Legion of the Damned

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. Like 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.

On either side of the sarcophagus’s head was a small confessional grille. On the left, Ezrachi’s apothecarion aides busied themselves in ivory robes, adorned with the insignia of the prime helix. They were making adjustments to a tripod arrangement and drill, the trepan of which was pointed through the open grille. On the opposite side were the Scourge’s own serfs, looking thoroughly miserable. Since the disgrace of their master they had been relegated to the cargo compartment also, bunking and toileting in the dark, down with the casket that held the fallen Kersh.

There were three. Old Enoch was the Scourge’s seneschal. He sat, perpetually oiling the braided length of ‘the purge’ and mumbling insensibly to himself. He was caretaker of the ceremonial lash and overseer of his master’s devotional mortification. Enoch’s son Oren proceeded to mop the area around the sarcophagus base where a growing pool of waste was escaping the casket-base. He was the lictor. Barrel-chested, with the thick arms of a scud-wrestler, it had been Oren’s solemn function to administer ‘the purge’ with all the devotion of which he was capable. His father supervised the ritual, his crabby eyes burning in disappointment that his own son had not been honoured with tissue compatibility for a life beyond mere humanity. Old Enoch’s daughter Bethesda was the Scourge’s absterge. An elfin waif of a girl – gaunt and grim – she was charged with the routine cleansing and dressing of the Adeptus Astartes’ ceremonial wounds. Excoriators all took their purification across their broad, muscular backs – as part of the ritual they called ‘Donning Dorn’s Mantle’. Beyond basic servitude to the Scourge, the three serfs were charged – by Kersh himself above all else – to excoriate his flesh and purify him of weakness so that he might achieve endorphic communion with the primarch.

Bethesda was reading to the Scourge through the confessional grille on the other side of the casket, although it was unclear how much of the text Kersh was hearing. Whilst enthralled by the Darkness, victims couldn’t speak or communicate. They couldn’t feed themselves or take water and seemed feverishly insensible to everything happening about them. At the Apothecary’s entrance, Kersh’s servants stood or turned to present themselves. Bethesda slammed the tome shut. Ezrachi caught the title: The Architecture of Agony by Demetrius Katafalque. He knew it well. A treatise of devotional suffering by the former captain and first Master of the Excoriators Chapter.

‘Pray, continue,’ Ezrachi ordered softly. ‘This will not be pleasant and I wish our convalescent every distraction.’

Bethesda returned to her reading.

‘… During Terra’s infancy, in which the warriors of brute nations were flogged as a test of their manhood…’

‘We’ve broken through the lower cranium, my lord,’ one of Ezrachi’s aides told him, standing at the tripod-trepan like a workman at a lathe.

‘All right,’ Ezrachi called to his aides. ‘Do your duty.’

‘…Later monastic orders of the Church Katholi indulged flagellation as a form of militant pilgrimage…’

Kersh seemed unmoved by the horrific procedure, held in place within the casket. The Scourge remained silent and still, the drill embedded in his skull and Bethesda’s honeyed words filling the cargo compartment.

Locking off the drill, one of the aides depressed a plunger on a power cell situated between the legs of the tripod. The other wrapped himself around an underslung buttstock and trigger arrangement hanging beneath the drill.

‘Charging. Six megathule range.’

‘…of the Old Hundred. The Geno Seven-Sixty Spartocid fought for the Emperor in the Unification Wars and during the Great Crusade, where it was considered a genic officer’s honour to match the number of strokes suffered by a stereobreed soldier, for failure under his command…’

‘Launching hypodermic rod.’

The apparatus fired and a sickening thud reverberated around the chamber. The robed aides made adjustments to their drill.

‘…whereas it is practice aboard the mighty Phalanx to embrace a technological solution to the self-infliction of suffering, I favour my Lord Dorn’s practice for my brother Excoriators. On our primarch’s fosterworld of Inwit, the winters were cold and the lash was hot. Such instruction was adopted across Dorn’s early empire and favoured by the Progenitor personally as a form of martial communion and as purification for the soul…’

Pressing his face into the micronocular eyepieces above the stock, the aide consulted a pict screen before announcing, ‘We have achieved the catalepsean node, Apothecary.’

‘What are you waiting for?’ Ezrachi barked. ‘Pray to Dorn and deliver the charge.’

A faint hum indicated the duration of the treatment. Bethesda closed the Scourge’s copy of Demetrius Katafalque’s mighty tome and got to her feet. The chamber fell still. Ezrachi’s brow began to knot with disappointment.

‘Again.’

The aides repeated the procedure. All in attendance waited.

Then it began. A sound like distant fury, building within the casket. An agonising roar that was everywhere. The rage of a woken giant.

‘Fire the seals,’ Ezrachi ordered Oren and Old Enoch. ‘Get this thing open.’

The sarcophagus started to shake. Ezrachi pursed his age-cracked lips. Perhaps the Scourge was experiencing a variety of fit. Perhaps the procedure had caused some kind of neural damage. Perhaps the warrior simply wanted out of the casket. ‘The drill!’ the Apothecary remembered, prompting his aides to simultaneously begin retracting the hypodermic rod and reverse-screwing the trepan drill-bit.

As the box shuddered and the furious lament built to a horrible crescendo, the sarcophagus lid swung open. Silence reigned in the compartment once again. The depths of the casket were a foetid darkness. The trembling cabinet grew still. Inside, the laboured breathing of the Scourge could be heard. The apothecarion aides worked frantically to withdraw the deadly reach of their apparatus. With a teeth-clenched grunt, Zachariah Kersh pulled his bulk from the sarcophagus interior.

He was as naked as the day he was initiated, five hundred and fifty-two years before, and stumbled from the interior and out into the cargo compartment. His beard was scraggy and cotted, and his white tonsure overgrown and threaded with silver. The Scourge had a face to match his name, both afflicted and afflicting. He had inherited the dour mask of his Lord Dorn, behind which eyes alive with predatory intensity and accusation burned. He would pass for Demetrius Katafalque himself, if the etchings were to be believed, but for a ragged wound on his right cheek, which had long healed exposing tendons, part of the jawbone and the darkness of his mouth.

Kersh wasn’t as tall as many of his Excoriator brothers but more than made up for this deficiency with muscle crafted in the desperation of battle, rather than the monastery gymnasia. His flesh was a primarch-pleasing canvas of burn marks and scar tissue, stretched across a frame broad with age and experience. He wavered before a delighted Ezrachi, reminding the Apothecary of a statue of Terran antiquity with his demigod’s physique. The Scourge had emerged alive, covered in his own filth but free of the Darkness and its curse.

Bethesda came up behind him with a cream shroud and threw it across the Scourge’s lash-mangled back and globed shoulders. The fabric blotched immediately with the Excoriator’s blood, sweat and mess. Kersh half slipped and went down on his knees, reaching out for support and finding only the slender serf. With his great hand on her tiny shoulder he steadied himself. Reaching for the back of his skull with the other, Kersh tore out the broken drill-bit and hypodermic rod, flinging the attachment at the compartment floor where it pranged off the metal decking.

Ezrachi hesitated, his lips forming around a greeting. He wanted to know if his subject had survived the procedure with his faculties intact. The Scourge beat him to it.

‘Stay out of my skull, Apothecary,’ Zachariah Kersh growled. Shoulders dropped with relief among the gathered Chapter serfs, and Ezrachi smiled.

‘You’re welcome, brother…’

The Scourge’s absterge crossed the benighted cargo bay and entered the bondservants’ berth with a heavy water cask. It was less a berth than a dusty unguent locker used by Techmarines to store oils and bless them in readiness for use in the enginarium. The Cog Mechanicum hung above a small shrine to the Omnissiah that Old Enoch had put to good use as a counter or tabletop. The seneschal was stripped to the waist, baring a shrivelled chest, and had laid out a bowl and a shaving blade. He peered at his gaunt, empty features in a section of metal wall that he’d had Bethesda clean and polish to dull reflection. The absterge poured fresh water into the bowl, at which her father said nothing. The seneschal dipped his hand into a can of blessed oil and rubbed his bristled chin with the thin unguent. He then went to work rhythmically with the razor, scraping his slick, leathery skin and cleansing the blade in the water.

Putting down the cask, Bethesda passed her brother Oren, who had toppled one of their metal bunks and was using it to accomplish pull-ups. The lictor’s meaty arms pulled his broad bulk up off the locker floor. With each rise and fall Oren gave a piggish grunt. Bethesda knelt in the corner of their berth and stacked a small collection of empty unguent cans. She produced a selection of half-spent candles and began to amuse herself with their arrangement.

‘What in Katafalque’s name do you think you’re doing?’ Oren asked between grunts, but Bethesda didn’t answer. Enchanted with her simple display, she attempted to light the candles with a screw-flint. The brawny lictor came to a stop, watching his sister. ‘I said, what are you doing? Answer when you’re damn well spoken to.’

Bethesda looked up, smiling to herself. ‘I’m just lighting some candles.’

‘Where did you get them from?’

‘Traded them, with one of the attendants in the chapel-reclusiam,’ the serf admitted.

‘What in damnation for?’

‘Sundries.’

‘You stupid slattern,’ her brother came back savagely. ‘I mean, why?’

‘For the Scourge,’ she answered. ‘To celebrate his delivery from the Darkness.’

This time it was her father’s turn to grunt. Oren put an angry boot straight through the cans and candle arrangement.

‘Not in here you don’t.’

Bethesda went to reclaim her smashed candles. She murmured, ‘Just because he is what you can never be.’

‘What did you say to me?’ Oren growled, his eyes livid and cheeks flushed. He closed on her and she stood with fragile defiance. Bethesda heard her father’s razor pause. Old Enoch mumbled something. Oren paused dangerously before her, his chest rising and falling with a sibling’s petty anger.

‘Once,’ he told her through clenched teeth, ‘I wanted more than my pitiful existence to be an Emperor’s Angel. More than a hundred pitiful existences to be the warrior at whose pleasure I serve – the Scourge. An Excoriator without equal. I know better now. Our master is but a false prophet. An Angel fallen. He is so deep in his brothers’ blood that he might as well have slain them himself. We are punished. The Darkness has taken us all. But know this, good sister, if I had been Chapter Scourge, I would not have given up our Stigmartyr so easily.’

A call came from the distant cargo bay. A demigod demanding attendance. Old Enoch grumbled his garbled insistence and Oren backed away from his sister, holding her gaze as he did so. As the lictor left the locker, his father dashed his unkindly face with water before using a ragged towel to dry it off. He turned and stood, giving Bethesda a sour glare. Throwing the towel at her, he mumbled his disgust before following Oren out, leaving the absterge alone with her candles.

Chapter Two Stigmartyr

‘Cease!’

Zachariah Kersh heard Ezrachi’s command across the Scarifica’s penitorium and the crack of the whip. Kersh’s personal serfs paused at the Apothecary’s order. Oren hesitated, the stock of ‘the purge’ clutched in his white-knuckled fist, the bloodied lash resting in coils on the deck beside him. Old Enoch looked to his Adeptus Astartes master, whose teeth-clenching snarl fell and eyes opened. He gave the seneschal a stabbing glare. Old Enoch began babbling to his son in a savage tone that echoed the Excoriator’s displeasure. His chest heaving with exertion, Oren gathered ‘the purge’s’ sacred length before handing it to his father for cleansing and consecration.

Kersh took his palms off the numbing cold of a section of reinforced armaplas. The blast shielding was closed, but the plas of the vistaport still retained the scalding sting of the void beyond. The heat from each handprint vanished from its deep blackness. The Scourge turned to present himself to the Apothecary and his freshly mauled back-flesh to the port. Ezrachi shook his head as he took in the constellation of ugly welts on the Space Marine’s body. Old scars from battles fought long ago.

‘What on Eschara do you think you’re doing?’ Ezrachi put to him. The Apothecary’s ceremonial plate was splattered with blood and he held his white helmet under one arm. ‘My express instructions were for rest, not mortification.’

‘I shouldn’t have to learn my shame from an errant,’ Kersh said, staring at the approaching Apothecary but nodding at Old Enoch. ‘I heard from mortal lips how Dorn’s flesh had failed them, failed their master and failed their master’s master.’

Ezrachi slowed. ‘I regret that,’ he said finally. ‘There have been pressing demands on my time. I had hoped to perform such a duty… at a suitable moment. Still, in my absence you had my orders–’

‘I have fallen so far in my estimation,’ Kersh seethed, ‘and that of my brothers that I’m not even sure I deserve to live.’

The Apothecary jabbed a gauntleted finger at Kersh’s superhuman bulk. ‘Do not be casual with this divine instrument, for it belongs neither to you nor your brothers,’ Ezrachi warned. ‘Your soul belongs to the Emperor and your flesh to Rogal Dorn – as you have correctly observed. The death separating the two belongs only to your enemies. In the meantime an Imperium’s interest resides in what may become of this crafted form before that eventuality.’

‘This flesh needs purification. I must find myself and the presence of the primarch within me.’

‘You have been one with the Darkness,’ Ezrachi countered. ‘You have walked in Dorn’s plate, seen the galaxy through his eyes, known the emptiness of his grieving heart. Some may say that no living Excoriator has known his father as well.’

‘Where is the Stigmartyr?’ Kersh asked. ‘Where is the Chapter’s sacred standard now?’

‘It is lost…’ a voice rumbled from behind Ezrachi. ‘Like you.’

Another Excoriator entered the penitorium. He was stripped to the waist, like Kersh, and accompanied by his own trio of Chapter serfs. His flesh was that of a veteran, leathery and lined from a lifetime spent in battle. His brow bore a neat row of service studs and a necklace of chainsword teeth jangled about his taut neck. ‘And now… like us.’

‘Tiberias,’ Ezrachi warned.

As his seneschal, lictor and absterge filed past, the Space Marine turned to hang a towel from a hook set into the wall. The word Vanguard was tattooed across his broad shoulders, identifying him as an honoured brother of the First Company. As he turned again his baleful gaze drove the Scourge’s eyes to the deck. The sting of shame kept them there for a moment, but before Kersh knew he had done it, he was staring back at the Excoriator in defiance.

‘Kersh,’ the Apothecary said.

‘Do not spare me, brother,’ the Scourge called at Tiberias. Fresh blood pitter-pattered the deck about the Space Marine, falling from the torn flesh on his back. Bethesda approached with Kersh’s own towel. ‘Back…’ the Scourge growled, causing the absterge to drop the item where she stood and retreat. Ezrachi watched, uncertain, as Tiberias approached. Kersh took several steps also, scooping up the towel and wiping the glistening sweat from a knotted brow. ‘Where is it?’

‘What would you do with such information?’ Tiberias teased through a sneer. ‘Reclaim it?’

‘I would.’

‘And I would check your instruments, Apothecary,’ the veteran said to Ezrachi, ‘for your patient here seems still to dream.’

‘You’ll wish I was dreaming, brother,’ Kersh told him.

‘I am no brother of yours, Scourge…’

‘Must I beat it out of you?’

‘Desist. The both of–’ Ezrachi began.

‘I’ll fight you for less than that,’ Tiberias informed him as the two of them closed. ‘The Alpha Legion has the Stigmartyr now.’ The two Excoriators began to circle. ‘You and the Santiarch are all that remain of the Chapter Master’s inner circle. And I am all that’s left of the Honoured First.’

Kersh looked from Ezrachi to Tiberias, then back to the Apothecary.

‘Chapter Master Ichabod?’

‘The Chapter Master lives,’ Ezrachi confirmed, ‘but the rumours are that he is waning.’

‘Rumours!’ Kersh spat. ‘You are Ezrachi, of the Helix – what does your Lord Apothecary say?’

‘My lord is dead,’ Ezrachi admitted, more harshly than he intended. Taking his helmet from under his arm, he hugged it to his chestplate. ‘Like Tiberias says, the circle is broken. Chapter Master Ichabod is strong, but his wounds are grievous. The Alpha Legion’s assassination failed, but they employed a virulent toxin for which we have no record, nor antidote. It is only a matter of time.’

‘How long?’

‘Weeks. Perhaps years. In truth we do not know.’

‘We must search for the source of this toxin.’

‘Already begun – that is the Fourth Company’s honour. They suspect it to be a naturally occurring substance, since it betrays no evidence of engineering. They have been despatched to every known death world in the segmentum. That is why I have been attached to this venture. Apothecary Absalom of the Second was due to travel with you to the Feast, but he is needed to coordinate the search and to formulate an antidote. He is Lord Apothecary now.’

‘Then where are the Alpha Legion?’ Kersh demanded.

‘They have slithered away like the serpents they are,’ Tiberias said.

‘The Fourth waste their time,’ Kersh said to Ezrachi. ‘We must find the Traitors and recover both the banner and intelligence of the toxin’s origin.’

‘You think we have not all thought on that?’ Tiberias goaded.

‘They are everywhere and nowhere,’ Ezrachi said with sadness. ‘They have played with us. Even the most promising leads have thus far turned out to be no more than shadows and whispers. That was until Veiglehaven.’

‘Veiglehaven?’

‘The Fifth Company were lured there,’ Ezrachi told the Scourge.

‘Looking for the Chapter standard,’ Tiberias added, jabbing a meaty finger at Kersh. ‘Your standard.’

‘A trap?’

The Apothecary nodded sadly.

‘How many?’

‘Over half the company was lost,’ Tiberias said. Kersh’s gaze fell to the deck. ‘Brothers, sent to suffer an ignoble death, while you live and breathe before me. The Scourge? More like a scourge. A scourge on this Chapter. Your hearts beat only to expound your dishonour. How do you suffer the insufferable? Our blood – on your hands.’

‘It’s Dorn’s way,’ Kersh said finally, his eyes rising once again to meet his accuser’s. ‘We are for the Emperor, to the point of death. Devotion at any cost – even that of my soul, Brother Tiberias. We talk of your blood and its whereabouts. My understanding is that you will find it in ample quantity on the blade of the White Templar you fought in the Cage.’

The Excoriator’s sneer split into an ugly snarl. His bruised fist came at Kersh with a furious desire. Tiberias was fast but his movements were those of a close combat veteran: precise, measured and committed. Predictably so. Kersh had spent a lifetime at his Chapter Master’s side, fighting experienced warriors of all creeds and species. The enemy would always send their best at him and it had been the Scourge’s simple honour to end them before they could end his master.

Kersh held his ground, craning and stretching. Tiberias’s fists were everywhere: punching, back-handing, swinging. Each failed to find its mark – the fury of each strike lost on air. The Scourge angled his shoulders, swooping and bobbing his head just out of the veteran’s considerable reach. A bare foot struck out at Kersh, forcing him to pivot. He slapped the knee aside and flung his towel into Tiberias’s contorted face. The honoured brother tore it away, only to find that Kersh had pivoted back.

A gobbet of blood and teeth erupted from the veteran’s mouth as his head was smashed to one side. The Excoriator’s mighty body followed, his feet thrown up into the air and his tattooed shoulders hammering into the hard deck with a metallic boom.

Kersh stood with Ezrachi’s helmet clutched in one hand. The Apothecary had tried to get between the two warriors in his ceremonial plate, but Kersh had snatched his bone-white helm from his hands. It sat snug in his fist as he’d spun around, like a moon in rapid orbit around a serene gas giant, until it crashed into Tiberias’s face.

Ezrachi knelt down beside the felled Space Marine to check his ruined features. A broken nose and shattered jaw fountained a further spray of blood as Tiberias coughed up more teeth. Kersh looked down at the gore-smear across the white of the helm’s faceplate.

‘I’ve found more of your blood, Brother Tiberias,’ the Scourge spat, prompting the veteran to shove the aged Ezrachi aside and scramble, half blood-blind to his feet.

‘Come on, meat,’ Kersh dared.

‘Enough!’ Corpus-Captain Gideon called, striding into the penitorium. ‘Save it for the damned arena,’ he said in disgust. ‘Get him out of here. Clear the chamber.’

Chapter serfs hurried past, while Ezrachi angled the unsteady Tiberias’s shoulders towards the exit. The Apothecary gave the Scourge a sullen scowl.

‘I will see you planetside,’ Ezrachi told him. Kersh threw Ezrachi back his besmirched helm.

The Apothecary looked back at Kersh and then left. The corpus-captain hit a vox-stud in the wall.

‘This is Gideon. Open the blast shields, port-side aft.’

The penitorium shuddered as the clinker plates of armour running down the frigate’s aft section began to part. As Gideon crossed the chamber, the colossal metal slats receded like blinds to admit the scene beyond. Light flooded the dim penitorium. ‘With me,’ the corpus-captain ordered.

Kersh hovered for a moment, just long enough for Gideon to register his defiance, before striding across to the vistaport. The armaplas window ran the length of the penitorium. The two Excoriators stood in silence, taking in the planet below and the craft upon which the Scarifica held orbital station. Beside the Excoriators frigate sat the Death Strike gunfreighter Nihilan Proxy. Beyond that the pocket-frigate Bellicose rolled, bearing the Chapter insignia of the Black Templars. Several other rapid strike vessels, all belonging to different Adeptus Astartes Chapters, lay in high orbit, gathered about the battle-scarred flanks of the Titus, a veteran Imperial Fists cruiser.

Below them was a world the yellow of cowardice and swirl-smeared in a cloud-cover of soot and ash. The Titus and the attending smaller craft drifted above a blackened pole. About the fat belt of the planet’s equator, Kersh could make out the lightshow of colossal impacts and explosions beneath the smog. A huge xenos craft hurtled towards the region. An obscenity of interstellar scrap, the vessel had the unmistakable graceless and clunky design of a greenskin kroozer. Flanked to starboard by Imperial Navy destroyers and a light cruiser, and on the portside by an Imperial Fists Gladius frigate, the unstoppable craft seemed to have an enemy escort. An almost continuous stream of fire existed between the Navy vessels and the monster’s thick hull, however, and the Imperial Fists vessel was engaged in a desperate high-speed boarding action. Beyond the spectacle, the distant sparks of lance beams and cannon fire marked out a distant cordon, a gauntlet of Navy and Adeptus Astartes vessels through which a swarm of other greenskin attack craft were attempting to punch.

‘All right,’ Kersh said finally. ‘Where are we?’

‘Samarquand.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘I’m not surprised. It has been part of the Urk Empire for two thousand years. A greenskin overlord called the Great Tusk holds the system here.’

‘Some overlord, I haven’t heard of him either.’

Gideon ignored Kersh’s obvious insolence. ‘The Samarquand agri-worlds supplied the cluster-hives of Coronis Agathon. Twelve verdant planets – amongst the most productive in the Imperium – inadequately garrisoned and consigned to doom and the infection of the xenos. Unfortunately, the Great Tusk and its line are plagued with an uncharacteristic lack of ambition. The fat monsters seem content to sit here, breeding in their own squalor. Their fleet and forces have never committed themselves out-system or joined the invasions plaguing nearby sectors.’

‘We think that this Tusk is building up to something?’

‘Two thousand years is a lot of patience for a greenskin, don’t you think?’ the corpus-captain returned. ‘No. But a populous xenos empire, no matter how small, cannot be tolerated so close to Imperial shipping lanes.’

‘So, destroy it,’ Kersh said.

‘The effort to do so continues to this day,’ Gideon told him.

‘For two thousand years?’

‘In turn, the Imperial Fists, the Dark Angels and the Space Wolves all have had honoured commitments to remove the Great Tusk and cleanse the system. Progress has been slow.’

‘The xenos are dug in?’

‘Nothing so sophisticated. There are just too many of them. Reports return of coast-to-coast greenskins on the planet surfaces: the Vostroyan Firstborn 13th Regiment, the Moloch 132nd Rifles and the Urdeshi 27th Mechanised – all wiped out in taking Samarquand.’

‘Then Samarquand is taken.’

‘Emperor be praised. Our brethren the Imperial Fists have succeeded where the Wolves and Angels failed. Samarquand IV has rejoined the Imperium. Still, one amongst twelve, with the enemy intent on taking it back…’

‘What in Dorn’s name are we doing here?’ Kersh interrupted. ‘What am I doing here?’

‘If it were my choice, Scourge, I would not have you here at all.’

‘Have our brother-Fists requested our assistance?’

‘No.’

‘Then don’t we have ongoing engagements of our own to honour?’ Kersh pressed. ‘The Alpha Legion. Chapter Master Ichabod?’

‘You are here at Master Ichabod’s decree and that is all your wretched ears need know.’

Kersh turned on the corpus-captain. ‘I belong at my master’s side.’

‘You are not wanted, nor needed there,’ Gideon said. ‘You are to play no further role in the tragic events afflicting our Chapter. Do you hear me, Scourge? Whatever worth you have left is to be measured here.’

‘Here?’ the Excoriator said, jabbing a finger at the vistaport. ‘I don’t even know where here is.’

‘Samarquand IV is the chosen ground for the eight hundred and sixteenth Feast of Blades.’

‘We’re here to compete?’

‘You’re here to compete.’

‘With the Chapter under attack and our master’s life hanging in the balance, we are here contesting?’ Kersh said, his words dripping with incredulity. ‘Have you gone mad?’

‘The Feast is important.’

‘The Feast is a distraction!’

‘An important one. These are dark times, Kersh – and not just for the Excoriators. The Emperor’s Angels are spread thin across the stars. Dorn’s sons spread even thinner. Chapter relations must be maintained. The bonds of brotherhood strengthened and tempered through contestation.’

‘We have only just concluded a Feast.’

‘Tradition dictates the Feasts are centennial – at least centennial. It is the right of the reigning Chapter to call a Feast before its time. They often do.’

‘Why, by Katafalque, would they do that?’ Kersh sneered.

‘The Feast of Blades serves its purpose,’ Gideon said. ‘Many pacts are created and obligations honoured among our brethren – but we are bred for victory. Reigning Chapters want to build on past triumphs, for their success to echo through eternity, to catch Dorn’s approving eye or ear, wherever the Lord Primarch might be. They call the Feast to best complement their advantage – the prowess of their champions, the perceived weakness of their opponent Chapters. Like us, they want to win. I would be surprised if the recent trials of our own Chapter hadn’t been a factor in the Feast’s most recent calling.’

‘Could we not we request that another Chapter take our place?’

‘On occasion that happens.’

‘Then why didn’t you make that happen?’

‘A brother’s love is hard won,’ Gideon told him. ‘The Feast of Blades is not, however, an empty exercise. Chapter relations bear fruit. Even now, the Fire Lords move in to relieve our Second Company at Celator-Primus.’

‘We are Excoriators–’

‘Yes, we are. You’ll find our blood in the earth of Holy Terra and staining the mighty walls of the Imperial Palace. We hold our ground now as we did then, in our primarch’s plate. Our very existence is a war of attrition. As a Chapter we shall not falter. Not now – not ever.’

‘Agreed,’ Kersh said. ‘But why contest honour when we can earn it through the worthy deaths of our enemies?’

‘There is a fire within you, Scourge, that even I can feel,’ Gideon told him. ‘Be it loyalty, shame, hunger for revenge – I know not. I care not. The Chapter is suffering its worst losses in five thousand years. These are dark times and I need that fire burning bright in every company, every squad, every Excoriator. As well as reinforcing relations with our primogenate kin, participation in the games generates Chapter pride. With Master Ichabod afflicted and the Stigmartyr lost, our brothers’ hopes have turned to ash in their chests. The mere embers of faith sustain them. Ichabod hoped that some success at the Feast might stoke the fire in their hearts. That is why he sent me. That is why he sent you.’

Kersh stared out across the frozen void. ‘How do we fare?’ he said finally.

‘The worst in our history,’ the corpus-captain admitted. ‘Nine of our ten champions have been beaten and are out of the contest – and the Feast is but yet at an early stage. You are the last. That is why I had Ezrachi experiment with that damned box.’

‘If I fail?’

‘Then we have dishonoured Dorn and our entire Chapter. In your case, again. It would strengthen the belief in our brothers that we are ruined and I don’t know if Master Ichabod would survive such news.’

‘But we would leave the Feast early?’

‘Think not on crusades to reclaim the Stigmartyr. If winning back your honour is the prize, then that can only be achieved here. If you do not do your utmost – as every Excoriator before you – to succeed in the Feast, then I shall leave Samarquand with my ten defeated champions and take the Scarifica to Onassis and join the Marines Mordant on their penance crusade through Tempest Hippocrene. You will not see our home world, Eschara, for a hundred years, and when you do, it will be because the dishonour of our failure has been bled from your body. I will then select you for participation in the Feast once more. Consider this both my threat and my promise, brother.’

Kersh stood there. Angry at Gideon. Angry at himself. He watched the Imperial Fists cruiser peel away from the greenskin hulk. The Imperial Navy vessels disengaged likewise, their magnabore laser batteries silent but still glowing. The kroozer rippled with explosions. Sections broke away and the bulbous monstrosity split in two. Both sections tumbled towards Samarquand IV, wreathed in an upper-atmospheric blaze. These were followed by falling stars that had erupted from the belly of the Adeptus Astartes strike cruiser and were now thunderbolting down through the wake of the wreckage. Drop-pods laden with Imperial Fists, intent on finishing the job and cleansing the inevitable crash-site of greenskin scum.

Kersh turned to Gideon, but he had gone, leaving the Scourge in the penitorium on his own. The deck lamps were out and the cool chamber was only lit by the sickly light of the planet below. A shiver danced up the Space Marine’s spine and the flesh on his forearms suddenly pimpled, telling Kersh that the temperature in the penitorium had dropped considerably. Something brushed past the tiny hairs standing erect on his thick neck, causing the Excoriator to spin around. He found nothing but empty darkness. He hocked and spat into the black.

‘I spit on your childish tricks, Tiberias,’ Kersh announced to the echoing chamber, ‘for they proceed from a cowardly soul.’

Kersh turned back to the thick armaplas and the deeper darkness of space. He soaked up the emptiness for a moment – the totality of black loneliness offered by the void – before realising that he wasn’t actually alone. The unrequested appearance of his serfs would simply have irritated the Scourge. If he had sensed Tiberias then the Excoriator’s brawny arms would have flared with the sudden burn of anger and adrenaline. This was something else. The pit of his stomach curdled. He felt the coolness of his blood. Then, the chatter of teeth.

The Scourge turned his head slowly. He saw a ghostly reflection in the plas, the silhouette of an armoured figure, cutting its shape into the darkness beyond.

‘No…’ Kersh mouthed, his breath misting before him. His eyes widened. Before him was the revenant from his dark dreams. It didn’t look at him. It merely existed. There. A horrifying reality. Its grotesque armour was the skeletal nightmare he remembered, and through a rent in its helm, Kersh caught a glimpse of something unliving, a vision of fear crafted in bone and smouldering with radiance unnatural.

Something akin to fear fluttered through the Scourge’s being. He had not been built with the emotional spectrum to experience dread as mortals did, but something deep and primordial within him was reacting to the phantasm, and it was not pleasant. This alien feeling soon churned into something all the more recognisable to the Space Marine. Anger. The desire to meet a threat head on and end it. The revenant could be heralding the return of the Darkness or it could be an unknown menace that was a danger to the ship. Either way, Kersh felt that he had to act. He risked a fleeting glance about the benighted penitorium, his eyes darting for anything that might serve as a weapon. The brief search revealed nothing and within a moment, his distrusting gaze was back on the revenant. Except, it wasn’t there.

Through the vistaport plas, the busy hull of the Scarifica became silhouetted against the sallow curvature of Samarquand IV. Amongst the aerials, crenellations and grotesques, Kersh could make out a distant, armoured figure on the exterior of the ship. The revenant. It too was in silhouette and held his attention as it worked its ghostly way up through the crowded architecture.

‘Terran Throne…’ Kersh murmured, his eyes almost to the armaplas. Step by spectral step he followed it with his eyes, until, with a ghoulish uncertainty plucking at his hearts, he watched it disappear around a maintenance barbican.

He felt something wet and slippery to the touch on the plas interior. Backing away, Kersh found himself staring at High Gothic scrawl written with a fingertip on the vistaport surface. Some of his own words – words he’d used in the penitorium only minutes before – quoted back to him. In dedicato imperatum ultra articulo mortis. ‘For the Emperor beyond the point of death,’ Kersh mouthed. Stunned, the Excoriator strode across the darkness of the chamber. Hitting a stud by the penitorium bulkhead, he brought the deck lamps back to life. With the lamps on, Kersh could see that the words were spelled out in blood. Blood taken from the pool Brother Tiberias had left on the floor. There were bloodied footsteps also. Armoured, broad and heavy. They led from the spot Tiberias had fallen to the High Gothic on the vistaport. They seemed to come from nowhere and they led to nothingness.

Kersh hit the stud that opened the bulkhead and found Old Enoch, Oren and Bethesda waiting obediently outside. Gideon had dismissed them but no one had given them permission to re-enter the penitorium.

‘Did anyone enter after the corpus-captain left?’ he put to them. They looked to each other and began to shake their heads.

‘Are you all right, my lord?’ Bethesda ventured.

His eyes narrowed, then he turned back to the penitorium chamber. The pool of Tiberias’s blood still decorated the floor, but the footprints were gone. The Excoriator scanned the vistaport, but all trace of the words had vanished. He approached and looked back out along the Scarifica’s hull for any sign of the figure, but there was none.

‘My lord?’ the absterge asked, stepping into the chamber.

Kersh turned and placed his scarred back and shoulders against the cool plas. He looked up at the blood-speckled ceiling of the penitorium. ‘I need the Apothecary,’ Kersh told her.

‘He is not here, my liege.’

‘Where is he?’

‘On the planet surface.’

‘Then that is where we will go. Prepare a transport.’

Chapter Three The Feast of Blades

‘Listen, Ezrachi…’

Kersh followed the Apothecary down the crowded stone corridor towards the arena. In turn the Scourge was trailed by his three serfs. Ezrachi limped through a throng of mortals and dead-eyed servitors. Each was pushing its way past, fetching, carrying and attending to urgent if minor duties. A sea of different Chapter colours, they parted as the Excoriators Apothecary marched to the rhythm of his leg’s hydraulic sighing.

‘I tell you, I am not well. I am not myself.’

‘Well, whoever you are,’ Ezrachi told him, ‘you’re entering the Cage in about three minutes, so I suggest you get yourself ready.’

‘I am suffering a spuriousness of the mind.’

‘Existential anxiety is an understandable side effect of such an unusually long time spent in the Darkness.’

‘Perhaps there was an error with the procedure…’

‘Gideon said that you would try something like this.’

‘I see the impossible.’

‘Seeing is believing, Kersh. Make the impossible happen here and we might just have a chance.’

‘I am still afflicted, Apothecary!’

Serfs, who usually had their eyes directed to the floor in the presence of an Adeptus Astartes, looked up at the tormented Excoriator.

Ezrachi ground to a halt and turned. ‘I’ve reviewed the procedure and already made a thorough medical examination of your person. The procedure was a success.’

‘An occulobular defect?’

‘Impossible.’

‘Suprahormonal imbalance.’

‘Would have other symptoms.’

‘Cerebral damage.’

‘I was wrong, Kersh.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Back on the Scarifica, I ordered rest and recuperation. I was wrong. All of your wounds, those sustained at the hands of the Alpha Legion and the catalepseal procedure that followed, are all but healed. We are the Emperor’s Angels and we are made in his image, but we are not the same. I underestimated your powers of recovery. You are gifted, Scourge, and I need you to use that gift now. Your brothers expect this of you. It is a matter of honour and you must answer your Chapter’s call. This above all other considerations. Do you hear me, Kersh? The time is now. Two minutes – or the Excoriators forfeit the contest and their honour.’

The Scourge’s shoulders sagged. ‘Then I am simply losing my sanity.’

‘A mortal condition – I assure you. Follow me,’ Ezrachi instructed and ducked through an archway. Inside, Kersh found a small chamber. Each Chapter had been set aside a small area close to the arena known as the Cage to use for their preparations martial, medical and spiritual. ‘Assist Brother Hadrach,’ Ezrachi ordered Kersh’s serfs as the Scourge came to stand on a central stone bearing the Excoriators’ seal. The young Techmarine Hadrach had forgone his ceremonial plate and had settled instead for forge-robes. He worked feverishly over an adamantium anvil with an assortment of calibrated hammers, but paused long enough to give Kersh a stare of positive dislike.

‘As you were, brother,’ Ezrachi said, and the Techmarine returned to his work. Old Enoch and Oren started walking pieces of armour from Hadrach’s workspace to their Excoriator lord. Bethesda disrobed the Scourge. As her two compatriots began decorating their master’s muscular form she got to work on the belts, clips and seals that held the ceramite plates together.

‘What is this?’ Kersh asked looking down at the deep yellow of the battered breastplate the absterge was harnessing to his chest.

‘All combatants wear the old Legion’s colours in the Cage,’ Ezrachi told him. He peered out of the chamber and down the corridor before turning back to the Scourge. ‘A sign of symbolic unity.’

Hadrach handed Old Enoch and Oren a shoulder plate each. The first was the allegiant yellow of the Imperial Fists. The second bore the Chapter marking of the Excoriators. It had been this plate that the Techmarine had been working on. It was crumpled and badly damaged.

‘That will have to do. Usachar took a real beating.’

‘Ezrachi…’

‘The contest had already begun when you were awoken. You therefore did not attend the opening rites.’ The Apothecary peered into the corridor once more, anxious about the time. ‘What do you know about the Feast of Blades?’

‘I know that it’s a diplomatic waste of time to have brothers fight one another when we have a galaxy of enemies more worthy of our blades.’

‘The Feast of Blades commemorates our Lord Primarch’s decision to break up his Legion as the Codex Astartes instructed. Dorn chose the Iron Warriors fortress known as the Eternal Fortress on Sebastus IV as the instrument upon which to break us.’

‘And make us,’ Kersh acknowledged. ‘I know the saga of the Iron Cage.’

‘We entered the Eternal Fortress as a Legion,’ Ezrachi said. ‘We left as a multitude of Chapters. It pained the primarch to do this, but he knew it was necessary. Dorn himself presided over the first of the centenary Feasts. He wished successor Chapters to maintain good relations and a cult brotherhood. This commitment was re-honoured following the Daedalus Crusade. Our brothers from participating progenitor Chapters were invited to attend, and many of the Feast’s present rites and rituals were established. We know that Rogal Dorn broke the blade he’d used on Horus’s barge, after it had failed to protect his Emperor. His second sword, the weapon to which we refer as the “Sword of Sebastus” or the Dornsblade, emerged with the primarch from the Iron Cage. It is one of our most revered artefacts, a weapon carried and used by mighty Dorn himself. The Chapter that wins the Feast has the honour of retaining the blade and the solemn duty of presenting it at the next Feast – the contest they will host, at most, one hundred years later.’

‘Thanks for the history lesson. You sound like Santiarch Balshazar.’

‘You should know what you are fighting for.’

Kersh watched Bethesda fasten his shoulder plates in place. ‘I haven’t worn carapace since I served in the Tenth Company.’ Kersh wore a simple sparring arrangement. Upon a tunic and plated skirt sat an aquila-adorned chestplate, codpiece and ceramite shoulder-guards. Plated gauntlets and boots completed the armour. He wore no helmet and both his forearms and muscular thighs were exposed.

Ezrachi led Kersh from the chamber. ‘The rules are simple. Each round consists of a knock-out. Two champions enter. The one that walks from the Cage is declared the winner. Contestations last as long as they have to. The Cage is a ceremonial arena but is no dusty amphitheatre. It is an architectural interpretation of the Iron Cage as far as accounts allow, but the layout is changed between and within each round.’

‘Within?’

‘Within.’

Ezrachi took the Scourge through a sequence of gates and drome-barbica. The iron portcullis and stone of each entrance was decorated with sculpted scenes depicting Imperial Fists at their primarch’s side – a reminder to all who came to fight at the Feast that the Fists above all were Dorn’s chosen. The first among equals. Those deemed worthy to wear the primarch’s plate and colours. It sent a powerful message of martial and cultural superiority to other Chapter champions.

The Apothecary directed the serfs up to the tiered gallery. Old Enoch mumbled a blessing and Oren gave a moody nod of subservience.

‘Fight well, my lord,’ Bethesda said and lingered before disappearing after her father.

‘Talk to me about weapons,’ Kersh said. Ezrachi nodded. Kersh – ever the pragmatist and warrior.

‘You are only permitted two weapons within the Cage,’ the Apothecary told him. ‘This,’ he said, slapping the Scourge across the back. ‘Use it as you will. The second is a gladius secreted about the Cage. There are two: one for you and one for your opponent. The tips and edges of both blades have been smeared with a powerful paralytic toxin, engineered by the Adeptus Mechanicus especially for the Feast. The more you are cut, the more likely that you will go down. Your opponent will, of course, walk away victorious.’

The pair of Excoriators stood at the gate to the Cage. A single bell chimed, indicating the beginning of the contest.

‘Ezrachi?’

‘Yes?’

‘What if it’s not the procedure? What if it’s not my mind? What if it’s a further manifestation of the Darkness?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What if these things I’m witnessing are… real?’

The Apothecary paused. ‘That would be a spiritual matter. Why don’t you discuss it with a Chaplain? As fortune would have it, you’re about to meet one.’

As the portcullis gate began to climb, a second bell sounded. Ezrachi brought his clenched right gauntlet to his lips and kissed it reverentially.

‘Dextera Dornami, Zachariah Kersh,’ the Apothecary said before climbing a set of steps up to the gallery. Kersh nodded and knelt before the opening gate. He formed a fist with his own gauntlet before touching his forehead with one knuckle, then his lips and then his breastplate – one heart then the other. Getting to his feet, the Excoriator entered the Cage.

It was like no amphitheatre or training dome he had experienced. The arena was large, perhaps the length of two gunships arranged nose to tail in diameter, Kersh estimated. The pit floor was uneven, an angular landscape of blocks, crafted from dark Samarquandian stone. There were square pits and perpendicular rises, steps and crenellated bulwarking. High above, through a caged dome, Kersh could make out the tiered gallery. This was no feral world gladiator pit. There were no howling onlookers or the frenzy of battle wagers that usually accompanied such contests. Rows of dark, armoured figures stood in silence, like impassive statues. The audience had the composure and still interest of those visiting a museum, with Chapter serfs, invited guests and gaunt servitors standing about the Emperor’s Angels, as the demigods looked on in expectation and judgement. Kersh swiftly picked out Oren and Old Enoch gathered about the dull white sheen of Ezrachi’s armour. Bethesda was at the bars, her knuckles blanched and her face a mask of fear and forced fortitude.

Kersh slowed to a standstill, looking up through the cage roof. There it was. Behind Bethesda was the horrid figure from his unending nightmare. His recent haunting. The phantasm in plate and bone. It stood amongst his brother Adeptus Astartes, watching him. As Kersh walked into the pit the sombre glow of its helm-optics followed him across the arena with dark interest.

The gate closed behind him. Kersh scanned the angularity of the Cage for any sign of a gladius. Breaking into a run, the Excoriator set off for higher ground and a better vantage point to spot a weapon. The soles of his boots scuffed the stone as he leapt lightly from block to block. His kept his shoulders low. His gaze was everywhere. His movements were athletic and economical. A predator’s approach.

Kersh heard a sudden roar of exertion as his waiting enemy revealed himself. The Space Marine slammed into him from the side with the force of a freight-monitor. Slabs of muscle and shoulder plates clashed as Kersh was knocked clean off his feet and down a steep flight of steps. The Excoriator’s kaleidoscopic tumble was punctuated by the harsh stone edges of the steps until finally Kersh met the grit and stone of the mezzanine level below.

Prone and vulnerable, Kersh turned. His attacker had cannonballed him off one floor of the busy, vertiginous arena and down onto another. His objective became immediately clear. The Space Marine clambered swiftly up an angular column. Kersh heard the scrape of metal on stone. Turning to face him, his opponent held in his gauntlet one of the two gladius blades left about the chamber.

Ezrachi had been right. Kersh had been drawn against a Chaplain. A heavy amulet dangled down by his opponent’s waist on a necklace of precious prayer-beads. The amulet itself was a stylised, adamantium aquila, which Kersh recognised as the Chaplain’s rosarius, deactivated for the competition, as honour dictated. His shoulder plate identified him as a member of the Fire Lords Chapter, but Kersh would have known this from the Space Marine’s tattoos. The Chaplain was a walking illustration – every part of his body inked to represent the swirling inferno he wished to bring to his foes. His canvas-flesh curled with flame and fury, while the blackened dome of his skull was spiky and soot-smeared, like the burned stubble of agri-world fields.

With another roar, the Fire Lords Chaplain launched himself from the top of the steps. He hungered for a swift end to the contest and closed with the distracted Excoriator. The gladius cut through the air. Kersh rolled to one side, allowing the blade to fall where he had lain, chipping the stone. Rolling back, the tip of Kersh’s boot made contact with the Fire Lord’s jaw, sending the Chaplain off balance. By the time Kersh was back on his feet, the Fire Lords Space Marine was coming at him with the envenomed blade, flicking it this way and that, exploring the Excoriator’s defences. Kersh danced away on the toes of his boots. He arched and angled his body, retracting his limbs and skipping back out of the blade’s path.

The Chaplain’s style demonstrated flair and expert choreography. The movement of the gladius flowed, stabbing and slashing with a razored poetry. It reminded Kersh of flames dancing in the darkness and was no less entrancing. The Scourge brought up his plated gauntlets, allowing the tip of the blade to glance rhythmically off the back of his fists. Kersh envied the warrior’s grace. The Excoriators were attrition fighters. Fluidity, timing and technique were all subservient in Kersh’s Chapter to the simple, primordial desire to be the last man standing. Survival was everything. Magnificence with a blade was worth little to the dead.

Kersh allowed the gladius to snake its way through his defences. As the Fire Lord sensed an opening, he extended his reach, allowing the Scourge to lay one of his gauntlets on his opponent’s wrist and the other around his throat. The Fire Lord’s blade danced no more as the two Space Marines fought for the right to direct it. For a moment the Adeptus Astartes stood in a stone embrace – immovable – faces taut in a contest of strength and will. The Chaplain grasped Kersh’s own wrist, attempting to break the lock the Excoriator had on his throat. He swiftly exchanged this for a desperate grip on the Scourge’s chestplate and the two Space Marines spun around. The Chaplain ran Kersh back into the brute architecture of a block obelisk. The surface of the Samarquandian stone shattered and fell in pulverised fragments. Kersh pushed back, slamming the Chaplain into the thick iron wall of the Cage. The Fire Lord’s shoulder plate screeched against the metal as Kersh pinned his shuffling opponent against the wall. The metal surface boomed with the repeated impact of the Chaplain’s gauntlet as Kersh smashed the Fire Lord’s fist and weapon into the wall. The Chaplain released his hold on the Excoriator’s carapace and began slugging him in the side.

The Fire Lord’s hand opened and the gladius fell to the floor of the Cage. This surprised Kersh, who hadn’t expected his efforts to be rewarded so swiftly. His immediate desire to lay his own hand on the tumbled blade slackened his grip, and before he knew quite what was happening, the Chaplain had hammered the Excoriator with a skull-bouncing blow. Kersh went down with the sword. Skidding around on the grit of the Cage floor, he slapped a hand out, feeling for the gladius’s hilt. The heel of the Fire Lord’s boot found his grasping gauntlet first. With his hand pinned, Kersh braced himself for impact. The sole of the Chaplain’s other boot hovered above him and then came crashing down again and again on the fallen Excoriator’s face.

Opening one bruised and bloodied eye, Kersh realised that the abuse was over. The Fire Lord was no longer above him and he heard the scrape of the gladius being reclaimed. There were other disturbing movements. The architecture of the Cage, mirroring the nightmare of the Iron Warriors’ Eternal Fortress on Sebastus IV, was moving. The section of stone upon which he lay was either rising or the floor around him falling away. Rolling off the moving block, Kersh landed messily on the Fire Lord below. The Adeptus Astartes both went down, and once again the gladius became a prize wrestled between them. Grasped with gauntlets at both hilt and blade tip, the Fire Lord and Excoriator battled for supremacy of the weapon. The Chaplain found his grimacing way on top, the inked globes of each bicep thumping with might as he attempted to force the blade down across Kersh’s throat.

The Scourge gagged as the Chaplain leant in closer. The Fire Lord’s breath was a chemicular wheeze. It was as though the Space Marine had been swilling promethium. The blade fell a little further and Kersh’s eyes widened. Raw effort had drawn the Fire Lord’s lips back in an ugly snarl. Instead of the perfect teeth of an Angel, the Scourge found himself staring at a maw of flint. The teeth had been replaced with shards of razor-sharp stone, each with the appearance of a primitive arrowhead or spear tip. Biting down, the Fire Lord’s clenched jaws sparked. The Chaplain hissed through his teeth, sending a gout of flame at the Excoriator’s face.

Kersh threw his head to one side, allowing the gladius to fall even further towards his throat. He felt the flesh on the side of his bulging neck roast and blister. Jerking his head in the opposite direction, Kersh felt the flames of a second searing breath burn his ear and the side of his face.

Writhing and stretching, Kersh caught a glimpse of the silent crowds above. He could feel Ezrachi’s disappointment. He saw Bethesda’s stricken beauty. He then caught a glimpse of the sickening apparition that haunted him still. It stood there amongst the still figures of the audience. Waiting. Watching. It seemed not to be looking at him, Kersh suddenly realised. Following the angle of the phantasm’s dread helm, the Scourge cast his eyes across the brute landscape of the Cage, the mock courtyards and battlements of the Eternal Fortress in miniature. Where the stone blocks of a mezzanine platform had rumbled aside, Kersh could now see the dull glint of the second gladius on the other side of the arena.

The sword became everything to Kersh. He hungered for the solid satisfaction of its grip, the cutting sheen of its leaf-shaped blade and the blunt punch of its broad, tapering point. With one concentrated effort, the Excoriator pushed the poisoned blade away and heaved the fire-breathing Chaplain off him. The two Space Marines rolled until Kersh released his foe and threw himself across the arena floor. The Scourge stumbled to his feet as fast as he could, but felt the bite of the Fire Lord’s sword-tip clip the back of his thigh and knew he had not been fast enough.

The effect of the Mechanicus-engineered toxin was almost instantaneous. Like the sting of some giant arachnid, a crippling deadness spread through the muscle of Kersh’s leg. With the Chaplain still on the ground, Kersh made a dash across the Cage, but his sprint soon became a hobble and the hobble a limp. The leg became rapidly useless to him. A handicap in flesh and bone. It refused to bear weight or answer the Excoriator’s desperate desire. The Excoriator flailed across the dread architecture of the arena, falling rather than dropping off blocks of black stone and crawling rather than climbing over crenellated bulwarks and barriers. As he slipped down into a depression in the Cage floor, he found himself in a shallow pool. Splashing through the dark water, he felt the breeze of sword swipes brush his skin. The Fire Lord was moments behind.

Ahead, Kersh could see a tower of blocks. It was atop the tower he’d spotted the second gladius. The stone blocks were unusual in as much as they were decorated with a neat pattern of equidistant holes. The Scourge slid down onto his palsied leg, showering water at the tower side.

The clunk of a firing mechanism reverberated through the stone. Iron spikes shot out of the holes in deadly unison. Kersh had heard of the Eternal Fortress’s nightmare design, its labyrinthine layout and nests of traps. The Imperial Fists had designed their representation of the Iron Cage with peerless attention to detail.

The Scourge skidded down below the reach of the lowest spike. The Fire Lord, in his desire to acquire his enemy, had not been as fortunate. He peeled off to one side but was still gouged through his shoulder by a sharpened iron shaft. As he groaned and began the agonising process of extricating himself from the metal barb, Kersh began hauling himself up the spikes. Using them as a ladder, the Excoriator climbed gauntlet over gauntlet up the side of the block tower. His paralysed leg dangled uselessly as he pulled himself over the angular edge and up onto the flat summit. There the gladius was waiting. Crafted. Sharp. Glistening with paralytic toxin.

Looking down through the forest of spikes Kersh saw that his opponent had gone, leaving a length of bloodied iron as evidence of his difficulty. From the block tower, the Scourge commanded an excellent view of the Cage, but with blocks rising and sinking, and entire floors moving, it was almost impossible to get a fix on his enemy. His superhuman hearing and vision swam with the rumble and disorientation of the arena’s motion. He had lost the use of one limb, but with the gladius in his grip, the Excoriator felt like he had gained the full use of another.

Dropping down the opposite side, Kersh faltered. His leg gave out immediately and he fell. Scrambling back to one foot he hopped about, sword held out in front of him. Dragging his paralysed leg around he slowly turned, expecting his enemy to erupt from anywhere. The Fire Lord, however, was nowhere to be seen. As he hopped full circle he came to the sinking conclusion that he had been fooled. The Fire Lord stood on top of the block tower from which Kersh had descended. He dropped in the fashion favoured by his brothers during their specialist planetary assaults, landing with the surety and barbaric grace of a drop-pod. The Fire Lord tossed his gladius from one hand to another. The puncture wound through his shoulder plate leaked blood down the side of his yellow carapace, but the Chaplain seemed unconcerned. His eyes burned into Kersh and his flint teeth ground together, flashing and sparking. The two shared a moment of calm before the Fire Lord assumed his familiar fighting stance. With both gauntlets on his sword and his leg like an anchor on his own movements, the Excoriator did likewise.

‘Come on, meat,’ Kersh growled.

The Iron Cage sang with the clash of fevered blades and the grunts of superhuman exertion as Kersh and the Fire Lords Chaplain did their utmost to best one another. Kersh was a killer of champions. It was his duty on the battlefield to neutralise the direst individual threats and cut down the best the enemy had to offer, freeing his Chapter Master to strategise and direct his Adeptus Astartes forces. His swordcraft was clean, brutal and, like his primarch, often demonstrated flashes of inspired invention that were difficult for his enemies to counter. The Chapters attending the Feast of Blades only sent their best, however, and his opponent was an equally gifted brute. His blade swirled and swooped like the raging of an inferno. He passed the gladius rapidly from hand to hand with ambidextrous skill and confidence. Where the blade wasn’t the Chaplain’s fists and boots were, and it was all Kersh could do to parry and deflect the rhythmic barrage. The Chaplain’s movements were entrancing and his form, despite his grievous injury, perfect.

The Fire Lord’s blade slithered through Kersh’s savage defence and nicked the Scourge above the brow. A curtain of blood washed over his eye. As the paralytic seized him, Kersh felt one half of his face freeze up. The eye closed and his lip began to droop on one side. He compensated with a desperate lunge unworthy of his training or Chapter standing. The Fire Lord hissed through his flint-clenched jaws once more. This time Kersh realised that the tongue of flame was aimed at his gladius. The orange gout evaporated about the blade, leaving the metal steaming and tacky. With horror, Kersh realised that the Fire Lord had cleansed his blade of the paralytic toxin.

The assault continued and, as Kersh’s sword was battered this way and that by the Fire Lord, blocks shifted and the dark landscape of the Cage changed about them. A block had descended immediately behind Kersh creating a small pit. Half-blind and hobbled, with the pit edge behind and the irresistible onslaught of the Chaplain in front, the Scourge was trapped. He felt the audience’s expectation and his own desperation on the air. A seed of doubt blossomed within him, and he felt the weight of the apparition’s gaze. For a moment the Darkness returned and Kersh knew a universe without hope. Perhaps his affliction had damned them all and the Excoriators were doomed to failure. To fail at the Feast. To fail as a Chapter.

Kersh became intensely aware of the limitations of his Adeptus Astartes body; what it could do and what it couldn’t. He was to be bested by a brother more worthy of the Emperor’s beneficence. A true son of Dorn. A master of the blade. An actual champion of champions.

The Fire Lord had found him. The Chaplain’s blade struck out with such fluid force that it not only smashed the Excoriator’s plated gauntlet to pieces, but broke several bones in his hand and knocked the gladius through the air like a propeller. Both warriors watched the blade clatter to the ground nearby. The end had come. They both knew it.

The Fire Lord arched. It was to be a strike from above. Something suitably dramatic to finish the Excoriator. To cut him down and drop his beaten body into the grave that had opened up beyond. A warrior vanquished. A Chapter routed. Honour tarnished.

One side of Kersh’s lip curled. His gauntlet shot up, batting the Fire Lord’s arm back. Snatching up the Chaplain’s rosarius, the Excoriator back-slashed the Space Marine across the face with the adamantium aquila. Gritting his teeth and holding on to the wire cord with both his gauntlet and smashed hand, Kersh leant into a centrifugal swing. Using his weight as the counter-balance, the Scourge swung his opponent about him. Dragged around, the Fire Lord fell back over Kersh’s trailing leg. The two Space Marines toppled. Kersh fell to the floor, but not before he had tossed the Fire Lord into the pit behind him.

Even prone, Kersh saw the flailing Chaplain strike the edge of the opening’s far side. The impact knocked the gladius from his hand and together both sword and Space Marine disappeared into the darkness. Kersh pushed himself up, balancing on one leg. He hobbled over to his own sword and scooped up the weapon with his unbroken hand. Limping back, he proceeded to half-scowl down into the depths. The Fire Lord lay on his broken back, his ragdoll form spread out across the bottom of the pit. Grasping fingertips reached out for his gladius, the weapon having fallen just out of reach.

‘Yield, brother,’ Kersh called down to the Fire Lord.

‘Not to you,’ the Chaplain finally managed, his voice just above a strangled hiss. ‘Not to the dishonourable wretch they call the Scourge. Not to the unfavoured of Dorn.’

Kersh narrowed his eye. He nodded slowly.

‘As is your right, brother.’

The Excoriator spun the gladius around in his gauntlet, so that he gripped the cross guard and the weapon’s pommel and grip protruded between his fingers. The blade he held parallel to his wrist and forearm. Sliding down onto his chest, Kersh dropped down into the pit. He knelt on the Fire Lord’s chestplate and brought back the sword hilt, ready to strike. The Chaplain’s eyes said it all. He would not surrender. The gallery waited. The Fire Lord would not yield. Kersh retracted his arm, ready for the first, merciless blow.

‘Kersh!’ the Apothecary called down, unable to disguise his disgust – even in a single word. The Scourge turned his head slightly. Above him, at the edge of the pit, was an Imperial Fists contest arbitrator. The aged Adeptus Astartes looked down on them both. With grizzled hesitation, the arbitrator raised a solemn gauntlet at the Excoriator’s gate. The Fist nodded to Ezrachi and left.

Kersh sagged. Returning his gaze to the Chaplain he found a little of the fire gone from the Space Marine’s eyes. Using the sides of the pit for balance, he stood as best he could and threw the gladius down at the still body of his mauled opponent.

‘It seems I was favoured by Dorn today, brother,’ he announced before spitting some of his own blood at the stone wall. Kersh looked up at the domed cage ceiling and the stunned audience above. He saw Bethesda – her face unreadable – and Ezrachi, whose bleak revulsion was all too easy to read. The apparition, it seemed, had gone. With no little revulsion of his own, Kersh finally called up to the gallery.

‘Who’s next?’

I am not sleeping, yet even as I think this, I know this to be a kind of sleep. Within his daily regimen of training, cult devotion and litany, an Excoriator allows himself four hours of rest. The demands of a single day in the Adeptus Astartes would kill an ordinary man. Our engineered forms are biological instruments of the Emperor’s will, but the mind needs rest. There is much to learn; errors to interrogate; the capabilities of an Angel’s body to master. Ever since the Darkness, I have been unable to lose myself in what might be described as a natural sleep.

My body is beaten and bruised. Some of my bones are broken. My blood swims with magna-opioids and growth hormones that help repair my injuries. A punishing training schedule and the ever more punishing contestations of the Feast are followed by ‘the purge’ and penitorium, the ritual purification of the flesh. My body, superhuman though it might be, is exhausted, but my mind will not submit. Abatement comes only in the form of catalepsean abstractions, like the one I assume I am experiencing now. Different parts of my genetically altered brain are allowed to shut down in sequence, while I remain in a state of semi-wakefulness. I have rested this way even in the lethal environs of death world phase-forests and quakeclonic superstorms. Your survival instincts remain intact while parts of the mind are allowed to rest. It cannot replace sleep, however, and the distinction between what is an abstraction and what is real is increasingly difficult to make.

Sitting here, I did not realise that I had entered such a state. I am down in the hold of the Scarifica. Despite my successes in the Feast of Blades, my presence on the dormitory decks and in the refectory is still not tolerated by my Excoriator brothers. Corpus-Captain Gideon has allowed me restricted use of the penitorium, chapel-reclusiam and the apothecarion – although I avoid the practise cages. Most of my preparation takes place down on the planet surface. Apart from the ceremonial presence of the Imperial Fists about the purpose-built Cage colosseum, only a garrison of the Thracian Fourth remains on Samarquand. All other resources are stationed on the cordon, keeping the Great Tusk and its greenskin invaders away. When I asked why the Fists would select such a place for the site of the Feast, Ezrachi told me that it was customary for the hosts to select the site of a recent Chapter victory for the contest location. Such choices were in line with the martial heritage of the Fists and their affiliated Chapters. With battles against greenskin blockade runners proceeding above our heads, and Imperial Guard cleanse and burn sorties decontaminating the earth for kilometres around, such a choice smacked of theme and pride. Regardless, it left me with the solitude of the ash fields and the apocalyptic ruins of a reclaimed world as my training ground.

I am sitting on a cargo crate. I sense the Apothecary and his Helix-serfs about me. My own people also. Ezrachi’s servants work solemnly on my face. Their needlework is neat and confident, and my flesh is a tessellation of stitching and stapled gashes. Between the nipping bladework of Sergeant Tenaka of the Death Strike and brutal headbutting I received from the hulking, nameless Crimson Fist I had the unfortunate honour of crossing swords with in the latter stages, my face is a mess. I know that each of these scars – these excoriations – are Katafalque’s blessing and the mark of Dorn, but my skull aches and my features feel as though they have been reassembled like a child’s puzzle. Ezrachi’s aides do their best with what’s left.

The good Apothecary works on my swordarm himself. The crate is covered with surgical foil, and Ezrachi’s instruments are laid out along the strapped-down length of my forearm. My flesh is open and the inner workings of the limb exposed. In the previous round, Knud Hægstad of Brycantia thought it prudent to shatter my arm – unhappy at what it was doing with a gladius on the end of it. I had the Iron Knight pay for the injury by cleaving off his hand – gauntlet, gladius and all – with the finest overhead downcut I believe I have ever performed. Dorn demands perfection. Demetrius Katafalque writes in detail on the sound a blade should make during the successful execution of such a manoeuvre, and the sword sang like a Terran songbird. Perfection is an ideal to which I aspire, but an imperfect victory still has a great deal to recommend it.

Ezrachi informed me that such an action, although legal in tournament terms, had offended several of the participant Chapters, the Iron Knights and Imperial Fists among them. It was not my intention to invoke an insult, an echo of the primarch’s own severed hand. That was how it was received by the Brycantians, however – a polemic and litigious breed, more interested in the detail of ritual law and tournament etiquette than victory itself. They petitioned my disqualification, and not for the first time. Earlier in the Feast, I left a former champion of the same Chapter called Hervald Strom gutted and all but dead on the Cage floor. A full day’s delay to the Games was called. A day for Ezrachi to attend to my wounds and Shiloh Gideon to berate me – although behind the corpus-captain’s words I sensed an unmistakable pride and relief. The dishonour of conduct in battle was preferential to the dishonour of early defeat. Strom lived, tough Brycantian bastard that he is, and my advancement was allowed.

The Excoriators would not indulge in such Chapter politics. There were no appeals on the ramparts of the Imperial Palace. No petitions to be had with the Sons of Horus, degenerate World Eaters or the warsmiths of Perturabo. When Berenger of the White Templars took my eye, I did not call for the tournament official or Feast charta. I did not yap like a dog, protest or pontificate. I fought on, like I was born to do. I took the only thing that mattered from my opponent: victory. I tire of rules and regulations. I yearn for the cold simplicity of the battlefield, where enemies were at least good enough to signal defeat with their deaths.

The Apothecary attended to my eye and offered a bionic equivalent. I refused. Ezrachi and Hadrach insisted that I would see better than with the original, but I cared not. When pressed they admitted that the change in depth perception would take some getting used to. I couldn’t afford the distraction this late in the contest. I opted for a simple ball-bearing to be inserted instead as a temporary measure. The matt, scratched surface of the metal revolves as I move my head. I catch others watching its motion. Ezrachi insists he’ll replace it after the Feast, but I have to admit that it is growing on me. The Apothecary already has his hands full with my shattered arm. He is surgically inserting an adamantium pin and piston arrangement that runs the interior length of the limb.

My serfs make themselves busy about my sitting form. With my arm strapped, there is little in the way of blood. What there is Oren moodily massages into the deck with his mop. Old Enoch is on his knees, babbling prayers and incomprehension. Bethesda is beside me, working around Ezrachi’s aides. She’s applying a moistened cloth to my brow, for all the comfort it gives me. I allow this irrelevance to continue. She is young and my form more than mortal. Her reverence is only human and if such meaninglessness gives her comfort then who am I to deny such minor mercies?

Of course, my visitor is here. It indulges in what might be described as an otherworldly pacing, the inky blackness of the hold giving up its armoured form before the phantasm disappears, again one with the darkness. I catch it in the periphery of my vision. It seems always there, even when it’s not. Once, in the chapel-reclusiam, I turned to find it beside me. The cleaved faceplate of its helmet radiated a chillness that turned my breath to fog. I heard its teeth chatter and, as I turned away, I caught once again the helmet interior and the fleshless face within.

It seems never not with me. On the dark and lonely passages of the lower decks I hear the distant footfalls of the revenant. On Samarquand its distant form stands atop the ruins and on the smouldering horizon, observing my progress as I run, train and fight. It is there above the Cage, always. I no longer look for its macabre presence, for I know I will find it amongst the colosseum crowds. Watching. In silent appreciation it stands, never talking, but a seeming supporter of my gladiatorial efforts.

‘Wake him,’ I hear a voice command. I know the voice. It is Corpus-Captain Gideon.

‘I am awake.’

The corpus-captain entered the gloom of the cargo compartment. His eyes flashed around the chamber. It was clear that the Excoriator had never been down in the hold before. Beside him Chaplain Dardarius glowered in his dark plate.

‘Chaplain Dardarius,’ Kersh greeted the Excoriator. ‘The good corpus-captain has allowed me restricted visitation to the chapel-reclusiam, yet when I am there you are not. Have you come down here to hear my affirmation? To cleanse my soul of doubt with your counsel as the lash cleanses my flesh of weakness?’

The gaunt Dardarius looked from Kersh to the sarcophagus that still decorated the chamber floor and then to Ezrachi, who busied himself with the surgery. ‘Chaplain?’ the Scourge pressed.

‘Later,’ Gideon instructed. ‘The Master of the Feast has made his ruling.’

‘Fortinbras came himself?’ Ezrachi asked, getting up off his adamantium knee and allowing an aide to close up the surgery.

‘And?’ Kersh said.

‘Fortinbras rules in favour of a continuance.’

Kersh looked to the Apothecary and his arm. ‘Let’s finish this.’

‘There’s a condition,’ the corpus-captain said.

‘Yes,’ Kersh agreed with building annoyance. ‘It’s a little matter called victory.’

‘The Fists have ruled in our favour,’ Dardarius added with low contempt. ‘But the corpus-captain’s equivalents amongst the remaining Chapters do not recognise your legitimacy, Scourge.’

‘They’ll recognise my blade as it comes for them.’

‘They will not honour you with sole engagement.’

‘What does that mean?’ Ezrachi put to the Chaplain.

‘It means their cowardice prevents them from stepping into the arena with me,’ Kersh barked.

‘Their honour prevents it,’ Dardarius corrected.

‘Again,’ Ezrachi asked. ‘What does that mean?’

‘The same honour also prevents them from claiming victory in the Feast without your besting,’ Gideon said. ‘Therefore, Master Fortinbras, with the primarch’s wisdom, has decreed that the Feast of Blades be decided by a three-way duel.’

‘A three-way duel…’ Ezrachi nodded.

‘The champions of the Fists and the Black Templars need not besmirch their reputations by facing you in single engagement,’ Dardarius informed them, ‘yet their victory will be rightful in your defeat.’

‘You seem confident of their success, Lord Chaplain,’ Kersh accused.

Dardarius took a moment. ‘You face Alighieri of the Black Templars. A devout Brethren of the Sword, a Castellan and veteran of the Volchis, Deltamagne and Hive Nimbus Crusades. He is half your age but has twice your conquests to his name. As for Montalbán, he is Pugh’s champion and the best of the Fists – the best of all of us, perhaps.’

‘I find your lack of faith inspirational, Chaplain,’ Kersh told him. Dardarius simply bowed his head.

‘Well, that is the situation, brothers,’ Gideon said finally. He looked to Ezrachi. ‘Get him planetside. Get him in his plate.’

‘And what from you, corpus-captain?’ Kersh asked. ‘Any advice?’

Gideon pursed his lips. ‘Do what you do best.’ The Excoriators captain went to leave. ‘Don’t lose.’

Montalbán. Alighieri. Kersh.

The Excoriator was surprised to find the rush of combat – the mad murderous scramble of gladiatorial confrontation – absent from the Cage. There were no stealth approaches or ambush attacks. No battle calls and no furious charges. The Imperial Fist and Black Templar simply walked out into the arena and composed themselves by their barbica-entrances. It was refreshing. All the while the Cage itself seemed to dominate with the mechanical thunk of blocks and floors moving about them, with pits opening and simple towers rising from the symbolic architecture. The Cage seemed in overdrive.

Above, Kersh saw that the gallery was crowded with superhuman silhouettes. The sons of Dorn had gathered to witness the final of the Feast; to discover which Chapter would demonstrate themselves worthy of their brothers’ esteem and be granted centennial custodianship of the primarch’s blade. History was about to be made. The eight hundred and sixteenth Feast of Blades was to end and a champion be immortalised in memory.

Alighieri was a devout killer. Zealot. Fanatic. A devotee of victory. He knew no fear. Doubt had never known a home in his pious hearts and his belief was absolute – in his primarch, his Emperor and his Imperium. The Black Templar was already on his knees in the arena grit, indulging in a warrior’s blessing. The dim light of the Cage shone off his bald crown and the bleak line of a mouth ran beneath the lustrous length of his crusader’s moustache. Alighieri was all about the moment. He lived his penitence and existed in a perpetual state of judgement – both on his enemies and himself.

Montalbán, by contrast, radiated presence. He was huge, second only in size to the savage Crimson Fist Kersh had fought in the earlier round. Unlike Alighieri, Montalbán’s belief grew from a place deep within his colossal chest. His faith was that of an Angel, long accustomed to the supreme capabilities of his superhuman body. He already thought of himself as a champion of champions. A symbol in flesh, sculpted in Dorn’s own image, whose eyes were not the pinpoints of grim determination that belonged to his Black Templar opponent, but gleaming, grey discs of adamantium assurance. A warrior who had played through the engagement in his mind a hundred times and had won every time. The Imperial Fist went through rudimentary flexes and stretches. His throbbing arms and shoulders were like rolling foothills to the tabletop mountain of his blond hair and graven brow, and beneath these hung a stoic visage of immortal calm.

Both Adeptus Astartes looked virtually untouched by the trials of the Feast so far, a testament to their skill and the ease with which they had despatched their opponents. Kersh looked like hell in comparison and decidedly ugly in his display of stitches and scarring both old and new. With his remaining eye the Excoriator caught a glint of light off the mirrored blade of a gladius. Montalbán strode over to the weapon and picked it up in one meaty gauntlet. Looking over at Alighieri he found that the Black Templar had ascended the wall of a mock-battlement. Stepping lightly across the merlon-tops, the Castellan found the second gladius and picked it up nimbly.

Kersh felt suddenly vulnerable.

‘Scourge!’

Kersh heard Montalbán call him and turned back. The mighty Imperial Fist was stood over the third sword. Kersh died a little inside. The blades had been randomly placed. It was not the kind of fortune he’d been hoping for. Hooking the tip of his gladius under one of the sword’s cross guards, Montalbán scooped the weapon up into the air. It spun the distance between them before being snatched out of its flight by the Scourge. With the gladius firmly in his grip, Kersh nodded his appreciation.

‘For all the good it will do you,’ Montalbán announced across the animated arena. He flashed his eyes at the Excoriator in mock surprise. ‘Here comes Alighieri. It begins…’

Alighieri was there. Like some feudal knight in an ogre’s cave, the Black Templar launched himself at Montalbán from the battlement, gladius clutched in both hands. Kersh admired the Castellan’s courage. It had been a brave opening gambit. The Imperial Fist turned on his heel and smacked the blade aside with his own, although the weapon looked comparatively short in the giant Montalbán’s fist. Alighieri hit the dark stone floor of the cage, tumbled and rolled, landing back on his feet like a cat. He came straight back at the Imperial Fist with immaculate bladework, each swipe and slash a manoeuvre of cold conviction.

It became immediately apparent to Kersh that although undeniably skilled, Montalbán’s fearsome reputation as Chapter Master Pugh’s champion was not built upon swordplay. He was fast for one so tall, however, and the power of each strike was irresistible. For every stabbing riposte the Templar offered in the wake of the champion’s broad sweeps, Alighieri suffered the reply of a hammerfall of cleaving cuts and smashes.

As blades sparked and the Black Templar was pounded back, Kersh found his grip tighten around his own gladius and his hesitant steps pick up speed. It was not fear that had slowed his advance, although the Excoriator feared it might be interpreted as such if he dallied much longer. It was opportunity. He had been unfortunate with the positioning of the gladius, but the opportunity to witness even a few seconds of his opponents at each other’s throats was a welcome gift. Kersh took in the Imperial Fist’s reach and his preference for scything sweeps and rapid downcutting. The Space Marine treated his blade like an extension of his arm, driving the razored edge at his opponent with brute proficiency.

Alighieri, the Scourge observed, guided his gladius. His technique betrayed a crusader’s bluntness, but the Castellan had a clear respect for the weapon’s balance. His wrists did much of the work, working within the counter-arcs of both pommel and fulcrum. He favoured the tip of the leaf-shaped blade, relying on its length for the demands of a hasty defence, and worked the weapon with an even speed and rhythm. Strike for strike, the Templar was the better swordsman, but round after round Montalbán had smashed the skill senseless from his opponents’ hands and it appeared that Alighieri would be little different.

Within moments Kersh was among them. The Scourge was a killer rather than a fighter. He lacked both the Black Templar’s deftness with the blade and the centrifugal power of Montalbán’s swordarm. The Excoriator’s gladius came at them both with murderous intent, however. His first few swings spoke of a squat ferocity, the first almost taking out the giant Montalbán’s throat and the second flashing narrowly before Alighieri’s face. The pair instantly sensed the threat and responded with a double-dealing of punishing bladework. Kersh could barely get his gladius between the Black Templar’s stabbing weapon and Montalbán’s bludgeoning, overhead barrage. He wouldn’t have achieved that if it hadn’t been for the pair’s own exchanged blows.

With the impact of the Imperial Fist’s weapon still ringing through his own and up through his arm and shoulder, Kersh rolled beneath a low, opportunistic swipe from Alighieri. Out from between his brothers, Kersh assumed a defensive posture at the apex of the revolving triangle the three Space Marines had created. If the sons of Dorn formed the points, the clash of blades gave the shape its scalenic sides.

As the battle roamed the Cage, the architecture of the arena transformed about the three warriors, adding the simple danger of disappearing footholds and floorspace to the evolving deathtrap of blades slicing up the air between them. The movement of the blocks in symbolic representation of the Iron Cage fortress was more than disorientating. Preoccupations with footing, falling and hazards sapped the only seconds the Space Marines had to spare between the furious onslaught of their opponents’ blades. Serrated discs spun like circular saws along the gaps between floor blocks, forcing the Adeptus Astartes to sidestep and jump in their carapace.

Pummelled into the ground by Montalbán’s unremitting overhead assault, Kersh was forced to roll across a quad of blocks set with vents that were flush to the stone. As the Excoriator tumbled, the vents emitted a volatile gas that was sparked and ignited about him. Burying his head in his arms, Kersh rolled shoulder over shoulder until he emerged, hair singed and armour smoking from the shallow field of flame. A pit had unexpectedly opened up beneath Montalbán and the giant had dropped down into a darkness into which Alighieri and the Scourge were forced to follow.

The Black Templar was easily the most sure-footed of the combatants, but even he could do little to avoid the clouds of thick, greasy smoke that erupted from grilles in the floor beneath the Space Marines’ boots. The tacky fog smeared the skin and ceremonial carapace, as well as gunging up the eyes and enveloping the warriors in brief banks of billowing gloom. Through the smog, sword strikes lost their discipline and technique lost out to the hack and slash of open opportunity. All three of the participants’ blades made contact through the smoke, but it was impossible to tell which strike belonged to which warrior.

Alighieri received a slash across his forehead, an arm and a leg, considerably hampering the Black Templar’s former grace and agility. Kersh took a swordpoint in the groin – at the top of his left thigh – as well as a slice across the back of the neck running parallel with the line of his carapace. The Excoriator felt the now familiar spider-bite numbness creep through his flesh as the paralytic took effect. His head began to droop to one side and the Scourge was forced to bunch his shoulders and tense the sinew in his neck to rawness in order to keep it upright. Montalbán emerged the worst hit, being the largest target in the greasy blindness. A razor edge had found a backstrap on his carapace, cutting it free and allowing the ceremonial armour to fall away from his broad, muscular chest. The hulking Imperial Fist was adorned with crippling nicks and slashes across his shoulders and down one leg, but seemed unconcerned. His movements were as assured as they were before, the giant simply pushing through the paralysis like a runaway train that had blown its brakes. Grabbing the chestplate, Montalbán tore it free of his perfect form and tossed it aside.

The nightmare of battle went on. Dorn and his Fists had endured weeks of torment and relentless assault at the design of Perturabo and his traitor Iron Warriors. There the battle-brothers had come to know each other’s true worth as both warriors and spiritual siblings, this as part of their own primarch’s design. As the crowds built and gathered in the gallery above the Cage and the spectacle of superhuman endeavour and skill continued, it became apparent that some of that same hard-won respect and the kindred bond of Dorn’s spirit had been ignited between the three warriors. Too many blades had been turned aside and too many brief fantasies of triumph had been quashed for the Emperor’s Angels not to feel the sting of Legion pride in their brothers’ indefatigable efforts.

Neither Montalbán, Alighieri or the Scourge had any idea how long they had been fighting. It was not the weeks of their brothers’ historic trials, but it was longer than all of the other rounds and contestations of the eight hundred and sixteenth Feast added together. Movement became a sluggish blur and detail of the surrounding arena ran like painting left out in the rain. The snarling faces of Montalbán and Alighieri flashed before Kersh. So furious and exhausted was the exchange that at one point the Scourge fancied he even saw his own face amongst the glint of blades.

In the background, beyond the whirlwind of the fray, Kersh sensed his ethereal stalker. In the shattered fragments of reeling moments, the Excoriator caught an impression of his private revenant – not watching from the gallery in ghastly expectation, but down in the evolving arena. It was everywhere. Different places; different moments. An armoured shade, bedecked in death, whose presence seemed to suck the life out of the very space it occupied. It watched and waited with the patience of the grave.

The living in the Cage could only measure the passage of time in the fat beads of sweat shaken from their skin, the ache and burn of their battered bodies and, if they had had the luxury of a spare moment to observe, the closing gap between the faces of their riveted audience and the bars of the domed ceiling-cage of the arena.

The spectators found the contestants closer than ever as the three Space Marines scaled a line of block-columns rising up out of the Cage floor. Bounding from the top of tower to stone tower, the Adeptus Astartes exchanged blows. In yet another fearless move, Alighieri had launched himself across the open space between the towers and landed on the one being defended by Kersh. Somehow the Black Templar had avoided being cleaved in two by the Scourge and danced in and out of the Excoriator’s tiring swordplay. The two were so close that Kersh could hear the incessant stream of battle-catechisms and recitation spilling from the Black Templar’s lips. The manoeuvre was even more daring than the Scourge had anticipated, as he discovered when Alighieri made it through the blaze of his blade and clipped the gladius from the fingers of Montalbán, who was swinging for all he was worth atop the tower beyond. The gladius left the Fist’s gauntlet and spun through the air above a large pool. Blocks had sunk into the floor of the arena, lined by the towers between which the Space Marines had been leaping. Dirty water had rapidly seeped up through grilles in the block-bottom of the large pit and filled it to a reasonable depth.

Montalbán watched the weapon fly across the water’s expanse and clatter to the ground on the other side. Instead of waiting for Alighieri to join him on his tower, the Imperial Fist dropped down the side of the column, sending a quake through the dark stone as he landed. The Black Templar wouldn’t have been able to make good on his bold opening since Kersh had come back at him with a lunge that had every right to gut the Castellan. Somehow the nimble Alighieri managed to arc his palsied form about the sword’s stabbing path.

The tower suddenly bucked. Kersh initially assumed that the blocks were once more on the move, but a second impact convinced him otherwise. The giant Montalbán was throwing his bulk at the tower base like a beast of the plains felling titanwoods. The third slam of superhuman shoulder against stone took out the base block and toppled the tower. As the column shook and tipped, Kersh lost his footing and went down in an ugly fashion. Striking his chest against the block edge he felt the shell of his fused ribs crack. He clawed at the smooth surface of the dark stone, allowing his gladius to tumble from his grip and into the filthy water below. The unsuccessful Scourge followed the weapon and was in turn followed and buried by the falling blocks of the collapsed tower.

The fallen column had created a shattered causeway across the pool and a path Montalbán fully intended on using to swiftly reclaim his weapon. Once again, the Black Templar’s light feet and balance had proved their worth and the Imperial Fist found a dry Alighieri holding an awkward fighting stance but blocking his way across the stepping stone. The Fist’s lips wrinkled in infuriation. Slapping the palms of his gauntlets on a colossal fragment of the broken base block, Montalbán heaved the slab of stone above his head and launched it at the Black Templar. As the rock flew like a meteorite along the path of the causeway, a wide-eyed Alighieri was forced to jump from the bridge and dive into the water.

As his feet found the bottom and the Castellan surfaced, sword in hand, he found himself staring up at Montalbán’s rippling chest. The giant had torn the remainder of the base-block out of the arena floor and was once again hefting the rock above the flat-top of his blond hair. Alighieri prepared himself to dive left or right out of the boulder’s trajectory. At that moment, like a daemon of the deep, Kersh broke the water’s surface. Coming up behind Alighieri he grabbed the Black Templar by both the wrist of his swordarm and his neck. The Castellan struggled in desperation but the Space Marine’s speed and agility were no match for the Scourge’s meaty arm-lock.

Kersh held Alighieri to him, holding the Black Templar in place and outstretched, resting his forehead against the back of the warrior’s skull. The Castellan’s face fell as he watched Montalbán hurl the rock at them both. Kersh felt the Templar’s bones break as the stone shattered against Alighieri’s presented form. The pair were smacked down through the water, leaving a cloud of rock dust to mark the point of dreadful impact.

Once again beneath the surface, the Scourge was slammed into the pool bottom by the weight of the broken block. The back of his head bounced off the stone and something cracked. Heaving the deadweight of the sinking rock off both himself and Alighieri’s motionless body, Kersh kicked off the pool floor only to find his right leg wouldn’t answer. It was broken and useless. Clawing for the surface with one hand he dragged the Templar behind him with the other.

He need not have bothered. The arena was morphing about them once again with a mechanical shuddering. Water drained about the Scourge through the grilles, and the pool bottom rose up to meet him.

All three Space Marines were now back on the same level. Alighieri was a broken and bloodied mess. Half of his chest had been caved in by the rock’s impact. Kersh slithered up beside him and put his ear to the other half and then to the Black Templar’s torn lips. Incredibly, he was still breathing. Barely.

Kersh heard the damp scrape of his blade on the arena floor and craned his stiff neck around to see the giant Montalbán reclaim it from down beside the toppled tower. Swinging it experimentally about him the Imperial Fist advanced. The gallery was silent and still.

‘Scourge!’ Montalbán called as he strode across the arena. ‘The time has come.’ Like a great death world predator, the Imperial Fist broke into a run. His sword came up overhead.

Kersh turned back to Alighieri’s broken body. His eyes drifted along the Black Templar’s arm and to the gladius clutched in his smashed hand. In the mirror blade of the weapon the Excoriator found himself looking at a reflection of the revenant. It peered out through the ceramite shard missing in its midnight faceplate. Kersh saw its teeth rattle and otherworldly life glow from the eye socket of its bleached skull, the full horror of its form revealed through a chink in its armour. An opening. A vulnerability.

Kersh felt the hulking Fist’s steps pounding through the floor. He was almost upon the prone and supplicant figure of the Excoriator. ‘Are you ready, brother?’ Montalbán boomed above him. Kersh began to tear feverishly at Alighieri’s broken fingers. With the gladius in his own, the Scourge sat, turned and twisted. Sent catapulting over Kersh’s own bleeding head, the sword shot the short distance between the Excoriator’s loosened grip and Montalbán’s exposed chest.

With a thud the gladius buried itself in the Imperial Fist’s torso. Stumbling, the mighty Montalbán tripped over the prone forms of Alighieri and the Scourge. Crashing to the arena floor, the champion rolled across one shoulder plate before coming to rest on his back. Crawling arm over arm, Kersh dragged himself alongside the fallen giant. The Imperial Fist’s eyes were stricken and wide open. He held his back off the floor and thrust his chest at the cage-dome of the arena ceiling and the spectators beyond. The toxin smeared on the tip and blade-edge of the gladius was spreading through the Space Marine’s chest, paralysing his twin hearts and bringing them to a stop.

‘Am I ready?’ the Scourge hissed in the champion’s ear, repeating his previous question. ‘For anything, brother,’ Kersh told him with blood dripping from his lips. ‘Even you.’

The Excoriator rolled onto his own back and stared up at the gallery of silhouettes staring back at him. ‘Call the Apothecaries!’ he bawled finally. Above, Master Fortinbras nodded his authorisation and the drome-barbica opened. The arena grew still and silent, and figures in gleaming white plate dashed out across the dark stone. Robed serfs and servitors followed with equipment. A Black Templars Apothecary went to work straight away on Alighieri’s crushed chest and collapsed lung.

The Imperial Fists Apothecary expertly withdrew the gladius Kersh had put in Montalbán’s chest. His serfs went to stem the blood pooling and streaming down the side of the champion’s torso. The Apothecary took a pair of hypodermic syringes from a medical crate carried by a gruesome servitor. One at a time the Apothecary stabbed them down through the muscle and black carapace of the Imperial Fist’s breast. With both piercing the Space Marine’s hearts the Apothecary depressed the plungers with his palms and administered the anti-paralytic. Montalbán spasmed. The needles twitched in rhythm as the Space Marine’s hearts resumed their thunderous beat as the Fist gulped a deep lungful of air.

Ezrachi suddenly appeared above Kersh. The solemnity of the occasion prevented Ezrachi openly celebrating or offering congratulations, but the Apothecary was clearly having difficulty hiding his pride and pleasure behind a mask of professional concern.

‘Remain still,’ he told the Scourge, an unintentional grin breaking through the his usual scowl. ‘You have a fractured skull, a multitude of breakages and internal bleeding.’

‘I feel tired,’ Kersh told him, his speech beginning to slur.

‘That’ll be the concussion,’ Ezrachi said.

‘Ezrachi?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is this a dream?’

The Apothecary watched the Scourge’s eyes close. He looked from the prone Black Templar to the giant Imperial Fist. He recalled what it had taken for Kersh to beat them both.

‘I hope not.’

Chapter Four The Chains of Command

The chapel-reclusiam of the Scarifica was all but empty. The Scourge knelt beneath its vaulted ceiling with his eyes cast down on the black marble of the chamber floor. The polished stone reflected a little of the stained-glass brilliance of the window beyond the altar – a tessellate representation of Demetrius Katafalque at Rogal Dorn’s side during the post-Heresy crusades of penitence. Kersh brought up his gaze. Before the glorious depiction, laid out across the simple altar, was the length of a highly-wrought stasis casket. The bejewelled case hummed, the temporal suspension of its contents and interior drowned out only by a small choir of chapel servitors. Chaplain Dardarius had the drones embedded in the stone plinths which lined the chamber so that they stood like statues, perpetually engaged in a round of liturgical chants.

Kersh was dressed in full battle-plate, as honour decreed. With the Excoriators frigate well into its journey home and Kersh recovered from his arena injuries, Corpus-Captain Gideon had allowed the Scourge his suit of power armour in quiet recognition of the warrior’s achievement. Kersh hadn’t worn the plate since the terrible day the Darkness had taken him. The day he had lost the Stigmartyr.

The day he had allowed the filth Alpha Legion to slither past and sink their fangs into his Chapter Master’s flesh. The Scourge had experienced mixed feelings upon first donning the ornate ceramite plates. It felt undeniably good to be back in both power armour and his Chapter’s colours, but his chest flushed with shame at such gladness. He had come through the Darkness but had left the Chapter in a darkness of its own, bereft of its standard and afflicted with grief and doubt. He was in good health while his Chapter Master writhed in envenomed agony. He was alive when so many of his brethren had fallen. These burdens and more weighed heavily on the Excoriator, and after his daily ‘Donning of Dorn’s Mantle’, Kersh spent time in quiet reflection in the chapel-reclusiam, searching his soul for a little of the primarch’s wisdom and fortitude.

Kersh wasn’t convinced that Gideon had reunited the warrior with his armour in entirely good faith. The Scarifica’s journey to Eschara was a circuitous one, returning battle-brother after participating battle-brother to their far-flung companies and Chapter houses across the coreward expanse of the segmentum. Each veteran of the Feast was returned to their corpus-captain in a small but significant ceremony, attended by battle-brothers of their company, senior officers, contestants and Gideon himself. As champion of the Feast of Blades, it was appropriate that Kersh appeared as such, in full battle armour. The Scourge suspected that this consideration – rather than a renewed respect and liking for Kersh – had a great deal to do with the corpus-captain’s decision to return the blessed plate to him. A ceremony without a champion would have been embarrassing.

In this way Gideon had also decided to return the Scourge to his commander last. Apart from Kersh’s ceremonial significance, his commanding officer was the Chapter Master himself. Since the Excoriators home world of Eschara was the final destination on the frigate’s journey, it made sense to deliver the Scourge last. Still, this did little to assuage the warrior’s impatience. As he had confided to both Gideon and Ezrachi, Kersh was eager to return to Eschara, beg forgiveness of Master Ichabod in person and request that Santiarch Balshazar despatch him on a penitence crusade of his own, to track down the Alpha Legion and reclaim the Excoriators Chapter’s precious standard. Only through such recompense could the Scourge earn redemption in the eyes of his brothers and achieve a spiritual peace.

About the kneeling Scourge’s penitent form his mortal serfs busied themselves, at once dedicated yet inconspicuous. While Techmarine Hadrach was responsible for the maintenance of the ancient plate and the suit’s machine-spirit, many Chapter rituals and cult appeasements fell to Kersh’s seneschal, lictor and absterge; and there was much to do. The plate was magnificent – as befitting a Scourge of the Excoriators Chapter. Every Excoriator honoured with carrying the Chapter standard or ‘Ancient’ had worn the suit and it was as old as it was immaculate. Like the banner itself, it displayed the venerated symbol of their brotherhood – the Stigmartyr – on the suit’s loincloth. Kersh had considered himself, therefore, part of the standard, making its personal loss all the more grievous.

Seals, chains and brown leather strapping dripped from the suit, but Old Enoch and Oren occupied themselves with the plate itself. The armour was a relic and as such had been heavily modified by Adeptus Astartes artisans, but its studs and robust cabling betrayed its original mark and designation. The ceramite surface was pock-marked and scarred like the meteorite-battered surface of a moon. The ivory paint was mottled silver-grey with burns and bolt-craters from the many engagements the armour had witnessed. It had been the Scourge’s honour to add to these. Equally scarred and annotated was the helm sitting on the flagstone before the Scourge. It spoke ugly belligerence with its unsmiling grille, snake-eyed optics, studs like horn buds and a short, brutal crest.

Oren’s bulging arms were put to good use rubbing sacred oils into the ancient plate of the suit’s pauldrons. Each was a representation of the Stigmartyr: crafted ceramite fists, clutching Kersh’s shoulders and shot through with lightning bolts that protruded both front and behind like wicked spikes. The sacred oils preserved the excoriations and provided extra spiritual protection for the plate. Bethesda stood barefoot beside him, reading benedictions of bearing and repairing from a devotional tract, her syllables a sibilant whisper amongst the servitor chanting. Old Enoch knelt beside one gleaming vambrace, a diamond-tip vibro-quill in his bony hand, annotating each nick, scar and hollow with a date and location.

Each of the seneschal’s additions bore the same name: Ignis Prime. The planet on which Chapter Master Quesiah Ichabod had come to inspect the mountaintop Excoriators garrison of Kruger Ridge, only to find a slaughterhouse rather than a Chapter house, and a waiting ambush in the form of heretic Alpha Legionnaires. It was there, barricaded in the oratorium, that Zachariah Kersh had fallen to the Darkness, failing both his Master and his Chapter, and allowing the Alpha Legion’s victory to become complete.

The Scourge blinked, shaking another abstraction from the mists of his mind. ‘Where is the Chaplain?’ he asked. He had come to the chapel-reclusiam to see Dardarius, against his better judgement. Since finding a new home for the sacred Dornsblade in his tiny temple, the Chaplain was now rarely found anywhere else. Old Enoch mumbled something unintelligible.

‘The corpus-captain sent for him, my lord,’ Bethesda answered, closing the tract.

Kersh’s eyes narrowed. ‘The engines have stopped.’

Old Enoch nodded. The faint rumble was absent from the deck. After the long haul from Samarquand, short jumps and frequent receptions had become the order of the day. As the Scarifica moved between the cruisers, keeps and warzones of the Excoriators Chapter, Kersh had learned that precious little progress had been made in locating an antidote for the toxin slowly eating its way through his Chapter Master. The hazardous environs of feral hellholes and death worlds had not given up their secrets. Meanwhile, all companies were on high alert. News of Kersh’s victory at the Feast of Blades had indeed lifted the hearts of his battle-brethren, but it made their duty of garrisoning the sectors bordering the Eye of Terror no easier. Servants of the Dark Gods were ever ready to test the mettle of Excoriators bastions, gauntlets and cordons, and with recent misfortunes the numbers of battle-brothers holding such precarious boundaries were dwindling.

‘Enough,’ Kersh commanded, scooping his helmet from the floor and rising to his full height. A sporran arrangement hung across the ceremonial loincloth, holstering an Adeptus Astartes Mark II bolt pistol. The ancient weapon was squat, fat and ugly like a guard dog, and sat within easy reach across the Excoriator’s groin to allow not one but two scabbard-sheathed gladii to hug the Scourge’s hip. The first bore a bulbous pommel, sculpted in the fashion of a clutched talon of the Imperial aquila. Both gladius and pistol, with the relic plate, accompanied the honour of being the Chapter Scourge.

The second sword was plain and had been with Kersh since his inception as an Adeptus Astartes Space Marine. The Excoriator used it as a functional back-up weapon. With standard held high and a Chapter Master to defend, Kersh did not want to fall to an enemy for want of weaponry, and many enemy champions were skilled in the arts of disarming and blade deprivation. In the end the Darkness had turned out to be the true master of such strategies. Gideon’s ceremonies did not necessitate carrying such an arsenal aboard the ship, but traversing the dreadspace about the Eye of Terror did, with all battle-brethren on board instructed to be armed and ready for the ambushes, boarding actions and unpredictable mayhem the warp rift routinely threw at them.

The serfs lowered their eyes and retreated. The Scourge turned to his seneschal. ‘Discover why our engines have stopped.’ Old Enoch bowed his head and left. To Oren and Bethesda he simply said, ‘Pray, leave me.’

As the lictor and absterge repeated their father’s subservience and exited the chapel-reclusiam, the Scourge approached the altar. The bejewelled case was closed. Looking furtively about him, Kersh found the chapel empty but for the blind chorus of the choir. Depressing two gleaming studs the Scourge disabled the case stasis field and opened the casket.

Within was the Dornsblade. Sheathless. Simple. Resplendent. The weapon’s spartan honesty had shocked the Scourge at first. With most warriors – even amongst the Adeptus Astartes – the greater the glory of the wielder, the more extravagant the decoration of the weapon wielded. Even laid out on the ermine interior of the stasis casket, the Dornsblade rang with history. It entranced the observer with the dull gleam of honours eternally earned. It was rumoured to be unbreakable, a symbolic reminder of the unbreakable spirit of the Imperial Fists in the face of adversity, given form in the trials of the Iron Cage. It also represented Legion unity during the necessities of the Second Founding.

It was crafted from a single piece of high-grade adamantium and remained completely unadorned. Cross guard, hilt and pommel were all bare metal, with the heavy blade counter-balanced by a solid pentagonal prism, with angular edges and featureless faces. The hilt had been cross-hatched and scored to provide a grip, and the cross guard had been stamped with three simple numerals across its breadth: VII. The blade was razored and featureless, bar its bronzed discolouration, which was believed to be the stain of the traitor blood that had baptised the blade in Rogal Dorn’s hand, during the Battle of the Iron Cage.

The blade misted. Kersh suddenly became aware that the temperature in the chapel-reclusiam had dropped. The lamps dimmed and the choir trailed off. The Scourge saw the white clouds of his breath before him.

‘Only you,’ Kersh announced to the temple without turning. ‘Phantom.’ There was no reply but for the chill on the air. The Excoriator turned but the revenant was nowhere to be seen. Kersh suddenly became aware of footsteps in the corridor approaching. The lamps returned to full brightness and the coolness dissipated. Snapping shut the casket and re-engaging the stasis field, Kersh turned just in time to see Gideon enter with Chaplain Dardarius. The Chaplain’s eyes narrowed and his gaunt expression soured. He made it clear he was unhappy with the Scourge’s proximity to the relic blade. Apothecary Ezrachi followed and behind him two strangers entered the chapel-reclusiam.

They were Adeptus Astartes. Excoriators. The first was like Dardarius, a Chaplain, also dressed in midnight black but sporting a hood and cloak mantle in the Chapter’s colours. The second wore the faded blue plate of the Librarius and a surcoat of tattered white identifying his rank as that of an Epistolary. Instead of a helm, a crafted metal hood protected the Librarian from both physical and psychic attack, and the willowy shaft of a war scythe rested in one gauntlet, the wicked blade-tip of the force weapon barely scraping the deck.

‘Corpus-captain,’ the Scourge acknowledged. Gideon looked uncomfortable.

‘May I introduce Chaplain Shadrath and Epistolary Melmoch,’ Gideon said, ‘attached to the Fifth Battle Company.’

Kersh looked to Ezrachi, whose eyes failed to meet his own, and then to Chaplain Dardarius, who glowered back. Both Shadrath and Melmoch walked out before the altar and the case containing the Dornsblade. Shadrath pulled back his hood to reveal a Chaplain’s helmet. From temple to jaw, the faceplate was decorated with a half-skull. He knuckled his forehead, the half-grille of his helm and then his breastplate – crossing from one heart to the other – before kneeling in front of the relic. Melmoch, whose piercing eyes and unguarded smile seemed out of place on the psyker’s weather-beaten face, merely kissed his fist before joining the Chaplain on the chapel flagstones.

‘No champions for the Feast were selected from the ranks of the Fifth,’ Kersh stated. ‘No offence intended, Chaplain.’

Shadrath said nothing, but came up off his ceramite knee and stared at the Scourge through the darkness of his helmet optics. The Epistolary looked to Kersh also, a knowing smile fixed on his odd features. ‘Then this is about the Stigmartyr,’ Kersh concluded. ‘You have found our sacred standard?’

‘We have not,’ Shadrath admitted, the grille of his helm reverberating with his grave words. ‘Though, we have lost over half our number in the endeavour.’

Kersh felt his face tighten. ‘I…’ he began.

‘…don’t have the words to express the loss of these brothers,’ Shadrath interrupted with plain but savage honesty, ‘both to their company and their Chapter.’

Kersh bridled. ‘Do you have intelligence of the Stigmartyr’s whereabouts or the movements of the traitors who took the standard?’

‘Our reconnaissance is sketchy,’ Shadrath said. ‘The enemy had the benefit of a clean escape and unchallenged withdrawal.’

The Scourge stared hard at the Chaplain’s half-skull helm. Without diverting his eyes, he said to Gideon, ‘Corpus-captain, we have returned the Feast’s contestants to their battle-brothers. Although Chaplain Shadrath is welcome to bathe in the hard-won honour of our contest victory, the Scarifica’s schedule is tight and we are needed above Eschara.’

‘You will not be travelling on to Eschara,’ Gideon told him.

‘What?’ the Scourge seethed, at last turning to face the corpus-captain.

‘Chaplain Dardarius and myself will see to it that the sacred Dornsblade is delivered safely to our home world. Have no fear of that.’

‘I am the victor, the champion of champions. It is my right to bear the blade back to our brothers and present it to Chapter Master Ichabod.’

Gideon offered him a data-slate he held in one gauntlet.

‘The Chapter Master has greater honours and greater need for you elsewhere, Scourge. You will not return to his side or even to the decimated First Company. You have been promoted, Kersh. You are corpus-captain of your own company, with all the power and responsibility that entails.’

Zachariah Kersh couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Silence intruded on the gathering.

‘The Fifth…’ he said finally.

‘What is left of it,’ Chaplain Shadrath hissed.

When Kersh didn’t take the data-slate, Gideon stepped forwards and placed it in his ceramite fingertips. ‘Corpus-Captain Thaddeus is dead. Long live Corpus-Captain Kersh. Your orders, corpus-captain,’ Gideon said. ‘From Eschara. From the Chapter Master himself.’

Kersh stared down at the slate. ‘There must be some kind of mistake,’ he insisted. ‘An astrotelepathic error. A garbled communication. Some confusion with the message terminus or destination.’

‘I was the terminus,’ Epistolary Melmoch told him, the broad smile still clear on his warrior’s features. ‘There was no mistake. I transcribed Master Ichabod’s orders personally. He was very specific, as you can read on the slate I’ve prepared for you.’

The Scourge’s gaze was on the floor. His mind light years away.

Gideon spoke. ‘I have taken the liberty of setting your personal serfs to work on packing up your… belongings and transporting them across to the Angelica Mortis, the strike cruiser in whose shadow the Scarifica currently resides. Your strike cruiser, corpus-captain. You will not be alone, either. I’m sending Ezrachi with you. Shadrath tells me the Fifth are bereft of their Apothecary as well as their commanding officer and, Emperor willing, we shall make Eschara without need of his talents.’

Kersh looked to the old Apothecary. Ezrachi raised a crabby brow. The Scourge said nothing for a while. ‘Kersh,’ Gideon said. ‘This is a great honour.’

Kersh’s face was creased with lines of fresh vexation and responsibility. ‘I am corpus-captain of the Fifth…’ he said.

‘You are,’ Chaplain Shadrath confirmed.

‘Then may I have the chamber once more, to fully take on board the magnitude of such an honour and consult the Chapter Master’s orders?’

Melmoch, still smiling, bowed his head and withdrew from the chamber.

‘As you wish,’ Shadrath hissed through his helmet half-grille and followed.

Gideon offered his gauntlet. ‘I know we’ve had our differences,’ he said, ‘but what I saw you accomplish in that arena will stay with me the rest of my days. Let me be the first to congratulate you, corpus-captain.’

Kersh didn’t take the offered hand. He turned to face the altar. Eventually, Gideon let it drop and nodded. It was the Scourge’s way. As he left, with a sneering Dardarius at his heels, Kersh called, ‘I fear you may be the last to do that.’

Gideon stopped and nodded once again.

‘Kersh, to command is not to be liked, feared or even respected. It is to be followed. Every corpus-captain finds his way. Some ways are harder than others, but they are all lonely paths,’ Gideon told him. ‘That’s why I left you Ezrachi.’ With that, Gideon left the chapel-reclusiam.

Once again, silence reigned.

‘This is a mistake,’ Kersh said, looking up at the towering stained-glass tessellations of Katafalque and the Primarch Dorn.

‘As corpus-captain you must master the art of the politician,’ Ezrachi answered. ‘It’s never a mistake when the Chapter Master makes it.’

‘I’m the Scourge,’ Kersh said, not seeming to hear the Apothecary. ‘I was born a warrior. I was engineered to kill.’

‘You’re a killer, yes. But killers need to be led, sometimes by other killers. You think yourself not worthy?’

Kersh let the question hang.

‘You are the first Excoriator to win the Feast of Blades. The first of our kind to earn the primarch’s sword. This promotion is just reward for your efforts at the Feast. Also, you are justly qualified for such a position. Before you were the Master’s Scourge you were a squad whip.’

‘First with the Eighth, second squad. Then, like Tiberias, with the Vanguard – First Company.’

‘Then I fail to see the mistake.’

‘The Feast is a distraction. I am afflicted. The Chapter has lost its standard and shares that affliction. I must assume responsibility for the Stigmartyr’s loss and the damage done as a result. I was a fool to think the Master would welcome my return – with or without the Dornsblade. He cannot trust me by his side. This promotion is a convenience. A way to keep me at arm’s length. Like sending me to the Feast in the first place.’

‘From what I know of the Chapter Master, that seems unlikely.’

‘Have you fought by his side for most of your life, Ezrachi?’ Kersh challenged. ‘Been his blade where his could not be, bled in his stead and been the moment between his life and death?’

‘No,’ the Apothecary admitted.

‘Then tell me not of your observations from afar. I know Quesiah Ichabod. He is a fair and honourable master, the best of us by a light year. He is more than a man, but he is still human and feels as humans do. He is dying. Slowly and in agony because he took an assassin’s blade that should have been mine to turn aside or receive. I am the Scourge!’

‘You are human also,’ the Apothecary reminded him. ‘You may think this promotion a return for some perceived failure or betrayal, but I watch as your all-too-human guilt eats away at you, corpus-captain. You punish yourself enough for both you and the Chapter Master. You view the Darkness as an affliction, but perhaps this is the primarch’s wish. Like Ichabod you were spared the butchery of that dark day on Ignis Prime. You both live your pain but are meant for greater things. The Feast of Blades. Company command.’

‘Command?’ Kersh snorted. ‘You honestly think of me as a commander? I am my brother’s right hand and the blade in his blind spot, not a voice on the vox directing that blade. I am not strategist or tactician. I am an attrition fighter in the best traditions of our Chapter, but when I cross blades I little know what I am going to do next, let alone a hundred others. And of the hundred, why the Fifth? Why did it have to be the Fifth?’

‘There is a poetry to the thinking,’ Ezrachi admitted. ‘You think that you earned the displeasure of your Excoriator brothers at the Feast? Wait until you meet the remainder of the Fifth Company. Then you will come to understand the true hatred of brother for brother.’

‘Like the loathing Master Ichabod must hold for me?’

‘Perhaps that is the point. Or perhaps the Master still has much to teach you and this is in turn a much needed lesson. You said it yourself, we are attrition fighters. We endure as you will endure this new responsibility and all that goes with it.’

‘Does your tiresome advice go with it, Apothecary?’

Ezrachi chuckled. ‘I will give you honest counsel when I can. To be corpus-captain is not to have all the answers. You will lead the way and your brethren will follow, it is as simple as that.’

‘I am a poor choice.’

‘But you are the choice. These are the chains of command, Kersh, and they are binding.’ The Scourge nodded.

‘Now, corpus-captain, if you’ll excuse me I have staff and equipment to transfer to the Angelica Mortis.’

Kersh nodded once more and the Apothecary withdrew, leaving him alone again in the chapel-reclusiam. He approached the altar, looking up at Katafalque and Dorn. He placed his helm and the data-slate of Ichabod’s orders next to the Dornsblade and knelt before the glass representations. He thought on the trials of the Second Founding. Dorn’s own guilt and the agony of the Codex Astartes’ decree, the division of the Legion into autonomous Chapters. He considered the noble features of Demetrius Katafalque at his primarch’s side. The captain who bled with his men before the walls of the Imperial Palace, under the horrific onslaught of the Warmaster’s siege. Holding out for as long as he could. Putting his body between the enemy and his Emperor. Making them pay in blood for every treasonous step. Demetrius Katafalque, whom Rogal Dorn had designated the first Excoriator. The first Master of their Chapter. The Scourge rested his gauntlet on the pommel of his gladius. The weapon he’d received upon becoming a fully-fledged battle-brother, so many years before.

‘Were you ready?’ Kersh put to the stained-glass Katafalque.

The four men of the God-Emperor knelt before the cardinal’s throne.

‘You think it wise to treat the Adeptus Astartes thus?’

‘How many of their calling have you encountered?’ Pontifex Nazimir asked his brother ecclesiarchs across the ancient’s lap. They too wore their years of faith on their faces, but where the cardinal drooled into his vestments, his sycophants still revelled in the wiles of old men.

‘None,’ Convocate Clemenz-Krycek admitted.

‘They’re solemn bastards,’ Confessor Tyutchev complained bullishly. ‘Much in love with their own self-importance and genic heritage.’

‘Common Imperials fear them,’ Nazimir said. ‘They are in awe of their blood-bond with the God-Emperor – but in reality the Adeptus Astartes are little more than genestock slaves.’

‘We are still right to fear them,’ Clemenz-Krycek replied. ‘Surely it is hubris to ensnare the Emperor’s Angels and shackle them to our bidding.’

‘You talk of hubris – an Angel’s prerogative,’ Tyutchev interrupted.

‘I will, of course, be guided by your excellencies in this,’ Arch-Deacon Schedonski told them. ‘But I too have some misgivings about using the Adeptus Astartes in this way.’

‘You would ask them politely for assistance, would you?’ Nazimir teased.

‘No–’

‘For it would be futile. They think themselves removed from the concerns of modern men.’

‘They think of themselves,’ Tyutchev repeated, ‘as the giants of old, battling alien barbarians on far-flung worlds, repeating the mistakes of their failed crusade.’

‘They still look outwards,’ Nazimir said, ‘acting on orders given ten thousand years hence, from an Emperor who was not all He would be. They do not appreciate as we do, the God-Emperor’s divinity.’

‘They deny it.’

‘A brand of heresy in itself,’ Clemenz-Krycek agreed.

‘It would not be the first heretical thought an Adeptus Astartes has entertained,’ Nazimir chuckled darkly, and the four priests made the sign of the aquila.

‘Perhaps a deceit would be preferable,’ the convocate advocated. ‘A truth even, one that played to the Angel’s noble inclinations.’

‘There is no need for such subtlety,’ Nazimir insisted. ‘The Adeptus Astartes were built to fight, not to think. Obedience is wired into their cult observance and fealty to their forefather. Being a martial breed, they are at their best when issued with straight orders and instruction. Their power is ours to wield.’

‘What do you know of these Excoriators?’ Schedonski said.

‘They descend from Dorn’s blood, I think, and favour mortifications of the flesh. They are, of course, one of the Astartes Praeses and have many honours to their name, won garrisoning the Eye and battling the dark forces of the Black Crusades. Their recent history escapes me.’

‘What if this does not go to plan?’ Clemenz-Krycek asked. ‘What if they refuse?’

Nazimir considered the question. ‘The Angels Eradicant Third Company takes supplies and munitions at Port Kreel. A sizeable contingent of White Consuls approaches the subsector from victory in the Ephesia Nebula to the galactic east. Then, there is the Viper Legion on Hellionii Reticuli. We exchange one of their names for the Excoriators Chapter in the record and repeat, until some of these wayward scions finally listen to their God-Emperor’s wishes from our lips.’

‘What if they become unruly?’ Clemenz-Krycek put to the gathering.

‘The convocate has a point,’ Schedonski agreed. ‘We’ll be exposed. Defence force troops garrison the palace – common soldiers are not traditionally tolerated within its holy chambers.’

‘Worry not about our security,’ Confessor Tyutchev assured them. ‘Our frater brothers will not allow violence against us.’

‘You are too close to the Redemptionists,’ Clemenz-Krycek warned.

‘To every shepherd a flock,’ the thick-set confessor replied. ‘Besides, we have the Sisters.’

‘It is settled then,’ Nazimir said and watched Tyutchev and Schedonski nod, followed finally by Clemenz-Krycek. Tyutchev took Cardinal Pontian’s hand. It was thin and frail with swollen joints and skin spotted with age. On one finger the cardinal bore a ring of office bearing the holy symbol of the Adeptus Ministorum. Tyutchev bowed his head to kiss the ring. With his lips to the sacred symbol he squeezed the cardinal’s hand. Crushing several bones within, the confessor prompted the dribbling ecclesiarch to momentarily break his aged insensibility and groan.

‘The cardinal has spoken,’ Pontifex Nazimir proclaimed. ‘And through him, the God-Emperor’s will is known to us…’

I am tempted to think of this as a dream, but know it to be a mere daydream of a nightmare. I lie in my private cell, with space and sparse luxury that as corpus-captain I am yet to get used to. I feel a claustrophobic anxiety crushing me into the stone slab of the berth, regardless. The weight of a responsibility that had not existed before. Ezrachi insists I will grow into it, comparing the feeling to the deadweight of plate first worn and the way in which before long the suit becomes part of the body and no more of a burden than the weight of the limb lifted to swing a gladius or aim a bolter. I am not so sure. Fifty Adeptus Astartes now live or die at my command, with a full squad of those Space Marine Scouts from the Tenth Company, assigned to bolster our numbers. I can feel the weight of their expectations within my chest, making it difficult for me to catch my breath.

There are far worse things waiting behind the lids of my eyes, however. For days now I seem privy to a slideshow of the mind. Images stab into my consciousness without warning during purification, briefings, cage practise and moments of calm reflection in the cruiser reclusiam. Experiences of wanton violence, delivered or received, with perspectives changing between horrible visions from perpetrator to victim. There is blood always, accompanied by suffering and screams, sometimes my own. When I’m not screaming, I’m roaring my jubilant rage. The horror is there and then it is gone, leaving me an irregular beating of the hearts and the copper-tang of blood in the mouth.

At first I considered these flashes of murderous lust to be some manifestation of my existing haunting, that my phantom was to blame. Since I could not consult Chaplain Shadrath over anomalies without crumbling whatever derelict authority I had with the Fifth Company, I reported this new symptom to Ezrachi. I was surprised to find that he too had been experiencing the visions. Further investigation by the Apothecary revealed that we were not the only ones. Without a medical explanation, the haughty Chaplain in turn had to be consulted to provide a spiritual perspective.

The door rumbles aside and Bethesda enters the cell with a bowl. The bowl rattles against the plate upon which it is sitting. If I had been asleep the sound would have woken me. It is Bethesda’s way of announcing her arrival. I sit up and check the time. We are in warp translation. Outside the eddies and currents of the immaterium – a sight never meant for human eyes – ripple and swirl as the Angelica Mortis slows and charges her warp engines, ready to tear her way back into reality. I must confess to an unsettled stomach. I cannot tell whether it is simply the ether-draught of different vessels or the styles of the Navigators piloting them, but this warp jump feels different. I have never had an appetite for warp travel but had just got used to the Scarifica’s smooth passages and the slim frigate’s knife-like dimensional shifts. The strike cruiser, by comparison, is a blunt-nosed beast that bulldozes its way through the currents of the empyrean. The Angelica Mortis’s Navigator – who I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting – goes about his translation like a Land Raider ramming through a blast door. I can feel the vessel below me, smashing through the troughs and prevailing drifts rather than riding them like the Scarifica had done.

There, stood by the opening arch, is my phantom. It has been stood there in the darkness, as has become its unsettling habit, cast in the brilliance of the warp. Its black armour shines with the indescribable spectrum of light and colour flooding the cell. It is almost constantly with me now. Always somewhere, unobtrusive, providing a ghastly background. Whatever it is, it seems to be perpetually on guard, casting me in the role of either prisoner or protectee. I am either being guarded or guarded against. The revenant never speaks but is merely there and ever more so.

The bulkhead opens and my seneschal and lictor enter. They have new robes, as befitting the serfs of an Excoriators corpus-captain. I blink as they file in past the armoured apparition. They seem not to see the thing. This is new. Usually the phantom disappears in the presence of the living. This time it remains for all to see, but for the fact that my serfs seem not to see it at all – the darkness of its armoured form becoming a peripheral blind spot or clouding in the corner of the eye.

Old Enoch mumbles an officious greeting. He is carrying the freshly oiled ‘purge’, ready for my purification. I look to the living and the dead, stunned at how I can be seemingly inbetween. I nod and stand. A moody Oren deposits a bowl of fresh water by my berth and follows his father into my private and adjoining penitorium. Bethesda holds before her the bowl of sourdough bread and Escharan figs. I’m not hungry and give an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

‘You must eat, my lord – to keep up your strength,’ the absterge says. She deposits the plate on the stone of the berth. I go to refute the suggestion but the girl pops a fig into my mouth before I can. She moves to the bowl of water and wrings out a rag. The figs are sweet and more pleasant than I remember. Grumbling, I take another from the plate to settle my warp-churning stomach.

As Bethesda cleanses my flesh in readiness for my purification, Old Enoch and Oren prepare the penitorium for my ‘Donning of Dorn’s Mantle’. Two misshapen servitors enter also, wheeling in the caterpillar-tracked frame upon which my helm and relic armour hangs. My eyes linger on the sheathed blades dangling on their belts from the mount.

After Dorn’s Mantle I don my plate, each piece of ceramite locked and sealed in place by the serfs and servitors. Clearing and reloading my bolt pistol I slip it into my navel holster while Old Enoch and Oren belt my gladii to my hip. The only new addition to the ensemble is Corpus-Captain Thaddeus’s chainsword – a Fifth Company heirloom. A Ryza-pattern rarity, the weapon is relatively short and falchion-shaped, making it perfect for use in areas with restricted space like tunnels and the meat-grinding throngs of battle. The weapon and its harness are strapped to my other thigh.

Oren carries my helm as I make my way through the dormitories, cell blocks and refectory of the strike cruiser. Everywhere I go, unsurprisingly, eyes are averted and heads bowed – a sign of passive defiance easily disguised as subservient acknowledgement. The battle-brothers of the Fifth Company have not forgotten themselves. They are the Adeptus Astartes, proud and bound by centuries of ritual and stricture. I can see through the martial routine and cult observance, however. I see tight jaws and eyes red-rimmed with defeat and loss. They feel the emptiness of the Angelica Mortis and hear the echoes of their butchered brethren. I can hear the snap of the lash with greater regularity than cult observance requires. A company punishing itself beyond the healthy parameters of its primarch’s teachings. Penitoria decks awash with blood. Angels, angry with themselves, furious at me; hollow vessels filling with hate and frustration. I have lived this loathing and there is but one cure. To become honour’s avenger, to right wrongs in the heat of battle; vengeance, surgically applied – the solemn duty for which we were created.

This company is one big open wound. I feel it in the halls and corridors. I feel it across the table of the tactical-oratorium. My officers are gathered here. The great and the good of the Fifth, within whom this pain finds its most intense expression. Again, I have plate, bodies and faces but no eyes. All eyes are on the table. They will not look at me for fear I might know their abhorrence. A hatred born of the shame of my loss both of our precious Stigmartyr and my mind to the Darkness. The same hatred tempered in the fires of their own loss and failure to reclaim the Chapter standard. It is all here, as clear as the Codex Astartes on their faces. The philosopher Guilliman has no advice for me in his great book. Even our own Demetrius Katafalque composed no chapter for this in The Architecture of Agony, although it would have been a worthy subject for his writings.

I sit at the head of a long stone table, a table where the seats are half empty. The absence of the heroes who would have filled those seats has already established a tone. Worse still, I find my phantom has already assumed a dead-man’s seat at the far end of the table. It watches me with a shadowy stillness. The rest of the gathering seem unaware of its macabre presence. I have grown used to the grotesque being and its parlour trickery and attempt to emulate them.

Silence stings the air. Ezrachi is present. The Apothecary is satisfied with his new facilities and Helix-staff, but has found the company’s welcome no warmer than my own. Next to him are the other company specialists: Melmoch, the Fifth’s assigned Librarian and astrotelepathic communications officer – still smiling; Techmarine Dancred with his clockwork face; Chaplain Shadrath, hiding his cold discontent, as always, behind the leering half-skull of his helm. Sitting opposite is Corpus-Commander Bartimeus of the Angelica Mortis, as gruff and blunt as his immaterial voidmanship. Beyond the bridge officer sit the Fifth Company’s remaining squad whips: Ishmael, Joachim and the chief whip, Uriah Skase. Skase is a veteran – as the torn and mangled flesh of his face testifies. It sits on his face like an ugly, snarling mask, seemingly only held together by the staples, stitches and decorative rings that run across it. I have no reason to believe that the rest of his body isn’t scarred in the same way, like some hideous resurrection experiment.

Ezrachi has already told me that Skase is going to be a problem. More so even than Chaplain Shadrath. He is a legend within the company. An assault squad whip, he has more combat experience than the rest of his squad added together. He has walked away from the most grievous injuries and heaviest fighting of the Fifth Company’s many victories and has been at the forefront of the Excoriators’ efforts to reclaim the Stigmartyr from the filth Alpha Legion at Veiglehaven. He is loved by his men, who view him as an indestructible force. Ezrachi heard that he was so unrelenting on the battlefield that on the midnight plains of Menga-Dardra, a Black Legion Land Raider slammed into him with its dozer blade, ran him down and crushed him beneath its tracks, only for the mauled and buckled Skase to get back to his feet and rush back into the heart of the fighting. Worse, he had been Corpus-Captain Thaddeus’s right hand and, with Shadrath, had held the company together in the wake of the atrocities at Vieglehaven. Every Excoriator in the Fifth had fully expected Uriah Skase’s promotion to corpus-captain as a given. That was until Chapter Master Ichabod’s intervention and my unwelcome arrival aboard the Angelica Mortis.

The surviving battle-brothers of the Fifth have been reorganised by Skase into three full squads. He has taken the first, Squad Cicatrix. The second, Squad Castigir, is led by Skase’s own right hand, Squad Whip Ishmael, an Excoriator crafted of much the same unforgiving brutality as the chief whip. Brother Joachim has been recently promoted to whip of Squad Censura. Joachim is younger and fresher of face, but his devotion to Skase and his ideals is clear, assuming the form of a kind of hero worship. Together, the three whips have the allegiance of the company’s fighting brotherhood locked up and the Fifth Company’s detestation of my existence is universal.

The only battle-brothers not under Skase’s influence are the Tenth Company Scouts under Veteran Squad Whip Keturah. Fortunately, Silas Keturah allows for no other influence upon his neophytes but his own. I have felt little warmth for my own authority from the silver-haired veteran, who has clearly not relished using his young charges to bolster the depleted numbers under my command. Whenever we speak, I feel his critical scrutiny through the visor interface built into his brow and the cyclopean burn of the sniper’s single bionic lens, whirring softly to magnification.

By the time I finally speak, I have been sat there for some time – lost in my thoughts. No doubt my brothers will think this some proud indulgence and abhor me all the more.

‘Corpus-commander Bartimeus, when do you expect us to make St Ethalberg?’ Kersh asked across the cool stone of the table. When Bartimeus didn’t immediately reply, Kersh pressed. ‘Learned brother?’

The Scourge immediately regretted the derisive comment. Sarcasm was an indulgence and one not befitting the Emperor’s Angels, let alone a corpus-captain. Ezrachi had warned him that it would be unwise to meet the discontent in the company head on. He advised the Scourge to think like an officer and handle his men as such. Kersh’s belligerence was not so easily tamed, however, and his warrior’s pride was constantly fed by the sting of the company’s own mordant provocation. As Ezrachi had observed, it was fuel for the mutinous cancer already eating away at the Fifth Company’s collective soul. Initially, the Space Marines – already unhappy with the choice of their new corpus-captain – had been taken aback by the Scourge’s manner, but this soon settled into a morose sourness that became the hallmark of their disappointment and acceptance.

‘Warp translation was successful,’ the Excoriators commander mumbled with ill-disguised truculence.

‘Speak up, sir!’ Kersh barked. ‘This is the tactical-oratorium. You’re not talking to one of your bridge drones now, corpus-commander.’

Bartimeus glared at the Scourge. Raising his voice a little, he reported, ‘We are approaching from the edge of the system at quarter sub-light speed.’

‘Why the hesitant approach? Were not my orders to reach the cardinal world at best possible speed?’

‘That is the best possible speed,’ Bartimeus snapped back. ‘The system is crowded with Adeptus Ministorum craft and the like on similar approaches.’

‘Understood,’ Kersh acknowledged. ‘And what of our turbulent passage?’

‘Sir?’

‘I felt every bump and roll in the pit of my stomach. Did we encounter difficulties during the jump?’

‘The Angelica Mortis is a thoroughbred cruiser, a veteran of her class…’ Bartimeus began defensively.

‘I don’t doubt it, corpus-commander,’ the Scourge replied. ‘No censure was intended. I was making reference to the journey, not the vessel.’

Bartimeus’s broad features dropped a little. ‘Immaterial squalls and storms are common this close to the Eye. It is possible that we crossed the wake of a convoy or flotilla, just clear of their entry point.’

‘Possible, corpus-commander?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it possible that it was a fleet or an armada, rather than a convoy?’

‘I’m sure I could not say…’

‘Well let’s try to be sure, shall we? Work with the Epistolary here to have your observations communicated to Cadia and Cypra Mundi. They may contribute to other intelligence. There could be a Black Crusade, for all we know, blasting its way out of the Eye of Terror.’

‘I think that unlikely…’ Bartimeus bit back.

‘And I think we should not profess to know the polluted contents of the Despoiler’s mind.’

‘It’s not the Despoiler,’ Chaplain Shadrath announced.

‘A spiritual perspective, Chaplain?’ Kersh turned on him. ‘I dare say the victims of previous crusades might have thought the same before their untimely deaths.’

‘It is the Keeler Comet,’ Shadrath hissed through his half-grille.

‘Stargazer too, Chaplain?’ Kersh said. ‘Are there no end to your talents? Pray, tell us how this astral body might provide an impediment in the warp?’

‘It’s an unnatural body, my lord,’ Melmoch interjected. The Librarian looked from Kersh to the Chaplain and then back to Kersh. ‘Records show that it was a long-period returning body that last visited the segmentum over ten thousand years ago.’

‘Was?’

‘Upon its return it found the Eye of Terror in its path. Witnessing vessels claim that it has emerged… changed. A blood-red comet, with a trailing ethereal tail and an erratic and unpredictable course.’

‘How can a comet have an unpredictable course?’ Kersh marvelled. ‘It has an orbit, it obeys the laws of gravity.’

‘Not the Keeler, sir,’ the Epistolary insisted. ‘It seems to have a mind of its own.’

‘How do you know of this?’

Melmoch told him. ‘The Ancient Traveller, sir. A pict of the original body, from antiquity, by the remembrancer Euphrati Keeler.’

‘Euphrati Keeler?’

‘Yes, corpus-captain. Saint Euphrati – prophet of the God-Emperor.’

‘The God-Emperor?’ Kersh questioned. ‘You think there not enough traits to set you apart from common Adeptus Astartes, Epistolary Melmoch, that you must indulge a belief that those more than mortal find offensive?’

‘I meant no offence, sir,’ Melmoch stated. ‘Only that the gift to which you allude is believed by some of my kind to be an expression of His divinity.’

‘And by some of mine to be an aberration, good Librarian, but there we have it.’

‘I am not the first Adeptus Astartes to hold such beliefs,’ Melmoch said, his smile still fixed to his face.

‘Well,’ Kersh said, leaning his head against the palm of his gauntlet. ‘We are all learning something today. To think that I was spending my time in the practise cages when I should have been in the Librarium.’

‘Your travels have taken you out of the segmentum, my lord. The comet’s reappearance is a relatively recent occurrence.’

The corpus-captain nodded slow thanks to the Epistolary. The Librarian would have made an able diplomat. Kersh had indeed been out of circulation for some time, but the psyker had only mentioned his duties at the far-flung Feast of Blades – and for this Kersh was grateful. He had not mentioned the time the Scourge had spent in the Darkness. Kersh allowed the index digit of his gauntlet to rest in the raw cavity in the side of his face. It had become a habit during moments of thoughtful reflection. Since losing his eye in the Feast, he had also taken to tapping the metal ball-bearing in the socket of his eye with the ceramite tip of his finger.

‘And what of these visionary distractions the company has been experiencing, Chaplain Shadrath?’ Kersh continued. ‘The Apothecary informs me that he has checked our water, provisions and life support systems for any evidence of tampering or neglect and has found none. I put it to you that there is some other explanation, perhaps the effects of this strange comet Melmoch speaks of.’

‘I believe the malign influence of the comet could be responsible,’ the Chaplain told Kersh evenly, ‘but I detect no signs of outward corruption or spiritual licentiousness. At present I have too little to go on to make an informed judgement.’

‘I am beginning to understand how you feel, Chaplain,’ Kersh retorted. ‘Well, while you reach a conclusion the rest of us will go on fearing for our eternal souls.’ Before Shadrath could reply the Scourge moved furiously on. ‘Brother Dancred, what is the status of the company’s Thunderhawks?’

The two power-towers reaching out of the back of the Techmarine’s adapted armour crackled and arced with energy. Dancred’s clockwork face whirred to life, the nest of Omnissiah-honouring cogs and pinions working in unison like a mask of gears.

‘Two of the company’s Thunderhawks are lost to us, corpus-captain,’ Dancred told him. ‘During the attack on Ignis Prime, the Inwitian was destroyed on the Chapter house landing pad. The Flagellant returned but has sustained too much damage to be saved. I have conducted the appropriate rites and appeased the fading spirit of the fallen machine. It will live on through the invaluable parts it will provide for ongoing repairs to the Demetrius Katafalque III and the venerable Gauntlet. The Impunitas did not partake in the original operation or the rescue on Ignis Prime.’

‘The Impunitas is our only functioning gunship?’

‘Yes, corpus-captain.’

‘Well, Brother Dancred, that simply will not do,’ Kersh said. ‘The Fifth Company will need all of its weapons of war.’

‘The Gauntlet is our oldest and most decorated Thunderhawk. Her firepower will be yours shortly, my lord.’

‘Make sure it is, brother,’ the Scourge said, and then a little softer, ‘and know your efforts are appreciated.’ The Excoriator turned to Ezrachi. ‘Have you had opportunity to inspect the gene-seed?’

‘Apothecary Philemon gathered the progenoids of the dead and dying at the Chapter house, as his solemn duty demanded,’ Ezrachi reported. ‘He lost his life to the Alpha Legion’s second ambush with Corpus-Captain Thaddeus. Squad Cicatrix had the honour of driving back the Traitor Legionnaires and recovering the bodies.’ The Apothecary nodded respectfully across the table at a smouldering Skase who, disarmed at such diplomacy, managed an almost imperceptible nod back. ‘In doing this Chief Whip Skase and his men saved the harvested gene-seed of their fallen brothers, and the company is rightfully in their debt.’

Kersh would not be drawn into the Apothecary’s placation. ‘The seed itself?’

‘In good condition and stored in the apothecarion frigocombs–’

‘And what of the brothers to whom the seed belonged?’ Skase boiled over. He stood, slamming the palms of his gauntlets into the surface of the table. ‘Who knows the price of their esteem? We taketh away. When do we giveth – that’s what I demand to know.’

Kersh burned into him across the stone. ‘Take your seat, brother.’

‘I will not.’

‘What would you give them, whip?’ Ezrachi cut in. ‘Was not their loss lamented in ritual?’

‘He does not speak of ritual,’ Chaplain Shadrath hissed.

‘He speaks of vengeance,’ Kersh said. ‘He speaks of a battle-brother’s gift to his fallen brethren: avengement.’

‘You have intelligence from the Angels Eradicant of Alpha Legion sightings amongst the petrified hives of Rorschach’s World, yet you do nothing,’ Skase accused.

‘You think I hide upon this cruiser – afraid to engage our enemies?’ Kersh seethed. ‘Filth to whom we have both lost so much?’

Skase considered his words. ‘You are the Scourge. You are victor in the Feast of Blades. You have not a cowardly bone in your body… and yet you have found one.’

Within the blink of an eye Kersh was on his feet and had kicked his chair back behind him. Both Excoriators had their gauntlets to their weapons. Kersh gripped the hilt of his chainsword; Skase had his palm on the haft of his power axe, just below the dormant blade, ready to snatch the weapon from his belt. ‘Found your spine, Scourge? Going to cut me down with my corpus-captain’s sword?’

Kersh’s lip curled.

‘I have lived your pain,’ the Scourge told him honestly. ‘No one wants to face the Alpha Legion more than I. They have the Stigmartyr and I am honourless without it. I have pledged on the primarch’s blade that I shall reclaim it, but until I do the blood of those who lost their lives in its taking, and the attempts to reclaim it since, stains these hands.’ Kersh released his weapon and presented his palms to the squad whip. ‘Know that the loss of the Stigmartyr, for me, is more a punishment than you could ever devise. So be satisfied, loyal whip, for no more blood of the Fifth Company will be spilt here today – by my hand or yours. As corpus-captain, I will not permit it.’

‘That’s not good enough…’

‘Well, it will have to be, Chief Whip Skase.’

Skase looked about him at the frozen masks of alarm and expectation around the table. Releasing his axe, the squad whip slowly presented his own open palm and took his seat. ‘I have my orders,’ Kersh announced to the gathering, but his eyes were still on Skase, ‘and you have yours. The reason we do not make straight for Rorschach’s World to act upon this intelligence is because Chapter Master Ichabod has already designated our present duty. His orders take us to St Ethalberg. These are the chains of command,’ Kersh repeated from his earlier conversation with Ezrachi. ‘And they are binding.’ The Scourge let his words sink in. He detected faint nods about the table.

A bridge serf entered. Bowing before Kersh he delivered a whispered message to Commander Bartimeus.

‘We are about to make the cardinal world system,’ Bartimeus relayed gruffly.

‘Oversee the warp translation,’ Kersh ordered, prompting the Excoriators commander to follow the serf out of the oratorium. When the young Joachim and Squad Whip Ishmael got to their feet the Scourge turned on them. ‘Remain!’ he barked, causing the pair to sink moodily back to their seats. ‘Damned insolence,’ Kersh told them. ‘You will leave when you are dismissed and not a moment before.’ He turned back to Skase. ‘You forget yourselves but you can be forgiven, given the poor example set by your chief whip. Therefore, after due consideration, I have decided his punishment to be a three day cessation of ritual observance. Over this time he should consider himself unfit to don the mantle of Dorn.’

Chaplain Shadrath’s helm turned sharply. Ishmael and Joachim glared. Skase sat enraged but silent.

‘Mortification of the flesh is every Excoriator’s right,’ Squad Whip Ishmael shot back.

‘No, brother,’ Kersh returned, ‘it is not. Union with the primarch is a privilege and should be denied to those whose actions have proved unworthy of his ideals. I’m sure Chaplain Shadrath would agree.’

Shadrath said nothing.

‘Then I too volunteer for punishment,’ Ishmael said.

‘Seconded,’ Joachim echoed.

‘As you wish,’ Kersh told them. ‘Your confessed unworthiness is noted. The Chaplain will oversee the implementation of this punishment.’

The oratorium felt the cold sting of the corpus-captain’s orders. The chamber was silent. ‘Dismissed, brothers.’

As the Excoriators left, Ezrachi held back.

‘That could have gone… smoother,’ the Apothecary said. Kersh wasn’t in the mood, however.

‘Why don’t you devote your talents to the wounded pride of my officers?’ Kersh bit back.

‘I fear they are wounds that are already festering and beyond my abilities,’ Ezrachi admitted.

Kersh nodded, appreciating the Apothecary’s appraisal. The Apothecary went to leave.

‘I want you to accompany me down to the cardinal world,’ Kersh called as he reached the oratorium archway.

‘As you wish, my lord,’ Ezrachi said.

‘I need someone who can cut through the Ecclesiarchy politics and subtlety,’ Kersh admitted. ‘I haven’t the ears for Adeptus Ministorum guile and sermonising. I am not much of a politician.’

‘I think you have already proved that today,’ Ezrachi said, allowing himself a dark chuckle before disappearing through the arch. The bulkhead fell to closing and Kersh was left in the empty oratorium.

Looking down the length of the table, the Scourge found himself staring at the revenant, who had been there all the while, like a macabre ornament. The otherworldly eavesdropper sat still and said nothing.

‘What are you looking at?’ Kersh said irritably.

Chapter Five Suspiriana Obligatio

The Thunderhawk Impunitas dropped out of the heavens.

St Ethalberg was a bitter, unforgiving world. As soon as the gunship broke the upper atmosphere it tumbled through a maelstrom of glass-shard gales and caustic snowstorms. Below, the planet surface was a stake trap of steeple-colossi, lofty towers and hive-shrine spires. A dark world of vertiginous devotion, reaching up into the chemical blizzard above.

Zachariah Kersh entered the cockpit. The helmscarl and his crew went to kiss their fists but the corpus-captain stopped them.

‘As you were.’

Kersh stared out through the hail-dashed canopy. Ahead was their destination. Carved from the frost-shattered peaks of the Vatic Heights was St Ethalberg’s administrative and episcopal capital. Here the monstrous pinnacles of the Palace Euphorica breached the clouds, the palace in turn nestling like a behemoth amongst the dark and forbidding sprawl of the grand cathedrals. It was from the daunting heights of the Palace Euphorica that the Ecclesiarchy provided spiritual guidance for the billions of pious St Ethalbergers below and for trillions more beyond the cardinal world and across the subsector. Highest of all was the bulbous tower known as the Pulpit, containing both the cardinal’s throne room and an Adepta Sororitas Preceptory.

‘My lord,’ the co-helmscarl called. Looking out to the left and right of the Thunderhawk, Kersh saw a pair of Vendetta gunships falling into escort position.

‘Identify.’

‘Ethalberg Inclements, fourth reserve.’

‘Defence force?’

‘Aye, my lord.’

‘Confirm our credentials and take us in,’ Kersh commanded.

Flanked by the local military aircraft, the battle-scarred Impunitas made for the landing pads that sprouted from the tower minaret like a crown. With the pock-marked Thunderhawk on the deck and Vendettas hanging with ominous intent in the sky like scavenging raptors, the Excoriators disembarked. Striding out into the cruel bluster of the cardinal world stratosphere, Kersh watched Scouts from Tenth Company’s Squad Contritus fan out with their silver-haired squad whip ahead.

Silas Keturah and his neophytes were all clad in their ceremonial carapace and dark, hooded cloaks, which streamed behind them in the relentless gales. They clutched slender sniper rifles to their chests. Each trailed a clutch of neat cables that disappeared beneath their mantles as well as large magnocular sights, laser guidance and long barrels terminating in a chunky muzzle, decorated with a fluttering Chapter pennant. The Scout squad took ceremonial flanking positions and walked the Excoriators party into the cardinal’s palace. For his unpurged sins, Kersh had Ezrachi, Epistolary Melmoch and Chaplain Shadrath accompany him.

Above the landing pad, amongst the busy Gothic architecture of the Pulpit, Kersh spotted gun emplacements and demi-turrets mounting heavy stubbers and autocannon. This didn’t surprise the Scourge. The Palace Euphorica was not only the cardinal’s seat, it was also the residence of the planetary lord. On St Ethalberg these positions were one and the same. The local defence force therefore had the responsibility of securing the palace perimeter, though they were rarely tolerated beyond its gates. Kersh looked up at a crow’s nest and watched the Ethalberg Inclements shiver in their Guardsman’s flak and sink down into the moth-eaten fur of their lined jackets.

The Excoriators marched, dwarfed by the gargantuan archways, naves and vaulted aisles of the cathedral palace. They were greeted by a gushing wretch of a cleric-warden, whose responsibility it was to officiate the north-west advent-archway. Due to the altitude, and like everyone else who worked within the palace, the warden wore a smeared plas altitude mask. The warden chattered inanely as he led the Space Marines inside, the warmth of his breath a continual stream of white haze escaping his mask.

Inside the monstrous dimensions of the Palace Euphorica, flocks of ancient priests and miserable novitiates moved across the polished obsidian expanse like birds, while others emerged from the myriad confessional booths and private chapels lining the chambers. Muscular fraters in sectarian skirts and conical sackcloth hoods observed the Adeptus Astartes with obvious suspicion from the darkness of ragged eyeholes. Kersh observed the Redemptionists with equal suspicion, and in particular, the slung-straps and crescent clips of grubby autoguns that were protruding from behind their bully-boy backs.

The ambulatory along which they walked was punctuated with lecterns, pulpits and altars, while statues of all-but-forgotten saints and ecclesiarchs seemed to watch the Excoriators pass beneath their stony gaze. Behind these, at intervals along their path, Kersh spotted the gleaming darkness of the revenant’s plate – the deathless thing appearing much like a statue itself. The open space about the Excoriators was thick with the bass of devotional choirs and sibilant chanting, but the air itself was thin and gelid.

Through an endless succession of cavernous chambers, the Space Marines were led by the warden into the equally enormous palace throne room. Kersh snorted. A chill mustiness assailed his nostrils like the smell of bad meat in an ice-locker. The throne room itself boasted power-armoured sentinels: bolter-wielding members of the Adepta Sororitas. With their claret-coloured plate and dusty black vestments, Kersh recognised the Daughters of the Emperor as belonging to the Order of the Bloody Rose. He nodded his head at the Celestian in respect but found that his generous gesture was not returned.

Although the throne room was large, it seemed crowded, as befitting a centre of episcopal and administrative authority. A woebegone choir seemed to hold the same despondent note while a small legion of cenobite scribes scratched commandments and observances into vellum with barbed quills. Armed Redemptionists milled about the devotional throngs, while vergers lit candles and restocked globes of billowing incense that swung on extensive lengths of chain suspended from the chamber ceiling.

At the epicentre of the activity was a vaulted throne, sat atop a tall stone column. The column was situated between a nest of other stunted pillars, each displaying a fully armed Sister of Battle, standing statuesque around the throne. A rickety scaffold had been constructed about the structure to enable access to the column’s summit and the frame was swarming with Sisters of various Orders Hospitaller. The throne itself was illuminated by a shaft of kaleidoscopic light falling from a circular stained-glass window situated in the ceiling. The desiccated husk who sat upon the throne was buried in a mitre and the heavy robes of his calling. A mind of mulch, within the wasted body of an ancient, Cardinal Bonifacius Pontian occasionally dribbled recitations or befuddled prayers to the gathering.

At first Kersh took Pontian to be the source of the chamber’s crisp stench. The cardinal had probably been quietly rotting away on the throne for the best part of a half-millennium. But the smell was not Pontian. Casting his eyes up the wall of both sides of the throne room, the Scourge regarded what he thought at first glance to be decorative stone statues and gargoyles. Water ran from the goylespouts and down the architecture in the manner of an ornate water feature, to be collected in the fonts that lined the wall below. The water was clearly collected from the steeple architecture, after falling as caustic sleet from the bitter cardinal world sky. Upon second inspection, however, Kersh saw that the forms were not statues built into the wall but unfortunates chained from it. Heretics, witches and mutants – unbelievers all – suspended from the cathedral-palace walls. Their faces and extremities were black and frostbitten, their features dissolved in the baptism of an agonising chemical-freeze. Their slow suffering, in turn, blessed the waters of the fonts below – waters that were being collected and distributed in vials to favoured priests and devout clerics across St Ethalberg and the subsector beyond.

‘Sir,’ Ezrachi said, drawing the Scourge’s attention back to a pack of priestly jackals who were approaching the Excoriators. The cleric-warden backed away like a beaten dog. Four ecclesiarchs presented themselves; old, wiry men, knotted with age and cunning. The first had been surrounded by Sisters of the Order of the Eternal Candle, who had parted at his brusque insistence. He limped over to the Adeptus Astartes using an ornate cane and was joined by a priestly inferior, who had fire in his eyes. Another ecclesiarch had been in deep discussion with a Guard officer and his ensign, while a thick-set third had been flanked by two brutish Redemptionists, who looked more like bodyguards than part of the priest’s pious congregation. Peeling off from their retinues, the four converged on the advancing Excoriators.

‘Corpus-Captain Kersh,’ the first announced with a sickly smile. He jabbed his cane towards the Scourge. ‘I am Nazimir, Pontifex-Urba of the Palace Euphorica. Welcome to St Ethalberg.’

Kersh cast his eyes over the pontifex at the heretics suffering on the wall. ‘Thank you, pontifex, but I can think of few places in the galaxy less welcoming than this,’ he told him.

Nazimir managed a sardonic laugh, passing Kersh’s reply off as a joke. ‘Can I introduce Convocate Clemenz-Krycek, Confessor Tyutchev and Arch-Deacon Schedonski.’

‘You can,’ Kersh said, ‘but I’m even less interested in meeting them than I was in meeting you.’

Nazimir’s smile died on his face.

‘We have invited you into our–’

‘No, sir,’ Kersh corrected him. ‘You have demanded an audience with the Emperor’s Angels. You now have that audience. You have applied some mysterious pressure, through your wiles and politicking, that has meant that Quesiah Ichabod – Master of the Excoriators Chapter – has insisted I exchange words with Cardinal Pontian of St Ethalberg. I am here to do just that. No less. No more.’

‘We speak for the cardinal,’ Nazimir said, leaning on his cane.

‘The cardinal cannot speak for himself?’

‘Not for many years now.’

‘Then the cardinal and I have said all that we are ever going to say,’ Kersh told them and turned away. Marching for the colossal archway egress, the Scourge said into his vox, ‘Impunitas, this is Kersh. Prepare–’

‘Corpus-captain!’

‘Excoriator!’

‘Kersh!’

Something hit the Scourge’s pauldron. With blistering reflexes the corpus-captain turned and snatched the object out of the air, his face a mask of grizzled venom. In his gauntlet he held a crumpled vellum scroll. The stunted Schedonski held the other end in his gnarled claws with the length of manuscript taut between them.

‘That was unwise, mortal,’ Ezrachi warned.

‘This is the Suspiriana Obligatio,’ Schedonski continued. ‘It details the mysterious pressure you speak of, Excoriator. It is the holy covenant that binds us and blesses our union with common purpose.’

Snatching it from the priest’s grip, Kersh slapped the tattered scroll into Melmoch’s chestplate. The Librarian scanned through the manuscript, feeding the length of the scroll through his gauntlets as he read. The Epistolary’s eyes blazed across the complexities of Adeptus Astartes Chapter commitments, blood oaths and the resolutions of antiquity. His shoulders sagged.

‘Well?’ Kersh pressed, his snarling face still fixed on Schedonski.

‘It’s a small avocation, my lord, but it exists. The cardinal world is granted succouricance rites for their role in the prayer-suppression of the daemon Chorozramodeus. These are guaranteed through the Conclave Suspiria and the Decree Vinculum, sworn on the bones of Constantine of Alamar. These rites extend through the unhonoured obligations of the Relictors, an existing accord between Chapter Masters Bardane and Abadiah – and through Abadiah, Master Ichabod. The rights also extend through the reassignment of the Aquinas and Ptolemy subsector boundaries. This, sir, all reinforced by a solitary but significant verse from the Mythos Angelica Mortis.’

‘The witchbreed speaks true,’ Schedonski spat, ill-disguising his disgust at the presence of the psyker.

‘Kersh,’ Nazimir sneered as Schedonski gathered the vellum. ‘You have obligations, corpus-captain. The weight of history lies on your broad shoulders. It would be a shame to see you falter and have such responsibilities pass from the penitent Relictors, through your failings, to another Chapter.’

‘That is why your Chapter Master has sent you here,’ Confessor Tyutchev pitched in. ‘He appreciates the import of pact and decorum. Mind you do the same, Excoriator.’

‘Be guided by the God-Emperor’s will in this, Angel,’ Convocate Clemenz-Krycek instructed.

Kersh let the ecclesiarchs’ insults wash over him. He looked to Ezrachi. He had brought the Apothecary along to help him cut through such chicanery.

‘You have words for these words?’ Kersh asked him.

Ezrachi’s face was taut with tension. The priests’ conduct had irritated him as much as any Excoriator in the chamber.

‘We are the Adeptus Astartes,’ he replied. ‘Our actions speak louder than our words.’

Kersh nodded. ‘Squad Contritus, are you in position?’ the Scourge said simply. His vox crackled back a short confirmation. Nazimir’s hooded eyes narrowed with confusion. The priests looked about the throne room. The Excoriators’ escort of Scout Marines had vanished. Only Kersh and his power-armoured brothers remained. ‘Pick your targets,’ Kersh said, his eyes burning into Nazimir. Red dots appeared on the hoods of armed Redemptionists about the room, causing consternation and panic in the hordes of clerics, scribes and menials about them.

‘You would mount an operation within the Palace Euphorica!’ the pontifex screamed incredulously.

‘Execute,’ Kersh commanded.

A thud-whoosh reverberated about the chamber. Headless bodies crashed to the cathedral floor in unison. The response was immediate. The statuesque Sisters of Battle in their crimson power armour turned to present arms – the gaping barrels of their bolters pointing at the Excoriators. The Inclement Reserves immediately went for their officer sidearms and, like the fraters who had got their chunky fingers to their secreted autoguns, were scanning the alcoves, statues and doorways to private chapels for any sign of their assailants. Squad Whip Keturah and his Scouts had all long secreted themselves, peeling off one by one unnoticed to take concealed positions about the colossal chamber. They had attached sonic-suppressors and set their rifles to non-visible wavelengths.

‘What are you doing?’ Convocate Clemenz-Krycek shouted.

‘Again,’ Kersh ordered. Spinning around, the priests watched a fresh set of frater bodies hit the throne room floor. Scribes and clerics shrieked and scattered like a flock of frightened birds. Kersh spotted the phantom at the heart of the horror and confusion. It watched and waited. The thunder of bells rang through the palace.

‘My lords!’ Schedonski called.

‘The Angels have gone mad,’ Nazimir screamed at the Adepta Sororitas, waving his cane about. ‘Defend the cardinal!’

‘Kill the interlopers!’ Tyutchev yelled to his frater militia.

‘Hit them again,’ Kersh said impassively. Once more, the bodies rained to the ground.

The thick-set confessor stepped over the dead and walked fearlessly towards the Excoriators. ‘Heretics in our midst, corrupted by the dark power of the Eye,’ Tyutchev blurted, before finding the broad blade of a ceremonial kris come to rest beneath his wrinkled chin. A helmeted Sister Superior stood behind the confessor.

‘Stop this!’ the ancient Nazimir wheezed.

‘The confessor is correct,’ Kersh announced calmly. ‘There are heretics in our midst. Do your duty, Sister.’

Nazimir, Clemenz-Krycek and Schedonski all exchanged horrified glances. The battle-sister hesitated long enough to demonstrate that the Excoriator’s words were encouragement rather than instruction. Then she slit the confessor’s throat, spraying Nazimir with blood, and allowed Tyutchev’s body to fall with his Redemptionists. For a moment the throne room was lost for words.

‘What are you doing?’ Clemenz-Krycek finally repeated.

‘Tell them,’ Kersh ordered.

Chaplain Shadrath gave the fool ecclesiarchs the horror of his half-skull helmet. ‘The Adeptus Ministorum is forbidden to keep men under arms,’ he hissed, ‘by order of the High Lords of Terra. You have broken the Decree Passive – a violation punishable by death.’

A clumsy stampede could be heard in the adjoining chamber accompanied by the echo of hastily issued orders. The bells had summoned the Ethalberg Inclement Reserves in their threadbare furs and cheap flak.

‘Squad Contritus, stand by,’ Kersh spoke calmly into his vox-link.

‘No, no, no!’ Arch-Deacon Schedonski shouted, waving his arms at the giant archway entrance to the throne room. He was swiftly accompanied by the Guardsmen to whom he had been talking. The officer and his ensign ordered the charging defence force troops to stand down.

‘We had no knowledge of the Redemptionist transgression,’ Convocate Clemenz-Krycek said.

‘For the love of the God-Emperor, please, I beg of you,’ Nazimir pleaded. Kersh looked to Epistolary Melmoch and found the psyker’s disarming smile waiting for him.

‘I hear enough of this God-Emperor from my Librarian,’ Kersh told them. ‘The love of our Emperor?’ Kersh marvelled. ‘You think yourself worthy of that?’ Nazimir fell to his arthritic knees. ‘You think you can earn his love through your worthless words? Your hives and palaces of soulless devotion? Your veneration of an empty idea? I feel the love of my father, as he felt the love of his. This flesh – these hearts – were made to feel. His blood courses through my veins. His loss lives on behind these eyes. He is more than man, but he is not a god. It is your fear that casts him as such. You are weak and foolish, and in your billions need him to be more than he is. But you are wrong, mortal. He is more than man for not being some all-powerful deity. His deeds are his own and we aspire to his greatness – not appropriate it, mythologise it and worship it as a shield against a galaxy of petty doubt, dread and pain. For his love I would do anything. I would obliterate this palace from orbit, for example.’

‘And you should,’ Chaplain Shadrath hissed with masked menace.

Nazimir gagged and vomited in his altitude mask. The stringy gruel dribbled out onto the throne room floor. Kersh looked from the Chaplain to the approaching convocate.

‘We ask only mercy, my lord,’ Clemenz-Krycek implored him.

‘But I won’t,’ Kersh said finally. ‘I will not destroy a world on a technicality.’ Shadrath turned away in silent disgust.

‘An Angel’s wisdom indeed,’ Clemenz-Krycek gasped and kissed the Excoriator’s gauntlet.

‘As the Fifth Company will not shirk their responsibilities on a technicality, either,’ Kersh said.

‘Rorschach’s World waits for us,’ Shadrath insisted. ‘It will not wait forever.’

‘Noted, Chaplain,’ the Scourge answered. ‘But Chapter Master Ichabod’s word has been given and we will honour it.’

‘Thank you, my lord. A thousand thanks,’ Clemenz-Krycek said.

‘Now, mortal,’ Kersh said, looking up briefly at the insensible ecclesiarch in the elevated throne above. ‘What does the cardinal ask of the Excoriators? Be brief – our patience wears thin.’

Clemenz-Krycek bent down and rifled the vomit-splattered robes of his pontifex. He extracted a data-slate and handed it to the corpus-captain.

‘The Keeler Comet blasts across the night skies of the subsector,’ the convocate said. ‘The crimson comet brings doom to all the planets on its path. This is well known. But it brings fear and madness to the region as a whole. An explosion of cultish activity. Insanity, violence, bloodshed. The statues of the Notre Dumas shrineworld bleed for the ungovernable atrocities committed there. Our sister cardinal world of St. Faustina is in uproar, with the enforcers forced to put down riot and rebellion with brutal force. The sanctuary worlds of Frau Mauro and Benedictus Secundus suffer blood cults and outbreaks of vampiric contagion. We have also lost contact with the Preceptor retreats on Caritas Minoris, Boltoph’s World and VII-Solace-Sixteen. We despatched the cloister-corvette Seraphic Dawn to investigate these mysteries, but she too has not returned. And this is but the Ministorum worlds in the subsector. Emperor only knows what is happening on the others. We fear for what might be in store for St Ethalberg itself. We have trebled persecutions within our jurisdiction, requested more Sisters from the Convent Prioris on Terra and prayed for the intervention of the Holy Ordos.’

‘We are the Astartes Praeses,’ Kersh announced. ‘It is the Excoriators’ sacred duty to garrison damnation’s borders. What you speak of is not unusual in such regions. The Eye of Terror is a storm. Its immateriology is unpredictable and cruel.’

‘But the comet, my lord–’ Clemenz-Krycek insisted with his eyes to the floor.

‘Is a new manifestation, I grant you,’ Kersh admitted. ‘As you have observed yourself, however, we are the Emperor’s Angels. We are not investigators. We are not charged with keeping order on Imperial worlds. I suggest you pursue the advice of the Inquisition. If the local military forces on these worlds cannot cope, then the Ordo Hereticus will use its influence with the Imperial Guard to have regiments brought in-sector and assigned to peace-keeping and security duties.’

‘Corpus-captain,’ the convocate said, ‘there is a small planet, out in the Andronica Banks, close to Hinterspace – a cemetery world called Certus-Minor.’

‘Go on,’ Kersh prompted.

‘Like the Preceptor retreats, we have lost contact with the cemetery world. We have stopped receiving astrotelepathic messages, and our last convoy of necrofreighters have not returned. Pontifex-Mundi Oliphant is both planetary governor and senior ecclesiarch of the cemetery world. The last few messages we did receive from him indicated that Certus-Minor was experiencing the same problems as other worlds with heretic cults. The very last, that his people had discovered a colossal monument, made of human skulls and bearing the markings of the Ruinous Powers.’

‘This giant monument just appeared?’ Kersh frowned. ‘I find that hard to believe. Were there no witnesses to its construction?’

‘I cannot answer to that. Pontifex Oliphant communicated fears that cultists operating on the planet might be trying to summon some unholy creature from the warp – that the object might be a gate or portal. He was instructed to quarantine the region around the object, establish a prayer-cordon and not interfere directly with it. He was told we were sending for assistance.’

‘You want us to destroy this dread monument?’ Kersh asked.

‘And whatever might proceed from the infernal artefact,’ Clemenz-Krycek replied. ‘We have heard nothing from Oliphant since – and that was over a month ago.’

Kersh looked at Epistolary Melmoch. ‘Opinion.’

‘This close to the Eye, anything is possible. I echo your concerns about this portal’s construction, but with the right tracts and dark knowledge a group of accomplished cultists might be able to achieve such a Ruinous wonder.’

Kersh looked to Ezrachi.

‘It is the Chapter Master’s wish that these obligations be honoured,’ the Apothecary commented, adding with a harsh edge, ‘no matter how foolishly these miserable wretches have acted in our midst. They are but mortal, after all.’

Kersh turned back to Clemenz-Krycek. ‘You went to a great deal of trouble to secure our involvement. What is the significance of this cemetery world?’

‘Certus-Minor is the birthplace of Umberto II – Ecclesiarch and High Lord of Terra. It is also the location of the memorial mausoleum containing his bones. It was the Ecclesiarch’s dying wish that he return. Such a prestigious burial ground is secured at a premium by the great and good of our fair Imperium. It is a holy place – we cannot allow the unclean to contaminate its sacred soil.’

Kersh considered the power and influence wielded by the families of the dead, their loved ones bound for a costly grave plot on the distant Certus-Minor. It was little wonder that the Ecclesiarchy on St Ethalberg had managed to secure the Excoriators’ involvement. Kersh felt a shoulder plate press against his own. It was Shadrath.

‘May I speak with you?’ the Chaplain hissed.

‘Proceed, Chaplain. We are all friends here now.’

Shadrath held on to his words and his fury a few moments longer.

‘We have intelligence of Alpha Legion activity in the Scintilla Stars,’ he stated, finally. ‘We have a small portal of opportunity. I suggest we take it. The Fifth Company’s finest hour waits for us on Rorschach’s World – not some miserable cemetery world in the lonely depths of Hinterspace. The Stigmartyr is there for the taking, but our sworn enemy will not wait.’

‘Nonsense, Chaplain,’ Kersh said. ‘It is the Alpha Legion of which you speak. Rorschach’s World is a trap and the intelligence allowed us by that most secretive of Legions is our invitation. We will be there for the taking. The trap will wait for us, Chaplain, for we have yet to spring it.’

‘Corpus-captain–’

‘Calm yourself, Chaplain Shadrath,’ the Scourge warned. ‘Before you do us both an injury.’ The Chaplain shook his helmet slightly before backing away. ‘Convocate. Pontifex,’ Kersh addressed the priests. ‘Chapter Master Ichabod’s word is his bond, as is mine. My Excoriators will travel to Certus-Minor, destroy this corrupt monument and anything that has issued forth from its darkness. I pledge no less but no more. Then, I hunt Traitor Angels in the Scintilla Stars as my Chaplain advises.’

‘Bless you, my lord,’ Clemenz-Krycek said, kissing the Excoriator’s withdrawing gauntlet once again.

‘Squad Contritus, vigilance on the withdrawal. Proceed,’ Kersh voxed. From alcoves, gargoylesque wall flourishes and behind statues, fonts and chained heretics, the Scout squad emerged. They stepped lightly and with caution through the throngs of throne room onlookers, their cloaks about them and the long barrels of their sniper rifles lowered. As the Excoriators made their way from the chamber, escorted by a reforming Squad Contritus, Kersh bowed his head to the helmeted Sister Superior. ‘Sister, I leave you this mess to clean up,’ the Scourge told her. She stood impassive. He turned to leave.

At the great archway entrance the Excoriators came face to face with Arch-Deacon Schedonski and the swarm of Inclement Reserves summoned by the bells. The scrawny Guardsmen gulped and parted as the striding giants moved through their number. Among them, the armoured visitant stood, Kersh catching a glimpse of the darklight in one bony eye socket through the crack in the vision’s helm. Kersh stopped, looking from an uncertain Schedonski back to the bright-eyed Clemenz-Krycek and miserable Pontifex Nazimir, knelt in his own vomit.

‘Pontifex – where is your Emperor now?’ Kersh asked. He crossed his arms and extending a finger on each gauntlet, pointed at his twin hearts. ‘He is here. We shall deliver your cemetery world. I have given your cardinal my pledge. Let me give you another. I am Adeptus Astartes, mortal. If you or your mongrel priests ever attempt to issue ultimatums to me or my brothers again, you will hear my own, issued in the thunder of my bombardment cannon, as I wipe you and your palace from the face of this world with one righteous strike.’

The ecclesiarchs nodded their dumbfounded understanding.

Kersh turned and marched from the throne room. ‘Impunitas – this is Kersh. We are inbound. Prepare for take-off.’