The First Heretic

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘I hate what you’ve forced me to see. I hate the truth we must bring to the Imperium of Man. Above all, I hate what I’ve become in service to your vision.’

  Argel Tal grinned the grin that wasn’t his own. ‘But we could never hate you, Lorgar.’

  Vendatha was still alive when they impaled him alongside the other nine sacrifices.

  But, mercifully, not for long.

  He never saw the consecration bought with his blood. He never saw what breached the barrier between the realm of spirit and the world of flesh.

  Ingethel’s writhing dance came to an end. The maiden was bathed in sweat, her hair in greasy ringlets and her body shining in the firelight as if beaded with pearls. In her hands, she still gripped her wooden staff, the head carved in a curving crescent moon.

  A tattooed god-talker stood before each of the occupied spears, blood from the slaughtered victims gathered into crude clay bowls that were clutched in white-knuckled hands. As Ingethel approached each in turn, the shaman would mark her flesh with a spiralling symbol, tracing blood onto her body with a fingertip.

  It was impossible to miss the significance. They were drawing the Eye on her.

  ‘Incredible,’ said Lorgar. He looked pained – the veins in his temples swollen and pulsing.

  ‘I know this ritual,’ Xaphen said. ‘I know it from the old books.’

  ‘Yes,’ the primarch gave a strained smile. ‘This is an echo of an ancient Colchisian ceremony. Kingpriests – the rulers of old – were appointed like this. The maiden’s dance; the blood sacrifices; the constellations inked upon her flesh... All of it. Kor Phaeron would know it, as would Erebus. Both of them will have seen it before, with their own eyes, performed by the Covenant in the years before my arrival on Colchis.’

  Argel Tal had considered their culture far beyond such decadence. Lorgar must have picked up on his disgusted thought, because the primarch turned to him with a sharp glance.

  ‘I do not perceive this as beautiful, Argel Tal. Merely necessary. You believe we have progressed past such superstition? I remind you that not all change is for the better. Buildings erode. Flesh weakens. Memories fade. These are all part of time’s progression, and all would be reversed, if a way could be found to do so.’

  ‘We are here to seek evidence for the existence of gods, sire. No gods worthy of worship could demand this of their followers.’

  Lorgar turned back to the ceremony, massaging his temples. ‘Those, my son, are the wisest words anyone has spoken since we found this world. The answers I am finding have dismayed me. Torture? Human sacrifice?’ The primarch’s features drew into a slow wince. ‘Forgive me, I ramble. My mind aches. I wish they would stop laughing.’

  The cavern echoed with the thunder of drums, and the air trembled with monotone chanting from hundreds of human throats.

  ‘No one is laughing, sire,’ said Argel Tal.

  Lorgar turned a pitying smile on his son. ‘Yes, they are. You’ll see. It will not be long now.’

  Ingethel came to the last god-talker. The shaman anointed her with Vendatha’s blood, outlining the Serrated Sun constellation on her bare stomach. With this last deed done, the maiden made her way back to the centre of the platform. There she stood, arms reaching out from her sides, head thrown back, crucified upon the very air.

  The drumming intensified, a dragon’s heartbeat thudding harder and faster as it slipped from its rhythm. The chanting became shouted laments, with hands and faces raised to the rock ceiling.

  Ingethel’s bare feet slowly left the ground. Blood was running down her legs in staining trails, dripping from her toes to the stone. The Cadians screamed. All of them, every single one, screamed. The captain’s helm dimmed its audio receptors to compensate, but it made no difference.

  Lorgar closed his eyes, fingertips still at his temples.

  ‘Here it comes.’

  Its arrival was heralded first by the reek of blood. Unbelievably potent, as rich and sour as spoiled wine, it flooded Argel Tal’s senses with enough violence to make him gag. Xaphen turned away and Lorgar’s eyes remained closed – Argel Tal alone saw what happened next.

  Ingethel, risen above the ground in weightless crucifixion, died a dozen deaths in mere moments. Invisible forces excoriated her, flaying her skin away in ragged strips, letting them fall with wet slaps onto the stone below. Blood flowed from her mouth, her eyes, her ears and nose; from every entrance and exit in her body. She endured this for a handful of seconds, until what remained of her simply ruptured. Her musculature burst, showering the primarch and his sons with human meat and lifeblood.

  Her skeleton, still articulated, remained before them for a moment more – only to splinter and shatter with the sound of smashing pottery. Bone chips cracked off Argel Tal’s armour, clacking like hailstones.

  The maiden’s staff clattered to the ground.

  Lorgar, said the creature taking form amidst the dead girl’s wreckage.

  Lorgar placed the quill on the parchment and closed his eyes – a reflection of that moment in the cavern: months ago to Argel Tal, only a handful of nights ago to the primarch himself.

  ‘I curse the truth we have discovered,’ he confessed. ‘I curse the fact that we have reached the edge of reality, only for hatred and damnation to stare back at us from the abyss.’

  ‘The truth is often ugly. It is why people believe lies. Deception offers them something beautiful.’

  The creature that was and wasn’t Argel Tal continued its recitation.

  The primarch opened his eyes and looked upon the face of the future.

  It towered above them all, taller even than Lorgar, and regarded them with mismatched eyes above an open maw. The Cadian worshippers were so silent, so still, that the Word Bearers were no longer sure any other beings remained alive in the cavern.

  Tactical data streamed across Argel Tal’s eye lenses as his targeting sensors cycled in frantic inability to lock onto the creature. Each attempted lock drew an invalid response. Where his retinal view would always display analyses of an enemy’s armour and anatomy, a Colchisian rune now blinked Unknown, Unknown, Unknown across his eyes.

  Xaphen voiced the same problem. ‘I can’t lock onto it. It’s... not there.’

  Oh, I am here.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ the Chaplain asked. Argel Tal nodded, though his audio receptors had tracked no changes at all.

  He disengaged the magnetic clamp sealing his bolter to his thigh, and aimed it the creature. He flinched when a golden hand rested on the weapon, lowering it to the floor.

  ‘No,’ Lorgar whispered. The primarch’s eyes shined. With the threat of tears? Argel Tal wasn’t sure.

  Lorgar, the creature said again. The primarch met the thing’s unbalanced stare.

  Four arms curled from its slender torso, each ending in a clawed hand. Its lower body was the mating of serpent and worm, ripe with thick veins in the grey flesh. Its face was almost entirely given over to its open jaws, with selachimorphic teeth in disorderly rows.

  A biological impossibility. An evolutionary lie.

  It was never still, never motionless, even for a moment. Veins throbbed beneath its discoloured skin, betraying its pulse, and its talons were constantly opening and closing. Only one of its four hands remained closed: gripping Ingethel’s ritual staff in a clawed fist.

  One eye was sunken, dark and buried in a face of filthy fur. The other: swollen fit to burst, and the sickening orange of a dying sun.

  Nothing remained of the maiden. What reared up before them on its coiled lower body was utterly beyond notions of gender.

  I am Ingethel the Ascended , it said, and its silent voice was a hundred murmurs all at once. Argel Tal found his eyes drawn to the curved spines of blackened bone that arced out from the thing’s shoulder blades.

  Wings, he thought. Wings of black bone.

  Yes. Wings. Humanity forever lies to itself about angels. The truth is ugly. Lies are beautiful. So mankind makes the gods’ messengers b
eautiful. No fear, then. Lovely lies. White wings.

  ‘You are not an angel,’ Argel Tal spoke aloud.

  And you are not the first Colchisians to reach this world. Khaane. Tezen. Slanat. Narag. All ventured here, millennia ago, guided by visions of angels.

  ‘You are not an angel,’ Argel Tal repeated, clenching his bolter tighter.

  Angels do not exist. They have never existed. But I bring the word of the gods, as angels must do. Look for the core of truth at the heart of humanity’s lies. You will see me. My kind. Angels. The creature blinked. Its swollen eye wouldn’t allow it, but its black pebble of an orb vanished for a moment under wet, wrinkled flesh.

  Angels. Daemons. Just words. Just words.

  Lorgar stepped forward at last. To Argel Tal’s eyes, he seemed naked without a crozius in his hands.

  ‘How do you know me?’

  You are the Chosen. You are the Favoured Son of the Powers. Your name has echoed across our realm since time immemorial, carried on the winds by the shrieks of the neverborn.

  ‘I do not understand what you are saying.’

  But you will. There are lessons to be taught. Things that must be shown. I will guide you. One lesson comes first.

  The creature, Ingethel, gestured two of its claws – one at Xaphen, the other at Argel Tal.

  Your sons, Lorgar. Give me their lives.

  ‘You ask a great deal of me,’ said Lorgar. ‘You plead for my trust and for the souls of my sons, yet I owe you nothing. You are a spirit, a daemon; superstition born from nightmare and incarnated into flesh.’

  All the while, Lorgar walked around the creature. He showed no fear, no trepidation. Argel Tal recognised the faint tension in the primarch’s fingers. The Urizen ached to wield the crozius that, for now, was not at his side.

  You know of the Primordial Truth. You know that a secret lies behind the stars. You know this is not a godless galaxy. The very gods you seek are the Powers that sent me to you.

  Lorgar’s angelic countenance twisted into a patient smile. ‘Or I could speak a single word to my sons, and their weapons would end this conjuror’s trick.’

  Ingethel’s jaw quivered, its fangs clicking together in a grotesque failure of symmetry. Argel Tal had seen the expression on its face before, written on the wide-eyed, shivering visages of trapped vermin.

  Your blood-sons could not end me.

  ‘They have ended everything else the galaxy has thrown at them.’ The primarch made no pretence at hiding his pride. Argel Tal and Xaphen raised their bolters in perfect unison, both warriors sighting down the gun barrels at the creature’s eyes.

  I bring the answers you have sought all your life. If you wish to awaken humanity to enlightenment, if you wish to be the architect of the faith that will save mankind, I –

  ‘Enough posturing. Tell me why you must take my sons from me.’

  It moved in a blur, its serpentine tail leaving a smear of residue the thickness of treacle along the stone. One moment, the creature stood in the centre of the platform, the next it slithered before Lorgar, staring down at the primarch.

  Lorgar didn’t recoil. He merely looked up at the creature.

  The Great Eye. I will guide them into the storm, into the realm of the Powers. That is the first step, written in fate’s own hand. They will return with answers. They will return as the weapons you require. Your time will come, Lorgar. But the Powers call for your sons, and I will guide them to where they must go.

  ‘I would not sacrifice them for answers.’

  Ingethel’s jaw clicked as it trembled. Its laughter was little more than verminous chittering.

  Do you believe that? Nothing matters more to you than the truth. The Powers know their son’s heart. They know what you will do before it is done. If you desire enlightenment, you will take this first step.

  ‘If I agree to this... will you harm them?’

  Ingethel turned its bestial head to the side, watching the two warriors with its inhuman eyes.

  Yes.

  The decision was not to be made lightly.

  As he was wont to do, the primarch retreated into seclusion, away from the distractions of fleet management, away from the menial responsibilities that came with soldiering, and remained in the caverns beneath Cadia’s surface.

  Argel Tal and Xaphen returned to their Thunderhawk at the modest landing site, finding they had much to say to one another and little will to speak it. While the Chaplain voxed a scant, vague update to the ships in orbit, Argel Tal took the task of appraising Aquillon of the situation over a secure vox-channel.

  Almost an hour later, the captain descended the gang ramp, standing once more on the desolate plains, watching the sky with its shroud of rippling violet.

  Incarnadine, ever the silent watchman, stood as an imposing sentinel nearby. Argel Tal saluted, but the robot made no response. Next to the automaton, Xi-Nu 73 emitted a blurt of irritated machine-code. Something in his data readings apparently vexed him. At that point in time, the Word Bearer couldn’t have cared less.

  When Xaphen joined him at last, Argel Tal had a hard time meeting his brother’s eyes. He placed his armoured boot on one of the swollen, twelve-legged beetles that scurried over the wastelands, killing it with a moist, crackling crunch.

  ‘What lies did you weave for the Eyes of the Emperor?’ asked the Chaplain.

  ‘A long and detailed tale that tasted foul to even speak. A Cadian sect attacked us out of bitterness, and Ven was lost with Deumos, Tsar Quorel and Rikus.’

  ‘Did they die like heroes?’

  ‘Oh, undoubtedly. Songs will be sung and legends forever told of their most noble ends.’ He spat acid onto the ground.

  Xaphen gave a mirthless snort, and they fell silent.

  The two Astartes watched the stained sky, neither wishing to be the first to broach the next subject. Ultimately, it was Argel Tal that ventured there first.

  ‘We’ve split the Legion and sailed to the galaxy’s edges, only to find... this. The Old Ways of Colchis were right. Daemons. Blood sacrifice. Spirits made flesh. All of it is real. Now Aurelian lingers in the darkness, sharing words with that creature, deciding whether to sell our souls for even uglier answers. If this is enlightenment, brother... perhaps ignorance is bliss.’

  Xaphen turned from the burning sky. ‘We have defied the Emperor to find these truths – defied the spirit of his decrees, even if we obeyed the letter of the law. Now a Custodian lies dead, and Imperial blades have shed Imperial blood. There can be no going back from this. You know what the primarch will decide.’

  Argel Tal thought back to Vendatha’s words: ‘The choice you offer is no choice at all.’

  ‘It will break his heart to do it,’ the captain said, ‘but he will send us into the Eye.’

  SIXTEEN

  Orfeo’s Lament

  The Storm Beyond the Glass

  Chaos

  The vessel chosen was Orfeo’s Lament. A sleek, vicious light cruiser captained most ably by the famously tenacious Janus Sylamor. When the primarch’s decree had reached the 1,301st, Sylamor had volunteered the Lament before Lorgar’s vox-distorted voice had even finished the traditional blessings that ended his fleet-wide addresses.

  Her first officer took a dimmer view of her eagerness, pointing out that this was the largest, most devastating warp storm ever recorded in the history of the species. Here was an anomaly with all the force of the legendary storms that severed humanity’s worlds from one another in the centuries before the Great Crusade.

  Sylamor had clicked her tongue – a habit of hers that always showed her impatience – and told him to shut up. The smile she gave him would only be considered sweet by people that didn’t know her very well.

  The departure window was set for sunrise over the wastelands, which left practically no time for preparation beyond the core necessities. Grey gunships graced the Lament’s modest landing bay, delivering squad after squad of dark-armoured Astartes. Storage chambers were cleared to house the
Word Bearers, their ammunition crates, their maintenance servitors, as well as the contingent from the Legio Cybernetica that accompanied Seventh Company, led by an irritable tech-adept calling himself Xi-Nu 73.

  Introductions were brief. Five Astartes marched onto the bridge, and Sylamor rose from her throne to greet them. Each spoke their name and rank – one captain, one Chaplain, three sergeants – and each saluted her in turn. She responded accordingly, introducing her own command crew.

  It was polite but cold, and over in a matter of minutes.

  Only when the Astartes remained on the bridge did Sylamor sense a breach in decorum. Unperturbed, the captain continued her final checks, pointing her silver-topped cane to each console station in turn.

  ‘Propulsion.’

  ‘Engines,’ replied the first officer, ‘aye.’

  ‘Auspex.’

  ‘Aye, ma’am.’

  ‘Void shields.’

  ‘Shields ready.’

  ‘Weapons.’

  ‘Weapons, aye.’

  ‘Geller field.’

  ‘Geller field, aye.’

  ‘Helm.’

  ‘Helm standing ready, ma’am.’

  ‘All stations report full readiness,’ she said to the Word Bearers captain. This was something of a lie, and Sylamor hoped her tone didn’t betray it. All stations had reported readiness, true, but the last hour had also seen reports of insurrection in the lower decks, put down by lethal force, and one suicide. The ship’s astropath had requested to be assigned to another vessel (‘Request denied’, Sylamor had frowned. ‘Who in the Emperor’s name does he think he is to even ask such a thing?’) and the Navigator was engaged in what he referred to as ‘intensive mental barricading so as to preserve one’s fundamental quintessence’, which Sylamor was fairly sure she didn’t even want to understand.

  So instead of relaying all of this to the towering warlord standing next to her throne, she simply gave him a curt nod and said, ‘all stations report readiness’.

  The Astartes turned his helm’s slanted blue eyes upon her, and nodded.