The First Heretic

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Sythran fought as he always fought: in the perfection of silence and solitude. Everything was in motion to an exacting standard – each twist of the spear haft brought the blade up to block las-fire or down to cut flesh, while each weave and duck was performed with the necessary vigour to keep him unwounded, but never left him overbalanced or needing to reposition himself. His footwork was stoic and rigid only long enough to kill the nearest soldier, before blending back into the dance of movement.

  They fell back again. No, they fled.

  Behind his faceplate, Sythran smiled. The bolter on his spear juddered with its release, punching explosive shells into the spines of all who were cowardly enough to turn their backs on him. The rhythmic pound of detonation after detonation made an abattoir of the hallway. Sythran went prone behind a mound of the dead, spinning his spear to hold the blade end. A clunk, a click, and the weapon was reloaded. Sythran rose again, already cutting the air with grand sweeps, batting aside the streaking laser fire.

  ‘Syth,’ crackled Aquillon’s voice. ‘We move.’

  Sythran returned an acknowledgement blip by blinking at the affirmation rune on his retinal display. More Euchar, so very proud in their dull orange fatigues, came charging down the corridor. Sythran leapt his cadaver barricade and met them head on. They fell in pieces, and beyond a las-burn along his shoulder guard, the blood on his blade was the only evidence he’d even been fighting. The corridor was clear for now, populated by dead fools who’d believed they could bayonet him where their fellows had failed. Sythran looked over his shoulder in time to see his brothers emerge from the witch’s cell. But only two. Nirallus and Aquillon, their armour pitted and cracked by incendiary fire.

  Perhaps they detected his questioning glance without seeing his face, for Aquillon said ‘Kalhin is dead. We must hurry.’

  Well did he mark the blood shining on Aquillon’s sword point.

  Xi-Nu 73 sighed. It vocalised from his rebreather mask as an insect’s buzzing. The sensory inhibitors lining his nerves like insulating cable around wire were doing all they could, but they failed to entirely mute the pain of shutting down. Shutting down? Dying. In his final mortal moments, he couldn’t resist the biological descriptor. Such resonance. Dying... Death... So dramatic.

  He laughed, and made more static-laden buzzing. It became a cough that tasted of spoiled oil.

  With his one remaining hand, the adept started the laborious task of dragging himself across the floor. A potential subroutine to this task presented itself as he moved. Could he not stop halfway and examine the corpse of the human female?

  A cost/benefit analysis flickered in his thought-core. Yes. He could. But he would not. The subroutine was discarded. His hand clawed at the smooth deck, and he dragged himself another half-metre with the squeal of his metal body along the floor. All the while, functionality statistics formed charts behind his eyes. He realised there was a chance, though small, that he would terminate before he reached his objective. It spurred him on, while the bionic nodules attached to his few remaining mortal organs stimulated the fading flesh with jolts of electrical energy and injections of emergency chemicals.

  The tech-adept was blind by the time he reached his destination. His visual receptors had failed, as blank as a monitor with no power. He felt his hand clank against his intended target, and used the motionless bulk to pull himself closer. The fallen robot was a toppled statue, a fallen avatar of the Machine-God, and Xi-Nu 73 embraced it as one would a beloved son.

  ‘There,’ he murmured, barely hearing his voice as his aural receptors failed next. ‘Duty done. Honoured. Name inscribed. In. Archive of. Visionary. Merit.’ His throat vocaliser failed at the last word, leaving him mute for the remainder of his existence.

  Xi-Nu 73 expired twenty-three seconds later as his augmetic organs powered down without hope of restarting. He would have taken no pleasure at all in the irony that his withered organs of meat strove on for half a minute more, still trying to feed life through a body that couldn’t process it.

  The chamber remained still and quiet for only a short while. Booted footfalls soon drummed down the hallway, heralding the arrival of more inhumans.

  The figure in crimson armour stood in the doorway, framed against the bloodstained wall behind. He waited there without moving, unable to accept what lay before his eyes.

  ‘Let me through,’ said Xaphen.

  Argel Tal stopped him with a glare, and went inside himself.

  Xi-Nu 73 lay in embryonic repose, curled foetally beside Incarnadine’s cracked and broken shell. The robot was in complete ruin, its armour riven into a hundred chopped canyons inflicted by hacking blades. The war machine’s banner-cloak and oath scrolls were likewise ravaged, reduced to shredded rags. The walls and floor had fared no better. Holes showed through the sides of the armoured chamber into adjacent rooms, and where the walls still stood whole, they were cratered by punishing bolter fire.

  Argel Tal noted all of these details in the time it took to blink, and paid no heed thereafter. He knelt by Cyrene’s slack form. Blood deepened the red of her gown – the same crimson as his own armour – and painted the floor beneath her. Liquid red flecked her neck and hair. The wound was a blatant one: a great split in her chest where the sword-tip had rammed into her. One blow, a heart strike, had been enough to pierce her precious mortality.

  Blood. The presence was still thick and slow, but Argel Tal’s despondent anger was rousing the daemon to wakefulness. Blood soon. Hunt.

  The change was taking hold again. The daemon sensed battle, and the flesh they shared began to warp in reaction. Argel Tal breathed a bestial rumble, but the sound died in his throat when Cyrene shuddered.

  She lived. How had he not seen? The faintest, barest rise of her chest betrayed the life that still beat beneath.

  ‘Cyrene,’ he growled, as much Raum now as Argel Tal.

  ‘This...’ Her voice was a child’s whisper, so breathless that it barely made a sound. ‘This was my nightmare.’ Blind eyes found his with unwavering ease. ‘To be in the dark. To hear a monster breathe.’

  Claws closed around her frail form with possessive, protective strength, but the damage had long since been done. Her blood stung his fingers where it dripped onto them.

  ‘What have they done to you?’ Cyrene asked with a smile.

  She died in his arms before he could answer.

  He heard the voices, but had no reason to pay heed to them. The Other, yes, he heeded such chattering. The bleating of humanity: fleshy tongues flopping in moist mouths, and the gusting of lung-breath over meat to make a sound in the throat. Yes, the Other listened to the voices and replied in kind.

  Raum did not. He barked a word of hate, drawn from the Old Tongue, hoping it would silence their nasal noises. It did not. Hngh. Ignore them. Yes.

  He had sensed the need for the blood-hunt, and risen to the fore in a rush of release. The Other’s body – no, the body they shared – assumed the hunting skin with ease now.

  He ran, aching with need, pained by the pursuit of prey without catching it. Humans in his way were dashed aside. Raum did not look back. He smelled them die, scenting their lifeblood and brainmeat spilling out onto walls and floors.

  Frail things.

  You are killing the crew.

  The Other was returning? This was good. They were stronger together. The Other’s silence had been a cause for fear. As he returned, Raum felt his instincts shifting, adapting, made sharper by reason and the concept of past and future. Intellect, not mere cunning. Sentience. Better. He charged down the corridor, roaring at the humans to frighten them aside. As he passed, he did not slay them.

  They are allies.

  They slowed the hunt. He felt an itching reluctance to confess to his weakness of reason and forethought. We will kill no more. We are whole.

  I... I am back.

  Argel Tal drew in a breath, tasting the ship’s recycled air with its stale-skin tang. Like a thread to be pulled loose, he scented somethi
ng snagging at the edge of his perception. His friend. Aquillon. That ozone smell of charged weapons. The oils used to maintain the golden armour.

  He ran on through the hallways, moving past more corpses, ended by blades rather than claws. De Profundis was packed with the dead, with slain Euchar lining the corridors.

  You were gone too long. The humans bleat and snort at us.

  The vox. Argel Tal blinked at the flashing runes. ‘I am here.’

  ‘Where?’ Xaphen sounded as furious as Argel Tal felt. ‘The Emperor’s bastard sons have decimated half the Euchar on board. Where are you?’

  ‘I… I lost control. I have Aquillon’s scent now. I... Thirteenth concourse, at the port hangar deck.’ Argel Tal stormed through the great doors onto the gunship bay.

  The Rising Sun’s aft thrusters flared before him, as it roared its way out through the containment field and into the void beyond.

  Argel Tal’s scream echoed around the hangar.

  ‘Brother?’ Xaphen was shouting. ‘Brother?’

  They run to hide. The prey goes to ground.

  ‘They flee us,’ Argel Tal raved across the general channel. ‘They’re running to the planet. Baloc! Track the Rising Sun. All batteries, track that ship and fire at will.’

  ‘No!’ Xaphen called. ‘Erebus wants them alive!’

  ‘I do not care what Erebus wants. Send them to the ground in flames.’

  De Profundis came about in a ponderous arc. Along with most of the Astartes Legion fleet, it had suffered hard in the void battle, and was loath to respond to orders now. Signals and firing solutions flew between all nearby Word Bearers vessels, and seven ships let loose with their broadsides, spilling their immensely destructive firepower into space in the hopes of hitting the tiny gunship.

  Less than a minute after it had blasted its way from De Profundis’s hangar bay, the Rising Sun cut through the atmosphere of Isstvan V, its hull aflame and its heat shields glowing molten orange with the stress of a spiralling, rudderless atmospheric re-entry.

  The capital ship Dirge Eterna claimed the kill shot.

  Argel Tal listened to the scramble of conflicting voices over the vox, and the fleetmaster’s description of the Thunderhawk falling in an uncontrolled descent, but not destroyed outright. There would come a time to dispute the Dirge Eterna’s attempt for glory, but that time was not now.

  ‘Gal Vorbak to the assault deck,’ he ordered. ‘Ready a drop-pod.’

  The gunship lay on its side, the very picture of twisted, miserable metal.

  Red shards of hull were scattered across the surrounding terrain, while one engine still valiantly coughed, wheezing smoke too oily and black to be healthy thruster emission. For almost a hundred metres behind, a furrow was carved into the soil where the Thunderhawk had come down and slid, shuddering, along the ground before ploughing headfirst into the ruins of a city wall. This eroded stone stood as warden around a long-forgotten city, home of a long-dead culture. Chunks of masonry broke off as the gunship smashed to a halt, and old stone rained onto the mangled hull plating, punctuating the abuse with a final insult.

  The sky lightened over the wreckage as sunrise came to Isstvan V. An unremarkable star winked over the horizon, more white than yellow, too distant to offer much warmth. On the other side of the continent, a great funeral pyre still burned.

  He breathed the cold dawn air through open jaws, tasting burning oil on the wind. His brothers, his crimson kin, hunted around and through the gunship’s wreckage, seeking any spoor. Behind them, their drop-pod still hissed and creaked as the metal strained in the aftermath of plummeting through the atmosphere.

  ‘They have not been down long enough to hide.’ Xaphen spoke the words as an assured threat. At his side, Malnor was a twitching, ragged creature that drooled venom. Torgal climbed the gunship like something grotesquely simian, leaping and hooking into the hull with his bone-scythes to haul himself upward. His blinded face jerked to the side as he gave canine snuffs. Argel Tal stalked around the gunship’s base, his claws folding closed into knuckly fists, then opening again into raptor talons. Like a desert jackal pack, the eleven remaining Gal Vorbak swarmed the downed Thunderhawk, sniffing out their prey. They did not need to hunt for long.

  ‘So, at last, comes the Crimson Lord.’ Aquillon’s voice was biting in its insincerity. ‘Revealing his true self to those he has betrayed.’

  The Custodes walked from the shadow of a broken wing, their weapons held in loose hands. Each of them exuded rigid confidence. Their gait was assured, their shoulders back, their armour damaged and dented, but ostensibly whole.

  The Gal Vorbak closed in. At the centre of the crimson circle, the three golden warriors went back to back. They offered the Word Bearers nothing but breastplates emblazoned with the Imperial eagle, and blades that would only ever rise in the Emperor’s service. Of the Astartes Legions, only one had ever been honoured enough to engrave the aquila upon their armour – the once-noble Emperor’s Children, now a core part of the Warmaster’s rebellion. But these were Imperial Custodians, the praetorians of the Master of Mankind, and kept their mandate far above such concerns. The Custodes wore the aquila more often than the primarchs themselves. Each eagle symbol shone on their chests in solid silver, clutching lightning bolts in their claws. Nowhere else in the Imperium were the two symbols of the Emperor’s ascension twinned like this: forged into the armour of his chosen guardians.

  The hunters drew even closer. At their vanguard, Argel Tal spared a brief moment’s concern for the fact the Custodes had not fired upon them. Perhaps they lacked ammunition after the battle aboard the ship. Perhaps they wished to end this cleanly, with blades rather than bolters.

  ‘You killed Cyrene,’ he said, the words thickened by spite and the acidic bile stringing between his jaws.

  ‘I executed a traitor who had borne witness to a Legion’s sins.’ Aquillon aimed at his sword at Argel Tal’s warped visage. ‘In the name of the Emperor, what are you? You seem more nightmare than man.’

  ‘We are the truth,’ Xaphen barked at the trapped Custodes. ‘We are the Gal Vorbak, the chosen of the gods.’ All the while, the Word Bearers stalked closer. A noose was closing around the Custodians.

  ‘Look upon yourselves,’ Aquillon said in disbelief. ‘You have cast aside the Emperor’s vision of perfection. You have abandoned everything it meant to be human.’

  ‘We were never human!’ Hissing spit sprayed from Argel Tal’s jaws as he roared the words. ‘We. Were. Never. Human. We were taken from our families to fight the Forever War in the name of a thousand lies. Do you believe this truth is easy to bear? Look at us. Look at us! Humanity will embrace the gods, or humanity will embrace oblivion. We have seen the Imperium burn. We have seen the species brought to extinction. We have seen it happen, as it happened before. The cycle of life in a galaxy owned by laughing, thirsting gods.’

  Aquillon’s voice held nothing but kindness, and that made it all the crueller. ‘My friend, my brother, you have been deceived. The Emperor–’

  ‘The Emperor knows far more than he has ever revealed to you,’ Xaphen cut in. ‘The Emperor knows the Primordial Truth. He has challenged the gods and damned humanity with his hubris. Only through allegiance....’

  ‘...through worship...’ said Malnor.

  ‘...through faith...’ said Torgal.

  ‘...will mankind endure the endless wars against the tides of blood that will drown our galaxy.’

  Aquillon turned to each of the Word Bearers as they spoke their piece of the sermon. He looked back to Argel Tal at its conclusion.

  ‘Brother,’ he said again. ‘You have been most blackly deceived.’

  ‘You. Killed. Cyrene.’

  ‘And you count this as some unfathomable betrayal?’ Aquillon’s laughter was rich and ripe, and to hear it made Argel Tal’s teeth grind. ‘You, who stand out of the Emperor’s light, malformed into a monster. You, who binds tortured souls into the walls of your ship with forbidden lore, letting them su
ck in all psychic sound for forty years? You, accuse me of betrayal?’

  Even through the daemon’s rage fogging his thoughts, even through his grief-born anger at Cyrene’s murder, his brother’s words struck with enough force to wound. Argel Tal had walked through that chamber himself many times, and no matter how ardently he hated the necessity of it, he had still allowed its existence.

  Images assailed him with guilty stabs, each memory knifing into him before he could cast it aside. Xaphen, chanting from the Book of Lorgar, as an astropath shrieked before him. She was being disembowelled, and not quickly, her pain serving as a focus while she was chained to the chamber walls. Colchisian symbols that had been tattooed onto her flesh an hour before still bled freely. The vitae engines, maintained by an Apothecary of the Legion, would keep her alive for many months to come. The daemon Xaphen summoned within her would enslave her mind to that most simple of tasks: to draw in and digest any psychic communication from nearby minds.

  No word would ever reach Terra, but for the falsified reports the Word Bearers made themselves. Compliances achieved. The perfect Legion. Lorgar, the Seventeenth Son, as loyal as any father could hope.

  ‘I accuse you,’ Xaphen laughed himself, ‘of being a fool. Your precious astropath has been wailing your suspicions right into the mouths of listening daemons for four decades. Every time you huddled around him and heard the Emperor’s words, you were hearing nothing more than the lies I whispered into a daemon’s ears.’

  Argel Tal did not add to Xaphen’s relish. The chamber was no source of sinister pride for him. He had condemned not one woman to die in agony there, but sixty-one souls in all. The strain of possession wore the astropaths down with disgusting rapidity. Their degradation was quick, but never merciful. Stinking black cancers ate through their bodies after only a few months. Most faded fast, their minds eroded by the warp’s winds like a cliff suffering in an endless storm. Few ever lasted a year – soon enough, it was always time to bind another helpless, screaming astropath into the life support engines, and inflict horrors upon their flesh with ritual blades and burning brands.