Scions of the Emperor Read online

  I recognised the man. Adarin. A man who had always despised me. And a man who had denounced my father's reforms. But Adarin's anger was now directed at Gallan.

  'Traitor!' cried another voice, then another, until a great wave of denunciation washed through the hall.

  Gallan reeled like a drunk. 'Idiots!' he screamed, spit flying from his lips. 'These people will rob you of everything. Think of what your fathers built. You will end up—'

  His words turned into a howl of outrage as soldiers grabbed his arms and began bundling him off the podium. His fury turned to panic. If he were convicted of deceit in the Hall of Concord, he would face a death sentence.

  I watched until he had been dragged from view, still spitting curses, then I climbed down the steps and started back across the hall to rejoin my men.

  Adarin pushed his way through the crowd and barred my way, his face grim.

  The hall fell quiet.

  He stared at me with such murderous intent that I thought I might have to fight my way out. I had meant everything I said on the podium, but I would not stand by while my men were battling outside. I would not leave them to die.

  Adarin did something unexpected. He removed the metal wreath from his head and dropped it at my feet

  There was a hiss of indrawn breath around the hall. Everyone understood the symbolism of the act. He was swearing allegiance to me.

  I wondered if he was mocking me, but he looked completely earnest.

  'I don't know where you came from,' he said, 'and I no longer care. I have never heard a truer son of Macragge. Your father lies slain, not a kilometre from here, and you have just spoken calmly and clearly in the face of his murderer. You put the needs of the senate before your own pain. You are an example, Roboute Guilliman.' He looked around the hall. 'To all of us.'

  I shook my head but, before I could reply, the man next to him removed his wreath and dropped it beside Adarin's. Then another man did the same. One by one, the patricians all pushed forwards to drop wreaths at my feet until I was surrounded by a pile of golden leaves.

  Pride and shock rooted me to the spot. 'Macragge will endure.' I whispered, thinking again of my father's prophecy, not intending to be heard.

  The acoustics of the hall snatched my words and cast them across the crowd.

  'Macragge will endure!' replied five hundred voices, as the council began to kneel.

  Night no longer existed above the domains of the Imperial Palace.

  When Terra's sun set beyond the ragged mountain peaks of the ancient Himilazian Range, a thousand smaller stars were lit to bathe the great precincts in a hard, white light, so that the armies of drone-helots, smiths and stonebreakers could toil on in their labours. Floating high over the Hall of Victories and down towards the Sprawl Magnifican, a fleet of autonomous aeronefs bearing huge lume arrays ensured that day never ended, the glow spilling all the way to the Katabatic Slopes and the outer fringes of the Petitioner's City.

  His golden wargear glistening in the endless light, the primarch Rogal Dorn observed the progress of the great siege work of his design. His hard-edged aspect sombre and vigilant, he stood aboard a disc-like contra-gravity platform.

  Dorn's only company was a mech-servile. The device resembled an avian, a hawk of some kind, and it carried upon its back an upright oval frame like the mount of a mirror. There was no glass in the surround; instead it pulsed with lambent blue light, throwing hololithic panes out in front of Dorn as he moved around the platform's edge. Now and then, the Imperial Fist would reach into the holocasts and make an adjustment or shift a data-point. Even at this late stage, there were always details that required his individual attention.

  The smallest error in the gap between two flagstones could open a crack that would fell a shield wall. A single overlooked decimal in the wrong place could see a macrocannon magazine run empty in the thick of an assault.

  Nothing must be left to chance. For Dorn, these words had become his mantra. All points will be defended. All doors barred. There would be no failure on his watch. This he swore, this oath he reaffirmed with each lost dusk that passed, as his errant brother's invasion drew inexorably closer.

  Horus Lupercal, may he be forever hated, would soon come to the Imperial Palace, to directly challenge their father the Emperor. Dorn knew that hour was almost at hand; he felt it in his genhanced blood and bones. When Horus' blighted ships darkened Terra's skies, and unleashed their traitors and the creatures that were their allies, these walls beneath Dorn's armoured boots would repel them. No stronghold in the entire Imperium, not even the Fists' mighty star-home Phalanx, was as fortified as the bastion of the Emperor's Palace.

  At least it will be, if my works are finished in time. I can only hope it will be enough. Dorn grimly nursed the thought as he directed the platform to take him north, in the direction of the Tower Aquilane. The mech-servile came with the primarch, moving to perch on the disc's safety rail. He made more notations, redirecting a legion of masons and steelmakers from their duties at the Inner Gardens towards efforts on a series of anti-Titan revetments in the Western Quad.

  Too many operations were running behind schedule. Too many things were going awry. Some incidents were to be expected, of course, but Dorn knew the difference between accident, error and sabotage.

  There had been open attempts to disrupt the construction in the early months, attacks against machinery and men by deluded devotees of Dorn's errant brother. The Imperial Fists and the Custodian Guard had largely brought such brazen acts to heel since then, but one did not need to drive a loaded promethium tanker into a building site to ruin a work. Subtle interferences, small deeds in the right places, could have massive consequences. A misplaced shipment of metals. A helot legion going underfed. A measurement on a blueprint made a few degrees off true. In a building project of such epic scope as the fortification of Terra's capital, these things could prove fatal.

  Dorn released a slow, dissatisfied breath as he found a datum lying out of synch, and pulled it back into place. A gale of white vapour from his exhale briefly wreathed him and dissipated.

  He could have undertaken this duty in a photic projection chamber on one of the Bhab Bastion's command tiers, but it was more immediate to be up here above the cityscape, up in the polar cold and thin air that would have frostbitten a mortal. Dorn needed to look with his own eyes, not second-hand via hololiths.

  It was real this way. Up here, the Imperial Fist could hear the ceaseless clatter of pneu-hammers and the chipping of stone. He could taste traces of dust and the exhaust of machines as they laboured under the perpetual daylight he had put in place.

  Darkness would fall soon enough when Horus arrived, and all those common souls who dwelled within the walls of the Imperial Palace would beg for the light.

  Dorn looked down as the platform drifted to a halt. He was above the Investiary, and he looked upon the great building and frowned. It was the perfect exemplar of the crimes he had committed against this magnificent labour of men, this palace of ultimates.

  Once, the Investiary had been a great amphitheatre two full kilometres wide, a beautiful arena to cradle wonders brought back from across the galaxy. Dorn had shed a few drops of sweat down there, fighting in sporting duels with his kindred, beneath the gaze of the towering statues that bore the likenesses of his brothers.

  But now it was a massive munitions store, repurposed into a colossal powder-house accommodating megatonnes of conventional shells, para-batteries and promethium casks. Dorn had made it so because the arena's central location put it in good range of all this quadrant's gun emplacements, and the sunken design was tough and durable. It had been a delight to behold, once. The Imperial Fist had transformed it into something blunt and unlovely.

  'When did I lose sight of that?' His words crackled in the cold. At some point, Dorn had forgotten the beauty, forgotten that he was sullying what made this place so incredible. It had been lost in the myriad needs of the war, fading beneath the weight of the duty; t
he weight of new stone, like the brutalist bulwarks that now masked the once-glittering spectacle of the Investiary's ornate walls.

  Would you tear them all down?

  His question rose in his memory. Malcador, saying the words to him, down there on the floor of the amphitheatre. The Sigillite and he, in better days, when the suspicions between them had not been so open, so bitter.

  Another casualty of the conflict, he thought. Something else lost - or discovered - in the chaos of this siege-to-come.

  His reverie was drawn from him as the cyber-hawk emitted a warning cry, a split-second before a peal of thunder reached Dorn's ears.

  As he pivoted in the direction of the sound, he picked out a curl of black cloud rising up from a minor donjon towards the centre of the Indomitor Bastion. There was a survey crew in that zone, checking redundant buildings for suitability to be cut down, their granite foundations to be used as buttresses elsewhere.

  But that area contained nothing of import, so he recalled, nothing that could explode with such force, only art galleries and the like. Malcador had told him to leave that quadrant alone, Dorn recalled, citing the inestimable value of keeping safe its fragile esoterica. But such things would mean nothing if the walls protecting the Palace were weak, he had countered.

  'The needs of the war,' he muttered, taking the platform's controls in his giant's hands. Rescue flyers, alerted by the same alarm that had stirred the hawk, would already be launching to investigate the explosion, but Dorn was close and could get there first. He put the disc into a steep dive and sent it towards the source of the smoke.

  It was a depository minaret, one of thousands of similar buildings that existed all across the precincts of the Imperial Palace. An ugly burn scar defaced one side of it, and through the rent in the construct, the black smoke was already thinning, fading.

  Dorn stepped off the grav-platform and saw where the survey crew had left their ground transport waiting in the courtyard. The big, six-wheeled machine lay silent, and the primarch's nostrils twitched as he approached it.

  Blood, within. He smelled human death, the particular tang of it well known to him, without the heavy compound odour of legionary vitae or the acridity of something xenos-born. He came upon a dead man lying half-out of the driver's seat. The body of the work-ganger was slack and still warm. His eyes were crimson pearls, and dark fluid oozed from his ears and his mouth.

  Shock death. Dorn categorised the method of the man's ending with a warrior's dispassion. Catastrophic overpressure or a pulse-wave weapon could have killed him in such a manner, but secondary damage did not support that conclusion.

  The primarch drew a weapon of his own; the formidable master-crafted bolter dubbed the Voice of Terra had been presented to him by the Adeptus Custodes, on the day he had been anointed as Terra's Praetorian. Glistening gold like his power armour, the gun shimmered in the false daylight as it led Dorn into the shattered minaret. He moved with caution; if Horus' insurgents had grown bold again - if this was their doing - the threat could be grave.

  Within the tower he found a curious architectural anomaly. The building concealed a long corridor, a false arcade dotted with clever archways designed to trick the eye of the unobservant. More dead men littered the floor here, all of them killed in the act of fleeing. Dorn paused to examine the nearest and found the same fashion of death as he had upon the work-ganger in the transport. Blood-red eyes staring sightlessly up at hint a face twisted in agony.

  Something subtle and distant in his thoughts pushed at Dorn to go no further. And by rights he should have done exactly that, waiting for the Arbites to arrive, waiting for the medicae and their servitors. This site was still a danger zone until someone could fathom what had happened here, and many would have said that Rogal Dorn was too important to concern with something so minor.

  But Rogal Dorn was never one to accept the idea of a thing he could not do. He strode forwards. advancing down the arcade at a march, scanning every shadowed corner and dark alcove for anything that resembled a threat.

  The further he walked, the worse the manners of the deaths became. The primarch found workers whose limbs appeared to have exploded from within, killed instantly by interne hydrostatic impulse. Other bodies ended at the neck, the stumps haloed by a mess of shredded brain matter and bone. And further still, there were the dead who could no longer be recognised as human, their corpses turned into a crimson-black slurry painted up over the ornate marble pillars and pale ouslite ceiling.

  With each step he took, the forbidding pressure inside Dorn's thoughts took form and gained potency. It was as if corridor itself did not wish him to walk within it, as if the very walls were trying to repel him. Unbidden, his pace slowed to a halt and Dorn's armoured gauntlet tightened around Voice's grip.

  The end of the corridor was within sight, and he could see it concluded in an anteroom dominated by two great doors that were scaled for transhumans. Even from this distance, Dorn could surmise what had happened.

  He saw the dying plasmatic flame of a cutting tool where it lay on the tiled floor. The worker who had wielded it was a red mess now, perhaps the same unfortunate fool who had cut into the shattered seal that previously had walled off the anteroom from the rest of the world.

  What did they trigger in here? What line did they unwittingly transgress?

  There were symbols on the doors. Dorn took another wary step, narrowing his eyes to see them clearly.

  And so he did, but before the fullness of his discovery could be processed, a pungent acid reek seeped into the air. Dorn recognised the spoor of witchery. He had walked into a trap.

  Eldritch fire burst from points on the pillars, the walls and the floor. Arcane symbols lit up, revealing themselves where wards had been carefully concealed in the ordinary designs of tile and stonework. Psionic kill-forms, shrieking masses of inchoate ectoplasm formed from warp-matter, attacked the primarch from all sides.

  He battered them away, his bolter rising to blast the ones that were beyond his reach. Each dissipated with a concussive howl of power, hitting him with shockwaves forceful enough to make even the Stone Man recoil.

  Dorn retreated a few steps, gathering himself, and the ephemeral attackers drew back towards the psychic cantrips that had spawned them. His jaw set, the primarch picked out and put huge mass-reactive rounds into each origin point. As the shots blasted open the stone, thin spurts of organic fluid leaked out and he saw what might have been blobs of cultured cerebral matter buried in the walls.

  Psionic trip-mines, he reasoned. Warp-weapons that had lain dormant here until the work gang had unwittingly triggered them. These things were defensive artifices, to protect what lay beyond the chamber at the end of the corridor. But such devices had no business being here. Dorn glared at the distant doors once more, then stalked away, back towards the courtyard.

  When he stepped out into the false day once more, the cluster of Arbites and rescue specialists who had arrived in the flyers fell into line and made the salute of the aquila. Dorn did not return it, pausing only to order the senior incident officer not to enter the corridor.

  He cast a glance up into the night sky, beyond the burning lights aboard the aeronefs. Dorn tapped the vox bead in the gorget of his armour, opening a priority channel to the Phalanx out in orbit.

  'Heed me,' he told his warriors. 'You will go to the Seclusium in the bowels of our fortress. On my authority, open the gate there and recover one of the brothers you find within.' Dorn shot a look back at the rip in the minaret's wall, as the full weight of the decision he was about to make fell upon him. 'I require a librarian.'

  'Your will, my lord,' came the reply.

  The primarch did not acknowledge the reply his thoughts dwelling on what he had seen in the anteroom at the end of the corridor. A pair of giant's doors, built not for men, not even for a legionary, but for one of greater stature.

  Upon those entrances, laser-etched into the metal, the symbols for the numbers two and eleven.

&
nbsp; Yored Massak emerged from the troop bay of the Stormbird and scowled at the hard, directionless glare from above. Like any Inwit-born son of his Legion, he had not paused to question why he was suddenly summoned from his meditation in the deep spaces of the Phalanx, accepting that this was by the order of his gene-sire, and thus as immutable as if the command was carved into granite.

  But now, as the Imperial Fist set foot on Terra - and within the bounds of the Emperor's Palace no less - it was difficult for him to silence the torrent of questions that flooded his thoughts.

  Ever since the Decree of Nikaea had forbidden the use of psykers such as himself from line duty among the Legiones Astartes, Brother Massak had willingly surrendered his status within the warriors of the Librarius and followed Lord Dorn's edict to accept isolation in the great psi-negating Seclusium chamber along with his fellow practitioners, and wait.

  The Decree cast them as liabilities to their Legions, as potential vectors through which the dangers of the infernal warp might enter the material realm. There was truth to that threat, Massak could not deny but he had always believed that the sons of the VII Legion were beyond such things. They were the Imperial Fists, the mailed gauntlet of the Emperor. They did not break, whatever the trial.

  Some - those of weaker character, those caught in moments of despair - had dared to think that Lord Dorn had abandoned his Librarians as the Warmaster's rebellion grew to overwhelm everything, but Massak eschewed such sentiments. Their primarch obeyed his father's word, as the Fists obeyed the word of theirs. When the moment was right, Dorn would call them back to the line. They would be ready when he needed them.

  Was that moment nigh, Massak wondered? Before him, his liege lord stood as a towering, gilded sentinel, one hand resting on the hilt of his baroque chainsword, the other at his chin as he mused. The Librarian bowed and slammed his fist across his breastplate in salute.