The Scourge had fallen several times and stubbornly regained his feet, but as he collapsed once more, he found that he couldn’t get up. With the cold creeping through his shattered plate and into his wounded body, Kersh found himself lying across a grave, his head propped against its stone marker. There, he hugged the polished, unbloodied gladius to his chest and waited for death in the battle-torn darkness.
Above, the blackness of the star-speckled firmament was still dotted with glowing embers, Cholercaust vessels that had lost their fight with colossal chunks of rock and ice and fallen into an explosion-wracked, decaying orbit around Certus-Minor. Such fragments still tumbled from the sky and obliterated the servants of Chaos still wandering the night. Squinting, Kersh thought he saw a vessel pass overhead. At first he thought it was falling to the cemetery world surface, growing larger as it descended. But from its movements and the twinkle of cannon fire he realised that it was in high orbit, mopping up fleeing members of the Chaos armada. The Scourge watched it for a few moments, entranced – the vessel appeared to him like an Imperial aquila, passing across the heavens. He blinked, reasoning that he must have imagined the spectacle in his concussed and skull-fractured state. The vessel would have had to have been colossal in size to appear to him as it did, at such a distance.
Kersh closed his blood-crusted eye for a moment of peace, but when he opened it again his armoured revenant was standing above him. The damned legionnaire blazed an ethereal radiance over its rachidian plate. It was staring down at the Scourge through the crack in its helm, the warp-lustre of a sentience glowing from its skeletal eye socket. It said nothing. It did nothing for a while, not even chatter its teeth. In its midnight gauntlet it held the Excoriators Chapter’s Fifth Company battle standard. Stabbing it into the earth beside the grave, the revenant let the blood-spattered banner flap in the breeze. In its other hand, between two exposed, skeletal digits, it held something else. The damned legionnaire dropped it on the Scourge’s chest and walked away into nothingness, leaving Kersh on the field of battle. Alone.
Mysterium Fidei
Epilogue
God-Emperor
Approbator Vaskellen Quast dropped the distance between the Valkyrie’s ramp and the carpet of burial ground carnage. With his meme-vox in his hand he bounded between bolt-mangled bodies and ran through the spoiling gore. Inquisitorial storm troopers from the 52nd Ranger Pelluciad were not far behind him, attending on the Ordo Obsoletus acolyte from a respectable distance.
Excoriators Thunderhawks had little trouble beating the Ordo Valkyrie across the festering necroplex to the reported location of the sole survivor, and by the time Quast trudged up behind them, Santiarch Balshazar and an honour guard of Excoriators Angels had surrounded the warrior – scattering the frater burn team who had almost incinerated him and the Sister Hospitallers who had barely begun attending to his grievous wounds. With Adeptus Astartes gunships circling overhead, the approbator slipped between the forest of hulking giants. Rounding their ancient, scar-annotated plate, Quast found the only living witness to the mysterious destruction of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade. The approbator was bursting with questions, but like the Excoriators Space Marines stood solemnly about him, he remained silent.
Propped up against a tombstone, his armoured limbs laid out across grave dirt, was a mauled Angel. An Excoriators captain of the Fifth Company. His plate – formerly an ivory edifice like that worn by his brothers – was stained the red of death. Its inscriptions and preserved battle-scarring had been obliterated by the mutilation of recent carnage. The Angel’s power armour was a rent, bolt-blasted shell of buckled ceramite, and the earth about him glistened with the moisture of his life quietly leaking away. His face was similarly plastered with blood – his enemies’ and his own – and dusted with the soot of raging fires. His tonsure-shaven hair was matted and singed, his ear was missing and the dull glint of a ball-bearing shone out from one eye as evidence of former atrocities suffered. Breaking the crust of blood that had dried across the other eye, the Excoriator stared at them. His gaze was weak and uncomprehending, sensitive to the burgeoning Certusian sunrise.
The breeze ruffled the captain’s battle standard, leaning slightly out of the ground as it was above him, playing with the brown-speckled material. At the sight of hulking silhouettes, cut out of the morning sky, the survivor clutched his gleaming short sword to his ruined chest. Unlike the wrecked Excoriator, and everything else on the cemetery world, the gladius was unblemished and unblooded. Quast was not a warrior, like the surrounding Space Marines, but the resplendent weapon held even his attention. The spartan honesty of its unadorned and heavy blade. The crafted angularity of its pommel. The three simple numerals stamped into the breadth of its cross guard: VII.
The approbator looked about him, his instincts taking his gaze to the Santiarch’s own. The Excoriators Angels were looking at the sword rather than their wounded brother.
‘Captain, I…’
‘Approbator!’ Balshazar boomed, the warning in the Chapter Chaplain’s words irresistible. The Santiarch stepped forwards, drawing a gladius of his own. Kneeling before the survivor he offered the captain the blade. ‘I believe this belongs to you, Corpus-Captain Kersh.’
Kersh took the blade from the Chaplain and clutched it to him with the other. The second was equally bare, but while similarly functional and austere, lacked the clear craftsmanship of the first. The Santiarch went to reach for the other gladius, but the unspeaking warrior tightened his grip, holding the weapon to him. Quast looked from Balshazar to the one they called Kersh and back again.
‘You came for the sword?’ the approbator marvelled.
The Santiarch ignored him and addressed one of his gathered brethren. ‘Brother Japhet, signal the Cerberus. Inform Chapter Master Ichabod that we have discovered the Dornsblade. Tell him that it remains in Corpus-Captain Kersh’s care and will be transported to the battle-barge with the Chapter Scourge directly.’
‘No astrotelepathic appeal. No request for assistance. You were already on your way to Certus-Minor,’ Quast said. ‘To reclaim a sword?’
Santiarch stood to his full, imposing stature.
‘This is not any blade, approbator. This is the Sword of Sebastus. The Dornsblade. A sacred relic to the genetic progeny of Rogal Dorn. It was carried by the primarch himself during his trials in the Eternal Fortress and used to spill Traitor blood in the Battle of the Iron Cage. It is a symbol of our unbreakable unity and the sacrifice shared by the sons of Dorn despite the Legion-splintering accords of the Codex Astartes. It is a piece of Imperial history, sculpted, beaten and honed to a razor edge.’
‘And the captain stole the relic blade?’
‘Corpus-Captain Kersh earned the Dornsblade,’ Balshazar corrected the approbator, his gaze meeting the Scourge’s. ‘He won the honour of a year’s custodianship at the centennial Feast of Blades. It is the corpus-captain’s by right.’
‘Then why reclaim it?’
‘Kersh should have sent the Dornsblade back to the safety of our home world, Eschara, on the frigate Scarifica. Instead, he kept the blade and sent that one in its stead, an inception sword, given to neophytes in recognition of their ascension to true brotherhood.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Quast asked before kneeling down in the blood-soaked earth beside the silent Scourge. ‘Captain, why would you do that?’
Kersh said nothing. He just stared up at the Santiarch.