Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

‘You speak in two voices.’

‘I am Argel Tal,’ the captain said through clenched teeth. ‘Ask what you will, sire. I have nothing to hide.’

‘The last night on Cadia,’ said Lorgar. ‘The night Ingethel was consecrated.’

‘This is heathen sorcery,’ said Vendatha.

‘I don’t believe in sorcery,’ Argel Tal said back. ‘And neither should you.’

Their voices echoed in the temple chamber, which was no more than a roughly-hewn room in the endless network of subterranean caverns. With no structures of human craft on the face of Cadia, the Temple of the Eye was far less grand than its name suggested. Beneath the northern plains where the Legion had made planetfall, the caverns and underground rivers formed a natural basilica.

‘This world is a paradise,’ Vendatha remarked. ‘It beggars belief that so many tribes come to dwell here in these deadlands.’

Argel Tal had heard this complaint before. Vendatha, in his blunt and stoic wisdom, had seen the orbital picts as often as the Word Bearer captain had. Cadia was a planet of temperate forests, expansive meadows, healthy oceans and arable land. Yet here, in an uninspiring corner of the northern hemisphere, the vagabond population gathered en masse to eke out a living on the arid plains.

Xaphen walked with Argel Tal and the Custodian down the stone corridor. The temple’s construction was as flimsy as could be expected from a culture of primitives – the sloping walls showed the stone-scars of miners’ picks and other digging tools – but the chambers weren’t entirely devoid of decoration. Pictographs and hieroglyphs covered every wall, replete with symbols, charcoal murals and etched sigils that made little sense to Vendatha.

In truth, it hurt his eyes to look at many of them. Uneven, jagged stars were scrawled everywhere, as well as long mantras in a meaningless tongue, their sentence structure clearly indicative of verse. Sketches of the Great Eye, as the Cadians named the storm above, were also commonplace.

Torches of bundled sticks burned in wall sconces at irregular intervals, making the stone hallways misty with smoke. All in all, Vendatha had been to many more pleasant places. A pox on Aquillon for volunteering him to descend to the surface.

‘It is not difficult to comprehend why they come here, when you understand faith,’ said the Chaplain.

‘Faith is a fiction,’ Vendatha snorted.

Argel Tal had never wagered in his life – to gamble was against the Legion’s monastic code; it showed a reverence for worldly wealth which was meaningless to all pure-hearted warriors – but he would have been safe to gamble that the words Vendatha spoke most often were: ‘Faith is a fiction’.

‘Faith,’ said Argel Tal, ‘means different things to different beings.’ It was a weak attempt to sunder the argument he could feel building between the other two, and it failed, just as he’d suspected it would.

‘Faith is a fiction,’ Vendatha repeated, but Xaphen went on, warming to his captive audience.

‘Faith is why these people come here. It is why their temple stands at this spot. The stars are all in the right alignment at this place, and they believe it aids their rituals. The constellations mark the gods’ homes in the sky.’

‘Heathen magic,’ Vendatha said again, getting annoyed now.

‘Pre-Imperial Colchis was the same, you know.’ Xaphen wouldn’t let up. ‘These rites are little different to the ones performed in the generations before Lorgar’s arrival. Colchisians have always invested great significance in the stars.’

Vendatha shook his head. ‘Do not add mindless superstition to the list of grievances I have against you, Chaplain.’

‘Not now, Ven.’ Argel Tal was in no mood for the two of them to go through yet another debate on the nature of the human psyche and the corruption of religion. ‘Please, not now.’

While Argel Tal had slowly grown closer to the Custodes contingent in the past three years, often training his sword work with them in the practice cages, Xaphen seemed to take a kind of wicked delight in baiting them at every turn. Philosophical arguments almost always ended with Vendatha or Aquillon needing to leave the chamber before they struck the Chaplain. In turn, Xaphen counted these moments as great personal victories, and had an old man’s cackle about the whole thing.

‘If the stars are so precious to them,’ Vendatha’s voice was crackling through his helm’s speakers, ‘then why do they hide beneath the earth?’

‘Why don’t you ask them tonight?’ Xaphen smiled.

The three of them walked on, and the silence lasted for several blessed moments.

‘I hear chanting,’ the Custodian sighed. ‘By the Emperor, this is madness.’

Argel Tal heard it, too. The levels below them extended deep into the earth, but the thick stone carried sound with deceptive ease. To walk in the temple-caverns was to hear laughter, footsteps, prayers and weeping – at all times of day and night.

On one of those lower levels, the ritual was underway.

‘I have watched you clutch at parchments and babble to the Cadians in their own tongue for weeks now.’

‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said, distracted, as he ran his gauntleted fingers along a charcoal depiction of what looked like the primarch. The image was crude, but showed a figure clad in a robe, next to another figure in mail armour, with one gaping eye. They stood atop a tower, in a field of shaded flowers.

This wasn’t the first such image Argel Tal had seen, yet they never failed to capture his interest. Serfs from the fleet had landed in huge numbers, set with the tasks of exploring the Cadian caves and taking pict references of every marking they found.

‘Is this is how your Legion repents for failing the Emperor?’ Vendatha asked. ‘After so many compliances, I’d dared to perceive you all in a new light. Monarchia was a past sin. Even Aquillon believed the same. And now we come here, and everything unravels as you stutter to these wretches in alien speech.’

‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said, refusing to be riled.

‘I may not be fluent in your monotonous tongue,’ said Vendatha, ‘but I know enough. What leaves the Cadians’ lips is not Colchisian. Nor are these writings. This resembles nothing else. Its roots aren’t even in proto-Gothic.’

‘It’s Colchisian ,’ Argel Tal said again. ‘It’s archaic, but it is Colchisian.’

Vendatha let the old argument go. Aquillon had already been informed, and had travelled down to the surface to see everything for himself. The Custodes leader was fluent in Colchisian, yet struggled with the words just as Vendatha did. The cognitive servitors brought down from orbit met with the same difficulties – no linguistic decoders could make sense of the runic language.

‘Perhaps,’ ventured Xaphen, ‘we are a chosen Legion. Only those of Lorgar Aurelian’s blood may speak and read this holiest of tongues.’

‘You would delight in that being the truth, wouldn’t you?’ Vendatha snorted.

Xaphen just smiled in reply.

The Custodian’s mood was black in the wake of his most recent failures to decipher the scrawls on these cave walls.

‘What does this say?’ he indicated a random verse written upon the uneven rock wall.

Argel Tal glanced at the prose, seeing more of the poetry he’d come to expect here: simple, more like a form of clumsy lyric than reverent chanting. Knowing the Cadians’ god-talkers, this was likely the work of a shaman, maddened with hallucinogenic narcotics, spilling his stream of consciousness onto the sacred walls.

‘...we offer praise to those who do,

That they might turn their gaze our way,