The First Heretic

After the short march through streets she couldn’t see, Cyrene had spent the rest of the day in one of the Covenant’s temples. Argel Tal and his officers remained with her as she was interviewed and questioned by overeager priests. Instead of being given a seat, she was guided to recline on a long couch, made almost princely by too many cushions. It had the opposite effect of the intended one, leaving her shuffling to get comfortable no matter how she reclined. In the end, she just sat up straight, treating it like a chair.

‘What was the last thing you saw?’ one priest asked.

‘Describe the fire that rained from the sky,’ pressed another.

‘Describe the city’s towers falling.’

As the questions went on, she wondered just how many inquisitors were sat before her. The room was cold, and the faint echo when people spoke suggested a large chamber. A background hum pervaded everything, a thrum that set her teeth on edge – it was one thing to recognise the active buzz of Astartes armour, but another entirely to get used to it.

‘Do you hate the Emperor?’ one of the priests asked.

‘What happened in the months after the city fell?’ asked another.

‘Did you kill any of your abusers?’

‘How did you escape?’

‘Would you serve the Covenant as a high priestess?’

‘Why did you refuse the Legion’s offer of new eyes?’

The answer to this last question intrigued her interrogators a great deal. Cyrene touched her closed eyes as she replied.

‘On my world, there is a belief that the eyes were windows to the soul.’

They answered her words with muttering unintended for her ears. ‘How quaint,’ one of them replied. ‘Do you fear your soul would quit your body through hollow eye sockets? Is that it?’

‘No,’ said Cyrene. ‘Not that.’

‘Please enlighten us, Blessed Lady.’

She shifted in discomfort yet again, and still blushed each time they used the title. ‘It was said that those who wore false eyes would never move beyond this life to paradise beyond. Our mortis-priests always preached that they could see the trapped souls of the lost and the damned in the false eyes of servitors.’

There was silence, for a time.

‘And you believe,’ one of the priests said, ‘that your spirit would be sealed within your corpse if you surrendered your natural eyes?’

She shivered to hear it put like that. ‘I don’t know what I believe. But I will wait until they heal. There’s still a chance they might.’

‘Enough,’ a voice boomed, edged by vox-crackle. ‘You are making her uncomfortable, and I have given my word to the Urizen that she will be taken to the Spire Temple at midnight.’

‘But there’s still time for–’

‘With respect: be silent, priest,’ Argel Tal stepped closer to her, and she felt her gums itching at the drone of his armour. ‘Come, Cyrene. The primarch awaits.’

‘May the Blessed Lady return tomorrow?’ one priest piped up as they were leaving.

None of the Astartes answered.

Once outside, another crowd was waiting for her. She smiled in the direction of the noise, and offered the occasional wave, feeling her face burn with self-conscious doubt. First and foremost in her mind was the effort to keep her discomfort from showing. There would be no getting used to this. She knew she’d hate it until it either stopped of its own accord, or they left Colchis behind.

‘We didn’t have to leave,’ she said. ‘I could have answered more questions. Was I supposed to?’

Over the din of the crowd, she heard Argel Tal reply.

‘My apologies for using you as an excuse to leave,’ he said, ‘but it was too pointless to endure any longer. Questions that led nowhere, or were already answered in the Legion’s reports. Tedious bureaucracy, propagated by self-important men.’

‘Is that not blasphemy? Defying the will of the Covenant?’

‘No,’ said the captain. ‘It was a tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming boredom.’

She smiled at that, as the Word Bearers led her on.

Less than three minutes later, as Cyrene was drawing breath to comment on the warmth of the desert night’s wind, there was a crashing sound from above, the crash of a hundred windows smashing at once.

What she couldn’t see was all four of her warrior guides standing utterly still, staring up at the Spire Temple – that twisting tower of tanned stone, central in the city, taller than all else.

Around her, the crowd’s cheers soured into whispers and weeping. Two of the Astartes, she didn’t know which, began to chant prayers in monotone vox-voices, benedictions to the primarch.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Move,’ Xaphen ordered. One of them gripped her elbow and forced her into a run. Their armour joints snarled with the change of pace.

‘What’s going on?’ she tried again. ‘What was that noise? An explosion?’

‘The primarch’s observatory on top of the central spire,’ he said. ‘Something is wrong.’

TEN

The Right to Lead a Legion

Empyrean

Misery