The Beast Arises

Why would any force, any species, keep its largest and strongest warrior-forms in reserve? Why would they not send them out into open combat? They might have halted or driven back the Adeptus Astartes’ attack long before they had cut their way to the blisternest.

The tek-tek-tek noise the Chromes made with their mouthparts, that malfunctioning data-engine clatter, was changing. The bigger, darker warrior-forms made a lower, duller noise, a clack-clack-clack. Two brothers in the line had already fallen to their superior power and savagery.

‘Do we fall back?’ Frenzy voxed. ‘Slaughter, do we break and regroup? This is new. This is—’

‘Hold the line,’ Slaughter replied. ‘No regroup. No fall back. Hold the line. Daylight Wall stands forever. No wall stands against it. Bring them down.’

‘Understood.’

Frenzy’s unquestioning understood was instantly echoed by a hundred voxed voices.

Slaughter ducked a slashing brown claw the size of Frenzy’s axe-head. He was smiling.

He had made a realisation. He knew what this was.

They are us. They are Daylight Wall.

The blisternest was the Chromes’ Palace of Terra. They had kept their bravest and best and mightiest warriors in reserve to defend it, in case an enemy ever got through.

This was their last ditch. Their last stand. This was their final wall, their do or die.

The Imperial Fists were just hours away from completing their undertaking to Ardamantua and adding another proud tally to their glory roll.

This was the bloody endgame, and it would be a battle to relish.

‘Hold the line,’ Slaughter ordered. Then, as a practical afterthought, he added, ‘Use your bolters.’

Three

Terra — the Imperial Palace

The air was smoke.

In preparation for the midday Senatorum meeting, servitors had lit the burners in the upper galleries and the approach halls, and in the alcoves along the Walk of Heroes, whose great leaded windows, miraculously spared by the pounding overpressure of the Siege, had looked out onto the stately yards behind Eternity Gate for two dozen centuries.

The burners fumed with camphor and septrewood, rose-ash and parvum, the sacred incense of the Saviour Emperor, thought to smell exactly like the incorruptible sanctity of His Eternal Form.

Vangorich couldn’t attest to this. Given his office as a Grand Master, he might have requested, and even been granted, the chance to show observance at the foot of the Golden Throne. He had never bothered. The dead did not interest him, not even the divine dead. What interested him — obsessed him — were the mechanisms by which things became dead, and the opportunities those deaths afforded the living.

He had entered the Inner Palace that morning through West Watch, and then followed the hallway walks behind the High Gardens and Daylight Wall before pausing in the chapel ordinary behind the cloister wall to make a small devotion at the basin font.

Vangorich was not a pious man. He was a man of faith, but it was not a spiritual faith. He made his devotion because he knew — or at least could be fairly certain — that agents from a dozen or more ministries and factions were watching him at all hours of the day and night. It was easier to make sure he was seen to be doing what he was supposed to do, than it was to waste manpower eradicating those spies on a daily basis.

Let his rivals do the hard work. It was no great effort to act a part.

Drakan Vangorich had been doing it all his life.

So he did what was expected of him. As a Grand Master — albeit of an Officio that had once been powerful and was now regarded as an atavistic throwback to a more brutal age — he was expected to attend all meetings, formal and discretionary. He was supposed to show humility and dignity. He was supposed not to express any cruel or bloodthirsty appetites, the sort of appetites his rivals assumed that a Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum must harbour. He was supposed to show respect to the Creed.

All Senatorum members took a blessing or expressed some devotion before taking their seats at meetings, so that the will of the God-Emperor might guide their thoughts and wisdom. Some, like the odious Lansung, made a great show of doing so, in full dress uniform, usually in the chapel-vault of one of his battlefleet vessels in orbit. Mesring was the same, leading a train of gowned, gold-helmed savant-priests into the rotunda church below Hemispheric Wall. Pompous idiots!

Vangorich, dressed in simple, ascetic black, opted for a less showy effect. The chapel ordinary was used by Palace servants and householders for their daily observances. It was not a public place, just a very plain cell with frugal appointments. Vangorich was aware that using it made him look dutiful, restrained, and very humble. It made him look more admirably spiritual than the lords who made their observances for show. It spoke of simplicity and a lack of arrogance.