Rob Sanders - Legion of the Damned

Quast watched the frater burn teams clear bodies about the wrecked city. They were uncovering the arterial routes of the necroplex – the labyrinth of lychways and paths that ran through the crowded memorial burial plots, mausolea and cenoposts. With the main roads leading into Obsequa City clear of death and destruction, the Adeptus Ministorum forces had started to move in heavy equipment and excavators.

Dig-teams swarmed across the city rubble and the ruins of the great Mausoleum. The cemetery world already had a new planetary governor, Pontifex Clemenz-Krycek, newly arrived from St Ethalberg with manpower and instructions to purge the hallowed ground of Certus-Minor of the taint of corruption. The irresistible bureaucracy of the Imperium implemented even in the face of carnage and catastrophe. Quast had felt it prudent to meet Clemenz-Krycek before initiating his investigations. He told the pontifex little of his true purpose there. The driven ecclesiarch seemed not to care, engaged as he was with the small army of frater militia faithful that were piling and incinerating the corrupt forms of the battle-dead and excavating the ruins of the mausoleum. Quast found that the pontifex’s vows of devotion to the God-Emperor had done nothing to quell the fire of ambition burning in his veins. Clemenz-Krycek clearly hoped to find Umberto II’s bones intact in the spiritual stronghold of the underground vault. Safe from the corruption of Chaos. Even without the ecclesiarch’s bones, the pontifex was boldly heralding Umberto II’s sacred remains as responsible for the halting of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade.

The investigation of such assertions was well within the remit of the Ordo Obsoletus, but information already in Quast’s possession made him question such a possibility – that and the fire behind the pontifex’s eyes. Clemenz-Krycek was already mooting recommendations for Umberto II’s veneration to the rank of Imperial Saint – a call that, if approved by the High Ecclesiarch, would undoubtedly improve the pontifex’s own prospects in the ranks of the Adeptus Ministorum.

A rusted breastplate creaked underfoot and, with a crack, the approbator’s boot slipped down into the stinking chest cavity of a fallen giant. Its armour was a god-pleasing red and one shoulder plate was spiked like an ocean urchin. A studded gauntlet still hate-clenched the shaft of a brute axe, unable – even in death – to surrender the weapon. The monster’s helmet was missing and the monstrous head with it. As Quast’s boot sank into corruption, liquefied tissue spilled from the neck brace, thick with squirming flesh lice.

‘Merda!’ Quast spat in gutter Gothic, flicking gobbets of rot from the toe of his boot. The approbator shook his head. He was a savant, a researcher – not a field operative. What he had learned aboard the Ordo Obsoletus Black Ship Providence , however, was too important to leave to another. If he had found evidence of an authentic miracle – an event beyond human phenomena, alien curiosity or the pollution of Chaos – then it was his solemn duty to ask challenging questions and hunt for elusive answers. Answers his venerable master, Inquisitor Ehrensperger, had charged him to find.

Quast went to scrape the sole of his boot on the sculpted finish of the Chaos Space Marine’s other shoulder plate, only to find himself staring down the brass throat of a fang-filled maw. The symbol of the fell xiith Legion, wrought in pure hate. The World Eaters.

Quast swiftly retracted his foot, fearful that the effigy itself might assume a bloodthirsty life and snap shut. There had been other Blood Crusades. The Odium Wars. The Coming of the Brazen Host. The Dominion of Fire. The Black Crusade of the Daemon Prince Doombreed. But not since Armageddon’s First War had so many berserker brethren of the World Eaters Traitor Legion gathered under one banner.

‘Approbator?’

‘Carry on, sergeant.’

The Inquisitorial storm troopers brought forth a prisoner. She was naked but for the scraps of filthy, feral world hide that preserved her modesty. Her matted hair trailed down her back and her flesh was the canvas upon which primitive tattoos were carved and inked. Her emaciated form crawled across the butchery like a hound on a scent, while the two troopers flanked and followed, holding her between them on metal poles and lanyards. The savage began clawing at a mauled body draped across a gravestone that was carved in the fashion of the Imperial aquila.

‘Sir, looks like the witch has something.’

Quast wiped his boot on the scalp of a dead cultist and turned back to approach the feverish psyker. She froze with her bare back to them, and then without warning started thrashing this way and that. The lanyards around her neck bit into her thin flesh and the storm troopers on the ends of the poles were yanked back and forth. The Ranger Pelluciad sergeant called to Quast to hold his position.

The witch returned to stillness before turning her head and snarling at the approbator. Her bright eyes rolled over blood-red like a wine glass filling with claret and her entire face suddenly contorted with an agonising rage. She looked along the pole at one of her storm trooper sentinels like a thing possessed. The witch suddenly convulsed and spewed forth a stream of bloody vomit. The blistering gruel splattered the Ranger’s helmet and body armour. He tore at his chin strap and started screaming something about burning.

‘Hold her down!’ the sergeant bawled, and to this end the remaining storm trooper brutally thrust the pole at the witch and the witch to the ground. ‘Reinforcements. Now!’ the sergeant called into his vox-bead, before drawing his hellpistol and charging across the slaughterscape at the struggling storm trooper and his charge. The trooper had forced the thrashing psyker right down into the stinking carpet of rent armour, jutting bones and festering bodies.

‘Sir!’

‘Hold her, damn it!’

But the witch was gone. The wasted creature had somehow slipped down into the layers of rotting flesh and ceramite, crawling – swimming almost – through the disintegrating carcasses. The pole suddenly followed, whipped into the cadaver-mound and taking the second storm trooper with it. ‘G’Vera!’ the sergeant called into his vox-link. ‘Corporal, talk to me!’

The mound exploded. A fount of blood blasted up out of the bodies and at the Certusian dawn-sky. How much of it belonged to G’Vera and how much to the surrounding dead was impossible to tell. What was certain was that the corporal was now one of them.

The sergeant began scanning the ground about them with his hellpistol. A limb twitched here. A body moved there. The witch was certainly on the move. ‘Sir, arm yourself,’ the storm trooper instructed. The approbator had been so sickened at the spectacle that it was the meme-vox that he still clenched in one white-knuckled hand, rather than his laspistol. Fumbling for the weapon, Quast drew his sidearm.

The witch was suddenly before him, slithering out from the slaughter like a serpent. Her body was completely naked now and slick with black blood and spoilage. Her eyes burned hate and her lips had retracted horribly like a predatory cat.

‘Approbator!’ the sergeant screamed, but Quast found that he couldn’t move. Fear clouded his mind and all he could do was gawp as the possessed witch hissed and came in so close as to touch her bloody forehead to his own.

There was a flash. The furious face suddenly disappeared. Snapped out of view. Blasted away. Quast stood, blinking. His face was speckled with the witch’s blood and his laspistol still felt a world away. Turning, the approbator saw the reinforcements that the sergeant had called for. Storm trooper sharpshooters, swiftly descended from the Valkyrie transport, with hellguns to chins and scopes to visors. They had executed the psyker from some distance away with a cool nerve, precision marksmanship and supercharged las-fire. As they brought their weapons down, Quast nodded in silent respect.