Legion of the Damned

by Rob Sanders

  ‘What of the Cholercaust – estimated time of planetfall?’ I put to the standard bearer. As we approach a seemingly resilient structure amongst the shattered and soot-stained landscape of destruction he achieves vox contact with the only vessel remaining in orbit around Certus-Minor. All other system ships departed under the protective wing of the Angelica Mortis with only the Adeptus Ministorum defence monitor Apotheon left behind.

  ‘The Apotheon confirms the first of the armada’s vessels breaching the asteroid field and entering the system core.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘At present speed the advance vessels should reach Certus-Minor in a little under eight hours standard,’ Novah tells me. I imagine the lonely defence monitor holding station above the cemetery world with her tiny engines, the reinforced shielding of her bulbous Voss prow, her grim batteries of fat cannon and the underslung length of her powerful lance quad, nestling beneath the vessel’s armoured keel.

  ‘My compliments to the commander and cleric,’ I say, and mean it. The Apotheon has the best view of the Cholercaust in the system. They know what is coming. To hold position and charge weapons ready for engagement in the face of such suicidal odds is nothing short of adamantium nerve. ‘Tell him to ignore the cultships and freighters. Any damage his vessel can visit upon Traitor Astartes cruisers, frigates and gunships on the approach is most welcome.’

  I think about wishing the captain luck but the words die on my lips. The Apotheon will be a boarder-ravaged wreck soon and the captain will shortly be dead. Since he knows this, it seems ridiculous to extend even the vaguest of optimistic wishes.

  Novah spots something charred and leathery flapping in a depression nearby and moves off to plug the surviving thing with bolt-rounds. I advance up the smoking steps of the building before me – the only one in the immediate area not to have fallen in the bomb blast. Its exterior is cracked and scorched, but symbols in the stonework above the iron doors identify the building as the precinct house of the enforcers.

  Putting a boot to the metal doors I enter cautiously. The inside of the building is untouched, protected by the thick walls of the precinct exterior. A perfect place for some otherworldly horror to hide from the Impunitas’s bombing run. The armoury is empty and a breeze from the open door disturbs vellum pages on the desks in the scriptoria. They float to the floor where they promptly begin to blotch and soak up blood recently spilt there. Several enforcers lie there also, one without a head and two others with ragged holes blown through their carapace and chests. Moving through the deserted precinct house, past the chastenoria, a booth-verispex and the provostery, I move down into the dungeon. An empty combat shotgun lies abandoned on the stairs. Here the cells are empty, bar one.

  Sitting on a bench, behind thick adamantine alloy bars, is Proctor Kraski. The enforcer’s scuffed armour is ripped and blasted, while his head leans to one side and his mouth is open. Tobacco juice dribbles from the corner of his mouth and down through his beard, pitter-pattering on the polished cell floor. Something crunches under my boot and lifting it I find a key, clearly thrown out of the cell by Kraski after he locked himself in.

  ‘Proctor,’ I call, my voice bouncing unsettlingly around the cell block. Clutching the bars with my gauntlet, one power-armoured tug forces the simple lock and I step inside the cage. Grabbing Kraski by his shaggy hair I lift his head up. ‘Proctor,’ I call at him again. His eyes have rolled over white but seem to quiver a little as though he is fitting. Suddenly I find out why.

  In the open mouth I see something horrible looking back out at me. Several spindly legs erupt from between the enforcer’s tobacco-stained teeth. An arachnoid being slips its tiny abdomen out of the opening and runs along my arm and across my armoured chest. All legs, the beast had crammed itself inside Kraski’s skull and devoured the contents.

  Recoiling with revulsion, my pack slams into the bars of the cell. I knock the monstrosity onto the floor where it clearly considers scrabbling back at me. Dipping my hand into my holster I soon dissuade it with several floor-pulverising blasts from my bolt pistol. The horror scuttles across the floor and up the stairs before I’m even out of the cell. Holding the Mark II in both hands I smack my pauldrons into walls, aiming around corners – expecting the thing to jump at my face. The ground floor of the precinct house confronts me with a fresh nightmare of hiding places, but a swift staccato of bolt-rounds outside persuades me that the beast has fled the building.

  Shouldering my way through the iron doors I see Brother Novah waving me to follow with the battle standard as he jumps from one piece of smouldering rubble to the next. I catch up with him at the boundary of destruction, where even a chapel-cryptia had weathered the bomb blast.

  ‘In here,’ Novah hisses, angling his bolter at a hole in the wall. Advancing through the brick-blasted opening, bolt pistol held before me, I creep into the darkness of the chapel-cryptia. Lowering the battle standard to get it inside, Novah follows. The interior – usually lit by candles – is a nest of shadows. A stained-glass portal above admits only gloom, and the centre of the chamber is dominated by a sunken stone stairwell down into a crypt. About the chapel are plinths bearing coffins of weathered stone, the brittle lids of which bear raised representations of minor Imperial saints. One is ajar.

  Jabbing my Mark II over at the coffin, Novah and I move quietly through the chamber. We both freeze as our sensitive hearing picks up on a scuffling within the coffin. With Novah’s bolter aimed at the stone box, I count us down with ceramite fingers from three to one. Tearing off the lid with one hand I thrust my pistol into the darkness with the other.

  There is a scream, which neither of us expect, and my finger twitches against the Mark II’s trigger. There is a young girl inside – alive and terrified; a dirty-faced cemetery worlder, hiding in the coffin. I hold my gauntlet up, as much an indication to her that we are no threat as an order to Brother Novah not to shoot. The foundling lets rip again with another shrill scream.

  Following her eyes I see that she is looking at the battle standard and the rift-spider running down its shaft. Novah’s response is immediate. He smacks the banner against the floor, propelling the thing down into the darkness of the crypt.

  ‘Down!’ I yell at the shrieking child, prompting her to duck back into the stone coffin. Aiming my pistol down the steps I thumb the weapon to automatic and illuminate the thick darkness with a stabbing stream of firepower. The monster vaults straight back at me from the murk of the crypt, forcing me to drop the weapon. With my gauntlets out in front of me I hold the warp-strong thing at bay as it scrabbles for my face. ‘Novah!’

  ‘Do it!’ the standard bearer shouts.

  Grasping one of the creature’s legs I swing it around, smacking its thrashing body against the chapel wall before hooking its obscene form back around and smashing through the stone torso of a nearby statue. Knocked senseless but still very intent on crawling into my skull, the thing spasms in my grip. I toss it into the air above the crypt where Brother Novah shreds the abomination with a precision burst of bolter-fire. With a reality-searing pop the creature vanishes and a light shimmer twirls for the roof. After a moment or two of silence, Novah says, ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  I nod in response and walk over to the stupefied child. She looks up at me with blank, fearful eyes. Plucking her delicately from her hiding place in the coffin, I hand her to Novah who holds her in the crook of his elbow, beneath the Fifth Company’s battle standard. Pushing open the ferruswood chapel-cryptia door with the muzzle of his bolter, I hear him call in the end of our sweep of the demolished district.

  I recover my pistol and re-holster the weapon. I find myself staring at the open stone coffin, its frail lid now shattered pieces on the floor. I think of the girl hiding within – the surreal nature of the moment we discovered her. Peering inside I can see something in the bare bottom of the coffin and I pick it out. It’s a crystalline wafer, a card from the Emperor’s Tarot. I look about, searching the shadows for the reve
nant, but he is nowhere to be seen.

  I turn the card over in my fingertips. The wafer bears the image of a stellar eclipse – a moon covering all but the coronal ring of a distant sun – as viewed from an aligned planetoid. Under the representation is a single word: Umbra.

  I feel the ghostly flutter of inspiration pass through the pit of my stomach – a sensation usually reserved for moments of inventive daring in combat, seconds before I wrong-foot my opponent with an unexpected slice of the blade or wholeheartedly commit to some bold and unpredictable manoeuvre. A sensation that has saved my life many times and taken the lives of my enemies many more. I am held there in the moment, stunned witness to the birth of an idea so audacious that it brings an involuntary smile to my mauled lips.

  I am there, smiling grimly at the wafer, long enough for Brother Novah to return. He has vox-messages.

  ‘Corpus-captain,’ he says, still holding the mortal child. ‘Squad Whip Joachim for you, sir. He requests that you and Epistolary Melmoch meet him in the Sepulchre Square. He says it’s important.’

  ‘Fine,’ I reply. Then add, ‘Vox back Brother Simeon. Inform him that I am on my way up to the Memorial Mausoleum. Tell him I want to see the pontifex. Tell him…’ I hesitate. ‘Tell him it’s important.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CESSATION

  His name had been Scarioch. He had been a brother Excoriator, a member of Squad Censura and a squad second whip. Hours before, it had been enough for him to serve his squad whip, to honour his company and fight for his Emperor. Katafalque’s words had been his guide and Dorn’s deeds his example. He had been an Adeptus Astartes – an Angel of the Imperium.

  All this was nothing to him now.

  He-Who-Had-Been-Scarioch now only thought in shades of red. He felt only a feral injustice – a hatred for everything he had been, for order and discipline, for honour and instruction, for spiteful subservience. For the first time the Space Marine felt the full potential of his superhuman form. He enjoyed the torrent of unbridled strength coursing through his bulging veins, brawn pumped to slabs of stone, the senses of a death world predator and the thunder of hearts in his chest.

  The Space Marine felt only the beginning of the end. He had become something else, something new and powerful, something that lived only for the end of others. The crack of skulls. The whisper of razored edges through soft flesh. The thud of blades buried in bodies. The spurt of sliced jugulars. The snapping of necks and spines. The sighs and gasps of the dying. The splash of footsteps in pools of spilt blood. All this He-Who-Had-Been-Scarioch could feel just beyond his aching fingertips. He desired nothing more than to make these murderous fantasies fact and his inability to enact the blood-lush nightmare only fuelled his building rage further.

  They had done this to him, his so-called brothers. The killing, the slaughter – it had to continue. The craven Angels of the corpse-Emperor failed to see this. Dastards all, they had mobbed him like cowards, holding him down and prising the steaming sword from his hand. Not before the Scarioch-Thing had broken a few more jaws and noses with his brow and flailing knuckles. When he would not soothe to the lullaby of their weakling words and fraternal entreaties, they cut the cable-fibres of his armour and stripped him of his pack power-plant. They stretched his arms behind him and bound his wrists behind a cloister-pillar, using the bent length of a nearby railing bar.

  The berserker thrashed against the deadweight of his plate. The pillar groaned. The metal of his bindings squealed and contorted. The raging Angel strained and struggled against his captivity. His teeth clenched and his gums oozed blood. The whites of his eyes were thread-shattered and deep red while his Adeptus Astartes flesh ruptured with the mosaic distension of bruising and exertion.

  About him, forgotten brothers paced and stared, infuriatingly out of reach. Some clutched boltguns and pistols – cowards shrinking behind their killing machines. The Scarioch-Thing thought he could smell their fear. Their weakness appalled him and fed the fires of his hatred. They looked down on him with an apoplexy-stirring mixture of superiority and sadness. Their pity gunned the engines of wrath booming inside his chest. More intolerable weakness. Blood stormed through his veins – the sacramental essence of the War-Given-Form. He no longer had words. His mouth opened and serpentine hatred leaked from his spoiling soul.

  The Emperor’s meek-seed had plenty to say, but their words seemed distant, almost unintelligible. He-Who-Had-Been-Scarioch detested them all.

  Joachim – but a battle-virgin compared to him – who had been elevated to whip. Melmoch the mutant with his witch-ways. Brother Boaz, who had bested him once in the practise cages and had never allowed him to forget it. The disgraced chief whip, Uriah Skase, who had failed so completely when demanding Trial by the Blade. And Zachariah Kersh, Scourge of the Fifth Company, the warrior who failed his Chapter Master, surrendered his standard and dropped his blade. Him, the Scarioch-Thing hated the most.

  The Excoriators looked at Scarioch.

  ‘He is taken,’ Melmoch said. ‘The gall-fever has him.’

  ‘You seem awfully eager to write him off, witchbreed,’ Joachim shot back. ‘Perhaps you suffer the fever, too.’

  ‘His soul is but a plaything for the Ruinous Powers now,’ Melmoch replied.

  ‘Like yours?’

  Melmoch let the goading insult wash over him. ‘Is that what you would want for your brother?’

  ‘Skase?’ Joachim urged.

  ‘Can’t we just keep him secure?’ Brother Boaz offered.

  ‘Like a caged animal?’ Melmoch asked.

  ‘Until the fever passes…’

  ‘This will not pass,’ the Epistolary told him. ‘He is the Blood God’s now. The first of our kind to fall to his hunger.’

  ‘He’s not the first,’ the Scourge said with regret. ‘Ishmael is lost to us, also.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Skase growled back.

  ‘You know what must be done,’ Kersh said.

  ‘Skase…’ Joachim pleaded.

  He-Who-Had-Been-Scarioch seared into the chief whip with his bloody, anathemic eyes. The words exchanged around him boiled his blood with their meaninglessness.

  Uriah Skase brought up his bolt pistol. The damned Excoriator looked up the length of its chunky barrel at his chief whip.

  ‘I’m sorry, brother.’

  The Scarioch-Thing snarled.

  Skase fired.

  Kersh entered the square. There were people everywhere. All of the small plazas, dirge-cloisters and devotional quads were swamped with cemetery worlders. The throngs parted for him, Adeptus Astartes as he was, even though the Certusians had precious little space and what little they had they had devoted to blankets, shroud tents and tiny shrines. Like pilgrims, the Certusians had gathered in the shadow of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum, thousands of them. Despite their need and number, the distribution of water and food was orderly and the atmosphere dour and reverent. Many of the cemetery worlders were at prayer and those who weren’t bowed their heads respectfully as the corpus-captain moved through the parting crowds.

  With Excoriators and the remaining Charnel Guard holding the city perimeter, and Squad Whip Keturah’s Scouts haunting the towers and belfries of Obsequa City, creating a city-maze of kill zones, common Certusians had been forced to make do with the harsh stone of the squares and the cobbles of the tight esplanades for beds. Kersh walked through them all: women and children, the old, the sick, Oliphant’s remaining priests and the droves of newly arrived menfolk – those who could not cope with the horror of the front line and had fled their stations on the perimeter during the initial assaults. The Excoriator saw what exposure to the madness of the warp did to ordinary mortals. Some men rocked like infants, others couldn’t stop weeping while others had gone mute. Some were babblers, incessantly speaking of the horrors they had seen, while others had simply crawled under a blanket and had not come out.

  ‘The pontifex?’ Kersh put to a preacher carrying a water-satchel and dist
ributing drinking water.

  The priest directed him to the next plaza where the scene was altogether different. Kersh nodded to a Sister of Battle in full armour and hefting the bulk of a heavy flamer. He couldn’t help wondering what havoc the scorched nozzles of the weapon might wreak on the city perimeter. Beyond, Kersh began to get an idea. The plaza was stained with soot. Smoke drifted from blast marks, and macabre cages of incinerated bodies decorated the blackened stone where the roasted bones of tightly-packed mobs had melted and warped into giant works of demented art. Amongst these scenes of charred horror, parents attempted to comfort their children, and cemetery worlders tried to concentrate on their devotions.

  Framed in the imposing architecture of the Memorial Mausoleum, Kersh found Pontifex Oliphant hobbling between the still smouldering remains, administering last rites to the dead. Several soot-smeared labourers with picks and saws had the unenviable duty of separating the merged forms while stone-faced vestals carried coffins across the plaza and tried their best to fit the twisted skeletons inside. Kersh noted that the Sisters of the August Vigil had stationed themselves about the crowds as well as on the nearby porch-barbican. A meltagun-wielding shadow in cobalt power armour watched the proceedings impassively from nearby.

  ‘Corpus-captain,’ Oliphant greeted him, the ghost of a smile on his slanted lips.

  ‘How are you coping, pontifex?’ Kersh asked.

  Dragging his slack leg and shoulder, the ecclesiarch turned. ‘Don’t worry about me, corpus-captain. I have my life, which is more than I can say for these unfortunate souls here.’

  Kersh bit at his bottom lip. ‘Pontifex,’ the Excoriator began uncomfortably. ‘I want to apologise for your losses here–’