‘You killed Vendatha,’ she said, keeping her voice soft to rob the accusation of its bite. ‘You killed your friend.’
Argel Tal looked into her blind eyes. Since returning from the storm’s depths, looking at living beings had a strangely pleasant edge. He’d always been able to hear the liquid rhythm of her heart, but now the sound was accompanied by the teasing sense of her blood running through her veins. All that warmth, all that taste, all that life: scarcely beneath her fragile skin. Looking at her, knowing how easy it would be to kill her, was a guilty pleasure he’d never felt before.
And it was so easy to imagine. Her heart would slow. Her eyes would glaze. Her breath would shiver as her lips trembled.
Then...
Then her soul would fall into the warp, screaming in that tumultuous abyss, to shriek into those thrashing tides until it was devoured by the neverborn.
Argel Tal looked away.
‘Forgive me a moment’s distraction, confessor. What did you just say?’
‘I said, you killed your friend.’ Cyrene touched a hand to her plain silver earring. A gift from her lover, Argel Tal suspected – Major Arric Jesmetine.
The Word Bearer didn’t reply right away. ‘I did not come to be forgiven for that.’
‘I am not sure you can be.’
The captain rose to his feet once more. ‘It was a mistake to come here so soon. I had feared this hesitance between us.’
‘Feared?’ Cyrene smiled up at him. ‘I have never heard you use that word before, Argel Tal. I thought the Astartes knew no fear.’
‘Very well. It is not fear.’ Those words spoken by any other might sound petulant and defensive, but she heard no such emotion in Argel Tal’s voice. ‘I have seen more than most Imperial souls will ever see. Perhaps I possess a greater understanding of mortality – after all, I have seen where our souls go when we die.’
‘Would you still give your life for the Imperium?’
This time, there was no hesitation in his answer. ‘I would give my life for humanity. I would never offer my life to preserve the Imperium. Day by day, we have sailed farther from my grandfather’s empire of lies. There will be a reckoning for the deceptions he has draped over the eyes of an entire species.’
‘It’s good to hear you speak this way,’ she said.
‘Why? You delight in hearing me speak blasphemy against the Emperor’s dominion?’
‘No. Far from it. But you sound so certain of everything once more. I am glad you made it back from that... place.’
Cyrene offered her hand, the way a Covenant priestess would offer her signet ring to be kissed. It was an old ritual between them; with no signet ring to kiss, Argel Tal’s cracked, warm lips met the skin of her knuckles for the briefest moment.
‘War will come from this,’ she said. ‘Won’t it?’
‘The primarch hopes it will not. Humanity has only one choice, and it must be made by those who have sought out the answers.’
‘Such as yourself?’
He chuckled again. ‘No. By my father, and the brothers he can trust. Some will be brought to his side by deception, if they are too dull-minded to come in perfect faith. But we are a populous Legion, and our conquests are many, with many more to come. Much of the Imperium’s border worlds will answer to the warriors of Aurelian first, and the Emperor second.’
‘You... you’re planning this, already?’
‘It may not come to war,’ he said. ‘The primarch is venturing into the Great Eye to witness his own revelations. Evidently, the lives of the Serrated Sun were spent and warped in what was merely truth’s prelude.’
Cyrene could hear the discomfort in his voice. He was making no move to hide it.
‘Do you believe the primarch sent you in first out of... fear?’
Argel Tal didn’t answer that.
‘Tell me one more thing before you leave, captain.’
‘Ask.’
‘Why did you believe all of this? Hell-worlds. Souls. Humanity’s slow extinction, and these... monsters... that call themselves daemons. What convinced you that it was more than some alien trick?’
‘Such creatures are no different from the gods of countless faiths that have risen and fallen over the millennia. Few gods were benevolent creators to any culture.’
‘But what if we’re being lied to?’
It would have been easy to say that the faith was its own sustenance and that humanity always reached for religion; that almost every rediscovered human culture clung to their own belief in the infinite and the divine; and that here was a realm of prophecy – where beings with the power of gods had proved beyond doubt that they’d summoned the Lord of the Seventeenth Legion, shaping fate to make these events unfold.
Whether they were benevolent creator gods from mythology or mere manifestations of mortal emotion was irrelevant. Here was the divine force in a galaxy of lost souls. On the edge of the physical universe, gods and mortals had finally met, and mankind would fall without their masters.
