The First Heretic

‘Forgive me, sire,’ he said to Lorgar. ‘I will keep my eyes open.’

Lorgar’s breathing quickened. No unaugmented man would be able to discern the difference in the primarch’s heartbeat, but Argel Tal’s senses were keener than a human’s by many degrees. In truth, they were keener than Astartes perception now. He could hear the tiniest creak-stresses in the metal walls of his chamber. The guards’ breathing outside the sealed bulkhead door. The skittering whisper of an insect’s legs in the ventilation duct.

He’d felt this acuity before, back on Orfeo’s Lament, during the seven months of drift-sailing in their bid to escape the Eye. The feeling had come many times, in truth, but none as strongly as when only a brother’s blood quenched his thirst.

‘I see two souls at war within you, and the violence behind your eyes. Yet I wonder,’ the primarch confessed, ‘if you are cursed or blessed.’

Argel Tal grinned, showing too many teeth. It wasn’t his smile. ‘The difference between gods and daemons depends largely upon where one stands at the time.’

Lorgar wrote the words down.

‘Speak to me of the last night on Cadia,’ he said. ‘After the religious debates and the tribal gatherings. I have no interest in repeating weeks of research and rituals performed in our honour. The fleet’s data-core is swollen with evidence that this world, like so many others, shares unity with the Old Faith.’

Argel Tal licked his teeth. It still wasn’t his smile. ‘None so close.’

‘No. None as close as Cadia.’

‘What do you wish to know, Lorgar?’

Here, the primarch paused, hearing his name leave his son’s lips with such casual disregard. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, neither threatened nor fearful, but not quite at ease.

‘We. I. We are Argel Tal. I. I am Argel Tal.’

‘You speak in two voices.’

‘I am Argel Tal,’ the captain said through clenched teeth. ‘Ask what you will, sire. I have nothing to hide.’

‘The last night on Cadia,’ said Lorgar. ‘The night Ingethel was consecrated.’

‘This is heathen sorcery,’ said Vendatha.

‘I don’t believe in sorcery,’ Argel Tal said back. ‘And neither should you.’

Their voices echoed in the temple chamber, which was no more than a roughly-hewn room in the endless network of subterranean caverns. With no structures of human craft on the face of Cadia, the Temple of the Eye was far less grand than its name suggested. Beneath the northern plains where the Legion had made planetfall, the caverns and underground rivers formed a natural basilica.

‘This world is a paradise,’ Vendatha remarked. ‘It beggars belief that so many tribes come to dwell here in these deadlands.’

Argel Tal had heard this complaint before. Vendatha, in his blunt and stoic wisdom, had seen the orbital picts as often as the Word Bearer captain had. Cadia was a planet of temperate forests, expansive meadows, healthy oceans and arable land. Yet here, in an uninspiring corner of the northern hemisphere, the vagabond population gathered en masse to eke out a living on the arid plains.

Xaphen walked with Argel Tal and the Custodian down the stone corridor. The temple’s construction was as flimsy as could be expected from a culture of primitives – the sloping walls showed the stone-scars of miners’ picks and other digging tools – but the chambers weren’t entirely devoid of decoration. Pictographs and hieroglyphs covered every wall, replete with symbols, charcoal murals and etched sigils that made little sense to Vendatha.

In truth, it hurt his eyes to look at many of them. Uneven, jagged stars were scrawled everywhere, as well as long mantras in a meaningless tongue, their sentence structure clearly indicative of verse. Sketches of the Great Eye, as the Cadians named the storm above, were also commonplace.

Torches of bundled sticks burned in wall sconces at irregular intervals, making the stone hallways misty with smoke. All in all, Vendatha had been to many more pleasant places. A pox on Aquillon for volunteering him to descend to the surface.

‘It is not difficult to comprehend why they come here, when you understand faith,’ said the Chaplain.

‘Faith is a fiction,’ Vendatha snorted.

Argel Tal had never wagered in his life – to gamble was against the Legion’s monastic code; it showed a reverence for worldly wealth which was meaningless to all pure-hearted warriors – but he would have been safe to gamble that the words Vendatha spoke most often were: ‘Faith is a fiction’.

‘Faith,’ said Argel Tal, ‘means different things to different beings.’ It was a weak attempt to sunder the argument he could feel building between the other two, and it failed, just as he’d suspected it would.

‘Faith is a fiction,’ Vendatha repeated, but Xaphen went on, warming to his captive audience.

‘Faith is why these people come here. It is why their temple stands at this spot. The stars are all in the right alignment at this place, and they believe it aids their rituals. The constellations mark the gods’ homes in the sky.’

‘Heathen magic,’ Vendatha said again, getting annoyed now.

‘Pre-Imperial Colchis was the same, you know.’ Xaphen wouldn’t let up. ‘These rites are little different to the ones performed in the generations before Lorgar’s arrival. Colchisians have always invested great significance in the stars.’

Vendatha shook his head. ‘Do not add mindless superstition to the list of grievances I have against you, Chaplain.’