by Rob Sanders
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.
‘Melmoch, watch the door,’ the Scourge ordered amongst the thunderous din of howling and shoulders striking the metal egress. Still on his knees, his eyes on the floor, Melmoch raised a weak hand.
Kersh ran through the anteroom and across the marble expanse of the Holy Sepulchre. Skase followed with difficulty. Ishmael’s lightning claw had raked through the chief whip’s pack, damaging the plant and some of the motive function hardware. The plate’s power supply was waning and the unsupported deadweight of the ceramite was slowing the Excoriator.
As the Space Marines crossed the open space of the Mausoleum the funereal beauty of the building was lost upon them: the intricate scrolling on the wall internments; the silver lettering adorning the floor slabs, recording the names of past pontiffs and cardinals; loggia supports and fat sculpted pillars reaching up to the exquisite detail of the Mausoleum’s domed ceiling – each hand-painted illustration a depiction of Umberto II’s long and spiritually-productive life. Candles and incense burned from a thousand suspended sconces, and stern statues of ecclesiarchs already elevated to sainthood adorned the sepulchre space in a ring around a simple block-crypt of obsidian brick. A silver-plated elevator was used to transport clerics and Adepta Sororitas deep below the sepulchre to a small complex of condition-controlled crypt chambers residing behind a thick vault door.
Within, laid out for private pilgrimage and display, were the surviving remains of Umberto II – Ruling Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum and High Lord of Terra. A circular gallery spiralled about the sepulchre’s exterior, made up of marble steps and landings, providing access to the wall-combs, vaultia and the upper storeys of the Mausoleum. It was the infuriating length of the gallery – winding around the sepulchre – that the Scourge and Skase negotiated. As they ran, the Excoriators could still hear the furious multitudes outside, echoing about the great dome, and could see the warp-spent Melmoch on his knees at the centre of the antechamber.
‘What now?’ Skase barked, as he drove his failing suit on along the gallery. Kersh didn’t respond, but he did keep pausing at intervals to stare out of the embrasure boltslits and allow the chief whip to catch up. Just before the locked entrance to the Sisters of Battle’s mission house, Kersh stopped and stared out through the stone aperture at the chaos beyond. The Memorial Mausoleum commanded the best view of Obsequa City that anyone could expect. The cemetery world capital wasn’t much to look at now: an inferno-tormented, partially demolished ruin, tainted with innocent blood, and a rockrete menagerie for murderous deviants, traitors and filth-entities from the warp. ‘Kersh!’ Skase said, soaking up the hopelessness beside him. ‘What are we going to do?’
The Scourge looked blankly at the Excoriator. He heard Melmoch call weakly from the sepulchre floor. Ignoring them both, Kersh took the mission house door off with a single strike of his boot. Striding across the small transeptory and past the cell-cloisters, Kersh moved swiftly through the sacristy and Lady Chapel. Near the palatine’s solitoria, Kersh found what he was looking for: the mission house armoury and the vox-berth.
‘Raid what’s left of the armoury. Grab us some weapons and grenades – something with punch,’ Kersh told Skase as he went to work on the frequency matrix of the vox-bank. Kersh heard Melmoch call again over the boom of the door assault below.
‘What for?’ Skase seared. ‘It’s over.’
Kersh dropped the vox-hailer and stormed at the chief whip. ‘I’ll tell you when it’s over!’
Skase fixed the Scourge with a gaze that was pure reason: no fear, no despair or sorrow.
‘The city’s lost,’ Skase shouted, ‘the Fifth is gone. You hear that?’ The chief whip let the rumble of mayhem intrude from outside. ‘They will get in, and when they do – no matter how hard we fight, no matter what honour we bring to the primarch or our Lord Katafalque – our blood will be theirs. They will end us, and those people out there, whom you confidently placed in the bosom of the earth, will rot there…’
Kersh roared his recriminations at the Excoriator, and Skase roared back.
‘Corpus-captain!’ Melmoch called. The two Space Marines burned into each other with accusatory eyes. Kersh looked out at the Holy Sepulchre and then back at Skase.
‘There is no dishonour in doubt,’ the Scourge told him. ‘You think Katafalque didn’t have doubts, out on the walls of the Imperial Palace? You think Dorn was not crippled by the deep melancholies of the unknown as he stood over the Emperor’s shattered form? There is no dishonour in doubt,’ Kersh repeated. ‘The measure of a primarch, a Chapter Master, a battle-brother, is what he does next. We are Excoriators. This is our burden. These are our trials. Trials of the mind, the spirit and the flesh. War through attrition. Victory through endurance, and we shall endure.’
Skase’s gaze drifted to the floor. He nodded, slowly and to himself.
‘Yes,’ he said, unlocking the seals on his gauntlets and slipping them off.
The vox crackled discordance before erupting with a solitary voice.
‘…please respond. This is His Beneficent Majesty’s planetary defence monitor Apotheon hailing Obsequa City – Fifth Company Adeptus Astartes Excoriators Chapter… Please respond.’
‘Apotheon, this is Corpus-Captain Zachariah Kersh of the Fifth. We receive.’
‘My lord,’ the voice crackled, ‘we’ve been trying to raise you. The interference…’
‘Listen to me carefully, mortal. I do not have time to ask you twice,’ Kersh boomed at the vox-hailer. ‘I saw your vengeance in the sky. I need to know your status.’
‘My lord, there is something I need–’
‘Mortal, believe me when I tell you that many lives – including my own – depend on the choice of your next words. Your status – have you been boarded?’
‘This is Commander Heiss,’ a female voice responded after a pause. ‘We have been boarded.’
‘Do you have steerage way and power to your weapons systems?’
‘Not for long, my lord. There has been a strange development up here,’ the commander replied.
‘Get ready for another one,’ Kersh told her, staring at maps and schemata located about the vox-berth. He proceeded to stab digits into a glyphpad on the vox-bank with the ceramite tip of his finger. ‘I’m sending you coordinates for a location on the planet’s surface. After examination of them you will reach the conclusion that the coordinates reside within Obsequa City, just outside the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum, to be exact.’
‘My lord…’
‘You will target these coordinates and manoeuvre your lance into position for an orbital strike in exactly fifteen minutes’ time.’
‘I can’t–’
‘You can, commander, and you will. That is a direct order. A great deal rides on whether you can find it within yourself to obey that order. Let me be clear. I am ordering you to destroy the Memorial Mausoleum.’
‘And a good part of the city,’ Heiss shot back.
‘Don’t concern yourself with that,’ the Scourge told her. ‘There is nobody left in the city.’ Kersh looked at Skase who was standing in the berth entrance holding a multimelta beside him in one hand and a heavy bolter in the other. Without his gauntlets he could only just get his thick fingers through the carryholds of the Sisters’ weaponry. The chief whip humped a pyrum-petrol fuel pack and had draped his battered shoulder plates with bandoliers of grenades and 1.00 calibre ammunition. The two Excoriators held each other’s grim gaze. ‘There is no dishonour in doubt, commander. The measure of us is what we do next. Fifteen minutes, commander. Good luck. Obsequa City out.’
As Heiss tried to interject, Kersh cut her off and dropped the vox-hailer.
‘That’s your p
lan?’ Skase said as the pair travelled back through the mission house transeptory.
‘I don’t plan on any of us being here in fifteen minutes,’ Kersh replied, the battle standard clutched tightly in his hand.
‘It took a lot of lives to get here,’ Skase said.
‘And now we’ve got the enemy where we want them, we’ll take a lot more.’
‘What about the people in the vault?’
‘The vault’s deep and the door’s thick. It will hold. If it could survive a meteorite impact, it’ll weather an orbital bombardment. Just.’
‘You can’t stop the Cholercaust with a single lance strike.’
‘No, but it will give these murderous bastards something to think about while we make good our withdrawal. I don’t care what they say about the Cholercaust. We have to endure – we have to survive this. Those people out there, counting on us, in the dark beneath the earth, have to survive this.’
‘Why? No planet ever has.’
‘But worlds will, once they hear of survivors. We will not stop the Cholercaust, but somebody will, somebody with hope in their heart, resolution and belief – all three of which our survival will have put there.’
As Kersh and the chief whip stepped back out onto the gallery, the corpus-captain called, ‘Melmoch – we’re leaving.’ Kersh expected some kind of protest – a question at least – but it didn’t come. Looking over the balustrade, the two Excoriators saw the Librarian still on his knees on the antechamber floor. He was vomiting projectile streams of blood down onto the marble floor, a copious pool of which had built up around the psyker. ‘Melmoch!’ Kersh called. The roaring cacophony of the mob outside died to silence.
‘The gateway called Melmoch no longer resides in this vessel,’ the Excoriators heard the hordes outside drone in unison. The stone of the Mausoleum hummed with the chorus of voices. ‘His witch’s soul burns for eternity in the fires of my master’s ire, and it drowns in the boiling depths of his bile. I am the Pilgrim, the Prince of Pain and Right Claw of Khorne. My gene-breed flesh remembers slaughtering your kind on the ramparts of the False Emperor’s Palace, on distant Terra, many lives-taken ago. It wishes to remember again.’
Melmoch’s body began to rise above the bloody pool. Cloven hooves on thick, red legs erupted from the Librarian’s armoured knees. Great infernal claws punctured the Excoriator’s plate at the elbow, unfolding into appendages of red sinew and brazen talons. Melmoch’s armour disintegrated about the materialising beast, shards and fragments becoming embedded in the obscenely muscular daemonhide. A blood-drenched pauldron remained, the Stigmartyr symbol of the Excoriators briefly bursting into flame before smouldering to the blasphemous World Eaters jaw-glyph around a paint-bubbling globe. The Epistolary’s afflicted gaze and precious skull disappeared, swallowed whole by the Pilgrim’s gulping, dagger-toothed maw, which emerged like a surfacing ocean behemoth from the Librarian’s back and shoulders.
Shaking the freshly-morphed head from side to side, a pair of bullish horns speared their way out from the monster’s temples. The thing itself did not speak, simply resorting to a foundation-shaking wrath-bellow of full realisation. With ease, the Pilgrim ripped the statue of a nearby saint out of the floor with his great claws and flung it at the Mausoleum door. The stone flew at the door, hitting the metal surface with infernal force. The door blasted open on its colossal hinges, crushing a score of slave-soldiers whose bodies were stamped into the ground by the flood of cultist pandemonium that raged into the Holy Sepulchre.
Kersh snatched a bandolier of grenades from Skase’s shoulder as the Excoriator bent down to load the belt feed into the heavy bolter’s breech. He snapped off several and tossed them across the breadth of the chamber, where they hit the gallery and bounced down the steps leading around and down towards the ground floor. The steps detonated, blasting the spiralling first floor gallery to dust along with the drove of blood cultists who had immediately mounted the stairwell.
Slapping shut the breech and balancing the heavy bolter on the balustrade, Skase began to hammer the endless hordes with blistering firepower. The Pilgrim tore another statue from the floor and tossed it through the air at the Excoriators. Skase leant aside and Kersh ducked as the sculpture of Saint Vatalis crashed through the embrasure behind him. Looking down on the hideous thing that had been Melmoch, Kersh came to understand the dire physical and spiritual dangers the psyker had been trying to avoid, when he put himself out during the Keeler Comet’s arrival. Lifting his gaze, Kersh began to feel about his plate for the ornately decorated urn Melmoch had used. The negatively-charged dust within was used by the Sisters for consecrating Umberto II’s shrine. The Epistolary had stolen the precious relic from the Mausoleum, and Kersh had intended on giving it back. Which he decided to do now.
Taking it in his hand, Kersh lobbed the urn like a grenade, over the balustrade and down onto the daemon World Eater. The pot smashed against the Pilgrim’s horns, dousing the monster in the fine dust. The particles seared into the Pilgrim’s daemonflesh on contact. The beast howled and screamed its torment as the psychic negativity not only broke down the horror’s warp-crafted flesh but also ate away at the thing’s tenuous link with reality.
‘Die, you monstrous thing,’ Kersh spat, as Skase continued to chew through the cultists swarming the chamber. The creature of Chaos clawed at its own dust-infected muscle and sinew, raking through its face and armoured chest. Cultists about the dissolving cage of bones screamed also and began savaging the beast with blades, nails and teeth. The surrounding slave-soldiers fell on the inner circle, tearing them apart, and before long the scene was a horrific orgy of butchery. Skase concentrated his mulching gunfire on the doorway, accompanied by throng-blasting grenades tossed by the Scourge, down through the antechamber.
A new and sickening sound rose up from the sepulchre floor. It sounded to Kersh like a thicket of trees all bending and breaking at the same time. The corpus-captain could hear snapping, fracturing and splintering. Below, at the heart of the carnage, the bodies of the dying and those who had killed them were being drawn into a bloody maelstrom. Bones were breaking and reaching out of cultist bodies, intertwining with the skeletal mesh of others in a macabre fusion, a daemon cage through which the shredded flesh and spilled gore of the cultists bubbled and swirled. Beneath the Excoriators, the Pilgrim was finding a new form. Feeding on the souls of his blood-pledged, the monster fought through the agonies Kersh had visited upon it and refused to release its terrible hold on the material universe. As more and more of the Blood God’s disciples flooding the chamber were gore-assimilated by the thing, it grew. The Pilgrim’s skin-rent skull emerged from the top of the carcass mountain, its devastating claws also – although being a flesh-frame of grasping, scratching, flailing limbs, it was not short of such appendages. As it rose on its murderous altar of butchered bodies, the Pilgrim’s eyes blazed white with hate and it reached out for the Emperor’s Angels on the gallery.
‘Let’s go!’ Kersh bawled, tugging at Skase’s shoulder, but the chief whip shrugged him off, burying a fresh volley of bolt-rounds in the Pilgrim’s grotesque embodiment.
‘It’s not going to happen,’ Skase shouted between staccato blasts. He threw a thumb behind him. ‘The pack’s shot. Power failure. My plate will only slow the both of us down.’
‘We can make it!’ the corpus-captain returned.
‘You can make it,’ Skase said, blasting at the Chosen of Khorne. ‘You must make it. Like you said, somebody’s got to survive.’
With the Pilgrim growing horrifically before them, the Scourge stared at his chief whip. Skase nodded at the battle standard fluttering in Kersh’s hand. ‘Keep it flying,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep them entertained until the lightshow begins.’
Nodding silently, Kersh knelt down and primed the multi-melta, cycling the pyrum-petrol mix and activating the sub-molecular reaction chamber. Leaving the fuel pack on the floor, Kersh placed the heavy weapon on the balustrade. Without a word or a glance, Skase sil
enced the heavy bolter and moved across to the melta. He punched a vaporising beam of intense fusion through the howling Pilgrim-monstrosity before recalibrating the weapon and turning another patch of its flesh-armour to molten slag. With the bandolier in one hand and the Fifth Company’s battle standard in the other, Kersh left the occupied Skase and stepped through the hole the statue had made in the wall.
Sidling out along the ledge, the Scourge looked down. The darkness below swarmed with movement, killers attracted by the bloodbath within the Mausoleum and eager to be part of it. Above, the sky was stranger still. In low orbit Kersh could see the telltale signs of obliteration, vessels he could not see suddenly flaring into fireballs of destruction. With the Apotheon’s lance hopefully aimed down over his head and Naval assistance light years away, Kersh could only reason that the insane captains of the Chaos fleet had decided to turn their guns on each other. It was certainly not unknown amongst the savage servants of the Blood God.
A sole winged fury swooped past, snapping at the Excoriator with its jaws. As it banked and tried to savage him again, Kersh swung the bandolier of grenades like a flail and smashed it in the wing, sending the thing careening off into the side of a building. Kersh could feel the precious seconds passing. Priming one of the grenades he let the bandolier drop into the unsuspecting crowd below. Giving the belt a few seconds advantage, and with the banner in his hand, Kersh too stepped off the ledge. There was simply no swift way down off the side of the colossal tomb. Kersh’s plate buckled and cracked as he struck lower ledges and the unforgiving stone of architectural flourishes. He reached out with his hand to grab rims, boltslits and the limbs and wings of gargoyles. His boots found brief and occasional footing on carved ridges and representations that could not support his weight or the gathering force of his fall. The paint on his ceramite chipped and scuffed as he grazed the building’s side.
Everything suddenly became white below as the grenades detonated in a chain reaction. The moment seemed to hesitate and Kersh felt himself momentarily slow as fiery lumps of flesh and masonry were rocketed skywards by the blast. The Scourge found himself suddenly winded as he landed on a pillartop, stomach first. He felt several things break inside. The impact had at least reined in the gathering speed of his fall, and as he rolled off, the few remaining storeys down the pillarside were uneventful. Taking in a breath, Kersh realised that he’d dropped the battle standard, and that the pole and banner had gone on ahead of him. When he struck the cobbles beside it, the epicentre of the devastating fragstorm moments before, something snapped in his leg. The hot glow of agony washed up the limb. Getting up off the crumpled plating and pauldron on his arm, the Scourge looked down at the injury. The ceramite had split at the knee, as had his flesh, allowing a bone from his leg to erupt through the rent.
