Legion of the Damned

by Rob Sanders

  This is an insufferable position for all. If I were but a squad whip in this company I would share their anger and indignation, and like Uriah Skase, I would make my displeasure known. It is my honour that hangs in the balance. My standard lost. My vendetta to prosecute with the filth Alpha Legion. I marvel that my own Excoriators cannot see the pain I share with them. As corpus-captain, however, my gaze must be broader. The Fifth Company’s hearts beat to a mutinous rhythm, and like the race to the runner, our time on Certus-Minor only serves to amplify the defiant thunder in their chests. It would be easy to excuse this as some malignant influence of the Chaos artefact. I am their corpus-captain and I know better. I cannot find it in myself to thank Chapter Master Ichabod for this duty, or see the wisdom in his orders. In a galaxy overrun with mankind’s enemies, I fail to see the significance of a single cemetery world. My Excoriators need to exorcise their grief through the blessings of battle. Only in the crash of their bolters and the fall of their enemies can the Fifth Company find itself once again.

  Oliphant talks still but I am no longer listening. He spits his prayers and blessings to the God-Emperor through his palsied lips, but his feeble words are drowned out by my silent rage. Like the pontifex, the priests are on their feet with goblets in their hands. Their gathering dims the chamber. They feel like a curtain about me, shutting out the world. I long to be free and for a terrible moment my hand drifts for my weapons.

  Then I see it. My spectre. My revenant. My madness – sat at the other end of the table. The dead thing fixes me with the unnatural life force glowing in a single eye. It stares down the table at me like a lance beam from the rent in the being’s helm. Then, in an action that chills me to the core, the revenant takes up a goblet from the table and holds it up to toast me also.

  My vision blurs. The deep black armour of the spectre blotches and runs into everything else. The clerics take their wine and then, depositing their cups on the tabletop, begin to clap their appreciation. A silent applause. The chamber shrinking. Their forms in shadow growing. Then, beyond them I see others. A gallery of shadows. Shapes in midnight plate. Indistinct but obviously armoured. Pauldrons. Helmets. Optics burning with otherworldly intelligence. They are everywhere. Row after row. An army of revenants. A host of darkness. Everything becomes an inky blackness, like being trapped deep under an ice-covered lake. Through an opening – distant and darkening – I see only Oliphant, deific praise still escaping his lips.

  Before I know I’ve done it, my fists come down. The stone table jumps, the impact of my assault sending a quake down its entire length. Goblets dance. Plates and cutlery leap and rattle. Red wine spreads like blood from wounds across the table, pitter-pattering off the edge and onto the floor. I am on my feet, towering above the frozen gathering. They are simultaneously shocked and terrified. Rooted to the spot. Even Oliphant has stopped. Light has returned to the chamber. The revenant is gone and so has his company of lost souls.

  ‘Enough,’ I say. The word is mine, unlike the wave of anger upon which it rides. ‘The Emperor is flesh and he is blood. He lives and breathes. His sons honoured this, as do his sons’ sons. When will humanity, from whose ranks the Emperor emerged, recognise this? Priests… what do they know of the Emperor’s will? Priests, who take history – the truth of deeds long done – and use it to peddle lies and expectation. Who are you to offer hope? Vague promises of sanctuary and intervention, designed to distract humanity from the misery of an Imperial existence? The Emperor is a powerful man – but he is not all-powerful. If he was, do you think he would allow his people to languish as they do under threat of torment, poverty, hunger and death? As a man he is father to us all, not some omnipotent god to feed your desire to be loved and assuage your mortal fears. As a father, he does his best – as he always has – to protect his children. He reaches out to smash, with a righteous fist, those that seek to harm you. We are that fist.’

  My own fists are buried in the cracked stone of the tabletop. I don’t really know to whom I am talking. Oliphant? The absent Melmoch? Myself? I lean at the gawping priests, my arms straight and shoulders hunched. I turn to look at Ezrachi, seated by my side. He is more the politician than myself, but I know that as an Adeptus Astartes, the priestly prattle rankles him also. His face is hard but not cast in the kind of disapproval I have come to expect from the Apothecary. My own face falls from fury to consternation.

  ‘The Darkness,’ I mumble. It is neither statement nor question. Ezrachi’s crabby brow furrows. The Apothecary is suddenly on his feet.

  ‘Please excuse us,’ Ezrachi says bowing his head. ‘Pontifex, gathered dignitaries. The corpus-captain’s duties demand his attention.’

  The pontifex, a good-natured smile still somehow plastered across his half-paralysed face, nods reverently back, an act mimicked by the stunned priests about the table. With that, Ezrachi gets me out of the chamber.

  Accompanied by the sibilance of his bionic leg, the Apothecary helped Kersh to the ground floor and the square before the pontifex’s palace.

  ‘It’s returning. I’m sure of it,’ Kersh said.

  ‘I severely doubt that,’ Ezrachi told him, ‘but I’ll do some tests.’

  ‘I told you before, I’m seeing things that are not there.’

  ‘Symptomatic of sleep deprivation. I can give you something for your sleeplessness. Even an Adeptus Astartes must sleep some time. We should not forget the monument. We have little idea of its malign influence. Melmoch tells me that it is corruptive and had a strange effect on both you and Skase. The Ruinous Powers delight in their mind tricks and we should not discount it.’ Kersh nodded slowly. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to alert the Chaplain just yet. I shall summon Melmoch for a second opinion.’

  Outside, one of Certus-Minor’s long nights had fallen. All three of the cemetery world’s suns were absent from the sky. Brother Micah stood sentry on the palace door nearby a pair of Charnel Guard. He had been waiting. Upon seeing Kersh slumped against the aged Apothecary, the young champion was prompted to ask, ‘What’s wrong with the corpus-captain?’

  ‘You protect him,’ Ezrachi said with annoyance, ‘Let me treat him, eh?’

  ‘Brother Toralech is trying to relay an urgent message from Corpus-Commander Bartimeus, but can’t get a vox-link,’ Micah informed the Apothecary.

  ‘As you can see, the corpus-captain isn’t answering his vox-bead right now,’ Ezrachi replied sardonically.

  With Micah under one ceramite shoulder and Ezrachi the other, the pair of Excoriators took Kersh across the square in the great shadow of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum. The journey downhill on cobbles, with the weight of the stumbling Scourge between them, was difficult. In the darkness of an alleyway the Space Marines heard screams and the echo of running footsteps. Gunshots followed. With his free hand Micah brought up his bolter and combat shield attachment, but Ezrachi pulled both Kersh and the company champion into the deeper darkness.

  ‘It’s local business. Let the cemetery world authorities handle it,’ the Apothecary insisted. ‘I don’t want anyone to see the corpus-captain like this.’ The three Excoriators held a hidden vantage point at a corner. Silent and still the Space Marines watched a servant girl, a common drudge, run for her life past them. Micah risked a brief glance around the corner. Heavier footsteps followed and close after he saw a thick-set foss-reeve bounding up the alleyway like a man possessed. As the reeve rounded the corner, Micah stepped out and shouldered the cemetery worlder into the opposite wall. Striking the masonry, the reeve hit his head and then tumbled to the cobbles, rolling shoulder over shoulder down the alleyway until he came to rest in a gutter. Ezrachi’s lip curled.

  ‘He didn’t see anything,’ Micah said before leading the two of them back down the alley.

  It was the company champion’s responsibility to protect the corpus-captain at all times and even Ezrachi had to admit that the young Excoriator had done an excellent job of memorising the steep maze of lanes, passageways and alleys back down t
owards the Umberto II Memorial Space Port. The path was an escape route from the palace to the hermitage Ezrachi and Chaplain Shadrath had arranged for the Excoriators to use as a planetside dormitory.

  As the Adeptus Astartes passed a dirge-cloister, they observed members of the Charnel Guard and a pair of Kraski’s enforcers gathered outside an emporium. The Excoriators with their superhuman hearing could hear stifled screams and growls of intimidation from within. The enforcers kicked in a flimsy door and entered with their shotguns raised. The Charnel Guard followed in their ceremonial gear and with their long lasfusils. There was a sudden rush and a cacophony of threats, followed by the inevitable bark of the enforcers’ weapons. The flash of lasfusils filled the narrow casements.

  ‘What on Terra is going on?’ Micah posed.

  ‘Come on!’ Ezrachi urged and the Excoriators pushed on along the final few alleyways. About them, against the backdrop of night, the city seemed alive with anger, shrieks of alarm and the occasional crack of stub-fire.

  ‘Shouldn’t we alert the Chaplain?’ Micah asked as they approached the hermitage.

  ‘Not the Chaplain,’ Ezrachi insisted.

  ‘Who then?’ Micah pushed. ‘Bartimeus? The chief whip? This is why we have a command structure.’

  Micah stopped. Ezrachi didn’t wait for him. Taking the full weight of the barely conscious Kersh onto one shoulder, the Apothecary dragged the Scourge with him along the cobbles.

  ‘You can debate the directives for command with me later,’ Ezrachi called behind him. ‘For now, help me get your actual commanding officer inside.’

  ‘Apothecary.’

  ‘What?’ Ezrachi barked. When Micah didn’t appear beside him or even reply, the Apothecary stopped and made an ungainly one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn. Micah stood in the middle of the alleyway, his boltgun slack in his grip. The Excoriator was staring up past the belfries, spires and steeples of the city and into the open night sky. Ezrachi did the same. There, hanging above the cemetery world like a drop of blood, was the bulb-head of a comet. A crimson comet, whose tail trickled after it, smearing the heavens with gore. Ezrachi had heard of the crimson comet. The worst of omens, it brought death in its wake to entire worlds, for along its pilgrim path blazed the Blood God’s servants, unimaginable in number, with an unquenchable thirst for slaughter. The Cholercaust had come to Certus-Minor and with it had come inescapable doom.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FALLEN STAR

  Lord Havloc nestled in his command throne – an object that had become as much part of him as he had the Traitor battle-barge Rancour. Pincering a strip of ancient flesh between a pair of black talons, Havloc peeled it from his grotesque shoulder. His infernal face – a mangled snout of sabre-tusk and red, reptilian scale – twisted with repugnant hate. The lord of the Rancour had long felt disgust for his previous, weakling form. He let the strip dangle and drop beside the flesh-throne before examining the bone-scabrous daemonhide beneath.

  About the creature the darkened bridge of the battle-barge extended, a nightmare of brasswork and chain. Gouts of flame routinely erupted from the grille floor, beneath which a gladiatorial slave-pit extended for Havloc’s pleasure. The roar of murderous intention and resulting death-shrieks that rose from the pit competed with the excruciating struggle of the Rancour’s ancient engines. Catwalks and elevated gangways led from the throne pulpit across the open space to the banks of rancid cogitators and runescreens, manned by half-mad emaciates and wretched captives that had proven themselves in the pit. The blood-smeared slaves were manacled to their stations and sat in their rags, staring glaze-eyed at their stations, reliving some past horror aboard the Rancour.

  Dominating the far end of the bridge were the gargantuan lancet windows, cracked and misted with old blood. Through them the deep darkness of space was visible. One celestial object dominated, however. In the main lancet screen, perpetually held in a set of cross hairs by the mechanical course corrections of brass automatons, was the gory miasma of the Keeler Comet’s tail. With ancient orders and angelic masks, the automatons maintained the Rancour’s course heading, its torpid pursuit of the crimson comet across the stars.

  Behind the mangled blasphemy of the battle-barge’s stately dimensions a colossal fleet extended. Like a growing stain on the empty void, the Cholercaust continued to grow. Daily, vessels of all descriptions joined the Ruinous armada. Some were warships, eager to join the Blood Crusade and prove themselves worthy of Khorne’s favour. Others had been led there under the command of killers and champions, whose carnage-clouded visions had revealed to them a slaughter without end, a patron-pleasing brotherhood of the barbarous. Others still were captured freighters, traders and heavy transports, swarming with the surrendered slave-stock of sundered worlds, Imperial innocents whose fate now lay in the Blood God’s claws and whose depraved treatment aboard the seized vessels led them down Khorne’s doomed path.

  Silhouetted in the comet’s tailsmear, a Traitor Astartes stood before the lancet screen in the studded extravagance of archaic Tactical Dreadnought armour. The figure was a vision of red and brass, spiked like an undersea urchin and draped in skull and chain. His helm was a sculpted representation of monstrous jaws swallowing a bronze globe whole. Held beside the ceramite hulk, one in each gauntlet, were a pair of ugly chainaxes. The Traitor Terminator rested their shafts on the mesh-decking and allowed their chunky belligerence and barbed outline to hang over his grotesque helmet. Lord Havloc might have been commander of the Rancour and leader of the crusader fleet, but Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh – World Eater and Skull Champion of the Blood God – led the Cholercaust once the berserker armies of Khorne stepped out onto the soon-to-be blood-drenched earth of Imperial worlds. He stood like a statue, unmoved in his silent fury, watching the Keeler Comet’s haemorrhaging bulb bleed out across the cosmos, leading the Blood Crusade fleet across the stars to its next planetary victim.

  On the bridge the air was thick with rage, heat and the haze of blood, pierced only by the Blood God-honouring screams of the dying. Devil-mutants and fang-faced bestials armed with serrated flails drove a chained train of fresh captives out onto the pulpit-mezzanine. There, before the horror of Havloc’s daemon form, the slaves shrieked their terror, emptied their bladders and begged for a mercy that would never come. With an imperceptible narrowing of his yellow, serpentine eyes, Lord Havloc gave successive orders for execution.

  Like his glorious deity, Havloc the Cold-Blooded had a special loathing for the meek and yielding. The Blood God drank deep in the fury of the sword’s swing, the thunder of flesh-pulping gunfire delivered at point-blank range and the seething malice of murderous thoughts. These the Chaos entity drew upon, whether carried out by the depraved champions of his hateful cause or enemies, worthy in their violent desires and bloody intent.

  A monstrous hulk lumbered forth, an obscene fusion of what had been a man and machine. Weapons protruded awkwardly from stone-hard flesh which had in turn grown cancerous and rampant across the thing’s armour and helmet. Two holes had been punctured in the tissue of the mask to allow the thing to see, and the eyeholes continually bled and crusted.

  Released from his bonds, a fat slave threw himself down before Havloc’s feet – cloven hooves that had long been fused to the base of the throne. The hulk snatched up the pleading captive by the head with an embedded power claw. Its other arm was a flesh-cradle for the broad disc of a spinning buzzsaw, which with an effortless swipe, cut the slave’s screeching head and shoulders from the rest of his thrashing carcass. Lord Havloc and his followers were baptised in the blood of the slaughtered. Depositing the decapitated head in a net of rotting skulls hanging off the hulk’s back, the brute kicked the rest of the butchered corpse off the side of the pulpit-mezzanine. The body tumbled into a crowded den of flesh-hounds below, initiating a short-lived daemonic frenzy. This the hulk repeated with two further submissives until before Havloc came a spitting whirlwind of a girl. Her chains jangled and her feet flew as she attempted to th
rash her way out of imprisonment. The Chaos lord licked his lips with a thick, forked tongue. He nodded and a bestial released her from her bonds.

  From the back of the throne, Havloc spread a large pair of black, leathery wings. The girl spat at the Rancour’s commander and, free of her shackles, came straight at the beast. Havloc relished her mindless fury – her lack of fear and desire to kill. Flapping his wings in front of him, Havloc sent a wall of foetid air at the girl. Running and kicking, the spirited slave was blown from the grille of the pulpit-mezzanine. She tumbled with a half-caught scream before hitting the floor with a sickening crack. The scream came fully-formed this time. The slave was squirming around on the blood-slick floor of the gladiatorial arena below. A shattered tibia had sheared up through her knee.

  ‘That should slow her down a bit,’ Lord Havloc hissed, emerging from behind his retracting wings. Howls of furious delight rose from the audience as another slave was freed from a holding cage. Snatching a crude flensing blade from a hook on the rusting pit wall, the gore-speckled defending champion swept down on the girl.

  The howls and shrieks of the berserkers on the bridge suddenly seemed to combine into one horrific roar. Flames thrashed to greater heights and the corroded metal of the deck began to vibrate, causing fragments of grit and shattered skull to dance, and blood to steam from its agitated surface. Umbragg took to one ceramite knee. The damned all spoke as one.

  ‘Havloc…’

  Even the Chaos lord bowed his head and lowered his wings, as though the voice was everywhere and its owner looking down on him from above.