Collatinus was still studying the record of troop movements. ‘It seems that once you managed to turn the tide against the rebels, you ended the worst of the crisis quickly.’
‘Thank you, shield-captain,’ Arkanasia was nodding vigorously, ‘but we could have ended things completely, and much sooner, too.’
‘Explain yourself,’ said Malcador. There was an undercurrent of barely contained excitement in the acting governor’s voice. He could read the passion erupting at the surface of her mind. What he wanted was for her to articulate that excitement, to give it explicit form and reveal what loomed behind it.
‘I mean no disrespect to the memory of Governor Vasra. Thawra has flourished under her leadership, and I would have followed her to my own death. But we disagreed on the prosecution of the war. I had the means to end it quickly, and she was reluctant to use them. I understand her reluctance, but I think it was wrong.’ She pointed to the map, where the arrows indicating the advances of loyalist forces suddenly became longer. ‘And I believe I have been proven correct. These advances began after her death.’
‘When you had a free hand,’ Collatinus said, his tone flat, unreadable.
‘Yes,’ said Arkanasia. She spoke to Malcador instead of the shield-captain. ‘I do not wish to sound vainglorious, but yes, that is correct.’ She was doing her best to maintain a solemn tone. The effort was only partly successful. Her eyes were growing brighter. She had more than an innovative strategy to disclose to him. She was bursting with a great truth. A revelation.
‘Tell me what you did,’ Malcador ordered, drawing out the shape created by her beliefs and actions.
‘We fought treachery with loyalty, and fire with fire. Psyker against psyker.’
‘That would require very rapid organisation,’ said Collatinus. ‘To find psykers, to train them, to coordinate the response. Unless there already was such a corps in existence…’ He trailed off when Arkanasia started nodding again.
‘You have created this corps?’ Malcador asked.
‘I have.’
‘In secret?’
‘No!’ Arkanasia sounded affronted. ‘It was done in consultation with Vasra and a select few of the other councillors.’
‘Ones who were psykers?’
‘Yes.’ Her gaze was defiant, ready to challenge anyone who doubted the psykers’ loyalty. Wondering how readily she would admit the truth, he bluntly put the question forward.
‘Are you one?
‘Yes.’
‘Was Vasra?’
‘No,’ said Arkanasia. ‘And it was important that she knew. Not just because she was governor. This corps must not be a secret organisation of psykers. The rebels are that. I think it may have been why they went wrong. I know there are risks, first lord. No one who has ever touched the warp can think there is no danger.’
‘One would hope not,’ Malcador said dryly.
‘But with care, first lord,’ Arkanasia went on, ‘with training, with discipline, think what such a force could do in the service of the Emperor. And we have proved this, here on Thawra.’ The light in her eyes was more than a reflection. Micro-lightning flickered around her pupils. ‘We live and die for the Emperor. This rebellion was a test. Perhaps He knew it would happen. All things are known to the Emperor. He–’
Malcador interrupted her. He did not like the path down which her rhetoric was heading. It was enough, for the moment, that she had revealed her fanaticism and the form it had taken. ‘Who trained the psykers?’ he said.
‘I did, and the officers I selected.’
‘And who trained you?’
‘Governor Vasra watched over me.’
‘Yet Vasra did not want to use the psyker corps against the rebels.’
‘On that point, she was wrong. I will not pretend we have found a perfect model for the corps. But we have shown what can be done. First lord, I believe this is what must be done. It is what the Emperor wills.’
Malcador stared back into her ecstatic gaze. ‘He has spoken to you, has He?’
Even now, directly challenged, Arkanasia did not retreat. ‘No. But we are made in His image. Our powers are His.’
Malcador held her stare for a few moments longer. She had already revealed enough to warrant censure, at the very least. He would not take action yet, though. Not until he knew the full extent of what was happening on Thawra. He pointed to the red circle on the map and changed the subject. ‘The war is not over,’ he said.
‘No,’ Arkanasia admitted. She frowned, and the light in her eyes dimmed. ‘I am not sure why that is. We had the rebels on the run. They were broken.’
‘They have a stronghold at this location?’ Collatinus asked.
‘Of a kind. There are no settlements in that region. There are some natural caves, and the rebels are using them.’
‘How extensive is the network?’
‘There isn’t one, as far as we know. The caves are not much more than recesses in the cliff faces. Even conventional forces should have finished them by now, and my entire force of psykers is engaged in the fight.’
My force of psykers, Malcador noted.
‘What are you hearing from the front?’
‘Nothing. The warp energy released by the fighting is too strong. It has disrupted our communications.’
Malcador turned to Collatinus. ‘We know where we must go.’
‘Yes!’ Arkanasia cried, ecstatic again when Collatinus nodded. ‘Then you will see. You must bear witness, first lord, to what we have accomplished here. And you will know what must be done.’
I hope you are right, Malcador thought. He said nothing to Arkanasia. She was caught in the grip of her vision. Words would serve no purpose now. And she was right. He had to see what she had done for himself.
The storm was familiar. Eight hundred metres away from its edge, from the top of a slope leading down to the dead end of a gorge, Malcador stared at the vortex of exploding warp energy and recognised the convulsion that had summoned him to Thawra. He had not thought there were features in the storm to memorise. During his meditation in the Vortex Chamber, he had registered only the danger, not the details of the tempest’s face. Or so he had thought. But here it was again, and he knew it. It seemed to him that it welcomed his recognition, that the destruction it wreaked was for his benefit, to mock him above all others. The storm had been in the non-space of the immaterium. Now it was here, at a very particular point in the materium, waiting for him. It was not huge. It was no more than a kilometre wide at most. Yet its reach was vast. It was a destroyer of hopes, a clarion of menace, a promise of madness for a galaxy. The tempest was not yet a full breach in the real, but that disaster would not be long in coming.
‘No,’ Arkanasia said when she saw the battlefield. ‘This isn’t… I can’t believe that…’ She could not finish her denials. The betrayal of her hopes was too great.
The gorge dipped sharply from the point where Collatinus had ordered the shield company to halt. The cliffs were three hundred metres high, and had been drawing closer together. For the last few hundred metres there had been no room for the Custodians to march more than four abreast. Now the canyon widened again, before ending at another three-hundred-metres-high sheer wall.
The maelstrom raged at the base of the cliffs, concealing the bottom third of them. If there were caves there in which the rebels had taken refuge, they were invisible, and Malcador doubted if they still existed.
The storm churned in one direction, then another. Coiling arms of power collided, sending monstrous, coronal arcs skyward. The confusion drew the eye and savaged the mind. It was made of warring nightmare and maddened thought. It was not physical, yet it sundered air and stone. There were no colours, yet it was a blinding darkness. Malcador glanced at the storm, looked away, then glanced again, trying to gain the measure of its force.