The First Heretic

ranks and followed. Thousands of warriors awaited his signal, their companies and Chapters marked by banners raised high.

Down the line, past the mounting masses of Iron Warriors battle tanks and assembling Astartes, Argel Tal could make out the cloaked form of First Captain Sevatar and his First Company elite, the Atramentar. Bronze chains wrapped their armour, leashing weapons to fists, as the Night Lords made ready for the coming signal.

‘We are to be the anvil,’ Xaphen voxed to the gathered Word Bearers as they waited by the barricades. ‘We are the anvil, while our brothers form the hammer yet to fall. The enemy will stagger back to us, exhausted, clutching empty bolters and broken blades, believing our presence to be a reprieve. The Iron Hands have damned themselves by remaining in the field, but you see the survivors of two Legions coming to us even now. The Salamanders. The Raven Guard. We must hold them long enough for our brothers to annihilate them from the flanks and the rear.’

Argel Tal had tuned out already. He watched the battle breaking apart, seeing the defiant Iron Hands contingent ringing their primarch at the heart of the battlefield. The righteous indignation that kept them there would see them slain before any others.

The forest-green of Salamander ceramite formed a withdrawing mass scrambling its way back uphill to the Iron Warrior barricades over to the east, while the battered black armour of the Raven Guard warriors came towards the unified Night Lords and Word Bearers force. The loyalists’ shattered unit cohesion was already beginning to reform, reshaping around bannered sergeants as they marched up the incline.

Argel Tal swallowed a mouthful of something that tasted like poisoned blood. He couldn’t keep himself from salivating.

Raum, he said silently, but there was no answer. In a bizarre moment of clarity, he realised he could feel the wind against his skin. Not the focused feeling of pressure from a puncture in his warplate, but all over – a faint breath of wind against his flesh, as if his wargear had grown dull nerves capable of recognising external sensation. His hands began to ache again, and this time the pain brought something new: the sense of swelling, stretching, the torture of his own body-meat rendered as malleable as clay, with the brittle creaking of bone still inside.

Targeting circles that he hadn’t activated started to spin before his eyes, flickering across the blue lenses in search of prey.

Beneath them the Raven Guard in their thousands marched up the rise of land. Not a single one had escaped with his armour unscarred from the battle below. Despite their distance, Argel Tal’s vision was keen enough to make out how individual warriors marched with their bolters slung, out of ammunition, and oaths of moment reduced to burned, flapping parchment rags in the wind.

‘Sixty seconds,’ he growled into the vox.

‘By your word,’ chorused three thousand warriors in the ranks alongside him.

Dagotal sat in his saddle, looking over the barricades. The repulsor drive built into his jetbike’s chassis hummed in sympathy with his movements, whining louder as the rider leaned forward to watch the withdrawing Raven Guard draw nearer.

His task was to skirt the battle’s edges, cutting down any stragglers that sought to escape from the main melee. Although only five of his outriders had survived the transition into the Gal Vorbak so many years before, they sat at his side now, gunning their engines in readiness for what they were committed to do.

He blinked burning sweat from his eyes, breathing in laboured rasps, trying to ignore the voice howling in his mind. The pain in his throat had been building in intensity for hours to the point where swallowing caused excruciating pain. Now, even breathing was a trial. Venom dripped down his chin, bubbling hot, from his overworking saliva glands. The acidic poison dripped over his lower teeth every few seconds, and he could no longer bear to swallow and neutralise it.

‘Thirty seconds,’ came Argel Tal’s order.

Dagotal murmured meaningless syllables with a wet voice, as acid hissed from his helm’s mouth grille.

Torgal thumbed a gear-rune on his chainaxe’s control, shifting settings from soft tissue to armour plating. A thicker second layer of jagged teeth slid forward alongside the first. In truth, a chainbladed weapon would always struggle to do more than strip the paint from layered ceramite, but it would chew through fibre-bundle armour joints or exposed power cables with ease.

He had been weeping blood, without feeling sorrow or any emotion at all, for an hour. Had he been able to remove his helm, Torgal was certain the scarlet tracks would be stained across his cheeks by now, darkening the skin with a tattoo’s permanence. Each time he blinked, his tear ducts flushed more of the watery blood-fluid down his face. When his tongue moved in his mouth, it slid along a maw of jagged teeth that cut his tongue open, and he tasted coppery pain for the few seconds it took the little slice wounds to seal.

Blood, thick and dark, was leaking from the knuckle-joints of his gauntlets, cementing his fingers to the haft of his axe. He couldn’t open his hand. He couldn’t release the weapon, no matter how he tried.

‘Twenty seconds,’ said Argel Tal.

Torgal closed his eyes to blink them clear, but they wouldn’t open again.

Malnor’s breath sawed in an out of his vocaliser grille. A chorus of voices assailed him, and for the briefest moment, he believed he was listening to the sounds of everyone he had ever met in his life. There was a tremor in his bones that he couldn’t suppress.

‘Ten seconds,’ came Argel Tal’s voice. ‘Stand ready.’

Malnor’s twitched head turned to the advancing ranks of the Raven Guard. Distance markers flashed across his retinal display, flickering as it recognised individual squad sigils on their shoulder guards.

Malnor grinned, and clutched his bolter tighter.

‘Brothers,’ the voice crackled. ‘This is Captain Torisian, 29th Company, Raven Guard.’

At the vanguard of the marching Astartes, a cloaked captain raised his hand in greeting. A spent bolter was mag-locked to his thigh, and a gladius glinted in his left hand. The captain’s cloak, once a regal blue, was a ragged ruin. Argel Tal raised his own hand in response, and replied over the vox.