There were three. Old Enoch was the Scourge’s seneschal. He sat, perpetually oiling the braided length of ‘the purge’ and mumbling insensibly to himself. He was caretaker of the ceremonial lash and overseer of his master’s devotional mortification. Enoch’s son Oren proceeded to mop the area around the sarcophagus base where a growing pool of waste was escaping the casket-base. He was the lictor. Barrel-chested, with the thick arms of a scud-wrestler, it had been Oren’s solemn function to administer ‘the purge’ with all the devotion of which he was capable. His father supervised the ritual, his crabby eyes burning in disappointment that his own son had not been honoured with tissue compatibility for a life beyond mere humanity. Old Enoch’s daughter Bethesda was the Scourge’s absterge. An elfin waif of a girl – gaunt and grim – she was charged with the routine cleansing and dressing of the Adeptus Astartes’ ceremonial wounds. Excoriators all took their purification across their broad, muscular backs – as part of the ritual they called ‘Donning Dorn’s Mantle’. Beyond basic servitude to the Scourge, the three serfs were charged – by Kersh himself above all else – to excoriate his flesh and purify him of weakness so that he might achieve endorphic communion with the primarch.
Bethesda was reading to the Scourge through the confessional grille on the other side of the casket, although it was unclear how much of the text Kersh was hearing. Whilst enthralled by the Darkness, victims couldn’t speak or communicate. They couldn’t feed themselves or take water and seemed feverishly insensible to everything happening about them. At the Apothecary’s entrance, Kersh’s servants stood or turned to present themselves. Bethesda slammed the tome shut. Ezrachi caught the title: The Architecture of Agony by Demetrius Katafalque. He knew it well. A treatise of devotional suffering by the former captain and first Master of the Excoriators Chapter.
‘Pray, continue,’ Ezrachi ordered softly. ‘This will not be pleasant and I wish our convalescent every distraction.’
Bethesda returned to her reading.
‘… During Terra’s infancy, in which the warriors of brute nations were flogged as a test of their manhood…’
‘We’ve broken through the lower cranium, my lord,’ one of Ezrachi’s aides told him, standing at the tripod-trepan like a workman at a lathe.
‘All right,’ Ezrachi called to his aides. ‘Do your duty.’
‘…Later monastic orders of the Church Katholi indulged flagellation as a form of militant pilgrimage…’
Kersh seemed unmoved by the horrific procedure, held in place within the casket. The Scourge remained silent and still, the drill embedded in his skull and Bethesda’s honeyed words filling the cargo compartment.
Locking off the drill, one of the aides depressed a plunger on a power cell situated between the legs of the tripod. The other wrapped himself around an underslung buttstock and trigger arrangement hanging beneath the drill.
‘Charging. Six megathule range.’
‘…of the Old Hundred. The Geno Seven-Sixty Spartocid fought for the Emperor in the Unification Wars and during the Great Crusade, where it was considered a genic officer’s honour to match the number of strokes suffered by a stereobreed soldier, for failure under his command…’
‘Launching hypodermic rod.’
The apparatus fired and a sickening thud reverberated around the chamber. The robed aides made adjustments to their drill.
‘…whereas it is practice aboard the mighty Phalanx to embrace a technological solution to the self-infliction of suffering, I favour my Lord Dorn’s practice for my brother Excoriators. On our primarch’s fosterworld of Inwit, the winters were cold and the lash was hot. Such instruction was adopted across Dorn’s early empire and favoured by the Progenitor personally as a form of martial communion and as purification for the soul…’
Pressing his face into the micronocular eyepieces above the stock, the aide consulted a pict screen before announcing, ‘We have achieved the catalepsean node, Apothecary.’
‘What are you waiting for?’ Ezrachi barked. ‘Pray to Dorn and deliver the charge.’
A faint hum indicated the duration of the treatment. Bethesda closed the Scourge’s copy of Demetrius Katafalque’s mighty tome and got to her feet. The chamber fell still. Ezrachi’s brow began to knot with disappointment.
‘Again.’
The aides repeated the procedure. All in attendance waited.
Then it began. A sound like distant fury, building within the casket. An agonising roar that was everywhere. The rage of a woken giant.
‘Fire the seals,’ Ezrachi ordered Oren and Old Enoch. ‘Get this thing open.’
The sarcophagus started to shake. Ezrachi pursed his age-cracked lips. Perhaps the Scourge was experiencing a variety of fit. Perhaps the procedure had caused some kind of neural damage. Perhaps the warrior simply wanted out of the casket. ‘The drill!’ the Apothecary remembered, prompting his aides to simultaneously begin retracting the hypodermic rod and reverse-screwing the trepan drill-bit.
As the box shuddered and the furious lament built to a horrible crescendo, the sarcophagus lid swung open. Silence reigned in the compartment once again. The depths of the casket were a foetid darkness. The trembling cabinet grew still. Inside, the laboured breathing of the Scourge could be heard. The apothecarion aides worked frantically to withdraw the deadly reach of their apparatus. With a teeth-clenched grunt, Zachariah Kersh pulled his bulk from the sarcophagus interior.
He was as naked as the day he was initiated, five hundred and fifty-two years before, and stumbled from the interior and out into the cargo compartment. His beard was scraggy and cotted, and his white tonsure overgrown and threaded with silver. The Scourge had a face to match his name, both afflicted and afflicting. He had inherited the dour mask of his Lord Dorn, behind which eyes alive with predatory intensity and accusation burned. He would pass for Demetrius Katafalque himself, if the etchings were to be believed, but for a ragged wound on his right cheek, which had long healed exposing tendons, part of the jawbone and the darkness of his mouth.
Kersh wasn’t as tall as many of his Excoriator brothers but more than made up for this deficiency with muscle crafted in the desperation of battle, rather than the monastery gymnasia. His flesh was a primarch-pleasing canvas of burn marks and scar tissue, stretched across a frame broad with age and experience. He wavered before a delighted Ezrachi, reminding the Apothecary of a statue of Terran antiquity with his demigod’s physique. The Scourge had emerged alive, covered in his own filth but free of the Darkness and its curse.
Bethesda came up behind him with a cream shroud and threw it across the Scourge’s lash-mangled back and globed shoulders. The fabric blotched immediately with the Excoriator’s blood, sweat and mess. Kersh half slipped and went down on his knees, reaching out for support and finding only the slender serf. With his great hand on her tiny shoulder he steadied himself. Reaching for the back of his skull with the other, Kersh tore out the broken drill-bit and hypodermic rod, flinging the attachment at the compartment floor where it pranged off the metal decking.
Ezrachi hesitated, his lips forming around a greeting. He wanted to know if his subject had survived the procedure with his faculties intact. The Scourge beat him to it.
‘Stay out of my skull, Apothecary,’ Zachariah Kersh growled. Shoulders dropped with relief among the gathered Chapter serfs, and Ezrachi smiled.