The Unburdened by David Annandale

Author:David Annandale
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2015-10-22T10:06:09+00:00

EIGHT

Voices through the dark

Between the lines

Let the Bull lead

The vox was useless over any distance. They worked by relay, one group of Word Bearers communicating with the nearest, which linked to another, and so on until news reached Kurtha Sedd. The system was imperfect and ungainly. He heard reports after frustrating delays. The jumble of redundant, conflicting and fragmented transmissions made effective coordination almost impossible.

At least the Ultramarines would be facing the same limitations beyond the reach of the command nexus. And they were blind. Word of encounters with the enemy arrived. Kurtha Sedd heard tales of vengeance. He was glad. At the news of each successful attack, he asked the same question.

‘Was Aethon among them?’

No. He was not. The dictates of fate would not be thwarted. Even so, Kurtha Sedd hoped.

He travelled upwards through the layers of tunnels and caverns. The direction of his journey was maddening, as it dragged him further and further away from his true goal. He accepted its necessity. He rose with the tide of darkness. And he circled closer and closer to the battle he would have given much to avoid.

His route was circuitous. The hungry dark kept leading him to more pockets of civilians. He obeyed the shadows and fed them. He fed them with slaughter and the inspiration of atrocity. His brothers climbed the heights of cruelty.

They found another large refuge. It was a medicae centre. Its patients had been injured by the collapses more than by the war itself. There was a single Ultramarines legionary here. He was wounded. Kurtha Sedd guessed he had not been posted here, but had stumbled upon the centre by chance too. He was blind. He raged and fired as Kurtha Sedd came for him, but he responded to more than the sounds of the Chaplain’s boots on stone. The whispers assailed him. Kurtha Sedd heard them too, but they were his allies. They were the disembodied jaws of truth, though the Ultramarine would have called them lies. Voices cried out to the legionary, and they taunted him. At Kurtha Sedd’s shoulders, they snickered.

A gibbering choir laughed as he sank his crozius into the wounded Ultramarine’s thigh. The armour was already broken there, and Kurtha Sedd shattered the leg in two. He brought the crozius down again, in a succession of blows, this time on the enemy’s arms. The Ultramarine cursed him.

‘I bring you illumination,’ Kurtha Sedd intoned as he immobilised the legionary. Then he began the real work of pain.

The cultists and his squad rampaged through the connected caverns. None of the deaths were hurried. The tortures were strategic. The most vulnerable suffered the worst horrors. The Word Bearers destroyed the medicae tables. In their place, they constructed altars. The building materials were bone and shattered bodies.

The altars were still breathing when they were completed. From the mouths of the bent, twisted, agonised bodies, new rivers of darkness flowed.

The dark was stronger, and not just because of the work of Kurtha Sedd. He sensed it feeding elsewhere.

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