The warband moved through a chain of ruin. There was no life in this region. This close to the concentration of Aethon’s forces, the civilians had been corralled behind the Ultramarines lines. These caverns had been deserted, stripped of all useful supplies. There were occasional bodies under fallen pillars: refugees who had been caught by earlier collapses. The caves nearer the pit that had swallowed the command nexus were most heavily damaged. More and more crevasses were opening with each tremor, though. The arcologies were falling to oblivion, and they were falling faster by the hour.
Kurtha Sedd wondered if they would find their target already destroyed.
The pipeline chamber was well beyond the fallen command nexus. It was also far enough removed from the larger living areas that it would be on the edges of a defensible perimeter. The Ultramarines would want to hold it, but they could not make it the centre of held territory without sacrificing everything else that made a region worth protecting in the first place. The Word Bearers closed in on the chamber from one level below. As they climbed a stone spiral staircase towards the tunnels that marked the final approach, the interior of Calth screamed and began to shake itself to death.
At the top of the stairs, Kurtha Sedd stumbled through the archway into the corridor. The ground tilted and dropped, throwing him against the opposite wall. Chunks of the ceiling rained down, a thudding of fists large enough to crush mortals. The howl of the quake grew. The rest of the company followed him out of the staircase. As Sor Gharax emerged, there was a roar from below and a huge billow of dust. The stairs fell into the depths, taking with them a score of cultists.
‘Forward!’ Kurtha Sedd cried. ‘Forward to annihilation!’
The floor heaved. The tunnel twisted. The Word Bearers charged through the hammering fall of rock. The fissures in the rock above split wide and rose higher. New levels of tunnels appeared through the gaps. And now the walls above fell away from each other, as if the earth were being ripped apart by giant hands.
The darkness roiled. The voices rejoiced with feral snarls.
The world before Kurtha Sedd’s eyes was still bathed in the clarity of night. But as it shook and transformed, as it tried to hurl him into the air or plunge him down the spreading crevasses in the floor, coherence broke down. He was no longer running through linked caverns. He was struggling through a maelstrom of stone.
Chaos. Harness it well.
The cultists never stopped chanting. Even the dying shouted their praise as they were left behind. Kurtha Sedd led the hymns of cancerous words, and he dared to reach out to the darkness.
The entrance to the pipeline chamber waited around the next bend to the right. Kurtha Sedd prepared for the Ultramarines defences. The darkness was with him and of him. He felt the fragility of the veil beneath the talons of his will. It tore. The darkness lashed out. There was a sudden flood. The night of the underworld became a battering wave. It was huge, and how could he be worthy, in his impurity, of something of this vastness? Kurtha Sedd pulled his will back. He released the veil.
But the dark did not release him. It never would, and nor did he wish it to. It sped him on. He was its fist and its acolyte. It was the end of reason, the end of stability.
It ate into the reality of the caverns. The tunnel shook itself into a blur. The ceiling before the bend fell in, blocking the way with tonnes of rubble. On the right, a massive crevasse opened up. It ran roughly parallel to the tunnel. With the crack and thunder of parting rock, it widened like a stretching maw. It swallowed the wall. Huge slabs tumbled into a void, vanishing into the greater, coiling darkness of the depths.
Kurtha Sedd stopped. He was at the edge of the drop. The deep called to him, and when he gazed down, he saw that the darkness in the tunnels was a mere echo of what waited below. The greater power was hungry. He would feed it. He would free it, if only he were worthy to do so. But for now it lashed out at the integrity of the caverns, and it opened the way. It opened many ways.
It opened the way to the pipeline chamber.
The walls were gone between the Word Bearers and their goal. The cavern was on the other side of the groaning crevasse. It was huge. The ceiling was fifty metres high. It was supported by pillars thick as Rhinos. Stalactites hung like gigantic chandeliers. The far wall was dominated by a huge mosaic depicting the construction of the arcologies. Guilliman’s vision was joined to the industry of the masses.
In the centre of the chamber were the pipelines. Each had the same huge diameter as the pillars. They were monsters of blackened iron. There were six of them, assembled in a tight parallel. On the left, they plunged downwards, towards the great promethium reserves deep within the planet. On the right, they branched into smaller lines that flowed in all directions back into the stone, taking the fuel across this region of the arcologies.
The Ultramarines had set up defences within the chamber, controlling the exits. But the one to the left was blocked, destroyed by the cave-in. Now there was a new entrance, and it was the entire side of the chamber.
The world trembled and roared. The crevasse widened. In a few more seconds, it would be too big to cross. ‘Repent of your lies!’ Kurtha Sedd shouted at the Ultramarines. ‘Enlightenment has come!’
Crozius raised high, he leapt. The dark reached up for him. It seemed to add force to his flight. He landed on the other side. His brothers were close behind him. The crevasse was wider yet when the last few made the jump. Cultists fell. So did two Word Bearers. Kurtha Sedd blinked away the flashing runes in his tactical display. Their names did not matter. They did not matter now, except as food for the hunger below.
Sor Gharax remained on the other side. Howling with frustration, he blanketed the rightward Ultramarines position with cannon shells. That end of the chamber disappeared in a riot of explosions.
Kurtha Sedd led Fifth Company in a solid mass along the side of the pipelines. The shelf of rock between the fuel conduits and the crevasse was less than five metres wide. Narrow, a good corridor for enemy fire. But the Bull kept hitting the Ultramarines, and the cavern shook like a Chimera in the hand of a Titan. Footing was treacherous. Aiming with any precision was impossible. And so the two forces moved towards direct engagement.
Stalactites dropped, spears of stone a metre wide. They crushed mortals and impaled Space Marines. Large chunks of the ceiling broke away, coming down like meteors on the combatants. Some punched through the pipelines. Promethium fountained out of the rents. It poured to the floor of the chamber, eager for flame.
Sor Gharax’s barrage ignited the fuel as giants in crimson and blue clashed. The two forces collided beneath the branching pipelines. The melee spilled wide across the bucking cavern floor. Kurtha Sedd grappled with a loyalist. He battered a chainsword away with his crozius and slammed his full weight against the enemy. Then everything was flame, an unending explosion. His armour’s sensors warned him of intense heat and rising damage. He ignored them, lost in the struggle and the ecstasy of total destruction.
These are my deeds, he thought as he knocked the Ultramarine back. This is my Chaos. The legionary raised a bolter. Kurtha Sedd smashed his right arm, breaking armour and bone. The Ultramarine shifted the weapon to his left hand. Kurtha Sedd dodged right, firing with his plasma pistol. He melted away his enemy’s flank. The Ultramarine sagged but stumbled forwards, enraged with pain. A huge fall of flaming promethium came down on him, enveloping, drowning, burning. The Ultramarine collapsed. Kurtha Sedd turned around and bolter shells burst against his chest.
The blows cracked his amour and sent him sprawling. The world disappeared as he dropped below the surface of the liquid flame. He stood up, roaring defiance and faith. Fire ran down his length. He was a walking torch. The pain was an insult he turned into the enemy’s blood, shooting in reply and racing forwards, bringing the crozius down on a sergeant’s skull, seeing the burst of deep red against the shrieking blue of the promethium’s flame.
/> Chaos. Storm. Madness. The struggling figures were shadows in the fire. The battle had no cohesion. There was just the desperation of slaughter, a striking-out against vague, contorted shapes. Enemies and brothers burst from the maelstrom and then sank back in. Kurtha Sedd lunged at the shadows. Proximity turned them into enemies, and he brought them down, smashing again and again with the crozius, smashing again and again with the force of truth.
The world shook harder, and harder yet. It upended. Kurtha Sedd tumbled through a battering of stone and flailing metal. The grind of rock drowned out the flame and the pounding of the assault cannon. The floor dropped, rose and shuddered from side to side. It cracked wide open. The deeper night appeared in a jagged slash beneath the incandescent blue. A second jaw opened, greater and wider than the first crevasse.
And the tearing, grinding shrieking of the underworld went on, louder and louder. It was everywhere, an immensity of shattering. Then light, a light as terrible as the darkness, the light of a great and final fire, came slashing in from above. It struck with the force of a beam weapon. Kurtha Sedd could not ignore it. He winced. His auto-senses shuttered themselves against the light of a sun come to burn its own children. He staggered. There was nowhere to turn. The quake had torn open the surface of Calth. The wrath of Veridia stabbed into the heart of the arcologies.
Judgement.
No. No, he rejected the dread. The light was destroying Ultramarines and Word Bearers alike. Destruction had come for all.
These are my works.
He overrode the auto-sense. He opened the shutters. He must see to move. He must bear witness. Light slashed his vision, but he saw the sublimity of annihilation. The earth parted and fell. Pillars tumbled, their huge masses destroying pipelines and erasing the struggling warriors beneath them. The ceiling had vanished, yet boulders cascaded down in the jaws of the quake. Ruins of the natural and the constructed plummeted and were thrown upwards. There was nothing but destruction, nothing but the storm, yet the war went on, beyond sense, beyond hope.
These are my works.
The floor vanished as the most violent tremor of all threw Kurtha Sedd into the air. Stone and fire, darkness and light, pain and fury, they were all one. There was nothing but the maelstrom. He was suspended. In this moment, he had nothing but faith.
In this moment, and for just this moment, the burdens released him.
He had no expectation except death.
But even now, as the end came for him, there was no peace. He had not completed his duty. The darkness still called.
Death would be failure, and he cried out, ‘My work is not done!’
The moment ended. He fell through the light, and into the dark.
TWELVE
To the bone
Octed
The Great Task
He was alone in the holy dark. He was walking. He did not know how long he had been conscious. He did not remember the end of his fall, or how he had woken. He did not know how far he had dropped. The servo-motors of his armour whined. Its plate was cracked and scarred, the words of the Book of Lorgar scraped and distorted. Some of the damage had created new words. He knew this, though he could not read them.
His body was heavy with pain. His armour dragged at some gestures and pulled others forwards with too much energy. His movements were a succession of rapid jerks. His muscles began to compensate immediately, smoothing out his gait, but the effort remained. With every action, he was reminded of the limitations and the inescapable reality of the flesh.
The quake had stopped. The ground was solid, still as death. He moved through the blackness of the corpse of Calth. He had been walking before his awareness had returned. So he kept walking. He had no destination. He had no location. He walked without purpose. The darkness was the most profound he had experienced. It did not grace him with the clarity of vision he had experienced earlier. His helm light showed no more than his next step. He cycled through ultraviolet and infrared ranges. The darkness was unchanged. It did not wish him to see.
He accepted its judgement. Grief weighed him down still further. He had failed. He was unworthy.
But as he walked, step by step over uneven stone, the grief slipped away. His task was not complete, and if he lived, then the duty was still his to fulfil. Step by step, learning the new motion of his body, step by step, and his mind cleared. Surrounded by a scaled night, blind except for the next step, and the next step, he began to understand. He began to truly see.
His last memory before the oblivion of the fall: the liberation from all burdens. A moment of divine grace in the midst of absolute chaos. Perfection within perfection. The two states coincided not by chance, but by necessity. One led to the other.
He would murder the galaxy to shed the burdens once more.
He walked faster, his steps more urgent and reckless. He marched to find that liberation. He would achieve it through the performance of his duty, through a supreme act of faith. He would find the truth of his duty somewhere in the dark ahead.
Something crunched beneath his tread. He stopped and looked down. It was a shard of crimson armour. He moved on, and saw more ceramite fragments, both blue and red. Perhaps he was truly alone. Perhaps the crevasse had swallowed all, and he was the only survivor of the XVII and XIII Legions on Calth. The civilians would be dead too. He could be the only living thing on the planet, a lone maggot moving through the rotting carcass of the world.
The thought had appeal. There was a kind of victory in that. The possibility that his brother Word Bearers were dead did not bother him. All lives were expendable in the service of the gods. If their destiny had been to perish in the great convulsion, so be it. Kurtha Sedd was of the Legion, but his first duty was to the gods. The Legion had abandoned him. It had misled him. Its fate could not concern him. He was a Word Bearer in the most profound sense. He would bear the words of truth more faithfully for his lack of concern about his lesser brothers.
Bear it where? Bear witness to whom?
No answer. But he walked faster, gaining strength and mastery over his movements. Faster, until he was running.
The call had him. Its source was close. He had not realised at first that it was still pulling him because he was so completely immersed in its power. But now he was aware of it, and he answered with the full consciousness of what he was doing. He plunged forwards through the perfect darkness, heedless of drops and barriers. His chest expanded with exultation. His lips pulled back in a snarl of worship, his prayer so full of praise and violence that it could not be articulated. He had followed the assigned path, and he was triumphant. He had gone uphill in order to descend, and the glorious fall had taken him. He had broken through to the greatest depths.
He thanked the gods. His thanks took the form of a raging hiss. He ran faster, racing over the final metres between himself and his invisible destiny. He was of the darkness, and he flowed with it. He felt the weight of his armour and the pain throughout his body. At the same time, he was not of the flesh. It seemed to slip away from him again, to become a thing of the background, a minor concern he had transcended.
This moment is important. Mark it.
The thought rang with the force of a great bell. It was spoken by a powerful voice. He did not know if it was his. No matter. It was a truth. He honoured it.
Faster. Faster. Through agony and against stone, with the dark and in it, blind to direction. There were no surroundings. There was only the black and the call.
Only sanctity and truth.
And then he halted. The stop was sudden, unwilled on his part, as hard as if his flight had been arrested by a divine hand. He stood still, gasping for breath, feeling for the first time his ribs working to knit themselves back together. He did not know why he had stopped. His body refused to take another step.
His vision slowly changed. His eyes adjusted to the dark. No, no, that was wrong. It was the
dark that was shifting. It was withdrawing some of its strength, pulling back from omnipresence. It no longer filled the cavern. It receded like a tide, leaving the natural dark in its wake. Kurtha Sedd’s photolenses worked again. He distinguished between the two kinds of dark. He saw tendrils of the night of the warp draining along the floor of the cavern, and then falling into a wonder.
There was another descent before him. The greatest of them all.
He stood at the edge of the true abyss. The subterranean gorge was deep and wide. It was at least a hundred metres across, and the far side was a sheer wall dropping straight down from the ceiling, itself barely visible in its height. There were more stalactites here. They were grey claws in the gloom, reaching towards the gorge, stone seeking to answer the powerful call.
The depths of the abyss were invisible. They were not infinite, though. The greatness of the descent had nothing to do with its dimensions. The greatness came from what lay at the bottom.
Kurtha Sedd’s breath became a sob of awe.
He gazed into the dark, and the dark was not empty. A vision waited. He could almost see it. There was no light. The vision was a thing of darkness so profound that though it could not be seen, it was so visible it would brand sight.
It had a form, but Kurtha Sedd could not discern it. It was too vast. Its contours were beyond his perception. Yet it was his duty to witness it. It was his duty to…
To…
To do what?
He swayed. He teetered on the edge of the fall. He reached out as if his hands could grasp his mission. The full revelation was just beyond his fingers. It brushed the edge of his soul.
‘Help me,’ he pleaded. ‘Urizen,’ he said. ‘Hear me, Urizen. Guide me, Urizen. I am chosen. I embrace this truth. Show me the way. Show me what I am called upon to do. Urizen, teach me.’
Urizen. He called upon Lorgar’s title. The primarch’s name did not cross his lips. He did not picture the face he had looked upon only hours before. Urizen. Not Lorgar himself, but what Lorgar should be. The voice of truth, unalterable. Infallible. In Kurtha Sedd’s mind, Lorgar and the Urizen were overlapping outlines, almost perfectly congruent, but only almost. Lorgar could be wrong. The Urizen was infallible.
The Unburdened Page 13
