Know No Fear by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

[mark: 4.12.45]

It’s the shock. It’s just the shock. You’ve been hurt, and I’ve shown you plenty. Plenty. I’m sorry, I really am. No one should have to see that. No one should have to deal with all of that in one go. But there really isn’t time to be gentle about this.

You saw what you had to see. I showed you where you have to go.

Now, this will hurt. This will be hard. You can do it. You’ve done hard before. Come on, Oll. Come on, my old, dear friend Ollanius.

It’s time to wake up. It’s time to w–

Oll wakes.

No sunlight. No bed. No singing from the kitchen.

Grey light. Fog. Cold.

Pain.

He’s fallen on his back, twisted. His hands are sore, and so is his back, and one of his hips too. His head feels as though iron screws have been driven into it.

He sits up. The pain gets worse.

Oll realises the worst of the pain isn’t his aches and sprains and bruises.

It’s the aftershock. The aftershock of the vision. He rolls onto all fours and dry-heaves, as if he’s trying to vomit out the memory and be rid of it.

It would be tempting to think it was just a nightmare. Tempting and easy. Just a bad dream that happened because he’d had a bump on the head.

But Oll knows the human mind doesn’t imagine things like that. Not like that. Grammaticus was here. The bastard was here. Not in the flesh, but as good as. He was here, and that’s what he had to show.

It says a lot that John made the superhuman effort, and took such an immense risk, to come. It says a lot, and what it says doesn’t sit comfortably with Oll Persson.

He gets to his feet, unsteady. He’s battered and bruised. His clothes are caked in mud that’s just beginning to dry and stiffen. He tries to get his bearings.

There’s not much to see. A dense grey mist is shrouding the entire world. There are rumbling sounds, and dull flashes up behind the clouds. Far away – Oll’s guess would be to the north – there’s a glow, as if something big on the other side of the fog is burning.

Something big like a city.

He looks around. The ground’s a slick of stinking black mud and ooze, of mangled agricultural machinery and broken fence posts. This is the spew the tidal wave left in its wake. This is what’s left of his land, of his fields.

He stumbles along, his boots squelching in the muck. The thick fog is part smoke, part vapour from the flood. The ground stinks of mineral cores and riverbed mire. All of his crops have gone.

He sees a line of fence posts, still standing. From the height of them above the muck, the flood wave left about a metre of silt and soil behind it. Everything’s buried. Worse than damned Krasentine Ridge. He sees a hand, a man’s hand, sticking up out of the black ooze, pale and wrinkled. It looks as if he’s reaching up, grasping for air.

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