The Unburdened

by David Annandale

  ‘Captain…’ a sergeant in Terminator plate began.

  Aethon walked away from the prisoners. The guards moved forwards uncertainly. ‘What?’ Aethon snapped.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I am.’ He glanced back at the guards. ‘Do as I said,’ he told them.

  ‘Honour does not require you to do this,’ the sergeant insisted.

  ‘Perhaps not. But the decision is mine.’

  ‘It is a decision that affects all of us.’

  ‘And what will be the consequences of sending these four wretches back to Kurtha Sedd?’ Aethon demanded. ‘What vital information about us do they possess? How will they shift the balance of power? How will they harm our position?’

  ‘They are four warriors we will have to fight again.’

  Aethon brushed off the objection. ‘A risk we can take.’

  ‘But why take it?’ another of the Ultramarines burst out. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Pain flashed across the anger in Aethon’s face. ‘It may be more than he would offer me now, but I will give Kurtha Sedd this chance. There is too much in our past for me to ignore, Envixus. If he will choose this way to end the war, I will let him. I hope he will.’

  ‘You can’t believe he will.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Aethon’s voice dropped with the exhaustion of despair. But when he spoke again, the determination and the wrath were strong once more. ‘Whatever fate he chooses, I want Kurtha Sedd to know I am here.’ He pointed at Toc Derenoth. ‘Speak my name. If you do nothing else in your miserable existence, do this thing. Tell him I am here. Tell him I am looking for him.’ To Envixus he said, ‘He won’t be able to ignore me any more than I can him. We will draw him out.’

  Envixus shook his head. ‘Theoretical – these are personal decisions, not tactical ones.’

  ‘Practical – the enemy will be forced to respond. The initiative is ours. Now send them on their way.’ Aethon left the cavern before Envixus could speak again.

  The sergeant grimaced, but nodded to the guards.

  The chains came off.

  They were taken downwards through the tunnels by a squad of Ultramarines. Five of the enemy, headed by an acting sergeant named Dardanus. As they descended, the darkness grew stronger. Toc Derenoth had the impression of a living thing pooling at his feet.

  The enemy saw it too. ‘What bewitchment is this?’ Dardanus demanded.

  With half an ear, Toc Derenoth listened to the Ultramarines try to divine the meaning of the rising tide of shadows. They tried and failed to rationalise it. Khuzhun, walking ahead under the guard of the legionary called Envixus, laughed at them. Dardanus halted. He closed with Khuzhun. ‘You have something to say, Colchisian?’

  And Khuzhun did. He called the Ultramarines frightened children. He boasted of the power of the Word. But he didn’t know what was happening. Not really. None of them did. Toc Derenoth felt the touch of the sacred dark that had looked at him when he dangled over the abyss. Something of what had stirred below had risen. It exhilarated the Word Bearers as much as it disturbed the Ultramarines.

  The further down they went, the deeper the dark became. It did not fill the tunnels, not yet, but Toc Derenoth sensed the promise of a great power. One that would answer the call of a prophet.

  His faith in Kurtha Sedd soared.

  The column came to another sudden halt. The Ultramarines were on high alert. They were expecting an attack. They must have detected movement. Toc Derenoth’s lips pulled back in a grin. His brothers were near. They had not been abandoned by Kurtha Sedd.

  ‘In here.’ The loyalist Tibor shoved Gherak Haxx into a narrow cavern. The rest of the squad followed. The Ultramarines bracketed the entrance with their guns. The legionary with the heavy bolter stood at the rear.

  Khuzhun murmured, ‘I can smell your fear…’ He whispered more taunts until Dardanus hammered Khuzhun unconscious with the grip of his bolt pistol.

  Toc Derenoth barely noticed. He was seized by an even greater consciousness of the darkness. It suffused the cavern, as if it had been flowing to this destination above all others. Shadows deeper than the absence of light coated his armour. They were strong. They concealed whispers and the laughter of the void.

  Beyond the cavern entrance came the sound of marching boots. Toc Derenoth’s brothers were passing by in strength. He could call out. The loyalists would kill him, but they would be annihilated. But he felt no need to sacrifice himself. He felt no frustration, but anticipation. The other prisoners must have felt the same. They too were silent.

  The darkness rippled, and what it concealed moved. Word Bearers stepped forwards in silence from the rear of the cavern. Toc Derenoth saw them. The Ultramarines did not. They surrounded the loyalists. They struck with blades. Toc Derenoth shook with silent, ecstatic laughter. He beheld art. He saw knives slide through the seams of armour as though the ceramite had no more substance than a mirage. And because art must have an audience, Dardanus realised what was happening at precisely the moment it was too late for him to act.

  Blood everywhere, crimson in the dark. Throats slashed. Skulls pierced from side to side. The Word Bearers cut the squad down in seconds. Dardanus fired, and Toc Derenoth snarled as he saw two of the assassins killed. He charged forwards with the rest to tear the sergeant apart.

  But then the Chaplain’s voice filled the dark. ‘Alive,’ he said. ‘I want the last of them alive.’

  The darkness receded. It had answered his call, but Kurtha Sedd had not been its master, at least not at a conscious level. There was a mystery and a promise here to be pursued. But first there was the prisoner. Dardanus, he learned. An acting sergeant. Kurtha Sedd looked at him, still defiant though surrounded by the corpses of his squad. Of course he was defiant. A simple-minded reaction typical of a Legion that could not think for itself.

  Kurtha Sedd was disappointed the Ultramarines had sent so few of their warriors to the slaughter. But perhaps this too was fate. The gods keeping the delay brief before the continued descent.

  And what if they had come in force? he thought. We must keep moving. We must answer the call of the depths.

  Toc Derenoth was speaking. ‘They are led by a captain. He gave his name as Steloc Aethon.’

  Aethon.

  Kurtha Sedd grunted from the blow. He forced the sound into a chuckle. ‘The Honoured, of course. Aethon, my old friend.’ He made himself sound eager and amused. ‘It is I who am honoured. Honoured to have lost so many of my kindred – not to any warrior of Ultramar, but to Steloc Aethon – the noble son of a doomed world. A world with an ignoble end.’ He kept speaking, gloating, teaching. He spoke for the benefit of his brothers, and for the despair of Dardanus. And he spoke to get ahead of his own thoughts.

  Toc Derenoth delivered Aethon’s message.

  The message full of sanctimony and delusions of honour.

  A tremor rumbled in the depths. The laughter of the gods at the absurdity of Aethon’s request.

  ‘You hear that, Ultramarine?’ Kurtha Sedd snarled. ‘That is the sound of your world – your very existence – collapsing about you.’ But he felt a collapse too. He raged ahead of it, held aloft by words of fury. He would not, though, be able to hold his thoughts at bay much longer.

  And then he was plunging his knife into the Ultramarine’s stomach. Deep, all the way to the spine, and then a savage, gutting rip. ‘Bring your captain to me, Dardanus,’ he hissed. ‘Bring me Steloc Aethon of the Honoured Nineteenth.’

  Words that he both meant and denied, his soul divided. He kept the division from the enemy and from his men. He left Dardanus at the edge of death and stormed out of the cavern. He had to go deeper. Where the darkness would give him the strength to confront his thoughts. And the means to prepare for the enemy he had summoned.

  Down. They found a new route. It was a fissure that descended through a gorge f
ormed from a series of caverns that had fallen in on each other. The descent was difficult. Manoeuvring Sor Gharax down it was painful, but possible. That possibility alone was confirmation of the truth of this path. The drop had been within the limits of what an armoured, genhanced body could take. Just. That perfection was another sign: speeding the Word Bearers towards the truth, while still keeping them alive.

  So many signs. So many omens. Aethon was one of them. Staring into the darkness as the company worked its way further down the gorge, Kurtha Sedd faced the patterns that were forming. And he faced his soul. Aethon. There could be no coincidences of this sort. Certainty and doubt in equal measure collided. Fate required that Aethon be his opponent.

  So the past kept coming for him. No matter how much he destroyed of all the lies that had warped the true path of the Word Bearers, he still could not shed its burden. He should rejoice that Aethon was here. After the Emperor’s betrayal, after the revelation that Lorgar’s words to him had not been true, it was Aethon’s role in Monarchia that had stabbed most deeply. Aethon had taken part in the censure without question. He had turned his back on comradeship forged in the fires of the Great Crusade. He had turned his back on the memory of Melior-Tertia.

  Kurtha Sedd remembered. He remembered the ice world overrun by orks. He remembered Aethon, wounded and dazed by a tremendous blast, floundering through suddenly boiling water. He remembered a greenskin chieftain, so heavily armoured it was a walking hill of metal and killsaws, closing with Aethon and raising its blades for the death blow. And he remembered hurling himself between the greenskin and his friend. He didn’t know if there were other Ultramarines within range to help. All he saw was a brother brought low. He smashed the killsaws aside with his crozius. And when Aethon’s brother legionary Urcus arrived to knock the greenskin down, Kurtha Sedd killed it. While Urcus saw to Aethon, Kurtha Sedd stood over them, defying the closing ranks of orks. His subsequent memories were of struggle, of fire, of violence and of blood. And of a victory against all odds made possible by the collective will of comradeship. At the end, standing in the midst of ork bodies beyond counting, barely keeping upright from the wounds, he and Aethon had laughed together. There had been losses that day, but it had also been a good one.

  A good day for memory.

  And Aethon had forgotten. He had revealed himself to be a tool of the lie. A willing one? An unthinking one? Kurtha Sedd hadn’t known until now. He had not spoken to the Ultramarine since Monarchia. But Aethon’s offered terms were telling. Aethon was willing and unthinking. He no doubt believed himself to be doing the honourable thing. He was blind, and complacent in his blindness.

  And so now, after forty-four years, it was time for Kurtha Sedd to avenge the personal betrayal, and doing so was also his duty to the Legion. Here in the depths of Calth, a great revelation called to him, and he was enjoined to destroy the enemy whose fall would have more meaning for him than for any other Word Bearer. The symmetry had a sublime perfection. In the discovery of a new truth, he would erase the day of the worst lie.

  There could be no greater proof of the hand of the gods in his fate. Yet he did not rejoice. He could not, because there were still doubts. Lorgar had said the Emperor watched him, and the Emperor did not. That falsehood ate at the roots of his faith. He believed in the gods of Chaos. He had seen their handiwork again and again. Yet despite what he had preached to his battle-brothers, he was not sure he believed in his own worthiness. He did not doubt the gods. He doubted himself.

  He did not want to kill Aethon.

  The burdens pressed down harder. They were enveloping cloaks of lead, and they smothered. They were the weight of the millions of tonnes of rock between his head and the surface, and they crushed. He thought he had shed the past, but it had returned in fury. He thought he had cut away the hold of old friendships, of an old life.

  He was wrong.

  He thought, I am my past. I am the shape it has moulded.

  With that admission, he realised what he must do. So he prayed to the darkness. He prayed for the strength to face the burdens.

  To turn to what defined him, to what most pained him, and to burn it away.

  Just beyond reach, in the shadows his imagination could not give form, a dream was born. A dream of incendiary liberation.

  SIX

  Erosion

  Song

  Revival

  They saw the scouting party before they could pull back. The Word Bearers pursued.

  ‘Silence them!’ Kurtha Sedd shouted. They might have already sent the alert. He hoped the Ultramarines vox was as unreliable as Fifth Company’s.

  The Ultramarines retreated, laying down heavy covering fire. A good sign, Kurtha Sedd thought. It was important to them to escape and report. He jinked left and right, making himself a difficult target. A shell careened off the side of his helm. The shriek of the impact was deafening. He snarled and fired back.

  The tunnel curved sharply to the left. The foes lost sight of each other.

  ‘Cease fire,’ Kurtha Sedd ordered. ‘Conserve your ammunition.’

  The Ultramarines kept shooting, their bolter rounds now pounding craters into the left-hand wall. Kurtha Sedd slowed his pursuit just enough to avoid running back into the barrage, waiting for the tunnel to straighten again.

  At the end of the curve, he found a vast cavern. It was a dining hall. Rows of long tables stretched across its width. Thousands of mortals could have fed here, though the space had not been used in a long time. The pillars were cracked. The tables were covered with dust that had fallen from the fissured ceiling. This far down in the arcologies, the Word Bearers were reaching zones that had seen little activity in centuries or more. The walls and periphery of the ceiling were covered by massive crystal formations. They reflected and refracted the few utility lumen globes, helm lights and muzzle flashes. The room coruscated with the glare of war.

  The exit at the far end was blocked by rubble. The corridor beyond was gone. The Ultramarines were trapped. They used pillars as cover and poured their fire into the entrance.

  Kurtha Sedd roared and plunged through the fire. A hard blow tried to stop him. It failed. Behind him, his brothers spread out into the room. In the tunnel, there had been space for only two legionaries to move abreast. There were only five Ultramarines, but the Word Bearers had been unable to use their greater numbers. Now they could. The company formed a line of death almost as wide as the room.

  The line advanced. The targets were clear. Bolt-shells punched into the pillars. The Ultramarines had marked their positions while they were trapped in the doorway. Now it was the Word Bearers who had precise locations to shoot at, while the enemy had too many targets.

  The Ultramarines used the seconds they had left to concentrate their assault on Kurtha Sedd. He allowed his brothers to move ahead of him. He had led the charge here. There was nothing to be gained by inviting his destruction. He had duties that transcended the events in this hall.

  He stepped back behind Var Rhuthag. Shells pummelled the legionary. He walked four more paces, returning fire all the while, and then he fell, blood spraying from the fist-sized holes in his helm. He was avenged in the next seconds. A pillar on the right disintegrated, and dozens of bolt-shells found the Ultramarine behind it. On the left, two frag grenades landed together behind another pillar. They blasted a son of Guilliman out from his cover. One of his legs dragged. He stumbled towards the next pillar, spraying his bolter in a wide arc. He wasn’t permitted to cross more than a few metres. He collapsed with a crash, smashing through the surface of one of the tables.

  Chanting their praise of the dark, the Word Bearers marched across the hall. The Ultramarines were dead before Fifth Company had reached the halfway mark. They had lost three of their own number.

  The echoes of the battle faded. The sounds of gunfire, though, continued. They were sporadic, short bursts. While the bodies were stripped o
f supplies, Kurtha Sedd went to the blocked doorway. Kaeloq and Toc Derenoth accompanied him. They crunched over a litter of crystal fragments. Light in the hall was now a sprinkle of jagged points. Toc Derenoth still moved with difficulty, but his body had made some progress in healing over the course of the last few days. He had been working even harder to redeem himself. Kurtha Sedd did not discourage his attempts. His willingness to sacrifice himself for the Chaplain might be needed.

  Kurtha Sedd punched the rubble. ‘Get us through this,’ he said. The shots were coming from the other side.

  Kaeloq prepared another demolition charge. A single blast was all it took. The collapse was a small one. Kurtha Sedd led the way through. The tunnel beyond was wide and sloped down sharply. Twenty metres down, another group of Ultramarines had assembled a barricade of storage units. There were three of them. They exchanged fire with two Word Bearers further down the slope, who had no shelter and were attempting to charge the uphill position. Two bodies in crimson armour lay on the corridor floor.

  Rations spilled out of the ruptured containers. Cowering behind the Ultramarines were twenty civilians. They screamed when they saw Kurtha Sedd’s legionaries. The Ultramarines whirled, reversing fire. The Word Bearers crashed into them with the force of a battering ram. Kurtha Sedd slammed his crozius against the side of one warrior’s head and fired his plasma pistol into the enemy’s flank, melting away armour and muscle and bone. The kill was not a clean one. It was dragged out. Which was what he wanted.

  The Ultramarine lost the use of his right side. He lurched at Kurtha Sedd, agony hissing from his helm grille. Kurtha Sedd brought the crozius in from his left and drove it though the Ultramarine’s exposed ribcage, crushing the hearts. The enemy fell at his feet. Blood coated the head of the crozius and ran down the shaft.