‘I think I still thought I would see the pearl-white armour, the ivory cloak and the face of a friend. I looked at him and he was looking at me, right at me. I wanted to run, but I could not, I could not move to breathe. I could only stare back at that face framed by armour the colour of an ocean storm. He pointed at me, and said “All but that one.” His sons did the rest.
‘Three seconds of thunder and blood. When it was quiet I was on the deck on my hands and knees. Blood was pooling around my fingers. There was just blood and pulped meat all around me. The only thing I could think of was that Askarid had been stood beside me. I felt her hand around mine just before the shooting started.’ Voss closed his eyes, his hands held together in his lap.
Qruze found that he could not look away from those ink-stained hands, the skin wrinkled, the fingers gripped together as if clutching a memory.
‘But he kept you alive,’ said Dorn, his voice as flat and hard as a hammer falling on stone.
Voss looked up, his eyes meeting the primarch’s. ‘Oh yes. Horus spared me. He walked to stand above me; I could feel his presence, that chained ferocity, like a furnace’s heat. “Look at me,” he said and I did. He smiled. “I remember you, Solomon Voss,” he said. “I have cleansed my fleets of your kind: all but you. You I will keep. No one will harm you. You will see everything.” He laughed. “You will be a remembrancer,” he said.’
‘And what did you do?’ asked Dorn.
‘I did the only thing I could. I was a remembrancer. I watched every bloody moment, heard the words of hate, smelt the stink of death and folly. I think for a time I went mad,’ Voss chuckled. ‘But then I realised what the truth of this age is. I found the truth I had come to see.’
‘What truth is that, remembrancer?’ said Dorn, and Qruze could hear the danger in the words like an edge on a blade.
Voss gave a small laugh, as if at a child’s foolish question. ‘That the future is dead, Rogal Dorn. It is ashes running through our hands.’
Dorn was on his feet before Qruze could blink. Rage radiated from him like the heat of a fire. Qruze had to steady himself as Dorn’s emotion filled the room like an expanding thundercloud.
‘You lie,’ roared the primarch in a voice that had cowed armies.
Qruze waited for the blow to land, for the remembrancer to be nothing more than bloody flesh on the floor. No blow came. Voss shook his head. Qruze wondered at what the man must have seen to make this primarch’s rage blow over him as if it were a gust of wind.
‘I have seen what your brother has become,’ said Voss, carefully measuring his words. ‘I have looked your enemy in the eye. I know what must happen.’
‘Horus will be defeated,’ spat Dorn.
‘Yes. Yes, perhaps he will, but I still speak the truth. It is not Horus that will destroy the future of the Imperium. It is you, Rogal Dorn. You and those that stand with you.’ Voss nodded to Qruze.
Dorn leant down so that he was looking the man in the eye.
‘We will rebuild the Imperium when this war is done.’
‘From what, Rogal Dorn? From what?’ sneered Voss, and Qruze saw the words hit Dorn like a blow. ‘The weapons of this age of darkness are silence and secrets. The enlightenment of Imperial truth, those were the ideals you fought for. But you cannot trust any more, and without trust those ideals will die, old friend.’
‘Why do you say this?’ hissed Dorn.
‘I say it because I am a remembrancer. I reflect the truth of the times. The truth is not something this new age wants to hear.’
‘I do not fear the truth.’
‘Then let my words,’ Voss tapped his parchment, ‘be heard by all. I have written it here, everything I saw, every dark and bloody moment.’
Qruze thought of the words of Solomon Voss spreading through the Imperium, carried by the authority of their author and the power of their message. It would be like poison spreading through the soul of those resisting Horus.
‘You lie,’ said Dorn carefully, as if the words were a shield.
‘We sit in a secret fortress built on suspicion, with a sword over my head, and you say I lie?’ Voss gave a humourless laugh.
Dorn let out a long breath and turned away from the remembrancer. ‘I say that you have condemned yourself.’ Dorn moved towards the door.
Qruze made to follow but Voss spoke from behind them.
‘I think I understand now. Why your brother kept me and then let me fall into your hands.’ Dorn turned from the open cell door. Voss looked back at him, a weary smile on his face. ‘He knew that his brother would want to save me as a relic of the past. And he knew that I would never be allowed free after what I had seen.’ Voss nodded, the smile gone from his face. ‘He wanted you to feel the ideals of the past dying in your hands. He wanted you to look it in the eye as you killed it. He wanted you to realise that you two are much alike, still, Rogal Dorn.’
‘BRING ME MY armour,’ said Rogal Dorn, and red-robed serfs scuttled from the darkness. Each bore a section of gold battle-plate. Some pieces were so large and heavy that several had to carry them.
Dorn and Qruze stood once more in the observation dome. The only light in the wide, circular chamber was from the starfield above. Rogal Dorn had not spoken since he had left Voss in his cell, and Qruze had for once not dared to speak. Voss’s words had shaken Qruze. No mad ranting or proclamation of Horus’s greatness. No, this was worse. The remembrancer’s words had spread through him like ice forming in water. Qruze had fought it, contained it within the walls of his will, but it still clawed at his mind. What if Voss had spoken the truth? He wondered if it was a poison strong enough to burn the mind of a primarch.
Dorn had stood looking out at the stars for over an hour before he had asked for his armour. The serfs would normally have armoured Dorn, cladding him in his battle-plate piece by piece. This time he armoured himself, pulling a hard skin of adamantium over his flesh, framing his stone-set face in gold: a war god rebuilding himself with his own hands. Qruze thought that the primarch looked like a man preparing for his last battle.
‘He has been twisted, my lord,’ said Qruze softly and the primarch paused, his bare right hand about to slot into a gauntlet worked in silver with eagle feathers. ‘Horus sent him here to wound and weaken you. He said as much himself. He speaks lies.’
‘Lies?’ said the primarch.
Qruze steeled himself and asked the question he had feared to ask since they had left Voss’s cell. ‘You fear that he is right? That the ideals of truth and illumination are dead?’ said Qruze, an edge of urgency to his voice.
As soon as he spoke he did not want to know the answer. Dorn put his hand into the gauntlet, the seals snapping shut around the wrist. He flexed his metal-sheathed hand and looked at Qruze. There was a coldness in his eyes that made Qruze remember moonlight glinting from wolves’ eyes in the darkness of lost winter nights.
‘No, Iacton Qruze,’ said Dorn. ‘I fear that they never existed at all.’
THE DOOR TO the cell opened, spilling the shadows of Rogal Dorn and Iacton Qruze across the floor. Solomon Voss sat at his desk facing the door as if waiting for them, his last manuscript on the desk at his side. Rogal Dorn stepped in, the low light catching the edges of his armour. He looked, thought Qruze, like a walking statue of burnished metal. There were no sounds other than the steps of the primarch and the hum of the glow-globes.
Qruze pulled the door shut behind them and moved to the side. Reaching behind his shoulder he gripped the hilt of the sword sheathed at his back. The blade slid out of its scabbard with a whisper sound of steel. Forged by the finest warsmiths at the command of Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of Terra, its double-edged blade was as tall as a mortal man. Its silvered surface was etched with screaming faces wreathed by serpents and weeping blood. It bore the name Tisiphone, in memory of a forgotten force of vengeance. Qruze rested the blade point down, his hands gripping the hilt level with his face.