But you did die. The traitorous thought rose behind his focus. You did die.
Yes. He did. He’d died before he chewed on the leathery skin of bloodless bodies. Before he’d used his dagger to slice open his brothers’ throats and drink their life to sustain his own.
Some of them had died twice, then. A final death, to fuel the lives of those who would survive.
Thirty-eight Word Bearers had left the wreck of Orfeo’s Lament. Thirty-eight, from one hundred. Far below half-strength. Seventh Company was devastated.
Argel Tal drew in a shivering breath. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the storm outside. In the warp’s roiling tides, ten million faces silently screamed his name. He saw their lips moving, their teeth bared, their faces formed of clashing, psychic energy spilling across the ship’s Geller Field barrier. The flesh and blood of unformed daemons. The raw matter of souls.
He exhaled, and opened his eyes.
The walls of his personal chamber, his haven aboard De Profundis for so many years of the Great Crusade, seemed alien now. Strange, how seven months could change a soul. Seven months, and a skull full of unbridled revelations.
The chronometer above the doorway mocked him with a date over half a year in the past. The primarch’s words were an unwanted truth: seconds had passed at the edges of the warp anomaly. Months dragged by within.
Stripped of his armour, the captain examined his wasted body in the reflection of his dagger, the only weapon remaining to him. A revenant returned his gaze – a skeletal, hollow-eyed creature on the wrong side of the grave.
He lowered the blade, and awaited the chime he knew would come soon.
In his humility, Lorgar had never looked grander.
He came to Argel Tal wearing the layered, glyph-embroidered robes of a Covenant priest, with the hood raised, darkening his features. In his hands he carried a small wooden chest; the box was open, revealing a selection of vulture-feather quills with an inkpot. Under one arm, the primarch bore a roll of papyrus parchments to record his son’s words. As Lorgar entered, Argel Tal saw the hulking forms of two Word Bearers – brothers from the Serrated Sun, but not Seventh Company – standing outside his door.
Standing guard outside his door.
‘Am I a prisoner, father?’ he asked the primarch.
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.
It was a violent storm, no doubt there. But there existed no passion, no anger, no intent in the warp’s tides.
Elsewhere on De Profundis, the decks were alive with activity, as Astartes and human crew made ready for planetfall.
Xi-Nu 37 was largely immune to the brain chemistry necessary to feel excitement, having reengineered himself beyond such sensation. Instead, he focused entirely on his work, which stimulated the pleasure centres of his brain – a minute amount for each subroutine performed with absolute accuracy and ergonomic efficiency.
His fingers – fifteen of them spread across three mechanical hands – worked in the armoured bowl of Alizarin’s skull. It was a process of restructuring globs of bio-plastic, each one dripping with nutrient-rich juices, within the robot’s head. Each tract of spherical relay globes needed to be fixed and sealed into position, then connected to the slave systems they controlled, as well as the fail-safes they relied on in incidents of battle damage. Such were the workings of the robotic mind: an intelligence in mimicry of life, grown in a gene-lab to be used in a machine body.
The smell rising from this bowl of artificial cerebrospinal fluid was a revoltingly spicy reek reminiscent of rotting onions, but of course, Xi-Nu 73 had taken himself beyond the capacity to react to that as well. He only knew of the smell at all because his perceptive sensors streamed data onto his retinas, describing the stench in bland screeds of binary.