‘My position is already one based on great presumption. I pronounced myself leader of the united Successor Chapters of the Imperial Fists, declaring my right to command other armies when I am the only one of mine remaining. Now I propose to do the same for the sons of other primarchs. The overreach is stunning, isn’t it? And I don’t even know if the call will be answered.’
‘I think it will be.’ Vangorich paused. ‘Might I offer some advice?’
‘I’ll be pleased to hear it.’
‘Leadership is symbolic as much as anything else. You are not leading the united Successors despite being the last Imperial Fist. You are leading because you are the last.’
‘I doubt that will be enough to sway the Space Wolves.’
‘It won’t,’ said Vangorich. ‘You will have to grow your symbolic worth.’
‘Is that all?’ Koorland looked between the columns, at the vast space to the floor below. I am elevated beyond my station, he thought. He had sought to ease Thane’s doubts while his own had been gnawing at him with greater and greater force. He was not a politician. He belonged in the battlefield. And now he was proposing to invade a legend, at the head of a coalition he had no claim to command.
‘I know,’ said Vangorich. ‘Simple enough, isn’t it?’
Koorland grunted. He stopped walking. He gazed on the dais below. Twelve thrones, twelve competitions. He had, for the moment, beaten the High Lords’ attempts to co-opt him to their own ends. He wished he could say he had risen above them. He saw himself in one of the thrones, a small figure, dwarfed by the space of the Chamber, insignificant in the eyes of the colossal beings depicted in the fresco above him. ‘Thank you, Grand Master,’ he said to Vangorich. ‘What I have to do is clear.’
‘If not how to do so. I’m familiar with that burden. You have my sympathies and my hopes, Lord Commander.’ Vangorich walked away.
Lord Commander. The title grated each time he heard it. It was a grimy necessity. Chapter Master was better, even though it had come to him drenched in tragic irony. Master of a Chapter of one.
There was more than one, now. The Last Wall was a reality. The title did not fit as ill as it once had. He still doubted it would be enough.
Movement to his left. He turned his head. A shadow approached, then resolved itself as Lastan Veritus stepped into the light coming between the pillars from the Chamber. ‘I don’t have to ask if you overheard,’ Koorland said.
‘It is my duty to do so.’
Koorland bit back a retort. He would not give the inquisitor anything to use for his own purposes. ‘What do you want?’
‘I have made clear my concern that the attention given to the struggle against the orks is distracting us from the battle against the true enemy.’
‘Abundantly so.’ He controlled his temper. ‘I find it curious to consider a force capable of destroying an entire Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes a distraction.’
‘I have not come to argue. I concede that the ork occupation of Ullanor is troubling in the extreme. The threats may be more entwined than I suspected.’
Now Koorland fought to master his surprise at the conciliatory tone.
‘Ullanor,’ Veritus repeated. His ancient face creased in pain. ‘The gravity of this…’ He trailed off.
‘Words are inadequate,’ said Koorland.
‘They are. I agree with your course of action, Chapter Master. You were right to send the call. But you are planning to attack a myth.’
‘I am.’
‘Maintaining unity of purpose and of force will require leadership the equal of the task. Only a myth can conquer a myth.’
‘I am well aware that I am no myth. Do you propose to make me one?’
‘No.’
‘Then I fail to see the point of this conversation. There is no myth to lead us.’
‘You are wrong. There is one.’
‘Oh?’ Koorland was sceptical. ‘Does this myth have a name?’
‘He does. Vulkan.’
The dome of the Chamber began to spin. Koorland shifted his stance to steady himself. He looked up. There in the frozen image of the Great Crusade were the figures of the loyal primarchs. He saw Vulkan, hammer upraised. Reality was turning fluid. In his mind’s eye, Vulkan descended from the fresco, called into being by Veritus.
Ullanor. Vulkan. The names of a cataclysmic past. Names that had been legends for a millennium. But one already had re-emerged into lived history.
Koorland focused his gaze on Veritus with effort. By invoking myth, the old man seemed to have moved into its realm. He was less real, and more formidable. There were immense depths here, to be approached with extreme caution.
‘And where will I find him?’ He had no doubt Veritus would have an answer.
‘On Caldera. Fulfilling an ancient oath.’
Four
The warp convulsed. It shrieked around the Sanguinem Ignis. An agony of non-matter and raging nightmare clawed at the strike cruiser’s Geller field. The immaterium attacked with the fury of a wounded beast and the integrity of the field cracked.
‘Translating!’ Shipmaster Laeca warned. ‘Brace, brace, brace!’
‘This is no Mandeville point,’ said Sergeant Marbas. He steadied himself against the port-side wall of the strategium.
Captain Valefor grasped the command pulpit. ‘The immaterium has had enough of us,’ he said. On the pict screens that surrounded the pulpit, the cascading runes were angry red. To try to understand the warp was to try to reason with madness. But in jagged brushstrokes the image was forming of a wound in the warp, and the Sanguinem Ignis was the target of the immaterium’s vengeance.
The translation was brutal. The vessel passed from the unreal to the material in a single, severing blow. Workstations across the bridge burst into flames. A shriek ran the length of the hull, an intertwined cry of the vessel, the warp and the void together. Another scream joined it, coming from the vox-casters, and Valefor knew it for the cry of the Navigator. He felt the jolt of the transition. The shadow of non-being slashed through him and was gone, as if a monomolecular blade had cut him in half, then healed him on the instant.
Reality settled. The scream faded. The bridge was filled with the cacophony of alarms, but there was deeper silence. The engines had stilled.
‘Damage!’ Valefor demanded.
‘Warp drive integrity intact,’ Laeca answered. ‘But power to the engines—’
She was cut off by the thunder of multiple impacts. They hammered the ship even as the auspex officer reported multiple hostiles.
The oculus snapped open. The pict screens adjusted to the new inputs, and Valefor saw what was coming for them.
The Sanguinem Ignis had translated in the wake of an ork attack moon. The greenskin base had suffered damage in its journey through the warp. A quarter of its southern hemisphere had been sheared away and an explosion like a solar prominence arced out of the wound. Molten fissures spread over the rest of the sphere. But it was still at war. Immense bays were open on all sides, and the ork fleet emerged in a swarm. Three cruisers were closing with the Blood Angels, their forward guns firing. The shells were huge, dense, and solid. Mass and velocity were all they needed to tear a vessel apart. The Sanguinem Ignis’ void shields flared in protest.
A second wave of cruisers was turning to follow the first. With them came a cloud of smaller vessels, insects zeroing in on carrion.
‘The enemy’s injuries are severe,’ said Marbas.
‘But its fleet is intact. Our fight is not here,’ Valefor said. ‘I want a retreat, shipmaster. Engines full. And recharge the warp drive. Gunners, weapons free on the nearest enemy vessel.’