Legion of the Damned

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 Montalban 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 Montalban reclaim it from down beside the toppled tower. Swinging it experimentally about him the Imperial Fist advanced. The gallery was silent and still.

‘Scourge!’ Montalban 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?’ Montalban 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 Montalban’s exposed chest.

With a thud the gladius buried itself in the Imperial Fist’s torso. Stumbling, the mighty Montalban 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 Montalban’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. Montalban 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.