Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

‘I don’t need this right now. I really don’t.’

‘I meant no offence.’

Ishaq took his seat again. The ship shook under enemy fire – enough to spill people’s drinks. Most pretended to ignore it. A few faked laughter, as if it were all part of the adventure.

‘Might I ask if you have any more masterpieces in the making?’ the old man asked. Ishaq glanced at his picter rod.

‘I’m not sure. Maybe. Look, I have to go.’ He squeezed his eyes shut, but everything looked the same when he opened them again. ‘I don’t want to be around anyone after all. And I’m not going to drink this, so consider it a gift.’

He slid the glass across the table. As Cartik took it, the astropath’s finger brushed the imagist’s knuckles. The elder jumped if kicked, staring with wide eyes. He looked as suddenly unwell as Ishaq felt.

‘By the Throneworld...’ he stammered. ‘Wh-what have you seen?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Goodbye.’

Absolom Cartik’s elderly claw gripped onto the younger man’s wrist with all the tenacity of a raptor talon. ‘Where. Was. This.’

‘I didn’t see anything, you crazy old bastard.’

Their eyes met. ‘You wish to answer the question,’ Cartik said softly.

‘I saw it on board the ship.’

‘Where?’

‘The monastic deck.’

‘And you made recorded images? Evidence of what you saw?’

‘Yes.’

Cartik released the man’s wrist. ‘Come with me, please.’

‘What? No chance.’

‘Come with me. What you have seen must be shown to the Occuli Imperator. If you refuse, I can guarantee you only one thing: Custodian Aquillon will kill you for attempting to keep this a secret. He will kill everyone who has kept this a secret.’

The emergency lighting dimmed back into life. Complaints rang out across the Cellar, and the vessel around them shivered as its engines flared open again. They were returning to the battle.

‘I’ll... come with you.’

Absolom Cartik smiled. He was an ugly man – and age hadn’t helped change that fact – but he wore the kind of paternal, assured smile that stayed in a family’s memory for many years.

‘Yes,’ the old man said. ‘I thought you might.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

Aftermath

Blood is Life

An Unusual Welcome

He found Dagotal after the battle.

First, he came across his brother’s jetbike, powerless and half-buried in the Urgall dirt. Not crashed. Abandoned. Abandoned when the change took place, abandoned in favour of running and killing with one’s own claws.

He moved on, stepping over the bodies of slain Raven Guard, their white Legion symbol tarnished by mud or split by savage weapons. A warrior nearby still lived, his breath straining from a broken mouth grille. With a reaching claw, Argel Tal enclosed the Raven Guard’s neck, squeezing the soft armour there and ending the warrior’s life with the popping crackle of destroyed vertebrae.

There was no flood of endorphins from a hunger momentarily sated. With each minute that passed, Raum’s consciousness ebbed from Argel Tal’s mind with the helpless loss of sand slipping through his fingers. With the daemon’s recession, Argel Tal’s own instincts and emotions rebuilt themselves in his mind. In place of bloodlust and unnatural appetites, he felt hollow, and used, and so very, very tired.

His shadow stretched before him, made uneven by the dead bodies it fell across. Great horns curled from his helm. His body was a nightmare of protruding bone ridges and crimson ceramite. His legs were... He didn’t even have the words. They were jointed like a beast’s hind legs – a lion or a wolf – and ended in huge hooves of black bone. His warplate still covered them, leaving his silhouette like the shade of a creature from unholy myth.

Argel Tal turned from his shadow. A wet, burbling growl rumbled in his throat. That scent. He snuffed the air twice. Familiar. Yes.

He stalked away, letting his shadow fall across other bodies. There. Dagotal. A blackened thing, ripe with the scent of baked blood and life reduced to ash. Grey and red armour was strewn all about him, making his husk the cremated statue at the heart of a fallen Word Bearers pack. In the deepest distance, bolters still chattered. Why? The battle was over. Prisoner execution, perhaps. It did not matter.

Still infused with the aftermath of Raum’s inhuman perception, he sensed the others approaching. All of them resembled Argel Tal to some degree. Malnor was a twitching, brutish thing, his bunched musculature claimed by frequent spasms. Torgal hunched as he moved, his faceplate moulded into a snarling face entirely lacking eyes. Argel Tal knew without asking that Torgal was blind. Perhaps he was aided by scent and sound, but he hunted by the daemonic awareness of mortality nearby. Instead of the claws most of the Gal Vorbak now sported, Torgal’s arms ended in lengthy bone blades, hooked like primitive scimitars. Jagged, knuckly teeth roughened the surface of them, showing where they’d once been his chainblades.

Eleven of the Gal Vorbak remained alive. Corax had slain over two dozen – their dismembered parts now scattered over the nearby area – red amidst the grey. In the heat of the battle, it had been an easy matter to ride Raum’s perceptions, discarding the fragmentary pulsing pain of his brothers’ lives ending. But now, in the bitter dusk, their absence was harder to ignore. Their loss left him cold.

With the passing minutes, Argel Tal could feel the daemon’s quiet, small presence wrapped in a crippling exhaustion. Raum was not gone, nor truly distant. The daemon slumbered, its cold weight seeking to warm itself within the Word Bearer’s mind.

The horrendous changes inflicted upon his body and armour began to undo themselves at last. Ceramite cracked and resealed. Bony protrusions sank back beneath his skin, dragged back into the bones from whence they came. As Ingethel had promised so long ago, it was not a painless process, but by now the Gal Vorbak had passed through the fire of that particular torment. Pain was just pain, and they’d endured so much worse. A few grunted as the changes unwrought and their Astartes physiques reformed, but none voiced a lament as bones creaked and muscles condensed.

Still, they’d been seen. Warriors from the other Legions had seen them during and after the battle, and made their distasteful fascination shown in varying measures. The Night Lords seemed particularly unwilling to approach the Gal Vorbak. When Argel Tal had neared Sevatar, the captain had removed his helm to spit acid on the ground by the Word Bearer’s feet. The Sons of Horus – the Warmaster’s own – were more willing to approach and speak of the change. Argel Tal was unwilling to indulge them, but Xaphen, the slowest by far in resuming his Astartes form, seemed all too keen to enlighten the Sons of what the future held for the gods’ chosen warriors.

Argel Tal waited an hour for his bones to cease their creak-aching, but the sense of relief was nothing short of divine when he disengaged his collar seals and pulled his helm free.

The battlefield stank of engine breath and chemical-rich blood, but he had no sense to spare for anything beyond the feel of the wind rushing over his face for the first time in so many weeks.

Boot steps, heavy and assured, came from behind. He knew who it would be without needing to turn.

‘How does it feel?’ came the expected voice.

‘Strong. Pure. Righteous. But then cold, and hollow. Violated.’ Argel Tal turned to meet the other’s eyes. ‘I feel the daemon within me now, weakened and slumbering. Even after knowing the change would grip and fade in tides like this, it was like nothing I can describe. I am uneasy in the knowledge it will happen again, but I also feel anticipation for it. I... I lack the words to do it justice.’