looked at him, and then at what he was looking at through the viewport. She got up out of her throne.

‘W-what is it?’ she murmured. Others turned and saw.

The prow of the defence monitor was drifting around from the creamy curvature of the cemetery world to the darkness of the void, where the Keeler Comet was making its unnatural pass, the bloody smear of the comet’s tail tracing its almost sentient change of direction and parabolic turn around the planet. This, like the colossal fleet that had been following the wandering comet like an omen, had been startling enough. Out beyond the melt-streaming surface of the bloody berg of ice, rock and metal, though, was something truly shocking. A colossal vessel. Larger than anything Heiss had witnessed over Ultrageddon, Cypra Mundi or Port Maw. Everyone on the bridge stared, and for a moment the horror that awaited them behind the bulkhead was forgotten.

‘Dimensions…’

The midshipman had already checked. ‘Estimated six hundred and seventy cubic kilometres.’

Heiss shook her head. It was bigger than the Keeler Comet, bigger than Certus-Minor’s dwarf moons.

‘What is it?’ Randt marvelled. ‘A hulk?’

‘Magnification!’ the commander snapped, and Randt had the portside lancet bring up the craft in greater detail. Beyond its sheer size, the glorious architecture of the craft was breathtaking. Colossal lancets, arches and stained-glass observation ports. The clean lines of Gothic design and detail: mullions, transoms, fan vaults, spandrels, quatrefoils and clerestory layering. Void steeples and etherspires reached up from great halls, cathedrex and monasterial superstructures all nestled between sensoria, the elongated barrels of long-range lances, nova cannon and squat plasma cannonades. The magnificent weaponry, as well as the gargantuan Scartix engine coils upon which the structures and emplacements sat, was long lost to the Imperium. Cutting the behemoth in four were solar wings of burnished adamantium, giving the vessel the bold and unusual design of two Imperial aquilas – one slotted within the other. Four armoured wings. Four engine coil talons. A monasterial body of supra-Gothic splendour. Four sculpted heads of aquiline majesty, between which the vast craft hid a far larger weapon, the yawning mouth of an enormous torpedo launch tube.

‘Closer…’ Heiss ordered and the screen rendered maximum magnification.

Close up the craft’s Gothic magnificence assumed the macabre and chilling status of a ruin. The vessel seemed completely without power, as evidenced in the expanse of black glass, the tall dark arches and empty lancet ports. The vessel was running without lamps or nav-strobes and seemed devoid of the kind of pods, hump shuttles and barges that might be expected to swarm around a structure of its size. The cold stone and metal of its massive construction was stunning from a distance, but close up was gaunt and weathered. The stone was cracked, granular and disintegrating, the victim of an eternity of etherical erosion. The solar inlaying was shattered, and the great adamantium expanse and detail of the wings was tarnished with even greater age. In places, it seemed the only thing holding the integrity of the structure together were the growths of warpsidium and immaterial deposits spreading out from the nooks like a sterile cancer. Stranger still, the craft wouldn’t have been visible at all against the backdrop of the empty space were it not for the spectral fire that burned across every surface and suffused the derelict vessel with a golden, phantasmal glow.

‘Chaos reinforcements?’ Randt asked finally.

Heiss snorted at the thought that the Cholercaust actually required reinforcing.

‘Looks like an Adeptus Astartes vessel. A monastery or star fortress,’ she replied. ‘Any signature readings, identicoda, hell – a nameplate?’

The midshipman moved along the runebank and put his eye to a monocular viewer. He double checked his reading with a nearby cogitator. ‘Nothing.’ he said. ‘She doesn’t match any known records. As far as the Imperium is concerned, she doesn’t exist.

The incessant hammering on the bulkhead door grew as the corridor beyond filled with Khornate raiders. A nearby servitor’s jaw suddenly went to work on a stream of code-chatter that drew Randt to its runescreen.

‘I have a power signature,’ the midshipman called. ‘It’s arming torpedoes.’

The commander sat back down in her throne. ‘Ready thrusters for evasive manoeuvres.’

‘Aye, commander.’

‘Charge the lance for return fire.’

‘Aye.’

The bridge watched the ruined star fortress as the eyes of the colossal aquila heads lit up. The dark orbits of the colossal structures were vents for the great torpedo tube running between them, and they flared brightly as the spectral gleam of a warhead erupted from the star fortress’s primary weapon. Heiss watched the ghostly torpedo fly straight and true towards Certus-Minor. As it streaked away from the mobile monastery, she watched the aurulent ghostfire of its appearance suddenly intensify to a halo of plasmic propulsion.

‘Did you see that?’ Randt said. Heiss nodded in silence, heart in her mouth, as she watched an illusion sear into reality and that reality rocket into the side of the Keeler Comet.

‘God-Emperor…’ she mumbled, but it had already happened.

The Keeler Comet, which had been traversing the galaxy for aeons and had last passed through the Imperium ten thousand years before, exploded. The flash of the torpedo’s impact picked out the irregular shape of the Ruinous object before the destructive force of detonation ripped through the body, wracking it to its frozen core and smashing it into a billion astral splinters. Within moments the comet was no longer there, just the bloody reminder of its void-smearing tail. Instead, the comet had become a rapidly tumbling apocalyptic heavenfall of blood-black ice shards, enormous rock fragments and rare metal nuggets, accelerating towards Certus-Minor at the speed of a bolt-round. The violently transformed Keeler had changed direction once again, this time blasted towards the cemetery world’s all-embracing, gravitational pull.

Heiss and Randt stared at each other in horror. The flesh-hungry marauders at the bulkhead were forgotten. None of them would survive the coming armageddon.

‘Thrusters, now!’ Heiss shouted. The Apotheon might not have very much manoeuvrability, but what it did have the commander intended to exploit in getting the lance in position to blast incoming fragments of ice and debris on course to hit the vulnerable ship.

‘Enemy vessels disengaging,’ Randt reported.

Heiss took a deep breath of satisfaction. The pirate captains of the raiders and armed freighters that had grappled the Apotheon had no intention of weathering the coming storm with the defence monitor, and were doing their best to haul off. The Cholercaust fleet below, stationed in low orbit, would not be so fortunate. Unlike the marauders, they would not see catastrophe coming. The ravenous raiders swarming the blood-splattered decks of the Apotheon had been abandoned by their Chaos captains and continued in ignorance to breach the bridge bulkhead. The degenerates would not be denied their last supper and communion with the dark lord of blood and vengeance. They would get through the bulkhead eventually and when they did, it would be carnage on the command deck.

‘Randt,’ Heiss called.

‘Commander?’ the midshipman answered, a tremor in his voice.

‘Get me the Adeptus Astartes.’

‘The Excoriators haven’t been responding to our vox-hailing,’ Randt told her. Heiss could imagine why.

‘Get me somebody. Anybody. The Excoriators have to know what is happening up here.’

Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh hunted like an animal through the lonely maze of ambulatories and tight alleys that was the cemetery world city. Like a predator of the deep, a clawed fiend stalking through the night or a mythic Fenrisian wolf, blood-tracking its doomed prey. He felt his ancient skin tighten over his blood-engorged, muscular frame. His brute biceps, globed shoulders and rockrete-hard chest pressed against the constraints of his World Eaters plate. He could feel the Blood God’s blessing – slabs of bronze, threading through the engineered tissue of his superhuman body like streaks of fat. Part flesh, part unfeeling lump of brazen indestructibility, Umbragg had served his master well.

With his warband, the Clysm, the World Eaters champion had fought on a thousand worlds, butchered human and alien alike in the name of wanton carnage, and brought glory to Khorne’s name through his prosecution of crusades, the slaughter of the Dark Prince of Pleasure’s perverse followers and the taking of skulls on an obscene scale. He had killed at the great Doombreed’s side, slayed with Skarbrand, murdered his own with Khârn the Betrayer and fought in every Black Crusade to ever strike fear into the weak heart of the Imperium. He had served with his daemon-father, the Primarch Angron himself, during the Dominion of Fire, on war-torn Armageddon and before the walls of the Imperial Palace on doomed Terra. Now, he served the Pilgrim – daemon prince and Right Claw of Khorne – leader of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade, who would take the Blood God’s disciples back to Ancient Terra and finish what they had started.

Blood-furious, Umbragg slowed to a trembling halt, his chainaxes like two silent scorpion claws held at his sides. They trembled not through fear – his scarred brain knew nothing of the emotion, bar what he saw others feel in his maniac presence – but through fury. His body quaked. His gore-rusted plate rattled. Elsewhere in the city, his brothers had found their quarry. He heard bolt-fire and the scream of axes. He felt the death of innocents only streets away and glory stripped from him by lesser World Eaters. Warband brothers of the Anointed, the Crimson Covenant and Sons of Skalathrax had killed and been killed in a battle that had stricken the killer-crowded city like a blood clot to the heart.

In common with all of the Cholercaust’s victories, the cemetery world had fallen swiftly and easily. Such a god-honouring burden was the World Eaters’ to shoulder. They were the victims of their own vicious success. This was why the Pilgrim had led them on the blood comet’s path. Only the heavily fortified worlds of Segmentum Solar and Terra itself held the challenge Khorne’s servants demanded. Somewhere on the cemetery world, however, the Emperor’s Angels were surviving, and this filled Umbragg’s flesh with simultaneous rage and desire. The False Emperor’s pawns had to be destroyed, but they had to die at Umbragg’s hand. Only He of the Brazen Flesh deserved such a sacrifice.

His murderous instincts had led him away from the havoc and carnage, out through the cobbled, labyrinthine slope-streets of a district already torched and sundered. The tall walls of chapels, hermitages and domiciles smoked and curled with flame. Blood splattered the streets in acts of violence past enjoyed. Guardsmen with antiquated weaponry, thin flak and dressed in sombre and ridiculous ceremonial robes littered the gutters. The ease of their butchery was evident. Umbragg felt the fluttering heartbeat of a dying Certusian nearby.

A mindless slave-soldier, naked and smeared from head to foot in gore, burst from an alley and raced across the cobbles with a nail-spiked club. By the time Umbragg had stalked up to the scene, the feral world cult conscript had beaten the brains from the broken body of the Guardsman. Umbragg felt the mortal’s heart hammer in his chest and then stop. He savoured the moment, but it only served to stoke his fury and remind him of the emptiness inside his own chest that should have been filled with the murderous delight of gluttonous life-taking and the slaughter of heroes. Without even bringing the chainaxe to life, the World Eater bludgeoned the slave-soldier into the ground with the razored weight of the weapon.

The feral worlder died instantly. His heart stopped with sudden efficiency. Beyond, an Adeptus Astartes hung from the shattered, skeletal metalwork of a burned-out building. His helmetless face was black with blood and the severity of mob-issued beating. His plate had been rent and punctured. An arm was missing. The clean pits of bolt-rounds mottled the ivory of his armour. The emblage of his Chapter could just be made out on his axe-cleaved shoulder plate. The Excoriators. Umbragg snorted. Dorn’s breed. A hateful derision started building in his twisted mind, but it died moments later. The World Eater’s instincts had not brought him to the eye of the storm for nothing, to savour the abhorrent calm of aftermath. He felt the Blood God’s eye on him, judging this wasted time. Here, away from the rush of daemoniacal destruction that the Cholercaust was bringing to other parts of the city.

Umbragg bridled. On the light breeze, he felt the fearful beating of other hearts. Out beyond the ancient stone of the walls, the burning buildings and the raging multitudes of tainted mortals, armoured slaughterkin and daemon madness. Amongst the overpowering stench of the tomb, the stale tang of old rot and the death-saturated scent of grave dust, Umbragg detected the sweet perfume of life and the living. There were mortals here – thousands of them – hidden from the inevitable and hoarding their skulls. Like a carnivore, enraptured at the prospect of fresh hunting grounds, Umbragg stood, his fists tight about his axe shafts; the primordial darkness of his brain struggling with what he could sense but could not see; his blood coursing with rage at the prospect of plots, scheming and trickery.

The World Eater did not see the ghost behind him. The darkness of a shadowy alcove that become a silhouette in the street smoke. The silhouette that became armoured detail. The revenant that became reality at the Traitor’s back. Umbragg never saw the rachidian horror of bone-moulded plate or the auric flame that danced off the ceramite’s bitter, black surface. He never saw the rent faceplate of the damned legionnaire appear over his brain-speckled shoulder, nor the burn of unnatural life glowing within the skull-socket of the being within. All the berserker heard was the nasty chatter of teeth before the cursed edge of the legionnaire’s short sword slid across the World Eater’s armoured neck. Passing through the plate like an apparition, the blade assumed its lethality within, its keen edge – honed to eternity – slicing through the World Eater’s brazen flesh and cutting his throat to the bone.

Chainaxes clattered to the cobbles. The World Eater crashed to the floor in a heavy metal avalanche of ceramite and hatred. His killer had gone – vanished back into the smoke and ether from whence it came. Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh – World Eater, Traitor, mass-murderer and champion of Khorne – bled his remaining life into the gutter. Alone, the infamous monster and warrior-tyrant died an unknown death, his warped hearts beating their thunderous last in a street so small and insignificant to the rest of the galaxy that it didn’t even have a name.

Zachariah Kersh could have little idea what had started in the streets below. The corpus-captain stomped along the roofside, his boots smashing through the tiles and punching into the lead and strutage beneath. The Excoriators had made good on their escape from the cloistrium, ascending through the floors of the sepulchre before smashing their way up into the roof using their fists and blades. A messy climb had taken them up through the balconies of a block-domicilia where, out of the range of pistol-fire, the Adeptus Astartes had watched the great Punisher silenced.

The honoured war machine had done the bloody work of ten immortals, blasting behemoths, turning cultist hordes to flesh-spatter and driving back hell-spawned daemons. It was the World Eaters that finally beat the cannon. It took a fair number of their brethren with its cold, calculating barrage of rhythmic havoc. The cloistrium became a smouldering pit of twisted ceramite and flesh that refused to die. World Eaters stormed the Thunderfire cannon’s position, crawling, limbless, overcome with fury and frustration. Bastard-brothers of the Traitor Legion – attracted by the roar of battle and the copper-tinge of death on the air – threw themselves into the chaos, climbing over their wounded brethren who filled the ordnance-pounded crater the space had become. Other warbands visited their fury on adjoining walls, smashing through old brick and mortar with their hammers, axes and shoulders. It was through such an opening that heretic Angels of the Crimson Covenant gained access to the rear of the sepulchre and came up behind the itinerant cannon, hacking into its armoured shell and ammunition feed with their chainaxes.

Kersh leapt from the edge of the domicilia and across the street to the mezzanine of an opposing tower-obsequium. The mezzanine floor cracked and shuddered as Melmoch followed – the Epistolary looking like pale hell as he demolished a stained-glass window with his force scythe and climbed through. Novah, still clutching the company standard, helped the grievously injured Chaplain on the take-off. Kersh grabbed Shadrath’s armour where a World Eater’s battleaxe had opened up his plate, and helped him to the window. Beyond, the Epistolary smashed and clambered his way up through the tower.

With Brother Novah and Skase across, the Scourge risked a glance down at the street below. The roaring rose up to meet him. All he saw were the maniac multitudes. Thoroughfares and posternways crowded with cultist fighters, World Eaters and their armoured renegade cousins stomping barbarously through the throng, and daemons crawling up walls and bounding fiendishly between ledges.

Obsequa City was a testament to insanity. Churches, chancelleries and frater houses were raging infernos, lighting up the necroplex beyond – still a wild ocean of charging heretics and Chaos cultists. The night sky flashed with the occasional streak of lance-fire, although to Kersh’s knowledge only the Adeptus Ministorum defence monitor Apotheon had remained.

‘Corpus-captain!’ Novah called, prompting the Scourge to duck in through the smashed window and follow the trail of destruction up through the tower. Every rooftop and steeple was an opportunity to climb higher. Every box-stoop and maintenance portico took a superhuman leap of faith, across the narrow spaces of cultist-filled streets and quads. Gargoyle-encrusted walls, drain conduits and masonry scaffolding helped the Excoriators work up through the steep, climbing architecture of the city and on towards the imposing structure and distinctive dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum.

As the Adeptus Astartes edged around cupolas, ran along apexes and braved the vertiginous heights of gable walls and slender diameters of bridging supports, they could hear the Cholercaustians below, screaming up the cobbled passages and stairwells to get ahead of them. Where slave-soldiers ascended the fussy architecture of the heights in their path, Kersh and Skase had stamping boots and the finger-slicing tips of their blades waiting. Daemons were a much bigger problem, with the horned heralds of the Blood God’s pantheon forced to leap further and further as Epistolary Melmoch demolished spires and walkways behind the escaping Excoriators. A huge flock of winged furies had taken to circling the towertops surrounding the Mausoleum, occasionally forcing the Space Marines to take cover in alcoves or press themselves flat to roofs in order to escape a swarm-mauling of wings and daggered claws. The monstrous myriad plunged through minarets and thrashed their thunderbolt course through belfries and cathedral lunette windows. Kersh saw blasted specimens fall from the flock as they ritually circled an abbey tower on the outskirts of the city, las-fire cutting daemons down with each pass. With horror the Scourge realised that one of Keturah’s sniper Scouts had escaped attention and had maintained his isolated defence against the countless masses.

As he hauled himself up a steeple maintenance ladder, Kersh noticed that the almost clockwork circling of the daemon flock had failed to materialise. Peering around the copper tiling, the corpus-captain saw the flock molesting the abbey tower, crawling about the exterior and clawing through a balistraria. It became obvious to the Excoriator that this was how the Cholercaust had dealt with the Tenth Company sniper threat. As he ascended the ladder, the remaining Excoriators behind him, Kersh saw the bell tower light up. An explosion – a grenade, the Scourge suspected – had taken out the belfry, the sniper and a number of the daemons, which plummeted towards the ground on what was left of their smashed, flaming wings. Pausing on the ladder, Kersh rested his forehead against the cool metal and mouthed a cult observation – a ritual thanks for a brother’s sacrifice. Sickened to the bottom of his stomach, the corpus-captain realised how many observances he had missed during the Long Night of the Cholercaust invasion.

As he reached the top of the maintenance ladder, Kersh leapt for the stone guttering of an adjacent shrine and hauled himself up onto the waterlogged expanse of its flat, modest roof. There the corpus-captain waited, both for his brothers and the daemon swarm’s clawing dive through the rooftops.

‘Chaplain!’ Squad Whip Skase roared as Shadrath’s flailing form was snatched from the ladder. It was sudden and shocking – even for the Adeptus Astartes warriors. The Scourge watched the Excoriators Chaplain dragged off into the night sky, tossed between the predatory daemons in the infernal flock. Shadrath was still fighting, but his crozius arcanum fell into the street below, ringing off the wall-clutching metal stairwells.

‘Keep moving!’ the Scourge called at the remaining Excoriators as they watched the Chaplain disappear.

Preoccupied with not falling to their deaths, and fighting off daemon aerial assaults with nothing but short swords, the Emperor’s Angels had little idea what was happening in shadowy streets storeys below their boots. Amongst the hallowed halls of sepulchres and sanctuaries, and in the ambulatories snaking between them, butchers were being butchered – and not by each other.

World Eaters of the Foresworn were lured into the pillared crypts below the Vault of Divine Transcendence, where ghostly apparitions stalked the armoured brutes, taking them one by one – infuriating their dwindling number further and making them ever easier to slaughter.

Slorak the Undying failed to live up to his name after unloading his bolt pistol’s entire magazine into an advancing, flame-swathed revenant and having his horned skull cleaved in two.

Berserker-brothers of the Bloodstorm issued their crude battle-cry before charging at two power armoured shadows in a corner of the Serenity Square. The World Eaters clearly thought the Angels were formerly encountered Excoriators. Their axe-wielding frenzy only served to hew rents and bloody gashes in each other’s plate, however, with the adamantium-toothed weapons passing clean through the warrior shades. Slave-soldiers, foaming at the mouth, found the Bloodstorm corpses gutted and piled at the centre of the square.

Techmarine Tezgavayn – more flesh warped over twisted machine than superman – was sent into a mechanical fury by phantom auspex returns amongst the statues of Imperial saints on the Boulevard of the Nine Sorrows. Smashing the statues to pieces, Tezgavayn was drawn to a solemn sculpture of Corvus the Sabine, where a clutch of ghostly grenades were waiting for the mechanical monstrosity. The grenades might have burned with a phantasmal glow but the armour-cracking explosions that issued from them felt very real to the Traitor Techmarine, as his body and workings were blown across the boulevard.

Skull-draped Kronosian Warlords simply disappeared whilst trailing the progress of the Slaughterfiend daemon engine Fellclaw as it hunted for Adeptus Astartes sighted in the Viaticus Quarter. Lord Drakkar – Blood Champion and Traitor Angel figurehead for the Hellion Dawn sadists – was torched along with a hundred of his depraved followers in a blind alley known as ‘The Quietus’. Charred cultist survivors reported sightings of silent warriors in sable armour who corralled the Chaos lord and his sadists with flamers before cremating the crush.

With World Eaters stalked and slaughtered across the city by the revenant crusaders, and daemonkin instinctively giving the empyreal intruders a wide berth, Kersh and his Excoriators reached the Memorial Mausoleum ahead of the anarchy swallowing the city.

Sliding down the steep roof of a monastic cell-block, the tiles shattering before the toes of their boots, the Adeptus Astartes reached the edge of the St Aloysion Hospice. The porch balconies of individual cells looked out on the Mausoleum’s impressive architecture, and a narrow strait ran between the brother and sister wings. Plunging down onto the top floor balcony, Kersh led the way, dropping back and forth across the open space, the Space Marine crashing through some porches, while bounding between others. The descent was similarly awkward amongst his brother Excoriators, but with the cultist hordes of the Cholercaust surging up the streets and closing on the Mausoleum, every moment counted.

Kersh dropped the final few floors and skidded on the cobbles as he raced for the great metal doors of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum. He felt Brother Novah close behind, the standard still clutched feverishly in his gauntlets; an exhausted Melmoch trailed behind the bearer, and Skase brought up the rear. The arterial boulevards and thoroughfares released a deluge of cultist madness on the open ground before the Mausoleum. The roaring had returned, as had the killer glint of a thousand eyes. Kersh felt the chill of cowardice shiver down his spine. He was not comfortable running from such a feeble foe, but numbers alone would prevent the Excoriators closing the Mausoleum’s great doors if all four Space Marines did not get there first.

Kersh hurdled several bikes, the chunky, armoured cycles having been parked in an orderly row around the Mausoleum before their riders had been assigned their doomed sniping duties. Melmoch once again brought his devastating warp-drawn power to bear on the enemy. Flailing arcs of distilled death erupted from the Librarian’s scythe-shaft. The energy danced across the front row of sprinting maniacs, detonating body after body and turning the riotous vanguards into a curtain of gore through which following slave-soldiers ran. The very essence of death was everywhere, like something you could touch and harness. The Excoriators Epistolary roared his denial and sent the second row the stomach-churning way of the first.

Kersh was in. Novah followed, the two Space Marines slamming their packs into the adamantium alloy of the massive door and heaving it across the tomb egress. Skase shot past Melmoch, literally skidding through the blood lapping against the exterior wall and in through the closing gap. Down on his chest, with Kersh and Novah putting their backs into the door, Skase yelled back furiously at the Librarian.

‘Melmoch, get in here – now!’

An Excoriator flashed through the opening, slipping down onto his side. It wasn’t Melmoch. It was Squad Whip Ishmael. ‘Ishmael…’ Skase began, but the greeting died in the Excoriator’s throat. Propping himself up on the tip of his crackling lightning claws, Ishmael looked up. Gone was the Escharan nobility of his calling and the eyes of a battle-brother and friend. Ishmael’s eyes were claret red. His head was a nest of purple veins and arteries, throbbing with blood and darkness. He was now Ishmael the animal. The animal that wanted to kill.

Both Excoriators scrambled to their feet on the cold marble floor of the Mausoleum antechamber. Ishmael came at his chief whip with savage sweeps of his power talons. Skase lightly deflected the blade tips with his gladius, not daring to risk the short sword against the full cutting capabilities of Ishmael’s claws. Grabbing at the gall-fevered wrist of the squad whip, Skase turned and slammed the gladius straight through Ishmael’s armoured palm. The squad whip took little heed of the bold move, chesting the Excoriator forwards and driving the claw-tips of his right gauntlet through Skase’s suit pack.

Weaponless, the brute Ishmael expected his chief whip to back away and proceeded to slice off the gladius blade-length protruding from the back of his talon with his other claw. By the time he feasted his blood-swamped eyes on the Excoriator, Skase was coming straight back at him. The chief whip slammed the sole of his boot into the animal-Ishmael’s chestplate, unbalancing the deviant and knocking him back towards the door.

The full weight of the advancing Cholercaust was behind the thick metal, with row upon blood-crazed row charging forwards against each other and the Mausoleum door in an effort to earn the Blood God’s favour and end an Adeptus Astartes. The Scourge and Brother Novah continued in their desperate, marble-grazing efforts. Ishmael turned his unseeing eyes on his brothers. Novah was nearest, so Novah died first. Ishmael spun around and buried a crackling claw all the way up to the knuckle in the Fifth Company standard bearer. The standard itself jangled to the floor, and as Ishmael retracted his devastating talons, the butchered Excoriator followed it. Kersh immediately felt the effect on the door as hundreds of the Blood God’s servants lent their weight to an irresistible entrance. A tattooed hiver managed to slip his emaciated and gore-slick form through the gap, along with a mass of clutching arms. The hiver screamed his demented triumph, but Ishmael silenced the annoyance with a savage headbutt that brained the cultist. As the hiver scum dropped like a sack of lead weights, Ishmael swung back on the Excoriators. Skase ran at the blood-mad squad whip as Kersh tried to reach for his gladius. Ishmael spat his fury at both – the Excoriator’s murderous mind struggling to choose between the pair.

A stream of soul lightning struck the degenerate in the side, smashing him across the antechamber and into the thick stone wall of the Mausoleum. Ishmael clawed at the immaterial energy and snapped like a trapped beast. Melmoch was through the door. The Librarian was on his ceramite knees, still dripping with cultist blood from the carnage outside. Scrabbling beneath the warpstream, Skase joined his corpus-captain on the door. Launching their armoured frames at the adamantium alloy with renewed fervour, the Excoriators slammed it closed, shearing off the twitching limbs of slave-soldiers clawing their way through. As Skase held the great door closed, Kersh hauled at the pinion mechanism that drove a heavy adamantium bar across the portal and into the wall.

Warp lightning arced off Ishmael’s plate causing the dried blood that covered it to smoulder. Ishmael screeched his hatred of the psyker and his unnatural powers, flicking his claws out and leaning into the soul-scalding stream of energy. Melmoch’s face was similarly contorted, the Epistolary trying his best to angle the shaft of his force scythe and the otherworldly energies spilling from it at the squad whip. Blood bubbled behind Ishmael’s eyes and his nostrils split with snorting exertion. Pure hatred alone drove the squad whip’s canine teeth down out of his gums like fangs. Veins and arteries split his skin, and the Excoriator issued a horrifying scream. Ishmael exploded. Shards of ceramite shrapnel flew in all directions, pranging off the surface of the door and embedding themselves in the stone of the wall and floor. It rained blood inside the Mausoleum as what was left of Ishmael coated the antechamber and the Excoriators within.

As the goremist settled, Kersh could see Melmoch on his knees. The Librarian’s head was lowered and he was leaning against the shaft of his devastating weapon. The corpus-captain and his chief whip slid down the wet surface of the metal door beside Brother Novah in exhaustion. Kersh checked the Excoriator for any signs of life, but there were none. Ishmael had finished him.

The hammering was awful. The Cholercaust had run its course. Only the Excoriators remained, and every slaughter-crazed servant of the Blood God was either outside the Mausoleum’s mighty walls or on their way there, to claim the few remaining skulls on the cemetery world in the name of their dark overlord. Kersh could imagine the tsunami of fists, boots, weapons and foreheads slamming against the unfeeling alloy of the great door. The nightmarish vision scarred his mind, the murderous crush of slave-soldiers, cultists, renegade Angels, daemons and World Eaters, all desperate to find a way inside.

Palatine Sapphira and the pontifex had told Kersh that the great door was the only entrance to the memorial tomb, and the corpus-captain believed them. He was not concerned about the ground floor. However, dotted across the Mausoleum’s exterior architecture were ornamental embrasures and aquila-shaped boltslits, apertures through which the Sisters of the August Vigil might defend Umberto II’s remains and his great Mausoleum from raids and civil unrest. Neither Palatine Sapphira or the tomb’s architect could have imagined the defensive necessities required to hold a host the size and devastating capability of the Cholercaust at bay. The walls were strong and Kersh had some limited faith in the great entrance door, but the Excoriator knew that the Blood God’s disciples would find a way in – the unmanned boltslits and embrasures in the upper storeys seemed a likely weakness.

Kersh’s gaze settled on the Fifth Company’s battle standard, still clutched in Novah’s gauntlet. Skase was staring at the blood-speckled banner also. The two Excoriators looked hard at one another. Snatching up the standard, Kersh slipped Novah’s gladius from his ceramite grip and handed it to the unarmed Skase.

‘Melmoch, watch the door,’ the Scourge ordered amongst the thunderous din of howling and shoulders striking the metal egress. Still on his knees, his eyes on the floor, Melmoch raised a weak hand.

Kersh ran through the anteroom and across the marble expanse of the Holy Sepulchre. Skase followed with difficulty. Ishmael’s lightning claw had raked through the chief whip’s pack, damaging the plant and some of the motive function hardware. The plate’s power supply was waning and the unsupported deadweight of the ceramite was slowing the Excoriator.

As the Space Marines crossed the open space of the Mausoleum the funereal beauty of the building was lost upon them: the intricate scrolling on the wall internments; the silver lettering adorning the floor slabs, recording the names of past pontiffs and cardinals; loggia supports and fat sculpted pillars reaching up to the exquisite detail of the Mausoleum’s domed ceiling – each hand-painted illustration a depiction of Umberto II’s long and spiritually-productive life. Candles and incense burned from a thousand suspended sconces, and stern statues of ecclesiarchs already elevated to sainthood adorned the sepulchre space in a ring around a simple block-crypt of obsidian brick. A silver-plated elevator was used to transport clerics and Adepta Sororitas deep below the sepulchre to a small complex of condition-controlled crypt chambers residing behind a thick vault door.

Within, laid out for private pilgrimage and display, were the surviving remains of Umberto II – Ruling Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum and High Lord of Terra. A circular gallery spiralled about the sepulchre’s exterior, made up of marble steps and landings, providing access to the wall-combs, vaultia and the upper storeys of the Mausoleum. It was the infuriating length of the gallery – winding around the sepulchre – that the Scourge and Skase negotiated. As they ran, the Excoriators could still hear the furious multitudes outside, echoing about the great dome, and could see the warp-spent Melmoch on his knees at the centre of the antechamber.

‘What now?’ Skase barked, as he drove his failing suit on along the gallery. Kersh didn’t respond, but he did keep pausing at intervals to stare out of the embrasure boltslits and allow the chief whip to catch up. Just before the locked entrance to the Sisters of Battle’s mission house, Kersh stopped and stared out through the stone aperture at the chaos beyond. The Memorial Mausoleum commanded the best view of Obsequa City that anyone could expect. The cemetery world capital wasn’t much to look at now: an inferno-tormented, partially demolished ruin, tainted with innocent blood, and a rockrete menagerie for murderous deviants, traitors and filth-entities from the warp. ‘Kersh!’ Skase said, soaking up the hopelessness beside him. ‘What are we going to do?’

The Scourge looked blankly at the Excoriator. He heard Melmoch call weakly from the sepulchre floor. Ignoring them both, Kersh took the mission house door off with a single strike of his boot. Striding across the small transeptory and past the cell-cloisters, Kersh moved swiftly through the sacristy and Lady Chapel. Near the palatine’s solitoria, Kersh found what he was looking for: the mission house armoury and the vox-berth.

‘Raid what’s left of the armoury. Grab us some weapons and grenades – something with punch,’ Kersh told Skase as he went to work on the frequency matrix of the vox-bank. Kersh heard Melmoch call again over the boom of the door assault below.

‘What for?’ Skase seared. ‘It’s over.’

Kersh dropped the vox-hailer and stormed at the chief whip. ‘I’ll tell you when it’s over!’

Skase fixed the Scourge with a gaze that was pure reason: no fear, no despair or sorrow.

‘The city’s lost,’ Skase shouted, ‘the Fifth is gone. You hear that?’ The chief whip let the rumble of mayhem intrude from outside. ‘They will get in, and when they do – no matter how hard we fight, no matter what honour we bring to the primarch or our Lord Katafalque – our blood will be theirs. They will end us, and those people out there, whom you confidently placed in the bosom of the earth, will rot there…’

Kersh roared his recriminations at the Excoriator, and Skase roared back.

‘Corpus-captain!’ Melmoch called. The two Space Marines burned into each other with accusatory eyes. Kersh looked out at the Holy Sepulchre and then back at Skase.

‘There is no dishonour in doubt,’ the Scourge told him. ‘You think Katafalque didn’t have doubts, out on the walls of the Imperial Palace? You think Dorn was not crippled by the deep melancholies of the unknown as he stood over the Emperor’s shattered form? There is no dishonour in doubt,’ Kersh repeated. ‘The measure of a primarch, a Chapter Master, a battle-brother, is what he does next. We are Excoriators. This is our burden. These are our trials. Trials of the mind, the spirit and the flesh. War through attrition. Victory through endurance, and we shall endure.’

Skase’s gaze drifted to the floor. He nodded, slowly and to himself.

‘Yes,’ he said, unlocking the seals on his gauntlets and slipping them off.

The vox crackled discordance before erupting with a solitary voice.

‘…please respond. This is His Beneficent Majesty’s planetary defence monitor Apotheon hailing Obsequa City – Fifth Company Adeptus Astartes Excoriators Chapter… Please respond.’

‘Apotheon, this is Corpus-Captain Zachariah Kersh of the Fifth. We receive.’

‘My lord,’ the voice crackled, ‘we’ve been trying to raise you. The interference…’

‘Listen to me carefully, mortal. I do not have time to ask you twice,’ Kersh boomed at the vox-hailer. ‘I saw your vengeance in the sky. I need to know your status.’

‘My lord, there is something I need–’

‘Mortal, believe me when I tell you that many lives – including my own – depend on the choice of your next words. Your status – have you been boarded?’

‘This is Commander Heiss,’ a female voice responded after a pause. ‘We have been boarded.’

‘Do you have steerage way and power to your weapons systems?’

‘Not for long, my lord. There has been a strange development up here,’ the commander replied.

‘Get ready for another one,’ Kersh told her, staring at maps and schemata located about the vox-berth. He proceeded to stab digits into a glyphpad on the vox-bank with the ceramite tip of his finger. ‘I’m sending you coordinates for a location on the planet’s surface. After examination of them you will reach the conclusion that the coordinates reside within Obsequa City, just outside the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum, to be exact.’

‘My lord…’

‘You will target these coordinates and manoeuvre your lance into position for an orbital strike in exactly fifteen minutes’ time.’

‘I can’t–’

‘You can, commander, and you will. That is a direct order. A great deal rides on whether you can find it within yourself to obey that order. Let me be clear. I am ordering you to destroy the Memorial Mausoleum.’

‘And a good part of the city,’ Heiss shot back.

‘Don’t concern yourself with that,’ the Scourge told her. ‘There is nobody left in the city.’ Kersh looked at Skase who was standing in the berth entrance holding a multimelta beside him in one hand and a heavy bolter in the other. Without his gauntlets he could only just get his thick fingers through the carryholds of the Sisters’ weaponry. The chief whip humped a pyrum-petrol fuel pack and had draped his battered shoulder plates with bandoliers of grenades and 1.00 calibre ammunition. The two Excoriators held each other’s grim gaze. ‘There is no dishonour in doubt, commander. The measure of us is what we do next. Fifteen minutes, commander. Good luck. Obsequa City out.’

As Heiss tried to interject, Kersh cut her off and dropped the vox-hailer.

‘That’s your plan?’ Skase said as the pair travelled back through the mission house transeptory.

‘I don’t plan on any of us being here in fifteen minutes,’ Kersh replied, the battle standard clutched tightly in his hand.

‘It took a lot of lives to get here,’ Skase said.

‘And now we’ve got the enemy where we want them, we’ll take a lot more.’

‘What about the people in the vault?’

‘The vault’s deep and the door’s thick. It will hold. If it could survive a meteorite impact, it’ll weather an orbital bombardment. Just.’

‘You can’t stop the Cholercaust with a single lance strike.’

‘No, but it will give these murderous bastards something to think about while we make good our withdrawal. I don’t care what they say about the Cholercaust. We have to endure – we have to survive this. Those people out there, counting on us, in the dark beneath the earth, have to survive this.’

‘Why? No planet ever has.’

‘But worlds will, once they hear of survivors. We will not stop the Cholercaust, but somebody will, somebody with hope in their heart, resolution and belief – all three of which our survival will have put there.’

As Kersh and the chief whip stepped back out onto the gallery, the corpus-captain called, ‘Melmoch – we’re leaving.’ Kersh expected some kind of protest – a question at least – but it didn’t come. Looking over the balustrade, the two Excoriators saw the Librarian still on his knees on the antechamber floor. He was vomiting projectile streams of blood down onto the marble floor, a copious pool of which had built up around the psyker. ‘Melmoch!’ Kersh called. The roaring cacophony of the mob outside died to silence.

‘The gateway called Melmoch no longer resides in this vessel,’ the Excoriators heard the hordes outside drone in unison. The stone of the Mausoleum hummed with the chorus of voices. ‘His witch’s soul burns for eternity in the fires of my master’s ire, and it drowns in the boiling depths of his bile. I am the Pilgrim, the Prince of Pain and Right Claw of Khorne. My gene-breed flesh remembers slaughtering your kind on the ramparts of the False Emperor’s Palace, on distant Terra, many lives-taken ago. It wishes to remember again.’

Melmoch’s body began to rise above the bloody pool. Cloven hooves on thick, red legs erupted from the Librarian’s armoured knees. Great infernal claws punctured the Excoriator’s plate at the elbow, unfolding into appendages of red sinew and brazen talons. Melmoch’s armour disintegrated about the materialising beast, shards and fragments becoming embedded in the obscenely muscular daemonhide. A blood-drenched pauldron remained, the Stigmartyr symbol of the Excoriators briefly bursting into flame before smouldering to the blasphemous World Eaters jaw-glyph around a paint-bubbling globe. The Epistolary’s afflicted gaze and precious skull disappeared, swallowed whole by the Pilgrim’s gulping, dagger-toothed maw, which emerged like a surfacing ocean behemoth from the Librarian’s back and shoulders.

Shaking the freshly-morphed head from side to side, a pair of bullish horns speared their way out from the monster’s temples. The thing itself did not speak, simply resorting to a foundation-shaking wrath-bellow of full realisation. With ease, the Pilgrim ripped the statue of a nearby saint out of the floor with his great claws and flung it at the Mausoleum door. The stone flew at the door, hitting the metal surface with infernal force. The door blasted open on its colossal hinges, crushing a score of slave-soldiers whose bodies were stamped into the ground by the flood of cultist pandemonium that raged into the Holy Sepulchre.

Kersh snatched a bandolier of grenades from Skase’s shoulder as the Excoriator bent down to load the belt feed into the heavy bolter’s breech. He snapped off several and tossed them across the breadth of the chamber, where they hit the gallery and bounced down the steps leading around and down towards the ground floor. The steps detonated, blasting the spiralling first floor gallery to dust along with the drove of blood cultists who had immediately mounted the stairwell.

Slapping shut the breech and balancing the heavy bolter on the balustrade, Skase began to hammer the endless hordes with blistering firepower. The Pilgrim tore another statue from the floor and tossed it through the air at the Excoriators. Skase leant aside and Kersh ducked as the sculpture of Saint Vatalis crashed through the embrasure behind him. Looking down on the hideous thing that had been Melmoch, Kersh came to understand the dire physical and spiritual dangers the psyker had been trying to avoid, when he put himself out during the Keeler Comet’s arrival. Lifting his gaze, Kersh began to feel about his plate for the ornately decorated urn Melmoch had used. The negatively-charged dust within was used by the Sisters for consecrating Umberto II’s shrine. The Epistolary had stolen the precious relic from the Mausoleum, and Kersh had intended on giving it back. Which he decided to do now.

Taking it in his hand, Kersh lobbed the urn like a grenade, over the balustrade and down onto the daemon World Eater. The pot smashed against the Pilgrim’s horns, dousing the monster in the fine dust. The particles seared into the Pilgrim’s daemonflesh on contact. The beast howled and screamed its torment as the psychic negativity not only broke down the horror’s warp-crafted flesh but also ate away at the thing’s tenuous link with reality.

‘Die, you monstrous thing,’ Kersh spat, as Skase continued to chew through the cultists swarming the chamber. The creature of Chaos clawed at its own dust-infected muscle and sinew, raking through its face and armoured chest. Cultists about the dissolving cage of bones screamed also and began savaging the beast with blades, nails and teeth. The surrounding slave-soldiers fell on the inner circle, tearing them apart, and before long the scene was a horrific orgy of butchery. Skase concentrated his mulching gunfire on the doorway, accompanied by throng-blasting grenades tossed by the Scourge, down through the antechamber.

A new and sickening sound rose up from the sepulchre floor. It sounded to Kersh like a thicket of trees all bending and breaking at the same time. The corpus-captain could hear snapping, fracturing and splintering. Below, at the heart of the carnage, the bodies of the dying and those who had killed them were being drawn into a bloody maelstrom. Bones were breaking and reaching out of cultist bodies, intertwining with the skeletal mesh of others in a macabre fusion, a daemon cage through which the shredded flesh and spilled gore of the cultists bubbled and swirled. Beneath the Excoriators, the Pilgrim was finding a new form. Feeding on the souls of his blood-pledged, the monster fought through the agonies Kersh had visited upon it and refused to release its terrible hold on the material universe. As more and more of the Blood God’s disciples flooding the chamber were gore-assimilated by the thing, it grew. The Pilgrim’s skin-rent skull emerged from the top of the carcass mountain, its devastating claws also – although being a flesh-frame of grasping, scratching, flailing limbs, it was not short of such appendages. As it rose on its murderous altar of butchered bodies, the Pilgrim’s eyes blazed white with hate and it reached out for the Emperor’s Angels on the gallery.

‘Let’s go!’ Kersh bawled, tugging at Skase’s shoulder, but the chief whip shrugged him off, burying a fresh volley of bolt-rounds in the Pilgrim’s grotesque embodiment.

‘It’s not going to happen,’ Skase shouted between staccato blasts. He threw a thumb behind him. ‘The pack’s shot. Power failure. My plate will only slow the both of us down.’

‘We can make it!’ the corpus-captain returned.

‘You can make it,’ Skase said, blasting at the Chosen of Khorne. ‘You must make it. Like you said, somebody’s got to survive.’

With the Pilgrim growing horrifically before them, the Scourge stared at his chief whip. Skase nodded at the battle standard fluttering in Kersh’s hand. ‘Keep it flying,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep them entertained until the lightshow begins.’

Nodding silently, Kersh knelt down and primed the multi-melta, cycling the pyrum-petrol mix and activating the sub-molecular reaction chamber. Leaving the fuel pack on the floor, Kersh placed the heavy weapon on the balustrade. Without a word or a glance, Skase silenced the heavy bolter and moved across to the melta. He punched a vaporising beam of intense fusion through the howling Pilgrim-monstrosity before recalibrating the weapon and turning another patch of its flesh-armour to molten slag. With the bandolier in one hand and the Fifth Company’s battle standard in the other, Kersh left the occupied Skase and stepped through the hole the statue had made in the wall.

Sidling out along the ledge, the Scourge looked down. The darkness below swarmed with movement, killers attracted by the bloodbath within the Mausoleum and eager to be part of it. Above, the sky was stranger still. In low orbit Kersh could see the telltale signs of obliteration, vessels he could not see suddenly flaring into fireballs of destruction. With the Apotheon’s lance hopefully aimed down over his head and Naval assistance light years away, Kersh could only reason that the insane captains of the Chaos fleet had decided to turn their guns on each other. It was certainly not unknown amongst the savage servants of the Blood God.

A sole winged fury swooped past, snapping at the Excoriator with its jaws. As it banked and tried to savage him again, Kersh swung the bandolier of grenades like a flail and smashed it in the wing, sending the thing careening off into the side of a building. Kersh could feel the precious seconds passing. Priming one of the grenades he let the bandolier drop into the unsuspecting crowd below. Giving the belt a few seconds advantage, and with the banner in his hand, Kersh too stepped off the ledge. There was simply no swift way down off the side of the colossal tomb. Kersh’s plate buckled and cracked as he struck lower ledges and the unforgiving stone of architectural flourishes. He reached out with his hand to grab rims, boltslits and the limbs and wings of gargoyles. His boots found brief and occasional footing on carved ridges and representations that could not support his weight or the gathering force of his fall. The paint on his ceramite chipped and scuffed as he grazed the building’s side.

Everything suddenly became white below as the grenades detonated in a chain reaction. The moment seemed to hesitate and Kersh felt himself momentarily slow as fiery lumps of flesh and masonry were rocketed skywards by the blast. The Scourge found himself suddenly winded as he landed on a pillartop, stomach first. He felt several things break inside. The impact had at least reined in the gathering speed of his fall, and as he rolled off, the few remaining storeys down the pillarside were uneventful. Taking in a breath, Kersh realised that he’d dropped the battle standard, and that the pole and banner had gone on ahead of him. When he struck the cobbles beside it, the epicentre of the devastating fragstorm moments before, something snapped in his leg. The hot glow of agony washed up the limb. Getting up off the crumpled plating and pauldron on his arm, the Scourge looked down at the injury. The ceramite had split at the knee, as had his flesh, allowing a bone from his leg to erupt through the rent.

His face a mask of suppressed torture, Kersh scooped up the company standard and used it as a staff, taking the worst of the weight off the wounded leg. Reaching for his Scourge’s blade, the corpus-captain clutched it feverishly in his other hand. The explosion had not gone unnoticed in the immediate vicinity and silhouettes were already running out of the smoke at him. Kersh had no time for strategy, skill or etiquette. Economy was imperative. As cultists rushed him they lost limbs and were barged aside as the Excoriator hobbled through the burned mist. A Goremongers Chaos Space Marine lost half his head, and before a World Eater had the chance to bring up the incredible length of his struggling chainsword, Kersh had turned the gladius over in his hand like a dagger and stabbed the Traitor Legionary straight through the helm with it.

Limping around the exterior of the Mausoleum as fast as his agony would allow, Kersh found what he was looking for: Keturah’s Scout bikes. No longer parked in a neat line, the corpus-captain found that they had been knocked down both by the clambering hordes and the grenade detonations. Leaving the first two, which had received the worst of the grenades’ attentions, Kersh hobbled around the third. Righting the vehicle and slipping his smashed leg over the saddle, he brought the bike’s powerful engine to life. He hadn’t ridden a bike since he was a neophyte himself, but it immediately came back to him. The solidity and weight of the vehicle. Its thick tyres and aching power, and the satisfaction derived from clinging to the handlebars as the galaxy streamed effortlessly by. It almost made him forget his leg.

Slipping the length of the company standard through the empty shotgun rack and down the side of the bike, Kersh flicked on the vehicle’s powerful arc lamp. The beam cut through the acrid murk, but where Kersh had expected to find demented cult-soldiers and renegades he found only a solitary armoured figure amongst bodies. His midnight revenant, the haunter of both his daydreams and nightmares. Kersh levelled his eyes at the silent Angel. The Scourge thought he knew now what the phantasm meant. At times he’d thought that it was a further affliction of the Darkness, at others some manifest damage to the brain inflicted by Ezrachi and his apothecarion aides. He’d questioned whether he’d gone mad; he’d heard of other forms of madness. Prophets, prognosticators and sometimes plain mortals who had glimpsed a little of a doom to come – in the same way as the soul-bound servants of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica with their tarot, or the solemn members of the Librarius. Certainly the death that Kersh had seen on Certus-Minor – the end of an Imperial world – warranted some kind of omen, and the dark revenant had been his. A chill warning of the brothers lost and the deaths to come.

Kersh drew his gladius and held the blade out across the handlebars, while providing support with his fingertips to the other grip. The revenant stood and watched him, the sinister light of its eye glimmering through the rent and across the darkness.

‘Better get out of the way,’ the Scourge told it, ‘because I’m not stopping.’

As Khornate warrior-wretches ran at the Excoriator, Kersh let the back wheel of the bike screech and slide on the cobbles. Releasing the brake and allowing the vehicle to catapult away from the Blood God’s minions, the Scourge blasted across the open space. Keeping his wheel straight and his accelerator at full wrench, the bike cannoned towards the ghostly Space Marine. The corpus-captain braced for impact. Seconds away from the phantom Kersh heard the rasping click of its teeth chattering. It was the last thing he heard before the bike passed straight through the revenant. Swinging his head back, Kersh saw that the apparition had gone. It had disappeared, leaving only smoke swirling in the bike’s wake.

Gunning the engine, Kersh rode the bike off the blind apex where the Mausoleum plaza met the downhill slope of an ambulatory. He’d been fortunate. He recognised the thoroughfare as an arterial route called the ‘Via Ossium’, the Road of Bones. Although bordered by the high walls of buildings and alleyways on both sides, the ambulatory was straight and steep, and was a ceremonial course running from the Memorial Mausoleum down to the Saint Bartolomé-East Lych Gate and out onto the necroplex.

As the heavy bike came shearing down, it crushed several unsuspecting cultists. Several others were brained against the wheelguard, lamp and the twin-linked boltguns adorning the handlebars, before their broken bodies were tossed aside by the merciless progression of the vehicle. The cobbled ambulatory was steep, and despite being one of the wider streets, was still cramped and narrow. The Scourge kept up his speed, allowing gravity to add to the bike’s murderous velocity. Kersh held the handlebars straight and true as the thick wheels ploughed through limbs, bounced the scrawny bodies of slave-soldiers like rag dolls and crushed skulls.

A sudden explosion ahead sent a cold streak across the Excoriator’s hearts. He spat in anger. For a moment he thought that the Apotheon had struck too early. The detonation blasted the side of a hermitage across the Road of Bones, throwing the bodies of feral warriors into the air and showering the area with brick. Resisting the urge to brake, Kersh rode the debris out, the bike lifted from the ground by a ramp of rubble. With fragments of stone blasted out before the wheel, the Scourge angled the soaring vehicle through a throng of disorientated daemon worshippers, decapitating several of them. Like the Excoriator, the warrior-acolytes had been wondering where the explosion had come from. Another, several streets across from the Via Ossium, revealed the heavens as the impact origin.

Looking up into the night sky, the bloody trail of the Keeler Comet still smearing the firmament, Kersh saw a crowded constellation of fireballs. Something devastating was happening far above the city, and the Scourge could only imagine that some minor skirmish or competition for prey had prompted all-out war between vessels in the Cholercaust fleet. Meanwhile, shooting stars – which Kersh took for battle damage debris – streaked towards the planet surface like a deadly pyrotechnic display. The fiery hailstorm had already started hitting the necroplex and pieces were now striking the ruined city.

Most cultists were blinded by the bike’s powerful lamp and the impossibility of an Adeptus Astartes hurtling towards them on two wheels at lethal speed. Others had the presence of mind to throw themselves and their weapons at the escaping Excoriator. Stub-rounds and scattershot rained off the Scourge’s plate, while the bike shot through a forest of poorly timed blades and blunt weaponry. Hammers and spiked clubs bounced off his battered pauldrons prompting the Scourge to hold the handlebars steady with one hand, while holding out his gladius with the other. The short sword wasn’t an ideal weapon to use mounted, but the partial impacts and opportunistic assaults were so close that it didn’t seem to matter. Revving through mobs and maniacs, wheels slipping through blood and wreckage, Kersh hacked, slashed and lopped off body parts. As mayhem blurred past, he smashed jaws and broke faces with his fist, the blade still clutched within his fingers.

A Blood Storm Chaos Space Marine saw Kersh coming, and with a double-handed daemon blade, glowing with infernal possession, stood his ground in the middle of the ambulatory. The renegade assumed a striking stance and held the blade up behind his modest helm. The Scourge narrowed his eyes and risked the tiniest of course corrections. Sweeping left across the road, Kersh brought his body and the gladius down low to the right. The skull-hungry blade sailed straight over the Excoriator, but as the bike accelerated away, the Blood Storm heretic tumbled, his leg sheared off at the knee.

As Kersh blazed down the ambulatory, away from the Memorial Mausoleum, he saw more of the impossible. Angels haunted the shadowy streets, passages and alleyways of the cemetery world city. Not Excoriators. Not the War-Given-Form’s Traitor World Eaters. Not the heretic brothers of renegade Chapters and warbands that pledged their blades and superhuman efforts to the Blood God’s cause. At first, Kersh though he was seeing his phantom again, but as he shot past macabre butchery and ghostly gunfire, he realised that his revenant was not alone. His wraith-like brothers were seeping from the shadows, cutting daemons and Ruinous champions down with cold efficiency.

The damned legionnaires burned with an ethereal fire, their bone-sculpted armour a stygian nightmare of darkness and gilt flame. Every stride they took, though silent, was a step of fearless determination. Whereas World Eaters degenerates came at them with the heat of mindless fury and angry blades, the accursed crusaders were cold to the point of repose and ruin. They moved with the certainty of the grave and killed with the indomitable will of beings who already knew what it was to lose life and know the end. Their unnatural presence gave birth to a fear in their enemies that they had not known, an antiquated darkness beyond petty notions of survival or an agonising death. A nightfall of the soul. An eventuality so hopeless and final that their victims didn’t dread the end of their existence – they feared not existing at all.

The daemon heralds of Khorne hunted phantoms in the labyrinthine expanse of the city, ethereal warriors who became one with darkness, only to inkblot into reality behind the spindly bloodletters and stalk towards them like otherworldly execution squads. Stampeding daemonstock, driven beyond madness, demolished an empty city as they gored and charged at evaporating shadows – their brazen clinker-hide punctured and bolt-riddled with an aurelian storm of shot that was incorporeal as it left phantom weapons, only to cross the barrier into reality as it mauled its Ruinous targets. The spectral Angels strode through ravenous mobs of traitor Guard and war-thralls, the insubstantial nexus of enraged crossfire, swinging the brute angularity of their heavy barrels and magazines about them like clubs, smashing heads and spilling brains. World Eaters warbands and their blood-blessed champions were decimated by vaporous gunfire – the plate-ripping teeth of their axes and the gaping death of their pistols nothing against a Legion of the Damned who seemed incapable of dying.

Daemons leapt at Kersh from the roofs and sides of buildings, several gangle-limbed forms coming close to tearing the Adeptus Astartes from his saddle with their hooked claws. He fired the twin-linked bolters on the front of the bike, clearing a bloody path through the cultist-choked ambulatory. A female slave-soldier, attempting to get out of the bike’s path, ended up clinging to the front of it – eye to eye with the Scourge. Pulling on the trigger, Kersh blew the soldier off with the twin-linked bolters.

Riding through the bloodhaze and aftermath, the Scourge didn’t see the chainaxe coming for him. The weapon shredded up his shoulder just beneath his pauldron, and blood began to leak down the side of his plate and the bike. As he tore away from the threat, his hand momentarily uncertain on the handlebars, he heard the deep roar of boltguns, fired in spectral unison, blasting apart the axe-wielding renegade and the death cult assassins in amongst whom he was standing.

As Kersh’s bike tore out of the chapels and dormitories of the city and into the smouldering devastation of Saint Bartolomé-East, the heavens truly fell. With a trail of soot streaming behind the bike from the cremated district – the result of the Impunitas’s earlier bombing raids – Kersh bled and watched material that was clearly not ship wreckage rocket from the sky. Unnatural blocks of blood-black ice were raining down on the district and necroplex beyond like artillery fire. Easing the speeding bike around craters created by tumbling rock and exotic metal fragments, Kersh suddenly became aware of a monstrous hound bounding up behind the bike and attempting to tear at the back wheel with its knife-point teeth. Swiping unsuccessfully with his gladius, the Scourge attempted to barge the reptilian beast into the walls of gutted derelicts.

The beast either bounded over the obstacles or crashed its bony head straight through them. When the thing almost took his arm off with a jaw-rearing snap, Kersh turned away from the daemon hound. Standing in the road were a trio of damned legionnaires, their bolters aimed straight at the advancing Kersh. As the ghastly Angels blazed coldly away, Kersh brought up his arm instinctively. Unmolested by the immaterial rounds, the Excoriator brought down his arm, only for it to jump back up as he rode straight through the line of revenants. Holding on to the screeching bike, the Scourge cast a glance behind him to see the accursed crusaders melt into nothing, revealing the bolt-blasted carcass of the daemon dead on the cobbles.

Gunning down clots of cultists with his bolters as he rode on, Kersh was almost knocked from the bike by a meteorite strike that demolished what was left of a burning hospice. Out across the ravaged district, the corpus-captain’s attention was arrested by the spectacle of a creature that had been less fortunate. Out in the wastes, the hulking greater daemon that had terrorised the Excoriator earlier stood impaled on a shard of ice which had fallen and speared the bloodthirster into the ground. Kersh sickeningly recalled the death of Squad Whip Joachim and thanked the Emperor for the daemon’s spectacular misfortune.

With the bike’s engine gunned excruciatingly to maximum speed, Kersh finally spotted the Lych Gate marking the limit of the city. A World Eater ran towards the road from a smashed chapel, his brass bolt pistols blazing – until a damned legionnaire stepped out from behind a blackened altar and gunned the Chaos Space Marine down from behind, ethereal bolts searing into his pack, through his warped body and out of his chestplate. The World Eater fell down by the roadside, one of his ornately crafted sidearms still aimed across the cobbles. As Kersh passed he felt a pair of bolt-rounds bore into his side. With the bike wobbling and the mauled Scourge fading fast, the sky lit up behind him.

A colossal stream of energy struck the city. For a moment, time seemed to stop. The ground seemed to shift below the wheels of Kersh’s bike. As darkness returned, buildings were blasted apart by a ring of concentric destruction spreading throughout the cemetery world city. As Kersh shot through the open Lych Gate, destruction cascaded after him, an avalanche of masonry, flaming bodies, blood and dust.

With little left to destroy in the blitzed Saint Bartolomé-East district, Kersh avoided the worst of the debris-storm. A rolling dust cloud rapidly swallowed the bike and Excoriator, however, blinding the grievously wounded Scourge to the danger ahead. The bike’s wheels left the ground without warning. Since Kersh hadn’t hit anything, he reasoned that there simply wasn’t any ground beneath him. The lychway had been pounded by a falling piece of the Keeler Comet minutes before, turning the width of the road into a crater. The bike began to fall, the front wheel not making the other side of the pit. As the front of the bike struck the crater wall, Kersh was flung like a piece of wreckage across the lychway. Bouncing and breaking along the track at all but lethal speed, the Excoriator tumbled to a plate-crushing stop by an ornate gravestone.

The half-dead Scourge blinked gore from his remaining eye. A gash across his face kept flooding the socket with blood. He might have lost consciousness, but if he had, he didn’t remember. As he moved his neck, pain streaked through the back of his head. Something was cracked or broken there. It was a living torment to move, but Kersh felt he had little choice. He was out on the necroplex. He sensed danger all about him.

Obsequa City lay behind him, a devastated mess of flaming wreckage and settling dust. The magnificent dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum was now a mountain of masonry. Many of the city centre cathedrals and temples had been wiped from the face of the cemetery world, but a good part of the city remained, albeit as a firestorm wracked ruin. Torched and shattered disciples of the Blood God who refused to give up the fight wandered the night with their murderous instincts still intact, even if their bodies were roasted and smashed. Damned legionnaires, incorporeal and impassive, hunted down such degenerate specimens without mercy, finishing what the lance strike had begun. The revenants had been unaffected by the city-levelling, star-hot beam of energy, with even those Angels directly below the orbital strike going about their vengeance oblivious to the destruction wrought around them.

Kersh limped agonisingly along the darkness of the lychway, daemon-haunted burial grounds on either side. He no longer had the company standard and had lost his Scourge’s blade in the crash. Drawing his remaining gladius – his back-up blade – the Excoriator hobbled on. With blood leaking from both sides of his mangled plate and the gleaming sword held limply in a shattered hand, the Scourge didn’t think to last long.

Destruction rained from the sky. Shattered pieces of ice had tumbled and rolled a path of annihilation through the Cholercaust fleet, cleaving vessels in half, destroying others outright and scattering smaller wolfpacks of raiders and pirates. Rock and immense warp-frozen shards of blood pounded the burial grounds – devastating the rabid hordes, blasting daemon entities back to the depths of the warp and laying waste to Khorne’s most frenzied warriors, decimate champions and able butchers. World Eaters raged at the heavens with their axes roaring and swords held high, shot through with white-hot metal nuggets that thunderbolted from the sky.

Kersh stomped on, blood-shod. A daemon herald leapt out over a crypt at the Scourge. He remembered raising his gladius but little else. Fading in and out of consciousness, the Excoriator found the daemon dead at his feet. Traitor Angels charged at him with oversized weapons and war cries, only to end up dead and bolt-punctured before him. An infernal predator swooped overhead, dive-bombing the corpus-captain, but that too found its way to a swift death on the ground. Kersh’s failing sight revealed only movements in the murk. He heard deviant hordes fighting with each other. Warbands at war. Infernal rivalries settled in blood. All he recognised were the flame-swathed Angels of his salvation. A Legion of the Damned, moving about the graves like an army of ghosts, taking the fight to the Ruinous, executing the tainted and delivering doom to the Emperor’s enemies.

The Scourge had fallen several times and stubbornly regained his feet, but as he collapsed once more, he found that he couldn’t get up. With the cold creeping through his shattered plate and into his wounded body, Kersh found himself lying across a grave, his head propped against its stone marker. There, he hugged the polished, unbloodied gladius to his chest and waited for death in the battle-torn darkness.

Above, the blackness of the star-speckled firmament was still dotted with glowing embers, Cholercaust vessels that had lost their fight with colossal chunks of rock and ice and fallen into an explosion-wracked, decaying orbit around Certus-Minor. Such fragments still tumbled from the sky and obliterated the servants of Chaos still wandering the night. Squinting, Kersh thought he saw a vessel pass overhead. At first he thought it was falling to the cemetery world surface, growing larger as it descended. But from its movements and the twinkle of cannon fire he realised that it was in high orbit, mopping up fleeing members of the Chaos armada. The Scourge watched it for a few moments, entranced – the vessel appeared to him like an Imperial aquila, passing across the heavens. He blinked, reasoning that he must have imagined the spectacle in his concussed and skull-fractured state. The vessel would have had to have been colossal in size to appear to him as it did, at such a distance.

Kersh closed his blood-crusted eye for a moment of peace, but when he opened it again his armoured revenant was standing above him. The damned legionnaire blazed an ethereal radiance over its rachidian plate. It was staring down at the Scourge through the crack in its helm, the warp-lustre of a sentience glowing from its skeletal eye socket. It said nothing. It did nothing for a while, not even chatter its teeth. In its midnight gauntlet it held the Excoriators Chapter’s Fifth Company battle standard. Stabbing it into the earth beside the grave, the revenant let the blood-spattered banner flap in the breeze. In its other hand, between two exposed, skeletal digits, it held something else. The damned legionnaire dropped it on the Scourge’s chest and walked away into nothingness, leaving Kersh on the field of battle. Alone.

Mysterium Fidei