‘Die, you monstrous thing,’ Kersh spat, as Skase continued to chew through the cultists swarming the chamber. The creature of Chaos clawed at its own dust-infected muscle and sinew, raking through its face and armoured chest. Cultists about the dissolving cage of bones screamed also and began savaging the beast with blades, nails and teeth. The surrounding slave-soldiers fell on the inner circle, tearing them apart, and before long the scene was a horrific orgy of butchery. Skase concentrated his mulching gunfire on the doorway, accompanied by throng-blasting grenades tossed by the Scourge, down through the antechamber.
A new and sickening sound rose up from the sepulchre floor. It sounded to Kersh like a thicket of trees all bending and breaking at the same time. The corpus-captain could hear snapping, fracturing and splintering. Below, at the heart of the carnage, the bodies of the dying and those who had killed them were being drawn into a bloody maelstrom. Bones were breaking and reaching out of cultist bodies, intertwining with the skeletal mesh of others in a macabre fusion, a daemon cage through which the shredded flesh and spilled gore of the cultists bubbled and swirled. Beneath the Excoriators, the Pilgrim was finding a new form. Feeding on the souls of his blood-pledged, the monster fought through the agonies Kersh had visited upon it and refused to release its terrible hold on the material universe. As more and more of the Blood God’s disciples flooding the chamber were gore-assimilated by the thing, it grew. The Pilgrim’s skin-rent skull emerged from the top of the carcass mountain, its devastating claws also – although being a flesh-frame of grasping, scratching, flailing limbs, it was not short of such appendages. As it rose on its murderous altar of butchered bodies, the Pilgrim’s eyes blazed white with hate and it reached out for the Emperor’s Angels on the gallery.
‘Let’s go!’ Kersh bawled, tugging at Skase’s shoulder, but the chief whip shrugged him off, burying a fresh volley of bolt-rounds in the Pilgrim’s grotesque embodiment.
‘It’s not going to happen,’ Skase shouted between staccato blasts. He threw a thumb behind him. ‘The pack’s shot. Power failure. My plate will only slow the both of us down.’
‘We can make it!’ the corpus-captain returned.
‘You can make it,’ Skase said, blasting at the Chosen of Khorne. ‘You must make it. Like you said, somebody’s got to survive.’
With the Pilgrim growing horrifically before them, the Scourge stared at his chief whip. Skase nodded at the battle standard fluttering in Kersh’s hand. ‘Keep it flying,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep them entertained until the lightshow begins.’
Nodding silently, Kersh knelt down and primed the multi-melta, cycling the pyrum-petrol mix and activating the sub-molecular reaction chamber. Leaving the fuel pack on the floor, Kersh placed the heavy weapon on the balustrade. Without a word or a glance, Skase silenced the heavy bolter and moved across to the melta. He punched a vaporising beam of intense fusion through the howling Pilgrim-monstrosity before recalibrating the weapon and turning another patch of its flesh-armour to molten slag. With the bandolier in one hand and the Fifth Company’s battle standard in the other, Kersh left the occupied Skase and stepped through the hole the statue had made in the wall.
Sidling out along the ledge, the Scourge looked down. The darkness below swarmed with movement, killers attracted by the bloodbath within the Mausoleum and eager to be part of it. Above, the sky was stranger still. In low orbit Kersh could see the telltale signs of obliteration, vessels he could not see suddenly flaring into fireballs of destruction. With the Apotheon’s lance hopefully aimed down over his head and Naval assistance light years away, Kersh could only reason that the insane captains of the Chaos fleet had decided to turn their guns on each other. It was certainly not unknown amongst the savage servants of the Blood God.
A sole winged fury swooped past, snapping at the Excoriator with its jaws. As it banked and tried to savage him again, Kersh swung the bandolier of grenades like a flail and smashed it in the wing, sending the thing careening off into the side of a building. Kersh could feel the precious seconds passing. Priming one of the grenades he let the bandolier drop into the unsuspecting crowd below. Giving the belt a few seconds advantage, and with the banner in his hand, Kersh too stepped off the ledge. There was simply no swift way down off the side of the colossal tomb. Kersh’s plate buckled and cracked as he struck lower ledges and the unforgiving stone of architectural flourishes. He reached out with his hand to grab rims, boltslits and the limbs and wings of gargoyles. His boots found brief and occasional footing on carved ridges and representations that could not support his weight or the gathering force of his fall. The paint on his ceramite chipped and scuffed as he grazed the building’s side.
Everything suddenly became white below as the grenades detonated in a chain reaction. The moment seemed to hesitate and Kersh felt himself momentarily slow as fiery lumps of flesh and masonry were rocketed skywards by the blast. The Scourge found himself suddenly winded as he landed on a pillartop, stomach first. He felt several things break inside. The impact had at least reined in the gathering speed of his fall, and as he rolled off, the few remaining storeys down the pillarside were uneventful. Taking in a breath, Kersh realised that he’d dropped the battle standard, and that the pole and banner had gone on ahead of him. When he struck the cobbles beside it, the epicentre of the devastating fragstorm moments before, something snapped in his leg. The hot glow of agony washed up the limb. Getting up off the crumpled plating and pauldron on his arm, the Scourge looked down at the injury. The ceramite had split at the knee, as had his flesh, allowing a bone from his leg to erupt through the rent.
His face a mask of suppressed torture, Kersh scooped up the company standard and used it as a staff, taking the worst of the weight off the wounded leg. Reaching for his Scourge’s blade, the corpus-captain clutched it feverishly in his other hand. The explosion had not gone unnoticed in the immediate vicinity and silhouettes were already running out of the smoke at him. Kersh had no time for strategy, skill or etiquette. Economy was imperative. As cultists rushed him they lost limbs and were barged aside as the Excoriator hobbled through the burned mist. A Goremongers Chaos Space Marine lost half his head, and before a World Eater had the chance to bring up the incredible length of his struggling chainsword, Kersh had turned the gladius over in his hand like a dagger and stabbed the Traitor Legionary straight through the helm with it.
Limping around the exterior of the Mausoleum as fast as his agony would allow, Kersh found what he was looking for: Keturah’s Scout bikes. No longer parked in a neat line, the corpus-captain found that they had been knocked down both by the clambering hordes and the grenade detonations. Leaving the first two, which had received the worst of the grenades’ attentions, Kersh hobbled around the third. Righting the vehicle and slipping his smashed leg over the saddle, he brought the bike’s powerful engine to life. He hadn’t ridden a bike since he was a neophyte himself, but it immediately came back to him. The solidity and weight of the vehicle. Its thick tyres and aching power, and the satisfaction derived from clinging to the handlebars as the galaxy streamed effortlessly by. It almost made him forget his leg.
Slipping the length of the company standard through the empty shotgun rack and down the side of the bike, Kersh flicked on the vehicle’s powerful arc lamp. The beam cut through the acrid murk, but where Kersh had expected to find demented cult-soldiers and renegades he found only a solitary armoured figure amongst bodies. His midnight revenant, the haunter of both his daydreams and nightmares. Kersh levelled his eyes at the silent Angel. The Scourge thought he knew now what the phantasm meant. At times he’d thought that it was a further affliction of the Darkness, at others some manifest damage to the brain inflicted by Ezrachi and his apothecarion aides. He’d questioned whether he’d gone mad; he’d heard of other forms of madness. Prophets, prognosticators and sometimes plain mortals who had glimpsed a little of a doom to come – in the same way as the soul-bound servants of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica with their tarot, or the solemn members of t
he Librarius. Certainly the death that Kersh had seen on Certus-Minor – the end of an Imperial world – warranted some kind of omen, and the dark revenant had been his. A chill warning of the brothers lost and the deaths to come.
Kersh drew his gladius and held the blade out across the handlebars, while providing support with his fingertips to the other grip. The revenant stood and watched him, the sinister light of its eye glimmering through the rent and across the darkness.
‘Better get out of the way,’ the Scourge told it, ‘because I’m not stopping.’
As Khornate warrior-wretches ran at the Excoriator, Kersh let the back wheel of the bike screech and slide on the cobbles. Releasing the brake and allowing the vehicle to catapult away from the Blood God’s minions, the Scourge blasted across the open space. Keeping his wheel straight and his accelerator at full wrench, the bike cannoned towards the ghostly Space Marine. The corpus-captain braced for impact. Seconds away from the phantom Kersh heard the rasping click of its teeth chattering. It was the last thing he heard before the bike passed straight through the revenant. Swinging his head back, Kersh saw that the apparition had gone. It had disappeared, leaving only smoke swirling in the bike’s wake.
Gunning the engine, Kersh rode the bike off the blind apex where the Mausoleum plaza met the downhill slope of an ambulatory. He’d been fortunate. He recognised the thoroughfare as an arterial route called the ‘Via Ossium’, the Road of Bones. Although bordered by the high walls of buildings and alleyways on both sides, the ambulatory was straight and steep, and was a ceremonial course running from the Memorial Mausoleum down to the Saint Bartolomé-East Lych Gate and out onto the necroplex.
As the heavy bike came shearing down, it crushed several unsuspecting cultists. Several others were brained against the wheelguard, lamp and the twin-linked boltguns adorning the handlebars, before their broken bodies were tossed aside by the merciless progression of the vehicle. The cobbled ambulatory was steep, and despite being one of the wider streets, was still cramped and narrow. The Scourge kept up his speed, allowing gravity to add to the bike’s murderous velocity. Kersh held the handlebars straight and true as the thick wheels ploughed through limbs, bounced the scrawny bodies of slave-soldiers like rag dolls and crushed skulls.
A sudden explosion ahead sent a cold streak across the Excoriator’s hearts. He spat in anger. For a moment he thought that the Apotheon had struck too early. The detonation blasted the side of a hermitage across the Road of Bones, throwing the bodies of feral warriors into the air and showering the area with brick. Resisting the urge to brake, Kersh rode the debris out, the bike lifted from the ground by a ramp of rubble. With fragments of stone blasted out before the wheel, the Scourge angled the soaring vehicle through a throng of disorientated daemon worshippers, decapitating several of them. Like the Excoriator, the warrior-acolytes had been wondering where the explosion had come from. Another, several streets across from the Via Ossium, revealed the heavens as the impact origin.
Looking up into the night sky, the bloody trail of the Keeler Comet still smearing the firmament, Kersh saw a crowded constellation of fireballs. Something devastating was happening far above the city, and the Scourge could only imagine that some minor skirmish or competition for prey had prompted all-out war between vessels in the Cholercaust fleet. Meanwhile, shooting stars – which Kersh took for battle damage debris – streaked towards the planet surface like a deadly pyrotechnic display. The fiery hailstorm had already started hitting the necroplex and pieces were now striking the ruined city.
Most cultists were blinded by the bike’s powerful lamp and the impossibility of an Adeptus Astartes hurtling towards them on two wheels at lethal speed. Others had the presence of mind to throw themselves and their weapons at the escaping Excoriator. Stub-rounds and scattershot rained off the Scourge’s plate, while the bike shot through a forest of poorly timed blades and blunt weaponry. Hammers and spiked clubs bounced off his battered pauldrons prompting the Scourge to hold the handlebars steady with one hand, while holding out his gladius with the other. The short sword wasn’t an ideal weapon to use mounted, but the partial impacts and opportunistic assaults were so close that it didn’t seem to matter. Revving through mobs and maniacs, wheels slipping through blood and wreckage, Kersh hacked, slashed and lopped off body parts. As mayhem blurred past, he smashed jaws and broke faces with his fist, the blade still clutched within his fingers.
A Blood Storm Chaos Space Marine saw Kersh coming, and with a double-handed daemon blade, glowing with infernal possession, stood his ground in the middle of the ambulatory. The renegade assumed a striking stance and held the blade up behind his modest helm. The Scourge narrowed his eyes and risked the tiniest of course corrections. Sweeping left across the road, Kersh brought his body and the gladius down low to the right. The skull-hungry blade sailed straight over the Excoriator, but as the bike accelerated away, the Blood Storm heretic tumbled, his leg sheared off at the knee.
As Kersh blazed down the ambulatory, away from the Memorial Mausoleum, he saw more of the impossible. Angels haunted the shadowy streets, passages and alleyways of the cemetery world city. Not Excoriators. Not the War-Given-Form’s Traitor World Eaters. Not the heretic brothers of renegade Chapters and warbands that pledged their blades and superhuman efforts to the Blood God’s cause. At first, Kersh though he was seeing his phantom again, but as he shot past macabre butchery and ghostly gunfire, he realised that his revenant was not alone. His wraith-like brothers were seeping from the shadows, cutting daemons and Ruinous champions down with cold efficiency.
The damned legionnaires burned with an ethereal fire, their bone-sculpted armour a stygian nightmare of darkness and gilt flame. Every stride they took, though silent, was a step of fearless determination. Whereas World Eaters degenerates came at them with the heat of mindless fury and angry blades, the accursed crusaders were cold to the point of repose and ruin. They moved with the certainty of the grave and killed with the indomitable will of beings who already knew what it was to lose life and know the end. Their unnatural presence gave birth to a fear in their enemies that they had not known, an antiquated darkness beyond petty notions of survival or an agonising death. A nightfall of the soul. An eventuality so hopeless and final that their victims didn’t dread the end of their existence – they feared not existing at all.
The daemon heralds of Khorne hunted phantoms in the labyrinthine expanse of the city, ethereal warriors who became one with darkness, only to inkblot into reality behind the spindly bloodletters and stalk towards them like otherworldly execution squads. Stampeding daemonstock, driven beyond madness, demolished an empty city as they gored and charged at evaporating shadows – their brazen clinker-hide punctured and bolt-riddled with an aurelian storm of shot that was incorporeal as it left phantom weapons, only to cross the barrier into reality as it mauled its Ruinous targets. The spectral Angels strode through ravenous mobs of traitor Guard and war-thralls, the insubstantial nexus of enraged crossfire, swinging the brute angularity of their heavy barrels and magazines about them like clubs, smashing heads and spilling brains. World Eaters warbands and their blood-blessed champions were decimated by vaporous gunfire – the plate-ripping teeth of their axes and the gaping death of their pistols nothing against a Legion of the Damned who seemed incapable of dying.
Daemons leapt at Kersh from the roofs and sides of buildings, several gangle-limbed forms coming close to tearing the Adeptus Astartes from his saddle with their hooked claws. He fired the twin-linked bolters on the front of the bike, clearing a bloody path through the cultist-choked ambulatory. A female slave-soldier, attempting to get out of the bike’s path, ended up clinging to the front of it – eye to eye with the Scourge. Pulling on the trigger, Kersh blew the soldier off with the twin-linked bolters.
Riding through the bloodhaze and aftermath, the Scourge didn’t see the chainaxe coming for him. The weapon shredded up his shoulder just beneath his pauldron, and blood began to leak down the side of his plate and the bike
. As he tore away from the threat, his hand momentarily uncertain on the handlebars, he heard the deep roar of boltguns, fired in spectral unison, blasting apart the axe-wielding renegade and the death cult assassins in amongst whom he was standing.
As Kersh’s bike tore out of the chapels and dormitories of the city and into the smouldering devastation of Saint Bartolomé-East, the heavens truly fell. With a trail of soot streaming behind the bike from the cremated district – the result of the Impunitas’s earlier bombing raids – Kersh bled and watched material that was clearly not ship wreckage rocket from the sky. Unnatural blocks of blood-black ice were raining down on the district and necroplex beyond like artillery fire. Easing the speeding bike around craters created by tumbling rock and exotic metal fragments, Kersh suddenly became aware of a monstrous hound bounding up behind the bike and attempting to tear at the back wheel with its knife-point teeth. Swiping unsuccessfully with his gladius, the Scourge attempted to barge the reptilian beast into the walls of gutted derelicts.
The beast either bounded over the obstacles or crashed its bony head straight through them. When the thing almost took his arm off with a jaw-rearing snap, Kersh turned away from the daemon hound. Standing in the road were a trio of damned legionnaires, their bolters aimed straight at the advancing Kersh. As the ghastly Angels blazed coldly away, Kersh brought up his arm instinctively. Unmolested by the immaterial rounds, the Excoriator brought down his arm, only for it to jump back up as he rode straight through the line of revenants. Holding on to the screeching bike, the Scourge cast a glance behind him to see the accursed crusaders melt into nothing, revealing the bolt-blasted carcass of the daemon dead on the cobbles.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 209