Legion of the Damned

by Rob Sanders

  Chainaxes clattered to the cobbles. The World Eater crashed to the floor in a heavy metal avalanche of ceramite and hatred. His killer had gone – vanished back into the smoke and ether from whence it came. Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh – World Eater, Traitor, mass-murderer and champion of Khorne – bled his remaining life into the gutter. Alone, the infamous monster and warrior-tyrant died an unknown death, his warped hearts beating their thunderous last in a street so small and insignificant to the rest of the galaxy that it didn’t even have a name.

  Zachariah Kersh could have little idea what had started in the streets below. The corpus-captain stomped along the roofside, his boots smashing through the tiles and punching into the lead and strutage beneath. The Excoriators had made good on their escape from the cloistrium, ascending through the floors of the sepulchre before smashing their way up into the roof using their fists and blades. A messy climb had taken them up through the balconies of a block-domicilia where, out of the range of pistol-fire, the Adeptus Astartes had watched the great Punisher silenced.

  The honoured war machine had done the bloody work of ten immortals, blasting behemoths, turning cultist hordes to flesh-spatter and driving back hell-spawned daemons. It was the World Eaters that finally beat the cannon. It took a fair number of their brethren with its cold, calculating barrage of rhythmic havoc. The cloistrium became a smouldering pit of twisted ceramite and flesh that refused to die. World Eaters stormed the Thunderfire cannon’s position, crawling, limbless, overcome with fury and frustration. Bastard-brothers of the Traitor Legion – attracted by the roar of battle and the copper-tinge of death on the air – threw themselves into the chaos, climbing over their wounded brethren who filled the ordnance-pounded crater the space had become. Other warbands visited their fury on adjoining walls, smashing through old brick and mortar with their hammers, axes and shoulders. It was through such an opening that heretic Angels of the Crimson Covenant gained access to the rear of the sepulchre and came up behind the itinerant cannon, hacking into its armoured shell and ammunition feed with their chainaxes.

  Kersh leapt from the edge of the domicilia and across the street to the mezzanine of an opposing tower-obsequium. The mezzanine floor cracked and shuddered as Melmoch followed – the Epistolary looking like pale hell as he demolished a stained-glass window with his force scythe and climbed through. Novah, still clutching the company standard, helped the grievously injured Chaplain on the take-off. Kersh grabbed Shadrath’s armour where a World Eater’s battleaxe had opened up his plate, and helped him to the window. Beyond, the Epistolary smashed and clambered his way up through the tower.

  With Brother Novah and Skase across, the Scourge risked a glance down at the street below. The roaring rose up to meet him. All he saw were the maniac multitudes. Thoroughfares and posternways crowded with cultist fighters, World Eaters and their armoured renegade cousins stomping barbarously through the throng, and daemons crawling up walls and bounding fiendishly between ledges.

  Obsequa City was a testament to insanity. Churches, chancelleries and frater houses were raging infernos, lighting up the necroplex beyond – still a wild ocean of charging heretics and Chaos cultists. The night sky flashed with the occasional streak of lance-fire, although to Kersh’s knowledge only the Adeptus Ministorum defence monitor Apotheon had remained.

  ‘Corpus-captain!’ Novah called, prompting the Scourge to duck in through the smashed window and follow the trail of destruction up through the tower. Every rooftop and steeple was an opportunity to climb higher. Every box-stoop and maintenance portico took a superhuman leap of faith, across the narrow spaces of cultist-filled streets and quads. Gargoyle-encrusted walls, drain conduits and masonry scaffolding helped the Excoriators work up through the steep, climbing architecture of the city and on towards the imposing structure and distinctive dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum.

  As the Adeptus Astartes edged around cupolas, ran along apexes and braved the vertiginous heights of gable walls and slender diameters of bridging supports, they could hear the Cholercaustians below, screaming up the cobbled passages and stairwells to get ahead of them. Where slave-soldiers ascended the fussy architecture of the heights in their path, Kersh and Skase had stamping boots and the finger-slicing tips of their blades waiting. Daemons were a much bigger problem, with the horned heralds of the Blood God’s pantheon forced to leap further and further as Epistolary Melmoch demolished spires and walkways behind the escaping Excoriators. A huge flock of winged furies had taken to circling the towertops surrounding the Mausoleum, occasionally forcing the Space Marines to take cover in alcoves or press themselves flat to roofs in order to escape a swarm-mauling of wings and daggered claws. The monstrous myriad plunged through minarets and thrashed their thunderbolt course through belfries and cathedral lunette windows. Kersh saw blasted specimens fall from the flock as they ritually circled an abbey tower on the outskirts of the city, las-fire cutting daemons down with each pass. With horror the Scourge realised that one of Keturah’s sniper Scouts had escaped attention and had maintained his isolated defence against the countless masses.

  As he hauled himself up a steeple maintenance ladder, Kersh noticed that the almost clockwork circling of the daemon flock had failed to materialise. Peering around the copper tiling, the corpus-captain saw the flock molesting the abbey tower, crawling about the exterior and clawing through a balistraria. It became obvious to the Excoriator that this was how the Cholercaust had dealt with the Tenth Company sniper threat. As he ascended the ladder, the remaining Excoriators behind him, Kersh saw the bell tower light up. An explosion – a grenade, the Scourge suspected – had taken out the belfry, the sniper and a number of the daemons, which plummeted towards the ground on what was left of their smashed, flaming wings. Pausing on the ladder, Kersh rested his forehead against the cool metal and mouthed a cult observation – a ritual thanks for a brother’s sacrifice. Sickened to the bottom of his stomach, the corpus-captain realised how many observances he had missed during the Long Night of the Cholercaust invasion.

  As he reached the top of the maintenance ladder, Kersh leapt for the stone guttering of an adjacent shrine and hauled himself up onto the waterlogged expanse of its flat, modest roof. There the corpus-captain waited, both for his brothers and the daemon swarm’s clawing dive through the rooftops.

  ‘Chaplain!’ Squad Whip Skase roared as Shadrath’s flailing form was snatched from the ladder. It was sudden and shocking – even for the Adeptus Astartes warriors. The Scourge watched the Excoriators Chaplain dragged off into the night sky, tossed between the predatory daemons in the infernal flock. Shadrath was still fighting, but his crozius arcanum fell into the street below, ringing off the wall-clutching metal stairwells.

  ‘Keep moving!’ the Scourge called at the remaining Excoriators as they watched the Chaplain disappear.

  Preoccupied with not falling to their deaths, and fighting off daemon aerial assaults with nothing but short swords, the Emperor’s Angels had little idea what was happening in shadowy streets storeys below their boots. Amongst the hallowed halls of sepulchres and sanctuaries, and in the ambulatories snaking between them, butchers were being butchered – and not by each other.

  World Eaters of the Foresworn were lured into the pillared crypts below the Vault of Divine Transcendence, where ghostly apparitions stalked the armoured brutes, taking them one by one – infuriating their dwindling number further and making them ever easier to slaughter.

  Slorak the Undying failed to live up to his name after unloading his bolt pistol’s entire magazine into an advancing, flame-swathed revenant and having his horned skull cleaved in two.

  Berserker-brothers of the Bloodstorm issued their crude battle-cry before charging at two power armoured shadows in a corner of the Serenity Square. The World Eaters clearly thought the Angels were formerly encountered Excoriators. Their axe-wielding frenzy only served to hew rents and bloody gashes in each other’s plate, however, with the adamantium-toothed weapons passing clean th
rough the warrior shades. Slave-soldiers, foaming at the mouth, found the Bloodstorm corpses gutted and piled at the centre of the square.

  Techmarine Tezgavayn – more flesh warped over twisted machine than superman – was sent into a mechanical fury by phantom auspex returns amongst the statues of Imperial saints on the Boulevard of the Nine Sorrows. Smashing the statues to pieces, Tezgavayn was drawn to a solemn sculpture of Corvus the Sabine, where a clutch of ghostly grenades were waiting for the mechanical monstrosity. The grenades might have burned with a phantasmal glow but the armour-cracking explosions that issued from them felt very real to the Traitor Techmarine, as his body and workings were blown across the boulevard.

  Skull-draped Kronosian Warlords simply disappeared whilst trailing the progress of the Slaughterfiend daemon engine Fellclaw as it hunted for Adeptus Astartes sighted in the Viaticus Quarter. Lord Drakkar – Blood Champion and Traitor Angel figurehead for the Hellion Dawn sadists – was torched along with a hundred of his depraved followers in a blind alley known as ‘The Quietus’. Charred cultist survivors reported sightings of silent warriors in sable armour who corralled the Chaos lord and his sadists with flamers before cremating the crush.

  With World Eaters stalked and slaughtered across the city by the revenant crusaders, and daemonkin instinctively giving the empyreal intruders a wide berth, Kersh and his Excoriators reached the Memorial Mausoleum ahead of the anarchy swallowing the city.

  Sliding down the steep roof of a monastic cell-block, the tiles shattering before the toes of their boots, the Adeptus Astartes reached the edge of the St Aloysion Hospice. The porch balconies of individual cells looked out on the Mausoleum’s impressive architecture, and a narrow strait ran between the brother and sister wings. Plunging down onto the top floor balcony, Kersh led the way, dropping back and forth across the open space, the Space Marine crashing through some porches, while bounding between others. The descent was similarly awkward amongst his brother Excoriators, but with the cultist hordes of the Cholercaust surging up the streets and closing on the Mausoleum, every moment counted.

  Kersh dropped the final few floors and skidded on the cobbles as he raced for the great metal doors of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum. He felt Brother Novah close behind, the standard still clutched feverishly in his gauntlets; an exhausted Melmoch trailed behind the bearer, and Skase brought up the rear. The arterial boulevards and thoroughfares released a deluge of cultist madness on the open ground before the Mausoleum. The roaring had returned, as had the killer glint of a thousand eyes. Kersh felt the chill of cowardice shiver down his spine. He was not comfortable running from such a feeble foe, but numbers alone would prevent the Excoriators closing the Mausoleum’s great doors if all four Space Marines did not get there first.

  Kersh hurdled several bikes, the chunky, armoured cycles having been parked in an orderly row around the Mausoleum before their riders had been assigned their doomed sniping duties. Melmoch once again brought his devastating warp-drawn power to bear on the enemy. Flailing arcs of distilled death erupted from the Librarian’s scythe-shaft. The energy danced across the front row of sprinting maniacs, detonating body after body and turning the riotous vanguards into a curtain of gore through which following slave-soldiers ran. The very essence of death was everywhere, like something you could touch and harness. The Excoriators Epistolary roared his denial and sent the second row the stomach-churning way of the first.

  Kersh was in. Novah followed, the two Space Marines slamming their packs into the adamantium alloy of the massive door and heaving it across the tomb egress. Skase shot past Melmoch, literally skidding through the blood lapping against the exterior wall and in through the closing gap. Down on his chest, with Kersh and Novah putting their backs into the door, Skase yelled back furiously at the Librarian.

  ‘Melmoch, get in here – now!’

  An Excoriator flashed through the opening, slipping down onto his side. It wasn’t Melmoch. It was Squad Whip Ishmael. ‘Ishmael…’ Skase began, but the greeting died in the Excoriator’s throat. Propping himself up on the tip of his crackling lightning claws, Ishmael looked up. Gone was the Escharan nobility of his calling and the eyes of a battle-brother and friend. Ishmael’s eyes were claret red. His head was a nest of purple veins and arteries, throbbing with blood and darkness. He was now Ishmael the animal. The animal that wanted to kill.

  Both Excoriators scrambled to their feet on the cold marble floor of the Mausoleum antechamber. Ishmael came at his chief whip with savage sweeps of his power talons. Skase lightly deflected the blade tips with his gladius, not daring to risk the short sword against the full cutting capabilities of Ishmael’s claws. Grabbing at the gall-fevered wrist of the squad whip, Skase turned and slammed the gladius straight through Ishmael’s armoured palm. The squad whip took little heed of the bold move, chesting the Excoriator forwards and driving the claw-tips of his right gauntlet through Skase’s suit pack.

  Weaponless, the brute Ishmael expected his chief whip to back away and proceeded to slice off the gladius blade-length protruding from the back of his talon with his other claw. By the time he feasted his blood-swamped eyes on the Excoriator, Skase was coming straight back at him. The chief whip slammed the sole of his boot into the animal-Ishmael’s chestplate, unbalancing the deviant and knocking him back towards the door.

  The full weight of the advancing Cholercaust was behind the thick metal, with row upon blood-crazed row charging forwards against each other and the Mausoleum door in an effort to earn the Blood God’s favour and end an Adeptus Astartes. The Scourge and Brother Novah continued in their desperate, marble-grazing efforts. Ishmael turned his unseeing eyes on his brothers. Novah was nearest, so Novah died first. Ishmael spun around and buried a crackling claw all the way up to the knuckle in the Fifth Company standard bearer. The standard itself jangled to the floor, and as Ishmael retracted his devastating talons, the butchered Excoriator followed it. Kersh immediately felt the effect on the door as hundreds of the Blood God’s servants lent their weight to an irresistible entrance. A tattooed hiver managed to slip his emaciated and gore-slick form through the gap, along with a mass of clutching arms. The hiver screamed his demented triumph, but Ishmael silenced the annoyance with a savage headbutt that brained the cultist. As the hiver scum dropped like a sack of lead weights, Ishmael swung back on the Excoriators. Skase ran at the blood-mad squad whip as Kersh tried to reach for his gladius. Ishmael spat his fury at both – the Excoriator’s murderous mind struggling to choose between the pair.

  A stream of soul lightning struck the degenerate in the side, smashing him across the antechamber and into the thick stone wall of the Mausoleum. Ishmael clawed at the immaterial energy and snapped like a trapped beast. Melmoch was through the door. The Librarian was on his ceramite knees, still dripping with cultist blood from the carnage outside. Scrabbling beneath the warpstream, Skase joined his corpus-captain on the door. Launching their armoured frames at the adamantium alloy with renewed fervour, the Excoriators slammed it closed, shearing off the twitching limbs of slave-soldiers clawing their way through. As Skase held the great door closed, Kersh hauled at the pinion mechanism that drove a heavy adamantium bar across the portal and into the wall.

  Warp lightning arced off Ishmael’s plate causing the dried blood that covered it to smoulder. Ishmael screeched his hatred of the psyker and his unnatural powers, flicking his claws out and leaning into the soul-scalding stream of energy. Melmoch’s face was similarly contorted, the Epistolary trying his best to angle the shaft of his force scythe and the otherworldly energies spilling from it at the squad whip. Blood bubbled behind Ishmael’s eyes and his nostrils split with snorting exertion. Pure hatred alone drove the squad whip’s canine teeth down out of his gums like fangs. Veins and arteries split his skin, and the Excoriator issued a horrifying scream. Ishmael exploded. Shards of ceramite shrapnel flew in all directions, pranging off the surface of the door and embedding themselves in the stone of the wall and floor. It rained blood inside
the Mausoleum as what was left of Ishmael coated the antechamber and the Excoriators within.

  As the goremist settled, Kersh could see Melmoch on his knees. The Librarian’s head was lowered and he was leaning against the shaft of his devastating weapon. The corpus-captain and his chief whip slid down the wet surface of the metal door beside Brother Novah in exhaustion. Kersh checked the Excoriator for any signs of life, but there were none. Ishmael had finished him.

  The hammering was awful. The Cholercaust had run its course. Only the Excoriators remained, and every slaughter-crazed servant of the Blood God was either outside the Mausoleum’s mighty walls or on their way there, to claim the few remaining skulls on the cemetery world in the name of their dark overlord. Kersh could imagine the tsunami of fists, boots, weapons and foreheads slamming against the unfeeling alloy of the great door. The nightmarish vision scarred his mind, the murderous crush of slave-soldiers, cultists, renegade Angels, daemons and World Eaters, all desperate to find a way inside.

  Palatine Sapphira and the pontifex had told Kersh that the great door was the only entrance to the memorial tomb, and the corpus-captain believed them. He was not concerned about the ground floor. However, dotted across the Mausoleum’s exterior architecture were ornamental embrasures and aquila-shaped boltslits, apertures through which the Sisters of the August Vigil might defend Umberto II’s remains and his great Mausoleum from raids and civil unrest. Neither Palatine Sapphira or the tomb’s architect could have imagined the defensive necessities required to hold a host the size and devastating capability of the Cholercaust at bay. The walls were strong and Kersh had some limited faith in the great entrance door, but the Excoriator knew that the Blood God’s disciples would find a way in – the unmanned boltslits and embrasures in the upper storeys seemed a likely weakness.

  Kersh’s gaze settled on the Fifth Company’s battle standard, still clutched in Novah’s gauntlet. Skase was staring at the blood-speckled banner also. The two Excoriators looked hard at one another. Snatching up the standard, Kersh slipped Novah’s gladius from his ceramite grip and handed it to the unarmed Skase.