The Chamber at the end of memory 
James Swallow

Night no longer existed above the domains of the Imperial Palace.
 	When Terra's sun set beyond the ragged mountain peaks of the ancient Himilazian Range, a thousand smaller stars were lit to bathe the great precincts in a hard, white light, so that the armies of drone-helots, smiths and stonebreakers could toil on in their labours. Floating high over the Hall of Victories and down towards the Sprawl Magnifican, a fleet of autonomous aeronefs bearing huge lume arrays ensured that day never ended, the glow spilling all the way to the Katabatic Slopes and the outer fringes of the Petitioner's City.
 	His golden wargear glistening in the endless light, the primarch Rogal Dorn observed the progress of the great siege work of his design. His hard-edged aspect sombre and vigilant, he stood aboard a disc-like contra-gravity platform.
 	Dorn's only company was a mech-servile. The device resembled an avian, a hawk of some kind, and it carried upon its back an upright oval frame like the mount of a mirror. There was no glass in the surround; instead it pulsed with lambent blue light, throwing hololithic panes out in front of Dorn as he moved around the platform's edge. Now and then, the Imperial Fist would reach into the holocasts and make an adjustment or shift a data-point. Even at this late stage, there were always details that required his individual attention.
 	The smallest error in the gap between two flagstones could open a crack that would fell a shield wall. A single overlooked decimal in the wrong place could see a macrocannon magazine run empty in the thick of an assault.
 	Nothing must be left to chance. For Dorn, these words had become his mantra. All points will be defended. All doors barred. There would be no failure on his watch. This he swore, this oath he reaffirmed with each lost dusk that passed, as his errant brother's invasion drew inexorably closer.
 	Horus Lupercal, may he be forever hated, would soon come to the Imperial Palace, to directly challenge their father the Emperor. Dorn knew that hour was almost at hand; he felt it in his genhanced blood and bones. When Horus' blighted ships darkened Terra's skies, and unleashed their traitors and the creatures that were their allies, these walls beneath Dorn's armoured boots would repel them. No stronghold in the entire Imperium, not even the Fists' mighty star-home Phalanx, was as fortified as the bastion of the Emperor's Palace.
 	At least it will be, if my works are finished in time. I can only hope it will be enough. Dorn grimly nursed the thought as he directed the platform to take him north, in the direction of the Tower Aquilane. The mech-servile came with the primarch, moving to perch on the disc's safety rail. He made more notations, redirecting a legion of masons and steelmakers from their duties at the Inner Gardens towards efforts on a series of anti-Titan revetments in the Western Quad.
 	Too many operations were running behind schedule. Too many things were going awry. Some incidents were to be expected, of course, but Dorn knew the difference between accident, error and sabotage.
 	There had been open attempts to disrupt the construction in the early months, attacks against machinery and men by deluded devotees of Dorn's errant brother. The Imperial Fists and the Custodian Guard had largely brought such brazen acts to heel since then, but one did not need to drive a loaded promethium tanker into a building site to ruin a work. Subtle interferences, small deeds in the right places, could have massive consequences. A misplaced shipment of metals. A helot legion going underfed. A measurement on a blueprint made a few degrees off true. In a building project of such epic scope as the fortification of Terra's capital, these things could prove fatal.
 	Dorn released a slow, dissatisfied breath as he found a datum lying out of synch, and pulled it back into place. A gale of white vapour from his exhale briefly wreathed him and dissipated.
 	He could have undertaken this duty in a photic projection chamber on one of the Bhab Bastion's command tiers, but it was more immediate to be up here above the cityscape, up in the polar cold and thin air that would have frostbitten a mortal. Dorn needed to look with his own eyes, not second-hand via hololiths.
 	It was real this way. Up here, the Imperial Fist could hear the ceaseless clatter of pneu-hammers and the chipping of stone. He could taste traces of dust and the exhaust of machines as they laboured under the perpetual daylight he had put in place.
 	Darkness would fall soon enough when Horus arrived, and all those common souls who dwelled within the walls of the Imperial Palace would beg for the light.
 	Dorn looked down as the platform drifted to a halt. He was above the Investiary, and he looked upon the great building and frowned. It was the perfect exemplar of the crimes he had committed against this magnificent labour of men, this palace of ultimates.
 	Once, the Investiary had been a great amphitheatre two full kilometres wide, a beautiful arena to cradle wonders brought back from across the galaxy. Dorn had shed a few drops of sweat down there, fighting in sporting duels with his kindred, beneath the gaze of the towering statues that bore the likenesses of his brothers.
 	But now it was a massive munitions store, repurposed into a colossal powder-house accommodating megatonnes of conventional shells, para-batteries and promethium casks. Dorn had made it so because the arena's central location put it in good range of all this quadrant's gun emplacements, and the sunken design was tough and durable. It had been a delight to behold, once. The Imperial Fist had transformed it into something blunt and unlovely.
 	'When did I lose sight of that?' His words crackled in the cold. At some point, Dorn had forgotten the beauty, forgotten that he was sullying what made this place so incredible. It had been lost in the myriad needs of the war, fading beneath the weight of the duty; the weight of new stone, like the brutalist bulwarks that now masked the once-glittering spectacle of the Investiary's ornate walls.
 	Would you tear them all down?
 	His question rose in his memory. Malcador, saying the words to him, down there on the floor of the amphitheatre. The Sigillite and he, in better days, when the suspicions between them had not been so open, so bitter.
 	Another casualty of the conflict, he thought. Something else lost - or discovered - in the chaos of this siege-to-come.
 	His reverie was drawn from him as the cyber-hawk emitted a warning cry, a split-second before a peal of thunder reached Dorn's ears.
 	As he pivoted in the direction of the sound, he picked out a curl of black cloud rising up from a minor donjon towards the centre of the Indomitor Bastion. There was a survey crew in that zone, checking redundant buildings for suitability to be cut down, their granite foundations to be used as buttresses elsewhere.
 	But that area contained nothing of import, so he recalled, nothing that could explode with such force, only art galleries and the like. Malcador had told him to leave that quadrant alone, Dorn recalled, citing the inestimable value of keeping safe its fragile esoterica. But such things would mean nothing if the walls protecting the Palace were weak, he had countered.
 	'The needs of the war,' he muttered, taking the platform's controls in his giant's hands. Rescue flyers, alerted by the same alarm that had stirred the hawk, would already be launching to investigate the explosion, but Dorn was close and could get there first. He put the disc into a steep dive and sent it towards the source of the smoke.
 	It was a depository minaret, one of thousands of similar buildings that existed all across the precincts of the Imperial Palace. An ugly burn scar defaced one side of it, and through the rent in the construct, the black smoke was already thinning, fading.
 	Dorn stepped off the grav-platform and saw where the survey crew had left their ground transport waiting in the courtyard. The big, six-wheeled machine lay silent, and the primarch's nostrils twitched as he approached it.
 	Blood, within. He smelled human death, the particular tang of it well known to him, without the heavy compound odour of legionary vitae or the acridity of something xenos-born. He came upon a dead man lying half-out of the driver's seat. The body of the work-ganger was slack and still warm. His eyes were crimson pearls, and dark fluid oozed from his ears and his mouth.
 	Shock death. Dorn categorised the method of the man's ending with a warrior's dispassion. Catastrophic overpressure or a pulse-wave weapon could have killed him in such a manner, but secondary damage did not support that conclusion.
 	The primarch drew a weapon of his own; the formidable master-crafted bolter dubbed the Voice of Terra had been presented to him by the Adeptus Custodes, on the day he had been anointed as Terra's Praetorian. Glistening gold like his power armour, the gun shimmered in the false daylight as it led Dorn into the shattered minaret. He moved with caution; if Horus' insurgents had grown bold again - if this was their doing - the threat could be grave.
 	Within the tower he found a curious architectural anomaly. The building concealed a long corridor, a false arcade dotted with clever archways designed to trick the eye of the unobservant. More dead men littered the floor here, all of them killed in the act of fleeing. Dorn paused to examine the nearest and found the same fashion of death as he had upon the work-ganger in the transport. Blood-red eyes staring sightlessly up at hint a face twisted in agony.
 	Something subtle and distant in his thoughts pushed at Dorn to go no further. And by rights he should have done exactly that, waiting for the Arbites to arrive, waiting for the medicae and their servitors. This site was still a danger zone until someone could fathom what had happened here, and many would have said that Rogal Dorn was too important to concern with something so minor.
 	But Rogal Dorn was never one to accept the idea of a thing he could not do. He strode forwards. advancing down the arcade at a march, scanning every shadowed corner and dark alcove for anything that resembled a threat.
 	The further he walked, the worse the manners of the deaths became. The primarch found workers whose limbs appeared to have exploded from within, killed instantly by interne hydrostatic impulse. Other bodies ended at the neck, the stumps haloed by a mess of shredded brain matter and bone. And further still, there were the dead who could no longer be recognised as human, their corpses turned into a crimson-black slurry painted up over the ornate marble pillars and pale ouslite ceiling.
 	With each step he took, the forbidding pressure inside Dorn's thoughts took form and gained potency. It was as if corridor itself did not wish him to walk within it, as if the very walls were trying to repel him. Unbidden, his pace slowed to a halt and Dorn's armoured gauntlet tightened around Voice's grip.
 	The end of the corridor was within sight, and he could see it concluded in an anteroom dominated by two great doors that were scaled for transhumans. Even from this distance, Dorn could surmise what had happened.
 	He saw the dying plasmatic flame of a cutting tool where it lay on the tiled floor. The worker who had wielded it was a red mess now, perhaps the same unfortunate fool who had cut into the shattered seal that previously had walled off the anteroom from the rest of the world.
 	What did they trigger in here? What line did they unwittingly transgress?
 	There were symbols on the doors. Dorn took another wary step, narrowing his eyes to see them clearly.
 	And so he did, but before the fullness of his discovery could be processed, a pungent acid reek seeped into the air. Dorn recognised the spoor of witchery. He had walked into a trap.
 	Eldritch fire burst from points on the pillars, the walls and the floor. Arcane symbols lit up, revealing themselves where wards had been carefully concealed in the ordinary designs of tile and stonework. Psionic kill-forms, shrieking masses of inchoate ectoplasm formed from warp-matter, attacked the primarch from all sides.
 	He battered them away, his bolter rising to blast the ones that were beyond his reach. Each dissipated with a concussive howl of power, hitting him with shockwaves forceful enough to make even the Stone Man recoil.
 	Dorn retreated a few steps, gathering himself, and the ephemeral attackers drew back towards the psychic cantrips that had spawned them. His jaw set, the primarch picked out and put huge mass-reactive rounds into each origin point. As the shots blasted open the stone, thin spurts of organic fluid leaked out and he saw what might have been blobs of cultured cerebral matter buried in the walls.
 	Psionic trip-mines, he reasoned. Warp-weapons that had lain dormant here until the work gang had unwittingly triggered them. These things were defensive artifices, to protect what lay beyond the chamber at the end of the corridor. But such devices had no business being here. Dorn glared at the distant doors once more, then stalked away, back towards the courtyard.
 	When he stepped out into the false day once more, the cluster of Arbites and rescue specialists who had arrived in the flyers fell into line and made the salute of the aquila. Dorn did not return it, pausing only to order the senior incident officer not to enter the corridor.
 	He cast a glance up into the night sky, beyond the burning lights aboard the aeronefs. Dorn tapped the vox bead in the gorget of his armour, opening a priority channel to the Phalanx out in orbit.
 	'Heed me,' he told his warriors. 'You will go to the Seclusium in the bowels of our fortress. On my authority, open the gate there and recover one of the brothers you find within.' Dorn shot a look back at the rip in the minaret's wall, as the full weight of the decision he was about to make fell upon him. 'I require a librarian.'
 	'Your will, my lord,' came the reply.
 	The primarch did not acknowledge the reply his thoughts dwelling on what he had seen in the anteroom at the end of the corridor. A pair of giant's doors, built not for men, not even for a legionary, but for one of greater stature.
 	Upon those entrances, laser-etched into the metal, the symbols for the numbers two and eleven.
 	Yored Massak emerged from the troop bay of the Stormbird and scowled at the hard, directionless glare from above. Like any Inwit-born son of his Legion, he had not paused to question why he was suddenly summoned from his meditation in the deep spaces of the Phalanx, accepting that this was by the order of his gene-sire, and thus as immutable as if the command was carved into granite.
 	But now, as the Imperial Fist set foot on Terra - and within the bounds of the Emperor's Palace no less - it was difficult for him to silence the torrent of questions that flooded his thoughts.
 	Ever since the Decree of Nikaea had forbidden the use of psykers such as himself from line duty among the Legiones Astartes, Brother Massak had willingly surrendered his status within the warriors of the Librarius and followed Lord Dorn's edict to accept isolation in the great psi-negating Seclusium chamber along with his fellow practitioners, and wait.
 	The Decree cast them as liabilities to their Legions, as potential vectors through which the dangers of the infernal warp might enter the material realm. There was truth to that threat, Massak could not deny but he had always believed that the sons of the VII Legion were beyond such things. They were the Imperial Fists, the mailed gauntlet of the Emperor. They did not break, whatever the trial.
 	Some - those of weaker character, those caught in moments of despair - had dared to think that Lord Dorn had abandoned his Librarians as the Warmaster's rebellion grew to overwhelm everything, but Massak eschewed such sentiments. Their primarch obeyed his father's word, as the Fists obeyed the word of theirs. When the moment was right, Dorn would call them back to the line. They would be ready when he needed them.
 	Was that moment nigh, Massak wondered? Before him, his liege lord stood as a towering, gilded sentinel, one hand resting on the hilt of his baroque chainsword, the other at his chin as he mused. The Librarian bowed and slammed his fist across his breastplate in salute.
 	'I answer your summons, my lord.'
 	'Brother Massak,' Dorn intoned, giving him a measuring look. 'I have need of your unique skills.'
 	'I stand ready.'
 	His gene-father was silent for a long moment. He seemed troubled.
 	'In any other circumstance, you would not be here. But there is danger here… Its origin is unclear to me, but your insight will not be so clouded.' The primarch told him of the explosion, the dead survey crew, and weapons hidden in the walls of the corridor.
 	Massak's head bobbed in a shallow nod as he took this in, and the Librarian couldn't stop himself from reaching up to gesture at the inactive psychic hood affixed to his power armour, and the force sword sheathed at his hip.
 	'I will confess, sire, that I did not expect this, nor to be given my weapons and wargear.'
 	Dorn held up a hand. 'This is not the day,' said the primarch, anticipating Massak's question before he uttered it. The legionary's heart sank as his master went on. 'The moment you hope for is not yet at hand, my son. But there is danger here, in this place. Of the kind you and your kindred are best suited to understand.' Dorn pointed at the minaret. 'You will walk with me. You will tell me all that your preternatural senses reveal to you. Know that this is not a decision I have taken lightly, or in haste. This defiance of my father's commands has been forced upon me.' Then his primarch said the words that left Massak both elated and filled with dread. 'For this day, I grant you respite from the Decree of Nikaea. Put your talents at my command once more.'
 	'Your will,' whispered Massak, and a flood of ghostly potency shot through him. The crystalline matrices of his psychic hood hummed, and the warrior felt renewed, alive, empowered. He was a blinded man suddenly given sight once more, his ephemeral talents surging back from the dormant state they had languished in for so long. Massak took in a breath, centring himself.
 	Immediately, a flood of psychic after-images buffeted the Librarian's sensorium. He felt the current of fear and awe in the humans standing in the courtyard, as the motes of their commonplace life-forces orbited around Dorn's fiery, potent self. Massak moved past these surface perturbations to the resonant echo of the death-howls that still hummed in the places where the survey crew had perished.
 	Dorn entered the corridor and Massak fell in step at his side. At any other time, the warrior would have been proud to be in such circumstances, but not now, not here. The air was filled with foreboding as much as the reek of murder.
 	He cast his gaze over the bodies and the blood, seeing the shape of them through the veil of the real and into the shadow realm of the immaterium, which seethed like an invisible ocean beneath the physical world.
 	The men and women of the work gang had died fast - or rather, their corporeal forms had. Their psionic essences, what idolatrists might have called their souls, were still in the process of slowly being torn apart. The psi-weapons that had stripped their energy from their crude matter were cruel and potent things. It struck Massak that the devices were overpowered for such simple targets as ordinary humans, and gravely he relayed this to his gene-father.
 	Dorn gave a grunt of assent. 'Are there more?'
 	Massak could sense them as they progressed along the corridor. 'Aye, lord. I fear, if anything, more potent than those already deployed. Waiting for a trigger.' And there was something else, a peculiar telepathic mark in the making of these things that Massak knew but could not place.
 	A signature, he decided. The psychic fingerprint of the one who seeded the weapons in this place.
 	'Awaken them,' ordered Dorn, bringing his bolter and his chainblade to the ready.
 	Massak drew his own sword and reached inside himself for the sleeping lightning he knew lurked in his bones. The crystals in his psychic hood flashed white and the Librarian cast out his hand, releasing a bolt of energy along the corridor's length.
 	The lightning flickered and bounced from wall to floor to ceiling, and in each place it touched, stone burned away to reveal more hidden wards that seethed with arcane power. Shrieking, protean globes of pure madness erupted from their hiding places and swarmed them.
 	'Advance!' snarled Dorn, and he sprinted into the mass, meeting the attack with an incredible, focused ferocity.
 	Massak put aside his desire to merely stand by and watch the primarch at his art, and fought his quarter of the brief engagement. Swords screamed, bolts thundered, and the warriors beat down the mindless kill-forms, obliterating every one of them.
 	When it was done, Dorn marched on, and Massak tarried behind him. The Librarian went to each origin point for the psi-forms and ran his force sword through the glyphs carved there, rendering them unable to regenerate. As he caught up to his master, Massak heard the rumble of his words cutting through the air.
 	'I know these rooms,' mused the primarch, as they reached the chamber before two great doors. 'I remember them… They were on the other side of the Palace.'
 	'Is that possible?' said Massak. 'How could—?'
 	His words became ashes in his mouth as a terrible silence gripped him.
 	The Librarian was bombarded by psionic sensations. Not just the agony of the newly dead and the torture their spirits were enduring, not just the hateful echoes of the psi-forms, but the shadow of a gargantuan psychic presence. A mind of intricate, lethal magnificence, its passage invisibly marbling the walls where only one such as Massak would be able to perceive them.
 	The full power of it was concentrated in the doors. To the right, a brass portico bore the numeral II,  in the old way of scribing. To the left, an identical entrance rendered in steel was etched with the numeral XI. Massak beheld those ill-fated symbols and the genhanced blood in his veins ran cold.
 	'The Second and the Eleventh.' He could barely say the words. It was forbidden to speak of them, by the censure of the Master of Mankind Himself. Every son of every Legion, be they loyalist or traitor, knew the rumours of the twin tragedies of these lost titans, the truth of their losses forever shrouded and unknowable.
 	Once, the Emperor had forged twenty sons from aspects of his own being, Rogal Dorn one of the mightiest among them. But two primarchs had been struck from the rolls of honour long before the Warmaster's rebellion, each consumed by a catastrophe of such fell scope that few knew the full dimensions of it. Massak could only call upon rumour and half-truth for his knowledge, but as he looked up at his gene-father's face, he knew that Dorn held the bleak memory of that disaster deep in his hearts.
 	'My brothers…' Massak's primarch put away his weapons and walked to the doors. Dorn reached out both hands, and placed the palms of his gauntlets on the metal. The psyker had rarely seen such reverence, such reluctance in the Fist's actions. 'If you were here now, what would be different?' Dorn asked the question to the cold, acidic air, as if he had forgotten that Massak was still with him. 'How would the course of this war be altered, if you stood with us? Or with them?' He shook his head. 'I wish I could know.' At length, Dorn withdrew his hands and glanced back at his warrior son. 'What will be said of them in the deep future, I wonder? Will they be remembered, Massak? Will we?'
 	The question seemed to bring Dorn physical discomfort, and Massak watched the muscles harden in his lord's lantern jaw.
 	'What is this place?' The Librarian forced out the utterance. 'The very air itself is heavy with psionic potency.'
 	'These are the chambers of my lost kindred,' said Dorn. 'I have my own quarters within the Palace's domains, as do all my father's sons. They are rarely used, but maintained in case of need. Those of the traitors were sealed at the beginning of their treachery…' He paused, frowning as he looked back at the doors. 'But these… they should be elsewhere.'
 	The creeping, inexorable growth of inevitability rose in Massak's mind, as his recollection connected the psionic spoor around them with a point of origin. He remembered. He knew the telepathic signature. He knew who it belonged to.
 	Massak had stood in the presence of the author of this artifice, many years ago, during the Triumph at Ullanor. The psychic aura was as potent and distinct now as it had been then, lingering in the ether as whispers of unearthly might.
 	'The Sigillite,' whispered Massak. 'This is his work. The traps, the door; the seals. My lord, it is as clear to me as if he had cut his name into the walls!'
 	'You are correct,' said Malcador, his robes rustling as he entered the anteroom from the corridor behind them. His black iron staff clanked against the bloodstained tiles of the floor. An icy, searing fury glittered in the old man's eyes, and Massak felt the colossal pressure of the Sigillite's mind crushing his in its grip. 'You should not be here, Rogal.'
 	'I know this place,' Dorn countered. 'Or do I? The memory is hazy. It is indistinct. How is that possible!' The primarch shouted the last, his voice booming. 'My father made us with perfect recall! We forget nothing! And yet…' He gestured at the air.
 	Malcador turned his gaze on Massak and nodded towards the corridor. 'Leave us. What will be spoken of you shall not hear.'
 	The Librarian tried to open his mouth to protest, but he could not. Moving without his conscious control - struggling, failing to command his own flesh - Massak turned on his heel and marched away, down the corridor, towards the distant light.
 	'How dare you, Sigillite.' In other times, Dorn would have shown decorum, he would have refused to allow himself to exhibit the ire that ran through him now like molten steel. But alone with the old man, there was no need for such an act of politesse. 'My sons are not playthings for you to toy with at a whim!'
 	'He cannot be allowed to recollect what he has seen here. For the good of all, he'll need to forget.'
 	Dorn's ire flared. 'You disrespect my Legion. You disrespect me!'
 	'And the Imperial Fists have never disrespected the Regent of Terra.' Malcador's retort was sardonic.
 	'I hold the office in high esteem,' Dorn countered.
 	'But not the man?' Malcador gave a bitter chuckle, but in the next breath it was gone. 'You should not have entered the corridor, Rogal. I told you to stay away from these buildings!' He peered grimly at the blood on the walls. 'Now you know why. This intrusion must be undone. It will be edited from history as if it never occurred… I will attend to it.'
 	'You lied to me about this place,' Dorn replied, frustration written across his aspect. 'Can you do nothing else, Malcador? Even in the simplest of your utterances, must there always be falsehood?' He jutted his chin at the seared remains. 'The deaths of these loyal Imperial subjects are added to your tally, not mine. But I doubt you would even notice them.'
 	If there was regret in the old man, Dorn did not see it. The Sigillite did not answer his statement, and instead made one of his own.
 	'I can imagine what is going through your mind at this moment. I have no need to read your thoughts. You wonder if I am a traitor… Not one like your brother Horus, grasping at naked power and fuelled by enmity, but a man out for himself. A schemer and player of games.'
 	'In your mind, you are loyal,' Dorn growled. 'I do not doubt you can justify every bloody action you have ever taken. But you are some of those things.' He looked away. 'The Sigillite plays the galaxy as if it were his own private regicide board. This place? This is another shrouded gambit of yours, another buried secret. I know it.'
 	'I am doing what you decided on!' Malcador's temper flared, and with it the plasmatic flames within the iron basket atop his staff crackled fiercely. 'I have only ever done what I was tasked to do!'
 	'Another lie?' Dorn stared at the twinned doors as if he could see past them by sheer force of will. 'A half-truth, at best?'
 	What would he find within those chambers if he entered? What answers would be gleaned, what guidance might be hidden inside? Some said that the tragedies of the lost primarchs were precursors to the schism the Imperium now faced. Could it be so?
 	'I have never lied to you,' Malcador insisted. 'Kept things from you, yes. Directed your attention elsewhere, indeed. But there has always been truth in our dealings. Disbelieve me if you wish, but know this. Of all your kindred, Rogal, you are the one I admire the most.'
 	'Don't flatter me,' he shot back. 'I care not for it. I want answers, old man! You sent Massak away, you have your privacy. Speak!'
 	'This place is hidden for good reason. The legacy of the lost holds within it too many doubts, too many harsh truths that would do nothing but damage the balance of our precious Imperium. Now is not the time to pull upon those threads. Son of Inwit!'
 	'If not now, when?' Dorn demanded. 'What if there is an answer in there, a way—'
 	'A way to end the war?' Malcador shook his head. 'Those are the words of someone cursed with hope! I tell you now, there is nothing but grief behind those barriers.' He sighed. 'Perhaps, when the scales are balanced once more and Horus has been brought to heel, these questions can be asked. But only then!'
 	'I knew them.' Dorn took another step towards the doors, silently reaching for deep memories of the two brothers. Not all the primarchs could say they had breathed the same air as the lost sons, but Dorn was one of the few. He had been with them, if only for a while.
 	'Have you ever wondered why none speak of them?' the Sigillite replied. 'Of course, there is the censure over all who know of the lost never to talk openly of their existence. Still, in the absence of fact all men will speculate. But you do not. The primarchs never speak of their lost kinsmen in anything but the vaguest of terms. Have you ever wondered why that is?'
 	'As you said, we are forbidden to do so.'
 	'Even when you are beyond your father's sight? Even when no one would be aware of such a discussion? Ask yourself why your thoughts always slip over recall of the lost and pass by.' Malcador bowed his head. 'What were they called, Rogal?' The Sigillite seemed almost sorrowful as he asked him. 'Your vanished brethren. Tell me their names and their titles.'
 	Dorn tried to grasp that vague recollection, tried to frame the questions that gnawed at him, but once more his perfect eidetic recall failed him. He could only see the phantoms of those moments. Holding on to them was like trying to capture smoke between his fingers.
 	'Their names were…' his mighty voice faltered. His brow creased in frustration. 'They were…'
 	To his horror, Dorn realised that he did not know. The awareness was there; he could almost see the shape of the knowledge out on the far horizon of his thoughts. But it retreated from his every effort to see it clearly. Each time he attempted to frame a memory of the lost, it was like fighting a tidal wave. Everything else is clear, but they are ghosts in my mind.
 	The Imperial Fist was experiencing an impossibility. Every known instant of his life was open to him, as if they were pages of a great book.
 	But not those moments.
 	'Something has been done to me.' The beginnings of a new fury built in his chest, boiling at the realisation of such an affront. 'You are behind this!' Dorn whirled, drawing his chainblade in a glittering arc of lethal metal, bringing it to aim at Malcador's wizened, cloak-wreathed form. 'You shrouded my memories! You invaded my mind… For that I should cut you down!'
 	The Sigillite showed no reaction to the threat. 'Not just yours. Guilliman's, and the others who met them.' He let his words bed in. 'It is extremely difficult to extract a reminiscence,' Malcador went on. 'Even in an ordinary human. In a brain as complex and perfectly engineered as that of a primarch, the task becomes herculean. Imagine a tree in the earth, rising from a web of roots. How would one remove that without disturbing a single atom of the soil? Memory cannot be cut and patched like a mnemonic spool. It exists as a holographic thing, in multiple dimensions. But it can be adjusted.'
 	'My father allowed that?' Dorn's sword did not waver.
 	'He did not stop you.'
 	'Stop me?' The primarch's eyes narrowed.
 	Malcador slowly moved back, out of the ornate sword's killing arc. 'The… loss of the Second and the Eleventh was such a wound upon us, and it threatened the ideals at the heart of the Great Crusade. It would have ruined all that we had built in the drive to reunite humanity, and drive off our enemies. Steps had to be taken.' He met Dorn's hard gaze. 'The legionaries they left behind, leaderless and forsaken, were too great a resource to be discarded out of hand. They did not share the fate of their fathers. You and Roboute argued in their favour, but you do not recall it.' Malcador nodded to himself. 'It fell to me to see that they were attuned to new circumstances.'
 	'You robbed them of their memories.'
 	'I granted them a mercy!' Malcador replied, his tone wounded. 'A second chance!'
 	'What mercy is there in a lie?' Dorn thundered.
 	'Ask yourself!' The Sigillite aimed the burning head of his staff in the primarch's direction. 'You wish to know the truth, Rogal? It is this - what I shrouded in you was done by your command! You told me to do it. You and Roboute conceived of the scheme and granted me permission!'
 	Dorn's scowl deepened. 'I would never countenance such a thing.'
 	'Untrue!' Malcador slammed the base of his staff into the floor, the crash of the metal punctuating the word. 'Such was the fate of the lost, that you willingly allowed it. To make safe that knowledge.'
 	Another denial formed in Dorn's throat, but he held it there. He put aside his anger and looked upon the possibility with detachment, with the cold eye of the Praetorian.
 	Would I have done such a thing? If the matter were grave enough, would I have been so pragmatic, so bloodless in my command?
 	Dorn instinctively knew the answer. There was no doubt that he would.
 	If the Imperium was put at risk, he would give his life for it. The cost of some memories, of a fraction of his honour, was indeed a price he would pay.
 	Malcador approached him, leaving his staff where it stood. One bony, long-fingered hand emerged from the voluminous sleeve of his monastic robes, and the Sigillite reached up to hold it before Dorn's face. Faint sparks of eldritch light glistened there.
 	'I will show you,' said the psyker. 'For this instant, I will let you remember. You will know why the lost must remain a mystery.'
 	Dorn closed his eyes and a glacial fire erupted behind them. Deep within him, a shadow briefly dissipated, stealing the breath from his throat.
 	He marched along the length of the blood-stained corridor, and with each footfall the reawakened memory retreated deeper into the darkness.
 	Dorn could feel it fading. He knew that by the time he reached the end of the passageway, the totality of it would be gone. The truth he had glimpsed, hidden, revealed and now to be hidden once more, became transitory and ephemeral.
 	He did not question what Malcador had shown him. Dorn knew his own mind, enough to be certain that the Sigillite had not projected some conjured illusion into his thoughts. Awakening from the induced reverie, barely seconds had passed, but for the primarch he felt the weight of days upon him. The Sigillite, for all his allusions, was nowhere to be seen when Dorn opened his eyes.
 	There was still much that the psyker had said and done which the Imperial Fist did not accept, and although Malcador had professed to have been truthful with him, Dorn had doubts that would never ebb.
 	But not in this matter. In this, he was certain.
 	The lost were gone, and it was well that they were. The grand misfortunes that befell them crumbled in Dorn's mind, but they left behind certainty.
 	What came to pass could overshadow everything. Dorn knew that now. The raw, hateful truth is clear to me. If they were here with us now… This war would already have been lost.
 	He emerged into the false daylight and found Massak awaiting him. Behind the legionary, the rescue crews and the Arbites kept their distance, knowing that what had happened inside the tower was not for them to question. By tomorrow, none of them would remember what they had seen.
 	'My lord,' began Massak. 'Forgive me, I was compelled—'
 	Dorn waved away the apology. 'You did your duty, Yored.'
 	Massak accepted that with a nod, then glanced back at the gaping crack in the minaret's flank. 'And with regards to the chamber? What are your orders?'
 	The primarch paused for a moment, searching his thoughts for unanswered questions. The memory of what had been spoken of inside the minaret was already gone, faded to nothing. He found only a granite-hard determination of what needed to be done.
 	'Bury this place,' he told Massak. 'It is only a tomb now. It will be forgotten.'