With the Custodians blinded to his true destination, Lorgar went into the Eye.
His last words to Argel Tal will never leave me – not only for the events they set in motion, but for what they did to my friend, and how they changed him.
‘Take the truth to Erebus and Kor Phaeron. While I am gone, they will be the Legion’s lords, and they will orchestrate the spread of true faith in the shadows of my father’s empire. I shall return to them soon.’
Xaphen swore an oath never to fail his primarch.
Argel Tal did not. He spoke in a voice soft enough to break hearts, ‘We are heretics, father.’
Lorgar laughed his melodic laugh. ‘No, we are saviours. Is all in readiness?’
‘It is.’
‘Sail far and wide without me, but keep the Custodians away from Imperial listeners. Once you return to stable space, they will resume their astropathic contact with Terra. My father will suspect the truth if he knows we came this close to the galaxy’s edge, and suspicion alone will be enough to damn us. I cannot remain here to block their pet astropath’s reaching voice. Find a solution. Xaphen, look to the texts retrieved from Cadia. The rituals within them will provide the answer.’
‘By your word, sire.’
‘Keep his watchdogs alive, Argel Tal. There may yet be a means to win this war without bloodshed. But keep them silent.’
With his last words ordering the first of a thousand treacheries, the primarch boarded his vessel and left us.
What he saw within the Eye is the source of near-infinite speculation. Many of the Word Bearers came to me for weeks afterwards, wracked by dreams that barely faded when their sufferers awoke. The blood connection between Aurelian and his sons was a powerful one indeed, for what Lorgar saw with his own eyes, his sons witnessed in horrifying echoes.
It was Xaphen who spoke most of his dreams, while Argel Tal remained next to silent. The Chaplain would speak with a fevered cast in his voice, as if harsh whispers could pierce the walls of my humble chamber and reach the primarch halfway across the galaxy.
He spoke of Lorgar walking the surface of worlds where the oceans were formed from boiling blood, and the skies stood dark under heavenly cities of clanking black steel. He told me of an entire Legion in the crimson of the Gal Vorbak, waging war before the gates of a golden palace.
Most tellingly of all, he described world after world dying under the tainted touch of alien claws. He swore that this was the Imperium’s demise – a godless empire reaved clean by inhuman tides. Only faith would save mankind from fate’s promises. Only worship of the Great Powers nestling within the warp.
Perhaps these were the lessons Lorgar was seeing for himself, while his sons returned to spread the word among the other fleets.
Cadia burned, just as we’d all known it would. The tribes were destroyed by Argel Tal’s own command, and the world left in silence, ready to be seeded with colonists in the future. He never once asked me to forgive him for it, just as he never asked me to console him over the murder of Vendatha.
I love him above all others, not only for saving my life, but for the fact he stains his soul with such blackness, yet masks his guilt and shame so completely. He has never broken, despite carrying the secrets and sins that will damn or save our entire species.
I believe the only mistake he ever made was in allowing himself to grow closer to the Custodes leader, Aquillon.
But then, it was just like Argel Tal to endure such penance. He became a brother to the one man he knew he must eventually betray.
Excerpted from ‘The Pilgrimage’,
by Cyrene Valantion
Part Three
CRIMSON
Forty years later
TWENTY
Three Talents
A New Crusade
The Crimson Lord
Ishaq Kadeen was immensely proud of himself, for he did three things in life with a skill few others could match. These three talents had earned him enough coins to rub together, no doubt there, but they’d also elevated him from the depths of poverty that had swallowed his parents – and getting out of those slums was something far out of reach for most of the beggars and street-folk in his home city.
Three talents. That’s all it took.
And they weren’t even that hard. If he’d needed to practise them, then it might have been a different story. Ishaq Kadeen was one of those naturally lucky souls that live their lives in the moment. He never spared a thought for getting old, never saved money with any great care, and never worried overmuch what the enforcer patrol around the next street corner might have to say about his activities.
Three talents got him through life, pitching him in and out of trouble.
The first was to run, which was a skill he’d honed by putting it to good use in the criminal-infested lower sprawls of Sudasia’s primary hive city.
The second was to smile with a vicious blending of charm, smarm and intimacy, which had variously gotten him into several lines of employment, out of an entirely legal execution that he’d absolutely deserved, and even once into the fine, black lace underwear of a countess’s younger cousin – the night of the gala held to celebrate her coming of age.
The third talent, which was what had gotten him posted to his current situation in the first place, was the fact he could take a wicked pict when he wanted to.
Not a day passed that Ishaq didn’t think back to the conversation that damned him out here onto the fringes of space. He’d been sitting in an austere office, absently picking dirt from beneath his nails while a robed hierarch in the Remembrancer Order droned on and on about ‘noble goals’ and the ‘very real need’ to record the present for future generations to study in excruciating detail.
‘It is the greatest honour,’ the stern gentleman insisted.
‘Oh, I know.’ Ishaq started to bite his nails now they were clean. ‘The greatest.’
The older man seemed dubious. Ishaq thought he looked like a vulture disapproving of a potential meal, largely because it was still alive.
‘Thousands of archivists, sculptors, painters, pictographers, poets, playwrights have been sent. Tens of thousands have been rejected for lacking the thoroughness and flair that the Great Crusade deserves in its remembrancers.’
Ishaq made a noncommittal noise to encourage the hierarch to continue, while secretly musing over the number of artistic professions beginning with the letter “P”. Painters, pictographers, poets, playwrights...
‘So you see, to be chosen like this... You have to understand how fortunate you are.’
‘What about puppeteers?’ Ishaq asked.
‘I... what?’
‘Nothing. Never mind.’
‘Yes, well. I’m sure you can appreciate the gravity of the situation.’ The hierarch did his vulture-sneer again. Ishaq smiled back – his eyes brightened; a faint movement of his eyebrows suggested something delightfully wry; and a calculatedly cocksure amount of teeth were on display for a predatory moment – but the hierarch was neither female nor attracted to males, and that disinterest rather disarmed Ishaq’s best weapon.
‘Mr. Kadeen?’ the man said. ‘Are you taking this seriously? Do you wish to be shipped to Mars to end your years as a servitor?’
He really didn’t. If it came to a choice between paying for his crimes in the traditional manner or catching a transport ship halfway across the galaxy to serve as a remembrancer... Well, it wasn’t much of a choice at all. He wasn’t going to spend his life lobotomised into penal service.