Fulgrim

by Graham McNeill

  ‘And why not, captain?’ sneered Diederik. ‘We have discovered the source of the enemy’s fuel as Lord Manus ordered.’

  ‘I am aware of our orders, but without the warships of the fleets to back us up, the Diasporex will vanish once more.’

  Diederik appeared to consider this and said, ‘Then what do you suggest, captain?’

  Grateful that the Iron Father had deferred to his authority, Balhaan said, ‘We wait. We send word back to the fleets and gather as much information as we can without giving away our position.’

  ‘And then?’ asked Diederik, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of waiting.

  ‘Then we destroy them,’ said Balhaan, ‘and regain our honour.’

  THE ARCHIVE CHAMBERS of the Pride of the Emperor were spread over three long decks, the gilded shelves stacked high with texts from Old Earth. The manuscripts of this magnificent collection had been painstakingly collated by the 28th Expedition’s archivist, a meticulous man by the name of Evander Tobias. Over many years of study, Julius had come to know Tobias very well, and now made his way towards the old man’s sanctum in the vaulted nave of the upper archive decks.

  The marble columned stacks stretched out before him, a reverential hush filling the wide aisles with a solemnity befitting such a vast repository of knowledge. Tall pillars of green marble marched into the distance, and the shelves of dark wood bowed under the weight of scrolls, books and data crystals that filled the spaces between them.

  Julius made his way along the polished marble floor, floating glow-globes throwing his shadow out before him. He had stripped out of his armour, and wore combat fatigues, over which he had thrown a mail shirt emblazoned with the eagle of the Emperor’s Children.

  He saw the beige robes of remembrancers down many of the sub-aisles, and barefoot servitors carrying oversized panniers of books passed him without so much as a glance.

  In one of the open spaces of the archive chambers, he saw the distinctive blue hair of Bequa Kynska, and briefly considered pausing to speak with her. She sat at a wide desk strewn with music paper, her unbound hair wild and unkempt, and the headphones of a portable vox-thief clamped over her ears. Even from a distance, Julius could make out the strange music that had filled the Laer temple, the blaring sound rendered tinny and distant, though he knew it must surely be deafening in Bequa Kynska’s ears. Her hands alternated between scrawling frantically across the paper and flitting like birds as she appeared to conduct some invisible orchestra. She smiled as she worked, but there was something manic to her movements, as though the music within her might consume her were it not poured onto the page.

  So that is how genius works, thought Julius, deciding not to interrupt Mistress Kynska, and pressing onwards.

  It had been some time since he had come to the archive chambers, his duties and the cleansing of Laeran leaving him little time to indulge in reading, and he felt the absence keenly. He had come to reacquaint himself with this place, though he had left instructions with Lycaon to contact him should anything arise that required his attention.

  Numerous scribes and notaries passed him, each bowing deferentially to him as they went. He recognised some from his time spent here, most he did not, but just being back in the archive chambers gave him an enormous sense of wellbeing.

  He smiled as he saw the familiar form of Evander Tobias ahead of him, the venerable archivist haranguing a sheepish group of remembrancers for some infraction of his strict rules.

  The old man paused in his diatribe and looked up to see Julius approaching. He smiled warmly, and dismissed the wayward remembrancers with an imperious sweep of his hand. Dressed in a sober, dark robe of heavy cloth, Evander Tobias exuded an air of knowledge and respect that even the Astartes recognised. His bearing was regal, and Julius held a great affection for the venerable scholar.

  Evander Tobias had once been the greatest public speaker of Terra and had trained the first Imperial iterators. His role as the Primary Iterator of the Warmaster’s fleet had been assured, but the tragic onset of laryngeal cancer had paralysed his vocal chords and led to his retirement from the School of Iterators. In his place, Evander had recommended that his brightest and most able pupil, Kyril Sindermann, be sent to the Warmaster’s 63rd Expedition.

  It had been said that the Emperor himself had come to Evander Tobias’s sickbed and instructed his finest chirurgeons and cyberneticists to attend him, though the truth of this was known only to a few. Though capricious fate had taken his natural talents for oratory and enunciation from him, his throat and vocal chords had been reconstructed, and now Evander spoke with a soft, mechanical burr that had fooled many unsuspecting remembrancers into thinking of him as a grandfatherly old man without a vicious bite.

  ‘My boy,’ said Evander, reaching out to take Julius’s hands, ‘it has been too long.’

  ‘It has indeed, Evander,’ smiled Julius, nodding at the retreating remembrancers. ‘Are the children misbehaving again?’

  ‘Them? Pah, foolish youngsters,’ said Evander. ‘One would think that selection to become a remembrancer implies a certain robustness of character and level of intellect beyond that of a common greenskin. But these fools seem incapable of navigating their way around a perfectly simple system for the retrieval of data. It confounds me, and I fear for the quality of work that will be this expedition’s legacy with such simpletons to record the mighty deeds of the Crusade.’

  Julius nodded, though having seen Evander’s byzantine system of archiving, he could well understand the potential for confusion, having spent many a fruitless hour trying to unearth some nugget of information. Wisely, he decided to keep his own council on the subject, and said, ‘With you here to collate it, my friend, I am sure that our legacy is in safe hands.’

  ‘You are kind to say so, my boy,’ said Evander, tiny puffs of air soughing from the silver prosthetic at his throat.

  Julius smiled at his friend’s continued use of the phrase ‘my boy’, despite the fact that he was many years older than Evander. Thanks to the surgeries and enhancements that had been wrought upon Julius’s chassis of meat and bone to elevate him to the ranks of the Astartes, his physiology was functionally immortal, though it gave him great comfort to think of Evander as the fatherly figure he had never known on Chemos.

  ‘I am sure you did not come here to observe the quality or otherwise of the fleet’s remembrancers, did you?’ asked Tobias.

  ‘No,’ said Julius, as Tobias turned and made his way down the stacks of shelves.

  ‘Walk with me, my boy, it helps me think when I walk,’ he called over his shoulder.

  Julius followed the scholar, quickly catching up to him and then reducing his own strides in order not to outpace him.

  ‘I am guessing that there is something specific you are after, am I right?’

  Julius hesitated, still unsure of what he was looking for. The presence of what he had seen and felt in the temple of the Laer still squatted in his mind like a contagion, and he had decided that he must attempt to gain some understanding of it for, even though it had been vile and alien, there had been a horrific attraction to it all.

  ‘Perhaps,’ began Julius, ‘but I’m not sure exactly where I might find it, or even what to look for in the first place.’

  ‘Intriguing,’ said Tobias, ‘though if I am to assist you I will, obviously, require more to go on.’

  ‘You have heard about the Laer temple I assume?’ asked Julius.

  ‘I have indeed and it sounds like a terribly vile place, much too lurid for my sensibilities.’

  ‘Yes, it was like nothing I have ever seen before. I wanted to know more about such things, for I feel my thoughts returning to it time and time again.’

  ‘Why? What is it that so enamoured you of it?’

  ‘Enamoured me? No, that’s not what I meant at all,’ protested Julius, though the words sounded hollow, even to him, and he could see that Tobias saw the lie in them.

  ‘Maybe it is, then,’ admitted Julius
. ‘I don’t think I’ve felt anything similar, except when I have been enraptured by great art or poetry. My every sense was stimulated. Since then everything is grey and ashen to me. I take no joy in the things that once set my soul afire. I walk the halls of this ship, halls that are filled with the works of the greatest artists in the Imperium, and I feel nothing.’

  Tobias smiled and nodded. ‘Truly this temple must have been wondrous to have jaded people so.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You are not the first to come to my archives seeking knowledge of such things.’

  ‘No?’

  Tobias shook his head, and Julius saw the quiet amusement in his weathered features as he said, ‘A great many of those who saw the temple have come here seeking illumination as to what it was they felt within its walls: remembrancers, Army officers, Astartes. It seems to have made quite an impression. I almost wish I had taken the time to see it myself.’

  Julius shook his head, though the elderly archivist failed to see the gesture as he halted beside a shelf of leather-bound books with gold edging. The spines of the books were faded, and clearly none of them had been read since their placement on the shelf.

  ‘What are these?’ asked Julius.

  ‘These, my dear boy, are the collected writings of a priest who lived in an age before the coming of Old Night. He was called Cornelius Blayke; a man who was labelled a genius, a mystic, a heretic and a visionary, often all in the same day.’

  ‘He must have lived a colourful life,’ said Julius. ‘What did he write about?’

  ‘Everything I believe you are looking to understand, my dear boy,’ said Tobias. ‘Blayke believed that only through an abundance of experience could a man understand the infinite, and receive the great wisdom that came from following the road of excess. His works contain a rich mythology in which he worked to encode his spiritual ideas into a model for a new, unbridled age of experience and sensation. Some say he was a sensualist who depicted the struggle between indulgence of the senses and the restrictive morals of the authoritarian regime under which he lived. Others, of course, simply denounced him as a fallen priest and a libertine with delusions of grandeur.’

  Tobias reached up, pulled one of the books from the shelf and said, ‘In this book, Blayke speaks of his belief that humanity had to indulge in all things in order to evolve to a new state of harmony that would be more perfect than the original state of innocence from which he believed our race had sprung.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I think his belief that humanity could overcome the limitation of its five senses to perceive the infinite is wonderfully imaginative, though, of course, his philosophies were often thought of as degenerate. They involved… enthusiasms that were considered quite scandalous for the times. Blayke believed that those who restrained their desires did so only because they were weak enough to be restrained. He himself had no such compunctions.’

  ‘I can see why he was labelled a heretic.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Tobias, ‘though such a word has more or less fallen out of usage in the Imperium, thanks to the great works of the Emperor. Its etymological roots lie in the ancient languages of the Olympian Hegemony and it simply means a “choice” of beliefs. In the tract, Contra Haereses, the scholar Irenaeus describes his beliefs as a devout follower of a long dead god, beliefs that were later to became the orthodoxy of his cult and the cornerstone of a great many religions.’

  ‘How does that make it a misunderstood word?’ asked Julius.

  ‘Come, my dear boy, I thought I had taught you better than that,’ said Tobias. ‘By following the logic of Irenaeus, you must surely perceive that heresy has no purely objective meaning. The category exists only from the point of view of a position within any society that has previously defined itself as orthodox. Anyone who espouses views or actions that do not conform to that point of view can be perceived as heretics by others within those societies who are convinced that their view is orthodox. In other words, heresy is a value judgment, the expression of a view from within an established belief system. For instance, during the Wars of Unification, the Pan-Europan Adventists held the secular belief of the Emperor as a heresy, while the ancestor worshippers of the Yndonesic Bloc considered the rise to power of the despot Kalagann as a great apostasy.

  ‘So you see, Julius, for a heresy to exist there must be an authoritative system of dogma or belief designated as orthodox.’

  ‘So you’re saying there can never be heresy now, since the Emperor has shown the lie in the belief in false gods and corpse worshipers?’

  ‘Not at all; dogma and belief are not reliant on the predisposed belief in a godhead or the cloak of religion. They might simply be a regime or set of social values, such as we are bringing to the galaxy even now. To resist or rebel against that could easily be considered heresy, I suppose.’

  ‘Then why should I wish to read this man’s books? They sound dangerous.’

  Tobias waved his hands dismissively. ‘Not at all; as I often told my pupils at the School of Iterators, a truth that is told with bad intent will triumph over all the lies that can be invented, so it behoves us to know all truths and separate the good from the bad. When an iterator speaks the truth, it is not only for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but also to defend those that do.’

  Julius was about to ask more when the vox-bead crackled at his ear and he heard Lycaon’s excited voice.

  ‘Captain,’ said Lycaon, ‘you need to get back here.’

  Julius raised the vox-cuff to his mouth and said, ‘I’m on my way. What’s happened?’

  ‘We’ve found them,’ said Lycaon, ‘the Diasporex. You need to get back here right now.’

  ‘I will,’ said Julius, sensing something amiss in Lycaon’s words, even over the distortion of the vox. ‘Is there anything I should know?’

  ‘Best you come and see for yourself,’ replied Lycaon.

  FULGRIM ANGRILY PACED the length of his stateroom to the deafening sound of a dozen phonocasters. Each broadcast a different tune: booming orchestral scores, the thumping music of the low hive cavern tribes and, greater than them all, the music of the Laer temple.

  Each tune screamed in discord with the others, the sound filling his senses with wild imaginings and the promise of undreamt of possibilities.

  His temper simmered just below the surface at his brother’s actions, but there was nothing to do but wait to catch up with the 52nd Expedition. For Ferrus to have acted alone displayed a lack of respect that infuriated Fulgrim and threw his carefully laid plans for the Diasporex into disarray.

  The plan had been perfect and Ferrus was ruining everything.

  The thought surfaced swiftly and with such venom behind it that Fulgrim was shocked at its intensity. Yes, his beloved brother had acted impetuously, but he should have suspected that Ferrus would be unable to contain the Medusan rage that lay at his core.

  No, you did all you could to contain his rage. His impetuosity will be his undoing.

  Fulgrim felt a chill travel the length of his spine as the thought, one surely dragged from the darkest reaches of his being, surfaced in his head. Ferrus Manus was his brother primarch and, while there were those amongst their number that Fulgrim counted as close friends, there was no closer brotherhood than the bond between him and Ferrus.

  Ever since the victory on Laeran, Fulgrim’s thoughts had turned inwards to claw the furthest depths of his consciousness, dragging out an acid resentment he had not known existed. Each night as he lay on his silk bed, a voice whispered in his ear and ensnared him with dreams he never recalled and nightmares he could not forget. At first he had thought he was going mad, that some last, deceitful trick of the Laer had begun to unravel his sanity, but he had discounted such a notion as preposterous, for what could lay a perfect being such as a primarch low?

  Then he had wondered if he was receiving some astrotelepathic message from afar, though he knew of no psychic potential he possessed. M
agnus of Prospero had inherited their father’s gift of foresight and psychic potential, though it was a gift that had distanced him from his brothers, for none truly trusted that such a power was without price or consequence.

  At last he had come to accept that the voice was in fact a manifestation of his subconscious, a facet of his own mindscape that articulated the things he could not, and stripped away deceits the conscious mind created to protect it from the barriers society placed upon it.

  How many others could lay claim to such an honest counsellor as their own mind?

  Fulgrim knew he should make his way to the bridge, that his captains needed his direction and wisdom to guide them, for they looked to him in all things, and from him would come the direction and character of his Legion.

  Which is as it should be; what is this Legion but a manifestation of your will?

  Fulgrim smiled at the thought, reaching over to increase the volume on the phonocaster that played the music recorded within the Laer temple. The music reached deep inside him, its sound without tune or melody, but primal in its intensity. It awoke a longing for better things, for newer things, for greater things.

  He remembered returning to the surface of Laeran and seeing Bequa Kynska in the temple with her hands raised to the roof, her face wet with tears as she recorded the music of the temple. She had turned to face him as he entered, falling to her knees as the passion of the alien music washed through her.

  ‘I shall write this for you!’ she shouted. ‘I shall compose something marvellous. It will be the Maraviglia in your honour!’

  He smiled at the memory, knowing the marvels she would compose for him were sure to be wondrous beyond belief. La Fenice was already undergoing great renovations, with exquisite paintings and mighty sculptures already commissioned from those who had also visited the surface of Laeran.

  If there had been any conscious thought as to why only they should receive commissions, he had since forgotten it, but the appropriateness of the decision still pleased him.