The First Heretic

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

PART ONE

Prologue

I

One

II

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

III

PART TWO

IV

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

V

PART THREE

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

VI

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About The Author

Legal

eBook license

The Horus Heresy

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

Dramatis Personae

The Primarchs

Lorgar, Primarch of the Word Bearers

Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines

Magnus the Red, Primarch of the Thousand Sons

Corax, Primarch of the Raven Guard

Konrad Curze, Primarch of the Night Lords

Ferrus Manus, Primarch of the Iron Hands

Perturabo, Primarch of the Iron Warriors

The Word Bearers Legion

Kor Phaeron, First Captain

Erebus, First Chaplain

Deumos, Master of the Serrated Sun Chapter

Argel Tal, Captain, 7th Assault Company

Xaphen, Chaplain, 7th Assault Company

Torgal, Sergeant, Torgal Assault Squad

Malnor, Sergeant, Malnor Assault Squad

Dagotal, Sergeant, Dagotal Outrider Squad

The Crimson Lord, Commander of the Gal Vorbak

The Night Lords Legion

Sevatar, First Captain

Legio Custodes

Aquillon, Occuli Imperator, ‘Eyes of the Emperor’, Custodian

Vendatha, Custodian

Kalhin, Custodian

Nirllus, Custodian

Sythran, Custodian

The 301st Expedition Fleet

Baloc Torvus, Master of the Fleet

Arric Jesmetine, Major, Euchar 54th Infantry

Imperial Personae

Cyrene Valantion, Confessor of the Word

Ishaq Kadeen, Official remembrancer, imagist

Absolom Cartik, Personal astropath to the Occuli Imperator

Legio Cybernetica

Incaradine, Conqueror Primus of the 9th Maniple, Carthage Cohort

Xi-Nu 73, Tech-Adept of the 9th Maniple, Carthage Cohort

Non-Imperial Personae

Ingethel, Emissary of the Primordial Truth

PART ONE

GREY

Forty-three years before the events of Isstvan V

‘Kill me then, “Emperor”. Better to die in freedom’s twilight than draw breath at the dawn of tyranny. May the gods grant me my last wish: that my spirit lingers long enough to laugh when your faithless kingdom at last falls apart.’

– Daival Shan, Terran separatist

warlord, at his execution.

‘If a man gathers ten thousand suns in his hands... If a man seeds a hundred thousand worlds with his sons and daughters, granting them custody of the galaxy itself... If a man guides a million vessels between the infinite stars with a mere thought... Then I pray you tell me, if you are able, how such a man is anything less than a god.’

– Lorgar Aurelian, Primarch

of the Word Bearers

‘There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.’

– Nikollo Makiavelli, Ancient

Eurasian philosopher

Prologue

The Grey Warrior

His sisters wept when the Legion came for him. At the time, he couldn’t understand why. There was no greater honour than to be chosen, so their sorrow made no sense.

The grey warrior’s voice was a machine’s rasp, deep and laden with static as he spoke from behind a death mask. He demanded to know the boy’s name.

Before the mother answered him, she asked a question of her own. It was her way to stand straight and strong, never to be bowed by the things she saw. It was a strength she had passed on to her son, and would stay in his blood despite the many changes to come.

She asked the question with a smile. ‘I will tell you his name, warrior. But first, will you tell me yours?’

The grey warrior looked down upon the family, meeting the eyes of the parents only once before he stole their child.

‘Erebus,’ he intoned. ‘My name is Erebus.’

‘Thank you, Lord Erebus. This is my son,’ she gestured to her boy. ‘Argel Tal.’

I

False Angels

I remember the Day of Judgement.

Can you imagine looking up and seeing the stars fall from the sky? Can you imagine the heavens themselves raining fire upon the world below?

You say you can picture it. I don’t believe you. I’m not speaking of war. I’m not speaking of promethium’s stinging oil-scent, or the burning chemical reek of flames born from missile fire. Forget battle’s crude pains and the sensory assault of orbital bombardment. I am not speaking of mundane savagery – the incendiary ills men inflict upon other men.

I speak of judgement. Divine judgement.

The wrath of a god who looks upon the works of an entire world, and what he sees turns his heart sour. In his disgust, he sends flights of angels to deliver damnation. In his rage, he seeds the skies with fire and rains destruction upon the upturned faces of six billion worshippers.

Now tell me again. Tell me again that you can imagine seeing the stars fall from the sky. Tell me you can imagine heaven weeping fire upon the land below, and a city burning so bright that all sight is scorched from your eyes as you watch it die.

The Day of Judgement stole my eyes, but I can still illuminate you. I remember it all, and why wouldn’t I? It was the last thing I ever saw.

They came to us in skyborne vultures of blue iron and white fire.

And they called themselves the XIII Legion. The Warrior-Kings of Ultramar.

We did not use those names. As they marched us from our homes, as they butchered those who dared to fight back, and as they poured divine annihilation upon everything we had built...

We called them false angels.

You came to me asking how my faith survived the Day of Judgement. I will tell you a secret. When the stars fell, when the seas boiled and the earth burned, my faith didn’t die. That is when I began to believe.

God was real, and he hated us.

–Excerpted from ‘The Pilgrimage’, by Cyrene Valantion

ONE

The Perfect City

False Angels

Day of Judgement

The first falling star came down in the heart of the perfect city.

The crowds were always dense and boisterous in the plaza’s midnight markets, yet everything fell silent when the sky wept fiery trails and the stars fell to earth in a stately drift.

The crowds parted, forming a ring around the huge arrival as it came down. Only when it came closer could the people see the truth. It wasn’t a star at all. It wasn’t formed of fire – it was breathing it from howling engines.

A smoke cloud drifted out from the downed craft, stinking of scorched oil and off-world chemicals. The ship’s hull was viciously avian, a raptor’s body of cobalt blue and dull gold. Its underbelly gleamed orange, bright with the hissing heat of orbital descent.

Cyrene Valantion was one of the gathered crowd, and three weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday. Whispers started up around her – whispers that became chants, chants that became prayers.

Jagged thunder echoed from nearby streets and plazas – the grumble of great engines and wheezing boosters. More of the stars-that-were-not-stars came raining down from heaven. The very air rattled with the hum of so many engines. Each breath tasted of exhaust.

The dark-hulled emissary from the sky was emblazoned with the symbol of the Holy Eagle, fire-blackened from its dive through the atmosphere. Cyrene’s vision twinned, blurring between what she was seeing now and what she’d seen in artistic renderings in childhood. She was far from being one of the faithful, but she knew this craft, elaborately brought to life in pictures of vibrant inks on scrolls of parchment. Such imagery was scattered throughout the scriptures.

And she knew why the elders in the crowd were weeping and chanting. They recognised it too, but not merely from the holy codices. Decades ago, they’d borne witness to the same vehicles arriving from heaven.

Cyrene watched as people fell to their knees, lifting their hands to the starry skies and weeping in prayer.

‘They have returned,’ one old woman was murmuring. She spared a moment from her obeisance to claw at Cyrene’s flowing shuhl robe. ‘On your knees, ignorant whore!’

By now, the whole crowd was chanting. When the old woman reached for her leg again, Cyrene shook herself free of the hag’s wrinkled talon.

‘Please don’t touch me,’ Cyrene said. It was tradition never to touch those who wore red shuhl robes without first gaining the maiden’s permission. In her fervency, the old woman ignored the ancient custom. Her fingernails raked the younger woman’s skin through the street dress’s thin silk.

‘On your knees. They have returned!’

Cyrene went for the qattari knife strapped to her naked thigh. Slender, ornamented steel gleamed amber in the firelight reflected from the sky-craft.

‘Don’t. Touch. Me.’

With a hissed curse, the old woman returned to her prayers.

Cyrene took a deep breath, seeking to slow her frenetic pulse. The air heated her throat, prickling at her tongue with the charcoal spice of thruster smoke. So they had returned. The angels of the God-Emperor had returned to the perfect city.

She didn’t feel the rush of reverence. Nor did she fall to her knees and thank the God-Emperor for his angels’ second coming. Cyrene Valantion stared at the vulture hull of the iron craft, while one question burned behind her eyes.

‘They have returned,’ the old woman murmured again. ‘They have returned to us.’

‘Yes,’ said Cyrene. ‘But why?’

Movement from the craft came without warning. Thick doors clanged wide and a ramp juddered down on squealing pneumatics. Between gasps and nervous weeping, the worshipful chanting grew louder. The people intoned prayers from the Word, and the last of those standing finally dropped to their knees. Cyrene was the only person left on her feet.

The first of the angels stepped from the thinning smoke cloud. Cyrene stared at the figure, her eyes narrowing despite the exalted rightness of the moment. A sliver of ice wormed through her blood.

As if one girl’s whispered protest could possibly change what was happening, she breathed a single word.

‘Wait.’

The angel’s heavy armour was at immediate odds with the images from scripture. It stood unadorned by the holy parchments that should detail its holiness in flowing script, nor was it clad in the winter-grey of the God-Emperor’s true angels. This one’s armour, like the craft it emerged from, was a deep and beautiful cobalt, trimmed with bronze so polished it gleamed close to gold. Its eyes were slanted red slits in a stoic facemask.

‘Wait...’ Cyrene said again, louder this time. ‘These are not the Bearers of the Word.’

The old woman hissed at her blasphemy, and spat on her bare feet. Cyrene ignored her. Her gaze never left the warrior armoured in cobalt, so subtly and distinctly different from the scriptures she’d been forced to study as a child.

The angel’s brethren emerged from the dark interior of their landing craft and descended to the plaza. All wore armour of the same blue. All of them carried great weapons too heavy for a mortal man to lift unaided.

‘They are not the Bearers of the Word,’ she raised her voice above the chanting. Several people kneeling around her replied with harsh whispers and potent curses. Cyrene was drawing breath to call out the accusation a third time when the angels, moving in inhuman unison, raised their weapons and aimed into the crowd of worshippers. The sight stole the breath from her throat.

The first angel spoke, its voice deep and raw, filtered through hidden speakers in its facemask.

‘People of Monarchia, capital city of Forty-Seven Ten, hear these words. We, the warriors of the XIII Legion, are oathed to this moment, honour-sworn to this duty. We come bearing the Emperor’s decree to the tenth world brought to compliance by the Forty-Seventh Expedition of humanity’s Great Crusade.’

All the while, the dozen angels kept their weapons aimed at the kneeling civilians. Cyrene could see the muzzles were as charred as the vulture craft’s hull, darkened from firing shells of monstrous size.

‘Your compliance with the Imperium of the Man has held for sixty-one years. With the greatest regret, the Emperor of Mankind demands that all living souls abandon the city of Monarchia immediately. Moments ago, your planetary leaders were given the same warning. This city is to be evacuated within six days. On the final day, your planetary leaders will be allowed to send a single distress call.’

The crowd kept silent, but their stares were now of confusion and disbelief, not reverence. As if sensing a drift in their attention, the angel aimed its weapon into the air and fired a single shot. The gunshot banged like a thunder peal rolling around a valley, storm-loud in the silence.

‘No one is to remain in Monarchia by dawn of the seventh day. Go now to your homes. Gather your belongings. Evacuate the city. Resistance will be met with bloodshed.’

‘Where will we go?’ a female voice called from the transfixed crowd. ‘This is our home!’

The first angel turned his weapon, aiming directly at Cyrene. It took several seconds for the young woman to realise she’d been the one to speak. It took much less time for those near her to break and flee, leaving her in an ever-expanding patch of sudden isolation.

The angel repeated its words, its emotionless inflection no different from before. ‘No one is to remain in Monarchia by dawn of the seventh day. Go now to your homes. Gather your belongings. Evacuate the city. Resistance will be met with bloodshed.’

Cyrene swallowed, saying nothing more. Cries and jeers rang out from the crowd. A bottle crashed against one of the angels’ helms, shattering into glass rain, and as several others shouted out demands to know what was happening, Cyrene turned and ran. Where the crowd wasn’t already fleeing with her, she forced her way through the press of people.

The throaty chatter of the angels’ weapons started up a handful of seconds later, as the God-Emperor’s messengers opened fire on the rioting crowd.

Three days later, Cyrene was still in the city.

Like many of the people calling Monarchia home, Cyrene’s dusky skin was a legacy of her ancestors’ lives in the equatorial deserts, and she had handsome eyes of a light brown that were rather like burnt auburn. Sun-lightened hazel hair fell in tumbling locks over her shoulders.

At least, her more infatuated lovers described her in such terms.

This was the picture her mind painted, though she no longer saw it when she looked in the mirror. Now her eyes were ringed from two nights without sleep, and her mouth was soured by dehydration.

Exactly how things had come to this point remained a mystery. Across the city, resistance to the invaders had been ferocious for the hour or so it had lasted. The greatest massacre had taken place at the Tophet Gate, when the protests became a riot, and the riot became a battlefield. Cyrene watched from the haven of a nearby church, though there hadn’t been much to see. Citizens cut down and culled, all for the crime of daring to defend their homes.

A battle tank of cobalt and bronze fired at the Tophet Gate itself, and though the slaughter was a tragedy, this was raw desecration. Grinding the dead beneath its treads, the tank fired a salvo at the towering structure. Its cannons left pain-scars across Cyrene’s sight, but she couldn’t look away.

The Tophet Gate fell, its marble bulk breaking into segments after it pounded into the plaza. A fortune in white stone and gold leaf, a monument to the God-Emperor’s true angels, shattered by invaders claiming to be loyal to the Imperium.

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 clouds. 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 square. ‘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.

Once, he would have smiled at the delicious blasphemy of an impossible idea. Not now.

‘We’re being hailed,’ one of the vox-officers called from his console.

At last. A fleet-wide message, from the only voice that mattered. The message was relayed across the bridge, ruined by vox-breakage but recognisable nonetheless.

‘My sons.’ No amount of distortion could conceal the hurt and affection in the words. ‘My sons, we have reached Khur. The last prayer from Monarchia must now be answered. Today we witness with our own eyes the ruin our brothers have made of the perfect city.’

The four Astartes warriors around the command throne shared a glance, though their expressions remained hidden behind their Mark III helms. Each of them heard the tremor in their father’s voice.

‘My sons,’ the message continued. ‘Blood demands blood. We will have the answers we seek before the day is done. This, I swear t–’

The message didn’t end, it was cut off. An overriding signal took hold of the vox-network, powerful enough to eclipse the words of the Legion’s own primarch.

This voice was deeper, colder, and just as sincere.

‘Warriors of the Word Bearers. I am Guilliman of the XIII Legion, Lord of Macragge. You are ordered to descend to the surface immediately and muster in the heart of the razed site once known as Monarchia. Coordinates are being conveyed. There will be no defiance of this mandate. Your Legion, in its entirety, will gather as ordered. That is all.’

The voice ceased, and silence reigned.

Almost a hundred souls – human, servitor and Astartes – gathered on the bridge of De Profundis. None of them spoke a word for almost a full minute.

Without even acknowledging the others, the Seventh Captain turned and stalked across the chamber, his armoured boots thudding on the plasteel decking.

‘Argel Tal?’ Deumos spoke into his helm’s vox-link. His visor display tracked his subordinate captain, scrolling white text feeds of biorhythmic data across his vision. He blinked at a peripheral rune to clear the automatic tactical display.

The Seventh Captain turned, making the sign of the holy aquila over his chest, his gauntlets forming the God-Emperor’s symbol over the polished breastplate.

‘I go to ready Seventh Company for planetfall,’ he said. ‘The answers we seek are on the surface of Khur, in the ruins of the perfect city. I want those answers, Deumos.’

The air was gritty, thickened by dust and smoke haze. The ground was a black ash desert, with heat-seared patches of glass and melted marble that reflected the sunlight until they were crunched underfoot.

Argel Tal breathed in, tasting the recycled filtration of his own suit – the sweat, the chemical tang of his gene-enhanced blood – but he couldn’t bring himself to seal his suit completely. Each breath drew in a penitent trace of the brimstone and scorched rock reek of the surrounding devastation.

Nothing was left standing. Stone powder in the air, the result of a million pulverised marble buildings, was already coating their armour as the Word Bearers stood in the heart of Monarchia. Oath parchments and prayer scrolls attached to Astartes warplate turned a grey-white with settling dust. Argel Tal watched his warriors standing amidst the ruination – some picking through debris with no real intent, others simply remaining motionless – and he searched for the words this moment required.

Whatever those words were, they escaped him for now.

The vox crackled live, and Xaphen’s identifier rune flashed on the edge of Argel Tal’s red-tinted retinal display.

‘We stood here, six decades ago.’ Xaphen came to his captain’s side, his rare, gold-trimmed armour greyed by the falling dust. For once, the Chaplain of the 7th Company resembled his brothers, rendering every warrior equal as they stood among Monarchia’s bones. ‘Now the city is drowning in clouds of dust, but we stood in this very place. Do you recall it?’ Xaphen asked.

Argel Tal stared out at the annihilated terrain, seeing ghosts in the mist – the spires and domes of buildings that no longer existed.

‘I remember,’ he said. ‘This was the public plaza of Inaga Sector.’ The captain gestured south, though every direction offered nothing but the same ravaged landscape. ‘There stood the Tophet Gate, where the preachers and traders gathered.’

Xaphen nodded. His left eye bore the same mark as Argel Tal’s: the serrated star, symbol of a shared brotherhood. The weapon mag-locked to his back – a ritual crozius arcanum, the war maul of Word Bearer Chaplains – was forged in the same shape. Its hammerhead was a spiked sphere of dark iron, threaded with silver.

The conversation, such as it was, ebbed to nothing until the unwelcome serenity was broken by another company making planetfall. On howling thrusters, gunships made their final approaches, clawed landing feet crunching onto the fire-blasted ground. Usually, the flame-and-oil stench of their engine exhausts would assault the senses. Here, it was undetectable among the ruin already inflicted.

Bulkheads and ramps clanged open. Another hundred warriors in the etched armour of the XVII Legion took their first steps into the dead city. What little formation existed broke almost immediately as the Astartes scattered, struggling to come to terms with what they were seeing. Argel Tal blink-clicked a vox rune on his visor display, tuning into the general channel again. These new arrivals, wearing the heraldry of 15th Company, voiced their breathless disbelief and impotent anger. Their chestplates were marked with the sigil of heaped human skulls, the Chapter of the Osseous Throne.

Argel Tal offered a quiet greeting. The closest warriors saluted, respecting his rank despite his allegiance to another Chapter. Body and blood, every one of them was a Bearer of the Word. That outweighed all else.

Still more Thunderhawks streaked overhead, the gunships seeking clear ground to land. Between the warriors already on the surface and the gunships remaining where they’d landed, it was becoming a trial to deploy more of the Legion. East to west, north to south, the sky was a mess of shaking gunships and the heat-shimmers of engines struggling to keep the Thunderhawks airborne.

Every few minutes, the sky would fall dark, heralding the passage of a Stormbird. These largest landers carried entire companies, their deafening passing temporarily blocking out the sun.

Argel Tal walked without purpose, crushing ruined rock underfoot. He sealed his armour’s ventilation systems when he grew tired of inhaling the sulphuric stench of Monarchia’s grave. Melted rock and scorched earth were never easy on the nose, and the captain’s gene-enhanced olfactory senses were pained by the intensity. Breathing the recycled air of his suit’s internal filters, he walked on.

The ground was uneven, pounded into blackened craters by the Ultramarines’ orbital assault. Argel Tal felt his suit’s stabiliser pistons and gravity gyros shifting to compensate. There were brief hums of power as the mechanics in his armour’s knees and shins adjusted to new patches of uneven terrain.

He knew Xaphen was following him even without looking at the digital distance tracker on his retinal display. It was no surprise when the Chaplain spoke again.

‘I feel as though we’ve lost a war without firing a single shot,’ the Chaplain voxed. ‘But look to the skies, brother. Our father comes.’

The sky grew dark once more, and Argel Tal looked upward as the final Stormbird flew overhead. Its hull was gold, reflecting the midday sun in a spray of solar glare. The captain’s visor dimmed to compensate.

With greater clarity came the revelation of shame. Smaller gunships, Thunderhawks with hulls of blue, flew in formation around the mighty golden Stormbird. An escort squadron: watchmen, not honour guards. The Ultramarines were escorting the Word Bearers’ primarch down to the surface with all the undignified pageantry of a prisoner being led to execution.

Argel Tal’s visor zoomed in, responding to his narrowed eyes. Static fuzzed for half a second, quickly clearing as his eye lenses refocused at the new range.

Every turret on the Ultramarines gunships was trained on the golden hull of the Word Bearers Stormbird.

‘Do you see that?’ he voxed to Xaphen.

‘An insult like that is hard to miss,’ the Chaplain replied. ‘I’d believe it a lie, had I not seen it myself.’

Argel Tal watched the lander’s arc taking it deeper into the city, and without any other signal, every Word Bearer nearby turned and walked in the direction set by the massive gunship.

‘This has the stench of history in the making,’ Xaphen muttered. ‘Gird your soul, brother. Mind your humours.’

The captain had never heard the layer of unease in Xaphen’s voice before. It was not helping his own fragile calm.

‘Answers,’ Argel Tal replied, bringing up retinal readouts of bolter ammunition supplies, along with his armour’s power-pack temperature. ‘Answers, Xaphen. That’s all I want.’

Argel Tal and Xaphen led Seventh Company into the heart of the city, marching to where the Legion gathered.

One hundred thousand warriors stood in silence beneath the setting sun.

One hundred thousand warriors in perfect formation, bolters held in grey fists, helmed heads raised in pride. A hundred thousand pairs of red eye lenses stared ahead. Squad by squad, led by sergeants. Company by company, led by captains. Chapter by Chapter, led by Masters.

Standard bearers stood before each company, banners held high even as their details faded in the dust. Borne by Sergeant Malnor, the Serrated Sun Chapter icon rose alongside the war banners of its three component companies, eclipsing them in both size and significance. A spiked circle of burnished bronze mirrored the symbol around every warrior’s left eye, decorated with sixty-eight bleached skulls hanging on black iron chains. The skulls were human and alien, each one the head of a fallen enemy champion worthy of remembrance. The left eye socket of every skull was ringed by the serrated sun symbol, painted with Astartes blood, blessed by the company Chaplains.

Similar icons were held above the mustered Legion. They rattled in the wind, trinkets chiming in grim melody, while the company war banners waved.

Argel Tal moved forward with the other commanders of the Serrated Sun, leaving their warriors in assembled columns. Although the Chapter was far from the primarch’s favour – such honour belonged to the larger and more prestigious Chapters made from twenty or more companies – their ranks still entitled them to stand at the forefront of the gathered Legion.

As he walked through ranks of statue-still Word Bearers, Argel Tal switched to the vox frequency secured by Seventh Company prior to planetfall.

‘Stand tall, brothers. Enlightenment will soon be ours.’

A series of ten vox-clicks signalled the acknowledgement of every squad sergeant under his command.

Several captains voxed quiet greetings as they assembled in an ordered line, their helms and shoulder guards marked with evidence of their own Chapter allegiances.

Before them all, the golden Stormbird stood at bay, resting in the midst of six Ultramarines Thunderhawk gunships. The edges of their ceramite hulls were scorched bare in places from the fires of atmospheric descent.

One captain broke ranks. He took a single step forward, and Argel Tal felt the ground’s miniscule tremor as the warrior moved.

In hulking Terminator armour, the silver-wrought warplate still fresh from the forges of Mars, First Captain Kor Phaeron stood apart from his brothers, as was his right. In the armour of the Legion’s elite, he towered a metre above the lesser captains, clad in layers of reverently sculpted ceramite as thick as the hull-skin of a battle tank. He carried no weapons beyond those his armour already offered: oversized gauntlets ending in talons extending from each finger, the individual blades as long and curved as the primitive scythes used to harvest crops on backwater Imperial worlds. Delicate circuitry threaded along the blades – veins of power that would invest the claws with crackling force upon the First Captain’s desire.

Unlike the gathered captains, Kor Phaeron wore no helm, and it was fair to say no poet or painter could ever portray the First Captain as a handsome being without liberal artistic license. Argel Tal watched Kor Phaeron’s finger-blades ripple with electric current, a sure sign of impatience. The larger warrior’s expression was locked in the sneer of a man who tastes nothing but bitterness and ash, which was the only face Argel Tal had ever seen him wear. Despite the impressive armour, Kor Phaeron’s visage was corpse-gaunt and bone-pale, as it had been on each of the rare occasions the two captains crossed paths.

‘I hate him,’ Xaphen whispered over the vox. ‘He wears that armour as a shield for one thousand weaknesses. I hate him, brother.’

Argel Tal remained unmoving, bolter across his chest. He’d heard this from the Chaplain many times before, and could offer no answer to ease his friend’s choler.

‘I know,’ he said, hoping Xaphen would fall silent. This was hardly the time for such things.

‘He is not one of us. A false Astartes.’ Xaphen fell into the familiar lament with teeth-clenching passion. ‘He is impure.’

‘This is not the time for old grudges.’

‘Laxity like that is why you will never carry a crozius,’ the Chaplain said.

The nepotism behind Kor Phaeron’s ascension to the First Captaincy was no secret. As the primarch’s spiritual counsel and foster father during the years of Lorgar’s youth away from the Imperium, Kor Phaeron had helped shape the growing demigod in ways his true father had not. They stood together through the years of sacrifice and revolution, through the holy wars that threatened to tear Colchis apart before its unity under the benevolent rule of Lorgar.

When the God-Emperor came to Colchis over a century before to offer Lorgar command of the XVII Legion, Kor Phaeron had been far too old to receive the organ implantations and prepubescent genetic manipulations necessary to grow into one of the Astartes. Instead, through rejuvenat surgery, costly bionics and limited gene-forging, Kor Phaeron was exalted above humanity as a sign of the value placed in him by the primarch.

Despite leaving humanity behind, he had not ascended to the ranks of true Astartes. Argel Tal watched him now, this pinnacle of genetic compromise. Respect stilled his tongue, even if admiration did not.

Kor Phaeron spat onto the broken ground. The acidic gobbet of saliva hissed as it ate into the ruined stone. Only then did Argel Tal reactivate the vox-channel to Xaphen by blink-clicking his brother’s name-rune.

‘Are you galled only by the First Captain’s impurity? Or is it his complete lack of Legion discipline, and that his victories eclipse yours and mine put together?’

Xaphen chuckled, the sound low and dark. His crozius hammer was in his fists, its mace head resting on the ground.

‘He is at the primarch’s side for each campaign. He commands the First Company, the Legion’s finest, and wears the armour of the Terminator elite. It would take a fool to fail in those circumstances.’

‘I have heard him preach, brother. As have you. I do not like him, but I respect him. He speaks the Word with an insight possessed by no other, and his wisdom pours fire into my blood. He orchestrated victory in a planet-wide civil war when he was merely a human priest. Do not underestimate him now.’

Xaphen’s voice was sterner. ‘Impurity cannot be forgiven.’

‘The primarch chose him,’ the captain’s tone also grew stonier in response. ‘Does that mean nothing to you?’

‘I do not doubt our father’s judgement,’ came the reluctant reply.

Just when Argel Tal sensed more to come, Xaphen fell silent, perhaps detecting an implied lecture in his brother’s disapproval.

‘Stand ready,’ Kor Phaeron growled, his grinding voice at odds with his cadaverous face. ‘The primarch comes.’

As those words hung in the air, the ramp beneath the cockpit of the golden Stormbird began to ease down on smooth gears.

Argel Tal breathed out, slow and tense, feeling his primary heart thud faster. Although he wasn’t in battle, his secondary heart started a slower counter-beat to the hammering of his first.

The figure descended the ramp alone, and the Seventh Captain felt the stinging threat of worshipful tears even as he kept his gaze on the ruined ground. He’d not seen his primarch in almost three years. To be cast away from his radiance, even in the name of sacred duty, was to walk in shadow, devoid of inspiration.

The vox came alive with thousands of muted voices as countless Word Bearers breathed their father’s name. Many thanked fate for the chance to stand within his presence once again. Reverent chants ghosted over the communication channels, never rising above whispers. Argel Tal was one of the few that remained silent at first, thanking fate in voiceless piety.

Three years. Three long, long years of fighting in the darkness, praying for this moment to come. All doubt, all concern, all suspicion of the Ultramarines’ summons was erased in a dual beat of his twin hearts.

The figure stopped walking. Argel Tal knew this from the cessation of footsteps on blackened earth.

Only then did he speak. A single word: a name used only rarely beyond the warrior-sons who carried Lorgar’s blood in their veins, as they conquered an ignorant galaxy by crozius and bolter.

‘Aurelian,’ the captain said, the word drowning in so many similar whispers.

Argel Tal raised his eyes at last, to see the son of a living god standing in the heart of a necropolis.

THREE

Blood Demands Blood

Sigillite

The Master of Mankind

The Seventeenth Primarch was known to the emergent Imperium by many names. The worlds left in his Legion’s triumphant wake knew him as the Anointed, the Seventeenth Son, or more elegantly, the Bearer of the Word.

To his primarch brothers he was simply Lorgar, the name given to him on his home world of Colchis during the years of turmoil before the Emperor’s arrival.

Yet as with many primarchs, he also bore an informal title – a term of respect often used by the eighteen Legions. Where Fulgrim of the III Legion was known respectfully as the Phoenician, and Ferrus Manus of the X Legion carried the Gorgon as his title, the lord of the XVII Legion was the Urizen – a name pulled from the half-forgotten writings of ancient Terran myth.

None of the one hundred thousand warriors gathered spoke those names now. As the Word Bearers Legion stood at its full, unbelievable strength in perfectly ordered ranks, every one of his sons chanted his true name in sibilant whispers, as if the syllables were an invocation.

Aurelian, they breathed in unison. Lorgar Aurelian, Lorgar the Golden One. Thus was the father known to his chosen children.

The Seventeenth Primarch turned his gaze to the ocean of grey-armoured warriors bred to do his bidding. He seemed to pause, just for a moment, at the immensity of what he was seeing. Those closest to him saw the fires of thought light up his eyes.

‘My sons,’ he said, colouring the words with a smile tainted by sorrow. ‘It lifts my heart to see you all.’

To stare at one of the God-Emperor’s sons was to drink in a vision of avataric perfection. Human senses, even the laboratory-forged perceptions of an Astartes warrior, struggled to process what they were seeing. When Argel Tal first stood before Lorgar as a boy still shy of his eleventh birthday, he had suffered nightmares of confusion and pain for a month.

The Legion’s Apothecaries who watched over the infant recruits were prepared for this. Turyon, the Apothecary who oversaw Argel Tal’s implantation surgeries during his pubescent years, had explained the phenomena to him in one of the tiny isolation cells granted to all Legion acolytes during their training.

‘The nightmares are natural, and will fade in time. Your mind must come to terms with what you have seen.’

‘I am not sure what I saw,’ the boy admitted.

‘You saw the son of a god. Mortal minds and eyes were never meant to witness such things. It will take time to adjust.’

‘It hurts when I close my eyes. It hurts to remember him.’

‘It will not hurt forever.’

‘I want to serve him,’ the eleven-year-old boy had promised, still trembling from the night’s visions. ‘I will serve him, I swear.’

Turyon had nodded, going on to speak of the many lethal trials ahead before he could wear the mantle of an Astartes. Argel Tal had listened to none of it – at least, not then, not that morning with the weak Colchisian sun bringing dawn to his single-windowed cell.

He still thought of Turyon. The Apothecary had died forty years before, and Argel Tal kept a memento of the battle. Even now, he could never hold the curved, broken alien blade without remembering Turyon’s slashed throat.

In truth, that was why he kept it. Remembrance. A morbid habit, perhaps, and one the Chaplains had often chastised him for. It was the mark of an unhealthy mind to gather the weapons that slew one’s brothers.

Argel Tal raised his eyes.

‘Blood demands blood,’ Lorgar said to the warriors gathered in Monarchia’s cratered grave. ‘Blood demands blood.’

As always when in his father’s presence, Argel Tal rationed his gaze to focus upon individual details, rather than his gene-father’s full manifestation.

Lorgar’s eyes, the snowy grey of Colchis’s winter skies, were ringed by kohl, setting them even brighter against the primarch’s skin – skin that seemed golden to unvisored eyes.

Argel Tal’s helm’s eye lenses filtered everything to a world of dark-washed tactical readouts, but it stole none of the detail. He could make out the thousands of individual Colchisian glyphs gold-inked onto the primarch’s white flesh. It was said the tattoos of cuneiform scripture covered most of Lorgar’s body. Certainly, they trailed down his face in tight, perfect lines, from his shaved head to his jawline, each sentence a prayer of devotion, a prophetic hope for the future, or an invocation of strength from a higher power.

Where Lorgar’s regalia hid his flesh, the writing continued over the golden plates of armour, acid-etched into the shining surfaces. Yet for all his majesty, the Seventeenth Primarch did not display his grandeur by ceremonial wargear. His armour may have been gold, but it was no more ornate than the Mark III plate worn by his captains. The oath papers and scrolls of scripture pinned to his breastplate and pauldrons told not of the primarch’s own glory, but his vows to his father, and his devotion to serve the people of the Imperium.

‘And so we come to this,’ the primarch said, his voice never rising far above a whisper, because it never needed to. It reached the ears of his closest sons, and translated smoothly across the vox for the rear ranks.

‘And so we come to this, yet still they make us wait for the answers we deserve.’

Human linguistics couldn’t convey the fierce, soulful confidence Lorgar exuded. His slender lips were curled into the crooked half-smile of an impassioned poet, despite standing in the grave of his greatest achievement. In his gauntleted hands, clutched in gold fists that seemed reluctant to raise the weapon, was a crozius the height of an Astartes warrior.

Illuminarum was the primarch’s one concession to grandeur. The weapon’s haft was the cream of ivory, reinforced by a grip of black iron. Its head was an orb of adamantium, stained black through a forgemaster’s touch and decorated with silver-leafed runes. Evenly-spaced spikes the length of human forearms projected from its outer edges, lending the mace a brutish air almost at odds with the philosophical seeker who carried it across the stars.

Despite the immense craftsmanship in its forging, Lorgar’s crozius was ostentation utterly without beauty. Entire worlds had been put to the flame by its bearer, while every Chaplain of the Word Bearers Legion wielded its lesser reflection.

None of Lorgar’s sons, even those who had spent years from his side, were blind to their father’s unease. The primarch cast glances back at the grounded Ultramarines Thunderhawks, waiting for any signs of emergence. Around his poet’s smile was the faint suggestion of black stubble, something Argel Tal had never seen before on his meticulous primarch.

Lorgar turned away from his sons, now staring down at the impassive gunships. His whisper carried to the entire Legion.

‘Guilliman, brother of my blood, if not my heart. Come to me and answer for your madness.’

In theatrical unity, the gunships’ ramps began to lower. The Legion heard their father’s last whisper, as the Ultramarines showed themselves at last.

‘Bearers of the Word,’ he murmured the warning, soft as snakeskin on silk. ‘Stand ready, and watch for the first sign of treachery.’

A mere hundred warriors stood opposed to one hundred thousand. Facing an ocean of grey armour, a single company of Ultramarines had made planetfall with their primarch. Even in the gravity of the moment, Argel Tal wasn’t sure whether to be mystified at this display, or insulted by it. He settled for both, his irritation rising all the while.

‘The 19th Company,’ Xaphen voxed, watching the Ultramarines banner waving in the gentle wind. It depicted a rearing white horse with a mane of fire, over a series of numerals. ‘Intriguing.’

Argel Tal watched the white horse rippling in the wind, trying to discern some significance in the 19th’s presence. The creature seemed in motion, the flames of its mane real and burning. Aethon Company, the Ultramarines 19th, was well-known to many outside Guilliman’s Legion. Aethon himself commanded an entire Imperial Expedition away from his primarch, and was rumoured to be a stern ambassador and a shrewd diplomat. Whatever the truth, the captain was trusted with a great deal more responsibility and independence than most other Astartes could ever claim.

‘They are named,’ Xaphen said, ‘for a fire-breathing horse, in ancient Macraggian mythology. Aethon was the name of a horse that pulled the sun-god’s chariot across the sky.’

Argel Tal resisted the urge to shake his head. ‘With the greatest respect, brother, I couldn’t care less.’

‘Knowledge is power,’ the Chaplain replied.

‘Focus,’ the captain snapped back. ‘You heard the primarch.’

Xaphen sent an acknowledgement chime across the vox – a single static buzz.

The final gunship ramp lowered on steam-venting pistons. Argel Tal remained still, his muscles locked tense, as the Thirteenth Primarch descended with his honour guard, followed by...

‘No,’ he said, shock stealing his breath.

‘Blood of the God-Emperor,’ Xaphen whispered.

Ahead of them, Lorgar watched with a viper’s smile. ‘Malcador the Sigillite.’

Next to the primarch armoured in battleplate of pearl and cerulean walked a slender figure in unassuming, plain robes. Human, utterly frail in Gulliman’s massive shadow, the First Lord of Terra clutched a staff of dark metal and rattling chains, topped by a twin-headed eagle.

Guilliman, by contrast, was hulking where the Sigillite was sparse. His warplate was the blue of Terra’s long-burned oceans, an echo from an age of legend, and edged by gold and mother of pearl, glinting in the rising moonlight.

‘What insanity is this?’ snarled Kor Phaeron, his voice thickened by emotion too rancid to suppress.

‘Peace, my friend,’ Lorgar murmured, his gaze never leaving the opposing line of warriors. ‘The answers we seek will soon be ours. Captains, step forward.’

At the command, one hundred captains advanced, bolters and blades held at ease in gauntlets of grey. One hundred Chaplains, their gold trimmings and crozius mauls marking them out from the ranks, remained a step behind. Behind the warrior-priests, a hundred thousand Word Bearers stood at the ready, holding ranks despite the uneven platform made by the pulverised ground.

Argel Tal tore his glance from Guilliman, the Lord of Macragge’s noble features as difficult to look upon as his own father’s. His eyes were the hardest part to take in. There was no doubt, no speculation, no curiosity – nothing that told of mortal emotion behind the deep-set eyes. The face could have been sculpted from suntanned stone. Dignity incarnate.

The Seventh Captain repressed a shiver, and turned his attention to the Sigillite. Too human to fear, yet too influential to ignore. The Emperor’s right hand and closest confidant.

Here.

Here, and apparently supporting the Ultramarines in their destruction of the perfect city. Argel Tal’s hand tightened on the bolter grip.

‘Brother,’ Lorgar spoke, his tones smooth on the surface, almost entirely hiding the tremble of grief his sons knew must be flowing through him. ‘And Malcador. Welcome to Monarchia.’ At these words, he gestured at the devastation, his handsome features lost to a sickened sneer.

‘Lorgar,’ Guilliman’s voice rumbled like distant thunder, and he said no more than his brother’s name.

Argel Tal narrowed his eyes at the absolute neutrality in the tone, not a ghost of emotion. He’d seen automatons in the Legio Cybernetica with more humanity than the Ultramarines primarch.

‘Primarch Lorgar,’ said Malcador, bowing by way of introduction. ‘It grieves us all to meet in these circumstances.’

The golden warrior took a step forward, his crozius resting on his shoulder. ‘Does it now? It grieves us all? You do not look grieved, my brother.’

Guilliman said nothing. Lorgar broke his stare after several moments, regarding the Sigillite.

‘Answers, Malcador.’ He took another step forward, now halfway between his Legion and the hundred Ultramarines. ‘I want answers. What happened here? What madness has been allowed to run unchecked?’

The Sigillite pulled back his hood, revealing a face so pale it bordered on grey unhealthiness. ‘You cannot guess, Lorgar?’ The human shook his head as if in sorrow. ‘Truly, this is a surprise to you?’

‘Answer me!’ the primarch screamed.

The Ultramarines flinched back, several raising weapons in hands that shook with surprise.

Lorgar threw his arms out to the sides, taking in the surrounding devastation a second time, and spit flew from his lips as he roared. ‘Answer me for what you have done here! I demand it!’

‘What do we do?’ Xaphen voxed. ‘What’s... what’s happening?’

Argel Tal didn’t answer. His blade and bolter were suddenly very heavy in his hands, and he stared at the Ultramarines displaying their own shock so openly. While they held ranks, it was clear they were uneasy. And rightly so.

‘What have you done to my city?’ Lorgar’s voice was a hissing whisper, spoken through a false smile.

‘It was not compliant,’ Malcador’s words were slowed by patience. ‘This culture, this world, was not comp–’

‘Liar! Blasphemer! It was the model of compliance!’

Several Ultramarines retreated a little now, and Argel Tal could see them looking to one another in doubt. A flutter of voices teased the vox-network as the Word Bearers picked up signals from the Ultramarines voxing each other in their unease. Only Guilliman appeared unmoved. Even Malcador was jarred, his eyes wide and his staff gripped tighter as he faced down the primarch’s anger.

‘Lorgar...’

‘They chanted my father’s name in the streets!’

‘Lorgar, they–’

‘They honoured him with each sunrise!’ Lorgar came closer, his eyes wild, focused like targeting reticules on his father’s advisor. ‘Answer me, human. Justify this, when statues of the Emperor adorned every place of gathering!’

‘They worshipped him.’ Malcador raised his head, for he was half the height of both primarchs. ‘They revered him.’ He looked up at Lorgar, seeking some sign of comprehension in the giant’s golden face. Seeing none, he drew breath again, and wiped a fleck of the primarch’s spittle from his cheek. ‘They worshipped him as a god.’

‘You plead my case for me?’ Lorgar dropped his crozius, letting it fall to the broken ground with a dull thud. He looked at his hands, fingers curled into claws as if he would tear out his own eyes. ‘You... you stand in the ruin of perfection, and you say yourself this city was annihilated for nothing? Have you travelled the length of the galaxy to show me you have lost your fragile mortal mind?’

‘Lorgar–’ the Sigillite tried again, but the rest of his words never left his throat. Malcador fell in silence, smashed aside by Lorgar’s backhanded strike. Every warrior nearby heard the wrenching snap of bones breaking, and Malcador crashed onto the rocky ground twenty metres away, tumbling to a halt in the dust.

Face to face with his brother, Lorgar bared his teeth into Guilliman’s impassive features.

‘Why. Did. You. Do. This.’

‘I was ordered to.’

‘By this worm?’ Lorgar laughed, reaching out a hand towards the fallen figure of Malcador. ‘By this maggot?’ The Word Bearers’ primarch shook his head and stalked back to his own warriors.

‘I will take my Legion to Terra, and inform our father of this... this madness, myself.’

‘He knows.’

The voice was Malcador’s. He rose on unsteady limbs, his words strained and spoken through bleeding lips. Guilliman inclined his head, the barest movement enough to send two of his warriors to aid the Emperor’s advisor. Malcador stood, still hunched from the pain, and ordered the approaching Ultramarines away. With his arm outstretched, his staff leapt from the ground a dozen metres away and slapped neatly into his palm.

‘What?’ Lorgar said, uncertain he’d heard correctly. ‘What did you say?’

The wounded First Lord of Terra closed his eyes, using his staff of office as a crutch.

‘I said, he knows. Your father knows.’

‘You lie.’ Lorgar clenched his teeth again, his breath coming fast and shallow. ‘You lie, and you are fortunate I do not kill you for this blasphemy.’

Malcador didn’t argue. He closed his eyes, raised his head to the sky, and spoke without sound. Every Word Bearer, every Ultramarine, every living being in a

ten-kilometre radius heard the man’s psychic voice pulsing through their minds, such was its power.

+He will not listen, my lord. Not to me+

Lorgar froze, his hands a hair’s breadth from retrieving his crozius on the ground. Guilliman’s most expansive movement since arriving was to turn from his golden brother, not in disgust as Argel Tal first thought, but without any expression at all. He was simply shielding his eyes.

Malcador’s eyes remained closed, his face angled up to the heavens. To the vessels in orbit.

Lorgar stepped back, voicelessly mouthing ‘No, no, no...’, as if whispered words could somehow alter fate.

The world around them exploded in light.

The displacement of air resulted in a bang not far from a sonic boom, but that wasn’t what sent Argel Tal reeling. He’d seen teleportation technology used before – had travelled via such rare means himself – but the noise was filtered to tolerable levels by his helm’s perceptive systems.

And it wasn’t the light of a teleport flare that forced him to avert his eyes. This, too, would have been compensated for by his armour’s internal sensors, dimming his eye lenses immediately.

But he was blind. Blinded by gold, burning like molten metal.

The vox shrieked with thousands of his brothers voicing the same malady, but the reports from his brethren were dull, half-lost in an assault of noise that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t a fault with the vox; it was in his head – a crashing of waves loud enough to throw off his balance.

Blind and almost deafened, Argel Tal felt his bolter slip from his grip. It took all his strength to remain standing.

Lorgar Aurelian saw none of this.

No blinding golden light. No deafening psychic roar.

He saw six figures standing in unity, five of whom he did not recognise, and one he did. Behind them, the Ultramarines – not afflicted as his warriors were – were on their knees in an orderly display. Only Guilliman and the Sigillite remained standing.

Lorgar looked back to the six. The five ringed the familiar figure, and though the primarch did not know them by name, he knew their creed. Achingly elaborate armour of rich gold. Cloaks of royal scarlet draped from their shoulders. Long halberds topped by weighty silver blades, gripped in hands that would never tremble.

Custodians. The Emperor’s guardians.

Lorgar looked to the sixth figure, who was just a man. Despite the vigour of youth, age lines showed time’s tracks across features that were both stern and gentle, all at once. The man’s appearance depended entirely on which facet of his face one focused upon. He was a tired, ageing man, and a heroic statue immortalised in life’s prime. He was a young, grimacing warlord with cold eyes, and a confused elder on the edge of weeping.

Lorgar focused on those eyes now, seeing the warmth of love within the benevolence of trust. The man blinked slowly, and as his eyes opened again, they were cold with the frigid touch of disappointment blending into the ice of disgust.

‘Lorgar,’ the man said. His voice was quiet but strong, lost in the indecipherable vista between hatred and kindness.

‘Father,’ Lorgar said to the Emperor of Mankind.

FOUR

A Legion Kneels

If Ultramar Burns

Grey

Sight returned, banishing the grotesque feeling of helplessness. Such emotion was anathema, prickling at Argel Tal’s skin with a thousand insect legs.

He managed to look through his dimmed visor, seeing a towering figure deep in a corona of agonising white light. Around the figure, cloaked and gold-armoured warriors hefted unique spears with practiced ease. Each one was the size of an Astartes, and no Astartes could fail to recognise them.

‘Custodes,’ he managed to speak through teeth gritted at the light’s intensity.

‘It’s...’ Xaphen stammered. ‘It’s the...’

‘I know who it is,’ Argel Tal exhaled the words through clenched teeth. And that’s when the voice hit him, hit them all, in a wave of invisible force.

+Kneel+ it whispered with the power of a hammer to the forehead. There was no resisting. Muscles acted instantly, no matter that many hearts fought not to obey. Argel Tal was one of them. This was not fealty, nor worship, nor service. This was slavery, and his instincts rebelled at the enforced devotion even as he obeyed it.

One hundred thousand Word Bearers kneeled in the dust of the perfect city, rendered prone by Imperial decree.

A Legion was on its knees.

Lorgar looked over his shoulder, taking in the seascape of his kneeling warriors. Fire flickered in his eyes when he returned his gaze to the Emperor.

‘Father–’ Lorgar began, but the man shook his head.

‘Kneel,’ he said. His timeless face was framed by dark hair the same colour as Lorgar’s facial stubble; like father, like son.

‘What?’ the primarch asked. He looked past the Emperor to Guilliman, straight-backed and proud. When he returned his gaze to his father, he wiped his eyes with his soft fingertips, as if to clear some lingering phantasm. ‘Father?’

‘Kneel, Lorgar.’

Argel Tal watched with clenched teeth as Lorgar lowered himself to one knee.

His first instincts were fading now, replaced by reason and the comfort of faith. It was only right to kneel before the God-Emperor. He willed his hearts to slow, despite the implied insult of his deity impelling him to abase himself.

The rebellious anger resurfaced in a stinging adrenal flood only a moment later, as he watched the Ultramarines rise to their feet at Guilliman’s command. He could see them watching, feel their eyes boring into him as he knelt before them. One Legion’s warriors stood in the Emperor’s presence with a primarch’s blessing, while another was on its knees in the bones of a dead city.

It was a moment that cast a dozen reflections, for the Word Bearers had mirrored this action many times before, under alien skies. Legions laying claim to less discipline or grace might beat their chests and howl at the moon upon achieving compliance, but among the sons of Lorgar, victory was to be cherished in reverence and dignity. The triumphant warriors would kneel in the heart of the fallen city, and heed the words of their Chaplains.

The Rite of Remembrance. A time to recall the sacrifices of lost brothers, and reflect upon one’s place in the Word.

Argel Tal felt sweat painting cold trails down his temples and cheeks. Trembling threatened to take hold as his traitorous muscles bunched, locking in painful cramps. The joints of his armour thrummed with unreleased strength, forcing him to endure this perversion of the Legion’s most sacred ritual.

The voice returned. This time, it gave the answers that the XVII Legion so craved.

Lorgar looked into his father’s unknowable face as the Emperor spoke.

‘You are a general, my son. Not a high priest. You were created for war, for conquest, to reunite the human race under the aegis of truth.’

‘I–’

‘No.’ The Emperor closed his eyes, and an image of Monarchia as it had been, bright and glorious, filled Lorgar’s mind. ‘This is worship,’ the Emperor said. ‘This is a poison to truth. You speak of me as a god, and forge worlds that suffer under the one lie that has brought humanity to the edge of extinction time and time again.’

‘The people are joyous–’

‘The people are deceived. The people will burn when their faith is proven false.’

‘My worlds are loyal.’ Lorgar was no longer kneeling. He rose to his feet, his voice rising with him. ‘My Legion shapes the most fiercely loyal worlds in your Imperium.’

+It is not my Imperium+

The words thudded into Argel Tal’s mind like a stream of bolter shells. For a brief, hateful moment, he glanced at his retinal display to check his life signs. He was certain he was dying, and had he not already been on his knees, he would’ve fallen to them now.

+It is the Imperium of Man. The empire of humanity, enlightened and saved by the truth+

He heard Lorgar’s reply this time.

‘I speak no lies. You are a god.’

+Lorgar+

‘I will not be silenced because you do not like the melody of one single word. In your grip, a thousand worlds turn! By your will, a million vessels sail the void. You are immortal, undying, seeing all and knowing all that transpires across creation. Father, you are a god in all but name. All that remains is to confess to it.’

+LORGAR+

The voice came with a wall of pressure now, dense and all too tactile. It pounded into Argel Tal like a miasma of engine wash, heating his armour and throwing him to the ground. Around him, he could see his brothers sent sprawling, their armour skidding across the dust.

Defiant in the cyclone of unseen energy, scrolls of scripture ripping from his armour, Lorgar raised his hand to point at his father.

‘You are a god. Say the words and end the lie.’

The Emperor shook his head, not in defeat, but calm defiance.

‘You are blind, my son. You cling to ancient perceptions, and endanger us all with them. Let this end, Lorgar. Let this end with you heeding my words.’

The psychic wind died with a peal of thunder.

Lorgar stood where he was, trembling for reasons his warriors couldn’t discern. Blood ran from one ear, running in a slow trail down his tattooed neck.

‘I am listening, father,’ he said.

The Seventh Captain hauled himself back to his feet, stumbling once and righting himself before his armour’s stabilisers needed to compensate. He was one of the first Word Bearers to rise. The others still struggled, shivering on hands and knees, or were locked in muscle spasms, their twitching limbs disturbing the dust.

Argel Tal helped Xaphen up, receiving a grunt of thanks.

+Word Bearers, hear me well. You, among all my Legions, are guilty of failure. You number more warriors than any other, excepting the XIII. Yet your conquests are the slowest, and your victories ring hollow+

It hurt too much to look directly at the figure of white-gold light, haloed by coruscating psychic fire, telling them with words of thunder that all their lives had been wasted.

+You linger on compliant worlds for years after final victory, driving the populace into the worship of false faith, seeding cults of the naive and the deceived, erecting monuments to lies. All you have done in the Great Crusade is for naught. While all others succeed and bring prosperity to the Imperium, you alone have failed me+

Lorgar stepped back from the figure, only now raising his arms to ward off its radiance.

+Wage war as you were created to do. Serve the Imperium as you were born to do. Take with you the lesson learned here this day. You kneel in the ruination found at the end of a false path. Let this be your Legion’s rebirth+

The primarch managed a weak ‘Father...’ but it was spoken to emptiness. Another sonic boom of displacing air heralded the Emperor’s return to orbit.

The Ultramarines remained, watching the kneeling, trembling Word Bearers in absolute silence. The Custodians stood alongside Guilliman, while the primarch conferred with their apparent leader, whose helm bore a red crest to match his cloak.

Argel Tal saw Kor Phaeron rising with painful slowness, despite his Terminator armour making the task easier with dense joints of snarling servos. Neither Argel Tal nor Xaphen offered to help. Both of them made for the primarch.

While the Word Bearers struggled to their feet, Lorgar crashed to his knees at last.

The Emperor’s golden son stared at the surrounding city as if he recognised none of it, with no idea how he had reached this place. Dead eyes too cold to cry looked out upon his shamed Legion, and the rubble of the lesson they needed to learn.

Argel Tal reached him first. Instinct compelled him to remove his own helm, and he disengaged the seals in his armoured collar, standing unmasked before his primarch.

‘Aurelian,’ he said.

For the first time, Argel Tal breathed the scorched air of Monarchia, unaltered by merciful filters. It reeked of the oil burned in a thousand years of industry. Xaphen’s earlier comment was haunting in its truth: it smelled like they’d lost a war.

He didn’t dare touch Lorgar. With his hand outstretched, just short of resting on his primarch’s shoulder, he whispered his father’s name.

Lorgar turned to regard him, his eyes lacking even a shadow of recognition.

‘Aurelian,’ Argel Tal said again. He glanced at the staring figures of Guilliman and the Custodians. ‘My primarch, come, we must return to our ships.’

For the first time, his hand rested on Lorgar’s armoured shoulder, where a scroll of scripture had once hung. Ignoring his touch, Lorgar threw his head back and roared. The captain gripped the primarch’s golden pauldron, doing all he could to keep the demigod steady.

Lorgar screamed, deep and low and long, at the uncaring sky. It lasted longer than mortal lungs would allow.

When the anguished cry finally faltered, he ran his bare fingers along the broken ground. With a shaking hand, the primarch smeared black ash across his face, tarnishing his features with the powdered bones of the perfect city.

Xaphen’s voice was low and urgent. ‘The Ultramarines are bearing witness to this. We must get him to safety.’

Lorgar’s mask of ashes was already streaked with tears that cut trails in the dust. The two warriors renewed their grips, trying to bring the golden giant to his feet. For a wonder, instead of the expected slackness in his limbs, Lorgar spat onto the ground and rose with their aid. Both of them felt the trembling in Lorgar’s limbs. Neither of them spoke of it.

‘Guilliman,’ the primarch spoke his brother’s name with an envenomed tongue. A shrug of his shoulders pushed Argel Tal and Xaphen aside, immediately forgotten.

Emotion flooded back into Lorgar’s eyes. His gaze was locked on Guilliman, who returned it – passionless where Lorgar was inflamed.

‘Does it please you,’ the Word Bearer lord sneered, ‘to witness my shame?’

Guilliman didn’t answer, but Lorgar wouldn’t back down.

‘Does it please you?’ he pressed. ‘Do you enjoy seeing my efforts reduced to ashes while our father favours you?’

Guilliman breathed slowly, utterly unfazed. He spoke as if no question had been asked.

‘Our father entrusted me to inform you of one last matter.’

‘Then speak it and begone.’ Lorgar reached for his crozius on the ground, and dragged it up from the ash. Dust rained from its spiked head.

‘These five warriors of the Legiones Custodes,’ the Ultramarines’ primarch inclined his head to them. ‘They are not alone. Fifteen more remain on my flagship. Our father has ordered them to accompany you, brother.’

Argel Tal closed his eyes at this final indignity. After kneeling in the ashes of failure, after being told by the Emperor that all their achievements were worthless... Now this.

Lorgar laughed, the sound ripe with derision. His face was still smeared with dust.

‘I refuse. They are not needed.’

‘Our father believes otherwise,’ Guilliman said. ‘These warriors are to be his eyes as your Legion rejoins the Great Crusade.’

‘And does our father set hounds to watch over you? Do they reside in your precious empire of Ultramar, whispering of your every move? I see the shadow of a smile on your lips. These others do not know you as I do, brother. Our sons may not see the amusement in your eyes, but I am not blind to such nuance.’

‘You have always possessed an active imagination. Today has proven that.’

‘My devotion is my strength.’ Lorgar clenched his perfect teeth. ‘You have no heart, and no soul.’ A snort blackened his angelic features with a disgusted twist. ‘I pray that one day, you feel as I feel. Would you smile if one of Ultramar’s worlds died in fire? Tarentus? Espandor? Calth?’

‘You should return to your fleet, brother.’ Guilliman uncrossed his arms, revealing the golden aquila emblazoned across his chest. The eagle’s spread wings glinted with reflected sunlight. ‘You have much work to do.’

The blow came from nowhere. In its wake, the air rang with the echo of metal on metal, the clashing chime of a great cathedral bell. It was almost beautiful.

A primarch lay in the dust, surrounded by his warriors. None present had ever witnessed such a thing. Argel Tal’s bolter was raised, aimed at the ranks of Ultramarines who mirrored the gesture in kind. A hundred gun barrels levelled at a hundred thousand. The Seventh Captain needed three attempts to form words.

‘Hold your fire,’ he whispered into the general vox-channel. ‘Do not fire unless fired upon.’

Lorgar rested the immense crozius mace on his golden shoulder. His grey eyes flickered with uncertain emotion as he bared his teeth at the fallen Lord of Macragge.

‘You will never mock me again, brother. Is that understood?’

Guilliman’s rise was slow, almost hesitant. The golden eagle on his breastplate was split, a valley-crack running through its body.

‘You go too far,’ a softer voice said. Malcador, First Lord of Terra, still clutched his staff. It was all that kept him standing. ‘You go too far.’

‘Be silent, worm. The next time you bleed my patience dry, I will do more than slap you aside.’

Guilliman was on his feet now. He turned an expressionless face back to his brother.

‘Is your tantrum concluded, Lorgar? I must return to the Crusade.’

‘Come, my son,’ Kor Phaeron’s corpse-sneer was directed at Guilliman even as his words were meant for his primarch. ‘Come. We have much to discuss.’

Lorgar exhaled, and nodded once. The anger was fading, and no longer offered a shield against shame. ‘Yes. Back to the ships.’

‘All companies,’ Kor Phaeron spat across the vox, ‘return to orbit.’

‘Yes, First Captain,’ Argel Tal replied with the others. ‘By your word.’

Argel Tal’s Thunderhawk nestled in the shadow cast by a ruined wall. This blasted slice of architecture stood almost alone in the ash desert, the last lingering piece of a building that would never rise again. The captain walked with Xaphen and his subcommanders, Brother-Sergeants Malnor and Torgal. Squads embarked aboard their own gunships, despondent gatherings of warriors walking in near-silence.

‘There will be no resettlement,’ Torgal said. ‘The city is a tomb. There is nothing left to rebuild.’

‘It is noted in many historical archives,’ said Xaphen, ‘that even the most enlightened primitive cultures on pre-Imperial Terra would salt the earth after razing a city to the ground. Nothing would grow for generations. The people of the defeated city had no choice but to leave and begin new lives elsewhere, rather than rebuild.’

‘How fascinating,’ said Malnor.

‘Be quiet,’ Torgal grunted. ‘Please continue, Chaplain.’

‘I am sure none of us are blind to the echoes of those ancient events taking place here. How many orbital bombardments have we prosecuted ourselves? How many times have we battled in the ruins of a sky-blasted city? This was more than simple destruction. This was eradication. The Ultramarines did as they meant to do, and wiped every significant remnant of Khur’s culture from the face of the planet. A lesson for us, and a lesson for the people.’

Argel Tal led the group into the Thunderhawk’s open cargo bay. Their boots clanged up the ramp.

‘I had my bolter aimed at one of the XIII Legion,’ he said at last. ‘Aimed at his throat.’ He tapped the softer fibre bundle cabling in his own armour’s flexible layered collar. ‘If I’d pulled the trigger, he would be dead.’

‘You didn’t pull the trigger,’ Torgal said. ‘None of us did. That’s what matters.’

Argel Tal nodded to a squad of Seventh Company as they moved past, and punched the sealant plate, activating the ramps’ pistons. The hydraulics compacted, lifting the gangway back up in a slow machine-grind.

‘I didn’t,’ the captain said. ‘But I wanted to. After what they did to our city. After they saw us kneel in false shame. I wanted to, and I almost did. I gave the order to hold fire, while silently hoping someone would break it.’

Malnor didn’t move. Xaphen said nothing. After several seconds, Torgal offered an unsure ‘Sir?’

Argel Tal stared through the diminishing slit of daylight allowed by the rising ramp. Without a word, he thudded a fist onto the control plate, halting the seal. The captain moved to the gang ramp as it made its shuddering descent again.

‘Sir?’ Torgal tried again.

‘I saw something. Movement, in the distance, at the edge of the northern craters.’

His visor zoomed and refocused, panning across the uneven horizon. Nothing. Less than nothing.

‘Dust and dead rock,’ said Malnor.

‘I will return shortly.’ Argel Tal was already moving back down the ramp. He didn’t reach for the bolter at his hip or the twin blades sheathed on his back.

‘Captain,’ Xaphen said. ‘We were ordered to return to orbit. Is this necessary?’

‘Yes. Someone is alive out there.’

The stranger staggered over the broken ground. When her foot caught on a jutting hump of rock, she tumbled forward without a sound, crashing down hard. There she remained, prone in the ash, breathing in arrhythmic wheezes as she sought to summon the strength to stand again.

Judging by the bleeding sores on her palms and knees, it was a performance she’d repeated many times, over many days.

Her scarlet robes were filthy and shredded, though they were clearly of inexpensive weave even before they’d suffered the indignity of neglect. Argel Tal watched her from afar, as the lurching figure made her painful way across the blasted terrain. She seemed to have no specific direction in mind, often turning back on herself, and pausing to crouch and catch her breath after each stumble.

The Astartes moved closer. The stranger’s head came up immediately.

‘Who’s there?’ she called.

Argel Tal’s helm turned his answer into a machine-growl, with a waspish, sawing edge. ‘Who indeed?’

The captain kept his gauntleted hands in full view, palms outward in the Khurian custom of greeting another without hostility. The young woman looked in his direction, but made no eye contact. She stared vaguely off to Argel Tal’s side.

‘You’re one of them,’ the human recoiled, her feet betraying her on the uneven rock and sending her down to the dust again. She was younger than Argel Tal had first guessed, but the warrior was poor at estimating human age. Eighteen. Perhaps younger. Certainly no older.

‘I am Captain Argel Tal of the Seventh Assault Company, Serrated Sun Chapter, Seventeenth Legio Astartes.’

‘Seventeenth... You... you are not a false angel?’

‘I came to this world six decades ago,’ the captain said. ‘I was not false then, nor am I now.’

‘You are not a false angel,’ the girl said again. She was clearly hesitant, still not looking directly at the Astartes as she rose on shivering legs. Argel Tal took a step closer, offering his hand. The young woman didn’t take it. She didn’t even acknowledge it.

The warrior’s eye lens displays flickered with crude bio-sign analyses that Argel Tal had no need to see. The female’s condition was obvious from her jutting facial bones, the patches of raw, discoloured skin decorating her body, and her limbs shaking in a manner that had nothing to do with fear.

‘You are on the edge of malnutrition,’ said the captain, ‘and the wounds on your hands and legs are grievously infected.’

This last was an understatement. Given the spread of flesh corruption below the knees, it was a miracle the girl could still walk at all. Amputation was a very real possibility.

‘What colour is your armour, angel?’ she asked. ‘Answer me this question, I beg you.’

The Word Bearer withdrew his offered hand.

‘And you are blind,’ the warrior said. ‘Forgive me for not noticing before.’

‘I saw the city die,’ she said. ‘I saw it burning as flame rained from the stars. The sky-fire stole my eyes on the Day of Judgement.’

‘It’s called flash blindness. Your retinas are bleached by an oversaturation of light. Sight may return in time.’

The young woman let out a panicked yell as Argel Tal rested his gauntleted fingers on her skeletal shoulder. She flinched back, but the Astartes kept her standing, not allowing her to fall.

‘Please don’t kill me.’

‘I will not kill you. I am guiding you to safety. We saved this world sixty years ago, Khurian. We never meant to bring this upon you. What is your name?’

‘Cyrene. But... what colour is your armour, angel? You never answered me.’

Argel Tal looked down into her blinded eyes.

‘Please tell me,’ she repeated.

‘Grey.’

The girl burst into tears, and allowed herself to be half-carried back to the shelter of the Word Bearers gunship.

FIVE

The Old Ways

The Soul’s Fuel

New Eyes

With that fierce breed of arrogance found only in the hearts of the truly ignorant, it was called the Last War.

The Last War – the conflict to end all conflict.

‘I remember it,’ Kor Phaeron murmured. ‘I remember every day and night we fought, while around us, Colchis burned.’

‘Six years,’ Lorgar’s smile was rueful, his eyes cast down to the marble floor of his meditation chamber. ‘Six long, long years of civil war. An entire world torn asunder, in the name of faith.’

Kor Phaeron licked his sharpened incisors. The chamber was lit only by candlelight, and the cloying reek of ashy incense was thick in the air.

‘But we won,’ he said. Seated opposite the primarch, Kor Phaeron wore the grey robe of Colchis’s ruling priest caste. Without his Terminator plate, he was as Lorgar had always known him: an ageing man despite physical enhancement surgery, skeletal of form, fierce of eye.

Lorgar wore nothing but a loincloth of coarse weave, leaving his immense but androgynously slender torso bare. Ritual branding marks, shaped like Colchisian runes, bled freely down his back, while older burn-scars had scabbed over with crusty seals. Fresh weals from the lash striped his shoulders – the overlapping wounds forming a cobweb of self-flagellation.

Erebus sat with his primarch and commander on the floor, wearing the black robe of the Legion’s Chaplains. It was difficult to breathe with Lorgar’s blood in the air. Such a potent, salty scent was almost dizzying. Primarchs did not receive wounds in war. It was a genetic blasphemy for one to bleed.

‘Yes,’ Lorgar said, scratching the stubble marking his jawline. ‘We won. We won and we spread our faith across our home world.’ He moistened his golden lips with a bitten tongue. ‘And look where we find ourselves in the wake of that triumph. A century later, we are the lords of nothing, kings of the only Legion ever to fail my father.’

‘You always taught us, sire–’

‘Speak, Erebus.’

‘You always taught us to speak the truth, even if our voices shake.’

Lorgar raised his head, a smile creasing the corners of his split lips as he met the Chaplain’s solemn eyes. ‘And have we done that?’

There was no hesitation. ‘The Emperor is a god,’ said Erebus. ‘We’ve taken the truth to the stars, and seeded it across the Imperium. We should feel no shame for how we acted. You should feel no shame for it, sire.’

The primarch wiped the back his hand across his forehead, brushing aside a streak of ash to reveal the gold beneath. Since leaving Khur less than a week before, Lorgar smeared dust from Monarchia’s surface over his features with each new day. His kohl-ringed eyes were darkened further by exhaustion and narrowed by the burden of shame, but this single gesture was the closest either warrior had seen to their primarch cleaning himself since his humiliation before the Emperor.

‘It all began on Colchis,’ he said. ‘And we have been in error since then. My visions of the Emperor’s arrival. The battles of the Last War. It all began with the belief that divinity deserved worship, purely because it was divine.’ He laughed without humour. ‘Even now, I ache to think of the faith we destroyed to make room for our beliefs.’

‘Sire,’ Erebus leaned closer, his eyes rapt upon his primarch’s. ‘We stand on the precipice of destruction. The Legion... its faith is shattered. The Chaplains remain stoic, but they are beset by warriors who come to them with doubts. And with you lost to us, with no guiding light, those who carry the crozius have no answers to give those in grey.’

Lorgar blinked, flecks of ash from his eyelashes dusting down to his lap.

‘I have no answers to offer the Chaplains,’ he said.

‘Perhaps that is so,’ allowed Erebus, ‘but you are still too mired in regret. “Draw inspiration from the past. Use it to shape the future. Do not let it strangle you with shame”.’

Lorgar snorted, though there was no malice in the sound. ‘You quote my own writings back to me, Erebus?’

‘They hold true,’ said the Chaplain.

‘You dwell on thoughts of Colchis,’ Kor Phaeron’s eyes glinted with reflected candlelight. To Erebus, he looked desperate on some subtle, secret level. A kind of insatiable, unfeedable, hunger brightened the elder’s eyes, eating at him from within. Most undignified. ‘If there is something you wish to speak of, my son...’ Kor Phaeron’s thin hand fell upon Lorgar’s golden, whip-scarred shoulder, ‘...then speak of it.’

The primarch looked to his oldest ally, with the cadaverous stare that forever lingered on the man’s face. Yet Lorgar saw beyond it, in a way few others ever could, seeing the kindness, the care.

The paternal love for an aggrieved son.

Lorgar smiled with genuine warmth for the first time in three days, and rested his tattooed hand over his foster father’s weaker, too-human fingers.

‘Do you remember the Emperor’s arrival? The exultation in our hearts, that we were proved right? Do you recall the savage vindication after six years of righteous war?’

The older man nodded. ‘I do.’

The young man with the golden skin drops to one knee, silver tears sparkling on his flawless features like droplets of sacred oil.

‘I knew you’d come,’ he weeps the words. ‘I knew you’d come.’

The God in Gold offers his armoured hand to the kneeling young man. ‘I am the Emperor,’ he smiles, benevolence incarnate, glory radiating from him in a palpable aura that hurts the eyes of every onlooker. Thousands of people line the streets. Hundreds of priests, clad in the dove-grey of the Covenant’s ecclesiarchs, kneel with Lorgar before the coming of the God-Emperor.

‘I know who you are,’ the golden primarch says through his dignified tears. ‘I have dreamed of you for years, foreseeing this moment. Father, Emperor, my lord... We are the Covenant of Colchis, and we have won this world through your worship, for the glory of your name.’

Lorgar turned to meet Kor Phaeron’s eyes.

‘That morning. As I knelt before the Emperor, with the home world’s holy caste chanting... With the red rock domes of Vharadesh made amber by the rising dawn. Did you see as I saw?’

Kor Phaeron looked away. ‘You will not like the answer, Lorgar.’

‘I have liked nothing of late, yet I still wish to know.’ He laughed suddenly, softly. ‘Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.’

‘I saw a god in golden armour,’ Kor Phaeron said. ‘The very image of you, but aged in ways I couldn’t grasp. I never saw the figure as a benevolent one. His psychic presence pained my eyes, and he smelled of bloodshed, domination, and the many worlds already burned to ash in his wake. Even then, I feared we’d waged six years of war in error, butchering a true faith to replace it with a false one. In his eyes – eyes so like yours – I saw the promise of avarice, the hunger of greed. Everyone else saw nothing but hope. Even you... So I thought, perhaps, I had seen wrong. I trusted your heart, Lorgar. Not my own.’

Lorgar nodded, his contemplative eyes turning away again. Erebus listened in silence, for rare were the moments that any Word Bearer received insight into the primarch’s life before the Legion.

‘Of all the Emperor’s sons,’ Kor Phaeron said, ‘you are the one that most resembles your father in face and form. But you could never commit acts of cruelty and destruction while wearing a smile. The others, your brothers, can do this. They take after the Emperor in that way, where you do not.’

Lorgar lowered his gaze.

‘Even Magnus?’ he asked.

A giant stands with the Emperor – a figure robed in the azure of off-world oceans. One eye stares down at the kneeling figure. The other eye is lost, a scarred crater marking its lack.

‘Greetings, Lorgar,’ says the muscled giant. He is taller even than the God in Gold, and his long hair is styled in a scarlet mane, like that of a prideland lion. ‘I am Magnus. Your brother.’

‘Even Magnus.’ Kor Phaeron seemed reluctant to admit it. His features remained tense. ‘Though I respect him greatly, there is a deep cruelty, born of impatience, threaded through his core. I saw it in his face that day, and each meeting since.’

Lorgar looked down at his hands, ash-stained with crescent moons of blood beneath the fingernails.

‘We are all our father’s sons,’ he said.

‘You are all facets of the Emperor,’ Kor Phaeron amended. ‘You are aspects pulled from a genetic primer. The Lion is your father’s rationality – his analytical skill – unburdened by conscience. Magnus is his psychic potential and eager mind, unrestrained by patience. Russ is his ferocity, untempered by reason. Even Horus...’

‘Go on,’ Lorgar said, looking up now. ‘What of Horus?’

‘The Emperor’s ambition, unshaped by humility. Think of all the worlds where our Legion waged war alongside the Luna Wolves. You’ve seen it as well as I have. Horus hides his arrogance, but it is there – a layer beneath his skin, a shroud around his soul. Pride beats through his body like blood.’

‘And Guilliman?’ Lorgar let his hands rest on his knees again. A smile inched across his features.

‘Guilliman.’ Kor Phaeron’s narrow lips moulded into a grimace, opposing his primarch’s smirk. ‘Guilliman is your father’s echo, heart and soul. If all else went wrong, he would be heir to the empire. Horus is the brightest star and you carry your father’s face, but Guilliman’s heart and soul are cast in the Emperor’s image.’

Lorgar nodded, still smiling to see his advisor’s bitterness. ‘My Macraggian brother is as easy to read as an open book,’ he said. ‘But what of me, Kor Phaeron? Surely I bear more than my father’s features. What aspect of the Imperial avatar have I inherited?’

‘Sire?’ interrupted Erebus. ‘If I may?’

Lorgar granted permission with a tilt of his head. Ever the statesman, Erebus needed no time to compose himself, or his answer.

‘You embody the Emperor’s hope. You are his belief in a greater way of life, and his desire to raise humanity to achieve its greatest potential. You devote yourself to these ends, forever selfless, utterly faithful, striving for the betterment of all.’

Amusement gleamed in the primarch’s eyes – eyes so like the Emperor’s own.

‘Poetic, but indulgent, Erebus. What of my failings? If I am not proud like Horus Lupercal, nor impatient like Magnus the Red... What will history say of Lorgar Aurelian?’

Erebus’s solemn facade cracked. A moment of doubt flashed across his features, and he glanced to Kor Phaeron. The gesture drew a whispered chuckle from their primarch.

‘You are both conspirators,’ he laughed, the sound soft. ‘Do not fear my wrath. I am enjoying this game. It is enlightening. So enlighten me, this last time.’

‘Sire,’ Kor Phaeron began, but Lorgar silenced him, reaching to touch his foster father’s hand as it rested upon his shoulder.

‘No. You know better than that, Kor. I am not “sire”. Never to you.’

‘History will say that if the Seventeenth Primarch had one weakness, it was his faith in others. His selfless devotion and unbreakable loyalty caused him grief beyond the capacity of a mortal heart to contain. He trusted too easily, and too deeply.’

Lorgar said nothing for several moments, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. His shoulders rose and fell with his quiet breaths, the whip-welts inflamed and angry, burning with the faint sheen of sweat dusting his body. Fresher brand marks burnt into the flesh of his back were scabbing over now.

At last, he spoke, his eyes narrowed to slits.

‘My father was wrong about me. I am not a general like my brothers. And I refuse that destiny. I will not blindly walk the same paths they already tread. I will never understand tactics and logistics with the effortless ease of Guilliman or the Lion. I will never possess the skill with a blade shown by Fulgrim or the Khan. Am I diminished because I recognise my faults? I do not believe so.’

He looked down at his hands once more. Fine-fingered, barely callused, the hands of an artist or a poet. His mace – the black iron crozius arcanum – was as much a sceptre of office as it was a weapon.

‘Is that so wrong?’ he asked his closest advisors. ‘Is it so wrong of me to walk the ways of a visionary, a seeker, rather than a simple soldier? What is it within my father that renders him so thirsty for blood? Why is destruction the answer to every question he is asked?’

Kor Phaeron clutched Lorgar’s shoulder tighter. ‘Because, my son, he is gravely flawed. He is an imperfect god.’

The primarch met his foster father’s eyes in the chamber’s gloom, the glance sharp and cold. ‘Do not say what you are about to say.’

‘Lorgar...’ Kor Phaeron tried, but the primarch’s glare silenced him. His eyes were sharp with a plea, not with fury.

‘Do not say it,’ whispered Lorgar. ‘Do not say we tore our home world apart all those years ago in the name of false worship. I cannot live with that. It is one thing for the Emperor to spit on all we have achieved as a Legion, but this is different. Can you piss upon the Covenant and the peaceful Colchis we created after six years of civil war? Will you name my father a false god?’

‘Speak the truth,’ Erebus cut in, ‘even if your voice shakes.’

Lorgar lowered his ash-streaked face into his filthy hands. In that moment, Erebus and Kor Phaeron locked eyes. The latter nodded to the former, and the First Captain spoke again.

‘You know it is true, Lorgar. I would never lie to you. This is something we must all face. We must atone for this sin.’

‘The Chaplains stand with you, sire.’ Erebus added his voice to Kor Phaeron’s. ‘The heart of every warrior-priest in the Legion beats in rhythm with yours. We stand ready to act upon your word.’

Lorgar shrugged off their platitudes, as well as his foster father’s reassuring hand. The movement split the healing scabs on his shoulder blades, birthing trickle-rivers of dark blood weeping down his golden back.

‘You are calling my entire life a lie.’

‘I am saying we were wrong, my son. That’s all.’ Kor Phaeron dipped his gnarled hand into the bowl of ash by Lorgar’s side. Monarchia’s dust spilled through his curled fingers, stinking of charred rock and failure. ‘We prayed to the wrong god for the right reasons, and Monarchia paid the price for our mistake. But it is never too late to atone. We purged our home world of the Old Faith, and now you fear as we all fear: Colchis prospered under the old ways and its legends, until we ravaged it in the name of a lie.’

‘This is heresy,’ Lorgar trembled, barely containing his emotion.

‘It is atonement, my son.’ Kor Phaeron shook his head. ‘We’ve been wrong for so long. We must purge the root of our errors. The source lies on Colchis.’

‘Enough.’ The ash on Lorgar’s cheeks was split by trailing tears. ‘Both of you... Leave me.’

Erebus rose to obey, but Kor Phaeron rested his hand on the primarch’s shoulder once more. ‘I am disappointed in you, boy. To be so proud that you cannot face up to failure and make amends.’

Lorgar clenched his perfect teeth, saliva glistening on his lips. ‘You want to return to Colchis, the cradle of our Legion, and apologise for two million deaths, six years of war, and devoting an entire world to worshipping an unworthy god for almost a century?’

‘Yes,’ Kor Phaeron said, ‘because it is the mark of greatness to deal with one’s mistakes. We will reforge Colchis, as well as every world we have conquered since we first left our home world to join the Great Crusade.’

‘And every world we take in the future,’ said Erebus, ‘must follow a new faith, rather than worship the Emperor.’

‘There is no new faith! You both preach madness. Do you think my Legion kneeling in the dust shames me? Monachia was nothing compared to the rape of my own home world over a lie?’

‘The truth cares nothing for what we wish, sire,’ said Erebus. ‘The truth simply is.’

‘You studied the Old Faith,’ Kor Phaeron said. ‘You believed it yourself as a young seeker, before your visions of the Emperor’s arrival. You know the way to uncover whether it was a false faith, or a pure one.’

Lorgar wiped drying silver tears from his face. ‘You want us to chase a myth across the stars.’ His eyes flicked between them both, bright and focused. ‘Let us speak plainly now, more than ever before. You want us to embark on a fool’s odyssey through the galaxy, in search of the very gods we’ve spent decades denying.’

Lorgar laughed, the sound rich with disgust. ‘I am right, aren’t I? You want us to undertake the Pilgrimage.’

‘We are nothing without faith, sire,’ said Erebus.

‘Humanity,’ Kor Phaeron pressed his palms together in prayer, ‘must have faith. Nothing unites mankind the way religion inspires unity. No conflict rages as fiercely as a holy war. No warrior kills with the conviction of a crusader. Nothing in life breeds bonds and ambitions greater than the ties and dreams forged by faith. Religion brings hope, unification, law and purpose. The foundations of civilisation itself. Faith is nothing less than the pillar of a sentient species, raising it above the beast, the automaton, and the alien.’

Erebus drew his gladius in a smooth motion, reversing the grip and offering the sword to Lorgar.

‘Sire, if you have truly abandoned your beliefs, then take this blade and end my life now. If you believe there is no truth in the old ways – if you believe mankind will prosper without faith, then carve the two hearts from my chest. I have no wish to live if every principle guiding our Legion lies broken at your feet.’

Lorgar took the blade in a trembling hand. Turning it this way and that, he stared at his candlelit reflection – a visage of gold in the silver steel.

‘Erebus,’ he said. ‘My wisest, noblest son. My faith is wounded, but my beliefs remain. Rise from your knees. All is well.’

The Chaplain obeyed, stoic as ever, resuming his position across from Lorgar.

‘Mankind needs faith,’ said the primarch. ‘But faith must be true, or it will lead to devastation – as our brothers in the Thirteenth Legion have so viciously proved. And... and as we learned ourselves in six years of unconscionable war before the Emperor came to Colchis. It is time we learned from our mistakes. It is time I learned from my mistakes.’

‘There is one other to whom you can turn,’ Kor Phaeron pressed on, supporting his primarch’s rising resolution, ‘a brother with whom you debated the nature of the universe. You have often spoken of those nights – discussing philosophy and faith in the Emperor’s own palace. You know of whom I speak.’

Erebus nodded at the first captain’s words. ‘He may hold the key to proof, sire. If the Old Faith has a core of fact at its heart, he may know where to begin the journey.’

‘Magnus,’ Lorgar said the name in contemplative softness. It made sense. His brother, whose psychic strength and fierce intelligence put all other minds to shame. They’d spoken often in the Hall of Leng – that cold, regal chamber on distant Terra – arguing with smiles and scrolls over the nature of the universe.

‘It will be done. I will meet with Magnus.’

Kor Phaeron smiled at last. Erebus bowed his head, as Lorgar continued.

‘And if our suspicions prove correct, we will undertake the Pilgrimage. We must know if our Colchisian forefathers spoke the truth when they founded their faith. But we must also move with caution. The Emperor’s hounds prowl around our pack, and as wise as my father is, he has shown his blindness to the underlying truths of the universe.’

Kor Phaeron now bowed as well, mirroring Erebus. ‘Lorgar. My son. This will be our atonement. We can enlighten humanity with this truth, and wash away the stains of the past. In truth... I have feared this moment for some time.’

Lorgar licked his cracked lips. They tasted of ash. ‘If that is so, why have you waited to share your worries? Hindsight is a powerful vindicator, my friend, but none of us saw this coming. Not you, not I.’

Kor Phaeron’s eyes fairly gleamed. The elder leaned forward, as if the scent of some triumphant hunt filled his senses.

‘I have something I must confess, great lord,’ he said. ‘A truth that must grace your ears now, for the time has come.’

Lorgar turned to his foster father with threatening slowness. ‘I do not like your tone,’ he said.

‘Sire, my primarch, I tell no lie when I say I have feared this day would come. I took the smallest, most humble measures against its arrival, and–’

The words died in his throat, trapped there by his master’s hand. Lorgar squeezed the older man’s thin, tiny neck, cutting off speech and air with the barest use of strength. Erebus tensed, his eyes moving between the two figures.

Lorgar pulled Kor Phaeron closer, breathing deeply as if to mock the elder’s strangled gasps.

‘No more revelations, Kor Phaeron. Have we not confessed to enough of our own flaws this night?’

He loosened his grip enough for Kor Phaeron to rasp out the words.

‘Davin, seventeen years ago,’ the elder whispered. ‘Corossa, twenty-nine years ago. Uvander, eight years ago...’

‘Compliant worlds,’ Lorgar hissed into his foster father’s face. ‘Worlds where you yourself remained behind to begin their education in the Imperial Truth.’

‘Compliant... with the Imperial Truth. But embers of... cultures... were allowed to... remain.’

‘What. Embers.’ Lorgar growled.

‘Beliefs... that matched... the Old Faith... of home... I could not let... potential... truths... die...’

‘Can I not control my own warriors?’ Lorgar took a shuddering breath, and something clicked quietly inside Kor Phaeron’s neck. ‘Am I my brother Curze, struggling to control a Legion of liars and deceivers?’

‘Lord, I... I...’ Kor Phaeron’s eyes were rolling back into his skull. His tongue was dark now, slapping against his thin lips.

‘Sire,’ Erebus began. ‘Sire, you’ll kill him.’

Lorgar stared at Erebus for several moments, and the Chaplain wasn’t sure his liege lord even recognised him.

‘Yes,’ Lorgar said at last. ‘Yes. I could.’ He opened his fingers, letting Kor Phaeron collapse to the chamber floor in a heap of robed limbs. ‘But I will not.’

‘My lord...’ the elder heaved in air through blue lips. ‘Much to be learned... from those cultures... They are all echoes of ancestral human faith... Like you... I am no butcher... I wished to save... the lore of the species...’

‘It is a time of many revelations,’ the primarch sighed. ‘And I am not blind to why you did this, Kor Phaeron. Would that I had showed the same forethought and mercy.’

It was Erebus who replied. ‘You have asked the question yourself, sire. What if there is truth in the cultures we destroy? Kor Phaeron saved a handful, but the Great Crusade has annihilated thousands. What if we are repeating the sin of Colchis over and over and over again?’

‘And why,’ Kor Phaeron managed a faint smile as he touched his discoloured throat, ‘do so many cultures share the same beliefs as our own home world? Surely that suggests an underlying truth...’

The Seventeenth Primarch nodded, the motion slow and sincere. Already, even before this latest confession, his mind was turning to the future, tuning in to the endless possibilities. This was his genetic gift in action: a thinker, a dreamer, where his brothers were warriors and slayers.

‘We have worshipped at the wrong altar for over a hundred years,’ said Kor Phaeron, his voice returning.

Lorgar sifted through the bowl of ash, clutching another handful and smearing it across his face.

‘Yes,’ he said, with strength returning to his voice. ‘We have. Erebus?’

‘At your command, sire.’

‘Take my words to the Chaplains, tell them all of what transpires in the days I remain sequestered here. They deserve to know their primarch’s heart. And when you return for further counsel tomorrow, please bring me parchment and a pen. I have much to write. It will take days. Weeks. But it must be written, and I will not leave my isolation until it is done. You, both of you, will help me compose this great work.’

‘What work, sire?’

Lorgar smiled, and never had he looked so much like his father.

‘The new Word.’

SIX

Kale the Servitor

Unfocused

Warrior-Priest

The girl found it difficult to sleep, with no grasp of where day ended and night began. There was never a cessation of sound; the room forever rumbled, even if only faintly, with tremors from the distant engines. With darkness and sound both constant, she wiled away the hours sitting upon her bed, doing nothing, staring at nothing, hearing nothing except for the occasional voice pass her door.

Blindness brought a hundred perceptive difficulties, but foremost among them was boredom. Cyrene had been a prolific reader and her job necessitated a fair amount of travel, seeing all of the public sights in the city. With her eyes ruined, both those paths were barred in any meaningful sense.

In her darker moments, she wondered at destiny’s cruel sense of humour. To be chosen by the Astartes, to dwell among the angels of the Emperor... To walk the hallways of their great iron warship, smelling the sweat and machine oil... but seeing nothing at all.

Oh, yes. Hilarious.

Her first hours aboard had been the hardest, but at least they’d been eventful. During a physical examination in a painfully cold chamber, with needles sticking into the wasted muscles of her legs and arms, Cyrene had listened to one of the angels explain about bleached retinal pigment, and how malnutrition affected the organs and muscles. She’d tried to focus on the angel’s words, but her mind wandered as she sought to embrace what had happened, and where she now found herself.

The last two months on the surface had not been kind to her. The wandering groups of bandits in the foothills around the city had no regard for the sacred shuhl robe, or its traditions of respect.

‘Our world has ended,’ one of them had laughed. ‘The old ways no longer matter.’

Cyrene had never seen him, but when she slept, her mind conjured faces he might have worn. Cruel, mocking faces.

During her medical examination, she couldn’t stop shivering, no matter how she tensed her muscles to resist. The angels’ solar-sailing vessel was cold enough to make her teeth clatter together when she tried to shape words, and she wondered if her breath was misting as it left her lips.

‘Do you understand?’ the angel had asked.

‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Yes, I understand.’ And then, ‘Thank you, angel.’

Soon, other humans came to assist her. They smelled of spicy incense and spoke in careful, serious voices.

They walked for some time. It could have been five minutes or thirty – without her eyes, everything felt stretched and slow. The corridors sounded busy. Occasionally she’d hear the machine-snarls of an angel’s armour joints as the warrior walked past. Much more frequently, she heard the swish of robes.

‘Who are you?’ she asked as they travelled.

‘Servants,’ one man replied.

‘We serve the Bearers of the Word,’ said the other.

On they walked. Time passed, the seconds marked by footsteps, the minutes by voices passing by.

‘This is your chamber,’ one of her guides said, and proceeded to walk her around a room, placing her shaking fingers on the bed, the walls, the door release controls. A patient tour of her new home. Her new cell.

‘Thank you,’ she said. The room was not large, and only scarcely furnished. She was far from comfortable, but Cyrene wasn’t worried about being left alone here. It would be a blessing of sorts.

‘Be well,’ the two men said in unison.

‘What are your names?’ she asked.

The reply she received was the hiss-thud of the automatic door sealing closed.

Cyrene sat on the bed – it was a hard, thin mattress not far removed from a prisoner’s cot – and commenced her long, sensory-deprived existence of doing absolutely nothing.

The only break in her daily monotonies came from a servitor, who was remarkably reluctant (or unable) to speak in any detail, bringing her three meals of gruel-like, chemical paste a day.

‘This is disgusting,’ she remarked once, summoning up a frail smile. ‘Am I to assume it consists of many nutrients and other beneficial things?’

‘Yes,’ was the dead-voiced reply.

‘Do you eat it yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am sorry to hear that.’

Silence.

‘You don’t speak much.’

‘No.’

‘What is your name?’ Cyrene tried at last.

Silence.

‘Who were you?’ she asked. Cyrene was inured to servitors; the Imperium had left behind the secrets of their construction sixty years before, and they were commonplace in Monarchia. Penance was the term used for the fate suffered by heretics and criminals. Either way, it amounted to the same. The sinner’s mind was scrubbed of all vitality, and bionics were installed within the body to increase its strength or enhance its utility.

Silence met her question.

‘Before you were made into this,’ she tried to make her smile more friendly. ‘Who were you?’

‘No.’

‘No, you don’t recall, or no, you won’t tell me?’

‘No.’

Cyrene sighed. ‘Fine. Go, then. See you tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ it replied. Feet shuffled. The door hissed closed again.

‘I shall name you Kale,’ she said to the empty room.

Xaphen had visited her twice since the first day, and Argel Tal had come three times. Each meeting with the captain had played out much the same as the one preceding it: with stilted conversation and awkward silences. From what Cyrene gathered, the Legion’s fleet was en route to a world they were supposed to conquer, but were denied the order to begin the assault.

‘Why?’ she’d asked, glad to have even this uncomfortable company.

‘Aurelian remains in seclusion,’ Argel Tal had said.

‘Aurelian?’

‘A name for our primarch, spoken by few outside the Legion. It is Colchisian, the language of our home world.’

‘It’s strange,’ Cyrene confessed, ‘to have a nickname for a god.’

Argel Tal fell silent for some time. ‘A primarch is not a god. Sometimes the sons of gods, despite the power they inherit, are demigods. And it is not a “nickname”. It is a term of kinship, used only among family. It translates loosely as “the gold”.

‘You said he remains secluded.’

‘Yes. Within his chambers on our flagship, Fidelitas Lex.’

‘Does he hide from you?’

She heard the Astartes swallow. ‘I am not entirely comfortable with this line of discussion, Cyrene. Let us just say that he has much to contemplate. The God-Emperor’s judgement is a burden upon many souls. The primarch suffers as we suffer.’

Cyrene thought long and hard before what she said next. ‘Argel Tal?’

‘Yes, Cyrene.’

‘You do not sound upset. You don’t sound as if you’re suffering.’

‘Do I not?’

‘No. You sound angry.’

‘I see.’

‘Are you angry at the Emperor for what he did to you?’

‘I have to go,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I am summoned.’ The Astartes rose to his feet.

‘I heard no summons,’ the young woman said. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you.’

Argel Tal walked from the room without another word. It would be four days before she had company again.

Argel Tal regarded the headless body with momentary consternation. He hadn’t meant to do that.

Decapitated, the servitor toppled to its side and lay on the floor of the iron cage, shivering in fitful spasm. The captain ignored its lifeless twitching, instead focusing on the slack-mouthed head that had flown between the iron cage’s bars and thudded against the wall of the practice chamber. It watched him now, its dead eyes trembling, its augmented maw open – tongueless, with a jawbone of bronze plating.

‘Was that necessary?’ Torgal asked. The sergeant was stripped to the waist, his muscled torso a geography of swollen, layered muscles, formed by the biological tectonics at work in his genetic code. The fused ribcage robbed him of much of his humanity, as did the lumpen physicality of his musculature. If there was anything that could be considered handsome in the laboratory-wrought physiques of the Astartes subspecies, it was lacking in Torgal. Scars decorated much of his dark flesh: ritual brandings, tattooed Colchisian scripture, and the slitted valleys from carving blades that found their marks over the years.

Argel Tal lowered the practice gladius. The smeared redness along its length reflected the overhead lighting in wet flashes.

‘I am unfocused,’ he said.

‘I noticed, sir. So did the training servitor.’

‘Two weeks now. Two weeks of sitting in orbit, doing nothing. Two weeks of Aurelian remaining in isolation. I was not made to deal with this, brother.’

Argel Tal hit the release pad, opening the training cage’s hemispheres and stepping from its boundaries. With a grunt, he cast his bloodied sword to the ground. It skidded, rasping along the floor and coming to a rest by the dead slave.

‘It was my turn next,’ Torgal muttered, looking down at the slain slave with its six bionic arms. Each one ended in a blade. None bore traces of blood.

Argel Tal wiped sweat from the back of his neck, and tossed the towel onto a nearby bench. He was only half-paying attention to the maintenance servitors dragging the slain slave away for incineration.

‘I spoke with Cyrene,’ he said, ‘several days ago.’

‘So I heard. I’ve been thinking of meeting with her myself. You don’t find her a calming influence?’

‘She sees too much,’ said Argel Tal.

‘How ironic.’

‘I’m serious,’ the captain said. ‘She asked if I was angry with the Emperor. How am I supposed to answer that?’

Torgal’s glance took in the rest of Seventh Company’s practice chamber. The battle-brothers training elsewhere knew well enough to give their leader a respectful space when his humours were unbalanced. Wooden staves clacked against each other; fist fighting spars played out to the sound of meaty thumps; powered force cages muted the sounds of clashing blades within. He turned back to the captain.

‘You could answer it with the truth.’

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘The truth feels foul on the tongue. I won’t speak it.’

‘Others will speak it, brother.’

‘Others? Like you?’

Torgal shrugged a bare shoulder. ‘I am not ashamed to be angry, Argel Tal. We were wronged, and we’ve been walking the wrong path.’

Argel Tal stretched, working out the stiffness in his shoulder muscles. He took a moment to compose his reply. Torgal was a loudmouth, and he knew whatever he said would be carried to the rest of the company, perhaps even across to the rest of the Serrated Sun.

‘There’s more to this than whether the Emperor wronged us or not. We are a Legion founded on faith, and we find ourselves faithless. Anger is natural, but it is no answer. I will wait for the primarch to return to us, and I will hear his wisdom before I decide my path.’

Torgal couldn’t help but smile. ‘Listen to yourself. Are you sure you don’t want to carry a crozius? I’m sure Erebus would consider training you again. I’ve heard him express his regret to Xaphen more than once.’

‘You are an insidious presence in my life, brother.’ The captain’s scowl darkened his otherwise handsome features. His eyes were the blue of Colchisian summer skies, and his face – unscarred like so many of his brethren – still showed echoes of the human he might have been.

‘That ship sailed a long time ago,’ the captain said. ‘I made my choice, and the First Chaplain made his.’

‘But–’

‘Enough, Torgal. Old wounds can still ache. Has there been word of the primarch’s return?’

Torgal regarded Argel Tal closely, as if seeking something hidden in his eyes. ‘Not that I’m aware of. Why do you ask?’

‘You know why. You’ve not heard anything from the Chaplain gatherings?’

Torgal shook his head. ‘They’re bound by oaths of secrecy that a few innocent questions won’t break. Have you spoken with Xaphen?’

‘Many times, and he reveals little. Erebus has the primarch’s ear, and delivers Aurelian’s words down to the warrior-priests at their conclaves. Xaphen promises we’ll be enlightened soon. The primarch’s seclusion will be a matter of weeks, not months.’

‘Do you believe that?’ Torgal asked.

Argel Tal laughed, the sound bitter and short. ‘Knowing what to believe is the greatest threat we face.’

Cyrene was asleep the next time she received a worthwhile visitor. The sound of her door sliding open roused her to a layer of rest slightly above unconsciousness.

‘Go away, Kale. I’m not hungry.’ She rolled over and covered her head with the ungenerous pillow. Evidently the monkish, scarce comforts of the Legion’s warriors extended to their servants, as well.

‘Kale?’ asked a deep, resonant voice.

Cyrene removed the pillow. Coppery saliva tingled under her tongue, and her heart beat a touch faster.

‘Hello?’ she called.

‘Who is Kale?’ the voice asked.

Cyrene sat up, her blind eyes flicking left and right in futile instinct. ‘Kale is the servitor that brings me my meals.’

‘You named your servitor?’

‘It was the name of a meat vendor in the Tophet Plaza. He was lynched for selling dog meat instead of lamb, and sentenced to penance for his deceit.’

‘I see. Appropriate, then.’

The stranger moved around the cell with the light whisper of robes. Cyrene could feel the change in the air – the newcomer was a hulking figure, imposing beyond her blindness.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘I thought you would recognise my voice. It is Xaphen.’

‘Oh. Angels sound very similar to me. All of your voices are so low. Hello, Chaplain.’

‘Hello again, shuhl-asha.’

She kept the wince from her face. Even the respectful term for her trade shamed her, when spoken in an angel’s voice. ‘Where is Argel Tal?’

Xaphen growled, like a desert jackal at bay. It took a few seconds for Cyrene to realise it was a chuckle.

‘The captain is attending a gathering of Legion commanders.’

‘Why are you not with him?’

‘Because I am not a commander, and I had my own duties to attend to. A conclave of the Chaplain brotherhood, aboard the Inviolate Sanctity.’

‘Argel Tal told me of those.’

Xaphen’s smile infected his tone, rendering the words almost kindly. ‘Did he? And what did he tell you?’

‘That the primarch speaks to one named Erebus, and Erebus carries the lord’s words to the warrior-priests.’

‘True enough, shuhl-asha. I was told your vision is still not showing signs of return. The adepts are considering augmetic replacements.’

‘Replacing my eyes?’ She felt her skin crawl. ‘I... I wish to wait, to see if they heal.’

‘It is your choice. Augmetics of delicate organs are specialised and rare. If you wish to have them, there would be a wait of several weeks before they were ready for implantation.’

The angel’s clinical tone was curiously unnerving. He delivered his blunt, kindly sentences with all the care of a hammer to the head.

‘Why are they considering it?’ Cyrene asked.

‘Because Argel Tal asked it of them. The Apothecarion on board De Profundis has the resources necessary for human augmentation, when it comes to valued mortal crew.’

‘But I am of no value.’ She didn’t speak from self-pity, merely gave voice to her confusion. ‘I do not know how I could ever serve the Legion.’

‘No?’ Xaphen said nothing for a several moments. Perhaps he looked around the featureless chamber. His voice was gentler when it returned. ‘Forgive my laxity in visiting you, shuhl-asha. The last days have been difficult. Allow me to cast some light on your situation.’

‘Am I a slave?’

‘What? No.’

‘Am I a servant?’

The angel chuckled. ‘Let me finish.’

‘Forgive me, Chaplain.’

‘Several other Chapters encountered lost souls in Monarchia’s graveyard. You were not the only Khurian to join the Legion when we left, but you were the only one taken in by the Chapter of the Serrated Sun. You ask how you could serve us. I would argue that you already do. Argel Tal is my brother, and I know the paths his thoughts take. He brought you as a reminder, a symbol of the past. You are the living memorial of our Legion’s greatest failure.’

‘The perfect city was no den of sin.’ She tried to keep the offence from her voice. ‘Why do you always speak of it so?’

A pause. The slow release of a deep breath. ‘The city itself was not the sin. It was what the city represented. I have told you what the God-Emperor decreed that day. You have a keen mind, girl. Do not ask for answers you can shape yourself. Now, this desire to serve the Legion: tell me why it matters to you.’

She’d not really considered it before. It seemed the only course to walk, given her presence here. Yet there was a deeper reason, a desire that pulled at her in the uncountable hours she sat in silence.

‘I owe my life to the Legion,’ she said, ‘and I wish to serve because it feels right that I should. It would be fair.’

‘Is that all?’

She shook his head, with no idea if Xaphen was even looking at her. ‘No. I confess I am also lonely, and very bored.’

Xaphen chuckled again. ‘Then we will deal with that. Were you one of the faithful on Khur?’

Cyrene hesitated, and moistened dry lips with a nervous tongue. ‘I listened to the Speakers of the Word preaching in the plazas, and the daily prayers echoing across the city. Nothing stirred my heart. I believed, and I knew the scriptures, but I did not...’

‘Care.’

Cyrene nodded. Her throat gave a sticky click as she took a breath. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. She couldn’t help the twitch when Xaphen’s hand rested heavy on her shoulder.

‘I’m sorry,’ the young woman said, ‘for my lack of faith.’

‘Don’t be. You were right, Cyrene.’

‘I... what?’

‘You showed insight, and the strength to doubt conventional belief. Over countless centuries, humanity has achieved great things in the name of faith. History teaches us this. Faith is the fuel for the soul’s journey. Without belief in greater ideals, we are incomplete – the union of the spirit with the flesh is what raises us above beasts and inhumans. But misplaced worship? To bow down before an unworthy idol? This is a sin of the gravest ignorance. And that is a sin you’ve never been guilty of. Be proud of that, lady.’

Warmth flooded through her, to earn the respect of an angel like this. Fervour filled her voice for the first time since the death of her city.

‘How could anyone bow before an unworthy idol?’

Another pause. A hesitation, before sighing out the words. ‘Perhaps they were deceived. Perhaps they saw divinity and believed it was worthy of worship purely because it was divine.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Her eyebrows met in confusion above unseeing eyes. ‘There’s nothing else to worship but the divine. There are no gods but the Emperor.’

She heard Xaphen take a breath. When the Chaplain spoke again, his voice was softer still.

‘Are you so certain, Cyrene?’

SEVEN

Compliance

Swords of Red Iron

Carthage

The world had two names, only one of which mattered. The first was used by the native population – a name that would soon be lost in history’s pages. The second was the name imposed by its conquerors, which would hold for centuries, branding an Imperial identity upon a dead planet.

The globe span in the void with an orbit of slow grace comparable to distant Terra, and its blue-green surface marked it as a younger sibling of that most venerated world. Where Terra’s seas were burned dry from centuries of war and tectonic upheaval, the oceans of Forty-Seven Sixteen were rich with salt-surviving life, and deep beyond poetic imagining. Perhaps the future would bring a need for this world to be a bastion-metropolis akin to Terra, where the buried earth choked beneath palaces and castles and dense hive towers. For now, its landmasses wore the green and brown of unspoiled wilderness, the white and grey of mountain ranges. Cities of crystal and silver, spires that speared the sky from almost laughably fragile foundations, dotted the continents. Each city was linked by well-worn trade roads – freight veins with traffic for blood.

This was Forty-Seven Sixteen, the sixteenth world ready to be brought to compliance by the 47th Expedition.

Four weeks after the Word Bearers fleet sailed from the ruin of Khur, they translated in-system here, prowling around Forty-Seven Sixteen with the predatory promise of ancient seaborne raiders.

The grey warships remained in orbit for eight hours, engines dead, doing nothing at all.

At the ninth hour, cheers echoed throughout every vessel in the fleet. The primarch appeared on the command deck of Fidelitas Lex, flanked by Erebus and Kor Phaeron. Both Astartes wore their battle armour – the former in the grey of the Legion, the latter in his brutal warplate of the Terminator elite.

A live pict-feed carried the image to the bridge of every warship bearing Legion colours, as thousands upon thousands of warriors watched their primarch return.

Clad in sleek armour of granite grey, somehow all the more regal for the lack of ostentation, Lorgar’s crooked smile spoke of some hidden amusement he ached to share with his sons.

‘I hope you will all forgive my absence,’ the words melted into a chuckle. ‘And I trust you have enjoyed this time of contemplation and respite.’

Around him, Astartes warriors broke into laughter. Kor Phaeron lowered his hollow eyes, giving a bleak smirk. Even Erebus smiled.

‘My sons, the past is the past and we look now to the future.’ In Lorgar’s grey fist was his crozius mace. He carried it over his shoulder with casual ease. ‘Those of you assigned to other expedition fleets will be granted leave to return to them shortly, but first, we will renew our bonds of brotherhood as a united Legion.’

Another cheer rang out across the decks of over a hundred of ships.

‘This is Forty-Seven Sixteen,’ Lorgar’s contemplative smile remained, though melancholy robbed it of some conviction. ‘A world of such great beauty.’

With his free hand, he smoothed his fingertips around his short brown beard, little more than neat stubble along his jawline. ‘I do not believe the people of this world to be irrevocably corrupt, but as we have seen, my judgement has its critics.’

More laughter. Kor Phaeron and Erebus met each other’s eyes, their chuckles joining the Legion’s. This levity was nothing less than an exorcism – a shedding of humiliation’s clinging stink – and both warriors sensed it clearly.

‘You have all seen the briefing details,’ said the primarch. ‘The First Chaplain and First Captain inform me that the Chapter leaders gathered this morning to discuss objectives and landing zones, so I will not waste your precious time.’ His dry smile bore little humour now, yet still it remained. ‘The Emperor wishes the XVII Legion to conquer with greater alacrity. If a world cannot be brought to compliance with haste, then it must be purged to its core. So we come to this.’

In unison, Erebus drew his crozius and lightning rippled in a jagged flow down the claws of Kor Phaeron’s gauntlets.

‘My sons.’ Their master’s smile died fast enough for many to doubt it had ever been there. ‘Forgive me for the words duty forces me to speak.’

Lorgar raised his maul of black iron, aiming it at the planet slowly spinning on the occulus viewscreen. Storms formed in a crawling, meteorological ballet as the Legion stood witness – the fleet’s low orbit was curdling the planet’s skies.

‘Word Bearers,’ said the primarch. ‘Kill every man, woman and child on that heretic world.’

Cyrene waited until she realised Argel Tal wasn’t going to continue. Only then did she speak.

‘And did you?’ she asked. ‘Did you do it?’

‘You didn’t feel the ship quake as it opened fire?’ The captain moved around the room. Cyrene wondered if he were pacing, or simply looking at what few personal effects she possessed. ‘I find it difficult to believe you slumbered through twelve hours of orbital barrage.’

Cyrene hadn’t slept at all. When the sirens wailed and the room shook two days before, she’d known what was beginning. The Word Bearers’ warships commenced their invasion with a full day of cannon-fire. At times, when myriad mechanical processes aligned just right, the main batteries hurled their incendiary payloads at the planet below in a united burst. The thunder rang in her ears for half a minute afterwards, and they were the worst moments: blinded and deafened, completely without senses. Anyone could enter her room, and she’d be none the wiser. Cyrene had lain on her uncomfortable bed in thrall to her imagination, praying not to feel unknown fingers on her face.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘Did you go to the surface after the sky-fire had ended?’

‘Yes. We landed in view of the only city that remained standing. It had to be destroyed from the ground. Our orbital weapons couldn’t pierce its defensive shield.’

‘You... killed an entire world in one day?’

‘We are the Legio Astartes, Cyrene. We did our duty.’

‘How many died?’

Argel Tal had seen the augury estimates. They put the number at almost two hundred million souls sacrificed that day.

‘All of them,’ said the captain. ‘A world’s worth of human life.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, closing her useless eyes. ‘All those people. Why did they have to die?’

‘Some cultures cannot be re-educated, Cyrene. When a civilisation is founded upon poisoned principles, redemption is a forlorn hope. Better that they burn, than live in blasphemy.’

‘But why did they have to die? What sins had they committed?’

‘Because the Emperor willed it. Nothing else matters. These people spat upon our offers of peace, laughed at our desire to integrate them into the Imperium, and openly displayed the gravest sin of ignorance, forging populations of artificial constructs. The breeding of false life in imitation of the human form is an abomination unto our species, and cannot be ignored.’

‘But why?’ she said. The words were almost her mantra these days.

Argel Tal sighed. ‘Are you aware of the old proverb: “Judge a man by his questions, not by his answers”?’

‘I know it. We said something similar on Khur.’

‘It is used across the galaxy, in one form or another. That was the Terran expression. But there is a Colchisian equivalent: “Blessed is the mind too small for doubt”.’

‘But why?’ the young woman repeated.

Argel Tal bit back a second sigh. It was difficult – the girl was immensely naive and Argel Tal knew he was no teacher – but enlightenment had to come from somewhere. There was no honour in making a secret of the truth.

‘The answer is in the stars themselves, Cyrene. We are a young species, spread thin across thousands of worlds. The space between the stars holds many threats: xenos creatures of countless breeds, evolved for predation. Those that do not immediately fall upon humanity to feed or destroy tend to be dangerous for other reasons. These ancient civilisations are in decline, either because they were too weak to stabilise after their growth, or because their own hubristic, deviant technologies doomed them. There’s nothing to learn from these races. History will discard them soon enough. So do we leave human colonies for aliens to prey upon, or do we claim their precious worlds to feed strength to the newborn Imperium? Do we allow these people to linger in ignorance and risk harming themselves – or us – or do we crush them before they can become a heretical threat?’

‘But–’

‘No.’ Argel Tal’s voice was cold stone. ‘There is no “but” this time. “The Imperium is right, and that makes it mighty”, so say our iterators, so the Word is written, and so shall it be. We succeed where every other human culture has failed. We rise where alien breeds fall. We defeat every solar empire or lonely world that refuses benevolent unity. What more evidence is needed that we, and we alone, walk the right path?’

Cyrene fell silent, chewing her lower lip. ‘That... makes sense.’

‘Of course it does. It’s the truth.’

‘So they are all dead. A whole world. Will you tell me what their last city looked like?’

‘If you wish.’ Argel Tal regarded the young woman for a long moment. She had healed well in the last four weeks, now clad in the shapeless grey robe of a Legion servant. When he’d first seen her wearing the uniform of a serf, she’d asked him what colour her new clothing was.

‘Grey,’ he’d said.

‘Good,’ she smiled at his answer, but didn’t elaborate.

Argel Tal watched her now. She stared at him blindly, her youthful features unclouded by shyness or doubt. ‘Why are you curious about their city?’ he asked.

‘I remember Monarchia,’ she said ‘It is only right that someone remembers this city as well.’

‘I’m unlikely to forget it, Cyrene. Spires of glass, and warriors formed from moving crystal. It was not a long compliance, but neither was it an easy one.’

‘Was Xaphen with you? He’s very kind to me. I like him.’

‘Yes,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Xaphen was with me. He was the first of Seventh Company to see the enemy’s blasphemy, when the city’s force shield came down.’

‘Will you tell me what happened?’

‘Captain,’ Xaphen voxed. ‘You’re not going to believe what I’m seeing.’

Argel Tal advanced through the outlying ruins, flanked by Torgal Assault Squad. His grey-clad brothers moved through the streets, crunching on shards of fallen glass architecture. Idling chainswords rumbled in every warrior’s gauntlets. Each toothed blade bore bloodstains.

‘This is Argel Tal,’ the captain voxed back. ‘We’re to the west – no resistance worth noting. Status report.’

‘Artificials,’ Xaphen’s voice was flawed by vox-distortion, but his disgust came through clear enough. ‘They’re deploying artificials.’

Argel Tal turned to the east, where the city of veined black stone and glass was already beginning to crack and splinter. Fire ran unchecked along the roads winding towards the city’s heart – the clearest sign of the Legion’s advance.

‘Torgal Assault Squad inbound,’ he voxed. ‘Word Bearers, with me.’

The bulky thrusters on his back cycled into life, propelling him skyward with a throaty roar.

The altitude gauge on his retinal display pulsed as it updated, overlaying the blue-tinted view through his eye lenses. Low towers of twisting glass and spiralling streets sailed by below. Here was a culture that bred architects who danced to their own tunes. The captain wasn’t sure if it was artistic license or the work of some logical process he couldn’t fathom. Still, a city of toughened alien glass... Roads of black stone...

It was beautiful, in a way. Madness often possessed a certain loveliness.

‘I see you,’ he voxed to Xaphen. Beneath him, squads of Word Bearers moved through the ruins of a levelled city block, pockets of grey armour engaged against a silver abomination that crackled with unhealthy energies. His armour’s receptive systems picked up on his confusion, and zoomed in on the enemy warriors.

Argel Tal still wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

‘Down,’ he commanded Torgal Squad. Acknowledgement pulses answered over the vox. Argel Tal killed his thrust with an instinctive thought – a flashing Colchisian rune on his visor display changed from red to white. With a judder, the jump pack’s primary boosters cut out. Smoke trailed from the deactivated wide-mouth thrusters as secondary jets fired, slowing his plummeting descent to a speed just shy of terminal.

He came down hard, his armoured boots crunching the road beneath his weight, sending cracks cobwebbing through the black stone. In a wave of howling engine wash and road-cracking landings, the rest of his warriors came down in a loose pack around him.

‘Stars above,’ said Torgal, gesturing over the devastation with his purring chainsword. ‘I see what the Chaplain meant.’

Across the ruined vista of tumbledown glass walls, one of the enemy artificials came on three insectile legs: each with too many joints, and each ending in a blade that spiked the ground with every step. Its torso could almost have been humanoid, but for the fact it was made entirely from moving glass. Beneath its transparent skin, circuits formed veins, metal bars made bones.

‘That has to be ornamental,’ Torgal said over the vox, as the artificial glided closer on bladed limbs. ‘I mean... just look at it.’

‘You took your damn time,’ said Xaphen. ‘Get into cover before it fires again.’

Argel Tal made a break for a nearby glass wall, where a handful of Xaphen’s warriors were crouching. They weren’t hidden, but it was cover nevertheless. The rest of his assault squad spread out.

‘It fires?’ Argel Tal asked. ‘Are you certain it’s not an automated statue, and you’ve been engaging some of the local art in a heroic battle?’

‘It fires,’ Xaphen grunted. ‘And it won’t die. Watch this. Malnor Squad, engage.’

From a crater ahead, several Word Bearers rose in trained unity, each of them opening up with bolt pistols. Shells hammered into the glass creature’s body, knocking it off-balance but inflicting no visible damage. Electrical force sparked where each bolt round punched home, detonating the shells before they inflicted anything more than minor kinetic annoyance.

‘Cease fire and fall back,’ Xaphen ordered.

‘I’m growing tired of hearing that order, sir,’ Malnor’s voice crackled, but the bolter fire stopped.

The creature immediately righted itself, and veered towards where Malnor’s warriors crouched in cover. The circuitry serving as its innards flared with phosphorous anger, and eye-aching electricity speared from its open mouth to dance across the edge of the crater, melting the black stone wherever it touched.

‘It’s made of unbreakable glass,’ Torgal voxed, ‘and it vomits lightning. The primarch was right to order these people dead. They are more than heretics – they forge insanity into physical form.’

Argel Tal swore softly as he listened to vox-reports of Legion squads encountering these things all over the city. With the capital’s protective shield down, he’d expected this to be easy. The planetary leaders were supposed to dead, damn it. Why wasn’t resistance crumbling?

‘Torgal Squad, to higher ground.’

‘By your word, captain,’ chorused the loyal responses. Heat haze rippled the air around each warrior as their bulky jump thrusters cycled back to life. The air was rich with charcoalish engine-stink.

Argel Tal boosted up, straight as a spear, coming down on a balcony overlooking the ruined street. The warriors of Torgal Squad followed, finding their own perches on the edges of nearby rooftops. Grey gargoyles, watching the battle below.

‘How many have you destroyed so far?’ asked Argel Tal.

‘Three, but two were downed by a Vindicator from Firestorm.’ Xaphen referred to the Serrated Sun’s armour battalion.

‘Don’t tell me the tank was destroyed.’

Malnor answered this time. ‘Then I won’t tell you, captain. But it’s not here anymore.’

Argel Tal watched the artificial stalking closer, maintaining its inhuman balance on those multi-jointed legs despite the punishing terrain. His visor zoomed in deep, clearing after a moment’s distortion. Silver veins threaded through the construct’s torso, flickering with power. Its skin moved like liquid glass, yet bolter shells sparked aside, as harmless as rainfall.

‘You said you’ve killed three of these, but the tanks destroyed two.’

‘I killed the third with my crozius,’ Xaphen replied. ‘The constructs seem vulnerable to power weapons.’

‘Understood. Leave this one to us.’ Argel Tal refocused his visor. ‘Torgal Squad, at the ready. We’ll fight fire with fire.’

‘By your word,’ came the voice chorus again.

Argel Tal drew both swords – each a red-iron blade housing generators in the ivory crosspieces. His fingers slid to the triggers along the leather-wrapped grips, and twin hums droned as the blades came alive, coated in jagged licks of electrical force.

‘For the primarch!’ The shout echoed across the street, drawing the artificial’s attention. It looked up with a featureless face – where a man’s mouth would be, the glass visage glowed with rising heat.

Argel Tal took two running steps; the first sent tremors through the balcony, the second shattered the railing as he kicked off from it, leaping into the air. His thrusters roared, breathing smoke and fire as he fell from sky. The twin blades trailed blurs of lightning.

‘Aurelian!’ the warriors of Torgal Squad cried out, leaping from their eyries to slice through the air, following their captain down on whining engines. ‘Aurelian!’

Argel Tal led the dive, hurling himself to the side as burning electricity arced up from the artificial below. A second later he was on the creature, twisting around it to bring his boot crashing against its glass head. Chips of diamond sprayed away as its skull snapped back. Both power swords fell a heartbeat later, the blades hammering into the artificial’s face. More twinkling shards scattered like hailstones.

Sergeant Torgal landed on the automaton’s shoulders from behind, his chainsword skidding and scraping along the glass. His bolter barked once, a shell hammering uselessly aside before detonating in the air.

With grunts of effort leaving their helm-speakers like avian cries, the rest of Torgal’s squad descended and added their grinding blades to the assault. They attacked in waves, thrusting skyward while those beneath struck, then diving for another strike as their brothers boosted away. The artificial staggered, reeling under the host’s attack, unable to bring its defences to bear against a single threat.

Argel Tal dived a third time, rasping his sword blades against each other, causing their overlapping power fields to hiss and spit. This time, the blades bit, both carving into the glass throat, sending diamond shards clattering against Argel Tal’s faceplate.

The construct died instantly. Its silver veins turned black, and it toppled to the dust on dead legs.

With sedate grace, the five warriors of Torgal Assault Squad drifted to the ground around their captain. Chainblades growled softer as trigger fingers relaxed. Jump thrusters exhaled as they cooled.

Xaphen and Malnor led their warriors from the ruins, bolters held across chestplates.

‘Nicely done,’ said the Chaplain. ‘Move ahead if you wish, brother. We will purge the road to the city’s heart. Don’t wait on our account.’

Argel Tal nodded, still not used to Xaphen’s repainted armour. The Chaplain’s warplate was black – darkened in remembrance of the ashes coating every warrior’s armour in Monarchia. Argel Tal had said nothing when he’d first witnessed this new tradition, but it still rankled. Some shames were better left forgotten.

A spurt of detuned vox preceded another broken voice. ‘Captain, this is Dagotal.’

Argel Tal looked to the spires making up the city’s core. Something there – some hidden machinery – was playing havoc with the communication channels.

‘I’m here, Dagotal.’

‘Requesting permission to summon Carthage.’

Xaphen and Malnor exchanged glances, their faceplates concealing their expressions. Torgal gunned his chainsword, the teeth chewing air for a few seconds.

‘Specifics, Dagotal,’ said Argel Tal.

‘It’s the artificials, sir. They have a king.’

Dagotal Squad kept moving through the streets, never going to ground, always watching. As Seventh Company’s outriders, penetrating a hostile city far ahead of the captain’s main force was nothing new.

This enemy, however, brought some foul surprises with them. The army of artificials stalking through the doomed city were putting up ferocious resistance – and that was before the Word Bearers advance forces began to encounter the Obsidians.

Dagotal was one of the first to spot one. He’d leaned forward in his saddle, forcing his visor to zoom and track the black construct making its ponderous way along the street ahead.

‘Blood of the Urizen,’ he swore. The thing was two storeys tall – an artificial on six legs, its torso cut not from clear glass, but opaque black.

He’d voxed the captain immediately, while his squad opened fire. The bolters mounted on each bike chattered and crashed. The black glass construct didn’t deign to notice. Despite the artificial’s apparent weight, its bladed limbs didn’t impale down into the road.

‘Fall back,’ Dagotal ordered his brothers. And they had – at speed.

The grey bikes snarled as they banked around a winding corner, tyres struggling to grip the smooth black stone of the road. Korus swerved in the lead, his braking wheels screeching as they sheared over the road’s surface.

‘Careful,’ Dagotal warned.

‘Easy for you to say, sergeant,’ Korus snapped.

Dagotal weaved between his brothers’ bikes, effortlessly outpacing them. His jetbike hovered two metres above the road, bucking forward with engine wails and bursts of acceleration at the merest pressure from his hands on the throttle. The jetbike ran cleaner than its grounded cousins, its power generator venting much less exhaust than the wheeled bikes in Dagotal’s squad.

The Word Bearer leaned to his right, sliding around another of the glass city’s insane spiralling corners. He slowed – if only a little – allowing his brothers to keep pace. From between two spires ahead, another immense artificial came forward on six legs, lightning ringing its faceless black skull in a radiant halo.

‘Another artificial,’ Dagotal voxed. He used the name already being cried out by Word Bearer squad leaders over the vox. ‘It’s another one of the Obsidians.’

‘We’re being boxed in,’ said Korus, drawing alongside. ‘Do we engage?’

‘For what? To waste shells?’ Dagotal accelerated, feeling the drag in his arms as the jetbike’s thrumming engine wailed louder. ‘Follow me.’

He veered left, taking another corner into a secondary street.

‘We can’t keep running,’ Korus growled. ‘Our fuel’s going to give out if we keep this up.’

Dagotal heard the whine of thirsty engines as his men took the corner behind him. Korus was right – their bikes’ growls were getting dry, and the squad had been playing a game of cat and mouse through these streets for hours now, scouting ahead of the Serrated Sun’s main forces.

‘We’re not running,’ he replied.

A shadow darkened the street, eclipsing the sun and filling the air with the grind of powerful engines. The sleek craft hovering overhead bore the bionic skull symbol of the Martian priesthood on its wings.

Dagotal smiled behind his faceplate. ‘We’re looking for somewhere Carthage can land.’

From beneath a red hood, three green eye lenses peered out at the burning city. This triad of visual receptors continually turned and refocused, each lens tuning to degrees of acuity that went far beyond the capacity of human sight.

‘Processing,’ the owner of the three eyes said. And then, after a pause of several seconds, during which the lenses continued to tune and retune, he added ‘Acknowledged’ in the same tone.

Dagotal’s outriders were using this chance to refuel, each Astartes filling their bike’s tanks with canisters of promethium taken from the Mechanicum lander’s hold.

Dagotal remained on his jetbike, the humming gravity suspensors pulsing quieter now they weren’t suffering strain.

‘Two Obsidians,’ he said to the three-eyed man, ‘coming this way.’ The vox was on fire with squads falling back, summoning help from the Carthage Cohort, requesting armour battalions... ‘The artificials are brutal, Xi-Nu.’

‘I am cognizant of the details, Sergeant Dagotal.’

Xi-Nu 73 was a stick-thin being, human only in the loosest sense. His red robe flapped in the heated wind, revealing an augmented body of lustreless iron bound together by industrial cabling. His arms, which he now raised in order to lower his hood, were a skeleton’s limbs constructed from contoured armour plating, ending in bronze hands with too many fingers. His face, such as it was, appeared from the lowered hood as a mess of thin wires and a noisy respiration mask, with no other discernible features beyond the green eye lenses that formed a triangle’s cardinal points.

Xi-Nu 73 had been human once – almost a century ago in the short, fragile two decades after his birth. Like all of the Mechanicum of Mars, he’d had to endure those early years living in a shell of warm meat and wet blood, until he gained the skill to purify himself.

He’d improved himself a great deal since then.

The tech-priest stood by the Mechanicum lander’s cargo ramp, overseeing the ungainly march of several towering figures. Each one was clad in dense armour plating painted in chipped coats of crimson. They stood almost five metres tall, their mechanical joints not even attempting to mimic human motion. The first two down the clanging ramp were gangly Crusaders, their long bladed arms swinging as their shoulders rocked side to side in awkward motion. Circuitry, thick and crude, was etched along the arm-swords’ edges, linking the blades to power generators in the robots’ bodies.

–Sanguine– said the first, vocalising in tinny machine tones, –standing ready–.

–Alizarin– the second intoned, –standing ready–.

The third figure to stomp down the ramp was twice the width of the first two, bulky where the Crusaders were gangly, great fists of riveted metal fused to form siege hammers. Even more than its kin, it reeked of greased machine parts and the earthy scent of lubricating oils. The Cataphract-class machine was hunched, made dense by sloping armour, and moved with even less claim to grace than the others.

–Vermillion– it droned as it clanked in line with the Crusaders, –standing ready–.

Xi-Nu 73 turned his eye lenses to regard the last machine emerging from the lander’s hold. This one seemed a compromise between its construct-kin, almost human in its posture and gait, armoured with thick plating and bearing weapons for arms. A third cannon rose from its shoulder, with ammunition belts trailing down its back, dreadlocks of bronze shells rattling with each step. Dagotal knew each of Xi-Nu’s wards, familiar with them from twelve years of sharing battlefields. This last was a Conqueror, and the primus unit of the group. It wore a Legion banner over its shoulder, and its armour plating was etched with Colchisian runes.

Several of the Word Bearers saluted this last robotic warrior. It didn’t acknowledge them.

–Incarnadine– the Conqueror declared in a voice devoid of personality, –standing ready–.

Xi-Nu 73 turned to the gathered Word Bearers, his eyes refocusing yet again. ‘Greetings, sergeant. Ninth Maniple of the Carthage Cohort, awaiting orders.’

Argel Tal hit the ground running, the boosters on his back cycling down as he ran. Both blades were sheathed; in his fists, a richly-inscribed bolter bucked with each fired shell. He took refuge with several of his warriors in the lowest level of a glass tower, shooting out of the stained glass windows. Whatever patterns the coloured glass once held were gone, smashed through by Word Bearers needing clear lines of fire.

The Obsidian in the street outside dwarfed them all, liberally blasting the road with streams of electrical force from its featureless face. Argel Tal reloaded, and as he slammed a fresh magazine home, he had a momentary glance of a glass shard by his boot – a fragment of the stained glass window showing a figure in golden armour.

Dagotal Squad was running interference, weaving between the artificial’s insect-legs, veering and jinking to avoid its lethal arcs of fire. Bolter shells hammered into its joints from where Torgal’s men took what cover they could find, but their efforts were little more than an irritant.

‘Xi-Nu 73,’ Argel Tal voxed. ‘We’re in position. Make this fast.’

‘Acknowledged, Seventh Captain.’

They came from behind the construct, emerging from a subsidiary road. Sanguine and Alizarin stalked forward first with all the grace of stumbling beggars, their movements a stark contrast to the liquid grace of the enemy machine. Lascannon fire streamed from the shoulder mounts of both Crusaders, carving searing scars into the Obsidian’s skin, the sludge-gleam of melted glass bright against the black. Their arm-blades came up on clanking, motorised hinge joints, slicing down to chop at the construct’s legs.

Recognising this new threat, the Obsidian span to face the Mechanicum war machines. It turned into a barrage of gunfire, shoulder-mounted heavy bolters punching shards from the construct’s face and torso with a torrent of explosive shells. Incarnadine, regal in form compared to its brothers, tracked every movement made by the enemy machine. It didn’t cease fire, even for a second. Nor did a single shot go wide.

The Obsidian’s storm-stream wasted itself, blasting up at the sky as the Mechanicum robotics knocked it off-balance.

The Cataphract-class Vermillion, as bulky as an Astartes Dreadnought, was an altogether more ponderous engine. Stocky and lumbering, it closed the distance as the Obsidian sought to right itself on its four remaining legs. Siege hammers swung in, meeting alien glass with a thunderclap’s refrain. Four legs became three – the glass machine crashed to the knees it had left.

‘Finish it,’ said Argel Tal. His jump pack burned again, groaning as the engines drew breath.

‘By your word,’ came the vox-replies.

The swords came free in smooth pulls, and Argel Tal let a short burst of thrust carry him skyward. Even prone, the Obsidian offered no purchase. As the Word Bearers came down in its back, most elected to hover, burning their jump jets rather than standing upon the thing’s body. Swords clashed and carved, but only Argel Tal’s empowered blades inflicted significant damage, sending shards of dark glass flying with each hack.

Even as it died, the Obsidian dragged itself across the street, a grasping hand reaching for the closest true threat. Incarnadine stepped back, autocannons laying into the outstretched hand, shearing fingers from the fist. Behind the Imperial war machine, Xi-Nu watched with unwavering attention, occasionally adjusting dials on his chestplate for reasons none of the Word Bearers had ever discerned, despite a decade of fighting by his side.

When the Obsidian lay still at last, Argel Tal and Dagotal came over to the tech-priest. The downed enemy construct had a shapeless resemblance to a melting ice statue, its body ruined by a thousand bullet impacts, blade cuts and lascannon beams. Both Word Bearers crunched closer on the glass shards lining the road.

‘Greetings, captain,’ said Xi-Nu 73. ‘Ninth Maniple of the Carthage Cohort, awaiting orders.’

Cyrene paused Argel Tal’s retelling with a hand on his forearm.

‘You used artificials yourself?’

He’d been expecting this. ‘The Legio Cybernetica is a treasured facet of the Mechanicum. The Great Crusade leans heaviest on the Legio Titanicus for their war engines, but Cybernetica plays its role among the noblest Astartes Legions. Their artificials are robotic shells housing machine-spirits. Cybernetica tech-priests engineer organic-synthetic minds from biological components.’

Cyrene reached for the glass of water on her bedside table. Her fingers slid across the metal surface, bumping the glass gently before she got a grip. When she drank, it was in little swallows, and she seemed in no rush to speak again.

‘You don’t see the difference,’ Argel Tal said, not quite asking.

She lowered the glass, facing him without seeing him. ‘Is there a difference?’

‘Do not ask that question to Xi-Nu 73, should your paths ever cross. He’d be insulted enough to kill you, and I would be vexed enough to kill him in return. Suffice to say, the difference is in the mind. Organic intelligence, even synthetic in nature, is still tied to the perfection of humanity. Artificial intelligence is not. That’s a lesson many cultures only learn when their machine slaves rise up against them, as the Obsidians would have done one day, to the people of Forty-Seven Sixteen.’

‘You always say we are perfect. Humans, I mean.’

‘So it is written in the Word.’

‘But the Word changes over time. Xaphen tells me it’s changing even now. Are humans really perfect?’

‘We‘re conquering the galaxy, aren’t we? The evidence of our purity and manifest destiny is clear.’

‘Other races conquered it all before we did.’ She took another sip of the room-temperature water. ‘Perhaps others will conquer it after we do something wrong.’ Then she smiled, brushing a lock of hair back from her face. ‘You are so certain in everything you do. I envy you for that.’

‘Were you not sure of your own life’s path back in Monarchia?’

She tilted her head, and he read a faint tension in her body language – the slight curl of her bare toes, the fingers gently clutching her grey robe. ‘I don’t wish to speak of that,’ she said. ‘I just find it curious that you have no regrets. No doubts.’

The Astartes wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘It’s not confidence. It’s... duty. I live by the Word. What is written must come to be, else all will come to nothing.’

‘That sounds like a great sacrifice to me. Fate shaped you into a weapon.’ Cyrene’s smile was tinged with an expression somewhere between amusement and melancholy. ‘The Speakers would say such things in their dawn prayers across the perfect city. “Walk the one true way, for all other paths lead to destruction”.’

‘That‘s from the Word,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Part of the primarch’s wisdom we left to guide your people.’

She waved a hand, batting aside his devotion to every detail. ‘I know, I know. Will you tell me the rest of the story? I want to know more of the city. Did the primarch fight with you?’

The captain took a breath. The girl’s mind moved with fleeting touches between subjects.

‘No. But we saw him at dawn. Before we reached his side, we crossed paths with Aquillon.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ said Cyrene. She lay down on her bed, making a pillow of her joined hands. For what use they were, her eyes remained open. ‘I’m not sleeping. Please, go on. Who is Aquillon?’

‘His title is Occuli Imperator,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘The Emperor’s Eyes. We encountered him as the sun set, while most of the city burned.’

EIGHT

Like Home

Gold, not Grey

At the Heart of a Fallen City

As dusk fell over the city’s remains, Argel Tal stood in battered armour, watching the amber disc sink beneath the horizon. It was a beautiful sunset, putting him in mind of Colchis, of home, of the world he’d not seen in almost seven decades. To his recollection, which bordered on eidetic, Argel Tal had seen the sun set on twenty-nine worlds. This was the thirtieth, and as lovely as the first.

The sky darkened in shades of blue and violet, heralding the coming night.

‘Chaplain,’ he said, ‘to me.’

Xaphen left the regrouping Word Bearers, walking to the captain at the end of the street.

‘Brother,’ Xaphen greeted him. Without his helm, the Chaplain watched the setting sun with naked eyes. ‘What do you need?’

Argel Tal nodded to the fading heavens. ‘Reminds me of home.’

He heard the faint growl of armour joints as Xaphen moved. A shrug, perhaps.

‘Where is Torgal and the Assault Squad?’

‘Scouting along the spire-tops,’ the captain said. ‘I will be glad when this world is at compliance, Xaphen. Despite the need to see battle, this is a hollow war.’

‘As you say, brother. What do you need?’ the Chaplain repeated.

Argel Tal refused eye contact.

‘Answers,’ he said, ‘before we return to orbit. The primarch remains away from us for a month, and the Legion’s warrior-priests gather in silence. What happens at the gatherings of those who wear the Black?’

Xaphen snorted, already turning away. ‘Now is hardly the time. We’ve a world to bring to compliance.’

‘Do not walk away from me, Chaplain.’

Their gazes met – the captain’s slanted eye lenses locked to the Chaplain’s narrowed eyes. ‘What is it?’ asked Xaphen. ‘What has you so unfocused?’ His tone mellowed, conciliatory despite its sternness. Argel Tal knew the voice well. It was how Xaphen spoke when warriors brought their doubts to him. Without knowing why, Argel Tal found it tainting his temper.

The captain aimed his sword down the street, where two squads were tending to their wounded. Much of the roadway was taken up by the corpse of another Obsidian, and Dagotal’s bikes undergoing battlefield repair by Xi-Nu 73.

‘We are all blind,’ said the captain, ‘except you. We are fighting as ordered, exterminating a heretic culture. And Aurelian was right – it is a purge of the past, and good for the blood. The Legion needed to stand in victory after gathering to commemorate failure. But after a month of silence since the perfect city’s grave, we are still blind.’

‘What would you have me say?’ Xaphen approached again, his gauntlet lifted as calculating indecision played across his features. He withdrew the hand, sensing if he rested it on Argel Tal’s shoulder, it would aggravate the captain, not remind him of kinship.

‘I would have you answer the question and enlighten your brothers, as your duty demands.’

Xaphen exhaled, and his patience left with his breath. ‘The gatherings of those in Black are inviolate and sacrosanct. None of us may speak of what transpires. You know this, yet still you ask? What of tradition, brother?’

Argel Tal lowered the sword. ‘What tradition?’ he laughed. ‘What of a Legion kneeling in the dust, and our primarch offering us nothing but silence for a month? The rest of us need answers, Xaphen. I need answers.’

‘By your word, captain. But all I may say are words I’ve spoken before. We look to the Word, and seek a new path. The Legion is lost, and we seek the answers to guide it again. Do you begrudge us that? Should we linger, lost in the void, cast from the Emperor’s light?’

Argel Tal felt acidic saliva stinging under his tongue. ‘Meanwhile, the Legion waits and wages war, equally blind in both states. Do the Chaplains have the answers they sought?’

‘Yes, brother. We believe so.’

‘And when did you plan to share these truths with us?’

Xaphen drew his crozius, clutching it in both hands as he turned back to the gathered squads. ‘Why do you think we came here? Purely to end these miserable blasphemers? To wipe this pathetic empire of one lonely world from the face of history?’

‘If you find my insight lacking,’ the captain spoke through clenched teeth, ‘then enlighten me.’

‘Peace, my brother. Lorgar knows the value of symbolism, and the purity of purpose. We followed a false path that ended in a city of ashes. In another city of ashes, we will take the first steps on the true path. He will show us the way, and we will perform the Rite of Remembrance as it should be performed, with honour and sincerity. Not collared by the Emperor and abused like disloyal hounds.’

This was, and wasn’t, a surprise to Argel Tal. It didn’t take a prophet to predict the primarch would speak after this compliance, but to have it framed as some first step on a new odyssey was both captivating and unnerving.

‘I lament that the Chaplain brotherhood kept this from us, but I thank you for speaking at last.’

‘There was little to tell before the primarch’s return today. It‘s no secret, in truth.’ Warmth returned to Xaphen’s craggy face as he smiled. ‘I expect word is filtering through the Legion even now. Aurelian will meet us in the heart of the city, once we’ve extinguished the last of this world’s unholy life. And this time, when the Legion kneels in the dust of a dead city, it will be because that city died in righteous flame.’

The vox chose that moment to crackle back to life.

‘Sir? Sir?’

‘This is Argel Tal. Speak, Torgal.’

‘Captain, I apologise for another unpleasant surprise, but you won’t believe what I’m looking at.’

Argel Tal swore under his breath, the clipped Colchisian syllables not carrying over the vox. He was growing tired of hearing those words on this world.

The five warriors killed in silence, their glaives spinning with the force and speed of turbine rotors, lashing through limbs and torsos with the ease of knives through mist. At last, with the Legion breaching deep into the city, Imperial forces encountered human resistance. The army of constructs seemed defeated, reduced to scattered pockets. It fell to the militia and the civilian population to die fighting, taking to the streets armed with weapons that would prove useless, seeking to squander their lives rather than surrender them.

Small-arms fire clattered from the warriors’ gold-wrought armour as they battled through the crowded street. The militia squads against them carried rifles that spat a solid shot not far removed from the smallest-calibre bolter shells. The culture’s ancestral connection to humanity’s pre-Imperial era was proven beyond dispute – and yet they were damned by their deviance.

Despite their worthless weaponry, they stood their ground in cover or arrayed in firing lines until they were overwhelmed. Their planet was finished and their final city was aflame. With nowhere to run, most simply didn’t try. They died in their uniforms, which were the same grey as the city’s architecture. Faceplates of clear glass shattered under stabbing blades as the spear-bearing warriors scythed into another phalanx of human militia.

The Custodes leader was obvious as he led the advance, his conic helm crested with a plume of red horsehair. In his hands, an immense two-handed sword span in blurring arcs, rising and falling, stabbing and carving. People tumbled away from him, some of them screaming, all of them falling to pieces in his wake. He killed and killed and killed, never missing a lethal strike, never slowing in his advance. Beneath his feet, the road ran red – the beginnings of a sick river, sourced by blood.

‘Aquillon,’ said Argel Tal from his vantage point above the carnage. He shook his head as he spoke the name. Unfeigned awe softened his voice. ‘I’ve never seen a Custodian fight.’

Several Word Bearers crouched at the lip of a roof overlooking the street. Argel Tal, Torgal, and the sergeant’s assault squad. The golden warriors moved ahead with consummate grace, the dance of their blades eclipsing anything a mortal could perform.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Torgal said. ‘Should we join them?’

From below, a shout rose above the butchery. For the Emperor – a battlecry that hadn’t left a Word Bearer’s lips since Monarchia. Strange, how it sounded almost alien to Argel Tal’s ears.

‘No,’ the captain replied. ‘Not yet.’

Torgal watched for several more moments, one finger idly stroking his chainword’s trigger. ‘There’s something about the way they fight,’ he said. ‘Some flaw that I can’t make out.’

Argel Tal watched Aquillon, the Custodian’s blade reaving its way through countless lives, and saw nothing of the kind. He said so.

Torgal shook his head, still watching. ‘I can’t form the thought. They lack... something. They’re fighting... wrong.’

And this time, as soon as Argel Tal returned his gaze to the battle in the street, he saw it instantly. The way the Custodes fought seemed almost identical to the Astartes; it took a trained eye to see the subtle differences. The captain had missed it first by focusing on a single warrior. The moment he took in the full view...

‘There,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I see it, too.’

Was it a flaw? Perhaps by the standards of the Astartes, who waged war and lived life with brotherhood etched into their genetic codes. But Custodes were the sons of a more rarefied and time-consuming process – the biological manipulation that gave birth to the Emperor’s guardians bred warriors who weren’t shackled by bonds of loyalty to anyone except their Imperial overlord.

‘They’re not brothers,’ Argel Tal said. ‘Watch how they move. See how each one fights his own war, alone, unsupported by the others. They’re not like us. These are warriors, not soldiers.’

The thought made his skin crawl. It must have had the same effect on Torgal, for he voiced the words on his captain’s mind.

‘Lions,’ the sergeant said. ‘They’re lions, not wolves, hunting alone instead of as a pack. Gold,’ he added, and tapped the chestplate of his armour, ‘not grey.’

‘Good eyes, brother.’ Argel Tal still stared intently. Now he was aware of the disunity, it was all he could focus on. Here was a weakness, a savage one, masked only by the heroic skills of each warrior and the worthlessness of the enemies they faced.

A ripple of unease shivered through him as he bore witness. Those ancient words of the Emperor came to him, that first creed of the Legiones Astartes: And they shall know no fear.

Argel Tal was one of those who took the creed in its most literal sense, believing the sensitivity to feel fear was rewritten out of him at the genetic level. But even so, watching these brotherless cousins fight chilled him to his core. They lacked so much, despite their individual perfection.

‘In standing free of brotherhood,’ he said, ‘they also sacrifice its strengths. The tactics of a pack. The trust in those who fight by your side. I suspect the secrets woven into their body and blood gene-bind them to a higher loyalty – perhaps their only brother is the Emperor himself.’

Torgal was as perceptive as ever. ‘You no longer admire them,’ he said. ‘I hear it in your voice.’

Argel Tal smiled, choosing to let his silence answer for him.

Beneath them, the Custodians fought on. ‘That looks like trouble,’ one of the assault squad gestured down the road. They watched as a glass construct stalked into the avenue from a side street, and began to make its way down the thoroughfare towards the golden warriors.

Now Argel Tal rose to his feet. ‘Come, brothers. Let’s see how the wolves hunt with the lions.’

‘By your word,’ they chorused in perfect unity, and ten sets of thrusters howled as one.

Aquillon’s greeting was cautious. He made the sign of the aquila across his breastplate, where the Emperor’s two-headed eagle symbol was already in ornate evidence.

‘Hail, captain.’

Argel Tal returned the salute, crashing a fist against his chestpiece over his heart – the sign of Imperial allegiance in the Terran Unification Wars.

‘Custodian. A pleasure to be of service,’ Argel Tal gestured one of his blades at the ruined construct. It lay dead in the road, cut and battered, surrounded by slain militia.

‘A curious greeting, captain, to use a salute that fell out of favour before the Great Crusade even began.’

The Word Bearers formed up behind and around Argel Tal, just as the Custodians came to Aquillon’s side. It wasn’t quite a standoff, but none of the warriors were blind to the spectre of tension between them.

Argel Tal didn’t rise to the bait. ‘You seemed to need the help. I’m just glad we were here to assist you.’

Aquillon chuckled and walked away, saying nothing more. The Custodes formed up in imprecise formation and marched ahead. Evidently, their leader wasn’t rising to any bait, either.

‘Sir?’ asked Torgal. ‘Should we go with them?’

Argel Tal was smiling despite himself.

‘Yes. For what little there is left to do, we’ll fight with them.’

By dawn, the glass city’s death-throes were over.

The place chosen for the Legion’s gathering was expansive out of necessity, but still deep within the urban sprawl. Crystal towers, purged of life by the Terminator elite, stood unburned around an immense park. The earth was soon churned to mud under the grinding treads of tanks and the boots of a hundred thousand Astartes. The park itself reached for kilometres in all directions. In better times, it had served as a place of peace and celebration for the people of the city; now it was being used to celebrate their annihilation, and Argel Tal found a quiet pleasure in that little slice of irony.

Seventh Company trickled in – not first, but far from last – and took their appointed places. Xi-Nu 73 and his four robotic warriors knew their place, and made no attempt to approach the assembling rows of Word Bearers. The captain and his squad leaders bid the tech-adept farewell at the edges of the Legion’s formation, and the last sight Argel Tal had of the Mechanicum priest was with Incarnadine, the Conqueror Primus. The robot stood slightly hunched at its master’s side, still towering above the augmetic human, its unliving eye lenses tracking left and right with a camera’s patience. Xi-Nu 73 absently stroked its armour plating, as if it were a pet to have its fur patted.