‘Take the truth to Erebus and Kor Phaeron. While I am gone, they will be the Legion’s lords, and they will orchestrate the spread of true faith in the shadows of my father’s empire. I shall return to them soon.’
Xaphen swore an oath never to fail his primarch.
Argel Tal did not. He spoke in a voice soft enough to break hearts, ‘We are heretics, father.’
Lorgar laughed his melodic laugh. ‘No, we are saviours. Is all in readiness?’
‘It is.’
‘Sail far and wide without me, but keep the Custodians away from Imperial listeners. Once you return to stable space, they will resume their astropathic contact with Terra. My father will suspect the truth if he knows we came this close to the galaxy’s edge, and suspicion alone will be enough to damn us. I cannot remain here to block their pet astropath’s reaching voice. Find a solution. Xaphen, look to the texts retrieved from Cadia. The rituals within them will provide the answer.’
‘By your word, sire.’
‘Keep his watchdogs alive, Argel Tal. There may yet be a means to win this war without bloodshed. But keep them silent.’
With his last words ordering the first of a thousand treacheries, the primarch boarded his vessel and left us.
What he saw within the Eye is the source of near-infinite speculation. Many of the Word Bearers came to me for weeks afterwards, wracked by dreams that barely faded when their sufferers awoke. The blood connection between Aurelian and his sons was a powerful one indeed, for what Lorgar saw with his own eyes, his sons witnessed in horrifying echoes.
It was Xaphen who spoke most of his dreams, while Argel Tal remained next to silent. The Chaplain would speak with a fevered cast in his voice, as if harsh whispers could pierce the walls of my humble chamber and reach the primarch halfway across the galaxy.
He spoke of Lorgar walking the surface of worlds where the oceans were formed from boiling blood, and the skies stood dark under heavenly cities of clanking black steel. He told me of an entire Legion in the crimson of the Gal Vorbak, waging war before the gates of a golden palace.
Most tellingly of all, he described world after world dying under the tainted touch of alien claws. He swore that this was the Imperium’s demise – a godless empire reaved clean by inhuman tides. Only faith would save mankind from fate’s promises. Only worship of the Great Powers nestling within the warp.
Perhaps these were the lessons Lorgar was seeing for himself, while his sons returned to spread the word among the other fleets.
Cadia burned, just as we’d all known it would. The tribes were destroyed by Argel Tal’s own command, and the world left in silence, ready to be seeded with colonists in the future. He never once asked me to forgive him for it, just as he never asked me to console him over the murder of Vendatha.
I love him above all others, not only for saving my life, but for the fact he stains his soul with such blackness, yet masks his guilt and shame so completely. He has never broken, despite carrying the secrets and sins that will damn or save our entire species.
I believe the only mistake he ever made was in allowing himself to grow closer to the Custodes leader, Aquillon.
But then, it was just like Argel Tal to endure such penance. He became a brother to the one man he knew he must eventually betray.
Excerpted from ‘The Pilgrimage’,
by Cyrene Valantion
Part Three
CRIMSON
Forty years later
TWENTY
Three Talents
A New Crusade
The Crimson Lord
Ishaq Kadeen was immensely proud of himself, for he did three things in life with a skill few others could match. These three talents had earned him enough coins to rub together, no doubt there, but they’d also elevated him from the depths of poverty that had swallowed his parents – and getting out of those slums was something far out of reach for most of the beggars and street-folk in his home city.
Three talents. That’s all it took.
And they weren’t even that hard. If he’d needed to practise them, then it might have been a different story. Ishaq Kadeen was one of those naturally lucky souls that live their lives in the moment. He never spared a thought for getting old, never saved money with any great care, and never worried overmuch what the enforcer patrol around the next street corner might have to say about his activities.
Three talents got him through life, pitching him in and out of trouble.
The first was to run, which was a skill he’d honed by putting it to good use in the criminal-infested lower sprawls of Sudasia’s primary hive city.
The second was to smile with a vicious blending of charm, smarm and intimacy, which had variously gotten him into several lines of employment, out of an entirely legal execution that he’d absolutely deserved, and even once into the fine, black lace underwear of a countess’s younger cousin – the night of the gala held to celebrate her coming of age.
The third talent, which was what had gotten him posted to his current situation in the first place, was the fact he could take a wicked pict when he wanted to.
Not a day passed that Ishaq didn’t think back to the conversation that damned him out here onto the fringes of space. He’d been sitting in an austere office, absently picking dirt from beneath his nails while a robed hierarch in the Remembrancer Order droned on and on about ‘noble goals’ and the ‘very real need’ to record the present for future generations to study in excruciating detail.
‘It is the greatest honour,’ the stern gentleman insisted.
‘Oh, I know.’ Ishaq started to bite his nails now they were clean. ‘The greatest.’
The older man seemed dubious. Ishaq thought he looked like a vulture disapproving of a potential meal, largely because it was still alive.
‘Thousands of archivists, sculptors, painters, pictographers, poets, playwrights have been sent. Tens of thousands have been rejected for lacking the thoroughness and flair that the Great Crusade deserves in its remembrancers.’
Ishaq made a noncommittal noise to encourage the hierarch to continue, while secretly musing over the number of artistic professions beginning with the letter “P”. Painters, pictographers, poets, playwrights...
‘So you see, to be chosen like this... You have to understand how fortunate you are.’
‘What about puppeteers?’ Ishaq asked.
‘I... what?’
‘Nothing. Never mind.’
‘Yes, well. I’m sure you can appreciate the gravity of the situation.’ The hierarch did his vulture-sneer again. Ishaq smiled back – his eyes brightened; a faint movement of his eyebrows suggested something delightfully wry; and a calculatedly cocksure amount of teeth were on display for a predatory moment – but the hierarch was neither female nor attracted to males, and that disinterest rather disarmed Ishaq’s best weapon.
‘Mr. Kadeen?’ the man said. ‘Are you taking this seriously? Do you wish to be shipped to Mars to end your years as a servitor?’
He really didn’t. If it came to a choice between paying for his crimes in the traditional manner or catching a transport ship halfway across the galaxy to serve as a remembrancer... Well, it wasn’t much of a choice at all. He wasn’t going to spend his life lobotomised into penal service.
So he assured the remembrancer hierarch that he was taking it very seriously indeed. Over the following two hours, he weaved a compelling fiction of interstellar ambition and an exploratory spirit that had suffered in the strangling confines of his birth-slums. Now, at last, he would be free to walk the stars, to gaze upon new suns, to chronicle the advance of mankind, to...
To lie through his teeth.
Ishaq, at thirty-five, was not an educated man, and he was fairly certain at several points he invented new words or mispronounced ones he’d only read before, but it did the trick. Three days later, his intermittent work as an imagist for almost-wealthy hive families and crime scene pictography was behind him – as was Terra itself and the shit-hea
p hive in which he’d been born.
Was it an honour, really? That all depended upon just where you were sent.
In the briefings, Ishaq had been hoping against hope for a posting that would actually mean something. While the major expeditionary fleets were already swollen with remembrancer hangers-on, there were still plenty of possible placements in the smaller fleets.
He might never get to lay eyes upon the Warmaster, or see his images depict the glory of a primarch like Fulgrim, but he’d not lost hold of the desperate, panicked hope that he’d be assigned to one of the Emperor’s so-called ‘glory Legions’. The Ultramarines, founders of the perfect empire... The Dark Angels, commanded by the consummate general... The Word Bearers, renowned for bringing the Emperor’s own wrath against enemy worlds...
At last, he’d been assigned. A full sprint through the order’s barracks had ensued, with remembrancers shoving past one another to reach the posted listings in the lobby. All dignity was cast aside in the rush – artists, poets, playwrights rioting against each other to see where in the galaxy they were being sent. Someone had even been stabbed during the crush of bodies – perhaps out of jealousy, since that imagist in particular had been assigned to a fleet commanded by the Emperor’s Children, and such a posting even among a modest fleet was worth its weight in gold.
There it was:
KADEEN, ISHAQ – IMAGIST 1,301 st EXPEDITIONARY FLEET
What did that even mean? Were there even Legion forces with that fleet? He’d shouldered a young woman aside to use one of the barracks’ information terminals, and hammered in his keycode with trembling fingers.
Yes. Yes. Each line sent his heart beating faster.
1,301 st Expeditionary Fleet.
Commanded by Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus.
3 Companies of XVII Legiones Astartes: Word Bearers.
Commanded by the Crimson Lord, Master of the Gal Vorbak.
Noted Citations: Honoured by the presence of the Emperor’s Custodian Guards, led by Aquillon Althas Nero Khai Marithamus... the name went on and on and on, but it didn’t matter.
He’d been posted to one of the most aggressive, renowned, largest Legions, responsible for more compliances in the last half a century than any other – and a fleet, minor or not, that was honoured to contain some of the Emperor’s own golden Custodes warriors. The images that could come from this... The fame... The attention...
Yes. Yes. YES.
‘Who were you posted to?’ he asked the girl next to him.
‘The 277th.’
‘Blood Angels?’
‘Raven Guard.’
He gave her a pitying smile and headed back to his room, making sure to tell everyone on the way back where he’d been assigned. This only backfired once, when a pretentious arse of a sculptor had sneeringly replied: ‘The Word Bearers? Yes, well, they’ve conquered much in recent years to make amends for their former flaws… but they’re not exactly the Sons of Horus, are they?’
The flight to join the 1,301st Expeditionary Fleet had lasted nineteen long, long months, during which Ishaq had slept with twenty-eight separate members of the transport ship’s crew, been slapped by three of them, taken almost 11,000 picts of tedious goings-on aboard the vessel, and passed out from ship-made alcohol more times than he could reliably remember.
He’d also lost a tooth in a fistfight with an angry husband, though he still claimed the moral victory in that one. Given all of this and the lifestyle that preceded it, it would be fair – but not entirely accurate – to assume that Ishaq Kadeen cared nothing for his work.
He didn’t consider himself lazy. It was just difficult to find things that inspired him, that was all.
The first pict he’d truly cared about had since done the rounds of the entire 1,301st fleet, and it was, in his own inestimable opinion, an absolute beauty. Already, it was being hailed as a masterpiece in the fleet’s archives, and he’d received a courier-brought note from the Crimson Lord himself, thanking him for the image.
When they’d arrived, dropping from a year and a half in the swirling tedium of the warp to approach the battlefleet, Ishaq had been unable to resist getting caught up in the moment.
With his picter rod in hand, about the size and heft of a cudgel, he’d aimed the eye lens at the view from the porthole, watching and recording the great warships drifting by.
And then, there it was. The grey-hulled fortress-flagship of Lord Argel Tal, silent and serene despite its world-breaking weapons array.
De Profundis. Ishaq’s new home.
Awe left his mouth slack as he clicked pict after pict. One of them – one of the very first he took – showed the warship abeam, slaved to a sharp perspective: a stone and steel bastion of Imperial might. Starlight cast raw glares across its dense armour plating, while a statue of the primarch jutted from the vessel’s spine – Lorgar, arms raised to the void, haloed by the system’s distant sun.
Click, went the picter, and Ishaq Kadeen fell in love with his work.
That had been three weeks ago. Three weeks spent waiting for inspiration to strike again. Three weeks spent waiting for today.
The starboard hangar deck was a messy maze of landed gunships, load-bearing vehicles and cargo containers, populated by an army of servitors, tech-adepts and human crew going about their business. Thunderhawks were being loaded, their swooping wings weighted down by racks of missiles, while boxes of bolter shell belt-feeds were installed by the defensive turrets. All around was the rattle, the clang, the clank of heavy machinery, which was doing nothing positive for Ishaq’s hangover.
At the heart of the organised chaos was the eye of the storm, where space had been cleared for the scheduled arrival. Ishaq stood at the edge of the cleared zone – just one of many witnesses to the morning’s events. A glance to the left revealed a flock of other remembrancers: there was Marsin, a painter, scribbling in his sketchpad. Lueianna, a skinny and pale little thing who composed entire concerts around various flute arrangements. Hellic, who almost definitely owed Ishaq some money from the last time they played cards.
What did Hellic do? Was he a composer, as well? Ishaq wasn’t sure. Whatever his fellow remembrancer did to express himself, he was a piss-poor gambler.
The Blessed Lady was here, of course – standing out from her maids and companions in a gown of arterial red that looked more suited to a Terran ballroom than the greasy, oil-blackened deck of a warship. She looked no older than her late-twenties, though given how long she’d been with the fleet, rejuvenation surgery must have featured heavily in her recent past.
Ishaq lost a fair few minutes just watching her. She was dusky-skinned, not as dark as Ishaq himself, but clearly from a desert people, and it was easy to see why she was considered blessed. He’d never seen anyone move with the same slow, effortless grace, or smile with such subtle brilliance. Every time she shared a word with one of her entourage, she seemed to be smiling with endearing shyness at some secret joke between them.
Ishaq decided, then and there, that he wanted her.
For a moment, he was certain she turned to regard him. Wasn’t she said to be blind? Was that a facade? A rumour to enhance her mystique?
An honour guard from the Imperial Army had deigned to show its face, too. White-clad officers of the Euchar 54th stood in neat ranks, their formalwear impressive in its ornate finery. Each of the officers rested a gloved hand on a sabre sheathed at their sides, while their free hands remained nestled in the small of their backs as they stood at attention. In the middle of the front row, Ishaq made out the grizzled, half-bionic figure of General Arric Jesmetine.
The general had a fearsome reputation on the ship: all the talk passed around the remembrancers had Old Arric pinned as a tyrant and a taskmaster. They’d only crossed paths once before, in an upper deck corridor while the new remembrancer was scouting around for something to inspire him.
Jesmetine had been with the fleet for sixty years, and every month of it showed. He walked with a silver cane, and m
ost of the right side of his body hummed and whirred with the bionics beneath the old man’s uniform. His beard was kept trimmed close to his haggard face, a fine pelt of white around a scowl like a slit in old leather.
‘You there,’ the general had said. ‘Are you lost?’
Well, no, he wasn’t lost. But nor was he supposed to be up here on the operations decks.
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
‘You’re a bad liar, son.’
This offended Ishaq a great deal, but he didn’t let it show. ‘Apparently so.’
‘You grin too much. If I had daughters, I’d kill you for ever going near them.’
‘With respect, sir, I’m not in the mood for a character assassination. And I am at least a little lost.’
‘See? Grinning again, you won’t charm me with that. Who are you?’
‘Ishaq Kadeen, official remembrancer.’ He liked the way that felt on the tongue, so he said it as often he could.
‘Oh.’ The old man cleared his throat with a sound like gargling gravel. ‘You’re not a poet by any chance, are you?’
‘No, sir. I’m an imagist.’
‘That’s a shame. The Blessed Lady has an ear for poetry. Though, hmm, it’s for the best if you never darken her door, I’m sure.’
This was before he knew who the Blessed Lady was, but that grumble alone was enough to make him vow to darken her door as soon as possible, whoever she might be.
‘So you’re hunting for picts to take?’
‘Guilty,’ Ishaq halted the grin before it reached his lips, ‘as charged.’
The old man scratched at his neat beard, fingers making scritch, scritch, scritch sounds against what was barely more than stubble. ‘This is a warship, you know. You can get in a lot of trouble wandering around like this. Go back to the lower decks, and wait for the Chaplain’s arrival like everyone else. You’ll get all your picts then.’
Ishaq considered that a fair deal, but as he turned to leave, he decided to push his luck a little more.
‘Sir?’
‘What?’ The old man was already walking away, cane tapping on the decking.
The First Heretic Page 29