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And Aethon falls.

See that plunge, that final plunge. See the darkness of the abyss rise to claim his body. To accept him as sacrifice. To devour him.

Do you know what you have done?

Yes.

Do you understand what you have done?

Yes.

Do you feel what you have done? Do you feel what you are doing?

Yes. The weight of the tumbling body. The weight of the act. Hurled into the dark, given to the truth. So much torn away, falling, vanishing. So much of identity and soul burned and severed.

So many beliefs, ties, loyalties. So many crimes and betrayals.

Burdens. Their masses like boulders, like mountain chains. Shaping, constraining, crushing, yet to release them is an amputation. A mutilation.

All the burdens, falling with Aethon into the dark.

The rising dark.

ONE

The taste of dust
Blindness
Faith and weakness

‘We will have the answers we seek before the day is done.’

Kurtha Sedd, Chaplain of the Fifth Assault Company, Chapter of the Third Hand, stood on the blasted plain that was the corpse and the grave of Monarchia. He repeated the words under his breath. No one else heard. He had removed his helm, and the sentence was swept away by the doleful wind. He repeated it again, with the doleful rhythm of a mourning bell. He was not the only one of his brothers whose spirit was held captive by that sentence. He heard others speak it, both nearby and over the vox. But the refrains he heard were at least as angry and determined as they were bewildered.

Was he the only one who regarded the promise of answers with sick dread?

The words were Lorgar’s words, the last full sentence he had spoken to his sons before his vox-transmission to the fleet had been cut off and Guilliman had ordered the XVII Legion planetside.

Guilliman ordered. And we obeyed.

He forced that thought – and its attendant question why? – aside. There were other, much larger questions. Much worse ones. And the answers, he was sure, would be worse yet.

We will have the answers we seek before the day is done.

The words of the primarch were reality itself. It was not that Lorgar shaped reality with his speech. He was the son of a god, not a god himself. But in Lorgar’s words, both written and voiced, Kurtha Sedd saw the total apprehension of the truth. Such was the depth of Lorgar’s understanding. He had prophesied the coming of the Emperor to Colchis, and so the Emperor had come, as if summoned by the call of his son and the need of the world. Lorgar had brought the XVII Legion to the knowledge of the Emperor’s godhood. Lorgar’s words, truth, the real: there was no space between the concepts. This certainty was the bedrock of Kurtha Sedd’s faith.

If Lorgar said answers would come, they would.

Kurtha Sedd did not want them to come. He could not imagine any answer that would not strike with the force of a cyclonic torpedo.

He took a deep breath. Unfiltered by his helm, the ruined air of Monarchia scraped into his throat and lungs. His mouth filled with the taste of betrayal. It was dust, it was ash, and it was the lingering heat of annihilation. His neuroglottis parsed the smell, telling what had burned. Stone and metal, wood and cloth. And yes, human flesh. Beyond what had been the outer walls of the perfect city was a displaced population of millions. The people wandered and mourned and tore their hair. They wept for their homes, they wept in incomprehension, and they wept for loved ones. There had been massacres here. People had resisted. People had chosen not to flee. They had died for their fidelity to the Emperor.

Kurtha Sedd tasted their martyrdom. He felt sick. Blood demands blood. Lorgar had said that too, when confronted by the scars on Khur, the evidence of the Ultramarines’ crime. Blood demands blood. Perhaps. But that was a response, not an answer.

And the response had not come. What had happened to Monarchia defied all comprehension, and instead of attacking, the Word Bearers had obeyed the Ultramarines and descended to the site of destruction.

Kurtha Sedd turned around slowly, blinking away the grit that gathered on his eyelashes. Every direction was the same: the blackened ground, the great absence of the perfection that had stood here, and the gathering of his brothers. Thunderhawks stirred up billows of dust with their engines as they came in to land. As Word Bearers wandered over the fused, melted, pulverised remnants of Monarchia, the ash blew in swirls from their armour. Grey motes flew from grey masses, as if the armour itself were disintegrating.

We are eroding, Kurtha Sedd thought. A killing wind was blowing through the Legion. It was bad enough now. What would it be when the answers came?

‘Chaplain?’

He blinked. Toc Derenoth stood before him. ‘What is it, brother?’ he asked the other legionary.

‘We are gathering.’ He pointed to Kurtha Sedd’s left.

‘Yes.’ The Chaplain didn’t look. He was gripped by a vision triggered by the close sight of the swirling ash and Toc Derenoth’s power armour. It was a vision of erosion, yes, but of a particular kind. On the Word Bearer’s right pauldron, the sunburst design and sinuous rune of the Third Hand were as bright and strong as ever. The parchments of devotion to the Emperor were turning grey in the air, darkening with filth, becoming illegible. The script on his armour, the indelible truths of the Imperium, appeared to be flaking off into the wind.

What am I seeing? Kurtha Sedd wondered.

The answer came between the beats of his hearts: truth crumbling. Truth that was eternal, that was the light for the entire galaxy. Breaking down, eaten by the wind, obscured by dust and flying away with ash.

Kurtha Sedd’s instinct was to turn from the vision. He should shut his eyes to this blasphemy. But the discipline and duty of a Chaplain sustained him. His duty was to look deeper. His discipline gave him the tools to reach understanding.

The Imperial Truth vanishes. The Third Hand remains.

The core is freed of the distorting encrustation.

He grunted. The idea struck him to the core, a gladius sinking deep between his ribs. He hurled it away, but the wound remained. He could already feel it fester, as if he had been struck by something with the potency of actual insight.

Of truth.

Another deep breath. Another lungful of ruin. Then: ‘Yes,’ he said, again. He nodded to Toc Derenoth. He observed the current of movement, the Legion forming up and advancing to a centre that no longer existed. He began to march. Around him, the Fifth Assault Company assumed formation and purpose.

Legionary Kaeloq approached from his left. Kurtha Sedd had spoken with him and Toc Derenoth often over the years. Both warriors had deep, laudable hungers for understanding, and a talent for exegesis. But where Toc Derenoth’s study of the Word and the Truth led him from one question to another, Kaeloq’s quest was for answers. He was devoted to the hierarchy of spiritual leadership in descent from the Emperor to the primarch, from the primarch to the Chaplains.

‘Are we at war, Chaplain?’ Kaeloq asked.

‘What do you think, brother?’ Kurtha Sedd made it a practice to redirect Kaeloq’s questions back at him. The easily gained answer, even though true, would lack the proper strength of revelation. But this time, there was nothing rhetorical or instructive about his response. His question was genuine.

‘It’s an attack, but it makes no tactical sense,’ Kaeloq said, struggling as they all were with the inexplicable. ‘And we were not fired upon when we arrived.’

‘And why would we be at war with a brother Legion?’ said Toc Derenoth.

The Chaplain didn’t answer. The vox crackled with silence. Even though Toc Derenoth had phrased his question as a denial, rejecting the idea even as he gave it form, just saying the words was to give voice to something monstrous.

Legion against Legion. Such unimaginable fratricide would crack the materium in half. There was no other way reality could respond to that impossibility.

And yet Monarchia was ash.

And the air was filled with the taste of a truth that could not be spoken.

‘Surely some revelation is at hand,’ Kurtha Sedd muttered.

‘What do you mean, Chaplain?’ Toc Derenoth asked.

Kurtha Sedd shook his head. ‘Nothing. Something. I don’t know, brother. I was quoting an ancient remembrancer of Terra. Yaitz. The fragments of his work that have come down to us have been interpreted as prophesying the coming of the Emperor.’

Surely some revelation is at hand.

We will have the answers we seek.

His life as Chaplain had been devoted to the Truth, and to its discovery, its praise, and its propagation. And now, how he dreaded its coming. He would hold it back if he could. And yet, he refused to don his helm. He refused to filter the murdered air of Monarchia. He was taking truth on board with every breath, and with every breath something fractured a bit more, something more than vital, something that should never break.

He walked through the cinders. His steps kicked up small clouds of particulate. A weight pressed down on his shoulders, growing more massive as the time for answers drew near.

The Word Bearers assembled for their answers. Rank upon rank of warriors in grey. As Toc Derenoth and Kaeloq fell back, rejoining their squad, Kurtha Sedd advanced with the other Chaplains and the captains. He opened a vox-channel to the full company. ‘The Word is our burden,’ he said. ‘Nothing can surpass its holy weight. Whatever this day brings, brothers of the Seventeenth Legion, know that we will shoulder it.’

Clicks and mutters of assent answered him. Then he broke the connection. He didn’t trust himself to speak without doubt working its way into his voice.

He didn’t even trust the sound of his breathing.

When, after the wounds of the day had scabbed over sufficiently for them to be discussed at all, Kurtha Sedd found, as he had suspected, that he was one of the first to feel the greater betrayals. Before the Rebuke, before the primarch confronted his father, even before Guilliman and the Sigillite appeared, Kurtha Sedd was staggered by the sight of the Ultramarines banners. A hundred warriors in blue descended the ramps of their Thunderhawks, and a white horse on an azure field shone with pride through the haze.

The 19th Company.

Aethon, Kurtha Sedd thought. He managed to remain upright.

He realised that, until this moment, he had nurtured an unconscious hope: that Aethon did not know about, or at the very least did not condone, the crime perpetrated on Khur. The idea of the Ultramarines turning on another Legion was mad, but the madness did not bear the face of a friend. He needed to hang on to something. There must be stability somewhere. The entire universe could not have fallen to madness. But there was Aethon at the head of his company. He not only knew, he had participated in the destruction.

The ground beneath Kurtha Sedd’s feet was thin as ice, changeable as sand.

Why? Kurtha Sedd wanted to reach across the space between the Word Bearers and Ultramarines, across the emptiness that had once been the Inaga Sector, and shake the warrior at whose side he had fought so many campaigns. Why? he wanted to cry to his friend. The legionary whose life he had saved on Melior-Tertia, the brother with whom he had celebrated victories, with whom he had debated the finer points of the Imperial Truth.

His trust in Aethon was adamantine. Every joint campaign between the Word Bearers and the Ultramarines had cemented the bond forged during the vanquishing of the orks.

Trust. Loyalty. Brotherhood. The belief in these concepts and the need for their reality were chains, wrapped so tight around his chest and throat that he could not breathe. They trapped him. They pushed down on his soul, crushing instead of freeing.

Aethon was here. Aethon knew. There was the first answer. If the first was so terrible, how much worse would the others be?

He tried to brace himself.

The effort was futile. The hammer blows began.

How much worse?

They would be enough to force him to his knees.

The answers came, one after another. Their impact was cumulative. The ends of Kurtha Sedd’s fingers buzzed. A sensation both numbing and agonising crawled up his limbs as all that was real crumbled, and the impossible rioted. His vision was blasted by the sight of everything he knew to be, ground into the ashes of Monarchia.

He saw Lorgar and Guilliman, the demi-god brothers, at odds. He saw Lorgar strike Malcador the Sigillite and, though the mortal fell like a bundle of brittle sticks, it was Lorgar who seemed impotent, his violence the futile striking-out of the vanquished. Impossible, of course.

And then the worst thing of all. Kurtha Sedd beheld the divine. He beheld the God-Emperor. His eyes burned. He thought he would go blind, yet he could no more avert his gaze than take to the air. He was forced to watch, even as his consciousness fragmented.

He saw his primarch plead with the greatest Father.

He saw a god reject worship and turn in anger on his most faithful children.

And worst of all, he heard the Emperor speak to him. To every Word Bearer. There were many words, but it was the first that was the most important. The most fatal. The one that brought the weight of all existence down on Kurtha Sedd’s shoulders, and shattered the foundation of his strength.

So much from a single word.

+Kneel.+

In the days that followed, Kurtha Sedd would know all the events of the Rebuke with perfect clarity. He would know every detail of the humiliation, and every syllable uttered. But he would know these things as if they had been reported to him. Their coherence was at a distance. His own experience of them was a raw, burning, slashing, bleeding maelstrom of injury and howling memory. In his lived experience, in the visceral, in the roar of his soul, there was no coherence.

Nor should there be. The Emperor forced the Word Bearers to their knees. What logic could exist after that?

The hours after the Rebuke were lost to him. They existed as fragments. There were impressions of ordered movement – his battle-brothers marching again, humiliation and lost purpose in their gait. There were the engine gales of one Thunderhawk after another taking off. No memory was complete. They were a blur of grey. Armour and ash and dust and faith all one, all vanishing. Only one fragment was vivid. It was of Sor Gharax.

Kurtha Sedd heard the Contemptor Dreadnought raging. That was not new. Sor Gharax had been descending into darker and darker fugues of anger and bitterness since his entombment in the war-shell. His injuries during the campaign to bring Seventeen-Seventeen into compliance had been more than physical. Now, though, his ranting was more venomous than ever. It was barely coherent. Kurtha Sedd made out only a few of the phrases. One cycle ago, he would have considered what he heard blasphemous. They were repetitions of the Emperor’s own words, but the hate in the echo was monstrous. The Word Bearers close to Sor Gharax turned their heads from him, as if to deny the echoing howls of the venerable warrior.

Of course Sor Gharax howled. Existence itself should have been destroyed by the Emperor’s act. But it was not. There was still earth beneath Kurtha Sedd’s boots when he became aware of his surroundings again.

It was night. He was no longer in the grave of Monarchia. The stench of the destruction was still in his nostrils, and the ash still turned the air grey, but the land he walked was not cinder and glass. In the distance, to his left, he heard the clamour and lamentation from one of the vast refugee camps that had sprung up outside the city’s former boundaries. Millions upon millions of civilians had been displaced. The people had nowhere to go. Monarchia and fifteen other great cities were gone. None of Khur’s remaining centres had the means to absorb influxes many times larger than their current populations. And the nearest city of any size was hundreds of kilometres from Monarchia.

‘Is this reason?’ Kurtha Sedd rasped, and for the first time in his life, he questioned the Emperor. ‘Is this truth? Is this justice? We brought this population into compliance for you. We taught them to worship you. They were guilty of nothing except absolute fidelity to your name. And so they must be punished in order to make an example of us. Are their lives meaningless, then? Their catastrophe unimportant except as a means to an end? You needed a Legion to kneel in dust, but first you needed the dust.’

‘Chaplain Kurtha Sedd, to whom are you speaking?’ The voice on the vox came from a huge distance. Too far to be of any importance. But it kept calling his name, an insistent insect. ‘Chaplain, respond.’ The voice belonged to Tergothar, the captain of the Fifth Assault Company.

Kurtha Sedd hadn’t realised he had left his vox open. His words would have been transmitted to the entire company.

Good. He surprised himself with the thought.

He clicked in answer to Tergothar, but said nothing.

‘Brother-Chaplain, we are leaving Khur. The order has been given for immediate embarkation. We must–’

Kurtha Sedd broke the connection and silenced the vox. He looked over, back in the direction of Monarchia. Thunderhawks rose on trails of fire through the smoke. They clawed their way towards the clouds. The Word Bearers were departing the scene of their humiliation.

He could not. Not yet. The wound was too deep and too fresh.

He marched on. He felt as if he were stumbling, but his boots hit the ground with each step as if they would crush the bedrock itself. The wind picked up. Dust ticked against his armour. It stung his flesh. It caked his nostrils, numbing his sense of smell. The cries of the Khur cocooned him. He retreated into his pain. The shriek of the wind was the sound of meaninglessness. He began to run. He did not know whether he was retreating from the pyre of faith or charging towards the void of hope.

There was a weight in his right hand. It dragged at him. He lifted the object. He held it before him as he ran. It was his crozius arcanum. The weapon was his staff of office. It was the symbol of his purpose. But his god had declared his purpose a lie. He held a symbol with no referent. His occulobe magnified the weak light of Khur’s moon shining through the cloud cover, and before his eyes the ornamentations of the metal appeared to writhe. They were seeking a new configuration, a new purpose.

He ran. Through dust and night, through nothing and towards nothing, holding a thing of metal and power, a weapon as dead and as hungry, as searching and as agonised as he was. He saw nothing except the crozius. He shut out the world. The wind and the dust were the static of reality, idiot sensation and noise, symptoms of a universal disease.

There was no time in the void through which he moved. He was suspended in a limbo of spiritual laceration. He would have run through the night, but a noise reached his consciousness. It drew him back to the world. He turned with a snarl in the direction of the sound. He froze when he recognised it: voices raised in prayer.

He was standing near the intersection of eight highways. Dust blew in serpentine twists over the rockcrete. The roads met in a traffic circle around a low elevation of granite. Eight staircases rose up to a house of worship that seemed to grow out of the rock itself. Kurtha Sedd stared, at first unable to understand where the chapel had come from. It was no cathedral, but it was large enough, its cluster of spires and gold-rimmed vaulted doorways imposing in isolation. There were no other buildings in the vicinity. There was no settlement within kilometres of his position. Then he remembered that this was precisely the point: he was looking at a wayfarers’ chapel. They dotted Khur, having sprung up in locations far from the major centres, but on the principal routes between them. Here the people could stop in their travels, rest and meditate, and express their love for the God-Emperor. The god who rejected their love.

Kurtha Sedd walked towards the chapel. There were numerous vehicles pulled off on the verges. Most were on the road from Monarchia. More refugees, fleeing the terror of the Ultramarines. They had not heard the news of the day. They still lived in a galaxy where the worship of the Emperor was the most natural and needful thing.

He donned his helm. He looked at the world with the eyes of a hunter. This was what he was, after all.

Wage war as you were created to do. The Emperor’s words. The Emperor’s command. Do not worship. Spread nothing but conquest.

Kurtha Sedd pushed the doors open. He walked into a scene of untroubled faith. The pews were full. There were more than a thousand people present. They were dirty from travelling. The aisles were clogged with bundles of hastily assembled possessions. Many of the worshippers were weeping, but their voices were strong in their pleas for help and their praise of the god. Their homes had been destroyed, but they had hope. They had their belief. It was adamantine. It would support them.

The doors shut behind Kurtha Sedd with a dull clang. He stood in the chapel, the sole being deprived of succour. He was the Chaplain of an apostate god.

The people turned to look at him. A collective sigh of joy rose to the chapel vaults. Then came a babble of voices, and from it emerged variations of the same words: angel… true angel… grey angel…

The nearest celebrants, still on their knees, reached out to touch his cloak. They cried out their thanks. Saved, they said, again and again.

Kurtha Sedd slowly turned his head back and forth, taking in every detail of the scene, every soul present, hearing the joy in the voices, seeing the faith in the eyes. Hearing the lie. Seeing the lie.

The wounds of the Rebuke stabbed deeper and deeper. The universe was devoid of anything except grief and rage and betrayal. He had devoted his life to the truth, and now the font of truth had denied itself. In this moment, when he needed to feel the strength of truth more than at any other time in his existence, he did not know if there was any truth at all beyond the lack of all meaning.

Rage in his bones. Hate in his limbs. His fist tightened on the haft of the crozius. The symbol in search of meaning. The weapon in search of blood.

‘You believe the Emperor has heard your prayers,’ he said. His helm speakers amplified his voice. The growl bounced off the walls. It filled the space with the iron of his pain. ‘You are correct. He has heard them. And he has come in anger. There will be no prayer. Obey him and turn from him!’

There was a confused silence. He could see the ripple of bafflement move over the crowd. Then the silence turned into shouts, and they were still confused, but there was also refusal. It emerged from the roar of questions and shouts, clear and strong and fanatical. What he had said was not true. What he had said was nonsensical. What he had said could not be accepted.

The people were right. But the Emperor had said otherwise. And so what was right was wrong.

Grief and betrayal and rage. Growing and festering with the beats of his hearts, merging into a single passion, one with no name and no expression except violence. A haze descended over his sight. He saw black and red and truth and lies and there was no distinguishing between them.

‘You will not worship!’ he roared. Our god commands it, he thought.

But the people shouted louder and louder, calling on the Emperor and his angels. Their praise grew more desperate. With panicked fidelity, the handful of worshippers clutching at his cloak held it now as if to hold him in their world. Their desperation overwhelmed the awe that would have held them back from daring to touch his being.

‘Silence!’ he shouted, and his agony was such that it should have torn the chapel asunder. Why did the air not bleed? Why did the stars not bleed?

And there was no silence. Only an ever-greater cacophony of prayer and plea and song.

And the haze. Darker. Deeper. Flashing with the nova intensity of despair.

Kurtha Sedd tilted his head back. ‘This is your will!’ he said in defiance and obedience to the god whose back had turned. ‘This is your command!’ he said in hate and love, faith and disbelief. He raised the crozius. It was suddenly filled with a purpose he could not name. ‘Release me!’ he said, but though he looked down, he was not speaking to the people gathered at his feet. Nor did he give them time to obey. He swung the crozius. With a single sweep of his arm, he smashed four heads to spray and flying bone. The bodies fell away from him. The hands let go of his cloak. Though the tugging had been weak, as he smashed the mortal burdens he felt a monstrous liberation.

He swung the crozius again. Blood splashed over his helm. His eyes saw red through red. The crack of bone and the tearing of muscle was the smashing of fetters. The shouts became screams. They were not loud enough. He could barely hear them through the roaring of his voice, the roaring in his head, and the roaring of the universe. So he struck again, and again, faster, striding through the aisles, pulling out his plasma pistol as the crowd surged for the exits, summoning more fear, more death, more shrieks, and still the screams were not loud enough. With his right hand, he battered the worshippers to shapeless pulp. With his left, he brought fire from the heart of a sun to each doorway.

With each blow, with each pull of the trigger, something broke inside. A part of him was wailing in horror, but he drowned that part in blood. Every death was another drop into the abyss, and the plunge was exhilarating. There was no difference between self-loathing and freedom. He was destroying everything he had been, but everything he had stood for had already been taken from him.

The fall accelerated. He killed faster and faster, and he roared without words, shouting nothing at nothing, voiding his soul. With fire and iron he transformed the outer world into the mirror of his slaughtered faith. He destroyed order. He destroyed sense. He destroyed truth.

Red of blood. Red of flame. Red of screams.

Red of ending.

He waded through bodies. Then there were so many dead that he was climbing over the mounds of his butchery. He needed more screams. He needed more blood as he fulfilled the Emperor’s decree to its most obscene limit. He could not kill fast enough. He fired the plasma pistol without pause, pushing it past its critical point.

The weapon overheated. The venting of the cooling ducts could not keep up with the rate of fire. The gun preserved its integrity with an emergency release. A cloud of superheated gas burst from the barrel. It enveloped Kurtha Sedd. It flashed through the entire space of the chapel, an expanding bubble of wrath itself. The readouts of his auto-senses screamed red, and were lost in the crimson sea of his frenzy. The outer layers of his armour flash-boiled. The flesh of the congregation vaporised. The heat reached through his armour, through the grille of his rebreather. His lungs took in the wrath, and they withered. He staggered, and his arms dropped to his side.

The incinerating gas cloud dissipated, leaving scorched walls and wet bones contorted in the instant of excruciating death. The red haze faded. He smelled blood and burned bodies. His auto-senses still flashed damage alerts. He blinked them off. He stood in the centre of the chapel, surrounded by his works, listening to the sound of his breathing, to his pulse, and to the thickening silence.

What have you done?

The hundreds of worshippers were mounds of blackened meat and broken shapes.

What have you done?

As rationality returned, a vertigo of disassociation took him. Who had committed this crime? He must have witnessed it from a distance, but he could not be responsible. The denial collapsed almost as soon as it took form. In its wake came a dread from the depths of his soul.

He knows what you have done.

There was a memory that had been the source of his greatest pride and the spur to his calling as Chaplain. It was a memory that had shaped him and his actions. It was the memory of Lorgar’s words to him, at the dawn of his existence as a Space Marine: ‘The Emperor is watching you.’

The Emperor was a god, and so the words were a literal truth. He had crusaded under that omniscient gaze. He had devoted his life to proving himself worthy of its favour.

He knows what you have done.

The Emperor had denied his divinity, but he had done so with divine power. He had judged the Word Bearers. He had made them kneel. A hundred thousand of them. With a single thought.

He knows what you have done.

Judgement must surely come.

Kurtha Sedd stood, and he waited. The silence grew heavy. It pressed on him as if he were at the bottom of an ocean. The ache in his chest was deep, hollow, filled with the swirl of dust.

An hour or an age passed. He heard a door open at his back. He did not turn. He heard the tread of ceramite boots on the stone floor. They stopped just inside the entrance.

Judgement has come.

Instead, a familiar voice said, ‘Chaplain, what has happened?’

Now he turned around. Toc Derenoth stood as motionless as he himself had been moments before. Behind the legionary came Kaeloq, then Captain Tergothar. Each appeared to take root as he encountered the abattoir.

Tergothar acted first. ‘Wait outside,’ he commanded unseen battle-brothers. Then he closed the door. ‘Chaplain?’ he said.

Kurtha Sedd made no answer. Where is judgement? he wondered.

‘Can you hear me?’ said Tergothar.

Kurtha Sedd could. He turned his vox back on, but he was listening to the greater silence beyond. He was listening to an emptiness that could not be.

‘Take him outside,’ said the captain.

Toc Derenoth and Kaeloq walked to Kurtha Sedd’s position in the transept. Bodies crunched beneath their steps. Some broke into powder. The two Word Bearers moved to either side of him. Toc Derenoth placed his hand on Kurtha Sedd’s right shoulder. ‘Come with us, Chaplain,’ he said.

Kurtha Sedd let himself be guided forwards. He started walking. His legs moved. His feet trod the floor of the chapel. He saw his actions but did not feel them. He was numb. The dread of judgement was giving way to the worse experience of absence.

‘Where is he?’ Kurtha Sedd whispered.

‘Who?’ Kaeloq asked.

‘Exactly.’ A breath wheezed from Kurtha Sedd’s lungs. It was the bitter laugh of absolute despair. ‘Exactly so. Who is he?’

Is he a god? Where is his judgement? Is he right to deny his divinity? Is Lorgar wrong? Did Lorgar lie?

The numbing limbo was inviting. If he submerged himself in it, perhaps the questions would not pursue him. The very articulation of those questions was a torture and an obscenity. Their answers could only be worse. The contradictions were beyond resolving. The truth, whatever form it took, could not be borne.

He did not succumb. The questions were too strong, and he was no coward. He had always fought for the truth, or at least what he had believed it to be. When at last it revealed itself to him, he would not turn from it. But for now, there were only the questions, and the incomprehension, and the horror, and the blood on his hands.

So much blood. Even though the vitae had been burned away along with the layers of his armour, he thought he could still see it. Instead of grey, he was crimson. Word and act and blood and being were all one now.

He exited the chapel. Toc Derenoth and Kaeloq walked with him down the steps to the dust-blown roads. Brothers from the Fifth waited outside the doors, lined the stairs, and gathered on the rockcrete. Four Thunderhawks rested on the roads. Tergothar had brought a large force in search of him. Kurtha Sedd wondered why. The captain could hardly have thought he had been captured. They were not at war, after all. The humiliation had been delivered, and the Ultramarines had departed. They were mere messengers, blindly following orders, and their work was done.

Perhaps Tergothar had expected something extreme on Kurtha Sedd’s part. He had a reputation for recklessness on the battlefield. He took the mad risks, sustained by the confidence of his faith.

And now? he thought. What have you done now?

He had no answer. There were no words. There was no Word. It had been broken by the Emperor.

There was a scratching at his ear. It cut through the limbo, irritating, drawing his attention. It was Tergothar’s voice on the vox. ‘Burn everything,’ Tergothar said. ‘Bring the chapel down. Leave no trace.’

Toc Derenoth and Kaeloq guided Kurtha Sedd towards a Thunderhawk. He stopped short of the loading ramp. He turned to watch Tergothar’s orders carried out. Word Bearers entered the chapel. After a few moments, flames erupted from the doorways and broken windows. As the legionaries exited, the other three gunships took off. They flew in a circle formation over the chapel. Their cannons poured shells into the structure. The foundations erupted. The walls collapsed in on each other. Fragments of spire cartwheeled skywards, a last gesture of prayer, then fell down into the holocaust. Fire, smoke and dust rose higher and spread outwards. They consumed. They obscured.

They erased.

Kurtha Sedd saw all trace of his crime expunged. The cannon barrage continued, battering even the rocky elevation to powder. Soon there would be nothing but a crater. The knowledge of what had happened would be buried deep within the Legion.

Kurtha Sedd had no doubt the massacre would be concealed. The knowledge filled him with wracking grief. The Emperor did not watch him. Lorgar had lied. The universe was empty of anything except betrayal. There was no room for faith.

But guilt, the corpse of faith, would not lie still. It thrashed back and forth in his chest. Where is the judgement? it asked, over and over, obsessed, unable to accept nowhere as an answer.

Where is the judgement? Where is the judgement?

He had sinned. He must answer. He could not shed the burden of this truth.

Where is the judgement?

It will come.

When?

When?

When?

TWO

Lanshear
Static
Shelter

He never stopped expecting judgement. Even when fidelity turned into a greater hate. Even when he followed the new teachings of Lorgar and turned, at last, to the old gods of Colchis. He had found a new truth, and he had found divinities worthy of worship. But still, at the back of his mind, gnawing at his soul, as he waded through new oceans of innocent blood, the belief never left him. It weighed him down. Decades passed.

Forty-four years after the Rebuke, an impossible flash made him think the judgement had come.

The Fifth Assault Company was moving up to assist Hol Beloth’s force in Lanshear. Tergothar’s Word Bearers entered the city in the south. They came up the Nacona Axis, driving hard with Thunderhawk and Rhino to bite into the flank of the Ultramarines reinforcements reported to have broken through from the east. Other arms of the XVII Legion were closing from other directions. Hol Beloth was closing a huge fist around the Ultramarines. Their breakthrough was a mere prolonging of their agony. They would hold their position at the guildhall a few minutes longer at the cost of even greater loss.

Then the sky erupted. Burning light too sudden and too intense, the shutters coming down over Kurtha Sedd’s lenses too late to save him from the glare-blindness. Pillars of fire struck Word Bearers positions with the perfect accuracy of divine verdicts. The vox-traffic became a storm of static and desperate, suddenly silenced shouts. The precision of the hits was sublime. They were the work of an omniscient intelligence that saw all and struck where it willed. A few seconds elapsed between the first hits, taking out the main concentration of Hol Beloth’s strength, and a meson beam blasting the Fifth’s position. Kurtha Sedd had time during those seconds to experience awe and numinous dread. A hand was reaching out across the decades to visit retribution on him.

Then Tergothar was on the vox. ‘They’ve regained control of the defence grid! Pull–’

The beam silenced him. Brilliant death took out the street. The gunships and tanks were leading the charge. They evaporated. Hundreds of legionaries perished in a second. The blast collapsed façades on either side of the boulevard. Tonnes of rockcrete and plex-glass fell into the crater and beyond, crushing still more of the advance.

Tergothar had been riding in the front Land Raider. He was gone. His last words freed Kurtha Sedd from his delusion. He gave the first order in the wake of the beam. ‘Scatter!’ he yelled. He broke right and ran towards the nearest intact entrance. ‘Spread wide,’ he said. ‘No concentrations. Deprive the foe of a target.’

He smashed through iron doors. He pounded down the marble hall of a luxury hab. Moments later, the meson beam hit again. He was a dozen metres in, moving at as close to a sprint as was possible in power armour. The walls of the building provided just enough shelter. They collapsed behind him. Wind and heat shoved him forwards. He almost fell. The fall of the building accelerated as floors pancaked. The hallway compressed. Powder filled the air. The rumble of falling marble and rockcrete and iron was a physical force, shaking the cracking floor beneath his feet. He stayed just ahead of the avalanche. The hab-block extended for half a kilometre. He reached the other end as the tower leaned towards its demolished face, parting from its foundations. It fell, and he was moving through a storm of thunder and dust.

He angled across the street. It was narrower than the Nacona Axis, but wide enough. While he was in the open, the sky was a single enormous weapon. Judgement could pierce the clouds at any second. He dismissed the thought with a growl. There was no judgement here, only a military reversal, one the true gods would not let stand.

One block to his right, on the other side of the road, was the large, arched entrance to a maglev station. A curved mosaic of stone depicted Guilliman – hand outstretched, pointing the way forward, inspiring transportation and industry. Kurtha Sedd chose the station over nearer shelter. Symbolism was important for brothers and for enemies. This location would serve.

The vox-chatter was disordered with unanswered calls and reports of massive casualties. Most of the traffic was coming from other companies elsewhere in Lanshear, also caught by the celestial fire. As Kurtha Sedd reached the station, he heard Kaeloq’s voice.

‘Chaplain,’ he began, ‘what are–’

‘Maintain vox-silence,’ Kurtha Sedd ordered. ‘Find cover and remain there. We must deprive the enemy of a target. Let their attention move on. Let them believe their work is done.’

It very nearly is, he thought. He doubted the Fifth had any vehicles left. He had no idea how many of his brothers had survived the bombardment.

The concourse of the maglev station was shadowed and empty. The line, extending north towards the guildhall zone, had been cut by the fighting. There were no civilian refugees in sight, which struck Kurtha Sedd. The station was silent. Its stillness was complete. There was no power to the lumen globes, no thrum of activity from lower levels. If the local population had fled to shelter, it had done so somewhere else. He filed the thought away for the moment. It had potential.

He stood in the dark of the concourse, waiting. Clouds of dust billowed past the opening. Rain began to dampen them. The searing shriek of particle beams and lance strikes continued, but further away. There were no more impacts in the immediate vicinity. Kurtha Sedd waited a full minute, then called to Fifth Company. ‘To me, brothers,’ he said. ‘The Savo maglev station.’ He called up the tactical display of his auto-senses, pinpointing his precise location in Lanshear. He looked for opportunity, and for inspiration. He could make no decision yet, though. There were too many variables. He wanted to believe the situation was not as bad as he felt it might be. He had faith that it was worse.

He was right. Three minutes after the orbital strikes, the city’s sirens wailed. The voice of Remus Ventanus resounded from vox-speakers on rooftops and walls. The Ultramarines captain was speaking to the planetary population. ‘The surface of Calth is no longer a safe environment,’ he warned. ‘The local star is suffering a flare trauma, and will shortly irradiate Calth to human-lethal levels.’ Run for the arcologies, he urged the citizens. ‘In the name of the Imperium, make haste.’

Our great work is coming to kill us, Kurtha Sedd thought.

Less than half the company made it to his rallying point. And by then, rumour was infecting his brothers. He had heard the messages bouncing through the fragments of vox-traffic from the other smashed regiments in Lanshear. There had been no communication established with the fleet in orbit. Therefore, the Infidus Imperator had fled the system. Or the battle-barge was destroyed. Or the entire fleet had burned.

His brothers surrounded him, waiting for his orders. With the captain dead, the command was his. The spiritual and the tactical had been one in this campaign. With Kor Phaeron and Erebus setting the example, Kurtha Sedd had had almost as much control over the Fifth’s direction in the war as Tergothar. Now he was the only leader.

‘What has happened to the fleet, Chaplain?’ Toc Derenoth asked.

‘It has fallen silent,’ said Kurtha Sedd. ‘And I will not speculate on strategy.’ But he did speculate. He distrusted the silence. But then, he trusted nothing.

He looked at the grey daylight outside the station entrance. It was benign, mundane. There was no hint of what was coming. ‘What is true, though,’ he continued, ‘is that we must assume there will be no evacuation for the time being.’

The company stirred. Every battle-brother present knew what that meant.

‘And Veridia…’ Toc Derenoth began, giving voice to the question they all had.

‘The Ultramarines’ warning is correct. The work has been completed. The storm approaches.’

‘We are abandoned?’

Abandoned was not the word that Kurtha Sedd had been working to keep from his consciousness. That word was betrayed. ‘No,’ he said, to himself and to Toc Derenoth. ‘We fight alone for now. That is all. The advantage the Ultramarines have regained will be taken from them in minutes. Our brothers will return for us.’

‘And where do we fight?’ Kaeloq asked.

‘Below. In the arcologies. We will find shelter from the solar storm and an enemy to humble. In the depths there is darkness, and in the darkness there is truth. We fight with the strength of the Word, brothers. We will not fall.’

‘Where is the nearest entrance?’ Sergeant Vor Raennag asked. He had turned his head towards the daylight too, as if expecting to see the fire arrive.

Kurtha Sedd checked the tactical display again, weighing possibilities. Then the emptiness of the station hit home, and gave him his inspiration. The closest was to the north, closer to the heart of the now-ended battle. It would also be a strongpoint. If the Ultramarines were not already there, they would be soon. The Word Bearers would have to fight their way in. Kurtha Sedd entertained a vision of a pyrrhic destruction of the shelter, then dismissed it. His war was far from over. Forty-four years ago, he had lost his purpose. Since then, he had come to a new faith. But he was still searching for his role, for his reason to exist. Since landfall on Calth, he had felt a pull at the edge of his soul. There was something on this planet, something important to him. He did not know what he was looking for. The instinct was too vague. But it was also real, and insistent. It had not grown any stronger during the day of the campaign, but now the thought of descending below the surface of the planet filled him with eagerness.

There was another entrance to the west. A bit further. With the flare on its way, the company only had minutes to reach it. It would be close. The Word Bearers would have a slightly wider margin if they headed for the northern access point, and maybe they would have the force necessary to overwhelm the defenders.

But the alternative position had other enticements.

‘This is our best option,’ he said, blinking at the western arcology entrance on his display and relaying it to the rest of the company. He had not answered Vor Raennag’s question directly, and the choice he was making was putting many of his brothers at risk. No matter. He had more important concerns, and he would be at the head of the charge. He would reach the entrance. He would make the descent.

The Word Bearers left the station and headed west. The route took them back through the devastation wrought by the meson beams. They charged through craters, battering their way through incinerated stone. They moved through a landscape dead as a meteor-blasted planetoid. Rain fell, and on all sides buildings still stood tall. The skyline of Lanshear was defiant, as if the city had been cauterised of its foes, and had a future ahead of it. Take full advantage of your future, Kurtha Sedd thought. It is measured in minutes.

They were two-thirds of the way to the destination. The day still gave no sign of the coming wrath. Without knowing exactly when Veridia had reached the critical stage, there was no way to tell how much time he had. Kurtha Sedd chose to believe he had enough. There was a path he must follow, and he would find it.

At the edge of the path of destruction carved by the defence grid beams, a spur of rubble reached outwards. Walls had been blasted by shells. It looked like a skirmish had been fought, but there had been no Ultramarines in this area. Beyond a final heap, Kurtha Sedd saw what had caused the damage. Sor Gharax had fallen there. The Dreadnought must have been clipped by the blast and had managed to stagger this far. He was roaring with the anger of a hundred wounded predators. His howls were shaped into syllables, but they were not words. He was consumed by insane, incoherent rage. There was limited movement in his upper limbs. His legs were motionless. The war-priest of old had fallen to this state: a helpless, mad machine.

Kurtha Sedd stopped running. He stared at Sor Gharax for a precious second. Then another. In the third second, he recalled the Bull’s wrath on Monarchia, and the words that had seemed blasphemous, but now were revealed as prophetic.

The Bull was important.

‘Bring him,’ Kurtha Sedd ordered.

His brothers obeyed. A squad’s worth of legionaries moved to either side of the Dreadnought and began to drag him forwards. Sor Gharax snarled at them. His right arm fired at the sky, but he could no longer swivel the gun. His brothers were able to stay out of the path of his shells. After a few metres, he stopped shooting. His inarticulate curses continued, but the electronic grind of his voice was weaker. There was little more than a spark of life still left in his scorched shell.

Kurtha Sedd led the way once more, back on a street now, the Gades Boulevard. Half a minute later, the goal came into view on the south side: the huge repository of the Gades Archives. This was the bureaucratic memory of Lanshear and the surrounding regions of Calth more than it was a cultural one. It was a monumental structure, squat in appearance even though it was a hundred metres high, sitting in the centre of its own square. Its marble walls, smooth, their surface uninterrupted by windows, were so polished they gleamed even in the grey light of the city’s last day. Four columns the size of Titan legs flanked twin entrances in the north face. Both portals were open. Enormous blast doors were raised above each.

The Word Bearers had not come across any civilians until now – those unfortunate enough to have still been near their initial advance had been eradicated by the beams. Now Kurtha Sedd beheld many, streaming in from the east down the Gades Boulevard. Thousands of them, heeding the words of Ventanus and the whoop and wail of the tocsins. Fleeing their own sun. They were crowding into the left-hand doorway. The right, which opened onto a staircase leading upwards, was ignored.

There were some Imperial troops with the refugees. Kurtha Sedd spotted a single squad of Ultramarines, one that had perhaps been split off from the main force during the fighting. The enemy presence he saw was insignificant, and the civilian numbers were what he had hoped to find.

‘Bearers of the Word,’ he called, pulling out his plasma pistol and raising his crozius high, ‘bless these vermin with the truth.’

The Imperials spotted Fifth Company at the same moment, and opened fire. They were hampered by the number of refugees. Whether they tried to avoid killing their own people or not, the civilians were in the way. They absorbed some of the rounds meant for the Word Bearers.

Even at half strength, Kurtha Sedd’s assault company was overwhelmingly stronger than what the Imperials could muster. Its barrage of bolter shells and plasma scythed through civilians and defenders. The Word Bearers pounded the handful of Ultramarines. Their skill and their armour counted for little. The sheer physics of being hit by hundreds of mass-reactive shells defeated them. Even so, they tried to vanquish the impossible. They dropped three Word Bearers before the charge reached them. Kurtha Sedd rammed through civilians, shattering their bodies with momentum and mass, and closed with the Ultramarines sergeant.

The loyalist trained his bolter on Kurtha Sedd. Two shells slammed into the Chaplain’s cuirass. Ceramite cracked. The blows were massive in their impact and their outrage. He swung his crozius and smashed the barrel of the bolter down. He collided with the Ultramarine. His momentum knocked the warrior back, throwing him off-balance for a second. Long enough for Kurtha Sedd to strike again with his crozius. His staff of office had found new meaning since Monarchia. The engravings had purpose. What they had lacked before was their proper shape. The aquila was a distortion, a forcing of lines into a lie. Now the head was an eight-pointed star, and it crashed down on the Ultramarine’s helm with the force of truth. Its energy field disrupted the internal gravity of the armour’s matter. The helm shattered. The black points of the star embedded themselves in the loyalist’s skull. Kurtha Sedd yanked the crozius out with a backward sweep of his arm. Bone splinters and cerebral cortex spread out in an arc. The Ultramarine toppled forwards.

The loyalist legionaries died. The Word Bearers cut through the mortal resistance without slowing. Kurtha Sedd ran through bodies no more substantial before his wrath than phantoms. They broke and bled beneath his boots. He passed through the left doorway into a vast antechamber. At its centre, a marble staircase thirty metres wide descended into the archive’s arcology. There were further thousands of civilians here, packing tight on the stairway and on the floor leading to it. The Word Bearers burned and shot their way in, carving space for themselves through murder and fear. Screams filled the antechamber. Their echoes rose to the frieze-adorned ceiling. Heroically proportioned administrators of Calth looked down with imperturbable, quiet pride as vengeful giants in crimson massacred the people of Lanshear.

Sor Gharax’s escort dragged him through the doorway. His snarls, amplified by the marble walls, were louder than the screams. Outside, the crowd panicked. Torn between the need to escape the coming solar event and the terror of the Word Bearers, its movements became confused. As the rest of the company entered the antechamber, Kurtha Sedd moved to the doorway to watch. He saw a populace abandon hope and become a collective manifestation of chaos.

Then, almost simultaneously, two mechanical rumbles began. Above his head, the blast doors began their slow descent. And approaching from a nearby road, still hidden but drawing closer, came the sound of massive engines.

Transports. Possibly tanks. The real force of Ultramarines heading for this shelter.

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