Legion of the Damned

by Rob Sanders

  The Scourge had fallen several times and stubbornly regained his feet, but as he collapsed once more, he found that he couldn’t get up. With the cold creeping through his shattered plate and into his wounded body, Kersh found himself lying across a grave, his head propped against its stone marker. There, he hugged the polished, unbloodied gladius to his chest and waited for death in the battle-torn darkness.

  Above, the blackness of the star-speckled firmament was still dotted with glowing embers, Cholercaust vessels that had lost their fight with colossal chunks of rock and ice and fallen into an explosion-wracked, decaying orbit around Certus-Minor. Such fragments still tumbled from the sky and obliterated the servants of Chaos still wandering the night. Squinting, Kersh thought he saw a vessel pass overhead. At first he thought it was falling to the cemetery world surface, growing larger as it descended. But from its movements and the twinkle of cannon fire he realised that it was in high orbit, mopping up fleeing members of the Chaos armada. The Scourge watched it for a few moments, entranced – the vessel appeared to him like an Imperial aquila, passing across the heavens. He blinked, reasoning that he must have imagined the spectacle in his concussed and skull-fractured state. The vessel would have had to have been colossal in size to appear to him as it did, at such a distance.

  Kersh closed his blood-crusted eye for a moment of peace, but when he opened it again his armoured revenant was standing above him. The damned legionnaire blazed an ethereal radiance over its rachidian plate. It was staring down at the Scourge through the crack in its helm, the warp-lustre of a sentience glowing from its skeletal eye socket. It said nothing. It did nothing for a while, not even chatter its teeth. In its midnight gauntlet it held the Excoriators Chapter’s Fifth Company battle standard. Stabbing it into the earth beside the grave, the revenant let the blood-spattered banner flap in the breeze. In its other hand, between two exposed, skeletal digits, it held something else. The damned legionnaire dropped it on the Scourge’s chest and walked away into nothingness, leaving Kersh on the field of battle. Alone.

  MYSTERIUM FIDEI

  EPILOGUE

  GOD-EMPEROR

  Approbator Vaskellen Quast dropped the distance between the Valkyrie’s ramp and the carpet of burial ground carnage. With his meme-vox in his hand he bounded between bolt-mangled bodies and ran through the spoiling gore. Inquisitorial storm troopers from the 52nd Ranger Pelluciad were not far behind him, attending on the Ordo Obsoletus acolyte from a respectable distance.

  Excoriators Thunderhawks had little trouble beating the Ordo Valkyrie across the festering necroplex to the reported location of the sole survivor, and by the time Quast trudged up behind them, Santiarch Balshazar and an honour guard of Excoriators Angels had surrounded the warrior – scattering the frater burn team who had almost incinerated him and the Sister Hospitallers who had barely begun attending to his grievous wounds. With Adeptus Astartes gunships circling overhead, the approbator slipped between the forest of hulking giants. Rounding their ancient, scar-annotated plate, Quast found the only living witness to the mysterious destruction of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade. The approbator was bursting with questions, but like the Excoriators Space Marines stood solemnly about him, he remained silent.

  Propped up against a tombstone, his armoured limbs laid out across grave dirt, was a mauled Angel. An Excoriators captain of the Fifth Company. His plate – formerly an ivory edifice like that worn by his brothers – was stained the red of death. Its inscriptions and preserved battle-scarring had been obliterated by the mutilation of recent carnage. The Angel’s power armour was a rent, bolt-blasted shell of buckled ceramite, and the earth about him glistened with the moisture of his life quietly leaking away. His face was similarly plastered with blood – his enemies’ and his own – and dusted with the soot of raging fires. His tonsure-shaven hair was matted and singed, his ear was missing and the dull glint of a ball-bearing shone out from one eye as evidence of former atrocities suffered. Breaking the crust of blood that had dried across the other eye, the Excoriator stared at them. His gaze was weak and uncomprehending, sensitive to the burgeoning Certusian sunrise.

  The breeze ruffled the captain’s battle standard, leaning slightly out of the ground as it was above him, playing with the brown-speckled material. At the sight of hulking silhouettes, cut out of the morning sky, the survivor clutched his gleaming short sword to his ruined chest. Unlike the wrecked Excoriator, and everything else on the cemetery world, the gladius was unblemished and unblooded. Quast was not a warrior, like the surrounding Space Marines, but the resplendent weapon held even his attention. The spartan honesty of its unadorned and heavy blade. The crafted angularity of its pommel. The three simple numerals stamped into the breadth of its cross guard: VII.

  The approbator looked about him, his instincts taking his gaze to the Santiarch’s own. The Excoriators Angels were looking at the sword rather than their wounded brother.

  ‘Captain, I…’

  ‘Approbator!’ Balshazar boomed, the warning in the Chapter Chaplain’s words irresistible. The Santiarch stepped forwards, drawing a gladius of his own. Kneeling before the survivor he offered the captain the blade. ‘I believe this belongs to you, Corpus-Captain Kersh.’

  Kersh took the blade from the Chaplain and clutched it to him with the other. The second was equally bare, but while similarly functional and austere, lacked the clear craftsmanship of the first. The Santiarch went to reach for the other gladius, but the unspeaking warrior tightened his grip, holding the weapon to him. Quast looked from Balshazar to the one they called Kersh and back again.

  ‘You came for the sword?’ the approbator marvelled.

  The Santiarch ignored him and addressed one of his gathered brethren. ‘Brother Japhet, signal the Cerberus. Inform Chapter Master Ichabod that we have discovered the Dornsblade. Tell him that it remains in Corpus-Captain Kersh’s care and will be transported to the battle-barge with the Chapter Scourge directly.’

  ‘No astrotelepathic appeal. No request for assistance. You were already on your way to Certus-Minor,’ Quast said. ‘To reclaim a sword?’

  Santiarch stood to his full, imposing stature.

  ‘This is not any blade, approbator. This is the Sword of Sebastus. The Dornsblade. A sacred relic to the genetic progeny of Rogal Dorn. It was carried by the primarch himself during his trials in the Eternal Fortress and used to spill Traitor blood in the Battle of the Iron Cage. It is a symbol of our unbreakable unity and the sacrifice shared by the sons of Dorn despite the Legion-splintering accords of the Codex Astartes. It is a piece of Imperial history, sculpted, beaten and honed to a razor edge.’

  ‘And the captain stole the relic blade?’

  ‘Corpus-Captain Kersh earned the Dornsblade,’ Balshazar corrected the approbator, his gaze meeting the Scourge’s. ‘He won the honour of a year’s custodianship at the centennial Feast of Blades. It is the corpus-captain’s by right.’

  ‘Then why reclaim it?’

  ‘Kersh should have sent the Dornsblade back to the safety of our home world, Eschara, on the frigate Scarifica. Instead, he kept the blade and sent that one in its stead, an inception sword, given to neophytes in recognition of their ascension to true brotherhood.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ Quast asked before kneeling down in the blood-soaked earth beside the silent Scourge. ‘Captain, why would you do that?’

  Kersh said nothing. He just stared up at the Santiarch.

  ‘To force an audience with the Chapter Master, possibly,’ Balshazar said, his deep voice finding its way to an accusatory edge. ‘He’d been formerly denied one. His act could be one of Chapter politics. The corpus-captain’s reasons are best known to himself. I know only this – if our passage had been easier and swifter here, then we might have faced the terrible odds evidenced about us as brothers, the Sword of Sebastus, thousands of years on, still bringing the sons of Rogal Dorn together.’

  Quast leant in. The stink of gore rising from the Scourge’s plate made the appr
obator recoil slightly.

  ‘Corpus-captain, I am here representing the interests of the Holy Ordos. I must know what happened here. These are strange happenings indeed and explanations must be sought.’

  Kersh moved suddenly, causing the approbator to retract further. In an agonising movement, and with fresh blood gushing from his ripped plate, Kersh dropped his neophyte’s inception blade and reached for the gravestone behind him. It was torment to watch. Both Balshazar and the approbator wanted to assist the wounded Space Marine, but had little idea what he was doing. Slowly, the Scourge’s ceramite fingertips reached for the sculpted stone of the grave marker. The stone was inscribed with a name: Erzsebet Dorota Catallus. At its heart, like the thousands of gravestones surrounding them across the necroplex, was a small bell. Quast frowned, assuming the instrument to be part of some Ecclesiarchy ritual or cemetery world custom. With an effort-trembling fingertip, Kersh prodded the bell, sending out a tinny chime across the steaming burial grounds. He did this a second and a third time until suddenly, and surprisingly, the bell began to ring of its own accord.

  Quast and the Santiarch looked at one another. About them, bells started ringing everywhere, each of the gravestones peeling with chimes of urgency and insistence. The approbator moved in closer to examine the grave marker. He saw the openings for air supply and the wire running from the bell and down into the earth. He turned back to Balshazar.

  ‘The dead are rising, Santiarch. Miracles indeed.’

  ‘Approbator!’ the Ranger Pelluciad sergeant called, standing next to a vox-pack-carrying storm trooper. ‘Dig teams report knocking from beneath the ruins of the Memorial Mausoleum. The new pontifex has begged assistance from the ordo and the Adeptus Astartes in excavating the survivors and the relic-remains of Umberto II.’

  ‘Inform the pontifex that we are going to need shovels,’ Quast called back. ‘Lots of shovels.’

  As the chorus of bells rang across the killing fields, the approbator’s eyes settled on an object, half buried in the bloody earth. Picking it up and wiping it off, Quast discovered a crystalline wafer bearing a name and illustration. He had seen astropaths use such cards to divine possible futures – a tarot card. On the bottom of the wafer it stated Deus Imperator and pictured their corpse-lord, sat on his Golden Throne, amongst ancient apparatus of gold, steel and brass.

  ‘God-Emperor…’ Quast mouthed.

  Looking down, the approbator saw another tarot wafer, and another – both amongst the carnage, sitting on the earth of newly dug graves. Burial plots all about were marked with the cards and each bore the holy image of the God-Emperor. Quast shook his head. He had seen Guardsmen drop playing cards on enemy dead as a signature of their success – a practice of certain regiments – but never wafers deposited on the living; on battle survivors. Returning to the wounded Excoriator, the approbator showed him the cards.

  ‘What happened here?’ Quast asked the Scourge. He held up the crystalline wafers. ‘I must know. Tell me everything.’

  ‘…or the teachings of our lord-founder, Demetrius Katafalque. I know not what I saw on Certus-Minor. I’m not sure that I’m the best instrument of elucidation. I have lived a warrior’s life. A simple but essential existence of death and darkness, so that the light of the Imperium might shine brightly. What I experienced, others have known. Brothers who bear witness to a Legion of the Damned. An intervention from beyond. Aid unexplained, yet offered in silence and with the fury of ethereal vengeance – vanishing as swiftly as it appeared. I shall let Imperial scholars and the sophists of the Holy Ordos assign an explanation to this strange but welcome phenomenon, whether that be brothers lost on the Sea of Souls, a corruption beyond our understanding or the manifestation of a divine Will. I think that another Chapter – I forget which one – said it best. Their motto was In dedicato deus imperatum ultra articulo mortis: For the God-Emperor beyond the point of death. Perhaps these damned legionnaires had pledged themselves as such. Perhaps one day I shall know. There are worse fates in the galaxy for a battle-brother, intent on serving one’s God-Emperor into eternity.’

  From Damnation’s Calling

  By Chapter Master Zachariah Kersh, of the Excoriators Space Marine Chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ROB SANDERS is a freelance writer, who spends his nights creating dark visions for regular visitors to the 41st millennium to relive in the privacy of their own nightmares.

  By contrast, as Head of English at a local secondary school, he spends his days beating (not literally) the same creativity out of the next generation in order to cripple any chance of future competition. He lives off the beaten track in the small city of Lincoln, UK. His first fiction was published in Inferno! magazine.

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

  Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan

  Maps by Rosie Edwards and Adrian Wood.

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  ISBN 978-0-85787-510-5

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