Aaron Dembski-Bowden: The First Heretic

I speak of judgement. Divine judgement.

The wrath of a god who looks upon the works of an entire world, and what he sees turns his heart sour. In his disgust, he sends flights of angels to deliver damnation. In his rage, he seeds the skies with fire and rains destruction upon the upturned faces of six billion worshippers.

Now tell me again. Tell me again that you can imagine seeing the stars fall from the sky. Tell me you can imagine heaven weeping fire upon the land below, and a city burning so bright that all sight is scorched from your eyes as you watch it die.

The Day of Judgement stole my eyes, but I can still illuminate you. I remember it all, and why wouldn’t I? It was the last thing I ever saw.

They came to us in skyborne vultures of blue iron and white fire.

And they called themselves the XIII Legion. The Warrior-Kings of Ultramar.

We did not use those names. As they marched us from our homes, as they butchered those who dared to fight back, and as they poured divine annihilation upon everything we had built...

We called them false angels.

You came to me asking how my faith survived the Day of Judgement. I will tell you a secret. When the stars fell, when the seas boiled and the earth burned, my faith didn’t die. That is when I began to believe.

God was real, and he hated us.

–Excerpted from ‘ The Pilgrimage’, by Cyrene Valantion

ONE

The Perfect City

False Angels

Day of Judgement

The first falling star came down in the heart of the perfect city.

The crowds were always dense and boisterous in the plaza’s midnight markets, yet everything fell silent when the sky wept fiery trails and the stars fell to earth in a stately drift.

The crowds parted, forming a ring around the huge arrival as it came down. Only when it came closer could the people see the truth. It wasn’t a star at all. It wasn’t formed of fire – it was breathing it from howling engines.

A smoke cloud drifted out from the downed craft, stinking of scorched oil and off-world chemicals. The ship’s hull was viciously avian, a raptor’s body of cobalt blue and dull gold. Its underbelly gleamed orange, bright with the hissing heat of orbital descent.

Cyrene Valantion was one of the gathered crowd, and three weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday. Whispers started up around her – whispers that became chants, chants that became prayers.

Jagged thunder echoed from nearby streets and plazas – the grumble of great engines and wheezing boosters. More of the stars-that-were-not-stars came raining down from heaven. The very air rattled with the hum of so many engines. Each breath tasted of exhaust.

The dark-hulled emissary from the sky was emblazoned with the symbol of the Holy Eagle, fire-blackened from its dive through the atmosphere. Cyrene’s vision twinned, blurring between what she was seeing now and what she’d seen in artistic renderings in childhood. She was far from being one of the faithful, but she knew this craft, elaborately brought to life in pictures of vibrant inks on scrolls of parchment. Such imagery was scattered throughout the scriptures.

And she knew why the elders in the crowd were weeping and chanting. They recognised it too, but not merely from the holy codices. Decades ago, they’d borne witness to the same vehicles arriving from heaven.

Cyrene watched as people fell to their knees, lifting their hands to the starry skies and weeping in prayer.

‘They have returned,’ one old woman was murmuring. She spared a moment from her obeisance to claw at Cyrene’s flowing shuhl robe. ‘On your knees, ignorant whore!’

By now, the whole crowd was chanting. When the old woman reached for her leg again, Cyrene shook herself free of the hag’s wrinkled talon.

‘Please don’t touch me,’ Cyrene said. It was tradition never to touch those who wore red shuhl robes without first gaining the maiden’s permission. In her fervency, the old woman ignored the ancient custom. Her fingernails raked the younger woman’s skin through the street dress’s thin silk.

‘On your knees. They have returned!’

Cyrene went for the qattari knife strapped to her naked thigh. Slender, ornamented steel gleamed amber in the firelight reflected from the sky-craft.

‘Don’t. Touch. Me.’

With a hissed curse, the old woman returned to her prayers.

Cyrene took a deep breath, seeking to slow her frenetic pulse. The air heated her throat, prickling at her tongue with the charcoal spice of thruster smoke. So they had returned. The angels of the God-Emperor had returned to the perfect city.

She didn’t feel the rush of reverence. Nor did she fall to her knees and thank the God-Emperor for his angels’ second coming. Cyrene Valantion stared at the vulture hull of the iron craft, while one question burned behind her eyes.

‘They have returned,’ the old woman murmured again. ‘They have returned to us.’

‘Yes,’ said Cyrene. ‘But why?’

Movement from the craft came without warning. Thick doors clanged wide and a ramp juddered down on squealing pneumatics. Between gasps and nervous weeping, the worshipful chanting grew louder. The people intoned prayers from the Word, and the last of those standing finally dropped to their knees. Cyrene was the only person left on her feet.

The first of the angels stepped from the thinning smoke cloud. Cyrene stared at the figure, her eyes narrowing despite the exalted rightness of the moment. A sliver of ice wormed through her blood.

As if one girl’s whispered protest could possibly change what was happening, she breathed a single word.

‘Wait.’

The angel’s heavy armour was at immediate odds with the images from scripture. It stood unadorned by the holy parchments that should detail its holiness in flowing script, nor was it clad in the winter-grey of the God-Emperor’s true angels. This one’s armour, like the craft it emerged from, was a deep and beautiful cobalt, trimmed with bronze so polished it gleamed close to gold. Its eyes were slanted red slits in a stoic facemask.

‘Wait...’ Cyrene said again, louder this time. ‘These are not the Bearers of the Word.’

The old woman hissed at her blasphemy, and spat on her bare feet. Cyrene ignored her. Her gaze never left the warrior armoured in cobalt, so subtly and distinctly different from the scriptures she’d been forced to study as a child.

The angel’s brethren emerged from the dark interior of their landing craft and descended to the plaza. All wore armour of the same blue. All of them carried great weapons too heavy for a mortal man to lift unaided.

‘They are not the Bearers of the Word,’ she raised her voice above the chanting. Several people kneeling around her replied with harsh whispers and potent curses. Cyrene was drawing breath to call out the accusation a third time when the angels, moving in inhuman unison, raised their weapons and aimed into the crowd of worshippers. The sight stole the breath from her throat.

The first angel spoke, its voice deep and raw, filtered through hidden speakers in its facemask.

‘People of Monarchia, capital city of Forty-Seven Ten, hear these words. We, the warriors of the XIII Legion, are oathed to this moment, honour-sworn to this duty. We come bearing the Emperor’s decree to the tenth world brought to compliance by the Forty-Seventh Expedition of humanity’s Great Crusade.’

All the while, the dozen angels kept their weapons aimed at the kneeling civilians. Cyrene could see the muzzles were as charred as the vulture craft’s hull, darkened from firing shells of monstrous size.

‘Your compliance with the Imperium of the Man has held for sixty-one years. With the greatest regret, the Emperor of Mankind demands that all living souls abandon the city of Monarchia immediately. Moments ago, your planetary leaders were given the same warning. This city is to be evacuated within six days. On the final day, your planetary leaders will be allowed to send a single distress call.’