He had no time to reload the pistol; besides, he needed a weapon that took life at a faster pace and didn’t rely on ammunition. Brother Omar unsheathed his combat knife. Neophytes trained with the honourable gladius but were not deemed worthy of an Adeptus Astartes blade until they attained the rank of Space Marine. With its clip point, cross guard, machete-length and cleaver-like cutting blade, a ‘Scout’s-only-friend’ – as Squad Whip Keturah called them – was still a graceful taker of lives.
Brother Omar slashed and hacked through the wall of rabid flesh. He clipped heads and limbs from torsos; he cut blades from shovels and improvised clubs in half; he sliced, speared and stabbed, gutted and butchered his way through the horde. His cloak was heavy with gorespill and the ivory sheen of his Scout carapace was stained claret-red with the sheer volume of blood gushing, spraying and spurting about him. Wiping blood from his eyes all he could see were further faces, screwed up with malice presenting eyes that glinted murder.
Omar’s blade suddenly hit something solid. Something that didn’t slice like flesh or merely tug at the blade like cleaved bone. The Scout had swung with all his superhuman might and struck stone. The combat blade had cut into the corner of a gargoyle-encrusted vault, a small building in the shadow of which the melee had raged. Surrounded as he was, the ringing up his arm was the first the neophyte had known of the crypt entrance. When a flick of the wrist failed to retract the broadness of the blade, Omar tugged on the hilt with both hands. The stone refused to surrender the blade, however, and once again the degenerates closed in. Teeth sank through his field smock and into the flesh of his arm, while his carapace back presented the savages with an irresistible opportunity. The Scout soon felt the weight of scores of the maniacs on him, and looking up, watched more scrawny shadows tumble down to join them from the vault roof.
Releasing the blade, Omar snatched at the wretches and tossed them away. Others he brained with his fists and tore limb from limb. Stumbling about like a hunchback under the sheer weight of crazies with their teeth and nails in him, the Scout began to buckle. A wretched specimen bit into his ear and ripped it off, prompting the Space Marine to clench his head in one fist. Omar took the degenerate’s skull and hammered it into the crypt wall, pounding it until it shattered, crumbled and spilled its insides like an egg. The masses moved this way and that about him, each blood-mental savage wanting Adeptus Astartes blood on their hands.
Omar suddenly lost his footing, the ground seeming to disappear beneath him. Falling onto his back with literally hundreds of squirming and thrashing degenerates, the Scout came to the conclusion that he had tumbled into a hole. A freshly dug grave. A common enough sight on the cemetery world. There, with teeth in his thigh-flesh, arms and bloody face – with murderous hands around his neck, tearing at and under his shredding carapace – Brother Omar, Scout Marine and Excoriator, realised his fate. To be buried alive in mortal flesh and to be slowly clawed and mauled to his death.
Chapter Eleven
By the Blade
Zachariah Kersh stood atop the tower-steeple of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Sepulchre. It was much higher than the tiny hermitage tower of the Excoriators’ dormitory. It had the second tallest spire and the best vantage point in the city. The tallest – the Obelisk – had suffered too much structural damage during the Scourge’s battle with the daemon, and Pontifex Oliphant had given the order for his Ecclesiarchical palace to be carefully demolished. The colossal dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum commanded the best view in the city, but Palatine Sapphira of the Order of the August Vigil had forbidden use of the sacred site as a strategic consideration, the building and the remains of the Ecclesiarch and High Lord of Terra within rendering the ground holy. It wouldn’t have taken Kersh much to countermand the Sister and force his agenda, but he needed the Adepta Sororitas onside and so allowed the Palatine the illusion of a refusal.
From a maintenance portico, with a pair of magnoculars to his one useful eye, Kersh surveyed the declining roofline of domes, cupolas, spires, monuments and bell-gables that gave Obsequa City its distinct Ecclesiarchical character. Kersh looked out across the darkness, dialling through the optical spectra of the device. A thermographic representation of the city bleared into view. There were fires everywhere. Running battles between psychotic mobs and the Certusian Charnel Guard could be seen in the streets, the telltale glares of las-fire revealing the true scale of the problem. Kersh could hear the bark of enforcer shotguns even in the streets nearby and imagined Kraski’s men putting down fellow Certusians with scattershot and bitterness.
Out across the expanse of Necroplex-South, Kersh could see the throngs of cemetery worlders, with simple lanterns and flaming torches dotted through their numbers, pouring into the city along arterial lychways. Kersh had sanctioned the strategy but that wouldn’t have mattered. With the reports he was receiving regarding the nightmarish barbarism afflicting the burial ground communities, the corpus-captain had fully expected common Certusians to flock to the seeming safety of the planetary capital. Whether this was due to the spiritual sanctity they expected the relic-remains of the Ecclesiarch to provide, or the simple security offered by stone walls and thick narthex doors, was unclear. They had arrived in their thousands, and continued to do so. Much of the Charnel Guard were engaged in urban pacification and hastily organised ‘Misery Squads’ – so called for their unhappy duty of hunting and putting out of their misery cemetery worlders who had succumbed to the gall-fever and become a danger to themselves and other citizens. This left few ceremonial Guardsmen to man the city Lych Gates and process the stream of Certusian refugees. In response Kersh had despatched the Fifth Company’s serfs and bondsmen – including his own – to take charge of the admittance and temporary housing of the masses in the crowded city.
Kersh tracked the powerful lamps of a Scout bike surging up along the columns of cemetery worlders towards the city. Lifting the magnoculars at the roar of engines overhead, he watched the Thunderhawk Impunitas pass above the city and bank. With all three of the company’s remaining gunships now repaired and at his disposal, Kersh had ordered one standing by on the rockrete of the Memorial Space Port, one to remain with the Angelica Mortis in orbit and one to maintain constant airborne patrols of Obsequa City and the surrounding necroplex.
Lowering the magnoculars, Kersh turned his head. Beneath his boots he could feel the supernatural cooling of the stone. He heard it cracking and blistering. Behind him stood the revenant in its ghoulish black plate, rippling with the rachidian contours of rib and bone. It waited like a thing eternal, as though it had all the time in the universe.
‘Ready?’ the Scourge said finally and disappeared through the maintenance arch followed by his solemn and silent haunter.
Down in the basilica nave, surrounded by pillars crafted in the baroque likeness of Imperial saints, and under the stained-glass gloom of the God-Emperor sat upon the Golden Throne in lead-lined representation, the corpus-captain had called a gathering. Kersh walked past Erasmus Oliphant, the young pontifex holding his crippled side awkwardly in the simple throne his frater menials had brought in for his comfort. Palatine Sapphira stood by his side, flanking the throne with two of her cobalt-plated Sisters, each armed with their distinctive Godwyn-Deaz-pattern bolters. Behind them huddled a small group of confessors, priests and deacons who were either too loyal to their pontifex to flee, or had been too late to arrange passage off-world with their Adeptus Ministorum colleagues. Kersh heard the hurried scuff of boots on the polished marble floor of the basilica, noting a shabby and tired-looking Proctor Kraski and Colquhoun’s replacement, Lord Lieutenant Laszlongia, enter the chamber via a side-arch.