She let the words hang in the air and I could see she was really was serious.
‘You want me to tell him this.’
‘He already knows. Macharius is not a stupid man, and as you have pointed out he understands the uses of all kinds of power. He also understands men who are motivated by glory. How could he not? He is first among them.’
‘I sometimes think you do not like the Lord High Commander.’
‘It does not matter whether I like him, Leo. It matters whether I serve him.’
She was a woman with a very firm grasp on what was important, was Anna, and a gift for the precise use of words, as I was to find out.
‘I do like him,’ I said. I was surprised to hear myself saying that.
‘It is in your self-interest to,’ she said.
‘I would like him anyway, even if it were not.’
‘You have an unswerving loyalty, you and your friends, I envy you that.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘I am loyal only to the Emperor.’ She said this very distinctly, as if giving a fair warning.
‘Does He give you His orders directly?’
‘I am loyal to what he represents.’ We were looking at each other warily now. I was not quite sure why she was telling me this. Perhaps she wanted me to understand finally at the end of things, and perhaps I did when it came. ‘You are too.’
And then as sudden as a summer squall on the sea of storms, her mood changed. ‘Do you remember Xenophon?’
I nodded.
‘I remember the islands and the beaches,’ I said. It blazed in my memory, bright with sunshine. I remembered giving her some seashells I had collected. They were polished to a sheen by the action of wave and sand. I wondered whether she still had them or whether they had been dumped along with all the other detritus of her life when she travelled.
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘I was happy there.’
She said it as if happiness were a concept that she did not quite understand, a strange intrusion from somewhere alien, a wonder which she still needed to try and grasp.
‘You will be guarding Macharius during his triumphal procession?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Be very careful, Leo,’ she said. ‘I would hate to see any harm come to you.’
I looked at her. I almost reached out but she was already in motion, rising from the bed, garbing herself in her robe. She dressed with grace and speed and no wasted effort, but when she stopped she was suddenly as clumsy as anyone else, wearing normality as a disguise, hiding what she was by pretending to be one of us, pretending to be only human.
She was good at that, as she was at anything she put her mind to. What she was best at was deception.
Chapter Nine
‘As ever, Helicon Blight is at your service, your excellency,’ the rogue trader said as he bowed to Macharius. I studied him closely. He was a tall, spare-looking man with a lined, sunburned face, craggy features and a sprinkle of grey in his hair. His clothing was of the finest fabrics, but it was not local manufacture. It was from some distant system still far outside the scope of the crusade, a reminder that not so long ago these worlds had been outwith the remit of the Imperium, and that we were still very close to the new frontier. Rogue traders were among the few citizens licensed to trade beyond its borders. They had other reasons for existing as well.
I knew Blight for an ambitious man and a spy. I had seen him reporting to Macharius in private on multiple occasions over the past decade, whenever he returned from one of his trading trips. His eyes were like chips of blue ice, and they stayed focused totally on Macharius as if they could divine the future by the study of the expression on his face.
‘Can you help me, Blight?’ Macharius asked. There was no sign of the eagerness he had shown about this matter in his discussions with Drake. He was once again a cold, calm Imperial general. ‘I wish very much to return to Procrastes and free its inhabitants from the scourge of these xenos.’
‘From what you have told me, it is a tricky passage, Lord High Commander,’ said Helicon Blight. ‘The fact that Admiral Kellerman flatly refuses to order his fleet to do as you have requested confirms that.’
Behind him, through a vast crystal dome, I caught sight of the blue shimmering orb of Emperor’s Glory. Blight sat in an ornate throne. He smoked some char-weed from a hookah. It was no way to greet an Imperial commander, but here on his own ship Blight was ranking and perhaps he wanted to make the point. Macharius did not seem in the slightest bit disturbed. ‘The Procrastes system is between two of the great warp storms and there are constant chronal flux streams emerging from there that can easily pull a ship off course. As you have found out to your cost.’
Macharius raised an eyebrow. The merchant prince said, ‘I am not haggling, Lord High Commander, nor telling you how difficult it is just to raise my fee. You know I am your man and would do this for nothing. I am telling you the way the thing truly lies.’
‘Difficult then, not impossible,’ said Macharius.
Blight took a puff on his hookah and offered the mouthpiece to Macharius. The general accepted it.
‘Exactly so. With a sufficiently skilled Navigator we could make the passage, although I am not sure I would advise you to risk it. If I may be so bold, commission me to acquire what you seek and I will return with it or die in the attempt. My life is far less valuable to the Imperium than yours.’
‘I have already made up my mind that I must personally supervise this operation.’
Blight shrugged as though the matter were settled. ‘I would advise you to speak to Raymond Belisarius then. His kinswoman Zarah is in port now and is the most skilled Navigator in the sector. She also has some experience with those warp currents.’
‘You do not feel your own Navigators could handle the matter? The less people who know of this the better.’
‘I have every confidence in my people, but in cases such as this, with yourself as super-cargo, I would want the very best. Why risk anything else? Of course, it would cost the ransom of a planetary governor to hire her away from her present job.’
‘I have the ransom of a thousand planetary governors,’ said Macharius. ‘Such questions are immaterial.’
‘Very good then, sire. I will open negotiations with House Belisarius.’
‘I wish to meet with them myself when you have concluded your arrangements.’
‘That too can be arranged,’ said Blight. ‘Anything can, for a price.’
‘I will meet any price that is likely to be asked,’ said Macharius.
‘I do not doubt it, your excellency,’ said Blight. ‘I do not doubt it at all.’
There was something strange about being in the presence of a Navigator. The strangeness was magnified when there was two of them, but that was not what held all of our attentions. It was the man who was with them, standing immobile as a statue behind their thrones.
He was tall, taller by far even than Macharius, and very broad. His ceramite armour made him seem broader still. His eyes had a peculiar canine quality in the way they reflected the light. Long whiskers drooped from his lips, huge sideburns concealed half his face. In his hands he held a bolter I would have struggled to lift. For all the life he showed, he might well have been a statue, but you just knew that he could come explosively to life and kill everything in the room if he chose to. This was one of the Wolfblades, one of the legendary wardens of House Belisarius provided by the Space Wolves Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. He was bodyguard to the Navigators just as I was to Macharius, but on his own he was probably a match for the score of us.