Sanction & Sin (Warhammer Crime) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-04T07:00:00+00:00

CONFESSIONS OF FIRE

GARY KLOSTER

Thaddeus was dead. The Weavers had killed him.

Lira moved with the mob, her thin arm caught tight in her mother’s grip. The crowd was a beast, a monster with a million shouting mouths and countless eyes flashing with flame, and Lira knew she’d die if she fell, crushed beneath uncaring feet, but she didn’t care.

The Weavers had wrapped a cord around her brother’s throat and pulled it tight, and she wanted to watch them burn.

‘I can’t see!’ Somehow her mother heard her in the deafening roar, and picked Lira up to sit on her shoulders. The crowd was packed into the square before the church, a building crouched like a black stone beast, its spire like a horn rising into the night sky. There was a clear space before the glowing maw of the church’s open doors, a stretch of stained rockcrete fenced off by wire and armoured guards. In that space, rows of steel frames gleamed in the light of a thousand torches. Strange bundles hung from their crosspieces, cord-bound forms that struggled and thrashed. People. People wrapped head to toe in thread, their gasping, howling mouths exposed. Beneath bound feet, more thread had been piled high, loose mounds of it that gleamed with the sheen of spilt promethium.

‘See them!’ a voice thundered over the square, spilling from a hundred laud hailers. ‘They name themselves Weavers? We name them heretic! They say they can read the future in the dance of threads on the auto-looms? They say they can change fate by shifting threads? We say they have no future, and their only fate is flame!’

‘Flame!’ the crowd shouted, thousands of hands raising torches high.

‘What fate the heretic?’ bellowed the laud hailers.

‘Flame!’ answered the mob.

‘What fate the heretic?’

‘Flame!’

‘What fate the heretic!’ The voice of the laud hailer was exultant.

‘FLAME!’ the mob howled, its thunderous voice shaking the windows. Lira sat on her mother’s shoulders, silent in that sea of sound, and watched as the torches began to fly. Thrown by the crowd, they arced through the air and landed among the bound figures and the fuel-soaked piles of thread. Within seconds, flames were shooting up, wrapping the Weavers in fire.

Screams echoed through the square and the crowd roared back. Over the laud hailers, angry prayers were shouted like curses, and the fire was roaring, its light flaring across the church’s facade. Lira tore her eyes from the twitching bodies, black and twisting, looking at the dark shadow of the church, and she saw Him. The man in the great stained-glass window that towered over the square. Lit by the raging flames, He looked at her, His eyes shining through the black clouds of smoke. Eyes sad and patient and wise, and when she looked at them, all the grief Lira had tried to lock away behind her rage suddenly broke free and she wailed. Her tiny body shook as she tipped back her head and howled her grief to the night, to the smoke and to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.