The Apothecary shook his battered face. ‘Quesiah Ichabod is the greatest Excoriator to have ever lived. Those armoured serpents were lucky – and perhaps born so – but even they, with their lies and infernal ways, could not take him from us. Besides, he is now on Eschara with one of our best, the Chief Apothecary.’
‘I can’t look my Chapter Master in the eye and tell him I did everything in my power to secure victory when I did not.’ Gideon seemed to come to a dismal decision. ‘I’d hoped that it would not come to this. Nine Excoriators have fought for their Chapter in the Feast, yet ten were sent for such a hallowed duty. Only Dorn knows why Master Ichabod insisted upon his inclusion, but that is now the choice laid before me. Can the Scourge be made fit for anything, let alone battle?’
‘I believe so. We are pure of hearts but not of blood. As part of a former Legion and now as a Chapter, we are not alone in our experience of genetic deficiency. The Wolves and the Angels, as well as the brethren of future Foundings, carry the flaws of their blood heritage on to new generations,’ the Excoriators Apothecary explained. ‘When the Darkness takes one of our number, it might appear to us a wretched palsy: the slackness of the jaw, the tremor of the limb, the blankness of the eye. But those who survive it report the experience as a living nightmare, a sleeping wakefulness in which they relive the bottomless woe of Dorn’s most trying time – the grievous loss of our Father-Emperor, at least as we knew him. This is both our father’s genetic blessing and his curse to his sons. To know the possibility – for even a second – of an Imperium without the Emperor. To feel what Dorn felt. The profound misery of a primarch. The paralysing fear that even one as great as he experienced, for himself and for humanity, over the Emperor’s shattered body. To live the Darkness.’
‘Such details have little meaning for me, Apothecary,’ Gideon told him. ‘The Adeptus Astartes are bred for battle. They exist only to avenge the Emperor and put the enemies of humanity to the blade. I need warriors, not dreamers. Whatever the actual nature of this affliction, it does not befit one of our calling. If it were me, I’d rather my brothers ended such a vegetative existence than watch me live on in a senseless state.’
‘Since the Darkness can strike any of us at any time, corpus-captain, I’ll bear that in mind,’ Ezrachi promised with a subversive curl of the lip. ‘While we dwell on such matters, you should know that the procedure I intend is untried and that the brother in question might not survive it.’
‘For the calamity he has brought down on all of us, I would lose little sleep over that.’
‘I suspected as much,’ the Apothecary said. ‘I inform you only that it in turn might inform your strategy for our brothers in the contest. You do know it is possible that his suffering caused the loss of the Chapter standard rather than his failure being the cause of the Darkness.’
‘What do I care for that?’ Gideon snorted. ‘He failed his primarch. He failed his Chapter Master. He failed us all. The only care I have in this is to find use for such traitorous hands. What will you do and how long do you need?’
‘Santiarch Balshazar has his way of managing the afflicted,’ Ezrachi replied. ‘A spiritual treatment that those suffering the Darkness survive or they do not. While I respect the symbolic significance of the Santiarch’s practice and the rituals specific to our Chapter cult, my method is comparatively direct.’ The Apothecary indicated a point at the back of his skull, where in the fashion of the Chapter, his thinning hairline met a scarred and shaven scalp. ‘The catalepsean node is located here on the brain stem. As the implant responsible for modifying the circadian rhythms – our patterns of sleep and elongated periods of consciousness – it seems possible that a malfunctioning node could be responsible for a loss of motor control and the experience of a “living nightmare”. I plan to drill through the bone and insert a hypodermic lightning rod into the brain. There I shall issue a localised shock to the catalepsean node, hopefully interrupting the affliction of the Darkness and reinstating the natural function of the implant.’
‘Sounds painful.’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘Good,’ the corpus-captain said. ‘When you are finished with Usachar and Dathan, return to the Scarifica. The Rites of Battle begin for the next round shortly. The Feast waits for no one. Send word if your experiment meets with success. I’ll also need informing if our fallen brother fails us once again.’
‘How do you define failure?’
‘A living-death or an actual one,’ Gideon told the Apothecary as he took his leave. ‘It makes very little difference to me when it comes to Zachariah Kersh.’
‘I trust everything is prepared?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
Apothecary Ezrachi stomped down the ramp into the cargo compartment of the frigate Scarifica, his leg clunking against the metal floor. His nostrils flared. They were down in the bowels of the ship. He would have preferred a more suitable location for the procedure, but his brother Excoriators would not tolerate the Scourge’s presence.
Crates and bulk-canisters had been cleared in the centre of the compartment, creating an open space. There stood a decorative casket, an item transported from Santiarch Balshazar’s Holy Reclusiam, buried deep within the Excoriators’ fortress-monastery on distant Eschara. Beaten from dull adamantium, the box had the dimensions of a sarcophagus and the extravagant garniture to match. Its frontispiece featured a raised depiction of the Emperor-of-All; despite the casket standing upright, it represented him as prone, maimed and broken, following his confrontation with the beast Horus. Santiarch Balshazar’s solution to the affliction of the Darkness. A darkness of his own. The most solitary of confinements, where no self-respecting Excoriator need look upon his weakness and invalidity.
On either side of the sarcophagus’s head was a small confessional grille. On the left, Ezrachi’s apothecarion aides busied themselves in ivory robes, adorned with the insignia of the prime helix. They were making adjustments to a tripod arrangement and drill, the trepan of which was pointed through the open grille. On the opposite side were the Scourge’s own serfs, looking thoroughly miserable. Since the disgrace of their master they had been relegated to the cargo compartment also, bunking and toileting in the dark, down with the casket that held the fallen Kersh.
There were three. Old Enoch was the Scourge’s seneschal. He sat, perpetually oiling the braided length of ‘the purge’ and mumbling insensibly to himself. He was caretaker of the ceremonial lash and overseer of his master’s devotional mortification. Enoch’s son Oren proceeded to mop the area around the sarcophagus base where a growing pool of waste was escaping the casket-base. He was the lictor. Barrel-chested, with the thick arms of a scud-wrestler, it had been Oren’s solemn function to administer ‘the purge’ with all the devotion of which he was capable. His father supervised the ritual, his crabby eyes burning in disappointment that his own son had not been honoured with tissue compatibility for a life beyond mere humanity. Old Enoch’s daughter Bethesda was the Scourge’s absterge. An elfin waif of a girl – gaunt and grim – she was charged with the routine cleansing and dressing of the Adeptus Astartes’ ceremonial wounds. Excoriators all took their purification across their broad, muscular backs – as part of the ritual they called ‘Donning Dorn’s Mantle’. Beyond basic servitude to the Scourge, the three serfs were charged – by Kersh himself above all else – to excoriate his flesh and purify him of weakness so that he might achieve endorphic communion with the primarch.
Bethesda was reading to the Scourge through the confessional grille on the other side of the casket, although it was unclear how much of the text Kersh was hearing. Whilst enthralled by the Darkness, victims couldn’t speak or communicate. They couldn’t feed themselves or take water and seemed feverishly insensible to everything happening about them. At the Apothecary’s entrance, Kersh’s servants stood or turned to present themselves. Bethesda slammed the tome shut. Ezrachi caught the title: The Architecture of Agony by Demetrius Katafalque. He knew it well. A treatise of de
votional suffering by the former captain and first Master of the Excoriators Chapter.
‘Pray, continue,’ Ezrachi ordered softly. ‘This will not be pleasant and I wish our convalescent every distraction.’
Bethesda returned to her reading.
‘…During Terra’s infancy, in which the warriors of brute nations were flogged as a test of their manhood…’
‘We’ve broken through the lower cranium, my lord,’ one of Ezrachi’s aides told him, standing at the tripod-trepan like a workman at a lathe.
‘All right,’ Ezrachi called to his aides. ‘Do your duty.’
‘…Later monastic orders of the Church Katholi indulged flagellation as a form of militant pilgrimage…’
Kersh seemed unmoved by the horrific procedure, held in place within the casket. The Scourge remained silent and still, the drill embedded in his skull and Bethesda’s honeyed words filling the cargo compartment.
Locking off the drill, one of the aides depressed a plunger on a power cell situated between the legs of the tripod. The other wrapped himself around an underslung buttstock and trigger arrangement hanging beneath the drill.
‘Charging. Six megathule range.’
‘…of the Old Hundred. The Geno Seven-Sixty Spartocid fought for the Emperor in the Unification Wars and during the Great Crusade, where it was considered a genic officer’s honour to match the number of strokes suffered by a stereobreed soldier, for failure under his command…’
‘Launching hypodermic rod.’
The apparatus fired and a sickening thud reverberated around the chamber. The robed aides made adjustments to their drill.
‘…whereas it is practice aboard the mighty Phalanx to embrace a technological solution to the self-infliction of suffering, I favour my Lord Dorn’s practice for my brother Excoriators. On our primarch’s fosterworld of Inwit, the winters were cold and the lash was hot. Such instruction was adopted across Dorn’s early empire and favoured by the Progenitor personally as a form of martial communion and as purification for the soul…’
Pressing his face into the micronocular eyepieces above the stock, the aide consulted a pict screen before announcing, ‘We have achieved the catalepsean node, Apothecary.’
‘What are you waiting for?’ Ezrachi barked. ‘Pray to Dorn and deliver the charge.’
A faint hum indicated the duration of the treatment. Bethesda closed the Scourge’s copy of Demetrius Katafalque’s mighty tome and got to her feet. The chamber fell still. Ezrachi’s brow began to knot with disappointment.
‘Again.’
The aides repeated the procedure. All in attendance waited.
Then it began. A sound like distant fury, building within the casket. An agonising roar that was everywhere. The rage of a woken giant.
‘Fire the seals,’ Ezrachi ordered Oren and Old Enoch. ‘Get this thing open.’
The sarcophagus started to shake. Ezrachi pursed his age-cracked lips. Perhaps the Scourge was experiencing a variety of fit. Perhaps the procedure had caused some kind of neural damage. Perhaps the warrior simply wanted out of the casket. ‘The drill!’ the Apothecary remembered, prompting his aides to simultaneously begin retracting the hypodermic rod and reverse-screwing the trepan drill-bit.
As the box shuddered and the furious lament built to a horrible crescendo, the sarcophagus lid swung open. Silence reigned in the compartment once again. The depths of the casket were a foetid darkness. The trembling cabinet grew still. Inside, the laboured breathing of the Scourge could be heard. The apothecarion aides worked frantically to withdraw the deadly reach of their apparatus. With a teeth-clenched grunt, Zachariah Kersh pulled his bulk from the sarcophagus interior.
He was as naked as the day he was initiated, five hundred and fifty-two years before, and stumbled from the interior and out into the cargo compartment. His beard was scraggy and cotted, and his white tonsure overgrown and threaded with silver. The Scourge had a face to match his name, both afflicted and afflicting. He had inherited the dour mask of his Lord Dorn, behind which eyes alive with predatory intensity and accusation burned. He would pass for Demetrius Katafalque himself, if the etchings were to be believed, but for a ragged wound on his right cheek, which had long healed exposing tendons, part of the jawbone and the darkness of his mouth.
Kersh wasn’t as tall as many of his Excoriator brothers but more than made up for this deficiency with muscle crafted in the desperation of battle, rather than the monastery gymnasia. His flesh was a primarch-pleasing canvas of burn marks and scar tissue, stretched across a frame broad with age and experience. He wavered before a delighted Ezrachi, reminding the Apothecary of a statue of Terran antiquity with his demigod’s physique. The Scourge had emerged alive, covered in his own filth but free of the Darkness and its curse.
Bethesda came up behind him with a cream shroud and threw it across the Scourge’s lash-mangled back and globed shoulders. The fabric blotched immediately with the Excoriator’s blood, sweat and mess. Kersh half slipped and went down on his knees, reaching out for support and finding only the slender serf. With his great hand on her tiny shoulder he steadied himself. Reaching for the back of his skull with the other, Kersh tore out the broken drill-bit and hypodermic rod, flinging the attachment at the compartment floor where it pranged off the metal decking.
Ezrachi hesitated, his lips forming around a greeting. He wanted to know if his subject had survived the procedure with his faculties intact. The Scourge beat him to it.
‘Stay out of my skull, Apothecary,’ Zachariah Kersh growled. Shoulders dropped with relief among the gathered Chapter serfs, and Ezrachi smiled.
‘You’re welcome, brother…’
The Scourge’s absterge crossed the benighted cargo bay and entered the bondservants’ berth with a heavy water cask. It was less a berth than a dusty unguent locker used by Techmarines to store oils and bless them in readiness for use in the enginarium. The Cog Mechanicum hung above a small shrine to the Omnissiah that Old Enoch had put to good use as a counter or tabletop. The seneschal was stripped to the waist, baring a shrivelled chest, and had laid out a bowl and a shaving blade. He peered at his gaunt, empty features in a section of metal wall that he’d had Bethesda clean and polish to dull reflection. The absterge poured fresh water into the bowl, at which her father said nothing. The seneschal dipped his hand into a can of blessed oil and rubbed his bristled chin with the thin unguent. He then went to work rhythmically with the razor, scraping his slick, leathery skin and cleansing the blade in the water.
Putting down the cask, Bethesda passed her brother Oren, who had toppled one of their metal bunks and was using it to accomplish pull-ups. The lictor’s meaty arms pulled his broad bulk up off the locker floor. With each rise and fall Oren gave a piggish grunt. Bethesda knelt in the corner of their berth and stacked a small collection of empty unguent cans. She produced a selection of half-spent candles and began to amuse herself with their arrangement.
‘What in Katafalque’s name do you think you’re doing?’ Oren asked between grunts, but Bethesda didn’t answer. Enchanted with her simple display, she attempted to light the candles with a screw-flint. The brawny lictor came to a stop, watching his sister. ‘I said, what are you doing? Answer when you’re damn well spoken to.’
Bethesda looked up, smiling to herself. ‘I’m just lighting some candles.’
‘Where did you get them from?’
‘Traded them, with one of the attendants in the chapel-reclusiam,’ the serf admitted.
‘What in damnation for?’
‘Sundries.’
‘You stupid slattern,’ her brother came back savagely. ‘I mean, why?’
‘For the Scourge,’ she answered. ‘To celebrate his delivery from the Darkness.’
This time it was her father’s turn to grunt. Oren put an angry boot straight through the cans and candle arrangement.
‘Not in here you don’t.’
Bethesda went to reclaim her smashed candles. She murmured, ‘Just because he is
what you can never be.’
‘What did you say to me?’ Oren growled, his eyes livid and cheeks flushed. He closed on her and she stood with fragile defiance. Bethesda heard her father’s razor pause. Old Enoch mumbled something. Oren paused dangerously before her, his chest rising and falling with a sibling’s petty anger.
‘Once,’ he told her through clenched teeth, ‘I wanted more than my pitiful existence to be an Emperor’s Angel. More than a hundred pitiful existences to be the warrior at whose pleasure I serve – the Scourge. An Excoriator without equal. I know better now. Our master is but a false prophet. An Angel fallen. He is so deep in his brothers’ blood that he might as well have slain them himself. We are punished. The Darkness has taken us all. But know this, good sister, if I had been Chapter Scourge, I would not have given up our Stigmartyr so easily.’
A call came from the distant cargo bay. A demigod demanding attendance. Old Enoch grumbled his garbled insistence and Oren backed away from his sister, holding her gaze as he did so. As the lictor left the locker, his father dashed his unkindly face with water before using a ragged towel to dry it off. He turned and stood, giving Bethesda a sour glare. Throwing the towel at her, he mumbled his disgust before following Oren out, leaving the absterge alone with her candles.
Chapter Two
Stigmartyr
‘Cease!’
Zachariah Kersh heard Ezrachi’s command across the Scarifica’s penitorium and the crack of the whip. Kersh’s personal serfs paused at the Apothecary’s order. Oren hesitated, the stock of ‘the purge’ clutched in his white-knuckled fist, the bloodied lash resting in coils on the deck beside him. Old Enoch looked to his Adeptus Astartes master, whose teeth-clenching snarl fell and eyes opened. He gave the seneschal a stabbing glare. Old Enoch began babbling to his son in a savage tone that echoed the Excoriator’s displeasure. His chest heaving with exertion, Oren gathered ‘the purge’s’ sacred length before handing it to his father for cleansing and consecration.
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