by Guy Haley
Ku’Gath drew up his saggy chest. ‘I am working towards the aims of Grandfather. Why, our entire scheme here is to bring these disgustingly clean worlds into the garden, and cultivate them as new beds of rot and glory. I–’
Once again, Rotigus interrupted him.
‘Don’t lie to yourself, you follow Mortarion’s plan because you want the Grandfather to forgive you for being born. When, really, all that’s happened is that you’ve let yourself get sucked into mortal obsessions.’
‘He’s a daemon!’
‘Pfft,’ said Rotigus dismissively. ‘Only half. You have lost sight of the bigger picture. You want to be careful. All plagues wax and wane, Ku’Gath Plaguefather. Could it be that your time is coming to an end, and mine is beginning? I am feeling most excellently contagious.’
Ku’Gath scowled. ‘If you are so mighty, why do you not lend your strength to us here?’
Rotigus examined his fingernails, scowled at them, pulled one free, popped it into his mouth and crunched on it.
‘I might, I might. But I am busy on other worlds, on other planes, in other places. Severally, in matter of fact. I have none of my being to spare for this conflict. Besides, why would I wish to steal your thunder?’
‘Then why are you here, if you are so occupied, dear Rotigus?’ said Ku’Gath with a vast and insincere smile. ‘Best be away, not to trouble yourself with our little war.’
‘Oh it’s no trouble at all!’ said Rotigus. ‘I am always happy to make time for the first in Nurgle’s favour. Though you better work harder if you wish to maintain the position.’ He wagged his finger admonishingly. ‘All things grow and die, Ku’Gath. Reputation too, and Grandfather’s love. I am second in his favour. For how much longer shall you remain first? You never know, I could be getting a promotion.’
The sky rumbled like a dyspeptic gut. Fat drops of rain plopped into the cauldron.
‘Rain, eh?’ said Rotigus with a grin. ‘I thought that my signature. They do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.’ Rotigus looked out over the stinking marshland. ‘I suppose I should feel very flattered indeed.’ He winked. ‘Until later, oh Ku’Gath, currently first in his favour.’
So saying, Rotigus sank beneath the surface. Fat bubbles welled up and popped in the cauldron. Ku’Gath thrust his hand into the mix, and searched about for his rival, but Rotigus had gone.
‘Flattery,’ said Ku’Gath. ‘Indeed!’ His mood worsened further when he gave his hand an experimental lick and found that Rotigus had been right: the pox was better.
Grumbling about the iniquities of life, Ku’Gath Plaguefather took up his paddle and began stirring again. His efforts were at first fast, driven by annoyance, but as he stirred, he thought, and as he thought, he slowed.
‘Hmmm,’ he said to himself. ‘I wonder if Mortarion knows? Surely, he must.’
He didn’t really wish to speak with the primarch, but they were allied, and he could not make the assumption he did know, he realised.
‘Oh botheration,’ he said, and reluctantly tickled the fungal infestation on his thigh that would call up the Mycota Profundis.
A short while later, he conferred with the ex-mortal, the half-son, dratted Mortarion, and discovered that he knew all about the invasion, and that he was quite piqued by it all. But the news he had made things even worse.
Typhus, Mortarion’s truculent lieutenant, had abandoned their war, and was leaving Ultramar.
Chapter Five
UPON THE NATURE OF GODS
‘It was not wise, what we did,’ said Donas Maxim.
Guilliman gave him a hard stare.
‘No,’ said Guilliman. ‘But it was necessary.’
‘To interrogate daemons is to invite them in. It does not matter that you destroyed the beast afterward. And the blade you carry, do not think it will protect you from the slow poisons of the warp, my lord. We are taught this by rote and rod in our Librarius, according to texts you set down. Why did you ask us to perform this act of daemonology? We are not sorcerers. Will you make them of us?’
They spoke in Guilliman’s library, his most sacred sanctum. Guilliman had removed the Armour of Fate, though it physically pained him to do so. Like Maxim, he wore a tunic and trousers. The primarch’s clothes were ultramarine blue to Maxim’s forest green, and unlike Maxim’s heavily embroidered garb, Guilliman wore no decoration besides the buckle stamped with the ultima that fastened his belt. As usual, he sat at his desk, working while he talked.
Maxim watched the primarch closely. He could feel the pain in him. Not only from the wound across his neck, which ached still, nor the nick it had cut in his spirit, but also a deeper hurt, buried beneath pragmatism and duty; a sense of loss, a sense of loneliness, broadcast so potently from that engineered soul it pressed on Maxim’s consciousness as hard as a gauntleted finger grinding against a wall. Speaking with the primarch was as taxing as any metaphysical battle.
‘I will not make you sorcerers,’ said Guilliman. ‘I seized the moment. We are running out of time. Tjejren’s daemonhost was there, available.’
‘Expediency has damned many noble spirits, my lord.’
‘Has it damned you, Donas? Your knowledge of the esoteric brought you into my service. You were close to censure yourself.’
‘We are all damned, my lord,’ said Maxim. ‘But if I am lost to the warp, it would be a lesser blow to the Imperium than if you were. I urge you, be careful.’
‘As always, I value your forthrightness, Codicier Maxim,’ said Guilliman. ‘It is why I retain you on the Concilia, but the matter is done. I have what I need. I will not pursue the same course of action again, if it sets your mind to rest.’
‘A little,’ admitted Maxim. ‘I have known others who have taken similar chances. None have escaped harm entirely.’
‘You are right to be concerned. I lost more than one brother who thought they could master such beings. They could not, and I know I cannot. Now, I must speak with you of other things.’
‘Gladly.’
Guilliman paused. ‘I must also ask for your utmost discretion. What I am about to tell you will be shocking.’
‘I am intrigued, for I am not easily shocked.’
‘Trust me, you will be,’ said the primarch. ‘There is another whose counsel I seek on this matter. Please, take a seat.’
He gestured to a chair made for transhuman stature by a table that was low enough for a mortal man to use. Maxim took it. Guilliman called down a cyber-construct and sent it away to bring in refreshments, and then activated a vox-unit set into the wall near his desk.
‘Send in our guest.’
Illiyanne Natasé entered, dressed in soft black robes with a high neck, long gloves and his ever-present charms, though he too bore no physical armour. Guilliman bade him sit also. Maxim had killed several aeldari psykers in his time. Although farseers were mighty with the warp, they lacked the brute martial power of a Space Marine Librarian.
Natasé glanced at him haughtily as he took his seat, letting Maxim understand that he knew what Maxim was thinking.
‘My lord primarch, Librarian,’ he said. ‘What manner of inadvisable peril am I to be embroiled in today?’
‘You are insolent, xenos, for a lone seer surrounded by the might of humanity,’ said Maxim.
‘Do you expect me to be your friend, murderer of my kin, or scared of you?’ said Natasé, not deigning to look at Maxim. ‘I am neither.’
‘You are our ally,’ said Guilliman. ‘Please, Donas, show him respect.’
‘No disrespect was intended,’ said Maxim. ‘I merely wished to know why our ambassador here thinks it suitable to openly display his hostility. It is an unwise action from such a wise being.’
‘We have a surfeit of such actions at the moment,’ said Guilliman meaning-fully.
Natasé hunched forward, and laced his fingers t
ogether, a most un-aeldari-like posture. He fixed the floor with his black eyes, as if addressing a confession to it.
‘I will tell you why. If you were to ask my people, they would say I was sour, like a young wine.’
‘Is that a compliment, or an insult?’ asked Maxim.
‘Neither. Both. Your language is unbelievably crude.’ Natasé gave a cruel smile. ‘Take that word, “unbelievably”, for example, that I employed just now, a word that does not mean what it means when I use it, and as no fine metaphor, but as crude hyperbole to reinforce an obvious statement, and grant it a little impact. Your speech is insipid. To convey what is meant by me being a “young wine” in your tongue would take dozens of your words. For us, two suffices, and both are rich with meaning that you cannot comprehend.’
Maxim pulled a face of mock offence. ‘Did you summon the alien to give us a lecture on linguistics, my lord?’
‘You jest, but your wit is as blunt as your mind,’ said Natasé. He sighed. He seemed a little shrunken. ‘I shall be blunt. Spending time with your people is hard for one of my sensibilities. The smell, for a start, and the food! A few months with Prince Yriel the Reborn was a blessed relief.’ He raised his gaze from the floor. ‘It is your minds that press hardest on me. Lumpen, open to corruption. You are not a stupid people, but you are unsophisticated, as like to we aeldari as the orks are unto you. So I apologise if my manners seem abrupt, but your company is almost unbearable.’
‘Eldrad Ulthran chose the most diplomatic of his comrades to advise us,’ said Maxim.
‘You see?’ said Natasé, appealing to Guilliman.
‘I understand,’ said Guilliman calmingly. ‘If it would soothe you, I can release you from your mission and send you back to your home. You have aided me on many occasions, and shall depart with all due honour.’
‘Do not tempt me,’ said Natasé. ‘A decade of your years I have been with you, and they have seemed an eternity. Each moment brings another lick of tedium.’ He scowled. ‘It is a wonder I have remained sane. But I must stay with you. That was Eldrad Ulthran’s command to me, and I swore to obey. Although I may be a young wine, I keep my word.’
‘If it’s that bad, I can see why he did not come himself,’ said Maxim.
Natasé grinned, a savage expression. ‘Now you begin to understand. In any case, Ulthwé lies across the Rift. Maybe when we cross it, I will leave you and return.’
‘You could open up your webway to us, master seer,’ said Maxim. ‘The return would be quicker.’
‘Quite impossible,’ said Natasé. ‘War afflicts the web. Since their awakening, the necrontyr have penetrated it, and Chaos rules supreme in many branches. Even were it not so, taking a force of this size through the way is impossible in this diminished era. In the days of my ancestors, perhaps, but not now.’
‘Transit across the Rift is not what we are here to discuss,’ said Guilliman. ‘That lies in our future.’
Some of the primarch’s servants arrived, summoned by the cyber-construct, bringing with them meat and drink. They placed them on the table.
‘Go, I will attend to my guests personally,’ Guilliman told them when they began to serve the wine. ‘I am not to be disturbed.’
The servants withdrew.
‘Engage full privacy field,’ Guilliman said. Somewhere beneath the library, a fresh hum joined the endless thrumming of machines, and faded away, taking with it all the mumblings of the vessel. The library fell silent. Even the vibrations of the engines seemed to have stilled, so that Maxim felt like they floated, alone, in a vault of knowledge cast adrift between the stars. For a moment, he thought of the Librarius on Firestorm, and wondered how the Chapter planet fared.
There was a box on Guilliman’s desk. He picked this up and joined his guests at the lower table, where he put it down and opened the lid, revealing the pale blue gleam of a stasis field. He pushed the box towards them. There was a book inside, and upon its cover was the title, Lectitio Divinitatus.
Guilliman poured wine while they looked at it.
‘The central text of the Imperial Cult?’ said Maxim.
‘Yes,’ said Guilliman. ‘That is what it is.’
‘This is old,’ said Natasé. ‘Other than that I fail to see the significance of this book. As the Librarian says, this is the text of your people’s religion, the one you do not follow yourself, but hold in contempt.’
‘Correct,’ said Guilliman. ‘But only partially.’
He passed out goblets to Maxim and Natasé. Maxim drank his in a single draught. Natasé sniffed his disdainfully.
‘A young wine?’ asked Maxim.
‘A bad one,’ said Natasé. He drank it anyway.
‘May I?’ said Maxim, gesturing at the book. ‘It seems more than old, it seems ancient.’
‘I sense it is several thousand years old – that is old, not ancient, to me. Age is a matter of perspective,’ said Natasé haughtily.
Maxim turned off the stasis field and picked up the book. The cover was a flaking, light brown leather. The bottom right corner was stained darker by skin oils. Maxim opened it, and examined the first lines.
‘Very ancient. I can barely read this. It is Gothic, but archaic in the extreme.’
‘You have read the central texts of the Adeptus Ministorum?’ asked Guilliman. He took a drink of the wine. The goblet he used was heroically sized, a mythic horn of plenty.
‘Of course,’ said Maxim. ‘It is mostly nonsense, so our Chapter cult says.’
‘There is some truth in it,’ said Guilliman. ‘Fragments of history in an age where history has been suppressed. The current scriptures are the work of thousands of hands. Nothing in this carcass of an empire has survived the years intact, certainly not the truth, and the Lectitio Divinitatus is no exception. It has been meddled with, redacted, added to, and retold so many times that what is real and what is not is impossible to tease apart. But this particular volume is different. This is a copy of the very first scripture.’ He looked at Maxim gravely. The information he was about to impart was doubtless known to Natasé, but would be news to any human. ‘It was written by my brother Lorgar.’
‘What?’ said Maxim. ‘The traitor primarch?’
Guilliman nodded. ‘The originator of the Imperial Cult was one of my brothers. Indeed, it was the Emperor’s spurning of Lorgar’s worship that sent him looking for other, more amenable gods. Terrible, yes?’ he said. He poured himself more wine.
‘You do not react. You knew this,’ Maxim said to Natasé.
The aeldari gave a subtle nod that managed to express every variation of self-satisfaction. ‘The identity of the author is known to my people.’
‘For want of a better word, this is the Lectitio Divinitatus in its purest form, or as near as is possible,’ said Guilliman. ‘I have had the material dated and psy-read. This particular book is around eight thousand years old, and so was printed less than a millennium after the Heresy.’
Guilliman paused. He drank more wine. Maxim thought he seemed disturbed.
‘I have recently read it. I never did so in my prior life, in fact I made a point of not reading it to show my scorn, and I tried my best to have every copy burned. I was too naive to see that it was too late. The cult was growing. Faith had taken root, and in such barren soil, I thought.’
He refilled Maxim’s goblet. Natasé placed a graceful hand over the cup when offered more.
‘The Emperor smashed every idol He came across. He threw down churches and temples, even the meanest shaman’s hut was burned to the ground. We were commanded to destroy every sign of religion we found. Iterators stood in the ashes of belief and spread the Imperial Truth. The Emperor would brook no cult but that of reason.’ Guilliman laughed. ‘To think I believed it all.’
‘My lord?’ asked Maxim, cautious now of Guilliman’s rancour.
‘Do not worry yourself,
Donas,’ said Guilliman. ‘I merely mean that reason is a faith of its own, with its own traps and heresies. I have not fallen into worship. Lorgar’s arguments are persuasive, but are built on several fallacies for all that. The Emperor said Himself that He was no god, over and over again. You should have seen Him when He commanded me to punish Lorgar. His anger was no sham. I cannot see any situation in which He would be happy with the way the Imperium has turned out.’
‘Then why show me?’ asked Maxim. ‘Why have you burdened me with this secret. Why not Lord Tigurius, or another, higher mind?’
‘You are here. I wish to discuss it now. You are most appropriate,’ said Guilliman. ‘Do you need another reason for my confidence?’
Maxim bowed his head in wonder, and put the book down. ‘This information is explosive. If you could get anyone to believe it.’
‘Your species is fractious. Someone would believe,’ said Natasé. ‘You are correct, it is damaging.’
‘Then my question is even more pressing,’ said Maxim. ‘Why?’
‘There have been many events that have occurred since I returned that make me question my assumptions. I wish to speak with you both on the nature of godhood,’ said Guilliman.
‘Should you not ask a priest?’ said Maxim, half joking to cover his discomfort.
‘I have had more than my fill of priests,’ said Guilliman. ‘I have no psychic ability. This world around us…’ He gestured around the hall. ‘It is the only one I can perceive. I am aware of the warp, I respect its power, and understand it better than I ever did, but it is not in my nature to comprehend it completely. You have many abilities, Maxim. Natasé, your people is far older than ours, and you know much, should you choose to share.’