belfries and cathedral lunette windows. Kersh saw blasted specimens fall from the flock as they ritually circled an abbey tower on the outskirts of the city, las-fire cutting daemons down with each pass. With horror the Scourge realised that one of Keturah’s sniper Scouts had escaped attention and had maintained his isolated defence against the countless masses.
As he hauled himself up a steeple maintenance ladder, Kersh noticed that the almost clockwork circling of the daemon flock had failed to materialise. Peering around the copper tiling, the corpus-captain saw the flock molesting the abbey tower, crawling about the exterior and clawing through a balistraria. It became obvious to the Excoriator that this was how the Cholercaust had dealt with the Tenth Company sniper threat. As he ascended the ladder, the remaining Excoriators behind him, Kersh saw the bell tower light up. An explosion – a grenade, the Scourge suspected – had taken out the belfry, the sniper and a number of the daemons, which plummeted towards the ground on what was left of their smashed, flaming wings. Pausing on the ladder, Kersh rested his forehead against the cool metal and mouthed a cult observation – a ritual thanks for a brother’s sacrifice. Sickened to the bottom of his stomach, the corpus-captain realised how many observances he had missed during the Long Night of the Cholercaust invasion.
As he reached the top of the maintenance ladder, Kersh leapt for the stone guttering of an adjacent shrine and hauled himself up onto the waterlogged expanse of its flat, modest roof. There the corpus-captain waited, both for his brothers and the daemon swarm’s clawing dive through the rooftops.
‘Chaplain!’ Squad Whip Skase roared as Shadrath’s flailing form was snatched from the ladder. It was sudden and shocking – even for the Adeptus Astartes warriors. The Scourge watched the Excoriators Chaplain dragged off into the night sky, tossed between the predatory daemons in the infernal flock. Shadrath was still fighting, but his crozius arcanum fell into the street below, ringing off the wall-clutching metal stairwells.
‘Keep moving!’ the Scourge called at the remaining Excoriators as they watched the Chaplain disappear.
Preoccupied with not falling to their deaths, and fighting off daemon aerial assaults with nothing but short swords, the Emperor’s Angels had little idea what was happening in shadowy streets storeys below their boots. Amongst the hallowed halls of sepulchres and sanctuaries, and in the ambulatories snaking between them, butchers were being butchered – and not by each other.
World Eaters of the Foresworn were lured into the pillared crypts below the Vault of Divine Transcendence, where ghostly apparitions stalked the armoured brutes, taking them one by one – infuriating their dwindling number further and making them ever easier to slaughter.
Slorak the Undying failed to live up to his name after unloading his bolt pistol’s entire magazine into an advancing, flame-swathed revenant and having his horned skull cleaved in two.
Berserker-brothers of the Bloodstorm issued their crude battle-cry before charging at two power armoured shadows in a corner of the Serenity Square. The World Eaters clearly thought the Angels were formerly encountered Excoriators. Their axe-wielding frenzy only served to hew rents and bloody gashes in each other’s plate, however, with the adamantium-toothed weapons passing clean through the warrior shades. Slave-soldiers, foaming at the mouth, found the Bloodstorm corpses gutted and piled at the centre of the square.
Techmarine Tezgavayn – more flesh warped over twisted machine than superman – was sent into a mechanical fury by phantom auspex returns amongst the statues of Imperial saints on the Boulevard of the Nine Sorrows. Smashing the statues to pieces, Tezgavayn was drawn to a solemn sculpture of Corvus the Sabine, where a clutch of ghostly grenades were waiting for the mechanical monstrosity. The grenades might have burned with a phantasmal glow but the armour-cracking explosions that issued from them felt very real to the Traitor Techmarine, as his body and workings were blown across the boulevard.
Skull-draped Kronosian Warlords simply disappeared whilst trailing the progress of the Slaughterfiend daemon engine
With World Eaters stalked and slaughtered across the city by the revenant crusaders, and daemonkin instinctively giving the empyreal intruders a wide berth, Kersh and his Excoriators reached the Memorial Mausoleum ahead of the anarchy swallowing the city.
Sliding down the steep roof of a monastic cell-block, the tiles shattering before the toes of their boots, the Adeptus Astartes reached the edge of the St Aloysion Hospice. The porch balconies of individual cells looked out on the Mausoleum’s impressive architecture, and a narrow strait ran between the brother and sister wings. Plunging down onto the top floor balcony, Kersh led the way, dropping back and forth across the open space, the Space Marine crashing through some porches, while bounding between others. The descent was similarly awkward amongst his brother Excoriators, but with the cultist hordes of the Cholercaust surging up the streets and closing on the Mausoleum, every moment counted.
Kersh dropped the final few floors and skidded on the cobbles as he raced for the great metal doors of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum. He felt Brother Novah close behind, the standard still clutched feverishly in his gauntlets; an exhausted Melmoch trailed behind the bearer, and Skase brought up the rear. The arterial boulevards and thoroughfares released a deluge of cultist madness on the open ground before the Mausoleum. The roaring had returned, as had the killer glint of a thousand eyes. Kersh felt the chill of cowardice shiver down his spine. He was not comfortable running from such a feeble foe, but numbers alone would prevent the Excoriators closing the Mausoleum’s great doors if all four Space Marines did not get there first.
Kersh hurdled several bikes, the chunky, armoured cycles having been parked in an orderly row around the Mausoleum before their riders had been assigned their doomed sniping duties. Melmoch once again brought his devastating warp-drawn power to bear on the enemy. Flailing arcs of distilled death erupted from the Librarian’s scythe-shaft. The energy danced across the front row of sprinting maniacs, detonating body after body and turning the riotous vanguards into a curtain of gore through which following slave-soldiers ran. The very essence of death was everywhere, like something you could touch and harness. The Excoriators Epistolary roared his denial and sent the second row the stomach-churning way of the first.
Kersh was in. Novah followed, the two Space Marines slamming their packs into the adamantium alloy of the massive door and heaving it across the tomb egress. Skase shot past Melmoch, literally skidding through the blood lapping against the exterior wall and in through the closing gap. Down on his chest, with Kersh and Novah putting their backs into the door, Skase yelled back furiously at the Librarian.
‘Melmoch, get in here – now!’
An Excoriator flashed through the opening, slipping down onto his side. It wasn’t Melmoch. It was Squad Whip Ishmael. ‘Ishmael…’ Skase began, but the greeting died in the Excoriator’s throat. Propping himself up on the tip of his crackling lightning claws, Ishmael looked up. Gone was the Escharan nobility of his calling and the eyes of a battle-brother and friend. Ishmael’s eyes were claret red. His head was a nest of purple veins and arteries, throbbing with blood and darkness. He was now Ishmael the animal. The animal that wanted to kill.
Both Excoriators scrambled to their feet on the cold marble floor of the Mausoleum antechamber. Ishmael came at his chief whip with savage sweeps of his power talons. Skase lightly deflected the blade tips with his gladius, not daring to risk the short sword against the full cutting capabilities of Ishmael’s claws. Grabbing at the gall-fevered wrist of the squad whip, Skase turned and slammed the gladius straight through Ishmael’s armoured palm. The squad whip took little heed of the bold move, chesting the Excoriator forwards and driving the claw-tips of his right gauntlet through Skase’s suit pack.
Weaponless, the brute Ishmael expected his chief whip to back away and proceeded to slice off the gladius blade-length protruding from the back of his talon with his other claw. By the time he feasted his blood-swamped eyes on the Excoriator, Skase was coming straight back at him. The chief whip slammed the sole of his boot into the animal-Ishmael’s chestplate, unbalancing the deviant and knocking him back towards the door.
The full weight of the advancing Cholercaust was behind the thick metal, with row upon blood-crazed row charging forwards against each other and the Mausoleum door in an effort to earn the Blood God’s favour and end an Adeptus Astartes. The Scourge and Brother Novah continued in their desperate, marble-grazing efforts. Ishmael turned his unseeing eyes on his brothers. Novah was nearest, so Novah died first. Ishmael spun around and buried a crackling claw all the way up to the knuckle in the Fifth Company standard bearer. The standard itself jangled to the floor, and as Ishmael retracted his devastating talons, the butchered Excoriator followed it. Kersh immediately felt
