by Rob Sanders
Writhing and stretching, Kersh caught a glimpse of the silent crowds above. He could feel Ezrachi’s disappointment. He saw Bethesda’s stricken beauty. He then caught a glimpse of the sickening apparition that haunted him still. It stood there amongst the still figures of the audience. Waiting. Watching. It seemed not to be looking at him, Kersh suddenly realised. Following the angle of the phantasm’s dread helm, the Scourge cast his eyes across the brute landscape of the Cage, the mock courtyards and battlements of the Eternal Fortress in miniature. Where the stone blocks of a mezzanine platform had rumbled aside, Kersh could now see the dull glint of the second gladius on the other side of the arena.
The sword became everything to Kersh. He hungered for the solid satisfaction of its grip, the cutting sheen of its leaf-shaped blade and the blunt punch of its broad, tapering point. With one concentrated effort, the Excoriator pushed the poisoned blade away and heaved the fire-breathing Chaplain off him. The two Space Marines rolled until Kersh released his foe and threw himself across the arena floor. The Scourge stumbled to his feet as fast as he could, but felt the bite of the Fire Lord’s sword-tip clip the back of his thigh and knew he had not been fast enough.
The effect of the Mechanicus-engineered toxin was almost instantaneous. Like the sting of some giant arachnid, a crippling deadness spread through the muscle of Kersh’s leg. With the Chaplain still on the ground, Kersh made a dash across the Cage, but his sprint soon became a hobble and the hobble a limp. The leg became rapidly useless to him. A handicap in flesh and bone. It refused to bear weight or answer the Excoriator’s desperate desire. The Excoriator flailed across the dread architecture of the arena, falling rather than dropping off blocks of black stone and crawling rather than climbing over crenellated bulwarks and barriers. As he slipped down into a depression in the Cage floor, he found himself in a shallow pool. Splashing through the dark water, he felt the breeze of sword swipes brush his skin. The Fire Lord was moments behind.
Ahead, Kersh could see a tower of blocks. It was atop the tower he’d spotted the second gladius. The stone blocks were unusual in as much as they were decorated with a neat pattern of equidistant holes. The Scourge slid down onto his palsied leg, showering water at the tower side.
The clunk of a firing mechanism reverberated through the stone. Iron spikes shot out of the holes in deadly unison. Kersh had heard of the Eternal Fortress’s nightmare design, its labyrinthine layout and nests of traps. The Imperial Fists had designed their representation of the Iron Cage with peerless attention to detail.
The Scourge skidded down below the reach of the lowest spike. The Fire Lord, in his desire to acquire his enemy, had not been as fortunate. He peeled off to one side but was still gouged through his shoulder by a sharpened iron shaft. As he groaned and began the agonising process of extricating himself from the metal barb, Kersh began hauling himself up the spikes. Using them as a ladder, the Excoriator climbed gauntlet over gauntlet up the side of the block tower. His paralysed leg dangled uselessly as he pulled himself over the angular edge and up onto the flat summit. There the gladius was waiting. Crafted. Sharp. Glistening with paralytic toxin.
Looking down through the forest of spikes Kersh saw that his opponent had gone, leaving a length of bloodied iron as evidence of his difficulty. From the block tower, the Scourge commanded an excellent view of the Cage, but with blocks rising and sinking, and entire floors moving, it was almost impossible to get a fix on his enemy. His superhuman hearing and vision swam with the rumble and disorientation of the arena’s motion. He had lost the use of one limb, but with the gladius in his grip, the Excoriator felt like he had gained the full use of another.
Dropping down the opposite side, Kersh faltered. His leg gave out immediately and he fell. Scrambling back to one foot he hopped about, sword held out in front of him. Dragging his paralysed leg around he slowly turned, expecting his enemy to erupt from anywhere. The Fire Lord, however, was nowhere to be seen. As he hopped full circle he came to the sinking conclusion that he had been fooled. The Fire Lord stood on top of the block tower from which Kersh had descended. He dropped in the fashion favoured by his brothers during their specialist planetary assaults, landing with the surety and barbaric grace of a drop-pod. The Fire Lord tossed his gladius from one hand to another. The puncture wound through his shoulder plate leaked blood down the side of his yellow carapace, but the Chaplain seemed unconcerned. His eyes burned into Kersh and his flint teeth ground together, flashing and sparking. The two shared a moment of calm before the Fire Lord assumed his familiar fighting stance. With both gauntlets on his sword and his leg like an anchor on his own movements, the Excoriator did likewise.
‘Come on, meat,’ Kersh growled.
The Iron Cage sang with the clash of fevered blades and the grunts of superhuman exertion as Kersh and the Fire Lords Chaplain did their utmost to best one another. Kersh was a killer of champions. It was his duty on the battlefield to neutralise the direst individual threats and cut down the best the enemy had to offer, freeing his Chapter Master to strategise and direct his Adeptus Astartes forces. His swordcraft was clean, brutal and, like his primarch, often demonstrated flashes of inspired invention that were difficult for his enemies to counter. The Chapters attending the Feast of Blades only sent their best, however, and his opponent was an equally gifted brute. His blade swirled and swooped like the raging of an inferno. He passed the gladius rapidly from hand to hand with ambidextrous skill and confidence. Where the blade wasn’t the Chaplain’s fists and boots were, and it was all Kersh could do to parry and deflect the rhythmic barrage. The Chaplain’s movements were entrancing and his form, despite his grievous injury, perfect.
The Fire Lord’s blade slithered through Kersh’s savage defence and nicked the Scourge above the brow. A curtain of blood washed over his eye. As the paralytic seized him, Kersh felt one half of his face freeze up. The eye closed and his lip began to droop on one side. He compensated with a desperate lunge unworthy of his training or Chapter standing. The Fire Lord hissed through his flint-clenched jaws once more. This time Kersh realised that the tongue of flame was aimed at his gladius. The orange gout evaporated about the blade, leaving the metal steaming and tacky. With horror, Kersh realised that the Fire Lord had cleansed his blade of the paralytic toxin.
The assault continued and, as Kersh’s sword was battered this way and that by the Fire Lord, blocks shifted and the dark landscape of the Cage changed about them. A block had descended immediately behind Kersh creating a small pit. Half-blind and hobbled, with the pit edge behind and the irresistible onslaught of the Chaplain in front, the Scourge was trapped. He felt the audience’s expectation and his own desperation on the air. A seed of doubt blossomed within him, and he felt the weight of the apparition’s gaze. For a moment the Darkness returned and Kersh knew a universe without hope. Perhaps his affliction had damned them all and the Excoriators were doomed to failure. To fail at the Feast. To fail as a Chapter.
Kersh became intensely aware of the limitations of his Adeptus Astartes body; what it could do and what it couldn’t. He was to be bested by a brother more worthy of the Emperor’s beneficence. A true son of Dorn. A master of the blade. An actual champion of champions.
The Fire Lord had found him. The Chaplain’s blade struck out with such fluid force that it not only smashed the Excoriator’s plated gauntlet to pieces, but broke several bones in his hand and knocked the gladius through the air like a propeller. Both warriors watched the blade clatter to the ground nearby. The end had come. They both knew it.
The Fire Lord arched. It was to be a strike from above. Something suitably dramatic to finish the Excoriator. To cut him down and drop his beaten body into the grave that had opened up beyond. A warrior vanquished. A Chapter routed. Honour tarnished.
One side of Kersh’s lip curled. His gauntlet shot up, batting the Fire Lord’s arm back. Snatching up the Chaplain’s rosarius, the Excoriator back-slashed the Space Marine across the face with the adamantium aquila. Gritting
his teeth and holding on to the wire cord with both his gauntlet and smashed hand, Kersh leant into a centrifugal swing. Using his weight as the counter-balance, the Scourge swung his opponent about him. Dragged around, the Fire Lord fell back over Kersh’s trailing leg. The two Space Marines toppled. Kersh fell to the floor, but not before he had tossed the Fire Lord into the pit behind him.
Even prone, Kersh saw the flailing Chaplain strike the edge of the opening’s far side. The impact knocked the gladius from his hand and together both sword and Space Marine disappeared into the darkness. Kersh pushed himself up, balancing on one leg. He hobbled over to his own sword and scooped up the weapon with his unbroken hand. Limping back, he proceeded to half-scowl down into the depths. The Fire Lord lay on his broken back, his ragdoll form spread out across the bottom of the pit. Grasping fingertips reached out for his gladius, the weapon having fallen just out of reach.
‘Yield, brother,’ Kersh called down to the Fire Lord.
‘Not to you,’ the Chaplain finally managed, his voice just above a strangled hiss. ‘Not to the dishonourable wretch they call the Scourge. Not to the unfavoured of Dorn.’
Kersh narrowed his eye. He nodded slowly.
‘As is your right, brother.’
The Excoriator spun the gladius around in his gauntlet, so that he gripped the cross guard and the weapon’s pommel and grip protruded between his fingers. The blade he held parallel to his wrist and forearm. Sliding down onto his chest, Kersh dropped down into the pit. He knelt on the Fire Lord’s chestplate and brought back the sword hilt, ready to strike. The Chaplain’s eyes said it all. He would not surrender. The gallery waited. The Fire Lord would not yield. Kersh retracted his arm, ready for the first, merciless blow.
‘Kersh!’ the Apothecary called down, unable to disguise his disgust – even in a single word. The Scourge turned his head slightly. Above him, at the edge of the pit, was an Imperial Fists contest arbitrator. The aged Adeptus Astartes looked down on them both. With grizzled hesitation, the arbitrator raised a solemn gauntlet at the Excoriator’s gate. The Fist nodded to Ezrachi and left.
Kersh sagged. Returning his gaze to the Chaplain he found a little of the fire gone from the Space Marine’s eyes. Using the sides of the pit for balance, he stood as best he could and threw the gladius down at the still body of his mauled opponent.
‘It seems I was favoured by Dorn today, brother,’ he announced before spitting some of his own blood at the stone wall. Kersh looked up at the domed cage ceiling and the stunned audience above. He saw Bethesda – her face unreadable – and Ezrachi, whose bleak revulsion was all too easy to read. The apparition, it seemed, had gone. With no little revulsion of his own, Kersh finally called up to the gallery.
‘Who’s next?’
I am not sleeping, yet even as I think this, I know this to be a kind of sleep. Within his daily regimen of training, cult devotion and litany, an Excoriator allows himself four hours of rest. The demands of a single day in the Adeptus Astartes would kill an ordinary man. Our engineered forms are biological instruments of the Emperor’s will, but the mind needs rest. There is much to learn; errors to interrogate; the capabilities of an Angel’s body to master. Ever since the Darkness, I have been unable to lose myself in what might be described as a natural sleep.
My body is beaten and bruised. Some of my bones are broken. My blood swims with magna-opioids and growth hormones that help repair my injuries. A punishing training schedule and the ever more punishing contestations of the Feast are followed by ‘the purge’ and penitorium, the ritual purification of the flesh. My body, superhuman though it might be, is exhausted, but my mind will not submit. Abatement comes only in the form of catalepsean abstractions, like the one I assume I am experiencing now. Different parts of my genetically altered brain are allowed to shut down in sequence, while I remain in a state of semi-wakefulness. I have rested this way even in the lethal environs of death world phase-forests and quakeclonic superstorms. Your survival instincts remain intact while parts of the mind are allowed to rest. It cannot replace sleep, however, and the distinction between what is an abstraction and what is real is increasingly difficult to make.
Sitting here, I did not realise that I had entered such a state. I am down in the hold of the Scarifica. Despite my successes in the Feast of Blades, my presence on the dormitory decks and in the refectory is still not tolerated by my Excoriator brothers. Corpus-Captain Gideon has allowed me restricted use of the penitorium, chapel-reclusiam and the apothecarion – although I avoid the practise cages. Most of my preparation takes place down on the planet surface. Apart from the ceremonial presence of the Imperial Fists about the purpose-built Cage colosseum, only a garrison of the Thracian Fourth remains on Samarquand. All other resources are stationed on the cordon, keeping the Great Tusk and its greenskin invaders away. When I asked why the Fists would select such a place for the site of the Feast, Ezrachi told me that it was customary for the hosts to select the site of a recent Chapter victory for the contest location. Such choices were in line with the martial heritage of the Fists and their affiliated Chapters. With battles against greenskin blockade runners proceeding above our heads, and Imperial Guard cleanse and burn sorties decontaminating the earth for kilometres around, such a choice smacked of theme and pride. Regardless, it left me with the solitude of the ash fields and the apocalyptic ruins of a reclaimed world as my training ground.
I am sitting on a cargo crate. I sense the Apothecary and his Helix-serfs about me. My own people also. Ezrachi’s servants work solemnly on my face. Their needlework is neat and confident, and my flesh is a tessellation of stitching and stapled gashes. Between the nipping bladework of Sergeant Tenaka of the Death Strike and brutal headbutting I received from the hulking, nameless Crimson Fist I had the unfortunate honour of crossing swords with in the latter stages, my face is a mess. I know that each of these scars – these excoriations – are Katafalque’s blessing and the mark of Dorn, but my skull aches and my features feel as though they have been reassembled like a child’s puzzle. Ezrachi’s aides do their best with what’s left.
The good Apothecary works on my swordarm himself. The crate is covered with surgical foil, and Ezrachi’s instruments are laid out along the strapped-down length of my forearm. My flesh is open and the inner workings of the limb exposed. In the previous round, Knud Hægstad of Brycantia thought it prudent to shatter my arm – unhappy at what it was doing with a gladius on the end of it. I had the Iron Knight pay for the injury by cleaving off his hand – gauntlet, gladius and all – with the finest overhead downcut I believe I have ever performed. Dorn demands perfection. Demetrius Katafalque writes in detail on the sound a blade should make during the successful execution of such a manoeuvre, and the sword sang like a Terran songbird. Perfection is an ideal to which I aspire, but an imperfect victory still has a great deal to recommend it.
Ezrachi informed me that such an action, although legal in tournament terms, had offended several of the participant Chapters, the Iron Knights and Imperial Fists among them. It was not my intention to invoke an insult, an echo of the primarch’s own severed hand. That was how it was received by the Brycantians, however – a polemic and litigious breed, more interested in the detail of ritual law and tournament etiquette than victory itself. They petitioned my disqualification, and not for the first time. Earlier in the Feast, I left a former champion of the same Chapter called Hervald Strom gutted and all but dead on the Cage floor. A full day’s delay to the Games was called. A day for Ezrachi to attend to my wounds and Shiloh Gideon to berate me – although behind the corpus-captain’s words I sensed an unmistakable pride and relief. The dishonour of conduct in battle was preferential to the dishonour of early defeat. Strom lived, tough Brycantian bastard that he is, and my advancement was allowed.
The Excoriators would not indulge in such Chapter politics. There were no appeals on the ramparts of the Imperial Palace. No petitions to be had with the Sons of Horus, degenerate World Eaters or the warsmiths of
Perturabo. When Berenger of the White Templars took my eye, I did not call for the tournament official or Feast charta. I did not yap like a dog, protest or pontificate. I fought on, like I was born to do. I took the only thing that mattered from my opponent: victory. I tire of rules and regulations. I yearn for the cold simplicity of the battlefield, where enemies were at least good enough to signal defeat with their deaths.
The Apothecary attended to my eye and offered a bionic equivalent. I refused. Ezrachi and Hadrach insisted that I would see better than with the original, but I cared not. When pressed they admitted that the change in depth perception would take some getting used to. I couldn’t afford the distraction this late in the contest. I opted for a simple ball-bearing to be inserted instead as a temporary measure. The matt, scratched surface of the metal revolves as I move my head. I catch others watching its motion. Ezrachi insists he’ll replace it after the Feast, but I have to admit that it is growing on me. The Apothecary already has his hands full with my shattered arm. He is surgically inserting an adamantium pin and piston arrangement that runs the interior length of the limb.
My serfs make themselves busy about my sitting form. With my arm strapped, there is little in the way of blood. What there is Oren moodily massages into the deck with his mop. Old Enoch is on his knees, babbling prayers and incomprehension. Bethesda is beside me, working around Ezrachi’s aides. She’s applying a moistened cloth to my brow, for all the comfort it gives me. I allow this irrelevance to continue. She is young and my form more than mortal. Her reverence is only human and if such meaninglessness gives her comfort then who am I to deny such minor mercies?
Of course, my visitor is here. It indulges in what might be described as an otherworldly pacing, the inky blackness of the hold giving up its armoured form before the phantasm disappears, again one with the darkness. I catch it in the periphery of my vision. It seems always there, even when it’s not. Once, in the chapel-reclusiam, I turned to find it beside me. The cleaved faceplate of its helmet radiated a chillness that turned my breath to fog. I heard its teeth chatter and, as I turned away, I caught once again the helmet interior and the fleshless face within.
