Coordinated fire drove him back. He threw himself back and to the side. Varnak Gath was too slow, and was riddled by shells. The stream was relentless, blasting his armour and body apart where he stood.
The Ultramarines held the cavern beyond in force, and they had adapted to the darkness. The darkness had less of a grip beyond, as if diluted by the space, or repelled by the determination of the enemy. Beyond them was another bunker. Vor Raennag cursed. The command nexus was broken down into strongpoints. The fall of one was not the destruction of all.
The reinforcements arrived. The Word Bearers responded with heavy fire of their own. They could not break out. The cave was a large one. The Ultramarines had the shelter of pillars and freedom of movement. The Word Bearers had the limited angle of fire created by the need to stay out of the bolter hail.
‘We need to get through,’ Arathrax cursed.
‘Wait,’ Vor Raennag told him. ‘We have the enemy’s attention. That was our goal. Give Ulughar a chance to reach theirs.’
He finished speaking, and the booming report of a great fist against steel began.
And to the left, a sudden barrage hitting the Ultramarines. Derzhahn Squad had found an access point through the ventilation system.
Two angles of attack, and the Bull was about to make his entrance.
His fist crashing against the blast door. Mass and energy field united in rage. His howls a promise of truth and atrocity.
The door buckling. Its lies crushed.
One more blow, and the door shattering. Metal exploding outwards like glass.
Charging into the hall beyond. Ultramarines everywhere, taking fire from Word Bearers to Sor Gharax’s left and from the other side of the hall. Holding their own, using pillars as cover and moving forwards to push the Word Bearers back. The Ultramarines captain wounded, leaning against a column.
Roaring, wrath in the darkness, assault cannon sweeping the hall, shattering pillars and legionaries.
His fist reaching for the first victim.
A rocket streaking through the dark. Hitting hard. Fuelling his rage.
The dark stained red with blood. With the fire of his truth.
Toc Derenoth came in shooting behind the Bull. He saw redemption blossom before his eyes. Moment by moment, with every pull of the trigger, with every flash and detonation, he felt the burden of shame slip from his shoulders. The Ultramarines had greater numbers to start with, but more and more of Fifth Company were arriving on the battlefield. The cavern was big, but the scale of the conflict shrank it down. Enemies unleashed sustained barrages at point-blank range. Columns fell. A wall frieze of the Ullanor Triumph circled the entire hall. It was vanishing, shattered by bolter shell and scorched by flame. Stray shots had punched through conduits in the ceiling. Promethium cascaded to the ground in a rain of liquid fire. Toc Derenoth moved through a maelstrom of destruction. It was magnificent.
He was moved to prayer. So were his brothers. Their chanting joined the choir of the voices in the darkness. They provided the counterpoint to Sor Gharax’s roars. The Ultramarines shouted and fought, but they were being overwhelmed. The Triumph of Ullanor crumbled beneath the triumph of Chaos.
Sor Gharax had scythed his way through the Ultramarines nearest the blast door. Toc Derenoth turned his attention to those on the Bull’s right flank. Ulughar Squad engaged them before they could coordinate a counter-attack on the Dreadnought. The Word Bearers moved on a diagonal to the right. Toc Derenoth led them at a run, leaping over fallen columns, trusting in the darkness to give sufficient cover. Bolter shells cut into the Ultramarines. Some fired in response, while the others kept up their attack on Sor Gharax. The Dreadnought was taking fire on all sides. He did not even acknowledge it, but he was not indestructible.
Sor Gharax was huge and slow. Even in the dark, the Ultramarines could not miss him. Ulughar Squad was fast. Chanting the praise of the gods, his tongue forming the syllables of the abyss, Toc Derenoth hurled himself at the enemy. Most of the shells coming at him missed. Some did not. He grunted when an impact punched through his pauldron and exploded against his right shoulder. He kept his bolter up and transmuted the pain into wrath.
He hit the Ultramarines’ position. He brought his chainsword down on the legionary who had shot him. The loyalist blocked with his chainsword. The weapons whined. Mechanised teeth ground at each other. Seconds of stalemate dragged on. Helms of blue and crimson faced each other, unchanging, impassive, yet hatred as clear as if the two warriors could see each other’s faces. Toc Derenoth leaned into his sword, then stepped back suddenly. The Ultramarine swung his chainsword in towards Toc Derenoth’s neck. The Word Bearer took another step back and pummelled his foe with bolter shells. The Ultramarine walked into the fire. He sagged, but swung his sword again. His movements were sluggish. Toc Derenoth knocked his blade aside and drove his sword up through the warrior’s gorget. The teeth sawed the Ultramarine’s chin in half. Toc Derenoth shoved upwards until the loyalist’s skull split in two.
As Ulughar Squad brought the rest of the foe at this position down, Kurtha Sedd’s voice boomed from the vox. ‘I am with you, brothers!’ the Chaplain cried. ‘The truth is with us!’
The darkness rolled in again, growing stronger. The Ultramarines pulled back. The blast doors at the rear of the hall ratcheted up. On the other side, Toc Derenoth saw an even larger hall, filled with cowering mortals. The call to atrocity was immense, and he headed for the exits as if there were no enemies between him and the burnt offerings.
The glimpse was a brief one. The Ultramarines retreated, leaving dozens of their brothers lying dead on the cavern floor. The doors started coming down again before they were all through.
‘Kill them all!’ Kurtha Sedd commanded.
Sor Gharax’s assault cannons never stopped. They blew apart more enemies. Toc Derenoth glanced back and saw the Chaplain crush a loyalist sergeant’s skull with his crozius. Toc Derenoth went after the departing foe, pursuing with shells and fury, and with the exaltation of the end of shame.
The doors came down. They would not hold, but they would buy the loyalists some time.
Kurtha Sedd’s roar of anger over the vox was as loud as the Bull’s.
They punched through the doors. Sor Gharax’s power fist and a melta bomb made short work of the barriers. But short was not enough. The Word Bearers found straggling civilians in the vast cavern beyond. They found more in the corridors. But then those corridors collapsed. The Ultramarines detonated enough explosives to seal off the path of their retreat forever.
Kurtha Sedd stood before the smoking ruins of the Ullanor frieze. In the distance, he could hear Sor Gharax smashing at the cave-ins. The Dreadnought was trying to batter his way through a mountain. It was futile. The Ultramarines had saved tens of thousands of civilians and the integrity of their fighting force.
And Aethon had survived.
Kurtha Sedd punched the frieze. The image of the Emperor, already decapitated by a shell hole, fell about his fist in shards.
He had been a fool to think he could leave his duty to the Bull. Aethon must die by his hand. No other resolution was permissible. He must shatter every bond, call down the judgement he no longer believed in, yet still expected.
And then?
He didn’t know.
Would the key below finally be his?
His way down blocked. The victory over the Ultramarines here barely more than a half-measure. He was being directed yet stymied at every turn.
He left the frieze and entered the great cavern. Its original purpose was unclear. What he saw suggested a holding pen for the civilians, though he knew the Ultramarines would not have conceived of it in those terms. It contained a huge jumble of supplies now. Crates were stacked high and deep along the walls. The cultists had caught up to Fifth Company, and they tore open the crates. They scavenged food and ammunition and explosives.
There was much more that was not of military significance. This was the repository of the traces of Calth’s culture its inhabitants had been able to rescue in their flight from the surface. The civilian crates were filled with jumbles of scrolls and art. There were masterpieces of sculpture and painting, and there were artisanal objects of merely personal worth. Kurtha Sedd gazed at a different sort of archive. It was curated by the masses in flight. What did the people think they would do with these treasures? Did they think they would ever see them again? Packed together with no organisation, thousands of items crowded together, destined to be neglected in favour of the necessary weapons.
Perhaps the mortals knew this. Perhaps it was enough for them to know objects had been saved. Each one was a concrete memory. Hastily assembled, chosen in the heat of desperation, these were the memories chosen to survive the end of the world. And so they had, but not for long. Kurtha Sedd had put Lanshear’s official memory to flame. Now he would do the same to the traces of its character.
Physical, intellectual, spiritual – every aspect of Calth’s civilisation would burn.
‘This ground belongs to the gods!’ Kurtha Sedd shouted. ‘Mark it! Claim it! Then send it to the depths!’
His anger tore his throat. Aethon had escaped. The burdens on his soul were intractable. They gripped him with chains and claws. His appointed task still waited, and the shedding of the burden was a burden in itself. He raged against the paradoxes and the contradictions tearing at him. He raged against the obstacles in his path.
There was meaning in the desecration and destruction he had commanded. But there was not enough.
The Word Bearers and cultists roamed through the caverns and tunnels captured from the Ultramarines. They took Lanshear’s artefacts, and they took the civilians who had not escaped, and they built altars once again. Sculpture and bone, canvas and flesh, memories and blood, all became the raw material of the tributes to pain and madness. Kurtha Sedd moved from location to location, watching as the walls were covered in runes of blood, watching as arms reached, spasming, from the centre of the altar pieces formed from spines and desecrated tomes. Ornate flourishes were shaped from mutilations. The work was quick, but it was skilled. The altars screamed. The voices in the dark answered back with sibilant laughter.
Kurtha Sedd answered the screams with snarls. He paced, waiting for the squads he had dispatched to the lower levels to complete their work. There had been a considerable quantity of explosive stored in the crates. Some of it was military, and some of it was industrial, used for the construction of further tunnels and expansion of caverns.
‘Use it all,’ Kurtha Sedd had instructed.
The work was progressing beneath his feet. The honeycomb of the arcologies was being undermined.
Darkness has risen, he thought. Now this world must descend into the darkness.
Descent. All must descend. He must too. His journey must resume.
But the dictates of fate were becoming confusing.
The vox broke into his thoughts. Toc Derenoth said, ‘The charges are ready, Chaplain.’
‘Good. Withdraw to a safe location. Wait for my signal.’
He made a final tour of the captured territory. He ordered the evacuation of each cavern and tunnel. He was the last to leave each space. He gazed upon good work. There was nothing here for the Ultramarines. These spaces, in their final minutes, had become the realm of Chaos. The darkness pulsed and gibbered. The walls writhed. The shrieks of the altars grew louder. The mortals were dying, but could not die. Their suffering was extended with their lives. The dark kept them alive and fed longer.
Kurtha Sedd walked through the smoking ruins of the command nexus. Halfway down the ramp he paused. He looked down into the abyss. The tug was so strong, he had to fight the urge to leap. I seek to do your bidding, he thought. Why do you frustrate my attempts? What must I do to prove myself worthy?
He crossed the gap. He walked into the rubble of the collapsed hall, and stopped again before the face of the nexus vanished behind fallen stone. He faced the way he had come. The rest of the company had pulled back further. He felt no need. He knew his journey did not end here.
‘Do it now,’ he said.
The floor shook. The explosions were a long series of muffled blasts, a deep, chest-rattling thunder of krump-kr-krump-kr-kr-kr-krumpkrumpkrump. The shaking increased. Fissures spread over the face of the command bunker’s walls. Then everything fell. Kurtha Sedd beheld a great movement, a colossal shift downwards as the tunnels and halls collapsed at once, plunging into the levels below, and taking them further yet. The roof over the sacrificed caverns remained intact, and so at his feet a huge pit formed. The crevasse became a canyon. Ruins and desecration fell into the dark, and it seemed to him the stone itself cried out in pain.
The shadows accepted the sacrifice. They swallowed the dust. When the rumble of disintegration finally ended, Kurtha Sedd was staring into a gaping void. Beyond the reach of his eyes, he sensed movement. Beyond the range of his hearing, there were deeper mutterings, the voices of forces far greater than the mocking things that tormented the enemy.
A great descent. A great offering.
‘Is this enough?’ Kurtha Sedd called. ‘Is this sufficient? Am I worthy now? Will you show me the way?’
There was no answer.
TEN
Choices
Warp-flask
Two truths
In the corridors beyond the great pit, the Bull raged back and forth, and the company waited. No one said anything when Kurtha Sedd arrived. He felt their questions, though. ‘A great victory, brothers,’ he said. ‘The loyalists are bleeding from their enlightenment.’ He gestured with a magnanimity he did not feel. Certainty and uncertainty warred inside him. But he must lead, and he must be known to lead.
‘What now, Chaplain?’ Kaeloq asked.
‘Surely we pursue the enemy?’ Toc Derenoth said.
‘Do we?’ There was a hard note of scepticism in Vor Raennag’s tone. ‘We have lost momentum. They were prepared for this eventuality, and will have reinforced their next lines of defence. We–’
A rumbling crack cut him off. The tunnel shook. Dust fell from the ceiling. A web of cracks spread down its length. Kurtha Sedd wondered if this was an aftershock of the immense cave-in. But the muttering of stone continued, and it ran deep and wide, as if the entire planet groaned. This was caused by something more powerful than any number of demolition charges.
After a minute, the volume of the rumble diminished, and the shaking eased. It did not stop altogether. New cracks continued to appear in the tunnel.
Vor Raennag resumed. ‘Strategically,’ he said, ‘we are no better off.’ He glanced at the walls and ceiling, as if implying he had chosen not to say more.
‘Are you saying the Ultramarines are?’ Kaeloq demanded. He was being very close to insubordinate, going beyond the freedom of questioning Kurtha Sedd had granted. ‘We hit them hard. We butchered them. We took much they had gained.’
‘This is still their world,’ Vor Raennag said quietly.
‘Is it?’ Kurtha Sedd asked him. He gestured, and the dark seemed to eddy around his gauntlet. Beyond the curve of the tunnel, something whispered, the words intense and destructive to understanding. ‘I don’t believe it is their world any more, brother-sergeant. There is more darkness than light in these tunnels, wouldn’t you say?’
Before Vor Raennag could answer, the deep rumble passed through the rock again, an invisible wave disturbing the underworld.
‘I don’t know that I would say this is our world, Chaplain,’ Vor Raennag said.
‘We will pursue, though, won’t we?’ Toc Derenoth insisted.
‘Our duty is the destruction of the loyalists,’ said Kurtha Sedd. ‘The question is the path assigned to us for that end. We were called to the depths, and from them we brought the darkness o
f the gods. We are still called below, brothers. We have not finished our descent.’ He paused. ‘Rest, and pray. Let me do the same. Our choice will become clear.’
And once more, he was speaking with more assurance than he possessed. The destruction Fifth Company had wreaked had allowed him to mask his frustration. He needed some time now to find the way forward. Time to force the doubts down.
He left his brothers. He ducked back through the entrance to what had been the command nexus’s access hall. The ceiling was cracked and sagging, but still holding. He walked back towards the pit. He would seek answers from the abyss.
Footsteps behind him. He waited, not turning around. He already knew who this would be. ‘What is it, sergeant?’ he said.
‘Something is destabilising the network.’
‘So it would appear.’
‘If the tremors become severe enough, we might lose everything.’
‘That is possible. I do not think it will happen.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and found he spoke a lie and the truth simultaneously. He could not promise the survival of the rest of the company. He remained convinced of his own.
‘I don’t think you can be,’ Vor Raennag said. ‘I don’t believe you are.’
‘I see. And so? What is your purpose here?’
Vor Raennag sighed. ‘There is still no word from our fleet.’
‘And? We couldn’t hear from them even if they were in orbit. The vox is barely functional.’
‘I know you have other means, Chaplain.’
Kurtha Sedd looked at Vor Raennag. He said nothing. While he waited for the other to speak again, he wondered whether he would have to kill the sergeant. He surprised himself by taking the idea seriously. The question was real. And was this not the lesson he was learning? That the burden of loyalty was a hindrance to the fulfilment of his task and his destiny?
‘In the archive,’ Vor Raennag said, ‘you told us the fleet’s departure was temporary. You said our brothers would return for us. I chose to believe you.’
The Unburdened Page 11
