The First Heretic

While they stood separate from the Astartes, they were far from alone. Carthage Cohort was comprised of dozens of maniples, of which Xi-Nu’s four wards were just one. It looked as though many advancing squads had summoned aid from the Legio Cybernetica forces allied to the XVII Legion, for over a hundred robots stood proud in their black and scarlet livery.

A few rare units had oath parchments and scrolls of scripture bound to their armour plating, marking them as particularly accomplished in battle. These robots, from a variety of classes and designs, were enrolled in the Fidelitas Lex’s archives as honorary members of the Word Bearers Legion.

Incarnadine was one of them. The robot bore the serrated sun icon, plated in gold upon its forehead.

Aquillon and the Custodians broke away as Argel Tal and his brothers began to form ranks.

‘Be well, captain,’ said the leader, and offered another salute.

Argel Tal acknowledged the warrior with a nod. ‘And you, Occuli Imperator.’

With that, the Custodes made their way through the gathered Legion to stand apart in a small cluster. Hundreds of grey helms followed the warriors’ movements, watching, judging, hating.

Argel Tal and Xaphen moved to the front ranks alongside Chapter Master Deumos and the other commanders of the Serrated Sun. Considering their victory here, the greetings were oddly subdued. It took a moment for Argel Tal to realise why.

‘How long were you with them?’ Deumos asked, just short of a demand.

Argel Tal glanced at the chron display counting up on the edge of his visor display. ‘Eight hours, forty-one minutes.’

Deumos was bareheaded, and his time-cracked face was set in an expectant glower.

‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’ asked Argel Tal. ‘Have I erred?’

‘Of course not. You have nothing to report?’

‘I do, sir.’ Argel Tal faced forward. ‘But it can wait.’

‘Look at them, brother.’ Deumos was too careful to gesture, but his meaning was clear nevertheless. ‘See how they stand away from us, yet still expect to hear the primarch’s words.’

The Custodes stood spear-straight in two lines of ten, horsehair crests blowing in the wind. Halberds held at attention, just as they would be in the Emperor’s presence. Products of a refined process, where the Astartes were mass-produced – it was easy to imagine these gilded knights hailed as humanity’s finest, beneath only the primarchs themselves in grandeur. It was the natural instinct of the untrained and inexperienced to presume such a thing. For those who perceived their flaws, matters were less cut and dried.

Argel Tal still hadn’t decided how he felt about them. They were stunning in battle, yet deeply flawed. Aquillon was appointed to watch over the Legion and report its actions to the Emperor, yet he had – irritatingly enough – been likable during the hours they’d battled together, and a demonstrably focused warrior.

The Word Bearers stood beneath the scripture-laden banner of Seventh Company and the icon of the serrated sun, as they waited for their brothers to take position.

‘Carthage stands apart from us, yet they will hear the primarch,’ said Argel Tal.

‘That’s different,’ Deumos growled. ‘The Carthage Primacy was signed and oathed over a century ago. Almost a dozen of their war machines have been inducted as honorary Legionnaires since then. Aurelian will order them to leave, mark my words, but at least they have earned the right to stand with us.’

‘Given time, Aquillon might earn the same.’

Deumos laughed, the sudden sound turning nearby heads in his direction. ‘Do you actually believe that, captain?’

Argel Tal tore his gaze from the clustered Custodians. ‘No, lord. Not for a moment.’

Even in the scalding flare of teleportation’s aftermath, every warrior noticed the same thing. Lorgar manifested not in the armour of the Word Bearers’ warlord, but in the robes of an archpriest of their home world.

Kor Phaeron and Erebus stood at the primarch’s side, as all had expected, and as tradition dictated. Yet they too wore the cowled robes of the Colchisian priesthood, their genhanced physiques draped in layered cloth the colour of ashen earth.

Oath papers pinned to the captains’ armour flapped and curled with the breath of displaced air. Rank by rank, from first to last, a hundred thousand warriors went to one knee. Each lowering rank gave a united thud of ceramite on soil as they knelt. Only the banners remained held high above an ocean of granite grey.

Lorgar carried his crozius over his shoulder, mirroring the posture of every Chaplain in the Legion standing before him. Despite its savagery, the ritual weapon wasn’t out of place in the primarch’s more peaceful aspect.

Without his armour, he couldn’t speak across the vox. To compensate, Legion serfs deployed servo-skulls – the skinned, bleached, augmented skulls of former Legion servants who were chosen to continue serving the Word Bearers even in death. The skulls hovered on humming anti-grav suspensors, their eye sockets containing pict-imagers, their grinning jaws replaced by vox-speakers.

One of them bobbed past Argel Tal in its leisurely pathfinding, and a disquieting thought was dredged up in the skull’s passing. This might be Cyrene’s fate one day. If she got her wish to serve the Legion in the decades to come... Argel Tal turned to watch the servo-skull, curious at his own sudden discomfort. Most mortal serfs relished the promise that they might be granted immortality in even this stunted way. But Cyrene–

‘What are you doing?’ Xaphen hissed. ‘Focus.’

Argel Tal snapped back to attention, facing the primarch. Lorgar had chosen his arrival point with great care, standing atop a natural rise in the land before the orderly ranks of warriors sworn to his name.

Before speaking, the cowl came down, pulled back with sublime patience to reveal his strong, handsome features – the features of his father, but inked gold, with his eyes ringed by kohl. He was the very image of a hierophant preacher in Ancient Gyptus: a faroah’s high priest, ministering to the faithful.

‘My loyal sons. In the past, you have kneeled for each Rite of Remembrance, as you kneel even now. But no more. Word Bearers... Rise.’

Discipline be damned, the Astartes began to glance at one another, taken aback by their lord’s words. This was already unprecedented, and it had barely begun. Surprise and confusion actually had most of the Astartes defying their primarch’s order.

‘Rise,’ Lorgar said, a gentle laugh edging into his speech. ‘Rise, all of you. Now is not the time for obeisance.’

Xaphen rose immediately. All of the Chaplains did. Argel Tal stood slower, looking at his friend.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘You’ll see,’ said Xaphen.

Lorgar’s next words weren’t for his sons. He gestured with his free hand, the skin gold in the dawn, taking in the small phalanx of warriors at the edge of the sprawling conclave.

‘And what have we here?’ he asked. The servo-skulls projected his words to the thousands gathered, preserving the gentle voice even through crackling vox. ‘Our appointed overseers. I give you the thanks of the Seventeenth Legion for your aid in bringing this heretic world into compliance.’

The twenty Custodes bowed, not quite in unison.

Argel Tal was too far distant to hear Aquillon’s words, but the Custodes commander bowed lower than his comrades, and gestured to the gathered Legion.

Lorgar’s reply was delivered with the same gentle diplomacy as his gratitude.

‘You are correct, Custodian Aquillon. Your tenure with the Seventeenth Legion began under dark skies. However, I must beg your indulgence this once. The words I wish to share with my sons are not for the ears of others.’

Again, Argel Tal had no hope of hearing Aquillon’s reply. Lorgar smiled in response, making the sign of the aquila. When the primarch formed the symbol over his grey robe, the gold hands became an aquila akin to those that marked the breastplates of the Emperor’s own guardians. Argel Tal doubted any present could miss the gesture’s symbolic nature.

‘My sons have been shamed, and endured the shattering of their beliefs. I brought them to this world not simply to reforge them in battle, but to speak of the future. And that will be with my sons, and my sons alone. Look to the south, where even our Mechanicum allies withdraw out of respect.’

Argel Tal looked over his shoulder guard, seeing the primarch’s words taking shape as the Mechanicum withdrew. Only the few robots granted honorary Legion inductance were remaining. Incarnadine stood motionless, the Word Bearers banner draped over its shoulders like a cloak of royalty.

Lorgar smiled his father’s smile, cutting off Aquillon’s reply. ‘Every Legion has its rites and observations, Aquillon. The Rite of Remembrance is one of ours. Would you impose upon the Wolves of Russ when they howl around the stone cairns of their fallen? Would you intrude upon the Sons of Prospero as they meditate on the perfection of human potential?’

Aquillon stepped forward now. A floating servo-skull picked up his reply and broadcast the words across to the gathered Legion.

‘If the Emperor, beloved by all, ordered me to watch over those Legions...’

Lorgar clasped his hands together, his smile of indulgence so earnest that it bordered on mockery.

‘I was there when my brother Guilliman gave you your orders, Aquillon. You are to ensure the Word Bearers apply themselves wholeheartedly to the Great Crusade. And I – we, all of us – thank you for your presence. But you are breaching decorum now. You are showing us disrespect, and violating our traditions.’

‘I mean no offence,’ said Aquillon, ‘but my duty is clear.’

Lorgar nodded, feigning sympathy for their intentions. It was a sour display, and Argel Tal wasn’t sure whether to laugh or feel shamed by it.

‘But let us not exceed your mandate,’ the primarch said. ‘You are not entitled to watch over me like a pack of prison wardens. I am the Emperor’s son, formed by his mastery in order to carry out his will. You are a flock of genetic toys pieced together in a laboratory from vials of biological scrap. You are so far beneath me that I wouldn’t piss on your bodies even if you were aflame. So... let me be clear, in the spirit of preventing future misunderstandings.’

Aquillon stepped forward, but Lorgar halted him in his tracks with a single name.

‘Kor Phaeron.’

As soon as the name was spoken, the First Captain’s voice rasped across the vox. ‘All Word Bearers, take aim at the Custodes.’

Unlike the order to rise, this one brought no hesitation. The ranks of Word Bearers raised their bolters or gunned chainswords into life.

‘Farewell,’ said Lorgar, still wearing his father’s smile. ‘We will see you in orbit soon.’

Two servitors shared the weight of a bulky teleportation beacon the size and shape of a reinforced oil drum. The bionic slaves trundled from the Astartes’ front ranks, unceremoniously dumping the bronze and black iron marvel of engineering on the ground. As Aquillon stood unmoving, staring up at Lorgar, the beacon toppled and clanked onto the grass.

‘You may use this to return to the Fidelitas Lex,’ the primarch said. ‘Go in peace.’

‘Very well,’ Aquillon hesitated before reaching down to set the beacon right. ‘By your word.’

‘He just left?’ Cyrene asked. Her nose wrinkled, either in confusion or distaste, Argel Tal wasn’t sure which.

‘He had no choice,’ the captain replied.

‘And then what happened?’

‘And then... the primarch looked out over the Legion. He watched us for what felt like an age. And at last, just before speaking, he smiled.’

‘What did he speak of?’

‘Two things.’ Argel Tal looked away from her. ‘Firstly, an ancient belief called the Pilgrimage, to seek a place where gods and mortals meet. And then, he spoke of Colchis.’

‘Your home world?’ there was wonder in her voice. Colchis. The cradle of angels.

‘Yes,’ Argel Tal replied, seeing the reverence in her features. ‘We’re going home.’

NINE

Crimson King

The City of Grey Flowers

Blessed Lady

Colchis is a thirsty world.

Depending on the speaker, those words were voiced with a smile or a curse. But they remained true: the continents were raw with thirst, and the world itself was marked by memories.

At three times the size of Terra, with a fraction of the population, it took almost five standard years to turn once around its merciless sun. And it turned with great patience: a day lasting a Terran week, a week lasting a Terran month.

From orbit, its skin was a visage of unforgiving mountain ranges and auburn desert plains, veined by threading rivers. It was in dry lands like these that that humanity’s ancestors – the very first men and women on the world no longer called Earth – rose in lands that would become known as the cradle of civilisation.

Colchis was aboriginal in the same way. Mankind had been born in lands kin to those blanketing its surface, making Colchis an Earth that might have been, rather than the Terra that was.

Over the generations, civilisation had spread itself thin across the arid continents, with most cities clinging to the coasts. Each city-state maintained links to the others though sky trade and ocean freight, on a world where roads across the desert plains would be little more than folly.

Unlike much of the emergent Imperium, Colchis was unprotected by vast orbital weapon platforms. More tellingly, it also had little in the way of the industrious space stations responsible for feeding and refuelling parasitic expeditionary fleets in their crusades through the galaxy.

Colchis still bore scars of long-forgotten greatness – an age of wonders, ended in fire. In that sense, it was a future echo of what Khur had so recently become. The world’s surface was bruised dark by the bones of dead cities, fallen in unrecorded ages, never resettled. New cities rose elsewhere with the genesis of a simpler, quieter culture. The ancient ruins suggested a machine-driven empire once ruled Colchis, though little evidence ever came to light regarding its destruction. The lost kingdom’s legacy was evident even in orbit, where drifting, dead hulks – locked in orbits that would still take millennia to completely decay – marked the graves of interstellar shipyards.

Few Imperial fleets ventured near Colchis, and not merely because of its lack of resupply capacity. Rumours circulated, citing unreliable shipping lanes, and the disappearance of the 2,188th Expeditionary Fleet in a nearby region, added fuel to that particular fire. Colchis seemed a world focused upon looking inwards, even backwards, refusing to clear its skies of wreckage from the Dark Age of Technology, and resisting all Imperial edicts to establish new orbital bases. The planet’s one concession was to allow the Mechanicum of Mars access to those serene hulks, letting the tech-priests plunder whatever they desired.

And they’d done just that, with great enthusiasm, for great profit.

The region was not haunted. No Imperial commander would ever give voice to a laughable superstition, when such words were holdovers from a more indecorous age. Yet still Colchis saw scarce traffic, and its resistance to supplying the Great Crusade remained inviolate.

It was said this defiance could only have come from Lorgar, the Emperor’s Seventeenth Son, for no other authority would allow a planet to remain so curiously provincial. In the capital city, Vharadesh, a golden plaque was fixed to the immense doors leading into the Spire Temple of the Covenant. This tablet marked the primarch’s supposed words – words he’d never admitted, yet never denied, speaking to his father.

‘Take me from my home, and I will sail to the stars of your empire. I will serve as a son must serve. But let Colchis stand as I have shaped it: a planet of peace and prosperity.’

It was also said, by the few that witnessed such rare moments, that the primarch smiled each time he passed those words, and reached out to stroke his golden fingertips across the etched lettering.

Colchis was hardly devoid of technology. It enjoyed the benefits of Imperial life and culture, despite its master’s hesitance to supply materiel for the Emperor’s war. Auspices in the sky-traffic towers of Vharadesh tracked the activity in orbit, with scanner consoles lighting up at the sudden pulse of so many signals.

It had been many years since the Urizen returned home.

This time, there was someone waiting for him.

The ship bore a proud title, named in honour of a legendary city in the murky tides of Prospero’s complicated mythology. The Sekhemra was the only live vessel in the heavens above Colchis, and it rested in its geocentric orbit, weapons unpowered, shields inactive. The humble strike cruiser seemed content to wait in silence, bathing its red hull in the fierce illumination offered by the system’s sun.

Reality opened in an uneven rent, and the Word Bearers fleet streaked across the void, great engines also streaming light into the darkness as they powered towards their home world.

On the strategium of the Fidelitas Lex, the Lord of the Legion watched the red ship’s resolving image on the occulus. He smiled, and closed his eyes as emotion threatened to overtake him.

‘Incoming hail,’ a bridge officer called.

‘Open channel,’ Lorgar replied. The smile didn’t leave his face when he opened his eyes, and the occulus projected a grainy image from the opposing vessel’s command deck.

The pict revealed a giant in unprepossessing black-stained mail armour, surrounded by his own bridge crew. His skin had a dark, coppery hue, as if he spent many long days under alien suns, and his helm bore a scarlet plume of cresting hair. One eye was sealed, puckered shut from an old wound. The other glinted with a colour that couldn’t be made out through the image’s distortion.

‘A trifle melodramatic, brother,’ said the giant in an amused baritone. ‘That many ships, when I only brought one.’

‘You came,’ Lorgar said through his smile.

‘Of course I came. But you owe me some answers, dragging me across half the Imperium like this.’

‘You’ll have them, I promise you. It lifts my heart to see you.’

‘And mine, to see you. It has been too long. But... brother,’ the giant hesitated. ‘There was talk of Monarchia. Is it true?’

The smile faded. ‘Not now,’ Lorgar said. ‘Not here.’

‘Very well,’ said Magnus the Red. ‘I’ll meet you in the City of Grey Flowers.’

Life always struggles in the desert.

On Colchis, as on many of the Imperium’s dryest worlds, the indigenous life coped with the climate however it could. For the human population, it was a matter of coastal cities, immense water filtration facilities, irrigation farming, and dealing with the seasonal floods from the rushing rivers that acted as blood vessels for the arid plains.

Vharadesh, the Holy City, was the nexus of such industrious efforts. Swathes of irrigated farmland reached out from the city walls, a triumph of ingenuity over nature. Colchis was a thirsty world, but the perfection of the human form showed in all things.

For other forms of life, lacking the capacity to affect their own environment, adaptation and evolution went hand in hand. Many plants in the drought-wracked scrubland had leaves with a layer of fine hairs to catch and hold more moisture from the infrequent rainfall, and as a defence against the wind’s drying touch. Colchis demanded much from its native life.

These forms of plant life had been catalogued by Imperial scholars over the years, and promptly ignored. All except for one wildflower growing in the alluvial deserts – a flower that couldn’t be dismissed so readily when it meant so much to the Colchisian people.

The moon lily bloomed with leaves of silver, white and grey – all to reflect more of the sun’s harsh light, stunting its own photosynthesis in the name of survival. Fragile, beautiful, the moon lily was a gift between lovers, a decoration at weddings and festivals, and those trained in its breeding and care were as respected as teachers and priests among the populace.

Across balconies throughout the city, especially on the spires claimed by the Covenant, great hanging gardens of white and silver blooms contrasted against the tan stone walls. Vharadesh was the Imperial designative name for the capital, and in the ruling caste’s religious sermons, it was referred to with passion and pride as the Holy City.

But to the people of Colchis, Vharadesh would always be the City of Grey Flowers.

Its wide streets were filled with cheering crowds as the Legion returned home, and when the first Stormbird – a vulture of gold – roared in for a landing by the Spire Temple, the people flocked to see their messiah return, and the pilgrims he brought with him.

Argel Tal was approaching this carefully. He wasn’t sure how she would react.

‘You will have to be careful on the surface,’ he said.

It had taken four months to reach Colchis from the ruin of Forty-Seven Sixteen. Four months of flight through stable warp conditions, four months of training and prayer, four months of listening to Xaphen debate about the Old Faith, and what hidden truths might be contained within the legend of the Pilgrimage. Argel Tal wasn’t sure what he believed, and the alien presence of doubt left him cold. He’d spent much of his time with Cyrene, as well as drilling the Seventh Company to battle readiness, and duelling Aquillon in the practice cages. The Custodian was a nightmare of an opponent, and both warriors enjoyed the challenge offered by the other. They weren’t even close to being friends, but grudging admiration was a fine foundation for meeting each other in the duelling ring.

With the four months of travel to Colchis added to the rest, Argel Tal and the Chapter of the Serrated Sun had been absent from their own expeditionary fleet for well over half a year. From what little word reached him, apparently the 1,301st Expedition was sending repeated pleas for the Serrated Sun to return, for they were locked in a vicious compliance that required Astartes aid to break the enemy. Already one of the smaller fleets, they were apparently grinding to a halt without their Legion contingent.

One of the messages had been addressed to him personally, as Chapter subcommander. It came directly from Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus – a veteran of void war, but self-confessed at lacking insight into planetary engagements.

‘We’re hurling men at one of their mountain strongholds, but they hold every advantage of terrain, and our armour divisions are ground down by ambushes in the foothills. Would that you were here, subcommander. The blades of the Seventh would make brutally short work of this place.’

Argel Tal had saved it in the data-slate’s memory archive as a form of penance. He sometimes brought it back up to read over, masochistic in his frustration.

Soon, though. They would return to the Great Crusade once breaking orbit from Colchis. The primarch had business here, and in truth, it was a blessing to be able to return to the home world. Argel Tal hadn’t been back himself in three decades.

‘I said, you will need to be careful on the surface,’ he repeated.

Cyrene had changed. Gone was the emaciated wraith who wept as she left the ashen remnants of the perfect city.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. Her sightless eyes were closed – a habit she’d unconsciously been forming in the past few months. As she spoke, she was arranging her hair in a fashion that seemed needlessly complicated to Argel Tal. Her hands moved slowly, carefully, sensing by touch what her eyes couldn’t see. He enjoyed watching her; it was something of a guilty pleasure. While nothing of attraction existed between them, he often found himself captivated by her fragile, gentle movements, as if she was forever careful about affecting the world around her. She seemed to want to leave no mark, no imprint, on anything she touched. There was no fear in her grace, no hesitation. Simply respect. Care.

The captain stood in full armour but for his helm, leaving his head bare, so the voice she heard was his own, not his helm’s. Cyrene was slowly learning to differentiate his voice from Xaphen’s, mostly through their accents. Argel Tal had a rough, almost impolite edge to his guttural intonation, whereas Xaphen – born in the Urals on Terra – had a clipped tendency to turn S’s into Z’s. The Chaplain spoke like a foreign diplomat. The captain like a ganger, or a boy living on the streets.

‘What don’t you understand?’ he asked her.

She toyed with a lock of hair as it lay against her cheek. ‘I don’t understand why I have to be careful.’

This was a difficult subject. Word from the Legion fleet was constantly cycled back to Colchis, for the people of the home world took great interest, and great pride, in the conquests of their chosen champions. Mothers and fathers listened in the hope some chronicle would detail the glory of a son taken from them in childhood and reshaped as one of the Astartes. Covenant clergy listened for inspiration to preach of the primarch’s righteousness.

This network was maintained by astropaths, sending short psychic pulses of information back to their counterparts on the home world. Several times a week, broadcast from speaker towers across the Holy City, updates of the Legion’s progress drew flocks of listeners. City-wide celebrations were declared by the Covenant each time a Legion expedition reached compliance.

Everyone – everyone – had listened to the reports of Monarchia. The Legion’s humiliation. The Word Bearers kneeling. The Emperor destroying the Imperial Creed forever.

The fleet’s return had an uncomfortable gravity about it, for despite the population’s joy, the whole thing reeked of so much more than a simple homecoming.

And then there was the matter of Monarchia’s survivors. The Legion had encountered few living souls in the ruined city, and Cyrene was one of only seven people taken from the devastation. Word of these holy refugees flashed through Colchisian society. Here were living martyrs, drawn from the ashes of the Legion’s shame. The Covenant sent entreaties to the Legion fleet, pleading with the primarch to allow the refugees to set foot on Colchis, perhaps even to be inducted into the holy order itself.

The seven names were already being spoken with all the reverence of saints’ titles, added into daily prayers. It was difficult to explain this, because Argel Tal had only learned the extent of the refugees’ fame an hour before. The Chapter of the Osseous Throne made planetfall shortly after the primarch, and the four refugees with them were mobbed by adoring crowds. Their every word was recorded, their names were chanted in the streets, while people sought to touch their skin in the hope of gaining some of their divine fortune.

Vox-reports immediately stabbed back to the ships in orbit, warning the other Chapters harbouring refugees that the City of Grey Flowers was as eager to see the Monarchians as it was to welcome the primarch home.

‘You have to be careful because there may be some people on the surface who seek your blessing, and approach you without warning. It might be disorienting.’

Her serf’s robe was a simple affair, but she smoothed it carefully against her returning figure. ‘I still don’t understand. Why would they want to see us?’

‘You are an icon,’ he said. ‘A living icon, a martyr in life rather than death. You paid the price for Colchisian ignorance, and in doing so, earned great respect from us all. I’m told they are saying the seven of you are tied to the Legion’s destiny. A reflection of failure, a hope for the future. Your life is a lesson, and one we must all learn.’

She faced him, without seeing him. ‘That’s very poetic for you, captain.’

‘It is the best way I can describe it.’

‘I’m an icon to them?’

He donned his helm, staining his sight blue and adding a layer of targeting information to his vision. His voice emerged as vox-growl.

‘Not just to them.’

The journey down to Colchis lasted twenty minutes.

In the Thunderhawk’s cockpit, Argel Tal stood behind Malnor, the pilot. They came in low over the parched earth, approaching the mud-brick city walls as the desert sliced past beneath. The city’s skyline showed a breathtaking view of tan buildings, brick spires as far as the eye could see. To the south, the great River Phranes flowed past – a wide road of sapphire glinting in the sunlight. River barges and bulk freight carriers crossed on the wide waters.

‘Legion gunship Rising Sun, this is western district control. Please respond.’

Argel Tal scowled behind his faceplate. This didn’t bode well.

‘They’re keen,’ said Malnor, and reached to activate the console’s voxsponder. ‘This is the Rising Sun, inbound.’

‘Rising Sun, please confirm you have the Blessed Lady aboard.’

‘The what?’ He deactivated the channel and looked over his shoulder. ‘Captain?’

Argel Tal swore in breathless Colchisian. ‘I think they mean–’

‘This must be a joke,’ Malnor muttered.

‘My blood’s running cold,’ said Argel Tal. ‘This is no joke.’

‘This is the Rising Sun,’ Malnor voxed again. ‘Repeat, please.’

‘Rising Sun, this is western district control. Please confirm you have the Blessed Lady aboard.’

‘I don’t know,’ the sergeant grumbled. ‘That depends on what you’re talking about.’

The voice on the other end of the vox-channel explained, and assigned landing coordinates accordingly.

‘This,’ Malnor said to Argel Tal, ‘is getting out of hand.’

The captain nodded. ‘Be ready. You’ve just volunteered to join the escort detail.’

‘By your word.’

The Thunderhawk shuddered as it graced the landing platform.

‘I hear something,’ Cyrene said. She stood in the gunship’s loading bay, flanked by Xaphen and Torgal.

‘It’s the engines cycling down,’ said Torgal, knowing full well it wasn’t. He’d seen the view from the cockpit window as they came in on approach, and like the other Astartes, his enhanced hearing could clearly differentiate between engine whine-down and the sounds outside the hull.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it’s voices. I can hear voices.’

Argel Tal stood ahead of them, ready to hit the door release and lower the gang ramp. Malnor came from the cockpit, thudding his way down the crew ladder. He saluted Argel Tal as he took up position behind the Monarchian.

‘You might be disoriented, Cyrene.’ Argel Tal’s vox-voice almost made the words a threat. ‘Do not fear, you will be between the four of us at all times. Malnor behind, Torgal to the left, Xaphen to the right. I will lead the way. It is only a short journey to the monastic spire where you will be staying.’

‘What’s happening?’ she asked. All four warriors could hear her heart beating faster now, a wet drum behind her ribcage. ‘What’s going on?’

‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ said Xaphen. They were the last words he spoke before donning his own helm. ‘We will be with you.’

‘But–’

‘You will be fine,’ Argel Tal said, and thumped the door release.

Sunlight flooded into the loading bay. As did thousands of cheering voices.

‘It’s going to be a long day,’ said Torgal.

Torgal’s prediction proved correct.

Cyrene was shaken by the day’s events, no doubt about it, but the Astartes believed she’d held up well. Colchis was a world of peace and law, and the City of Grey Flowers respected its holy leaders above all. On more barbarous worlds, the Monarchian refugees might have been besieged by adoring crowds in celebrations that bordered on riots, but here they were cheered from the side of roads, with the petals of moon lilies cast onto the ground before them.

Upon first leaving the gunship, Cyrene had lifted a hand to her mouth, almost staggered by the wall of sound that rose to meet her. Xaphen lightly rested his gauntlet on her shoulder in reassurance. She’d heard Argel Tal, a few steps ahead of her, swearing in a language she didn’t understand.

And then they were walking.

In the bellicose good cheer, she lost the second of her senses. After growing used to perceiving the world around her by sound, to have everything washed away in the crowd’s noise was a frightening loss. Several times she reached a hand out, her fingertips brushing the cold metal of Argel Tal’s back-mounted power pack.

‘Are they near?’ she asked. The crowd sounded close, so very close.

‘They won’t touch you.’ She thought it was Torgal’s voice, but through the helm filters, she couldn’t be sure. ‘We are between you and the crowd, little mistress.’

Definitely Torgal. Only he called her that.

‘Will they not touch your armour?’ she asked. ‘For good luck?’

‘No. It’s against tradition.’ She was certain that was Xaphen, but he said nothing more.

The crowd continued to chant. Sometimes, her name. Sometimes, her title.

‘How many are there?’ asked Cyrene, her voice small.

‘Thousands,’ one of the Word Bearers said. In the clash of noise, it was difficult to tell where their voices were coming from.

‘We’re almost there.’ That was definitely Argel Tal. She recognised his accent, despite the helm.

The captain couldn’t entirely swallow his unease. It lingered, coppery and unwelcome, on the underside of his tongue. Target locks flitted from peasant to peasant as he scanned the crowd. Row upon row of celebrants, lining the street. So much for a meditative homecoming.

‘Sir,’ Malnor voxed. ‘Oath papers?’

‘Permission granted.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Malnor broke ranks, walking towards the crowd. The closest citizens knelt as he approached, and averted their eyes. Without ceremony, though with obvious care, the sergeant untied the parchment scroll bound to his right pauldron. He rolled it up into a scroll, and offered it to one of the kneeling peasants. An old man took it in hands that trembled. Whether they shook with emotion or palsy wasn’t clear, but the silver wetness in his eyes was testament to his devotion.

‘Thank you, great lord,’ the elder said, and pressed the gift to his forehead in thanks.

Malnor had another oath paper bound to the shin of his armour. He removed this next, and offered it to a woman who quietly wept.

‘Bless you,’ she whispered, and touched the scroll to her forehead, just as the old man had done.

‘From the fires of righteousness,’ Malnor intoned, ‘unto the blood of purity. We bring the Word of Lorgar.’

‘By your word,’ the nearby peasants chorused.

Malnor nodded his helmed head in acknowledgement, and walked back to join his brothers.

‘What happened?’ Cyrene asked. ‘Why did we stop?’

‘It’s considered a blessing to be offered the oath papers from our armour,’ said Argel Tal. A few minutes later, Argel Tal paused the march again to give one of his parchments to a young mother holding a baby. She pressed the scroll to her infant’s forehead, then her own.

‘What is your name, warrior?’ she asked, needing to crane her neck to look up at him.

‘Argel Tal.’

‘Argel Tal,’ she repeated. ‘My son will carry that name from this day forward.’

Insofar as it was possible for a walking suit of battle armour to look humble, the captain did so now. ‘I’m honoured,’ he said, and added ‘Be well,’ before rejoining the march.

Torgal glanced down at the frail figure of Cyrene. ‘Would you like my oath scroll, little mistress?’ he offered.

‘I don’t read very much anymore,’ she smiled, bright and sincere. ‘But thank you, Torgal.’

After the short march through streets she couldn’t see, Cyrene had spent the rest of the day in one of the Covenant’s temples. Argel Tal and his officers remained with her as she was interviewed and questioned by overeager priests. Instead of being given a seat, she was guided to recline on a long couch, made almost princely by too many cushions. It had the opposite effect of the intended one, leaving her shuffling to get comfortable no matter how she reclined. In the end, she just sat up straight, treating it like a chair.

‘What was the last thing you saw?’ one priest asked.

‘Describe the fire that rained from the sky,’ pressed another.

‘Describe the city’s towers falling.’

As the questions went on, she wondered just how many inquisitors were sat before her. The room was cold, and the faint echo when people spoke suggested a large chamber. A background hum pervaded everything, a thrum that set her teeth on edge – it was one thing to recognise the active buzz of Astartes armour, but another entirely to get used to it.

‘Do you hate the Emperor?’ one of the priests asked.

‘What happened in the months after the city fell?’ asked another.

‘Did you kill any of your abusers?’

‘How did you escape?’

‘Would you serve the Covenant as a high priestess?’

‘Why did you refuse the Legion’s offer of new eyes?’

The answer to this last question intrigued her interrogators a great deal. Cyrene touched her closed eyes as she replied.

‘On my world, there is a belief that the eyes were windows to the soul.’

They answered her words with muttering unintended for her ears. ‘How quaint,’ one of them replied. ‘Do you fear your soul would quit your body through hollow eye sockets? Is that it?’

‘No,’ said Cyrene. ‘Not that.’

‘Please enlighten us, Blessed Lady.’

She shifted in discomfort yet again, and still blushed each time they used the title. ‘It was said that those who wore false eyes would never move beyond this life to paradise beyond. Our mortis-priests always preached that they could see the trapped souls of the lost and the damned in the false eyes of servitors.’

There was silence, for a time.

‘And you believe,’ one of the priests said, ‘that your spirit would be sealed within your corpse if you surrendered your natural eyes?’

She shivered to hear it put like that. ‘I don’t know what I believe. But I will wait until they heal. There’s still a chance they might.’

‘Enough,’ a voice boomed, edged by vox-crackle. ‘You are making her uncomfortable, and I have given my word to the Urizen that she will be taken to the Spire Temple at midnight.’

‘But there’s still time for–’

‘With respect: be silent, priest,’ Argel Tal stepped closer to her, and she felt her gums itching at the drone of his armour. ‘Come, Cyrene. The primarch awaits.’

‘May the Blessed Lady return tomorrow?’ one priest piped up as they were leaving.

None of the Astartes answered.

Once outside, another crowd was waiting for her. She smiled in the direction of the noise, and offered the occasional wave, feeling her face burn with self-conscious doubt. First and foremost in her mind was the effort to keep her discomfort from showing. There would be no getting used to this. She knew she’d hate it until it either stopped of its own accord, or they left Colchis behind.

‘We didn’t have to leave,’ she said. ‘I could have answered more questions. Was I supposed to?’

Over the din of the crowd, she heard Argel Tal reply.

‘My apologies for using you as an excuse to leave,’ he said, ‘but it was too pointless to endure any longer. Questions that led nowhere, or were already answered in the Legion’s reports. Tedious bureaucracy, propagated by self-important men.’

‘Is that not blasphemy? Defying the will of the Covenant?’

‘No,’ said the captain. ‘It was a tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming boredom.’

She smiled at that, as the Word Bearers led her on.

Less than three minutes later, as Cyrene was drawing breath to comment on the warmth of the desert night’s wind, there was a crashing sound from above, the crash of a hundred windows smashing at once.

What she couldn’t see was all four of her warrior guides standing utterly still, staring up at the Spire Temple – that twisting tower of tanned stone, central in the city, taller than all else.

Around her, the crowd’s cheers soured into whispers and weeping. Two of the Astartes, she didn’t know which, began to chant prayers in monotone vox-voices, benedictions to the primarch.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Move,’ Xaphen ordered. One of them gripped her elbow and forced her into a run. Their armour joints snarled with the change of pace.

‘What’s going on?’ she tried again. ‘What was that noise? An explosion?’

‘The primarch’s observatory on top of the central spire,’ he said. ‘Something is wrong.’

TEN

The Right to Lead a Legion

Empyrean

Misery

An hour before, Lorgar was leaning on the balcony’s railing, looking out over the city. The Spire Temple of the Covenant offered an unparalleled view of Vharadesh, and the primarch inhaled the scent of spice, flowers and sand as he watched the sun setting behind the horizon.

Magnus stood alongside him, still clad in the coat of black mail, his coppery skin burnished by occasional sweat trickles. Of the two brothers, Magnus was taller, and even in the years before losing his eye, he’d scarcely resembled their Imperial father. Lorgar was the image of the Emperor in an unknowable younger life – an immortal at thirty.

‘You have done great things here,’ Magnus said, also staring over the vista of Vharadesh. The spiralling towers, bedecked in sloping walkways, like twisted horns... The sea of red-walled homes... The great parks of moon lilies growing in unforgiving soil, ready to be spread over roads and balconies across the city...

‘I have seen Tizca,’ Lorgar’s smile was sincere, ‘and I am always honoured you can leave your City of Light, yet still praise my people’s work here.’

Magnus chuckled, avalanche-low. ‘To think such beauty could rise from riverside sand and bricks of compacted mud. The City of Grey Flowers is a haven for me, Lorgar. You have melded technology and antiquity with consummate skill. It puts me in mind of those first cities ever raised by mankind, in the deserts they were forced to call home.’

Lorgar laughed, shaking his head. ‘I’ve seen no such images in scrolls, brother.’

‘Nor have I,’ the one-eyed king smiled. ‘But in dreams. Meditations. In traversing the waves and depths of the Great Ocean.’

Lorgar’s smile fell a notch. Where his brothers were concerned, Magnus was highest in his affections, not only because he was the first of the family Lorgar had met, but because he was one of the few the Word Bearers lord could relate to. The others were, by varying degrees, feral simpletons, cold-hearted instruments of warfare, or vainglorious warlords.

Except for Horus, of course. It was impossible to hate Horus.

He loved Magnus as one of the few he could speak with, but he never believed himself his brother’s equal. Magnus’s psychic gifts were unrivalled – they’d often spoken of the things Magnus witnessed in his spiritual travels through the infinite. The past. The future. The hearts and minds of men.

‘Cairus,’ Magnus said, his voice softer now. ‘Alixandron. Babalun, most of all, for it possessed a great garden of hanging flowers akin to the one your city wears like a crown of silver blooms.’

Lorgar felt warmed by the image. The beauties of the past, rising again through human inspiration.

‘As I’ve told you before,’ he said, ‘it’s not my city. I had a hand in it, but I am not solely responsible for the wonders we see here.’

‘Always, this modesty.’ Magnus’s tone had the slightest edge of disapproval, perhaps hinting at a lecture soon to come. ‘You live your life for others, Lorgar. There is a line when selflessness becomes unhealthy. If all you do is to raise others from ignorance, when is there time for you to learn more yourself? If all you seek is a greater purpose in existence, where is the joy in your own life? Look to the future, but cherish the present.’

He nodded to his brother’s words, watching the sun set. Even as it darkened in the horizon’s clutch, it was still bright enough to pain mortal eyes. Lorgar was untroubled by such human concerns.

‘Another parade,’ he said, watching a distant street filled with revellers.

‘You sound melancholic,’ Magnus observed. ‘Your people are pleased you have come home, brother. Doesn’t that lift your spirits?’

‘In truth, it does. But that’s not a parade in my honour. It is for the refugees of Monarchia. I asked for the seven of them to be brought here after sunset. Judging by the crowd’s size, I would guess that’s the parade in honour of the Blessed Lady.’

Magnus leaned his huge hands on the balcony railing, as if leaning forward would bring the distant street into sharper focus.

‘Why is one of your refugees treasured above the others?’

‘It is the way of things,’ Lorgar inclined his head in the parade’s direction. ‘She is the only female, and I am told she possesses great beauty. Couple that with the fact she was the only one to actually witness Monarchia’s destruction. The orbital barrage blinded her. Such sacrifice appeals to the masses.’

Magnus’s patrician features hardened. ‘I hear Kor Phaeron’s calculations in your voice, brother. I have cautioned you before on heeding his words too closely, and too often. Bitterness burns within him.’

Lorgar shook his head. ‘He worries he isn’t worthy, that’s all. But you’re wrong – these refugees are nothing to do with Kor Phaeron, though I confess the Covenant dearly hungers to capitalise on their popularity. I requested their presence here tonight, for I wished to meet them. No more, no less.’

Magnus was appeased. Silence stretched out between them. As with all close brothers, it was a comfortable quiet, as meaningful and worthy as the words they shared.

Only one matter remained raw.

‘How did it come to this?’ Magnus eventually asked. ‘I know of Colchis’s religious wars. I remember the day I arrived with Father, and you offered him a world devoted in worship. But we have fallen so far, and so fast. How did it come to this?’

Lorgar didn’t meet his brother’s eye. He continued to look down upon the city.

‘This whole world burned under a crusade I led almost two centuries ago. I dreamed of god’s arrival. I suffered hallucinations, visions, nightmares and trances. Night after night after night. Sometimes, I would wake at dawn to find blood running from my eyes and ears, and our father’s face burned into my mind. Of course, I was too young, too naive, to realise what I was. How could I know what psychic power boiled within me, seeking a release? I was not you, to know from birth how to control my sixth sense. I am not Russ, to be able to howl and have every wolf in the world howl with me. My powers always fired in fits and bursts, coming in feasts or famines. I was eight years old when I realised that some people had pleasant dreams instead of endless nightmares. Nothing could have shocked me more.’

Magnus remained silent. Despite all their talks, all their closeness, this was a tale he’d not heard from his brother’s lips before.

Lorgar closed his eyes and continued.

‘I waged a holy war in the name of a father who finally descended from above, saw the oceans of blood and tears shed in his name, and simply didn’t care. I wasted my youth hunched over scripture and religious codices, planning for the messiah’s coming, believing he would give meaning to all human life – meaning that thousands of human cultures are forever seeking. And I was wrong.’

‘The Emperor brought meaning,’ said Magnus. ‘Just not the meaning you hoped for.’

‘He brought as many questions as he did answers. Father is hollowed through, infested by secrets. I hate that about him. He is a creature incapable of trust.’

Another pause reached out between them.

At last, Lorgar smiled, bleak and unamused. ‘Perhaps he did bring meaning. But he did not bring the meaning humanity needs. That’s what matters.’

‘Go on,’ Magnus said. ‘Finish the thought.’

‘Since then I have crusaded across his empire for over a century, raising icons and faiths in his image – and only now he objects? After a hundred years, only now am I told that all I’ve done is wrong?’

Magnus kept his silence. The doubt he felt shone through his narrowed eye.

‘Magnus,’ Lorgar smiled as he saw the emotion on his brother’s face, ‘only the truly divine deny their divinity. It’s written thus in countless human cultures. He never denied his godhood when he first came to Colchis to take me into the stars. You were there. He witnessed weeks of celebrations in his honour, never once rebuking me for lauding him as a god. And since then? He has watched me crusade for him, never saying a word about what I’ve done. Only now, at Monarchia, did he bring down his wrath. When he decided my faith had to be broken, after more than a century.’

‘Faith is an ugly word,’ Magnus said, idly stroking the bound spine of the great book he always carried chained at his hip.

‘Why were we born to be warriors?’ Lorgar asked, apropos of nothing.

‘Finally,’ Magnus laughed, ‘we reach the reason you summoned me to Colchis. Why are we warriors? A fine question, with a simple answer. We are warriors because that is what the Emperor, beloved by all, required in the galaxy’s reclamation.’

‘Of course. But this is the greatest age in mankind’s history, and instead of philosophers and visionaries... it is led by warriors. There’s something poisonous in that, Magnus. Something rotten. It is not right.’

Magnus shrugged, with a whisper of fine mail. ‘Father is the visionary. He needed generals at his side.’

Lorgar clenched his teeth. ‘By the Throne, I am sick to my core of hearing those words. I am not a soldier. I have no wish to be one. I am not a destroyer, Magnus. Not like the others. Why do you think I spend so long establishing compliance and creating perfect worlds? In creation, I am vindicated. In destruction, I am–’

‘Not a soldier?’

‘Not a soldier,’ Lorgar nodded. He looked exhausted. ‘There are greater things in life than excelling at shedding blood.’

‘If you are not a soldier, then you have no right to lead a Legion,’ said Magnus. ‘The Astartes are weapons, brother. Not craftsmen or architects. They are the fires that raze cities, not the hands that raise them.’

‘So we are speaking in hypocrisies today?’ Lorgar managed a smile. ‘Your Thousand Sons are responsible for much of Tizca’s beauty, let alone Prospero’s enlightenment.’

‘True,’ Magnus returned the smile, altogether more sincere, ‘and they are also responsible for a great number of faultless compliances. The Word Bearers, by comparison, are not.’

Lorgar fell silent.

‘Is this about Monarchia?’ Magnus asked.

‘Everything is about Monarchia,’ Lorgar admitted. ‘It all changed in that moment, brother. The way I see the worlds we conquer. My hopes for the future. Everything.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Do not patronise me,’ Lorgar snapped. ‘With the greatest respect, Magnus, you cannot imagine this. Did the lord of all human life descended upon you, burn your greatest achievements to ash and dust, and then tell you that you – and you alone – were a failure? Did he throw your precious Thousand Sons to the ground and tell your entire Legion that every soul wearing their armour was a wasted life?’

‘Lorgar–’

‘What? What? I spent decades on Colchis dreaming of the day god himself would arrive and lead humanity to the empyrean. I raised a religion in his honour. For over a hundred years, I have spread that faith in his name, believing he matched every dream, every prophecy, every mythic poem about the ascension of the human race. Now I am told my life was a lie; that I have ruined countless civilisations with false faith; that every one of my brothers who laughed at me for seeking a greater purpose in life was right to laugh at our bloodline’s only fool.’

‘Brother, calm yourself–’

‘No!’ Lorgar instinctively reached for a crozius that wasn’t there. His fingers curled in a rage that couldn’t be released. ‘No... Do not “brother” me with indulgence in your eyes. You are the wisest of us all and you see nothing of the truth in this.’

‘Then explain it. And shackle your temper, I have no desire to be whined at. Or will you strike me, as you struck Guilliman?’

Lorgar hesitated. After a moment, he brushed a white petal from the railing with his golden palm. Anger quietened, without fully fading, as the petal flitted down through the air. He met Magnus’s gaze.

‘Forgive me. My choler is kindled, and my control lacking. You’re right.’

‘I always am,’ Magnus smiled. ‘It’s a habit.’

Lorgar looked back out over the city. ‘As for Guilliman... You have no idea how fine it felt to strike him down. His arrogance is unbelievable.’

‘We are blessed with many brothers who would benefit from being humbled once in a while,’ Magnus smiled, ‘but that is for another time. Speak what must be spoken. You are afraid.’

‘I am,’ Lorgar confessed. ‘I fear the Emperor will break the Word Bearers – and break me. We would be cast alongside the brothers we no longer speak of.’

The silence was hardly comforting. ‘Well?’ Lorgar asked.

‘He might,’ the one-eyed giant said. ‘There was talk of it, before Monarchia.’

‘Did he come to you to ask your thoughts?’

‘He did,’ Magnus admitted.

‘And he went to our brothers?’

‘I believe so. Don’t ask what sides were taken by whom, for I do not know where most of them stood. Russ was with you, as was Horus. In fact, it was the first time the Wolf King and I have agreed on anything of import.’

‘Leman Russ spoke in my favour?’ Lorgar laughed. ‘Truly, we live in an age of marvels.’

Magnus didn’t share the amusement. His lone eye was a deep, arctic blue as it fixed upon Lorgar. ‘He did. The Space Wolves are a spiritual Legion, in their own stunted and blind way. Fenris is an unmerciful cradle, and it breeds such things in them. Russ knows that, though he lacks the intelligence to give it voice. Instead, he swore that he’d already lost two brothers, and had no desire to lose a third.’

‘Two already lost.’ Lorgar looked back to the city. ‘I still recall how they–’

‘Enough,’ warned Magnus. ‘Honour the oath you took that day.’

‘You all find it so easy to forget the past. None of you ever wish to speak of what was lost. But could you do it again?’ Lorgar met his brother’s eyes. ‘Could you stand with Horus or Fulgrim, and never again speak my name purely because of a promise?’

Magnus wouldn’t be drawn into this. ‘The Word Bearers will not walk the same paths as the forgotten and the purged. I trust you, Lorgar. Already, there’s talk that compliance was achieved on Forty-Seven Sixteen with laudable speed. Settler fleets are en route, are they not?’

Lorgar ignored the rhetorical question.

‘I need your guidance, Magnus. I need to see the things you see.’ The gold-skinned primarch watched the procession weaving through the streets, marching closer by the minute.

‘You know of Colchisian mythology, and the Pilgrimage to where gods and mortals meet. You know how it matches the beliefs of so many other worlds. The empyrean. The Primordial Truth. Heaven. Ten thousand names in ten thousand cultures. It cannot be mere superstition, if shamans and sorcerers on so many words all share the same beliefs. Perhaps father is wrong. Perhaps the stars hide more secrets. Perhaps they truly do hide the gods themselves.’

‘Lorgar...’ Magnus warned again. He turned from the balcony, and moved back into the expansive chamber atop the Spire Temple. The domed ceiling was glass, offering a breathtaking view of the sky as night fell. The stars were beginning to make themselves known, pinpricks of light in the sapphire sky.

‘Do not hunt for something to worship,’ Magnus said, ‘merely because your faith was proven false.’

Lorgar followed his brother, slender fingers toying with the hem of his grey robe’s sleeve. The Word Bearers primarch spent much of his time on Colchis in this spire-top observatory, staring up at the stars. It was here that he’d watched and waited for the Emperor’s arrival so many decades ago, mistaken in the belief that he would be a god worthy of worship.

‘Is that how you see me?’ he asked Magnus, his voice softer than before. Hurt shone in his eyes, flecked with buried anger. ‘Is that how you judge my actions? That I cast about in ignorance, desperate for something, anything, to hear my prayers?’

Magnus watched the stars coming out for the night. He noted several constellations already – their shapes taken and bestowed on Chapters within the Word Bearers Legion. There, the faint image of a crozius crowned with a skull; there, the high seat, adopted as the symbol of the Osseous Throne; and there, the flared circle of the serrated sun.

‘That is how history will judge you,’ said Magnus, ‘if you remain devoted to this path. No one will see your desire to elevate humanity or raise the species into some unknown enlightenment. They will see you humiliated and weak, desperate for something to believe in.’

‘Humanity is nothing without faith,’ Lorgar whispered.

‘And yet we do not need religion to explain the universe. The Emperor’s light illuminates all.’

‘That is what you always fail to see,’ Lorgar moved over to a table with several crystal wine glasses. ‘You think faith is about fear. About needing things explained to ignorant minds. Faith is the greatest unifying element in mankind’s history. Faith was all that kept the light of hope burning through the millennia on the thousands of worlds we now reclaim in this Crusade.’

‘So you say, brother.’ Magnus shrugged. ‘You will not be judged kindly for that belief.’

Lorgar poured a glass of dark wine, its scent heightened by the powdered spices added during its fermentation. Lacking the climate for grape vineyards, Colchisian wine was almost always made from dates. The bitter drink reddened his lips as he sipped it.

‘We are immortal,’ Lorgar pointed out. ‘Why would we worry for the future when we will still be around to shape it?’

Magnus ventured no answer.

‘You’ve seen something,’ Lorgar pressed. ‘Something in the Great Ocean. Something in the warp you stare into so often. Some... some hint at what might be. A future yet to come?’

‘It doesn’t work that way, brother.’

‘You’re lying. You are lying to me.’

Magnus turned his gaze from the darkening sky. ‘Sometimes you see and hear only what you wish. You’re wrong, Lorgar. Father is not a god. There are no gods.’

At last, Lorgar smiled as if he’d waited hours for those words to be spoken.

‘Is he a magical sky-spirit dwelling inside a mythical paradise? No. I am not a fool. He is not a god as primitive cultures once understood the concept. But the Emperor is a god in all but name, Magnus. He is psychic power incarnated within a physical shell. When he speaks, his lips never move and his throat makes no sound. His face is a thousand visages at once. The only aspect of humanity he possesses is the facade he wears to interact with mortals.’

‘That’s a very melodramatic perception.’

‘And it is true. The only difference between you and I is that you call him father, and I call him a god.’

Magnus sighed, his breath rumbling as he suppressed a growl. ‘I see where you are leading with this. Now I see why you summoned me. And Lorgar... I am leaving.’

Lorgar offered a golden hand, reaching out to his brother. ‘Please, Magnus. If the Emperor is what he is, there might be other beings that wield the same power. How can so many legends of divinity, from so many disparate cultures, all agree on other powers that exist beyond the veil? There must be gods in the universe. Our species’ most natural instincts cannot be wrong.’

‘This reeks of desperation,’ Magnus sighed. ‘Have you considered that father warned you for a reason?’

‘There is no shame in seeking the truth, Magnus. You of all souls should know that. Have you seen nothing of this in your travels through the Great Ocean? No beings that a human civilisation could perceive as a god or daemon?’

Magnus did not reply. His gaze burned into his brother.

‘My mind is alive with questions,’ the Word Bearer lord confessed. ‘Where in the galaxy would gods and mortals meet?’

The giant’s lip curled. ‘The Great Ocean hides much beneath its tides, Lorgar. We have both walked worlds where the warp bleeds into our reality, only to be manipulated by heathen ritemasters and misinterpreted as “magic”. Would you deceive yourself as they do?’

‘Stay,’ Lorgar implored. ‘Help me.’

Magnus shook his head. ‘Help you stare into the abyss? You want me to guide you along the paths walked by primitives and barbarians?’

Lorgar drew a shaky breath before replying.

‘Help me seek the truth that lies behind the stars. What if we are waging a false crusade? This might be an unholy war... World after world is purged or brought to compliance... We might be strangling the truth – a truth believed in one form or another by countless cultures... We... We... I hear something call out to me, day and night. Something in the void. Is it fate? Is this how we perceive the future? By hearing destiny’s voice whisper our names?’

Lorgar fell silent as Magnus came to him, the larger brother gripping the other’s robed shoulders. The golden primarch’s lips were trembling. His fingers twitched and shook.

‘My brother, you are raving,’ said Magnus. ‘Look at me. Peace, Lorgar. Peace. Look at me.’

Lorgar did as he was asked. Magnus the Red, the Crimson King, fixed his brother’s gaze with his own remaining eye.

‘Your eye has changed colour,’ Lorgar murmured. ‘I hear them calling, Magnus. Fate. Destiny. I hear destiny’s thousand voices...’

‘Focus on me,’ Magnus intoned, speaking slow and soft. ‘Listen well to my words. You are speaking from fear. A fear of failing again. A fear of dooming another world to destruction. A fear that father will order a third Legion, and a third son, to be purged from history.’

‘The fear has faded. I am no longer afraid. I am inspired.’

‘You cannot hide it from me with mere words, brother. And you are right to fear what may come to pass. You stand on the precipice of destruction, and still contemplate a path that will send you falling over the edge. I understand your pain. Everything you achieved on Colchis was for a flawed faith. Every compliant world is one your Legion must revisit and reshape. But you cannot live in fear of making another mistake.’

Lorgar said nothing for several moments. At last, his shoulders slumped.

‘You could have helped me, Magnus.’ The Word Bearers’ primarch lifted his brother’s hands away, and walked back to the wine table. ‘We could have taken the Pilgrimage together, and sought the place where the stars are stained by divine influence. You see into the Great Ocean better than anyone else. You could have been my navigator.’

Magnus narrowed his good eye. In sympathy, the puckered scar marking the absence of his other eye pulled tight.

‘What do you intend to do, Lorgar? You have no idea of what you seek.’

‘I will continue the Great Crusade,’ Lorgar smiled, taking another swallow of the dark wine. ‘I will cast my fleet across the galaxy, and bring every world we find into compliance. And as we sail the heavens, we will be as pilgrims seeking a holy land. If there is truth behind the legends so many cultures share, then I will find it. And with it, I will enlighten humanity.’

Magnus said nothing. Disbelief robbed him of speech.

Lorgar drained the wine. It stained his golden lips again. ‘I will apply my Legion’s full strength to the Great Crusade, and never raise another monument in the Emperor’s image. I will do it all under the watchful eyes of his Custodes war dogs. Surely there is no harm in recording ancient tales of faiths from the cultures we encounter? You yourself assured me they were all false. Father said the same.’

‘I am leaving,’ Magnus said again, and moved to the centre of the room. Resting his gloved hand on the great leather-bound book chained to his belt, the primarch looked back at his brother. They would not meet again for almost forty years, and the galaxy would be a very different place by the time they did.

They both sensed this. It carried between them in that lingering stare: half-challenge, half-plea.

‘What swims within the Great Ocean that you’ve always kept from us?’ Lorgar demanded, teeth clenching. ‘What secrets hide within the warp? Why do you spend your life staring into it, if there’s nothing there? What if I asked our father about your secret travels into the aether?’

‘Farewell, Lorgar.’

The Word Bearers lord pulled back his hood, his handsome features rendered into true gold by the candlelight.

‘Is there a place where reality and unreality converge? An empyrean, a heaven that humanity has always misunderstood? A realm where gods and mortals meet? Answer me, Magnus.’

Magnus shook his head as motes of misty light began to form around him. A teleportation lock from his vessel in orbit. Wind, from nowhere, began to breathe.

‘What are the voices?’ Lorgar screamed over the rising winds. ‘Who calls to me?’

‘If you will not alter your path, then only one thing awaits you in the stars,’ said Magnus.

Lorgar stared in rapt silence, hungering for the answer, but Magnus spoke only a single word before vanishing in a burst of bright light and white noise.

‘Misery.’

ELEVEN

In a God’s Service

Confession

The Pilgrimage

For several kilometres around the Spire Temple, revellers in the streets looked up in horror as the tower-top exploded in searing light. A dusty powder rained down from the observatory – its glass dome pulverised to the tiniest, twinkling shards.

The sonic boom of teleportation faded, as did the rush of displaced air.

In the wake of Magnus’s thunderous departure, Lorgar stood unfazed. His robe fluttered in the evening wind, and he spared a moment’s consideration for his scripture scrolls and parchment notes blowing out into the city. His crystal glasses were as annihilated as the reinforced glass dome, and his writing desk was stained by an expanding pool of bitter wine.

After an unknowable time of staring down at Vharadesh, he became aware of a pounding on the iron door set in the only remaining wall. Distracted, he paid the sound only a little heed.

‘Enter,’ he said.

Ascending the spire temple had been an exercise in frustration, with Covenant priests frantic about both the Blessed Lady’s presence and the explosion almost ten minutes before, in the master’s observatory. On several occasions, the Word Bearers had threatened panicking clergymen, forcing them aside to clear the way.

‘He will not open the doors!’ one wailed with a flagellant’s desperation.

‘We will speak with the primarch,’ Xaphen assured the Covenant ministers. ‘He sent for the Blessed Lady, and our lord will open the door for us.’

‘What if he is wounded?’ one of them whined, an obese creature with shaking jowls in the layered white and grey robes of a deacon. ‘We must attend to the Urizen!’

‘Control your emotions, and move aside,’ Argel Tal growled, ‘or I will kill you.’

‘You cannot mean that, lord!’

Faster than human eyes could follow, the swords of red iron came free in hissing rasps. The tips of both blades rested against the fat priest’s three chins before he’d even had time to blink. Apparently, the lord did mean it.

‘Yes,’ the deacon stammered. ‘Yes, I...’

‘Just move,’ Argel Tal suggested. The priest took the suggestion, trying not to burst into tears. As he moved, an animal scent tainted the air; stronger than the fear-sweat and sour breath from the priests around them.

‘Sir,’ Torgal switched to vox, rather than speaking aloud. ‘The priest pissed in his robes.’

Argel Tal grunted, and lifted Cyrene over the warm puddle on the wooden stairs.

With the last of the clergy sent scurrying, the warriors ascended the wide, spiralling stairway with their ward guarded between them.

‘Enter,’ the voice called.

Argel Tal hadn’t sheathed his swords. He led the group into the primarch’s observatory, which was now little more than a stone platform exposed to the night’s breeze. Scrolls and books lay scattered across the floor, the former gently nudged by the wind, the latter having their pages turned by it.

The primarch stood by the platform’s edge, staring down at the city below. His shaven, tattooed head was bare, seemingly unmarked by injury, and the grey-white robe of Covenant hierarchs was free of bloodstains.

‘Sire?’ said Argel Tal. ‘What happened here?’

Lorgar turned slowly. Faint confusion marred his features, as if he’d expected someone else.

‘Argel Tal,’ he said, his voice rumbling. ‘Captain of the Seventh Assault Company, Subcommander of the Chapter of the Serrated Sun.’

‘Yes, lord. It is I.’

‘Greetings, my son.’

The captain fought to keep the unease from his voice as he replied. ‘Sire, the vox-network is aflame. May I inform the Legion that all is well?’

‘Why would all not be well?’ the primarch asked, his face still unresolved from distracted confusion.

‘The explosion, sire,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Nine minutes ago.’ He gestured around. ‘The dome,’ he added lamely.

‘Ah,’ Lorgar smiled. It was a magnanimous and entertained smile, crooked as if sharing a joke. ‘I will have to discuss the matter of teleportation inside sensitive structures with my beloved brother in the future. Captain, do you intend to murder me?’

Argel Tal lowered his blades, only then realising he held them en garde.

‘Forgive me, sire.’

Lorgar laughed, the feyness dissipating completely. ‘Please inform the Legion I am well, and apologise

for my lack of contact. I was quite lost in thought.’

On shrieking engines, two gunships drifted out of the night, hovering close to the tower-top. Their engine wash sent the remaining scrolls scattering off the edges, and spotlights stabbed down to illuminate the primarch with Argel Tal’s coterie.

Argel Tal blinked at a flashing icon on his retinal display. ‘This is the Seventh Captain. Stand down, stand down. False alarm.’

The tower-top fell dark as the stab-lights cut out.

‘By your word,’ one of the pilots said. ‘Disengaging.’

Lorgar watched the gunships cruise away, back to their landing pads on the city’s outskirts. All sky-freight – most notably the Legion’s own military outposts – were situated in the desert outside the city walls. Vharadesh would not be defiled by warfare. Never again. Not after the civil war that crushed the Old Ways and brought the planet under Lorgar’s rule so long ago.

‘My lord,’ Argel Tal ventured. ‘You requested the presence of Cyrene, the Monarchian.’

Lorgar seemed to notice the others for the first time. A warm smile lit his features, and he stepped closer.

‘I was just musing, captain, on whether I have thanked you yet.’

Argel Tal sheathed his blades and removed his helm. The warm air felt good on his face and sweating neck.

‘Thanked me, lord?’

‘Yes,’ the primarch nodded. ‘Were you and your Chaplain not the two who lifted me from the perfect city’s dust, and set me on my feet once more?’

‘Yes, lord. That was us. With respect, we didn’t expect you to recall it.’

‘Kor Phaeron professed not to remember your names. The old man has a black sense of humour. But I recall the moment all too well, and I thank you for it. I will arrange for my gratitude to be shown in a more significant way soon.’

‘No, sire...’ said Xaphen.

‘That’s not necessary, lord...’ said Argel Tal.

Lorgar raised a hand to stall their protests. ‘Ah, ah. Enough of that foolish modesty. Now, this must be the Blessed Lady. Come forward, child.’

Torgal and Malnor, who’d been kneeling in their lord’s presence, rose to their feet and guided Cyrene closer.

In the presence of a primarch, most mortals were gripped by the immensity of just what they were seeing. Here, in physical form, stood majesty incarnate. The biological manipulation, flesh-smithing and genetic rewriting that goes into the construction of one of the Emperor’s sons was a unique and unrepeatable practice, with its roots hidden beneath layers of ubelievable secrecy, for even if another sentient being could glimpse the Emperor’s gestation laboratories, they would never understand what transpired within. Every mote of biological matter in their bodies was painstakingly shaped – forged on the quantum level to contribute to the whole. It was beyond science, beyond alchemy, beyond psychic sorcery, and yet drew from all of these and more.

Humans had suffered strokes and heart attacks in the presence of primarchs. Almost all, without exception, abased themselves upon first meeting one. Many wept without intention or reason.

Cyrene stood where she was led to stand, and she smiled at Lorgar. Directly at him – directly at his face.

‘Hello, Blessed Lady,’ the god’s son chuckled. She was just tall enough to reach his waist.

‘I... I can see you,’ she almost laughed. ‘I can see your smile.’

Lorgar saw his warriors begin to come closer, ready to examine her, to see if her sight was returning. He gestured them back with a hand, and shook his head.

+Argel Tal+ The primarch’s voice was sibilant in the captain’s mind. Despite the gene-link between them, it was unpleasantly invasive – a spike of cold cutting right to the brain. The captain felt his muscles bunch, and both hearts beat faster.

The Word Bearer nodded, hoping his liege didn’t detect his discomfort, but knowing he almost definitely did.

+It is said she was abused on Khur+ came the primarch’s voice.

The Word Bearer nodded again.

+What a creature is Man+, Lorgar’s silent voice seemed to sigh. +So much of life is wasted seeking dominance over all around us.+

Emboldened by his father’s familiarity tonight, Argel Tal tapped two fingertips beneath his eyes, one after the other.

+No+ Lorgar’s silent voice was weighted by emotion. +She cannot see me. She senses me, my aura, and her mind misinterprets it as sight. But her eyes are still dead. They will always be. Guilliman’s incendiary rage blinded her forever.+

All of this transpired in three beats of Argel Tal’s twinned hearts. Lorgar hadn’t even glanced in his direction.

‘Yes,’ the primarch said to Cyrene, and lowered himself to one knee. It brought his face almost level with hers. Her sightless gaze followed his movements, and he smiled to see the effect he had on her. ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘You can see me.’

‘As bright as the sun,’ Cyrene whispered, crying now. ‘I see gold, and gold, and gold.’

A hand the size of her head touched her with a ghost’s softness, thick fingertips brushing her cheeks, drying her tears. She breathed out a sigh without meaning to, somewhere between a sob and a laugh.

‘Cyrene,’ Lorgar’s voice was resonant and low in her ears. ‘I am told you are something of a talisman to my warriors. A lucky charm, if you will.’

‘I couldn’t say, my lord.’

‘I am not your lord,’ Lorgar gently stroked her features, fingertips smoothing along her nose, her cheekbones, her jawline. It was as if he were the blind one, needing to touch her to imagine her features. ‘Your life is your own, not mine – not anyone’s – to claim.’

She nodded, unable to speak through the mask of tears shining on her face.

‘Do you know why I wished to see you, Cyrene?’

‘No,’ her voice was strengthless and breathless. She merely mouthed the word.

‘To ask you for something. A gift only you can give.’

‘Anything,’ she mouthed. ‘Anything.’

‘Will you grant me forgiveness?’ the primarch asked. He took her tiny hands in his own, the golden fingers enveloping hers completely. ‘Will you forgive what I did to your world, to your perfect city, to your precious eyes?’

She managed a nod, looking away from the golden light she thought she could see.

Lorgar kissed her knuckles, the barest touch of his lips against her skin. ‘Thank you, Blessed Lady. My soul is lighter in the wake of your words.’

He released her hands, and rose to his feet, moving away.

‘Wait,’ she called out. ‘Let me serve you. Let me serve your Legion. Please.’

Argel Tal repressed a shiver. Cyrene’s words were achingly similar to the vow he’d made himself upon first seeing the primarch. How curious it was, when the past reached through to the present with such clarity.

‘Do you know,’ Lorgar asked her, ‘what a confessor is? Did they have such positions on Khur?’

‘They did, master,’ Cyrene said. She’d still not recovered her voice. ‘They called themselves the Listeners. They would hear our sins, and forgive them.’

‘Exactly,’ Lorgar chuckled. ‘Your life is your own, Cyrene Valantion of Monarchia. But if you wish to walk with my warriors and journey through the stars, then there is the perfect role for you to fill. You have heard my sins, and forgiven me. Would you do the same for my sons?’

Her answer was to kneel, abasing herself in thankful prayer. Instead of replying, her whispering voice spoke invocations of piety, straight from the scriptures she studied as a child.

The primarch cast a last affectionate look at Cyrene, before turning to Argel Tal. ‘Captain,’ he said.

‘My lord.’ Argel Tal saluted, fist over his chestplate.

‘Erebus had much to say about you in the month I was secluded. When I recalled who pulled me up from my knees before my brother Guilliman, Erebus spoke of you.’

‘I... am surprised to hear that, lord.’

Lorgar wasn’t deaf to the hesitance in Argel Tal’s tone. ‘I had assumed your discomfort with Erebus had faded with time. Have I erred in that belief?’

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘No, lord. Forgive me a moment’s distraction. Our difficulties are in the past. The trials were long ago.’

‘That’s good to hear,’ Lorgar chuckled. ‘To be trained by Erebus himself, and choose the blade above the crozius. You walking another path is a great blow to his pride, and a disappointment that cut him to his core. But he has forgiven you. I wondered – could the same be said for you? Have you forgiven him?’

Choosing another path. That, Argel Tal thought, was putting it very delicately.

‘There was nothing to forgive,’ he said. ‘His anger at my decision was understandable.’

Lorgar watched him closely, the primarch’s grey eyes forever judging, despite the affection that lay within them.

‘Your compassion has always done you great justice, Argel Tal.’

‘I am honoured you believe so, sire.’

‘So now we come to the crux of why you were summoned.’

‘I stand ready.’

‘There will be some changes to the Serrated Sun when you return to the Great Crusade. I have chosen four Chapters to play host to our Custodes sentinels – each Chapter dealing with five of the twenty. It is with regret that I inform you the Serrated Sun is one of them. I understand you met Aquillon in the city of glass? I have granted his request that one of the Custodes groups travel with the Serrated Sun. I saw no harm in throwing the Emperor’s watchdogs this one bone.’

‘By your word,’ said Argel Tal.

‘There’s more, I’m afraid.’ Lorgar smiled again, every inch the charming, golden hierarch who led a revolution on this very world. ‘I trust you above and beyond the call of duty. You lifted me from shame, dragging me from the dust, and I thank you for it. So I would ask, in all humility, if you would grant me a favour, Seventh Captain Argel Tal.’

The words, and the tone in which they were spoken, drove Argel Tal to his knee in supplication. What other primarch – what other godlike being – would be so humble as to ask one of his own sons for the gift of a favour? It humbled Argel Tal to be born into this being’s bloodline.

Lorgar laughed, the sound melodious in the night’s faint breeze. A dozen metres away, Cyrene heard the sound and felt the threat of tears again.

‘Rise,’ Lorgar said through the smile. ‘Have you not knelt enough, Argel Tal?’

He rose, but kept his eyes at the primarch’s feet. ‘Ask anything of me, sire. Anything, and it will be done.’

‘I have travelled with thousands upon thousands of my warriors, decade after decade, acting the general, playing the admiral. I grow weary of such games. While the Legion scatters across the stars, I have no wish to cross paths with my brothers now. Their righteous indignation will grate on my last nerves. You could say I wish to hide, but that would be a lie. I simply wish not to be found. There’s a beautifully subtle difference between the two.’

‘I understand, lord.’

‘Tell me: your expeditionary fleet – which was it, again?’

‘The 1,301st, sire. Commanded by Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus, currently engaged in the Atlas subsector.’ And awaiting reinforcement, he didn’t add out loud.

‘Yes,’ Lorgar nodded. ‘The 1,301st. I have journeyed with eighteen of my Chapters since the dawn of the Great Crusade. This time, as we face our uncertain future, I would ask your permission to travel with the three hundred warriors of the Serrated Sun.’

Argel Tal looked over his shoulder at Cyrene, then Xaphen, before turning back to Lorgar. The Chaplain nodded once. The confessor had her hands over her mouth as tears streamed down her face.

‘Pardon me, sire?’ Argel Tal asked. ‘I am not sure I heard you correctly.’

‘I am asking this favour of you, my son. Kor Phaeron will lead the 47th Expedition in my absence. I may not be able to outrun the Occuli Imperator – he will follow me wherever I go – but I can seek the empyrean far

from my brothers’ eyes. And that is enough for now.’

‘You will... travel with us?’

‘I would be honoured to,’ said the primarch. ‘I could ask this of any of my fleets, I know. But you were the one to raise me back to my feet, when my ignorance had murdered a world. So I am asking you.’

‘I... Sire... I...’

Lorgar laughed again, his golden hands reaching to prevent Argel Tal from kneeling a second time. ‘Is that a yes?’

‘By your word, Aurelian.’

‘Thank you. It’s a new age, Argel Tal. A new age of vision and discovery. Every Word Bearer fleet will be cast to the winds of fate, sailing where they will. We will reach farther from Terra than any other Legion, pushing the Imperium’s boundaries with each world we take.’

Argel Tal knew where this was leading. It could only be going one way. He sensed Xaphen approaching from behind, though the Chaplain elected to say nothing.

‘We are seekers,’ Lorgar smiled, enjoying the word on his tongue. ‘We seek the place where gods and mortals meet – seeking divinity in a galaxy my father believes is godless.’

Lorgar clasped his hands together, and lowered his head in readiness for prayer.

‘The Legion will undertake the Pilgrimage.’

III

The Faceless Tarot

The cards are faceless, devoid of illustration. This is intentional – it’s what makes them so valuable, for they respond to the touch of an unseen sense, never relying on a lesser artist’s imagery to limit the human consciousness.

The crystal wafers are cored by a psychoreactive liquid, the images taking shape in the celadon resin as the tarot reader holds each card in his hands.

He had hoped, in time, that every psychically gifted soul in his father’s Imperium would come to learn this tarot. Instead, their creation had been scorned – even by Magnus (who had no need of such foci for his powers) and Leman Russ (who derided them even as he cast runestones and knucklebones in a bid to see the future).

It will soon be time to leave Colchis.

He turns the first card. In its milky surface, he sees a burning torch carried in a strong hand. Truth.

Something calls to me. That is a truth I am only now coming to accept. Something out there is calling to me.

I am not Magnus, to stare into space and easily hear the heartbeat of creation. My powers are not those of my dearest brother, nor my ascendant father. But something has always called to me. In my youth, it reached my mind as visions, nightmares, hallucinations. And now...

Erebus and Kor Phaeron – through their patience and guidance – aided me in growing attuned to the call.

My tutors in the Covenant, and my heart’s family now. We meditated, pored over the Covenant’s texts, and we decided the Legion’s destiny.

Something calls me, faint but infinite, prickling my sixth sense like an echo in the stars.

He turns the second card, and sees himself – robed and cowled, turning away so as to avoid his own gaze. A common card, this one. Faith.

Humanity is nothing without faith.

Faith raises us above the soulless and the damned. It is the soul’s fuel, and the driving force behind millennia of mankind’s survival. We are hollow without it. Existence is cold and arbitrary in a godless galaxy – faith shapes us, raises us above all other life, defines us as perfect in our sentience.

In eras where faith was choked, weakness and decay infested the species, withering its innards. That is something the Emperor, beloved by all, has always known, but never admits.

Yet he knows, and he forges his empire accordingly. A god need not be named a god in order to stand in supremacy. Names are meaningless. Supremacy matters – and my father stands ascendant over all mortal life in the galaxy: a god in power, a god in wrath, a god in vision.

A god in all but name.

The Old Faith of Colchis is one that shares roots in thousands of human cultures, across thousands of worlds. That alone is evidence that somewhere within its meandering parables, and the unsubtle blending of myth into history and history into myth, there exists a core of absolute truth.

The loveliest legend is that of the empyrean, the Primordial Truth.

It is known by countless names, of course. The empyrean is the name we spoke on Colchis. Others named it heaven – a means of existing into eternity, long after the death of the mortal form. A realm of infinite possibility: a paradise of potential where the souls of every mortal in history coil around one another.

Even I know such things are myths, stories spoken and passed down imperfectly through countless generations.

But... imagine it. Imagine the reality behind the myths. Imagine a place in the universe where gods and mortals meet. Imagine the miracles of power that could be performed.

Imagine a state of utter chaos, utter purity, where anything is possible. Life ends in death, but existence does not.

If there is truth to the Old Faith, I will find it.

He turns the third card. A haze of heat makes the sky shimmer above a skyline of towers and domes. Colchis. The City of Grey Flowers. Home.

The people of Colchis have always looked to the stars for answers. The Legion born on that world, the Bearers of the Word, is no exception. Many Chapters within the Legion are named for the constellations that brighten the night sky. Even the name they bestowed upon me, the name spoken by no one outside the Legion, has its foundations in antiquity. ‘Aurelian’, they call out as they wage war. ‘The golden’.

Yet its linguistic roots go further back, to a truer meaning, created by those ancestors that forever stared skyward for inspiration.

Aurelian. The sun.

It is natural for us to seek answers in the stars. Life comes from them. The Emperor descended from them. The Legion rose into them.

Fate awaits us beyond them.

Colchisian legends tell tales of primitive space-faring vessels leaving the world in search of the gods, much in the same way the Afrikaharan and Grecianic peoples of Ancient Earth once sought their deities. I have read the fragments that remain of their cultures, and I have walked the ways of the past with my brother Magnus. The travels of Osyrus and Odisseon in Terran myth are the travels of Khaane, Tezen, Slanat and Narag – prophets born of Colchis, great seekers now lost to time’s embrace.

Their journey to seek the home of the gods is known to us as the Pilgrimage.

He turns the fourth card. The psychoreactive liquid forms architectural wonders in his fingertips: an arching bridge, a meandering path of stone through a great garden... A journey. A pilgrimage.

The Pilgrimage is the oldest legend in the Covenant of Colchis, and the one most often seen in human cultures scattered across the galaxy. Humanity has a fundamental need to believe in it. The Primordial Truth: heaven, paradise... It exists somewhere, in some form – home of the gods, underworld of the daemons. The layer behind natural reality. Anything is possible within its boundaries.

The Pilgrimage is nothing less than the journey to see it with one’s own eyes. To confirm where mythology ends and faith begins.

Heaven. Hell. Gods. Daemons.

I will have the answers I seek.

He turns the fifth and final card. The Emperor, bedecked in finery, all details writ with punishing clarity except the one aspect that matters: his face. A golden lord.

I was weaned on the old scrolls – the very scrolls we cast aside in favour of worshipping the Emperor. Now, I cannot help but look back to the teachings of my youth, and think of those legends and their cores of truth.

In crude imagery, the old works showed a stain on the stars – a scar in reality, where the Primordial Truth reached out into the universe of flesh, bone, blood and breath. Each of them foretold of a golden lord, a being of godly power that would carry humanity to divine perfection. It had to be my father. It had to be the Emperor. And I believed it was, until the moment it was not.

He was not the golden lord. The Emperor will carry us to the stars, but never beyond them. My dreams will be lies, if a golden lord does not rise.

I look to the stars now, with the old scrolls burning runes across my memory. And I see my own hands as I write these words.

Erebus and Kor Phaeron speak the truth.

My hands.

They, too, are golden.

Part Two

PILGRIMAGE

Three years after the Legion’s

departure from Colchis

IV

A Child’s Dreams

I can only imagine how the primarch’s heart shattered when the Pilgrimage ended.

Three years of the Seventeenth Legion scattered across the stars. Three years of the Word Bearers sailing farther and faster than any of their brother warriors, reaching into the edges of space and pulling the boundaries of the Imperium with them.

So much of humanity’s dominion over the stars is owed to the sons of Lorgar – a bitter reality after the years of ponderous, meticulous advancement, earning them nothing but scorn.

But I know the temperament of this Legion. For every peaceful compliance – for every culture brought into the Imperium and quietly encouraged to follow the new Word – there will have been a world that now spins in space as a dead husk, fallen victim to the Word Bearers venting their wrath.

The Pilgrimage revealed many truths: the flaws written into the Legion’s precious gene-seed; the arcane gestation of Lorgar Aurelian himself; the existence of the neverborn – named as daemons, spirits and angels by a million ignorant generations of mankind. But the greatest truth revealed was also the hardest to accept, and it broke a primarch’s heart.

And of course, it changed his sons. The Word Bearers could never go back to a time before the truth.

Argel Tal and Xaphen were my closest links to a world I could no longer see, and the Pilgrimage’s destination changed them in ways far more profound than mere physical differences. The knowledge was a burden to them: that they and their brothers in the Word Bearers Legion must be the ones to return to the Imperium with this terrible truth.

I cannot conceive how they endured, being the heralds of such tidings. To be the ones chosen to enlighten an entire species that humanity would struggle from now until the day creation died. There would be no Golden Age, no era of peace and prosperity. In the darkness of the future, there would be only war.

Perhaps we are all playing the roles marked out by the gods. People who are destined for greatness will often dream great dreams as children. Fate shapes them for the years to come, offering their young minds a teasing glance at what will be.

Blessed Lorgar, Herald of the Primordial Truth, dreamed like this. His childhood was tormented by visions of his father’s arrival – a god of gold, descending from above – as well as nightmares of someone unknown, something unseen, forever calling his name.

And that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Word Bearers Legion. Their father knew he would be one of those bringing enlightenment to humanity, but he could never foresee how it would come to pass.

The primarch has spoken of his brothers and how they dreamed similar dreams. Curze, born on a world of eternal night, dreamed of his own death. Magnus, Lorgar’s closest kin, dreamed the answers to the universe’s mysteries. One was cursed with foreknowledge; the other blessed by it. Both were destined to do great things as they reached maturity. Their actions have shaped the galaxy, just as Lorgar Aurelian’s have.

As for myself, I only remember one nightmare from my youngest years.

In my dream, I sat in a blackened room, as blind in the darkness then as I am now. And in that darkness I sat in silence, listening to a monster breathe.

Where is the line between prescience and fantasy? Between prophecy and a child’s imagination?

The answer is simple. Prophecy comes true.

We just have to wait.

- Excerpted from ‘The Pilgrimage’,

by Cyrene Valantion

TWELVE

Death

Final Flight of Orfeo’s Lament

Two Souls

Xaphen lay dead at the creature’s feet.

His spine twisted, his armour broken, a death that showed no peace in rest. A metre from his outstretched fingers, his black steel crozius rested on the deck, silent in deactivation. The corpse was cauled by its helm, its final face hidden, but the Chaplain’s scream still echoed across the vox-network.

The sound had been wet, strained – half-drowned by the blood filling Xaphen’s ruptured lungs.

The creature turned its head with a predator’s grace, stinking saliva trailing in gooey stalactites between too many teeth. No artificial light remained on the observation deck, but starlight, the winking of distant suns, bred silver glints in the creature’s unmatching eyes. One was amber, swollen, lidless. The other black, an obsidian pebble sunken deep into its hollow.

Now you, it said, without moving its maw. Those jaws could never form human speech. You are next.

Argel Tal’s first attempt to speak left his lips as a trickle of too-hot blood. It stung his chin as it ran down his face. The chemical-rich reek of the liquid, of Lorgar’s gene-written blood running through the veins of each of his sons, was enough to overpower the stench rising from the creature’s quivering, muscular grey flesh. For that one moment, he smelled his own death, rather than the creature’s corruption.

It was a singular reprieve.

The captain raised his bolter in a grip that trembled, but not from fear. This defiance – this was the refusal he couldn’t voice any other way.

Yes. The creature loomed closer. Its lower body was an abomination’s splicing between serpent and worm, thick-veined and leaving a viscous, clear slug-trail that stank of unearthed graves. Yes.

‘No,’ Argel Tal finally forced the words through clenched teeth. ‘Not like this.’

Like this. Like your brothers. This is how it must be.

The bolter barked with a throaty chatter, a stream of shells that hammered into the wall, impacting with concussive detonations that defiled the chamber’s quiet. Each buck of the gun in his shaking hand sent the next shell wider from the mark.

Arm muscles burning, he let the weapon fall with a dull clang. The creature did not laugh, did not mock him for his failure. Instead, it reached for him with four arms, lifting him gently. Black talons scraped against the grey ceramite of his armour as it clutched him aloft.

Prepare yourself. This will not be painless.

Argel Tal hung limp in the creature’s grip. For a brief second, he reached for the swords of red iron at his hips, forgetting that they were broken, the blades shattered, on the gantry decking below.

‘I can hear,’ his gritted teeth almost strangled the words, ‘another voice.’

Yes. One of my kin. It comes for you.

‘This... is not what... my primarch wanted...’

This? The creature dragged the helpless Astartes closer, and burst Argel Tal’s secondary heart with a flex of thought. The captain went into violent convulsions, feeling the pulped mass behind his ribs, but the daemon cradled him with sickening gentleness.

This is exactly what Lorgar wanted. This is the truth.

Argel Tal strained for breath that wouldn’t come, and forced dying muscles to reach for weapons that weren’t there.

The last thing he felt before he died was something pouring into his thoughts, wet and cold, like oil spilling behind his eyes.

The last thing he heard was one of his dead brothers drawing a ragged breath over the vox-channel.

And the last thing he saw was Xaphen twitching, rising from the deck on struggling limbs.

He opened his eyes, and saw he was the last to awaken.

Xaphen stood stronger than the others, his crozius maul in his hands. Through the blur of Argel Tal’s returning consciousness, he heard the Chaplain speaking orders, encouragement, demands that his brothers stand and pull themselves together.

Dagotal remained on his knees, vomiting through his helm’s mouth grille. What he produced from his stomach was much too black. Malnor leaned against the wall, his forehead pressed to the cool metal. The others were in similar states of disarray, hauling themselves to their feet, purging their guts of stinking ichor, and whispering litanies from the Word.

Argel Tal couldn’t see the daemon. He looked left and right, targeting reticule not locking on to anything.

‘Where is Ingethel?’ he tried to ask, but the only sound he made was a sick, thick drawl of wordless growling.

Xaphen came over to him and offered a hand to help him rise. The Chaplain had removed his helm, and in the chamber’s gloom the warrior-priest’s face was unnaturally pallid, but otherwise unchanged.

‘Where is Ingethel?’ Argel Tal repeated. This time, the words came forth. It was almost, but not quite, his voice.

‘Gone,’ Xaphen replied. ‘The vox is back online, and power has been restored to the ship. Squads are checking in from all decks. But the daemon is gone.’

Daemon. Still so strange, to hear the word voiced out loud. A word from mythology, spoken as cold fact.

Argel Tal looked up at the glass dome ceiling, looking out into the void beyond. There was no space. Not true space, at least. The void was a swirling, psychotic mass of flensed energy and clashing tides. A thousand shades of violet, a thousand shades of red. Colours humanity had never catalogued, and no living beings had seen before. Stars, stained by the riot of crashing energies, winked through the storm like bloodshot eyes.

At last, in the window’s reflection, he saw himself. Pearls of sweat rolled down his face. Even his sweat stank of the daemon: bestial, raw, ripe – the reek of organs, failing to cancer.

‘We need to get out of here,’ said Argel Tal. Something moved in his stomach, something cold uncoiling within him, and he swallowed acidic bile to keep from throwing up.

‘How did this happen?’ Malnor groaned. None present had ever heard the stoic warrior so unmanned.

Torgal staggered over to them, rubbing reddened eyes in sallow sockets. His chestplate was painted with a messy scorch-streak of burned ceramite – the black acid-burn of his vomit.

‘We need to get back to the fleet,’ he said. ‘Back to the primarch.’

Argel Tal caught sight of his own broken blades, scattered in jagged pieces across the decking. Repressing the sting of loss, he reached for his discarded bolter. As soon as his gauntleted fingers touched the grip, an ammunition counter on his eye lenses flickered at zero.

‘First, we need to get to the bridge.’

Every human on board was dead.

This was something Argel Tal had first feared as he moved in a lurching stride from corridor to corridor. The fear became reality as more and more of Seventh Company’s squads voxed to report the same thing.

They were alone here. Every servitor, every serf, every slave and preacher and artificer and servant was dead.

Deck by deck, chamber by chamber, the Word Bearers hunted for any sign of life beyond themselves.

Smaller than De Profundis, the destroyer Orfeo’s Lament was an attack ship, a sleek and narrow hunter, not a line-breaking assault vessel like many Astartes cruisers. Its crew numbered just under a thousand humans and augmented servitors at full complement, in addition to the hundred Astartes – a full company’s worth.

Ninety-seven Word Bearers remained alive. Of the humans, not one.

Three Astartes had simply not awoken as the others had. Argel Tal ordered their bodies burned, with the remains to be blasted out of an airlock as soon as the ship managed to get clear of the warp storm.

When, and if, that would ever be.

Evidence of the human crew’s demise was everywhere to behold. Argel Tal, bred without the capacity to feel fear, was not immune to disgust nor shielded by his genes from feeling regret. Each corpse he passed watched him with a lifeless stare and open jaws. They screamed in silence. Shrunken, yellowed eyes accused him with every step he took.

‘We should have defended them from this,’ he murmured the words aloud without realising.

‘No.’ Xaphen’s tone invited no argument. ‘They were naught but resources for the Legion. We do the Legion’s work, and they were the price we paid.’

Not the only price, Argel Tal thought.

‘This decay,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’ The captain’s pace was increasing with each step he took, and the closer he came to the bridge, the nearer he found himself to running. Strength flooded him, its presence a welcome contrast to the weakness only minutes before.

The hallway was a major thoroughfare running along the ship’s ridged back like a spinal column. At all hours of day and night, it was busy with crew members going about their duties.

Except now. Now it was silent but for Argel Tal’s footsteps, and his closest brothers with him. Rotting bodies lay gaunt and withered along the decking, husked by the dry, stale air put out by the ship’s oxygen scrubbers.

‘These bodies have been dead for weeks,’ said Xaphen.

‘That’s not possible,’ Malnor said. ‘We were unconscious for no more than a handful of minutes.’

Xaphen looked up from where he knelt by the desiccated corpse of a servitor. Its bionics had shaken loose of the withering organic limbs, and lay pristine on the floor.

‘Unconscious?’ he shook his head. ‘We were not unconscious. I felt my hearts burst in that beast’s claws. I died, Malnor. We all died, just as the daemon said we would.’

‘My hearts beat now,’ the sergeant replied. ‘As do yours.’

Argel Tal saw the same. Retinal displays didn’t lie. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘is not the time. We need to get to the bridge.’

The warriors moved again, stepping over the dried corpses that grew more frequent as they neared the command deck.

Eighty-one dead bodies waited for them on the bridge.

They lay sprawled or sat hunched, with several locked foetal on the floor, while others were cringing, curled, in their seats.

‘They knew what was happening,’ said Xaphen. ‘This wasn’t fast. They felt something as they died.’

Argel Tal hesitated by the twisted figure of Captain Janus Sylamor, curled in her throne as if she sought, in her last moments, to escape something that prowled nearby. Her sunken features, almost mummified, told him all he needed to know.

‘Pain,’ he said. ‘What they felt was pain.’

Dagotal was already by one of the drive consoles, dragging an officer’s body off the controls. The cadaver slumped to the decking, only to find its rest further disturbed by Xaphen, who set about examining it – carving into it – with his combat blade.

Dagotal swore in back-alley Colchisian. ‘I drive a jetbike, sir. I can’t fly an Imperial warship, even if we had the slaves necessary to feed the engine furnace.’

Argel Tal turned from the ship captain’s husk. ‘Just give me an overview.’

His voice still didn’t sound, didn’t feel, quite right. As if someone nearby was speaking the words in unison with him, in mocking chorus.

‘We’re dead in space,’ Dagotal adjusted more controls to no effect. ‘Power hasn’t been restored to all systems. Not even close. The Geller Field is enabled, but we lack void shields, plasma propulsion, energy weapons, projectile weapons, and life support on half the decks.’

‘Manoeuvring thrusters?’

‘Sir,’ Dagotal hesitated. ‘We’ve drifted significantly in the storm’s tides from where we came to all stop. Taking that into account, and lacking warp flight... On manoeuvring thrusters it will take us at least three months to break clear of the... nebula.’

‘It’s not a nebula,’ Xaphen murmured. ‘You’ve seen what’s outside. It’s not a nebula.’

‘Whatever in the name of hell it is,’ Dagotal snapped back.

‘Hell is a good enough word for it,’ Xaphen muttered, still distracted in his work.

Argel Tal lifted the body of Captain Sylamor from the oversized Astartes command throne, laying her to rest at the edge of the command deck. When he returned, he took her place, his armour clanking against the metal of her seat.

‘Fire the thrusters,’ he ordered. ‘The sooner we begin, the sooner we’ll be back with the fleet.’

‘Bloodless,’ Xaphen announced. He rose from his knees, blade in hand, the grisly dismemberment complete at his feet. Vox-officer Amal Vrey’s autopsy would never enter any official record, but it was unarguably thorough.

‘The bodies,’ Xaphen said, ‘they’re bloodless. Something leeched the blood from their veins, killing them all.’

‘Ingethel?’

‘No, Ingethel was with us. Its kin did this.’

Its kin. The daemon’s words resurfaced in Argel Tal’s aching mind. ‘Yes. One of my kin. It comes for you.’

He felt something slither within him. Something stirring, wrapping around the bones of his arms and legs, coiling in a tight spiral around his spine.

‘Summon every warrior to the bridge,’ he ordered, hearing his own voice echoing in his mind, a silent chorus twinned with his words.

‘And Dagotal,’ said Argel Tal, ‘get us out of here.’

The ship that limped its way from the warp storm was a far cry from the noble Imperial vessel that had cut its way in. It trailed psychic fog around its membrane-thin Geller Field, turning in a slow roll that spoke of flawed guidance systems and damaged stabilisers.

Pulsing from its mangled communications towers was a repeated message, the Colchisian words rendered into fuzz by detuned vox.

‘This is the Orfeo’s Lament. Critical casualties sustained. Grievous damage. Requesting extraction. This is the Orfeo’s Lament...’

‘Contact re-established with Orfeo’s Lament,’ called out one of the bridge crew.

The command deck of De Profundis was alive with activity – a hive of officers, servitors, analysts and crew members of every stripe, all working around a central platform that rose above the consoles. On the platform, a golden giant in robes of grey silk watched the occulus screen. His face, so close to the face of his father, was softened in a way the Emperor’s never was: Lorgar was both curious and concerned.

‘Already?’ he said, glancing to the officers at the vox-console.

‘Sire,’ the Master of Auspex called from his bank of flickering monitors, ‘the ship is... horrifically damaged.’

The bustle of the bridge began to quieten, as more and more crew members watched the occulus, seeing the Orfeo’s Lament in its powerless drift.

‘How can this be?’ Lorgar leaned on the handrail ringing the raised podium, his golden fingers gripping the steel. ‘That’s not possible.’

‘Receiving a distress pulse,’ said one of the vox-officers. ‘Sire... My primarch... The Orfeo’s Lament has suffered critical casualties. We’re getting an automated message.’

Lorgar covered his parted lips with a hand, unable to conceal his unrest where another primarch might have stood stoic. Worry was etched onto his handsome features, replacing the confusion that had taken hold moments before.

‘Play the message, please,’ he asked in a soft voice.

It came through in a crackle of vox, grating across the bridge speakers.

‘...the Orfeo’s Lament. Critical casualties sustained. Grievous damage. Requesting extraction. This is the Orfeo’s Lament...’

‘How can this be?’ he asked again. ‘Master of Vox, get me a signal to that ship.’

‘By your word, sire.’

‘Argel Tal,’ Lorgar breathed his son’s name. ‘I know his voice. That was Argel Tal.’

At his side, Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus nodded, his stern features emotionless where his primarch’s were tormented. ‘Aye, sire. It was.’

Contact took three and a half minutes to restore, during which the rest of the 1,301st Fleet had raised its shields and armed all weapons. Tug-ships sailed from the flagship’s docking bays, ready to drag the limping Lament back to its sister vessels.

At last, a picture resolved on the occulus, showing the other vessel’s bridge. Audio contact filtered back a few seconds afterwards, heralded by a burst of static.

‘Blood of the Emperor,’ Lorgar whispered as he watched.

Argel Tal wore no helm. His face was gaunt, a pathetic wraith of his former vitality, with his eyes ringed by the dark smears of countless restless nights. Speckles of old blood decorated the left side of his face, and his armour – what was left of it – was pitted and cracked, devoid of any holy parchment.

He rose from his command throne on unsteady legs and saluted. There was the softest bang as his fist hit his breastplate.

‘You’re... still here,’ he rasped. All strength was gone from his voice.

Lorgar was the one to break the silence. ‘My son. What has befallen you? What madness is this?’

Behind Argel Tal, other figures were moving into view. Word Bearers, all. They were just as weak, just as ruined, as their commander. One fell to his knees as Lorgar watched, praying in a senseless stream of conflicting words. It took several moments for the primarch to realise it was Xaphen, recognisable only because of the broken black armour.

Argel Tal closed his eyes, letting out a breath. ‘Sire, we have returned, as ordered.’

Lorgar glanced at Torvus, before turning back to Argel Tal. ‘Captain, you’ve been gone no more than sixty seconds. We just witnessed the Lament enter the edges of the storm. You return to us less than a minute after your departure.’

Argel Tal scratched his ravaged face, shaking his head. ‘No. No, that cannot be.’

‘It can be,’ Lorgar stared hard at him, ‘and it is. My son, what happened to you?’

‘Seven months,’ the captain sagged, leaning on the arm of his throne to keep standing. ‘Seven. Months. There are barely forty of us left. No food. We ate the crew... hateful mouthfuls of leathery flesh and dry bones. There was no water. Water tanks ruptured in the storm damage. We drank promethium fuel... weapon oils... engine coolant... Sire, we’ve been killing each other. We have been drinking each other’s blood to stay alive.’

Lorgar looked away only for long enough to address one of the vox-officers. ‘Bring them in,’ he said, pitching his voice low. ‘Get my sons off that ship.’

‘Sire? Sire?’

‘I am here, Argel Tal.’

‘The Lament has had its final flight. We are on guidance thrusters alone.’

‘Thunderhawks are already launching,’ the primarch assured him. ‘We will return to safer space together.’

‘Thank you, sire.’

‘Argel Tal,’ Lorgar hesitated. ‘Did you slay the crew of Orfeo’s Lament?’

‘No. No, sire, never. We ate their carcasses. Carrion-feeders. Like the desert jackals of Colchis. Anything to survive. We had to bring you the answers you sought. Sire, please... There is something you have to know. We have the answers to all your questions, but one above all.’

‘Tell me,’ the golden giant whispered. He was unashamed at the tears in his eyes, to see his sons reduced to... to this. ‘Tell me, Argel Tal.’

‘This place. This realm. Future generations will name it the Great Eye, the Eye of Terror, the Occularis Terribus. In hushed voices, they will give a thousand foolish names to something they cannot understand. But you were right, my lord.

‘Here,’ Argel Tal gestured with a weak hand at the seething warp storm visible through the bridge windows, ‘is where gods and mortals meet.’

Soon, he was in isolation. Taken from his brothers.

This was not entirely unexpected, but they had also taken his weapons – ‘for much-needed maintenance, brother’ – and that, he’d not foreseen. They were cautious around him now. The escorts walking him to his meditation chamber had been tense, reluctant to speak, hesitant to answer even the simplest questions.

Never before had he felt this raw distrust between brothers. He knew what its genesis was, of course. The truth could never be hidden, and he had no desire to hide it. Yes, the survivors had eaten the human dead. Yes, they had butchered their own brothers. But not for sport. Not for glory. For survival.

To quench a lethal thirst, with the coppery wine that runs from cut veins.

What other choice was there? To die? To die away from the fleet, with the answers to every question the primarch had ever asked locked behind their dead lips?

But you did die. The traitorous thought rose behind his focus. You did die.

Yes. He did. He’d died before he chewed on the leathery skin of bloodless bodies. Before he’d used his dagger to slice open his brothers’ throats and drink their life to sustain his own.

Some of them had died twice, then. A final death, to fuel the lives of those who would survive.

Thirty-eight Word Bearers had left the wreck of Orfeo’s Lament. Thirty-eight, from one hundred. Far below half-strength. Seventh Company was devastated.

Argel Tal drew in a shivering breath. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the storm outside. In the warp’s roiling tides, ten million faces silently screamed his name. He saw their lips moving, their teeth bared, their faces formed of clashing, psychic energy spilling across the ship’s Geller Field barrier. The flesh and blood of unformed daemons. The raw matter of souls.

He exhaled, and opened his eyes.

The walls of his personal chamber, his haven aboard De Profundis for so many years of the Great Crusade, seemed alien now. Strange, how seven months could change a soul. Seven months, and a skull full of unbridled revelations.

The chronometer above the doorway mocked him with a date over half a year in the past. The primarch’s words were an unwanted truth: seconds had passed at the edges of the warp anomaly. Months dragged by within.

Stripped of his armour, the captain examined his wasted body in the reflection of his dagger, the only weapon remaining to him. A revenant returned his gaze – a skeletal, hollow-eyed creature on the wrong side of the grave.

He lowered the blade, and awaited the chime he knew would come soon.

In his humility, Lorgar had never looked grander.

He came to Argel Tal wearing the layered, glyph-embroidered robes of a Covenant priest, with the hood raised, darkening his features. In his hands he carried a small wooden chest; the box was open, revealing a selection of vulture-feather quills with an inkpot. Under one arm, the primarch bore a roll of papyrus parchments to record his son’s words. As Lorgar entered, Argel Tal saw the hulking forms of two Word Bearers – brothers from the Serrated Sun, but not Seventh Company – standing outside his door.

Standing guard outside his door.

‘Am I a prisoner, father?’ he asked the primarch.

Lorgar drew back his hood, revealing his eternally youthful face and the uncertain smile upon it. His grey eyes were heavy with emotion, and little of it was pleasant. He grieved for his sons. He grieved for what he saw now.

‘No, Argel Tal. Of course you are not a prisoner.’ Their eyes met in that moment, and Lorgar’s smile froze on his perfect lips.

‘The guards at my door would seem to suggest otherwise,’ said Argel Tal.

Lorgar didn’t answer. The beautifully carved wooden box crashed to the bare metal floor. The noise drew attention, and the bulkhead door slammed open. Two warriors from 37th Company came in, bolters aimed at Argel Tal’s head.

‘Sire?’ they asked as one.

The primarch didn’t answer them, either. He stood in rapt silence, reaching out, almost touching the captain’s gaunt face. At the last moment, he drew his hand back before his fingers brushed Argel Tal’s sunken flesh.

Their eyes were still locked: primarch and captain, father and son.

‘You have two souls,’ Lorgar whispered.

Argel Tal closed his eyes to break the stare. Something – a hundred somethings – slithered through his blood, worming within his veins, pushed on by his heartbeat.

He rose to his feet at last.

‘I know, father.’

‘Tell me everything,’ said the primarch. ‘Speak to me of the daemon, and the world of revelation. Tell me why my son stands before me with his soul cleaved in two.’

THIRTEEN

Incarnadine

Stormlost

Voices in the Void

‘1301-12.’ As Argel Tal spoke the code, acidic saliva stung the underside of his tongue.

1301-12, the twelfth world to be brought to compliance by the 1301st Expeditionary Fleet. ‘Of the seven worlds we conquered in three years,’ he said, ‘this was the most painful.’

Lorgar did not disagree.

‘And yet,’ the primarch said, ‘it was also bloodless. Not a shot fired in anger, nor a blade drawn in rage. The pain was born of revelation.’

‘Three years, sire,’ said Argel Tal, looking away from his father’s eyes. ‘Three years, and seven worlds. History will point to those worlds, the husks we left, and describe how the XVII Legion vented its wrath in the wake of our failure. World after world burned, the populations butchered to slake our fury.’

Lorgar’s smile was pyrite-false. ‘Is that how you see our Pilgrimage?’

‘No. Never. But seven worlds died in fire, and we were almost destroyed after leaving the eighth.’

Lorgar’s grey gaze didn’t waver for a moment. He was seeing with his sixth sense, looking into his son’s heart, and sensing the second soul gestating there.

‘Enough of this maudlin remembrance,’ Lorgar’s tone betrayed his impatience. ‘Speak of the world we found.’

‘Do you remember,’ Argel Tal asked him, ‘when we first reached orbit?’

The floor was trembling in a most specific way.

Xi-Nu 73 processed this. Beneath his metal feet, the rumble of the ship’s deck had a very particular pulse – neither the arrhythmic flow of warp flight, nor the heartbeat tremor of sustained guidance thrust. Instead, murmurs coursed through his artificial bones, faint but blessedly metronomic.

Orbit.

Orbit, at last.

The last journey had been a long one. Xi-Nu 73 wasn’t a being given to indulging in speculation beyond the present, but his calculated projections were grim. The warp storms battering the fleet would certainly have claimed more than the three ships they’d already taken, had the 1,301st pressed on even farther past this world.

Xi-Nu 73 had heard one of his menials tell another that ‘the storm outside was hurling itself at the ship’s shields’, and he’d berated the worker for grafting human attributes onto an inappropriate subject. Such anthropomorphosis would harm the servant’s chances for future elevation within the Mechanicum.

It was a violent storm, no doubt there. But there existed no passion, no anger, no intent in the warp’s tides.

Elsewhere on De Profundis, the decks were alive with activity, as Astartes and human crew made ready for planetfall.

Xi-Nu 37 was largely immune to the brain chemistry necessary to feel excitement, having reengineered himself beyond such sensation. Instead, he focused entirely on his work, which stimulated the pleasure centres of his brain – a minute amount for each subroutine performed with absolute accuracy and ergonomic efficiency.

His fingers – fifteen of them spread across three mechanical hands – worked in the armoured bowl of Alizarin’s skull. It was a process of restructuring globs of bio-plastic, each one dripping with nutrient-rich juices, within the robot’s head. Each tract of spherical relay globes needed to be fixed and sealed into position, then connected to the slave systems they controlled, as well as the fail-safes they relied on in incidents of battle damage. Such were the workings of the robotic mind: an intelligence in mimicry of life, grown in a gene-lab to be used in a machine body.

The smell rising from this bowl of artificial cerebrospinal fluid was a revoltingly spicy reek reminiscent of rotting onions, but of course, Xi-Nu 73 had taken himself beyond the capacity to react to that as well. He only knew of the smell at all because his perceptive sensors streamed data onto his retinas, describing the stench in bland screeds of binary.

Despite the intricacies of his task, Xi-Nu 73 reserved a median five per cent of his focus to monitor his surroundings. Internal sensor arrays, perceiving the world through echolocation, first tracked the door to his workshop opening, then the movement of a figure traversing the chamber. The figure emitted an unmistakable power signature: armour, Mark III, Astartes.

Several other signals joined the first. Five Astartes in total.

These details flashed up as runic symbols on Xi-Nu 73’s vision display. He paid them little heed, knuckle-deep as he was in organic slime, plugging tiny interface feeds into segmented spheres of bio-plastic. Each sphere was a part of the cortex program. Each fibre-optic link simulated synapses.

The Astartes had the good grace not to interrupt. They waited the three point three-two minutes until Xi-Nu 73 had finished the current phase of ministrations. A satisfaction pulse wormed through Xi-Nu’s datacore. Dampened pleasure receptors fired. Work was complete.

At last, the Mechanicum adept turned from the workshop table. Ooze dripped from his fifteen metal fingers.

‘Subcommander,’ he said, neither acknowledging the senior sergeants at Argel Tal’s side nor offering the kind of respectful bow usually given by mortal members of the crew. ‘You are present to commence preparations on Incarnadine.’

Argel Tal was armoured for the coming planetfall, as were the officers with him. Xaphen, clad in black, Dagotal, Malnor and Torgal – all wearing the Legion’s granite grey.

‘It is time,’ said Argel Tal.

Xi-Nu’s three lens-eyes took a few seconds to refocus. ‘This way,’ the adept replied.

The warriors followed the machine-priest into the red-lit chamber beyond.

It wasn’t that Xi-Nu 73 felt any shame in Incarnadine’s induction into the Word Bearers Legion. Such an honour was tantamount to the highest accolades in the Legio Cybernetica, and evidence of the commanding adept’s mastery – such a machine clearly had a spirit of fierce intensity, and was worthy of recognition.

It was just that since the induction into the Serrated Sun, since the Chapter’s sigil had been etched onto the robot’s forehead, the Conqueror Primus of 9th Maniple was a touch more... erratic. The machine’s spirit had the error-laden propensity to act unpredictably, and that was unacceptable.

Even to a veteran adept like Xi-Nu 73, this made no sense outside of his deepest, darkest suspicions. He’d run several hundred diagnostics, as was his meticulous duty, but the discrepancies (the flaws? The aberrations?) in Incarnadine’s cortex would resurface after each maintenance.

On one occasion, never to be repeated, Xi-Nu 73 had taken the greatest, gravest risk, purging Incarnadine’s bioplastic brain. After flushing every trace of matter from the robot’s skull bowl, he rebuilt the cortex over the space of four months, using spare parts, ritually cleansed after being taken from his supply caches.

The robot had a new brain, for Cog’s sake. And still, still, it was...

Well. There was another problem. The Martian code-tongue lacked adequate description to summate the problem. Xi-Nu 73 had ventured the closest human term to describe the situation was that his Conqueror Primus was glitched. He considered this a symptom of his assignment, not just to the 1,301st Expeditionary Fleet, but to the Word Bearers Legion itself.

The war machines and expert technical crews of Carthage Cohort were spread across the many Word Bearers fleets, rather than housed on their own Mechanicum vessels the way the Titan Legions were. Lorgar’s own insistence made it thus. Decades before, when the Legio Cybernetica had first approached the Word Bearer lord, Lorgar had generously offered to modify his vessels to accommodate the specialist needs of his new Mechanicum allies.

‘We are all brothers under the same god’s gaze,’ he’d said to the Fabricator-General, during his first visit to the surface of Mars. Apparently, a concordance was reached soon after. The Carthage Cohort, one of Cybernetica’s proudest armies, would march with the XVII Legion, and dwell in the bowels of their vessels.

Xi-Nu 73 had not been present at the time this ancient oath was sworn – had not even been flesh-born back then – and this contributed to his doubts about the tale’s veracity. The reason it never cogitated as pure truth to Xi-Nu’s perceptions was simple: despite how useful the Carthage Cohort was to the Word Bearers Legion, the Astartes simply did not like the Mechanicum element in their midst. Relations were closer to cold than cordial, even taking the Mechanicum’s inhumanity into consideration.

It was said other Legions worked more harmoniously with the Martian Cybernetica cult, especially the blessed Iron Hands and unbreakable Iron Warriors – both of whom enjoyed the Mechanicum’s immense (and immensely valuable) respect from the first days their forces joined together in the Terran Emperor’s crusade.

But over time, Xi-Nu 73 – who had most humbly risen to oversee a maniple of four robots – came to realise that the Word Bearers were not like their Astartes brothers. It was an opinion shared by others of his rank, on those increasingly rare occasions he established contact with them.

As the fleets moved farther and farther apart since the last grand gathering at Colchis three years before, so too did contact between the Carthage maniples wane. Vox-signals would never reach across such distances. Even astropathy was rumoured to be becoming unreliable – not that Xi-Nu 73 had access to such a talent.

Xi-Nu 73’s principal problem where the Word Bearers were concerned was their fundamental organic nature. In short, they were too human. They valued the flawed aspects of faith, focusing on the flesh and the soul, rather than transcendence through oneness with the Machine-God. They were fuelled by emotion, rather than logic, which affected their tactical decisions and their very goals in the Great Crusade.

Most tellingly of all, many of the Serrated Sun’s warriors seemed uncomfortable around the Mechanicum adepts themselves, as if forever on the edge of voicing some accusation, or framing a grievous complaint.

Too human. That was the problem. Too emotional, too driven by instinctive faith and eloquent diction. Too human, resulting in distance between the factions.

The exception to this distance was a source of disquiet for Xi-Nu 73, because the exception was his own Conqueror Primus.

Incarnadine, blessings upon its brave soul, was sincerely respected by the Word Bearers.

Indeed, they called it ‘Brother’.

He led the Astartes into the preparatory chamber, where his wards were undergoing the final rituals before reawakening. The three armoured machines stood in impassive silence, doted on by Mechanicum menials, all under Xi-Nu 73’s command. Two of the robed attendants were lifting Vermillion’s back-mounted lascannon, hefting it up along its greased runner track, testing the smoothness of motion as they brought it up to the firing position on the Cataphract’s shoulder.

Sanguine, the gangly Crusader-class twin to Alizarin, was almost ready. The juddering clank of autoloaders filled the chamber as its shoulder cannon was fed fresh stores of ammunition. Servitors oiled its joints, only allowed near the war machine now that the vital work was complete.

Incarnadine was waiting for them.

That fact brought a stab of irritatingly human unease to Xi-Nu 73’s thought processes. The robot’s combat wetware was about to be installed, and then Incarnadine would be ready for deployment. But there it was: the anomalous reading in its brain patterns. An attention spike in the otherwise flat-lining rumble of its cognition. This flare of perception, along with the faintest adjustment of its visual receptors, only ever occurred in the presence of Word Bearers.

Like an animal instinctively recognising its kin, Incarnadine knew when warriors of the XVII Legion were near.

This was why Xi-Nu 73’s pride was tainted. The robot’s cortex shouldn’t have allowed for this level of recognition without its combat wetware installed. It shouldn’t be able to distinguish between targets and non-targets – seeing no difference between Astartes, human soldiers, aliens, or anything else.

In fact, it shouldn’t be able to perceive anything at all beyond the presence of walls and floors, with the simple operational understanding not to crash into anything. And yet the robot had been waiting for this moment. Xi-Nu 73 tracked the glitch in Incarnadine’s sensors as the Conqueror Primus recognised the Word Bearers before it.

‘Incarnadine,’ said Argel Tal, and the voice broke the adept’s scrambled line of reasoning. The subcommander wore no helm, and Xi-Nu 73 saw the Astartes looking up at the towering machine. With no small reverence, the warrior unrolled a scroll of parchment, and began to read.

‘As a warrior of the Seventeenth Legio Astartes, the Bearers of the Word, a brotherhood born of Colchis and born of Terra, do you swear to fight in the name of Lorgar – heart and soul, body and blood – until the world below, designated One-Three-Zero One-Nine, is brought to lawful compliance with the Imperium of Man?’

Incarnadine stood in silence. Argel Tal smiled, and didn’t look away.

‘Incarnadine,’ said Xi-Nu 73 from his position to the side, ‘swears the oath as it is written.’

The Astartes continued as if the adept wasn’t even there. ‘Incarnadine, your oath of moment is witnessed by your brothers...’

‘Dagotal.’

‘Torgal.’

‘Malnor.’

‘Xaphen.’

‘...and affirmed by myself, Argel Tal, Subcommander of the Serrated Sun.’ The captain affixed the scroll to Incarnadine’s armour plating, mounting it on the hooks designed especially for this use. All five of the Astartes wore similar scrolls attached to their shoulder guards.

Xi-Nu 73’s pride warred with his unfading irritation. Praise to the Omnissiah for the blessing of his own Conqueror Primus being accepted into an Astartes Legion’s ranks, but curse the influence such a loyalty was having on its cortex.

The ritual completed, the Astartes saluted with their fists over their primary hearts, and made their way from the chamber. There’d been a time when the warriors would have made the sign of the aquila, but Xi-Nu 73 hadn’t seen them perform the Imperial salute since the Legion’s shaming three years before.

In the red-lit gloom of the chamber, the adept focused his tri-lens gaze on the hulking form of his favoured ward.

‘Where do your loyalties lie, I wonder?’

Incarnadine didn’t answer. It stood as it had for hours now: silently awaiting the next battle.

The ship shook again – even in orbit, the void around this new world was rich with warp energies, and occasional pulses of force brushed the ship’s skin. Xi-Nu 73 had also stripped his brain function to deplete the fantastical outreaching of his human imagination, and yet the squealing of the storm against the hull sounded like... claws.

He filed the sound in his lobe archives, and went about his duties, only occasionally disturbed by the sound of nails clawing at the metal hull.

The Blessed Lady really needed to put some clothes on.

She reached blindly over the edge of her bed, her hand patting the floor, questing until she found her robe. Cyrene was slipping the garment over her head when she felt Arric’s arms encircling her from behind.

‘It’s still early,’ he said, breathing the words against her neck.

‘Actually, I think you’re already late. That wasn’t the dawn chime, it was the signal for noon.’

‘Don’t joke,’ he said, pulling her closer.

‘I’m not joking.’ Cyrene ran her fingers through her hair, ignoring his as they quested over her. ‘Arric,’ she said, ‘I’m really not joking.’

He rolled out of bed with an ‘Oh, shit...’ before repeating the curse a number of times, in various languages.

Being in love with an officer could, at times, be an educational experience – especially ones that could swear in eighteen Gothic dialects.

‘Shit,’ he finished the tirade back where he started. ‘I have to go. Where the hell is my sabre?’

She faced him without seeing him. ‘I think it slid under the bed. I heard it scrape on the floor last night.’

‘Where would I be without you?’ Arric dragged the blade out from beneath the bed, and fastened the leather belt around his crumpled, unbuttoned uniform. ‘I’ll be back later,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Planetfall today,’ he said, as if it would somehow be news to her. The ship quivered around them, and she reached out to the wall, steadying herself.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Though with this storm...’

‘I know,’ she said again.

‘How do I look?’ he spoke the words with a grin, always enjoying this oldest of rituals between them. Usually she smiled back. Not this time.

‘Like someone who is late for a meeting with fleet command. Now go.’

Argel Tal nodded to Major Jesmetine as the human officer half-tumbled through the closing doors.

‘I’m here,’ he called out. ‘I made it.’

His ochre uniform, marking him as a senior commander in the 54th Euchar Infantry, wouldn’t pass muster on a parade ground without some serious tidying up first. His black hair was in a similar state, and he’d not shaved this morning, either.

He regarded the others gathered in the briefing room, where they all stood around an expansive central table. Forty men, women and Astartes (the latter, he smirkingly liked to call ‘post-humans’) turned to regard him in turn.

Above them, the chamber’s illumination globes flickered as the ship shuddered again.

‘Sorry,’ said the major. ‘I’m here now.’

Several heads shook, while irritated mutters broke out. The officer took one of the few places left at the table, next to a Word Bearer captain. The charged hum from the warrior’s armour joints was ear-achingly loud up close. It made it a chore to hear the others’ voices.

‘Good of you to join us, Arric,’ Fleet Commander Baloc Torvus said, scowling down the table at the breathless major. ‘As I was saying–’

‘My apologies,’ the major interrupted again. ‘The servitors on D deck are struggling with the... elevator... gyro-cogs. Something of a nightmare, really. Had to run the long way.’

From across the chamber, the armoured figure of Chapter Master Deumos thudded a fist onto the table.

‘Be quiet, you fool,’ he grunted.

‘Sorry, sir.’ Arric saluted – the pre-Crusade fist over his chest, rather than the aquila.

Xi-Nu 73 turned his hooded head with a rattle of grinding gears. ‘There is no component in the ship’s construction matching the term “gyro-cog”,’ he noted.

Arric narrowed his eyes at the tech-adept. Thanks for that.

‘I am aware,’ the Word Bearer lord growled, ‘that Major Jesmetine was lying through his teeth with very little skill. Torvus, get on with the details. We have a world to bring to compliance.’

Torvus began his summary, detailing land masses, population projections, and the disposition of forces. The people of 1301-12 were primitives, yet the entire Expeditionary Fleet was preparing for war: Army contingent, Astartes companies, Mechanicum forces – everything.

It all depended on first contact.

Arric listened to the things he’d already studied in the official reports. He caught the Word Bearer captain next to him glancing down.

‘Did you comb your hair with your fingers?’ Argel Tal asked.

The doors slid open before Arric could reply, but the retort would have been a rude one. Clad in ceremonial armour of chainmail and a breastplate of carved ivory, the primarch entered the war room.

‘My friends, please accept the sincerest apologies for my untimely arrival.’ Lorgar favoured them all with a beatific smile before taking his place at the head of the table. ‘I trust all is in readiness for planetfall?’

The gathered commanders assured him that it was. Resplendent in the ceremonial armour of a Covenant warlord, Lorgar listened to their reports in turn.

‘Sire,’ one said, at the conclusion.

‘Speak, Argel Tal.’

‘One matter still troubles me. It has been three weeks now,’ the captain said, ignoring the mutters that started up. ‘Where is the Unending Reverence?’

Lorgar rested his golden hands on the central table, leaning forward. All present could see in his eyes how much the words cost him.

‘It is stormlost. We will mourn the crew, and our brothers on board. But it is folly to hold out hope any longer.’

‘Sire...’ Argel Tal was far from placated. ‘We will not even search for them? One vessel stormlost is a tragedy, but three... Aurelian, please, the Expedition is threatened. We must seek them.’

‘How? In the warp?’

Another judder gripped the ship, this one lasting several moments. Lorgar smiled a downcast little smile, no doubt amused at the timing of the ship’s renewed trembling. ‘Even the aftershocks of this storm are savage. You wish to dive back into the warp to hunt three atoms in a whirlwind?’

‘I call again for the astropaths to make the attempt,’ said Argel Tal. ‘If they can find their counterparts on the Reverence–’

‘My son,’ Lorgar shook his head. ‘Your compassion does you great credit, but we cannot halt the Pilgrimage on account of one lost warship. The warp is a cruel mistress. How many vessels has the Imperium lost in its tides over the course of the Great Crusade? Hundreds? Perhaps even a thousand or more.’

Major Arric tapped a few buttons on his own data-slate. ‘We’re on the frontier, and we all know it. Reinforcements aren’t coming our way, no matter how loud we shout for help. How regularly are we receiving word from other fleets now?’

‘The time between contacts is rising exponentially,’ said Phi-44. ‘The last astropathic transmission from Lord Kor Phaeron’s main fleet was four months ago.’

Xaphen spoke up now. ‘The first captain’s last message contained updated star charts showing the Legion’s expansion to the Galactic Rim, and a list of compliances achieved. It also contained the sincerest gratitude for the eight thousand more words and three pict references to be added to their fleet’s copies of the Book of Lorgar.’

The primarch chuckled, but said nothing.

Xaphen continued, ‘The closest Imperial expedition to us is the 3,855th, almost a year’s warp flight distant.’

‘What Chapters lead the 3,855th?’ asked Deumos.

‘The Bloodied Visage,’ Phi-44 confirmed, ‘and the Crescent Moon. And Chaplain Xaphen is incorrect. The 3,855th Expeditionary Fleet is between thirteen and fifteen months distant, depending on the vagaries of the warp.’

Silence fell.

‘A year,’ said Lorgar. ‘How far we have come, to serve as humanity’s eyes in the dark. No other Imperials have spread themselves this far apart, nor travelled this far from Terra and its conquered territories.’

A year. Argel Tal was struck by the distance put into such terms. We are over a year’s flight distant from our nearest brothers, and even farther from the Imperium’s true edge.

‘So we’re well and truly alone,’ Arric echoed the captain’s thoughts, and the ship punctuated his words with another savage tremor.

‘Sire,’ Argel Tal began again.

‘Peace, my son,’ the primarch cut him off with a gentle lift of his hand. ‘Master Delvir? Can you offer Captain Argel Tal the solace he seeks?’

The Master of Astropaths was a watery-eyed rake of a man, clad in a robe of colourless grey that hung off his shoulders in velvet waves. He regarded the room with a kicked dog’s expression as he realised more and more faces were turning his way.

‘Our auguries are... That is to say... Our senses are... I can hear the world we move towards. It’s difficult to put into words.’

Lorgar cleared his throat to draw the man’s attention. ‘Master Delvir?’

‘My lord?’ the man asked in his whispery voice.

‘You are among equals, here. Friends. We all sympathise with the pressures the storm has placed upon you. Do not be nervous or hesitant in explaining the details.’

Shosa Delvir, Master of Astropaths, bowed without much in the way of grace. But it was sincere. Lorgar returned the bow, not to same depth, but with a smile.

‘Sometimes,’ the astropath began slowly, ‘mere chance is enough to bring an Imperial fleet to one of humanity’s lost worlds. Blessed are those occasions. More often, we rely upon the few ancient star charts that endured the chaos of Long Night and the Unification Wars that ravaged Terra. But when you rely upon us – when you call upon the astropathic choir – I... I will explain it as best I can.’

‘That,’ Argel Tal watched his father writing the words down, ‘was the first moment my blood ran cold. Anchored above the world, when the astropath told us how his kind saw through the storm.’

Lorgar nodded. ‘It was the moment I first knew we were reaching the end of the Pilgrimage,’ he said.

‘There’s truth in that,’ the captain sighed.

No longer did their eyes meet as Argel Tal spoke. The delicate scratching of a feather quill on parchment provided the only accompaniment to Argel Tal’s spoken words.

The Master of Astropaths only hesitated for a moment.

‘We hear voices in the void,’ he said. ‘A world is a hive of sound, the buzzing of locusts or flies, but far, far in the distance. It is never easy to make out one world in the endless reaches of space. The Imperium is an ocean of silence, and only the most intense focus allows us to hear the hum of human sentience. Imagine yourselves beneath the water of a great sea. All sound is muted, while the silence is powerfully oppressive. Now try to listen for voices in the nothingness, when all you can hear is your own heartbeat.’

‘Sire...’ Deumos interrupted. ‘Must we listen to this crude prose?’

Lorgar’s answer was to press a golden finger to his smile. ‘Let Master Delvir speak. I find his words enlightening.’

The astropath pressed on, avoiding any of their gazes. ‘If you focus too hard on listening for voices, you will forget to swim. You’ll drown. If you devote all your energy to swimming for the surface and breathing once more... you will hear none of the ocean’s sounds.’

‘You strive for balance,’ said Argel Tal. ‘That does not sound easy.’

‘It is not, but no soul in this room can lay claim to an easy existence.’ The astropath offered a respectful bow to the gathered warriors. Several acknowledged his respect with a salute. Argel Tal was one of them. He liked the scrawny little man.

‘What has changed?’ the captain asked. He felt the primarch’s eyes upon him.

‘This region of space is like no other we’ve seen in our travels. The warp is savage, and our ships are slaves to raging tides of aetheric energies.’

‘We have all seen warp storms before,’ said Lorgar. The glint in his grey eyes spoke volumes: he knew all of this, and was leading the astropath on, letting the psychic sensitive explain it to the fleet’s commanders.

‘This is different, sire. This storm has a voice. A million voices.’

It was safe to say he had the council’s attention. Argel Tal tasted poison as he swallowed. On a whim, he keyed in an activation code onto the table’s hololithic projector.

In flickering imagery, the region of space – zoomed out to display hundreds of suns and their systems – was beamed above the central table. It was impossible to miss what was wrong.

‘This region here,’ the astropath gestured. ‘If the choir closes its eyes and reaches out with its secret senses... all we hear is screaming.’

The area was vast. Bigger than vast. It covered hundreds upon hundreds of solar systems, ugly even on the hololithic. The warp anomaly showed as a gaseous fog staining the stars, coiling down to a centre of roiling, boiling energy.

‘When you all look at this,’ said Arric Jesmetine, ‘does anyone else see an eye? An eye in space?’

Many agreed. Lorgar did not.

‘No,’ the primarch said. ‘I see a genesis. This is how galaxies appear when they are born. My brother Magnus showed me such things in the Hall of Leng, on fair Terra. The difference is that this... birth... is not physical. This is the ghost of a galaxy. You all see an eye, or a spiral. Both are right, both are wrong. This is the psychic imprint of some incredible stellar event. It was powerful enough to rip the void apart, letting warp space bleed into the corporeal galaxy.’

The astropath nodded, awed gratitude in his eyes as the primarch spoke the words he lacked himself.

‘That is what we believe, sire. This is not merely a warp storm. This is the warp storm, and it has raged for so long that it now saturates physical reality. The entire region is both space and unspace. Warp and reality, all at once.’

‘Something...’ Lorgar stared at the bruised heavens, his gaze distant. ‘This is an abortion. Something was almost born here.’

Argel Tal cleared his throat. ‘Sire?’

‘It’s nothing, my son. Just a fleeting thought. Please continue, Master Delvir.’

The astropath had little more to say. ‘The storms that have wracked our journeys these last weeks emanate from this region. Around 1301-12, space is relatively stable. But think of the storm we endured to reach this point of stability. That storm blankets thousands of star systems around us. If we break from this narrow corridor, the energies playing out would be...’

He trailed off. Lorgar looked at him sharply. ‘Speak,’ the primarch commanded.

‘An old Terran term, sire. I would have said the storm is apocalyptic.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Argel Tal.

It was Xaphen that answered. ‘Damnation. The end of everything. A very, very old legend.’ The thought seemed to amuse him.

‘If the storm is nothing but screaming,’ Argel Tal turned to Delvir, ‘then how did we find this world? How could you hear the life upon it?’

The astropath took a trembling breath. ‘Because something on the world below us screams even louder.’

‘Something,’ the captain said. ‘You did not say “someone”.’

The robed man nodded. ‘Do not ask me to explain, for I cannot. It sounds human, but is not. The way you would hear another warrior’s accent and know him to be from another part of your home world, the astropathic choir hears something inhuman screaming in human tongues.’

Lorgar cut off the discussion with a motion of his hand. ‘This region is unmapped and unnamed. What vessels were lost in the journey through the storm?’

Phi-44 answered before the fleetmaster could. ‘The Unending Reverence, the Gregorian and the Shield of Scarus.’

The Word Bearers present inclined their heads in respect. The Shield had been the strike cruiser of their own Captain Scarus and his 52nd Company. Their loss was a savage blow to the Serrated Sun, finding itself at two-thirds strength purely by the warp’s fickle winds.

‘Very well,’ said Lorgar. ‘Ensure all stellar cartography is updated, with records sent back to Terra. This region is hereafter known as Scarus Sector.’

‘Will we make planetfall, sire?’ This from Deumos.

With infinite care, the primarch took a rolled parchment from a wooden tube at his belt. He unrolled it with a precious lack of haste, and finally turned it to face them all. On the papyrus scroll, a spiralling stain was sketched in charcoal. Everyone recognised it immediately. It was already before them – the stain across the stars.

As the commanders watched, a vicious shiver ran through the ship. Emergency lighting stained all vision red for several seconds, and the hololithic winked out of existence. Argel Tal re-keyed the activation code as the lights returned.

The image flared back into jagged, unreliable life.

‘Bitch of a storm,’ Major Jesmetine muttered. A few quiet agreements were all the response he got.

‘This is drawn from memory,’ said Lorgar, meeting their eyes in turn. ‘But my Word Bearers will recognise it.’

‘The empyrean,’ the Legion officers said at once.

‘The Gate of Heaven,’ Xaphen amended, ‘from the old scrolls.’

‘We were summoned here,’ Lorgar said, his voice low and clear and unbroken by doubt’s shadow. ‘Something called out to our astropathic choir through the storm. Something wanted us here, and something awaits us on the planet below.’

The astropath broke decorum, possibly for the first time in his quiet and sheltered life. ‘How... how can you know that?’ he stammered the words through pale lips.

Lorgar let the scroll fall onto the table. Something like anger burned behind his eyes.

‘Because I hear the screaming, too. And it is not wordless. Something on the world beneath us is crying out my name into the psychic storm.’

FOURTEEN

Violet Eyes

Two Voices

Answers

Argel Tal looked at his reflection in the cup of water. Thin fingers touched the stark geography of his face. It was like stroking a skull.

Lorgar didn’t look up from writing.

‘Planetfall,’ said the captain.

Violet eyes.

It was only apparent deviation from the purestrain human breed. With violet eyes, the people stared at the emissaries from the stars. Barbarians, dressed in rags and wielding spears tipped by flint blades, confronted Lorgar and his sons.

And yet, the primitives showed little fear. They approached the Word Bearers’ landing site as a disjointed horde, divided by tribes, each host carrying flayed-skin banners and animal bone totems denoting their allegiance to the spirits and devils of their world’s faith.

Lorgar had taken a small host to make first contact with the humans of 1301-12. The rest of the fleet remained ready in the heavens above, but Lorgar preferred to orchestrate first contact in more humble ways.

At his side stood Deumos, Master of the Serrated Sun, with the captains Argel Tal and Tsar Quorel of the Seventh and Thirty-Ninth Companies respectively. Both captains brought their Chaplains, who in turn stood with their crozius mauls drawn. Behind them, one figure stood skeletally slender, clad in a hooded robe. Three mechanical eyes peered out from the cowl as Xi-Nu 73 watched proceedings taking place. At his side, Incarnadine waited motionless, exuding threat without moving a gear.

Only one figure stood apart from the pack; clad in gold, bearing a spear of exquisite craftsmanship. Vendatha, the Custodian. Aquillon would not be dissuaded from one of his brothers joining them. The Occuli Imperator made it a point for at least one of his warriors to always accompany the primarch on incidents of first contact.

The Custodian’s red helmet crest fluttered in the wind, as did the parchment scrolls bound to the Word Bearers’ armour. He stood closest to Argel Tal. In all Vendatha’s time with the fleet, no other Astartes present had showed him – or the other Custodes – the ghost of respect, let alone an offer of friendship.

At their backs, a Legion Thunderhawk sat at rest – traditional granite-grey, for Lorgar’s golden Stormbird remained with the 47th Expedition. The primarch didn’t miss it, even three years since last setting eyes upon it. The gunship’s ostentation had always reeked more of gaudiness than grandeur. Let the preening Fulgrim adorn his war machines like works of art. Lorgar’s tastes ran to less puerile pursuits.

‘Their eyes,’ said Xaphen. ‘Every one of them has violet irises.’

‘Look up,’ the primarch spoke softly.

Xaphen obeyed. They all did. The warp storm wracking the region shrouded most of the night sky, a great spiral stain of reds and purples staring down like an unblinking eye.

‘The storm?’ Vendatha asked. ‘Their eyes are violet because of the storm?’

Lorgar nodded. ‘It has changed them.’

Xaphen rested his crozius on his shoulder as he still stared into the sky. ‘I know the warp can infect psychics with the flesh-change, if their minds are not strong enough. But normal humans?’

‘They are impure,’ Vendatha interrupted. ‘These barbarians are mutants...’ he gestured with his spear at the approaching tribes, ‘...and they must be destroyed.’

Argel Tal glanced to his left, where the Custodian stood with his halberd lowered. ‘Does this not fascinate you, Ven? We stand on a world at the edge of the greatest warp storm ever seen, and its population comes to us with eyes the same colour as the tortured void. How can you damn that before asking why it happens?’

‘Impurity is its own answer,’ said the golden warrior. He refused to be drawn into debate. ‘Primarch Lorgar, we must cleanse this world.’

Lorgar didn’t look at the Custodian. He merely sighed before speaking.

‘I will meet these people, and I will judge their lives myself. Pure, impure, right and wrong. All I want is answers.’

‘They are impure.’

‘I am not slaughtering the population of an entire world because my father’s war hound whined at the colour of their eyes.’

‘The Occuli Imperator will hear of this,’ Vendatha promised. ‘As will the Emperor, beloved by all.’

The primarch took a last look at the blazing sky. ‘Neither the Emperor, nor the Imperium, will ever forget what we learn here. You have my word on that, Custodian Vendatha.’

The first of the barbarians approached.

Draped around her shoulders was a cloak of discoloured peach-brown, heavy like bad leather, bound by crude black stitching. Her eyes, that beautiful and disquieting violet, were ringed by white paint, daubed in tribal runes over her face. The symbols meant nothing to Vendatha.

But the cloak did.

‘Degenerates...’ the Custodian hissed over a closed vox-channel. ‘That is human skin. Dried, cured, worn like a cloak of honour.’

‘I know,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘Lower your weapon, Ven.’

‘How can Lorgar deal with these creatures? Flayers. Primitives. Mutants. They coat their skin in meaningless hieroglyphs.’

‘They’re not meaningless,’ said the captain.

‘You can read those runes?’

‘Of course,’ Argel Tal sounded distracted. ‘It’s Colchisian.’

‘What? What does it say?’

The Word Bearer didn’t answer.

Lorgar inclined his head in respectful greeting.

The barbarian leader, at the head of over a hundred ragged people dressed in similar rags and armour of disquieting ‘leather’, showed no trepidation at all. More tribes were still converging from across the plainsland, but they held back, perhaps in deference to the young woman with the raven hair.

Skulls tied to her belt rattled as she moved. Despite reaching the primarch’s waist, she seemed utterly at ease as she lifted her mutated eyes to meet the giant’s own.

When she spoke, a heavy accent and clipped syllables couldn’t disguise the language completely. It had come far from its proto-Gothic roots, but the Imperials recognised it, some with greater ease than others.

‘Greetings,’ the primitive said. ‘We have been waiting for you, Lorgar Aurelian.’

The primarch let none of his surprise show. ‘You know my name, and you speak Colchisian.’

The young woman nodded, seeming to muse on the primarch’s deep intonation, rather than agreeing with Lorgar’s words. ‘We have waited many years. Now you walk upon our soil at last. This night was foretold. Look west and east and south and north. The tribes come. Our god-talkers demanded it, and the warchiefs obeyed. Warchiefs always heed the shaman-kind. Their voices are the voices of the gods.’

The primarch watched the crowd for signs of such respected tribal elders. ‘How is it that you speak the tongue of my home world?’ he asked their leader.

‘I speak the tongue of my home world,’ the woman replied. ‘You speak it, also.’

Despite the burning skies and the surprises the girl brought, Lorgar smiled at the stalemate.

‘I am Lorgar, as you foresaw, though only my sons call me Aurelian.’

‘Lorgar. A blessed name. The favoured son of the True Pantheon.’

Through great effort, the primarch kept his voice light. No stray nuance could allow this first contact to go wrong. Control was everything, all that mattered.

‘I do not have four fathers, my friend, and I am not of woman born. I am a son to the Emperor of Man, and no other.’

She laughed, the melody of the sound stolen by the blowing wind.

‘Sons can be adopted, not merely born. Sons can be raised, not merely bred. You are the favoured son of the Four. Your first father scorned you, but your four fathers are proud. So very proud. The god-talkers tell us this, and they only speak truths.’

Lorgar’s casual facade was close to cracking now. The Word Bearers sensed it, even if the humans did not.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I am Ingethel the Chosen,’ she smiled, all innocence and kindness. ‘Soon, Ingethel the Ascended. I am your guide, anointed by the gods.’ The barbarian woman gestured at the plain, as if it encapsulated the world itself. More tellingly, she gestured to the warp-wracked void above.

‘And this world,’ she spread her painted hands in benevolence, ‘is Cadia.’

It was something of a unique first contact.

Never before had the Imperials been expected like this. Never before had they been greeted by a primitive culture that not only welcomed them, its people showed no fear at all in the face of giant armoured warriors striding through their midst. The Thunderhawk attracted some curiosity, though the primarch had warned Ingethel that the vehicle’s weapons were active, manned by Legion servitors who would open fire if the Cadians drew too close.

Ingethel waved the curious men and women away from the Word Bearers gunship. The language she spoke was quick and flourishing, with a wealth of unnecessary words bolstering every sentence. Only when she addressed Lorgar and his retinue did she seem to strip the language down to its core, striving for brevity and clarity, evidently speaking Colchisian rather than Cadian.

Lorgar stopped his son’s words with a concerned glance.

‘You are snarling as you speak,’ the primarch said.

‘It is unintentional, sire.’

‘I know. Your voice is as divided as your soul. I can see the latter with my psychic sense – two faces stare out at me, four eyes and two smiles. None would ever know of it, save perhaps my brother Magnus. But to know the truth, one has only to listen. Mortal ears will know of your affliction, Argel Tal. You must learn to hide it better.’

The captain hesitated. ‘I was under the belief that I’d be destroyed after telling you all of this.’

‘That is a possibility, my son. But I would take no pleasure in seeing you dead.’

‘Will the Serrated Sun be purged from Legion records?’

Before speaking, Lorgar trickled fine, powdery sand onto the parchment, helping to dry the inked words he’d written thus far.

‘Why would you ask that?’

‘Because where once three hundred warriors once stood loyal, now barely a hundred remain alive. Of the three companies, one remains whole. Deumos is dead, slain upon Cadia. A hundred of our brothers were stormlost, taken by the warp on the Shield of Scarus. And now my company returns to you broken and... changed.’

‘The Serrated Sun will always be a lesson for the Legion,’ said Lorgar, ‘no matter how the Pilgrimage ends. Some things must never be forgotten.’

Argel Tal took a breath. In the exhalation was a whispering sound. Something was laughing.

‘I do not wish to speak of Cadia, sire. You already know everything I know that transpired on the surface. The nights of discussions with Ingethel and the tribal elders. The comparisons of our star charts with their crude maps of the heavens. Their pictographs of the Eye of Terror, and how the Cadians’ images of the storm matched the empyrean from our scrolls of the Old Faith.’ Argel Tal laughed, and the sound lacked any humour. ‘As if we needed more evidence.’

Lorgar was watching him closely.

‘What, sire?’

‘The storm that blights this subsector. You called it the Eye of Terror.’

Argel Tal froze. ‘That... Yes. That’s what it will come to be called. When it opens wider across the void, when the trembling Imperium sees it as the galaxy’s own hell. A void-sailors’ dramatic name for the greatest mystery of the deep. It will be scrawled onto maps and digitally inscribed into stellar cartography databanks. Humanity will give it that name, as a child names its own simple fears.’

‘Argel Tal.’

‘Sire?’

‘Who is speaking to me now? That is not your voice.’

The captain opened his eyes. He didn’t recall closing them.

‘It has no name.’

Lorgar didn’t answer at once. ‘I believe it does. It has identity, as strong as yours. But it slumbers. I sense its dissipation within you. You absorb it into the cells of your body like...’ here, he paused again. Argel Tal had often wondered what it was like to see all life on every possible level, even the genetic one – the lives and deaths of billions of barely measurable cells. Could all primarchs perceive thus? Merely his own? He had no idea.

‘Forgive me, sire,’ he said to Lorgar. ‘I will keep my eyes open.’

Lorgar’s breathing quickened. No unaugmented man would be able to discern the difference in the primarch’s heartbeat, but Argel Tal’s senses were keener than a human’s by many degrees. In truth, they were keener than Astartes perception now. He could hear the tiniest creak-stresses in the metal walls of his chamber. The guards’ breathing outside the sealed bulkhead door. The skittering whisper of an insect’s legs in the ventilation duct.

He’d felt this acuity before, back on Orfeo’s Lament, during the seven months of drift-sailing in their bid to escape the Eye. The feeling had come many times, in truth, but none as strongly as when only a brother’s blood quenched his thirst.

‘I see two souls at war within you, and the violence behind your eyes. Yet I wonder,’ the primarch confessed, ‘if you are cursed or blessed.’

Argel Tal grinned, showing too many teeth. It wasn’t his smile. ‘The difference between gods and daemons depends largely upon where one stands at the time.’

Lorgar wrote the words down.

‘Speak to me of the last night on Cadia,’ he said. ‘After the religious debates and the tribal gatherings. I have no interest in repeating weeks of research and rituals performed in our honour. The fleet’s data-core is swollen with evidence that this world, like so many others, shares unity with the Old Faith.’

Argel Tal licked his teeth. It still wasn’t his smile. ‘None so close.’

‘No. None as close as Cadia.’

‘What do you wish to know, Lorgar?’

Here, the primarch paused, hearing his name leave his son’s lips with such casual disregard. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, neither threatened nor fearful, but not quite at ease.

‘We. I. We are Argel Tal. I. I am Argel Tal.’

‘You speak in two voices.’

‘I am Argel Tal,’ the captain said through clenched teeth. ‘Ask what you will, sire. I have nothing to hide.’

‘The last night on Cadia,’ said Lorgar. ‘The night Ingethel was consecrated.’

‘This is heathen sorcery,’ said Vendatha.

‘I don’t believe in sorcery,’ Argel Tal said back. ‘And neither should you.’

Their voices echoed in the temple chamber, which was no more than a roughly-hewn room in the endless network of subterranean caverns. With no structures of human craft on the face of Cadia, the Temple of the Eye was far less grand than its name suggested. Beneath the northern plains where the Legion had made planetfall, the caverns and underground rivers formed a natural basilica.

‘This world is a paradise,’ Vendatha remarked. ‘It beggars belief that so many tribes come to dwell here in these deadlands.’

Argel Tal had heard this complaint before. Vendatha, in his blunt and stoic wisdom, had seen the orbital picts as often as the Word Bearer captain had. Cadia was a planet of temperate forests, expansive meadows, healthy oceans and arable land. Yet here, in an uninspiring corner of the northern hemisphere, the vagabond population gathered en masse to eke out a living on the arid plains.

Xaphen walked with Argel Tal and the Custodian down the stone corridor. The temple’s construction was as flimsy as could be expected from a culture of primitives – the sloping walls showed the stone-scars of miners’ picks and other digging tools – but the chambers weren’t entirely devoid of decoration. Pictographs and hieroglyphs covered every wall, replete with symbols, charcoal murals and etched sigils that made little sense to Vendatha.

In truth, it hurt his eyes to look at many of them. Uneven, jagged stars were scrawled everywhere, as well as long mantras in a meaningless tongue, their sentence structure clearly indicative of verse. Sketches of the Great Eye, as the Cadians named the storm above, were also commonplace.

Torches of bundled sticks burned in wall sconces at irregular intervals, making the stone hallways misty with smoke. All in all, Vendatha had been to many more pleasant places. A pox on Aquillon for volunteering him to descend to the surface.

‘It is not difficult to comprehend why they come here, when you understand faith,’ said the Chaplain.

‘Faith is a fiction,’ Vendatha snorted.

Argel Tal had never wagered in his life – to gamble was against the Legion’s monastic code; it showed a reverence for worldly wealth which was meaningless to all pure-hearted warriors – but he would have been safe to gamble that the words Vendatha spoke most often were: ‘Faith is a fiction’.

‘Faith,’ said Argel Tal, ‘means different things to different beings.’ It was a weak attempt to sunder the argument he could feel building between the other two, and it failed, just as he’d suspected it would.

‘Faith is a fiction,’ Vendatha repeated, but Xaphen went on, warming to his captive audience.

‘Faith is why these people come here. It is why their temple stands at this spot. The stars are all in the right alignment at this place, and they believe it aids their rituals. The constellations mark the gods’ homes in the sky.’

‘Heathen magic,’ Vendatha said again, getting annoyed now.

‘Pre-Imperial Colchis was the same, you know.’ Xaphen wouldn’t let up. ‘These rites are little different to the ones performed in the generations before Lorgar’s arrival. Colchisians have always invested great significance in the stars.’

Vendatha shook his head. ‘Do not add mindless superstition to the list of grievances I have against you, Chaplain.’

‘Not now, Ven.’ Argel Tal was in no mood for the two of them to go through yet another debate on the nature of the human psyche and the corruption of religion. ‘Please, not now.’

While Argel Tal had slowly grown closer to the Custodes contingent in the past three years, often training his sword work with them in the practice cages, Xaphen seemed to take a kind of wicked delight in baiting them at every turn. Philosophical arguments almost always ended with Vendatha or Aquillon needing to leave the chamber before they struck the Chaplain. In turn, Xaphen counted these moments as great personal victories, and had an old man’s cackle about the whole thing.

‘If the stars are so precious to them,’ Vendatha’s voice was crackling through his helm’s speakers, ‘then why do they hide beneath the earth?’

‘Why don’t you ask them tonight?’ Xaphen smiled.

The three of them walked on, and the silence lasted for several blessed moments.

‘I hear chanting,’ the Custodian sighed. ‘By the Emperor, this is madness.’

Argel Tal heard it, too. The levels below them extended deep into the earth, but the thick stone carried sound with deceptive ease. To walk in the temple-caverns was to hear laughter, footsteps, prayers and weeping – at all times of day and night.

On one of those lower levels, the ritual was underway.

‘I have watched you clutch at parchments and babble to the Cadians in their own tongue for weeks now.’

‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said, distracted, as he ran his gauntleted fingers along a charcoal depiction of what looked like the primarch. The image was crude, but showed a figure clad in a robe, next to another figure in mail armour, with one gaping eye. They stood atop a tower, in a field of shaded flowers.

This wasn’t the first such image Argel Tal had seen, yet they never failed to capture his interest. Serfs from the fleet had landed in huge numbers, set with the tasks of exploring the Cadian caves and taking pict references of every marking they found.

‘Is this is how your Legion repents for failing the Emperor?’ Vendatha asked. ‘After so many compliances, I’d dared to perceive you all in a new light. Monarchia was a past sin. Even Aquillon believed the same. And now we come here, and everything unravels as you stutter to these wretches in alien speech.’

‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said, refusing to be riled.

‘I may not be fluent in your monotonous tongue,’ said Vendatha, ‘but I know enough. What leaves the Cadians’ lips is not Colchisian. Nor are these writings. This resembles nothing else. Its roots aren’t even in proto-Gothic.’

‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said again. ‘It’s archaic, but it is Colchisian.’

Vendatha let the old argument go. Aquillon had already been informed, and had travelled down to the surface to see everything for himself. The Custodes leader was fluent in Colchisian, yet struggled with the words just as Vendatha did. The cognitive servitors brought down from orbit met with the same difficulties – no linguistic decoders could make sense of the runic language.

‘Perhaps,’ ventured Xaphen, ‘we are a chosen Legion. Only those of Lorgar Aurelian’s blood may speak and read this holiest of tongues.’

‘You would delight in that being the truth, wouldn’t you?’ Vendatha snorted.

Xaphen just smiled in reply.

The Custodian’s mood was black in the wake of his most recent failures to decipher the scrawls on these cave walls.

‘What does this say?’ he indicated a random verse written upon the uneven rock wall.

Argel Tal glanced at the prose, seeing more of the poetry he’d come to expect here: simple, more like a form of clumsy lyric than reverent chanting. Knowing the Cadians’ god-talkers, this was likely the work of a shaman, maddened with hallucinogenic narcotics, spilling his stream of consciousness onto the sacred walls.

‘...we offer praise to those who do,

That they might turn their gaze our way,

And gift us with the boon of pain,

To turn the galaxy red with blood,

And feed the hunger of the gods.’

‘It’s just more bad poetry,’ he said to Vendatha.

‘I cannot read a single word.’

‘It’s very artless,’ Xaphen smiled. ‘You’re not missing any insight into an advanced culture.’

‘It doesn’t concern you that I cannot read this?’ the Custodian pressed.

‘I have no answer for you,’ snapped Argel Tal. ‘It’s the feverish etchings of a long-dead shaman. It ties in to the Cadian belief in other gods, but its meaning is as lost on me as it is on you. I know nothing more.’

‘Were the weeks spent with the primitives in their tent-city somehow not enough, Argel Tal? Now you must attend the false worship of ignorant barbarians?’

‘You are giving me a headache, Ven,’ said Argel Tal, barely listening. His retinal display tracked a digital counter of the last time he’d slept. Over four days now. The conclaves with the Cadians ate up a great deal of time, as the Word Bearers pored over the humans’ scriptures and discussed their faith’s ties to the Old Ways of Colchis. Lorgar and the Chaplains were bearing the brunt of the ambassadorial and research efforts, but Argel Tal found his time occupied with plenty of tribal leaders pleading for his attention.

‘I confess,’ said Vendatha, ‘that I’d hoped the Legion would avoid tonight’s... foolishness.’

‘The primarch ordered our presence,’ Xaphen replied. ‘So we will be present.’ As the three warriors descended down more rough stone steps, the sound of distant drums grew more resonant.

‘You have agreed to witness these degenerates perform a ritual without knowing what they intend.’

‘I know what they intend,’ Xaphen gestured at the walls. ‘It is written everywhere, plain for all to see.’ Before Vendatha could answer, the Chaplain added something that Argel Tal hadn’t heard before. ‘The Cadians have promised us an answer tonight.’

‘To what?’ both the Custodian and the captain asked as one.

‘To what was screaming the primarch’s name in the storm.’

Argel Tal clenched his fist, but there was little anger in the gesture. He seemed content to watch the play of his muscles and the bones of his fingers working in natural, biological unity.

‘Deumos,’ he said. ‘It was not easy to see him die.’

The primarch’s quill stopped scratching at the parchment. ‘Do you mourn him?’

‘I did for a time, sire. But he has been dead over half a year to me. What I’ve seen since has made all previous revelations seem trivial.’

‘You are snarling again.’

Argel Tal grunted acknowledgement, but had no desire to speak of it. ‘The consecration,’ he said instead.

The captain was surprised when he first entered the main cavern, which wasn’t quite the same as being impressed.

It was certainly of considerable size, and given that the Cadians’ technology was somewhere in the region of Terra’s long-forgotten Age of Stone, it had likely taken years to carve out the subterranean chamber and etch the murals, symbols and verses upon the walls and floors.

An underground river ran in a rushing torrent below dozens upon dozens of arched stone bridges. The curving walls were lit by more smoky torches, casting myriad silhouettes across the cavern that danced in frantic abandon to the sound of the drums.

A central island formed a hub for the bridges to meet in the middle. Here, naked in the firelight, her pale skin painted with twisted runes, was Ingethel. For the ghost of a moment, the symbols tattooed on her body drew Argel Tal’s eyes. He recognised them all immediately, for each sigil was a stylised representation of a constellation drawn right from the night skies of Colchis. The Serrated Sun encircled the girl’s navel in blue ink.

Drummers surrounded her in a ring, beating leathery skins with animal bones. Thirty in all – their harmonic pounding like the world’s own beating heart. Hundreds and hundreds of Cadians lined the outer walls and walkways, all watching the performance as it was underway. Many chanted in praise of their heathen gods.

The alkaline smells of pure water, human sweat and ancient stone were almost overpowering, but Argel Tal still scented blood before he saw its source. Sensing his urgency, his visor tracked and zoomed across the scene. In the shadowed edge of the central ring, ten spears reached up from the ground.

The bases of nine of the wooden spears were streaked with blood and shit, forming sick pools on the stone. The spears themselves bore human fruit: each of the nine stakes played host to a tribesman – all impaled, all dead. The speartips thrust up through the dead men’s open mouths.

‘This cannot be allowed to continue,’ said Vendatha. Disbelief softened his voice.

And this time, Argel Tal agreed with him.

Ingethel danced on, her lithe figure silhouetted into blackness by the bright fires behind her. At the heart of it all, not far from the maiden’s undulating form, Lorgar towered above every other living being. He watched in silence with his arms crossed over his chest, his features masked by a raised hood.

Deumos stood by the robed primarch’s side, sweating in full battle armour. Captain Tsar Quorel and his Chaplain, Rikus, stood way behind. Both wore their helms. Both were watching the impaling spears, rather than the dancing human girl.

‘Brother,’ Argel Tal voxed to his fellow captain, ‘what blasphemy have we intruded upon?’

Tsar Quorel’s tone betrayed his own unease. ‘When we arrived, the woman was as you see her, and the primarch stood here watching. The atrocities on the spears were already committed. We saw as you see now.’

Argel Tal led Xaphen and Vendatha over a stone walkway, approaching the primarch. Cadians scattered like vermin before a pack of hunting dogs, bowing, scraping, reaching out with shaking fingers to touch the Colchisian runes engraved on their armour.

‘Sire?’ Argel Tal asked. ‘What is all this?’

Lorgar didn’t look away from Ingethel. Her dance seemed carnal to Argel Tal’s inexpert eyes, as if the maiden was mating with some unseen creature as part of her performance.

‘Sire?’ Argel Tal repeated, and the primarch glanced his way at last. Ingethel’s shadow danced across his eyes, reflected there by the firelight.

‘The Cadians believe this ritual will allow their gods to manifest among us.’ His voice was as low as the drums.

‘You allowed them to do this?’ He stepped closer, showing more disrespect to his gene-sire than he ever had in his life, for his hands fell to rest upon his sheathed swords. ‘You watched them commit human sacrifice?’

The primarch took no offence at his son’s boldness. In truth, he seemed not to notice it. ‘The blood offerings were made before I was invited into the sacred chamber.’

‘Yet you are still taking part. You tolerate this. Your silence endorses this barbarism.’

Lorgar turned back to watch the girl’s dance, which grew ever more frantic. Perhaps an edge of doubt marred his flawless features. Perhaps it was simply the maiden’s shadow flickering over the primarch’s face.

‘This is no different to the rituals practised on Colchis only decades before your birth, captain. This is the Old Faith in all its theatrical glory.’

‘This is an abomination,’ Argel Tal took another step closer.

‘All I want,’ Lorgar enunciated each word with patient care, ‘is an answer.’

Before them, Ingethel slowed in her whirling dance. Her tattooed skin was a living, sweating devotion to the Word Bearers’ Chapters and the Colchisian night skies from whence they drew their names.

‘It is time,’ she said to Lorgar in a hoarse, breathless voice. ‘It is time for the tenth sacrifice.’

The primarch tilted his head down at the girl, not quite a concession. ‘And what is the tenth sacrifice?’

‘The tenth sacrifice must come from the seeker. He chooses the slain. It is the final consecration.’

Lorgar drew breath to answer, but was denied the chance to speak.

A sinister crackle came into waspish life – all recognised the snapping buzz of a power weapon going live. Vendatha lowered his guardian spear, aiming the blade and bolter at Lorgar’s heart.

‘In the Emperor’s name,’ said the Custodian, ‘this ends now.’

FIFTEEN

Sacrifice

Baptism of Blood

Unworthy Truths

‘By the authority invested in me by the Emperor of Mankind, I do judge thee a traitor to the Imperium.’

Lorgar watched Vendatha, his benign expression unchanging all the while.

‘Is that so?’ asked the primarch.

‘Don’t do this,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Ven, please, do not do this.’

Vendatha didn’t take his eyes from Lorgar. The golden spire-helm faced forward, red eye lenses catching the flames’ reflection. Around them all, the drums were starting to slow and fall quiet.

‘If any of you reach for a weapon, this becomes an execution, not an arrest.’

The Word Bearers remained frozen. Some risks weren’t worth taking.

‘Lorgar,’ whispered Ingethel. ‘The ritual must not be interrupted. The wrath of the gods will–’

‘Be silent, witch,’ Vendatha said. ‘You have said enough already. Lorgar, Seventeenth Son of the Emperor, do you yield to righteous authority and give your oath to abandon this den of heathen belief? Do you vow to return at once to Terra and submit to the Emperor’s judgement?’

‘No,’ the primarch spoke softly. ‘I do not.’

‘Then you leave me no choice.’

‘There is always a choice,’ said Argel Tal.

Vendatha ignored the captain’s plea. He reached for the scrollwork etched into his ornate bracer, and pushed one of the mother-of-pearl buttons inlaid in the decoration.

Nothing happened.

He pressed the button again.

Nothing continued to happen.

The Custodian took a step backwards as the Word Bearers very, very slowly drew their weapons. The Chaplains unlimbered their crozius mauls. Tsar Quorel and Deumos raised their bolters, and Argel Tal unsheathed the swords of red iron.

‘I think you will find,’ the primarch smiled, ‘that your teleport signal has been blocked since you entered this chamber. Just a precautionary measure we took, you understand? Aquillon and your brothers will not be appearing to aid you. They will never even know you needed them.’

‘I confess I had not anticipated this,’ Vendatha said. ‘Well done, Lorgar.’

‘It’s not too late, Ven.’ Argel Tal raised his swords en garde. ‘Lower your weapon and we can end this without crossing the line.’

‘Great One...’ Ingethel whined. ‘The ritual...’

‘I said be silent, witch,’ snapped Vendatha.

Lorgar sighed, as if a great disappointment settled upon his shoulders. ‘Decide now, Custodian Vendatha, how best to serve my father’s Imperium. Do you flee, escaping this chamber, and bring a truth you don’t even understand to your brothers in orbit? Or do you shoot me now, and rid the galaxy of its only chance at enlightenment?’

‘The choice you offer is no choice at all,’ Vendatha said.

Argel Tal moved first, launching forward as the cavern echoed with bolter fire.

Vendatha was not a fool. He knew the odds of surviving the next few moments were slim, and he knew a primarch’s reflexes were the peak of biological possibility, faster than even his own, which bordered on the preternatural.

But Lorgar was at ease, his muscles loose. He actually expected his offer of truce to hold some weight, and that lapse in judgement was enough for Vendatha to take the chance. He pulled the haft-trigger, and his spear’s underslung bolter cracked off a stream of rounds on full-auto.

Argel Tal saw it coming. The swords of red iron smashed the first three bolts aside, their power fields strong enough to detonate the shells as they streaked towards the primarch’s heart. The explosions threw the captain to the ground, his grey armour scraping along the stone with the shriek of offended ceramite.

Vendatha was already in motion. The golden warrior leapt at the primarch, guardian spear spinning in his fists, an oath to the Emperor on his lips. Four Word Bearers blocked his path, and those four Word Bearers had to die.

Rikus was the first to fall. The Custodian’s blade crunched into the soft, jointed armour at the Chaplain’s throat, punching from the back of his neck. Tsar Quorel died next, decapitated with a buzzing sweep of the energised blade, dead before he’d pulled his trigger.

Deumos managed to fire a stream of bolt shells, none of which connected. Vendatha weaved left, thudded the base of his spear into the Chapter Master’s bolter, knocking it aside, and followed with a cutting swing that sheared both the Word Bearer’s hands from his body, severing them at the forearms. Deumos had a scarce moment to draw in a stunned gasp before the spear sliced again, this time cleaving through his collarbone and spine, ripping his head free.

Vendatha span the blade in his hands, letting it come to rest with the tip and gun barrel aimed at Lorgar’s heart again. Behind the Custodian, the bodies crashed to the ground in slow succession. Three seconds had passed.

Argel Tal was picking himself off the floor. Only Xaphen stood between the primarch and his attacker, but the Chaplain had used the scant, precious seconds to draw his bolter, which he aimed squarely at Vendatha’s faceplate.

‘Hold,’ he warned.

‘Lorgar, Seventeenth Son of the Emperor, surrender yourself into my custody at once.’

‘You killed my sons,’ Lorgar covered his mouth with a hand. ‘They had never wronged you. Not once. Is this what my father’s mandate allows you to do? To slaughter my sons if I do not dance to his ignorant tune?’

‘Surrender yourself,’ the Custodian repeated.

Vendatha had fought at the Emperor’s side many times before. Always writ upon the Lord of Man’s face was an unbreakable defiance, all emotion suppressed beneath the mask of stoic perfection.

Lorgar didn’t share his father’s capacity to conceal emotion. Hate bleached his features, and white teeth showed in a skull’s grin.

‘You dare threaten me? You murdered my sons, you soulless, worthless husk of genetic overspill.’

Vendatha squeezed the trigger again, but it was too late. Xaphen fired first.

Bolt rounds hammered into the Custodian’s golden armour, beating the faceplate and chest out of shape, tearing chunks of plating away as they detonated. Each suit of battle armour was individually wrought for the Custodian granted the honour to wear it, and despite their finery, Custodes armour was a step beyond the mass-produced wargear used by the Astartes Legions.

Even so, the burst of bolter shells to the head and upper torso was almost enough to kill the warrior outright.

Vendatha staggered back, the guardian spear falling from slack fingers and crashing to the stone. Even with his face a burned and bleeding ruin, even with his helm wrecked and its twisted metal digging into his broken skull, he stared through the one eye that still worked.

Xaphen reloaded. The primarch did nothing. The naked maiden tugged at Lorgar’s robe sleeve, imploring him to continue with the heathen rite, warning of the gods’ anger if he didn’t.

Vendatha reached for his fallen spear.

Wait. Where is Argel T–