Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

‘From the fires of righteousness,’ Malnor intoned, ‘unto the blood of purity. We bring the Word of Lorgar.’

‘By your word,’ the nearby peasants chorused.

Malnor nodded his helmed head in acknowledgement, and walked back to join his brothers.

‘What happened?’ Cyrene asked. ‘Why did we stop?’

‘It’s considered a blessing to be offered the oath papers from our armour,’ said Argel Tal. A few minutes later, Argel Tal paused the march again to give one of his parchments to a young mother holding a baby. She pressed the scroll to her infant’s forehead, then her own.

‘What is your name, warrior?’ she asked, needing to crane her neck to look up at him.

‘Argel Tal.’

‘Argel Tal,’ she repeated. ‘My son will carry that name from this day forward.’

Insofar as it was possible for a walking suit of battle armour to look humble, the captain did so now. ‘I’m honoured,’ he said, and added ‘Be well,’ before rejoining the march.

Torgal glanced down at the frail figure of Cyrene. ‘Would you like my oath scroll, little mistress?’ he offered.

‘I don’t read very much anymore,’ she smiled, bright and sincere. ‘But thank you, Torgal.’

After the short march through streets she couldn’t see, Cyrene had spent the rest of the day in one of the Covenant’s temples. Argel Tal and his officers remained with her as she was interviewed and questioned by overeager priests. Instead of being given a seat, she was guided to recline on a long couch, made almost princely by too many cushions. It had the opposite effect of the intended one, leaving her shuffling to get comfortable no matter how she reclined. In the end, she just sat up straight, treating it like a chair.

‘What was the last thing you saw?’ one priest asked.

‘Describe the fire that rained from the sky,’ pressed another.

‘Describe the city’s towers falling.’

As the questions went on, she wondered just how many inquisitors were sat before her. The room was cold, and the faint echo when people spoke suggested a large chamber. A background hum pervaded everything, a thrum that set her teeth on edge – it was one thing to recognise the active buzz of Astartes armour, but another entirely to get used to it.

‘Do you hate the Emperor?’ one of the priests asked.

‘What happened in the months after the city fell?’ asked another.

‘Did you kill any of your abusers?’

‘How did you escape?’

‘Would you serve the Covenant as a high priestess?’

‘Why did you refuse the Legion’s offer of new eyes?’

The answer to this last question intrigued her interrogators a great deal. Cyrene touched her closed eyes as she replied.

‘On my world, there is a belief that the eyes were windows to the soul.’

They answered her words with muttering unintended for her ears. ‘How quaint,’ one of them replied. ‘Do you fear your soul would quit your body through hollow eye sockets? Is that it?’

‘No,’ said Cyrene. ‘Not that.’

‘Please enlighten us, Blessed Lady.’

She shifted in discomfort yet again, and still blushed each time they used the title. ‘It was said that those who wore false eyes would never move beyond this life to paradise beyond. Our mortis-priests always preached that they could see the trapped souls of the lost and the damned in the false eyes of servitors.’

There was silence, for a time.

‘And you believe,’ one of the priests said, ‘that your spirit would be sealed within your corpse if you surrendered your natural eyes?’

She shivered to hear it put like that. ‘I don’t know what I believe. But I will wait until they heal. There’s still a chance they might.’

‘Enough,’ a voice boomed, edged by vox-crackle. ‘You are making her uncomfortable, and I have given my word to the Urizen that she will be taken to the Spire Temple at midnight.’

‘But there’s still time for–’

‘With respect: be silent, priest,’ Argel Tal stepped closer to her, and she felt her gums itching at the drone of his armour. ‘Come, Cyrene. The primarch awaits.’

‘May the Blessed Lady return tomorrow?’ one priest piped up as they were leaving.

None of the Astartes answered.

Once outside, another crowd was waiting for her. She smiled in the direction of the noise, and offered the occasional wave, feeling her face burn with self-conscious doubt. First and foremost in her mind was the effort to keep her discomfort from showing. There would be no getting used to this. She knew she’d hate it until it either stopped of its own accord, or they left Colchis behind.

‘We didn’t have to leave,’ she said. ‘I could have answered more questions. Was I supposed to?’

Over the din of the crowd, she heard Argel Tal reply.

‘My apologies for using you as an excuse to leave,’ he said, ‘but it was too pointless to endure any longer. Questions that led nowhere, or were already answered in the Legion’s reports. Tedious bureaucracy, propagated by self-important men.’

‘Is that not blasphemy? Defying the will of the Covenant?’

‘No,’ said the captain. ‘It was a tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming boredom.’

She smiled at that, as the Word Bearers led her on.

Less than three minutes later, as Cyrene was drawing breath to comment on the warmth of the desert night’s wind, there was a crashing sound from above, the crash of a hundred windows smashing at once.

What she couldn’t see was all four of her warrior guides standing utterly still, staring up at the Spire Temple – that twisting tower of tanned stone, central in the city, taller than all else.

Around her, the crowd’s cheers soured into whispers and weeping. Two of the Astartes, she didn’t know which, began to chant prayers in monotone vox-voices, benedictions to the primarch.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Move,’ Xaphen ordered. One of them gripped her elbow and forced her into a run. Their armour joints snarled with the change of pace.

‘What’s going on?’ she tried again. ‘What was that noise? An explosion?’

‘The primarch’s observatory on top of the central spire,’ he said. ‘Something is wrong.’

TEN

The Right to Lead a Legion

Empyrean

Misery

An hour before, Lorgar was leaning on the balcony’s railing, looking out over the city. The Spire Temple of the Covenant offered an unparalleled view of Vharadesh, and the primarch inhaled the scent of spice, flowers and sand as he watched the sun setting behind the horizon.

Magnus stood alongside him, still clad in the coat of black mail, his coppery skin burnished by occasional sweat trickles. Of the two brothers, Magnus was taller, and even in the years before losing his eye, he’d scarcely resembled their Imperial father. Lorgar was the image of the Emperor in an unknowable younger life – an immortal at thirty.

‘You have done great things here,’ Magnus said, also staring over the vista of Vharadesh. The spiralling towers, bedecked in sloping walkways, like twisted horns... The sea of red-walled homes... The great parks of moon lilies growing in unforgiving soil, ready to be spread over roads and balconies across the city...

‘I have seen Tizca,’ Lorgar’s smile was sincere, ‘and I am always honoured you can leave your City of Light, yet still praise my people’s work here.’

Magnus chuckled, avalanche-low. ‘To think such beauty could rise from riverside sand and bricks of compacted mud. The City of Grey Flowers is a haven for me, Lorgar. You have melded technology and antiquity with consummate skill. It puts me in mind of those first cities ever raised by mankind, in the deserts they were forced to call home.’