Nearby, Woodes heard the spade of his brother-in-law Donalbain crunch through the earth. Shovelfuls of dirt flew up out of a grave and landed in a neat pile next to the crisply cut hole. Donalbain was a fosser like Woodes and lived in the same cenopost hamlet.
‘This is insane…’ Woodes said to himself. He looked about him in the darkness. Nearby, cemetery worlders were dragging carts bearing barrels of promethium through the mounds of bodies that surrounded the city perimeter like a hillock or new battlement. The miserable teams pulled their carts through the corpse-piles of daemon insanity, pumping plungers and spraying the fallen nightmares with precious fuel.
‘It’s what the pontifex ordered,’ Donalbain said. Woodes hadn’t noticed the silence of the fosser’s shovel. Donalbain was taller than his brother-in-law and portlier around the belly; he’d worked up a significant sweat digging the grave so quickly. The Certusian noticed an Excoriators Space Marine stood upon the perimeter battlement, Obsequa City reaching up behind him. The Adeptus Astartes warrior watched them from the continuous mountain of rubble, casting his helmeted gaze up and down the line at other cemetery worlders hard at work clearing the dead and warped flesh of immaterial entities, and digging up graves. Donalbain shuddered. He had no idea how effective the Space Marine’s enhanced vision was in the darkness or, indeed, how good his hearing was. ‘The Angels ordered it also, so get back to work.’
Woodes thought of the thousands of graves being dug around the battlement perimeter. Graves that were situated where the necroplex met the city limits. Graves that had witnessed the worst of the fighting so far and been hidden beneath the daemon creatures storming the city as heavy gun emplacements and the blessed weapons of the Emperor’s Angels had ripped through them. ‘Insanity,’ he said again.
He watched two figures approach, picking their steps carefully through the gravestones, ichor-soaked earth and mangled bodies of the spawn-monstrosities. The first was his wife, Goody, dressed in her bonnet, shawl and fleece boots. Her face was soot-stained, tight and grim, but in that moment, with the grave at his feet and the shovel in his hand, she had never looked better to him. Goody had her arm around their daughter, Nyzette, and her delicate hand over the young girl’s eyes. She did not want the child to see the horror of the warped bodies through which they trudged. The child clutched a home-made rag doll of Saint Astrid to her. Woodes’s chest ached for the both of them. As they got closer, he walked to them, embracing both in his sinewy arms.
‘Papa!’ Nyzette said as she felt his lips against her forehead. He kissed Goody, holding both her and the child close to him – feeling a fearful passion for his wife that he hadn’t felt for a number of years.
‘Woodes…’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he told her. ‘You will be safe and you’ll be together. That’s the important thing.’
‘Papa, stay with us,’ the young girl chided.
‘I can’t, my little blessing.’
‘No, papa…’
‘You must be strong and stay with your mother. You will hide and be safe, but papa must fight – you know, like he did before, when you and mama stayed with Aunt Merelda up near Great Umberto’s tomb.’
‘Papa!’
‘Peace, child. I will be with him,’ Donalbain said, smiling as he came up behind them. Goody moved from her husband’s embrace to her brother-in-law. The large fosser looked down at her. ‘Where’s your sister?’
‘Merelda’s on her way down with the boys,’ Goody replied before returning to the arms of her husband.
‘Have you got everything?’ Woodes asked her as Donalbain picked up Nyzette.
‘Everything the pontifex instructed us to take,’ Goody replied, taking a sling bag from her shoulder. She pulled a roll of blankets from the bag and as she did caught a glimpse of the open grave behind Woodes, the open coffin and the skeletal woman within. ‘Oh, Holy Throne,’ she exclaimed, clasping her mouth with her hand.
‘Don’t look at it,’ Woodes said, taking one of the blankets and covering the desiccated cadaver.
‘Can’t we remove it?’ Goody said, horrified.
‘Not without arousing suspicion,’ Donalbain said, angling the child’s head away. ‘Besides, disturbing the grave is desecration enough. Removing the body before the end of tenure? That’s sacrilege. The pontifex would not hear of it.’
‘What else have you got there?’
Goody opened the bag to show her husband the meagre rations of food she’d managed to collect and the water satchel she’d filled from one of the city’s holy fountains. She also had a small, pack-powered handlamp and a bunch of black lilies. The flowers grew along the Certusian lakeshores and were used for decorative arrangements during burial ceremonies. Goody aimed to use them to mask the musty grave-stench of the coffin. Woodes caught sight of a small knife. A stiletto shearing-blade, hidden amongst the death-blooms. He caught Goody’s eye and nodded bleakly. If events did not unfold according to plan, with silence from above and provisions spent, the blade would become the most essential of her gathered items.
Woodes looked at his wife, her gaunt but beautiful face. He took her again in a tight embrace. Over her shoulder he saw Donalbain nod. Woodes’s eyes drifted skywards to the darkness, knowing that they had little time, that the enemy would not wait. Looking down he saw that there were now several Excoriators stood on the rubble battlement looking down at them. The Emperor’s Angels were still like statues in their scarred plate, impassive and beyond the concerns of mortal men.
‘All right,’ the fosser said finally, feeling Goody’s slender body against his own. ‘Quickly, into the casket.’ Helping his wife down into the grave and taking his child from her uncle, Woodes kissed Nyzette and passed the terrified child down to his wife stood in the coffin. Goody smiled – a gesture, under the circumstances, so telling in its strength and generosity that it brought tears that streaked the fosser’s gravedust-smeared cheeks. The mother and child curled up around one another in the space allowed by the sarcophagus occupant. Using the slingbag as a pillow and a second blanket for warmth, the terrified pair looked up at Woodes and Donalbain. ‘Remember,’ Woodes began, ‘only ring the bell when you hear others. Wait as long as you can. You cannot alert the enemy to your presence.’ His wife nodded.
‘You stay alive,’ Goody told them. ‘Both of you.’
‘I will see you soon,’ Woodes promised. And he meant it.
Moving around to the other side of the grave, Donalbain used his shovel to close the lid. Resting the tip of the blade against the rusty lid he pressed down and re-sealed the casket. Woodes tapped on the top of the coffin with his own shovel and was rewarded with a knock in return.
With Donalbain looking for Merelda and his own young ones, the two cemetery worlders began tossing sacred Certusian earth down onto the casket and into the hole. With each disbelieving shovelful, Woodes shook his head. He could not fully reconcile in his mind the fact that he had just buried his own wife and daughter alive. That all about him, fathers, husbands, brothers and sons were doing the same for their loved ones.
The only thing that kept his arms moving and the shovel blade slicing through the mound of soil was the knowledge that they would all be safer below ground than above it when the Cholercaust arrived. That they would hopefully be spared the wanton butchery of the Chaos degenerates. With their families as safe as they could make them, the disturbed earth patted down and the promethium-soaked, misshapen daemon-forms dragged back over the burial site, Woodes snatched up his autorifle. Making the sign of the aquila, he knelt down in front of the grave marker. It bore the name Erzsebet Dorota Catallus. He would not forget it. An ice-water determination built in the pit of his stomach. A cold fury he held in reserve for the bastard invaders who were bringing death and destruction to his tiny part of the Imperium. Carrying their weapons and shovels, the cemetery worlders began to make their way back up towards the battlement, to take their positions and ready themselves for the carnage
ahead.
I have been watching for a while. This is what it is to lead. A moment’s inspiration, the hot quake of an idea or strategy in the privacy of the mind. Abstraction given form through word and order, followed by the rapid shift of men’s hearts. Even Angels, who need to be led no less. Loyalty. Pride. Trust. Action. Before your eyes, command becomes reality. What you saw in the orderly, bloodless theatre of the mind unfolds in the drawing of blades and the priming of firing mechanisms. It rapidly devolves into a nightmarish version of your imaginings, replete with deadly, unseen movements, fears that find their form. That’s what it is to lead, to dip the toe of one’s boot into the calm, crystal waters of possibility, but to march on as you find yourself up to your helmet in the raging torrent of your brothers’ blood.
Standing atop the perimeter battlement, I survey the killing fields. A sea of obscene bodies swallowing up the graven architecture of mausolea, tombstones and statues. Out there, amongst the past chaos of battle, are the cemetery worlders. Those it is clear I am here to protect. The duty I was bred to perform. A little of the Emperor’s burden taken on my shoulders. What had been the silent insanity of a strategy in my mind is now consigned to history. I told Pontifex Oliphant and for his sins the ecclesiarch lent his words to my own. Thousands of cemetery worlders, ordered to bury their Certusian kin alive. The brief spark of mortal existence, burning brightly under the ground, where blood-soaked minds would not think to look for them.
For a moment I think my revenant returned. I have not seen his ghastly form in a little while. Where he haunted the shadows, there is now but empty darkness. His bale eye gazes upon some other unfortunate, for it no longer looks upon me. I should feel reassured. While I had grown accustomed to the being’s attentions and fell presence, it was either the manifestation of an unnatural existence or some symptom of a fractured mind. Neither were particularly attractive prospects and I should feel relieved at the thing’s absence. Still, I find myself looking. In the gloom of the Long Night; in the reflection of glass darkly; in the corner of my eye.
I feel brother Excoriators about me. They, I know are there. Immortals on the rubble palisade. Like me, come to watch what common men will do at the word of an Angel. With the slice and cut of shovels through gritty earth on the air, we watch – silently impressed. It can’t be easy to dig a grave for your loved ones. Less easy still to fill one containing them.
‘Anything?’ I ask.
Melmoch is beside me.
‘No astrotelepathic communication,’ the Epistolary answers. ‘Nothing from the hosts and destinations to whom I appealed. I can only reason that the comet’s malign influence is too much of a barrier for my skill.’
I nod. ‘Thank you for trying,’ I say as we watch the cemetery worlders go about their solemn task. ‘You think the dust will mask them?’
The Epistolary considers the question.
‘This place is saturated with death,’ the Librarian concludes. ‘The earth is sacred and overpowering in its purpose. We see what we expect to see. The enemy will see a cemetery. He will taste loss. He will smell the stench of death. The Blood God’s servants are warriors all. Their unthinking art is murder. Their weapon of choice is carnage – not the shovel. I think our charges safe.’
I nod my acknowledgement and appreciation of the Epistolary’s support.
‘What if no one survives?’ Chief Whip Skase asks grimly, his mind soaked with bloody thoughts.
‘Then we lose,’ I answer – a statement of the obvious. ‘We get to rot above the ground while those we sought to protect – the Emperor’s subjects – are left to do so below us. That is why we must fight. Fight and survive. The Blood God’s disciples have come here to battle, and we will give them one. In doing so we shall take their eyes off the prize – their intended slaughter of innocents and through this the sundering of this world. We fight to win, but if we lose, I want to go to my death knowing that our enemy will leave sated and swiftly move on. Like a poor marksman, the Blood God will have missed his target and his followers would have failed him. Certus-Minor will not be some deadrock, bathed in slaughter and left behind by the Cholercaust like a cautionary tale. The cemetery worlders will live and the Imperium shall know it. The continued beating of mortal hearts shall give other worlds hope. They shall know that the Cholercaust can be beaten. It will put fire in their bellies and belief in their hearts. Perhaps we will not stop the Blood Crusade here. Perhaps we will not survive. But if we fail, we do so in the hope that others – both mortal and immortal – will succeed. Let that be our legacy.’
Brother Micah comes up behind us with the Fifth Company’s Chaplain. Shadrath gives me the dread gaze of his half-skull helm.
‘Brother Novah has word from the commander of the Apotheon. The defence monitor has engaged the enemy. She reports a vast Chaos fleet – vessels without number. The Blood God’s warriors and minions. Their landing is under way. The Cholercaust is here.’
‘The pontifex?’ I ask.
Micah and Chaplain Shadrath part. Behind them is a Sister of Battle in cobalt plate, a boltgun in her slender gauntlets and a pair of bolt pistols at her hip. Palatine Sapphira of the Order of the August Vigil.
‘Pontifex Oliphant is safe,’ Sapphira tells me. ‘He is down in Umberto II’s vault with as many of his remaining priests and attendants as we could accommodate.’
‘A kindness,’ I return.
‘The pontifex told me of your plan,’ the Sister reveals. ‘A kindness on your own part, corpus-captain – if a macabre one. My Sisters thought your interest in the Certusians lay only in feeding them as fodder to the enemy.’
‘I’m happy to disappoint them.’
‘The vault door is thick and crafted from adamantium. It should resist all but the most determined assault. I have garrisoned the vault with a squad of my Sisters, under a trustworthy subordinate. I offer myself and the rest of my mission in defence of the city, where the holy work of the God-Emperor might be done.’
I hold out my gauntlet and take her own.
‘You are most welcome, Sister,’ I tell her. ‘We are honoured to share the burden with you.’
Shadrath steps forwards, looking up into the sky.
‘Chaplain?’
Carefully, he takes off his half-skull helmet, revealing his face. It is the first time I have gazed upon his features. The shock of white hair, the unsmiling mouth and the implacable lines of almost elemental determination are the primarch’s own. Like Demetrius Katafalque before him, Shadrath had been blessed with the features of the Emperor’s truest Angel. I follow his gaze to see the flash of gunfire in the sky overhead, the searing burn of the Apotheon’s mighty lance.
‘Let’s to our posts,’ Chaplain Shadrath rumbles, his eyes still on the deep expanse of the heavens above. ‘Rogal Dorn waits for us at the Eternity Gate.’
We nod and walk slowly away, with the Chaplain’s words still ringing in our ears. We are silent, for we have no words to better them.
Part Four
Deus Ex Damnation…
Chapter Eighteen
Cholercaust
Roaring.
The distant darkness gave up the rage-fuelled cacophony of murderous intention. The Blood God’s disciples honoured him with their bombast. The stomach-curdling din of barbarism and animal fury. The Cholercaust had arrived and it wanted the cemetery world to know. A deafening barrage of ferocity, made up of personal, if mindless, expressions of individual hatred. Unsettling, in sheer volume alone.
In a demonstration of steadfastness – the kind Kersh reasoned the Charnel Guard and remaining Certusians would need to see – the Scourge stood atop the ichor-splattered battlement. Once again the Imperial forces would try to hold the rubble-mound perimeter, falling back concentrically as the need arose. With the cemetery worlders – vulnerable men, women and children – buried beneath the bordering necroplex, the narrow alleys, stairs and cloisters of the city could play their part if needed. And, if it came to it, the imposing architecture of
the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum had been established as a final fall-back position. Kersh couldn’t hope to win against the Blood God’s unstoppable host, but the Excoriator planned on putting off the eventuality for as long as possible. The Fifth Company would sell their lives dearly and fight for as long as they could.
There was still a dim possibility that Epistolary Melmoch’s appeal had reached out across the stars to a brother-Chapter. The Scourge rested his gauntlet on the angular edges of his gladius pommel. He had not entirely given up on the slim possibility that their kin could arrive to turn the tide. He hadn’t burdened his Fifth Company brothers with such damning hope, though suspected it already beat in the hearts of each and every one. Regardless of such mortal folly, the howling tsunami of hate surging across the burial grounds at them was theirs alone.
The dread expectation was palpable. With his enhanced hearing the Scourge could hear the creak of Certusian fingers against triggers, the rapid beating of hearts in serf-manned gun emplacements, and the deep and determined breathing of Excoriators in their battle-helms. Then he saw it. The first offerings of the darkness. Chaos martyrs. The Cholercaust meat shield. Bodies moved through the necroplex, racing towards Obsequa City, the battlement perimeter and certain death.
The Scourge swore. He recognised them immediately. Blood-crazed cemetery worlders. Victims of the gall-fever that had swept the planet in the wake of the Keeler Comet. Husbands, mothers, children. Certusians all. Drawn to Obsequa City like a plague of moths irresistibly summoned to a flame. Kersh felt their urge to kill across the graves. He felt the Charnel Guard and surviving members of the hastily created Certusian militia tighten at the sight of their kindred: neighbours, friends, family. He felt the bile rising within him, his hatred for the servants of darkness and their barbarous tactics. Over the vox-channel, the corpus-captain heard similar confirmations from along the line. The Thunderhawk Impunitas, circling high above the city, also reported incoming targets. Peering up into the sky, the corpus-captain watched the stars blink. He got the impression of an ungainly daemon-flock, thunderbolting above them on leathery wings.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 201