It struck the seam of the armour. Plates parted. The blade plunged through carapace, muscle and ribs.
And deeper.
Aethon’s arm went slack. Lethal shock flashed through his eyes. He sagged. Dark blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
A long stillness. The war fell into silence. Vague shapes moved with glacial slowness at the edge of Kurtha Sedd’s vision. Stars were born and died, and he finally understood what he had done.
For the first time since Monarchia, and for the last time in his life, Kurtha Sedd experienced horror.
‘Aethon,’ he said. ‘Forgive me.’
Surely judgement must come now. If it did not, it never would. He had murdered the past. There were no more new crimes left to him. He begged forgiveness in the name of the legionary he had once been, in the voice of the last spark of the beliefs for which he had once been willing to die, the beliefs that had refused to free him of their persistent grasp.
He begged forgiveness, and before the answer came, the change had come upon him. He no longer needed an answer. The final traces of the old Kurtha Sedd died before Aethon could even have spoken.
And Aethon did not speak.
Kurtha Sedd drove the dagger home through the primary heart. The Ultramarine’s eyes dimmed. Kurtha Sedd pushed.
Aethon fell.
Kurtha Sedd watched.
Do you know what you have done?
Yes.
Aethon’s head struck a protrusion. His body tumbled. It took a long time to disappear. It diminished in Kurtha Sedd’s sight. It shrank to insignificance, just another spinning piece of debris.
Aethon fell.
And with him went Kurtha Sedd’s chains.
FIFTEEN
The freedom of damnation
Warp-flesh
To look upon these works
Kurtha Sedd shed his burdens. He sloughed them off like a dead, ill-fitting skin. He spread his arms in welcome. He delighted in the fullness of damnation. All was gone now. All his past, all his bonds. He was free. He felt no regret. With this great severing, there was nothing left to regret.
Clarity returned. He saw the Octed’s shape once more. He saw the road ahead, and the tasks to come. Unburdened, all became possible to him.
And the flesh? What of the burden of the flesh?
He still had need of his. For now. But there was a moment coming, advancing with predatory intent, when that burden too would be shed. If not by him, then by others.
The flesh shall be fused with the warp.
He would know how. Of this he was certain.
He had no more doubts. The last had fallen with Aethon. New ones were impossible.
The dark accepted the sacrifice. It rose towards him. He accepted its obedience as his due.
Kurtha Sedd turned from the abyss and faced the battlefield once more. His gaze swept over the struggling figures. He looked upon Word Bearers, Ultramarines and cultists with the perspective of a god. The war was of interest to him. The combatants were useful. They were different shades of sacrifice. They were willing and unwilling. There were crude offerings and grand ones, and there were the useful tools. The raw material for transformation.
An Ultramarines sergeant in damaged Cataphractii plate dragged himself to his feet nearby, grief and anger driving his pained movements. ‘There isn’t anywhere you can go on this planet where we won’t find you, traitor,’ he spat, bringing his lightning claws up.
Kurtha Sedd paused. The warrior’s ignorance was almost painful to behold.
‘There isn’t anywhere on this planet to go,’ he replied, grinning beatifically behind his visor as he turned away. ‘Only deeper into the underworld...’
He saw more Word Bearers die. Enraged by the death of their captain, the Ultramarines threw themselves against Fifth Company with redoubled wrath. They wanted vengeance, and they were finding it. The tide rose higher against Kurtha Sedd’s brothers.
He was not troubled. He had the darkness at his back, and he slipped into it as easily as stepping behind a curtain.
The twisted words of the old tongue of Colchis had new meaning and new power. He had called upon potential in the dark. He tore the veil wide. Beneath the rattling drum of battle, he heard the scrabbling of claws on the walls of the gorge. The sound was steady. It did not dissolve into the bubbling of flesh. It drew closer.
Kurtha Sedd hefted the crozius Arcanum, and lifted it high. The war demanded he react as another vengeful Ultramarine broke through and charged him, bolter blazing. Kurtha Sedd slipped again into the flow of the dark. The Ultramarine appeared to slow, as if moving deep underwater. Kurtha Sedd let the speed of the dark’s current carry him. He was beside the loyalist before the other had registered the shift in his position. He brought the crozius down on the back of the Ultramarine’s neck. At impact, the dark released him. The Ultramarine’s helm and spine shattered as Kurtha Sedd returned to the time of the materium. The loyalist fell. Kurtha Sedd kicked his body into the abyss.
The scratching of claws sounded like a hailstorm. So many. And now there were voices, laughing and gurgling and whispering obscene hungers.
Kurtha Sedd shouted, ‘Welcome!’
A wave of abominations broke over the lip of the gorge. There were hundreds.
‘Daemons,’ Kurtha Sedd whispered. He savoured the word. ‘Daemons,’ he said again, louder. The negations of all the Emperor’s teachings fell upon the Ultramarines, and they had come at his bidding. ‘Daemons!’ Kurtha Sedd howled. The word was reality, and the reality was triumph.
The forms of the daemons were rough-hewn. They were still incomplete, though they had coherence of a kind. There were heaving masses of sores. There were crimson things stalking forwards on hooved legs. The upper halves of their bodies were amorphous collections of limbs and horns. Other monsters were both flesh and flame. There were clawed, elongated shapes that writhed with an insectoid sensuality. And there were creatures of no true shape at all, gibbering accumulations of tentacles, maws, eyes and blades that slithered and hopped and slouched towards their prey.
The horde of ruinous flesh spilled over and through the combatants. The struggle changed in an instant. The daemons swarmed over the Ultramarines, pushing them back in the cavern. They sought to smother the loyalists, to drown them in a suppurating mass. Claws like swords stabbed at armour, seeking weak points.
The daemons were not strong. Bolter shells made short work of their forms. Strong blows burst their bodies. They exploded into mists of flesh. Single daemons were little threat to a legionary. The multitude was lethal.
‘Destroy the betrayers of the Word!’ Kurtha Sedd commanded. He ran into the fray, leading with the crozius, and the daemons flowed on either side, his infinite army to command.
So he thought at first.
Then he saw the daemons leaping on Word Bearers too, prying at armour, howling with need. One caught Vor Raennag by surprise. The sergeant drove his chainsword through the gorget and throat of an Ultramarine, decapitating him. As he pulled the blade away from the corpse, a mottled pink and blue abomination leapt onto his head. It pushed his head back and plunged limbs like stingers into his mouth and his eyes. He flailed with the chainsword. Before he could strike the daemon, it appeared to implode, its body sucking itself down the stingers and into Vor Raennag’s skull.
The sergeant staggered. He clawed at his face. He shouted Kurtha Sedd’s name, pleading and cursing. He stiffened. His skull pulsed. So did his armour. He cried out, his voice suddenly a chorus of two. Armour, bone and flesh melded together and mutated. He twisted around and around himself, and then his body exploded outwards. He became a confusion of limbs and wings. Kurtha Sedd saw a suggestion of something greater, a shadow of a warrior from beyond the veil, but then all shapes ended. Vor Raennag disappeared into a swamp of being, the organic and inorganic turned into an indistinguishable sludge
.
Vor Raennag’s end had been a promise and failure. And now Kurtha Sedd knew he had overreached.
The cavern was a maelstrom of death. Word Bearers and Ultramarines still fought each other. There was no distance between the forces, no order, no strategy, just a roil of close combat, chain weapons shrieking teeth against each other, bolters discharged within arm’s reach of the target. The daemons were everywhere, and more still were climbing from the pit. They concentrated on the Ultramarines, attacking with the ferocity reserved for a hated enemy. They leapt upon the Word Bearers with the clutch of ownership. Grenades and flamers devastated flesh of all kinds, mortal, genhanced, warp-spun. A storm of flame and muscle and teeth and armour.
The battle had turned into its own monster, beyond the control of either Legion. Kurtha Sedd raged with wounded pride. He had summoned the beings of the warp, and they were weak and beyond his control. This was not as it should be. This was not his destiny.
There was a lesson in what he had seen happen to Vor Raennag. But there was no time to learn it.
The daemons had been sweeping past Kurtha Sedd, drawn by the wealth of prey beyond him. Now one turned on him. It was long and angular. Its narrow head had the suggestion of a beak. Feathered, useless wings spread from its shoulders. It lunged at him, reaching with arms as long as its body. Talons seized his shoulders. He brought up the crozius and blocked the snapping beak. Thoughts, insidious as worms, reached into his mind.
Let me in. Become me.
The thoughts were strong with desire. Kurtha Sedd’s will was strong too. No, he thought and hurled the daemon back with the force of destiny.
Not yet.
The abomination hissed at him. Its eyes glinted slyly. Then it turned and rushed, squawking, into the fray.
Kurtha Sedd followed. He fell upon an Ultramarine struggling with three daemons. He fired his plasma pistol into the loyalist’s power pack. It erupted in blinding flame. The Ultramarine fell. The daemons pulled off his head and fell upon the remains.
He waded deeper into the chaos of the battle. He hurled himself from foe to foe, striking with growing anger as everything disintegrated around him. The Ultramarines were falling now, overwhelmed, but what then? Drowning in a sea of the half-formed and the uncontrollable? His service to the gods must be grander than this. The Octed must be completed. Calth must be given to Chaos. But this, was this victory?
Is this destiny?
The answer came with a blast of rockets. A concentration of daemons erupted in a fountain of limbs and body parts that dissolved a moment later. From the main entrances to the cave came a constant, disciplined fusillade. Daemons burst into mist. Word Bearers fell, their armour holed by dozens of bolter shells.
No, Kurtha Sedd thought.
The Ultramarines reinforcements marched forwards, methodical, relentless. They reclaimed the cavern metre by metre. They brought order with them. They drove Chaos back, tearing its fabric apart, dispersing the being of daemons. Wounded, the darkness began to withdraw.
NO.
The vox became a chorus of defeat. ‘Pull back!’ asked one voice. ‘Where?’ was its answer.
Rethaz Qann stumbled to Kurtha Sedd’s left side. His armour was torn open by shell hits and claw gouges. ‘Chaplain,’ he said. ‘We must–’
Grenades vaporised the daemons in front of them before Rethaz Qann could finish. A squad of Ultramarines had them in their sights. Kurtha Sedd mag-locked his pistol to his side and grabbed Rethaz Qann by the shoulder. He dragged the other Word Bearer before him. The loyalists fired. Rethaz Qann convulsed as he took the full brunt of the fusillade. ‘There will be no must from you,’ Kurtha Sedd snarled to the dying legionary. He backed up, keeping him as a shield. Daemons flowed into the space between him and the Ultramarines.
More time, Kurtha Sedd thought. He pulled an explosive from his belt. It was a rad grenade. He threw it over the daemons, into the midst of the Ultramarines. The krump of its blast was followed by a strangled gargle. As Kurtha Sedd retreated, he caught glimpses of the ferocious radiation’s effects. The daemons in the vicinity were losing shape as their material flesh attacked itself. An Ultramarines sergeant was on his knees. His face was a cankered mass slipping from his skull.
The Ultramarines launched more rockets, this time at the side entrance where Aethon had broken through the barricade. They brought down tonnes of rock over the opening. There was no way out of the cavern. Nowhere to go except the abyss.
No!
Kurtha Sedd retreated with the dark. The daemons had stopped coming out of the pit. They kept attacking the Ultramarines, but the loyalists had their measure. The incessant barrage destroyed the abominations at a distance. Those who drew near were incinerated by flamers. The wall of blue advanced, unstoppable as fate.
No. Not my fate. Not with so much incomplete.
Kurtha Sedd reached the gorge. He looked down. The warp-dark still filled the emptiness, and within it, all was clear. Partway to the wall on his left and about four metres down was a ledge. It was just wide enough to stand on. The middle of the ledge ran past a gap in the cliff face.
A way out.
His path still stretched before him.
‘With me, brothers!’ Kurtha Sedd called.
Toc Derenoth started to turn, and shells stitched a line across his chest-plate. They broke through his armour. Others followed, their mass-reactive blasts going off in his ribcage. The impacts threw Toc Derenoth several metres back. He fell. His ribs moved freely. He tried to move. His body was slow to respond. It was trying to stop the bleeding. It was trying to keep from dying. It had no strength for his limbs.
Then a huge weight on his chest.
Let me in.
A mind with teeth gnawed at his consciousness.
Let me in.
The daemon crouched on him. Its features were vague, but it had a smile as wide as his arm was long. The face began to rearrange itself. It began to look like his own.
Never. He would fight as himself, not as a puppet to another being.
Toc Derenoth heaved himself up to a sitting position, knocking the daemon away. It clutched at him. Its will squeezed his once more. He struck it with his chainsword. His blade cut through a shower of filth.
He could not stand. His legs would not respond. He turned over and saw Kurtha Sedd drop below the edge of the pit. Kaeloq was just behind him. Other Word Bearers were retreating towards the same point. So few of them, the ragged remnants of Fifth Company.
Toc Derenoth dragged himself forwards. He crawled through blood and dissipating mires of warp-flesh and mutilated corpses. He retreated from the cries and the explosions, and the marching, systematic destruction of Chaos.
As he reached the pit, he thought of the moment he had hung from the ramp before the command nexus, and he wondered if there truly was anything worth the sacrifice he had been willing to make.
There was nowhere to go but forwards.
He pulled himself over, and dropped to the ledge below. He could not control his landing. The interior of his chest crunched. He began to slip off the ledge. Khuzhun came down beside him and pulled him into the narrow tunnel in the cliff.
Toc Derenoth slipped in and out of consciousness as Khuzhun hauled him through the passageway. Voices like old bones whispered in his ear, demanding entrance. He refused, and refused, and refused.
The movement stopped. His pain stabilised, and his vision cleared. He and his surviving brothers were in a small cave. Khuzhun had left him propped against a wall. The company was small, battered, bleeding. There were a few cultists too. Khrothis was among them. She was barely recognisable as human. She appeared to revel in her wounds. Her eyes shone. There was no defeat in her.
In the centre of the chamber, Kurtha Sedd was standing over a crouching Kaeloq. The legionary was growling. The sound was both liquid and metallic, as if the snarl were coming
from two throats at once.
The voice at his ear and at his mind. Let me in.
‘No,’ Toc Derenoth whispered.
Kurtha Sedd turned to look at him.
‘Yes,’ he said.
The daemon flesh had failed. It was gone, but the darkness remained in the gorge, concealing the Word Bearers’ retreat from the Ultramarines. Kurtha Sedd had the time he needed. And he had learned the lesson taught by Vor Raennag’s death.
The flesh shall be fused with the warp.
Kaeloq had become disoriented during the retreat, and he was the final key. Unburdened at every level but the flesh, Kurtha Sedd had no hesitation in sacrificing other Word Bearers.
Kaeloq was in the midst of accepting that gift. His faith was absolute. His obedience was pure. He welcomed his ascension.
‘You hear the command, brother, don’t you?’ the Chaplain said to Toc Derenoth.
‘Yes.’
‘Chaos has chosen you, brother. As I have been chosen to lead us, you have been chosen to transcend before me. My time is not yet.’
‘Transcend…’ Toc Derenoth repeated, his voice weak with wounds, bitter with resistance.
Khrothis began to draw a circle around Toc Derenoth using her own blood.
‘Do you have faith in the gods and in the Word?’ Kurtha Sedd asked.
‘I do,’ said Toc Derenoth.
‘Then obey. This is not surrender, brother. This is victory. You are to be Unburdened. You shall be one of the vessels of our victory. Through the Unburdened, Calth will be sanctified to Chaos.’
‘I–’ Toc Derenoth began.
Kurtha Sedd plunged his fist into the legionary’s massive chest wound. Toc Derenoth gasped. His body went rigid. ‘Release your burdens,’ Kurtha Sedd ordered. ‘Ascend!’
Toc Derenoth’s will collapsed, and the ascension began. His body trembled, then lurched upright. His scream became a double-voiced snarl of triumph.
The Unburdened Page 16