Legion of the Damned

‘Unconscious,’ the Apothecary confirmed. ‘Like Melmoch.’

‘Listen!’ Kersh said, shutting off the chainsword’s brutal motor. The remaining Excoriators, who had been moving through the expanse of the throne room, froze. As they scanned the chamber, they heard a distant murmur.

‘It’s coming from outside,’ Ishmael said. Kersh joined him on the pontifex’s balcony, squinting through the darkness. A narrow ledge ran along the four sides of the Obelisk, running under the balcony, a decorative rather than a practical structure. Peering through the murk along it, the Excoriators caught a glimpse of fingers, clasping the corner of the building with bone-white desperation. A figure was somehow situated out on the ledge. As a fearful face edged around the corner, peering at the Excoriators, the figure released a howl of relief and urgency.

‘Oliphant!’ Kersh cried. ‘Ishmael–’

But the squad whip was already over the balcony balustrade and stepping down onto the narrow ledge. ‘Ezrachi,’ the corpus-captain called, as he craned his head back around into the reception chamber. The Apothecary left Brother Levi with the comatose astropath and made his way up the steps.

‘He’s coming around,’ the Excoriator announced as the astropath’s head came up. Instead of empty sockets, a pair of dark orbs – black as midnight and sizzling with blank hatred – rolled over in the psyker’s skull. Momentarily transfixed, Brother Levi watched as twisted horns of charred bone sliced their way out of the man-puppet’s gaunt flesh.

‘Daemo–’ Levi began, but the thing before him exploded in a bloodstorm of shattered skull and brain. An elongated cranium blasted out of the back of the astropath’s head, while daemonfangs burst through his forehead and neck, swallowing his face whole. In its place a visage of infernal flesh appeared: primordial, bestial and depraved. Willowy, lurid limbs and talons erupted from the palms and soles of the astropath’s own and the daemon grew, wearing the puppet’s body like a garment over its horrific and emaciated torso. Pinpricks of immaterial life, like keyholes into a furnace, burned through the inky incomprehension in the monster’s eyes. In one savage motion, the daemon seized Brother Levi by his pauldrons and enveloped the Excoriator’s head with the cage of its jaws. Snapping down, the beast sheared Levi’s head from his neck and swallowed, leaving the Space Marine’s power armour to fountain gore from the neckbrace.

With his attention split between the throne room and the ledge, Kersh was slow to react. The first he truly understood of the danger was the sight of his Excoriators lifting their weapons at the far end of the throne room. The Scourge felt a shockwave of rage and hatred spread through the chamber like a red mist that could be felt but not seen. All Kersh saw was the cavernous muzzle of Shadrath’s bolt pistol thrust at him and the Chaplain lean into a firing position.

Kersh snatched his own Mark II piece from his holster only to see Brother Micah slam the Chaplain’s arms aside with his shoulder.

‘The corpus-captain!’ he yelled.

Before the Scourge could take aim a florid blur shot across the entrance to the balcony. The corpus-captain got the impression of something spindly and daemonic, all horns, claws and blasphemous flesh. Kersh thrust a palm back at Ishmael on the ledge, the squad whip having the exhausted pontifex under one arm. By the time he turned back, the creature had bounded halfway down the chamber on its gangly legs. Both Micah and Chaplain Shadrath’s gunfire had now been unleashed, blasting its way up the precious Ecclesiarchical relics that adorned the throne room wall. Kersh brought his own to bear, trapping the beast between two converging arcs of .75 calibre hell.

Clawing a foothold in the masonry, the daemon vaulted up through the beams of the chamber ceiling and into the great belfry above. The clangs of its ungainly movements could be heard against the metal of the Obelisk’s bell. As the Chaplain indulged a slick reload of his pistol, Brother Micah sidestepped across the chamber towards his corpus-captain, dribbling bolt-rounds at the ceiling beams. These were joined by the judicious crash of the Apothecary’s pistol and the fully automatic hurricane of fire from Toralech. The standard bearer had been drawn in by the sound of gunfire and held his banner upright like some religious artefact, ready to repel the infernal beast with faith alone.

‘Hold your fire!’ Kersh ordered, bringing even Toralech’s chattering bolter to a halt. The Excoriators listened to the ring and scrape of the thing’s talons on the bell. Kersh’s eyes widened as the potential calamity of the situation crystallised in his mind. ‘Fall back!’ the corpus-captain roared, but by then the calamity was already in play.

The Obelisk’s Great Bell crashed down through the ceiling beams from the belfry above. The colossal instrument descended on a furious cloud of masonry dust and debris, clanging and pealing its thunderous way down through the throne room floor. Kersh watched in horror as Chaplain Shadrath, Toralech and Brother Micah all disappeared, carried down with the bell as it made its cacophonous descent through the different floors of the Obelisk. Once again, Kersh was treated to the hazy impression of the daemon, clinging to the bell crown and riding the instrument down through its path of destruction.

Ezrachi had been fortunate not to have been caught in the path of the object, but now with the demolished throne room floor collapsing under him, the Apothecary had little choice but to make a clumsy bound for the balcony. The Excoriator’s hydraulic leg wouldn’t entertain the speed such a manoeuvre entailed and Kersh watched the marble floor fall away beneath the Apothecary.

Dropping both pistol and chainsword, Kersh threw himself down and half over the crumbling floorspace. Marble disappeared beneath his chest also, leaving only his legs and armoured midriff spread awkwardly across the balcony. With one of the Scourge’s gauntlets clutching for a handhold, the other shot for the falling Ezrachi. His ceramite fingertips clawed their way around the edge of the reductor adorning the Apothecary’s armoured wrist. Ordinarily, Ezrachi would use the sacred tool to extract gene-seed from fallen Excoriators. As the Apothecary dangled from his corpus-captain’s grasp it became clear that the instrument had saved him from falling. Holstering his pistol and getting his gauntlet to the Scourge’s arm, Ezrachi gave Kersh a glare of crabby exertion before hauling himself up the ceramite plating of his arm and shoulder. Swinging his bionic leg up and onto the balcony edge, the Apothecary used his powerful hydraulics to do the last of the heavy lifting.

As the two Excoriators lay on their chestplates looking down through the devastation the bell had punched through the different levels of the palace, they heard Colquhoun’s Charnel Guard hit the stairs and make their way down towards the ground floor.

‘The casualties…’ Ezrachi began, getting to his feet. Kersh snatched up his pistol and chainsword.

‘Let me at least kill it first,’ the Scourge shouted as he gunned the chainblade to serrated life. ‘Call for the Gauntlet,’ Kersh ordered, ‘and get the pontifex off that ledge.’

With that, Kersh turned and dropped off the side of the balcony. As the Great Bell had fallen, taking out floor after floor, it had left behind a narrow rim of masonry on each level, keystones and structural girder-stumps protruding from the exterior wall. Bounding from one to the other, dropping whole floors and spiralling his way down through the wreckage, Kersh went after the daemon.

A thick cloud of dust rose to meet him about halfway down, indicating that the bell had finally reached the ground floor of the palace. With the powdered masonry and final resonance of the instrument hanging in the air it became increasingly difficult to make the footholds out. When what looked like a snapped support strut turned out to be nothing, the Scourge fell the remaining three floors. Hitting the uneven floor of debris and stone carnage, Kersh felt the hydraulics of his power armour groan and protest. Springing back and rolling, he assumed a combat stance in the miasma of dust. Kersh could make out little but the ghostly outline of the toppled bell and mess of ropes, cords and pulleys left by the falling instrument, hanging in the haze like vines in a jungle mist.

‘Shadrath… Micah… Toralech. Respond.’ The vox-link fed back only static.

The beast was suddenly upon him.

Launching itself over the bell, with a shattered length of girder clutched within its infernal talons, the daemon howled its inhuman desire to end the Scourge. The potent length of a slack, bestial tongue swung from the creature’s maw. The chainsword raged in Kersh’s hand.

The corpus-captain followed the savage motion of the girder with his sword. Kersh ducked the first swing – a manoeuvre that had every right to take his head from his shoulders. A second and a third danced in an arc of pure wrath, flying for the Excoriator time and again. Attempting to keep his focus and composure amid the supernatural speed of the strikes and the primeval roaring and hissing of the thing, Kersh sidestepped across the uneven ground. He leant back out of the path of the shattered end of the girder as it descended, his throat a hair’s breadth from the razor tip of the metal support strut. A roll to the left took him away from the improvised weapon, and the daemon