the effect on the door as hundreds of the Blood God’s servants lent their weight to an irresistible entrance. A tattooed hiver managed to slip his emaciated and gore-slick form through the gap, along with a mass of clutching arms. The hiver screamed his demented triumph, but Ishmael silenced the annoyance with a savage headbutt that brained the cultist. As the hiver scum dropped like a sack of lead weights, Ishmael swung back on the Excoriators. Skase ran at the blood-mad squad whip as Kersh tried to reach for his gladius. Ishmael spat his fury at both – the Excoriator’s murderous mind struggling to choose between the pair.
A stream of soul lightning struck the degenerate in the side, smashing him across the antechamber and into the thick stone wall of the Mausoleum. Ishmael clawed at the immaterial energy and snapped like a trapped beast. Melmoch was through the door. The Librarian was on his ceramite knees, still dripping with cultist blood from the carnage outside. Scrabbling beneath the warpstream, Skase joined his corpus-captain on the door. Launching their armoured frames at the adamantium alloy with renewed fervour, the Excoriators slammed it closed, shearing off the twitching limbs of slave-soldiers clawing their way through. As Skase held the great door closed, Kersh hauled at the pinion mechanism that drove a heavy adamantium bar across the portal and into the wall.
Warp lightning arced off Ishmael’s plate causing the dried blood that covered it to smoulder. Ishmael screeched his hatred of the psyker and his unnatural powers, flicking his claws out and leaning into the soul- scalding stream of energy. Melmoch’s face was similarly contorted, the Epistolary trying his best to angle the shaft of his force scythe and the otherworldly energies spilling from it at the squad whip. Blood bubbled behind Ishmael’s eyes and his nostrils split with snorting exertion. Pure hatred alone drove the squad whip’s canine teeth down out of his gums like fangs. Veins and arteries split his skin, and the Excoriator issued a horrifying scream. Ishmael exploded. Shards of ceramite shrapnel flew in all directions,
As the goremist settled, Kersh could see Melmoch on his knees. The Librarian’s head was lowered and he was leaning against the shaft of his devastating weapon. The corpus-captain and his chief whip slid down the wet surface of the metal door beside Brother Novah in exhaustion. Kersh checked the Excoriator for any signs of life, but there were none. Ishmael had finished him.
The hammering was awful. The Cholercaust had run its course. Only the Excoriators remained, and every slaughter-crazed servant of the Blood God was either outside the Mausoleum’s mighty walls or on their way there, to claim the few remaining skulls on the cemetery world in the name of their dark overlord. Kersh could imagine the tsunami of fists, boots, weapons and foreheads slamming against the unfeeling alloy of the great door. The nightmarish vision scarred his mind, the murderous crush of slave-soldiers, cultists, renegade Angels, daemons and World Eaters, all desperate to find a way inside.
Palatine Sapphira and the pontifex had told Kersh that the great door was the only entrance to the memorial tomb, and the corpus-captain believed them. He was not concerned about the ground floor. However, dotted across the Mausoleum’s exterior architecture were ornamental embrasures and aquila-shaped boltslits, apertures through which the Sisters of the August Vigil might defend Umberto II’s remains and his great Mausoleum from raids and civil unrest. Neither Palatine Sapphira or the tomb’s architect could have imagined the defensive necessities required to hold a host the size and devastating capability of the Cholercaust at bay. The walls were strong and Kersh had some limited faith in the great entrance door, but the Excoriator knew that the Blood God’s disciples would find a way in – the unmanned boltslits and embrasures in the upper storeys seemed a likely weakness.
Kersh’s gaze settled on the Fifth Company’s battle standard, still clutched in Novah’s gauntlet. Skase was staring at the blood-speckled banner also. The two Excoriators looked hard at one another. Snatching up the standard, Kersh slipped Novah’s gladius from his ceramite grip and handed it to the unarmed Skase.
‘Melmoch, watch the door,’ the Scourge ordered amongst the thunderous din of howling and shoulders striking the metal egress. Still on his knees, his eyes on the floor, Melmoch raised a weak hand.
Kersh ran through the anteroom and across the marble expanse of the Holy Sepulchre. Skase followed with difficulty. Ishmael’s lightning claw had raked through the chief whip’s pack, damaging the plant and some of the motive function hardware. The plate’s power supply was waning and the unsupported deadweight of the ceramite was slowing the Excoriator.
As the Space Marines crossed the open space of the Mausoleum the funereal beauty of the building was lost upon them: the intricate scrolling on the wall internments; the silver lettering adorning the floor slabs, recording the names of past pontiffs and cardinals; loggia supports and fat sculpted pillars reaching up to the exquisite detail of the Mausoleum’s domed ceiling – each hand-painted illustration a depiction of Umberto II’s long and spiritually- productive life. Candles and incense burned from a thousand suspended sconces, and stern statues of ecclesiarchs already elevated to sainthood adorned the sepulchre space in a ring around a simple block-crypt of obsidian brick. A silver-plated elevator was used to transport clerics and Adepta Sororitas deep below the sepulchre to a small complex of condition-controlled crypt chambers residing behind a thick vault door.
Within, laid out for private pilgrimage and display, were the surviving remains of Umberto II – Ruling Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum and High Lord of Terra. A circular gallery spiralled about the sepulchre’s exterior, made up of marble steps and landings, providing access to the wall-combs, vaultia and the upper storeys of the Mausoleum. It was the infuriating length of the gallery – winding around the sepulchre – that the Scourge and Skase negotiated. As they ran, the Excoriators could still hear the furious multitudes outside, echoing about the great dome, and could see the warp-spent Melmoch on his knees at the centre of the antechamber.
‘What now?’ Skase barked, as he drove his failing suit on along the gallery. Kersh didn’t respond, but he did keep pausing at intervals to stare out of the embrasure boltslits and allow the chief whip to catch up. Just before the locked entrance to the Sisters of Battle’s mission house, Kersh stopped and stared out through the stone aperture at the chaos beyond. The Memorial Mausoleum commanded the best view of Obsequa City that anyone could expect. The cemetery world capital wasn’t much to look at now: an inferno-tormented, partially demolished ruin, tainted with innocent blood, and a rockrete menagerie for murderous deviants, traitors and filth-entities from the warp. ‘Kersh!’ Skase said, soaking up the hopelessness beside him. ‘What are we going to do?’
The Scourge looked blankly at the Excoriator. He heard Melmoch call weakly from the sepulchre floor. Ignoring them both, Kersh took the mission house door off with a single strike of his boot. Striding across the small transeptory and past the cell-cloisters, Kersh moved swiftly through the sacristy and Lady Chapel. Near the palatine’s solitoria, Kersh found what he was looking for: the mission house armoury and the vox-berth.
‘Raid what’s left of the armoury. Grab us some weapons and grenades – something with punch,’ Kersh told Skase as he went to work on the frequency matrix of the vox-bank. Kersh heard Melmoch call again over the boom of the door assault below.
‘What for?’ Skase seared. ‘It’s over.’
Kersh dropped the vox-hailer and stormed at the chief whip. ‘I’ll tell you when it’s over!’
Skase fixed the Scourge with a gaze that was pure reason: no fear, no despair or sorrow.
‘The city’s lost,’ Skase shouted, ‘the Fifth is gone. You hear that?’ The chief whip let the rumble of mayhem intrude from outside. ‘They will get in, and when they do – no matter how hard we fight, no matter what honour we bring to the primarch or our Lord Katafalque – our blood will be theirs. They will end us, and those people out there, whom you confidently placed in the bosom of the earth, will rot there…’
Kersh roared his recriminations at the Excoriator, and Skase roared back.
‘Corpus-captain!’ Melmoch called. The two Space Marines burned into each other with accusatory eyes. Kersh looked out at the Holy Sepulchre and then back at Skase.
‘There is no dishonour in doubt,’ the Scourge told him. ‘You think Katafalque didn’t have doubts, out on the walls of the Imperial Palace? You think Dorn was not crippled by the deep melancholies of the unknown as he stood over the Emperor’s shattered form? There is no dishonour in doubt,’ Kersh repeated. ‘The measure of a primarch, a Chapter Master, a battle-brother, is what he does next. We are Excoriators. This is our burden. These are our trials. Trials of the mind, the spirit and the flesh. War through attrition. Victory through endurance, and we shall endure.’
Skase’s gaze drifted to the floor. He nodded, slowly and to himself.
‘Yes,’ he said, unlocking the seals on his gauntlets and slipping them off.
The vox crackled discordance before erupting with a solitary voice.
‘…please respond. This is His Beneficent Majesty’s planetary defence monitor
