The Unburdened

by David Annandale

  When the other two Ultramarines had been overwhelmed, the Word Bearers butchered the civilians. They struck with a sadism born of frustration. The air was filled with a miasma of anger. The slaughter did little to dispel it. Nor did the arrival of the two new legionaries.

  They were from the Third Hand’s Tenth Company. As far as they knew, they were all that remained of it. Their armour was heavily scarred. They had entered the arcologies at close to squad strength, but one skirmish after another had chipped away at them.

  ‘Where were you heading?’ Kurtha Sedd asked them.

  ‘Nowhere,’ the one called Versithis answered. ‘We’ve been fighting the forces we could, retreating from the ones we could not. Battle chose our route.’

  ‘Have you seen other brothers of our Legion?’

  ‘A few,’ said Ruath Dhur. ‘They’re dead now.’ His voice was filled with resentment. He had removed his helm, and his face was raw and shining from severe burns. The resentment was in his eyes too when he looked at Kurtha Sedd.

  ‘Everything has collapsed,’ Versithis said. He sounded more exhausted than angry, more hopeless than challenging. ‘We’re scattered remains running through a maze, and our battles are about nothing except survival.’ He sighed. ‘We’re still fighting, but the war has ended.’

  ‘Be careful, brother,’ Kurtha Sedd warned.

  ‘Where is our purpose?’ Versithis sounded as if he wanted an answer, but did not believe he would receive one. ‘We may have taken the surface away from the Thirteenth Legion, but we’ve been thrown away underground.’

  ‘We have much to do yet,’ said Kurtha Sedd. ‘I intend to complete our mission before the fleet returns.’

  Instead of asking what that mission was, as Kurtha Sedd had intended, Ruath Dhur said, ‘It isn’t coming back.’

  ‘The Legion did what it could here,’ said Versithis. ‘There is no reason to return.’

  ‘Not for us,’ Ruath Dhur muttered.

  ‘Is that the extent of your faith?’ said Kurtha Sedd. ‘We are here for a reason. And it will be glorious.’

  ‘What reason, Chaplain?’ Gherak Haxx said. He was standing just to Kurtha Sedd’s right. ‘You have promised us a great discovery, but when? Where? There has been no sign of it.’

  Kurtha Sedd thought about executing Gherak Haxx. He decided not to. A show of patience now would be more useful than what might be perceived as frustrated violence. Gherak Haxx was not the only legionary to hold such views. The fabric of Kurtha Sedd’s company was fraying. The descent was starting to resemble Versithis and Ruath Dhur’s pointless journey. Aethon was searching for them, and with the capture of the command nexus, he had established at least rudimentary control of the regions higher up. The struggle had become death by slow attrition. Every so often, as now, Fifth Company found other Word Bearers to swell the ranks. But the losses were more frequent. If the situation continued, Kurtha Sedd’s force would eventually be reduced to nothing.

  He was not alone in foreseeing the end. The discontent was growing stronger. He would not give it a chance to result in rebellion. But only a few days ago, he would not have had to prepare for such an eventuality.

  ‘We will receive a sign,’ he told Gherak Haxx, raising his voice so the entire company heard. ‘We will receive a sign,’ he repeated. ‘We are simply not deep enough yet.’ He looked at the pile of butchered human refugees. ‘We have not done enough.’

  Still they went deeper. More and more of the caves were undeveloped. The routes became more difficult, and they had to turn away from some promisingly direct descents because of the burden of Sor Gharax. The Dreadnought was a source of increasing resentment, though no one yet suggested abandoning him.

  Distorted by the twists of rock, the sound reached Kurtha Sedd’s ears first as a sibilant rustle. He thought he might be hearing an underground stream. After a few minutes, the hiss resolved itself into syllables.

  Chanting.

  ‘Would that be our sign, Brother-Chaplain?’ Kaeloq asked.

  No, Kurtha Sedd almost said. He was looking for something beyond the human, and those were mortal tongues he heard. But the sinuosity of the chant called him, and gave him hope.

  The company moved through a long tunnel that doubled back on itself with a perversity that felt like a ritual. Only helm lights pierced the darkness. Then a glow appeared. It wavered and flickered. It seemed to dance. It seemed to whisper.

  The cave the cultists were gathered in was so low, the plume of Kurtha Sedd’s helm brushed against the ceiling. There were close to a hundred humans here. The Chaplain was astounded to see so many, this far down. They were standing in a circle. Their clothes, a mix of robes and patchy leather-and-steel armour, were ragged. Many were injured, though some of the fresh wounds were self-inflicted runes carved into forehead, cheek, arm and chest. In the centre of the floor, an eight-pointed star had been painted in blood. Torches made from cloth wrapped around human bone stood at each point.

  The bodies of civilians had been torn apart and spread around the periphery of the star. The air was thick with the stench of human tallow and spilled vitae. Some of the bodies looked as if they had been devoured, and many of the cultists had blood around their mouths. They swayed as they chanted, and the words seemed to sway as well, entwining and disappearing into each other. Meaning without language emerged from sound, and then shaped sound. The noise was guttural, fluid and clawed. It was the song of reality unravelling, peeling back to reveal the slavering hunger in the heart of the universe.

  The cultists stopped chanting when Kurtha Sedd entered the cavern, but the song took a second too long to fade away. The people turned to look at him. As one, they fell to their knees. They abased their foreheads against the floor. They shouted a cacophony of prayers of thanks. A woman whose head was so carved with runes that her skull showed through in patches crawled towards Kurtha Sedd. She reached up to touch the bloody head of his crozius.

  ‘Lord Chaplain,’ she said. Her voice was a dusty, greasy croak. ‘You have heard us. You have come to lead us.’

  The surprise of finding the congregation took Kurtha Sedd back to Khur. The memory of his first true slaughter, the act that still awaited judgement, was never far from the surface of his mind. He had found a scene of worship on a day when all such things must end. Now he found one where no such thing could be. As the cultists raised their heads to gaze upon him as they would a divine emissary, he felt a spasm of disgust. These people were vermin. Their loyalty to the old gods had nothing to do with a fidelity to truth. There was no philosophy here, only blind obedience. They were meat that walked. Nothing more.

  Their turn to him repulsed him and made him uneasy. The will of the gods remained elusive to him. The dark and the depths pulled him with ever more strength, but the goal was unknown, elusive, frustrating. And he had taken no concrete steps to kill Aethon. He told himself he needed to reach the secret in the dark first, to have the means of regaining the initiative in the upper levels of the arcologies. But he doubted his motivations and his decisions.

  He recoiled from the cultists’ worship. He had an impulse, born of doubt and old pain, to kill everyone in the room. He resisted. The cultists were loyal, their faith real. If they wanted to be led, he would lead them. They would have their use. Marching ahead of Fifth Company, they could absorb enemy fire.

  At the thought, a cold finger touched his heart. Were the cultists the secret he had come to find? Were they his weapon to turn against Aethon? There would be a dark symmetry to his life if that were the case.

  But no, he thought. His destiny would not rest on such sad irony. The pull was still strong. The secret, the gift, was deeper yet.

  ‘Yes,’ he said to the woman. ‘Yes,’ he repeated to all the cultists. ‘You have prayed and we have answered. We will lead you on a journey commanded by the gods.’ Even though what he said was true, it felt like a lie. He was not wor
thy. His faith in the gods was not enough. There were too many doubts, too many burdens holding him down.

  His voice was strong, though. It was sure. And the cultists rejoiced.

  When the tumult died again, Sor Gharax’s incoherent raving became louder for a moment. The woman looked past Kurtha Sedd at the company behind him. Her eyes widened. ‘One of the Annunake travels with you.’ She used the Colchisian word. Judge of Hell.

  Kurtha Sedd nodded. ‘We travel with him,’ he corrected. ‘He has sustained severe damage.’

  ‘We can revive him.’

  Kurtha Sedd looked down at her. ‘What did you say?’

  The woman’s name was Khrothis. She and several other cultists had served on the Infidus Imperator as part of the maintenance and repair brigades. They had all had experience with the Contemptor Dreadnoughts. She assured Kurtha Sedd they had the skills to make Sor Gharax combat-ready again.

  ‘And what of the equipment?’ he asked.

  ‘We have that too.’

  The cavern where Fifth Company had found the cultists turned out to be one of several in close proximity to each other that they had taken over. Two were part of the arcology network, so far down that they had become permanent habitations, housing workers whose duties were the maintenance of the otherwise empty zone of developed caverns. Those residents had barely been aware of the war on the surface of Calth until it had come to them. The cultists had massacred them and then, having come this far, ceased their travels.

  ‘We must have sensed that you were coming,’ Khrothis said as she guided the Word Bearers through passageways slick with blood. Lumen globes pulsed, casting a shifting, uneasy light over the runes painted in vitae on the walls. ‘We felt that we must tarry here.’

  ‘Have you seen any of the loyalists?’

  ‘The sounds of battles have travelled to us. But we have seen none.’

  Good. Aethon’s search parties would find Fifth Company again soon enough, or perhaps it would be a splinter of Ultramarines still adrift in the endless web of caves. But there might be time enough to get the Bull on his feet once more. With Sor Gharax in the fight, new possibilities would open for Kurtha Sedd. Nothing would change his first duty, but an idea was taking shape, one still too amorphous to articulate, that would help him with a more tormenting task.

  Khrothis brought them to a cave where the cultists had stored their equipment. It appeared to have been a warehouse, though it had been emptied of almost all the workers’ supplies. The cultists had managed to salvage a surprising number of their tools, and they had scavenged quite a bit from the residents as well.

  ‘We can tap into the arcology’s power network,’ Khrothis said. ‘And we have what we need. Venerable Sor Gharax will walk again.’ She looked up at Kurtha Sedd, her eyes alight with purpose and fanaticism. ‘How glorious,’ she said, ‘to feel the hands of the gods so directly. We were brought here to wait for you, and now our purpose is clear.’

  ‘Indeed.’ She might well be correct. What mattered was that she and her comrades serve Kurtha Sedd’s purpose.

  The Word Bearers set up as close to a defensive perimeter as the immediate geography permitted. They guarded the cave where the attempted resurrection would occur. They blocked the tunnels leading to it. Lines of sight were bad, but they would hear anyone approaching.

  The ritual took hours. The cultists swarmed over the Dreadnought. Sor Gharax was placed in a standing position in the warehouse, at the centre of another star. More civilian corpses were used to paint the symbol, but two cultists also presented themselves as sacrifices. While their fellows turned plasma cutters to the damaged armour and set about re-soldering ruptured circuitry, repairing the physical damage, the volunteers were bled out on the star rune. Their screams were agonised, and they were ecstatic. They gave themselves freely in the belief that their pain would fuel the spirit of the Bull, and give it the strength to move the gargantuan body once more.

  Kurtha Sedd watched the process from the entrance to the chamber. The fusion of the religious and the practical became a violent dance of jerking shadow and searing light. Dozens of cultists gathered around Sor Gharax. The hissing of their chanting was indistinguishable from the sounds of the tools. Kurtha Sedd knew the ritual was superfluous. Prayer had no bearing on the very material damage that needed repair. But his knowledge of the mechanism that gave the Dreadnoughts their immortality was limited. And here, the people who possessed that knowledge were also committed to the spiritual component to the point of giving up their lives.

  And was he not meant to be the speaker for the gods to Fifth Company? Why should he question the workings of the miraculous?

  The work on Sor Gharax’s looming bulk became more frantic. The shadows of the workers jerked and twitched like black flame. The chanting grew in power, drowning out the shrieks of the dying, mutilated sacrifices. The lumen globes hanging from the cavern ceiling dimmed amber, then grey. The darkness was called, and the darkness answered. The ceremony mesmerised Kurtha Sedd. He absorbed the lesson. He learned. He hoped.

  The rhythms built. The cultists chanted faster. The lights flashed brighter, only to be swallowed by a dark so thick it had fangs. The sound was a pulsing hiss, reaching out of the cave to bring its truth to the world. Beneath the hiss, moving around and above the beats of the leprous song, came the voice of Sor Gharax. The rage, the pain and the madness were undiminished. They became elemental in their force. They could reshape reality. They were the voice of the insanity of war.

  Kurtha Sedd felt the stirrings of awe. His lips pulled back into the semblance of a smile. He felt as if he were standing against a psychic wind, one that was coming to break all the bonds of spirit and flesh and stone.

  With a final twitch, the sacrifices died at last. Something flashed. Kurtha Sedd could not tell if it was light or something merely pretending to be light. Then Sor Gharax roared. There were no words now, only the alchemical fusion of all his tortured thoughts and words into total fury.

  He moved. He took a step forwards and crushed a cutter-operator beneath his tread, smashing the man’s midsection to a stew of viscera. His left arm swung out, assault cannon blazing. The shells turned cultists to mist, blasting through their bodies to trace a line of explosions on the far wall. The fingers of the Bull’s power fist twitched. He reached up and grabbed the human on his left shoulder. The fingers tightened, turning the cultist’s head to paste.

  Then the slaughter began in earnest. Sor Gharax strode forwards, raging, full of murder. The cultists ran to him, surrounding him, dancing with joy at their great work. He tore them apart, he crushed them, and he blasted them into nothing. He filled the cave with fire and blood. Bodies flew in pieces, nothing but torn wet meat. The cultists rejoiced as they died. More pushed their way past Kurtha Sedd into the room. ‘Annunake!’ they cried as they raced to their end. ‘Annunake!’ Their joy met rage and they died ecstatic in their good work.

  Kurtha Sedd watched Sor Gharax lurch towards him. The Dreadnought was a giant of agonised destruction. His hatred was bright enough to turn the galaxy to ash. He was unstoppable, and in these tunnels, he moved with the majesty of an Imperator Titan. His voice was the thunder of the end of lies. It was the terrible blast of truth, and the truth was madness and hate. There was no doubt in Sor Gharax. The Bull was certainty incarnate, and as he walked forwards enveloped by flame and blood, Kurtha Sedd exulted.

  And there was more. As the cultists chanted and danced and died, as Sor Gharax annihilated the willing, praying victims, something gathered. The darkness again, the physical darkness. It oozed up from the floor, called up from the greater depths. It moved independently of any of the movements in the ritual of carnage. It was muscular, serpentine, and cold. It spread its tendrils across the floor as if it would grip the entire cavern. Where it moved, it scraped the very air. Scales dropped to the ground, flickered black and lustrous, then vanished. The dark’s existence
was a wound to the real. It undulated around the pulverising steps of the Dreadnought. It reached out for the Chaplain.

  It looped around his legs, breaking up and reforming, fragile as fog, defined as insects. There were things within the dark, things he could not see because they could not exist yet. But they wanted to. They hungered to experience the real, and to drink its blood. They called out to Kurtha Sedd.

  Make us real, they cried.

  Unfetter us.

  Unburden all.

  The dark had been summoned by the ritual, and now it summoned Kurtha Sedd. It had risen so he must descend.

  And now it made of him its master.

  He saw the dark. He heard the dark. He looked up into the approaching, blood-drenched monstrousness of Sor Gharax. He stared into the glory and promise of revelation, and in this moment, and for this moment, when he thought he could submerge himself forever in the exaltation of horror, his doubts vanished.

  His chest swelled with a thing of gnarled sinew and venomous claws.

  It was hope.

  SEVEN

  The rage contained

  The Great Descent

  The rage unleashed

  The spike of agony frozen into eternity. His body a bag of torture, a vestigial organ stabbing his being. The moment of the Titan exploding on Seventeen-Seventeen preserved forever. The revelation in the burn renewed with every second.

  He was a Word Bearer, and there must be a word for the pain. The pain was all there truly was. All else was delusion. All else was lies.

  Smash the lies.

  Drown worlds, drown stars, drown the galaxy in their blood.

  Find the word. Bring all of reality into the experience of his agony.

  Roaring, howling, tearing all language apart in search of the word.

  Failing. Syllables without form, words without sense, sentences that were violence alone.