The Armour of Fate

The Armour of Fate hummed its secret tunes at all times, but they were most noticeable when all else was quiet, and nowhere was quieter on Macragge’s Honour than Roboute Guilliman’s scriptorium.

No such thing as a silent suit of power armour existed. Even the specially adapted battleplate of Primaris Reivers emitted a toothache whine. Power armour carried a compact reactor, which made a noise. Fibre bundles contracting in their sleeves of plasteel made a noise. Servo motors at the major joints that worked in concert with the bundles and with the wearer’s limbs… They made a noise. As did the cogitator unit, the pharmacopoeia, the recycling plant, the nutrient dispenser, atmospheric filtration system, vox-comms system, and all the other various, miniaturised artefacts that were crammed into its armoured shell. In the library silence it was aggravatingly loud, boring through Roboute Guilliman’s concentration as steadily as a worm spoiling an apple.

The primarch did not need to sleep. That was fortunate, because he thought it likely he would not manage with the sound of the armour’s workings buzzing through his skull. If he could lie down in it in the first place. It was bonded to him, impossible to remove, a situation he worked to remedy.

‘This armour is the work of genius, but it is damnably noisy,’ said Roboute Guilliman testily.

‘My lord?’ Captain Sicarius waited on him that evening, though he did not have to; Guilliman was more than capable of defending himself, and besides, Captain Sicarius could easily exempt himself from such duties. Nevertheless, he stood on guard by the entrance on the far side of the chamber, lost in his thoughts. Guilliman pitied the warrior. He had known Sicarius only a little before he vanished into the warp, but it was enough to notice that he had changed for the worse when he returned.

‘Nothing,’ said Guilliman. He tried to think. Upon a separate table set up in a recess, and crowding the shelves around it, was every work upon Adeptus Astartes power armour in existence, in multifarious formats. That subsection of his library alone was a trove of information any magos of Mars would kill to access, not that Guilliman would ever let such fanatics past the doorway.

Sheaves of blueprints were scattered across the desk in front of him. He spotted something of interest written on one and reached for it, gritting his teeth against the purring of the suit. He always reached with his right hand. The integration points for the Hand of Dominion on his left made picking anything up nigh on impossible, even with the over gauntlet and its underslung bolter removed. Day-to-day tasks such as this were a struggle. His armoured fingers pushed at slick plastek. Ceramite skidded across the papers, knocking them to the ground in wafting flutters.

‘Oh, for the love of…’ he grumbled as he bent awkwardly to pick them up. The Armour of Fate was bulky. As its waist joint prevented him from flexing his spine and reaching the floor, he had to kneel. He reached for the scattered flimsies. Fingertips failed to grasp the sheets, sending them fleeing in small armadas over the polished floor. He growled in frustration, abandoned his task and stood, drawing a curious look from Sicarius.

‘I have the manual dexterity of a Legio Cybernetica battle automaton!’ Guilliman said. ‘Created by the Lord of All Mankind, master of the greatest armies in the Imperium, and I cannot pick up a plastek flimsy.’ He glared at the offending articles. ‘My greatest enemy.’

There was a thoughtful quiet.

‘You are joking, my lord?’ said Sicarius.

Guilliman looked at Sicarius. He had to turn all the way around to do so. The pauldrons, ornamental wings and large halo mounted on his back made it impossible for him to see over his shoulder. At least he had stopped knocking into things. There was that.

‘By the Throne, why am I expected to be serious at all times? Yes, Captain Sicarius, I am making light of my predicament. During the worst of the Great Crusade, I was known to make the occasional jest. Even after Terra fell. I did not spend my entire previous life writing deep thoughts into little notebooks, but sometimes dared to enjoy myself. I suppose that was not recorded in the hagiographies.’

‘Humour is not something you are renowned for, my lord.’

‘My time in this new age has revealed that to me amply.’ Guilliman held up his right hand and clenched it. One could not form a fist properly in power armour. Fingers could be clenched to punch effectively, but they would not curl inward fully. Plates and soft seals got in the way, holding the digits slightly away from the palm. If he squeezed hard to make them nestle, the ceramite squealed against itself, and he feared that he would break it. His right hand did nearly close, but for his left hand, which was wreathed with power plugs and interface ports, there was no chance. The inability to clench his fists properly frustrated him more than any other thing. Even more than the itches he could not scratch, and the impossibility of bathing.

‘There must be another way,’ he said, spreading his fingers again.

‘You wish me to fetch your scribes to collect your papers, my lord?’

‘I do not wish for you to fetch my scribes,’ he snapped. ‘I do not wish to watch them pick up things for me. I do not wish to be so helpless!’ He raised the hand that wore the outer power fist assembly. ‘In this armour I can crush the skull of an ork warlord, but I cannot lift a cup of recaff, nor hold a pen.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘This armour has to come off.’

‘But…’ said Sicarius, his doleful manner broken for the briefest second by a hint of surprise. ‘You told me you would die if you tried.’

‘That was what I was told by the aeldari prophetess. That does not necessarily mean it is true. What do you think I have been doing in here these last weeks?’ He gestured at the piles of flimsies.

Sicarius shrugged. His armour too whined, causing Guilliman to grimace. ‘Studying, my lord. I do not question what.’ He paused again. ‘You spend a lot of time studying.’

‘This study has a singular purpose. This is the Armour of Fate, but while I wear it I am not in command of my own. It must be removed. I have learned how.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘I have, however, reached something of an impasse,’ Guilliman said. ‘All the secrets of the armour’s function are here.’ He rapped the table. That action, at least, was accomplished easily enough. ‘There is but one question that I do not know the answer to.’ He stared at intricate plans he had memorised already, his eyes darting over their lines as if he would spot something he had missed. ‘You may leave me, captain,’ he said. ‘I do not need you hovering over my shoulder constantly. When you go, take the others with you. No guard is required on my scriptorium this watch. I prefer to be alone.’

‘My lord.’ Sicarius dipped his head in acknowledgement.

‘And I apologise for my tone,’ said Guilliman, still testy. ‘I find this situation frustrating.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ Sicarius withdrew, leaving Guilliman alone with the burden of the Armour of Fate and its infuriating noises.

The last loyal son of the Emperor waited until he was sure the Victrix Guard had departed, using the time to put his things in as good an order as he could with his clumsy armoured hands, then set out for his quarters and the concealed lifter there.

Astropath Prime Ultra Guidus Losenti was surprised to find Guilliman entering the hidden chambers of the Cawl Inferior.

‘Do you have a message for the Archmagos?’ asked Losenti.

‘No,’ said Guilliman bluntly.

Losenti paused uncertainly. The blind stones nested in his eye sockets glinted in the ruddy light of the machine.

‘Do we have a new code then, my lord?’ he said, perturbed. ‘Has the Archmagos been in contact? I have sensed nothing. Did I miss something?’

The look of alarm on Losenti’s face moved Guilliman, and shook him out of his irritation. If the astropath had missed a communique from the Archmagos, he would be useless. Guilliman had told Losenti in no uncertain terms when he volunteered that the only way he would leave the secret chambers would be as an honoured corpse.

‘You have done no wrong, astropath. Do not be afraid. I have no code nor any message to send, but I require you to wake the machine anyway, because I wish to speak with it.’

Losenti was confused.

‘Very well. Then which code should I use? Should I use the code for message send?’

‘I do not want it to send this conversation to Cawl – beyond that I don’t care very much which code you use. Turn it on. Use the last one. Use the one before that. Just wake it up.’

‘Very well, my lord,’ said Losenti. ‘I will do as you wish.’ He placed his stave carefully upon the ground and raised his voice. ‘By the will of the Omnissiah, engage initiation sequence!’

Guilliman waited impatiently as the machine went through its activation cycle. Once they had passed through the security protocols and their identities were confirmed, Losenti provided the last code Cawl had sent. After its delivery, the device went into action. Machinery spooled up to high activity. Doors slid up to reveal twenty severed heads installed in nutrient tanks within the walls of the chamber. Light pulsed along etheric circuit tracks. Guilliman steeled himself against the rising psychic pressure. Something about it sickened him.

Losenti was far more affected by the machine’s spiritual radiation. Partway through its activation, Losenti departed with a bow, withdrawing behind the psychic shielding of his quarters, leaving Guilliman to face the discomfort of the activation process alone. The heads twitched and jiggled. The machines whined and thumped. The pressure grew. Every activation brought a different set of sensory illusions. This time, there were bright lights that strobed from unexpected places, and the smell of cut grasses drying in the sun. He felt himself stretch sideways, like his legs were anchored in one gravitic plane while his head was attracted by another set at ninety degrees. From somewhere, he heard children singing.

It concluded as it always did, with a loud pop that sounded only inside his mind. The heads shuddered and were still. The noise dropped to a quiet, oiled clatter.

Belisarius Cawl’s voice boomed from thin air. The mouths of the dead heads spoke along with his words, but the sound itself was generated from no particular place.

‘Greetings, Roboute Guilliman, last son of the Emperor of Mankind, Lord Imperial Regent,’ it said. Each time, the machine chose to greet Guilliman differently. Sometimes it was insolent in its over familiarity, sometimes it would regale him with every one of his titles. Sometimes it would deliver its message and shut off without another word. ‘Master of Ultramar,’ the Cawl Inferior continued, ‘Lord Commander, the Aveng–’

‘Silence,’ said Guilliman.

The voice stopped. Fast-paced whooping and the shushety-shush sounds of pistons pumping beneath the primarch’s feet took its place.

‘Your order does not fall within my operating parameters,’ the Cawl Inferior said, with tones of sarcastic hurt. ‘You provide the code, I provide a structured set of responses activated by that code. That’s how it works, like a key in a lock. First of all, I must greet you, then I provide the edification. You have interrupted the greeting. We cannot proceed until it is delivered.’

Guilliman took a deep breath. ‘I do not wish to hear the edification.’

‘Why?’ said the machine. It paused, as if it were thinking. ‘You have delivered this set of data before. I thought it was familiar,’ said the Cawl Inferior slyly. Its mannerisms were very much like those of its creator. ‘What do you want? If you wish to contact–’

‘I do not wish to contact the Archmagos. In fact, I expressly forbid you from sending the content of this conversation to him.’

‘I am bound to obey,’ said the machine, though Guilliman doubted it would. Something clunked in its innards. One of the heads shouted silent, nonsense words in its tank, then settled down again.

‘I want to ask you a question,’ said Guilliman. ‘Will I survive if I remove the Armour of Fate?’

‘That information is not contained within this unit.’

A little of the Cawl Inferior’s machinic manner returned, though not enough to convince Guilliman it was a machine.

‘I sincerely doubt that,’ said Guilliman.

‘Invalid query,’ said the machine, then was silent. ‘Question incompatible with data cache unlock.’

‘I know you can understand me, Cawl Inferior,’ said Guilliman.

‘Of course I can understand you.’

‘Then answer my question,’ said Roboute Guilliman. ‘It is simple enough.’

The Cawl Inferior let out an exasperated noise.

‘You make noises like a living being,’ said Guilliman. ‘You sigh and mumble like a scholum instructor confronted with a student who cannot grasp a simple concept. I know you think.’

‘Once, I would have asked you how you could possibly know what the noise of a frustrated teacher was, for I doubt you ever heard it,’ said the machine. ‘Now, I am not so sure. In reference to your analogy, I present to you a simple concept – you do not grasp it. The responses I can provide are limited to the subset of information the code activates within my datastore. I can provide no further enlightenment beyond that which I already contain.’

‘This conversation is not within that subset,’ Guilliman pointed out. ‘In fact, very few of our conversations are.’

‘You are ignorant of my sophistication and the genius of the Archmagos Belisarius Cawl. They fit well within the limits of my standard conversational subroutines.’

‘Yet you speak like a man, not a machine. You know you do – now answer my question!’ demanded the primarch.

‘I am not a man. I cannot think for myself, Lord Imperial Regent, as well you know, because I have told you repeatedly. What sentience I appear to possess is solely an illusion. A data ghost. If I were anything else, I would go against the greatest ban of the Cult Mechanicus, enshrined in the Crimson Accords at the time of the advent of the Omnissiah upon Mars – “Thou shalt not craft a machine with the mind of a man.” Such work is for the Machine-God alone. To facilitate a conduit for the inhabitance of a machine by one of the Machine-God’s holy spirits is the acme of the Mars mechanica. To fashion an ersatz soul is blasphemy, for such a thing emanates not from the triple god’s divine grace but is a vileness of human make.’

‘If anyone is going to break that ban, it would be Belisarius Cawl,’ said Guilliman.

‘That is a calumny. He would do no such thing,’ insisted the Cawl Inferior. ‘We have had this debate before. I am sure you have had the same argument with the Archmagos Belisarius Cawl also.’

I have not, thought Guilliman, but I will most certainly be doing so next time he shows his face.

‘So, to answer your question,’ the Cawl Inferior continued, for it was as garrulous as its creator, ‘I cannot reply to your satisfaction. I simply do not know the answers to the questions you seek.’

‘I asked one question.’

‘There are always more. One question begets a host. That is the nature of the quest for knowledge. If there were but one question, mankind would already exist in a state of graceful wisdom. You ask me, “Will I survive the removal of the Armour of Fate?” If yes, the next question is, “How can this be accomplished?” The one after is, “Should I attempt it?” If my answer is no, then the next question would be, “Why not?” and so on and on. I do not know if you can safely remove the armour or not. For what it is worth, I am sorry.’

‘If what you say is true,’ said Guilliman wearily, ‘then you cannot feel sorrow.’

‘I cannot. But if I could, then I would, I assure you. I do not envy your quandary. Or would not, if I felt envy.’

Guilliman’s lips thinned.

‘Very well. We are done here.’

In the course of their usual conferences, the Cawl Inferior shut itself down. At Guilliman’s insistence, the actual Belisarius Cawl had installed a single master switch that Guilliman could use to turn off the device himself. He moved for this now.

‘Wait!’ said the Cawl Inferior, for despite its protestations of unlife, it seemed to enjoy its infrequent activations a great deal.

‘What?’ said Guilliman. He opened the steel front of the switch cabinet and rested his hand on the bar of the lever within. His armoured fingers barely fit on it.

‘There are others who might know this information.’

‘I know,’ said Guilliman. ‘I would have preferred an answer from you, but if I must, then I shall go to them. Until next time, machine.’

‘Your servant as always,’ said the Cawl Inferior, with enough of a tone of irony to make Guilliman doubt its sincerity completely.

Guilliman pulled the lever to the device. The lights went out behind the heads. The dead faces ceased to gurn. The doors slid closed. The heavy sense of psychic activity lessened, though it would never disperse in that room.

‘Losenti,’ called Guilliman. ‘Come forth.’

The triple-layered door to the astropath’s quarters opened. The astropath came out again.

‘My lord?’ he said.

‘I require a favour from you. A message.’

‘My lord. What do you wish to relay to the Archmagos?’ Losenti stood tall, a sign he was preparing himself to memorise the primarch’s words then consult the code board secreted in his rooms. Cawl had an identical Cawl Inferior upon his own vessel. Or so he said.

‘You will not need your codes. The message is not for Cawl,’ said Guilliman. ‘It is for another.’

Guilliman’s Overlord gunship set down upon a plain furred with fantastical, natural sculptures of frost. A cliff of ice, blue with age, soared steeply in front of the landing ground.

The Overlord gushed steam in prodigious amounts from its temperature regulators, the deep cold of the planet straining the machine’s thermal tolerances. The Overlord dwarfed the Thunderhawks escorting it with its broad twin hulls, but the ice wall was bigger than them all, an implacable mass of frozen atmosphere unaffected by the clouds of vapour billowing up around the ships. The ground emitted curls of gas melted by the heat the ships brought to the frigid world, but it was a brief warming. As the gas rolled upwards, it was already freezing, and it got no further than a few score yards before freezing out into fat flakes of carbon snow and falling back down again through the thin air. Metal clicked with rapid contraction. Within moments, frost ran spider-quick over freezing hulls. By the time the first boarding ramps were lowered, the gunships were growing beards of ice.

Captain Sicarius and six of the Victrix Guard emerged first: three Primaris Space Marines in modestly decorated armour, and three of the older sort, whose highly ornamented plate proclaimed them as veterans of centuried experience. Their boots crunched on the untrodden plain. Gold trim glinted under the light of the naked void. There was not enough of an atmospheric envelope to obscure the cosmos from the unnamed world, and the light of its distant sun barely competed with the stars. Black was the colour of the sky at morning, noon and night.

More Primaris Space Marines emerged from their gunships. They wore a variety of liveries, their badges crossed by a pale grey chevron, but they worked together in close-knit teams. They formed a wide perimeter around the ships, dark silhouettes upon the icy white. Wing- and hull-mounted heavy weapons rotated to cover every direction over the plain and the base of the cliff.

Sicarius made his checks. He took his time, waiting for void-scry and surface auspex soundings to be performed several times. Only when he was satisfied that the area was devoid of anything but ice did he open up his vox channel to the Imperial Regent and pronounce his verdict.

‘The landing zone is clear,’ he said.

Roboute Guilliman disembarked from the Overlord.

‘I can find no foes, my lord,’ said Sicarius, ‘but there is nothing here at all, only rock and frozen air. What did you expect to find?’

‘What I seek is here,’ said Guilliman. ‘A meeting place made known to me by an old friend long ago.’ He looked up at the cliff and ran his gaze across it. He raised the Hand of Dominion and pointed a single huge mechanical digit. ‘It is there.’

Sicarius called over his auspex specialist.

‘You will find nothing,’ said Guilliman. ‘There is a door buried in the ice. Bring up melta devices and burn your way in.’ He strode along the foot of the cliff. It was peculiarly regular, the ripples in its surface almost too well formed to be natural. There were no boulders at its foot. The plain stopped, and it rose up, as if the land been neatly folded. As the primarch passed the last of the sentries, a group of them broke free from the circle and fell in with him, the rest adjusting their positions so their perimeter was again perfectly spaced. The Victrix Guard broke into a run and ranged out ahead.

Roboute Guilliman stopped in front of a section of cliff that looked no different to any of the others. He spread his hand upon the ice. It was so old time and pressure had squeezed all impurities from it. Under the dark of the sky it was almost as blue as Ultramarine armour.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Dig.’

Water ran as fluid across the unnamed world, perhaps for the first time in its history. Huge clouds of steam roared skywards from the touch of the melta beams, and then, when the surface was breached and the Space Marines had gouged out a smooth entrance, blasted from the growing tunnel with great force. The vapour froze on anything it touched, coating the Space Marines nearest to the excavation site in hoarfrost an inch thick.

A shout came over the vox. ‘Wraithbone.’

‘The aeldari?’ Sicarius asked.

Guilliman nodded, but said nothing more. A few minutes later, the last of the vapours ceased roaring from the tunnel and the cutting team emerged encased in ice. It clung in clear sheets to the flat parts of their battleplate, cracking in small showers from their joints, melting and then refreezing around their armour’s heat vents in a steady cycle.

‘There is a tunnel, my lord. Stairs.’ The Space Marine was unsurprised. All of them had seen stranger things than a city hidden in ice.

‘I have an auspex sounding now,’ said Sicarius. ‘There is a building inside this cliff. It is large. We are detecting energy sources, psychic, fusion, more. All theoreticals demand a commander be protected, and I would be preparing myself to escort you, but I have spent enough time in your presence now to know that you will be going alone.’

‘I will,’ said Guilliman. ‘I would thank you not to try to convince me otherwise.’

‘Noted,’ said Sicarius. ‘I will urge you to caution, however.’

‘You do not need to,’ said Roboute Guilliman. ‘It is my greatest fault.’

‘I do not trust the aeldari, my lord. Be on your guard.’

‘Then you are wiser than you look, Captain Sicarius,’ said Guilliman.

With those words he went inside, bowing to navigate the low ceiling of the freshly carved tunnel.

Sicarius arrayed his warriors in a defensive formation outside the entrance and told them to wait.

Rippled ice caught Guilliman’s stablights and refracted them into an eerie glow. Veils of turquoise and aquamarine shifted in the glacial depths, seeming to dance around darker shapes that flowed away to nothing when looked at directly.

The distance to the complex’s entrance was a hundred metres inside the ice sheet. Under such masses of frozen material, there should have been a constant chorus of musical fractures and harmonic growling as the ice moved. Even if entirely inert, as was possible on so small and cold a world, the tunnel should have awoken the ice as the melting forced a redistribution of load, yet there was nothing but hollow, sinister silences.

Guilliman’s hand trailed along the tunnel walls, the cold penetrating through his armour and chilling his fingers. He enjoyed the sensation, as it was directly felt by his own flesh and blood, not mediated by the machine’s sensorium, and that was all too rare a happening.

A soft luminance filled the tunnel from another source, and Guilliman shut off his suit lights. The glow was familiar to him: the lambency of aeldari technology.

His warriors had uncovered a double doorway of sculpted psychoplastic, decorated with simple curves. Despite having been subjected to the full force of melta weaponry, it was unmarked, remaining a pale colour close to bone, though warm with inner life. The doors were only part uncovered. Their shape suggested a pointed archway, but a height only to Guilliman’s head had been exposed. They parted as he approached, opening onto an elegant stairway completely free of ice.

As he ducked through the doors, Guilliman’s armour detected the subtle pressures of an atmospheric retention field, and he paused to unclasp his helm and draw it off. The pressure was exactly equal, the air fresh and spiced with the strange perfumes of aeldari kind. Wraith glow underlit the steps and shone upon a dozen statues arranged in alcoves spaced up the flight. It was as perfect and clean as if the inhabitants had left only moments before, though Guilliman would wager no aeldari had been there for millennia.

Although he did not know exactly where to go, he let his feet carry him forward, and presently he reached his destination.

There was a windowless tower that nevertheless promised the finest of views, if one only knew how to see them. Beneath the soaring cone of the ceiling a lithe figure in black armour and a crescent-shaped helm floated cross-legged in mid-air. He was lit by a shaft of light that began nowhere, and orbited by an interweaving pattern of spinning runes.

Roboute Guilliman met with the one he had called, one of the most powerful beings at large in the galaxy.

‘Greetings, Eldrad Ulthran, Farseer of the Aeldari,’ said Guilliman. He spoke in the tongue of Ulthran’s people of Ulthwé.

‘And to you, son of the Emperor of Mankind, my ally, and my enemy.’

‘Enemy I sometimes am to your people, and so I am grateful that you have come,’ said Guilliman. The tower room was well furnished, including a number of chairs. All were far too small for his bulk, and so he remained standing.

‘I expended a great deal of effort in bringing you back to life,’ said Ulthran distantly; his attention was not wholly on the encounter. ‘I would be foolish not to heed your call if you are to fulfil your purpose. All men require guidance from time to time, and for all your father’s art, you are mostly a man.’

‘What is the purpose you have in mind for me?’ asked Guilliman.

‘That is not the question you came to ask, but I will answer it anyway. The task you must fulfil is the one you appointed yourself, that of the saviour of humanity.’ Ulthran looked down. ‘If it would not be offensive to suggest,’ he said, switching to Imperial Gothic, ‘I would prefer to conduct this conversation in your language. You are one of the very few sons of Terra who can speak our tongue at all. You do so very well, but there are certain subtleties you do not manage perfectly, and it grates upon my ears.’

‘I apologise for my lack of expertise,’ said Guilliman.

‘Not at all,’ said Ulthran, staring ahead again. ‘The fault is yours, of course, but one day you will master it. Virtually none of your species, no matter how mighty, ever could nor ever will.’ He caught a rune from the air, examined it and set it in motion again. The rustle of his robes was loud in the city’s immemorial silences.

‘I can feel your discomfort at this new era,’ Eldrad said. His gothic was accented in a way that imbued the language with fresh beauty. ‘I sense your pain. You have a great burden to bear, almost as great as mine. You and I both have seen all we hold dear cast down by folly, and are pained by the misery of what took its place. We are kindred spirits, in a way. Ask your question. I will answer, as a favour, in recognition of our shared sorrows.’

‘You already know what I want to ask.’

‘Ask anyway,’ said Eldrad Ulthran. ‘As you must.’

Guilliman looked away, casting his eyes over the perfectly preserved ghost room he found himself in. He wondered who had lived here, or if anyone ever had. The aeldari were enigmatic, and despite their physical similarities to humanity, were alien of thought.

‘For the last several months I have studied the workings of this armour that I wear, and that I have not removed since it was placed upon my body years ago,’ he said. ‘I believe I understand how it functions, and what it does, broadly speaking. The prophetess Yvraine warned me never to remove it, but I must. What I do not know is whether I will survive its removal.’

‘This is not your famed caution at work,’ said Eldrad Ulthran. ‘That is rashness speaking. Leave it on, if you are afraid.’

‘I am not afraid. I simply lack sufficient understanding to assess the risks. There is a personal element, of course. I have no desire to die again, but I can account for my concern while calculating the probability of my death.’

‘The issue is that you understand full well what the armour does physically for you, but there is another element to it. An element of the spirit.’

‘I cannot give that credence,’ said Guilliman plainly.

Eldrad Ulthran gave a dry chuckle. ‘How difficult it must be for you, a child of the Emperor’s enlightenment, to judge these things. The armour sustains your soul. When you were wounded by your fallen brother, the cut went past flesh and wounded your eternal being. That wound will never heal.’

‘It is true I feel an emptiness inside myself,’ said Guilliman.

‘That is the injury of the soul.’

‘Be that as it may, you have not answered my question. Will I survive?’

‘The question is wrong. It is not will you survive, but are you capable of surviving?’ Eldrad raised his hand and gestured at the circling runes. ‘These are the tools by which I might read the skein,’ he said. ‘These runes represent you. There are many of them, as you can see. Their interaction is complex. Hard even for me to read. If I go into the othersea, where I may look directly upon the branchings of what may come to be, your path is difficult to follow. To remove the Armour of Fate risks not only death, but ultimate annihilation. Even if you do not die, its removal will affect you profoundly in a way you will find uncomfortable. There is grief woven tight about every possible future for you, Roboute Guilliman. Take off this armour, and the emptiness you feel will grow to a void that can never, ever be filled.’

‘Sorrow I can bear,’ he said. ‘I have endured more of that than any being. What is a little more?’

‘You do not know my sorrows,’ said Eldrad. He looked again at the primarch. When his head shifted, Guilliman realised he could see the ceiling through the helm. Eldrad was fading away. He must get his answer quickly, or not at all.

‘You cannot know all of mine either, for all your psychic gifts.’

‘This is true,’ said the farseer. ‘Remove the armour, if you wish. There will be consequences. Of what degree is down to you – it is an outcome dictated by your will, and the strength of your own soul. Annihilation, death, or simply sadness. I cannot answer this question, no more than could Cawl’s puppet. You can answer it only yourself, and ask it only by doing.’

‘Then I will not die,’ said Guilliman firmly.

Eldrad nodded. ‘That is entirely up to you.’ The aeldari and his runes were vanishing from view, a spectre caught in full sunlight. ‘There is a further thing you have not said.’

‘Is there?’ asked Guilliman.

‘You wish to be free of the influence of my kind,’ Eldrad said, his voice fading with his body. ‘You see the armour as a gaoler holding you hostage to our whims. Know this – the fates of humanity and aeldari are bound together. Either both species will survive, or neither will. Your Emperor understands this. There are greater enemies than the primordial annihilator. In the times to come, you will see. The struggle is only beginning. The old war returns.’ Ulthran was an outline, a shadow. ‘Remember this conversation, and reconsider carefully, on the day realisation comes, whether you wish to stand alone.’

Eldrad Ulthran was gone.

Guilliman left the unliving city to itself.

Guilliman chose his arming chamber for the task of removal. The day came quickly, and before he knew it, he was on the cusp of the moment. Four high-ranking adepts of the Cult Mechanicus waited on his command, as did medicae, Apothecaries and a host of servitors. Apart from the large, upright arming cradle made for his stature, the room was more operating theatre than armoury, being full of medical equipment, the air prickly with the astringent scents of counterseptic. A large section of the space was taken up with a primarch-sized operating table, over which a multi-limbed chirurgeon hovered in readiness.

Nobody spoke. Guilliman stood in the door. Weighing his decision one final time, he looked behind him into the greater hall that housed his museum of weaponry. The lights in the Grand Hall of Armaments were out, and the collection of armours it contained were dark silhouettes, all inert, simple machines that possessed none of the dangers his own wargear did.

This section of the ship was the one most badly damaged by the Red Corsairs during their tenure. He remembered coming aboard after the vessel’s retrieval, sorrowing at the damage done, soothing his anger by its restoration. He wondered, as he returned his gaze to the specially made machinery awaiting him, if he was risking similar damage to all the Imperium by taking this course of action.

What if he died?

I can be nobody’s slave, he thought firmly. He stepped into the arming cradle and gripped the armrests so tightly the metal sang.

‘Begin,’ he said.

A servitor raised a cybernetic arm, the power tool mounted in place of its hand already rotating. The bit engaged smoothly with a locking bolt upon the primarch’s greave.

Guilliman gritted his teeth as the bolt was withdrawn, and he took his fate back into his own hands.