by Rob Sanders
I feel the moment. I feel the city slipping away on the regicide board, and then I feel the pieces swept from the board by an angry fist. It’s the heavy flamer. I hear it chug, gasp and run dry. I can hardly be surprised. Sister Casiope has roasted a legion of slave-soldiers in the alleyways leading into the cloistrium. As the flamer falls silent, the Sister unhooks the support straps and shrugs off the weapon, bringing the half-clip she has left in her boltgun to bear. We all feel the heavy weapon’s absence, the beginning of an end. Even though the alleyways are still flame-filled mayhem, cultists and Blood Crusaders sprint through the inferno – blades held high. Bubbling and crackling, writhed in orange tongues of hot fury, the slave-soldiers of Khorne make their doomed assault.
The palatine and her Sisters drop the killers with merciful rounds, but as the bodies begin to trip, tumble and burn, others run the gauntlet of the firestorm alley. Blood-red daemons of the Ruinous pantheon sprint horribly through the flames. They look similar to the herald-thing I faced in the Obelisk, but no two of the monstrosities look truly alike. They leap and land on the Sisters with arachnid precision, gutting and stabbing the Adepta Sororitas with supernaturally frenzied thrusts of their hellforged blades. Flashes of light and the bark of Sapphira’s bolt pistols force the monsters from her prone form. As she blasts away, one of the things thrashes this way and that. Rounds tear off horn-tips, claws and a foot, but it doesn’t stop the beast leaping straight back on the Sister and savaging her again.
Crackling energy suddenly leaps across the open space of the cloistrium. The searing soul lightning had passed through the bodies of several slave-soldiers crowding a side-alley. The mortals explode on contact, their torsos detonating in a fine shower of blood-spittle. The silver arc of warp-drawn power slams into the lesser daemon, as it huddles over the Sister of Battle, and throws it into the far wall. It struggles, thrashes and claws against the stream of power until it too is vaporised in an explosive gore-cloud of red mist.
Epistolary Melmoch and Chaplain Shadrath burst into the cloistrium from the alleyway. Melmoch isn’t smiling. He looks tired and drawn – his eyes sunken and his talent a burden. He carries his force scythe in both hands, discharging another soul-scalding burst of energy at the daemons picking over the remains of the dead Adepta Sororitas. Second Whip Azareth is behind them, plugging the alleyway with single discharges from his boltgun. Priming his last grenade, the second whip bounces it down the alleyway at their rabid pursuers. The alleyway flashes and collapses in a rolling dustbank of masonry and pulverised rockcrete.
My heart lifts at the sight of the three Excoriators, but the reinforcement is not enough to save us. More howling World Eaters barge into the cloistrium, their pauldrons clashing in an effort to push past one another and get to us first. I choose my targets and favour manoeuvres for economy. My chainsword flicks and jabs, cleaves and slices. World Eaters get my attention for barely a moment. Just enough for the thrashing teeth of my blade to turn their own aside, take off a gauntlet at the wrist or excavate a hole in the chest. For a moment I imagine the horror before the walls of the Imperial Palace, the onslaught of the World Eaters and the lives they must have taken with their devastating combination of martial skill, fearlessness and bottomless hatred. Few of my opponents drop to the floor. I don’t have the spare seconds it would take to finish them, and before I have turned to face another Traitor Space Marine, his berserker brother – who had the attention of my chainblade moments before – is back on his feet and hacking away.
The hellish melee has forced us back together. Skase and I find ourselves back to back, slapping aside angry blades coming for each other’s plate while at the same time negotiating the murderous thrusts and slashes of multiple World Eaters assailants. The moment that began with Sister Casiope’s flamer continues to unravel. I feel the bite of a chainaxe through my thigh plate. The teeth of some other unseen weapon glances off my shoulder plate, ripping up the ceramite but failing to reach flesh. Brother Simeon’s serf Amos runs before me towards the body of his fallen master. A hulking World Eaters champion steps on Simeon’s armoured form and pulls free the daemon battleaxe he buried there. I see Amos hacked cleanly in half by the soul-hungry weapon.
As Amos falls aside in two pieces, Chaplain Shadrath appears – his midnight plate glistening with the serf’s blood. Holding his crozius arcanum up like a religious icon he commands the hulk and his cursed weapon back. The monstrous World Eater seems uncertain for a moment – a trait I have yet to experience in my Traitor opponents. Suddenly furious with itself, the battleaxe comes up over its head and down on Shadrath. The Chaplain knocks it to one side with his crozius, which seems to glow with a spiritual luminescence, before smashing at the giant’s ancient plate with his sacred staff of office.
World Eaters Space Marines continue to flood the cloistrium, each more blood-hungry than the last. I can hear the gunning of chainblades echoing in the ambulatory beyond, indicating even more of the Traitors, eager to cut up what is left of us. Epistolary Melmoch’s unnatural powers continue to be a boon, dwindling though they might be with the Librarian’s building exhaustion. Streaks of soul lightning keep a gathering horde of lesser hellions at bay, the furious monsters seemingly drawn down on Palatine Sapphira and her affronting badges of faith. Sapphira is run through and can barely get up, but Melmoch continues to fight over her struggling form, his force scythe sweeping the space about them, the psychically-charged weapon sparking off hellblades and lopping off daemon limbs.
Brother Novah stands at the centre of the chaos. The Adeptus Astartes holds the company standard proud and high, a heart-stabbing provocation to the World Eaters degenerates roaring their way into the cloistrium. Novah clutches his boltgun in his other hand and appears to be the only Excoriator with any ammunition left for the bastard warriors of Khorne. They come at Novah – at the standard, really – screaming their obscene oaths and swinging their raging axes. Second Whip Azareth goes down under the blitz of blades, pieces of the Excoriator flying out of the frenzy. Novah puts bolt blasts into several Chaos Space Marines, but the irresistible draw of the standard drives the mindless warriors on, World Eaters running straight into the blazing path of the Excoriator’s murderous gunfire.
It is a massacre. I don’t know what I expected. The carnage about me is all the Cholercaust came to Certus-Minor to do. The swift and bloody annihilation of the Blood God’s enemies. A world, dead in a day. The flames have died down in the alleyways and wall-to-wall cultist warriors race for our skulls. Red, reptilian hellhounds bound over their number. The beasts spit and hiss, their brazen claws tearing up the cobbles as the daemon mongrels run at us. A pack of the monsters spreads out across the cloistrium, the black leathery sail-skin of their neck frills erect and aggressive. They sink their fang-filled jaws into our ceramite, tearing at legs and hanging off our arms. Two of the beasts snap at Brother Boaz, causing the Excoriator to swipe at them with his blade. He slashes the first beast across its horn-buds and scaly face. The second is saved by the spiked, brass collar around its neck. As the gladius sparks off the collar, the moment’s distraction costs the Excoriator – a mangled World Eater getting back off the ground and to his berserker’s feet. I call out, but by the time Boaz turns, the Traitor Legionary’s chainsword has already taken off the Excoriator’s head.
Fury builds inside me. I feel something dark and unseen wrestling for my soul. My anger and frustration feed it. A question without words chimes through my being like the clash of two blades. A proposal. A dark bargain. The unrivalled power of my enemies. The fearless, mindless instincts of a predator – with all the bloodthirsty prowess and indestructibility that comes with them – in exchange for my surrender. Not to my enemy, who deserves my enmity, my skill and my blade, but to my rage. I see the World Eaters – once the Emperor’s Angels – live the benefits of such surrender. I envy their power and certitude. I see their blades butcher the supermen under my command and wonder what I might be able to do with such fury. Might I, the Scourge, b
e able to turn the tide of battle? My boundless wrath and the desire to avenge my brothers, forged into a weapon. My body a raw lump of brazen metal – able to withstand anything the enemy might throw at me. My mind an instrument of vengeance. My arm the executor of divine will…
A chainaxe buzzes past my head. There is blood. I think I might have just lost an ear. A World Eater, with a brass, mechanical claw for an arm, snaps out for my head. I retract, but the Traitor’s brazen pincer snaps closed about my chainsword – stopping it dead. The claw cuts through the weapon, rendering it a tip-sheared, chugging mess. I abandon the weapon, slipping my Scourge’s gladius from its scabbard. I spin the sword around the index digit of my left gauntlet before bringing the weapon down on the claw. The blade rings off the obscene bionic attachment. The World Eater’s axe comes for me again. Claw. Axe. Claw. Axe. Each time, the gladius drives them aside. I know I can kill this monstrous combat machine. I have seen his death flash before my eyes. I know the fury I will have to unleash in order to end him. In order to end all of them. I am a moment away from damnation and I know it. A scream brings me back to my senses.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Bethesda. My lictor, Oren, is on the floor, two of the daemon hounds feasting on the serf. A third has the tips of its teeth around Bethesda’s ankle, dragging the absterge away. My dark desire to kill the World Eater is greater than ever. Somehow I resist it. Instead of driving my blade through the gore-speckled degenerate, I turn in close and slam my shoulder into the Traitor’s chest. He gets my elbow across his faceplate before I grab the heavy metal claw and heave the Chaos Space Marine over my pack and pauldron. He crashes into the cobbles.
I watch Bethesda screaming, her body dragged away through the gore, the whites of her eyes bright and pleading. Without ammunition and the serf too far away for my blade, there is only one thing I can do. Slapping my gauntlet down on my belt I find ‘the purge’ where I left it, coiled over the hilt of my other blade. Like my plate, the whip’s braided length is smeared in blood-drizzle. I crack the length of the leather flail. It fails to wrap itself around her wrist as I might have hoped and instead snaps against the cobbled floor nearby. This should not surprise me. ‘The purge’ is not exactly the weapon of choice for an Adeptus Astartes. In her desperation and fear, the absterge strikes out with her fingers and snatches at the tip of the weapon with her pale fingers. She yelps in agony as I pull on its length, hauling her back towards me. The fiendhound bites further up the serf’s leg and scrabbles against the stone floor with its brass talons.
I feel an immediate pressure on my leg. Looking down at the World Eater on the floor I see that he has his claw around my knee. The bionic shears through my plate under hydraulic insistence and I feel its crushing attentions on my flesh. Turning the gladius back around in my left hand, I stab down into the Chaos Space Marine’s shoulder. Slipping the tip of the blade between the monstrous bionic attachment and the warped flesh of the Angel, I thrash back and forth with the sword hilt like a gearstick, cutting through tendons and hydraulic piping. As the claw releases me I bring up my boot and stamp down on the World Eater’s extravagant helm. The helmet twists and something snaps. I hope it is the Traitor’s neck.
I heave at the whip’s length, but two further daemon beasts have sunk their maws into Bethesda’s flailing legs. They drag at her, and my boots skid across the cloistrium floor. She screams again. The blood-smeared ‘purge’ begins to slip through my power-armoured grip.
‘Melmoch!’ I call. I hate to. Palatine Sapphira’s body has been snatched by fleet-of-claw blood-heralds. The Epistolary doesn’t even know, since he is surrounded by cultists and slave-soldiers, which he cuts down like a reaper with his force scythe. The psyker spots me and my desperate tug of war with the hounds. He angles the shaft of the scythe at the beast, and with his kindly face now a hollow mask of exhaustion, desperation and fury, the Librarian sends an energy storm of arcing power at the hounds.
Impossibly the destructive stream deviates and crackles harmlessly about the savage monsters. Furious, the Librarian sends another blast of soul lightning at the beasts, but it too sears wide. The spiked collars the creatures are wearing glow with an unnatural energy, seemingly protecting the hellhounds from Melmoch’s psychic barrage. The whip slips from my fingers and the monsters drag the shrieking serf into a narrow alley.
The terrible cacophony of battle grows. Skase, Chaplain Shadrath and I do what we can to prevent the storm front of mulching axes and Traitor bolt-fire from turning us into Escharan chum. Melmoch sweeps the sizzling blade of his force scythe repeatedly through the meat-grinding crush of the cultist crowds, slicing through torsos and daemonflesh in a desperate attempt to hold the Cholercaustians back. Novah drops his empty boltgun, and his gladius joins ours, the company standard held high above our heads. Only Squad Whip Joachim fights on alone in the centre ground, beating back three rapid World Eaters with his remaining blade and a steel nerve alone.
A shockwave of revulsion and otherworldly dread passes through me. A face has appeared at an ambulatory entrance. As the cultists thin, a colossal hand grasps the brick corner of a block-domicilia. Muscular fingers of daemonflesh terminate in metal claws, and the tough hide of the palm is etched with blasphemous runes and symbols. Heavy chain adorns the wrist, and moving up behind it, peering through the ambulatory gap and into the god-pleasing bloodshed of the cloistrium, is the face of a greater daemon, old as murder and ugly as an eternity of sin. It’s all ferocity-taut flesh, flared nostrils, bared tusks and canines. I can feel its destructive power in eyes that burn with the infinitely-focused heat of hatred. Amongst the din of battle I did not even notice the distant thunder of the great being’s approach.
The long reach of its palm goes out and it seizes Joachim from behind, its fingers wrapping around the struggling Excoriator, his arms and his weapon. With ease, the greater daemon squeezes. Joachim screeches. The squad whip’s pack and plate crumple, and with nowhere else to go, the Angel’s flesh and blood erupt from the daemon’s tight-closed fist in a fountain of unspeakable horror. I die a little inside myself. It ends here, it seems. Drowned in cultist mayhem while being hacked apart by the Traitor World Eaters, with daemons picking over our bones and the fearful semblance of the Blood God himself looking on with primordial satisfaction.
This would be a distracting notion enough, amongst the bolt-rounds and roaring teeth of chainaxes – but then the sepulchre wall behind me explodes.
Sharp fragments of ancient brick, stone and mortar flew across the cloistrium like shrapnel. The remainder of the sepulchre wall fell away in large pieces, revealing the interior of the repository to the stars. Chewing up the rubble and masonry on the polished sepulchre floor, Punisher rolled out on its rugged tracks. The Thunderfire cannon’s quad-barrelled muzzles smoked with the demolishing blast, and the targeting reticula mounted on its back blazed with the life of its machine-spirit through the billowing dust cloud.
During the initial assault, with Punisher having received its locking and loading libations, ritual targeting protocols, prayers and appeasements from Frater Astrotechnicus Dancred, the Thunderfire cannon had dutifully held its part of the perimeter. Dancred had attached a caterpillar flatbed trailer to the itinerant cannon to aid self-loading and assigned Punisher its own part of the battlement to defend. Unconcerned by fleeing cemetery worlders, dying Guardsmen and the horror of otherworldly threats, the machine prioritised enemy targets according to a simple equation based upon size and closing distance. This had seen the Thunderfire cannon through the horror of the immaterial assault and helped the ordnance hold the line all but alone on its eastern section of the battlement.
Following the invasion, with no further catechisa or protocol forthcoming in the wake of Techmarine Dancred’s death, the cannon had merely continued its still, silent vigil of the eastern battlement. Dancred had provided the cannon’s machine-spirit with modus-contingencia, including an inner-city ‘hunt and destroy’ protocol, should the battlement be overrun in the
initial assault. Since the perimeter had held, Punisher simply waited – quiet and unnoticed by forces re-fortifying the section in preparation for the incoming Cholercaust. Charnel Guardsmen, Sisters of Battle and Excoriators assumed that the cannon was dead, like the Techmarine it had taken to following like a faithful hound.
With the resurgence of hostilities on the eastern perimeter, the Punisher returned to automotive and explosive life. As the Cholercaust swamped battlements all over the city, including the one upon which the cannon was unsuspectingly stationed, Punisher fell to its ‘hunt and destroy’ duties in the small, sloped streets and alleyways of the cemetery world city.
As the dust cleared, fresh targets presented themselves in profusion. Heretics. Daemonic entities. Enemy Adeptus Astartes. The completion of a cold equation prompted Punisher’s quad-barrel to start cycling and its trailer feed system to begin loading the rotating breeches. A large etherform attempting to enter the cloistrium received Punisher’s initial attention. The creature received an explosive shell in the face as well as several follow-up shots that momentarily drove it back to a less threatening range. Lesser entities attempted to rush the cannon, but the Punisher stopped them in their tracks with a succession of volleys at the kill zone before the cannon, turning the creatures into scraps of smouldering daemonflesh. The cannon targeted the foundations of a nearby building in order to economically stall the advance of multiple heretic signatures. The old hermitage wall to which the foundation belonged collapsed, burying the heretics in an avalanche of stone as well as temporarily blocking off the entry point, which the Thunderfire cannon’s machine-spirit had swiftly designated as tactically significant.
The enemy Adeptus Astartes closed with the cannon, but Punisher detected only small arms and close-quarter weaponry. The Thunderfire cannon sent a rhythmic barrage at the advancing contingent, blasting power-armoured bodies apart and around the confines of the cloistrium. The assault defied the machine-spirit’s calculations, and Punisher found itself turning its barrels time and again back to the enemy Adeptus Astartes, who even with body parts blown off, continued in their attempts to reach the cannon.