by Rob Sanders
Woodes looked at his wife, her gaunt but beautiful face. He took her again in a tight embrace. Over her shoulder he saw Donalbain nod. Woodes’s eyes drifted skywards to the darkness, knowing that they had little time, that the enemy would not wait. Looking down he saw that there were now several Excoriators stood on the rubble battlement looking down at them. The Emperor’s Angels were still like statues in their scarred plate, impassive and beyond the concerns of mortal men.
‘All right,’ the fosser said finally, feeling Goody’s slender body against his own. ‘Quickly, into the casket.’ Helping his wife down into the grave and taking his child from her uncle, Woodes kissed Nyzette and passed the terrified child down to his wife stood in the coffin. Goody smiled – a gesture, under the circumstances, so telling in its strength and generosity that it brought tears that streaked the fosser’s gravedust-smeared cheeks. The mother and child curled up around one another in the space allowed by the sarcophagus occupant. Using the slingbag as a pillow and a second blanket for warmth, the terrified pair looked up at Woodes and Donalbain. ‘Remember,’ Woodes began, ‘only ring the bell when you hear others. Wait as long as you can. You cannot alert the enemy to your presence.’ His wife nodded.
‘You stay alive,’ Goody told them. ‘Both of you.’
‘I will see you soon,’ Woodes promised. And he meant it.
Moving around to the other side of the grave, Donalbain used his shovel to close the lid. Resting the tip of the blade against the rusty lid he pressed down and re-sealed the casket. Woodes tapped on the top of the coffin with his own shovel and was rewarded with a knock in return.
With Donalbain looking for Merelda and his own young ones, the two cemetery worlders began tossing sacred Certusian earth down onto the casket and into the hole. With each disbelieving shovelful, Woodes shook his head. He could not fully reconcile in his mind the fact that he had just buried his own wife and daughter alive. That all about him, fathers, husbands, brothers and sons were doing the same for their loved ones.
The only thing that kept his arms moving and the shovel blade slicing through the mound of soil was the knowledge that they would all be safer below ground than above it when the Cholercaust arrived. That they would hopefully be spared the wanton butchery of the Chaos degenerates. With their families as safe as they could make them, the disturbed earth patted down and the promethium-soaked, misshapen daemon-forms dragged back over the burial site, Woodes snatched up his autorifle. Making the sign of the aquila, he knelt down in front of the grave marker. It bore the name Erzsebet Dorota Catallus. He would not forget it. An ice-water determination built in the pit of his stomach. A cold fury he held in reserve for the bastard invaders who were bringing death and destruction to his tiny part of the Imperium. Carrying their weapons and shovels, the cemetery worlders began to make their way back up towards the battlement, to take their positions and ready themselves for the carnage ahead.
I have been watching for a while. This is what it is to lead. A moment’s inspiration, the hot quake of an idea or strategy in the privacy of the mind. Abstraction given form through word and order, followed by the rapid shift of men’s hearts. Even Angels, who need to be led no less. Loyalty. Pride. Trust. Action. Before your eyes, command becomes reality. What you saw in the orderly, bloodless theatre of the mind unfolds in the drawing of blades and the priming of firing mechanisms. It rapidly devolves into a nightmarish version of your imaginings, replete with deadly, unseen movements, fears that find their form. That’s what it is to lead, to dip the toe of one’s boot into the calm, crystal waters of possibility, but to march on as you find yourself up to your helmet in the raging torrent of your brothers’ blood.
Standing atop the perimeter battlement, I survey the killing fields. A sea of obscene bodies swallowing up the graven architecture of mausolea, tombstones and statues. Out there, amongst the past chaos of battle, are the cemetery worlders. Those it is clear I am here to protect. The duty I was bred to perform. A little of the Emperor’s burden taken on my shoulders. What had been the silent insanity of a strategy in my mind is now consigned to history. I told Pontifex Oliphant and for his sins the ecclesiarch lent his words to my own. Thousands of cemetery worlders, ordered to bury their Certusian kin alive. The brief spark of mortal existence, burning brightly under the ground, where blood-soaked minds would not think to look for them.
For a moment I think my revenant returned. I have not seen his ghastly form in a little while. Where he haunted the shadows, there is now but empty darkness. His bale eye gazes upon some other unfortunate, for it no longer looks upon me. I should feel reassured. While I had grown accustomed to the being’s attentions and fell presence, it was either the manifestation of an unnatural existence or some symptom of a fractured mind. Neither were particularly attractive prospects and I should feel relieved at the thing’s absence. Still, I find myself looking. In the gloom of the Long Night; in the reflection of glass darkly; in the corner of my eye.
I feel brother Excoriators about me. They, I know are there. Immortals on the rubble palisade. Like me, come to watch what common men will do at the word of an Angel. With the slice and cut of shovels through gritty earth on the air, we watch – silently impressed. It can’t be easy to dig a grave for your loved ones. Less easy still to fill one containing them.
‘Anything?’ I ask.
Melmoch is beside me.
‘No astrotelepathic communication,’ the Epistolary answers. ‘Nothing from the hosts and destinations to whom I appealed. I can only reason that the comet’s malign influence is too much of a barrier for my skill.’
I nod. ‘Thank you for trying,’ I say as we watch the cemetery worlders go about their solemn task. ‘You think the dust will mask them?’
The Epistolary considers the question.
‘This place is saturated with death,’ the Librarian concludes. ‘The earth is sacred and overpowering in its purpose. We see what we expect to see. The enemy will see a cemetery. He will taste loss. He will smell the stench of death. The Blood God’s servants are warriors all. Their unthinking art is murder. Their weapon of choice is carnage – not the shovel. I think our charges safe.’
I nod my acknowledgement and appreciation of the Epistolary’s support.
‘What if no one survives?’ Chief Whip Skase asks grimly, his mind soaked with bloody thoughts.
‘Then we lose,’ I answer – a statement of the obvious. ‘We get to rot above the ground while those we sought to protect – the Emperor’s subjects – are left to do so below us. That is why we must fight. Fight and survive. The Blood God’s disciples have come here to battle, and we will give them one. In doing so we shall take their eyes off the prize – their intended slaughter of innocents and through this the sundering of this world. We fight to win, but if we lose, I want to go to my death knowing that our enemy will leave sated and swiftly move on. Like a poor marksman, the Blood God will have missed his target and his followers would have failed him. Certus-Minor will not be some deadrock, bathed in slaughter and left behind by the Cholercaust like a cautionary tale. The cemetery worlders will live and the Imperium shall know it. The continued beating of mortal hearts shall give other worlds hope. They shall know that the Cholercaust can be beaten. It will put fire in their bellies and belief in their hearts. Perhaps we will not stop the Blood Crusade here. Perhaps we will not survive. But if we fail, we do so in the hope that others – both mortal and immortal – will succeed. Let that be our legacy.’
Brother Micah comes up behind us with the Fifth Company’s Chaplain. Shadrath gives me the dread gaze of his half-skull helm.
‘Brother Novah has word from the commander of the Apotheon. The defence monitor has engaged the enemy. She reports a vast Chaos fleet – vessels without number. The Blood God’s warriors and minions. Their landing is under way. The Cholercaust is here.’
‘The pontifex?’ I ask.
Micah and Chaplain Shadrath part. Behind them is a Sister of Battle in cobalt plate, a boltgun in her
slender gauntlets and a pair of bolt pistols at her hip. Palatine Sapphira of the Order of the August Vigil.
‘Pontifex Oliphant is safe,’ Sapphira tells me. ‘He is down in Umberto II’s vault with as many of his remaining priests and attendants as we could accommodate.’
‘A kindness,’ I return.
‘The pontifex told me of your plan,’ the Sister reveals. ‘A kindness on your own part, corpus-captain – if a macabre one. My Sisters thought your interest in the Certusians lay only in feeding them as fodder to the enemy.’
‘I’m happy to disappoint them.’
‘The vault door is thick and crafted from adamantium. It should resist all but the most determined assault. I have garrisoned the vault with a squad of my Sisters, under a trustworthy subordinate. I offer myself and the rest of my mission in defence of the city, where the holy work of the God-Emperor might be done.’
I hold out my gauntlet and take her own.
‘You are most welcome, Sister,’ I tell her. ‘We are honoured to share the burden with you.’
Shadrath steps forwards, looking up into the sky.
‘Chaplain?’
Carefully, he takes off his half-skull helmet, revealing his face. It is the first time I have gazed upon his features. The shock of white hair, the unsmiling mouth and the implacable lines of almost elemental determination are the primarch’s own. Like Demetrius Katafalque before him, Shadrath had been blessed with the features of the Emperor’s truest Angel. I follow his gaze to see the flash of gunfire in the sky overhead, the searing burn of the Apotheon’s mighty lance.
‘Let’s to our posts,’ Chaplain Shadrath rumbles, his eyes still on the deep expanse of the heavens above. ‘Rogal Dorn waits for us at the Eternity Gate.’
We nod and walk slowly away, with the Chaplain’s words still ringing in our ears. We are silent, for we have no words to better them.
PART FOUR
DEUS EX DAMNATION…
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHOLERCAUST
Roaring.
The distant darkness gave up the rage-fuelled cacophony of murderous intention. The Blood God’s disciples honoured him with their bombast. The stomach-curdling din of barbarism and animal fury. The Cholercaust had arrived and it wanted the cemetery world to know. A deafening barrage of ferocity, made up of personal, if mindless, expressions of individual hatred. Unsettling, in sheer volume alone.
In a demonstration of steadfastness – the kind Kersh reasoned the Charnel Guard and remaining Certusians would need to see – the Scourge stood atop the ichor-splattered battlement. Once again the Imperial forces would try to hold the rubble-mound perimeter, falling back concentrically as the need arose. With the cemetery worlders – vulnerable men, women and children – buried beneath the bordering necroplex, the narrow alleys, stairs and cloisters of the city could play their part if needed. And, if it came to it, the imposing architecture of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum had been established as a final fall-back position. Kersh couldn’t hope to win against the Blood God’s unstoppable host, but the Excoriator planned on putting off the eventuality for as long as possible. The Fifth Company would sell their lives dearly and fight for as long as they could.
There was still a dim possibility that Epistolary Melmoch’s appeal had reached out across the stars to a brother-Chapter. The Scourge rested his gauntlet on the angular edges of his gladius pommel. He had not entirely given up on the slim possibility that their kin could arrive to turn the tide. He hadn’t burdened his Fifth Company brothers with such damning hope, though suspected it already beat in the hearts of each and every one. Regardless of such mortal folly, the howling tsunami of hate surging across the burial grounds at them was theirs alone.
The dread expectation was palpable. With his enhanced hearing the Scourge could hear the creak of Certusian fingers against triggers, the rapid beating of hearts in serf-manned gun emplacements, and the deep and determined breathing of Excoriators in their battle-helms. Then he saw it. The first offerings of the darkness. Chaos martyrs. The Cholercaust meat shield. Bodies moved through the necroplex, racing towards Obsequa City, the battlement perimeter and certain death.
The Scourge swore. He recognised them immediately. Blood-crazed cemetery worlders. Victims of the gall-fever that had swept the planet in the wake of the Keeler Comet. Husbands, mothers, children. Certusians all. Drawn to Obsequa City like a plague of moths irresistibly summoned to a flame. Kersh felt their urge to kill across the graves. He felt the Charnel Guard and surviving members of the hastily created Certusian militia tighten at the sight of their kindred: neighbours, friends, family. He felt the bile rising within him, his hatred for the servants of darkness and their barbarous tactics. Over the vox-channel, the corpus-captain heard similar confirmations from along the line. The Thunderhawk Impunitas, circling high above the city, also reported incoming targets. Peering up into the sky, the corpus-captain watched the stars blink. He got the impression of an ungainly daemon-flock, thunderbolting above them on leathery wings.
Kersh looked back down at the havoc storming its way across the burial grounds towards them. He hated himself for the order he was about to give. He could not afford to waste their hardest-hitting ammunition on such cannon-fodder, yet couldn’t allow the masses to swamp the battlement in expectation of hand-to-hand combat alone.
‘All battle-brothers and Sisters on the perimeter to hold fire,’ he commanded across the channel. ‘Heavy weapons to hold fire. Guardsmen and militia to fire at will.’
Shots were hesitant at first, sporadic bolts of light flung across the expanse followed by brief chatters of auto- and stub-fire. The busy landscape of the necroscape impeded the advance of the blood-mental Certusians in a way that it hadn’t done so with the many-limbed spawn-swarm of the immaterial incursion. Crazies and cemetery world killers found it difficult to charge at the front line when hampered by the expanse of tombstones, statues and funeral architecture that was the necroplex. This made the howling madmen easier targets, even for the ceremonial Charnel Guard and ill-trained militia, and before long the perimeter lit up the night with a streaming lightshow of near-continuous las-fire. Auto-fire ripped through bodies clambering over grave markers and graven obstacles. Stub-round-riddled torsos lay draped over decorative stone sarcophagi, and lunatics joined the corpse-carpet of warp-spewed forms from the earlier assault.
Above him, Kersh could hear the whoosh of sniper fire punctuating the distant hammering of the Impunitas’s heavy bolters. Over the vox, estimations of the aerial assault had jumped. Both the Impunitas and venerable Gauntlet were preoccupied with shredding their way through storm fronts of red daemonflesh, while Whip Keturah and Squad Contritus reported the ragged, broken bodies of winged daemon-predators raining from the heavens. Keturah’s Scouts were doing their best to support the Thunderhawks with sizzling sniper fire that cut through the beastforms as they swooped through the narrow spaces between the city towers, spires and belfries.
A blood-freezing shriek erupted from the Imperial line as a shotgun-armed verger left his post and started tearing up the rubble with wild blasts of scattershot. As nearby Guardsmen and cemetery worlders scrambled for cover, the Scourge dipped his hand into his holster. Within a blink the Mark II bolt pistol was out. Without taking his eyes from the chaos of the necroplex, Kersh gunned down the gall-fevered unfortunate. Before the maniac hit crumbled masonry the Mark II was sat back snug in its sporran. The afflicted were no longer a threat to innocent Certusians, but Kersh had made it clear that such infections and defections could still disrupt the integrity of the line and should be dealt with decisively.
Before the battlement, the corpus-captain witnessed a massacre. Every time a bolt from a lasfusil seared through a rabid, unarmed Certusian, another took their place. And another. And another. The stink of fresh death seemed only to send the following fossers, shack-wives and deranged hearsiers into a further frenzy, causing them to double their already fevered efforts to reach the perimeter and wreak havoc.
Others began to emerge through the death and thinning cemetery world gall-thralls. Kersh saw the glint of starlight in unsheathed blades, the flash of optimistic small-arms fire and the macabre flesh desecration of the Blood God’s soul-pledged. He saw wires, chains and pins, plucked through faces; knife-crafted tattoos of obscene Khornate symbols, inked in darkness; eyes that were bile-yellow with spite, teeth that were blood-clenched, and skin that was withered with the burden of diabolic patronage. The Regna-Rouge. The Anarchan Razorbacks. The Hellion Dawn. The Krugarian Turncoats. The blade-venerate Gornan Venals. The Attilan Traitor 32nd. The Frater Vulgariate. The Necromundan ‘Crazy’ Eights. Clan Gamibal of the feared Vessorine Janissaries. The Deathfest. The Bloodsaken. Thousands besides: butcher-baptised slave-soldiers from a myriad of conquered worlds, traitor Guardsmen, heretic militia, mutants, fallen mercenaries, piratical raiders, bestial abhumans, Chaos cultists. All Kersh had fought before on battlefields bordering the Eye of Terror. All had gone down under the Excoriators’ blades. Never before, however, had Kersh seen so much Ruinous detritus gathered in one place.
‘Open fire!’ the Scourge roared.
The bolters of the Sisters of Battle and his brother-Excoriators joined the barrage of las-bolts and lesser weaponry from the battlement, which in turn competed with the dissonant thunder of heavy stubber and autocannon gun emplacements. The collective force of such a release annihilated the remaining rows of cannon-fodder Certusians and knocked the advancing mobs of cultist killers from their feet. As they gunned back furiously from behind crumbling gravestones, other skulltakers barged past. Some simply could not restrain themselves, like mad dogs off their leashes. Others were forced forwards by the sheer weight of numbers behind them, desperate to get into battle and honour the War-Given-Form through deed and death. They too met their end in a torso-punching, head-blasting, limb-shearing broadside of bolts, bullets, light and devastation.
