The Anathema. The creature you know as the God-Emperor.
Xaphen exhaled misty curls of vapour. ‘This... This is Terra. The Emperor’s gene-laboratories.’
Yes. Many years before the Anathema’s crusade to reclaim the stars. Here, with the full clarity of its emotionless inhumanity, it has finished shaping its twenty children.
The Chaplain crossed to a table, where vials of blood span in a centrifuge, separating into layers within each glass vial. ‘If this is a vision of the past, how could the Emperor destroy us here?’
You are protected for now, Xaphen. That is all that matters. This is what transpires on Terra, as the elder empire burns with soul-fire. The Anathema senses it will soon be time to begin his Great Crusade.
The Word Bearers moved along the rows of tables, their course taking them closer to the central platform standing above the laboratory. A column of black and silver machinery stood upon the decking there, ringed by a wide walkway. Argel Tal climbed the stairs first, his boots echoing on the metal, going unheard by the dozens of technicians nearby. Several passed him, paying no heed to anything beyond the digital streams on their frostbitten data-slates and the sine-wave readings on their handheld auspex readers.
Argel Tal walked across the platform, around the amniotic pods coupled to the main column – bound there by dense messes of wires, chains, cables and industrial clamps. The generators built into the column of metal made the same angry thrum as Astartes back-mounted power packs, and that little detail brought a smile to the captain’s face.
The womb of the primarchs. Here, the Anathema’s sons gestate in their cold cradles.
Argel Tal approached the closest pod. Its surface was unpainted grey iron, smooth in the few places where it wasn’t scabbed by machinery sockets and connection ports. Etched clearly onto its front plating in silver lettering was the Gothic numeral XIII. Beneath the silver plate, an inscription was scratched into the metal in tiny, meticulous handwriting.
The exact meaning of the words escaped Argel Tal – it seemed a long and complicated prayer, beseeching outside forces for blessings and strength – but the fact he could read them was mystery enough.
‘This is Colchisian,’ he said aloud.
It is, and it is not.
‘I can read it.’
The tongue you name Colchisian is a fragment of a primordial language. Colchisian... Cadian... these tongues were seeded onto your worlds in readiness for the coming age. The Emperor’s golden pets could not read those inscriptions, for they do not carry Lorgar’s blood in their veins. All of this was planned aeons ago.
‘And the Cadians?’
Their world was touched, as Colchis was touched. Seeds planted in abundance, all to flower in this moment.
Argel Tal approached the pod marked XIII. A glass screen at eye level showed nothing but the milky fluid within.
And then, movement.
Go no closer.
The briefest shadow of something stirred inside the artificial womb.
Stay back. The daemon’s voice was edged now – sharpened by concern.
Argel Tal stepped closer.
A child slumbered within the gestation pod, curled up in foetal helplessness, its eyes closed. It turned slowly in the amniotic milk, half-formed limbs moving in somnolent repose.
Stay back, Word Bearer. I sense your rising wrath. Do not assume I am the only one who is capable of feeling it. Strong emotion will also alert the Anathema.
Argel Tal leaned closer to the pod. His fingertips brushed frost from its surface.
‘Guilliman,’ he whispered.
The child slept on.
Xaphen moved away from the others, coming to the pod etched with XI. Rather than peer into its depths, he looked over his shoulder at Argel Tal.
‘The eleventh primarch sleeps within this pod – still innocent, still pure. I ache to end this now,’ he confessed.
Malnor chuckled from behind the Chaplain. ‘It would save us all a lot of effort, wouldn’t it?’
‘And it would spare Aurelian from heartbreak.’ Xaphen traced his fingertips over the designating numeral. ‘I remember the devastation that wracked him after losing his second and eleventh brothers.’
Argel Tal still hadn’t left Guilliman’s pod. ‘We do not know for certain if our actions here would change the future.’
‘Are some chances not worth taking?’ asked the Chaplain.
‘Some are. This one is not.’
‘But the Eleventh Legion–’
‘Is expunged from Imperial record for good reason. As is the Second. I’m not saying I don’t feel temptation creeping over me, brother. A single sword thrust piercing that pod, and we’d unwrite a shameful future.’
Dagotal cleared his throat. ‘And deny the Ultramarines a significant boost in recruitment numbers.’
Xaphen regarded him with emotionless eyes, seeming to weigh the merit of such a thing.
‘What?’ Dagotal asked the others. ‘You were thinking it, too. It’s no secret.’
‘Those are just rumours,’ Torgal grunted. The assault sergeant didn’t sound particularly certain.
‘Perhaps, perhaps not. The Thirteenth definitely swelled to eclipse all the other Legions around the time the Second and Eleventh were “forgotten” by Imperial archives.’
Enough of this insipid conjecture, came the disembodied voice again.
Argel Tal looked below the platform, where the scientists laboured at their stations. Most were dealing with bloodwork, or working on biopsies of pale flesh. He recognised the extracted organs immediately.
‘Why are these men and women experimenting on Astartes gene-seed?’ he asked. The other Word Bearers followed his gaze.
They are not experimenting on it. They are inventing it.
Argel Tal watched them work, as Ingethel’s voice hissed on. He saw several of the workers nearby slicing open the pale organs with silver scalpels. Each of them bore the numeral I on the back of their environment suits.
Your Emperor has conquered his own world with the proto-Astartes created in far inferior conditions. Now he breeds the primarchs, and in their shadow, he breeds the warriors he needs to lead the Great Crusade.
He watched them work, but the sight of his genetic genesis left his skin crawling.
These are the prototypical organs that will become the gene-seed for the first true Astartes. You know them as –
‘The Dark Angels,’ said Argel Tal. ‘The First Legion.’ Below him, the biotechnicians scalpelled through malformed organs, threaded veins, analysed with microscopes, and took tissue samples for further testing. The progenoid glands implanted in his own throat and chest throbbed with sympathetic ache. He lifted a hand to rub at the sore spot on the side of his neck, where the organ hidden beneath the skin did its silent work – storing his genetic coding until the moment of his death, whereupon it would be harvested and implanted within another child. The boy would, in turn, grow to become a Word Bearer. No longer human. No longer Homo Sapiens, but Homo Astartes.
It will be many Terran years before the organs below are ready for implantation in human youths. This is early in the process. Most of the flaws in gene-seed structure will be written out in the course of the coming decades.
The captain didn’t like the creature’s tone. ‘Most?’
Most. Not all.
‘The Thousand Sons,’ said Xaphen. ‘Their genetic code was misaligned. The Legion was afflicted by mutation and psychic instability.’
They are not alone in their flaws. The unwinding years will bring these biological errors to light. Gene-seed degeneration resulting in organ failure, stealing the ability to salivate venom; intolerance to certain radiation will alter a warrior’s skin and bones.
‘The Imperial Fists,’ said Malnor. ‘And the Salamanders.’
‘But what of us?’ Dagotal asked.
There was a pause as Ingethel whisper-laughed behind their eyes. What of you?
‘Will we suffer from those... impuriti
es?’
‘Answer him,’ said Argel Tal. ‘He asks what we all wish to know.’
The code written into your bodies is purer than most. You will suffer no special degeneration, and endure no unique flaws.
‘But there is something,’ he said. ‘I hear it in your voice.’
No Astartes is as loyal to their primarch as the XVII are to Lorgar. No Imperial warrior believes in their father’s righteousness with as much faith and ardent devotion.
Argel Tal swallowed. It felt cold, and tasted sour. ‘Our loyalty is bred into our blood?’
No. You are sentient creatures with free will. This is no more than a minor divergence in an otherwise flawless code. Your gene-seed enhances the chemicals in your brain tissue. It gives you focus. It grants you unbreakable loyalty to your cause, and to Lorgar Aurelian.
‘I do not like the turn this revelation is taking,’ the captain confessed.
‘Nor I,’ admitted Torgal.
The surprise you feel is false, Argel Tal. You have seen this before, reflected in the eyes of your brother Legions. Think of the compliance of Cassius, when the pale sons of Corax watched you with distaste, arguing against your savage purge of the heathen population. The Thousand Sons at Antiolochus... The Luna Wolves at Davin... The Ultramarines at Syon...
All of your brothers have watched you and hated you for your unquestioning, focused wrath.
He moved back to Guilliman’s pod, examining it rather than paying attention to the technicians below. ‘I will speak of this no further.’
It is not a flaw to believe, Word Bearer. There is nothing purer.
Argel Tal paid the daemon’s words no mind. Something else had caught his attention and wouldn’t let go.
‘Blood of the... Look. Look at this.’ The captain crouched by the lower half of Guilliman’s coffin-womb. A bulky generator box was half-meshed with the main machinery behind the gestation pod. Coolant feeds quivered as they pumped fluid, and the details that could be made out through gaps in the armoured covering showed the generator’s internal compartments were filled with bubbling red liquid.
Dagotal looked over Argel Tal’s shoulder. ‘Is that blood?’
The captain gave Dagotal a withering look.
‘What?’ the sergeant asked.
‘It’s haemolubricant, for a machine-spirit. These secondary generators are fastened behind each pod. And look, they run along the spinal columns of these structures, up the tower.’
Dagotal and the others looked around. ‘So?’
‘So where have you seen power generators of similar design before? What engine requires a machine-spirit of this complexity to function?’
‘Oh,’ the sergeant said. ‘Oh.’
The Word Bearers looked up at the central column, juddering and humming with its machine-parts and multiple power supplies.
At last... Yes...
‘This is more than an incubation tower,’ said Xaphen.
You are so close now...
Argel Tal looked at the pods, each in turn, and the insanely complex array of machinery coupling them to the central column.
Yes... Yes... Witness the truth...
‘This is a generator,’ his voice softened in disbelief, ‘for a Geller Field.’
Xaphen circled the walkway, his clanging boot steps unheard by the horde of technicians working away. Argel Tal watched his Chaplain moving around the pods, a slow suspicion creeping over the back of his neck. Both warriors were unhelmed, and thin sheens of icy sweat glistened on their faces.
‘The most powerful Geller Field in existence,’ Argel Tal gestured to the machinery. ‘The generators on board our vessels, linked with the Navigators... they are a shadow of what we’re seeing here.’
You do not truly comprehend the effect you name a Geller Field. It is more than a kinetic shield against warp energy. The warp itself is the Sea of Souls. Your fields repel raw psychic force. They are a bulwark against the claws of the neverborn.
‘The question we must ask ourselves,’ Xaphen spoke as he stroked the surface of the pod marked XVII, ‘is why these incubators are shielded against...’
Say it.
Xaphen smiled. ‘...against daemons.’
Torgal joined the Chaplain before Lorgar’s pod. He stared inside at the slumbering infant for some time.
‘I believe I know. These children are almost grown to the point of birth. Daemon? Spirit?’
I am here.
Torgal looked acutely uncomfortable interacting with a disembodied voice. ‘The Legions tell the tale of the Emperor’s twenty sons being cast into the heavens by some great tragedy, some flaw in their creation process.’
You have been raised with tales of the primarchs that lead your Legions, but you have been fed centuries of lies. In a matter of moments, you will witness the truth. The Anathema dealt with the Powers of the warp long before he left Earth on the Great Crusade.
The Anathema desired mighty sons, and the gods granted him the lore to forge them with a union of divine genetics and psychic sorcery. He came to my masters, hungry for answers, beseeching the gods for power. With the lore they gave him, he shaped his twenty sons.
But treacheries have occurred. Oaths – sworn in blood and paid in soul – have been broken. The Anathema now refuses to show humanity the Primordial Truth, and the gods of the warp grow wrathful.
The Anathema is keeping its twenty primarch sons and paying no price to the Powers that gifted him with the knowledge to shape them.
Xaphen gripped the handrail to keep from going to his knees. ‘Our father – all of our fathers – are the spawn of ancient blood rituals and forbidden science.’
Argel Tal couldn’t keep from laughing. ‘The Emperor that denies all forms of divinity shaped his own sons with the blessings of forgotten gods. Prayers and sorcery are written upon their gestation pods. This is the most glorious madness.’
Be ready. The reckoning comes. The Powers will reach into the material realm to reclaim the sons they helped breed.
Argel Tal looked at the pods through a smile that wouldn’t fade. ‘This Geller Field. It fails, doesn’t it?’
It will fail in exactly thirty-seven beats of your heart, Argel Tal.
‘And the primarchs are seized – taken by your masters in the warp. That’s the accident that casts them across the galaxy.’
The warp gods are the primarchs’ rightful fathers. This is not to spite your Emperor. It is nothing but divine justice. And as these perfect children travel through the stars, they will grow. This is the first step in the gods’ plans to save mankind.
‘And Aurelian...’
Is the most important one of all. Lorgar’s incubation pod will be carried to Colchis, to walk the first steps to enlightening humanity of the Primordial Truth, and the gods behind the stars. Without the gods, humanity will die, piece by piece, under the predation of the aliens that still lay claim to much of the galaxy. Those that remain will die as the eldar died: in agony, unable to see the Primordial Truth before their very eyes.
This is Fate. It is written in the stars. Lorgar knows that humanity needs divinity – it is what shaped his life and Legion. It is why he was chosen as the favoured son.
Xaphen closed his eyes, murmuring a litany from the Word. ‘Faith raises us above the soulless and the damned. It is the soul’s fuel, and the driving force behind millennia of mankind’s survival. We are hollow without it.’
Argel Tal drew his weapons. The swords of red iron slid free from their scabbards with twin hisses.
Yes. Yes...
Both blades sparked into electrical life as the captain pulled the handle-triggers. Xaphen regarded him with hooded eyes.
‘Do it,’ the Chaplain said. ‘Let it begin.’
Argel Tal whirled the blades in slow, arcing loops, their crackling power fields growing more intense, the blades emanating ozone mist as they burned and rasped through the frozen air.
‘Aurelian,’ whispered Malnor. ‘For Lorgar.’
�
��For the truth,’ Torgal said. ‘Do it, and we will carry these answers back to the Imperium.’
Argel Tal looked at Dagotal; the youngest of his sergeants, only recently promoted before the Legion’s humiliation. The outrider commander’s eyes were distant.
‘I am weary of being lied to by the Emperor, brother. I am so tired of being ashamed, when what we believe is the truth.’ Dagotal nodded, meeting his captain’s eyes at last. ‘Do it.’
Three.
He stepped forward, staring at a cluster of vein-like cables twitching as they channelled artificial blood around the semi-organic tower machine.
Two.
Argel Tal span the swords, leaving blurred trails of lightning in their wake.
One.
The blades chopped down, crashing through steel, iron, rubber, copper, bronze and vat-grown blood.
Both swords exploded in his hands, their blades shattering like smashed glass and decorating his bare face with bloody cuts.
And then, for one horrific, familiar moment, Argel Tal saw nothing but burning, psychic gold.
EIGHTEEN
A Hundred Truths
Resurrection
Return
‘I heard your brother,’ Argel Tal confessed.
The primarch was no longer writing. For several minutes, Lorgar had done nothing but listen in mounting emotion as the captain relayed the events in Ingethel’s vision. Now, at these words, he released a breath he’d been holding for some time.
‘Magnus?’
Argel Tal had never heard his sire speak so softly. ‘No. The Warmaster.’
The golden-skinned giant brushed his hands over his face, seemingly afflicted by a sudden weariness. ‘I do not know that title,’ he said. ‘Warmaster. An ugly word.’
Argel Tal chuckled in two voices. ‘Of course, forgive us, Lorgar. He will not be named that for some time. He is still merely Horus. When the vision ended in golden light, we could see nothing beyond the flare. But we heard your brother Horus. The machinery was breaking down, rattling and crashing. There was gunfire. The rush of the most powerful wind we’ve ever felt. And we heard Horus’s voice – shouting, defiant, enraged. It was as if he were there with us, seeing what we saw.’
The First Heretic Page 25