Legion of the Damned

to a second rope and began pulling arm-over-arm for his life. The daemon flew skywards, its legs swinging back and forth like a doll’s, its neck and bulbous head snug in the improvised noose. It gagged, spat and hissed its brute vehemence. The Scourge held the beast there for a moment, taking no little satisfaction in the monster’s spasmodic thrashing.

‘Kersh!’ came a call from above. The corpus-captain began an almost torturous return to his senses. It was Ezrachi. Kersh felt a tremble on the air. The welcome quake of a Thunderhawk’s engines.

Two figures approached through the dust and mist. In one hand Brother Micah trained his reloaded boltgun on the snared beast. With his other he held up Chaplain Shadrath, freshly extricated from beneath the bell’s crushing weight. Shadrath held the company standard in his fierce grip. They too stood entranced by the monster’s jigging and twitching. Patting the Chaplain’s plate, the company champion allowed Shadrath to lean against the battered standard and brought his weapon into his shoulder. Micah angled the sights of his bolter up at the daemon. Kersh saw the fire in the champion’s eyes.

‘Save it,’ the corpus-captain commanded, before adjusting his vox-channel. ‘Gauntlet, this is Kersh.’ The Scourge returned to his ropework, hauling the beast up through the rock dust and gloom. ‘Target lock, palace interior.’

The three Excoriators watched the daemon disappear above them. Kersh feverishly worked the bell cord, feeling the creature’s livid desperation through the length of rope. The line suddenly went slack. Simultaneously the roar of heavy bolters echoed through the ruins and the haze above flickered with a steady stream of firepower.

A mangled form tumbled through the murk, striking the Great Bell and sending a thunderous death knell reverberating through the palace. The Excoriators looked down at the smoking remains of the daemon at the foot of the instrument. Whatever murderous, immaterial life had flowed through the daemonflesh had now left it. The corpse was black and shredded, punched through with bolt-rounds and mauled beyond grisly recognition.

‘Are you wounded?’ Micah put to his corpus-captain.

‘No, but you are.’

‘Are you all right?’ the champion pressed.

‘I am now,’ Kersh told him, stepping over the infernal remains. Walking across the rubble, Kersh reclaimed his weapons.

‘What do you want me to do with it?’ Shadrath hissed.

Before leaving the chamber Kersh stopped and turned, taking one final look at the smouldering daemon. It was already beginning to lose its tenuous grip on reality, the red flesh bubbling and spitting. A bronze steam rose from the infernal corpse – its corporeal presence beginning to ebb away – threading through the smoke and slaughter. The Scourge would take no chances.

‘Burn it,’ Kersh told the Chaplain and left.

Chapter Ten Necroplex

Brother Omar gunned the bike’s throttle. The vehicle bucked with obedience, its machine-spirit hungry for the road. As a neophyte, Omar’s flesh had yet to be worthy of the lash, and no dents, rents or craters marked his carapace – his armour bearing the ignoble sheen of battle virginity. With the fat tyres of the bike tearing up the grit of the lychway and his dark robes flowing behind him, Omar surged up along the column cavalcade.

With the appearance of the blood comet in the Certusian skies, cemetery world society collapsed. The wealthy and educated fled. Merchants sold their stock. Scribes and scriveners left their quills in their ink. Priests abandoned their flocks. Anyone with ears and coin had packed what they could carry and joined the crowds gathered about the mortuary lighters and hump shuttles on Memorial Space Port rockrete. Their ears were ringing with tales of the Keeler Comet and the death of worlds that followed in its wake. Their purses were soon emptied by greedy freighter captains whose crammed vessels hung in low orbit like last chances.

Such fear felt alien and craven to Omar – as it did to all Excoriators. As a Scout and brother of the Tenth Company, he was young enough to remember the doubts and uncertainties of childhood. Back beyond his years of psycho-surgical enhancement and cult instruction. A time when fathers ruled and a mother’s embrace was everything. A time of nightmares, when darkness felt full of dread and danger.

Brother Omar remembered and he felt for the cemetery worlders left behind. Like children, the remaining Certusians seemed haunted by their ignorance. Their existence had been the Emperor’s word, delivered daily through priestly lips and the reassuring drudgery of a hard day’s labour with teat or shovel. Now they had neither. Newborns went unfed and the dead unburied. There was only blind panic. Infrastructure had swiftly broken down and early fears for basic requirements such as food and safety found expression in petty tyranny, violence and murders of seeming necessity.

It was for this reason that Corpus-Captain Kersh gave Squad Whip Keturah and his Scouts orders to ride out. To blast along the lychways and crow roads of the necroplex, across the sea of grave markers and stone sculpture, and through cenopost communities. In the absence of the Emperor’s words, the corpus-captain thought it important that common Imperials had the example of the Emperor’s flesh to comfort them. Even in such dark times, the sight of a hulking Adeptus Astartes – even a Scout – drew eyes and minds. Demigods walked among them.

Partly to escape the violence, raiding and looting that had swiftly engulfed the hamlets and foss-parishes, and partly because they knew no better, cemetery worlders began to move in ragged convoys on Obsequa City. Herd instinct had led the Certusians to do this, and as lychways intersected, the crowds and pilgrim processions grew larger and longer. This too had been encouraged by Corpus-Captain Kersh, who had too few Excoriators and Charnel Guardsmen at his disposal to defend a world from what might follow in the blood comet’s wake.

Omar, like his brother neophytes, had been instructed to ride across the tiny world, stopping briefly in each cenopost hamlet he rode through to order Certusians to move on to the capital. Obsequa City was designated a planetary holdpoint, to be further fortified by honoured members of the Fifth Company, and like a rescue vessel, the city took in as many as needed shelter – crowding the cells and domiciles of those who had escaped off-world and creating a tent shanty on the open and now empty expanse of the Memorial Space Port. It had taken Omar several days to reach the grave-lined shores of Lake Sanctity on the far side of the planet, and from there onwards he found that he was riding along the teeming lychways with the cavalcades rather than against the current of cemetery worlders. Omar had ridden amongst them all, vergermen and their families, gravediggers, foss-reeves, pallbearers and vestals, attending to the old, the sick and orphaned. Shabby masses, their rags covered with grave dust, pulling carts and carrying all they owned in the world.

The strategy was not popular amongst the members of the Tenth. Brother Kush had been briefly seconded to Squad Cicatrix during training rites on board the Angelica Mortis. There he had been exposed to the full hatred the Excoriators First Squad felt for their new commanding officer. Kush, in turn, had brought these opinions to his brother neophytes, who had swiftly begun to revel in similar derision of the unfavoured Scourge, his loss of the Chapter Stigmartyr and his affliction with the Darkness. The Scout dormitory had soon became a forum for a kind of hollow boasting and scorn that Omar tried his best to avoid. When Squad Whip Keturah had delivered orders to break out the bikes and take to the lychways, Omar had been secretly relieved. After Keturah had left, Kush and several other Scouts had questioned the wisdom of the Scourge’s strategy. Omar had listened but said nothing. Kush claimed Kersh’s seeming concern for mere mortals was further weakness in the flawed commander – labelling it hesitation and cowardice when faced with the prospect of actual battle on the Vanaheim Cordon or Rorschach’s World.

As Kush and his brothers went to leave the dormitory they had found the squad whip standing in the corridor. Keturah had run a hand through his silver mane and fixed them all with the cyclopean intensity of his bionic eye. Omar had withered under his gaze, but again opted for silence.

‘I know there are mixed feelings about the corpus-captain amongst the Fifth Company,’ Keturah finally said in steely syllables. ‘No such confusion exists in this company. Do you understand? When you are corpus-captain, you can debate deployment and strategy. Until then you will follow orders without discussion. Is that clear? Zachariah Kersh has had more broken bones than you have bones all together. He’s spilled more blood than entire companies have ever seen and has recent scars older than you. For Throne’s sake, he won the Feast of Blades. He has wielded