‘How did you come by this information?’ Balshazar demanded, scanning the vellum transcript in his ceramite fingertips.
Quast hesitated. ‘My Lord Ehrensperger maintains a choir of powerful astropaths aboard his personal Black Ship. They have instructions to listen for telepathic messages and to scan those communiqués for motifs relating to the Ordo Obsoletus’s work.’
‘Your inquisitor lord roams the galaxy, eavesdropping on the communications of others?’ Balshazar marvelled. ‘Again, how like the Holy Ordos. How pathetic. Then specimens like your good self are dispatched to investigate the promise of information and authenticate its relevance.’
Quast nodded, allowing the slurs to wash over him.
‘Our choir intercepted a psychic distress signal in an Adeptus Astartes code, relayed through the Stroika-Six Observium Array but originating from this very world.’
‘I should have you flayed for even that,’ the Santiarch growled. ‘Those were Adeptus Astartes words for Adeptus Astartes ears, information not meant for mere mortals such as yourself.’
‘I’m not sure it was meant for the Emperor’s Angels, either,’ Quast told the Excoriator. ‘The message transcript in your hand contains a report of planetary invasion and a request for reinforcement, followed by a direct appeal to the God-Emperor of Mankind for assistance. For intervention. For a miracle.’
Balshazar scanned the words to which the approbator was referring.
‘A simple prayer,’ the Santiarch said. ‘Open reverence to the father of our very own. I hope that such benediction is not absent from the prosecution of your own work, approbator.’
‘A prayer,’ Quast echoed. ‘My master reached the same conclusion. Until I showed him the intended destination of the message.’
Balshazar located the astrotelepathic terminus on the crumpled vellum. ‘Ancient Terra…’
Quast nodded. ‘The Excoriators did not prevail on Certus-Minor. They are all dead. Yet the Cholercaust was defeated. I do not know what happened here. What I do know is that one of your Librarians made a direct appeal to Holy Terra, to the God-Emperor of Mankind for a miracle, and that appeal seems to have been answered.’
The Space Marine and approbator locked gazes. ‘And that is reason enough for the Ordo Obsoletus’s involvement, so please, Santiarch, now tell me what you and three companies of your Excoriators are really doing here.’
The Chaplain’s mangled face creased with vexation. His anger had dissipated and his brow now furrowed with genuine conflict. As his lips began to form around a response to the approbator’s request, the storm trooper sergeant jogged up behind him.
‘Approbator!’
‘Yes, sergeant,’ Quast replied with obvious displeasure. His eyes remained on the hulking Santiarch.
‘Report just in. One of the frater burn teams has found a survivor.’
Both Quast and Balshazar turned.
‘A cemetery worlder?’
‘An Adeptus Astartes.’
Balshazar seemed to sag in his heavy plate.
‘We might get answers to our questions, yet,’ the Santiarch told Quast.
The approbator gave a brief nod. ‘Sergeant, take us to him. Take us to him, right now.’
PART ONE
Terror is their harbinger…
Chapter One
The Darkness
‘How goes the Feast, brother?’ called Apothecary Ezrachi, across the frigate Scarifica’s tactical-oratorium. Corpus-Captain Shiloh Gideon stood at a rostrum decorated with runeslates and scrolls of vellum. As Ezrachi approached, the small gathering of bondservants about the rostrum peeled away. The Apothecary’s right leg was a full bionic replacement and almost as old as Ezrachi himself. While robust and powerful, it sighed with hydraulic insistence and lagged a millisecond behind its flesh-and-bone equivalent, giving the impression of a slight limp.
‘The Feast of Blades goes badly,’ the corpus-captain lamented. ‘For the Excoriators, at least.’
‘How many?’ inquired the Apothecary as he approached.
‘Too many,’ Gideon snapped, running a palm across the top of his tonsure-shaven scalp. He grasped hair that grew like a silver crown around his skull in obvious frustration. ‘We lost three more to our Successor Chapter kin this morning in honorific contestations. Occam, Basrael and Jabez. Occam fought well, but not well enough. I thought Jabez was dead. I don’t think anything is going to stop that Crimson Fist. The Feast may already be theirs.’
‘Brother Jabez will live,’ Ezrachi assured him. ‘Just.’
Gideon didn’t seem to hear the aged Apothecary.
‘Shame begets shame,’ the corpus-captain said. ‘Our failure at the Feast is tied to the loss of our Chapter’s sacred standard. I can feel it.’
‘Your head is full of Santiarch Balshazar’s sermons. I honour the primarch, but Dorn lives on through our flesh and blood, not dusty artefacts,’ Ezrachi insisted. ‘The loss of our standard is a mighty blow, but in truth it was but a blood-speckled banner.’
‘Rogal Dorn himself entrusted his sons – our Excoriator brothers – with the standard over ten thousand years ago,’ the corpus-captain said. ‘It displays the Second Founding’s decree and is threaded with the honours of every battle fought in our long, bloody history. It carries the distinctia of the Astartes Praeses and our service in garrisoning the Ocularis Terribus. It bears the Stigmartyr – the emblem that the Chapter adopted as its own.’ Gideon turned to present his own ivory shoulder plate, adorned with the scarlet symbol to which he made reference, a gauntleted fist clenching the length of a thunderbolt-shaped scar. ‘It is much more than the blood-soaked rag to which you allude and I’ll have you mind your irreverence, Apothecary.’
‘I meant no offence, corpus-captain,’ Ezrachi replied plainly, slapping the adamantium scaffolding of his thigh. ‘As you well know, there is more than a little of my own blood splashed across that standard.’
‘Our brothers fight for a broken honour,’ the corpus-captain continued, oblivious to Ezrachi. ‘We are accursed. The Emperor’s eternal fortitude, once absent in the brother that surrendered the banner, is now absent in us all. It is our collective punishment.’
‘Is it not our way?’ Ezrachi put to him. ‘Do not the Excoriators of all Dorn’s sons feel the loss of the Emperor deepest? Do not the Excoriators alone know our primarch’s true grief, the agony of his redemption and the cold wrath of his renascence? Do we not purge his weakness and our own from this shared flesh through the Rites of Castigation and the Wearing of Dorn’s Mantle?’
‘This is beyond our inherited sin,’ Gideon said miserably. ‘The loss of the Honoured First Company. The near assassination of our Chapter Master. The failure and near decimation of the Fifth and now this – one hundred years of humiliation in the making, right underneath the disapproving noses of our Legionary kindred. All as spiritual censure for the loss of Dorn’s gift – the very embodiment of our Adeptus Astartes honour.’