Legion of the Damned (Space Marine Battles) by Rob Sanders

Author:Rob Sanders [Sanders, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

By the Blade

Zachariah Kersh stood atop the tower-steeple of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Sepulchre. It was much higher than the tiny hermitage tower of the Excoriators’ dormitory. It had the second tallest spire and the best vantage point in the city. The tallest – the Obelisk – had suffered too much structural damage during the Scourge’s battle with the daemon, and Pontifex Oliphant had given the order for his Ecclesiarchical palace to be carefully demolished. The colossal dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum commanded the best view in the city, but Palatine Sapphira of the Order of the August Vigil had forbidden use of the sacred site as a strategic consideration, the building and the remains of the Ecclesiarch and High Lord of Terra within rendering the ground holy. It wouldn’t have taken Kersh much to countermand the Sister and force his agenda, but he needed the Adepta Sororitas onside and so allowed the Palatine the illusion of a refusal.

From a maintenance portico, with a pair of magnoculars to his one useful eye, Kersh surveyed the declining roofline of domes, cupolas, spires, monuments and bell-gables that gave Obsequa City its distinct Ecclesiarchical character. Kersh looked out across the darkness, dialling through the optical spectra of the device. A thermographic representation of the city bleared into view. There were fires everywhere. Running battles between psychotic mobs and the Certusian Charnel Guard could be seen in the streets, the telltale glares of las-fire revealing the true scale of the problem. Kersh could hear the bark of enforcer shotguns even in the streets nearby and imagined Kraski’s men putting down fellow Certusians with scattershot and bitterness.

Out across the expanse of Necroplex-South, Kersh could see the throngs of cemetery worlders, with simple lanterns and flaming torches dotted through their numbers, pouring into the city along arterial lychways. Kersh had sanctioned the strategy but that wouldn’t have mattered. With the reports he was receiving regarding the nightmarish barbarism afflicting the burial ground communities, the corpus-captain had fully expected common Certusians to flock to the seeming safety of the planetary capital. Whether this was due to the spiritual sanctity they expected the relic-remains of the Ecclesiarch to provide, or the simple security offered by stone walls and thick narthex doors, was unclear. They had arrived in their thousands, and continued to do so. Much of the Charnel Guard were engaged in urban pacification and hastily organised ‘Misery Squads’ – so called for their unhappy duty of hunting and putting out of their misery cemetery worlders who had succumbed to the gall-fever and become a danger to themselves and other citizens. This left few ceremonial Guardsmen to man the city Lych Gates and process the stream of Certusian refugees. In response Kersh had despatched the Fifth Company’s serfs and bondsmen – including his own – to take charge of the admittance and temporary housing of the masses in the crowded city.

Kersh tracked the powerful lamps of a Scout bike surging up along the columns of cemetery worlders towards the city.

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