Legion of the Damned

by Rob Sanders

  Kersh would have stormed into the hail of las-bolts himself if it hadn’t been for the company standard, resting in the rubble. Toralech’s hand was still clenched around the banner pole, despite the fact that the hulking standard bearer’s body was a twisted mess of bone and ceramite, half buried in the wreckage. Kersh spat and swore. Suddenly a gauntlet snatched at his boot. Spinning around, Kersh saw a partially buried Excoriator. Looking from the lightshow to the gauntlet, the corpus-captain slammed his Mark II and his chainsword down in the rubble. Heaving pieces of stone off the Space Marine, Kersh found himself looking down at the cracked, half-skull face of Shadrath’s helm. The Chaplain had been buried in masonry and the rim of the Great Bell rested across the smashed ceramite of his chest.

  ‘Hold on,’ Kersh told the Chaplain and rested his pack against the metal of the bell. Hooking his fingers around the rim, the Scourge pushed with his legs.

  From the stairwell beyond, Kersh could hear the disciplined fire of the lasfusils break up and the screams of Guardsmen echo about the ruins of the palace. Heaving upwards, the corpus-captain lifted the colossal weight of the bell slightly, allowing the rim to clear the buckled chestplate of the Chaplain. Kersh heard Shadrath take a laboured breath, then the sounds of slaughter. The beast was among the Guardsmen, tearing and gutting its way through the Charnel Guard with hateful ease.

  Within moments the thing was back. Down on all fours, the daemon charged at Kersh. It smouldered with the scorch tracks of las-bolts that had found their mark, and steamed with the blood of the Guardsmen it had butchered. Kersh held his ground as Chaplain Shadrath squirmed his way out from under the Great Bell. At the last moment, Kersh released his grip. The bell came back down on the Chaplain’s pauldron, trapping his arm and causing the Excoriator to grunt in pain and exertion. The daemon hit the metal of the instrument with the dome of its elongated cranium – its twisted horns ringing against the surface. Snatching the relic-gladius from his belt, the Scourge allowed the weight of its bulbous pommel to carry the blade around with centrifugal certainty before slashing down through the beast’s willowy arm.

  Kersh’s stroke took off the limb at the elbow. But though such a loss might have given most enemies pause for thought, the daemon seemed oblivious. It spat its gall and fed its rage with a blinding counter. Using the dribbling stump of the same limb, the monster smacked the gladius out of the Scourge’s grip with bone-ringing force. Pushing itself off the bell with its hind-talons, the daemon blazed at the Excoriator. Slamming the length of its skull against his chest and midriff, the beast ran the corpus-captain into the opposite wall. Stone crumbled and masonry fell as the creature butted the Space Marine repeatedly into the unforgiving surface. Kersh tried to reach for the hilt of his remaining gladius – the only weapon he had left – but was forced to grab on to the monster’s horns in order to prepare himself for the next brutal impact.

  Twisting the hydraulic sinew of his armoured wrist, Kersh broke off a length of the fiend’s horn and thrust it into the thing’s hideous visage. The reaction was immediate. Its head came up and its jaws flashed open, wider than the Scourge thought possible. Gagging under the creature’s gorebreath, Kersh once again grabbed the torturous cage of horn that protruded from the daemon’s skull, forcing it back. As the Excoriator fought to force the monster back, the slack length of bloodlustful tongue suddenly became solid and sharp, like a speartip. Kersh intuitively craned his head out of harm’s way, as the tongue shot out like a slaughterhouse groxgun. Puncturing the wall, the repellent tongue retracted. The Scourge threw his head the other way, only to have the devilish tip nick the side of his head and impale the brickwork.

  Out of nowhere Kersh heard the familiar crack of a bolt pistol. The beast seemed to arch and screech its vexation before rocketing away, allowing several rounds to pluck at the stone about the Scourge. Falling to a crouch, Kersh saw that Chaplain Shadrath – his shoulder still trapped beneath the Great Bell – had got his other gauntlet to the corpus-captain’s Mark II pistol. The daemon was back down on all fours, bounding this way and that, causing each of the Chaplain’s unsteady shots to narrowly miss. Leaping up onto the side of the bell once more, it forced the instrument down with its infernal weight, causing the Chaplain to gasp and drop the weapon. Pinning his wrist to the floor with one wicked hind-talon, the beast reared its other above Shadrath’s cracked helm in readiness for the kill.

  The ruins were suddenly filled with the clamour of bolt-fire. Brother Micah, masonry dust still cascading from his plate, took several determined – if shaky – steps around the Great Bell. His combat shield attachment was buckled but his bolter raged fully-automatic fury at the beast. The creature let loose an inhuman wail as the bolt-rounds plucked at its daemonflesh. With its stump and talons held out as an instinctive shield, and its digits and claws blasted off by the barrage, the monster backed away from the advancing champion.

  As Micah’s half-spent magazine ran dry, the mauled beast turned to find the Scourge standing behind it. The Excoriator stood tall and held a large chunk of ruined masonry above his head. His face was a strained mask of fury and physical effort. Smashing the small boulder down on the creature’s long head, Kersh watched the daemon stagger back. Shaking dust, grit and rock fragments from its hellish form, the beast seemed momentarily dazed. Fearless and foolish, the Scourge ran at the monster, wrapping his arm around its neck, grabbing it by its repulsive tongue and clutching its head to his armoured side. He felt the spirit of his plate protest against such close proximity to the Chaos daemon. Kersh was beyond caring, however. Holding the beast in an armlock, the Scourge pummelled the beast with his other fist.

  Kersh felt his being expand to accommodate the pure rage coursing through him. A natural gene-bred hatred of the Emperor’s enemies, growing into something unnatural and monstrous. Fighting the warp-sired thing had given rise to something ugly and uncompromising within the Scourge, a primal thing beyond his Adeptus Astartes training and the cool conduct of battle. A feeling that superseded strategic frustration and a Space Marine’s bottomless desire to win. Anger, indiscipline, anarchy. A lack of control that could only be described as bloodlust. Kersh became a ceramite chalice, spilling over with hot, mindless fury.

  Spitting curses and oaths, beating and punching the monster, Kersh’s actions were no longer his own. His eyes remained fixed on the rubble through which his boots and the monster’s hind-talons stumbled. An image flashed before the Scourge’s eyes. A momentary flicker. A memory, seared into the Space Marine’s unconscious.

  The crystalline wafer he’d found on his chest. The Emperor’s Tarot card. The Magnus Occularis. The single, unflinching eye, its doom-laden orb staring through the Scourge and filling him with the chill sensation of a feeling equally unnatural in an Excoriator. Fear. Kersh remembered the Darkness. Dorn’s gift. Dorn’s curse. A galaxy undone. A future alone. Kersh could not see the revenant but he sensed he was there. Just like he had been in the living nightmare of the Darkness. The Scourge felt his heart freeze within his chest. A benumbing emptiness that extinguished the fires of wanton wrath gutting him like a burning building.

  At once, Kersh was himself again. The fury gone. The spite steaming away before a Space Marine’s singular purpose. The Scourge became aware once more of the monster in his grasp. The threat. The need to act. Kersh dragged the daemon over to the knotted carnage of the Great Bell’s pulley system. Snatching a length of bell cord, the Scourge looped the thick rope around the daemon’s macabre skull. As he released the beast he felt furious life return to its blasted limbs. Two remaining talons scraped across the ceramite of his shoulder plate before Kersh got to a second rope and began pulling arm-over-arm for his life. The daemon flew skywards, its legs swinging back and forth like a doll’s, its neck and bulbous head snug in the improvised noose. It gagged, spat and hissed its brute vehemence. The Scourge held the beast there for a moment, taking no little satisfaction in the monster’s spasmodic thrashing.

  ‘Kersh!’ came a call fro
m above. The corpus-captain began an almost torturous return to his senses. It was Ezrachi. Kersh felt a tremble on the air. The welcome quake of a Thunderhawk’s engines.

  Two figures approached through the dust and mist. In one hand Brother Micah trained his reloaded boltgun on the snared beast. With his other he held up Chaplain Shadrath, freshly extricated from beneath the bell’s crushing weight. Shadrath held the company standard in his fierce grip. They too stood entranced by the monster’s jigging and twitching. Patting the Chaplain’s plate, the company champion allowed Shadrath to lean against the battered standard and brought his weapon into his shoulder. Micah angled the sights of his bolter up at the daemon. Kersh saw the fire in the champion’s eyes.

  ‘Save it,’ the corpus-captain commanded, before adjusting his vox-channel. ‘Gauntlet, this is Kersh.’ The Scourge returned to his ropework, hauling the beast up through the rock dust and gloom. ‘Target lock, palace interior.’

  The three Excoriators watched the daemon disappear above them. Kersh feverishly worked the bell cord, feeling the creature’s livid desperation through the length of rope. The line suddenly went slack. Simultaneously the roar of heavy bolters echoed through the ruins and the haze above flickered with a steady stream of firepower.

  A mangled form tumbled through the murk, striking the Great Bell and sending a thunderous death knell reverberating through the palace. The Excoriators looked down at the smoking remains of the daemon at the foot of the instrument. Whatever murderous, immaterial life had flowed through the daemonflesh had now left it. The corpse was black and shredded, punched through with bolt-rounds and mauled beyond grisly recognition.

  ‘Are you wounded?’ Micah put to his corpus-captain.

  ‘No, but you are.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ the champion pressed.

  ‘I am now,’ Kersh told him, stepping over the infernal remains. Walking across the rubble, Kersh reclaimed his weapons.

  ‘What do you want me to do with it?’ Shadrath hissed.

  Before leaving the chamber Kersh stopped and turned, taking one final look at the smouldering daemon. It was already beginning to lose its tenuous grip on reality, the red flesh bubbling and spitting. A bronze steam rose from the infernal corpse – its corporeal presence beginning to ebb away – threading through the smoke and slaughter. The Scourge would take no chances.

  ‘Burn it,’ Kersh told the Chaplain and left.

  CHAPTER TEN

  NECROPLEX

  Brother Omar gunned the bike’s throttle. The vehicle bucked with obedience, its machine-spirit hungry for the road. As a neophyte, Omar’s flesh had yet to be worthy of the lash, and no dents, rents or craters marked his carapace – his armour bearing the ignoble sheen of battle virginity. With the fat tyres of the bike tearing up the grit of the lychway and his dark robes flowing behind him, Omar surged up along the column cavalcade.

  With the appearance of the blood comet in the Certusian skies, cemetery world society collapsed. The wealthy and educated fled. Merchants sold their stock. Scribes and scriveners left their quills in their ink. Priests abandoned their flocks. Anyone with ears and coin had packed what they could carry and joined the crowds gathered about the mortuary lighters and hump shuttles on Memorial Space Port rockrete. Their ears were ringing with tales of the Keeler Comet and the death of worlds that followed in its wake. Their purses were soon emptied by greedy freighter captains whose crammed vessels hung in low orbit like last chances.

  Such fear felt alien and craven to Omar – as it did to all Excoriators. As a Scout and brother of the Tenth Company, he was young enough to remember the doubts and uncertainties of childhood. Back beyond his years of psycho-surgical enhancement and cult instruction. A time when fathers ruled and a mother’s embrace was everything. A time of nightmares, when darkness felt full of dread and danger.

  Brother Omar remembered and he felt for the cemetery worlders left behind. Like children, the remaining Certusians seemed haunted by their ignorance. Their existence had been the Emperor’s word, delivered daily through priestly lips and the reassuring drudgery of a hard day’s labour with teat or shovel. Now they had neither. Newborns went unfed and the dead unburied. There was only blind panic. Infrastructure had swiftly broken down and early fears for basic requirements such as food and safety found expression in petty tyranny, violence and murders of seeming necessity.

  It was for this reason that Corpus-Captain Kersh gave Squad Whip Keturah and his Scouts orders to ride out. To blast along the lychways and crow roads of the necroplex, across the sea of grave markers and stone sculpture, and through cenopost communities. In the absence of the Emperor’s words, the corpus-captain thought it important that common Imperials had the example of the Emperor’s flesh to comfort them. Even in such dark times, the sight of a hulking Adeptus Astartes – even a Scout – drew eyes and minds. Demigods walked among them.

  Partly to escape the violence, raiding and looting that had swiftly engulfed the hamlets and foss-parishes, and partly because they knew no better, cemetery worlders began to move in ragged convoys on Obsequa City. Herd instinct had led the Certusians to do this, and as lychways intersected, the crowds and pilgrim processions grew larger and longer. This too had been encouraged by Corpus-Captain Kersh, who had too few Excoriators and Charnel Guardsmen at his disposal to defend a world from what might follow in the blood comet’s wake.

  Omar, like his brother neophytes, had been instructed to ride across the tiny world, stopping briefly in each cenopost hamlet he rode through to order Certusians to move on to the capital. Obsequa City was designated a planetary holdpoint, to be further fortified by honoured members of the Fifth Company, and like a rescue vessel, the city took in as many as needed shelter – crowding the cells and domiciles of those who had escaped off-world and creating a tent shanty on the open and now empty expanse of the Memorial Space Port. It had taken Omar several days to reach the grave-lined shores of Lake Sanctity on the far side of the planet, and from there onwards he found that he was riding along the teeming lychways with the cavalcades rather than against the current of cemetery worlders. Omar had ridden amongst them all, vergermen and their families, gravediggers, foss-reeves, pallbearers and vestals, attending to the old, the sick and orphaned. Shabby masses, their rags covered with grave dust, pulling carts and carrying all they owned in the world.

  The strategy was not popular amongst the members of the Tenth. Brother Kush had been briefly seconded to Squad Cicatrix during training rites on board the Angelica Mortis. There he had been exposed to the full hatred the Excoriators First Squad felt for their new commanding officer. Kush, in turn, had brought these opinions to his brother neophytes, who had swiftly begun to revel in similar derision of the unfavoured Scourge, his loss of the Chapter Stigmartyr and his affliction with the Darkness. The Scout dormitory had soon became a forum for a kind of hollow boasting and scorn that Omar tried his best to avoid. When Squad Whip Keturah had delivered orders to break out the bikes and take to the lychways, Omar had been secretly relieved. After Keturah had left, Kush and several other Scouts had questioned the wisdom of the Scourge’s strategy. Omar had listened but said nothing. Kush claimed Kersh’s seeming concern for mere mortals was further weakness in the flawed commander – labelling it hesitation and cowardice when faced with the prospect of actual battle on the Vanaheim Cordon or Rorschach’s World.

  As Kush and his brothers went to leave the dormitory they had found the squad whip standing in the corridor. Keturah had run a hand through his silver mane and fixed them all with the cyclopean intensity of his bionic eye. Omar had withered under his gaze, but again opted for silence.

  ‘I know there are mixed feelings about the corpus-captain amongst the Fifth Company,’ Keturah finally said in steely syllables. ‘No such confusion exists in this company. Do you understand? When you are corpus-captain, you can debate deployment and strategy. Until then you will follow orders without discussion. Is that clear? Zachariah Kersh has had more broken bones than you have
bones all together. He’s spilled more blood than entire companies have ever seen and has recent scars older than you. For Throne’s sake, he won the Feast of Blades. He has wielded the sacred Sword of Sebastus – the primarch’s own weapon. Above all, he’s your commanding officer. And mine. Show some respect.’

  ‘But, whip…’ Kush had began.

  ‘Brother Kush,’ Keturah had said calmly, ‘you will take a vow of silence in regards to this matter or I will have the Apothecary sew your mouth shut for the duration of this mission. Do we have an understanding?’

  Kush nodded. ‘Yes, squad whip.’

  ‘Until I say otherwise,’ Keturah had told Kush, ‘you are forbidden from donning your shoulder carapace and gauntlets. Shed your field smock and cloak also. Cuirass and faulds only. I want your brothers to see the shame of your unspoilt flesh, to see your lack of battle scars and, by extension, your lack of judgement in this matter.’

  ‘Yes, squad whip.’

  After Keturah had left, Kush honoured his word to the squad whip. His lips said nothing. But they didn’t have to. His eyes – burning with defiance and meaning – did the talking.

  On the lychway before him a throng had gathered, making it difficult for Omar to ride. There was light ahead and some isolated screams, prompting some Certusians to turn around and start pushing their way back through the oncoming crowd. Clutching at the brakes, the Scout brought his machine to a gravel-crunching halt. Turning, Omar took the bike out along a narrow walkway, leading between gravestones and statues, alongside a crypt belonging to some hive-world House or family. The swarm of cemetery worlders on the lychway seemed to have come to a stop at a cenopost ahead, and Omar gunned the bike down a slender pallbearer’s track, riding up several burial mounds and clearing a line of gravestones in order to reach another track. This brought him out at the cenopost, a small collection of shacks and permanent hovels. These were built around the necroplex crosslyches and intersections dominated by a simple block cenotaph, carved in the semblance of the Adeptus Ministorum’s symbol and inscribed with prayers and blessings. It also bore the hamlet’s name. Little Amasec.