‘Oh,’ the sergeant said. ‘Oh.’
The Word Bearers looked up at the central column, juddering and humming with its machine-parts and multiple power supplies.
At last... Yes...
‘This is more than an incubation tower,’ said Xaphen.
You are so close now...
Argel Tal looked at the pods, each in turn, and the insanely complex array of machinery coupling them to the central column.
Yes... Yes... Witness the truth...
‘This is a generator,’ his voice softened in disbelief, ‘for a Geller Field.’
Xaphen circled the walkway, his clanging boot steps unheard by the horde of technicians working away. Argel Tal watched his Chaplain moving around the pods, a slow suspicion creeping over the back of his neck. Both warriors were unhelmed, and thin sheens of icy sweat glistened on their faces.
‘The most powerful Geller Field in existence,’ Argel Tal gestured to the machinery. ‘The generators on board our vessels, linked with the Navigators... they are a shadow of what we’re seeing here.’
You do not truly comprehend the effect you name a Geller Field. It is more than a kinetic shield against warp energy. The warp itself is the Sea of Souls. Your fields repel raw psychic force. They are a bulwark against the claws of the neverborn.
‘The question we must ask ourselves,’ Xaphen spoke as he stroked the surface of the pod marked XVII, ‘is why these incubators are shielded against...’
Say it.
Xaphen smiled. ‘...against daemons.’
Torgal joined the Chaplain before Lorgar’s pod. He stared inside at the slumbering infant for some time.
‘I believe I know. These children are almost grown to the point of birth. Daemon? Spirit?’
I am here.
Torgal looked acutely uncomfortable interacting with a disembodied voice. ‘The Legions tell the tale of the Emperor’s twenty sons being cast into the heavens by some great tragedy, some flaw in their creation process.’
You have been raised with tales of the primarchs that lead your Legions, but you have been fed centuries of lies. In a matter of moments, you will witness the truth. The Anathema dealt with the Powers of the warp long before he left Earth on the Great Crusade.
The Anathema desired mighty sons, and the gods granted him the lore to forge them with a union of divine genetics and psychic sorcery. He came to my masters, hungry for answers, beseeching the gods for power. With the lore they gave him, he shaped his twenty sons.
But treacheries have occurred. Oaths – sworn in blood and paid in soul – have been broken. The Anathema now refuses to show humanity the Primordial Truth, and the gods of the warp grow wrathful.
The Anathema is keeping its twenty primarch sons and paying no price to the Powers that gifted him with the knowledge to shape them.
Xaphen gripped the handrail to keep from going to his knees. ‘Our father – all of our fathers – are the spawn of ancient blood rituals and forbidden science.’
Argel Tal couldn’t keep from laughing. ‘The Emperor that denies all forms of divinity shaped his own sons with the blessings of forgotten gods. Prayers and sorcery are written upon their gestation pods. This is the most glorious madness.’
Be ready. The reckoning comes. The Powers will reach into the material realm to reclaim the sons they helped breed.
Argel Tal looked at the pods through a smile that wouldn’t fade. ‘This Geller Field. It fails, doesn’t it?’
It will fail in exactly thirty-seven beats of your heart, Argel Tal.
‘And the primarchs are seized – taken by your masters in the warp. That’s the accident that casts them across the galaxy.’
The warp gods are the primarchs’ rightful fathers. This is not to spite your Emperor. It is nothing but divine justice. And as these perfect children travel through the stars, they will grow. This is the first step in the gods’ plans to save mankind.
‘And Aurelian...’
Is the most important one of all. Lorgar’s incubation pod will be carried to Colchis, to walk the first steps to enlightening humanity of the Primordial Truth, and the gods behind the stars. Without the gods, humanity will die, piece by piece, under the predation of the aliens that still lay claim to much of the galaxy. Those that remain will die as the eldar died: in agony, unable to see the Primordial Truth before their very eyes.
This is Fate. It is written in the stars. Lorgar knows that humanity needs divinity – it is what shaped his life and Legion. It is why he was chosen as the favoured son.
Xaphen closed his eyes, murmuring a litany from the Word. ‘Faith raises us above the soulless and the damned. It is the soul’s fuel, and the driving force behind millennia of mankind’s survival. We are hollow without it.’
Argel Tal drew his weapons. The swords of red iron slid free from their scabbards with twin hisses.
Yes. Yes...
Both blades sparked into electrical life as the captain pulled the handle-triggers. Xaphen regarded him with hooded eyes.
‘Do it,’ the Chaplain said. ‘Let it begin.’
Argel Tal whirled the blades in slow, arcing loops, their crackling power fields growing more intense, the blades emanating ozone mist as they burned and rasped through the frozen air.
‘Aurelian,’ whispered Malnor. ‘For Lorgar.’
‘For the truth,’ Torgal said. ‘Do it, and we will carry these answers back to the Imperium.’
Argel Tal looked at Dagotal; the youngest of his sergeants, only recently promoted before the Legion’s humiliation. The outrider commander’s eyes were distant.
‘I am weary of being lied to by the Emperor, brother. I am so tired of being ashamed, when what we believe is the truth.’ Dagotal nodded, meeting his captain’s eyes at last. ‘Do it.’
Three.
He stepped forward, staring at a cluster of vein-like cables twitching as they channelled artificial blood around the semi-organic tower machine.
Two.
Argel Tal span the swords, leaving blurred trails of lightning in their wake.
One.
The blades chopped down, crashing through steel, iron, rubber, copper, bronze and vat-grown blood.
Both swords exploded in his hands, their blades shattering like smashed glass and decorating his bare face with bloody cuts.
And then, for one horrific, familiar moment, Argel Tal saw nothing but burning, psychic gold.
EIGHTEEN
A Hundred Truths
Resurrection
Return
‘I heard your brother,’ Argel Tal confessed.
The primarch was no longer writing. For several minutes, Lorgar had done nothing but listen in mounting emotion as the captain relayed the events in Ingethel’s vision. Now, at these words, he released a breath he’d been holding for some time.
‘Magnus?’
Argel Tal had never heard his sire speak so softly. ‘No. The Warmaster.’
The golden-skinned giant brushed his hands over his face, seemingly afflicted by a sudden weariness. ‘I do not know that title,’ he said. ‘Warmaster. An ugly word.’