streets away and glory stripped from him by lesser World Eaters. Warband brothers of the Anointed, the Crimson Covenant and Sons of Skalathrax had killed and been killed in a battle that had stricken the killer-crowded city like a blood clot to the heart.
In common with all of the Cholercaust’s victories, the cemetery world had fallen swiftly and easily. Such a god-honouring burden was the World Eaters’ to shoulder. They were the victims of their own vicious success. This was why the Pilgrim had led them on the blood comet’s path. Only the heavily fortified worlds of Segmentum Solar and Terra itself held the challenge Khorne’s servants demanded. Somewhere on the cemetery world, however, the Emperor’s Angels were surviving, and this filled Umbragg’s flesh with simultaneous rage and desire. The False Emperor’s pawns had to be destroyed, but they had to die at Umbragg’s hand. Only He of the Brazen Flesh deserved such a sacrifice.
His murderous instincts had led him away from the havoc and carnage, out through the cobbled, labyrinthine slope-streets of a district already torched and sundered. The tall walls of chapels, hermitages and domiciles smoked and curled with flame. Blood splattered the streets in acts of violence past enjoyed. Guardsmen with antiquated weaponry, thin flak and dressed in sombre and ridiculous ceremonial robes littered the gutters. The ease of their butchery was evident. Umbragg felt the fluttering heartbeat of a dying Certusian nearby.
A mindless slave-soldier, naked and smeared from head to foot in gore, burst from an alley and raced across the cobbles with a nail-spiked club. By the time Umbragg had stalked up to the scene, the feral world cult conscript had beaten the brains from the broken body of the Guardsman. Umbragg felt the mortal’s heart hammer in his chest and then stop. He savoured the moment, but it only served to stoke his fury and remind him of the emptiness inside his own chest that should have been filled with the murderous delight of gluttonous life-taking and the slaughter of heroes. Without even bringing the chainaxe to life, the World Eater bludgeoned the slave-soldier into the ground with the razored weight of the weapon.
The feral worlder died instantly. His heart stopped with sudden efficiency. Beyond, an Adeptus Astartes hung from the shattered, skeletal metalwork of a burned-out building. His helmetless face was black with blood and the severity of mob-issued beating. His plate had been rent and punctured. An arm was missing. The clean pits of bolt- rounds mottled the ivory of his armour. The emblage of his Chapter could just be made out on his axe-cleaved shoulder plate. The Excoriators. Umbragg snorted. Dorn’s breed. A hateful derision started building in his twisted mind, but it died moments later. The World Eater’s instincts had not brought him to the eye of the storm for nothing, to savour the abhorrent calm of aftermath. He felt the Blood God’s eye on him, judging this wasted time. Here, away from the rush of daemoniacal destruction that the Cholercaust was bringing to other parts of the city.
Umbragg bridled. On the light breeze, he felt the fearful beating of other hearts. Out beyond the ancient stone of the walls, the burning buildings and the raging multitudes of tainted mortals, armoured slaughterkin and daemon madness. Amongst the overpowering stench of the tomb, the stale tang of old rot and the death-saturated scent of grave dust, Umbragg detected the sweet perfume of life and the living. There were mortals here – thousands of them – hidden from the inevitable and hoarding their skulls. Like a carnivore, enraptured at the prospect of fresh hunting grounds, Umbragg stood, his fists tight about his axe shafts; the primordial darkness of his brain struggling with what he could sense but could not see; his blood coursing with rage at the prospect of plots, scheming and trickery.
The World Eater did not see the ghost behind him. The darkness of a shadowy alcove that become a silhouette in the street smoke. The silhouette that became armoured detail. The revenant that became reality at the Traitor’s back. Umbragg never saw the rachidian horror of bone-moulded plate or the auric flame that danced off the ceramite’s bitter, black surface. He never saw the rent faceplate of the damned legionnaire appear over his brain-speckled shoulder, nor the burn of unnatural life glowing within the skull-socket of the being within. All the berserker heard was the nasty chatter of teeth before the cursed edge of the legionnaire’s short sword slid across the World Eater’s armoured neck. Passing through the plate like an apparition, the blade assumed its lethality within, its keen edge – honed to eternity – slicing through the World Eater’s brazen flesh and cutting his throat to the bone.
Chainaxes clattered to the cobbles. The World Eater crashed to the floor in a heavy metal avalanche of ceramite and hatred. His killer had gone – vanished back into the smoke and ether from whence it came. Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh – World Eater, Traitor, mass-murderer and champion of Khorne – bled his remaining life into the gutter. Alone, the infamous monster and warrior-tyrant died an unknown death, his warped hearts beating their thunderous last in a street so small and insignificant to the rest of the galaxy that it didn’t even have a name.
Zachariah Kersh could have little idea what had started in the streets below. The corpus-captain stomped along the roofside, his boots smashing through the tiles and punching into the lead and strutage beneath. The Excoriators had made good on their escape from the cloistrium, ascending through the floors of the sepulchre before smashing their way up into the roof using their fists and blades. A messy climb had taken them up through the balconies of a block-domicilia where, out of the range of pistol-fire, the Adeptus Astartes had watched the great
The honoured war machine had done the bloody work of ten immortals, blasting behemoths, turning cultist hordes to flesh-spatter and driving back hell-spawned daemons. It was the World Eaters that finally beat the cannon. It took a fair number of their brethren with its cold, calculating barrage of rhythmic havoc. The cloistrium became a smouldering pit of twisted ceramite and flesh that refused to die. World Eaters stormed the Thunderfire cannon’s position, crawling, limbless, overcome with fury and frustration. Bastard-brothers of the Traitor Legion – attracted by the roar of battle and the copper-tinge of death on the air – threw themselves into the chaos, climbing over their wounded brethren who filled the ordnance-pounded crater the space had become. Other warbands visited their fury on adjoining walls, smashing through old brick and mortar with their hammers, axes and shoulders. It was through such an opening that heretic Angels of the Crimson Covenant gained access to the rear of the sepulchre and came up behind the itinerant cannon, hacking into its armoured shell and ammunition feed with their chainaxes.
Kersh leapt from the edge of the domicilia and across the street to the mezzanine of an opposing tower- obsequium. The mezzanine floor cracked and shuddered as Melmoch followed – the Epistolary looking like pale hell as he demolished a stained-glass window with his force scythe and climbed through. Novah, still clutching the company standard, helped the grievously injured Chaplain on the take-off. Kersh grabbed Shadrath’s armour where a World Eater’s battleaxe had opened up his plate, and helped him to the window. Beyond, the Epistolary smashed and clambered his way up through the tower.
With Brother Novah and Skase across, the Scourge risked a glance down at the street below. The roaring rose up to meet him. All he saw were the maniac multitudes. Thoroughfares and posternways crowded with cultist fighters, World Eaters and their armoured renegade cousins stomping barbarously through the throng, and daemons crawling up walls and bounding fiendishly between ledges.
Obsequa City was a testament to insanity. Churches, chancelleries and frater houses were raging infernos, lighting up the necroplex beyond – still a wild ocean of charging heretics and Chaos cultists. The night sky flashed with the occasional streak of lance-fire, although to Kersh’s knowledge only the Adeptus Ministorum defence monitor
‘Corpus-captain!’ Novah called, prompting the Scourge to duck in through the smashed window and follow the trail of destruction up through the tower. Every rooftop and steeple was an opportunity to climb higher. Every box-stoop and maintenance portico took a superhuman leap of faith, across the narrow spaces of cultist-filled streets and quads. Gargoyle-encrusted walls, drain conduits and masonry scaffolding helped the Excoriators work up through the steep, climbing architecture of the city and on towards the imposing structure and distinctive dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum.
As the Adeptus Astartes edged around cupolas, ran along apexes and braved the vertiginous heights of gable walls and slender diameters of bridging supports, they could hear the Cholercaustians below, screaming up the cobbled passages and stairwells to get ahead of them. Where slave-soldiers ascended the fussy architecture of the heights in their path, Kersh and Skase had stamping boots and the finger-slicing tips of their blades waiting. Daemons were a much bigger problem, with the horned heralds of the Blood God’s pantheon forced to leap further and further as Epistolary Melmoch demolished spires and walkways behind the escaping Excoriators. A huge flock of winged furies had taken to circling the towertops surrounding the Mausoleum, occasionally forcing the Space Marines to take cover in alcoves or press themselves flat to roofs in order to escape a swarm-mauling of wings and daggered claws. The monstrous myriad plunged through minarets and thrashed their thunderbolt course through
