Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

The primarch watched the crowd for signs of such respected tribal elders. ‘How is it that you speak the tongue of my home world?’ he asked their leader.

‘I speak the tongue of my home world,’ the woman replied. ‘You speak it, also.’

Despite the burning skies and the surprises the girl brought, Lorgar smiled at the stalemate.

‘I am Lorgar, as you foresaw, though only my sons call me Aurelian.’

‘Lorgar. A blessed name. The favoured son of the True Pantheon.’

Through great effort, the primarch kept his voice light. No stray nuance could allow this first contact to go wrong. Control was everything, all that mattered.

‘I do not have four fathers, my friend, and I am not of woman born. I am a son to the Emperor of Man, and no other.’

She laughed, the melody of the sound stolen by the blowing wind.

‘Sons can be adopted, not merely born. Sons can be raised, not merely bred. You are the favoured son of the Four. Your first father scorned you, but your four fathers are proud. So very proud. The god-talkers tell us this, and they only speak truths.’

Lorgar’s casual facade was close to cracking now. The Word Bearers sensed it, even if the humans did not.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I am Ingethel the Chosen,’ she smiled, all innocence and kindness. ‘Soon, Ingethel the Ascended. I am your guide, anointed by the gods.’ The barbarian woman gestured at the plain, as if it encapsulated the world itself. More tellingly, she gestured to the warp-wracked void above.

‘And this world,’ she spread her painted hands in benevolence, ‘is Cadia.’

It was something of a unique first contact.

Never before had the Imperials been expected like this. Never before had they been greeted by a primitive culture that not only welcomed them, its people showed no fear at all in the face of giant armoured warriors striding through their midst. The Thunderhawk attracted some curiosity, though the primarch had warned Ingethel that the vehicle’s weapons were active, manned by Legion servitors who would open fire if the Cadians drew too close.

Ingethel waved the curious men and women away from the Word Bearers gunship. The language she spoke was quick and flourishing, with a wealth of unnecessary words bolstering every sentence. Only when she addressed Lorgar and his retinue did she seem to strip the language down to its core, striving for brevity and clarity, evidently speaking Colchisian rather than Cadian.

Lorgar stopped his son’s words with a concerned glance.

‘You are snarling as you speak,’ the primarch said.

‘It is unintentional, sire.’

‘I know. Your voice is as divided as your soul. I can see the latter with my psychic sense – two faces stare out at me, four eyes and two smiles. None would ever know of it, save perhaps my brother Magnus. But to know the truth, one has only to listen. Mortal ears will know of your affliction, Argel Tal. You must learn to hide it better.’

The captain hesitated. ‘I was under the belief that I’d be destroyed after telling you all of this.’

‘That is a possibility, my son. But I would take no pleasure in seeing you dead.’

‘Will the Serrated Sun be purged from Legion records?’

Before speaking, Lorgar trickled fine, powdery sand onto the parchment, helping to dry the inked words he’d written thus far.

‘Why would you ask that?’

‘Because where once three hundred warriors once stood loyal, now barely a hundred remain alive. Of the three companies, one remains whole. Deumos is dead, slain upon Cadia. A hundred of our brothers were stormlost, taken by the warp on the Shield of Scarus. And now my company returns to you broken and... changed.’

‘The Serrated Sun will always be a lesson for the Legion,’ said Lorgar, ‘no matter how the Pilgrimage ends. Some things must never be forgotten.’

Argel Tal took a breath. In the exhalation was a whispering sound. Something was laughing.

‘I do not wish to speak of Cadia, sire. You already know everything I know that transpired on the surface. The nights of discussions with Ingethel and the tribal elders. The comparisons of our star charts with their crude maps of the heavens. Their pictographs of the Eye of Terror, and how the Cadians’ images of the storm matched the empyrean from our scrolls of the Old Faith.’ Argel Tal laughed, and the sound lacked any humour. ‘As if we needed more evidence.’

Lorgar was watching him closely.

‘What, sire?’

‘The storm that blights this subsector. You called it the Eye of Terror.’

Argel Tal froze. ‘That... Yes. That’s what it will come to be called. When it opens wider across the void, when the trembling Imperium sees it as the galaxy’s own hell. A void-sailors’ dramatic name for the greatest mystery of the deep. It will be scrawled onto maps and digitally inscribed into stellar cartography databanks. Humanity will give it that name, as a child names its own simple fears.’

‘Argel Tal.’

‘Sire?’

‘Who is speaking to me now? That is not your voice.’

The captain opened his eyes. He didn’t recall closing them.

‘It has no name.’

Lorgar didn’t answer at once. ‘I believe it does. It has identity, as strong as yours. But it slumbers. I sense its dissipation within you. You absorb it into the cells of your body like...’ here, he paused again. Argel Tal had often wondered what it was like to see all life on every possible level, even the genetic one – the lives and deaths of billions of barely measurable cells. Could all primarchs perceive thus? Merely his own? He had no idea.

‘Forgive me, sire,’ he said to Lorgar. ‘I will keep my eyes open.’

Lorgar’s breathing quickened. No unaugmented man would be able to discern the difference in the primarch’s heartbeat, but Argel Tal’s senses were keener than a human’s by many degrees. In truth, they were keener than Astartes perception now. He could hear the tiniest creak-stresses in the metal walls of his chamber. The guards’ breathing outside the sealed bulkhead door. The skittering whisper of an insect’s legs in the ventilation duct.

He’d felt this acuity before, back on Orfeo’s Lament, during the seven months of drift-sailing in their bid to escape the Eye. The feeling had come many times, in truth, but none as strongly as when only a brother’s blood quenched his thirst.

‘I see two souls at war within you, and the violence behind your eyes. Yet I wonder,’ the primarch confessed, ‘if you are cursed or blessed.’

Argel Tal grinned, showing too many teeth. It wasn’t his smile. ‘The difference between gods and daemons depends largely upon where one stands at the time.’

Lorgar wrote the words down.

‘Speak to me of the last night on Cadia,’ he said. ‘After the religious debates and the tribal gatherings. I have no interest in repeating weeks of research and rituals performed in our honour. The fleet’s data-core is swollen with evidence that this world, like so many others, shares unity with the Old Faith.’

Argel Tal licked his teeth. It still wasn’t his smile. ‘None so close.’

‘No. None as close as Cadia.’

‘What do you wish to know, Lorgar?’

Here, the primarch paused, hearing his name leave his son’s lips with such casual disregard. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, neither threatened nor fearful, but not quite at ease.

‘We. I. We are Argel Tal. I. I am Argel Tal.’