The First Heretic

The grav-chute finally kicked in hard enough to wrench the muscles in his neck, its gravity suspensors humming as they came alive. The late activation saved Ishaq from becoming a red smear along the wall of a palace tower, but he paid the price for distraction. Laughing with terror, he careened off the stone parapet, bouncing, giggling and trying not to soil himself as he tumbled through the air.

Forty-eight seconds later, the first of his minders touched down in the courtyard. He found Ishaq Kadeen a bloody mess, cradling his picter in bruised hands as he sat on the grass, rocking back and forth.

‘Did you see that?’ he grinned at the soldier.

Three remembrancers, six Euchar soldiers – a strike force of nine souls, moving through the corridors of the palace. It was a scantly-decorated affair with little in the way of art or ornamentation. The architecture was all pillars and arched roofs, while uncarpeted stone floors led them deeper into the structure, which had all the charm and warmth of a mountaintop monastery.

When they’d first entered the palace, leaving the fire-blackened Astartes drop-pod behind, Ishaq had wondered how they’d know which way to go. It turned out to be a needless worry. They just followed the bodies.

Evidence of the Astartes’ passing was everywhere. This wing of the palace was swept clean of life, with ruptured corpses left in place of traditional decoration. One of the other remembrancers, a whippet-lean imagist by the name of Kaliha, would pause every few minutes and compose a pict around the dead bodies. It was clear from the angle of her picter that she sought to avoid any real focus on the slain, perhaps leaving them as blurred images in the foreground.

Ishaq had no interest in chronicling this butchery – artfully, tastefully or otherwise. The ambitious, mercenary part of his brain knew there’d be no point: such work would never enter the most treasured archives. Truly morbid pieces rarely did. People on Terra wanted to see what was humanity was capable of creating, not the aftermath of what it destroyed. They wanted to witness their champions in moments of glory or struggling in righteous strife, not slaughtering helpless humans that resembled Terrans far more than the Astartes themselves did.

It was all about presentation, about presenting what people wanted to see, whether they knew it or not. So he left the bodies unrecorded.

He tried not to look at the corpses they passed. Their ruination was so brutally complete it was difficult to imagine that these gobbets of meat had ever been people. They hadn’t just been killed, they’d been destroyed.

One of the soldiers, Zamikov, caught Ishaq’s eye. ‘Chainblades,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The look on your face. You’re wondering what does this to a body. Well, it’s chainswords.’

‘I wasn’t wondering that,’ Ishaq lied.

‘No shame in honest horror,’ Zamikov shrugged. ‘I’ve been with the Serrated Sun twelve years now, and I puked my way through the first two. The Crimson Lord’s lot do messy work.’

They took a left, stepping through another broken barricade that had failed to do its job. Gunfire in the distance hastened their strides.

‘I’d heard the Word Bearers always incinerated their enemies.’

‘They do.’ Zamikov hiked a thumb over his shoulder, at the corpses arrayed in various pieces around the furniture barricade. ‘That’ll come afterwards. First they kill, then they purify.’

‘They come back to burn the dead after a battle? They actually do it themselves?’

Zamikov nodded, no longer looking over at the imagist. Ishaq noticed the shift in the soldier’s stride – as soon as they’d heard the gunshots, each of the Euchars moved lower, faster, their lasrifles clutched tighter. It was like watching hive-street cats on the hunt for rats.

‘They do it themselves. No funerary serfs or corpse-servitors for the Word Bearers. They’re a thorough lot, you’ll see.’

‘I can already see.’

‘That a fact?’ Zamikov spared him a quick glance. ‘What do you see here?’

‘Bodies.’ Ishaq raised an eyebrow. What kind of question was that?

‘It’s more than that.’ The soldier looked ahead again. ‘This entire wing of the palace is cleaned out, but we’ve doubled back on ourselves more than once following the trail of dead. The Word Bearers aren’t racing to the throne room. That’s not how they do things. They’re killing everyone in the palace first, room by room, chamber by chamber. That’s punishment. That’s being thorough. You understand now?’

Ishaq nodded, not sure what else to say.

The sound of gunfire was joined by the guttural whine of motorised blades. He felt his heart quicken. This was it: battle, seeing the Astartes fight. And hopefully, not getting shot at himself.

‘Look alive,’ the sergeant grunted. ‘Rifles up.’

Ishaq didn’t have a rifle, but with his face set just as stern as Zamikov’s, he raised his picter.

When they caught up to the Word Bearers, the scene was nothing like he’d expected. Firstly, it wasn’t a squad of Word Bearers, it was just one. And secondly, he wasn’t alone.