The First Heretic

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Lorgar shrugged off their platitudes, as well as his foster father’s reassuring hand. The movement split the healing scabs on his shoulder blades, birthing trickle-rivers of dark blood weeping down his golden back.

  ‘You are calling my entire life a lie.’

  ‘I am saying we were wrong, my son. That’s all.’ Kor Phaeron dipped his gnarled hand into the bowl of ash by Lorgar’s side. Monarchia’s dust spilled through his curled fingers, stinking of charred rock and failure. ‘We prayed to the wrong god for the right reasons, and Monarchia paid the price for our mistake. But it is never too late to atone. We purged our home world of the Old Faith, and now you fear as we all fear: Colchis prospered under the old ways and its legends, until we ravaged it in the name of a lie.’

  ‘This is heresy,’ Lorgar trembled, barely containing his emotion.

  ‘It is atonement, my son.’ Kor Phaeron shook his head. ‘We’ve been wrong for so long. We must purge the root of our errors. The source lies on Colchis.’

  ‘Enough.’ The ash on Lorgar’s cheeks was split by trailing tears. ‘Both of you... Leave me.’

  Erebus rose to obey, but Kor Phaeron rested his hand on the primarch’s shoulder once more. ‘I am disappointed in you, boy. To be so proud that you cannot face up to failure and make amends.’

  Lorgar clenched his perfect teeth, saliva glistening on his lips. ‘You want to return to Colchis, the cradle of our Legion, and apologise for two million deaths, six years of war, and devoting an entire world to worshipping an unworthy god for almost a century?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kor Phaeron said, ‘because it is the mark of greatness to deal with one’s mistakes. We will reforge Colchis, as well as every world we have conquered since we first left our home world to join the Great Crusade.’

  ‘And every world we take in the future,’ said Erebus, ‘must follow a new faith, rather than worship the Emperor.’

  ‘There is no new faith! You both preach madness. Do you think my Legion kneeling in the dust shames me? Monachia was nothing compared to the rape of my own home world over a lie?’

  ‘The truth cares nothing for what we wish, sire,’ said Erebus. ‘The truth simply is.’

  ‘You studied the Old Faith,’ Kor Phaeron said. ‘You believed it yourself as a young seeker, before your visions of the Emperor’s arrival. You know the way to uncover whether it was a false faith, or a pure one.’

  Lorgar wiped drying silver tears from his face. ‘You want us to chase a myth across the stars.’ His eyes flicked between them both, bright and focused. ‘Let us speak plainly now, more than ever before. You want us to embark on a fool’s odyssey through the galaxy, in search of the very gods we’ve spent decades denying.’

  Lorgar laughed, the sound rich with disgust. ‘I am right, aren’t I? You want us to undertake the Pilgrimage.’

  ‘We are nothing without faith, sire,’ said Erebus.

  ‘Humanity,’ Kor Phaeron pressed his palms together in prayer, ‘must have faith. Nothing unites mankind the way religion inspires unity. No conflict rages as fiercely as a holy war. No warrior kills with the conviction of a crusader. Nothing in life breeds bonds and ambitions greater than the ties and dreams forged by faith. Religion brings hope, unification, law and purpose. The foundations of civilisation itself. Faith is nothing less than the pillar of a sentient species, raising it above the beast, the automaton, and the alien.’

  Erebus drew his gladius in a smooth motion, reversing the grip and offering the sword to Lorgar.

  ‘Sire, if you have truly abandoned your beliefs, then take this blade and end my life now. If you believe there is no truth in the old ways – if you believe mankind will prosper without faith, then carve the two hearts from my chest. I have no wish to live if every principle guiding our Legion lies broken at your feet.’

  Lorgar took the blade in a trembling hand. Turning it this way and that, he stared at his candlelit reflection – a visage of gold in the silver steel.

  ‘Erebus,’ he said. ‘My wisest, noblest son. My faith is wounded, but my beliefs remain. Rise from your knees. All is well.’

  The Chaplain obeyed, stoic as ever, resuming his position across from Lorgar.

  ‘Mankind needs faith,’ said the primarch. ‘But faith must be true, or it will lead to devastation – as our brothers in the Thirteenth Legion have so viciously proved. And... and as we learned ourselves in six years of unconscionable war before the Emperor came to Colchis. It is time we learned from our mistakes. It is time I learned from my mistakes.’

  ‘There is one other to whom you can turn,’ Kor Phaeron pressed on, supporting his primarch’s rising resolution, ‘a brother with whom you debated the nature of the universe. You have often spoken of those nights – discussing philosophy and faith in the Emperor’s own palace. You know of whom I speak.’

  Erebus nodded at the first captain’s words. ‘He may hold the key to proof, sire. If the Old Faith has a core of fact at its heart, he may know where to begin the journey.’

  ‘Magnus,’ Lorgar said the name in contemplative softness. It made sense. His brother, whose psychic strength and fierce intelligence put all other minds to shame. They’d spoken often in the Hall of Leng – that cold, regal chamber on distant Terra – arguing with smiles and scrolls over the nature of the universe.

  ‘It will be done. I will meet with Magnus.’

  Kor Phaeron smiled at last. Erebus bowed his head, as Lorgar continued.

  ‘And if our suspicions prove correct, we will undertake the Pilgrimage. We must know if our Colchisian forefathers spoke the truth when they founded their faith. But we must also move with caution. The Emperor’s hounds prowl around our pack, and as wise as my father is, he has shown his blindness to the underlying truths of the universe.’

  Kor Phaeron now bowed as well, mirroring Erebus. ‘Lorgar. My son. This will be our atonement. We can enlighten humanity with this truth, and wash away the stains of the past. In truth... I have feared this moment for some time.’

  Lorgar licked his cracked lips. They tasted of ash. ‘If that is so, why have you waited to share your worries? Hindsight is a powerful vindicator, my friend, but none of us saw this coming. Not you, not I.’

  Kor Phaeron’s eyes fairly gleamed. The elder leaned forward, as if the scent of some triumphant hunt filled his senses.

  ‘I have something I must confess, great lord,’ he said. ‘A truth that must grace your ears now, for the time has come.’

  Lorgar turned to his foster father with threatening slowness. ‘I do not like your tone,’ he said.

  ‘Sire, my primarch, I tell no lie when I say I have feared this day would come. I took the smallest, most humble measures against its arrival, and–’

  The words died in his throat, trapped there by his master’s hand. Lorgar squeezed the older man’s thin, tiny neck, cutting off speech and air with the barest use of strength. Erebus tensed, his eyes moving between the two figures.

  Lorgar pulled Kor Phaeron closer, breathing deeply as if to mock the elder’s strangled gasps.

  ‘No more revelations, Kor Phaeron. Have we not confessed to enough of our own flaws this night?’

  He loosened his grip enough for Kor Phaeron to rasp out the words.

  ‘Davin, seventeen years ago,’ the elder whispered. ‘Corossa, twenty-nine years ago. Uvander, eight years ago...’

  ‘Compliant worlds,’ Lorgar hissed into his foster father’s face. ‘Worlds where you yourself remained behind to begin their education in the Imperial Truth.’

  ‘Compliant... with the Imperial Truth. But embers of... cultures... were allowed to... remain.’

  ‘What. Embers.’ Lorgar growled.

  ‘Beliefs... that matched... the Old Faith... of home... I could not let... potential... truths... die...’

  ‘Can I not control my own warriors?’ Lorgar took a shuddering breath, and something clicked quietly inside Kor Phaeron’s neck. ‘Am I my brother Curze, struggling to control a Legion of liars and deceivers?’

>   ‘Lord, I... I...’ Kor Phaeron’s eyes were rolling back into his skull. His tongue was dark now, slapping against his thin lips.

  ‘Sire,’ Erebus began. ‘Sire, you’ll kill him.’

  Lorgar stared at Erebus for several moments, and the Chaplain wasn’t sure his liege lord even recognised him.

  ‘Yes,’ Lorgar said at last. ‘Yes. I could.’ He opened his fingers, letting Kor Phaeron collapse to the chamber floor in a heap of robed limbs. ‘But I will not.’

  ‘My lord...’ the elder heaved in air through blue lips. ‘Much to be learned... from those cultures... They are all echoes of ancestral human faith... Like you... I am no butcher... I wished to save... the lore of the species...’

  ‘It is a time of many revelations,’ the primarch sighed. ‘And I am not blind to why you did this, Kor Phaeron. Would that I had showed the same forethought and mercy.’

  It was Erebus who replied. ‘You have asked the question yourself, sire. What if there is truth in the cultures we destroy? Kor Phaeron saved a handful, but the Great Crusade has annihilated thousands. What if we are repeating the sin of Colchis over and over and over again?’

  ‘And why,’ Kor Phaeron managed a faint smile as he touched his discoloured throat, ‘do so many cultures share the same beliefs as our own home world? Surely that suggests an underlying truth...’

  The Seventeenth Primarch nodded, the motion slow and sincere. Already, even before this latest confession, his mind was turning to the future, tuning in to the endless possibilities. This was his genetic gift in action: a thinker, a dreamer, where his brothers were warriors and slayers.

  ‘We have worshipped at the wrong altar for over a hundred years,’ said Kor Phaeron, his voice returning.

  Lorgar sifted through the bowl of ash, clutching another handful and smearing it across his face.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, with strength returning to his voice. ‘We have. Erebus?’

  ‘At your command, sire.’

  ‘Take my words to the Chaplains, tell them all of what transpires in the days I remain sequestered here. They deserve to know their primarch’s heart. And when you return for further counsel tomorrow, please bring me parchment and a pen. I have much to write. It will take days. Weeks. But it must be written, and I will not leave my isolation until it is done. You, both of you, will help me compose this great work.’

  ‘What work, sire?’

  Lorgar smiled, and never had he looked so much like his father.

  ‘The new Word.’

  SIX

  Kale the Servitor

  Unfocused

  Warrior-Priest

  The girl found it difficult to sleep, with no grasp of where day ended and night began. There was never a cessation of sound; the room forever rumbled, even if only faintly, with tremors from the distant engines. With darkness and sound both constant, she wiled away the hours sitting upon her bed, doing nothing, staring at nothing, hearing nothing except for the occasional voice pass her door.

  Blindness brought a hundred perceptive difficulties, but foremost among them was boredom. Cyrene had been a prolific reader and her job necessitated a fair amount of travel, seeing all of the public sights in the city. With her eyes ruined, both those paths were barred in any meaningful sense.

  In her darker moments, she wondered at destiny’s cruel sense of humour. To be chosen by the Astartes, to dwell among the angels of the Emperor... To walk the hallways of their great iron warship, smelling the sweat and machine oil... but seeing nothing at all.

  Oh, yes. Hilarious.

  Her first hours aboard had been the hardest, but at least they’d been eventful. During a physical examination in a painfully cold chamber, with needles sticking into the wasted muscles of her legs and arms, Cyrene had listened to one of the angels explain about bleached retinal pigment, and how malnutrition affected the organs and muscles. She’d tried to focus on the angel’s words, but her mind wandered as she sought to embrace what had happened, and where she now found herself.

  The last two months on the surface had not been kind to her. The wandering groups of bandits in the foothills around the city had no regard for the sacred shuhl robe, or its traditions of respect.

  ‘Our world has ended,’ one of them had laughed. ‘The old ways no longer matter.’

  Cyrene had never seen him, but when she slept, her mind conjured faces he might have worn. Cruel, mocking faces.

  During her medical examination, she couldn’t stop shivering, no matter how she tensed her muscles to resist. The angels’ solar-sailing vessel was cold enough to make her teeth clatter together when she tried to shape words, and she wondered if her breath was misting as it left her lips.

  ‘Do you understand?’ the angel had asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Yes, I understand.’ And then, ‘Thank you, angel.’

  Soon, other humans came to assist her. They smelled of spicy incense and spoke in careful, serious voices.

  They walked for some time. It could have been five minutes or thirty – without her eyes, everything felt stretched and slow. The corridors sounded busy. Occasionally she’d hear the machine-snarls of an angel’s armour joints as the warrior walked past. Much more frequently, she heard the swish of robes.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked as they travelled.

  ‘Servants,’ one man replied.

  ‘We serve the Bearers of the Word,’ said the other.

  On they walked. Time passed, the seconds marked by footsteps, the minutes by voices passing by.

  ‘This is your chamber,’ one of her guides said, and proceeded to walk her around a room, placing her shaking fingers on the bed, the walls, the door release controls. A patient tour of her new home. Her new cell.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. The room was not large, and only scarcely furnished. She was far from comfortable, but Cyrene wasn’t worried about being left alone here. It would be a blessing of sorts.

  ‘Be well,’ the two men said in unison.

  ‘What are your names?’ she asked.

  The reply she received was the hiss-thud of the automatic door sealing closed.

  Cyrene sat on the bed – it was a hard, thin mattress not far removed from a prisoner’s cot – and commenced her long, sensory-deprived existence of doing absolutely nothing.

  The only break in her daily monotonies came from a servitor, who was remarkably reluctant (or unable) to speak in any detail, bringing her three meals of gruel-like, chemical paste a day.

  ‘This is disgusting,’ she remarked once, summoning up a frail smile. ‘Am I to assume it consists of many nutrients and other beneficial things?’

  ‘Yes,’ was the dead-voiced reply.

  ‘Do you eat it yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that.’

  Silence.

  ‘You don’t speak much.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is your name?’ Cyrene tried at last.

  Silence.

  ‘Who were you?’ she asked. Cyrene was inured to servitors; the Imperium had left behind the secrets of their construction sixty years before, and they were commonplace in Monarchia. Penance was the term used for the fate suffered by heretics and criminals. Either way, it amounted to the same. The sinner’s mind was scrubbed of all vitality, and bionics were installed within the body to increase its strength or enhance its utility.

  Silence met her question.

  ‘Before you were made into this,’ she tried to make her smile more friendly. ‘Who were you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, you don’t recall, or no, you won’t tell me?’

  ‘No.’

  Cyrene sighed. ‘Fine. Go, then. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ it replied. Feet shuffled. The door hissed closed again.

  ‘I shall name you Kale,’ she said to the empty room.

  Xaphen had visited her twice since the first day, and Argel Tal had come three times. Each meeting with the captain had played out much the same as the
one preceding it: with stilted conversation and awkward silences. From what Cyrene gathered, the Legion’s fleet was en route to a world they were supposed to conquer, but were denied the order to begin the assault.

  ‘Why?’ she’d asked, glad to have even this uncomfortable company.

  ‘Aurelian remains in seclusion,’ Argel Tal had said.

  ‘Aurelian?’

  ‘A name for our primarch, spoken by few outside the Legion. It is Colchisian, the language of our home world.’

  ‘It’s strange,’ Cyrene confessed, ‘to have a nickname for a god.’

  Argel Tal fell silent for some time. ‘A primarch is not a god. Sometimes the sons of gods, despite the power they inherit, are demigods. And it is not a “nickname”. It is a term of kinship, used only among family. It translates loosely as “the gold”.

  ‘You said he remains secluded.’

  ‘Yes. Within his chambers on our flagship, Fidelitas Lex.’

  ‘Does he hide from you?’

  She heard the Astartes swallow. ‘I am not entirely comfortable with this line of discussion, Cyrene. Let us just say that he has much to contemplate. The God-Emperor’s judgement is a burden upon many souls. The primarch suffers as we suffer.’

  Cyrene thought long and hard before what she said next. ‘Argel Tal?’

  ‘Yes, Cyrene.’

  ‘You do not sound upset. You don’t sound as if you’re suffering.’

  ‘Do I not?’

  ‘No. You sound angry.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Are you angry at the Emperor for what he did to you?’

  ‘I have to go,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I am summoned.’ The Astartes rose to his feet.

  ‘I heard no summons,’ the young woman said. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you.’

  Argel Tal walked from the room without another word. It would be four days before she had company again.

  Argel Tal regarded the headless body with momentary consternation. He hadn’t meant to do that.

  Decapitated, the servitor toppled to its side and lay on the floor of the iron cage, shivering in fitful spasm. The captain ignored its lifeless twitching, instead focusing on the slack-mouthed head that had flown between the iron cage’s bars and thudded against the wall of the practice chamber. It watched him now, its dead eyes trembling, its augmented maw open – tongueless, with a jawbone of bronze plating.