Prospero Burns

Ten

The Wolf King straightened up, like some elemental giant rousing from its telluric slumber.

‘Juvjk. Wurgen,’ he said. ‘I was informed you spoke both fluently.’

The distinctive wet leopard-growl of the Fenrisian Astartes haunted every syllable of his words. Hawser was mesmerised by the primarch’s size. Every physical dimension exceeded that of an Astartes. It was like meeting a god. It was as though one of the great and perfectly proportioned statues of classical antiquity, one scaled fifty or seventy-five per cent bigger than human standard, had come to life.

‘Well?’ asked Russ. ‘Or have you lost your command of Low Gothic too?’

‘Ser, I…’ Hawser began. ‘Ser… you’re speaking Low Gothic?’

‘I am now.’

‘Then I don’t know,’ said Hawser. He wished, desperately, his voice didn’t sound so pathetic and paper-thin. ‘I could speak both Juvjk and Wurgen before I was brought to this quiet room. Then again, I could speak neither of them until I came to Fenris, so make of that what you will.’

The Wolf King pouted thoughtfully.

‘I think it confirms what Wyrdmake and the others have believed all along. You’ve been tampered with, Ahmad Ibn Rustah. At some point prior to your arrival on Fenris, some agency, probably a psyker, altered your mind.’

‘Aun Helwintr suggested as much to me, ser. It’s quite a thing to take in. If it’s true, then I can’t trust myself.’

‘Imagine how we feel.’

Hawser stared at the Wolf King.

‘Why do you even tolerate me, then? I’m untrustworthy. I’m maleficarum.’

‘Oh, sit down,’ said the Wolf King. He held out a huge open hand and gestured to a stone bench beside him. ‘Sit down and we’ll talk about it.’

The Wolf King was also seated on a stone bench. He had a deep silver lanx near to hand, brimming with mjod. His armour appeared almost black, as if it had been scorched and tarnished in a smithy, but Hawser felt that was just the way the gloom of the firelight played upon it. Under an open sky, he thought, it would be tempest grey.

The armour was by far the heaviest and most marked power plate Hawser had ever seen. It dwarfed the formidable suits of the Terminators. It was notched and gouged, and the damage was as much decoration as the knotwork and tooled etching on the main plates. Around his shoulders, Russ wore a black wolf-skin. The pelt seemed to surround him and clothe him, like a forest beards a hillslope or a stormcloud smokes a peak. His face was shaved clean, and his skin was white like marble. Close to, Hawser could see light freckles on it. The Wolf King’s hair was long. Thick plaits of it hung down across his chest plate, weighted at the tips by polished stones. The rest of it was lacquered into a spiked mane. Hawser had heard many stories about the Wolf King from the men of Tra. They had all described his hair as red, or the colour of rust, or of molten copper. Hawser wasn’t so sure. To him, the Wolf King’s mane looked like bright blond hair stained in blood.

Russ watched Hawser take his seat. He sipped from his lanx. He was panting still, through parted lips, like a large mammal made uncomfortable by the heat but unable to shed its fur.

‘This chamber has proved the tampering.’

‘They called it the quiet room,’ said Hawser. ‘Who are those females, ser?’

He gestured towards the armoured figures waiting near the mouth of the chamber, but he could not bring himself to look at them.

‘Members of the Silent Sisterhood,’ Russ replied. ‘An ancient Terran order. Null Maidens, some call them.’

‘Why do I find them so… distressing?’

Russ smiled. It was an odd expression. He had a long philtrum and a heavy lower lip. These, combined with the high, freckled cheekbones, made his mouth into something of a muzzle, and his smile into a threat display of teeth.

‘That’s their function… aside from the fact they fight like bastards. They’re blanks. Untouchables. Psyker-inert. Got the pariah gene in them. Nothing on Nikaea can see us or hear our minds while we’re in here with them. There are more of them stationed throughout these chambers, and their effect is general enough to cloak the presence of the Vlka Fenryka. But Gunn thought it a good idea if I stayed in here, in the heart of it.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want to upset my brother,’ replied Russ.

‘Why? What might he do?’ asked Hawser, swallowing hard. The question he’d really wanted to ask was, who is your brother?

‘Something stupid that we’d all regret for a damned long time,’ said Russ. ‘We’re just here to make sure he arrives at the right decision. And if he doesn’t, we’re here to make sure the repercussions of the wrong decision are restricted to a bare minimum.’

‘You’re talking about another primarch,’ said Hawser.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You’re talking about taking arms against another primarch?’

‘Yes. If needs be. Funny, I always seem to get the dirty jobs.’

The Wolf King rose to his feet and stretched.

‘The moment you came in here, ser,’ Russ said, mocking Hawser’s use of the honorific, ‘the scramble-your-guts sisters blocked whatever was playing with your head. I’d be very interested to know who was handling you.’

‘Handling?’

‘My dear Ahmad Ibn Rustah, wake up and see where you are. You’re a spy. A pawn in a very long game.’

‘A spy? I assure you, not willingly, ser! I—’

‘Oh, be quiet, little man!’ the Wolf King growled. The vibratory force alone sat Hawser back on his stone bench. ‘I know you’re not. We’ve spent a long time and a lot of effort testing you. We want to know what kind of spy you are: a basic intelligence gatherer, or something with a more insidious mission. We want to know who’s running you, and who sent you to infiltrate the Vlka Fenryka twenty years ago.’

‘That was my choice. I chose Fenris, out of academic interest and—’

‘No,’ said Leman Russ. ‘No, you didn’t. You think you did. You feel like you did, but it’s not true.’

‘But—’

‘It’s not true, and you’ll see that yourself in time.’

The Wolf King sat down again, facing Hawser. He leaned in and stared into Hawser’s eyes. Hawser trembled. He wasn’t able not to.

‘People think the Sixth are just savages. But you’ve spent enough time among us to know that’s not true. We fight smart. We don’t just charge in howling, even if it looks like we do. We gather impeccable intelligence and we use it. We exploit any crack, any weakness. We are ruthless. We’re not stupid.’

‘I’ve been told this,’ said Hawser. ‘I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes. I’ve heard Jarl Ogvai repeat the lesson to the men of Tra.’

‘Jarl Ogvai knows how I like my Legion run. He would not have been named jarl otherwise. There are certain philosophies of war that I adhere to. Does that surprise you?’

‘No, ser.’

‘You may have been placed among us by an enemy, or a potential enemy,’ said the Wolf King. ‘Rather than just disposing of you as a threat, I’d like to use you. Are you willing to help me?’

‘I serve,’ said Hawser, blinking fast.

‘It might get your thread cut,’ rumbled Leman Russ through a smile, ‘but I want you to test the ice and see if you can’t get whoever sent you to show themselves.’

Russ rose again.

‘Women!’ he shouted, and made a great beckoning gesture for the Sisters of Silence to follow them. All six moved in perfect coordination, and swung their longswords up to a shoulder guard position from the tip-down stance. Hawser heard six, quick simultaneous scratches of metal on rock.

Russ took another swig of mjod, set his lanx aside, and lumbered out of the cavern through a melta-cut gap opposite the corridor Hawser had entered by. Following close behind him, Hawser had time to appreciate the size of the broadsword the Wolf King wore in a leatherwork and nacre scabbard across his back. He was struck by its beauty. It had the same hypnotic perfection as an approaching storm, or the gape of an apex predator a millisecond away from biting. The sword was bigger than him, taller. It would not have fitted into a coffin built for Kasper Hawser.

The gold-plated female warriors fell in step around them as an honour guard, three on each side. Hawser felt his skin crawl at their proximity. He had not put his axe away since drawing it at the chamber mouth, and his hands white-knuckled around the warm bone grip. Sweat beaded on his face.

The gap was short, and led down a series of crude, torch-cut steps into a soaring, lofty chamber. After the confines of the tunnels and the quiet room, its size took Hawser’s breath away. An immense bubble had once been trapped in the lava stream that had solidified to compose this part of the mountain. The floor had been levelled off with melta work, but the upper reaches of the cavern were naturally arched, mimicking a cathedral’s nave. Though the air was warm, there was a murmur in it, the echo of many voices dwarfed by a great space.

The chamber had been set up as a command post. On top of the metal decking plates set up on the heat-levelled floor, portable power units were running cogitator sets and deep-gain vox-casters. There were lighting rigs and, Hawser noted, automated sentry guns and field generators at the outer exits. This was a strongpoint. The area had been made defensible. Solemn rows of Imperial banners and flags had been suspended down the length of the chamber from the ceiling, hanging limp and heavy in the heat. They were martial symbols and honour rolls, vast sheets of cloth and gold thread evidencing the dignity and import of the Imperium of Man. Here, even here in a rock-cut facility built for temporary purposes, it had been considered necessary to make such a display, as though the chamber was one of the great halls of the Royal Palace of Terra.

A curious mix of personnel manned the command post. There were hundreds of humans and servitors at work. More of the silent sisters lurked around the corners of the vast space, lending their distressing absence to the location. At the bustling console positions, most of the personnel were uniformed officers of the Imperial Fleet and the Hegemonic Corps, though Hawser saw some Sixth Legion thralls along with liveried human servants from other institutions.

The most striking figures were the giants dressed in gold. There were at least a dozen of them in the chamber, supervising different tasks. Their armour was ornate, like that worn by the Astartes, but it was more lightly and finely built, as if forged by more subtle craftsmen. Some of the giants were bareheaded. Others wore conical golden helmets with green-glowing eye slits and red horse-hair plumes.

They were Custodes, the praetorian bodyguards of High Terra. Their accelerated post-human nature had been derived by yet another different principle to those which had produced the Astartes and the primarchs, and they fitted in magnitude between the two: far fewer in number yet greater in faculty than the Astartes.

‘I can think,’ Hawser began.

‘What?’ asked Russ gruffly, swinging round to look at the skjald behind him. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said I can think of only one reason why the warriors of the Legio Custodes would be here,’ said Hawser.

‘Then you’re thinking well,’ Russ snapped.

‘He’s here,’ said Hawser.

‘Yes, he’s here.’

Kasper Hawser slowly tilted his head back and looked up at the roof of the glass-rock cave. Magmatic light pulsed inside the volcanic walls, but all he really saw was the light in his imagination. He had never thought, never ever thought, he would stand in such proximity—

‘He’s here?’ he whispered.

‘Yes! That’s why we’re on our best behaviour.’

The Wolf King gestured insistently at one of the noble golden figures who was standing at a codifier not far away, observing the crew of operators at work. The figure had already noticed the entry of the glowering Wolf King. So had other people in the room. They were approaching with some haste, as if they didn’t want to keep him waiting.

Or they didn’t want to leave him alone long enough to cause a problem.

The Custodes reached them first. Close up, it became clear how ornamented the surface of his gilded armour was. Serpents curled around the seals of the gorget, and writhed around the shoulders and breastplate. Suns, stars and moons of all phases ran around the vambraces and the arm-guards. There were trees, flames, petals, diamonds, daggers, figures of tarot and open palms. Eyes and circumpuncts gazed out. The symbological historian in Hawser saw a lifetime’s work in every part of the Custodes’s plate, in the heraldic and cultural significance of every mark and engraving, every inscription and device. The man was a walking artefact. An incomplete but tantalising primer to mankind’s esoteric tradition presented itself in the form of power armour.

Over his armour, the Custodes wore a long red cloak and a red kilt covered by a war skirt of studded leather. His all-enclosing conical helm with its flowing plume of red hair made him a towering prospect. He regarded the Wolf King with his softly glowing green eye slits, and curtly nodded his head in deference.

‘My lord, is there something the matter?’ he asked, his voice sounding slightly boxy due to the helmet vox.

‘I was just saying, we’re on our best behaviour, Constantin.’

‘Indeed, my lord. Now, is there something? I thought you were resting in the quiet room. We are rather occupied at the moment.’

‘Yes. Constantin, this is the skjald of Tra Company. I’ve said he can look around. Skjald, I present to you Constantin Valdor, Praetor of the Custodes. Look suitably impressed. He’s a very important fellow. It’s his job to keep my father safe.’

‘My lord, might I speak to you privately for a moment?’ Valdor asked.

‘I’m making introductions here, Constantin,’ snapped Russ.

‘I insist,’ said Valdor, his vox-clipped tones sounding threatening. A second Custodes had arrived behind Valdor, along with two fully armoured Astartes, one in crimson armour, the other in heavy Terminator plate that was ash grey trimmed with green. A single horn protruded from his helmet like a tusk. A lot of other personnel in the immediate area were stopping to watch the exchange. Two cherub servitors, the size of real human babies, flew in low on damselfly wings. Their faces were silver masks and their wings made drowsy, thrumming beats like outboard motors.

‘You know what?’ said the Wolf King. ‘The last time anyone insisted anything to me, I twisted their arms off and stuck them up their arse.’

The cherubs squealed and swooped into Valdor’s shadow to hide.

‘My lord,’ replied Valdor levelly. ‘This constant need of yours to playfully maintain the role of barbarian king is most amusing, but we are busily occupied with—’

‘Oh, Constantin!’ Russ chuckled. ‘I honestly hoped you’d go for it!’ He gave the Praetor an open-handed slap on the arm that Hawser was quite sure left a dent in the golden plate.

‘Lord Russ, I must support Lord Valdor’s statement,’ said the Astartes in red. ‘This is no place for a…’

His voice trailed off to the crackle-stop of a vox speaker turning off. He nodded his head at Hawser.

‘A person brandishing an axe,’ he finished.

Hawser realised the axe was still in his hands. He quickly slipped it back into the loop at his hip.

‘Look now, skjald,’ said the Wolf King, sweeping his hand out to encompass all four imposing figures confronting them. ‘They’re ganging up on you. You see the one in red? That’s Raldoron, Chapter Master of my brother Sanguinius’s Blood Angels. And the handsome brute in grey, that’s Typhon, First Captain of the Death Guard. Remember their names so you can tell the account of this day in all detail and particulars at Tra’s hearth-side.’

‘Enough, my lord,’ said Typhon. ‘There are matters of security—’

‘Oh-ho! Over-stepping your mark, First Captain!’ said Russ, taking a step forwards and aiming an accusing finger at the Astartes in ash grey. ‘You do not… You do not tell a primarch “enough”.’

‘Maybe I’m allowed to, then,’ said another voice. They turned. The towering newcomer had the presence of Leman Russ and the charisma of a main sequence star. He was light and aesthetic perfection where Russ was visceral dynamism and blood-gold hair. Between them, they outshone even the magnificent Custodes.

‘You,’ said Russ grudgingly. ‘Yes, you’re allowed to, I suppose.’

He glanced at Hawser.

‘You know who this is?’

‘No, ser,’ mumbled Hawser.

‘Well, ser, this, ser, is my brother Fulgrim.’

The Primarch of the Emperor’s Children was dressed in finely wrought wargear of purple and gold. His white hair framed a face of almost painfully perfect grace. He smiled down at Hawser politely, briefly.

‘Were you getting fretful in your quiet room again, brother?’ Fulgrim asked.

‘Yes,’ Russ admitted, looking away.

‘You realise you need to stay there for now? Your presence might be seen as inflammatory, especially when he finds out you pushed for this censure.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Russ impatiently.

Fulgrim smiled again. ‘Console yourself. Concealing you means that the revelation of the evidence we have at our disposal will carry more effect. Your man Wyrdmake is about to step up to make account.’

‘Good. Then the secrecy will be done with and I can stop hiding behind the sisters,’ said Russ.

‘Still,’ he added, with a plaintive tone, ‘how I would love to see the look on his face when Wyrdmake is revealed. Or, at least, how I would love to hear that look described at the fireside in years to come by my skjald here.’

The Wolf King got hold of Hawser’s upper arm and dragged him forwards, shaking him a little for emphasis.

‘We’re trying to be patient with you, brother,’ said Fulgrim.

‘Please, my lord,’ added Valdor. ‘It’s inappropriate for—’

‘You never let me introduce him properly,’ said Russ, blithely cutting them off. ‘Not very polite of you. He is skjald of Tra, also called Ahmad Ibn Rustah, also called Kasper Ansbach Hawser.’

There was a pause, a hesitation.

‘You dog, Russ,’ murmured Fulgrim.

Valdor reached his hands up to the sides of his steeple helmet, disengaged the neck seals with a pneumatic hiss, and removed it. He handed the helm to his fellow Custodes.

‘Playing games with us a little, my lord?’ he asked. It sounded from his tone as though he was trying to appear amused. Valdor’s head was shaved back to a stubble of white, and he was deep-browed and aquiline. It looked like he seldom found cause to smile at anything.

‘Yes, Constantin,’ Russ purred. ‘I got bored in my quiet room. I had to find something to do.’

‘You might have told us this man’s identity a little sooner,’ said Valdor. He took a hand scanner from his companion and swept Hawser.

‘Because my identity matters somehow?’ asked Hawser.

‘Of course, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim.

‘You know who I am?’ Hawser stammered.

‘We’ve been briefed,’ said Raldoron in a crackle of helmet vox.

‘Kasper Hawser, distinguished and fêted scholar and academician,’ said Typhon, ‘founder and director of the Conservatory project that enjoys the Emperor’s personal approval.’

Typhon removed his brutally horned helm. The choleric face beneath was bearded and framed by long dark hair. ‘Resigned suddenly about seventy years ago adjusted, and subsequently disappeared, apparently while making an inexplicable and ill-advised voyage to Fenris.’

‘You know who I am,’ Hawser breathed.

‘Let’s get him debriefed,’ said Constantin Valdor.

‘You talk as if my whole life has been played out to someone else’s rules,’ said Hawser. The servitors hummed around him.

‘Perhaps it has,’ said Valdor.

‘I refuse to accept that,’ said Hawser.

‘How many people have got to tell you before you start listening?’ asked Russ, his voice a rumble.

‘Please, my lord,’ chided the other Custodes attending them.

‘Constantin, keep your puppy in check,’ warned Russ.

Valdor nodded in the direction of the other Custodes, who had removed his engraved helm to reveal the face of a younger man.

‘Amon Tauromachian is a bit more than a puppy, Wolf King. Don’t goad him.’

Russ laughed. He was sitting on the raised edge of the command post’s staging area, watching the bio-checks. Standing at his side, arms folded, Fulgrim smirked and shook his head.

They had taken Hawser to a small medical monitoring area set up in a corner of the main hall. He had been required to lie down on a padded couch. Specialist personnel were running biometric scans using both paddles and skin-patch contacts. Servitors were swabbing spots on Hawser’s skin so that small terminals could be attached.

‘I went to Fenris because I was driven by the same urge to learn and discover that has inspired me since childhood,’ said Hawser, aware that his tone was defensive. ‘The decision was prompted by dissatisfaction that after long and devoted service to the cause of Unification, my work was being sidelined and shelved. I was frustrated. I was disappointed. I decided to turn my back on the ridiculous politicking of Terra that was foundering my efforts, and undertake an expedition of pure research, as a cultural historian, to one of the wildest and most mysterious worlds in the Imperium.’

‘Even though you’ve suffered from a crippling fear of wolves since your earliest years?’ asked Valdor.

‘There are no wolves on Fenris,’ replied Hawser.

‘Oh, you know there are,’ growled Russ, his voice a wet leopard-purr, ‘and you know what they are.’

Hawser realised his hands were trembling slightly.

‘Then… then if you’re searching for some deep-seated psychological reason, perhaps I was seeking to face and overcome my childhood phobia.’

Aun Helwintr had joined them from the outer halls. He sat nearby on one of the other padded couches, rolling polished sea shells out of one gloved palm into the other. The weight of him put huge strain on the adjustable rod frame of the couch.

‘Doubtful,’ he said. ‘I think it’s the key. The fear. That specific fear. It has potency. I think it’s how they found a way into you in the first place. Still, we’ve never been able to discern the trigger, despite what we milked from your thoughts during the cold dreaming, and despite how close Longfang came to seeing it. The trigger remains too well clouded.’

‘What trigger?’ asked Hawser. ‘What cold dreaming?’

Constantin Valdor was consulting a data-slate.

‘You won the Prix Daumarl among many other citations. Your work was acclaimed by academicians throughout the inner systems. Some of your papers became springboards for lines of research and development that have had profound and positive implications for society. The Conservatory wielded formidable political influence.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Hawser. ‘We had to fight for every centimetre of ground.’

‘And other political bodies did not?’ asked Raldoron, who stood nearby.

‘No,’ said Hawser, moving so sharply that one of the terminals detached from his skin. ‘The Conservatory was an academic foundation with a simple mandate. We had no influence. By the time I left, we were going to be absorbed into the Hegemonic administration. I couldn’t stomach it. Don’t tell me we had influence. We were thrown to the wolves.’

He looked over at the Wolf King.

‘No offence, ser.’

Russ boomed another laugh that showed his teeth in a distressing way.

‘Try not to do that, dear brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘You’re scaring him.’

‘I believe you may have had a great deal of influence,’ said Valdor. ‘If I may say, ser, your greatest crime was naivety. At the very highest level, your work was admired, and received tacit protection. Other institutions of the Imperium’s political machine were aware of that. They were afraid of you. They were jealous of you. You didn’t see it and you didn’t know it. It’s a common mistake. You were a superb academic trying to run an academic foundation. You should have got on with your study and left the job of management to someone more suited to the task. Someone sharp and savvy who could have kept the wolves at bay.’

Valdor turned to Russ.

‘I speak metaphorically, my lord,’ he said.

Russ nodded, still amused.

‘That’s all right, Constantin. Sometimes I dismember metaphorically.’

‘Navid always filled that role,’ Hawser said quietly, to himself. ‘He loved the machinations of the Hegemony and the academies. He was never happier than when competing for a stipend or negotiating for a procurement fund.’

‘This is Navid Murza?’ asked Valdor, consulting the slate. ‘Died young, I see. Yes, you were quite a team. Your brilliance at field work supported by his boundless enthusiasm in the bureaucratic arena. He was killed in Ossetia.’

‘The death may have been significant,’ said the other Custodes.

‘Oh, please!’ Hawser snorted. ‘Navid was killed by an insurgent’s bomb.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Valdor, ‘it removed him from the Conservatory and took him from your side.’

‘I did not decide to go to Fenris because Navid Murza was killed in Ossetia,’ said Hawser angrily. ‘A number of decades separate those two events. I refuse to believe—’

‘The scale of your thinking is too small, ser,’ said the other Custodes, the one called Amon. ‘Murza was eliminated, and the benefits he brought to you and the Conservatory were eliminated with him. Did you ever replace him? No. He had been your friend for a long time, you were used to him. You took on the responsibilities yourself, even though you knew you weren’t suited to them like he was. You forced yourself to be a political animal because to find a replacement would have felt like a betrayal. You didn’t want to dishonour his memory.’

‘So you were much more worn down when the time came, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim. ‘You were tired from years of bureaucracy, years of doing the job Murza always should have done, years of not getting on with the work you really enjoyed. You were absolutely primed and ready to throw it all away and go to Fenris.’

‘There’s still the matter of a trigger,’ said Aun Helwintr.

‘Yes, that remains a mystery,’ Valdor agreed.

‘Not the timing,’ said Typhon. The ash-grey Terminator stood on the far side of the medical couch. Like Valdor, he was consulting a data-slate.

‘He was ripe,’ said Fulgrim.

‘With respect, yes, my lord,’ said Typhon. ‘The subject was ready. I meant the timing in terms of who was directing the subject.’

He looked at his data-slate again.

‘Spool eight-six-nine-alpha,’ he said. Valdor consulted his slate, and Fulgrim produced one of his own.

‘I refer you to the report filed by Henrik Slussen, the undersecretary brought in to facilitate the Conservatory’s incorporation into the Administration.’

‘That was the straw that broke my spirit,’ said Hawser. ‘Slussen was an odious man. He didn’t begin to appreciate what I was—’

‘He may have been a more sympathetic ally than you thought, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim. The primarch’s smile was calm and reassuring, and his tone supportive. ‘At the time of your resignation and disappearance, Slussen filed a report to his superiors. There’s a copy in the file spool here. He was recommending that the Conservatory’s independence be preserved. He suggested that absorption into the Administratum would seriously hamstring the Conservatory’s work, and the benefits it could offer.’

‘The proposal was approved by Lord Malcador,’ said Valdor. ‘The Sigillite placed his personal seal upon the ratification of the Conservatory’s autonomy.’

‘The Sigillite?’ asked Hawser.

‘He always took a great interest in your work,’ Valdor replied. ‘I think he was your champion behind the scenes. If you had not vanished, ser, you would have been granted the authority you craved. Your staff would have increased, along with the scope of your operation. I believe that within three to five years, you would have found yourself with a secretarial position on the advisory council of the Inner Hegemony. You would have been a man of great influence.’

‘First Captain Typhon is quite probably correct,’ said Fulgrim. ‘You would have been less malleable. Your frustrations would have receded. Whoever was running you had to pull the trigger, in that small window, or run the risk of losing all control over an agent they had spent upwards of five decades developing.’

Hawser stood up. The sensors that had been attached to him pinged off under tension, one by one.

‘Ser, we haven’t quite finished—’ a medical orderly began to protest.

Fulgrim held up a hand to hush the man gently.

‘No one spends that long grooming and deploying an agent,’ Hawser said quietly.

‘Yes, they do, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim. ‘The main institutions of the Imperium wouldn’t think twice about procuring agents at birth and arranging deployments that saw out their lifetimes. Most of these things are done without the agents in question even knowing.’

‘You’d do it, ser?’ Hawser asked, looking up at him.

‘We’d all do it,’ said Valdor bluntly. ‘The business of intelligence is vital.’

‘We kept you on ice for nineteen great years just to find out who had sent you,’ said Russ.

‘Predictions may be made,’ said Aun Helwintr. ‘Wyrd may be parsed. A man’s character may be analysed, and that analysis extrapolated to foresee what career he might take, and where he might find himself at certain points in his life. An experienced diviner can chart a man’s life, and train him like a plant, tend him, make him grow in a specific direction for a specific purpose.’

‘Who did that to me?’ asked Hawser.

‘Someone who exploited your innate characteristics, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Someone who saw that your innocent hunger for lost knowledge could be harnessed for their benefit.’

‘He means our benighted brother,’ said the Wolf King.

The Custodes called Amon took Hawser out of the vast cathedral of the command post, and up through melta-cut tunnel levels guarded by Astartes of the Ninth and Fourteenth Legions Astartes. The Custodes carried his ceremonial weapon, the guardian spear, an ornate golden halberd that incorporated a master-crafted bolter. The tunnels were smoky and hazed with heat. Hawser could feel the steady and monumental pump of the atmosphere processors preserving the engineered enclave of Nikaea from instant incineration. His heart thumped and he felt sick. The beautiful Primarch Fulgrim had suggested he be allowed to walk and settle his thoughts, though Hawser suspected that, yet again, other hands were directing his life.

He was glad to be away from the group of worthies, however. To be the focus of attention for two primarchs, two Custodes and three senior Astartes was overwhelming. They had all loomed over him literally and in terms of potency. He had felt like a child in a room with adults, or an insect in a specimen jar.

Or a livestock animal tethered out as an offering for predators.

‘Are we not moving out of the range of the untouchables?’ Hawser asked his escort.

‘Yes,’ replied the Custodes. ‘Only the lower levels are thought-proofed.’

‘So my mind is about to become visible?’ Hawser asked. ‘Visible, perhaps to my manipulator? Isn’t there a risk that I’m about to give a great deal away?’

Amon nodded.

‘There’s also a good chance of securing some leverage,’ he said. ‘The Wolf King knew you were a spy, but he kept you around for a long time. He kept you on Fenris and took you out into the Crusade. He wanted whoever was spying on him to see what you saw, and to understand that he was aware of them. The Wolf King believes that he doesn’t win battles by hiding secrets from his enemies. He believes he wins them by showing his enemies exactly what they’re up against and how miserably they’re going to lose.’

‘That’s arrogant.’

‘That’s his way.’

‘This enemy, it’s not really an enemy, is it? Another primarch? We’re talking about rivalry, aren’t we?’

‘All of the Legions run networks of intelligencers,’ replied the Custodes. ‘But they do it for different reasons. The Space Wolves do it to strategically evaluate any opponent they might ever, even theoretically, face. The Thousand Sons do it primarily to feed their hunger for learning.’

‘Learning?’ Hawser echoed. ‘What do they want to know?’

‘As I understand it,’ replied the Custodes, ‘everything.’

He ushered Hawser ahead of him with a subservient gesture. There was a light ahead of them, as if the sun was rising, shafting its rays down the throat of a specially aligned barrow-grave. The tunnel was broadening out and opening.

Hawser stepped out onto a platform of black rock like an immense gallery that curved around the upper level of the vast volcanic interior. The ragged lip of the cone above him was backlit by a sky lit pink with Nikaea’s vulcanism. It reminded Hawser, for a swift, unmanning moment, of the view up out of the entry-wound pit on the Quietude’s home world, the view he had turned to look up at so he did not have to behold Longfang’s doom.

Above the pink horizon, the open sky above the cone was still. There was an eerie calm inside the colossal space that the supervolcano enclosed.

Hawser glanced at the Custodes, who nodded reassuringly. Around the curved range of the huge gallery, other figures had gathered, looking down into the volcanic bowl. Hawser stepped forwards to the lip, a waist-high wall of glittering black basalt. He felt its gritty surface as he leaned against it. He felt the tug of soft wind stirring far below, the tremor of an atmosphere subjugated but defiant.

The gallery and its lip had been melta-cut. Below, similar industry had carved out more galleries in concentric rings, stepping down the inner slopes of the cone flue until they became, in turn, stacked tiers of black benches, hewn from the rock, forming a monumental amphitheatre.

Figures crowded the watching galleries, and packed the benched tiers. Hawser peered to make them out. Most were so far away, they were specks: robed adepts, nobles in finery with attendants, groups of Astartes.

Hawser glanced back at Amon, his escort.

‘What is happening here?’ he asked.

‘Philosophies are being tested,’ replied the Custodes. ‘The uses and abuses of power are being considered and weighed.’

‘By whom?’ asked Hawser.

Amon Tauromachian made a sound that was probably laughter.

‘My dear ser,’ he said, ‘look again.’

Hawser looked down. The wind stirred up at him. Vertigo tugged his belly at the soaring plunge past the galleries beneath, down the sculpted slopes, over the banked tiers of seating, staged like an ancient Romanii arena, where freemen would bay and jeer as slaves were thrown to wolves.

Down, down, over the heads of some of the Imperium’s most potent and significant beings, to the polished floor of the amphitheatre, where a spread eagle the size of a Stormbird had been inlaid in gold in the black marble.

Adjacent to the inlaid eagle’s head was a stepped dais.

The dais held light.

The light had been there all the time, too bright to be reconciled, so sublime that his mind had denied it rather than recognise it. It was the source of the rays he had mistaken as sunrise. It was a supernova of blue-white radiance that shafted light into the sky like a spear.

It was a light and it was a figure, and the thought and reality of both made him sob out loud. He had been looking right at it, but his brain had been too afraid to consciously acknowledge what it was seeing.

The Master of Mankind was holding audience, and the light of his magnitude was humbling to behold.

It was the second most extraordinary thing Kasper Hawser would ever witness.

‘You have to look,’ said Amon.

‘I can’t bear to,’ mumbled Hawser, wiping the tears from his eyes.

‘You can’t look away either,’ replied the Custodes.

Shaking, Hawser gazed down. He perceived the shape of a throne in the radiance, a seat of flaring wings. Black banners hung above the seated figure, suspended by choirs of cherubs that were barely visible in the glare.

Flanking the throne on the dais were Custodes warriors, their lance weapons held at attention. The outflung light seemed to infuse them too, transforming their lustrous golden armour into living, writhing magma.

‘Who are those other men?’ asked Hawser. ‘They can’t even be men, to stand on the dais so close to the light and not be burned away.’

Amon stepped in beside him, and identified the figures one by one, pointing his index finger.

‘The Choirmaster of the Astropaths, the Lord Militant of the Imperial Army, my lord Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator General of Mars, the Master of Navigators, and my lord Malcador, the Sigillite.’

‘Ser, I have lost the ability to feel,’ said Hawser. ‘This day has numbed me. Awe has given way to some kind of trauma, I think. My mind is broken. My sanity has fled. I can no longer register shock, or be impressed. You have just named the five principals of the Emperor’s court, and they are just words to me. Words. You might as well tell me I have sunk with Atlantys or been buried in the caves of Agarttha. A man should not be forced to face the myths that underpin his universe.’

‘Unfortunately, some men must,’ said Amon. ‘And isn’t that what you’ve been doing your entire life? So your bio-briefing ran, anyway. You’ve searched your whole career for the myths that have been hidden by the dust of ages, and now they confront you, you shy away? It suggests a lack of backbone.’

Hawser jerked his gaze away from the spectacle and stared at the towering Custodes by his side.

‘I think I might be permitted a little recoil! I’m not used to this rarefied society like you!’

‘I apologise, ser,’ said Amon, ‘if I offended you, but it is your inquisitive quality that caused you to be selected as a player in the game. It’s what made you appealing to the Fifteenth Legion Astartes. You were already an eager seeker of knowledge. They merely had to harness it.’

‘How could they do that? I’ve never even encountered one of their kind.’

‘Never?’ asked Amon.

‘Never! I—’

Hawser’s voice dried up. Another memory swam close out of the lightless abyss at the back of his mind.

Boeotia. So long ago, so very, very long ago.

He had asked, ‘Ser, which Legion do I have the honour of being protected by?’

‘The Fifteenth.’

The Fifteenth. So. The Thousand Sons.

‘What is your name?’

Hawser had turned. The Tupelov Lancers had led most of the team out of the shrine, leaving only him behind. Two more Astartes, each as immense as the first, had manifested behind him. How could something that big have moved so stealthily?

‘What is your name?’ the new arrival had repeated.

‘Hawser, ser. Kasper Hawser, conservator, assigned to—’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘What?’ Hawser had asked. The other Astartes had spoken.

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

‘I don’t understand, ser.’

‘You told us your name. Was it supposed to be a joke? Is it some nickname?’

‘I don’t understand. That’s my name. Why would you think it’s a joke?’

‘Kasper Hawser? You don’t get the reference?’

‘It was years ago,’ Hawser said to Amon. ‘Just once, and so briefly. I had barely remembered it. It couldn’t have been then. It was so… insignificant. They asked about my name.’

‘Your name?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my name, is there?’ Hawser asked.

‘Names are important,’ said Amon. ‘They invest power on those who own them, and grant power over those who own them to those who learn them.’

‘I… what?’

‘When you know someone’s name, you have power over them. Why do you suppose no one knows the Emperor by anything other than his rank?’

‘You speak of this as if it were sorcery!’ exclaimed Hawser.

‘Sorcery? Now there’s an accusation. You know the power of words. You saw what Murza did with words in Lutetia.’

‘Has the damn rune priest shared that story with everybody?’ Hawser snapped.

‘Who gave you your name?’

‘Rector Uwe, when I was a foundling. No one knew my name when I was brought to the commune. He chose it for me.’

‘It is a name from a folktale. Kaspar Hawser, Casper Hauser, there are variant forms. In ancient times, in the city of Nuremborg, before even the Age of Technology, he was a boy from nowhere, without parents or a past, who had been raised in nothing but a darkened cell, with nothing but a toy horse carved of wood to play with, who emerged into the world only to die in equal mystery, a riddle, in the gardens of Ansbach. This rector, he chose your name well. It is suffused with a sublime power derived from significance. The foundling child. The past of utter darkness. The quest for truth. Even the wooden horse, an attendant symbolism, representing the deceit by which one party may penetrate the defences of a rival.’

‘The Strategy of Ilios?’ asked Hawser. ‘Is that what I am?’

‘Of course,’ said Amon. ‘Though the Wolves, with their senses sharper than any of the Astartes, saw through it in a second.’

‘It is simply preposterous to suggest my life has been controlled through my name,’ spat Hawser. ‘Where would you come by such a notion?’

The Custodes tapped the throat of his armour.

‘Names are crucial signifiers for my kind. A Custodes’s name is engraved inside the chest plate of his gold armour. The name begins at the collar, on the right side, with just the first element exposed, and then runs around the inside of the plate. For some of the oldest veterans, the accumulated names filled up the linings of their torso plates, and were engraved outside like belts across the abdomen. Constantin Valdor’s name is nineteen hundred and thirty-two elements long.’

‘I know this tradition amongst the Custodes,’ said Hawser.

‘Then you will understand that “Amon” is just the start of his name, the earliest part of it. The second part is “Tauromachian”, then “Xigaze”, the site of his organic birth, then “Lepron”, the house of his formative study, then “Cairn Hedrossa”, the place where he was first tutored in weapon use—’

‘Stop. Stop! You mean to say your name, not his,’ protested Hawser.

‘When one shares a name,’ said the voice that belonged to Amon, Custodes of the first circle, ‘it becomes especially easy to achieve mastery and control. My name is also Amon. For the moment, I have used that coincidence to eclipse your noble escort. Turn and know me, Kasper Ansbach Hawser.’

Hawser was abruptly aware that the Custodes was oddly still, as if paralysis had seized him, or his burnished armour had been used to clothe a statue. Amon Tauromachian, Custodes, stood with one hand resting on the gallery parapet, gazing out into the amphitheatre, utterly still.

Hawser began to turn, looking to his right. His skin began to crawl. An emotion finally pierced the traumatic numbness that had overwhelmed his mind.

It was fear.

Something else stood behind him, something that had approached behind his back without betraying its presence. It was an Astartes warrior in red and gold, his bulk half blurred by the distortion field of a falsehood device. He leaned his massive elbows on the parapet, like a casual spectator, the gaze of his green-lensed visor on the theatre below rather than on Hawser.

‘I am Amon of the Fifteenth Astartes, Captain of the Ninth Fellowship, Equerry to the Primarch.’ The Astartes was using his own voice now.

‘How long have I been conversing with you rather than the Custodes?’

‘Since we came into the open air,’ the Equerry replied.

‘Did you create me?’ asked Hawser. ‘Did you twist me to your will?’

‘We guided you to our pathway,’ the warrior replied. ‘Hidden Ones are more obliging if they are not bent against their will, even unconsciously.’

‘So you freely admit I’m an asset?’

‘Curious, is it not? We know you’re our spy, and so do the Wolves. One might be tempted to presume you were useless.’

‘Why am I not?’

‘Because things are not yet played out.’

The Equerry of the Thousand Sons gestured down at the bowl of the amphitheatre. Far below, a shock-haired giant was ascending a small plinth to stand at a wooden lectern facing the radiant dais.

‘This is not a council,’ said the Equerry. ‘This is a trial without legitimacy or statute. My beloved primarch, behold him there, is about to plead for mercy on behalf of knowledge to a court driven by superstition and credulity. The Emperor has been steered into this. He has been manipulated into serving judgement on the Crimson King.’

‘By who? How is that even possible?’ asked Hawser.

‘By the Crimson King’s brothers. Other primarchs are jealous of the Thousand Sons, and the arts we have mastered for the benefit of the Imperium. They call our talents sorcery, and rail against them, but it is simply jealousy. Some hide their envy well. Sanguinius, for example, and the Khan, they pretend it is a minor concern that should simply be settled for the good of everyone, but inside they burn with a jealous rage. Others cannot even begin to hide it. Mortarion. The Wolf King. Their hatred is perhaps more honest because it is open.’

The Equerry looked at Hawser for the first time. The red and gold visage of his crested helm was threatening. The lens slits shone with green light, but the light died as the Equerry lifted the helmet clear of his head. The Equerry was a veteran soldier, with a close-cropped grizzle of hair, and skin like aged paper.

‘The Council of Nikaea is intended to resolve the issues surrounding the use of Librarian adepts in the Legions,’ he said. His voice, no longer disguised by the helmet-mic, was deep and rich. ‘We believe that what some call magic is a tool vital to the continued survival of the Imperium. Our opponents call us heretics and decry the lore we have accumulated. If the Emperor rules against us, a divisive wedge will be driven so deeply into the brotherhood of primarchs it will never recover.’

‘Especially if you defy the Emperor’s ruling,’ said Hawser.

‘He would have no choice but to sanction us,’ the Equerry of the Thousand Sons agreed.

‘And that sanction would be the Sixth.’

‘Sanction is the only reason he permits the feral and monstrous Sixth to endure. The only way he can justify their creation and continued existence is as his ultimate deterrent.’

‘And I am your early warning. Through me, you will see them coming.’

‘Yes, Kasper Hawser. Just so.’

‘He will rule against you,’ said Hawser. ‘No matter how you dress it up, the art you speak of is maleficarum, and that, I have come to believe, is what led mankind into Old Night.’

The Equerry turned to look back at the scene below. Hawser studied his profile. He wondered what a warlock was supposed to look like. He wondered if sorcery had a smell.

He tried to remember if it had been this warrior’s face that had been waiting behind him that morning when he had woken on the orbital plate and looked down at Terra. Had it been this face? Was it familiar?

‘Let me tell you of Old Night,’ said the Equerry, ‘since you’ve spent your career trying to uncover its traces. It was the catastrophe of universal proportions the myths say it was. A cosmological apocalypse. And yes, the abuse of certain arcane and transformatory talents were specific causal events. But I stress the word abuse. I’m talking about whole cultures and societies misusing and misapplying esoteric practices, often because they had no understanding of what they were doing. But do you know the most frightening thing about Old Night, Kasper?’

‘No,’ Kasper replied.

‘I’ll tell you. The term is imprecise. There was no Old Night. When we look back across time, across the train of history, it is possible to discern hundreds of disasters. Whole eras lost to the outer darkness, from which man rebuilt, only to be swept down again. Civilisation has come and gone more times than can be remembered. Atlantys and Agarttha, ser. There have been versions of the rule of man before that have left no lasting trace. This is a natural process.’

‘Natural? Surely it’s testament to man’s meddling with destructive powers!’

‘No,’ said the Equerry, adopting a patient tone as though he was a tutor coaching a faltering student. ‘Think of a forest, afflicted by raging fires from time to time. The fires denude and raze, but they are part of the cycle because they allow for vigorous new growth. Mankind is regrowing from the ashes of the last conflagration, Kasper. What we learned from that is that knowledge is the only continuity. Knowledge is the only strength. Without it, we will burn again, so the primary devotion of the Fifteenth Astartes is the accumulation of knowledge. Just like you, Kasper. That was why you were such a suitable candidate for recruitment. That’s why your mind didn’t even murmur in protest when we yoked your ambitions to ours. Knowledge is life and power, and protection against the dark. Forgetfulness is the true abomination, and the wound that darkness tries to inflict upon us.’

He touched his fingertips to his brow.

‘Here, more than anywhere, is where it matters. Commitment to knowledge. Not in books or in slates or data-stores, but in the memory. Tell me, don’t the Wolves themselves, for all their protestations against maleficarum, proudly pursue a tradition of oral histories? Isn’t memory and retelling the only form they respect, skjald?’

‘Yes,’ Hawser admitted, quietly and grudgingly.

‘There is an old myth,’ said the Equerry. He paused, and looked up at the frozen violence of the Nikaean sky. ‘It is a story of Thoth, a god of the Faeronik Era. He invented writing, and he showed it to the King of Aegypt. The king was horrified, because he thought it would promote forgetfulness.’

The Equerry turned and looked directly at him again.

‘We did not come to you with words, or instructions on a page. We did not try to influence you with things that could be erased or tampered with. We spoke in your dreams, and wrote on your memories, where it would matter.’

‘You gave me no choice, you mean,’ replied Hawser. ‘You altered my life and shaped my wyrd, and I had no say in the course of it.’

‘Kasper—’

‘You say forgetfulness is the true abomination? Then why do you employ it? Why can I remember some things so clearly, while others are invisible to me? If forgetfulness is the greatest evil of all, why did you use it to shape me? Why is my memory selective? What is it that you don’t want me to see?’

The Equerry’s eyes became cold.

‘What are you saying?’ he asked.

‘He’s saying step back,’ said Bear.