The First Heretic

The sword of red iron flew like a javelin, cracking Vendatha’s remaining teeth into porcelain chips as it smashed into his closed mouth. Two metres of shimmering blade lanced from the back of the Custodian’s head, while most of the warrior’s ruined face was covered by the hilt and handle protruding from his open jaws.

As Rikus, Tsar Quorel and Deumos had done only moments before, Vendatha crashed to the ground, felled by an Imperial blade.

Xaphen released a breath. ‘Nicely done, brother.’

The Chaplain had no warning, for Argel Tal struck without any. The captain’s fist crashed into Xaphen’s jaw, throwing him to the ground.

‘Brother?’ from his place on the stone floor, the Chaplain stared up at Argel Tal’s fury.

‘We have just killed one of the Emperor’s own guardians, and your eulogy in this moment is “Nicely done, brother”? Are you insane? We stand upon the edge of heresy against the Imperium. Sire, we have to leave this place. We must speak with Aquillon, and–’

‘Retrieve your blade,’ ordered the primarch. Lorgar stared into the middle distance, paying little heed to what unfolded before his eyes. His voice barely lifted above a whisper.

Argel Tal approached with slow steps, taking his second sword back without gentleness, yanking it from the corpse’s jaws. He froze as Vendatha’s remaining eye followed him, and the body’s fingers twitched.

‘Blood of the... Sire, he’s still alive,’ Argel Tal called back.

‘There is no virtue in cruelty,’ murmured Lorgar. ‘I wrote that once. In my book. I remember doing so. I remember the scratch of quill upon parchment, and the way the words looked on the page...’

‘Sire?’

Lorgar stirred, focused. ‘End his suffering, Argel Tal.’

All heads turned towards Ingethel as she cried out – wordless defiance, in a keening wail.

‘This was ordained by the gods.’ She gestured her tattooed hand to Vendatha’s ravaged form. ‘Lorgar is the seeker, the Favoured Son of the Great Powers, and he has provided the tenth sacrifice. Consecration may begin.’

A pack of Cadians came forward, their dirty hands pulling at Vendatha’s golden armour, stripping it from his dying body. Argel Tal kicked one of the jackals off the fallen Custodian and levelled his blades at the rest. They scattered; carrion-feeders disturbed from a meal at the last moment.

‘This was not a sacrifice for your blood magic,’ the captain said. ‘He aimed a weapon at the Emperor’s son, and he will die for the sin. That is all.’ Argel Tal looked over his shoulder. ‘Sire, we have to leave. No answer is worth this.’

Lorgar lowered his hood, looking at neither Argel Tal nor Ingethel. His gaze rested on a far wall, and a faint scowl creased his lips.

‘What’s that sound?’ the primarch asked.

‘I hear nothing but the drums, sire. Please, we must leave at once.’

‘You don’t hear that?’ Lorgar glanced at his two remaining sons. ‘Neither of you?’ Their silence answered for them, and Lorgar reached a hand to his forehead. ‘Is that... laughter?’

Ingethel was on her knees now, dragging at his robes, weeping in her worship. ‘The ritual... The gods come... It is not complete...’

Lorgar paid her heed at last, though the distant look never left his eyes. ‘I hear them. I hear them all. Like the memory of laughter. The forgotten faces of distant kin when one struggles to recall them.’

Argel Tal clashed the swords of red iron together; the skish-skash of metal on metal loud enough to draw the primarch’s attention.

‘Sire,’ he growled, ‘we must leave.’

Lorgar shook his head, infinitely patient, infinitely calm. ‘It is no longer our choice to make. Events are in motion. Stand away from the Custodian, my son.’

‘But sire...’

‘Ingethel speaks the truth. This was all ordained. The storm that stranded us. The screams that summoned us. The fear that led Vendatha to betray us. All part of a... a plan. It’s so clear to me. The dreams. The whispers. Decade after decade after decade of...’

‘Sire, please.’

Lorgar’s statuesque features were warped by a sudden rush of fury. ‘Stand away from that treacherous dog before you join him on an eleventh spear. Do you understand me? This moment is a crucible upon which all else spins. Obey me, or I will kill you where you stand.’

A shadow passed over Argel Tal’s sight – something terrible in aspect, something winged and wrathful beyond mortal imagining.

The moment passed. The darkness receded. Argel Tal did as Lorgar commanded, stepping away from the body and sheathing the swords of red iron.

‘No answers are worth this,’ the captain said.

Neither Xaphen nor Lorgar met his glare. With keen eyes, both watched the ritual proceeding again.

Here, Lorgar stopped writing. His smile was enriched by melancholy.

‘Do you believe I sinned in that moment?’

Argel Tal laughed, the sound black and bitter. ‘A sin is decided when mortal morality meets a code of ethics. Did you sin against a faith? No. Did you stain your soul? Perhaps.’

‘But you hate me, my son. I hear it in your voice.’

‘I think desperation blinded you, father. You may take no joy in sadism, but your need for the truth drove you to viciousness.’

‘And for this, you hate me.’ Lorgar was no longer smiling. His tone was low and barbed, while his eyes had all the warmth of a body on the battlefield.

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

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

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

But, mercifully, not for long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lorgar closed his eyes, fingertips still at his temples.

‘Here it comes.’

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

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

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

The maiden’s staff clattered to the ground.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, I am here.

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

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

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

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

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

A biological impossibility. An evolutionary lie.

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

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

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

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

Wings, he thought. Wings of black bone.

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

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

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

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

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

Angels. Daemons. Just words. Just words.

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

‘How do you know me?’

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

‘I do not understand what you are saying.’

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

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

Your sons, Lorgar. Give me their lives.

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

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

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

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

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

Your blood-sons could not end me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I would not sacrifice them for answers.’

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

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

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

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

Yes.

The decision was not to be made lightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Did they die like heroes?’

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

Xaphen gave a mirthless snort, and they fell silent.

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

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

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

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

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

SIXTEEN

Orfeo’s Lament

The Storm Beyond the Glass

Chaos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Propulsion.’

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

‘Auspex.’

‘Aye, ma’am.’

‘Void shields.’

‘Shields ready.’

‘Weapons.’

‘Weapons, aye.’

‘Geller field.’

‘Geller field, aye.’

‘Helm.’

‘Helm standing ready, ma’am.’

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

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

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

‘There will be one last vessel docking soon. Ensure all of your crew are removed from the bay once it arrives.’

Her raised eyebrow conveyed just what she thought of this unorthodox demand. And in case it didn’t, she added her own spice to it. ‘Very well. Now tell me why.’

‘No,’ said one of the other Astartes. He’d named himself as Malnor, a sergeant. ‘Just obey the order.’

The captain, Argel Tal, gestured for his brother to remain silent.

‘The last gunship will be bringing a creature on board. The fewer of your crew that are exposed to it, the better it will be for all of us.’

The first officer pointedly cleared his throat. Crew members turned in their seats. Sylamor blinked twice. ‘I will suffer no xenos presence on board the Lament,’ she stated.

‘I did not say it was an alien,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I said it was a creature. My warriors will escort it to the bridge. Do not look at it once we are underway. Focus on your duties, all of you. I have my men in the starboard docking bay, and will inform you when the gunship reaches us.’

‘Incoming hail from De Profundis,’ called an officer from the vox-console.

The Word Bearers went to their knees, heads lowered.

‘Accept the hail,’ Sylamor said. Without realising, she lifted a hand to check her hair was in neat order, and straightened her uniform. Around her, officers did the same, brushing epaulettes and standing straighter.

The occulus tuned into a view of De Profundis’s command deck, where the primarch and Fleetmaster Torvus stood in pride of place.

‘This is the flagship,’ Torvus said, ‘Good hunting, Lament.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Sylamor replied.

An awkward silence reached between both bridge crews, broken by Argel Tal.

‘Sire?’

‘Yes, my son?’ Lorgar’s smile was sincere, though vox-crackle ruined his smooth voice.

‘We will return with the answers the Legion needs. You have my word,’ he gestured to the parchment bound to his shoulder guard, ‘and my oath of moment’.

The smile remained upon the primarch’s painted lips. ‘I know, Argel Tal. Please, rise. I cannot abide you kneeling before me in this moment of moments.’

The Word Bearers rose as ordered, and Argel Tal nodded to Captain Sylamor.

‘The last vessel has docked and my warriors are leading the creature to the bridge. Take us in, captain.’

The ship trembled as its engines came alive, and Orfeo’s Lament speared away from the planet, cutting through the void towards the storm’s distant edges.

‘Three hours until we reach the storm’s outermost border,’ one of the helmsmen called.

Argel Tal held his bolter in his fists, waiting for the bridge doors to open once more.

‘When the creature arrives, do not look at it.’ He seemed to be addressing everyone, while looking at none of them. ‘This is not a matter of decorum or politeness. Do not look at it. Do not meet its eyes. Try not to breathe too much of its scent.’

‘Is this creature toxic?’ asked Sylamor.

‘It is dangerous,’ the Word Bearer allowed. ‘When I say these instructions are for your safety and sanity, I mean those exact words. Do not look at it. Do not even look at its reflection in any screen or monitor. If it speaks, focus on anything but its words. And if you feel nauseous or afflicted in its presence, leave your station at once.’

Sylamor’s laugh was patently false. ‘You are unnerving my crew, captain.’

‘Just do as I ask, please.’

She bristled, not used to being given orders on her own deck. ‘Of course, sir.’

‘Don’t act so offended, Janus.’ The Word Bearer forced some warmth into his voice, which his helm’s vox-speakers immediately stole and twisted. ‘Just trust me.’

When the doors finally opened, the first thing to wash over the bridge was the smell, which caused several of the human crew to gag.

Commendably, only one turned around to see what entered, escorted as it was by a full squad of Word Bearers – and that one soul was Captain Janus Sylamor.

In accidental defiance of the promise she’d made only minutes before, she turned to the opening doors and saw the creature framed in the light of the illumination globes in the corridor behind. The first heave of bitter sick hit her teeth and lips so fast she didn’t have time to open her mouth. The rest spread onto the floor as she went down on all fours, purging her stomach of the morning’s caffeine and dry rations, and painting the decking with her bile.

‘I warned you,’ Argel Tal said to her, without taking his eyes from the creature.

Her answer was to heave some more, ending with a string of saliva hanging from her lips.

Ingethel wormed its way onto the bridge, leaving a discoloured smear in its wake. The tap, tap, tap of the staff’s base on the metal floor acted as accompaniment to the sound of its slick flesh slithering across the deck.

Officers abandoned their posts by the captain’s throne, stepping away with undisguised disgust and covering their mouths and noses. More than one vomited into their hands as Ingethel drew nearer, though for the creature’s part, it seemed to notice none of this. Its malformed eyes stared dead ahead at the storm taking over the occulus.

Sylamor rose to her feet again, after taking Argel Tal’s offered hand.

‘What have you brought onto my bridge, captain?’

‘It is a guide. Now with the greatest respect, Janus, wipe your mouth and do your duty. Next time, perhaps you will listen to me.’

She was familiar enough with Argel Tal from fleet command meetings to know that this curt treatment wasn’t like him at all. Of all the Word Bearer commanders, he’d always been the most approachable, and the most inclined to hear the concerns of the human officers.

She said nothing. Instead, she nodded, breathing through her mouth to hinder some of the obscene reek that only fuelled her nausea. The foulness of the stench wasn’t the worst part; it was the familiarity of it.

As a young girl on Colchis, she’d survived an outbreak of rotten lung in her village, and had been one of the few left to witness the arrival of a coven of mortuary priests from the City of Grey Flowers. Over the course of a single day, they’d erected a great pyre to cleanse the dead before scattering their ashes across the desert. The smell of that funeral pyre had never left her, and when it resurfaced now, it was all she could do not to choke at the creature’s stench.

A curious drip, drip, drip ate at her attention, drawing her glance to the deck by the creature’s sluggish body. A greasy, opaque plasm dripped from the muscled folds of its serpentine lower half, bleaching the steel decking where it fell.

‘Full speed ahead,’ said Sylamor, and swallowed before another purge took hold.

Orfeo’s Lament trembled – ever the eager huntress, ever the keen explorer – and increased her pace. The storm swelled in the occulus before them as they cruised closer to its edge.

‘Have the flagship’s augurs managed to measure the afflicted area of space?’ she asked.

Thousands upon thousands of solar systems lie within the Great Eye.

She froze, cheeks paling. ‘I... I heard a voice.’

‘Ignore it,’ ordered Argel Tal.

You could sail your mortal craft for a hundred lifetimes within its depths, and see no more than a shadow of its full glory.

‘I can still hear it...’

Argel Tal growled, deep and low, his head tilted towards the creature. ‘Do not toy with their lives,’ he said. ‘You have been warned.’

None of them will survive this journey. You are a fool to believe they will.

‘Did... did it just say...’

‘It said nothing,’ Argel Tal interrupted her stammer. ‘Ignore the voice. Focus, Janus. Attend to your duties, and leave all else to us. I will not let the creature harm you, or anyone in the crew.’

She does not believe you.

‘Be quiet, false angel.’

She knows you lie. You hear her heartbeat, as I do. She is terrified, and she knows you are lying to her.

Across the bridge, two menials vomited over their consoles. Another fainted at his station, with blood running from his ears in a slow trickle.

‘Will this keep happening?’ Sylamor asked Argel Tal, careful not to look at the creature over the warrior’s shoulder, and hoping her voice wasn’t shaking.

The Word Bearer didn’t answer immediately. ‘I believe so,’ came the eventual response.

One of the helmsmen jerked in his seat, cracking his head against the back of the throne. Through clenched teeth, he managed a thin wail before falling into a seizure, kept in place only by his restraint harness.

‘Medicae team to the helm,’ ordered the captain.

Sylamor’s patience was close to its end when one of her adjutant servitors unplugged itself from its post and began to painstakingly crawl across the floor. The servitor in question had no legs below the thighs, having had them surgically removed in order to better remain at its post at all times. When it detached itself from its bronze cradle and started clawing its way over the decking, Captain Sylamor watched this unprecedented behaviour for several stunned moments. The augmetic servant trailed wires and cables from its spine and severed legs, viscous oil leaking from its nose.

‘Blood of the Emperor,’ Sylamor cursed under her breath. ‘Stand back, everyone. Stand back.’

She put the servitor down herself with a single pistol round to the back of the poor thing’s head, and ordered two deckhands to remove it at once.

Vox-officer Arvas turned to his captain as she passed on the way back to her throne. ‘Do you hear that?’ he asked her.

‘A contact? Another vessel?’

‘No.’ He held his earpiece, face darkened by concentration. ‘I can hear him, captain.’

Mounting irritation overrode her unease. ‘Hear who?’

Janus had known Arvas for over a decade, and on one night in particular four years ago, she’d known him – and four bottles of silver Yndonesic wine – regrettably well. Despite that lone indiscretion, he was one of her most adept and loyal crew members. ‘Tell me who you hear, lieutenant.’

He tried to retune his console, twisting a row of dials. ‘I can hear Vanic dying. He screams, but not for long. The rest is white noise. Listen,’ he offered her his earpiece. ‘You can hear Vanic dying. You hear him scream, but not for long.’

She hesitantly reached to take the earpiece. Standing next to Arvas, Vox-officer Vanic gave her an attempt at a smile. Discomfort was written across his fat features.

Arvas unholstered his sidearm and pumped four rounds into the other man’s stomach. Blood, stinging and hot, flecked Sylamor’s face as Vanic collapsed screaming to the deck.

‘Now you hear it,’ said Arvas.

The captain had no time to react – a blur of dark grey shoved her aside. Before she’d even blinked, Arvas was kicking and dangling above the ground, held aloft by Argel Tal’s fist around his throat. The ship shivered around them as if it shared the crew’s disquiet.

As he was strangled in the warrior’s grip, Arvas’s fingers scraped across Argel Tal’s faceplate with all the ferocity of a cornered beast hoping to scratch out its killer’s eyes. Sweat-smears painted across the eye lenses.

The medicae team reached Vanic’s side in time for him to die at their feet. Arvas had been right – Vanic hadn’t screamed for long.

The Word Bearer ignored the fingers scrabbling over the implacable ceramite, and turned to address his warriors. ‘Dagotal, take this wretch to the containment cells.’ He passed Arvas towards the other Word Bearers, sending him sprawling with a shove.

Another of the Astartes stepped forward, catching the struggling officer by the collar and lifting him from the ground. Arvas took over where Vanic’s screams left off.

‘And render him silent,’ Argel Tal added.

‘By your word, brother.’ Dagotal gripped the officer’s neck, squeezing his windpipe with gentle force. The human’s voice faded to a gasping squeak as the Word Bearer hauled him from the bridge.

Captain Sylamor glared up at the towering figure of Argel Tal.

‘That creature cannot remain on my bridge. It is... doing something to us, isn’t it?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Then ask it.’

‘We will take it to the observation deck, captain. Ensure your crew vacate the area, as well as the corridors between. Make full speed for the storm’s edge. I will contact you with any alterations to those orders if the need arises.’

‘Thank you,’ she said to him.

Argel Tal returned a curt nod, and moved back to his brethren.

‘You should have killed the murderer,’ Xaphen admonished.

‘He will stand trial for his sin. It could be argued that his actions were not his own.’ Argel Tal turned to watch Ingethel as the creature began its slithering withdrawal from the command deck. They followed, avoiding the slick trail it left in its wake.

‘We are walking into the unknown, and there is nothing but darkness before my eyes,’ Argel Tal said to his Chaplain.

‘And that worries you.’

‘Of course it worries me. If we are on the precipice of enlightenment, why have I never felt so blind?’

‘Everything is darkest,’ Xaphen mused, ‘before the dawn.’

‘That, my brother, is an axiom that sounds immensely profound until you realise it’s a lie.’

The observation decks on most Imperial ships were places of great serenity. Although Orfeo’s Lament was a modest vessel compared to De Profundis, let alone the grandeur of the Fidelitas Lex, Argel Tal still felt his breath catch as he entered.

Midway along the cruiser’s battlemented spine rose an armoured dome, its clear surface offering an unparalleled view of the surrounding void. In normal space, the view of a billion stars in the infinite night never failed to capture his imagination – and, he’d admit in his prouder moments, his ambition as well. These were humanity’s stars. No other species had the right to claim them, for their ages had come and gone. The future was one of purity, and it belonged to mankind.

Here, now, the stars were stained violet. Argel Tal watched distant suns drown in curling, thrashing mists of purple and red.

Do you see?

Ingethel had reared up to its full unnatural height, four stick-thin arms spread in benediction to the burning heavens. From jaws that couldn’t close, it spat out a rattlesnake’s hiss.

Do. You. See.

Argel Tal tore his gaze from the night sky. The observation deck was spacious, fitted with Spartan furniture that none of the Word Bearers were using. Each remained standing, bolters clutched in their hands.

‘I see a storm,’ said the captain. ‘Nothing more.’

‘You and I both, sir.’ This, from Dagotal. The outrider sergeant had arrived several minutes after the rest of them, coming straight from the containment block where he’d left Lieutenant Arvas in the less than tender care of the brig officers. ‘I feel something, though. The ship’s shaking itself apart.’

‘Always thought I’d die in battle,’ grumbled Malnor.

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘You dragged us into this nexus of energies, Ingethel. It is time to tell us why. What are we supposed to be seeing?’

The truth. The truth behind the stars. The hidden layer of the universe.

‘I see a storm that threatens to kill us all, comprised of a thousand colours.’

No. You see target locks and biological data streams. You see the world before you through filtering lenses. You stand on the border of heaven, Word Bearer. Remove your helm. Look upon the home of the gods with your true eyes.

It took him a moment to comply, hesitating at the thought of the creature’s smell assaulting his olfactory senses without first being purified by his helm’s intake grille. He took a final breath of his armour’s stale, recycled air, and disengaged the collar seals.

It was worse than he’d imagined, and the bridge crew were to be commended for the fact so few of them vomited. The chamber already reeked of a charnel house; that coppery spice of fouled blood, the stinging meat-stink of digestive organs bared to the air.

‘I still see nothing,’ Argel Tal grunted. ‘I see the storm.’

You cannot lie to me as you lie to the humans. Stare into the clashing tides around us. Do you see what stares back?

The captain stepped closer to the dome’s edge, peering out into the roiling void, where the playing energies mixed and swirled. The ship gave another tremor at the mercy of the forceful tides. There, just a for a moment, as the ship shook...

You saw. Your heart quickened. Your eyes dilated. You saw.

Argel Tal stroked his hand along the dense glass wall, staring into the tumult beyond. How could one draw meaning from this madness? The ship shuddered in the aetheric tides again, and once more the riotous energies coalesced for the briefest moment.

A human face, spoiled by frightened eyes and a screaming mouth, formed from the burning matter outside the glass. It burst against the dome, dissipating back into the raging tides from whence it came.

Do you know what this storm is?

Argel Tal wouldn’t look away from the tides. ‘It’s warp energy. The aetheric current, reaching through into the material universe. Imperial records have chronicled the presence of alien creatures in the warp itself, but they are catalogued among the lesser xenos threats.’

Ingethel’s hiss echoed in his mind. How verminous, the creature’s laughter.

Do you know what those words mean? Or do you relate lore poured into your mind by the indoctrinations that shaped you? What do you see when you stare into this storm?

The Word Bearer turned to Ingethel. A face that would have been handsome – had it not suffered the trials of Astartes surgery – stared up at the creature. ‘This is the galaxy’s blood. Reality is bleeding.’

Close. The daemon-thing chittered with a rodent’s delight. Humanity is precious in its ignorance, but that cannot be allowed to last if your species is to survive. The warp is more than a realm for mortal vessels to cut into with impunity, and use its tides to sail faster than light.

What you are seeing is creation’s own shadow, where every mortal emotion and urge takes immortal form. You are sailing through seas made of psychic energy and liquefied sorrow. You are cast adrift in the heaven and hell of a million mythologies, Argel Tal.

This is where every moment of hatred, disgust, wrath, joy, grief, jealousy, indolence and decadence manifest as raw energy.

This is where the souls of the dead come to burn forever.

Orfeo’s Lament gave a horrendous shudder, and the sound of wrenching metal ran through the deck beneath them. Torgal and Xaphen went to their knees – the former with a gutter curse, the latter with an indignant grunt.

In the storm beyond, more images took shape. Hands pressed against the glass, leaving discoloured smears. Faces, warped by screams, aching in their familiarity. The shadow of something, something vast and dark and cold behind it all, sweeping past the ship like a whale passing in the deepest ocean.

For a moment, Argel Tal’s breath misted in the air. Frost beaded his skin. The shadow passed, and kept passing, disturbing the crashing energies with its immense, half-formed bulk.

A void leviathan. Fear would draw it closer, and this vessel would disintegrate in its jaws. But it passes, hunting other prey. In many of the futures I saw, it turned upon us, and your lives ended here. In three of those futures, Argel Tal, you were laughing as you died, dissolving in the energies outside the ship.

He was not laughing now.

‘This is hell.’ Argel Tal no longer struggled to see the faces shrieking in at him, nor the hands clawing at the glass. He could see nothing else. ‘This is the underworld of human imagination.’

Do not be blinded by dogma. This is the Primordial Truth. Creation’s shadow. The layer behind the stars.

The Word Bearer breathed a single word as he watched the sea of screaming souls beyond.

‘Chaos.’

The daemon’s maw twisted into a grin. Now you begin to understand.

Argel Tal sipped the water. It was brackish on his tongue, and distastefully warm. It was also the fifth such cup to sour in his hands like this, and he had the unsettling notion that it was his own body curdling the water.

‘We soon reached the first world,’ he said. ‘Melisanth. The world had no human name, but in ancient days, the eldar-breed xenos... they named it Melisanth.’

Lorgar’s flowing script recorded each word. ‘The eldar? What is their role in all this?’

‘Now? They have no role. They are the galaxy’s memory, fading night by night. But once, this region of space was their most precious dominion – the heart of their empire. Their decadence brought us forth, from our realm into this one. We watched their worlds burning in spectral fire, and we tore their souls apart in claws of spirit and flesh.’

‘Argel Tal.’

‘Every sensation was new to us. We were newborns in the material realm. Blood fed us. Pain fuelled us. You cannot know what it is like to grow stronger when a creature suffers nearby. To swell with power when parents watch their children burn. To grow in size and intellect with each sin you inflict upon mortal flesh. To know more of the universe’s secrets with each soul you swallow.’

‘My son... Please.’

‘But I was there, Lorgar. I saw these things. I did these things.’

‘You are Argel Tal. You were born on Colchis, in the village of Singh-Rukh, to a carpenter and a seamstress. Your name means “the last angel” in the dialect of the southern steppes tribes. You are the youngest warrior in the Legion ever to inherit the mantle of company captain. You once bore swords of red iron – the blades of your predecessor – which you lost in service to your primarch. You are Argel Tal, a Bearer of the Word. You are my son.’

The Word Bearer looked down at his skeletal hands. ‘Sire,’ he said softly. ‘Forgive me.’ Argel Tal managed to meet his primarch’s eyes, infinitely grateful that he saw no judgement in those grey depths.

‘There is nothing to forgive.’

‘You knew more of my life than I realised.’

Lorgar smiled. ‘All of my sons are precious to me.’

Argel Tal rubbed at his sore eyes. ‘Ingethel told us that our changes would begin at the ordained time, when the galaxy burns. But I am losing myself now. Is this the ordained moment already? Is the galaxy aflame? None of my memories are my own, father. There’s a copper taste on my tongue, like the echo of blood. Perhaps this is fear. Perhaps this taste is the fear so many poets and archivists have written about.’ The captain laughed, the sound hollow and humourless. ‘And now I speak my valediction.’

‘It need not be a valediction, Argel Tal. That cannot be decided until the tale is told.’

SEVENTEEN

A Dead Empire

Revelations

Genesis

Ingethel gestured at the planet with a crooked claw.

They called it Melisanth. It was one of the last to feel the Eye’s spreading influence.

‘Auspex confirms no life readings, even down to the bacterial level,’ Captain Sylamor’s voice rasped over the vox.

‘She really needed to scan to see that?’ Torgal asked.

Below them was the ghost of a world – a globe of black oceans and grey landscapes, inexpertly guarded by thin cloud hazes. Even in orbit above Melisanth, the ship was buffeted by the warp-winds outside, while the observation dome endured the liquid, a tidal press of human faces and figures bursting against the reinforced glass. Each one splashed over the shielding with oil-on-water incandescence, flowing back into the maelstrom as soon as it destroyed itself.

After a while, Argel Tal started to see the same faces reappear. They seemed to be reforming out there in the winds and hurling themselves at the ship over and over again.

‘Are they souls?’ he asked aloud.

It is primordial matter. In the realm of flesh and blood, it manifests as psychic energy. Your thoughts give it shape. You see human souls, but it is so much more. Eldar souls. The flesh of the neverborn, that humanity once named daemonkind. Raw psychic currents. Possibility incarnate, when the mind shapes reality.

‘I want to walk the surface of that world.’

You will die.

Argel Tal rounded on the creature, anger marring his unscarred features. ‘Then why drag us here? What is the purpose of this journey if we cannot leave the ship? To stare at dead worlds from behind our Geller Field? To listen to the shrieking of lost souls?’

Ingethel slithered closer to the gathered Word Bearers. The black-wood staff, once carried by the maiden who sacrificed herself to bring the daemon into being, tapped on the decking like an old man’s walking cane.

Such things I have to show you.

It gestured two gnarled claws at the world below. There is no lesson in Melisanth as it is. You must see Melisanth as it was.

Close your eyes. Hear the storm outside. Listen to the tide breaking against your vessel’s skin.

Melisanth is but one world floating in the Sea of Souls. One amongst millions. Let me show it to you.

And then, no more than a heartbeat later – Open your eyes, Argel Tal.

He’d always treasured sunrise.

This one, an ocherous orb painting fierce light over a city of spires and minarets, was one to remember. Even with pain tolerance and resistance to light saturation written into his genetic code, the rising sun was bright enough to make his eyes ache. And that was beautiful too, for it had never happened before.

Ingethel was nowhere to be seen. They stood on a cliff’s edge, above an alien city turned golden by the dawn. Argel Tal turned to see his brothers: Xaphen, watching the xenos colony; Malnor and Torgal with him; Dagotal, staring up into the blue sky.

This was Melisanth, came the creature’s burbling voice in his mind. See the city made of bone and gemstones. See the spires too delicate for mortal physics to support them, standing only because of eldar witchcraft.

Now see the Fall.

In the sky above, the clouds raced in a cyclical dance – day and night flashing past in a blur of flickering grey. Tendrils of violet clawed across the heavens, thickening, linking, coiling, staining the air with red mist. Sweat broke out on Argel Tal’s face and neck in the savage heat. It warmed even the aqueous moisture that lubricated his eyes.

As he watched, the city below began to tumble, its spires and walkways falling to shatter on the ground, crushing crowds of slender alien figures and demolishing lesser buildings beneath.

Their sorceries are fading. This is on the edge of the Great Eye. The destruction took days to unfold on these lesser colonies. At the core of their empire, all life was ended in mere moments.

Argel Tal could hear the city dying, the sounds of thunder, sorrow and lamentation carried up to him on the wind.

‘Aliens,’ Xaphen smiled at the toppling towers. ‘May they all burn, soulless and forgotten.’

None of the others disagreed. ‘Why did this happen?’ asked Argel Tal.

The eldar were close to seeing the truth of the universe. Their civilisation spanned the galaxy, evolving for millennia under the guidance and worship of their gods. And then, at the last step... they faltered.

‘How?’

Look to the sky.

The storm clouds gathered in a threatening spiral, darkening the land to every horizon. From the very first raindrops – hot on the skin and rich in their metallic reek – it was clear what was in store for the city below. With a single peal of thunder, loud enough to vibrate the air itself, the blackened clouds ground together and signalled the opening of the heavens.

Sheets of scarlet rained from the sky, showering the broken city in blood so thick it stained the bone structures that still remained standing. Xaphen closed his eyes, lifting his face to the downpour.

‘This is not human blood. It’s too sweet.’

Argel Tal wiped his face clear of the raining gore. In the city below, creatures were melting from the shadows of fallen monuments, rising from the lakes of blood that were forming in the streets. They staggered and sprinted, each one uneven and unnatural in its own half-formed way. Some crawled on a multitude of boneless limbs. Others wailed as they dashed on spindly legs, reaching out with curling claws.

My kin, taking physical form. They hunt souls, and flesh, and blood and bone.

‘Why is this happening?’

The malformed beasts ran in packs, dragging down any of the slender, weeping survivors they found. The sight left him cold. Genocide should be a purification, and there was nothing of purity in this insane unleashing of unknowable powers.

‘Answer me,’ Argel Tal said softly. No answer came, beyond the blood running down his cheeks and over his lips. He could smell nothing else, taste nothing else, beyond the sanguine rain.

New towers rose from the tumbling city below – slender spires formed from pulsing walls of still-living flesh, decorated by voiceless faces and flayed arms stretching from the architecture. The rising towers reached for the panicking eldar in the streets, using their lives as raw material, their alien flesh as living mortar.

Watch them die. You would die the same way.

‘I told you to answer me,’ said the Word Bearer.

Watch and learn, Word Bearer.

‘We have records of the eldar and their histories.’ He spat the foul blood that kept running onto his tongue. ‘They speak of the Fall, when decadence and sin bred corruption throughout their culture. A spiritual cataclysm annihilated them centuries ago. That devastation is this? This... divine wrath?’

This is their judgement. In their ignorance, they see only the death of an empire as countless worlds drown in blood and fire. In this moment of ascension, the eldar choose terror over power, and damn their kingdom to ashes because the Primordial Truth frightens them all.

They have given birth to a god. A god of pleasure and promise. Yet they feel no joy.

‘Enough!’ Argel Tal threw back his head and drew breath into his three lungs. The storm intensified, its tortured skies bleeding onto the world below.

‘Answer me!’ he screamed at the sky.

This is the Fall they speak of in whispered tones. The eldar were blind. They could have lived in harmonic union with the Powers, as humanity must soon learn themselves. Instead, they are dying. Unable to accept the Primordial Truth, they are being destroyed by it.

You ask why? Can you not see why? This is not how empires die, Word Bearer. This is how gods are born. The eldar faith has given the galaxy a new deity. She Who Thirsts. Slaa Neth. It has a thousand names.

These are its first moments of life, and it wakes to find its own worshippers are abandoning it, out of ignorance and fear.

This endless storm, this Eye of Terror, is the echo of its birth-cries.

‘I have seen enough,’ Argel Tal watched the city below, now silent, flooded, reaped clean of all life. ‘Blood of the gods, I have seen enough.’

Then open your eyes.

Ingethel was watching them, its mismatched eyes unblinking as they reflected the sick light from beyond the dome. The stench of blood lingered in Argel Tal’s nostrils, despite the warriors’ pristine armour and clean skin.

‘That was unpleasant,’ said Torgal.

‘Sir,’ Dagotal reached for Argel Tal’s shoulder guard. ‘I think we should leave this place.’

It was Xaphen, not the daemon, that quelled such discussion. ‘You overstep your authority, sergeant. We will not flee from the truths we’ve travelled so far to find.’

Argel Tal ignored their bickering. His vox-network was alive with squads checking in, retinal runes flickering as each sergeant linked to him.

‘Sir, we just saw...’

‘Captain, there was a voice and... and a vision...’

‘This is Vadox Squad, reporting...’

The Word Bearer turned to the daemon. ‘Every one of my warriors on the ship saw what we saw.’

They hear my voice, the same as you. That is why they are here: to bear witness. To learn. The eldar failed, and the price paid for their sin was slow extinction. Humanity must not follow the same path. Mankind must accept the Primordial Truth.

‘We cannot carry this message back to the Imperium,’ said Argel Tal.

‘Of course we can,’ Xaphen narrowed his eyes. ‘We can and we will, because we must. This is humanity’s enlightenment.’

You came here seeking to learn if your home world’s Old Ways were true. And now you know they were.

‘This is a truth too ugly to be embraced by the Imperium.’ The captain watched the dead world below. ‘You, creature, know nothing of what you speak. But brother, do you expect us to sail into orbit around Terra and right into the Emperor’s welcoming embrace? The answers we carry home will make a lie of the Imperial Truth. All human emotion takes form as psychic force? Not only is the Emperor’s godless vision a lie, it must be crushed in favour of allying with daemons and spirits?’ Argel Tal shook his head. ‘It will be civil war, Xaphen. The Imperium will tear itself apart.’

The Chaplain gave a threatening growl. ‘This is why we came. The truth is all that matters. You speak as though you expected the primarch to be proved wrong, and panic now he was shown to be right.’

‘But the captain has a point,’ said Dagotal. ‘We will not be showered with medals for bringing home the truth that hell is a real place.’

They all turned as the daemon laughed in their minds.

You have seen nothing yet, but you already judge what is best for your species?

‘What more is there to see?’ asked Argel Tal.

Ingethel beckoned with its gnarled fingers. Close your eyes.

‘No.’ The captain took a calming breath. ‘I am finished with blind indulgence. Tell me what you wish to show us.’

I will show you how your primarch was born. I will show you why the Cadians called him the Favoured Son of the Four. The Emperor is not his only father.

Argel Tal glanced at the others, seeing their eyes already closed, the mention of their father enough to tempt them into obedience. He spoke into the vox, alerting the other squads.

‘Be ready, all of you, for what we see may be a deception.’

You have such little faith, Argel Tal.

The Word Bearer closed his eyes again.

The air’s touch was ice against his skin, and the first thing Argel Tal’s returning vision offered was his own breath misting before him. The smell here was neither the sanguine richness of the alien world, nor the musky odour of oxygen filtered through a vessel’s recycling scrubbers. A certain sharpness hung in the air: the chemical tang of volatile machinery and burning glass.

Argel Tal looked around the laboratory, surrounded on all sides by live generators, cluttered tables and humans at work in pressurised environment suits – some white, some bright yellow and marked by radiological sigils. Frost rimed their faceplates, scuffing away as powder when brushed off by gloved hands.

The Word Bearer had been in scarce few laboratories in the many decades of his existence, so his frame of reference was limited. Still, he could form a fair estimation that a facility this size would only be required for the most vital or visionary work. The walls were lost behind dense cabling and clanking generators; the technicians at work numbered in the hundreds, spread around tables, platforms and desks.

One passed Argel Tal, the figure’s environmental hazard suit rustling as it brushed the Word Bearer’s battle armour. The suit’s faceguard stole any hope of seeing the wearer’s face; either way, the technician ignored the Astartes completely.

Argel Tal reached for the figure.

Don’t.

He hesitated, grey fingers curling back. The tiny servos in his armour’s knuckles whirred as he pulled away from the technician’s shoulder.

Be careful, Argel Tal. These souls remain blind to you as long as you do not interfere with their work.

‘And if I did?’ he asked quietly.

Then one of the most powerful psychic forces in the history of life would be alerted to you, and would kill you where you stand. You are within the Anathema’s innermost sanctum. Here, it breeds its spawn.

‘The Anathema,’ Argel Tal repeated, looking around the colossal facility. The other Word Bearers walked to his side, none of them reaching for weapons just yet.

The Anathema. The creature you know as the God-Emperor.

Xaphen exhaled misty curls of vapour. ‘This... This is Terra. The Emperor’s gene-laboratories.’

Yes. Many years before the Anathema’s crusade to reclaim the stars. Here, with the full clarity of its emotionless inhumanity, it has finished shaping its twenty children.

The Chaplain crossed to a table, where vials of blood span in a centrifuge, separating into layers within each glass vial. ‘If this is a vision of the past, how could the Emperor destroy us here?’

You are protected for now, Xaphen. That is all that matters. This is what transpires on Terra, as the elder empire burns with soul-fire. The Anathema senses it will soon be time to begin his Great Crusade.

The Word Bearers moved along the rows of tables, their course taking them closer to the central platform standing above the laboratory. A column of black and silver machinery stood upon the decking there, ringed by a wide walkway. Argel Tal climbed the stairs first, his boots echoing on the metal, going unheard by the dozens of technicians nearby. Several passed him, paying no heed to anything beyond the digital streams on their frostbitten data-slates and the sine-wave readings on their handheld auspex readers.

Argel Tal walked across the platform, around the amniotic pods coupled to the main column – bound there by dense messes of wires, chains, cables and industrial clamps. The generators built into the column of metal made the same angry thrum as Astartes back-mounted power packs, and that little detail brought a smile to the captain’s face.

The womb of the primarchs. Here, the Anathema’s sons gestate in their cold cradles.

Argel Tal approached the closest pod. Its surface was unpainted grey iron, smooth in the few places where it wasn’t scabbed by machinery sockets and connection ports. Etched clearly onto its front plating in silver lettering was the Gothic numeral XIII. Beneath the silver plate, an inscription was scratched into the metal in tiny, meticulous handwriting.

The exact meaning of the words escaped Argel Tal – it seemed a long and complicated prayer, beseeching outside forces for blessings and strength – but the fact he could read them was mystery enough.

‘This is Colchisian,’ he said aloud.

It is, and it is not.

‘I can read it.’

The tongue you name Colchisian is a fragment of a primordial language. Colchisian... Cadian... these tongues were seeded onto your worlds in readiness for the coming age. The Emperor’s golden pets could not read those inscriptions, for they do not carry Lorgar’s blood in their veins. All of this was planned aeons ago.

‘And the Cadians?’

Their world was touched, as Colchis was touched. Seeds planted in abundance, all to flower in this moment.

Argel Tal approached the pod marked XIII. A glass screen at eye level showed nothing but the milky fluid within.

And then, movement.

Go no closer.

The briefest shadow of something stirred inside the artificial womb.

Stay back. The daemon’s voice was edged now – sharpened by concern.

Argel Tal stepped closer.

A child slumbered within the gestation pod, curled up in foetal helplessness, its eyes closed. It turned slowly in the amniotic milk, half-formed limbs moving in somnolent repose.

Stay back, Word Bearer. I sense your rising wrath. Do not assume I am the only one who is capable of feeling it. Strong emotion will also alert the Anathema.

Argel Tal leaned closer to the pod. His fingertips brushed frost from its surface.

‘Guilliman,’ he whispered.

The child slept on.

Xaphen moved away from the others, coming to the pod etched with XI. Rather than peer into its depths, he looked over his shoulder at Argel Tal.

‘The eleventh primarch sleeps within this pod – still innocent, still pure. I ache to end this now,’ he confessed.

Malnor chuckled from behind the Chaplain. ‘It would save us all a lot of effort, wouldn’t it?’

‘And it would spare Aurelian from heartbreak.’ Xaphen traced his fingertips over the designating numeral. ‘I remember the devastation that wracked him after losing his second and eleventh brothers.’

Argel Tal still hadn’t left Guilliman’s pod. ‘We do not know for certain if our actions here would change the future.’

‘Are some chances not worth taking?’ asked the Chaplain.

‘Some are. This one is not.’

‘But the Eleventh Legion–’

‘Is expunged from Imperial record for good reason. As is the Second. I’m not saying I don’t feel temptation creeping over me, brother. A single sword thrust piercing that pod, and we’d unwrite a shameful future.’

Dagotal cleared his throat. ‘And deny the Ultramarines a significant boost in recruitment numbers.’

Xaphen regarded him with emotionless eyes, seeming to weigh the merit of such a thing.

‘What?’ Dagotal asked the others. ‘You were thinking it, too. It’s no secret.’

‘Those are just rumours,’ Torgal grunted. The assault sergeant didn’t sound particularly certain.

‘Perhaps, perhaps not. The Thirteenth definitely swelled to eclipse all the other Legions around the time the Second and Eleventh were “forgotten” by Imperial archives.’

Enough of this insipid conjecture, came the disembodied voice again.

Argel Tal looked below the platform, where the scientists laboured at their stations. Most were dealing with bloodwork, or working on biopsies of pale flesh. He recognised the extracted organs immediately.

‘Why are these men and women experimenting on Astartes gene-seed?’ he asked. The other Word Bearers followed his gaze.

They are not experimenting on it. They are inventing it.

Argel Tal watched them work, as Ingethel’s voice hissed on. He saw several of the workers nearby slicing open the pale organs with silver scalpels. Each of them bore the numeral I on the back of their environment suits.

Your Emperor has conquered his own world with the proto-Astartes created in far inferior conditions. Now he breeds the primarchs, and in their shadow, he breeds the warriors he needs to lead the Great Crusade.

He watched them work, but the sight of his genetic genesis left his skin crawling.

These are the prototypical organs that will become the gene-seed for the first true Astartes. You know them as–

‘The Dark Angels,’ said Argel Tal. ‘The First Legion.’ Below him, the biotechnicians scalpelled through malformed organs, threaded veins, analysed with microscopes, and took tissue samples for further testing. The progenoid glands implanted in his own throat and chest throbbed with sympathetic ache. He lifted a hand to rub at the sore spot on the side of his neck, where the organ hidden beneath the skin did its silent work – storing his genetic coding until the moment of his death, whereupon it would be harvested and implanted within another child. The boy would, in turn, grow to become a Word Bearer. No longer human. No longer Homo Sapiens, but Homo Astartes.

It will be many Terran years before the organs below are ready for implantation in human youths. This is early in the process. Most of the flaws in gene-seed structure will be written out in the course of the coming decades.

The captain didn’t like the creature’s tone. ‘Most?’

Most. Not all.

‘The Thousand Sons,’ said Xaphen. ‘Their genetic code was misaligned. The Legion was afflicted by mutation and psychic instability.’

They are not alone in their flaws. The unwinding years will bring these biological errors to light. Gene-seed degeneration resulting in organ failure, stealing the ability to salivate venom; intolerance to certain radiation will alter a warrior’s skin and bones.

‘The Imperial Fists,’ said Malnor. ‘And the Salamanders.’

‘But what of us?’ Dagotal asked.

There was a pause as Ingethel whisper-laughed behind their eyes. What of you?

‘Will we suffer from those... impurities?’

‘Answer him,’ said Argel Tal. ‘He asks what we all wish to know.’

The code written into your bodies is purer than most. You will suffer no special degeneration, and endure no unique flaws.

‘But there is something,’ he said. ‘I hear it in your voice.’

No Astartes is as loyal to their primarch as the XVII are to Lorgar. No Imperial warrior believes in their father’s righteousness with as much faith and ardent devotion.

Argel Tal swallowed. It felt cold, and tasted sour. ‘Our loyalty is bred into our blood?’

No. You are sentient creatures with free will. This is no more than a minor divergence in an otherwise flawless code. Your gene-seed enhances the chemicals in your brain tissue. It gives you focus. It grants you unbreakable loyalty to your cause, and to Lorgar Aurelian.

‘I do not like the turn this revelation is taking,’ the captain confessed.

‘Nor I,’ admitted Torgal.

The surprise you feel is false, Argel Tal. You have seen this before, reflected in the eyes of your brother Legions. Think of the compliance of Cassius, when the pale sons of Corax watched you with distaste, arguing against your savage purge of the heathen population. The Thousand Sons at Antiolochus... The Luna Wolves at Davin... The Ultramarines at Syon...

All of your brothers have watched you and hated you for your unquestioning, focused wrath.

He moved back to Guilliman’s pod, examining it rather than paying attention to the technicians below. ‘I will speak of this no further.’

It is not a flaw to believe, Word Bearer. There is nothing purer.

Argel Tal paid the daemon’s words no mind. Something else had caught his attention and wouldn’t let go.

‘Blood of the... Look. Look at this.’ The captain crouched by the lower half of Guilliman’s coffin-womb. A bulky generator box was half-meshed with the main machinery behind the gestation pod. Coolant feeds quivered as they pumped fluid, and the details that could be made out through gaps in the armoured covering showed the generator’s internal compartments were filled with bubbling red liquid.

Dagotal looked over Argel Tal’s shoulder. ‘Is that blood?’

The captain gave Dagotal a withering look.

‘What?’ the sergeant asked.

‘It’s haemolubricant, for a machine-spirit. These secondary generators are fastened behind each pod. And look, they run along the spinal columns of these structures, up the tower.’

Dagotal and the others looked around. ‘So?’

‘So where have you seen power generators of similar design before? What engine requires a machine-spirit of this complexity to function?’

‘Oh,’ the sergeant said. ‘Oh.’

The Word Bearers looked up at the central column, juddering and humming with its machine-parts and multiple power supplies.

At last... Yes...

‘This is more than an incubation tower,’ said Xaphen.

You are so close now...

Argel Tal looked at the pods, each in turn, and the insanely complex array of machinery coupling them to the central column.

Yes... Yes... Witness the truth...

‘This is a generator,’ his voice softened in disbelief, ‘for a Geller Field.’

Xaphen circled the walkway, his clanging boot steps unheard by the horde of technicians working away. Argel Tal watched his Chaplain moving around the pods, a slow suspicion creeping over the back of his neck. Both warriors were unhelmed, and thin sheens of icy sweat glistened on their faces.

‘The most powerful Geller Field in existence,’ Argel Tal gestured to the machinery. ‘The generators on board our vessels, linked with the Navigators... they are a shadow of what we’re seeing here.’

You do not truly comprehend the effect you name a Geller Field. It is more than a kinetic shield against warp energy. The warp itself is the Sea of Souls. Your fields repel raw psychic force. They are a bulwark against the claws of the neverborn.

‘The question we must ask ourselves,’ Xaphen spoke as he stroked the surface of the pod marked XVII, ‘is why these incubators are shielded against...’

Say it.

Xaphen smiled. ‘...against daemons.’

Torgal joined the Chaplain before Lorgar’s pod. He stared inside at the slumbering infant for some time.

‘I believe I know. These children are almost grown to the point of birth. Daemon? Spirit?’

I am here.

Torgal looked acutely uncomfortable interacting with a disembodied voice. ‘The Legions tell the tale of the Emperor’s twenty sons being cast into the heavens by some great tragedy, some flaw in their creation process.’

You have been raised with tales of the primarchs that lead your Legions, but you have been fed centuries of lies. In a matter of moments, you will witness the truth. The Anathema dealt with the Powers of the warp long before he left Earth on the Great Crusade.

The Anathema desired mighty sons, and the gods granted him the lore to forge them with a union of divine genetics and psychic sorcery. He came to my masters, hungry for answers, beseeching the gods for power. With the lore they gave him, he shaped his twenty sons.

But treacheries have occurred. Oaths – sworn in blood and paid in soul – have been broken. The Anathema now refuses to show humanity the Primordial Truth, and the gods of the warp grow wrathful.

The Anathema is keeping its twenty primarch sons and paying no price to the Powers that gifted him with the knowledge to shape them.

Xaphen gripped the handrail to keep from going to his knees. ‘Our father – all of our fathers – are the spawn of ancient blood rituals and forbidden science.’

Argel Tal couldn’t keep from laughing. ‘The Emperor that denies all forms of divinity shaped his own sons with the blessings of forgotten gods. Prayers and sorcery are written upon their gestation pods. This is the most glorious madness.’

Be ready. The reckoning comes. The Powers will reach into the material realm to reclaim the sons they helped breed.

Argel Tal looked at the pods through a smile that wouldn’t fade. ‘This Geller Field. It fails, doesn’t it?’

It will fail in exactly thirty-seven beats of your heart, Argel Tal.

‘And the primarchs are seized – taken by your masters in the warp. That’s the accident that casts them across the galaxy.’

The warp gods are the primarchs’ rightful fathers. This is not to spite your Emperor. It is nothing but divine justice. And as these perfect children travel through the stars, they will grow. This is the first step in the gods’ plans to save mankind.

‘And Aurelian...’

Is the most important one of all. Lorgar’s incubation pod will be carried to Colchis, to walk the first steps to enlightening humanity of the Primordial Truth, and the gods behind the stars. Without the gods, humanity will die, piece by piece, under the predation of the aliens that still lay claim to much of the galaxy. Those that remain will die as the eldar died: in agony, unable to see the Primordial Truth before their very eyes.

This is Fate. It is written in the stars. Lorgar knows that humanity needs divinity – it is what shaped his life and Legion. It is why he was chosen as the favoured son.

Xaphen closed his eyes, murmuring a litany from the Word. ‘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.’

Argel Tal drew his weapons. The swords of red iron slid free from their scabbards with twin hisses.

Yes. Yes...

Both blades sparked into electrical life as the captain pulled the handle-triggers. Xaphen regarded him with hooded eyes.

‘Do it,’ the Chaplain said. ‘Let it begin.’

Argel Tal whirled the blades in slow, arcing loops, their crackling power fields growing more intense, the blades emanating ozone mist as they burned and rasped through the frozen air.

‘Aurelian,’ whispered Malnor. ‘For Lorgar.’

‘For the truth,’ Torgal said. ‘Do it, and we will carry these answers back to the Imperium.’

Argel Tal looked at Dagotal; the youngest of his sergeants, only recently promoted before the Legion’s humiliation. The outrider commander’s eyes were distant.

‘I am weary of being lied to by the Emperor, brother. I am so tired of being ashamed, when what we believe is the truth.’ Dagotal nodded, meeting his captain’s eyes at last. ‘Do it.’

Three.

He stepped forward, staring at a cluster of vein-like cables twitching as they channelled artificial blood around the semi-organic tower machine.

Two.

Argel Tal span the swords, leaving blurred trails of lightning in their wake.

One.

The blades chopped down, crashing through steel, iron, rubber, copper, bronze and vat-grown blood.

Both swords exploded in his hands, their blades shattering like smashed glass and decorating his bare face with bloody cuts.

And then, for one horrific, familiar moment, Argel Tal saw nothing but burning, psychic gold.

EIGHTEEN

A Hundred Truths

Resurrection

Return

‘I heard your brother,’ Argel Tal confessed.

The primarch was no longer writing. For several minutes, Lorgar had done nothing but listen in mounting emotion as the captain relayed the events in Ingethel’s vision. Now, at these words, he released a breath he’d been holding for some time.

‘Magnus?’

Argel Tal had never heard his sire speak so softly. ‘No. The Warmaster.’

The golden-skinned giant brushed his hands over his face, seemingly afflicted by a sudden weariness. ‘I do not know that title,’ he said. ‘Warmaster. An ugly word.’

Argel Tal chuckled in two voices. ‘Of course, forgive us, Lorgar. He will not be named that for some time. He is still merely Horus. When the vision ended in golden light, we could see nothing beyond the flare. But we heard your brother Horus. The machinery was breaking down, rattling and crashing. There was gunfire. The rush of the most powerful wind we’ve ever felt. And we heard Horus’s voice – shouting, defiant, enraged. It was as if he were there with us, seeing what we saw.’

‘Stop saying “we”. You are Argel Tal.’

‘We are Argel Tal, yes. In forty-three years, Horus will speak four words that will save humanity or lead to its extinction. We know what those words are, Lorgar. Do you?’

Lorgar cradled his head in his hands, fine fingers pressed to the elegant runes inked onto his skin.

‘This is too much. Too much to bear. I... I need Erebus here. I need my fa— Kor Phaeron.’

‘They are far from here. And we will tell you something more: neither Erebus nor Kor Phaeron would struggle to accept the truths that we speak. Kor Phaeron has always kept his belief in the Old Ways hidden behind lying smiles, and Erebus drools in the presence of power. Neither of those twisted warlocks would hold their heads in their hands and panic about how the Imperium will–’

Argel Tal’s voices fell silent, quenched by the golden hand around his emaciated throat.

Lorgar rose to his feet in a smooth and effortless motion, dragging the Astartes up with him, the captain’s feet lifting from the deck.

‘You will watch your tongue when you speak the names of my mentors, and you will speak with respect when you address the lord of your own Legion. Is that understood, beast?’

Argel Tal didn’t answer. His hands clawed at the primarch’s forearm in desperate futility.

Lorgar hurled the skeletal figure against the wall. The captain crashed against the metal and tumbled to the floor.

‘Wipe that filthy grin from your lips,’ Lorgar demanded.

When the Astartes lifted his face to regard the primarch, it was Argel Tal who looked out through his own eyes once more.

‘Control yourself, captain,’ Lorgar warned. ‘Now finish your tale.’

‘I saw things.’ Argel Tal tried to rise on trembling limbs. ‘When the gold faded, there was more to see. Visions. I can’t explain it any other way, sire.’

Sensing his son’s return to the fore, Lorgar helped Argel Tal to a seating position.

‘Speak,’ he said.

One by one, the pods came down.

Alone now, Argel Tal stood on the surface of each world and watched them strike home. Not all of them; and that itself was a source of mystery. Was there some significance in the planetfalls he was entitled to witness? Why these, and not others?

The first was a blazing meteorite, ploughing into the soft soil of a temperate world. The pod didn’t punch deep; it carved a furrow in the ground and skidded to a halt in the midst of an evergreen forest so dense that the overhanging trees refused the moonlight above.

The child that emerged from the broken pod was pale of skin and fierce of eye. His hair was as black as the armour of the warriors he would grow to lead.

Twilight fell without warning–

–withering the trees to dust, their ashes scattering in the sudden wind. In place of the lush forest was bleak tundra reaching from horizon to horizon, populated by black rock and stunted, colourless flora.

The pod rained down aflame from the grey sky, crashing against the jagged slopes of a cliff side and causing an avalanche of tumbling rocks in its wake. When the dust finally cleared, Argel Tal saw a slender child rise from the wreckage of metal and stone, brushing his dusty hands through hair the white of flawless marble.

The boy looked to his surroundings, while–

–Argel Tal was alone on a mountaintop, snow clinging to his armour as it fell. On a distant peak, a fortress stood silhouetted against a clean sky, its exquisite stone battlements and towers lit by the sun shining down through a break in the clouds.

The Word Bearer stared upward, feeling the light snowfall cool his fevered skin as he watched the pod fall from the heavens. When it struck the earth, it hit with enough force to drive itself into the side of the mountain, shaking the ground with the anger of an artillery barrage.

Argel Tal waited, watching the wound in the mountainside. At last, a child emerged, climbing over the rocks with ease, his skin bronze in the high sun. For a moment, it seemed the child saw him, but–

–no world should ever be this dark.

Argel Tal’s eyes took a few seconds to pierce the deep night, and what met his gaze was no better than the preceding darkness. A lightless sky was dominated by an imposing moon that eclipsed the starlight rather than reflect the sun. A sprawling city on the horizon was barely lit, as though the eyes of its denizens would rebel against any true illumination.

Fire heralded the pod’s arrival – brightening the air over the wasteland with blazing light as it tore groundward. The impact was a spear-thrust into the metallic-smelling soil, driving the incubator deep into the ground with enough force to split the land with tectonic cracks.

The Word Bearer maintained his balance, breathing in air that tasted of iron and waiting for signs of movement from the chasm freshly-carved into the infertile earth.

The boy that rose under the night sky was corpse-pale, and unique among the progenitors Argel Tal had seen so far, for he carried a shard of his gestation pod clutched tight in his fist – a knife, crude and instinctive, made from the twisted metal of his pod.

Thunder announced itself overhead. The boy raised his face to the sky, a sudden trident of lightning illuminating the child’s gaunt, unhealthy features.

Argel Tal–

–stood atop another cliff edge, this one overlooking a valley that split a brutal mountain range.

The pod hammered down – a blur of grey metal – smashing against the rock walls without piercing the stone. Argel Tal watched as the pod span end over end, wrecking itself in its devastating fall down the mountainside. Dark metal ripped from its armoured hull, shed like peeling scabs.

It came to rest upside-down at the bottom of the valley, and Argel Tal’s visor zoomed in to compensate for the distance. He saw the pod shake once, twice, then roll aside, pushed away by the infant it had contained. Free of his burden, the boy touched trembling hands to a face awash with blood.

The scream of pain that rose from the valley had no place leaving the lips of a child so young.

When–

–everything changed again, Argel Tal watched the dusk through a haze of mist. The fog was thin, a sickly celadon jade that spoke of both chill air and toxicity. What little daylight pierced the mist was born of a pinprick sun, meagre in both size and generosity, setting below a flat horizon.

Plainsland stretched in every direction, as uninspiring and barren as any number of ignorable lifeless worlds Argel Tal had passed as part of the Great Crusade’s expeditionary fleets.

The falling pod trailed smoke and flame, burning with green fire as it ignited the virulence in the mist. Its final descent brought it hammering against the rocky ground, cracking open as it skidded over the shale.

The Word Bearer moved closer to the downed capsule, seeing tendrils of fog creeping through the rent metal, misting up the interior behind the clear viewplate. Something pale moved within, but–

–he was standing in the white stone and shining crystal heart of a city, surrounded by spires, pyramids, obelisks and towering statuary.

The pod fell from the summer sky at a meteor’s angle, shearing through a slender tower with a crash of breaking glass that could be heard across the city. A moment later, the incubator cracked the mosaic ground, sliding and burning across the white stone until it ended its fiery journey against the base of a great pyramid.

Crowds of tanned, handsome figures gathered in the afternoon sunlight, watching as the metal coffin’s rivets and bolts unscrewed and removed themselves, detached by unseen hands. Plate by plate, the pod’s armour plating lifted away, floating in the air above the crash site. At last, the final structural pieces drifted apart, while at the heart of the hovering display was a red-haired child, his eyes closed, his skin a burnished coppery red.

The boy’s feet didn’t touch the ground. He floated a metre above the burned mosaics, and at last opened his eyes. Argel Tal–

–walked the surface of a wasted world. The air held the taint of exhaust fumes, and the lifeless landscape was a grey twin to Luna, Terra’s only moon.

The pod fell from a night sky filled with stars – each of the constellations pregnant with the promise of deeper meaning. The ground rumbled in protest as the pod struck, and the Word Bearer climbed the small rise of a crater’s lip to see the incubator gouging a furrow through the silvery soil.

The pod’s door blasted open even as it was coming to rest, clanging loudly in the silent night. The boy that rose from the confines was inhumanly handsome, his fine features pale and contemplative, his grey eyes matching the earth of the world he’d landed upon.

There was no–

–chance to move closer.

He was home. Not the sterile decks of the expeditionary fleet, nor even the Spartan sanctuary of his meditation chamber aboard De Profundis. No, he was home.

The sky was a cloudless expanse of blue above the dusty desert, while a city of grey flowers and fire-hardened red bricks sat by the side of a wide river. Argel Tal regarded the Holy City from his position downriver; such was his pleasure at this curious homecoming that he forgot to look up until the last moment.

The pod – his father’s black iron womb – hit the rushing river with a great splash, throwing spray and a fine wet mist into the air. Argel Tal was already sprinting, his armour joints whirring as he ran over the arid soil. He didn’t care if this was a vision or if he was really here; he had to reach his father’s pod.

Astartes battle armour wasn’t made for this. With its immense weight, his boots sank into the sticking river mud, generating grinding protests from the inbuilt mercury-threaded stabilisers in his shins and knee-joints.

The Word Bearer hauled himself through the waist-deep mud, clambering lower down the riverbank to reach the downed capsule. As he neared the incubator, one thing was obvious above all else: Lorgar’s pod

had suffered a great deal more damage than any other.

He reached out, the ceramite armouring his fingers just managing to scrape the pod’s side, and an image flashed before his eyes, superimposing itself over reality.

The pod rattled, spinning through the void, tumbling alone through the warp’s tides. Burn marks and cracks appeared as the lurching journey continued, while mist the colour of madness seeped in through the armour cracks. The child within slept on as pain marred its features, now restless in its repose.

See how the gods of this galaxy treasured your primarch above the others, keeping him in the Sea of Souls for decades, preparing him for the role he would play in the ascension of mankind to divinity.

Lorgar felt their blessed touch more than any of his brothers.

Argel Tal–

–stumbled, staggering to a halt.

The pod before him was a clone to his father’s, but growing faint and indistinct before his eyes. The ground was dark, the night sky was starless, and for a moment Argel Tal wasn’t sure whether he stood on the surface of a world or the deck of a powered-down ship.

As his senses faded, he caught a momentary glimpse through the viewplate on the pod’s bulky front. Whatever moved within the incubator had too many limbs to be a lone human child.

Argel Tal stepped closer, only to have his attention stolen by a blur of scarlet in the glass reflection. It was his helm, his chestplate, but warped by ivory protrusions – a twisted, gothic bio-architecture formed from ceramite and bone. The face that looked back was a tusked rendition of his war helm, painted crimson and black but for the golden star around his right eye lens.

He–

–opened his eyes.

The observation deck, on board the Orfeo’s Lament. The sky beyond the dome was full of thrashing chaos.

The daemon remained exactly where it had been, its muscled form never completely still, forever swaying side to side, its claws flicker-twitching in the air. Xaphen, Torgal, Malnor, Dagotal – all were exactly as they had been before.

The outrider sergeant checked his retinal chron. Three seconds had passed. Four. Five.

They’d been gone no time at all.

‘Was any of that real?’ he asked.

Ingethel the Ascended gestured with two of its spindly arms, the talons pointing to the ground behind the Word Bearers. There, on the decking, were the swords of red iron: broken beyond repair, the shards darkened by scorch markings from the detonation that ruined them.

‘That looks real to me,’ Xaphen chuckled.

You have seen much, and learned more. One matter remains. The daemon slithered around the Astartes, circling them with slow relish. Something akin to amusement glinted in its ugly eyes as it watched Argel Tal.

‘What remains?’

A leap of faith.

Xaphen’s eyes met Argel Tal’s. ‘We’ve come this far. We stand united.’

The captain nodded.

A choice must be made. You have witnessed the truth of the gods. You have seen the Emperor’s own lies laid bare, and you know the slow extinction that awaits humanity if the species remains blind to the Primordial Truth.

So choose.

‘Choose what?’ Argel Tal narrowed his eyes. Unwilling to tolerate the creature’s stench any longer, he put on his helm, breathing easier as the collar seals hissed and locked.

To lower this vessel’s Geller Field. Ingethel stroked a claw down the dome’s side. On the other side of the dense glass, screaming faces and frantic talons pressed against the daemon’s hand. Lower the Geller Field. Become the architects of humanity’s destiny, and the weapons Lorgar needs to wield against the Empire of Lies.

The Word Bearers didn’t all react alike. Xaphen closed his eyes with a knowing smile, as if this confirmed something he’d been waiting to hear. Torgal rested his hands on his holstered pistol and sheathed blade, while Malnor placed his grey gauntlet on the stocks of the two bolt pistols mag-locked to his thighs. Dagotal stepped back from the group, his body language betraying his unease even though his eye lenses gave no emotion away.

Argel Tal didn’t reach for a weapon. Instead, he laughed.

‘You are insane, creature.’

This is the respect you show to a messenger of the gods?

‘What did you expect? That the Word Bearers would kneel and accept everything you said as a divine mandate? We are done with kneeling, Ingethel.’

The daemon’s maw quivered as it offered a rattish hiss. Lower the Geller Field and you will taste the last promise of proof.

‘We must heed the messenger’s words,’ said the Chaplain.

‘Enough, Xaphen.’

‘Aurelian demanded this of us! We were ordered to follow the guide, no matter where he led us. How can you baulk at the final moment of truth?’

‘Enough. We are not risking the ship in this storm. We already lost the Shield of Scarus. A hundred brothers lost in this sector of space, and you smile when it comes to losing a hundred more.’

They were not chosen, Argel Tal. You are. It was their time to meet destruction. They lacked the strength of will to endure what you are being offered.

The captain rounded on the daemon. ‘What will happen if we lower the field? Will we be at the mercy of the storm? Pulled apart like every other Imperial vessel that lost Geller stability during warp flight?’

No. Lower the anathemic skin, and my kin will come to join us. To share the final revelation with the gods’ chosen warriors.

‘Daemons... on the ship.’ Argel Tal watched the faces of screaming souls thrashing against the dome. ‘This cannot be our choice. These cannot be the gods of the galaxy.’

Xaphen softened his voice. To Argel Tal’s ears, he’d never sounded more like Erebus, his former mentor.

‘Brother... We were never given a promise that the truth would be easy to bear. The way we were chosen – and our father favoured – by true divine power.’

Argel Tal turned to stare at Xaphen through a targeting reticule. ‘You seem very certain about this course of action, brother.’

‘Are you not honoured to be chosen like this? I wish to be one of the first to receive the blessing of the gods. It is a leap of faith, as Ingethel said.’

‘Sylamor will not lower the Geller Field, even if we order it. It would be suicide.’

There will be no fruitless death. This is your moment of ascension, Word Bearers. Let fate take its course. Think of your primarch, kneeling in the dust before Guilliman and the God-Emperor.

This moment will be the beginning of his vindication. The Emperor’s lies will damn your species. The Primordial Truth will set it free.

‘We can carry this lore back to the Imperium, but humanity will never surrender itself to this... chaos.’

Humanity has no choice. It will die under the claws of aliens, and those few that survive will be swallowed by the spreading influence of the warp gods. They only grow stronger, Argel Tal. If one refuses to worship them, then that species has no place in this galaxy.

The Word Bearer didn’t speak the words that lay on his tongue – nevertheless, the daemon sensed them.

What will you do, human? Fight us? Wage war against the gods themselves? How lovely, to imagine the little Empire of mortal man laying siege to heaven and hell.

Just like the eldar... You will see the Primordial Truth, or you will be destroyed by it.

‘One last question,’ he said.

Ask.

‘You name the Emperor as the Anathema. Why?’

Because of the future. The Emperor will damn your species, denying humanity its birthright as the chosen children of the gods. He wages war against divinity, shrouding your species in ignorance. That will damn you all. The Emperor is not only loathed for his treacheries against the gods, he is anathemic to all human life.

Lorgar knows this. It is why he sent you into the Eye. Your enlightenment is the first step in the human race’s ascendancy.

Argel Tal looked into the daemon’s eyes for a long, long moment. In the mismatched depths, he once more saw Lorgar abase himself in the dust. He felt the deceitful Emperor’s psychic gale throwing him from his feet, casting him to the dirt before the Ultramarines.

He felt the serenity of standing in the City of Grey Flowers, knowing beyond doubt that his cause was holy, that his crusade was just. How long had it been since he’d felt such purity of purpose?

‘Qan Shiel Squad,’ Argel Tal spoke into the vox. ‘Make your way to Geller Generation on deck three. Squad Velash, move to support Qan Shiel.’

Affirmations crackled back. ‘Orders, sir?’ asked Sergeant Qan Shiel. ‘I... we have all heard as you heard.’

The captain swallowed.

‘Destroy the Geller Field generator. That’s an order. All Word Bearers, stand ready.’

Ninety-one seconds later, the ship gave the slightest rumble beneath their feet.

Ninety-four seconds later, it pitched to starboard, wrenched from orbit by the storm’s rage, drowning in the thrashing tides.

Ninety-seven seconds later, light died on every deck, bathing the crew and their Astartes protectors in the red gloom of emergency sirens.

Ninety-nine seconds later, every vox-channel erupted in screaming.

Ingethel uncoiled itself and launched forward, reaching for Malnor first.

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 like a bunch of crushed grapes, 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.

Lorgar lowered the quill once more. An unknowable emotion burned in his eyes – whatever it was, Argel Tal had never seen it before.

‘And so we come full circle,’ said the primarch. ‘You died and resurrected. You found the crew slain. You sailed out from the Eye, taking seven months to do so.’

‘You desired answers, sire. We brought them to you.’

‘I could not be prouder of you, Argel Tal. You have saved humanity from ignorance and extinction. You have proved the Emperor wrong.’

The captain watched his father closely. ‘How much of this did you already know, sire?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You lingered for three nights in the Cadian caves with Ingethel. How much of this tale had the creature already told you before you sent us in to the Eye?’

Lorgar released a breath, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. ‘I did not know what would happen to you, my son. Please believe me.’

Argel Tal nodded. That was good enough.

He started to answer, but the affirmation caught in his throat. Was this the genetic loyalty all Astartes felt for their primarchs, only magnified in the XVII Legion? Would he ever be able to see deceit in his father’s eyes, even if the Urizen lied right to his face?

Entire worlds had fallen to Lorgar’s oratory without a single shot being fired in anger. In his son’s eyes, he personified the persuasive, soulful charm so resplendent in the Emperor – always seeming above anything as base and crude as deception.

And yet, Ingethel’s words cast the shadow of doubt.

‘I believe you, father,’ he said, hoping the words were true rather than knowing they were.

‘We must cover our tracks.’ Lorgar shook his head slowly. ‘The Cadians’ lives are evidence that the Emperor must never see. With his watchdogs among us, my father will know we witnessed the Cadian rituals, and that we ventured into the Eye. We must remain pure in the Emperor’s eyes. The storm revealed nothing. The Cadians... well, they were destroyed for their deviance.’

Argel Tal swallowed acid. ‘You will destroy the tribes?’

‘We must cover our tracks,’ Lorgar sighed. ‘Genocide has never given me pleasure, my son. Tales of unrest will be spread among the fleet, and we will use tectonic weapons on the landing site to destroy the tribes that occupy the wastelands.’

Argel Tal said nothing. There was nothing he could say.

‘You are reborn,’ Lorgar pressed his palms together. ‘The gods have reshaped you, granted you this great blessing.’

That’s one way of seeing this, Argel Tal thought.

‘I am possessed,’ he replied. The words did no justice to the sense of violation, yet any other explanation would be too crude a fit. ‘We were possessed, as evidence to you that Ingethel’s words of the gods were truth.’

‘I need no more convincing. Everything, at last, has fallen into place. I know my role in the galaxy, after two centuries of struggling to find the right path. And we will come to see your... union... as something avataric, something that exalts you in the eyes of the gods. Not a sacrifice. You were chosen, Argel Tal. Just as I was.’ And yet, he did not sound as certain as his words insisted. Doubt shadowed his tone.

Argel Tal seemed lost in thought, watching the skeletal play of his opening and closing hand.

‘Ingethel warned us all: this is merely the beginning. We will change as the possession takes hold, but not until the ordained time. These gods will cry out from their haven here in the storm, and when we hear them call to us, we will begin our... “evolution”.’

‘What form will these changes take?’ Lorgar was writing once more, recording every word in his rapid, elegant script. He never went back to amend mistakes in his handwriting, for there were never any errors to amend.

‘The daemon said nothing of that,’ Argel Tal confessed. ‘It said only that this age was coming to an end before another century has passed. When it does, the galaxy will burn and the gods will scream. Until then, we carry a second soul, letting it ripen inside us.’

Lorgar said nothing for some time. At last, he laid the quill aside and smiled at his son – a reassuring, welcoming smile.

‘You must learn to hide this from the Custodes. You must hide this from everyone outside the Legion, until you hear the gods call.’

NINETEEN

Confession

Restoration

The Gal Vorbak

The Blessed Lady knew who it was even before the door opened.

She sat comfortably on the edge of her bed, hands folded in her lap, clad in her layered priestess’s robe of cream and grey. Her sightless eyes turned to him as he entered, following the sounds of his bare feet. She heard the swish of robes rather than the thrum of active armour, and the novelty brought a smile to her lips.

‘Hello, captain,’ she said.

‘Confessor,’ he replied.

It took considerable poise to hide her shock. His voice had changed from the months of privation, sounding dryer as it left his throat. And there was something else... Something more: a new resonance despite the current weakness.

She’d heard the rumours, of course. If the talk was true, they’d resorted to killing one another and drinking their brothers’ blood.

‘I thought you’d have come to me before now.’

‘Forgive the delay. I have been with the primarch since my return.’

‘You sound tired.’

‘The weakness will fade.’ Argel Tal sat on the floor by her bed, taking his customary position. He’d last sat there only three nights before, though for the Word Bearer, almost a year had passed.

‘I missed you,’ he told her. ‘But I am glad you were not with us.’

Cyrene wasn’t sure how to begin. ‘I heard... things,’ she said.

Argel Tal smiled. ‘They are likely all true.’

‘The human crew?’

‘Dead, to a man. That is why I am glad you were not on board with us.’

‘And you suffered as the rumours say?’

The Word Bearer chuckled. ‘That depends what the rumours say.’

His casual stoicism charmed her, as it always did. The hint of another smile tickled the corners of her lips.

‘Come here. Kneel, and let me see you.’

He complied, bringing his face before her and holding her wrists in a gentle grip as he led her hands. She brushed her fingertips along his skin, tracing the contours of his diminished features.

‘I have always wondered if you were handsome. It is so hard to tell with only touch to rely on.’

The thought hadn’t really crossed his mind before. He was bred above such matters. He told her so now, with an amused addendum: ‘Whether I was or not, I have looked better than I do now.’

Cyrene lowered her hands. ‘You are very gaunt,’ she noted. And your skin is too warm.

‘Sustenance was in short supply. As I said, the rumours were true.’

When silence reached out between them, she found it awkward and unsettling. Never before had they struggled for words to share. Cyrene toyed with a lock of her hair, which her maid had painstakingly arranged only half an hour ago.

‘I have come for confession,’ he said, breaking the silence at last. Rather than soothe her, it sent her heart racing faster. She wasn’t certain she wished to know what depredations had occurred on the Orfeo’s Lament.

But Cyrene, above all else, was loyal to her Legion. Hers was a cherished role, and she was honoured to perform it.

‘Speak, warrior.’ A friendly formality came over her voice. ‘Confess your sins.’

She expected him to relate how he’d butchered his brothers and supped their blood to survive. She expected tales of horror from the warp storm – a storm she’d never seen herself and had only the poorly-worded descriptions of other crew members to rely on.

The captain spoke slowly, clearly. ‘I have spent decades of my life waging war in the name of a lie. I have rendered worlds compliant to a false society. I need forgiveness. My Legion needs forgiveness.’

‘I don’t understand.’

He began to describe the last year of his life for Cyrene, just as he had for his father. She interrupted a great deal less often, and once the retelling was complete, she focused not on the greater ramifications, but the moment that she’d heard Argel Tal’s voice wavering more than any other.

‘You killed Vendatha,’ she said, keeping her voice soft to rob the accusation of its bite. ‘You killed your friend.’

Argel Tal looked into her blind eyes. Since returning from the storm’s depths, looking at living beings had a strangely pleasant edge. He’d always been able to hear the liquid rhythm of her heart, but now the sound was accompanied by the teasing sense of her blood running through her veins. All that warmth, all that taste, all that life: scarcely beneath her fragile skin. Looking at her, knowing how easy it would be to kill her, was a guilty pleasure he’d never felt before.

And it was so easy to imagine. Her heart would slow. Her eyes would glaze. Her breath would shiver as her lips trembled.

Then...

Then her soul would fall into the warp, screaming in that tumultuous abyss, to shriek into those thrashing tides until it was devoured by the neverborn.

Argel Tal looked away.

‘Forgive me a moment’s distraction, confessor. What did you just say?’

‘I said, you killed your friend.’ Cyrene touched a hand to her plain silver earring. A gift from her lover, Argel Tal suspected – Major Arric Jesmetine.

The Word Bearer didn’t reply right away. ‘I did not come to be forgiven for that.’

‘I am not sure you can be.’

The captain rose to his feet once more. ‘It was a mistake to come here so soon. I had feared this hesitance between us.’

‘Feared?’ Cyrene smiled up at him. ‘I have never heard you use that word before, Argel Tal. I thought the Astartes knew no fear.’

‘Very well. It is not fear.’ Those words spoken by any other might sound petulant and defensive, but she heard no such emotion in Argel Tal’s voice. ‘I have seen more than most Imperial souls will ever see. Perhaps I possess a greater understanding of mortality – after all, I have seen where our souls go when we die.’

‘Would you still give your life for the Imperium?’

This time, there was no hesitation in his answer. ‘I would give my life for humanity. I would never offer my life to preserve the Imperium. Day by day, we have sailed farther from my grandfather’s empire of lies. There will be a reckoning for the deceptions he has draped over the eyes of an entire species.’

‘It’s good to hear you speak this way,’ she said.

‘Why? You delight in hearing me speak blasphemy against the Emperor’s dominion?’

‘No. Far from it. But you sound so certain of everything once more. I am glad you made it back from that... place.’

Cyrene offered her hand, the way a Covenant priestess would offer her signet ring to be kissed. It was an old ritual between them; with no signet ring to kiss, Argel Tal’s cracked, warm lips met the skin of her knuckles for the briefest moment.

‘War will come from this,’ she said. ‘Won’t it?’

‘The primarch hopes it will not. Humanity has only one choice, and it must be made by those who have sought out the answers.’

‘Such as yourself?’

He chuckled again. ‘No. By my father, and the brothers he can trust. Some will be brought to his side by deception, if they are too dull-minded to come in perfect faith. But we are a populous Legion, and our conquests are many, with many more to come. Much of the Imperium’s border worlds will answer to the warriors of Aurelian first, and the Emperor second.’

‘You... you’re planning this, already?’

‘It may not come to war,’ he said. ‘The primarch is venturing into the Great Eye to witness his own revelations. Evidently, the lives of the Serrated Sun were spent and warped in what was merely truth’s prelude.’

Cyrene could hear the discomfort in his voice. He was making no move to hide it.

‘Do you believe the primarch sent you in first out of... fear?’

Argel Tal didn’t answer that.

‘Tell me one more thing before you leave, captain.’

‘Ask.’

‘Why did you believe all of this? Hell-worlds. Souls. Humanity’s slow extinction, and these... monsters... that call themselves daemons. What convinced you that it was more than some alien trick?’

‘Such creatures are no different from the gods of countless faiths that have risen and fallen over the millennia. Few gods were benevolent creators to any culture.’

‘But what if we’re being lied to?’

It would have been easy to say that the faith was its own sustenance and that humanity always reached for religion; that almost every rediscovered human culture clung to their own belief in the infinite and the divine; and that here was a realm of prophecy – where beings with the power of gods had proved beyond doubt that they’d summoned the Lord of the Seventeenth Legion, shaping fate to make these events unfold.

Whether they were benevolent creator gods from mythology or mere manifestations of mortal emotion was irrelevant. Here was the divine force in a galaxy of lost souls. On the edge of the physical universe, gods and mortals had finally met, and mankind would fall without their masters.

But Argel Tal said none of this. He was weary of such explanation.

‘I remember your words after Monarchia died in the Emperor’s fire. You told me it was the day you truly began to believe that gods were real, once you had seen such power unleashed. I felt the same when I saw the power at work in this storm. Can you understand that, Cyrene?’

‘I understand.’

‘I thought you would.’

And with those words spoken, he walked from her room.

Aquillon found him in the practice cages.

Both warriors were aware of each other long before either said a word. Aquillon watched in silence, respectfully waiting until Argel Tal finished his round of exercises, while the Word Bearer graced the Custodian with a perfunctory nod, saying nothing as he worked through his sword work routines. Finding balance in his weakened physique was a torturous affair. The deactivated sparring blades cut the air in dull sweeps – a poor shadow of the lost swords of red iron – and he was breathless with exertion as his hearts thudded to keep up with the demands he placed upon his emaciated physique.

At last, Argel Tal lowered the blades. His muscles ached from only two hours of training. Before his journey into the Eye, such a poor performance would see him doing penance for a ritual ninety-nine nights.

‘Aquillon,’ he greeted his friend.

‘You look as though you died and forgot to lie down.’

The Word Bearer snorted. ‘I feel like it.’

‘A shame. You’d managed to last almost four minutes against me last time we stepped into these cages together.’

‘I see you are not in a merciful mood.’ In better times, this banter would have come easily to Argel Tal. ‘Did you come to speak of Ven?’

Aquillon opened the force cage and took up a practice blade twin to the one Argel Tal still held. The sparring cage’s hemispheres closed around them both. Both warriors wore robes: one, the white of Terra’s palace servants, one, the grey of the XVII Legion.

‘I wanted to hear it from you.’ He raised the blade in a two-handed grip, mimicking his favoured weapon. His warriors carried the traditional glaives, but Aquillon’s antique bidenhander broadsword was a blade apart. He carried this blade as he wielded his own sword: with a confident, effortless grip.

Argel Tal raised his own swords in a defensive cross, feeling the burn of lactic acid in his muscles. The two warriors tended to play to their strengths in the past: Aquillon was ferociously offensive in his blade work; Argel Tal remained consummately defensive.

‘So will you tell me what happened?’

Aquillon was indeed not in a merciful mood. Before the Word Bearer could even answer, Argel Tal’s blades were knocked from his hands and the captain found himself on the floor, breathing against the Custodian’s sword point. It scratched the dirty skin of his throat, and Aquillon shook his head.

‘Pathetic.’ He offered his hand to help Argel Tal rise. ‘Try again.’

The Word Bearer rose without the offered hand, retrieving his blades. ‘I do not like the pity in your voice.’

‘Then do something to get rid of it. But at least answer my question.’

The next clash lasted several seconds, but ended the same way. The Word Bearer backhanded Aquillon’s sword away from his neck.

‘Have you read the reports?’ he asked the Custodian, again refusing his friend’s offered hand and rising unaided.

‘Yes. They are vague, and I am being generous when I say even that.’

Argel Tal had read them as well. The surface of Cadia... The journey into the Eye... The reports of each event were loose and evasive fictions that almost moved him to laughter. ‘They are vague,’ he conceded, raising his blades again. ‘But they are accurate. I will enlighten you where I can.’

This time, Argel Tal attacked. Aquillon disarmed him in two swings of his blade, and a boot to the solar plexus sent the Word Bearer back down to the floor.

‘Begin with Vendatha. He told me that Lorgar was attending a heathen ritual and several of the officers would be with him.’

‘That’s true enough.’

‘You are still blocking the feinted thrust, by the way.’

‘I know.’

‘Good. Now speak.’

Something burned in his blood. Something reactive, unwilling to be dominated. Argel Tal bit back a sudden need to curse at the Custodian in a language that was and was not Colchisian.

‘It... was not a ritual in the sense that we feared it would be.’ He rose to his feet as he continued. ‘A tedious recital of ancient texts. Prayers to spirits of ancestors. Dances, drums and herbal narcotics.’

Blades in hands, Argel Tal attacked again. Another clash, clash, clash, and he was dumped back onto the floor – the back of his head perilously close to the buzzing bars of the force cage.

‘Lorgar sent you into the storm based on this? A... theatrical performance of old lies?’ This time, Aquillon didn’t offer to help Argel Tal stand. A doubting scowl passed over his features.

‘Don’t be foolish.’ The Word Bearer rolled his shoulders, wincing at the crackle of abused muscle and vertebrae. ‘He never sent us into the storm. I volunteered. We lacked standard Mechanicum explorator vessels, so we used the smallest warship in the fleet.’

The two warriors circled one another, blades half a metre apart. ‘You volunteered?’

‘It was a last attempt to salvage some worth from the journey. One last venture beyond Imperial borders, before we turn around and make for new space. Aquillon... there is nothing out here. Do you think we wish to heap further shame upon ourselves by admitting that? Plenty of expeditionary fleets take months, even years, to find a world worthy of conquest – but this is our primarch’s fleet, even if only temporarily. Desperation drove us to try one last time. Don’t hate us for doing our sworn duty.’

The Custodian attacked, his blade lashing one of Argel Tal’s blades out of the captain’s grip, while a kick smashed the other aside.

The Word Bearer smiled through a face streaked with sweat, and went to recover his blades yet again.

‘And Vendatha?’ Aquillon asked.

Argel Tal’s smile faded, wiped from his face. ‘Ven died with my brothers. Deumos fell first, then Rikus and Tsar Quorel. Ven was last.’ The Word Bearer met the Custodian’s eyes, letting his sincerity show. ‘He was my friend, Aquillon. I mourn him as you do.’

‘And this... riot... on the planet that killed three Astartes and a Custodes?’

‘When the primarch renounced the barbarians and refused to draw them into the Imperium, they rose up in anger. What could we do? Their rituals are too far from the Imperial Truth. Never will they accept the Emperor’s rule.’

‘Invasion?’

‘The planet is sparsely populated, and much of it is a paradise despite its proximity to the hellish storm. Cyclonic torpedoes will annihilate the tribes, and leave the planet free for future colonisation – if the Emperor wills it.’

Aquillon released a pent-up breath. There was something unarguably youthful about the warrior, despite his ageless, regenerative immortality. ‘I commend Lorgar’s actions in rejecting the primitives on the world below. I have seen compliance after compliance executed to perfection for three years, and I do not judge his actions as flawed now. It’s difficult to believe Ven is dead, that’s all. He’d earned twenty-seven names in the Emperor’s service over a century of immaculate duty. The same mentor taught us both to wield a blade. Amon will grieve to learn of his fate.’

‘He died in the Emperor’s service, defending a primarch from the rebellion of heathen culture. You may not respect my sire, but he is still a son of the Emperor. If I could choose my hour of death, it would be in battle at Lorgar’s side.’

Aquillon raised his sword en garde, speaking with a curious formality. ‘Thank you for your candour, Argel Tal. Our presence is loathed by your Legion, but the Custodes have always appreciated your friendship.’

The Word Bearer didn’t answer. His next attack was deflected and beaten back within a matter of moments.

Aquillon offered a hand again, and this time, Argel Tal took it as he rose.

‘What now for the Serrated Sun?’ asked the Custodian.

‘There’s nothing left for us out here. Once Cadia is purged, we press on as part of the 1,301st, returning to more promising territory. I believe the primarch will rejoin the main crusade fleet, with Erebus and Kor Phaeron. He will be done with these provincial conquests. I suspect he also wishes to speak with several of his brothers.’

Aquillon nodded, and returned his practice sword to the weapon rack. His white robe was unmarked, while Argel Tal’s was bathed in sweat stains down the spine and around the collar.

The Custodian saluted, making the sign of the aquila over his chest. Argel Tal returned it, as he always did in his friend’s presence.

‘One last thing,’ the Custodian remarked.

The Word Bearer raised an eyebrow. ‘Speak.’

‘Congratulations, Chapter Master.’

Argel Tal couldn’t resist a smile. ‘I wasn’t aware it was public knowledge. Will you be at the ceremony?’

‘Without a doubt.’ In a moment of rare fellowship, Aquillon rested his hand on Argel Tal’s shoulder. ‘I wish you well on your return to health. I am glad that, at the end, Vendatha stood with a friend.’

An image of Ven’s last moments flashed through Argel Tal’s mind: the naked Custodian twitching, gagging, being dragged down and impaled upon the wooden spear.

Unable to speak another lie, the Word Bearer merely nodded.

The ceremony was attended by every officer of significant rank, as well as the remaining Word Bearers of the Serrated Sun, including the robed ranks of their Acolyte Auxiliary – many of whom would be elevated into the three shattered companies with the Legion’s losses in recent months.

Such a gathering required use of De Profundis’s primary hangar deck, which in turn offered a stunning, disquieting backdrop through the open bay doors’ shimmering force field. Through the haze of thin energies, the storm beyond was a swirling mess of psychic vitriol. The ship creaked and whined around them as they stood in orderly rows, facing Lorgar.

At the primarch’s side, the Blessed Lady carried a rolled scroll on a plain, white cushion. She stared blindly over the ranks of Word Bearers, occasionally glancing to the towering primarch as if she could somehow see him. On Lorgar’s left, Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus stood tall and proud in his ceremonial grey and white uniform, a fur cloak – once the skin of some immense arctic beast that the officer had never even seen, let alone killed himself – draped over one side of his body. None present could actually recall the last time Torvus had set foot on a planet; the man clearly treasured his place among the stars.

Fully a third of the Legion warriors were wasted husks in their half-repaired armour. These were the survivors of the Eye, standing in rows ahead of their hundred remaining brethren.

The Mechanicum contingent had manifested in full strength as well, though only one of their robotic charges was present. To no one’s surprise, Incarnadine was among the Word Bearers ranks, the scarlet war machine bedecked in honour scrolls and towering above its living kinsmen. Despite bearing the scarlet armour of Carthage, it was a welcome presence among the Legion’s grey.

Standing aside from all the others, four golden figures watched from a gantry above. Aquillon and his Custodians were resplendent in their armoured finery – the gold surfaces playing host to flickering reflections from the storm outside.

The primarch, clad in a shirt of fine silver mail, raised his hands for silence. All whispers died down immediately.

‘I have brought this expeditionary fleet far from the heart of my father’s kingdom. Every fleet with a Word Bearer presence has done the same, sailing far from beloved Terra, into the cold, away from the cradle of our species. We are far from our brothers and will hear tell of their travels and conquests in time, but I say this with confidence: none of my Legion has endured what you have. None have stared into the madness at the edge of the universe, as you have done. And you survived. You returned.’

Lorgar inclined his head at his warriors before continuing. ‘This Legion, more than any other, has suffered through change and evolution since its inception. But each phase exalts us, improves us and brings us closer to fulfilling our potential. The Emperor bred this Legion from his biological barracks on distant Terra, and for many years only Terrans filled its ranks. A more innocent age, an age when the Legion bore a different name, and today we begin to leave the last vestiges of those days behind. The Imperial Heralds became the Word Bearers, and the Word Bearers were shown the error of their ways in worshipping the Emperor. Change upon change, all leading towards this moment.’

The primarch gestured a gloved hand to a bulkhead in the closest wall, and spoke a single word. ‘Enter.’

The bulkhead opened to reveal two figures – both armoured in crimson ceramite – walking towards the primarch. The first bore a black helm with eye lenses of crystal blue. One eye was ringed by the golden Serrated Sun, and his power armour was edged in polished silver. The second carried a familiar crozius of black iron, with its armour trimmings formed of bronze and bone. Thick, ornamental chains rattled around their waists and wrists as both warriors moved. Prayer scrolls were bound to shin-guards and pauldrons, the parchment showing the primarch’s own flowing script.

‘Warriors of the Serrated Sun,’ Lorgar smiled. ‘Kneel before your new commanders.’

Every Word Bearer went to their knees. Incarnadine took several seconds longer to complete its obeisance, lowering itself on grinding hydraulics.

The first crimson warrior removed his helm. Argel Tal looked upon the gathered Legion, and called out across the deck.

‘Survivors of the Orfeo’s Lament, rise and step forward.’

They did as they were ordered. Behind Argel Tal, Xaphen removed his own skulled helm, remaining by the primarch’s side.

The new Chapter Master was still gaunt, as were the warriors he surveyed with a calm gaze. ‘Our sire has ordered we rebuild the Serrated Sun far beyond its former strength. We obey his word, as we have always obeyed. But he has offered more. You, the survivors of the Orfeo’s Lament, are to be honoured for your sacrifices.’

Argel Tal nodded to Xaphen, who took the scroll from Cyrene’s cushion and brought it to the Chapter Master.

‘This scroll is bare, but for two names. My own, and Chaplain Xaphen’s. If you accept the honour of joining us as the primarch’s chosen elite, then you will kneel before the Blessed Lady in this very hangar, and you will speak your name to her. It will be written upon this parchment, and stored in the vaults aboard De Profundis.’

Argel Tal looked each of the survivors in the eyes, one after the other. ‘We will be the Gal Vorbak, armoured in black and crimson, the elite of the Serrated Sun and the chosen of Lorgar Aurelian.’

Lorgar chuckled, light and pleasant, as he stepped forward to rest a hand on Argel Tal’s shoulder-guard.

On the gantry above, Kalhin let his glance flicker to Aquillon. His voice was low, despite the fact he wore his helm and none would overhear them speaking over the inter-squad vox.

‘Gal Vorbak. I did not study their culture as you did. Is that Colchisian?’

Aquillon nodded. ‘It means “Blessed Sons”.’

‘I am pleased for Argel Tal. He is healing well, and it will be good to turn back into fairer territory after this failed madness. Deumos was always cancerous, so I will shed no tears at his tenure coming to an end.’

That statement met with grunts of agreement from the others.

‘When Lorgar returns to the 47th Expedition, should we accompany him?’

Aquillon had been dwelling on that very thought. ‘Our mandate is to stand vigil over the Legion itself. Four Custodian teams, bound to four fleets. Iacus already claims the 47th, and I trust him as I trust any one of you. Let him play watchdog over this weakling primarch for a while. Our duties will keep us with the 1,301st, and the compliances to come.’

Kalhin released a slow breath. ‘I would pay dearly to set eyes on Terra’s skylines once more.’

‘You will,’ said Aquillon.

‘In forty-seven years,’ the other Custodian scoffed. ‘Remember the terms of our oath. Five decades among the stars. Fifty long, tedious years away from Terra.’

‘It beats the endless blood games,’ Nirallus shrugged.

‘You only say that,’ Kalhin pointed out, ‘because you are so awful at them.’

Aquillon heard the tension in his brothers’ voices. ‘The Word Bearers will not languish under suspicion forever. In three years, have you seen evidence that they still worship the Emperor? And look at them now: already their rites are growing closer to the traditions of the other Legions. This is almost like Sigismund knighting one of his templars at a gathering of the Imperial Fists.’

Kalhin shrugged. ‘Perhaps they have come a long way from the fanatics we joined, but the stink of desperation yet clings to their breath when they shout their battle cries. I still do not trust them.’

The Occuli Imperator didn’t take his eyes from the red-clad figure speaking with his new warriors as they knelt before the blind girl from the dead world.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Neither do I.’

‘Not even Argel Tal?’

‘One warrior in an entire Legion.’ Aquillon left the railing, turning back to his Custodians. ‘He is the only one I trust. That’s the problem.’

V

Smoke and Mirrors

It was a lie, of course.

Blessed Lorgar didn’t return to Imperial space right away. One of the fleet’s scout vessels was chosen to carry the primarch back to his main crusade fleet, and a grand event was held on every deck of De Profundis to honour the Urizen before he left.

And that was the lie.

I was there when the primarch bade farewell to his sons Xaphen and Argel Tal, and I travelled back to safer space with the new lords of the Gal Vorbak.

Lorgar, meanwhile, travelled the same path that the daemon Ingethel had chosen for his children.

With the Custodians blinded to his true destination, Lorgar went into the Eye.

His last words to Argel Tal will never leave me – not only for the events they set in motion, but for what they did to my friend, and how they changed him.

‘Take the truth to Erebus and Kor Phaeron. While I am gone, they will be the Legion’s lords, and they will orchestrate the spread of true faith in the shadows of my father’s empire. I shall return to them soon.’

Xaphen swore an oath never to fail his primarch.

Argel Tal did not. He spoke in a voice soft enough to break hearts, ‘We are heretics, father.’

Lorgar laughed his melodic laugh. ‘No, we are saviours. Is all in readiness?’

‘It is.’

‘Sail far and wide without me, but keep the Custodians away from Imperial listeners. Once you return to stable space, they will resume their astropathic contact with Terra. My father will suspect the truth if he knows we came this close to the galaxy’s edge, and suspicion alone will be enough to damn us. I cannot remain here to block their pet astropath’s reaching voice. Find a solution. Xaphen, look to the texts retrieved from Cadia. The rituals within them will provide the answer.’

‘By your word, sire.’

‘Keep his watchdogs alive, Argel Tal. There may yet be a means to win this war without bloodshed. But keep them silent.’

With his last words ordering the first of a thousand treacheries, the primarch boarded his vessel and left us.

What he saw within the Eye is the source of near-infinite speculation. Many of the Word Bearers came to me for weeks afterwards, wracked by dreams that barely faded when their sufferers awoke. The blood connection between Aurelian and his sons was a powerful one indeed, for what Lorgar saw with his own eyes, his sons witnessed in horrifying echoes.

It was Xaphen who spoke most of his dreams, while Argel Tal remained next to silent. The Chaplain would speak with a fevered cast in his voice, as if harsh whispers could pierce the walls of my humble chamber and reach the primarch halfway across the galaxy.

He spoke of Lorgar walking the surface of worlds where the oceans were formed from boiling blood, and the skies stood dark under heavenly cities of clanking black steel. He told me of an entire Legion in the crimson of the Gal Vorbak, waging war before the gates of a golden palace.

Most tellingly of all, he described world after world dying under the tainted touch of alien claws. He swore that this was the Imperium’s demise – a godless empire reaved clean by inhuman tides. Only faith would save mankind from fate’s promises. Only worship of the Great Powers nestling within the warp.

Perhaps these were the lessons Lorgar was seeing for himself, while his sons returned to spread the word among the other fleets.

Cadia burned, just as we’d all known it would. The tribes were destroyed by Argel Tal’s own command, and the world left in silence, ready to be seeded with colonists in the future. He never once asked me to forgive him for it, just as he never asked me to console him over the murder of Vendatha.

I love him above all others, not only for saving my life, but for the fact he stains his soul with such blackness, yet masks his guilt and shame so completely. He has never broken, despite carrying the secrets and sins that will damn or save our entire species.

I believe the only mistake he ever made was in allowing himself to grow closer to the Custodes leader, Aquillon.

But then, it was just like Argel Tal to endure such penance. He became a brother to the one man he knew he must eventually betray.

Excerpted from ‘The Pilgrimage’,

by Cyrene Valantion

Part Three

CRIMSON

Forty years later

TWENTY

Three Talents

A New Crusade

The Crimson Lord

Ishaq Kadeen was immensely proud of himself, for he did three things in life with a skill few others could match. These three talents had earned him enough coins to rub together, no doubt there, but they’d also elevated him from the depths of poverty that had swallowed his parents – and getting out of those slums was something far out of reach for most of the beggars and street-folk in his home city.

Three talents. That’s all it took.

And they weren’t even that hard. If he’d needed to practise them, then it might have been a different story. Ishaq Kadeen was one of those naturally lucky souls that live their lives in the moment. He never spared a thought for getting old, never saved money with any great care, and never worried overmuch what the enforcer patrol around the next street corner might have to say about his activities.

Three talents got him through life, pitching him in and out of trouble.

The first was to run, which was a skill he’d honed by putting it to good use in the criminal-infested lower sprawls of Sudasia’s primary hive city.

The second was to smile with a vicious blending of charm, smarm and intimacy, which had variously gotten him into several lines of employment, out of an entirely legal execution that he’d absolutely deserved, and even once into the fine, black lace underwear of a countess’s younger cousin – the night of the gala held to celebrate her coming of age.

The third talent, which was what had gotten him posted to his current situation in the first place, was the fact he could take a wicked pict when he wanted to.

Not a day passed that Ishaq didn’t think back to the conversation that damned him out here onto the fringes of space. He’d been sitting in an austere office, absently picking dirt from beneath his nails while a robed hierarch in the Remembrancer Order droned on and on about ‘noble goals’ and the ‘very real need’ to record the present for future generations to study in excruciating detail.

‘It is the greatest honour,’ the stern gentleman insisted.

‘Oh, I know.’ Ishaq started to bite his nails now they were clean. ‘The greatest.’

The older man seemed dubious. Ishaq thought he looked like a vulture disapproving of a potential meal, largely because it was still alive.

‘Thousands of archivists, sculptors, painters, pictographers, poets, playwrights have been sent. Tens of thousands have been rejected for lacking the thoroughness and flair that the Great Crusade deserves in its remembrancers.’

Ishaq made a noncommittal noise to encourage the hierarch to continue, while secretly musing over the number of artistic professions beginning with the letter “P”. Painters, pictographers, poets, playwrights...

‘So you see, to be chosen like this... You have to understand how fortunate you are.’

‘What about puppeteers?’ Ishaq asked.

‘I... what?’

‘Nothing. Never mind.’

‘Yes, well. I’m sure you can appreciate the gravity of the situation.’ The hierarch did his vulture-sneer again. Ishaq smiled back – his eyes brightened; a faint movement of his eyebrows suggested something delightfully wry; and a calculatedly cocksure amount of teeth were on display for a predatory moment – but the hierarch was neither female nor attracted to males, and that disinterest rather disarmed Ishaq’s best weapon.

‘Mr. Kadeen?’ the man said. ‘Are you taking this seriously? Do you wish to be shipped to Mars to end your years as a servitor?’

He really didn’t. If it came to a choice between paying for his crimes in the traditional manner or catching a transport ship halfway across the galaxy to serve as a remembrancer... Well, it wasn’t much of a choice at all. He wasn’t going to spend his life lobotomised into penal service.

So he assured the remembrancer hierarch that he was taking it very seriously indeed. Over the following two hours, he weaved a compelling fiction of interstellar ambition and an exploratory spirit that had suffered in the strangling confines of his birth-slums. Now, at last, he would be free to walk the stars, to gaze upon new suns, to chronicle the advance of mankind, to...

To lie through his teeth.

Ishaq, at thirty-five, was not an educated man, and he was fairly certain at several points he invented new words or mispronounced ones he’d only read before, but it did the trick. Three days later, his intermittent work as an imagist for almost-wealthy hive families and crime scene pictography was behind him – as was Terra itself and the shit-heap hive in which he’d been born.

Was it an honour, really? That all depended upon just where you were sent.

In the briefings, Ishaq had been hoping against hope for a posting that would actually mean something. While the major expeditionary fleets were already swollen with remembrancer hangers-on, there were still plenty of possible placements in the smaller fleets.

He might never get to lay eyes upon the Warmaster, or see his images depict the glory of a primarch like Fulgrim, but he’d not lost hold of the desperate, panicked hope that he’d be assigned to one of the Emperor’s so-called ‘glory Legions’. The Ultramarines, founders of the perfect empire... The Dark Angels, commanded by the consummate general... The Word Bearers, renowned for bringing the Emperor’s own wrath against enemy worlds...

At last, he’d been assigned. A full sprint through the order’s barracks had ensued, with remembrancers shoving past one another to reach the posted listings in the lobby. All dignity was cast aside in the rush – artists, poets, playwrights rioting against each other to see where in the galaxy they were being sent. Someone had even been stabbed during the crush of bodies – perhaps out of jealousy, since that imagist in particular had been assigned to a fleet commanded by the Emperor’s Children, and such a posting even among a modest fleet was worth its weight in gold.

There it was:

KADEEN, ISHAQ – IMAGIST 1,301st EXPEDITIONARY FLEET

What did that even mean? Were there even Legion forces with that fleet? He’d shouldered a young woman aside to use one of the barracks’ information terminals, and hammered in his keycode with trembling fingers.

Yes. Yes. Each line sent his heart beating faster.

1,301st Expeditionary Fleet.

Commanded by Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus.

3 Companies of XVII Legiones Astartes: Word Bearers.

Commanded by the Crimson Lord, Master of the Gal Vorbak.

Noted Citations: Honoured by the presence of the Emperor’s Custodian Guards, led by Aquillon Althas Nero Khai Marithamus... the name went on and on and on, but it didn’t matter.

He’d been posted to one of the most aggressive, renowned, largest Legions, responsible for more compliances in the last half a century than any other – and a fleet, minor or not, that was honoured to contain some of the Emperor’s own golden Custodes warriors. The images that could come from this... The fame... The attention...

Yes. Yes. YES.

‘Who were you posted to?’ he asked the girl next to him.

‘The 277th.’

‘Blood Angels?’

‘Raven Guard.’

He gave her a pitying smile and headed back to his room, making sure to tell everyone on the way back where he’d been assigned. This only backfired once, when a pretentious arse of a sculptor had sneeringly replied: ‘The Word Bearers? Yes, well, they’ve conquered much in recent years to make amends for their former flaws… but they’re not exactly the Sons of Horus, are they?’

The flight to join the 1,301st Expeditionary Fleet had lasted nineteen long, long months, during which Ishaq had slept with twenty-eight separate members of the transport ship’s crew, been slapped by three of them, taken almost 11,000 picts of tedious goings-on aboard the vessel, and passed out from ship-made alcohol more times than he could reliably remember.

He’d also lost a tooth in a fistfight with an angry husband, though he still claimed the moral victory in that one. Given all of this and the lifestyle that preceded it, it would be fair – but not entirely accurate – to assume that Ishaq Kadeen cared nothing for his work.

He didn’t consider himself lazy. It was just difficult to find things that inspired him, that was all.

The first pict he’d truly cared about had since done the rounds of the entire 1,301st fleet, and it was, in his own inestimable opinion, an absolute beauty. Already, it was being hailed as a masterpiece in the fleet’s archives, and he’d received a courier-brought note from the Crimson Lord himself, thanking him for the image.

When they’d arrived, dropping from a year and a half in the swirling tedium of the warp to approach the battlefleet, Ishaq had been unable to resist getting caught up in the moment.

With his picter rod in hand, about the size and heft of a cudgel, he’d aimed the eye lens at the view from the porthole, watching and recording the great warships drifting by.

And then, there it was. The grey-hulled fortress-flagship of Lord Argel Tal, silent and serene despite its world-breaking weapons array.

De Profundis. Ishaq’s new home.

Awe left his mouth slack as he clicked pict after pict. One of them – one of the very first he took – showed the warship abeam, slaved to a sharp perspective: a stone and steel bastion of Imperial might. Starlight cast raw glares across its dense armour plating, while a statue of the primarch jutted from the vessel’s spine – Lorgar, arms raised to the void, haloed by the system’s distant sun.

Click, went the picter, and Ishaq Kadeen fell in love with his work.

That had been three weeks ago. Three weeks spent waiting for inspiration to strike again. Three weeks spent waiting for today.

The starboard hangar deck was a messy maze of landed gunships, load-bearing vehicles and cargo containers, populated by an army of servitors, tech-adepts and human crew going about their business. Thunderhawks were being loaded, their swooping wings weighted down by racks of missiles, while boxes of bolter shell belt-feeds were installed by the defensive turrets. All around was the rattle, the clang, the clank of heavy machinery, which was doing nothing positive for Ishaq’s hangover.

At the heart of the organised chaos was the eye of the storm, where space had been cleared for the scheduled arrival. Ishaq stood at the edge of the cleared zone – just one of many witnesses to the morning’s events. A glance to the left revealed a flock of other remembrancers: there was Marsin, a painter, scribbling in his sketchpad. Lueianna, a skinny and pale little thing who composed entire concerts around various flute arrangements. Hellic, who almost definitely owed Ishaq some money from the last time they played cards.

What did Hellic do? Was he a composer, as well? Ishaq wasn’t sure. Whatever his fellow remembrancer did to express himself, he was a piss-poor gambler.

The Blessed Lady was here, of course – standing out from her maids and companions in a gown of arterial red that looked more suited to a Terran ballroom than the greasy, oil-blackened deck of a warship. She looked no older than her late-twenties, though given how long she’d been with the fleet, rejuvenation surgery must have featured heavily in her recent past.

Ishaq lost a fair few minutes just watching her. She was dusky-skinned, not as dark as Ishaq himself, but clearly from a desert people, and it was easy to see why she was considered blessed. He’d never seen anyone move with the same slow, effortless grace, or smile with such subtle brilliance. Every time she shared a word with one of her entourage, she seemed to be smiling with endearing shyness at some secret joke between them.

Ishaq decided, then and there, that he wanted her.

For a moment, he was certain she turned to regard him. Wasn’t she said to be blind? Was that a facade? A rumour to enhance her mystique?

An honour guard from the Imperial Army had deigned to show its face, too. White-clad officers of the Euchar 54th stood in neat ranks, their formalwear impressive in its ornate finery. Each of the officers rested a gloved hand on a sabre sheathed at their sides, while their free hands remained nestled in the small of their backs as they stood at attention. In the middle of the front row, Ishaq made out the grizzled, half-bionic figure of General Arric Jesmetine.

The general had a fearsome reputation on the ship: all the talk passed around the remembrancers had Old Arric pinned as a tyrant and a taskmaster. They’d only crossed paths once before, in an upper deck corridor while the new remembrancer was scouting around for something to inspire him.

Jesmetine had been with the fleet for sixty years, and every month of it showed. He walked with a silver cane, and most of the right side of his body hummed and whirred with the bionics beneath the old man’s uniform. His beard was kept trimmed close to his haggard face, a fine pelt of white around a scowl like a slit in old leather.

‘You there,’ the general had said. ‘Are you lost?’

Well, no, he wasn’t lost. But nor was he supposed to be up here on the operations decks.

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

‘You’re a bad liar, son.’

This offended Ishaq a great deal, but he didn’t let it show. ‘Apparently so.’

‘You grin too much. If I had daughters, I’d kill you for ever going near them.’

‘With respect, sir, I’m not in the mood for a character assassination. And I am at least a little lost.’

‘See? Grinning again, you won’t charm me with that. Who are you?’

‘Ishaq Kadeen, official remembrancer.’ He liked the way that felt on the tongue, so he said it as often he could.

‘Oh.’ The old man cleared his throat with a sound like gargling gravel. ‘You’re not a poet by any chance, are you?’

‘No, sir. I’m an imagist.’

‘That’s a shame. The Blessed Lady has an ear for poetry. Though, hmm, it’s for the best if you never darken her door, I’m sure.’

This was before he knew who the Blessed Lady was, but that grumble alone was enough to make him vow to darken her door as soon as possible, whoever she might be.

‘So you’re hunting for picts to take?’

‘Guilty,’ Ishaq halted the grin before it reached his lips, ‘as charged.’

The old man scratched at his neat beard, fingers making scritch, scritch, scritch sounds against what was barely more than stubble. ‘This is a warship, you know. You can get in a lot of trouble wandering around like this. Go back to the lower decks, and wait for the Chaplain’s arrival like everyone else. You’ll get all your picts then.’

Ishaq considered that a fair deal, but as he turned to leave, he decided to push his luck a little more.

‘Sir?’

‘What?’ The old man was already walking away, cane tapping on the decking.

‘You don’t seem the merciless terror that the remembrancers have been told to fear.’

General Arric smiled, which made the slit in his face even less appealing. ‘That’s only because you’re not one of my men, Remembrancer Kadeen. Now get off the operations decks and back to the jury-rigged bar I know you little vermin are already setting up in the shadows of this blessed ship.’

‘It’s called the Cellar.’

‘How very apt,’ the old man huffed as he walked away.

So he’d waited eleven days, and true to both form and the general’s appraisal, he’d spent those eleven days in the bar.

Now he was here, after hauling his hungover carcass across to the main starboard hangar, waiting with the dregs and top brass alike for the Chaplain to arrive.

‘I thought the Crimson Lord was supposed to be here,’ he whispered to Marsin. The other remembrancer just shrugged, still taking notes and sketching vague figures.

The Astartes were here at least, though Ishaq took much less pleasure in their presence than he’d expected. Twenty of them in all: grey statues in two ranks of ten, not a ghost of movement between any of them. Immense bolt pistols were clutched to the Word Bearers’ chests, while unpowered chainswords were kept at their sides. Scrolls and iconography marked them as warriors from the 37th Assault Company.

Ishaq kept abreast of deployment chatter: most of 37th Company were engaged on the world below, waging a compliance war alongside General Arric’s Euchar regiments.

He snapped several images of the towering, silent Astartes, but his angle was far from perfect, and the edge of frame was ruined by servitors stumbling around in the background. He supposed there should be something glorious and inspiring about the warriors, but he found it hard to swallow if he looked too long in their direction. They weren’t inspiring at all. Just... imposing. Distant. Cold.

‘Attention!’ the general barked.

Ishaq conceded to this by standing slightly straighter. The Euchar officers went ramrod-straight. The Astartes still didn’t move.

The gunship came into the hangar on a sedate drift, guidance thrusters gushing pressurised air as it hovered down. Crimson armour plating coated the Thunderhawk in dry scales, while heavy bolter turrets panned left and right – the servitors slaved to the guns’ systems ever-alert to threats.

Landing claws kissed the decking. At last, the boarding ramp lowered on squealing hydraulics. Ishaq clicked a pict of the gunship’s yawning maw.

From the hangar’s edge, more Astartes entered – five warriors clad in armour of a newer, more streamlined design than their grey brethren, painted in scarlet and silver, with black helms staring ahead. The remembrancers turned as one, whispering and muttering, variously taking picts, making notes and sketching what they saw.

Gal Vorbak, came the whisper from many mouths.

Leading them was a warrior with a black cloak draped over his shoulders, and his Legion symbol hidden beneath yellowed parchment scrolls depicting his deeds. He stalked past the gathered remembrancers, the joints of his Mark IV battle armour humming a smooth hymn. Skulls of slain alien warlords rattled against his dark ceramite as they dangled from iron chains.

There he is, the whispers started up again. The Crimson Lord.

The warrior moved to the Blessed Lady’s side, whereupon he offered her a slight inclination of his head, and spoke the name ‘Cyrene’ with a growl of acknowledgement.

‘Hello, Argel Tal,’ she smiled without looking up at him. Her entourage of maids and advisors scattered back with dignified slowness as the Gal Vorbak took their places around their master.

Ishaq took another pict: the huge warrior in his snarling black helm, and the petite figure at his side, both surrounded by red-clad Astartes.

The figure that descended from the Thunderhawk onto the hangar deck wore armour to match his brothers in the Gal Vorbak, though his trimmings were reinforced bone and bronze, and his helm bore Colchisian runes painted in gold leaf.

Chaplain Xaphen walked down the gang ramp, briefly embracing Argel Tal at the bottom.

‘Cyrene,’ the Chaplain said afterwards.

‘Hello, Xaphen.’

‘You look younger.’

She blushed, and said nothing.

Argel Tal gestured to the Thunderhawk. ‘How were our brothers in the IV Legion?’

Xaphen’s rumbling voice was as vox-ruined as Argel Tal’s. ‘The Iron Warriors are well, but it is good to be back.’

‘I assume there’s much to discuss.’

‘Of course,’ the Chaplain replied.

‘Come, then. We’ll talk while the preparations are made for planetfall.’

The warriors walked past, and the orderly gathering began to dissolve into groups heading back to their duties. Just like that, it was over.

‘You coming?’ Marsin asked Ishaq.

Ishaq was looking down at his picter, intensifying the image on the small viewscreen. It showed the two commanders of the Gal Vorbak side by side, with the Blessed Lady nearby, her head tilted as she regarded them both with unseeing eyes – a look of adoring beneficence writ upon her lovely features. One of the Astartes carried his black crozius maul: the ornate weapon slung over his shoulder. The other, the cloaked Crimson Lord, sported deactivated claws of red iron, each oversized power fist ending in four talons the length of scythe blades.

Both suits of armour glinted with shards of yellow jade as they reflected the orange overhead lighting. Both helms had slanted, sapphire eye lenses that seemed to stare right into Ishaq’s viewfinder.

This, he thought to himself, might be another classic.

‘Are you coming?’ Marsin repeated.

‘What? Oh. Yes, sure.’

TWENTY-ONE

Machinations

A Curious Deception

Indulgence

‘These remembrancers,’ Xaphen said with an air of displeasure, ‘are everywhere.’

‘Ours arrived this month. It was not possible to deny them access to the fleet any longer.’

‘Horus’s flagship has had the little rats crawling over its decks for two years. Can you believe that?’

Argel Tal shrugged his shoulders, uncaring either way. ‘Three of the poets read to the Blessed Lady, for which Cyrene is monumentally grateful. And I have a beautiful pict of De Profundis that one of them took on his first day. It almost stopped my heart to see the ship looking so grand.’

Xaphen chuckled. ‘You are growing soft, brother.’

The two warriors had retired to Xaphen’s prayer room, which was a rather immodest chamber by Argel Tal’s standards. The Chapter Master preferred Spartan furnishings and a minimum of distraction, but Xaphen’s personal reflection room was decorated in a plethora of banners and old prayer scrolls cast across the table and floor. Many of the banners were from victories fought with other Legions – as they talked, the Chaplain added another to the hallowed ranks. This one sported the metallic skull of the Iron Warriors, emblazoned with runes around the central symbol.

Several of them resembled Colchisian constellations. Argel Tal examined them each in turn. ‘What are these?’

‘Symbols of the Iron Warrior circles. They do not name them “lodges”, as the Sons of Horus do.’

Argel Tal removed his helm with a click-hiss of air pressure. As always, the Chaplain’s festooned chamber had the lingering twin-scent of dried spices and old incense.

‘You were gone much longer than expected,’ he said. ‘Problems?’

‘Nothing worth doing is ever easy.’

Argel Tal flexed his hands, closing and opening them from fists. They ached. They’d ached for days now.

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘There were no problems,’ said Xaphen. ‘I stayed longer because it seemed prudent. Their circles are large, taking up the overwhelming majority of the Legion, but it was a critical phase. I was not the only Chaplain there.’

Argel Tal raised an eyebrow, not realising he was mimicking Cyrene’s bemused smirk out of habit. ‘Oh?’

‘Maloq Kartho was there to deal with another of the warrior circles, and I was treated to several of his sermons. The air fairly reeked of brimstone when he spoke. Var Valas was there, as well. Both were with the Iron Warriors after long tenures with the World Eaters.’ Xaphen sighed – a satisfied sound to match the brightness in his eyes. ‘The web is wide, brother. Lorgar’s conspiracy spans the stars themselves. At last count, there are over two hundred of our Chaplains seconded to other fleets. Erebus now stands at the Warmaster’s side. Can you give that countenance? Horus himself, heeding Erebus’s words.’

Xaphen laughed as he trailed off. ‘It begins, brother.’

Argel Tal didn’t share his brother’s relish. A scowl darkened features that had grown continually more scarred over the last half a century.

‘I do not like that word,’ he said, low and slow.

‘What word?’

‘The word you used. Conspiracy. It demeans the primarch’s vision. It demeans us all.’

Xaphen smoothed the black war banner against the wall before stepping back to admire it. ‘You are oversensitive,’ he muttered.

‘No, I am not. It is the wrong word, implying plotted schemes and ignoble secrecy.’

‘Dress it however you wish,’ the Chaplain said. ‘We are the architects of humanity’s ascension, and the web of necessary deceit is wide.’

‘I choose to see it in nobler terms. Now finish what you have to say. I am releasing the Gal Vorbak, and have final preparations to make.’

The Chaplain sensed Argel Tal’s recalcitrance. It was hard not to. ‘You are angry with me.’

‘Of course I am angry with you. I have five hundred warriors that haven’t seen a Chaplain from their own Legion in almost a year. You were many months overdue, fighting with the Iron Warriors. Oros, Damane and Malaki are also still with Perturabo’s lesser fleets, furthering the conspiracy.’ He sneered through the word.

‘What of Sar Fareth?’

‘Dead.’

‘What?’

‘Killed ten months ago, shortly after you left. Slain by a human, of all things. An unlucky thrust with a wooden spear.’ Argel Tal tapped two fingertips against his neck. ‘Tore out most of his throat, laid it bare to the bone. I’ve never seen anything like it. Blood of the gods, I’d have laughed if it hadn’t been so pathetically tragic. He bled out before the Apothecaries could reach him, still trying to shout the whole time.’

‘What happened to his killer?’

Argel Tal had seen it himself. Sar Fareth had gripped the human’s shoulder and leg, and pulled. The result came away in three bloody pieces before the Chaplain died.

‘Justice happened.’

Xaphen released a breath that wasn’t quite a sigh. Sar Fareth had been one of his own: trained by his hand to wield a crozius in Lorgar’s name.

Argel Tal crossed his arms over his armoured chest. ‘Will the Iron Warriors join us?’

The Chaplain’s smile returned. ‘Will they? Perturabo’s Legion has already abandoned the Great Crusade. I was with them on Olympia.’

That couldn’t be. ‘Olympia?’ Argel Tal managed to speak. ‘So soon?’

‘All of the primarch’s plans are coming to fruition. That, in truth, is why I returned. Olympia was in open rebellion against the Imperium, and the Iron Warriors declared war against their own people in desperation to pacify their home world. Brother, you cannot imagine the sight. The skies were black with Perturabo’s gunships and landers, while the ground shook from dawn to dusk under the wrath of half a million war machines.’

Argel Tal took a slow breath, forcing an unwilling imagination to picture Xaphen’s words. ‘A primarch has lost control of his own home world.’

‘You speak as if you never believed this day would come.’

Argel Tal said nothing, motioning for the Chaplain to continue.

‘All of it was orchestrated to the very finest degree. The Iron Warriors’ wrath was a sight to behold. They have instigated genocide against their own people. What choice do they have now? The call will come soon: Horus is already gathering his forces, cleansing them of unworthy elements. The Emperor’s Children, the Death Guard and the World Eaters are with him. The bulk of each Legion gathers in the Isstvan system, while Perturabo has betrayed the Imperium in his need for vengeance. He will stand with us when Lorgar throws off the False Emperor’s shackles.’

The fervency in his voice wasn’t new to Argel Tal, but without the presence of a Chaplain for almost a year, Xaphen’s eager passion had faded from his memory. He found his brother’s enthusiasm more unnerving than anything else.

‘When do we travel to the primarch?’

‘Soon.’ The Chaplain met his brother’s eyes. ‘I told you, I returned because the time has come. Soon, the call will come from Terra.’

Xaphen activated the wall-screen, cycling through visuals of stellar cartography. He added layer upon layer of superimposed fleet markers. Argel Tal watched the display taking shape, so beautifully complex in its completion.

‘Tell me what you see,’ Xaphen said with a smile.

Argel Tal glanced at him. ‘I see the death of my patience. I see my anger rising at how you hold all these answers purely by virtue of your position in the Chaplain brotherhood. I see me walking from this room without a straight answer given immediately.’

‘Such vim,’ the Chaplain chuckled. ‘Very well. Here is the Isstvan system. Here, far across the western spiral arm, is Terra. Take note of the compliances being carried out in the subsectors closest to Isstvan. Now, humour me. What do you see?’

Argel Tal recognised symbolising runes from four Legions – and no others. It formed a curious pattern, notable for the lack of Imperial Army or Mechanicum battlefleets, as well as the total absence of many notable Legions.

‘I see the hand of the Warmaster at work,’ said Argel Tal. ‘He has positioned certain fleets closest to him at Isstvan. These fleets could reach the system within a matter of days. Those on the outer arc will take longer, but... This is an immense gathering of force.’ Argel Tal looked at Xaphen, reluctantly drawing his eyes from the twinkling stellar ballet. ‘Now tell me why.’

‘Forgive me, brother. Little did I realise the frustration of isolation you’ve suffered in a fleet burdened by Custodes presence. Your duty was to maintain the lie, and you’ve done so to perfection. But you are owed enlightenment.’

Xaphen cancelled the cartographic imagery and continued. ‘Horus and Lorgar are already moving against the Emperor. The Warmaster has sworn devotion to the Hidden Gods, and now walks in their light. For now, the warp is pregnant with unrest, leaving much of the Imperium blind. Many of the established warp-paths are severed from each other by aetheric storms. The tumult will only grow worse, giving us enough time to enact the primarch’s will without fear of Imperial retribution. Such is the influence of the true gods. The warp itself is their canvas, and they paint to please us.’

The Master of the Serrated Sun let his scowl speak for him. He took offence to the way Xaphen insinuated they were no longer Imperial, purely for contemplating regicide. We are overthrowing a stagnant and ignorant ruling order. We are bringing enlightenment to our people, not ending the empire.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘A call will reach us soon – a panicked plea that every astropath in the fleet will hear at once. A call from Terra. The Emperor will soon learn of Horus’s rebellion, and what choice does he have? He must order the closest Legions to destroy the Warmaster’s traitorous forces.’

Argel Tal pictured the Legion signifiers flashing closest to the sun named Isstvan.

‘Horus will be destroyed.’

The Chaplain laughed, relishing the moment. ‘He will be entrenched on an impregnable world, commanding four Legions. What could destroy him?’

‘The seven Legions tasked with doing so. Even with the Iron Warriors at our side, the other five Legions remain under the Emperor’s aegis. Six against five. Our losses will be catastrophic. How can we illuminate Terra when the Legions sworn to Lorgar and Horus are bloodied and broken?’

Xaphen didn’t answer immediately. His brother recognised something in his face – some creeping disquiet, close to the bladed edge of mistrust.

‘Do you have such little trust in your own Legion’s Chaplains, that our work has failed to turn the Night Lords, or the Alpha Legion? Lorgar has worked for half a century to spread the truth to those ears worthy of hearing it. Every Legion we need will be at our side. The loyalists will find nothing but extinction waiting for them on the surface of Isstvan V. They will never leave their dropsites alive, Argel Tal. I promise you that.’

‘This conspiracy,’ said Argel Tal, ‘disgusts me.’

‘It is the primarch’s plan, brought into being by Horus himself.’

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘No. This is not Aurelian’s work. This is Erebus and Kor Phaeron’s doing. Their treacherous stink comes off this vision in waves. Lorgar is a golden soul, a being of light. This shadowplay comes from the dreams of much smaller, darker men. The primarch, blessings upon him, loves that foul wretch. He embraces a viper to his breast and names it father.’

‘You should not speak this way of the Master of the Faith.’

‘Master of the...’ Argel Tal laughed. ‘Kor Phaeron? “Master of the Faith”? He coats himself in titles the way a killer’s knife is laced with poison. Truly, I have been isolated from the Legion too long, if Kor Phaeron is now beloved of the masses. You of all people, Xaphen – you loathed him. An impure soul. A false Astartes. Your own words, brother.’

Xaphen looked away at last, unwilling or unable to hold the gaze any longer. Nothing broke eye contact like shame. ‘Times change,’ the Chaplain said.

‘So it seems.’ Argel Tal closed his hands into fists to ease the pain in his bones. It didn’t work. His knuckles went on throbbing. ‘Just get on with it. I have a world to bring to compliance.’

‘If you please, I have questions of my own.’

‘Ask,’ said Argel Tal, ‘and I will answer.’

‘Cyrene,’ Xaphen began. ‘She has undergone more rejuvenation treatment.’

‘Do not look at me, nor should you accuse her of vanity. An astropathic order came from the primarch himself some time ago. He still holds her in high regard, and expressed his desire that she go through another cycle of treatments.’

Xaphen nodded. ‘And Aquillon?’

Argel Tal’s expression was unreadable. ‘As before. He knows nothing, and suspects even less. His messages to the Emperor never leave the fleet.’

‘My failsafe?’

‘Is still in effect.’

‘Have you checked yourself?’ The Chaplain knew his brother found certain methods distasteful. ‘It is integral you check yourself.’

‘I have,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Nothing has changed, put it from your mind.’

‘Then I am sanguine. Nevertheless, I will renew the wards tonight.’ He moved over to his writing desk, and unclasped a great book from where it was chained to his waist. Slowly, reverently, he leafed through the pages of the great, leather-bound tome – through pages and pages of elegant scripture, mathematical designs, astrological diagrams, chanted invocations and ritual formulae.

Argel Tal ached to step closer and read the secrets spilled from the primarch’s mind. Truly, Lorgar was sharing a great deal with the Legion’s Chaplain brotherhood.

‘You have added much to the book,’ he noted.

‘I have. Each month, we receive new chapters and verses for the holy work. The primarch’s mind is aflame with ideas and ideals, and we are honoured to hear them first. Thousand of epistles now grace these pages.’

The 1301st’s databanks would never be allowed to archive digital copies of the primarch’s scriptures, for such information could be accessed by the wrong souls. Instead, the Serrated Sun’s Chaplains each carried their own copies chained to their armour – forever adding to them as the Word grew and spread – using them to preach at secret sermons. Argel Tal had taken Sar Fareth’s Book of Lorgar from the Chaplain’s corpse, incinerating it on the battlefield; committing necessary blasphemy to prevent the tome ever falling into unintended hands.

The Chaplain took a slow breath. ‘I have been gone too long, Argel Tal. You’re right. I was lost in manipulating the dull-witted labourers of the IV Legion, when in truth I desired nothing more than to be here with my brothers, preaching the evolving Word of Lorgar.’

‘Apology accepted,’ said the Crimson Lord. ‘And you have thirty-eight minutes before planetfall. I will see you on the deck before the Rising Sun.’

Xaphen was reading the data screeds scrolling over his eye lenses. ‘There’s an order for the coming engagement, sanctioning the presence of remembrancers during combat operations. That cannot be correct, for I know you would never acquiesce to such a thing.’

Argel Tal grunted something that wasn’t quite an answer, and made his way to the door.

‘Wait.’

Argel Tal froze, already at the chamber door. ‘Yes?’

‘Think of all that has come to pass, brother. Focus upon how events are flowing faster towards the inevitable insurrection. Are you feeling anything within you? Any... changes?’

The Chapter Master’s hands ached with sudden ferocity. It was if his knuckles and wrists were hinged by broken glass.

Without knowing why he did it, Argel Tal lied.

‘No, brother. Nothing. Are you?’

Xaphen smiled.

Making war upon another human culture was always a distinct kind of poison, and Argel Tal loathed every time it became necessary.

These were unclean wars, and fought with bitterness bred into every soul doomed to take up arms against the Imperium. It wasn’t that the enemy dared resist that discomfited the Crimson Lord, nor was it the expenditure of munitions or the fact each of these worlds was peopled by defenders he came to admire for their tenacity. Those aspects grieved him, but the waste of life and potential from their defiance – that was what left scars.

He’d tried to raise the point with Xaphen in the past. With characteristic bluntness, the Chaplain had lectured him on the rightness of their cause and the tragic need to crush these cultures. Such discussion told Argel Tal nothing he didn’t already know. Similar talks with Dagotal and Malnor had progressed the same way, as had one with Torgal. The Gal Vorbak dispensed with all ranks outside of Argel Tal’s own, rendering all its warriors equal under the Chapter Master, and the former assault sergeant had struggled hardest to understand what Argel Tal was trying to explain.

‘But they are wrong,’ Torgal said.

‘I know they are wrong. That’s the tragedy. We bring enlightenment through unification with mankind’s ancestral home world. We bring hope, progress, strength and peace through unmatched might. Yet they resist. It grieves me that extinction is so often the answer. I pity them for their ignorance, but admire them for the fact they will die for their way of life.’

‘That is not admirable. That’s moronic. They would rather die being wrong than learn to embrace change.’

‘I never said it was intelligent. I said it grieved me to reave a world clean of life because of ignorance.’

Torgal mused on this, but not for very long. ‘But they’re wrong,’ he said.

‘We were wrong once, too.’ The Chapter Master held up a gauntleted fist to make the point: it was crimson, where it would once have been grey. ‘We were wrong when we worshipped the Emperor.’

Torgal had shaken his head. ‘We were wrong, and we adapted rather than be annihilated. I do not see the source of your grievance, brother.’

‘What if we could convince them? What if the flaw is with us, that we merely lack the words to win them to our side? We are butchering our own species.’

‘We are culling the herd.’

‘Forget I mentioned it,’ the Chapter Master conceded. ‘You are right, of course.’

Torgal would not be moved. ‘Do not mourn idiocy, brother. They are offered the truth and they have refused. If we had resisted the truth unto destruction, then we would have deserved our fate, just as these fools deserve theirs.’

Argel Tal hadn’t tried again. A treacherous and unworthy thought plagued him in those grimmest moments – how much of his brothers’ unquestioning belief was born of their own hearts, and how much was bred into them by their gene-seed? How many souls had he consigned to destruction himself, silently urged into bloodshed by sorcerous genetics?

Some questions had no answers.

Reluctant to burden Cyrene with his own troubles when she already served as confessor for hundreds of Astartes and Euchar soldiers, the only other time he’d spoken of his unease was with the one soul he knew he needed to guard against.

Aquillon understood.

He understood because he felt the same, sharing Argel Tal’s subtle lament at the need to destroy entire empires simply because their leaders were blind to the realities of the galaxy.

The latest world to earn destruction was called Calis by its inhabitants, and 1301-20 by the 1301st Expeditionary Fleet. A planetwide invasion was in the making even as Calis’s primitive orbital defences fell, burning, back into the atmosphere.

The population was sentenced to destruction on account of their dealing with xenos breeds. The purestrain human biological code of Calis’s citizens had been unalterably corrupted by the introduction of alien genetics. The people of the world below would not surrender the exact details to the Imperium, but it was clear from blood samples that the Calisians had cultured alien deoxyribonucleic acid into their own cells at some point in time.

‘Most likely to cure hereditary or degenerative disease,’ Torvus suggested. But the reason was meaningless. Such deviation could not be tolerated.

General Jesmetine’s Euchar regiments were tasked with taking hold of twelve major cities across Calis’s scarce landmasses, each with support from several Astartes squads.

The capital city – a sprawl of industrial decay by the name of Crachia – was also the seat of the planetary ruler, who claimed the evidently hereditary title of ‘psychopomp’.

It was this woman, Psychopomp Shal Vess Nalia IX, that had rebuffed the Word Bearers’ emissaries. And it was this woman, swollen with corpulence, who had signed her culture’s death warrant.

‘Leave the capital untouched,’ Argel Tal had informed Baloc Torvus at the preceding war council. ‘I will release the Gal Vorbak upon Crachia and take their queen’s head myself.’

The fleetmaster had nodded. ‘And what of the remembrancers? They’ve barely been with us a fortnight, yet already I’m suffering hourly beseeching from their representatives, begging that they be allowed to witness an assault.’

The Crimson Lord shook his head. ‘Ignore them. We are conquering a world, Baloc, not nursemaiding tourists.’

Baloc Torvus had grown deeply patient in his advancing age, which was one of the fleetmaster’s many virtues that his men admired and his fellow commanders relied upon. Argel Tal saw the beginnings of cracks in that ironclad facade now, showing in the lines around the ageing man’s eyes, and the way he adjusted his white cloak to calm himself before replying.

‘With respect, lord–’

Argel Tal raised a hand in warning. ‘Don’t fall into formalities just because you disagree with me.’

‘With respect, Argel Tal, I have been ignoring them on your behalf since their arrival, and for over a year before that. I have mouthed platitudes and composed missives refusing them access to the fleet, citing a hundred and more reasons that it would be inappropriate, impossible, or impractical to deal with them. Now they are here, and they come equipped with Imperial seals from the Sigillite himself, demanding that they be allowed to record the Great Crusade. Short of shooting them – and don’t think I can’t see that smile – how am I to continue delaying them?’

Argel Tal chuckled, the first break in his foul mood the fleetmaster had seen today. Whatever news the returning Chaplain had brought, it was not sitting well with the Chapter Master. ‘I see your point. How many have joined the fleet?’

Torvus consulted a data-slate. ‘One hundred and twelve.’

‘Very well. Make them choose ten. We’ll take them down with us in the first wave, and give them a minimal Army escort from the Euchars. The rest can follow once the landing zones are secure.’

‘What if they encounter significant opposition?’

‘Then they die.’ The Crimson Lord made to leave the room. ‘I do not care, either way.’

Torvus took several seconds to make sure Argel Tal wasn’t joking.

‘By your word.’

TWENTY-TWO

An Idea

Brothers

The Ordained Hour

Ishaq was faintly concerned that he was going to die down here, but that wouldn’t stop him enjoying it while it lasted.

The other remembrancers whined on and on, badgering their Echuar aides about where would be best to observe the battle without actually getting anywhere near it. Apparently they’d forgotten the honour of getting sent down here shortly after first setting foot on solid ground. Most of them seemed dedicated to completely missing the whole point of making planetfall in the first place, but that was fine by Ishaq. He wasn’t here to babysit their careers.

The ride down to the surface had been an uneventful drift through the afternoon sky – anticlimactic after all the tension of being selected, and boring enough for Ishaq to start wondering if there was really a war going on at all. The limited view from the dirty window had revealed a distant city of obviously human construction below.

Strange, to consider waging war against such a familiar scene.

Their lander was an Army troop transport, a shaking, rattling example of the ancient Greywing-class shuttles that he’d assumed were out of service these days, replaced by the smaller, sleeker Valkyries. Ishaq had looked at the boxy underslung compartment where the thirty passengers were evidently supposed to travel. He’d looked at the sloping wings, ran a gloved hand over the armour plating, pockmarked from battle and painted with faded lightning bolts from the Emperor’s Unification Wars on Terra two centuries before.

And he’d fallen in love.

He snapped several picts of the venerable old girl, pleased with each and every one of them.

‘What’s her name?’ he asked the pilot, who was standing around with the two dozen Army soldiers on the hangar deck and looking just as annoyed.

‘They didn’t name them back when she was made. Too many, produced too fast, by too few facilities.’

‘I see. So what do you call her?’ He pointed at the faint, stencilled print along the hull: E1L-IXII-8E22.

The man thawed a touch at Kadeen’s interest. ‘Elizabeth. We call her Elizabeth.’

‘Sir,’ Ishaq grinned. ‘Permission to come aboard your fine lady.’

So it’d started well. Once they were down, things took a turn for the worse. The officer in nominal command of their expedition wasn’t an officer at all – he was a Euchar sergeant who’d drawn the short straw and had to babysit the gaggle of pretension and nervousness that made up ten highly-strung artists in a warzone.

Ishaq half-listened to the sergeant arguing with a handful of the other remembrancers about just where would be acceptable for them to enter the city. He was already bored, standing on the edge of a rise about three kilometres from the city limits. The place itself looked no different from any industrialised sprawl on Terra, and there weren’t even any obvious signs of battle.

The nature of Astartes assault presented a problem for the people attempting chronicle the event. A direct drop-pod attack against the palace meant the remembrancers had to cross an entire hostile city alone, or would remain outside the city limits and ultimately witness nothing at all. The former was never going to happen. The latter almost definitely was.

Ishaq Kadeen was a naturally suspicious soul, and he felt a bleak sense of humour behind all this. Someone, perhaps even the Crimson Lord himself, was making fun of them all. Inviting them down here, but keeping them tediously safe and out of the way.

He trudged over to his minders: two men in the neat ochre uniforms of the Euchar 81st. Each of the remembrancers was similarly guarded. Ishaq’s own sentinels looked both bored and annoyed all at once, which was quite a feat for human facial expressions.

‘What if we just flew over to the palace?’ he suggested.

‘And get shot down?’ The Euchar was practically spitting. ‘That piece of shit would catch fire and fall out of the sky as soon as it came into range of the anti-air guns.’

With effort, Ishaq kept his smile cordial. ‘Then fly really, really high, and come down sharp on top of the palace. Then find somewhere to land.’ He demonstrated this feat of aeronautics with his hands. They didn’t seem convinced.

‘Not happening,’ one of them said.

Ishaq turned without another word, heading back into the dark confines of the Greywing’s passenger pod. When he emerged again, he had a plastek personal grav-chute pack tucked under one arm, clearly taken from the overhead storage lockers.

‘Then how about this? We fly really damn high, and anyone who actually wants to do their job can jump out and do it.’

The two soldiers shared a glance, and called their sergeant over.

‘What is it?’ the sergeant asked. His face painted enough of a picture: he needed another whining artist like he needed a hole in his head.

‘This one,’ the soldier pointed at Ishaq. ‘He’s had an idea.’

It took twenty minutes for the idea to become reality, and Ishaq regretted it right about the same time he jumped out of the gunship and started falling.

Below him sprawled the white-stone palace, like something from Ancient Hellas in Terra’s decadent past. It was coming up to meet him with surprising speed, while the wind was doing its best to beat him unconscious.

This, he thought, may have been a mistake.

He tapped the switches on his chest buckle that would engage the grav-chute. First one, then the other. First one, then the other.

‘Wait twenty seconds before you switch it on,’ the sergeant had said to the few of them that were making the drop. ‘Twenty seconds. Understood?’

Wait twenty seconds.

The wind roared against him, and the ground swelled below. Was he going to be sick? He hoped not. The queasiness in his stomach flipped and bubbled. Ugh.

Wait twenty seconds.

No sign of anti-air fire, at least. He could make out a spot among one of the inner courtyards – a blackened stain where a red drop-pod had beached itself. That was a good place to start.

Wait twenty seconds.

How... How long had he been falling?

Oh, shit.

Ishaq looked up, through bleary goggles he could see his two minders above. Both were far, far higher than him, shrinking all the while. Even smaller, above them both, were the others who’d caught onto his plan and given it enough credence to come with him.

He flicked the switches, first the blue, then the red. For several moments, absolutely nothing happened. Ishaq continued his plummeting death-dive, too surprised to even swear. He started flicking the switches in random panic, little realising that by doing so he wasn’t giving it time to warm up and engage.

The grav-chute finally kicked in hard enough to wrench the muscles in his neck, its gravity suspensors humming as they came alive. The late activation saved Ishaq from becoming a red smear along the wall of a palace tower, but he paid the price for distraction. Laughing with terror, he careened off the stone parapet, bouncing, giggling and trying not to soil himself as he tumbled through the air.