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Magisterium – Chris Wraight

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Magisterium

Chris Wraight

Samonas had survived.

The bald fact meant almost nothing to him. Preservation of his own life, for its own sake, had never been something he had cared about. The very idea was a kind of blasphemy – one of the few he still believed in.

By the same token, he was not self-indulgent enough to wish that he had perished alongside his brothers of the Ten Thousand. That would have been an equal, if an opposite, error, for grief was as alien an emotion to him as pride. And yet, the event itself, the catastrophe, could not be ignored. It hung like an iron chain around the shoulders of all those who had come back. Physical wounds could heal, and most would do so quickly, but this weight was not a physical thing. None spoke the word ‘failure’, but still it could be half heard in the echoing silences of the Tower, detected in every whisper of faded crimson fabric on cold stone, seen in every deflected look.

Samonas walked down the long gallery. The suspensor lumens in the Tower of Hegemon were turned down. That reflected the mood – the innards of the place were almost empty now, and already growing musty from stagnant air.

Nine out of every ten. Nine out of every ten. At first he had not believed it, even after witnessing the scale of the slaughter at close quarters. No one had. Only once the portal was truly sealed and the foundations of the Palace secured, only once the last ragged lines of survivors had limped back to the arming chambers, their cloaks rent and their blades broken, did it start to seem possible.

Those who had gained the gate waited for many days in the Tower afterwards, hoping more would somehow follow them out, but the deep paths had been closed by the Emperor Himself and could not be opened again. Any souls that had been sent into that impossible realm to contest the approach of Unreality and had not yet returned were lost there.

Nine out of every ten. The loss was barely conceivable. Every Custodian was a unique and priceless creation, a masterpiece of genecraft curated over many decades, sometimes centuries. Before the current conflict had come, the numbers lost in combat had never risen above a handful in any single engagement. A belief in their near-invincibility had taken root, both within and outside the order. Strength begat strength – the Legio Custodes did not shy away from its reputation, but instead cultivated the most ostentatious displays of dominance. Their armour became more ornate, decorated in exponentially more complex designs and insignias. Confidence, bordering – some said – on arrogance, had never been in short supply.

Samonas drew closer to a pair of large doors. He did not know how his master would be. For the first time in the many long years since he had begun to serve him, Samonas found him hard to predict. It had been a sobering discovery, realising that even he was subject to the cold hand of doubt, to the slow poison of uncertainty – beforehand, that had not been obvious.

But there was no time for hesitation. All knew that the Warmaster was approaching now, cleaving an accelerating path towards the world of his birth. What was left was left; those who could still stand and hold a sword were required to find the strength to do so again.

At his approach, a gold-masked Tower guardian opened the doors, and twin brass plates swung inwards across a bare stone floor.

Twenty figures stood in the chamber on the far side. Fourteen were baseline human counsellors and adjutants of the Tower, variously armoured and cloaked in fabrics of antiquity. Five were, like Samonas, members of the order proper – Custodians of the Legion, calm giants of destruction, their helms removed to expose wound-puckered faces. Among them was Diocletian, who would surely be announced Tribune soon, one of the last to withdraw from the great subterranean defeat. That one carried many injuries, some of them physical.

The twentieth, Constantin Valdor, Samonas’ master, towered over them all. His head was unhelmed, exposing a slim, dour face. His scalp was shaved to the skin, marked by a filigree of scars. Little trace of age lingered on his features, even though he had lived for a very long time. When he spoke, his voice was hard-edged but held low. Even for one of the Legio, even when set against the peerless adepts of that place, the command exercised over his body was astonishing and worthy of study – he would resemble a graven image one moment, utterly still, every facial muscle held in perfect stasis, before action demanded a response, and then the liquidity of movement was so abrupt as to scrape against the limits of physical law.

But even his fine armour was damaged. The many carved eyes and sigils and signs were scratched out, as if by a cat’s claws. In places, the gold of his battleplate was burned black-orange. His cloak was tattered, long strips of frayed fabric hanging from battered shoulders.

‘Can nothing be done?’ Valdor asked.

One of the assembled officials, a green-robed woman named Alei Nai-Borsch who bore the mark of the Tower’s principal forge, bowed her shaved head in apology.

‘I have demanded more from the Martian delegation, who are the only ones with the power to emend this,’ she said. ‘There are limits to our prestige with them at this time. They lost a great deal, too.’

Valdor nodded. ‘How many are required?’

‘Seven, captain-general. By nightfall, dependent on the labours of the Apothecaries, perhaps eight.’

Samonas immediately understood what was being discussed. Dreadnought-shells. For centuries the requirement for such things had been light, and only a handful had existed within the frigid depths of the Tower’s mausoleum. Now, demand for the hallowed sarcophagi was acute. In normal times, the process of interment would have been extended for months, enough time to painstakingly prepare the purpose-built individual walker-units for the unique mind-impulse lattices of the recipient. These were not normal times, though, and assistance was urgently required.

‘I shall speak to them,’ said Valdor. ‘What did they want in return?’

‘That was the thing,’ said Nai-Borsch. ‘Nothing that I could ascertain. There was… I do not know. But I thought I detected something like… shame.’

Valdor’s expression never flickered. ‘As well there might be.’ He turned to another official, Kain Noi-Hailas, the master armourer. ‘The returned fighters who still stand,’ he said. ‘You have seven days. Every blade, every armour-plate, every spear.’

Samonas guessed that the timetable was impossible. The equipment of the Legio had been mutilated at an even faster rate than its warriors. In the final hours of the subterranean defeat, many Custodians had fought empty-handed, taking on enemies beyond imagination with clenched fists and broken spear-staves. Samonas had been one of them, wielding his extinguished sentinel blade against creatures of unbound terror. By the end, the metal had been boiled away into a foul reek of smoke, leaving him only the shards at the hilt to stab with. He still remembered the eyes, glaring at him through a haze of alien spoil, like reptiles’ eyes, yellow and slitted, confident, infinitely malignant, and winning.

Noi-Hailas merely bowed. Like all of them, he had been working for weeks with only snatched hours of sleep between punishing work-details. He was not posthuman in the way that Diocletian and Samonas were, and the exertion would likely kill him if not halted soon. And it would not halt soon.

‘By your will, captain-general,’ he said.

Only then did Valdor turn to Samonas. ‘You bring me welcome news, I trust, vestarios.’

That was an archaic title, one that meant little other than a vague conferral of seniority. Samonas had been at the side of the captain-general for over a hundred years now, and that carried more weight than any dusty term of the Lex.

‘The Lord Dorn is ready to receive you,’ Samonas said. ‘Is that welcome or unwelcome?’

Valdor did not smile.

‘Another primarch,’ he murmured. Then his expression lifted – forcefully, perhaps. ‘Very good,’ he said to the others. ‘Continue as you have been doing. The protection of Him on the Throne be with you.’

The others bowed, then withdrew to pursue the tasks Valdor had given them.

‘What was his mood?’ Valdor asked Samonas, turning and walking with his vestarios back towards the great double doors.

‘The war takes its toll on us all,’ said Samonas evenly.

Valdor snorted. ‘Difficult, then. I shall watch my tongue.’

‘The time for watching tongues may have passed some time ago.’

‘You are an insolent servant, Samonas.’

‘We teeter on the edge of annihilation, lord,’ said Samonas, bowing in apology. ‘A breeding ground for insolence.’

The two of them passed back into the Tower’s broad passageways, bored deep within ancient foundations. The captain-general’s gait was languid, almost totally silent despite his bulk.

‘This may be our last war together,’ Valdor said dryly. ‘Maintain the formalities, please.’

Those who did not know the captain-general assumed that he possessed nothing in the way of mortal humours. That was not entirely true, although it had taken Samonas years of close acquaintance to appreciate them.

‘This will not be like it was before, lord,’ Samonas said.

Valdor thought on that for a moment, never breaking stride. Ahead loomed great brass gates marked with the thunder-and-lightning emblem of the Legio.

‘Or it may very well be,’ the captain-general said. ‘All things repeat themselves. All lives are lived an endless number of times.’ He smiled thinly. ‘The trick is to welcome that. To wish to see it come again, just as it did in the past, now and for eternity.’

Samonas was used to his master’s musings on philosophy. Like all his kind, the captain-general was as much scholar as warrior, though in the years since Prospero it was said that he had taken to his books more than before.

‘Then we will be fighting into infinity,’ Samonas said, as the doors opened.

‘Do not regret that,’ said Valdor, passing through them. ‘One way or another, it was always our fate.’

The glass panes blew out, scattering wildly across Tizca’s old streets in knee-deep piles. The shards were crimson now, refracting the blood of those who had won and lost the narrow ways into the central city. The skies above them roared, black like burning slicks of promethium. Red-hot winds raced down the blasted canyons of rubble, tearing at the lingering stone and throwing ash-clouds as high as the pyramids beyond. The earth underfoot vibrated, drumming as if hammered by great fists.

A colonnade smashed, punched into debris by a tank-barrage, and the fragile walls beyond it tottered. Samonas ducked down. He breathed heavily, gripping the hilt of his crackling sentinel blade. Far to the left, across a boiled-dry watercourse, he could see the tiny dark-grey outlines of Wolves running into the maw of combat on another front, ducking and swerving to avoid a hail of oncoming las-fire.

He watched them go, just for a second, admiring their bravado. There was something liberating about the Sons of Fenris in battle – a joy, a purity, a rawness. He had never expected to be impressed by them in that way, schooled as he had been in tales of their barbarism.

He could feel his heart beating hard. Armour-thralls and Auxilia troops pushed up the shattered transitway on either side, hugging the piles of crystal detritus. Two Custodians of Samonas’ sodality loped at the head of the advance, going warily as they passed under the shadows of more burned-out buildings.

He could feel the rumble of heavy armour grinding its way closer. Gunships braved the lightning-scarred skies over a background bellow of a planet in torment. Explosions went off with clockwork regularity, some far into the distance, many driven in close, all of them rocking the skeletal remains of the great pyramids looming still on the northern horizon.

Samonas had fought many wars for the Legio, but nothing could have prepared him, or anyone else, for Prospero. This was battle conducted across every plane of sensory perception – reality itself rippling as the fury of two Legiones Astartes crashed into one another. The very air felt fractured, as if cracked by some unholy magic that made eyes burn and skin itch.

He looked down, and only then saw where he had crouched – over the body of a Thousand Sons Space Marine, half buried in the rubble underfoot, his helm cracked open to reveal a mutilated face beneath. The sorcerer was dead, his breastplate cleaved by swinging cuts of a greatblade. Despite those terrible wounds, the Space Marine looked almost poised to re-emerge from his dusty tomb to take up the fight again.

Samonas had killed many of them already. They did not die easily, those witches, and they were dangerous in turn, but their defiance was coming to an end now. The story’s details might differ, but the conclusion was always the same – the Legio would be victorious, just as it had been ever since taking up arms alongside the Master of Mankind. These were not the first sorcerers to be excised from existence under the banner of Unity, and they would not be the last.

He got to his feet, joining the steady advance towards the end of the street. A Coronus grav-carrier thrummed past at close quarters, buoyed by a shimmer-haze that kicked and scattered the glass debris. A hundred Auxilia infantry brought up the rear, jogging through the glowing rubble and swinging las-sights.

Proximity markers on Samonas’ false-image visual field drew closer, and he broke out into the intersection of two major thoroughfares. A long avenue of bombed-empty hab-units stretched along a straight axis, along which whole battalions of VI Legion armour were grinding north, wreathed in a fog of their own copious smoke. Muffled booms rang out from positions up ahead, a ranged bombardment of dug-in enemy lines.

The Wolves were not the only ones there. Aquilon Terminators were forging a path up the debris-strewn central reservation, shepherded by scattered prowl-units of the Sisterhood. Valdor was among them, his long cloak whipping in the ash-blown wind. More than sixty Custodians of the Legio, plus hundreds of support troops and regular Auxilia units, were gathering for the push north.

The captain-general looked almost untouched by combat. His armour was close to pristine, giving off a reflective aura under Prospero’s blackening skies. His Apollonian Spear seethed with energy, wrapping the golden shaft in a corona of false sunlight. He moved in the way he always did before battle – proud, confident, measured.

Samonas bowed as he drew close.

‘Grim labour, vestarios,’ Valdor said.

‘Indeed, lord. Now that I see this place–’

He had been intending to say that he wished to see it utterly destroyed – he had seen sorcery of a scale and depravity he had never witnessed before – but he never got the chance.

The Land Raider juddered in close, gunmetal-grey and adorned with blood-red decorations of writhing serpents. It was the first of more than twenty such troop carriers, driven insanely fast through the rubble and kicking it up like a ship throws a bow wave.

For a moment Samonas never even saw Leman Russ. He had certain expectations of primarchs – that they marched on foot at the head of their armies, issuing orders in clear voices like his own master. He did not expect them to ride into war, hanging off the back of a personnel transport one-handed and swinging a damned sword around like a baresark.

‘Constantin!’ Russ cried out, throwing himself from the still-racing Land Raider and crunching heavily to the ground. His blade, the one Imperial scholars called Balenight, but which the Wolves themselves called Mjalnar, gleamed with a malignant silver-white spitefulness.

The Wolf King marched up to the captain-general, pelts swinging about him. Other warriors jumped down from skidding Land Raiders – Varagyr Terminators bearing axes and frostblades, their liberally bloodied armour hung with fur scraps and bone totems.

Valdor waited for him, flanked by his own honour guard. The Custodians were taller than their counterparts, and no doubt more accomplished in some of the finer arts of combat, but there was something in the Varagyr’s latent menace, bleeding from them with every swaggered move, that chilled the blood.

‘What took you so damn long?’ Russ demanded, hawking up a gobbet of spittle and loosing on the ground. He went helmless, the only one of them there who did – a statement of arrogant confidence that struck Samonas as borderline crazed. ‘We’ve been killing witches without your Sisters to blunt their fangs.’

Valdor stiffened a little. ‘It was your wish to engage first, lord,’ he said.

‘True.’ Russ laughed. There was a strange light in those bestial eyes – Samonas thought he looked half mad. ‘True! But you took your time when the order came.’

Order. No living man gave the captain-general an order, save the one who had created him. ‘Our landings are completed,’ Valdor said calmly. ‘We advance on all fronts, and the Knight Commander’s sisterhoods are now deploying throughout the city.’

Russ growled low in his throat, a sound that made Samonas’ spine tingle. ‘This will throttle them now. This will crush them. Hel’s eyes, I have learned to hate these bastards, but still he eludes me.’

‘Is he even on this world?’ asked Valdor doubtfully. ‘We have detected nothing.’

Russ drew up to Valdor then. He was a little shorter, much broader, his armour stained and smeared where Valdor’s was pristine. ‘Oh, yes,’ he hissed, smiling in a disconcertingly feral manner. ‘I can smell him now. I can smell him hunkering down in his own filth, fearful of me.’

Valdor remained unmoved. ‘Even now, I would see him taken to Terra, if it could be done. I would wish to know why.’

Russ laughed, a coarse bark that sent more spittle flying into Valdor’s faceplate. ‘You’re still clinging to that? Ha!’ He turned away, swinging his greatblade casually. ‘I’ve known since I first saw this world that we would face one another. I did not come here for prisoners, Constantin. If my Father had truly wished for such, He would not have sent me.’

‘You were not sent alone, Lord Russ.’

Russ glanced back at Valdor, a sly smile on his fanged face. ‘Oh, that’s it, is it?’ He laughed again, but it was an ice-cold sound. ‘You have the power of Magisterium, and wish to cling to it.’ Russ paced back to him again. He was always moving, restless, like a tempest bound up inside the sham-form of a man. ‘Don’t try to invoke the Lex with me. You claim to speak for my Father, but you’re not His blood, are you? Not like we are. That’s what really gets you, isn’t it? You’re His instruments. He’d toss you aside in an instant if He cared to. We, though. We. We’re family.’ Russ gave out a great belly-laugh then, amused by the idea. ‘You’ll never understand that.’

Valdor didn’t reply for an instant, seemingly genuinely nonplussed.

‘There are so many errors there,’ he said eventually, ‘I do not even know where to start.’

But a reply never came. Fresh mortar-blasts bloomed at the end of the avenue. The Land Raiders gunned their smoggy engines, and the grav-tanks swung round to target new markers. In the far distance, where one of the many great pyramids slumped in burning ruin and the clouds deepened towards an inky vortex, the enemy was moving.

‘They stir!’ Russ roared joyously, running back to the Land Raider and leaping onto its chassis. The Wolves were crying out battle-cant, slamming their blades against their armour and slavering for action once more. ‘Try to keep up, Constantin – you’ll have to get your armour dirty sooner or later.’

And then the column powered up and thundered down the shattered avenue, followed by loping packs of Grey Hunters and whole contingents of bound Auxilia.

Samonas watched them go. The Aquilon guard remained static around them, their helm-faces magnificently blank. ‘Is he… in his right mind, lord?’ he ventured, looking up at Valdor enquiringly.

Valdor didn’t respond immediately. He watched the Wolves race into battle, whooping and hollering. It was impossible to gauge what he thought behind that ornate mask of auramite and carnelian.

‘Primarchs,’ he said finally, a single, withering expletive that sounded as close to a curse as the captain-general of the Ten Thousand would ever get.

‘You refused our offer of assistance,’ said Dorn.

‘We refused nothing,’ said Valdor. ‘You know where the order came from.’

‘And you never resisted it.’

‘Of course not.’ Valdor drew in a weary breath. ‘Resisting orders has not given spectacular results thus far, has it?’

‘Neither has following them,’ said Dorn grimly.

The tension between the two figures was evident, despite the informal setting. The primarch Rogal Dorn was unarmoured, as he preferred to be unless called to war. As ever, his aspect was spartan, clad in the robes of a warrior-monk. His white hair had grown long, adding to the effect. The many stone tables of his private chambers were stuffed with the paraphernalia of Imperial bureaucracy – order capsules, tactical reports, innumerable requests for audience or support. Even though the doors were closed and locked, Samonas guessed that dozens of attendants still hovered on the far side, waiting for their moment to run the gauntlet of the Lord Commander’s unpredictable mood.

For now, though, it was only the three of them, locked away in the windowless heart of Dorn’s cell-like sanctum, raking over old regrets before the storm hit.

‘There are days,’ said Dorn, ‘when I think nothing any of us do is free of the curse.’

‘Curse? I did not have you as a suspicious soul.’

‘I wasn’t. We’re all having to learn new things.’ Dorn sat back in his heavy throne, for a moment letting the aura of control slip. He looked like some archaic warlord then, holed up in his crumbling citadel as the tides of ruin lapped closer. Samonas tried not to meet his gaze.

‘The situation remains the same,’ Valdor said, steering the discussion back to its purpose. ‘The Emperor holds the breach under the Palace. The Mechanicum works on a way to release Him from this duty, but you and I both know that they will not succeed in the time we have left to us.’

‘But it’s not the same, though, is it?’ said Dorn. ‘You should have withdrawn earlier. Tell me, Constantin, what did you gain, clinging on down there for so long? You’d all rather have died following a command than countermand it.’

‘I do not see–’

‘It was a fool’s errand!’ Dorn exclaimed. ‘I tried to warn you. Unless we committed everything we had, there was no hope of holding those portals. But no, only the pure could be risked. And look how that turned out.’

‘The order was given.’

Dorn smiled, cynically and without warmth. ‘You see, there’s your old problem. You never see any fault in Him. You never push back. You never stop, think, say to yourself – is that sensible?’ He pressed his great, calloused hands together. ‘And now you have this conundrum, the greatest of your existence. You were created to be the embodiment of His will, but we can no longer discover what that is. You are His Voice, but He is silent. Can you think for yourself now, captain-general? That is what’s required.’

Samonas hardly dared to look at Valdor. No one, not even Russ, who was as much bluster as substance, had ever dared to speak with quite such casual condescension to his master. And yet, when he finally lifted his eyes to that noble countenance, there was no anger there, only a kind of thoughtfulness.

‘We were faithful,’ Valdor said quietly. ‘I watched, while your brotherhood was created. I studied you. I saw the dangers in you from the start, and witnessed the way you fought, and acted, and quarrelled. And still I said nothing. If there had been a time to question an order, perhaps it was then. But the moment passed, and your great success came soon afterwards. I will be honest now, for you have been honest with me. I did not believe you would ever be that deadly. I saw how swiftly you conquered worlds, and said to myself, perhaps this is why you were made in the way you were. That was your great victory – you became untouchable.’

Dorn listened warily. Samonas did also.

‘But now we see the errors implicit in your forging,’ Valdor said. ‘I should have spoken earlier. By the time war came to this place, the moment had passed, and we were all trapped by our fates. You say that the defence of the tunnels was doomed? Perhaps so. I have fought in other wars – more than you will ever know – that were also doomed, and they always played some part in His pattern. I still cleave to that. The only element that could not be accounted for–’ and there he looked directly at Dorn – ‘was you.’

Dorn lost his chilly smile.

‘And, as always, the fault lies elsewhere,’ Dorn said. ‘From the first time I met you, Constantin, you were never quite able to keep the disdain from staining your words. Oh, you’ve been polite. I never met a more courteous soul. That doesn’t really cut much with me.’ The primarch stirred himself, sitting forwards in the throne and jabbing a finger at the captain-general. ‘See, for all you look down on us, at least we were doing. We were building the empire while you were musing over the finer points of the law that binds you. We were making decisions over which planets would burn and which would be saved. I’d rather have blood on my hands than book-ink.’

For a moment, Samonas thought Valdor might snap then – release the anger that he was surely capable of. Over heartbeats, the two of them held one another’s gaze, as if engaged in some hidden test of will.

‘And yet, the task remains before us,’ Valdor said at last. ‘I came to confer, not to dispute. We know Lupercal will be here soon. You are the Lord Commander. I have invested in me the power of Magisterium. We must speak with one voice from now on, lest further division hamper what preparation remains.’

Dorn looked at the floor then, pressing his fingers together in an image of contemplation. Samonas saw the curve of those mighty shoulders, and had a mental image of the weight of the entire Imperium bearing down on them.

‘I speak as my soul dictates,’ Dorn said slowly. ‘If it appears blunt to you, then it is not intended as such. I do not have time for much else – only truth, now.’ He lifted up his eyes, which were ringed from lack of sleep. ‘And this is the truth. Your power was exhausted in that war. You have fewer than a thousand warriors under arms, and half of them are beneath the Apothecary’s knife. My Father is silent, and cannot guide you. Magisterium is an empty word. I have no doubt you will fight when the time comes, and reap as great a tally as you always have, but your place is by the Throne now, not on the walls.’

Samonas listened, unable to keep shame from welling up within him as the primarch reeled off his judgement. The power of the words came not from their delivery, which was issued more in sorrow than disdain, but the fact they were being uttered at all.

‘You have given great service, captain-general,’ said Dorn, working to keep the worst of the hardness from his voice. ‘But this war has moved beyond you. It will be settled by the Legions. If you wish to remain a part of it, you will have to find some way to fit around that.’

The apocalypse came, reaving through the remains of the broken city and rendering it down to flying squalls of dust and wreckage. With the fallen primarch’s destruction, the great pyramid fractured, first leaking brilliant light, then exploding into a whirling column of eye-burning plasma that joined sky to heaven.

Warriors were hurled through the air, cracking against the storm-scoured flanks of the surviving buildings. Tanks were overturned as they raced across the causeways, and even the distant silhouettes of Titans were tested, leaning into the hurricane while it tore at them.

Samonas gripped the Tower’s balustrade hard, feeling the unnatural storm drive into him like a blow. His sentinel blade was ripped from his grip and spun away into the maelstrom. Far below, out on the great plaza, the Wolf King strode through the tumult, roaring out in anger and frustration. His armour had been turned as black as jet, seared by the magics of his great enemy, and the edges of his mighty sword blazed with an impotent fury.

Valdor stood tall, staring impassively into the racing tempest. His cloak snapped and writhed around him like a living thing, though his body remained rigid, untouched, still splendid despite the bloodshed and the raw horror of a Legion’s ending.

Samonas struggled to keep his feet. He could feel the Tower’s stones shift underfoot. Cracks snaked up the stonework, blowing the mortar from the joints.

‘Lord,’ he urged, struggling to keep standing. ‘We must withdraw.’

Valdor remained still, his gauntlets clutching his spear. Unearthly screams from below added to the tidal wave of noise. Lesser pyramids collapsed in on themselves, flickering with multi-hued lightning as they slid into oblivion.

‘Lord,’ Samonas tried again.

‘He has unleashed something he does not understand,’ Valdor said, staring at the distant Russ and speaking slowly and deliberately. ‘Just as Magnus did before him. What is it with them all? Where did they get this monstrous pride?’

More flagstones cracked, and Samonas heard the sighing creak of breaking stone. There was no sign of the primarch of the Thousand Sons now, only the endless bellows of his assassin. He lurched over to Valdor across the tilting flags, daring to reach out to pull him back from the edge.

But at last the captain-general turned away. As the debris of a world’s demise blew about them in furious eddies, he finally reached up to remove his helm. It came loose with a hiss, and Valdor inhaled the first unfiltered air of doomed Prospero.

The captain-general was furious. Never before had Samonas witnessed such raw anger on that normally implacable face.

‘They are the architects of this,’ Valdor said, speaking to the storm. ‘All of them.’

He turned to look at his thrall.

‘It could have been prevented,’ he said grimly. ‘Yet when the hour came, we merely watched them being born.’

The Tower remained dark. Promised aid from the Mechanicum never came. The forges rang each day and each night, and still there were not enough blades for the few who were able to wield them. More died on the medicae slabs, as even their gene-tempered bodies were unable to resist the lingering cankers carried by daemon-blades.

In the days following Valdor’s meeting with Dorn, Samonas’ attention was consumed by a thousand tasks. Those who still survived needed tending. Those who were able to fight needed to be re-equipped. In times past the Tower had been able to obtain anything it required with ease. Now things were harder, and the Legio’s voice was diminished. There were rumours abroad that more Legions were returning, running for Terra ahead of Horus’ advance, and minds were turned towards that hope. In such an environment, the Custodians retreated back into the shadows, overlooked by all, save perhaps Malcador, who was smothered by his own burdens.

For all that, battle-readiness gradually returned. The Tower was re-manned and fortified, equipment and materiel was steadily put back to use, and throughout it all the ceaseless watch over the Throneroom never slackened. Ancient duty-patterns were re-examined, and provisions made for the deployment of the remaining Custodian Guard when the need came, together with those few Sisters of Silence who had made it out of the subterranean killing ground.

Samonas trained as hard as any of his brothers. He finally received a new sword, bereft of the fine carvings that he had loved, but deadly nonetheless. He entered the fight-cages with a different attitude than before. The old superlative certainties were gone, replaced by something new – the tinge of vengeance. He detected the same in all those who had returned from the slaughter. They would take the shame that they could not erase, and turn it into yet another marginal gain, a way to fight faster and better than those who came to eradicate the last of them.

Whenever he thrust his new sword, Samonas remembered that final look in Dorn’s tired eyes. This war has moved beyond you. That would be the challenge now, the spur forever dug in their flesh, goading them out of grief and into wrath.

In that time, Valdor was the most active of them all, deprived of the support of the tribunate that had ever been the most active force in the Legio’s workings, but also freed of the more onerous demands of the Senatorum Imperialis and able to devote his formidable energies to his own order.

Samonas was not summoned into his presence for a long time. When he next saw his master, it was on the cusp of the Khan’s anticipated return, and all Terra was looking up to the void rather than into the depths of the sprawling Palace.

He climbed the long winding stair leading to the observation parapet atop the Tower’s northern edge. From there, the view looked out towards the colossal fortifications of the Inner Palace, still being added to, re-fortified, over and over as if caught up in a kind of obsession. The sun was setting, casting a dark red pall over the haze of construction.

The captain-general was waiting for him, looking out at the landscape of incipient siege.

‘You are disappointed in me, vestarios,’ he said.

Samonas, taken off guard, began to issue a denial.

‘You think I should have challenged the Lord Commander.’ Valdor turned to face him. ‘Do you believe, truly, that I would not have been up to the contest?’

‘Far from it, lord.’

‘You and I have witnessed the results of strife between brothers. No alien power did this to us – we turned on one another, driven by pride and human resentment. I will not add to it.’

Samonas bowed. He could understand that, but still the insults rankled.

‘So what now?’ he asked cautiously.

‘The Emperor will speak again,’ said Valdor. ‘He repairs what we were unable to preserve. The silence will not last. Until then, our task is to endure.’

‘Nothing more than that?’

Valdor’s lips creased in the approaches of a smile. ‘You wish for more.’ He looked up into the heavens, to where shoals of atmospheric transports hovered between wings of gunships. A far greater fleet had mustered beyond sight, standing guard over the Throneworld, set against the coming hour of attack. ‘We saw the Eighteen arrive, we saw them fall, we will see them slip away again. What they perceive as weakness is what shields us from their mistakes.’

The sunset deepened, and shadows pooled between the spires.

‘Both of them invoked Magisterium, Dorn and Russ,’ Valdor said. ‘They think of that as the exercise of power. I do not blame them – they are creatures of power, built to dominate. But they are wrong. The term is older than that. It is the interpretation of the truth, discovered through communion with the source. We are interpreters of it, not masters. We are slaves to it. That is our first lesson. All others are secondary.’

In the eastern sky, the faint pinprick of stars became visible, their brilliance obscured by the growing palls of urban smog.

‘Could this have been prevented?’ Samonas asked.

Valdor did not look at him. His eyes remained fixed on the darkening sky.

‘Why ask what cannot be known?’ he said. ‘This is the fate we have been given.’

Across the cityscape, marred by the Lord Commander’s fortifications, floodlights switched on. The great hulk of the Inner Palace, the structure that shielded the Emperor as much as it now imprisoned Him, turned a bloody hue from them.

‘He will speak,’ said Valdor, his voice firm with certainty. ‘All things repeat themselves. Our time will come again.’

About the Author

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Scars and The Path of Heaven, the Primarchs novel Leman Russ: The Great Wolf, the novellas Brotherhood of the Storm and Wolf King, and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Inquisition novel The Carrion Throne and the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, as well as the short story collection Wolves of Fenris. For Space Marine Battles, he has written the novels Wrath of Iron and War of the Fang. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Time of Legends novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works near Bristol, in south-west England.

Inquisitor Crowl, who serves on Holy Terra, follows the trail of a conspiracy that leads him to the corridors of the Imperial Palace itself…

A Black Library Publication

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Dominik Oedinger.

Magisterium © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Magisterium, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-848-8

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