THE HEART OF THE PHAROS    L J Goulding	 

	‘He fell, my lord. Of that much, at least, we can be certain.’
	Captain Adallus’ words rang with an echo that did not entirely match the physical confines of the chamber in which he stood. The effect was apparently disorienting even for those who had used the Pharos many times before, making the smooth, polished walls appear shadowy and indistinct. Beyond them – through them? – the high pillars of the Convincus Cubicularum were clearly visible, many lights years away on Macragge. He blinked hard, trying his best to focus on the matter at hand.
	‘I, uhh… I can find no evidence to suggest that anything unusual occurred in the initial stages of the descent. It seems that the correct procedures were followed throughout.’
	Adallus stood at the centre of the tuning stage in Primary Location Alpha, scanning the information on the data-slate in his hands as though it were all new to him.
	In truth, he had read it more than a dozen times. They all had.
	Behind his iron mask, Warsmith Dantioch sighed. ‘The sergeant’s report is comprehensive in detail, Captain Adallus, and yet it offers little in the way of real insight. I for one am still no closer to understanding what actually happened to young Oberdeii. That, if nothing else, is a problem.’
	‘Quite so,’ Adallus replied sternly.
	Four of them were haloed within the communication field, there on Sotha. Three were centurion-level officers from three different Legions, a living testament to the ideals of Imperium Secundus. They stood as equals – Adallus of the Ultramarines, Barabas Dantioch of the Iron Warriors, and Alexis Polux of the Imperial Fists. A giant in his yellow battleplate, he remained always at the periphery, quietly tending to the esoteric functions of the Pharos and noting each minute change in the polarity readings as his kinsmen spoke.
	Adallus beckoned to the fourth of their number.
	‘Neophyte Tebecai. Step forwards.’
	Far more slender than his superiors, Tebecai wore the light carapace and fatigues of a legionary Scout. He was a youth of no more than fifteen, still acclimatising to his transhuman physiology with the air of someone not entirely comfortable in his own skin. His final surgery scars would still be pink across pale flesh not yet truly tempered in the forges of war, his combat doctrines and weapon drills still requiring conscious thought in training.
	He saluted stiffly, though he said nothing and kept his gaze firmly on the chamber floor.
	Scrolling back to the top of the report, Adallus tapped one knuckle thoughtfully against the edge of the slate as he began to read again. ‘Sergeant Arkus led your training cohort on a mapping rotation, following the original request from Warsmith Dantioch. Is that correct?’
	‘Yes, my lord.’
	‘What do you understand the purpose of this task to have been?’
	Tebecai still did not look up. ‘Security, lord.’
	‘Explain.’
	‘There were… concerns. Concerns about how far the spaces under the mountain went down. Because normal auspex won’t work, no one knew, not really.’ He paused, nervously clenching his jaw several times. ‘No one knows, I mean.’
	Adallus looked to Dantioch. The warsmith sighed, and took a step back to settle onto the plain throne that had become a permanent fixture upon the tuning stage of late. The wooden frame creaked beneath the weight of his armour.
	‘We used servitor drones to begin with,’ he explained. ‘As part of my earliest investigations into the workings of the Pharos, I had the Mechanicum adepts fit them with ranging markers and send them down on pre-figured exploration routes. Primary Location Alpha is connected to a vast network of chambers descending ever deeper into the mountain – far beneath the surface and local sea level, in fact. The immediate tributaries feed into the Pharos system in five places, but below the Epsilon cavern it splits into dozens of separate passageways.’
	Dantioch gestured with his gauntlets, tracing large rounded shapes in the air.
	‘Some of the passages double back on themselves in loops or great, spiralling whorls. We lost almost all of the drones. At first I supposed that their logic protocols were insufficient for the task at hand, but Magos Carantine was unwilling to volunteer any more advanced automata. If I am honest, at this point my enthusiasm was directed rather more towards the potential uses of the device, rather than explaining the exact science behind it.’
	He paused, glancing back through the communications field to where another seated figure listened intently.
	‘But as you know, after we managed to establish the two-way, reciprocal contact with Macragge, it was decided that security measures should be stepped up if the Pharos was to be relied upon so heavily. There was agreement that if the extent of the network was still unknown, then it could not be effectively guarded without closing off everything beyond the range of our previous mapping expeditions. I made my thoughts known – such action would almost certainly reduce the accuracy of the device, or stop it working altogether.’
	Adallus frowned. He had never been particularly skilled at hiding his frustration, even when under the scrutiny of his superiors.
	‘I wouldn’t know anything about the workings of the Pharos, my lord,’ he said, choosing his words carefully as he rechecked the details on the data-slate one last time. ‘But if the warsmith had made it clear that he had simply lost more than… forty servitors under the mountain in a five-month period, then Sergeant Arkus might not have been so quick to offer the use of one of my company’s Scout cohorts instead. And in that case, we would not be here now trying to establish what manner of threat lurks in the darkness beneath our very feet, preying upon any who stray too far into its domain.’
	There was a long silence. Adallus was content to let it remain, but Warsmith Dantioch looked to Tebecai once more. ‘It falls to you then, neophyte. Where your sergeant’s report is lacking, we would hear your account of what happened to young Oberdeii, beneath Mount Pharos.’
	Tebecai let out a slow breath. His voice sounded small beneath the weight of their expectation.
	‘By the primarch’s command, I will tell you all that I remember.’
	They had taken the conveyor, then followed the main arterial gantry to its end and rappelled down to the fallen remains of the first temporary structure on the floor of the old Epsilon cavern.
	It was not far, only four hundred metres or so. They had all made the journey before. The soft, distant throb of the quantum-pulse engines could be felt all around them, in the very rock itself, and their dropped magnesium flares marked out a rough circle amidst the debris.
	Wordlessly, they drew their boltguns and paired off exactly as they had been trained. Sergeant Arkus took the handheld ranging markers from Florian’s open pack and passed them around, keeping one for himself, before gesturing for the neophytes to disperse. It was standard Legion protocol to use only battle-sign when on field reconnaissance duties, though there had been some question whether or not that applied here. Still, Arkus had said, it was good practice; that was why the Scout cohorts were allowed to range so far on the planet’s surface, away from Sothopolis and even the castellum.
	With the rest of the galaxy apparently crushed beneath the renegade Warmaster’s boot, the Ultramarines needed fresh battle-brothers like never before – warriors that knew the XIII Legion’s ways like the backs of their gauntlets.
	A greater war would come, soon enough. A war of vengeance against the traitors who had taken Terra.
	His own thoughts far from such grave matters, Oberdeii grinned at Tebecai as they picked their way around the edge of the cavern. They flipped on their harness lamps only when the last of the flares had burned out and they could no longer hear the careful movements of the other Scout teams heading away from them.
	‘The sergeant’s gone,’ he said in a hushed voice, ‘so give me that ranging marker. I’ve been waiting weeks for my turn, and you lost our bet. Hand it over.’
	Tebecai grunted, thrusting the device into Oberdeii’s waiting hand. ‘Just don’t break it. Ark-o gave it to me, and I’ve taken enough grief for your clumsiness these past weeks.’
	He pulled a tatty sheet of parchment from his belt pack, and shone his lamp onto the hand-drawn map, tracing the path ahead.
	‘Come on, move. We’re supposed to be heading north-west today... Then sort of... north?’
	Oberdeii looked up from the ranging marker’s display. ‘You’re not lost already, are you?’ he snorted.
	‘Shut up. You know how these tunnels are. Calibrate the rangefinder and let’s go.’
	Shaking his head in amusement, Oberdeii shouldered his boltgun and aimed the marker at the nearest wall. A near-invisible thread of pale green light played from the emitter, and the device’s tinny voice spoke. ‘Range to target – one point six-three metres.’
	Tebecai checked the reading with a measuring line. Satisfied, the two of them trudged away and into the unknown depths beyond.
	‘What is that you’re always humming?’ Oberdeii asked, after a goodly hour or so of managing to ignore it. He stopped, leaning against the smooth, black wall of the tunnel and wiping his forehead on the back of his glove.
	Tebecai wrinkled his nose. ‘What, this little ditty?’ He droned out a few bars of the same, repetitive tune, then shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I think I’ve always known it, even before we joined the Legion. It’s hard to recall much before that…’
	He pulled the drinking tube from his collar and drew a mouthful of tepid water.
	‘What do you remember?’
	Oberdeii gazed off into the blackness ahead. ‘Caballus steeds. All I remember is caballus steeds.’
	‘What?’
	‘It’s a biologis designation. Equus... Ferus?... Caballus. That’s it. Horses, in the low tongue. That was my birth-family’s trade. Someone, somewhere in Ultramar, must have decided at some point that Sotha needed horses.’
	‘What for?’
	Oberdeii turned, narrowing his eyes against the glare from Tebecai’s lamp.
	‘How should I know? We had cold-bloods for field work, and more spirited Caprisian breeds for riding.’ He paused, sighing. ‘But I think they must all be gone now, anyway.’
	‘The horses?’
	‘No, my family. They would have been shipped off once Dantioch took over the mountain, I suppose. A shame. Seems to me like Sotha is just about the safest place in the galaxy to be, right now...’
	They stood in silence for a moment, each trying to recall a time that was now lost to them forever. Layers of hypno-conditioning and psycho-indoctrination had scoured their mortal past and left them ready to be reforged in Guilliman’s image. But although the future could hold nothing more for them than a life of unceasing battle and a glorious death at its end, no legionary neophyte ever felt anything as feeble as regret.
	Without realising it, Tebecai began to murmur the half-remembered tune again, his subconscious straining to form words around the melody.
	Oberdeii laughed. ‘I’ve never been one for music or poems. You should teach it to the herdsmen from the settlement. They love a good singsong.’
	‘Ha! I’m not going near them, the filthy scrodders!’ Mischief glinted in Tebecai’s eye. ‘I always thought you had a bit of a whiff about you, too – now I know it’s because you’re a little stable boy!’ He slung his boltgun and cracked his knuckles, making it clear that another of their playful, brotherly scraps was certainly on the cards.
	Before Oberdeii could respond, the mountain began to quake.
	The quantum heartbeat of the Pharos shifted, setting the glassy walls of the tunnel resonating with an almost painful thrum. Such an effect was commonplace whenever Dantioch or Captain Polux tried to push the device too far.
	But this was different. This was more intense.
	Oberdeii dropped the ranging marker, clamping his hands over his ears. The sound still beat in his chest nonetheless, as though he were screaming silently at the top of his lungs. From further away in the unseen reaches of the tunnel, they heard the clatter of falling rock on the smooth curve of the floor, and the almost tectonic rumble of the planet’s crust shifting around them.
	Tebecai fell to his knees, mouthing something that Oberdeii couldn’t make out.
	Gradually, the quake subsided.
	They both remained there, crouched and poised, ready for any aftershocks. None came.
	Reaching for his vox-link, Tebecai cursed. ‘That damned fool warsmith! He knows we’re down here!’ He clicked open a channel. ‘Calling Cohort Arkus, Fifty-Five.’
	Oberdeii scuttled to his side, checking over the ranging marker for any damage.
	‘What are you doing? We’re not supposed to break vox-silence except in an emergency!’
	‘What would you call this?’ Tebecai snapped back at him. ‘We’re more than nine kilometres beneath the surface – we’ll be buried alive if they try that again. Cohort Arkus, Fifty-Five, please acknowledge.’
	The link crackled. The channel was empty.
	‘The Pharos beam could still be on,’ Oberdeii muttered, aiming the marker down the tunnel. ‘If so, then the vox won’t work anyway.’
	‘Range to target – eighty-eight point three-four metres.’
	Tebecai raised a hand. ‘Shh. Turn that thing down.’
	‘What? Why?’
	‘Quiet!’
	They both held their breath. The link still returned nothing but a flat hiss.
	Except...
	His eyes wide, Tebecai looked up. ‘There. You hear that?’
	It was a faint binaric warble, only just audible at the very limits of the frequency.
	Oberdeii frowned. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.
	‘It’s an automated Mechanicum cant,’ Tebecai replied. ‘That’s one of the lost servitor drones.’
	They followed the weak signal for at least another two kilometres down and to the north-west, as far as Oberdeii could make out with the ranging marker set against the almost nonsensical curve of the tunnel. They had strayed well off the edge of their map, and Tebecai had given up trying to record their route. His rough calculations suggested that they’d actually gone in a circle more than three times.
	There was a chill in the depths – a deep cold, the like of which they had never encountered even beyond the great engine halls of Primary Location Ultra. As far as either of them could make out, no living human had ever set foot this deep beneath the mountain.
	Were they even beneath the mountain at all, any longer?
	‘It’s like being inside a huge beast,’ Oberdeii murmured. ‘Some huge, frozen beast of the void...’
	‘Be quiet,’ Tebecai hissed.
	‘I’m just saying, doesn’t it feel like... organic to you? Down here, I mean. More so than above ground level. The tunnels remind me of–’
	‘Be quiet!’
	They both stopped abruptly at the faint sound of struggling servos.
	Their lamps picked out an opening low in the smooth wall of the tunnel, almost capillary-like. Tebecai made a show of not seeing the similarity with what Oberdeii had just been saying, and closed the vox-link.
	‘Well volunteered, brother,’ he said with a grin. ‘Get down that gap and snag the drone. Forget our poor measurements – the data in that servitor could be ten, twenty, a hundred times more useful. We’ll drag it back to the surface and let the warsmith do whatever it is he does with it all. Tebecai and Oberdeii, the heroes of Sotha!’
	Sighing, Oberdeii shook his head. ‘You’re an idiot.’
	Tebecai shrugged. ‘I’m not the one crawling down a tiny hole in the guts of a xenos machine on the edge of known space. Mind how you go.’
	Oberdeii handed his boltgun off and eased himself head first into the opening, Tebecai lowering him as far as he could by the bootstraps. Then, bracing with his elbow pads, he scraped and slid his way down the steep angle of the crawlspace, his lamp all but useless against the glassy, black rock, towards the unmistakeable sound of the stuck servitor.
	‘It’s a good job you kept on chirping, you old clanker,’ he marvelled. ‘Otherwise we would never have found you in the dark.’
	Eventually, the crawlspace opened out. Oberdeii caught a gasp before it could leave his throat.
	The drone was perched on the edge of an abyss, no more than four paces away from him, its tracked feet moving weakly back and forth in the emptiness beyond. How it had not simply fallen, he could not begin to guess.
	Vertigo gripped at Oberdeii’s stomach as he inched forwards. His dual heartbeat began to thump in his chest. Beyond the ledge in front of him, there was simply nothing.
	No distant rocky walls, no suggestion of light.
	No physical object that even his enhanced vision could pick out.
	This space, whatever it was, was so unimaginably vast that he had difficulty reconciling its existence with what he knew about the geographical layout of Mount Pharos. It just seemed too big to fit under the mountain in any literal sense.
	The warsmith would have to revise his calculations. No wonder they had lost so many of the drones down here.
	Tebecai’s voice came faintly down the crawlspace after him. ‘Have you got it?’
	Oberdeii gingerly pulled himself up, and knelt beside the drone. Its power-cells were at less than one per cent, but its mapping memory was reading as almost full.
	‘Yes. Yes, I’ve got it. I’m going to shut it down first, so we don’t risk data-coil corruption.’
	As the servitor’s systems lapsed into hibernation, its feet went still. Only then did Oberdeii realise just how completely silent this immense space was.
	He clapped his gloved hands together, but the sound cast no echo.
	He shook his head and pulled the rappel line from his harness, fastening it to the servitor’s chassis. He wouldn’t risk losing it on the climb back up to Tebecai.
	‘I’m coming now,’ he called, heaving the servitor around as carefully as he could. Tebecai’s reply was too faint for him to hear.
	Oberdeii paused at the crawlspace opening. He cast a glance back over his shoulder.
	His curiosity got the better of him, and he reached for the ranging marker on his hip.
	Aiming blindly, he watched the pale thread of light flick out into the impenetrable darkness.
	‘Range to target – nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, niNe, NiinE, NNIIII–’
	The marker’s voice became distorted, then Oberdeii flinched as the emitter burst out with a firecracker bang and a shower of sparks. He twisted, putting out a hand to catch himself.
	But his fingers closed on nothingness. His balance lurched to one side, and he kicked harder than he meant to, in reflex.
	He sprawled outwards, and he fell.
	Oberdeii’s wordless cry was deadened by the abyss. There was nothing around him in any direction to reach out for. The rappelling line spooled out at an alarming rate, doing nothing to arrest his fall.
	Panicking, he flailed, reaching, grasping for the catch on his harness that would engage the braking gears.
	Before he could find it, the line struck taut.
	The sudden halt was agonising. He felt both of his shoulders wrench from their sockets, the left one popping immediately back in as he sprung two metres back upwards on the end of the rappel. The air was torn from his winded lungs. The broken ranging marker slipped from his grasp and tumbled down into the infinite void beneath him.
	Oberdeii hung there, gasping and whimpering in pain, like a crushed arachnid on the end of its final silken thread. He hung there for a long time.
	He did not like to question how the servitor had remained tethered back up on the ledge, saving him from an endless plunge into who-even-knew-where. Nor did he like to question how long it would be before it toppled over after him, joining him in oblivion.
	His arms were numb and limp. He was all but helpless. His only hope was that Tebecai would have been so startled by his cries that he might dare venture down the crawlspace after him, and haul him back up.
	A slim hope. Tebecai seemed to be as dumb as a bag of rocks, when it truly mattered. Even Krissaeos, whom the rest of the cohort often mocked for his slow wits, would occasionally show him up in training exercises.
	Oberdeii laughed thinly at that thought, tears stinging his eyes. He had the impression that his vision was swimming before him, except that there was nothing but impenetrable blackness above and below. At least when he screwed his eyes shut, he was rewarded with a brief riot of colour behind his eyelids to let him know that he hadn’t gone blind.
	He could feel unconsciousness rising in him. His underdeveloped transhuman body was shutting down in response to the pain. He tried to call out, his tongue feeling thick in his mouth.
	‘Teb... Tebecai...? B-Brother...?’
	In the void beneath him, something stirred.
	A presence. An intelligence, of sorts. It was ancient, and cold, and incomprehensibly alien.
	A wave of disorienting nausea passed over him. Not fear. No, nothing like that.
	They shall know no fear.
	It was something else.
	Oberdeii felt himself being regarded in the way that a Sothan phantine might regard a fire ant, or a man might regard an amoeba. Otherworldly voices whispered to him in languages he did not understand.
	Know no fear. Know no fear. Know no fear.
	Gritting his teeth against the agonising pain in his shoulders, he forced himself around in the harness. He managed to turn his head just enough – just enough – to glimpse that ancient, cold, alien presence. And he screamed.
	He saw the truth at the heart of the Pharos, and he saw what was coming to Sotha.
	And it saw him.
	Tebecai sagged. His eyes moved to each of the three legionary centurions in turn, anxious for their approval, though he did not allow his gaze to remain long on the other figures beyond the communication field.
	‘That’s everything, my lords. That was when we brought him up, and gave him over to Apothecary Taricus. I don’t know what it was that happened to him down there, but he was barely conscious.’ Tebecai wrung his fingers plaintively. ‘He was saying things. Strange things.’
	From the other side of Ultramar, the voice of a primarch reached Mount Pharos. ‘What was it, neophyte? What did young Oberdeii say?’
	Tebecai’s face twisted. He trembled before the quiet, assured power of that voice.
	‘My lord, I cannot tell a lie. He kept crying out, “They see our light,” over and over again. Sergeant Arkus asked him who, but we couldn’t make him tell us.’
	Warsmith Dantioch ambled over to him, his power-armoured joints wheezing, and he placed his gauntleted hands upon the youth’s shoulders. ‘Just as Arkus said in the report. You’ve done well here today, Neophyte Tebecai. You are a credit to your company and your Legion.’
	Captain Adallus managed to catch Dantioch’s eye. The warsmith glared back at him through the sockets of his iron skull mask, but Adallus would not be made to look weak before the primarch.
	‘That is open to some debate, warsmith,’ he said. ‘Tebecai and the rest of the cohort will be–’
	‘There’s something more,’ the neophyte blurted out, interrupting his captain. ‘Something that can’t be in the report.’
	Adallus froze. ‘What?’
	‘Oberdeii whispered something to me, and Sergeant Arkus didn’t know about it. I’ll never forget what he said, though. I’m sure of that. No one could forget it.’
	Even Dantioch was taken aback. ‘Tell us, lad.’
	Tebecai narrowed his eyes. ‘He said... He said that they are out there, now, in the dark between the stars. And again, he said that they see our light.’
	No one spoke. Even the machinery tended by Captain Polux seemed to hush its mechanical chatter.
	From his throne on distant Macragge, it was Lion El’Jonson himself, primarch of the First Legion, that broke the silence. ‘And what do you think that means, Tebecai?’
	The neophyte shuffled awkwardly. ‘Forgive me, lord, but I know you met my brother before, when you were here on Sotha. He talked about it a lot. It was him who saw the coming of Emperor Sanguinius, in his dreams. So maybe this was a new vision. Something bad.’
	Dantioch moved back to his own chair, but did not sit. ‘We have yet to fully explore the various incidental empathic projection phenomena associated with the Pharos, though the locals seem to accept it well enough. They call it “mountain dreaming”.’
	‘Indeed,’ the Lion nodded. ‘I heard Oberdeii’s original prophecy with my own ears.’
	Adallus stood tall. ‘You will send more legionary forces to us as a precaution then, my lord? We can accommodate another company on the orbital platform, and any number of ships at defensible anchorage points within the system. That’s before we even land anything onto the planet itself.’
	The primarch fixed him with an intense gaze.
	‘We will not be landing anything on Sotha, captain,’ he said flatly, ‘because I am not sending any more legionary forces to you.’
	Dantioch twitched. Adallus made to reply, but thought better of it. The Lion went on.
	‘There is a whole company of Ultramarines guarding the system, plus the orbital platform itself and a constant rotation of ships from at least three Legions. We have been over this before, thanks to Captain Polux, and my previous decision still stands. I will not draw attention to Sotha by blockading it with my fleet.’ He nodded to Dantioch again. ‘Never mind the Aegida Company – the greatest shield you have there, warsmith, is the appearance of being completely and utterly insignificant. As unsettling as Oberdeii’s feverish words might have been for his neophyte brethren, I hear nothing like the certainty in them that I did the first time. This was not a prophecy. It was just a bad dream.’
	Dantioch bowed, the movement causing him some noticeable discomfort. ‘Of course, I shall defer to your tactical wisdom, Lord Jonson. If you are satisfied that Sotha and the Pharos remain safe, then that is–’
	‘Indeed, that is all,’ said the Lion, leaning back into his seat. ‘Captain Adallus, you are to inform Sergeant Arkus and his Scout cohort – including Tebecai, and Oberdeii, when he can be roused from the apothecarion – that I would commune with them again directly. In the meantime, all of these matters here discussed are to be considered of the utmost secrecy. Let none speak of them, or face my wrath.’
	‘My lord,’ said Adallus, relieved in no small measure that the audience was finally coming to a close. ‘It shall be done.’
	With a gloaming sigh the communication field faded, leaving the Convincus Cubicularum in a cold, pensive silence. The Lion remained seated, gazing into the now empty air, one finger tapping absently upon the arm of the throne.
	Holguin, voted-lieutenant of the Deathwing, waited as long as was seemly before stepping forwards to relight the chamber’s lamps.
	‘Leave them,’ the primarch murmured.
	‘My lord?’
	‘We shall not remain here. The hour is late, and I suspect we have already drawn the attention of my brothers’ guardians in this unscheduled contact with Sotha.’
	‘As you wish. What will you tell Lord Guilliman of these events? Or the Emperor Sanguinius?’
	‘I have no intention of telling either of them anything.’
	Holguin shifted uneasily. ‘But… the neophytes…’
	The primarch shrugged, dismissing the lieutenant’s concern with a flick of his hand.
	‘There is nothing to tell. I did not hear evidence of any credible threat to the Thirteenth Legion operation on Sotha, far less the security of the palace here. Like as not, the whole story is just fanciful suggestion, amplified in the minds of those boys by that damned mountain. I cannot explain any of what they claim to have witnessed, but equally I cannot see that it gives me any cause to investigate further.’
	He rose, holding out his bare hands to the Deathwing warriors standing nearby. They brought him his gauntlets, his weapon belts and war helm. As he fastened the clasps at his wrists, Holguin also stepped forwards bearing the mighty Lion Sword, and the primarch gave him a knowing look.
	‘Besides – when have you ever known me to offer anyone the whole truth, unasked for? I will not lie, but I will not play Roboute’s game of Imperium Secundus with an open hand.’
	Holguin handed him the blade. ‘I see the wisdom in it. “A truth unspoken is the coin of tomorrow,” is it not?’
	‘Just so,’ the primarch said. ‘Regardless, we have far more pressing matters to attend to.’
	‘The hunt continues as planned, then? You intend to keep searching for the Night Haunter in secret?’
	A tremor flickered beneath the Lion’s right eye at the mention of the name, and he gripped the hilt of the sheathed sword tightly. ‘The hunt will never end,’ he growled. ‘Not until I have him, Holguin – broken or in chains, begging for his miserable, worthless life…’
	He tilted his head, cricking the tension from his neck.
	‘And then I’ll gut him.’
	‘While that would be a righteous and justified act, I feel honour-bound to remind you that Guilliman appointed you Lord Protector, not chief executioner.’
	The Lion’s glare turned icy. ‘Have a care, little brother – those who question my judgement soon wish they hadn’t. Konrad Curze is an evil from which the entire galaxy needs protecting. He has no place in a sane, ordered universe. Would you not agree with that at least, my voted-lieutenant?’
	Holguin bowed his head. ‘Of course, my liege. The other Legions are more than a match for the traitor warbands still scattered throughout Ultramar. The Deathwing stands ready to serve you, and you alone.’
	‘Then send word to the fleet, triple-encryption – we leave before dawn. The flagship and her attendant flotillas will remain on station over Macragge as a show of force. All other shipmasters and legionary captains are to expect new orders within the hour.’
	The primarch took up his helm in the crook of his arm, and they strode side by side towards the grand doors of the chamber, the Lion letting his cloak sweep behind him as he went. Holguin held out a finely wrought bolt pistol, pressing the grip into the primarch’s waiting hand.
	‘And our destination, lord?’ he asked. ‘Where are we to resume the hunt for Curze?’
	The Lion smiled grimly to himself as the doors were thrown wide.
	‘Wherever he is, he’s not on Sotha. Of that much, at least, we can be certain.’