by Rob Sanders
‘A cemetery worlder?’
‘An Adeptus Astartes.’
Balshazar seemed to sag in his heavy plate.
‘We might get answers to our questions, yet,’ the Santiarch told Quast.
The approbator gave a brief nod. ‘Sergeant, take us to him. Take us to him, right now.’
PART ONE
Terror is their harbinger…
Chapter One
The Darkness
‘How goes the Feast, brother?’ called Apothecary Ezrachi, across the frigate Scarifica’s tactical-oratorium. Corpus-Captain Shiloh Gideon stood at a rostrum decorated with runeslates and scrolls of vellum. As Ezrachi approached, the small gathering of bondservants about the rostrum peeled away. The Apothecary’s right leg was a full bionic replacement and almost as old as Ezrachi himself. While robust and powerful, it sighed with hydraulic insistence and lagged a millisecond behind its flesh-and-bone equivalent, giving the impression of a slight limp.
‘The Feast of Blades goes badly,’ the corpus-captain lamented. ‘For the Excoriators, at least.’
‘How many?’ inquired the Apothecary as he approached.
‘Too many,’ Gideon snapped, running a palm across the top of his tonsure-shaven scalp. He grasped hair that grew like a silver crown around his skull in obvious frustration. ‘We lost three more to our Successor Chapter kin this morning in honorific contestations. Occam, Basrael and Jabez. Occam fought well, but not well enough. I thought Jabez was dead. I don’t think anything is going to stop that Crimson Fist. The Feast may already be theirs.’
‘Brother Jabez will live,’ Ezrachi assured him. ‘Just.’
Gideon didn’t seem to hear the aged Apothecary.
‘Shame begets shame,’ the corpus-captain said. ‘Our failure at the Feast is tied to the loss of our Chapter’s sacred standard. I can feel it.’
‘Your head is full of Santiarch Balshazar’s sermons. I honour the primarch, but Dorn lives on through our flesh and blood, not dusty artefacts,’ Ezrachi insisted. ‘The loss of our standard is a mighty blow, but in truth it was but a blood-speckled banner.’
‘Rogal Dorn himself entrusted his sons – our Excoriator brothers – with the standard over ten thousand years ago,’ the corpus-captain said. ‘It displays the Second Founding’s decree and is threaded with the honours of every battle fought in our long, bloody history. It carries the distinctia of the Astartes Praeses and our service in garrisoning the Ocularis Terribus. It bears the Stigmartyr – the emblem that the Chapter adopted as its own.’ Gideon turned to present his own ivory shoulder plate, adorned with the scarlet symbol to which he made reference, a gauntleted fist clenching the length of a thunderbolt-shaped scar. ‘It is much more than the blood-soaked rag to which you allude and I’ll have you mind your irreverence, Apothecary.’
‘I meant no offence, corpus-captain,’ Ezrachi replied plainly, slapping the adamantium scaffolding of his thigh. ‘As you well know, there is more than a little of my own blood splashed across that standard.’
‘Our brothers fight for a broken honour,’ the corpus-captain continued, oblivious to Ezrachi. ‘We are accursed. The Emperor’s eternal fortitude, once absent in the brother that surrendered the banner, is now absent in us all. It is our collective punishment.’
‘Is it not our way?’ Ezrachi put to him. ‘Do not the Excoriators of all Dorn’s sons feel the loss of the Emperor deepest? Do not the Excoriators alone know our primarch’s true grief, the agony of his redemption and the cold wrath of his renascence? Do we not purge his weakness and our own from this shared flesh through the Rites of Castigation and the Wearing of Dorn’s Mantle?’
‘This is beyond our inherited sin,’ Gideon said miserably. ‘The loss of the Honoured First Company. The near assassination of our Chapter Master. The failure and near decimation of the Fifth and now this – one hundred years of humiliation in the making, right underneath the disapproving noses of our Legionary kindred. All as spiritual censure for the loss of Dorn’s gift – the very embodiment of our Adeptus Astartes honour.’
‘We have lost a great symbol,’ Ezrachi admitted, ‘but not what the standard symbolised. That is alive and well in the hearts of every Excoriator who bears his blade in the Emperor’s name. As they do here, brother, at the Feast of Blades.’
‘Blades drawn in disbelief and sheathed in failure,’ the corpus-captain said grimly.
‘Is our standing in the Feast really so dire?’
‘I’m pinning our hope on Usachar and Brother Dathan. Usachar is a squad whip and a veteran. Dathan is young but fast and has a way with a blade.’
‘Some hope, then,’ Ezrachi said.
‘Usachar is chosen against Knud Hægstad of the Iron Knights and young Dathan has drawn Pugh’s champion,’ Gideon reported. ‘It’s never easy crossing blades with those chosen to wear the primarch’s plate, but with the Imperial Fists defending their title and the Feast fought on a First Company-conquered world… I don’t rate our chances. Even if they win, they’ll have to face that damned Crimson Fist in the next round. It’s fairly hopeless.’
‘So,’ Ezrachi put to the corpus-captain, ‘it’s time.’
‘I would enter the arena myself, but for the desperation it speaks to our brethren.’
‘Making your decision all the easier and more forgivable,’ the Apothecary persisted. ‘You have no choice. Give the order. Let me set free the Scourge.’
‘I would not do that for a hundred worlds,’ Gideon snarled. ‘He’s afflicted and has damned us all. Dorn has seen fit to punish him. The Scourge can rot for all I care. The Darkness is his to endure and I for one would not spare him his agonies.’
I am in a place… of darkness. I have never been here, yet I know it well. My mind – like my body – is in sensory overdrive. Something far beyond my genetic inheritance, beyond the rigours of Chapter indoctrination and the suprahormones roaring through my veins. This moment feels more acute, more vivid and keener than any I have formerly experienced. Every molecule of my being is devoted to it. Like the seconds have been honed to a razored edge.
Despite the intensity of this experience, the world about me is dark and indistinct. Everything, from the walls to the floor beneath my feet, is cloaked in a peripheral haze. I try to focus, but anything upon which I settle my eyes assumes the quality of screaming shadow. The howling gloom spreads like a stain, running into everything else and framing me in a vision of smeared charcoal.
I wander the labyrinthine nightmare of this place, weapon in hand. Searching. Splattered with blood that is not my own. Knowing that brothers both lost and true clash about me. There is gunfire. There is death. I can hear calls of distant anguish. I cannot make out the words but know that they are laced with venom and cold reason. The hot ringing of blades fills the air, punctuated by the crash of bolt-fire. I am on a smoke-stained battlefield. Boarding an enemy vessel. Reclaiming heretical dirt. Bringing sanity to a daemon world. I am in every battle that I have ever fought, one superimposed upon the other. Death and foes blurring. The colours of destruction smudging and blotting until all that is left is black.
My hearts hammer in unison. I am running. Fearful, but not for myself.
The dark nothingness about me saps my soul. Blood courses through my body. Battle beckons. I tremble not with dread but with expectation, the impending realisation of my genetic heritage. I am a warrior down to the last molecule of my being. I was engineered to kill for something greater than myself, to serve the Father-of-All with blade, bolt – even my last breath, and all those preceding.
I live the lost brothers I have ended. Their bodies fallen and terrible in the murderous ruin they have committed – one upon the other and myself upon them all. Mighty brothers lie twisted and broken. Their god-flesh is still. Fratricide over. The chime of battle hangs about their corpses. Their weapons decorate the changing floor. My own joins them.
A doom, so deep, has reached me. A pain so clear and a loss so searing to my existence that it shatters my soul. Lik
e a dread nova, erupting through histories both galactic and personal, the Darkness finds me. For a moment, there is light in the nothingness. The Emperor of Mankind is with me – here, in this hopeless place. His presence and legacy a beacon in the blackness. Withering to look upon. Impossible not to. I approach as one might his doom. Hesitant. Uncomprehending. Child-like. The moment overwhelms me and tears cascade down my blood-flecked cheeks. Then like a nova – brief, beautiful and sad in its distant diminishing – the beacon fades. I fall to my knees and I weep uncontrollably, for there is nothing left to do. No higher power to whom I can appeal.
The star has faded. The light is gone. In its place is dead space, laced with the poisonous shockwave of the aftermath, trembling through the ages. All that is left is the bottomless grief of the orphan Angel. My hearts know his immortal sorrow. Rogal Dorn. My father’s loss. My loss through his. I feel what he felt, stood over the Emperor. I know the fear and misery he allowed himself. That moment of doubt and horror-stricken possibility becomes my eternity. It saturates me with its despair. I sink deep within myself and find a greater darkness there. An Imperium without an Emperor. A fatherless humanity. An eternity without direction. Dorn’s Darkness.
I roar my defiance, like an infant freshly ripped from the womb. I fall to my knees. A new coldness clings to me. I quake. I know only fear and fury at an empty cosmos, devoid of answers.
But there is a figure. Something I have not seen before. There and yet not. An armoured shape that steps from the darkness into silhouette, glorious against the emptiness. Unlike the stygian surroundings or the Emperor, his presence eclipsed by his own brilliance, the figure falls into harrowing focus. Its movements are slow and deliberate, and as it walks towards me, it grows in stature and menace.
An ally? An enemy? There are no shortage of either, dead on the innumerable battlegrounds about me. I remain kneeling, as though my legs are now part of them all. My mind is overwhelmed with a grief beyond grief. I sit. I watch. I dread.
The revenant approaches. Its searing plate is of the blackest night. Each ceramite boot is wreathed in spectral flame. I look on as its incandescent steps fracture and frost-shatter the metal of the deck beneath them. The ghost-fire curls and crooks its way about the figure as one burned at the stake. It slows to an appalling stop and looks down on my kneeling form. Before me is an Angel of Death. A brother of the beyond. Devoid of Chapter markings, the armour speaks only of the grave, a rachial nightmare of rib and bone, a skeleton set within the surface of the sacred plate. Beneath, the ghastliness goes on. The faceplate of its helmet is smashed and a ceramite shard missing. The bleach-white of a fleshless skull leers at me. The glint of a service stud. The darkness of an eye socket that burns with unnatural life. Perfect teeth that chatter horribly.
‘What are you?’ I manage, although it takes everything I have left to brave the utterance.
It says nothing, but reaches out with a raven gauntlet. A bone digit protrudes from the splintered ceramite fingertip. I watch it drift towards my face with horror. The thing touches me. And I scream.
Corpus-captain Gideon stepped into the stone corridor. Closing the barbican behind him, the Excoriator rested his broad shoulders against the cool metal of the door. Beyond, Gideon could hear the crisp ring of blades rise up from the pit and through the solemn gathering of Adeptus Astartes officers stood amongst the tiered galleries.
Apothecary Ezrachi stepped out onto the long, empty corridor. He wiped blood from his hands with a surgical rag and stared down at the corpus-captain, whose head was angled to the door.
‘Usachar?’
‘Cut to ribbons,’ the Apothecary told him, his voice bouncing around the confines of the subterranean passage. ‘He’ll be more stitch than flesh when I’m finished with him.’
Gideon turned his head to put his ear flat to the metal barbican. The sound of clashing blades had ceased. A sombre announcement was being made. Even muffled through the door, it was obvious to the corpus-captain that Brother Dathan had not been successful.
‘Expect another for your slab,’ Gideon informed the Apothecary. He turned to look at the aged Excoriator. Rubbing the red from his hands, Ezrachi returned the grim gaze.
‘Corpus-captain…’
‘I know,’ Gideon said with slumped resignation. ‘I would not do this but for the dishonour we would endure in exiting the Feast so early and the disgrace to carry back to Eschara. I promised Master Ichabod a victory to lift the Chapter and carry our brothers through these dark times. I cannot return with both empty hearts and hands. News of our failure would likely finish what the filth Alpha Legion started. I fear the disappointment alone might end him, Ezrachi.’
The Apothecary shook his battered face. ‘Quesiah Ichabod is the greatest Excoriator to have ever lived. Those armoured serpents were lucky – and perhaps born so – but even they, with their lies and infernal ways, could not take him from us. Besides, he is now on Eschara with one of our best, the Chief Apothecary.’
‘I can’t look my Chapter Master in the eye and tell him I did everything in my power to secure victory when I did not.’ Gideon seemed to come to a dismal decision. ‘I’d hoped that it would not come to this. Nine Excoriators have fought for their Chapter in the Feast, yet ten were sent for such a hallowed duty. Only Dorn knows why Master Ichabod insisted upon his inclusion, but that is now the choice laid before me. Can the Scourge be made fit for anything, let alone battle?’
‘I believe so. We are pure of hearts but not of blood. As part of a former Legion and now as a Chapter, we are not alone in our experience of genetic deficiency. The Wolves and the Angels, as well as the brethren of future Foundings, carry the flaws of their blood heritage on to new generations,’ the Excoriators Apothecary explained. ‘When the Darkness takes one of our number, it might appear to us a wretched palsy: the slackness of the jaw, the tremor of the limb, the blankness of the eye. But those who survive it report the experience as a living nightmare, a sleeping wakefulness in which they relive the bottomless woe of Dorn’s most trying time – the grievous loss of our Father-Emperor, at least as we knew him. This is both our father’s genetic blessing and his curse to his sons. To know the possibility – for even a second – of an Imperium without the Emperor. To feel what Dorn felt. The profound misery of a primarch. The paralysing fear that even one as great as he experienced, for himself and for humanity, over the Emperor’s shattered body. To live the Darkness.’
‘Such details have little meaning for me, Apothecary,’ Gideon told him. ‘The Adeptus Astartes are bred for battle. They exist only to avenge the Emperor and put the enemies of humanity to the blade. I need warriors, not dreamers. Whatever the actual nature of this affliction, it does not befit one of our calling. If it were me, I’d rather my brothers ended such a vegetative existence than watch me live on in a senseless state.’
‘Since the Darkness can strike any of us at any time, corpus-captain, I’ll bear that in mind,’ Ezrachi promised with a subversive curl of the lip. ‘While we dwell on such matters, you should know that the procedure I intend is untried and that the brother in question might not survive it.’
‘For the calamity he has brought down on all of us, I would lose little sleep over that.’
‘I suspected as much,’ the Apothecary said. ‘I inform you only that it in turn might inform your strategy for our brothers in the contest. You do know it is possible that his suffering caused the loss of the Chapter standard rather than his failure being the cause of the Darkness.’
‘What do I care for that?’ Gideon snorted. ‘He failed his primarch. He failed his Chapter Master. He failed us all. The only care I have in this is to find use for such traitorous hands. What will you do and how long do you need?’
‘Santiarch Balshazar has his way of managing the afflicted,’ Ezrachi replied. ‘A spiritual treatment that those suffering the Darkness survive or they do not. While I respect the symbolic significance of the Santiarch’s practice and the rituals specific to our Chapter cult,
my method is comparatively direct.’ The Apothecary indicated a point at the back of his skull, where in the fashion of the Chapter, his thinning hairline met a scarred and shaven scalp. ‘The catalepsean node is located here on the brain stem. As the implant responsible for modifying the circadian rhythms – our patterns of sleep and elongated periods of consciousness – it seems possible that a malfunctioning node could be responsible for a loss of motor control and the experience of a “living nightmare”. I plan to drill through the bone and insert a hypodermic lightning rod into the brain. There I shall issue a localised shock to the catalepsean node, hopefully interrupting the affliction of the Darkness and reinstating the natural function of the implant.’
‘Sounds painful.’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘Good,’ the corpus-captain said. ‘When you are finished with Usachar and Dathan, return to the Scarifica. The Rites of Battle begin for the next round shortly. The Feast waits for no one. Send word if your experiment meets with success. I’ll also need informing if our fallen brother fails us once again.’
‘How do you define failure?’
‘A living-death or an actual one,’ Gideon told the Apothecary as he took his leave. ‘It makes very little difference to me when it comes to Zachariah Kersh.’
‘I trust everything is prepared?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
Apothecary Ezrachi stomped down the ramp into the cargo compartment of the frigate Scarifica, his leg clunking against the metal floor. His nostrils flared. They were down in the bowels of the ship. He would have preferred a more suitable location for the procedure, but his brother Excoriators would not tolerate the Scourge’s presence.
Crates and bulk-canisters had been cleared in the centre of the compartment, creating an open space. There stood a decorative casket, an item transported from Santiarch Balshazar’s Holy Reclusiam, buried deep within the Excoriators’ fortress-monastery on distant Eschara. Beaten from dull adamantium, the box had the dimensions of a sarcophagus and the extravagant garniture to match. Its frontispiece featured a raised depiction of the Emperor-of-All; despite the casket standing upright, it represented him as prone, maimed and broken, following his confrontation with the beast Horus. Santiarch Balshazar’s solution to the affliction of the Darkness. A darkness of his own. The most solitary of confinements, where no self-respecting Excoriator need look upon his weakness and invalidity.
