‘Melmoch,’ Kersh greeted the Epistolary as he stood over him.
The Librarian sat up, leaning back on his arms. He licked his lips.
‘I’m thirsty,’ he said. It was a statement, but Kersh, still clutching his side, poured a small bowl of water from a ceramic pitcher and offered it to the psyker. Taking the bowl, Melmoch drank deeply, allowing rivulets of water to stream down from the corners of his mouth. ‘The apothecarion?’ he asked. Kersh nodded.
‘You’ve been out a while, brother.’
‘I heard voices,’ Melmoch said. Kersh felt himself tense.
‘Brother Ishmael was here…’
‘Whooh,’ Melmoch said, dropping the empty bowl and reaching for his head.
Crunching through the shattered ceramic, Kersh put a hand on the psyker’s shoulder. ‘What is it? Is it your gift?’
‘Yes,’ Melmoch moaned.
‘Is it compromised?’
‘Quite the opposite,’ the psyker told him, his face criss-crossed with lines of pain and tension.
‘You have the skill?’
Melmoch’s eyes opened wide and bright, and he spoke. His gaze was piercing to the point of discomfort and his words echoed around the inside of Kersh’s mind.
‘There is pain here like you would not believe. Not in this body but in the very fabric of existence. The dull agony of our savagery is a galactic affliction. The hot blood of ill will and the mindless brutality of our species sustaining its insatiable desire. Our kind were bred to trade in such currency. With each bolt and blow we feed the beast. Here and now…’ The Librarian trailed off. His eyes momentarily glazed before searing back to focus. ‘Here and now – this time and this place is a wound within a wound. An injury internal, like a bottomless pit discovered in the deepest trench.’
‘You speak of the Cholercaust.’
‘The screams,’ Melmoch marvelled. ‘The never-ending shrieks of slaughterlust, fear and rage, layered, echoing, bleeding into one another like a spiritual static. The starvation of reason – food for a god.’
‘Melmoch, I don’t–’
‘It speaks through me, but to us all. You can hear it in the drawing of a blade and the
‘The gall-fever,’ Kersh agreed.
‘The futility of fighting fire with fire. A spiral of degeneration. The War-Given-Form. It will stop at nothing until we have all become the instruments of its boundless wrath. So much hate.’
‘Is that why you took this from the Ecclesiarch’s shrine?’ Kersh asked, dipping his hand into a belt pouch and extracting the small urn the psyker had used to put himself out. The Librarian immediately flinched in its presence. ‘All of the witchbreeds are dead. Navigators, astropaths – everyone.’
‘The Skull Taker knows we’re here,’ the Epistolary said, not taking his eyes off the orb container with its agonising contents: the God-Emperor’s psi-negative essence, dust of the divine. ‘It knows our gorestink, the copper tang of our blood. We are candles in the darkness to such an entity, flaring every time we lay our lands on a weapon or indulge our spite. It hates the witch most of all. A loathing beyond your all-too-human unease and disgust. The witch’s soul burns bright. The witch is a coward who shuns the unthinking urgency of the hand and whose agency is the warp. That is why the witch dies first at the Blood God’s hand. I needed to douse that flame, to retreat into the darkness and gather my strength – or, Adeptus Astartes or not, I would have shared the same fate as the unfortunates of whom you spoke.’
‘Melmoch,’ Kersh said, trying to get the psyker to focus. ‘I need to know if you can reach beyond the screaming – beyond the influence of the Cholercaust and this cursed comet.’
‘You wish me to send an astrotelepathic message?’
‘Yes. Several. Can you do that?’
Melmoch got down from the stone tablet and steadied himself. ‘I can try.’
‘We need to appraise the Vanaheim Cordon of our status,’ Kersh said, ‘and the Terran-bound trajectory of the Keeler Comet. Their contingents must hold station. We cannot afford the Cholercaust to slip by into Segmentum Solar.’
‘And the others?’
‘Long range, narrow-band requests for reinforcement to the Viper Legion on Hellionii Reticuli,’ the corpus- captain instructed. ‘The Novamarines at Belis Quora and the Angels Eradicant stationed at Port Kreel.’ Melmoch went to interrupt but Kersh had more for him. ‘And a subsector, wide-band appeal for assistance. There were rumours the White Consuls were moving out of the Ephesia Nebula. We could get lucky.’
Melmoch looked hard at the Scourge.
‘Of course, I will do all that you ask. You must know – the magnitude of the enemy force we are facing…’ The Librarian didn’t have the words. ‘Even if we were reinforced, the time it would take for another contingent to reach us – the Cholercaust will be gone and our corpses will have been long stamped into the grave dust.’
‘A little optimism too much to expect?’ Kersh said.
‘Optimism’s a little hard to come by,’ Melmoch said. ‘I’m only being realistic about our chances.’
‘Does not the God-Emperor fight on our side?’ Kersh asked. Melmoch’s brow furrowed, surprised at such a reference from the corpus-captain.
‘He does,’ the Epistolary replied suspiciously.
‘Then I suppose you had better take it up with him.’
PART THREE
For whom the bell tolls…
Chapter Thirteen
Heavenfall
Brother Omar stumbled through the mist. It was as though the clouds were too tired to take their own weight and had settled like ephemeral behemoths on the necroscape. Thick and noxious, the miasma stank of evil, threaded through as it was with a dull spectrum of unnatural colour, like oil spreading through water. Above the Excoriators Scout, the overcast sky – all but indistinguishable from the burial ground-hugging mist – glowed with atmospheric agitation. It was as though the heavens were alight. It was a bad sign. Certus-Minor was passing through the tail of the comet, Omar presumed.
The neophyte was a mess. His carapace was but a feral worlder’s loincloth, shredded and hanging in tatters about his waist. His muscular torso glistened with his own blood, decorated all over as it was with nicks, bites and slices. A ragged strip from his long-abandoned cloak served as a bandana to keep the gore from his eyes, and his recovered combat blade dangled loosely from his exhausted grip like a machete. With only a primordial will to live sustaining the Excoriator, Omar had crawled up through the bodies, breaking bones and crushing skulls with his bare hands. With the roaring masses swarming about him, the Scout’s combat blade had been knocked free. Too much of a temptation to the bloodthirsty wretches, the razor-sharp weapon had been picked up and used on the
