Not the only price, Argel Tal thought.
‘This decay,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’ The captain’s pace was increasing with each step he took, and the closer he came to the bridge, the nearer he found himself to running. Strength flooded him, its presence a welcome contrast to the weakness only minutes before.
The hallway was a major thoroughfare running along the ship’s ridged back like a spinal column. At all hours of day and night, it was busy with crew members going about their duties.
Except now. Now it was silent but for Argel Tal’s footsteps, and his closest brothers with him. Rotting bodies lay gaunt and withered along the decking, husked by the dry, stale air put out by the ship’s oxygen scrubbers.
‘These bodies have been dead for weeks,’ said Xaphen.
‘That’s not possible,’ Malnor said. ‘We were unconscious for no more than a handful of minutes.’
Xaphen looked up from where he knelt by the desiccated corpse of a servitor. Its bionics had shaken loose of the withering organic limbs, and lay pristine on the floor.
‘Unconscious?’ he shook his head. ‘We were not unconscious. I felt my hearts burst in that beast’s claws. I died, Malnor. We all died, just as the daemon said we would.’
‘My hearts beat now,’ the sergeant replied. ‘As do yours.’
Argel Tal saw the same. Retinal displays didn’t lie. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘is not the time. We need to get to the bridge.’
The warriors moved again, stepping over the dried corpses that grew more frequent as they neared the command deck.
Eighty-one dead bodies waited for them on the bridge.
They lay sprawled or sat hunched, with several locked foetal on the floor, while others were cringing, curled, in their seats.
‘They knew what was happening,’ said Xaphen. ‘This wasn’t fast. They felt something as they died.’
Argel Tal hesitated by the twisted figure of Captain Janus Sylamor, curled in her throne as if she sought, in her last moments, to escape something that prowled nearby. Her sunken features, almost mummified, told him all he needed to know.
‘Pain,’ he said. ‘What they felt was pain.’
Dagotal was already by one of the drive consoles, dragging an officer’s body off the controls. The cadaver slumped to the decking, only to find its rest further disturbed by Xaphen, who set about examining it – carving into it – with his combat blade.
Dagotal swore in back-alley Colchisian. ‘I drive a jetbike, sir. I can’t fly an Imperial warship, even if we had the slaves necessary to feed the engine furnace.’
Argel Tal turned from the ship captain’s husk. ‘Just give me an overview.’
His voice still didn’t sound, didn’t feel, quite right. As if someone nearby was speaking the words in unison with him, in mocking chorus.
‘We’re dead in space,’ Dagotal adjusted more controls to no effect. ‘Power hasn’t been restored to all systems. Not even close. The Geller Field is enabled, but we lack void shields, plasma propulsion, energy weapons, projectile weapons, and life support on half the decks.’
‘Manoeuvring thrusters?’
‘Sir,’ Dagotal hesitated. ‘We’ve drifted significantly in the storm’s tides from where we came to all stop. Taking that into account, and lacking warp flight... On manoeuvring thrusters it will take us at least three months to break clear of the... nebula.’
‘It’s not a nebula,’ Xaphen murmured. ‘You’ve seen what’s outside. It’s not a nebula.’
‘Whatever in the name of hell it is,’ Dagotal snapped back.
‘Hell is a good enough word for it,’ Xaphen muttered, still distracted in his work.
Argel Tal lifted the body of Captain Sylamor from the oversized Astartes command throne, laying her to rest at the edge of the command deck. When he returned, he took her place, his armour clanking against the metal of her seat.
‘Fire the thrusters,’ he ordered. ‘The sooner we begin, the sooner we’ll be back with the fleet.’
‘Bloodless,’ Xaphen announced. He rose from his knees, blade in hand, the grisly dismemberment complete at his feet. Vox-officer Amal Vrey’s autopsy would never enter any official record, but it was unarguably thorough.
‘The bodies,’ Xaphen said, ‘they’re bloodless. Something leeched the blood from their veins, killing them all.’
‘Ingethel?’
‘No, Ingethel was with us. Its kin did this.’
Its kin. The daemon’s words resurfaced in Argel Tal’s aching mind. ‘Yes. One of my kin. It comes for you.’
He felt something slither within him. Something stirring, wrapping around the bones of his arms and legs, coiling in a tight spiral around his spine.
‘Summon every warrior to the bridge,’ he ordered, hearing his own voice echoing in his mind, a silent chorus twinned with his words.
‘And Dagotal,’ said Argel Tal, ‘get us out of here.’
The ship that limped its way from the warp storm was a far cry from the noble Imperial vessel that had cut its way in. It trailed psychic fog around its membrane-thin Geller Field, turning in a slow roll that spoke of flawed guidance systems and damaged stabilisers.
Pulsing from its mangled communications towers was a repeated message, the Colchisian words rendered into fuzz by detuned vox.
‘This is the Orfeo’s Lament. Critical casualties sustained. Grievous damage. Requesting extraction. This is the Orfeo’s Lament...’
‘Contact re-established with Orfeo’s Lament,’ called out one of the bridge crew.
The command deck of De Profundis was alive with activity – a hive of officers, servitors, analysts and crew members of every stripe, all working around a central platform that rose above the consoles. On the platform, a golden giant in robes of grey silk watched the occulus screen. His face, so close to the face of his father, was softened in a way the Emperor’s never was: Lorgar was both curious and concerned.
‘Already?’ he said, glancing to the officers at the vox-console.
‘Sire,’ the Master of Auspex called from his bank of flickering monitors, ‘the ship is... horrifically damaged.’
The bustle of the bridge began to quieten, as more and more crew members watched the occulus, seeing the Orfeo’s Lament in its powerless drift.
‘How can this be?’ Lorgar leaned on the handrail ringing the raised podium, his golden fingers gripping the steel. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘Receiving a distress pulse,’ said one of the vox-officers. ‘Sire... My primarch... The Orfeo’s Lament has suffered critical casualties. We’re getting an automated message.’
Lorgar covered his parted lips with a hand, unable to conceal his unrest where another primarch might have stood stoic. Worry was etched onto his handsome features, replacing the confusion that had taken hold moments before.
‘Play the message, please,’ he asked in a soft voice.
It came through in a crackle of vox, grating across the bridge speakers.
‘...the Orfeo’s Lament. Critical casualties sustained. Grievous damage. Requesting extraction. This is the Orfeo’s Lament...’
‘How can this be?’ he asked again. ‘Master of Vox, get me a signal to that ship.’
‘By your word, sire.’
‘Argel Tal,’ Lorgar breathed his son’s name. ‘I know his voice. That was Argel Tal.’
At his side, Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus nodded, his stern features emotionless where his primarch’s were tormented. ‘Aye, sire. It was.’
Contact took three and a half minutes to restore, during which the rest of the 1,301st Fleet had raised its shields and armed all weapons. Tug-ships sailed from the flagship’s docking bays, ready to drag the limping Lament back to its sister vessels.
At last, a picture resolved on the occulus, showing the other vessel’s bridge. Audio contact filtered back a few seconds afterwards, heralded by a burst of static.
‘Blood of the Emperor,’ Lorgar whispered as he watched.
Argel Tal wore no hel
m. His face was gaunt, a pathetic wraith of his former vitality, with his eyes ringed by the dark smears of countless restless nights. Speckles of old blood decorated the left side of his face, and his armour – what was left of it – was pitted and cracked, devoid of any holy parchment.
He rose from his command throne on unsteady legs and saluted. There was the softest bang as his fist hit his breastplate.
‘You’re... still here,’ he rasped. All strength was gone from his voice.
Lorgar was the one to break the silence. ‘My son. What has befallen you? What madness is this?’
Behind Argel Tal, other figures were moving into view. Word Bearers, all. They were just as weak, just as ruined, as their commander. One fell to his knees as Lorgar watched, praying in a senseless stream of conflicting words. It took several moments for the primarch to realise it was Xaphen, recognisable only because of the broken black armour.
Argel Tal closed his eyes, letting out a breath. ‘Sire, we have returned, as ordered.’
Lorgar glanced at Torvus, before turning back to Argel Tal. ‘Captain, you’ve been gone no more than sixty seconds. We just witnessed the Lament enter the edges of the storm. You return to us less than a minute after your departure.’
Argel Tal scratched his ravaged face, shaking his head. ‘No. No, that cannot be.’
‘It can be,’ Lorgar stared hard at him, ‘and it is. My son, what happened to you?’
‘Seven months,’ the captain sagged, leaning on the arm of his throne to keep standing. ‘Seven. Months. There are barely forty of us left. No food. We ate the crew... hateful mouthfuls of leathery flesh and dry bones. There was no water. Water tanks ruptured in the storm damage. We drank promethium fuel... weapon oils... engine coolant... Sire, we’ve been killing each other. We have been drinking each other’s blood to stay alive.’
Lorgar looked away only for long enough to address one of the vox-officers. ‘Bring them in,’ he said, pitching his voice low. ‘Get my sons off that ship.’
‘Sire? Sire?’
‘I am here, Argel Tal.’
‘The Lament has had its final flight. We are on guidance thrusters alone.’
‘Thunderhawks are already launching,’ the primarch assured him. ‘We will return to safer space together.’
‘Thank you, sire.’
‘Argel Tal,’ Lorgar hesitated. ‘Did you slay the crew of Orfeo’s Lament?’
‘No. No, sire, never. We ate their carcasses. Carrion-feeders. Like the desert jackals of Colchis. Anything to survive. We had to bring you the answers you sought. Sire, please... There is something you have to know. We have the answers to all your questions, but one above all.’
‘Tell me,’ the golden giant whispered. He was unashamed at the tears in his eyes, to see his sons reduced to... to this. ‘Tell me, Argel Tal.’
‘This place. This realm. Future generations will name it the Great Eye, the Eye of Terror, the Occularis Terribus. In hushed voices, they will give a thousand foolish names to something they cannot understand. But you were right, my lord.
‘Here,’ Argel Tal gestured with a weak hand at the seething warp storm visible through the bridge windows, ‘is where gods and mortals meet.’
Soon, he was in isolation. Taken from his brothers.
This was not entirely unexpected, but they had also taken his weapons – ‘for much-needed maintenance, brother’ – and that, he’d not foreseen. They were cautious around him now. The escorts walking him to his meditation chamber had been tense, reluctant to speak, hesitant to answer even the simplest questions.
Never before had he felt this raw distrust between brothers. He knew what its genesis was, of course. The truth could never be hidden, and he had no desire to hide it. Yes, the survivors had eaten the human dead. Yes, they had butchered their own brothers. But not for sport. Not for glory. For survival.
To quench a lethal thirst, with the coppery wine that runs from cut veins.
What other choice was there? To die? To die away from the fleet, with the answers to every question the primarch had ever asked locked behind their dead lips?
But you did die. The traitorous thought rose behind his focus. You did die.
Yes. He did. He’d died before he chewed on the leathery skin of bloodless bodies. Before he’d used his dagger to slice open his brothers’ throats and drink their life to sustain his own.
Some of them had died twice, then. A final death, to fuel the lives of those who would survive.
Thirty-eight Word Bearers had left the wreck of Orfeo’s Lament. Thirty-eight, from one hundred. Far below half-strength. Seventh Company was devastated.
Argel Tal drew in a shivering breath. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the storm outside. In the warp’s roiling tides, ten million faces silently screamed his name. He saw their lips moving, their teeth bared, their faces formed of clashing, psychic energy spilling across the ship’s Geller Field barrier. The flesh and blood of unformed daemons. The raw matter of souls.
He exhaled, and opened his eyes.
The walls of his personal chamber, his haven aboard De Profundis for so many years of the Great Crusade, seemed alien now. Strange, how seven months could change a soul. Seven months, and a skull full of unbridled revelations.
The chronometer above the doorway mocked him with a date over half a year in the past. The primarch’s words were an unwanted truth: seconds had passed at the edges of the warp anomaly. Months dragged by within.
Stripped of his armour, the captain examined his wasted body in the reflection of his dagger, the only weapon remaining to him. A revenant returned his gaze – a skeletal, hollow-eyed creature on the wrong side of the grave.
He lowered the blade, and awaited the chime he knew would come soon.
In his humility, Lorgar had never looked grander.
He came to Argel Tal wearing the layered, glyph-embroidered robes of a Covenant priest, with the hood raised, darkening his features. In his hands he carried a small wooden chest; the box was open, revealing a selection of vulture-feather quills with an inkpot. Under one arm, the primarch bore a roll of papyrus parchments to record his son’s words. As Lorgar entered, Argel Tal saw the hulking forms of two Word Bearers – brothers from the Serrated Sun, but not Seventh Company – standing outside his door.
Standing guard outside his door.
‘Am I a prisoner, father?’ he asked the primarch.
Lorgar drew back his hood, revealing his eternally youthful face and the uncertain smile upon it. His grey eyes were heavy with emotion, and little of it was pleasant. He grieved for his sons. He grieved for what he saw now.
‘No, Argel Tal. Of course you are not a prisoner.’ Their eyes met in that moment, and Lorgar’s smile froze on his perfect lips.
‘The guards at my door would seem to suggest otherwise,’ said Argel Tal.
Lorgar didn’t answer. The beautifully carved wooden box crashed to the bare metal floor. The noise drew attention, and the bulkhead door slammed open. Two warriors from 37th Company came in, bolters aimed at Argel Tal’s head.
‘Sire?’ they asked as one.
The primarch didn’t answer them, either. He stood in rapt silence, reaching out, almost touching the captain’s gaunt face. At the last moment, he drew his hand back before his fingers brushed Argel Tal’s sunken flesh.
Their eyes were still locked: primarch and captain, father and son.
‘You have two souls,’ Lorgar whispered.
Argel Tal closed his eyes to break the stare. Something – a hundred somethings – slithered through his blood, worming within his veins, pushed on by his heartbeat.
He rose to his feet at last.
‘I know, father.’
‘Tell me everything,’ said the primarch. ‘Speak to me of the daemon, and the world of revelation. Tell me why my son stands before me with his soul cleaved in two.’
THIRTEEN
Incarnadine
Stormlost
Voices in the Void
�
��1301-12.’ As Argel Tal spoke the code, acidic saliva stung the underside of his tongue.
1301-12, the twelfth world to be brought to compliance by the 1301 st Expeditionary Fleet. ‘Of the seven worlds we conquered in three years,’ he said, ‘this was the most painful.’
Lorgar did not disagree.
‘And yet,’ the primarch said, ‘it was also bloodless. Not a shot fired in anger, nor a blade drawn in rage. The pain was born of revelation.’
‘Three years, sire,’ said Argel Tal, looking away from his father’s eyes. ‘Three years, and seven worlds. History will point to those worlds, the husks we left, and describe how the XVII Legion vented its wrath in the wake of our failure. World after world burned, the populations butchered to slake our fury.’
Lorgar’s smile was pyrite-false. ‘Is that how you see our Pilgrimage?’
‘No. Never. But seven worlds died in fire, and we were almost destroyed after leaving the eighth.’
Lorgar’s grey gaze didn’t waver for a moment. He was seeing with his sixth sense, looking into his son’s heart, and sensing the second soul gestating there.
‘Enough of this maudlin remembrance,’ Lorgar’s tone betrayed his impatience. ‘Speak of the world we found.’
‘Do you remember,’ Argel Tal asked him, ‘when we first reached orbit?’
The floor was trembling in a most specific way.
Xi-Nu 73 processed this. Beneath his metal feet, the rumble of the ship’s deck had a very particular pulse – neither the arrhythmic flow of warp flight, nor the heartbeat tremor of sustained guidance thrust. Instead, murmurs coursed through his artificial bones, faint but blessedly metronomic.
Orbit.
Orbit, at last.
The last journey had been a long one. Xi-Nu 73 wasn’t a being given to indulging in speculation beyond the present, but his calculated projections were grim. The warp storms battering the fleet would certainly have claimed more than the three ships they’d already taken, had the 1,301st pressed on even farther past this world.
Xi-Nu 73 had heard one of his menials tell another that ‘the storm outside was hurling itself at the ship’s shields’, and he’d berated the worker for grafting human attributes onto an inappropriate subject. Such anthropomorphosis would harm the servant’s chances for future elevation within the Mechanicum.
The First Heretic Page 17