Paragon of Faith and Other Stories by Various Authors

Author:Various Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction: space opera (FLS)
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2025-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Disbelief coursed like a sedative in Docia’s veins, slowing her reaction to Gawel’s damning words. She knew their meaning immediately – she had heard them too many times accompanied by the muzzle reports of stolen weapons and the whistle of incoming heavy fire to mistake them. She felt time stretching helplessly outwards in the delay between hearing that familiar heresy and dropping her hand to her holster.

Gawel seized suddenly, head snapping back at a painful angle as his ravaged limbs curled in. All at once, the symptoms of the Judgement erupted across his body.

What was left of the soldier’s cheeks tore apart from jaw to jaw, leaving the bone dangling open in a too-wide smile. Pustules along his palate and throat burst and made discharge drip from his yawning mouth to the floor. His skin seemed to shrink away from his flesh, revealing greyish, rotting muscle. Once again, Docia thought she saw something rippling within the tissue.

His stomach finally burst apart. The entrails didn’t droop out of the ragged skin but squirmed in place, pulsing with inflammation and releasing a noxious fume from his perforated guts that silenced the moans of the nearest patients. The fingernails that had ruined his face cracked into jagged, discoloured claws. With his mouth unhinged and his belly leaking stinking fluids onto the floor, the soldier looked like an avatar of disease.

‘Embrace the pox!’

Gawel released another manic howl before lurching forward and reaching for Docia.

The deafening bang of a boltgun shot went off next to Docia’s ear. Ydith’s bolt struck Gawel between his bleeding eyes and blew his head apart in a shower of gore and bone fragments.

The soldier’s corrupted corpse dropped to the ward floor with a splat, blood and ichor pooling around the piecemeal body.

‘You should have listened to me when you had the chance, Hospitaller,’ the Palatine snapped.

Docia barely heard the recrimination, her head still ringing with the echoes of bolt-fire and Gawel’s last apostatic words.

Her mind replayed the soldier’s deformation like a hololith. The Judgement had not simply despoiled him – it had been transforming him. Into what, she didn’t know.

Ydith’s tirade was interrupted by the shrieking of the rest of the crowded ward at the sight of the creature still twitching on the floor. Predictably, a few of the patients expired of the mortal terror to which the Judgement made them vulnerable – their convulsing bodies rattled on their beds before melting into swill or popping like massive boils. Others tore at their skin like penitents donning haircloth, squealing for divine mercy and salvation.

Some of those shrieks also began to decay into mad laughter.

Before Docia’s eyes, another patient tipped off their bed and lurched onto unsteady feet, and then another. The nearest nurses fled crying to the far corners of the ward, distancing themselves from the upright Judged as they too began to seize.

Their limbs jerked in unnatural directions as the Judgement’s final corruption flowed through their veins and tissues. Just like Gawel, they laughed as their bodies putrefied

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