Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

The image flared back into jagged, unreliable life.

‘Bitch of a storm,’ Major Jesmetine muttered. A few quiet agreements were all the response he got.

‘This is drawn from memory,’ said Lorgar, meeting their eyes in turn. ‘But my Word Bearers will recognise it.’

‘The empyrean,’ the Legion officers said at once.

‘The Gate of Heaven,’ Xaphen amended, ‘from the old scrolls.’

‘We were summoned here,’ Lorgar said, his voice low and clear and unbroken by doubt’s shadow. ‘Something called out to our astropathic choir through the storm. Something wanted us here, and something awaits us on the planet below.’

The astropath broke decorum, possibly for the first time in his quiet and sheltered life. ‘How... how can you know that?’ he stammered the words through pale lips.

Lorgar let the scroll fall onto the table. Something like anger burned behind his eyes.

‘Because I hear the screaming, too. And it is not wordless. Something on the world beneath us is crying out my name into the psychic storm.’

FOURTEEN

Violet Eyes

Two Voices

Answers

Argel Tal looked at his reflection in the cup of water. Thin fingers touched the stark geography of his face. It was like stroking a skull.

Lorgar didn’t look up from writing.

‘Planetfall,’ said the captain.

Violet eyes.

It was only apparent deviation from the purestrain human breed. With violet eyes, the people stared at the emissaries from the stars. Barbarians, dressed in rags and wielding spears tipped by flint blades, confronted Lorgar and his sons.

And yet, the primitives showed little fear. They approached the Word Bearers’ landing site as a disjointed horde, divided by tribes, each host carrying flayed-skin banners and animal bone totems denoting their allegiance to the spirits and devils of their world’s faith.

Lorgar had taken a small host to make first contact with the humans of 1301-12. The rest of the fleet remained ready in the heavens above, but Lorgar preferred to orchestrate first contact in more humble ways.

At his side stood Deumos, Master of the Serrated Sun, with the captains Argel Tal and Tsar Quorel of the Seventh and Thirty-Ninth Companies respectively. Both captains brought their Chaplains, who in turn stood with their crozius mauls drawn. Behind them, one figure stood skeletally slender, clad in a hooded robe. Three mechanical eyes peered out from the cowl as Xi-Nu 73 watched proceedings taking place. At his side, Incarnadine waited motionless, exuding threat without moving a gear.

Only one figure stood apart from the pack; clad in gold, bearing a spear of exquisite craftsmanship. Vendatha, the Custodian. Aquillon would not be dissuaded from one of his brothers joining them. The Occuli Imperator made it a point for at least one of his warriors to always accompany the primarch on incidents of first contact.

The Custodian’s red helmet crest fluttered in the wind, as did the parchment scrolls bound to the Word Bearers’ armour. He stood closest to Argel Tal. In all Vendatha’s time with the fleet, no other Astartes present had showed him – or the other Custodes – the ghost of respect, let alone an offer of friendship.

At their backs, a Legion Thunderhawk sat at rest – traditional granite-grey, for Lorgar’s golden Stormbird remained with the 47th Expedition. The primarch didn’t miss it, even three years since last setting eyes upon it. The gunship’s ostentation had always reeked more of gaudiness than grandeur. Let the preening Fulgrim adorn his war machines like works of art. Lorgar’s tastes ran to less puerile pursuits.

‘Their eyes,’ said Xaphen. ‘Every one of them has violet irises.’

‘Look up,’ the primarch spoke softly.

Xaphen obeyed. They all did. The warp storm wracking the region shrouded most of the night sky, a great spiral stain of reds and purples staring down like an unblinking eye.

‘The storm?’ Vendatha asked. ‘Their eyes are violet because of the storm?’

Lorgar nodded. ‘It has changed them.’

Xaphen rested his crozius on his shoulder as he still stared into the sky. ‘I know the warp can infect psychics with the flesh-change, if their minds are not strong enough. But normal humans?’

‘They are impure,’ Vendatha interrupted. ‘These barbarians are mutants...’ he gestured with his spear at the approaching tribes, ‘...and they must be destroyed.’

Argel Tal glanced to his left, where the Custodian stood with his halberd lowered. ‘Does this not fascinate you, Ven? We stand on a world at the edge of the greatest warp storm ever seen, and its population comes to us with eyes the same colour as the tortured void. How can you damn that before asking why it happens?’

‘Impurity is its own answer,’ said the golden warrior. He refused to be drawn into debate. ‘Primarch Lorgar, we must cleanse this world.’

Lorgar didn’t look at the Custodian. He merely sighed before speaking.

‘I will meet these people, and I will judge their lives myself. Pure, impure, right and wrong. All I want is answers.’

‘They are impure.’

‘I am not slaughtering the population of an entire world because my father’s war hound whined at the colour of their eyes.’

‘The Occuli Imperator will hear of this,’ Vendatha promised. ‘As will the Emperor, beloved by all.’

The primarch took a last look at the blazing sky. ‘Neither the Emperor, nor the Imperium, will ever forget what we learn here. You have my word on that, Custodian Vendatha.’

The first of the barbarians approached.

Draped around her shoulders was a cloak of discoloured peach-brown, heavy like bad leather, bound by crude black stitching. Her eyes, that beautiful and disquieting violet, were ringed by white paint, daubed in tribal runes over her face. The symbols meant nothing to Vendatha.

But the cloak did.

‘Degenerates...’ the Custodian hissed over a closed vox-channel. ‘That is human skin. Dried, cured, worn like a cloak of honour.’

‘I know,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘Lower your weapon, Ven.’

‘How can Lorgar deal with these creatures? Flayers. Primitives. Mutants. They coat their skin in meaningless hieroglyphs.’

‘They’re not meaningless,’ said the captain.

‘You can read those runes?’

‘Of course,’ Argel Tal sounded distracted. ‘It’s Colchisian.’

‘What? What does it say?’

The Word Bearer didn’t answer.

Lorgar inclined his head in respectful greeting.

The barbarian leader, at the head of over a hundred ragged people dressed in similar rags and armour of disquieting ‘leather’, showed no trepidation at all. More tribes were still converging from across the plainsland, but they held back, perhaps in deference to the young woman with the raven hair.

Skulls tied to her belt rattled as she moved. Despite reaching the primarch’s waist, she seemed utterly at ease as she lifted her mutated eyes to meet the giant’s own.

When she spoke, a heavy accent and clipped syllables couldn’t disguise the language completely. It had come far from its proto-Gothic roots, but the Imperials recognised it, some with greater ease than others.

‘Greetings,’ the primitive said. ‘We have been waiting for you, Lorgar Aurelian.’

The primarch let none of his surprise show. ‘You know my name, and you speak Colchisian.’

The young woman nodded, seeming to muse on the primarch’s deep intonation, rather than agreeing with Lorgar’s words. ‘We have waited many years. Now you walk upon our soil at last. This night was foretold. Look west and east and south and north. The tribes come. Our god-talkers demanded it, and the warchiefs obeyed. Warchiefs always heed the shaman-kind. Their voices are the voices of the gods.’