‘The Emperor’s turned back. Poison delivered by a penitent’s kiss. An Ecclesiarch bought for a few meagre days of life.’
‘Bought?’
‘My alchemist was able to extend the final dose that Wienand supplied, but no more.’ He gestured to the empty vial. ‘Tomorrow I will be dead.’ He hissed the final word as a sudden, clenching pain overtook his self-control. His vision ran like the paint of an underhive mission in the acid rain. Something warm trickled down the inside of his leg. The Beast’s emissary to Holy Terra’s orbit had been vanquished and Mesring no longer knew where to turn. ‘Without… a… miracle.’
As if on cue — a sign, he prayed, a sign that the Emperor truly does watch and forgive — the monolithic Gates of Undying that led, ultimately, to the Golden Throne Room itself were opened and a procession of frocked men and their entourage entered.
The cortege was led by a frater swinging a jewelled censer and followed out by vestal choristers in trailing robes. The clergy were escorted by Frateris Templar in gleaming carapace, marching with ceremonial gold-plated lasguns locked to their shoulder, the cold fire of force-bayonets flickering by their ears. Mesring couldn’t tell how many there were. His eyes were too bleary to count, his mind too fuzzy to hold a number, but after a few minutes the procession tailed off and the gates were barred, physically, by the towering figure of a lone Adeptus Custodes.
The guardian was four metres tall, encased in golden artificer armour and wielding a halberd that was anything but ornamental. The Adeptus Custodes were crafted by the same artifice that had sired the primarchs, and though they were less than those demigods, they were still greater than the Adeptus Astartes. Seeing that being, Mesring felt the first stirrings of doubt at the enfeeblement of the God-Emperor.
‘You are not going to…’ hissed Mendelyev.
‘The Ecclesiarch has the authority.’
‘To make a request on behalf of another, not for himself. The Emperor’s tears are shed for His fallen warriors. They are for His warriors.’
‘He leaves me no choice. It cannot be His will for me to die like this. It cannot.’
An arch-cardinal in ostentatious white robes and jewelled mitre passed through the fug of incense and verse, dropped to one knee and kissed Mesring’s fingers. The memory of the last time Mesring had allowed that particular show of respect made his fists clench. The man’s name was Wilbran. His position of Emperor’s Chaplain was, naturally, a largely ceremonial one, but it carried tremendous prestige.
It occurred to Mesring that Wilbran’s would be high on any list of names to succeed him.
With a platitudinous greeting, the arch-cardinal stepped aside. Past him shuffled a lachrymal page with the wrung-out, worn-down look of a man who had grown old in spite of the chemical treatments belaying the onset of puberty and the death of innocence. He bore a silk cushion and on it a small golden reliquary. He prostrated himself and Wilbran opened the box. Inside was a vial, cut from a single piece of diamond, on a bed of scented tissue. It contained one droplet of glistening liquid.
Mesring’s breath caught as Wilbran lifted it reverentially and passed it to him.
The Emperor shed a tear for every one of His own that fell in battle. There was a priesthood dedicated to their collection, and just one had the power to heal a man of all wounds.
He took it, cotton-wool fingers fumbling with the stopper, and upended it over his desperate tongue.
He felt nothing.
The volume of liquid was so miniscule he did not even feel it hit his mouth. He was aware of the coiling in his gut, the fog in his brain, the thumping inside his ears. He scrunched his eyes and prayed to the Emperor to accept this one last chance to demonstrate His power. But he felt nothing. Nothing at all.
His grip tightened around the vial, and he pressed it to his forehead until it cut in.
He would not go quietly. He knew all the lies now.
And if a man as powerful as Mesring was going to fall, then the earth was damn well going to shake.
Three
Lady Kavalanera Brassanas, knight abyssal of the Sisters of Silence, sat perfectly upright at the head of the table, hands on her armoured thighs. She was clad in antique crimson armour etched with ancient Terran designs, extinct languages, ideograms representative of concepts relevant to a mythic age. Parchment strips attached to the armour with wax seals decorated her body with an impenetrable, spiderish script. The collar of her battleplate was high, obscuring her mouth and nose and leaving only the dark-matter emptiness of her stare between her and the world. She was an untouchable, a blank, one in a trillion: a homozygous carrier of the mutant pariah gene that rendered her impervious to all forms of psyker assault. A useful trait, if an unnerving one to be around.
The High Lords, those that Koorland had demanded attend, adopted various manifestations of mental brace against the negative pressure of the woman’s mind, and the inexorable pull on their souls.
Juskina Tull and Fabricator General Kubik sat together along one side of the long table, with Admiral Lansung, Wienand and Gibran facing them on the other. Drakan Vangorich sat somewhere between attention and repose at the far end. Though not officially represented on the High Twelve, the Assassin had become as much a part of proceedings as the Lord Commander himself, and Koorland suspected that a few of his less informed peers had forgotten that they technically outranked him.
In spite of recent damage, the Clanium Library remained very much the overstuffed vanity project that Lansung had made of it. For all the Lord Admiral’s faults in matters of grand strategy and statecraft, however, given a small enough stage in which to operate he was a perfectly able military commander. The chronometric displays, hololiths, and loop projectors that had been installed at great expense in place of the books and other portable storage media that had previously filled the shelves actually, by accident or design, made for an excellent consultation chamber.
The snarling visage of an ork filled the big screens that surrounded the conference table, not frozen exactly but jerking from one millisecond to the next and then back again as though eager to be done but barred from moving on. A pair of fuzzy verticals ran though the image at the exact same spot on every display. The brute’s crusted nose and gaping mouth were up close to the capturing lens, its expression very much what one would expect from an ork having its skull crushed in a Black Templars Dreadnought’s power fist. With every twitch around the timepoint, the ork’s eyes were noticeably squashed closer together and then released back. Energetic emanations sparked from the cracks in the ork’s skull, generating strange, unsettling imagery on the data medium that became overt only when, as now, the playback was held.
Koorland was not at all surprised that everyone — barring Juskina Tull, he judged by her rapt expression — had already seen the Dzelenic IV footage. He was resigned to the fact that any information known to more than two people within the Palace’s walls quickly became common knowledge.
‘This,’ said Koorland, ‘as you are probably all by now aware, is live footage retrieved from a battle between a force of Black Templars under Venerable Magneric and an ork warband. It was returned to Terra at great cost by the Interdictor in the belief of her crew that what it shows is the weakness that we have all been looking for in the orks. Their psykers. We simply did not have the means to exploit this information until now.’
Ignoring the intrigued murmur from the Lords, Koorland reached across Lady Brassanas to depress the intercom switch set into a panel at the head of the table. ‘Brother Thane, have you located Magos Laurentis?’