In battle, he changed. His was not the ascendant consciousness. He ceded a measure of control to Raum, the surrender coming as naturally as breathing: it seemed simply a function of his new form. The daemon in possession added strength to even his lighter blows, and tore chunks from his enemies even as Argel Tal sought only to clutch onto them. His every motion was made feverish, hungrier somehow, drenched in blood and inhuman needs. As he wrapped his claws around a Raven Guard’s throat with the intent to strangle, his talons sank into the warrior’s neck and hooked around his spine. Every motion was instinctively more violent, breeding more pain in those foolish enough to stand before him.
Many of the Raven Guard sought to run. Argel Tal let these live, knowing his grey-armoured kin would cut these down with their bolters. It was a chore to resist the animalistic need to chase down prey – just seeing them flee from him was enough to tense his muscles into the desire for pursuit – but he knew his role in this war. He was a warrior, not a hunter.
A connection he’d not known existed went hollow and cold, and he felt, rather than saw, Dagotal die.
You are all bound. Blessed and bound.
A second of pain, like the memory of an old wound, and a curious loss stole over him. It was a lessening, as if the warmth of the sun had fallen behind a greying sky. The momentary chill passed, but the knowledge of his brother’s demise was etched into him, as cold as a stone in his skull.
He died in fire. Raum’s voice was as ecstatic as it was breathless. A cascade of chopping images flickered in Argel Tal’s mind, showing Dagotal engulfed in flame, surrounded by Raven Guard bearing flamer units. They bathed him in the corrosive fire, layering chemical propellant over his mutated armour, stoic against the unbelievable stench their murder was making.
The images flashed away, and Argel Tal dropped the corpse he’d strangled. Immediately, the need took him again. Like a hunger, a need for satiation, he physically ached unless he was moving toward prey. And he knew this ferocious need was the only emotion the neverborn could ever feel. This was how their minds worked – in stunted, brutal instinct.
The daemon moved to sate his new hunger.
The tremors eased, but didn’t cease. Still, Ishaq was thankful for small mercies. Nonessential bulkheads were grinding open now. The red light staining everything flickered back to standard illumination. He assumed De Profundis was pulling free of the main battle for... some reason. To rearm? To regroup? Whatever, he didn’t know and it didn’t matter. He was bolting through the corridors the moment he heard the first bulkhead unsealing.
Many were still shut tight, blocking off voided sections of the deck. This, too, didn’t matter. He didn’t want to explore any more, he just wanted to get out of here alive.
It was strangely worse to slow down and walk solemnly past Euchar infantry patrols than it was to pick and weave between the dead bodies that adorned some of the more damaged corridors. The Euchar squads were here to clean up, and he didn’t envy them that job. On several occasions, he moved past them in a dignified walk, seeing them gathering the fallen and bagging them up. He made sure his face was covered by the serf hood, and did his best to seem as if he paid little heed.
Once he was free of the monastic deck, he made his way to the Cellar, shaking loose the Legion robe on his way. His picter scanner was kept in a white-knuckled grip that would’ve broken a cheaper, less sturdy model.
The doors opened before him, revealing the Cellar in all its bustling slum hole glory. Even in the midst of the battle, the remembrancers and civilian crew had gathered here, gambling and drinking and doing their damndest to ignore the war raging outside. In truth, he didn’t blame them. He’d done it himself in smaller battles before.
His hands were shaking when he reached an empty table. A passing girl brought him something he didn’t order, and wouldn’t like even if he was in the mood to drink it. He scattered the few coins he had left, not caring that he overpaid. He just needed to be around people. Normal people.
‘Ishaq Kadeen. The imagist. I have your pict of De Profundis. A masterpiece, young sir.’
Ishaq looked up to meet the speaker’s dark-ringed eyes. He recognised the old man immediately.
‘You’re the astropath. The astropath for the Occuli Imperator.’
‘Guilty,’ the old man performed a strangely courtly bow, ‘as charged.’ He gestured to the chair. ‘Absolom Cartik at your service. May I sit?’
Ishaq’s grunt passed as a yes. The elder seemed nervous in the Cellar, just as he had last time Ishaq saw him in here. ‘I’ve not seen you in a couple of weeks. There was talk you’d be forsaking this place for good.’
‘I do not fit in well, but at times, the quiet gets to me. I feel the need to be around other people.’ Cartik gestured to the walls. ‘The battle,’ he swallowed. ‘They always get to me.’
‘I know that feeling. Sorry, but I’m not exactly wonderful company right now,’ Ishaq said.
The astropath was watching him with unwavering focus. ‘Your thoughts are very loud.’
All the blood drained from Kadeen’s face. ‘You’re reading my mind?’ He stood up fast enough to make himself dizzy. ‘Is that legal?’
The astropath waved his concerns aside. ‘I could never read a mind as you would understand it. Suffice to say, you are broadcasting your emotion with great intensity. Just as someone might see you laugh or cry, knowing your thoughts from your face, I can see the distress in your mind. No details, but it is very... loud,’ he finished lamely.
‘I don’t need this right now. I really don’t.’
‘I meant no offence.’
Ishaq took his seat again. The ship shook under enemy fire – enough to spill people’s drinks. Most pretended to ignore it. A few faked laughter, as if it were all part of the adventure.
‘Might I ask if you have any more masterpieces in the making?’ the old man asked. Ishaq glanced at his picter rod.
‘I’m not sure. Maybe. Look, I have to go.’ He squeezed his eyes shut, but everything looked the same when he opened them again. ‘I don’t want to be around anyone after all. And I’m not going to drink this, so consider it a gift.’
He slid the glass across the table. As Cartik took it, the astropath’s finger brushed the imagist’s knuckles. The elder jumped if kicked, staring with wide eyes. He looked as suddenly unwell as Ishaq felt.
‘By the Throneworld...’ he stammered. ‘Wh-what have you seen?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Goodbye.’
Absolom Cartik’s elderly claw gripped onto the younger man’s wrist with all the tenacity of a raptor talon. ‘Where. Was. This.’
‘I didn’t see anything, you crazy old bastard.’
Their eyes met. ‘You wish to answer the question,’ Cartik said softly.
‘I saw it on board the ship.’
‘Where?’
‘The monastic deck.’
‘And you made recorded images? Evidence of what you saw?’
‘Yes.’
Cartik released the man’s wrist. ‘Come with me, please.’
‘What? No chance.’
‘Come with me. What you have seen must be shown to the Occuli Imperator. If you refuse, I can guarantee you only one thing: Custodian Aquillon will kill you for attempting to keep this a secret. He will kill everyone who has kept this a secret.’
The emergency lighting dimmed back into life. Complaints rang out across the Cellar, and the vessel around them shivered as its engines flared open again. They were returning to the battle.
‘I’ll... come with you.’
Absolom Cartik smiled. He was an ugly man – and age hadn’t helped change that fact – but he wore the kind of paternal, assured smile that stayed in a family’s memory for many years.
‘Yes,’ the old man said. ‘I thought you might.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
Aftermath
Blood is Life
An Unusual Welcome
He found Dagotal after the battle.
&
nbsp; First, he came across his brother’s jetbike, powerless and half-buried in the Urgall dirt. Not crashed. Abandoned. Abandoned when the change took place, abandoned in favour of running and killing with one’s own claws.
He moved on, stepping over the bodies of slain Raven Guard, their white Legion symbol tarnished by mud or split by savage weapons. A warrior nearby still lived, his breath straining from a broken mouth grille. With a reaching claw, Argel Tal enclosed the Raven Guard’s neck, squeezing the soft armour there and ending the warrior’s life with the popping crackle of destroyed vertebrae.
There was no flood of endorphins from a hunger momentarily sated. With each minute that passed, Raum’s consciousness ebbed from Argel Tal’s mind with the helpless loss of sand slipping through his fingers. With the daemon’s recession, Argel Tal’s own instincts and emotions rebuilt themselves in his mind. In place of bloodlust and unnatural appetites, he felt hollow, and used, and so very, very tired.
His shadow stretched before him, made uneven by the dead bodies it fell across. Great horns curled from his helm. His body was a nightmare of protruding bone ridges and crimson ceramite. His legs were... He didn’t even have the words. They were jointed like a beast’s hind legs – a lion or a wolf – and ended in huge hooves of black bone. His warplate still covered them, leaving his silhouette like the shade of a creature from unholy myth.
Argel Tal turned from his shadow. A wet, burbling growl rumbled in his throat. That scent. He snuffed the air twice. Familiar. Yes.
He stalked away, letting his shadow fall across other bodies. There. Dagotal. A blackened thing, ripe with the scent of baked blood and life reduced to ash. Grey and red armour was strewn all about him, making his husk the cremated statue at the heart of a fallen Word Bearers pack. In the deepest distance, bolters still chattered. Why? The battle was over. Prisoner execution, perhaps. It did not matter.
Still infused with the aftermath of Raum’s inhuman perception, he sensed the others approaching. All of them resembled Argel Tal to some degree. Malnor was a twitching, brutish thing, his bunched musculature claimed by frequent spasms. Torgal hunched as he moved, his faceplate moulded into a snarling face entirely lacking eyes. Argel Tal knew without asking that Torgal was blind. Perhaps he was aided by scent and sound, but he hunted by the daemonic awareness of mortality nearby. Instead of the claws most of the Gal Vorbak now sported, Torgal’s arms ended in lengthy bone blades, hooked like primitive scimitars. Jagged, knuckly teeth roughened the surface of them, showing where they’d once been his chainblades.
Eleven of the Gal Vorbak remained alive. Corax had slain over two dozen – their dismembered parts now scattered over the nearby area – red amidst the grey. In the heat of the battle, it had been an easy matter to ride Raum’s perceptions, discarding the fragmentary pulsing pain of his brothers’ lives ending. But now, in the bitter dusk, their absence was harder to ignore. Their loss left him cold.
With the passing minutes, Argel Tal could feel the daemon’s quiet, small presence wrapped in a crippling exhaustion. Raum was not gone, nor truly distant. The daemon slumbered, its cold weight seeking to warm itself within the Word Bearer’s mind.
The horrendous changes inflicted upon his body and armour began to undo themselves at last. Ceramite cracked and resealed. Bony protrusions sank back beneath his skin, dragged back into the bones from whence they came. As Ingethel had promised so long ago, it was not a painless process, but by now the Gal Vorbak had passed through the fire of that particular torment. Pain was just pain, and they’d endured so much worse. A few grunted as the changes unwrought and their Astartes physiques reformed, but none voiced a lament as bones creaked and muscles condensed.
Still, they’d been seen. Warriors from the other Legions had seen them during and after the battle, and made their distasteful fascination shown in varying measures. The Night Lords seemed particularly unwilling to approach the Gal Vorbak. When Argel Tal had neared Sevatar, the captain had removed his helm to spit acid on the ground by the Word Bearer’s feet. The Sons of Horus – the Warmaster’s own – were more willing to approach and speak of the change. Argel Tal was unwilling to indulge them, but Xaphen, the slowest by far in resuming his Astartes form, seemed all too keen to enlighten the Sons of what the future held for the gods’ chosen warriors.
Argel Tal waited an hour for his bones to cease their creak-aching, but the sense of relief was nothing short of divine when he disengaged his collar seals and pulled his helm free.
The battlefield stank of engine breath and chemical-rich blood, but he had no sense to spare for anything beyond the feel of the wind rushing over his face for the first time in so many weeks.
Boot steps, heavy and assured, came from behind. He knew who it would be without needing to turn.
‘How does it feel?’ came the expected voice.
‘Strong. Pure. Righteous. But then cold, and hollow. Violated.’ Argel Tal turned to meet the other’s eyes. ‘I feel the daemon within me now, weakened and slumbering. Even after knowing the change would grip and fade in tides like this, it was like nothing I can describe. I am uneasy in the knowledge it will happen again, but I also feel anticipation for it. I... I lack the words to do it justice.’
‘We saw you fight,’ said the other. ‘The “blessed sons” indeed.’
Argel Tal sighed, still enjoying the world’s air instead of the filtered oxygen of his warplate. ‘I was spiteful to you before the battle, master. I ask forgiveness.’
Erebus’s smile didn’t reach his lips, but the momentary warmth of sincerity showed in his gaze. ‘Master no more.’
Argel Tal broke the look to stare out over the battlefield. Thousands and thousands of armoured bodies. Hundreds of wrecked tanks. Gunship hulls, still burning in their craters. Roaring cheers from the ranks of the World Eaters as they gathered skulls. The buzzing grind of chainblades as the warriors of seven Traitor Legions looted the dead for trophies and relics.
‘I do not regret taking the sword instead of the crozius all those years ago. As I’ve proven so many times since, I lack the words to be a preacher.’
Erebus came alongside his former pupil, looking out over the desolation. His armour showed clear signs of the battle, cracked and scorched all over. Erebus was never one to send his warriors into battle without leading them in himself. The bas-relief etchings of his deeds in neat Colchisian were discoloured by burn markings and stripped paint showing flashes of metallic ceramite beneath.
‘I believe that night may have been the very first incident of an Astartes seeking to kill another Astartes.’
Argel Tal remembered it well. ‘The primarch told me, long ago when I last stood in the City of Grey Flowers, that you had forgiven me for that night.’
‘The primarch was right.’
Argel Tal narrowed his eyes. ‘I never asked for your forgiveness. Not for that.’
‘It is yours, nevertheless. You still believe I went too far in my methods. I do not. We will never agree upon it. Do you believe you were right in your reaction? To draw a weapon against a brother? To seek to slay a Chaplain of your own Legion?’
‘Yes.’ Argel Tal’s gaze was unwavering. ‘I still believe that. I would have killed you, had I the chance.’
Erebus remained impassive. ‘Beside that first and last betrayal, you were a better student than you give yourself credit for. Loyal, intelligent, and strong of both heart and will.’
Loyal.
Raum’s thought was somnolent, barely formed in a veil of fogged weariness. It brought Argel Tal on guard, as he expected the daemon’s intent had been.
‘Sometimes I wonder,’ he said, ‘just how much of our loyalty is written into our blood.’
Erebus wasn’t blind to the inference. ‘The gene-seed changes every Legion, but the Word Bearers would not follow Aurelian into damnation and triumph with equal passion. We follow him because he is right, not because we must.’
Argel Tal nodded, neither agreeing nor arguing.
‘I need ans
wers,’ the Gal Vorbak commander said. His tone was cold and clear, and Erebus turned upon hearing it.
‘Is this really the time?’ he asked.
Argel Tal fixed his former mentor with a cynical scowl. ‘We stand in the midst of two Legions brought to extinction by traitorous hands, and walk the first battlefield of an Imperial civil war. There will never be a better time to talk of betrayal, Erebus.’
The slightest edge of a smile coloured the Chaplain’s lips. ‘Ask.’
‘You already know what I would ask, so spare me speaking the question.’
‘The primarch.’ Erebus was utterly neutral once more, ever the statesman. ‘You would have me relay what we have done in the main Legion fleet for forty years? There is no time for such discussion. Much of what we learned is contained within the Book of Lorgar.’
A curl to his lips showed how little Argel Tal liked that answer. ‘Which, it seems, you have written half of,’ the Gal Vorbak lord said.
Erebus acquiesced to this with a shallow nod. ‘I have added to the rituals and prayers within, yes. As has Kor Phaeron. We have learned much, and have guided the primarch as often as he has guided us.’
Argel Tal growled his displeasure. ‘Be clearer.’
‘As you wish. A moment, please.’ Erebus knelt to slide his gladius into the throat of a twitching Raven Guard warrior. As they walked on, he wiped blood from the blade with an oiled cloth from his belt pouch.
‘You do not know what it was like, Argel Tal. After venturing into the Great Eye, Lorgar was... distraught. His faith in the Emperor was already destroyed, and the truth he found at the galaxy’s edge tormented him as much as it inspired him. Indecision gripped him for months. Kor Phaeron took command of the fleet for a second time, and we did little but vent our wrath across the worlds we came across. Despite Lorgar’s return, the Legion felt no joy from the primarch’s presence. In truth, Aurelian wasn’t certain humanity was ready to learn of such... horror.’
Argel Tal’s skin crawled. ‘Horror?’
‘The primarch’s own word, not mine.’ Erebus nudged another body with his boot. When a rasping breath wheezed from its mouth grille, the Chaplain repeated his execution, cleaning the blade again afterwards. ‘The Legion never struggled to adopt the new faith. We are philosophers as much as warriors, and take pride in such. All could see how the gods had seeded their worship into our culture from generations in the past. The constellations. The cults that always looked skyward for answers. The Old Ways themselves. Few Word Bearers resisted the truth, for most had always felt it on some level.’
The First Heretic Page 39