The First Heretic Read online

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

  ‘Dust and dead rock,’ said Malnor.

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

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

  ‘Yes. Someone is alive out there.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Who’s there?’ she called.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The Word Bearer withdrew his offered hand.

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

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

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

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

  ‘Please don’t kill me.’

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

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

  Argel Tal looked down into her blinded eyes.

  ‘Please tell me,’ she repeated.

  ‘Grey.’

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

  FIVE

  The Old Ways

  The Soul’s Fuel

  New Eyes

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

  The Last War – the conflict to end all conflict.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘You always taught us, sire–’

  ‘Speak, Erebus.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘They hold true,’ said the Chaplain.

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

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

  The paternal love for an aggrieved son.

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

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

  The older man nodded. ‘I do.’

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

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

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

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

  Lorgar turned to meet Kor Phaeron’s eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Lorgar lowered his gaze.

  ‘Even Magnus?’ he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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