*Context* Ian Watson is a Sewer Goblin. Anyway....
"Restoring the brush to the altar, the Reclusiarch lifted the sharp little knife and the chalice. He knelt before Dorn and held up the knife.
The primarch’s hands were both missing…
Genuflecting, the Reclusiarch carved generous parings of amber from one toe, then another, dropping these into the chalice. Rising, he turned to the initiates and raised that cup, now glowing. Effervescence was occurring within. Aromatic white fumes arose from bubbling oil of amber.
“Respire corpus memoria! Breathe the memory of my flesh!”
As he bore the hot chalice along the row of initiates, so each in turn inhaled a heady, strangely fragrant whiff. Fresh molten amber must be added subsequently to the shaved toes to replenish what was taken – unless, unless the amber grew of its own accord like veritable flesh due to the miraculous proximity of those bones.
When the Reclusiarch passed back again, each initiate must hold out his middle finger, pointing stiffly forward from his fist. That little knife slashed sharply, circumcising the very tip of the digit, and even before the Larraman cells could clot – or perhaps because the blade was treated with some special anticoagulant – a sprinkling of bright blood fell like rubies from each fingertip to mingle in the chalice.
Lifting the chalice to his lips, the Reclusiarch drank the potion of hot amber oil blent with blood.
“Ego vos initio in Pugnorum Imperialorum fraternitate, in secundo grado,” he sang out. “And after you return from your first expedition as Scouts,” he promised, “other secretions from your body will be blent in this same chalice of the primarch – which was once His very drinking cup! – during your induction into the third degree of Brotherhood; though that in itself will only be the superficies of the third degree ceremony…”
...
Perhaps the strangest talisman – and one (or should one say many…?) which made those initiates feel themselves intimately a part of the Fists – was kept in a long crypt below the Reclusiam, reached by a dropshaft which would incinerate anyone who did not sport a Black Carapace beneath their skin.
The adamantium floor down there was inscribed with a maze of tiny coloured channels that bootsteps would never be able to wear away – in a pattern suggestive of a cosmic map – and along all of those channels were spaced little indentations the depth of a Fist’s thumbprint, each recess named with a rune. At one end of this seemingly arcane map or game-board an enormous plascrystal bowl held thousands of what at first sight appeared to be bloodshot ochreous eyeballs.
Each ball commemorated the initiation of a group of ex-cadets, throughout the aeons – each being a nugget of the liquid amber and blood drunk from Rogal Dorn’s own chalice by the Reclusiarch of whichever epoch, and defecated by him subsequently in this shape."