The First Heretic

‘This is Argel Tal, Lord of the Gal Vorbak, Word Bearers Legion. How goes the battle, brother?’

The Raven Guard leader laughed as he came closer. ‘The traitorous dogs already flee the field, but they fight like bastards, each and every one. In Terra’s name, it is a blessing to see you. Our primarch has ordered us back for resupply – but Lord Corax is an unselfish man. He would not wish us to steal all the glory on this day of days.’

Argel Tal could hear the smile in the other warrior’s voice as he continued. ‘Good hunting down there, all of you. Glory to the Word Bearers. Glory to the Emperor!’

The commander of the Gal Vorbak didn’t reply. The advancing Raven Guard were almost at the barricades. He felt his muscles bunching and twitching with sick need.

‘Brother?’ asked Torisian. The captain’s armour was an older Mark III Iron-class suit, blocky and heavy, almost primitive compared to the Maximus-class armour worn by the XVII Legion. ‘What are your plans for assault?’

Argel Tal took a breath, and prepared to speak damnation.

Without knowing why, he couldn’t keep from thinking of Lorgar’s words to him, spoken so long ago. ‘You are Argel Tal. You were born on Colchis, in the village of Singh-Rukh, to a carpenter and a seamstress. Your name means ‘the last angel’ in the dialect of the southern steppes tribes.’

He thought, briefly, of his parents – two hundred years dead now. He had never visited their graves. He wasn’t even sure where they might be.

His father had been a quiet man with kind eyes, who had round shoulders from a lifetime of devotion to his craft. His mother was a mouse of a woman, with dark eyes and black hair in the ringlets preferred by the southern tribes. She had smiled a great deal. It was his abiding memory of her.

How far he’d come, in distance and time, from their riverside hut of packed mud and straw. He could almost feel the river water on his hands now, cooling to the touch even as it sparkled in the oppressive Colchisian sun.

He had four older sisters, each as distant and dead as his parents. They had wept when the Legion came for him, though at the time he couldn’t understand why. All he could see was the adventure, the joy, in being chosen by the holy warriors. The youngest – Lakisha, only a year older than he was – had given him a necklace of desert-dog teeth that she’d made herself. He felt it now, tied around his wrist, bound there each dawn upon rising and completing his meditations. The original string had long since rotted away, but he threaded the jackal teeth onto a new cord with the passing of every few years.

His oldest sister, Dumara, had spent every day telling him that he was good for nothing but getting underfoot. But she had no unkind words that day, and instead brought him a blanket of goat’s wool to take with him.

‘He will not require that,’ the massive grey warrior had declared in a machine- voice.

Dumara flinched back, clutching the blanket to her chest. Instead of offering it to the boy, she kissed his cheek instead. She was crying, too. He remembered how her tears made his face wet, and he hoped the warrior didn’t think it was he who’d been crying. He had to look brave, else the warrior might not choose him after all.

‘What is the boy’s name?’ the warrior demanded.

His mother had surprised him with a question of her own. ‘What is your name, warrior?’

‘Erebus. My name is Erebus.’

‘Thank you, Lord Erebus, this is my son, Argel Tal.’

Argel Tal. The Last Angel. He’d been born as a sickly little thing, during a year of blight and drought, and was given a name to mark him as the last child his mother would ever bring into their dry, thirsty world.

‘Forgive me,’ he whispered now. He hadn’t meant to speak the words aloud, but didn’t regret doing so.

‘Brother?’ Torisian’s voice crackled. ‘Repeat, please.’

Argel Tal’s grey eyes hardened to flint. ‘All Word Bearers,’ he said. ‘Open fire.’

TWENTY-SIX

Dropsite Massacre

Hull Breach

In the Shadow of Great Wings

Torisian shoved the body of his sergeant aside and scrambled forward. His ammunition counter flashed up the moment he touched a hand to his bolter, and it told a stark tale indeed. Among the clattering, crashing carnage, he drew his combat blade and charged.

‘Victory or death!’ he cried the call of his Legion. ‘We are betrayed! Attack!’

Bolt shells hammered into his chest and pauldrons as he ran, throwing him off-balance and breaking his armour apart. He sustained damage faster than his retinal display could track it. Torisian staggered, feeling fluid in his throat. A dense wetness was drowning him behind his ribcage.

The flash of blue hit him from nowhere, brighter than staring into the sun, tipping him back down to the ground. There he died alongside so many of his brothers, bisected by lascannon fire and dead from his wounds before he could drown in the blood filling his lungs.

The Raven Guard front ranks went down as if scythed, harvested in a spilling line of detonating bolter shells, shattered armour and puffs of bloody mist.

Black-armoured Astartes tumbled to their hands and knees, only to be cut down by the sustained volley, finishing those who fell beneath the initial storm of head- and chest-shots. Seconds after the first chatter of bolters, beams of achingly bright laser slashed from behind the Word Bearers as the cannon mounts of Land Raiders, Predators and defensive bastion turrets gouged through the Raven Guard and the ground they stood upon.

Argel Tal saw precious little of the bigger picture. Beams of ice-blue, as thick as his arm, slashed and burst overhead as they carved furrows in the soil and sliced cleanly through bodies. At his side, the Gal Vorbak stood in silence, clutching their axes and blades. The Iron Warriors and Word Bearers around them were variously