The First Heretic

Lorgar drew back his hood, revealing his eternally youthful face and the uncertain smile upon it. His grey eyes were heavy with emotion, and little of it was pleasant. He grieved for his sons. He grieved for what he saw now.

‘No, Argel Tal. Of course you are not a prisoner.’ Their eyes met in that moment, and Lorgar’s smile froze on his perfect lips.

‘The guards at my door would seem to suggest otherwise,’ said Argel Tal.

Lorgar didn’t answer. The beautifully carved wooden box crashed to the bare metal floor. The noise drew attention, and the bulkhead door slammed open. Two warriors from 37th Company came in, bolters aimed at Argel Tal’s head.

‘Sire?’ they asked as one.

The primarch didn’t answer them, either. He stood in rapt silence, reaching out, almost touching the captain’s gaunt face. At the last moment, he drew his hand back before his fingers brushed Argel Tal’s sunken flesh.

Their eyes were still locked: primarch and captain, father and son.

‘You have two souls,’ Lorgar whispered.

Argel Tal closed his eyes to break the stare. Something – a hundred somethings – slithered through his blood, worming within his veins, pushed on by his heartbeat.

He rose to his feet at last.

‘I know, father.’

‘Tell me everything,’ said the primarch. ‘Speak to me of the daemon, and the world of revelation. Tell me why my son stands before me with his soul cleaved in two.’

THIRTEEN

Incarnadine

Stormlost

Voices in the Void

‘1301-12.’ As Argel Tal spoke the code, acidic saliva stung the underside of his tongue.

1301-12, the twelfth world to be brought to compliance by the 1301st Expeditionary Fleet. ‘Of the seven worlds we conquered in three years,’ he said, ‘this was the most painful.’

Lorgar did not disagree.

‘And yet,’ the primarch said, ‘it was also bloodless. Not a shot fired in anger, nor a blade drawn in rage. The pain was born of revelation.’

‘Three years, sire,’ said Argel Tal, looking away from his father’s eyes. ‘Three years, and seven worlds. History will point to those worlds, the husks we left, and describe how the XVII Legion vented its wrath in the wake of our failure. World after world burned, the populations butchered to slake our fury.’

Lorgar’s smile was pyrite-false. ‘Is that how you see our Pilgrimage?’

‘No. Never. But seven worlds died in fire, and we were almost destroyed after leaving the eighth.’

Lorgar’s grey gaze didn’t waver for a moment. He was seeing with his sixth sense, looking into his son’s heart, and sensing the second soul gestating there.

‘Enough of this maudlin remembrance,’ Lorgar’s tone betrayed his impatience. ‘Speak of the world we found.’

‘Do you remember,’ Argel Tal asked him, ‘when we first reached orbit?’

The floor was trembling in a most specific way.

Xi-Nu 73 processed this. Beneath his metal feet, the rumble of the ship’s deck had a very particular pulse – neither the arrhythmic flow of warp flight, nor the heartbeat tremor of sustained guidance thrust. Instead, murmurs coursed through his artificial bones, faint but blessedly metronomic.

Orbit.

Orbit, at last.

The last journey had been a long one. Xi-Nu 73 wasn’t a being given to indulging in speculation beyond the present, but his calculated projections were grim. The warp storms battering the fleet would certainly have claimed more than the three ships they’d already taken, had the 1,301st pressed on even farther past this world.

Xi-Nu 73 had heard one of his menials tell another that ‘the storm outside was hurling itself at the ship’s shields’, and he’d berated the worker for grafting human attributes onto an inappropriate subject. Such anthropomorphosis would harm the servant’s chances for future elevation within the Mechanicum.