The First Heretic

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Cyrene could make out the unmoving bodies of fallen statues, toppled from the fallen gate. She knew them well, having attended many midnight markets in Tophet Plaza. Each time, marble angels had stared down at her from their places carved into the gate’s surface. Slanted, featureless eyes watched without blinking. Wingless suits of armour were rendered with exquisite skill in the smooth stone. These were not the false, feathered angels of ancient Terran myth, but holiness incarnate – the angels of death – formed in the fearful aspect of the God-Emperor. His shadows, his sons, the Bearers of the Word.

  Through the dust, heretic silhouettes drifted closer to the tank. ‘The Warrior-Kings of Ultramar’, Cyrene had murmured in that moment. ‘The XIII Legion.’

  Blasphemers, all. Their resemblance to the Bearers of the Word only compounded their impurity.

  Planetary vox was down. She’d heard from a street vendor that the invaders destroyed all of Khur’s satellites before they came through the clouds. True or not, contact with other cities – even within Monarchia itself – was limited to word of mouth.

  ‘They rose up in Quami District,’ the vendor insisted. ‘Not just Tophet. Gulshia, too. Hundreds dead. Perhaps thousands.’ He shrugged as if such things were mere curiosities. ‘I’m leaving tonight. There’s no hope fighting devils, shuhl-asha.’

  Cyrene said nothing, though she smiled at his gentlemanly use of her profession’s archaic title. But what was there to say? The invaders had the city in lockdown. The seeds of rebellion would never take root in such unfertile ground.

  District by district, the exodus from Monarchia began after those first purges. Once the gates were opened, a ceaseless flood of humanity spilled from the city.

  By nightfall, the mass evacuation was fully underway. Monarchia’s wealthiest citizens – most of them merchants or high-ranking clergymen serving as Speakers of the Word – secured their own transportation, leaving the city for secondary estates in other towns. The morning air above Monarchia was dense with shuttlecraft boosting away to other havens, ferrying the rich, the important, the economically vital and the spiritually enlightened to sanctuary elsewhere.

  Cyrene hadn’t left yet. In truth, she wasn’t certain she would leave. She stood on the balcony of her second-floor habitation pod – somewhere between a room and a cell in the Jiro Apartment Block, in one of the cheapest parts of town.

  The nearby speaker towers blared their message, over and over. ‘Strict weight allowances are in effect for personal belongings on the evacuation craft. All residents of Inaga District are to report to Yael-Shah Skyport or the Twelfth Trade Gate immediately. Strict weight allowances are...’

  Cyrene tuned out the warnings, watching the people flocking through the streets below, strangling traffic with their slow, marching queues. There, at the end of the street, one of the XIII Legion directed the herds of people like livestock. In its hands, the false angel carried the same weapon as its brothers, the massive rifle with its supply of explosive ammunition.

  Cyrene leaned on the balcony’s railing, bearing witness to the eternal theatre of oppressor and oppressed, of conquerors and the conquered. Her district was due to be evacuated by tomorrow morning. The process was stilted, with a great deal of curses cried and lamentations heaped upon the silent false angels.

  ‘Strict weight allowances are in effect,’ the speakers boomed again. Those vox-towers had been used for the city’s thrice-daily prayer readings, speaking words of tolerance and enlightenment to all sheltering within the city. Now their holiness was perverted, as they served as the invaders’ mouthpieces.

  Too late, Cyrene saw she’d been noticed.

  The air turned thicker and hotter from engine wash, as a small skycraft drifted over the street at the same level as her balcony. A two-man vehicle, its skin formed from sloping blue armour, was suspended on whining turbines as it weaved through the air. The false angels seated in its cockpit scanned the second-level windows of the buildings as they passed.

  Cyrene’s shiver threatened to become a tremble, yet she remained where she was.

  The craft hovered closer. Rotor fans blew hot air from the craft’s anti-gravitational engines. The false angel in the gunner seat leaned forward, adjusting a hidden control on his armour’s collar.

  ‘Citizen,’ the warrior’s vox-voice was a raw bark over the speeder craft’s engine. ‘This sector is being evacuated. Proceed to street level immediately.’

  Cyrene took a breath, and didn’t move.

  The warrior glanced at his companion in the pilot’s seat, then looked back to Cyrene in her quiet defiance.

  ‘Citizen, this sector is being evac–’

  ‘I heard you,’ Cyrene said, loud enough to carry over the craft’s infernal din.

  ‘Proceed to street level immediately,’ the warrior said.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked, her voice still raised.

  The gunner shook his head and gripped the handles of the massive calibre weapon mount, aiming it directly at Cyrene. The young woman swallowed – the gun’s muzzle was the size of her head. Every bone in her body gave a panic-twinge, pleading she run.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she demanded, drowning her fear with anger. ‘What sins have stained us all, that we must leave our homes? We are loyal to the Imperium! We are loyal to the God-Emperor!’

  The false angels remained unmoving for several seconds. Cyrene closed her eyes, waiting for the hammer-hard impact that would spell her destruction. Despite the moment, she felt a smile tickling her lips. This was an insane way to die. There’d be nothing left to bury.

  ‘Citizen.’

  She opened her eyes. The warrior had lowered the cannon’s aim. ‘The Emperor, beloved by all, ordered the XIII Legion here and mandated our actions. Look at us. Look upon our armour, and the weapons we bear. We are his warriors, and we do his will. Proceed to street level and evacuate the district.’

  ‘The God-Emperor demanded that we abandon our lives?’

  The warrior snarled. It was a crackling machine-growl, only rendered human by the hint of anger within. This was the first emotion Cyrene had heard from the invaders.

  ‘Proceed to street level.’ The warrior brought the cannon to bear again. ‘Now. I will slay you where you stand if you cast your ignorant heathen words once more over the name of the Emperor, beloved by all.’

  Cyrene spat over the side of the balcony. ‘I will go, only because I seek illumination. I will find the truth in all this, and I pray there will come a reckoning.’

  ‘The truth will be revealed,’ the warrior said, as the craft made ready to hover away. ‘At sunrise on the seventh day, turn and look back to your city. You will witness the illumination you crave.’

  And so dawned the seventh day.

  The lightening sky found Cyrene Valantion standing atop a rise in the Galahe Foothills, her traditional dress hidden beneath a long jacket clutched tightly against the worsening autumn wind. Her hair blew free in a mane, and she watched the utterly silent, utterly still city to the east. In the last hours, burning blurs had floated upwards: each one a landing craft belonging to the XIII Legion, each one returning to the heavens now that their warriors’ work was done.

  With creeping inevitability, the sun reached the horizon. Pale gold – cold for all its gentle brightness – spilled over the minarets and domes of Monarchia. A city of unrivalled beauty, the spear-tips of its ten thousand towers turned golden by the dawn.

  ‘Holy Blood,’ the young woman whispered, unable to find her voice and feeling the wet warmth of tear trails on her cheeks. To think that mankind could create such marvels. ‘Holy Blood of the God-Emperor.’

  The sky grew brighter still – too bright, too fast. Barely past dawn, it was already becoming as bright as noon.

  Cyrene raised her head, watching with weeping eyes as the clouds of heaven lit up with a second sunrise.

  She saw the fire fall from the sky, lances of unbelievable light spearing into the perfect city from above the c
louds. But she did not watch for long. The sun-spears’ incomparable brightness stole her sight after only the first few moments, leaving her in darkness as she listened to the sounds of a city dying. The world shook beneath Cyrene’s feet, casting her to the ground. Worst of all, her eyes itched as they failed, and the last clear sight she ever saw was Monarchia in ruin, its towers falling into the flames.

  Blind and betrayed by fate, Cyrene Valantion cried out to the heavens and prayed for a reckoning, while the city of her birth burned.

  II

  The Last Prayer

  ‘Bearers of the Word, hear our prayer.

  False angels walk in our midst, cast in your image but bringing none of your mercy. They call themselves the XIII Legion, the Warrior-Kings of Ultramar, and have spoken only threats of bloodshed and sorrow since they darkened the skies a week before. Their warriors have walked the streets of Monarchia, forcing the people to abandon the city. Those who resisted were butchered. Fate willing, they will be remembered as martyrs.

  Monarchia is not alone. Sixteen cities across the planet stand empty, likewise swept clean of life.

  For many days, we were silenced, unable to call out to you. The XIII Legion has allowed us this moment, in the hours before the last dawn. They have vowed to end the perfect city in a storm of fire as the sun rises this very day. Return to us, we beg you. Return to us and make them answer for this injustice. Avenge the fallen, and restore what will be lost when the horizon lightens.

  Bearers of the Word, hear our prayer.

  Return to us, sons of the God-Emperor, blessings upon His Name. Retur–’

  – First and only distress call sent from

  Monarchia, capital of Khur.

  TWO

  Serrated Sun

  Devastation

  Aurelian

  Cyrene’s reckoning took two months to arrive. Almost nine weeks of lancing headlong through the tides of unspace, breaking through the immaterium with little thought of safety or control. They lost vessels. They lost lives. But they lost no time. Reality trembled in their wake.

  The first ship to burst from the immaterium ripped back into reality on tormented engines. As it accelerated from the wound of re-entry, it seemed cast from the warp like a grey spear, trailing plasma mist the colour of madness. Its engines roared heavy and hot into the silence of space.

  Along its ridged spine, statues of marble and gold stared out into the starry void. Armoured buildings of worship rose like overlaid carbuncles from the vessel’s skin. Battlements lined the walls of those cathedrals, and dozens of lesser temples were decorated with banks of weapon turrets in their tallest towers. The vessel, terrible in size and grim in aspect, was more a bastion city of prayer and warfare than a spaceborne vessel.

  Its dangerous momentum sent shudders through its metal bones, and still it didn’t slow down. Blue-white engine wash streamed in disintegrating smoke trails from immense boosters that had taken decades to construct, by thousands of labourers working millions of hours. The ship’s prow was fashioned into a colossal ram – an eagle figurehead, wrought in dense metals polished to a silver sheen. In its talons, the eagle held the steel-forged icon of an open book. The beast’s head was frozen open in a silent shriek. Its cold eyes reflected the stars.

  Other ships arrived, rending reality, breaking from the warp as lesser blurs of grey – a volley of arrows that eclipsed the stars around them. A few at first, then a dozen, soon a fleet, at last an armada... A hundred and sixteen ships, one of the greatest coalitions of force the human race had ever assembled. And still more arrived, savaging the layer between realms, dropping from the immaterium, attempting to race alongside their glorious flagship.

  The grey armada moved in loose formation, the slower vessels falling behind as over a hundred ships closed in on a single blue-green world.

  A world already surrounded by another battlefleet.

  One of the armada’s vessels – a ship mighty enough in its own right, but utterly dwarfed by the flagship at the fleet’s vanguard – was the battle-barge De Profundis. In Low Gothic, its name translated with ragged eloquence into ‘Out of the Depths’. In the Colchisian dialect of the warship’s home world, it translated from those proto-Gothic roots as ‘From Despair’.

  The terminal shuddering through the ship’s bones lessened with realspace reasserting its hold, and temporal engines took over from the overheated warp thrusters. The captain of De Profundis rose from his ornate command throne as his ship threw off the empyrean’s lingering shackles. The throne itself was carved ivory and black steel, draped with devotional parchment scrolls and taking up the centre of a raised dais. On the tiered steps leading up to his throne stood three other figures, each clad in the same granite grey battle armour, each one with their gazes cast at the display occulus taking up the entire forward wall.

  The scene unfolding on the visual screen was one of unrivalled chaos. Order was breaking down before the fleet even engaged the enemy, as if the anger of every captain bled freely into the trajectories of their vessels, breeding irrationality where focus was needed.

  The Chapter Master’s armour thrummed with energy, its exposed cabling connected to the back-mounted power pack. Ornate beyond many other suits of Astartes warplate, the personal armour of Chapter Master Deumos was unashamedly brazen in its declaration of his accomplishments. Detailed in engravings etched onto his pauldrons was a recording written in Colchisian cuneiform, the runic script listing his victories and kill-counts in poetic verse. Emblazoned on his left shoulder guard and overlaying the runic poetry was an open book sculpted from bronze, with its pages aflame. Each tongue of fire was hand-carved from red iron, welded with artful craft onto the book itself. In the right light, the metal pages seemed to flicker with iron flame.

  Lastly, ringing one of the slanted red eye lenses of his snarling helm, was a stylised, spiked star of brass. It was a symbol repeated across the hull and spinal buildings of the De Profundis, heralding the battle-barge as the vessel of the Chapter of the Serrated Sun. Each ship in the fleet bore its own unique sigils – the Osseous Throne, the Crescent Moon, the Coiled Lash... symbol upon symbol, a stream of signifiers. Here, in the void, they were scattered like the hieroglyphs on a shaman’s runestones.

  The eyes of every warrior, officer, serf and slave were fixed upon the planet of Khur, and the capital city that had once been visible from space. In a sense, it still was: an ashen stain blackening a quarter of a continent.

  Deumos’s features could easily have been hewn from the metamorphic rock of Terra’s ancient Himalayan mountain range, not far from where he’d had been born two hundred years ago. Some men laughed, and laughed often. Deumos was not one of them. His humour ran along bleaker lines.

  One of his subordinates, the Seventh Captain by rank, had once told him that his scarred face was a ‘chronicle of wars no one wished to fight’. Deumos smiled at the recollection. He was fond of Argel Tal’s attempts at wit.

  Breaking from the momentary indulgence of reverie, Deumos regarded the occulus, still unsure exactly what he was bearing witness to. The rest of their ships spread out in loose attack formation, many of them still accelerating. The outriders and scouts were slowing significantly, their momentum dying as the rage of their engines faded.

  ‘What am I watching?’ Deumos asked. His helm emitted the words as a crackling growl. ‘Auspex, report.’

  ‘Initial auspex reports are filtering in now.’ The officers by the three-faced scanner table were all human, their uniforms the same stark grey as the Chapter Master’s armour. Their senior rating, the Master of Auspex, had gone pale. ‘I... I...’

  The Chapter Master turned his glare on the humans. ‘Speak, and speak quickly,’ he said.

  ‘The enemy fleet in geostationary orbit above Monarchia registers as Imperial, sir.’

  ‘So it’s true.’ Deumos stared hard at the Master of Auspex, an ageing officer with a strong voice, who was frantically adjusting tuning dials on a display screen three metres sq
uare. ‘Speak.’

  ‘They’re Imperial, confirmed. They’re not the enemy. A host of transponder codes are flooding the sensors, actively broadcast. They’re announcing themselves to the entire fleet.’

  The tension still didn’t bleed from Deumos. Instead, it wormed deeper into his thoughts, dredging the memory of that maddening message to the fore. Return to us, it had pleaded. They call themselves the XIII Legion. Return to us, we beg you.

  Deumos let the disquiet sink back into the calmer sediment of his mind. He needed to focus.

  He watched the occulus as grey-hulled ships slowed, their wide-mouthed engines breathing diminished flares. Several vessels veered away from the rest of the fleet, breaking the elegance of the attack formation. Doubt, most definitely. No captain could know what to do.

  The perfect, regimented anger of the assault run was crumbling, unsalvageable with so many vessels slowing and breaking away. All around them, the colossal fleet on the edge of open warfare collapsed, powering down their weapons. As an astral ballet, it was running through these final anticlimactic motions with clear reluctance. Again came the sense of the ships’ captains infecting their vessels with emotion.

  The planet itself was close, close enough for the enemy fleet to edge into visual range. At this distance, they were little more than dark specks framed by dense cloud cover, hanging in low orbit. Deumos turned to his brothers, his subordinates, each one of them standing on the lesser steps of his raised dais.

  ‘Now we discover the truth in all this.’

  ‘Today will end in darkness,’ this from the Seventh Captain, his left eye ringed by the serrated sun. ‘We know the truth, we know what our brothers have done. No explanation will quench the primarch’s sorrow. No reasoning will quell his rage. You know this as well as I, master.’

  Deumos nodded. He’d indulged a moment of concern that the Lex wouldn’t slow down, that it would drive like a grey blade into the heart of the opposing fleet, its weapon batteries aflame as they sang their lethal songs. Brother against brother, Astartes against Astartes.