Aaron Dembski-Bowden: The First Heretic

The voice ceased, and silence reigned.

Almost a hundred souls – human, servitor and Astartes – gathered on the bridge of De Profundis. None of them spoke a word for almost a full minute.

Without even acknowledging the others, the Seventh Captain turned and stalked across the chamber, his armoured boots thudding on the plasteel decking.

‘Argel Tal?’ Deumos spoke into his helm’s vox-link. His visor display tracked his subordinate captain, scrolling white text feeds of biorhythmic data across his vision. He blinked at a peripheral rune to clear the automatic tactical display.

The Seventh Captain turned, making the sign of the holy aquila over his chest, his gauntlets forming the God-Emperor’s symbol over the polished breastplate.

‘I go to ready Seventh Company for planetfall,’ he said. ‘The answers we seek are on the surface of Khur, in the ruins of the perfect city. I want those answers, Deumos.’

The air was gritty, thickened by dust and smoke haze. The ground was a black ash desert, with heat-seared patches of glass and melted marble that reflected the sunlight until they were crunched underfoot.

Argel Tal breathed in, tasting the recycled filtration of his own suit – the sweat, the chemical tang of his gene-enhanced blood – but he couldn’t bring himself to seal his suit completely. Each breath drew in a penitent trace of the brimstone and scorched rock reek of the surrounding devastation.

Nothing was left standing. Stone powder in the air, the result of a million pulverised marble buildings, was already coating their armour as the Word Bearers stood in the heart of Monarchia. Oath parchments and prayer scrolls attached to Astartes warplate turned a grey-white with settling dust. Argel Tal watched his warriors standing amidst the ruination – some picking through debris with no real intent, others simply remaining motionless – and he searched for the words this moment required.

Whatever those words were, they escaped him for now.

The vox crackled live, and Xaphen’s identifier rune flashed on the edge of Argel Tal’s red-tinted retinal display.

‘We stood here, six decades ago.’ Xaphen came to his captain’s side, his rare, gold-trimmed armour greyed by the falling dust. For once, the Chaplain of the 7th Company resembled his brothers, rendering every warrior equal as they stood among Monarchia’s bones. ‘Now the city is drowning in clouds of dust, but we stood in this very place. Do you recall it?’ Xaphen asked.

Argel Tal stared out at the annihilated terrain, seeing ghosts in the mist – the spires and domes of buildings that no longer existed.

‘I remember,’ he said. ‘This was the public plaza of Inaga Sector.’ The captain gestured south, though every direction offered nothing but the same ravaged landscape. ‘There stood the Tophet Gate, where the preachers and traders gathered.’

Xaphen nodded. His left eye bore the same mark as Argel Tal’s: the serrated star, symbol of a shared brotherhood. The weapon mag-locked to his back – a ritual crozius arcanum, the war maul of Word Bearer Chaplains – was forged in the same shape. Its hammerhead was a spiked sphere of dark iron, threaded with silver.

The conversation, such as it was, ebbed to nothing until the unwelcome serenity was broken by another company making planetfall. On howling thrusters, gunships made their final approaches, clawed landing feet crunching onto the fire-blasted ground. Usually, the flame-and-oil stench of their engine exhausts would assault the senses. Here, it was undetectable among the ruin already inflicted.

Bulkheads and ramps clanged open. Another hundred warriors in the etched armour of the XVII Legion took their first steps into the dead city. What little formation existed broke almost immediately as the Astartes scattered, struggling to come to terms with what they were seeing. Argel Tal blink-clicked a vox rune on his visor display, tuning into the general channel again. These new arrivals, wearing the heraldry of 15th Company, voiced their breathless disbelief and impotent anger. Their chestplates were marked with the sigil of heaped human skulls, the Chapter of the Osseous Throne.

Argel Tal offered a quiet greeting. The closest warriors saluted, respecting his rank despite his allegiance to another Chapter. Body and blood, every one of them was a Bearer of the Word. That outweighed all else.

Still more Thunderhawks streaked overhead, the gunships seeking clear ground to land. Between the warriors already on the surface and the gunships remaining where they’d landed, it was becoming a trial to deploy more of the Legion. East to west, north to south, the sky was a mess of shaking gunships and the heat-shimmers of engines struggling to keep the Thunderhawks airborne.

Every few minutes, the sky would fall dark, heralding the passage of a Stormbird. These largest landers carried entire companies, their deafening passing temporarily blocking out the sun.

Argel Tal walked without purpose, crushing ruined rock underfoot. He sealed his armour’s ventilation systems when he grew tired of inhaling the sulphuric stench of Monarchia’s grave. Melted rock and scorched earth were never easy on the nose, and the captain’s gene-enhanced olfactory senses were pained by the intensity. Breathing the recycled air of his suit’s internal filters, he walked on.

The ground was uneven, pounded into blackened craters by the Ultramarines’ orbital assault. Argel Tal felt his suit’s stabiliser pistons and gravity gyros shifting to compensate. There were brief hums of power as the mechanics in his armour’s knees and shins adjusted to new patches of uneven terrain.

He knew Xaphen was following him even without looking at the digital distance tracker on his retinal display. It was no surprise when the Chaplain spoke again.

‘I feel as though we’ve lost a war without firing a single shot,’ the Chaplain voxed. ‘But look to the skies, brother. Our father comes.’

The sky grew dark once more, and Argel Tal looked upward as the final Stormbird flew overhead. Its hull was gold, reflecting the midday sun in a spray of solar glare. The captain’s visor dimmed to compensate.

With greater clarity came the revelation of shame. Smaller gunships, Thunderhawks with hulls of blue, flew in formation around the mighty golden Stormbird. An escort squadron: watchmen, not honour guards. The Ultramarines were escorting the Word Bearers’ primarch down to the surface with all the undignified pageantry of a prisoner being led to execution.

Argel Tal’s visor zoomed in, responding to his narrowed eyes. Static fuzzed for half a second, quickly clearing as his eye lenses refocused at the new range.

Every turret on the Ultramarines gunships was trained on the golden hull of the Word Bearers Stormbird.

‘Do you see that?’ he voxed to Xaphen.

‘An insult like that is hard to miss,’ the Chaplain replied. ‘I’d believe it a lie, had I not seen it myself.’

Argel Tal watched the lander’s arc taking it deeper into the city, and without any other signal, every Word Bearer nearby turned and walked in the direction set by the massive gunship.

‘This has the stench of history in the making,’ Xaphen muttered. ‘Gird your soul, brother. Mind your humours.’

The captain had never heard the layer of unease in Xaphen’s voice before. It was not helping his own fragile calm.

‘Answers,’ Argel Tal replied, bringing up retinal readouts of bolter ammunition supplies, along with his armour’s power-pack temperature. ‘Answers, Xaphen. That’s all I want.’

Argel Tal and Xaphen led Seventh Company into the heart of the city, marching to where the Legion gathered.

One hundred thousand warriors stood in silence beneath the setting sun.