Rob Sanders - Legion of the Damned

‘Sounds painful.’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘Good,’ the corpus-captain said. ‘When you are finished with Usachar and Dathan, return to the Scarifica . The Rites of Battle begin for the next round shortly. The Feast waits for no one. Send word if your experiment meets with success. I’ll also need informing if our fallen brother fails us once again.’

‘How do you define failure?’

‘A living-death or an actual one,’ Gideon told the Apothecary as he took his leave. ‘It makes very little difference to me when it comes to Zachariah Kersh.’

‘I trust everything is prepared?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Apothecary Ezrachi stomped down the ramp into the cargo compartment of the frigate Scarifica , his leg clunking against the metal floor. His nostrils flared. They were down in the bowels of the ship. He would have preferred a more suitable location for the procedure, but his brother Excoriators would not tolerate the Scourge’s presence.

Crates and bulk-canisters had been cleared in the centre of the compartment, creating an open space. There stood a decorative casket, an item transported from Santiarch Balshazar’s Holy Reclusiam, buried deep within the Excoriators’ fortress-monastery on distant Eschara. Beaten from dull adamantium, the box had the dimensions of a sarcophagus and the extravagant garniture to match. Its frontispiece featured a raised depiction of the Emperor-of-All; despite the casket standing upright, it represented him as prone, maimed and broken, following his confrontation with the beast Horus. Santiarch Balshazar’s solution to the affliction of the Darkness. A darkness of his own. The most solitary of confinements, where no self-respecting Excoriator need look upon his weakness and invalidity.

On either side of the sarcophagus’s head was a small confessional grille. On the left, Ezrachi’s apothecarion aides busied themselves in ivory robes, adorned with the insignia of the prime helix. They were making adjustments to a tripod arrangement and drill, the trepan of which was pointed through the open grille. On the opposite side were the Scourge’s own serfs, looking thoroughly miserable. Since the disgrace of their master they had been relegated to the cargo compartment also, bunking and toileting in the dark, down with the casket that held the fallen Kersh.

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.