The Trials Of Isador

by C. S. Goto

  Not unlike the falsely-cursed Prospero, Cyrene was a planet with well-developed nascent psykers and communes of sorcery. It was a place of wonder. But rather than utilising his power to save the souls of his homeworld and the knowledge that they cherished, Gabriel reacted to this realisation with fear and loathing, summoning the Exterminatus and razing the planet to the ground. He did not have the courage to stand up for a truth that even the Emperor could not understand or condone. Can there be any greater sense of stupidity, impotence or irresponsibility? Had he been willing to pay the price of excommunication in the name of truth, he should have made a stand that might have led to him being branded a heretic and a traitor. But he lacked the vision. Unlike the short-sighted fool, I am willing to be misunderstood—indeed, I am now resigned to it. But knowledge is power, and I must guard it well.

  There seemed to be some logic and reason in Isador’s words, but they stung Gabriel’s eyes as he read them. There was something so profoundly wrong with the sentiments of the text that they caused him physical pain. Even worse, he was struggling to understand where Isador’s argument was flawed. Like Magnus at the notorious “Hearing of the Thousands”, about which all Blood Ravens of command rank were taught, Isador’s words were eloquent and persuasive without necessarily being right. There was an important distinction to be made between having the power to convince others of the truth of your knowledge, and actually have the power of knowing the truth. One of the things that all commanders of the Blood Ravens were trained to do was to intuit precisely this distinction, and Gabriel could feel the signs of clever persuasion masking the truth in Isador’s words.

  Pushing the book away from him, as though its very presence obstructed his clarity of mind, Gabriel sat back into his chair and closed his eyes. He concentrated, trying to recall what he had been told about the events that Isador had narrated from the reports of Prothius. So adhesive were Isador’s clever words that it took him several minutes to cleanse his thoughts and to remember what he would have taken as absolute truth only an hour earlier. Even then, the horror of Isador’s blasphemies about the Emperor’s character still lingered in the shadows of his mind. He had never heard anyone dare to give voice to such thoughts before, and for the first time in his life he thought that he could understand a glimmer of what it might have been like to have lived through the terrible days of the Heresy itself.

  It was true, recalled Gabriel, that the “Hearing of the Thousands”, as it was referred to in the archives of the Blood Ravens, had become perceived as a legal and moral trial regarding the rectitude of psychic powers and sorcery. One side had argued that there was nothing inherently evil about any kinds of knowledge, and that the problem lay only in the uses to which it was put. This was a defence of the right to scholarship and inquiry into the sorcerous arts, as well as an assertion that certain Space Marines were more than capable of harnessing such knowledge for the good of the Imperium. The logic dictated that depriving the legions of these resources would effectively deprive the Imperium of its greatest powers. It is conjectured in the “Apocrypha of Haidyes” that a variation on the slogan that would eventually become the maxim of the Blood Ravens, “Knowledge is power, and we should seek it relentlessly,” was employed during the Hearing, although its source is not identified.

  The other side of the debate insisted that psychic powers were inherently unstable and that because not everyone with such powers might also display the kind of strength of will required to control them properly, their use should be tightly controlled and delimited.

  The Librarians and Marines of the Blood Ravens had discussed this debate over and over again, trying to understand the significance and meaning of its various possible outcomes, as well as its actual historical outcome all those millennia before. The debate was part of their heritage and an essential problematic at the heart of their identity—all Blood Ravens would be exposed to elements of the discussion during their hypno-conditioning.

  According to the Ravonicum Rex, an ancient and possibly apocryphal text that was kept under guard in the deepest recesses of the Librarium Sanatorium aboard the Omnis Arcanum, there were those amongst the Gathering of the Thousands that had sought compromise, seeing the merits of each side of the intractable debate. The relevant sections of the Ravonicum had remained hotly debated within the lore of the Blood Ravens, despite the mysteriousness of their origins. Vidya himself makes reference to them in his classic text, Pax Psykana. Vidya’s text alludes to the existence of a complete copy of the Ravonicum that vanished during the attack of the eldar Harlequins at the raid of Quarab.

  As he considered the conventional lore of his Chapter, Gabriel finally realised the critical logical perversion of Isador’s argument: it rested upon the dismissal of the Emperor. For Isador, there was a level of knowledge and truth that transcended not only the person of the Emperor himself, but even transcended the Emperor’s comprehension. Hence, Isador’s argument rested upon the assertion that he was not only the equal but actually superior to the Emperor. This was the worst kind of heresy.

  Furthermore, Isador’s position de-recognised the function of wisdom, law and duty in the Imperium. In other words, it ignored the question of responsibility. Isador neglected the possibility that the Emperor was fully aware of the powers that he was depriving his children, but that his superior wisdom told him that even the minds of the primarchs could not hope to withstand such terrible pressures and temptations for long.

  How much less so could the minds of Librarians, Space Marines, or normal humans? Laws cannot accommodate exceptions, and so the Edicts of Nikaea were promulgated for the good of the whole Imperium—to prevent the weak from damaging themselves and others, all members of the Imperium, including those who might be strong enough to cope with them, would be forbidden from certain designations of knowledge. It then became a matter of duty and responsibility for the primarchs and the Legions to uphold these Edicts as law. To fail to do so, even in the name of greater knowledge and power, would be to undermine the fabric of the Emperor’s Imperium itself.

  “Duty before all else,” muttered Gabriel to himself. Out of all the Chapters of Space Marines, the Blood Ravens had a special reason to embrace this truism, he reflected, letting his mind shift back to the screaming faces of Cyrene that still haunted his dreams. That is why our Chapter Masters insist on a mixture of Marines and Librarians in the command structure.

  “I did my duty,” he murmured. “The Blood Ravens did not seek to save our tainted homeworld through the exercise of great power. We cleansed it in the name of the Great Father and the Emperor, just as we did on Tartarus.

  “We might have sought to harness the innate power of the nascent psykers and the mutants there, cultivating them into powerful warriors, as legend tells us once happened on Prospero. However, that would have been a perversion, a heresy: knowledge and power before all else, pursued relentlessly. To act in this way would be a dereliction of duty. It would be a failure of responsibility. It would have been wrong.

  “Knowledge is power, so it must be guarded well and given the respect of wisdom and duty.

  “I have exterminated my own homeworld—the homeworld of Isador and of the Great Father himself. And I did so out of pristine duty. That is why the Emperor’s Astronomican soars into my mind, confirming my place at the shoulder of Vidya in the shimmering tones of the silver choir. I enact their will, not my own.”

  Flicking over to the last page of Isador’s report once again, Gabriel gazed down at the words that had horrified him only hours before:

  That fool Gabriel has no idea what’s happening on this blessed world. He thinks that the approaching warp storm is to be feared, and that the artefacts we have found must be destroyed. Such blindness. How much will this stupidity cost us? How far can I permit this to go?

  Even if the others cannot, I can see the mania in his eyes, and I know the secrets of the voices that he hides from us, those that sing into his soul in the guise of the sacred choir. He cannot conceal t
hese silvering tones from me. For I hear them too, but I know their nature and I know that the Emperor has not blessed them. This is the difference between my old friend and me: I can tell the difference between truth and lies, for my soul has been wrought and tested in the secret fires of the great Librarium Sanatorium, and yet it is the bumbling, ignorant captain that leads our Company into error and stupidity.

  Reading through those words again, Gabriel could not help but feel the horror of their power once more. He was sure that Isador had gone insane, tempted out of his right-mind by the whispered seductions of daemons, vanity, and promises of secret knowledge. And yet, interlaced and curdled through the complicated text Gabriel could sense threads of truth and flickers of light.

  As he stared at the page, his mind flashed with images of the daemon that he had unleashed from the Maledictum on Tartarus. It had taunted him with its gratitude, calling him its herald rather than its vanquisher, as though he had been guided through his actions like some kind of puppet. And the thoughts of the eldar farseer had riddled his mind, competing with the daemon in its ridicule of his weakness of will. And then there were the screaming faces of Cyrene, coagulating and gyring through his waking dreams, like razor-wire being stirred through his brain. Somehow, Gabriel knew that Isador must be right that there were important connections between these haunting visions that he could neither comprehend nor even admit to anyone else. Despite everything, Gabriel found himself wishing that Isador was still with him.

  With a nod of resolution, Gabriel withdrew his pistol from its harness and took careful aim. The shell seared cleanly through the cable that supported the lighting-orb over the desk. He watched it fall, as though in slow motion, seeing the complicated array of filaments and flames inside it begin to splutter and fade through its descent. Then, in an explosion of glass and gas, the orb crashed down onto Isador’s book. For a fraction of a second the room plunged into darkness, but then a residual spark ignited the ballooning gas and the book erupted into flames.

  As he watched the complicated and dangerous journal burn into cinders before him, Gabriel gazed into the flames, letting his eyes fixate as his mind continued to race with everything that he had just read. And, as the flames started to fade, his mind began to calm. A single, distant voice started to sing with exquisite precision and metallic coolness. After a few seconds, the voice was all that he could see and hear, echoing and resounding through his mind like a refracted star. Gradually, other voices joined the first, peppering his mind with points of starlight until his head seemed to encompass an entire galaxy. As he watched, the breathtaking vision began to swirl and tinge with red, and Gabriel knew that mysterious choir of voices was soaked through with blood and death. He did not know what it was, and he realised that Isador had been right about at least one thing: he feared what he did not understand.