Legion of the Damned

by Rob Sanders

  WARHAMMER 40,000

  IT IS THE 41ST MILLENNIUM. FOR MORE THAN A HUNDRED CENTURIES THE EMPEROR HAS SAT IMMOBILE ON THE GOLDEN THRONE OF EARTH. HE IS THE MASTER OF MANKIND BY THE WILL OF THE GODS, AND MASTER OF A MILLION WORLDS BY THE MIGHT OF HIS INEXHAUSTIBLE ARMIES. HE IS A ROTTING CARCASS WRITHING INVISIBLY WITH POWER FROM THE DARK AGE OF TECHNOLOGY. HE IS THE CARRION LORD OF THE IMPERIUM FOR WHOM A THOUSAND SOULS ARE SACRIFICED EVERY DAY, SO THAT HE MAY NEVER TRULY DIE.

  YET EVEN IN HIS DEATHLESS STATE, THE EMPEROR CONTINUES HIS ETERNAL VIGILANCE. MIGHTY BATTLEFLEETS CROSS THE DAEMON-INFESTED MIASMA OF THE WARP, THE ONLY ROUTE BETWEEN DISTANT STARS, THEIR WAY LIT BY THE ASTRONOMICAN, THE PSYCHIC MANIFESTATION OF THE EMPEROR’S WILL. VAST ARMIES GIVE BATTLE IN HIS NAME ON UNCOUNTED WORLDS. GREATEST AMONGST HIS SOLDIERS ARE THE ADEPTUS ASTARTES, THE SPACE MARINES, BIO-ENGINEERED SUPER-WARRIORS. THEIR COMRADES IN ARMS ARE LEGION: THE IMPERIAL GUARD AND COUNTLESS PLANETARY DEFENCE FORCES, THE EVER-VIGILANT INQUISITION AND THE TECH-PRIESTS OF THE ADEPTUS MECHANICUS TO NAME ONLY A FEW. BUT FOR ALL THEIR MULTITUDES, THEY ARE BARELY ENOUGH TO HOLD OFF THE EVER-PRESENT THREAT FROM ALIENS, HERETICS, MUTANTS - AND WORSE.

  TO BE A MAN IN SUCH TIMES IS TO BE ONE AMONGST UNTOLD BILLIONS. IT IS TO LIVE IN THE CRUELLEST AND MOST BLOODY REGIME IMAGINABLE. THESE ARE THE TALES OF THOSE TIMES. FORGET THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE, FOR SO MUCH HAS BEEN FORGOTTEN, NEVER TO BE RE-LEARNED. FORGET THE PROMISE OF PROGRESS AND UNDERSTANDING, FOR IN THE GRIM DARK FUTURE THERE IS ONLY WAR. THERE IS NO PEACE AMONGST THE STARS, ONLY AN ETERNITY OF CARNAGE AND SLAUGHTER, AND THE LAUGHTER OF THIRSTING GODS.

  ANNO INCOGNITA

  PROLOGUE

  SIGNS AND WONDERS

  The deafening silence of carnage after the fact.

  An ocean of bolt-riddled bodies, as far as the eye could see. Corpse crests and blasted troughs, black with blood and swarming with flesh lice. Plunging breakers of ragged remains and shattered armour, marking the abrupt end of some maniacal charge. The trampled mulch of the fallen: deviants, the daemon-possessed and warriors in desecrated plate. Hideous faces of indescribable rage. A battle-smear of wretched flesh, hammered out of its misery by some merciful trajectory. The Emperor himself, it seemed, guiding the path of each blessed bolt and blast.

  Approbator Vaskellen Quast of the Ordo Obsoletus pulled his scented neckerchief down and brought the grille of the meme-vox to his lips. ‘Twenty-seven fifty-eight hours, Central Planetary Time. Certus-Minor – Adeptus Ministorum cemetery world.’ The stench of gore steaming in the morning heat seared his nostrils, prompting the young acolyte to snort, hock and spit. ‘Praga subsector, Segmentum Obscurus.’

  Quast clambered carefully across a ridge of corrupt forms. His advance was frustrated by more than just bodies. Beneath the carpet of bone-jutting butchery lay the cemetery world surface: a crowded expanse of ornate tombstones, mausolea and funerary sculpture. Every square metre of dirt was devoted to the art of burial and the infrastructure that served that hallowed purpose. Space on Certus-Minor existed at a premium, with grave plots and baroque memorial markers almost built one on top of another. This created a landscape of cold, crafted stone. A graveyard on a planetary scale.

  The approbator could see little of the surface from where he was standing, covered as it was with the splattered remains of those who had never reached the solace of an Imperial grave, and those who didn’t deserve one. Knee-deep in the Chaotics and carnage, Quast felt tense with overwhelming disgust. It was more than just the stench and warming rot. He felt that his very soul was in danger just standing in the presence of the unhallowed dead – that the corrupting influence of the Ruinous Powers was still in evidence in the mutilated remains and that it was aware of his God-Emperor-fearing footsteps.

  Behind the acolyte hovered a Valkyrie carrier, as black as a silhouette against the pearly cloud cover of the cemetery world sky and marked only with the sinister insignia of the Ordo Obsoletus. About him stalked Inquisitorial storm troopers from the 52nd Ranger Pelluciad, all field masks, humming weaponry and camo-carapace.

  ‘Ruling pontifex and planetary governor,’ Quast continued, ‘one Erasmus Oliphant. Tithe grade: Solutio Tertius. Population at last Administratum census estimated at one million Imperial souls. Certus-Minor, revised estimates, post-atrocities: zero.’

  The Cholercaust had built its fearful reputation on such barbaric efficiency. The Blood God’s servants couldn’t help themselves. Survivors weren’t a strategic consideration. The Slayer cared little for the tales of victims-in-waiting and what others might do with such information. Its tactics were always the same: uncompromising, overwhelming and savage. Where hearts beat with the defiance of life, the goremongers raged, honouring only the razored edge and baptising worlds in torrents of blood.

  ‘Hadria, Dregeddon IV, L’Orient, Callistus Mundi, Port Koronach, among a hundred other worlds, all similarly butchered. All victims of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade. All planets on the path of the Keeler Comet.’

  Quast’s vox-bead chirped. ‘Proceed.’

  ‘Sir, the Providence reports that a large vessel has just translated in-system.’

  ‘Markings and registration?’

  ‘Still collating that information, sir. I can tell you that it has achieved high orbit.’

  ‘Probably a Ministorum heavy transport, bringing in penitents and frater labour from Bona Phidia. Get a visual. Keep me informed. Quast out.’

  The approbator let his eyes linger on the charred mountain of rubble that was Obsequa City. The smouldering ruins before Quast had been a beautiful, baroque metrapol. A vision of towers, steeples and spires. Stained-glass and rockrete, dark with age, thrusting for the heavens with reverent majesty. With nearly every square metre of dirt on Certus-Minor devoted to the dead, even the city was considered an extravagance. Like a tiny, ecclesiastical hive, Obsequa City comprised bethels, basilicas and cathedrals that were built tall and tight. The narrow alleys and passages were steep and cobbled, leading up to the crowning monument – the heart of the city in both a physical and spiritual sense – the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum.

  The huge dome of the vault had once dominated the city skyline. Now it was a blasted remnant. A demolished edifice, collapsed in on itself – open and exposed to the elements. It had originally been built to honour and house the bones of Umberto II – Ecclesiarch, High Lord of Terra and prosecuter of innumerable wars of faith. Under Umberto, the Ecclesiarchy’s influence across the galaxy grew and the forces of darkness in and around the Eye of Terror made precious little progress. With Umberto’s leadership, the common faithful of the Imperium rose up and took the fight back to the Ruinous Powers, standing shoulder to shoulder with their brothers and sisters in the Imperial Guard and the Emperor’s Angels of Death. Ancient Terran scholars ascribed the near two thousand years of uneasy peace between the Eleventh Black Crusade and the Gothic War largely to the legacy of Umberto’s efforts in the segmentum.

  Quast watched the frater burn teams clear bodies about the wrecked city. They were uncovering the arterial routes of the necroplex – the labyrinth of lychways and paths that ran through the crowded memorial burial plots, mausolea and cenoposts. With the main roads leading into Obsequa City clear of death and destruction, the Adeptus Ministorum forces had started to move in heavy equipment and excavators.

  Dig-teams swarmed across the city rubble and the ruins of the great Mausoleum. The cemetery world already had a new planetary governor, Pontifex Clemenz-Krycek, newly arrived from St Ethalberg with manpower and instructions to purge the hallowed ground of Certus-Minor of the taint of corruption. The irresistible bureaucracy of the Imperium implemented even in the face of carnage and catastrophe. Quast had felt it prudent to meet Clemenz-Krycek before initiating his investigations. He
told the pontifex little of his true purpose there. The driven ecclesiarch seemed not to care, engaged as he was with the small army of frater militia faithful that were piling and incinerating the corrupt forms of the battle-dead and excavating the ruins of the mausoleum. Quast found that the pontifex’s vows of devotion to the God-Emperor had done nothing to quell the fire of ambition burning in his veins. Clemenz-Krycek clearly hoped to find Umberto II’s bones intact in the spiritual stronghold of the underground vault. Safe from the corruption of Chaos. Even without the ecclesiarch’s bones, the pontifex was boldly heralding Umberto II’s sacred remains as responsible for the halting of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade.

  The investigation of such assertions was well within the remit of the Ordo Obsoletus, but information already in Quast’s possession made him question such a possibility – that and the fire behind the pontifex’s eyes. Clemenz-Krycek was already mooting recommendations for Umberto II’s veneration to the rank of Imperial Saint – a call that, if approved by the High Ecclesiarch, would undoubtedly improve the pontifex’s own prospects in the ranks of the Adeptus Ministorum.

  A rusted breastplate creaked underfoot and, with a crack, the approbator’s boot slipped down into the stinking chest cavity of a fallen giant. Its armour was a god-pleasing red and one shoulder plate was spiked like an ocean urchin. A studded gauntlet still hate-clenched the shaft of a brute axe, unable – even in death – to surrender the weapon. The monster’s helmet was missing and the monstrous head with it. As Quast’s boot sank into corruption, liquefied tissue spilled from the neck brace, thick with squirming flesh lice.

  ‘Merda!’ Quast spat in gutter Gothic, flicking gobbets of rot from the toe of his boot. The approbator shook his head. He was a savant, a researcher – not a field operative. What he had learned aboard the Ordo Obsoletus Black Ship Providence, however, was too important to leave to another. If he had found evidence of an authentic miracle – an event beyond human phenomena, alien curiosity or the pollution of Chaos – then it was his solemn duty to ask challenging questions and hunt for elusive answers. Answers his venerable master, Inquisitor Ehrensperger, had charged him to find.

  Quast went to scrape the sole of his boot on the sculpted finish of the Chaos Space Marine’s other shoulder plate, only to find himself staring down the brass throat of a fang-filled maw. The symbol of the fell XIIth Legion, wrought in pure hate. The World Eaters.

  Quast swiftly retracted his foot, fearful that the effigy itself might assume a bloodthirsty life and snap shut. There had been other Blood Crusades. The Odium Wars. The Coming of the Brazen Host. The Dominion of Fire. The Black Crusade of the Daemon Prince Doombreed. But not since Armageddon’s First War had so many berserker brethren of the World Eaters Traitor Legion gathered under one banner.

  ‘Approbator?’

  ‘Carry on, sergeant.’

  The Inquisitorial storm troopers brought forth a prisoner. She was naked but for the scraps of filthy, feral world hide that preserved her modesty. Her matted hair trailed down her back and her flesh was the canvas upon which primitive tattoos were carved and inked. Her emaciated form crawled across the butchery like a hound on a scent, while the two troopers flanked and followed, holding her between them on metal poles and lanyards. The savage began clawing at a mauled body draped across a gravestone that was carved in the fashion of the Imperial aquila.

  ‘Sir, looks like the witch has something.’

  Quast wiped his boot on the scalp of a dead cultist and turned back to approach the feverish psyker. She froze with her bare back to them, and then without warning started thrashing this way and that. The lanyards around her neck bit into her thin flesh and the storm troopers on the ends of the poles were yanked back and forth. The Ranger Pelluciad sergeant called to Quast to hold his position.

  The witch returned to stillness before turning her head and snarling at the approbator. Her bright eyes rolled over blood-red like a wine glass filling with claret and her entire face suddenly contorted with an agonising rage. She looked along the pole at one of her storm trooper sentinels like a thing possessed. The witch suddenly convulsed and spewed forth a stream of bloody vomit. The blistering gruel splattered the Ranger’s helmet and body armour. He tore at his chin strap and started screaming something about burning.

  ‘Hold her down!’ the sergeant bawled, and to this end the remaining storm trooper brutally thrust the pole at the witch and the witch to the ground. ‘Reinforcements. Now!’ the sergeant called into his vox-bead, before drawing his hellpistol and charging across the slaughterscape at the struggling storm trooper and his charge. The trooper had forced the thrashing psyker right down into the stinking carpet of rent armour, jutting bones and festering bodies.

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘Hold her, damn it!’

  But the witch was gone. The wasted creature had somehow slipped down into the layers of rotting flesh and ceramite, crawling – swimming almost – through the disintegrating carcasses. The pole suddenly followed, whipped into the cadaver-mound and taking the second storm trooper with it. ‘G’Vera!’ the sergeant called into his vox-link. ‘Corporal, talk to me!’

  The mound exploded. A fount of blood blasted up out of the bodies and at the Certusian dawn-sky. How much of it belonged to G’Vera and how much to the surrounding dead was impossible to tell. What was certain was that the corporal was now one of them.

  The sergeant began scanning the ground about them with his hellpistol. A limb twitched here. A body moved there. The witch was certainly on the move. ‘Sir, arm yourself,’ the storm trooper instructed. The approbator had been so sickened at the spectacle that it was the meme-vox that he still clenched in one white-knuckled hand, rather than his laspistol. Fumbling for the weapon, Quast drew his sidearm.

  The witch was suddenly before him, slithering out from the slaughter like a serpent. Her body was completely naked now and slick with black blood and spoilage. Her eyes burned hate and her lips had retracted horribly like a predatory cat.

  ‘Approbator!’ the sergeant screamed, but Quast found that he couldn’t move. Fear clouded his mind and all he could do was gawp as the possessed witch hissed and came in so close as to touch her bloody forehead to his own.

  There was a flash. The furious face suddenly disappeared. Snapped out of view. Blasted away. Quast stood, blinking. His face was speckled with the witch’s blood and his laspistol still felt a world away. Turning, the approbator saw the reinforcements that the sergeant had called for. Storm trooper sharpshooters, swiftly descended from the Valkyrie transport, with hellguns to chins and scopes to visors. They had executed the psyker from some distance away with a cool nerve, precision marksmanship and supercharged las-fire. As they brought their weapons down, Quast nodded in silent respect.

  The sergeant was suddenly beside him, his boot on the witch’s ribcage and his hellpistol pointed at what was left of her head. The storm trooper put three more blasts into the creature before he was satisfied.

  ‘Freaks,’ the sergeant spat. ‘Can’t stand them, sir.’

  ‘She was no doubt possessed by some residual evil she found amongst the bodies,’ Quast announced, trying to re-establish some kind of authority over the situation, even if it was only intellectual. He found himself looking down on the jumbled cadavers: the hellspawn, Traitor Guardsmen and degenerate World Eaters.

  ‘How are you, sir?’

  ‘Better now, sergeant,’ Quast managed.

  ‘Approbator, perhaps we should–’

  ‘Continue,’ Quast interjected. ‘Perhaps, sergeant, we should continue.’ He holstered his laspistol and nodded at the ordo Valkyrie. ‘Bring me another.’

  The sergeant hesitated, before nodding. ‘As you wish, approbator,’ he said, before marching off towards the Valkyrie transport. He left Quast alone with the dead and his thoughts.

  ‘The question…’ Quast began again, activating the meme-vox and wiping blood from his cheeks with a silk scarf,‘ …is not what ended this world. The Cholercaust clearly did that.
The question is, what ended the Cholercaust?’

  Inquisitorial records often identified the Blood God’s favoured operating in wretched warbands roaming the galaxy. Greater concentrations were rare, since the XIIth Legion’s primordial hate seemed to extend to brother-slayers as well as the innocents of the Imperium. The Cholercaust had been different, however. The planetary populations upon whom it descended were always slaughtered to the last man, woman and child. Failed Adeptus Astartes interventions and Imperial Navy gauntlets had confirmed large numbers of ancient World Eaters vessels in the screaming cultist armada, which seemed to grow with every conquest. Some of those frigates and cruisers identified hadn’t been seen since the Horus Heresy, thousands of years before.

  Little was known about the champion that led the Blood Crusade, the maniac who had managed the impossible and gathered so many of his murderous brothers to one cause and objective. He was known only as ‘the Pilgrim’ and led his vast host with religious conviction, following the strange path of a blood-red comet. Celestial cartographers believed it to be the Keeler Comet, a long-period body with a highly eccentric orbit, recorded to have passed through both Segmentum Obscurus and Segmentum Solar nearly ten thousand years before. Euphrati Keeler, the remembrancer of great antiquity, immortalised the comet over El’Phanor in The Ancient Traveller, a pict rumoured to hang in the Imperial Palace and reproduced across the Imperium. The comet had found the galaxy much-changed upon its most recent return. The xenos empire of the eldar had fallen, the Imperium had been shattered by civil war and the colossal warp storm known as the Eye of Terror had erupted in its path.

  As the Keeler Comet blasted out of the immateriality of the Eye, it became apparent that it too had changed. A blood-red beacon, it appeared to wander with a mind of its own and trailed in its wake the Pilgrim and his Cholercaust Blood Crusade. The daemons, cultists and World Eaters seemed to believe that the cursed comet embodied the will of their Chaos god and would lead them across the stars in a celebration of slaughter, right to the Imperium’s finest and Holy Terra itself.