Behind the mangled blasphemy of the battle-barge’s stately dimensions a colossal fleet extended. Like a growing stain on the empty void, the Cholercaust continued to grow. Daily, vessels of all descriptions joined the Ruinous armada. Some were warships, eager to join the Blood Crusade and prove themselves worthy of Khorne’s favour. Others had been led there under the command of killers and champions, whose carnage-clouded visions had revealed to them a slaughter without end, a patron-pleasing brotherhood of the barbarous. Others still were captured freighters, traders and heavy transports, swarming with the surrendered slave-stock of sundered worlds, Imperial innocents whose fate now lay in the Blood God’s claws and whose depraved treatment aboard the seized vessels led them down Khorne’s doomed path.
Silhouetted in the comet’s tailsmear, a Traitor Astartes stood before the lancet screen in the studded extravagance of archaic Tactical Dreadnought armour. The figure was a vision of red and brass, spiked like an undersea urchin and draped in skull and chain. His helm was a sculpted representation of monstrous jaws swallowing a bronze globe whole. Held beside the ceramite hulk, one in each gauntlet, were a pair of ugly chainaxes. The Traitor Terminator rested their shafts on the mesh-decking and allowed their chunky belligerence and barbed outline to hang over his grotesque helmet. Lord Havloc might have been commander of the Rancour and leader of the crusader fleet, but Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh – World Eater and Skull Champion of the Blood God – led the Cholercaust once the berserker armies of Khorne stepped out onto the soon-to-be blood-drenched earth of Imperial worlds. He stood like a statue, unmoved in his silent fury, watching the Keeler Comet’s haemorrhaging bulb bleed out across the cosmos, leading the Blood Crusade fleet across the stars to its next planetary victim.
On the bridge the air was thick with rage, heat and the haze of blood, pierced only by the Blood God-honouring screams of the dying. Devil-mutants and fang-faced bestials armed with serrated flails drove a chained train of fresh captives out onto the pulpit-mezzanine. There, before the horror of Havloc’s daemon form, the slaves shrieked their terror, emptied their bladders and begged for a mercy that would never come. With an imperceptible narrowing of his yellow, serpentine eyes, Lord Havloc gave successive orders for execution.
Like his glorious deity, Havloc the Cold-Blooded had a special loathing for the meek and yielding. The Blood God drank deep in the fury of the sword’s swing, the thunder of flesh-pulping gunfire delivered at point-blank range and the seething malice of murderous thoughts. These the Chaos entity drew upon, whether carried out by the depraved champions of his hateful cause or enemies, worthy in their violent desires and bloody intent.
A monstrous hulk lumbered forth, an obscene fusion of what had been a man and machine. Weapons protruded awkwardly from stone-hard flesh which had in turn grown cancerous and rampant across the thing’s armour and helmet. Two holes had been punctured in the tissue of the mask to allow the thing to see, and the eyeholes continually bled and crusted.
Released from his bonds, a fat slave threw himself down before Havloc’s feet – cloven hooves that had long been fused to the base of the throne. The hulk snatched up the pleading captive by the head with an embedded power claw. Its other arm was a flesh-cradle for the broad disc of a spinning buzzsaw, which with an effortless swipe, cut the slave’s screeching head and shoulders from the rest of his thrashing carcass. Lord Havloc and his followers were baptised in the blood of the slaughtered. Depositing the decapitated head in a net of rotting skulls hanging off the hulk’s back, the brute kicked the rest of the butchered corpse off the side of the pulpit-mezzanine. The body tumbled into a crowded den of flesh-hounds below, initiating a short-lived daemonic frenzy. This the hulk repeated with two further submissives until before Havloc came a spitting whirlwind of a girl. Her chains jangled and her feet flew as she attempted to thrash her way out of imprisonment. The Chaos lord licked his lips with a thick, forked tongue. He nodded and a bestial released her from her bonds.
From the back of the throne, Havloc spread a large pair of black, leathery wings. The girl spat at the Rancour’s commander and, free of her shackles, came straight at the beast. Havloc relished her mindless fury – her lack of fear and desire to kill. Flapping his wings in front of him, Havloc sent a wall of foetid air at the girl. Running and kicking, the spirited slave was blown from the grille of the pulpit-mezzanine. She tumbled with a half-caught scream before hitting the floor with a sickening crack. The scream came fully-formed this time. The slave was squirming around on the blood-slick floor of the gladiatorial arena below. A shattered tibia had sheared up through her knee.
‘That should slow her down a bit,’ Lord Havloc hissed, emerging from behind his retracting wings. Howls of furious delight rose from the audience as another slave was freed from a holding cage. Snatching a crude flensing blade from a hook on the rusting pit wall, the gore-speckled defending champion swept down on the girl.
The howls and shrieks of the berserkers on the bridge suddenly seemed to combine into one horrific roar. Flames thrashed to greater heights and the corroded metal of the deck began to vibrate, causing fragments of grit and shattered skull to dance, and blood to steam from its agitated surface. Umbragg took to one ceramite knee. The damned all spoke as one.
‘Havloc…’
Even the Chaos lord bowed his head and lowered his wings, as though the voice was everywhere and its owner looking down on him from above.
‘My lord,’ Havloc grizzled, with fear and fire fighting within him. ‘Great Pilgrim, the Right Claw of Khorne, Chosen of the Brazen-Fleshed. What is thy bidding, my merciless master?’
‘I lead,’ the cacophony of spite continued, ‘the Cholercaust follows. To what part of the doomed Imperium does the crimson comet – the physical embodiment of the Blood God’s will – take us next?’
‘Under your ruthless leadership, Great Pilgrim – back to Terra, to the crumbling walls of the corpse-Emperor’s palace and the Eternity Gate. For your murderous amusement, the War-Given-Form has blessed your path with a faith world. A planet of the dead, where the corpse-Emperor’s cultcubines minister to the galaxy’s silent majority.’
‘A planet of the dead, indeed,’ the Pilgrim boomed through the mouths of the mob. ‘Hone your blades, my slaughterkin, for shortly they shall taste priest-flesh…’
I dream.
For the longest time I have lived a nightmare. My eyes have been half open to events unfolding about me while behind them a macabre puppet show has played. To be neither awake nor asleep. A mind-breaking combination of both. It is custom to pinch oneself – to test if one is awake. I need no such test to know I am finally asleep. To know I am in the cradle of the unconscious. The world about me has that punch-drunk quality, the distant resonance of the unreal.
I walk the surface of the cemetery world. The sandy Certusian earth crunches beneath my boots. Through my helmet optics I zoom in on a crenulated horizon. A sea of gravestones and masonry markers extends before me. Above, the ivory sky broils and bubbles in the distance. Then, like an atomic explosion, a mushroom cloud vomits forth from the heavens and billows thunderously for the surface. There is no sound – only doom. The creamy cloud spumes and rages, swirling black, then red and gold as a swirling wall of flame overreaches the blast wave and the inferno hits the ground.
I turn and run. Armoured footfalls pulverise the grit beneath my boots as stride for stride my plated form attempts to outrun the conflagration. As the firewall of destruction billows furiously across the necroscape behind me, I feel my progress slowing. Even in full battle-plate I could make the horizon, but it is not the distance, nor the extra weight of ceramite that impedes me. I hurdle gravestones and will myself on, but as the flames engulf the world behind me, my boots sink deeper and deeper into the grave dirt. The soil has lost its consistency and I have run myself down into a quagmire. The earth – black, sodden and heavy – pulls me down into the ground itself. It oozes up my greaves, splatters plate and swallows cabling. With my legs and arms ch
urning the morass, I see shattered bones, earth-stained skulls and rotten remains in the mire about me. Even a smashed stasis casket surfaces for a moment, like a sinking ship, before disappearing back into the depths.
With every movement my ceramite sinks further, and within moments I am up to my helm in cemetery world dirt. I turn to see the bank of flame – an unstoppable inferno of fire and fury that has scorched the Certusian surface clean – erupting upon my position. The most primal of instincts takes over, and before I know it, I have dived down below the quagmire and into an underworld of darkness, grit and death. My optics turn black. I desist in my armoured struggles and allow the cemetery world to take me down, while above the earth hardens, as the inferno bakes the ground with the heat of its righteous fury.
Kersh opened his eyes. The vague recollection of a dream misted his mind like a taste water wouldn’t wash away. He felt smothered yet calm and took a moment to savour several deep breaths. He allowed his head to roll to one side. A form sat by his bunk crystallised into focus. Bethesda, his personal serf and absterge, was watching him. Her mask of tension broke with relief and she smiled. The curl of her lip was simple and sweet, and Kersh found that he was actually quite glad to see her.
She turned and called ‘lord’ lightly at the dormitory door. It opened slightly and Kersh saw Micah’s face in the crack. His expression became a grin.
‘It’s good to see you, sir. I’ll send for your Apothecary, plate and bondsmen.’
Kersh nodded and went to sit up. The hermitage slab made a harsh bunk, but the Scourge had known worse. He had been stripped of his warrior’s plate and lay in his clean but blood-stained robes, bearing the venerated symbol of the Stigmartyr. As was custom, the cream of the garment was fresh but the spiritual work of ‘the purge’ was forever allowed to stain the material.
Putting the soles of his feet on the cold stone of the hermitage floor, Kersh felt something fall from his chest. On the flags beneath him, the Excoriator found a liquid-crystal wafer. He picked it up. It bore an illustration: a single eye, unflinching, open and glinting with predatory intention. The Space Marine felt some unease looking at the disturbing image. It was as though the card itself was watching him. Below the illustration, inscribed in High Gothic, was the title Magnus Occularis. The Scourge’s brow creased with confusion.
‘Did Melmoch leave this?’ Kersh asked. Bethesda shook her head.
‘Your armour, sir?’ Micah said as Kersh strode past and out into the dark hermitage thoroughfare. The company champion’s thoughts were always centred on his commander’s safety. The dim light of struggling candles illuminated the glower on the Scourge’s face.
‘The plate can wait,’ Kersh murmured, advancing up the cloister past the heavy doors of private dorms and hermitories. The corpus-captain came to a silent halt outside one. The ferruswood door was slightly ajar. Beyond, Kersh and Micah could hear the savage crack of a ‘purge’ at work. Kersh recognised the knotty face of Chief Whip Skase’s lictor. The serf himself was stripped to the waist and his body slick with the effort of mortification. Edging around, Kersh could also see the pool of blood gathering around the purged. Dorn’s Mantle had not been so much donned as spread across the floor. Both Skase’s seneschal and absterge were employed with mops and buckets, attempting to stem the flood. Against the wall stood the chief whip himself, stoic and immovable – like a statue – his mangled back cut to ribbons.
Pain and endurance were their genetic heritage and through the spilling of blood, Demetrius Katafalque had taught them that spiritual communion with the primarch could be achieved. In the cold remove achieved by Excoriators during the hot agony of purgation, Rogal Dorn had answers for each of them. Kersh had seen Excoriators punish themselves as such before. He had done so, cloaked in the shame of losing the Chapter Stigmartyr and failure to protect his Chapter Master. It led to a dark place. The long journey from Samarquand had taught him that his flesh had a greater purpose in Dorn’s eyes; that beyond the spiritual unity of the Mantle lay only a labyrinth of needless suffering in which to lose oneself forever.
Kersh was so struck by the spectacle – the simultaneous sadness for and anger towards the hurting Skase – that he did not even acknowledge Ezrachi’s hydraulic approach. Others in the dormitory had, however, and a figure behind him promptly closed the hermitory door.
‘Have Toralech relay a message to the Chaplain,’ Ezrachi ordered Brother Micah. ‘Inform him that the corpus-captain is conscious and demands a report.’
Micah nodded and peeled off into the shadows.
‘I ordered a cessation of ritual observance,’ Kersh growled at the ferruswood door.
‘And Chaplain Shadrath enforced it,’ said the Apothecary. ‘You’ve been out a few days.’ Ezrachi turned the Scourge’s face towards him before dazzling the Excoriator with some medical instrument that sent a flickering beam between his eyes. Since the dull, scratched surface of a ball bearing sat in one socket, Ezrachi focused his attention on the corpus-captain’s remaining eye.
‘Days,’ Kersh marvelled. ‘The company…’
‘Shadrath will make his report. Be still.’
Kersh allowed the Apothecary his rudimentary medical tests.
‘It’s not healthy,’ Kersh said looking back to the door, but the Apothecary brought his attention back to the beam.
‘I’ve spoken to Skase,’ Ezrachi said. ‘Right now I’m more worried about you.’
‘Was it a relapse of the Darkness?’
‘No,’ Ezrachi said with some certainty. ‘I just don’t think you were sleeping. Even an Adeptus Astartes must sleep some time. I can give you something for that. You must tell me if you begin suffering the delusions you spoke of.’
‘You think I’m hallucinating?’
‘I should have listened. My apologies, corpus-captain. We must accept the possibility that the catalepsean node is still malfunctioning. It might require further surgery. It is certainly more evidence for the likelihood of the Darkness having a genetic rather than spiritual cause.’
‘Well, thrilled as I am to help you solve a medical mystery,’ Kersh told him, ‘just fix it, will you?’
‘I need the surgical bay in the apothecarion – on board the Angelica Mortis. I’m happy, however, to submit a report indicating that you’re fit for duty.’
‘I suppose this recent incapacitation has further cemented ill-will towards my command amongst the Fifth.’
‘The rank and file hate you with a passion,’ Ezrachi told him with brutal honesty. ‘Nothing has changed there. Events, however, have overreached us.’
‘Explain.’
‘Follow me.’
The Apothecary led Kersh up a spiral staircase of stone and dust. In the awkwardness of full plate, Ezrachi found that he had to angle his pauldrons to ascend, while the globes of the Scourge’s muscular shoulders merely brushed the staircase walls. A door at the top of the twisting steps opened out into a narrow balcony. Below them the tiled roofs of the hermitage extended; above, a small bell tower reached for the darkness of the cemetery world sky. Stars glimmered in the heavens, and on the horizon, the Eye of Terror’s distant, heliotropic haze besmirched the depths of the void. It was not the warp storm’s horror that held the corpus-captain’s attention.
‘Katafalque’s blood,’ Kersh said, the oath carried off on the light breeze. Above Certus-Minor, the sky had been cleaved in two, a gore smear trailed across the starry firmament – like that a wounded soldier might make, crawling for his life. Instead of a soldier, the haemorrhaging bulb of a crimson comet blazed the bloody path. ‘The Keeler Comet…’
‘Destruction follows in the wake of the comet,’ Ezrachi told him. ‘It is more than just an omen. If the crimson comet appears in a sky then the world to which that sky belongs is doomed to fall.’
‘Stop talking like a prophet and give me specifics. Specifics I can kill.’
‘We’ve been out of segmentum, but Shadrath claims intelligence is patchy. The comet leaves no witnesses t
o its passing,’ the Apothecary said.
‘No survivors?’
‘Some claim the comet eats worlds whole,’ Ezrachi replied, ‘others that it is responsible for some kind of rift or daemonic incursion. The Imperial Navy reports sightings of an armada trailing its tail, a Blood Crusade called the Cholercaust. The Exorcists, the Grey Knights and our cousins the Fists are rumoured to man a cordon at Vanaheim – to prevent a crusader advance on Segmentum Solar.’
Kersh’s eyes drifted down to the planet surface. Beyond the city, the necroplex of grave markers, statues and mausolea extended before being swallowed by the darkness.
‘How long until dawn?’
‘Two, perhaps three hundred hours standard. The cemetery worlders call it the Long Night.’
‘We’ve got to send word to Vanaheim,’ Kersh said. ‘We need to alert the Viper Legion on Hellionii Reticuli. The Cadians…’
‘This world’s problems have already begun,’ Ezrachi said, pointing behind the corpus-captain. Turning, Kersh took in the rising spires and towers of Obsequa City with the dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum topping the cathedralscape like a crown. Smoke streamed from various fires across the city while tiny sparks of las-fire could be seen flashing across the streets below. Amongst the chaos, Kersh could make out large crowds in the streets. A mortuary lighter made an unsteady take-off and blasted past the belfry at full throttle. Kersh could imagine the panic and pure havoc created on the cemetery world at the appearance of the crimson comet. Kersh made for the stairs.
‘I presume an evacuation has begun,’ the Scourge called behind him.
‘With necrofreighter captains auctioning space in their empty holds to the highest bidders,’ Ezrachi said with obvious disappointment. ‘The ruling classes and many of the priests simply abandoned world. There was little in the way of haggling – speed being of the essence.’
‘The pontifex…’
‘Remains,’ Ezrachi said. ‘He claims he won’t leave his people or sacred Certusian soil. There are, of course, many thousands of scribes and labourers without the coin to secure a passage off-world.’
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 188