Rob Sanders - Legion of the Damned

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.

‘You’re welcome, brother…’

The Scourge’s absterge crossed the benighted cargo bay and entered the bondservants’ berth with a heavy water cask. It was less a berth than a dusty unguent locker used by Techmarines to store oils and bless them in readiness for use in the enginarium. The Cog Mechanicum hung above a small shrine to the Omnissiah that Old Enoch had put to good use as a counter or tabletop. The seneschal was stripped to the waist, baring a shrivelled chest, and had laid out a bowl and a shaving blade. He peered at his gaunt, empty features in a section of metal wall that he’d had Bethesda clean and polish to dull reflection. The absterge poured fresh water into the bowl, at which her father said nothing. The seneschal dipped his hand into a can of blessed oil and rubbed his bristled chin with the thin unguent. He then went to work rhythmically with the razor, scraping his slick, leathery skin and cleansing the blade in the water.

Putting down the cask, Bethesda passed her brother Oren, who had toppled one of their metal bunks and was using it to accomplish pull-ups. The lictor’s meaty arms pulled his broad bulk up off the locker floor. With each rise and fall Oren gave a piggish grunt. Bethesda knelt in the corner of their berth and stacked a small collection of empty unguent cans. She produced a selection of half-spent candles and began to amuse herself with their arrangement.

‘What in Katafalque’s name do you think you’re doing?’ Oren asked between grunts, but Bethesda didn’t answer. Enchanted with her simple display, she attempted to light the candles with a screw-flint. The brawny lictor came to a stop, watching his sister. ‘I said, what are you doing? Answer when you’re damn well spoken to.’

Bethesda looked up, smiling to herself. ‘I’m just lighting some candles.’

‘Where did you get them from?’

‘Traded them, with one of the attendants in the chapel-reclusiam,’ the serf admitted.

‘What in damnation for?’

‘Sundries.’

‘You stupid slattern,’ her brother came back savagely. ‘I mean, why?’

‘For the Scourge,’ she answered. ‘To celebrate his delivery from the Darkness.’

This time it was her father’s turn to grunt. Oren put an angry boot straight through the cans and candle arrangement.

‘Not in here you don’t.’

Bethesda went to reclaim her smashed candles. She murmured, ‘Just because he is what you can never be.’

‘What did you say to me?’ Oren growled, his eyes livid and cheeks flushed. He closed on her and she stood with fragile defiance. Bethesda heard her father’s razor pause. Old Enoch mumbled something. Oren paused dangerously before her, his chest rising and falling with a sibling’s petty anger.

‘Once,’ he told her through clenched teeth, ‘I wanted more than my pitiful existence to be an Emperor’s Angel. More than a hundred pitiful existences to be the warrior at whose pleasure I serve – the Scourge. An Excoriator without equal. I know better now. Our master is but a false prophet. An Angel fallen. He is so deep in his brothers’ blood that he might as well have slain them himself. We are punished. The Darkness has taken us all. But know this, good sister, if I had been Chapter Scourge, I would not have given up our Stigmartyr so easily.’

A call came from the distant cargo bay. A demigod demanding attendance. Old Enoch grumbled his garbled insistence and Oren backed away from his sister, holding her gaze as he did so. As the lictor left the locker, his father dashed his unkindly face with water before using a ragged towel to dry it off. He turned and stood, giving Bethesda a sour glare. Throwing the towel at her, he mumbled his disgust before following Oren out, leaving the absterge alone with her candles.

‘Cease!’

Zachariah Kersh heard Ezrachi’s command across the Scarifica ’s penitorium and the crack of the whip. Kersh’s personal serfs paused at the Apothecary’s order. Oren hesitated, the stock of ‘the purge’ clutched in his white-knuckled fist, the bloodied lash resting in coils on the deck beside him. Old Enoch looked to his Adeptus Astartes master, whose teeth-clenching snarl fell and eyes opened. He gave the seneschal a stabbing glare. Old Enoch began babbling to his son in a savage tone that echoed the Excoriator’s displeasure. His chest heaving with exertion, Oren gathered ‘the purge’s’ sacred length before handing it to his father for cleansing and consecration.

Kersh took his palms off the numbing cold of a section of reinforced armaplas. The blast shielding was closed, but the plas of the vistaport still retained the scalding sting of the void beyond. The heat from each handprint vanished from its deep blackness. The Scourge turned to present himself to the Apothecary and his freshly mauled back-flesh to the port. Ezrachi shook his head as he took in the constellation of ugly welts on the Space Marine’s body. Old scars from battles fought long ago.

‘What on Eschara do you think you’re doing?’ Ezrachi put to him. The Apothecary’s ceremonial plate was splattered with blood and he held his white helmet under one arm. ‘My express instructions were for rest, not mortification.’

‘I shouldn’t have to learn my shame from an errant,’ Kersh said, staring at the approaching Apothecary but nodding at Old Enoch. ‘I heard from mortal lips how Dorn’s flesh had failed them, failed their master and failed their master’s master.’

Ezrachi slowed. ‘I regret that,’ he said finally. ‘There have been pressing demands on my time. I had hoped to perform such a duty… at a suitable moment. Still, in my absence you had my orders–’