Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

It had started well. Then the battle had started, and he’d got lost.

Luckily, no Word Bearers were on board, all of them committed to the world below. The Legion serfs he did see were hurrying along about their business, but even they were hardly a sizable population. Evidently they had other duties to perform when their masters went to war. What they might be, Ishaq had no idea.

‘Shields down,’ shouted a voice over the shipwide vox, accompanied by some truly horrendous shaking. ‘Shields down, shields down.’

Well, that wasn’t good.

He stumbled around a corner as the lights flickered above. Another long corridor awaited him, with various junctions leading off deeper into this never-ending maze. At the far end, he could see another bulkhead of dense, multi-layered metal. He’d come across several of these so far, and was almost certain that they led to the most interesting parts of the deck. Ishaq wasn’t about to attempt to gain entrance though – a single failed retinal scan would mark his location to the Army units on board, and he could look forward to a quick execution. Oh, yes. He remembered the penalties for coming here all too well.

The Euchar were proving to be a problem too. Squads of them patrolled the halls with their lasguns held diligently to their chests, and though he was immune to their gaze with his robe’s hood covering most of his face, they made it difficult to take any picts, even if he had actually come across anything worthwhile.

Ishaq was finally considering a tactical retreat when the ship shook with enough violence to send him sprawling off-balance, head banging off the steel wall. It hurt enough to stun him, and it stunned him enough that he didn’t even think of swearing.

That lapse was rectified several seconds later, when an automated voice declared a list of breached decks over the vox. The list came to a climax with the words: ‘Deck Sixteen, void breach. Bulkheads sealing. Deck Sixteen, void breach. Bulkheads sealing.’

In a moment of almost poetic disgust, Ishaq looked up to see the great, red ‘XVI ’emblazoned on the wall where he’d hit his head. It was even decorated with spots of his blood.

‘You’re kidding me,’ he said out loud.

‘Deck Sixteen, void breach,’ the crackling voice monotoned again. ‘Bulkheads sealing.’

‘I heard you the first time.’

The ship rattled again, with the definite booming of explosions only a few corners away. Smoke billowed from the far end of the corridor.

Ishaq’s world dimmed into the deep, unwanted red spectrum of emergency lighting. At best, it would ruin any picts he took. At worst, and much more likely, he was about to die.

Argel Tal drew back his claws. The blood lining them sank into the curling metal, drank as thirstily as desert soil drinks rainwater. He released a great howl to the sky as he waded forward, kicking aside wounded Astartes and carving out at the massed Raven Guard in range. Their blades broke against his armour, each strike hitting with a curiously muted sensation – he could feel the slices as if they were chopping into the skin of his armour, but they never bled, never caused any pain.

blade left danger kill

The warnings manifested with tickling pressure behind his forehead, somewhere between a voice, a premonition, and a tide of instinct. He wasn’t sure if Raum was warning him, or he was warning Raum – both voices were the same, and his movements were only half his own. He would swipe with a claw, but the blow would accelerate and hit harder than he could ever manage himself. He would block a sword blow, but would find his talons around the enemy’s throat before he had time to think.

He wrenched his head to the left – he smelled the metal tang of the descending blade, he caught the flash of sunlight along its edge without even looking – and Argel Tal span to kill its wielder. The Word Bearer’s claws raked across the warrior’s torso and the Raven Guard dropped instantly, his armour savaged and pulled from his body. Argel Tal’s fingers burned as they absorbed his brother’s blood. Under his helm, his grinning mouth was stained red by a bleeding tongue.

In every battle of his life, he’d felt a desperation beneath the ferocity of the moment. A feverish awareness of how to survive always nestled beneath his righteous anger, even in those moments of near-suicidal attack when he’d led dozens of his brothers against hundreds of the enemy. As his claws ravaged the armour and exposed faces of the Raven Guard around him, he cast that awareness aside.

‘Traitor!’ one of the Raven Guard cried at him. Argel Tal roared in reply, the ceramite of his helm cracking open to reveal a jagged maw, and leapt at the warrior. The Astartes died on the blood-mulched ground, pulled and torn to pieces by Argel Tal’s jointed claws.

He was dimly aware of snarling laughter coming over the vox. At one point, in the senseless, timeless melee, Xaphen had shouted to them all.

‘The Gal Vorbak are released at last!’

‘No,’ Argel Tal replied with growling certainty, without knowing how he knew. ‘Not yet.’

He tore the helm from a Raven Guard’s head and leered into the struggling warrior’s face.

‘Beast...’ the Astartes choked. ‘Corruption...’

Argel Tal caught his reflection in the warrior’s eyes. His black helm roared back at him, the left eye still ringed by a golden sun, the mouth grille split to reveal monstrous jaws of ceramite and bone, the crystal blue eye lenses leaking trails of blood down his painted faceplate.

Argel Tal sank his claws into the warrior’s body, feeling the tingle of leeching blood as his talons scratched at the man’s organs and bones. ‘I am the truth.’

He pulled, and the Raven Guard came apart in his hands, rendered into bloody chunks.

‘ No peace among the stars,’ he said, unsure if both of his voices were speaking or if he merely imagined one of them.

‘ Only the laughter of thirsting gods.’

The Gal Vorbak howled as one as they cast around for more prey, chasing down the Raven Guard that sought to regroup and oppose the unbelievable treachery facing them. Argel Tal howled loudest of all, but the sound soon died in his throat.

A shadow, the shadow of great wings, eclipsed the sun.

The ground murmured with his landing. Claws slashed from their power-fist housings with silver flashes, and shimmering wings of dark metal reached up from his shoulders into the air above. Slowly, so painfully slowly, he raised his head to the traitors. Black eyes stared from a face whiter than Imperial marble, and written across the pale features was the most consummate, complete anger Argel Tal had ever seen. It was an emotion truer and deeper even than the rage that ruined the faces of the daemons within the warp.

And Argel Tal realised it was not anger, nor rage. It went beyond both. This was wrath , in physical form.

The primarch of the Raven Guard turned with an inhuman cry, letting the thrumming wing-blades affixed to his smoking jetpack slice out with their killing edges. Word Bearers tumbled away in droves, shredded into lumps of armoured flesh. The claws followed, rending through any of the grey warriors unlucky enough to be within range of the warlord’s landing.

Once he was in motion, Corax never slowed. He was a blur of charcoal armour and black blades, carving, chopping, dismembering without effort, mutilating with the barest movement, butchering with an ease that belied his ferocity.

Lascannon fire rained towards the primarch as the Iron Warriors turned their turrets on the gravest threat in range. The Word Bearers caught in the net of streaming fire were sliced apart as surely as the ones killed by Corax’s claws, but the beams themselves flashed aside from the primarch’s armour, never striking it straight-on, leaving savage burn scars without once penetrating.