‘Greetings,’ the primitive said. ‘We have been waiting for you, Lorgar Aurelian.’
The primarch let none of his surprise show. ‘You know my name, and you speak Colchisian.’
The young woman nodded, seeming to muse on the primarch’s deep intonation, rather than agreeing with Lorgar’s words. ‘We have waited many years. Now you walk upon our soil at last. This night was foretold. Look west and east and south and north. The tribes come. Our god-talkers demanded it, and the warchiefs obeyed. Warchiefs always heed the shaman-kind. Their voices are the voices of the gods.’
The primarch watched the crowd for signs of such respected tribal elders. ‘How is it that you speak the tongue of my home world?’ he asked their leader.
‘I speak the tongue of my home world,’ the woman replied. ‘You speak it, also.’
Despite the burning skies and the surprises the girl brought, Lorgar smiled at the stalemate.
‘I am Lorgar, as you foresaw, though only my sons call me Aurelian.’
‘Lorgar. A blessed name. The favoured son of the True Pantheon.’
Through great effort, the primarch kept his voice light. No stray nuance could allow this first contact to go wrong. Control was everything, all that mattered.
‘I do not have four fathers, my friend, and I am not of woman born. I am a son to the Emperor of Man, and no other.’
She laughed, the melody of the sound stolen by the blowing wind.
‘Sons can be adopted, not merely born. Sons can be raised, not merely bred. You are the favoured son of the Four. Your first father scorned you, but your four fathers are proud. So very proud. The god-talkers tell us this, and they only speak truths.’
Lorgar’s casual facade was close to cracking now. The Word Bearers sensed it, even if the humans did not.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘I am Ingethel the Chosen,’ she smiled, all innocence and kindness. ‘Soon, Ingethel the Ascended. I am your guide, anointed by the gods.’ The barbarian woman gestured at the plain, as if it encapsulated the world itself. More tellingly, she gestured to the warp-wracked void above.
‘And this world,’ she spread her painted hands in benevolence, ‘is Cadia.’
It was something of a unique first contact.
Never before had the Imperials been expected like this. Never before had they been greeted by a primitive culture that not only welcomed them, its people showed no fear at all in the face of giant armoured warriors striding through their midst. The Thunderhawk attracted some curiosity, though the primarch had warned Ingethel that the vehicle’s weapons were active, manned by Legion servitors who would open fire if the Cadians drew too close.
Ingethel waved the curious men and women away from the Word Bearers gunship. The language she spoke was quick and flourishing, with a wealth of unnecessary words bolstering every sentence. Only when she addressed Lorgar and his retinue did she seem to strip the language down to its core, striving for brevity and clarity, evidently speaking Colchisian rather than Cadian.
Lorgar stopped his son’s words with a concerned glance.
‘You are snarling as you speak,’ the primarch said.
‘It is unintentional, sire.’
‘I know. Your voice is as divided as your soul. I can see the latter with my psychic sense – two faces stare out at me, four eyes and two smiles. None would ever know of it, save perhaps my brother Magnus. But to know the truth, one has only to listen. Mortal ears will know of your affliction, Argel Tal. You must learn to hide it better.’
The captain hesitated. ‘I was under the belief that I’d be destroyed after telling you all of this.’
‘That is a possibility, my son. But I would take no pleasure in seeing you dead.’
‘Will the Serrated Sun be purged from Legion records?’
Before speaking, Lorgar trickled fine, powdery sand onto the parchment, helping to dry the inked words he’d written thus far.
‘Why would you ask that?’
‘Because where once three hundred warriors once stood loyal, now barely a hundred remain alive. Of the three companies, one remains whole. Deumos is dead, slain upon Cadia. A hundred of our brothers were stormlost, taken by the warp on the Shield of Scarus. And now my company returns to you broken and... changed.’
‘The Serrated Sun will always be a lesson for the Legion,’ said Lorgar, ‘no matter how the Pilgrimage ends. Some things must never be forgotten.’
Argel Tal took a breath. In the exhalation was a whispering sound. Something was laughing.
‘I do not wish to speak of Cadia, sire. You already know everything I know that transpired on the surface. The nights of discussions with Ingethel and the tribal elders. The comparisons of our star charts with their crude maps of the heavens. Their pictographs of the Eye of Terror, and how the Cadians’ images of the storm matched the empyrean from our scrolls of the Old Faith.’ Argel Tal laughed, and the sound lacked any humour. ‘As if we needed more evidence.’
Lorgar was watching him closely.
‘What, sire?’
‘The storm that blights this subsector. You called it the Eye of Terror.’
Argel Tal froze. ‘That... Yes. That’s what it will come to be called. When it opens wider across the void, when the trembling Imperium sees it as the galaxy’s own hell. A void-sailors’ dramatic name for the greatest mystery of the deep. It will be scrawled onto maps and digitally inscribed into stellar cartography databanks. Humanity will give it that name, as a child names its own simple fears.’
‘Argel Tal.’
‘Sire?’
‘Who is speaking to me now? That is not your voice.’
The captain opened his eyes. He didn’t recall closing them.
‘It has no name.’
Lorgar didn’t answer at once. ‘I believe it does. It has identity, as strong as yours. But it slumbers. I sense its dissipation within you. You absorb it into the cells of your body like...’ here, he paused again. Argel Tal had often wondered what it was like to see all life on every possible level, even the genetic one – the lives and deaths of billions of barely measurable cells. Could all primarchs perceive thus? Merely his own? He had no idea.
‘Forgive me, sire,’ he said to Lorgar. ‘I will keep my eyes open.’
Lorgar’s breathing quickened. No unaugmented man would be able to discern the difference in the primarch’s heartbeat, but Argel Tal’s senses were keener than a human’s by many degrees. In truth, they were keener than Astartes perception now. He could hear the tiniest creak-stresses in the metal walls of his chamber. The guards’ breathing outside the sealed bulkhead door. The skittering whisper of an insect’s legs in the ventilation duct.
He’d felt this acuity before, back on Orfeo’s Lament, during the seven months of drift-sailing in their bid to escape the Eye. The feeling had come many times, in truth, but none as strongly as when only a brother’s blood quenched his thirst.
‘I see two souls at war within you, and the violence behind your eyes. Yet I wonder,’ the primarch confessed, ‘if you are cursed or blessed.’
Argel Tal grinned, showing too many teeth. It wasn’t his smile. ‘The difference between gods and daemons depends largely upon where one stands at the time.’
Lorgar wrote the words down.
‘Speak to me of the last night on Cadia,’ he said. ‘After the religious debates and the tribal gatherings. I have no interest in repeating weeks of research and rituals performed in our honour. The fleet’s data-core is swollen with evidence that this world, like so many others, shares unity with the Old Faith.’
Argel Tal licked his teeth. It still wasn’t his smile. ‘None so close.’
‘No. None as close as Cadia.’
‘What do you wish to know, Lorgar?’
Here, the primarch paused, hearing his name leave his son’s lips with such casual disregard. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, neither threatened nor fearful, but not quite at ease.
‘We. I. We are Argel Tal. I. I am A
rgel Tal.’
‘You speak in two voices.’
‘I am Argel Tal,’ the captain said through clenched teeth. ‘Ask what you will, sire. I have nothing to hide.’
‘The last night on Cadia,’ said Lorgar. ‘The night Ingethel was consecrated.’
‘This is heathen sorcery,’ said Vendatha.
‘I don’t believe in sorcery,’ Argel Tal said back. ‘And neither should you.’
Their voices echoed in the temple chamber, which was no more than a roughly-hewn room in the endless network of subterranean caverns. With no structures of human craft on the face of Cadia, the Temple of the Eye was far less grand than its name suggested. Beneath the northern plains where the Legion had made planetfall, the caverns and underground rivers formed a natural basilica.
‘This world is a paradise,’ Vendatha remarked. ‘It beggars belief that so many tribes come to dwell here in these deadlands.’
Argel Tal had heard this complaint before. Vendatha, in his blunt and stoic wisdom, had seen the orbital picts as often as the Word Bearer captain had. Cadia was a planet of temperate forests, expansive meadows, healthy oceans and arable land. Yet here, in an uninspiring corner of the northern hemisphere, the vagabond population gathered en masse to eke out a living on the arid plains.
Xaphen walked with Argel Tal and the Custodian down the stone corridor. The temple’s construction was as flimsy as could be expected from a culture of primitives – the sloping walls showed the stone-scars of miners’ picks and other digging tools – but the chambers weren’t entirely devoid of decoration. Pictographs and hieroglyphs covered every wall, replete with symbols, charcoal murals and etched sigils that made little sense to Vendatha.
In truth, it hurt his eyes to look at many of them. Uneven, jagged stars were scrawled everywhere, as well as long mantras in a meaningless tongue, their sentence structure clearly indicative of verse. Sketches of the Great Eye, as the Cadians named the storm above, were also commonplace.
Torches of bundled sticks burned in wall sconces at irregular intervals, making the stone hallways misty with smoke. All in all, Vendatha had been to many more pleasant places. A pox on Aquillon for volunteering him to descend to the surface.
‘It is not difficult to comprehend why they come here, when you understand faith,’ said the Chaplain.
‘Faith is a fiction,’ Vendatha snorted.
Argel Tal had never wagered in his life – to gamble was against the Legion’s monastic code; it showed a reverence for worldly wealth which was meaningless to all pure-hearted warriors – but he would have been safe to gamble that the words Vendatha spoke most often were: ‘Faith is a fiction’.
‘Faith,’ said Argel Tal, ‘means different things to different beings.’ It was a weak attempt to sunder the argument he could feel building between the other two, and it failed, just as he’d suspected it would.
‘Faith is a fiction,’ Vendatha repeated, but Xaphen went on, warming to his captive audience.
‘Faith is why these people come here. It is why their temple stands at this spot. The stars are all in the right alignment at this place, and they believe it aids their rituals. The constellations mark the gods’ homes in the sky.’
‘Heathen magic,’ Vendatha said again, getting annoyed now.
‘Pre-Imperial Colchis was the same, you know.’ Xaphen wouldn’t let up. ‘These rites are little different to the ones performed in the generations before Lorgar’s arrival. Colchisians have always invested great significance in the stars.’
Vendatha shook his head. ‘Do not add mindless superstition to the list of grievances I have against you, Chaplain.’
‘Not now, Ven.’ Argel Tal was in no mood for the two of them to go through yet another debate on the nature of the human psyche and the corruption of religion. ‘Please, not now.’
While Argel Tal had slowly grown closer to the Custodes contingent in the past three years, often training his sword work with them in the practice cages, Xaphen seemed to take a kind of wicked delight in baiting them at every turn. Philosophical arguments almost always ended with Vendatha or Aquillon needing to leave the chamber before they struck the Chaplain. In turn, Xaphen counted these moments as great personal victories, and had an old man’s cackle about the whole thing.
‘If the stars are so precious to them,’ Vendatha’s voice was crackling through his helm’s speakers, ‘then why do they hide beneath the earth?’
‘Why don’t you ask them tonight?’ Xaphen smiled.
The three of them walked on, and the silence lasted for several blessed moments.
‘I hear chanting,’ the Custodian sighed. ‘By the Emperor, this is madness.’
Argel Tal heard it, too. The levels below them extended deep into the earth, but the thick stone carried sound with deceptive ease. To walk in the temple-caverns was to hear laughter, footsteps, prayers and weeping – at all times of day and night.
On one of those lower levels, the ritual was underway.
‘I have watched you clutch at parchments and babble to the Cadians in their own tongue for weeks now.’
‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said, distracted, as he ran his gauntleted fingers along a charcoal depiction of what looked like the primarch. The image was crude, but showed a figure clad in a robe, next to another figure in mail armour, with one gaping eye. They stood atop a tower, in a field of shaded flowers.
This wasn’t the first such image Argel Tal had seen, yet they never failed to capture his interest. Serfs from the fleet had landed in huge numbers, set with the tasks of exploring the Cadian caves and taking pict references of every marking they found.
‘Is this is how your Legion repents for failing the Emperor?’ Vendatha asked. ‘After so many compliances, I’d dared to perceive you all in a new light. Monarchia was a past sin. Even Aquillon believed the same. And now we come here, and everything unravels as you stutter to these wretches in alien speech.’
‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said, refusing to be riled.
‘I may not be fluent in your monotonous tongue,’ said Vendatha, ‘but I know enough. What leaves the Cadians’ lips is not Colchisian. Nor are these writings. This resembles nothing else. Its roots aren’t even in proto-Gothic.’
‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said again. ‘It’s archaic, but it is Colchisian.’
Vendatha let the old argument go. Aquillon had already been informed, and had travelled down to the surface to see everything for himself. The Custodes leader was fluent in Colchisian, yet struggled with the words just as Vendatha did. The cognitive servitors brought down from orbit met with the same difficulties – no linguistic decoders could make sense of the runic language.
‘Perhaps,’ ventured Xaphen, ‘we are a chosen Legion. Only those of Lorgar Aurelian’s blood may speak and read this holiest of tongues.’
‘You would delight in that being the truth, wouldn’t you?’ Vendatha snorted.
Xaphen just smiled in reply.
The Custodian’s mood was black in the wake of his most recent failures to decipher the scrawls on these cave walls.
‘What does this say?’ he indicated a random verse written upon the uneven rock wall.
Argel Tal glanced at the prose, seeing more of the poetry he’d come to expect here: simple, more like a form of clumsy lyric than reverent chanting. Knowing the Cadians’ god-talkers, this was likely the work of a shaman, maddened with hallucinogenic narcotics, spilling his stream of consciousness onto the sacred walls.
‘...we offer praise to those who do,
That they might turn their gaze our way,
And gift us with the boon of pain,
To turn the galaxy red with blood,
And feed the hunger of the gods.’
‘It’s just more bad poetry,’ he said to Vendatha.
‘I cannot read a single word.’
‘It’s very artless,’ Xaphen smiled. ‘You’re not missing any insight into an advanced culture.’
‘It doesn’t
concern you that I cannot read this?’ the Custodian pressed.
‘I have no answer for you,’ snapped Argel Tal. ‘It’s the feverish etchings of a long-dead shaman. It ties in to the Cadian belief in other gods, but its meaning is as lost on me as it is on you. I know nothing more.’
‘Were the weeks spent with the primitives in their tent-city somehow not enough, Argel Tal? Now you must attend the false worship of ignorant barbarians?’
‘You are giving me a headache, Ven,’ said Argel Tal, barely listening. His retinal display tracked a digital counter of the last time he’d slept. Over four days now. The conclaves with the Cadians ate up a great deal of time, as the Word Bearers pored over the humans’ scriptures and discussed their faith’s ties to the Old Ways of Colchis. Lorgar and the Chaplains were bearing the brunt of the ambassadorial and research efforts, but Argel Tal found his time occupied with plenty of tribal leaders pleading for his attention.
‘I confess,’ said Vendatha, ‘that I’d hoped the Legion would avoid tonight’s... foolishness.’
‘The primarch ordered our presence,’ Xaphen replied. ‘So we will be present.’ As the three warriors descended down more rough stone steps, the sound of distant drums grew more resonant.
‘You have agreed to witness these degenerates perform a ritual without knowing what they intend.’
‘I know what they intend,’ Xaphen gestured at the walls. ‘It is written everywhere, plain for all to see.’ Before Vendatha could answer, the Chaplain added something that Argel Tal hadn’t heard before. ‘The Cadians have promised us an answer tonight.’
‘To what?’ both the Custodian and the captain asked as one.
‘To what was screaming the primarch’s name in the storm.’
Argel Tal clenched his fist, but there was little anger in the gesture. He seemed content to watch the play of his muscles and the bones of his fingers working in natural, biological unity.
‘Deumos,’ he said. ‘It was not easy to see him die.’
The primarch’s quill stopped scratching at the parchment. ‘Do you mourn him?’
‘I did for a time, sire. But he has been dead over half a year to me. What I’ve seen since has made all previous revelations seem trivial.’
The First Heretic Page 20
