by Rob Sanders
The Scourge thought on Ezrachi and the brusque corpus-commander. He had felt the Apothecary’s absence immediately, having come to value if not always appreciate the grizzled veteran’s advice. Kersh knew that the Excoriators of the Fifth would also miss the Angelica Mortis, the strike cruiser being their only hope of exodus. A lifeline cut. Their home, gone. The corpus-captain knew that the thought of the warship carrying the company’s genetic future to safety would console some of the Space Marines, but for some the sore loss of the Angelica Mortis would only be drowned in the hot distraction of battle. For that reason, Kersh willed their enemy on.
It was Melmoch who had provided the answer to Kersh’s questions. What was the nature of the orbital bombardment? If not the Cholercaust, then what was out on the burial grounds, haunting the mist and chilling Certusians to the bone with its weirdness, wailing and nonsensical whispers? The Librarian told him that the Keeler Comet was no ordinary astral body. It was no longer a simple amalgam of ice, rock and metal plummeting through the void, enslaved to an orbit and the long chain of gravity. It had punched through the Eye of Terror and had changed, its nature abnormal, its purpose warped. Like a claw, tearing at the very fabric of reality, the blood comet had opened rents in time and space, tainting the darkness and creating an immaterial breach through which the raw essence of the warp could bleed. The Epistolary told Kersh, pointing up at the unnatural flux of the sky, that he suspected the comet’s tail was such a rift, and that the unfiltered insanity of the warp was pouring out into the void before falling towards Certus-Minor with gravitational certainty to streak down through the cemetery world’s atmosphere. Trying to reassure the Scourge, the psyker hypothesised that weak entities and warpforms might burn up on descent, and that the grip other such creatures had on reality might be weakened by such a scorching. What horrified Kersh further was Melmoch’s belief that anything resilient enough to survive planetfall and impact would be suitably difficult to kill.
‘Anything?’ Kersh asked.
‘Nothing,’ Kale replied. He held an auspex out before him, scanning the thick murk. ‘No movement, no heat signature, no emissions.’
‘Well, there’s clearly something out there,’ Ishmael bit back. The squad whip was wearing his lightning claws and watching searing energy arc between the polished surfaces of his talons.
Minutes passed. Kale continued to sweep the necroplex but detected nothing. Ishmael took out his impatience on the already terrified mortals on the battlement. Then Kersh heard it. In the distance. Along the perimeter. Amongst the sibilant cacophony emanating from the mist. The rhythmic chatter of a heavy stubber.
‘Corpus-captain,’ Kersh’s vox-bead crackled. ‘Enemy contacts.’ It was Brother Novah. Kersh had stationed the newly-promoted standard bearer with Chaplain Shadrath some way to the east. The chug of the stubber could be heard much clearer over the vox-channel, and the corpus-captain also detected the ragged whoosh of lasfusils and the Emperor-pleasing crash of boltguns through the static. ‘The chief whip, Brother Dancred and the lord lieutenant – all reporting enemy contact, sir.’
Kersh visualised the tiny city, tinier still since Brother Dancred’s demolitions. He considered the relative locations of the reports. It seemed initial assaults were coming in from the north and east.
‘What about Joachim, the Epistolary, Second Whip Scarioch?’
‘Nothing, my lord.’
Then Kersh heard the isolated reports of nervous trigger fingers. Behind a collapsed cloister-pillar two Charnel Guardsmen had punched several holes in the fog bank with their lasfusils. The single bolts faded into the mist and the lance-lieutenant fell on the two soldiers with harsh and equally nervous words. The Charnel Guard officer was cut off in mid-stream by the chudder of a stub-carbine and the deeper crash of Oren’s autocannon. Vague suggestions became shadows and shadows rapidly became horrific threats coming out of the mist at the battlement. The night sizzled to life as a hail of poorly aimed las-bolts lanced the miasma. The autocannon and a heavy stubber further up the palisade gave better accounts of themselves – the cannon in particular chewing up the advancing forms before they had even had a chance to make themselves known.
Kersh unclipped his chainsword and held the barbed tip of the silent weapon out beside Ishmael. He’d hoped the squad whip might return the battle-brotherly gesture and tap the back of his lightning claw against the weapon. Ishmael just gave the Scourge a look of sour disgust, slapped on his helmet and started advancing.
‘Sir,’ Kale called. Kersh didn’t know if the Excoriator had seen his squad whip’s snub. The Space Marine held up the auspex. ‘I’ve got nothing.’
Kersh grunted. Enemies that eluded the scanners were not good news for the Excoriators.
‘If you can see it and it moves, burn it,’ Kersh told Kale. Re-attaching the auspex to his belt and adopting his helmet, the Excoriator ran up the perimeter, adjusting the nozzle aperture on his weapon for a blanket burn.
Firing the chainsword to life, the Scourge gunned the weapon to shrieking lethality. Slipping his own helm over his head and firing the pressure seals, he watched monstrous forms swoop, bound and scuttle from the fog. As the warp-spawned swarm grew, more of the immaterial creatures made it through the gauntlet of the las-fire. Kersh watched the autocannon and heavy stubber continue to do good work, ripping up etherforms and blowing what appeared to be limbs and appendages from the fearless horrors. The storm of las-fire that had greeted the first appearance of the entities immediately began to thin, causing Kersh to march forwards. It was as he feared. As more of the myriad monstrosities revealed themselves, common Certusians had shifted from panic-stricken trigger pumping to mind-scalding horror. The cemetery worlders and a number of Charnel Guard proceeded to gawp at the spectacle, their fragile minds overwhelmed by the impossible vision unfolding before their eyes. Some recoiled and slammed their backs to the battlement ruins, refusing to believe what they were seeing. Others fell to weeping and vomiting. Many simply could not take their eyes of the gut-curdling sight of the warp-spewed nightmares and froze up, clutching their silent weapons uselessly to their chests.
Several flying beasts corkscrewed their haphazard way through the streams of heavy weapons fire and dissipating curtain of las-bolts. Their repugnance even stirred deep-buried feelings of disgust in Kersh, looking as they did like giant insects that had been turned inside out. They swooped in low over the battlement on deformed multi-wings. Ishmael ran at the monsters, leaping off a shattered arch and reaching for the open night sky with his lightning claws. The talons crackled and steamed as the first beast flew straight into them. The creature sliced into an ugly mess on the rubble behind the squad whip before raining skywards in a shower of immaterial dissipation. Ishmael landed and, risking a swift look over his shoulder, brought up his bolt pistol and hammered several rounds into a second oncoming glider.
A third fiend rolled into a spin with its ragged wings, bypassing Ishmael and coming at Kersh. The Scourge feinted right and then turned back, sweeping down with the angry teeth of the chainsword. The weapon chugged through a large wing and tore a rent down the monster’s flank, causing it to stream entrails across the crumbling masonry and smash its remaining wings in a crash-landing. The corpus-captain watched the mess stream into a cyclonic scattering of dark emotion and wastage. Bethesda ran forwards from her position protecting the ammunition supply line. Holding the chunky laspistol in both hands like a carbine, cable trailing to the humming powerpack on her belt, the absterge lanced the downed entity with automatic las-fire.
Following Ishmael to the palisade, Kersh saw the squad whip roar savagely down the line of militia and Charnel Guardsmen. As encouragement to keep firing, the Excoriator stepped up onto the parapet and blasted single bolts from his pistol down the steep rubble of the battlement, plugging the swollen abdomens of obscene scuttlers.
‘Fire, you worthless wretches!’ Ishmael bawled, stabbing the talon-tips of a lightning claw down the line in accusation. ‘Fire or I’ll m
ake you wish you had, you merelings! I’ll feed you to these beasts to give the rest something to aim at!’
A wall of insanity came at the battlement. Spindle-limbed arachnid-maws that jumped from gravestone to gravestone. Fleshy urchin-like beings that rolled across the ground on pneumatic spines, spearing all in their path. Osseous shafts growing out of the mist and impaling Guardsmen, before violently projecting hydric stalks of cartilage into the bodies of nearby victims to create a reticulated network of skewered bodies. Conical torsos, twitching with single-clawed stumps and slimy mouths that stream-vomited corrosive bile all about them. Blooms of floating cephalogeists, draping their victims in manes of life-sapping tentacles. Voracious, protoplasmic absorbers. Beasts that were claws and nothing else. Cancroid growths that spread across the ground, rocky surfaces and living tissue with sickening speed. A carpet of larval horrors that escaped the worst of the suppression fire and wriggled up through the loose rubble. Kersh saw cemetery worlders tearing at their own faces as the glassy elvers slithered into ears, mouths and eyes before writhing and exploding in a bloody, reproductive shower of empyreal birth.
Kersh fought through the spray of ichor and gobbets of warpflesh. He sawed through bestial nightmares and chopped limb-things from corporeal entities that simply grew back. He took the head from a Khymeric carnivore before cleaving the helical tusk from a screamer that swooped at him on triangular, pectoral wings. The Scourge booted aside a spongy mass of stubby eye-stalks before stamping down on the disappearing tail of a slinking gorgopede. He cut a fat, serpentine fluke from the lance-lieutenant’s back only to find that it had already eaten his head and had been pushing down into his body. The air was thick with death. The battlement was swamped with horror. Immaterial entities – hungry for souls – were everywhere, and the Scourge was enveloped in a whirlwind of blade-banished dissipation as monstrosities about him died and departed reality.
The Scourge didn’t know how long he had been fighting. The sea of spawn had just kept coming – monsters buzzing above, crawling over and slithering through the flesh-mounds of the slain. He had barely been allowed a moment’s independent thought. His superhuman body had been enslaved to necessity – arching, reaching, barging and slamming his way through the havoc. The chainsword shimmered in his grip, so hot was the weapon in its constant state of carnage. Over the vox-bead he’d heard a similar story from around the entirety of the perimeter. He thought he’d heard reports of cemetery worlders and Charnel Guard abandoning their posts in mind-numbing terror. He’d heard of Second Whip Azareth and Brother Lemuel’s sections pushed back to the second perimeter battlement and Techmarine Dancred’s completely overrun.
Suddenly the path ahead of Kersh was clear. Misshapen entities became even more so as they dissolved into a blur of cannon-blasted mess. The corpus-captain thought of Oren, the moody serf proving himself behind the stock of the heavy weapon, feverishly twisting the autocannon’s length this way and that on its squat tripod, mulching otherworldly miscreations in tight, controlled sweeps. Through ichor-spattered optics Kersh could see Kale doing his worst with his flamer. The Excoriator was holding part of the palisade all by himself, indulging in broad burns that sanitised the tainted rubble and roasted a labyrinthine network of bodies, shot through with the explorative shafts of a bone monster – gargling, corrupted Guardsmen and all. Brother Micah was working his way down to him, sweeping a swarm of spindly spider-creatures from his path with conservative bolter blasts while bludgeoning his way through the spiny legs of a larger chitinid with his barrel and combat shield attachment.
From what the Scourge could see, the autocannon emplacement with Brothers Micah and Kale were the only contingent holding the battlement. The cemetery worlders had fled through the rat-run, back towards the city. Some of the Charnel Guard had held their ground but had been overwhelmed by warp entities that stripped their flesh and picked their bones. Spinning around, Kersh ducked beneath the legs of a fang-faced strider. The thing had been charging at him and had snapped at the corpus-captain with an elongated jaw, malformed and twisted with surplus teeth. The Scourge heard who he thought was Micah over the vox, but couldn’t make out what the company champion was saying. Kersh flicked out his wrist and brought the raging tip of the chainsword up, shearing off one of the strider’s gangly legs.
Peering through the mist, the corpus-captain spotted Ishmael down amongst the gravestones of the necroplex. The squad whip was fighting like a cornered cat, his lightning claws flashing through warpflesh, slicing and stabbing.
‘Ishmael!’ Kersh yelled, but the Excoriator was too far out. Looking along his faltering section of the battlement and then down at the struggling squad whip, Kersh came to a decision. ‘Pull back!’ he yelled across the thunder of the autocannon. Riddling ground-hugging abominations with automatic las-fire, Bethesda covered the retreat as Oren and Old Enoch began separating the cannon from its mount and running the length of the white-hot weapon down the rat-run. Kale provided a wall of flame behind him and started to back towards the evacuation route.
The Scourge clambered up onto the parapet and cut his way through a conjoined monstrosity of legs and torsos. With every skidding step down the flesh-littered scarp his chainsword took an existence. A gossamer-winged whip-tail landed on his helmet from behind and proceeded to dig at the ceramite with its slender pincers. Snatching the thing by the tail, Kersh threw it into the rubble-strewn floor and crunched it underfoot. With a tiny etherquake, the thing became scraps of ash and nothingness. Through the throng of mayhem the Scourge watched the squad whip fight deeper and deeper into the immaterial ranks. The flood of malformed horror continued to roll in from the darkness of the burial grounds, washing up with mindless, soul-ravenous insanity against the rocky battlement. With unreal forms dying about them, the Excoriators were enveloped in curtains of warp essence that streamed for the night sky in torrents of instability.
‘Ishmael!’ Kersh managed as he sheared off limbs and plunged the shredding tip of the chainsword through warp-sculpted bodies. As the corpus-captain pushed deeper through the ranks, so did Ishmael. The Excoriator wouldn’t be stopped. He seemed only to exist for the killing. He responded to no entreaties – vox-transmitted or otherwise – and seemed completely unaware of his tactical vulnerability, leading a one-warrior spearhead through the ether-swarm. His lightning claws were an electrical storm sweeping through the plague of madness. His motions were decimate yet disturbing in their automotronic fervour – like the Excoriator was killing for the sake of it and had little idea of where he was.
‘Squad Whip Ishmael, respond!’ Kersh called across the vox-channel but only heard a continuous, guttural growl across the channel in response. Already, the swathe of destruction the squad whip had cut through the chaos was closing up. He saw the arc of a lightning claw blaze in the distance. Like a swimmer forced down below the waves, the Scourge was suddenly swamped by warp effluence. There was monstrosity everywhere. Things were on his back. His boot was held fast in the mantrap jaws of some scuttling beast. Claws and jaws of abominate designs and dimensions snapped at his armoured form, and he was forced to hold up an outstretched gauntlet to block a stream of bile jetting at his faceplate and obscuring his optics. In his ears he heard Brother Micah over the vox, but he couldn’t tell if the champion was talking to him.
Kersh found himself faltering. There were beasts all around and the sheer weight of creatures climbing upon his shoulders – and the weight of the entities crawling up onto their backs – forced the Scourge down onto his armoured knees. His hands hit the ichorial mire that was the cemetery world earth, and for the first time in hours the raging shriek of the chainsword chugged to a full stop. In amongst the forest of bestial legs, lying across a carpet of half-slain freakery, was a form Kersh recognised. Splattered from head to foot with blood, both black and fresh, and with carapace tatters decorating his stabbed and sliced flesh, one of Keturah’s neophytes was slowly crawling across the landscape of carcasses. Half dead already and all but in
distinguishable from the dissipating cadaverscape, an Excoriators Scout had made it back through the horror of the immaterial incursion.
‘Excoriator!’ the corpus-captain called, but the only response the Scout could make was to crane his head upwards and roll over onto his back. Kersh saw for the first time the full extent of his injuries. Four cavernous puncture wounds decorated his stomach – equidistant and gushing with the Scout’s own blood. The unmistakable wound of a lightning claw. In his battle-blindness, Ishmael had gutted a brother Excoriator and slashed him down the face with a disfiguring swipe of his sword before moving on to his next victim. The squad whip had not even halted in realisation. He was lost to the kill.
Through his mauled face the Scout looked up at his corpus-captain. ‘S-s-sir…’
‘Save it,’ Kersh told the neophyte. ‘I’m getting you back to the city.’
Roaring with exertion the Scourge got back to his feet. Abominations fell from his shoulders and the sickening mass of soul-sucking aberration about him instinctively backed away. It was not enough to save them from the monomolecular fury of Kersh’s chainsword as he whirled around, tearing through bodies in a three-hundred-and-sixty degree arc of serrated savagery. This alone, however, was not enough to save the Scourge. He had fought too far into the maelstrom and had been claimed by the current of interdimensional madness. Etherspawn were everywhere and it was all Kersh could do to decapitate, disembowel and clip appendages from the twisted screechers about him and the fallen Scout.
Bodies began to fall about him. Things that looked like heads and pulsing abdomens began opening up in sizzling plunks of light and ethereal fluids. The curtains of insanity parted and Brother Micah appeared, protecting himself from a warp-stew-spitting cluster-bud with his steaming shield attachment before hammering back with a mulching burst of bolter-fire. Bizarre forms reaching out for the champion thudded and dropped as covering fire from the nearest of the city belfries and tower tops cut a fresh path through the army of confusion. All about him, the monstrous dead lost their forms and shot for the heavens in bursts of twisting ephemera. Kersh could imagine Squad Contritus on their bellies, their sniper rifles resting in the cradles of bipods, their eyes to their magnocular scopes, dropping abomination after abomination, working their way through to the corpus-captain. The Scourge had little doubt that their orders came from the company champion.