‘Do not look at me, nor should you accuse her of vanity. An astropathic order came from the primarch himself some time ago. He still holds her in high regard, and expressed his desire that she go through another cycle of treatments.’
Xaphen nodded. ‘And Aquillon?’
Argel Tal’s expression was unreadable. ‘As before. He knows nothing, and suspects even less. His messages to the Emperor never leave the fleet.’
‘My failsafe?’
‘Is still in effect.’
‘Have you checked yourself?’ The Chaplain knew his brother found certain methods distasteful. ‘It is integral you check yourself.’
‘I have,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Nothing has changed, put it from your mind.’
‘Then I am sanguine. Nevertheless, I will renew the wards tonight.’ He moved over to his writing desk, and unclasped a great book from where it was chained to his waist. Slowly, reverently, he leafed through the pages of the great, leather-bound tome – through pages and pages of elegant scripture, mathematical designs, astrological diagrams, chanted invocations and ritual formulae.
Argel Tal ached to step closer and read the secrets spilled from the primarch’s mind. Truly, Lorgar was sharing a great deal with the Legion’s Chaplain brotherhood.
‘You have added much to the book,’ he noted.
‘I have. Each month, we receive new chapters and verses for the holy work. The primarch’s mind is aflame with ideas and ideals, and we are honoured to hear them first. Thousand of epistles now grace these pages.’
The 1301st’s databanks would never be allowed to archive digital copies of the primarch’s scriptures, for such information could be accessed by the wrong souls. Instead, the Serrated Sun’s Chaplains each carried their own copies chained to their armour – forever adding to them as the Word grew and spread – using them to preach at secret sermons. Argel Tal had taken Sar Fareth’s Book of Lorgar from the Chaplain’s corpse, incinerating it on the battlefield; committing necessary blasphemy to prevent the tome ever falling into unintended hands.
The Chaplain took a slow breath. ‘I have been gone too long, Argel Tal. You’re right. I was lost in manipulating the dull-witted labourers of the IV Legion, when in truth I desired nothing more than to be here with my brothers, preaching the evolving Word of Lorgar.’
‘Apology accepted,’ said the Crimson Lord. ‘And you have thirty-eight minutes before planetfall. I will see you on the deck before the Rising Sun.’
Xaphen was reading the data screeds scrolling over his eye lenses. ‘There’s an order for the coming engagement, sanctioning the presence of remembrancers during combat operations. That cannot be correct, for I know you would never acquiesce to such a thing.’
Argel Tal grunted something that wasn’t quite an answer, and made his way to the door.
‘Wait.’
Argel Tal froze, already at the chamber door. ‘Yes?’
‘Think of all that has come to pass, brother. Focus upon how events are flowing faster towards the inevitable insurrection. Are you feeling anything within you? Any... changes?’
The Chapter Master’s hands ached with sudden ferocity. It was if his knuckles and wrists were hinged by broken glass.
Without knowing why he did it, Argel Tal lied.
‘No, brother. Nothing. Are you?’
Xaphen smiled.
Making war upon another human culture was always a distinct kind of poison, and Argel Tal loathed every time it became necessary.
These were unclean wars, and fought with bitterness bred into every soul doomed to take up arms against the Imperium. It wasn’t that the enemy dared resist that discomfited the Crimson Lord, nor was it the expenditure of munitions or the fact each of these worlds was peopled by defenders he came to admire for their tenacity. Those aspects grieved him, but the waste of life and potential from their defiance – that was what left scars.
He’d tried to raise the point with Xaphen in the past. With characteristic bluntness, the Chaplain had lectured him on the rightness of their cause and the tragic need to crush these cultures. Such discussion told Argel Tal nothing he didn’t already know. Similar talks with Dagotal and Malnor had progressed the same way, as had one with Torgal. The Gal Vorbak dispensed with all ranks outside of Argel Tal’s own, rendering all its warriors equal under the Chapter Master, and the former assault sergeant had struggled hardest to understand what Argel Tal was trying to explain.
‘But they are wrong,’ Torgal said.
‘I know they are wrong. That’s the tragedy. We bring enlightenment through unification with mankind’s ancestral home world. We bring hope, progress, strength and peace through unmatched might. Yet they resist. It grieves me that extinction is so often the answer. I pity them for their ignorance, but admire them for the fact they will die for their way of life.’
‘That is not admirable. That’s moronic. They would rather die being wrong than learn to embrace change.’
‘I never said it was intelligent. I said it grieved me to reave a world clean of life because of ignorance.’
Torgal mused on this, but not for very long. ‘But they’re wrong,’ he said.
‘We were wrong once, too.’ The Chapter Master held up a gauntleted fist to make the point: it was crimson, where it would once have been grey. ‘We were wrong when we worshipped the Emperor.’
Torgal had shaken his head. ‘We were wrong, and we adapted rather than be annihilated. I do not see the source of your grievance, brother.’
‘What if we could convince them? What if the flaw is with us, that we merely lack the words to win them to our side? We are butchering our own species.’
‘We are culling the herd.’
‘Forget I mentioned it,’ the Chapter Master conceded. ‘You are right, of course.’
Torgal would not be moved. ‘Do not mourn idiocy, brother. They are offered the truth and they have refused. If we had resisted the truth unto destruction, then we would have deserved our fate, just as these fools deserve theirs.’
Argel Tal hadn’t tried again. A treacherous and unworthy thought plagued him in those grimmest moments – how much of his brothers’ unquestioning belief was born of their own hearts, and how much was bred into them by their gene-seed? How many souls had he consigned to destruction himself, silently urged into bloodshed by sorcerous genetics?
Some questions had no answers.
Reluctant to burden Cyrene with his own troubles when she already served as confessor for hundreds of Astartes and Euchar soldiers, the only other time he’d spoken of his unease was with the one soul he knew he needed to guard against.
Aquillon understood.
He understood because he felt the same, sharing Argel Tal’s subtle lament at the need to destroy entire empires simply because their leaders were blind to the realities of the galaxy.
The latest world to earn destruction was called Calis by its inhabitants, and 1301-20 by the 1301st Expeditionary Fleet. A planetwide invasion was in the making even as Calis’s primitive orbital defences fell, burning, back into the atmosphere.
The population was sentenced to destruction on account of their dealing with xenos breeds. The purestrain human biological code of Calis’s citizens had been unalterably corrupted by the introduction of alien genetics. The people of the world below would not surrender the exact details to the Imperium, but it was clear from blood samples that the Calisians had cultured alien deoxyribonucleic acid into their own cells at some point in time.
‘Most likely to cure hereditary or degenerative disease,’ Torvus suggested. But the reason was meaningless. Such deviation could not be tolerated.
General Jesmetine’s Euchar regiments were tasked with taking hold of twelve major cities across Calis’s scarce landmasses, each with support from several Astartes squads.
The capital city – a sprawl of industrial decay by the name of Crachia – was also the seat of the planetary ruler, who claimed the evidently hereditary title of ‘psychopomp’.
I
t was this woman, Psychopomp Shal Vess Nalia IX, that had rebuffed the Word Bearers’ emissaries. And it was this woman, swollen with corpulence, who had signed her culture’s death warrant.
‘Leave the capital untouched,’ Argel Tal had informed Baloc Torvus at the preceding war council. ‘I will release the Gal Vorbak upon Crachia and take their queen’s head myself.’
The fleetmaster had nodded. ‘And what of the remembrancers? They’ve barely been with us a fortnight, yet already I’m suffering hourly beseeching from their representatives, begging that they be allowed to witness an assault.’
The Crimson Lord shook his head. ‘Ignore them. We are conquering a world, Baloc, not nursemaiding tourists.’
Baloc Torvus had grown deeply patient in his advancing age, which was one of the fleetmaster’s many virtues that his men admired and his fellow commanders relied upon. Argel Tal saw the beginnings of cracks in that ironclad facade now, showing in the lines around the ageing man’s eyes, and the way he adjusted his white cloak to calm himself before replying.
‘With respect, lord–’
Argel Tal raised a hand in warning. ‘Don’t fall into formalities just because you disagree with me.’
‘With respect, Argel Tal, I have been ignoring them on your behalf since their arrival, and for over a year before that. I have mouthed platitudes and composed missives refusing them access to the fleet, citing a hundred and more reasons that it would be inappropriate, impossible, or impractical to deal with them. Now they are here, and they come equipped with Imperial seals from the Sigillite himself, demanding that they be allowed to record the Great Crusade. Short of shooting them – and don’t think I can’t see that smile – how am I to continue delaying them?’
Argel Tal chuckled, the first break in his foul mood the fleetmaster had seen today. Whatever news the returning Chaplain had brought, it was not sitting well with the Chapter Master. ‘I see your point. How many have joined the fleet?’
Torvus consulted a data-slate. ‘One hundred and twelve.’
‘Very well. Make them choose ten. We’ll take them down with us in the first wave, and give them a minimal Army escort from the Euchars. The rest can follow once the landing zones are secure.’
‘What if they encounter significant opposition?’
‘Then they die.’ The Crimson Lord made to leave the room. ‘I do not care, either way.’
Torvus took several seconds to make sure Argel Tal wasn’t joking.
‘By your word.’
TWENTY-TWO
An Idea
Brothers
The Ordained Hour
Ishaq was faintly concerned that he was going to die down here, but that wouldn’t stop him enjoying it while it lasted.
The other remembrancers whined on and on, badgering their Echuar aides about where would be best to observe the battle without actually getting anywhere near it. Apparently they’d forgotten the honour of getting sent down here shortly after first setting foot on solid ground. Most of them seemed dedicated to completely missing the whole point of making planetfall in the first place, but that was fine by Ishaq. He wasn’t here to babysit their careers.
The ride down to the surface had been an uneventful drift through the afternoon sky – anticlimactic after all the tension of being selected, and boring enough for Ishaq to start wondering if there was really a war going on at all. The limited view from the dirty window had revealed a distant city of obviously human construction below.
Strange, to consider waging war against such a familiar scene.
Their lander was an Army troop transport, a shaking, rattling example of the ancient Greywing-class shuttles that he’d assumed were out of service these days, replaced by the smaller, sleeker Valkyries. Ishaq had looked at the boxy underslung compartment where the thirty passengers were evidently supposed to travel. He’d looked at the sloping wings, ran a gloved hand over the armour plating, pockmarked from battle and painted with faded lightning bolts from the Emperor’s Unification Wars on Terra two centuries before.
And he’d fallen in love.
He snapped several picts of the venerable old girl, pleased with each and every one of them.
‘What’s her name?’ he asked the pilot, who was standing around with the two dozen Army soldiers on the hangar deck and looking just as annoyed.
‘They didn’t name them back when she was made. Too many, produced too fast, by too few facilities.’
‘I see. So what do you call her?’ He pointed at the faint, stencilled print along the hull: E1L-IXII-8E22.
The man thawed a touch at Kadeen’s interest. ‘Elizabeth. We call her Elizabeth.’
‘Sir,’ Ishaq grinned. ‘Permission to come aboard your fine lady.’
So it’d started well. Once they were down, things took a turn for the worse. The officer in nominal command of their expedition wasn’t an officer at all – he was a Euchar sergeant who’d drawn the short straw and had to babysit the gaggle of pretension and nervousness that made up ten highly-strung artists in a warzone.
Ishaq half-listened to the sergeant arguing with a handful of the other remembrancers about just where would be acceptable for them to enter the city. He was already bored, standing on the edge of a rise about three kilometres from the city limits. The place itself looked no different from any industrialised sprawl on Terra, and there weren’t even any obvious signs of battle.
The nature of Astartes assault presented a problem for the people attempting chronicle the event. A direct drop-pod attack against the palace meant the remembrancers had to cross an entire hostile city alone, or would remain outside the city limits and ultimately witness nothing at all. The former was never going to happen. The latter almost definitely was.
Ishaq Kadeen was a naturally suspicious soul, and he felt a bleak sense of humour behind all this. Someone, perhaps even the Crimson Lord himself, was making fun of them all. Inviting them down here, but keeping them tediously safe and out of the way.
He trudged over to his minders: two men in the neat ochre uniforms of the Euchar 81st. Each of the remembrancers was similarly guarded. Ishaq’s own sentinels looked both bored and annoyed all at once, which was quite a feat for human facial expressions.
‘What if we just flew over to the palace?’ he suggested.
‘And get shot down?’ The Euchar was practically spitting. ‘That piece of shit would catch fire and fall out of the sky as soon as it came into range of the anti-air guns.’
With effort, Ishaq kept his smile cordial. ‘Then fly really, really high, and come down sharp on top of the palace. Then find somewhere to land.’ He demonstrated this feat of aeronautics with his hands. They didn’t seem convinced.
‘Not happening,’ one of them said.
Ishaq turned without another word, heading back into the dark confines of the Greywing’s passenger pod. When he emerged again, he had a plastek personal grav-chute pack tucked under one arm, clearly taken from the overhead storage lockers.
‘Then how about this? We fly really damn high, and anyone who actually wants to do their job can jump out and do it.’
The two soldiers shared a glance, and called their sergeant over.
‘What is it?’ the sergeant asked. His face painted enough of a picture: he needed another whining artist like he needed a hole in his head.
‘This one,’ the soldier pointed at Ishaq. ‘He’s had an idea.’
It took twenty minutes for the idea to become reality, and Ishaq regretted it right about the same time he jumped out of the gunship and started falling.
Below him sprawled the white-stone palace, like something from Ancient Hellas in Terra’s decadent past. It was coming up to meet him with surprising speed, while the wind was doing its best to beat him unconscious.
This, he thought, may have been a mistake.
He tapped the switches on his chest buckle that would engage the grav-chute. First one, then the other. First one, then the other.
‘Wait twenty seconds before you
switch it on,’ the sergeant had said to the few of them that were making the drop. ‘Twenty seconds. Understood?’
Wait twenty seconds.
The wind roared against him, and the ground swelled below. Was he going to be sick? He hoped not. The queasiness in his stomach flipped and bubbled. Ugh.
Wait twenty seconds.
No sign of anti-air fire, at least. He could make out a spot among one of the inner courtyards – a blackened stain where a red drop-pod had beached itself. That was a good place to start.
Wait twenty seconds.
How... How long had he been falling?
Oh, shit.
Ishaq looked up, through bleary goggles he could see his two minders above. Both were far, far higher than him, shrinking all the while. Even smaller, above them both, were the others who’d caught onto his plan and given it enough credence to come with him.
He flicked the switches, first the blue, then the red. For several moments, absolutely nothing happened. Ishaq continued his plummeting death-dive, too surprised to even swear. He started flicking the switches in random panic, little realising that by doing so he wasn’t giving it time to warm up and engage.
The grav-chute finally kicked in hard enough to wrench the muscles in his neck, its gravity suspensors humming as they came alive. The late activation saved Ishaq from becoming a red smear along the wall of a palace tower, but he paid the price for distraction. Laughing with terror, he careened off the stone parapet, bouncing, giggling and trying not to soil himself as he tumbled through the air.
Forty-eight seconds later, the first of his minders touched down in the courtyard. He found Ishaq Kadeen a bloody mess, cradling his picter in bruised hands as he sat on the grass, rocking back and forth.
‘Did you see that?’ he grinned at the soldier.
Three remembrancers, six Euchar soldiers – a strike force of nine souls, moving through the corridors of the palace. It was a scantly-decorated affair with little in the way of art or ornamentation. The architecture was all pillars and arched roofs, while uncarpeted stone floors led them deeper into the structure, which had all the charm and warmth of a mountaintop monastery.
The First Heretic Page 31