Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

Argel Tal closed his eyes, letting out a breath. ‘Sire, we have returned, as ordered.’

Lorgar glanced at Torvus, before turning back to Argel Tal. ‘Captain, you’ve been gone no more than sixty seconds. We just witnessed the Lament enter the edges of the storm. You return to us less than a minute after your departure.’

Argel Tal scratched his ravaged face, shaking his head. ‘No. No, that cannot be.’

‘It can be,’ Lorgar stared hard at him, ‘and it is. My son, what happened to you?’

‘Seven months,’ the captain sagged, leaning on the arm of his throne to keep standing. ‘Seven. Months. There are barely forty of us left. No food. We ate the crew... hateful mouthfuls of leathery flesh and dry bones. There was no water. Water tanks ruptured in the storm damage. We drank promethium fuel... weapon oils... engine coolant... Sire, we’ve been killing each other. We have been drinking each other’s blood to stay alive.’

Lorgar looked away only for long enough to address one of the vox-officers. ‘Bring them in,’ he said, pitching his voice low. ‘Get my sons off that ship.’

‘Sire? Sire?’

‘I am here, Argel Tal.’

‘The Lament has had its final flight. We are on guidance thrusters alone.’

‘Thunderhawks are already launching,’ the primarch assured him. ‘We will return to safer space together.’

‘Thank you, sire.’

‘Argel Tal,’ Lorgar hesitated. ‘Did you slay the crew of Orfeo’s Lament ?’

‘No. No, sire, never. We ate their carcasses. Carrion-feeders. Like the desert jackals of Colchis. Anything to survive. We had to bring you the answers you sought. Sire, please... There is something you have to know. We have the answers to all your questions, but one above all.’

‘Tell me,’ the golden giant whispered. He was unashamed at the tears in his eyes, to see his sons reduced to... to this. ‘Tell me, Argel Tal.’

‘This place. This realm. Future generations will name it the Great Eye, the Eye of Terror, the Occularis Terribus . In hushed voices, they will give a thousand foolish names to something they cannot understand. But you were right, my lord.

‘Here,’ Argel Tal gestured with a weak hand at the seething warp storm visible through the bridge windows, ‘is where gods and mortals meet.’

Soon, he was in isolation. Taken from his brothers.

This was not entirely unexpected, but they had also taken his weapons – ‘for much-needed maintenance, brother’ – and that, he’d not foreseen. They were cautious around him now. The escorts walking him to his meditation chamber had been tense, reluctant to speak, hesitant to answer even the simplest questions.

Never before had he felt this raw distrust between brothers. He knew what its genesis was, of course. The truth could never be hidden, and he had no desire to hide it. Yes, the survivors had eaten the human dead. Yes, they had butchered their own brothers. But not for sport. Not for glory. For survival.

To quench a lethal thirst, with the coppery wine that runs from cut veins.

What other choice was there? To die? To die away from the fleet, with the answers to every question the primarch had ever asked locked behind their dead lips?

But you did die. The traitorous thought rose behind his focus. You did die.

Yes. He did. He’d died before he chewed on the leathery skin of bloodless bodies. Before he’d used his dagger to slice open his brothers’ throats and drink their life to sustain his own.

Some of them had died twice, then. A final death, to fuel the lives of those who would survive.

Thirty-eight Word Bearers had left the wreck of Orfeo’s Lament. Thirty-eight, from one hundred. Far below half-strength. Seventh Company was devastated.

Argel Tal drew in a shivering breath. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the storm outside. In the warp’s roiling tides, ten million faces silently screamed his name. He saw their lips moving, their teeth bared, their faces formed of clashing, psychic energy spilling across the ship’s Geller Field barrier. The flesh and blood of unformed daemons. The raw matter of souls.

He exhaled, and opened his eyes.

The walls of his personal chamber, his haven aboard De Profundis for so many years of the Great Crusade, seemed alien now. Strange, how seven months could change a soul. Seven months, and a skull full of unbridled revelations.

The chronometer above the doorway mocked him with a date over half a year in the past. The primarch’s words were an unwanted truth: seconds had passed at the edges of the warp anomaly. Months dragged by within.

Stripped of his armour, the captain examined his wasted body in the reflection of his dagger, the only weapon remaining to him. A revenant returned his gaze – a skeletal, hollow-eyed creature on the wrong side of the grave.

He lowered the blade, and awaited the chime he knew would come soon.

In his humility, Lorgar had never looked grander.

He came to Argel Tal wearing the layered, glyph-embroidered robes of a Covenant priest, with the hood raised, darkening his features. In his hands he carried a small wooden chest; the box was open, revealing a selection of vulture-feather quills with an inkpot. Under one arm, the primarch bore a roll of papyrus parchments to record his son’s words. As Lorgar entered, Argel Tal saw the hulking forms of two Word Bearers – brothers from the Serrated Sun, but not Seventh Company – standing outside his door.

Standing guard outside his door.

‘Am I a prisoner, father?’ he asked the primarch.

Lorgar drew back his hood, revealing his eternally youthful face and the uncertain smile upon it. His grey eyes were heavy with emotion, and little of it was pleasant. He grieved for his sons. He grieved for what he saw now.

‘No, Argel Tal. Of course you are not a prisoner.’ Their eyes met in that moment, and Lorgar’s smile froze on his perfect lips.

‘The guards at my door would seem to suggest otherwise,’ said Argel Tal.

Lorgar didn’t answer. The beautifully carved wooden box crashed to the bare metal floor. The noise drew attention, and the bulkhead door slammed open. Two warriors from 37th Company came in, bolters aimed at Argel Tal’s head.

‘Sire?’ they asked as one.

The primarch didn’t answer them, either. He stood in rapt silence, reaching out, almost touching the captain’s gaunt face. At the last moment, he drew his hand back before his fingers brushed Argel Tal’s sunken flesh.

Their eyes were still locked: primarch and captain, father and son.

‘You have two souls,’ Lorgar whispered.

Argel Tal closed his eyes to break the stare. Something – a hundred somethings – slithered through his blood, worming within his veins, pushed on by his heartbeat.

He rose to his feet at last.

‘I know, father.’

‘Tell me everything,’ said the primarch. ‘Speak to me of the daemon, and the world of revelation. Tell me why my son stands before me with his soul cleaved in two.’

THIRTEEN

Incarnadine

Stormlost

Voices in the Void

‘1301-12.’ As Argel Tal spoke the code, acidic saliva stung the underside of his tongue.

1301-12, the twelfth world to be brought to compliance by the 1301 st Expeditionary Fleet. ‘Of the seven worlds we conquered in three years,’ he said, ‘this was the most painful.’

Lorgar did not disagree.

‘And yet,’ the primarch said, ‘it was also bloodless. Not a shot fired in anger, nor a blade drawn in rage. The pain was born of revelation.’

‘Three years, sire,’ said Argel Tal, looking away from his father’s eyes. ‘Three years, and seven worlds. History will point to those worlds, the husks we left, and describe how the XVII Legion vented its wrath in the wake of our failure. World after world burned, the populations butchered to slake our fury.’