by Rob Sanders
The fallen column had created a shattered causeway across the pool and a path Montalbán fully intended on using to swiftly reclaim his weapon. Once again, the Black Templar’s light feet and balance had proved their worth and the Imperial Fist found a dry Alighieri holding an awkward fighting stance but blocking his way across the stepping stone. The Fist’s lips wrinkled in infuriation. Slapping the palms of his gauntlets on a colossal fragment of the broken base block, Montalbán heaved the slab of stone above his head and launched it at the Black Templar. As the rock flew like a meteorite along the path of the causeway, a wide-eyed Alighieri was forced to jump from the bridge and dive into the water.
As his feet found the bottom and the Castellan surfaced, sword in hand, he found himself staring up at Montalbán’s rippling chest. The giant had torn the remainder of the base-block out of the arena floor and was once again hefting the rock above the flat-top of his blond hair. Alighieri prepared himself to dive left or right out of the boulder’s trajectory. At that moment, like a daemon of the deep, Kersh broke the water’s surface. Coming up behind Alighieri he grabbed the Black Templar by both the wrist of his swordarm and his neck. The Castellan struggled in desperation but the Space Marine’s speed and agility were no match for the Scourge’s meaty arm-lock.
Kersh held Alighieri to him, holding the Black Templar in place and outstretched, resting his forehead against the back of the warrior’s skull. The Castellan’s face fell as he watched Montalbán hurl the rock at them both. Kersh felt the Templar’s bones break as the stone shattered against Alighieri’s presented form. The pair were smacked down through the water, leaving a cloud of rock dust to mark the point of dreadful impact.
Once again beneath the surface, the Scourge was slammed into the pool bottom by the weight of the broken block. The back of his head bounced off the stone and something cracked. Heaving the deadweight of the sinking rock off both himself and Alighieri’s motionless body, Kersh kicked off the pool floor only to find his right leg wouldn’t answer. It was broken and useless. Clawing for the surface with one hand he dragged the Templar behind him with the other.
He need not have bothered. The arena was morphing about them once again with a mechanical shuddering. Water drained about the Scourge through the grilles, and the pool bottom rose up to meet him.
All three Space Marines were now back on the same level. Alighieri was a broken and bloodied mess. Half of his chest had been caved in by the rock’s impact. Kersh slithered up beside him and put his ear to the other half and then to the Black Templar’s torn lips. Incredibly, he was still breathing. Barely.
Kersh heard the damp scrape of his blade on the arena floor and craned his stiff neck around to see the giant Montalbán reclaim it from down beside the toppled tower. Swinging it experimentally about him the Imperial Fist advanced. The gallery was silent and still.
‘Scourge!’ Montalbán called as he strode across the arena. ‘The time has come.’ Like a great death world predator, the Imperial Fist broke into a run. His sword came up overhead.
Kersh turned back to Alighieri’s broken body. His eyes drifted along the Black Templar’s arm and to the gladius clutched in his smashed hand. In the mirror blade of the weapon the Excoriator found himself looking at a reflection of the revenant. It peered out through the ceramite shard missing in its midnight faceplate. Kersh saw its teeth rattle and otherworldly life glow from the eye socket of its bleached skull, the full horror of its form revealed through a chink in its armour. An opening. A vulnerability.
Kersh felt the hulking Fist’s steps pounding through the floor. He was almost upon the prone and supplicant figure of the Excoriator. ‘Are you ready, brother?’ Montalbán boomed above him. Kersh began to tear feverishly at Alighieri’s broken fingers. With the gladius in his own, the Scourge sat, turned and twisted. Sent catapulting over Kersh’s own bleeding head, the sword shot the short distance between the Excoriator’s loosened grip and Montalbán’s exposed chest.
With a thud the gladius buried itself in the Imperial Fist’s torso. Stumbling, the mighty Montalbán tripped over the prone forms of Alighieri and the Scourge. Crashing to the arena floor, the champion rolled across one shoulder plate before coming to rest on his back. Crawling arm over arm, Kersh dragged himself alongside the fallen giant. The Imperial Fist’s eyes were stricken and wide open. He held his back off the floor and thrust his chest at the cage-dome of the arena ceiling and the spectators beyond. The toxin smeared on the tip and blade-edge of the gladius was spreading through the Space Marine’s chest, paralysing his twin hearts and bringing them to a stop.
‘Am I ready?’ the Scourge hissed in the champion’s ear, repeating his previous question. ‘For anything, brother,’ Kersh told him with blood dripping from his lips. ‘Even you.’
The Excoriator rolled onto his own back and stared up at the gallery of silhouettes staring back at him. ‘Call the Apothecaries!’ he bawled finally. Above, Master Fortinbras nodded his authorisation and the drome-barbica opened. The arena grew still and silent, and figures in gleaming white plate dashed out across the dark stone. Robed serfs and servitors followed with equipment. A Black Templars Apothecary went to work straight away on Alighieri’s crushed chest and collapsed lung.
The Imperial Fists Apothecary expertly withdrew the gladius Kersh had put in Montalbán’s chest. His serfs went to stem the blood pooling and streaming down the side of the champion’s torso. The Apothecary took a pair of hypodermic syringes from a medical crate carried by a gruesome servitor. One at a time the Apothecary stabbed them down through the muscle and black carapace of the Imperial Fist’s breast. With both piercing the Space Marine’s hearts the Apothecary depressed the plungers with his palms and administered the anti-paralytic. Montalbán spasmed. The needles twitched in rhythm as the Space Marine’s hearts resumed their thunderous beat as the Fist gulped a deep lungful of air.
Ezrachi suddenly appeared above Kersh. The solemnity of the occasion prevented Ezrachi openly celebrating or offering congratulations, but the Apothecary was clearly having difficulty hiding his pride and pleasure behind a mask of professional concern.
‘Remain still,’ he told the Scourge, an unintentional grin breaking through the his usual scowl. ‘You have a fractured skull, a multitude of breakages and internal bleeding.’
‘I feel tired,’ Kersh told him, his speech beginning to slur.
‘That’ll be the concussion,’ Ezrachi said.
‘Ezrachi?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is this a dream?’
The Apothecary watched the Scourge’s eyes close. He looked from the prone Black Templar to the giant Imperial Fist. He recalled what it had taken for Kersh to beat them both.
‘I hope not.’
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CHAINS OF COMMAND
The chapel-reclusiam of the Scarifica was all but empty. The Scourge knelt beneath its vaulted ceiling with his eyes cast down on the black marble of the chamber floor. The polished stone reflected a little of the stained-glass brilliance of the window beyond the altar – a tessellate representation of Demetrius Katafalque at Rogal Dorn’s side during the post-Heresy crusades of penitence. Kersh brought up his gaze. Before the glorious depiction, laid out across the simple altar, was the length of a highly-wrought stasis casket. The bejewelled case hummed, the temporal suspension of its contents and interior drowned out only by a small choir of chapel servitors. Chaplain Dardarius had the drones embedded in the stone plinths which lined the chamber so that they stood like statues, perpetually engaged in a round of liturgical chants.
Kersh was dressed in full battle-plate, as honour decreed. With the Excoriators frigate well into its journey home and Kersh recovered from his arena injuries, Corpus-Captain Gideon had allowed the Scourge his suit of power armour in quiet recognition of the warrior’s achievement. Kersh hadn’t worn the plate since the terrible day the Darkness had taken him. The day he had lost the Stigmartyr.
The day he had allowed the filth Alpha Legion
to slither past and sink their fangs into his Chapter Master’s flesh. The Scourge had experienced mixed feelings upon first donning the ornate ceramite plates. It felt undeniably good to be back in both power armour and his Chapter’s colours, but his chest flushed with shame at such gladness. He had come through the Darkness but had left the Chapter in a darkness of its own, bereft of its standard and afflicted with grief and doubt. He was in good health while his Chapter Master writhed in envenomed agony. He was alive when so many of his brethren had fallen. These burdens and more weighed heavily on the Excoriator, and after his daily ‘Donning of Dorn’s Mantle’, Kersh spent time in quiet reflection in the chapel-reclusiam, searching his soul for a little of the primarch’s wisdom and fortitude.
Kersh wasn’t convinced that Gideon had reunited the warrior with his armour in entirely good faith. The Scarifica’s journey to Eschara was a circuitous one, returning battle-brother after participating battle-brother to their far-flung companies and Chapter houses across the coreward expanse of the segmentum. Each veteran of the Feast was returned to their corpus-captain in a small but significant ceremony, attended by battle-brothers of their company, senior officers, contestants and Gideon himself. As champion of the Feast of Blades, it was appropriate that Kersh appeared as such, in full battle armour. The Scourge suspected that this consideration – rather than a renewed respect and liking for Kersh – had a great deal to do with the corpus-captain’s decision to return the blessed plate to him. A ceremony without a champion would have been embarrassing.
In this way Gideon had also decided to return the Scourge to his commander last. Apart from Kersh’s ceremonial significance, his commanding officer was the Chapter Master himself. Since the Excoriators home world of Eschara was the final destination on the frigate’s journey, it made sense to deliver the Scourge last. Still, this did little to assuage the warrior’s impatience. As he had confided to both Gideon and Ezrachi, Kersh was eager to return to Eschara, beg forgiveness of Master Ichabod in person and request that Santiarch Balshazar despatch him on a penitence crusade of his own, to track down the Alpha Legion and reclaim the Excoriators Chapter’s precious standard. Only through such recompense could the Scourge earn redemption in the eyes of his brothers and achieve a spiritual peace.
About the kneeling Scourge’s penitent form his mortal serfs busied themselves, at once dedicated yet inconspicuous. While Techmarine Hadrach was responsible for the maintenance of the ancient plate and the suit’s machine-spirit, many Chapter rituals and cult appeasements fell to Kersh’s seneschal, lictor and absterge; and there was much to do. The plate was magnificent – as befitting a Scourge of the Excoriators Chapter. Every Excoriator honoured with carrying the Chapter standard or ‘Ancient’ had worn the suit and it was as old as it was immaculate. Like the banner itself, it displayed the venerated symbol of their brotherhood – the Stigmartyr – on the suit’s loincloth. Kersh had considered himself, therefore, part of the standard, making its personal loss all the more grievous.
Seals, chains and brown leather strapping dripped from the suit, but Old Enoch and Oren occupied themselves with the plate itself. The armour was a relic and as such had been heavily modified by Adeptus Astartes artisans, but its studs and robust cabling betrayed its original mark and designation. The ceramite surface was pock-marked and scarred like the meteorite-battered surface of a moon. The ivory paint was mottled silver-grey with burns and bolt-craters from the many engagements the armour had witnessed. It had been the Scourge’s honour to add to these. Equally scarred and annotated was the helm sitting on the flagstone before the Scourge. It spoke ugly belligerence with its unsmiling grille, snake-eyed optics, studs like horn buds and a short, brutal crest.
Oren’s bulging arms were put to good use rubbing sacred oils into the ancient plate of the suit’s pauldrons. Each was a representation of the Stigmartyr: crafted ceramite fists, clutching Kersh’s shoulders and shot through with lightning bolts that protruded both front and behind like wicked spikes. The sacred oils preserved the excoriations and provided extra spiritual protection for the plate. Bethesda stood barefoot beside him, reading benedictions of bearing and repairing from a devotional tract, her syllables a sibilant whisper amongst the servitor chanting. Old Enoch knelt beside one gleaming vambrace, a diamond-tip vibro-quill in his bony hand, annotating each nick, scar and hollow with a date and location.
Each of the seneschal’s additions bore the same name: Ignis Prime. The planet on which Chapter Master Quesiah Ichabod had come to inspect the mountaintop Excoriators garrison of Kruger Ridge, only to find a slaughterhouse rather than a Chapter house, and a waiting ambush in the form of heretic Alpha Legionnaires. It was there, barricaded in the oratorium, that Zachariah Kersh had fallen to the Darkness, failing both his Master and his Chapter, and allowing the Alpha Legion’s victory to become complete.
The Scourge blinked, shaking another abstraction from the mists of his mind. ‘Where is the Chaplain?’ he asked. He had come to the chapel-reclusiam to see Dardarius, against his better judgement. Since finding a new home for the sacred Dornsblade in his tiny temple, the Chaplain was now rarely found anywhere else. Old Enoch mumbled something unintelligible.
‘The corpus-captain sent for him, my lord,’ Bethesda answered, closing the tract.
Kersh’s eyes narrowed. ‘The engines have stopped.’
Old Enoch nodded. The faint rumble was absent from the deck. After the long haul from Samarquand, short jumps and frequent receptions had become the order of the day. As the Scarifica moved between the cruisers, keeps and warzones of the Excoriators Chapter, Kersh had learned that precious little progress had been made in locating an antidote for the toxin slowly eating its way through his Chapter Master. The hazardous environs of feral hellholes and death worlds had not given up their secrets. Meanwhile, all companies were on high alert. News of Kersh’s victory at the Feast of Blades had indeed lifted the hearts of his battle-brethren, but it made their duty of garrisoning the sectors bordering the Eye of Terror no easier. Servants of the Dark Gods were ever ready to test the mettle of Excoriators bastions, gauntlets and cordons, and with recent misfortunes the numbers of battle-brothers holding such precarious boundaries were dwindling.
‘Enough,’ Kersh commanded, scooping his helmet from the floor and rising to his full height. A sporran arrangement hung across the ceremonial loincloth, holstering an Adeptus Astartes Mark II bolt pistol. The ancient weapon was squat, fat and ugly like a guard dog, and sat within easy reach across the Excoriator’s groin to allow not one but two scabbard-sheathed gladii to hug the Scourge’s hip. The first bore a bulbous pommel, sculpted in the fashion of a clutched talon of the Imperial aquila. Both gladius and pistol, with the relic plate, accompanied the honour of being the Chapter Scourge.
The second sword was plain and had been with Kersh since his inception as an Adeptus Astartes Space Marine. The Excoriator used it as a functional back-up weapon. With standard held high and a Chapter Master to defend, Kersh did not want to fall to an enemy for want of weaponry, and many enemy champions were skilled in the arts of disarming and blade deprivation. In the end the Darkness had turned out to be the true master of such strategies. Gideon’s ceremonies did not necessitate carrying such an arsenal aboard the ship, but traversing the dreadspace about the Eye of Terror did, with all battle-brethren on board instructed to be armed and ready for the ambushes, boarding actions and unpredictable mayhem the warp rift routinely threw at them.
The serfs lowered their eyes and retreated. The Scourge turned to his seneschal. ‘Discover why our engines have stopped.’ Old Enoch bowed his head and left. To Oren and Bethesda he simply said, ‘Pray, leave me.’
As the lictor and absterge repeated their father’s subservience and exited the chapel-reclusiam, the Scourge approached the altar. The bejewelled case was closed. Looking furtively about him, Kersh found the chapel empty but for the blind chorus of the choir. Depressing two gleaming studs the Scourge disabled the case stasis field and opened the caske
t.
Within was the Dornsblade. Sheathless. Simple. Resplendent. The weapon’s spartan honesty had shocked the Scourge at first. With most warriors – even amongst the Adeptus Astartes – the greater the glory of the wielder, the more extravagant the decoration of the weapon wielded. Even laid out on the ermine interior of the stasis casket, the Dornsblade rang with history. It entranced the observer with the dull gleam of honours eternally earned. It was rumoured to be unbreakable, a symbolic reminder of the unbreakable spirit of the Imperial Fists in the face of adversity, given form in the trials of the Iron Cage. It also represented Legion unity during the necessities of the Second Founding.
It was crafted from a single piece of high-grade adamantium and remained completely unadorned. Cross guard, hilt and pommel were all bare metal, with the heavy blade counter-balanced by a solid pentagonal prism, with angular edges and featureless faces. The hilt had been cross-hatched and scored to provide a grip, and the cross guard had been stamped with three simple numerals across its breadth: VII. The blade was razored and featureless, bar its bronzed discolouration, which was believed to be the stain of the traitor blood that had baptised the blade in Rogal Dorn’s hand, during the Battle of the Iron Cage.
The blade misted. Kersh suddenly became aware that the temperature in the chapel-reclusiam had dropped. The lamps dimmed and the choir trailed off. The Scourge saw the white clouds of his breath before him.
