Senatorum ushers and Palace staff with pinched faces and grubby uniforms waited fractiously by the staircases to the Great Chamber’s few standing galleries that remained open. Hektor Rosarind, the Chancellor of the Imperial Estates, had outlawed the use of water for washing. Koorland had even heard of Chartist vessels returning to the asteroid belt and the Jovian moons in search of water ice and — the odd floating rock aside — they had been exhausted millennia before the Great Crusade. The tired officials drifted out of the way as Koorland walked towards the Great Chamber.
No one made a path for himself like a Space Marine with a purpose.
‘Word is in from Kill-Team Stalker,’ said Thane, marching in step behind his left shoulder. ‘The Adeptus Astra Telepathica interpreted the message this morning, and it was handed to me personally by Anwar’s staff.’
‘Thank him for his alacrity and tell him to begin forwarding messages to the Inquisition from now on. Meme-banks containing the kill-teams’ rendezvous coordinates, and our subsequent destinations, will be couriered to your ship at once.’
‘This clandestine skulking sits ill with me,’ muttered Bohemond.
The two Chapter Masters walked a step behind, garbed in plain robes. Those of the Fist Exemplar were grey, the Black Templar’s bone white, a black surplice over the top with the Sigismund cross emblazoned across the breast. In accordance with convention, the pair had surrendered their arms to the Lucifer Blacks before entering the Inner Palace, but Bohemond, as always, retained the Sword of Sigismund, belted at his side. The High Marshal regarded the genuflecting mortal dignitaries with a curl of his melted lip, his lidless augmetic eye picking them off one by one.
‘I despise every second,’ he finished.
‘The Beast must not be allowed to become aware of our plans,’ Koorland said. ‘Not until it is too late.’
‘I am scarcely aware of them. How then can I fairly call them plans?’
‘You will have coordinates of your own, brother. I trust you will be with me at the finish.’
Bohemond’s good eye spasmed. ‘You will find Abhorrence there ahead of you.’
‘I will hold you to your word, brother.’ He glanced over the other shoulder. ‘I will be making Alcazar Remembered my flagship. You will cede the remainder of your fleet strength to Issachar’s command.’
Thane bowed in acquiescence. There was no pride in the Chapter Master. Disaster had stalked the Fists Exemplar since the outbreak of the great Waaagh. They had lost their home world, Eidolica, half their fleet at Vandis, been further diminished by the battles for Mars, Caldera, and then Ullanor. They were the wider Imperium in microcosm. They no longer had the capacity to conduct this scale of operation alone.
‘For Dorn, brother.’
Bohemond watched his brother Chapter Master depart with a scowl, arms crossed over his surplice, and glanced towards the heavy adamantium-reinforced oak doors at the corridor’s end. They trembled slightly under the low bass bombardment of a powerful augmitter system. A few dulled words drifted down the corridor like smoke from an impact crater.
‘We need to talk about the Ecclesiarch.’
The reminder brought Koorland a flare of renewed anger and guilt. The anger was partly at himself, the resentment of which only goaded his temper further. ‘He left me little choice.’
‘Regardless, your actions leave a hole that needs to be filled, and now. It is in times of darkness and privation that the words of the witch or the heretic will be heeded. The people need certainty. They need the guidance of their Ecclesiarch.’ He dug into his habit and brought forth a data-slate. ‘At my invitation, the Adeptus Ministorum have provided a list of potential successors.’
With a sigh, Koorland stopped walking. He turned, enclosed his brother’s shoulder in one etched and damascened gauntlet.
The Black Templars’ conversion to their own variant of the Imperial Creed had, for some time, been the most open of open secrets amongst the sons of Dorn. Perhaps it would be better to stamp down hard, now, before such practices could embed and pervert. Vulkan had shown him a better way, and he would not have the Black Templars recalled as the sons of Dorn who had stumbled down the Word Bearers’ path.
‘The Emperor neither recognised His own divinity, nor encouraged His worship. Indeed, He enforced the opposite point with more than mere words. Such practices will no longer be sanctioned in His Imperium.’
The ruined, semi-augmetic face that glared back at him was expressionless, but the flesh eye bulged with an emotion that Koorland did not believe he had ever felt and did not recognise. Bohemond’s voice was quiet, like a melta beam, as he withdrew the slate and returned it to the fold in his habit. ‘Tell that to Magneric.’
Koorland let his breath out slowly.
It had been too late to save Lorgar too.
Furious suddenly, he turned and flung an arm towards the Great Chamber’s heavy doors. A handful of Chapter serfs in dulled yellow habits stood there with hands clasped, surrounded by a full squad of Lucifer Blacks in mirror-black ballistic carapace and softly humming shock-glaives.
‘Open the doors,’ Koorland boomed, stunning the hallway to silence. ‘I did not summon the people to hide from them.’
Great tiers of seating rose above Koorland on all sides as he strode down the processional to the dais. There were several other aisles through the auditorium seating, bringing in lesser lords, military officers, and senior officials from other wings of the Inner Palace, but most of them were roped off. Rubble was heaped up, sometimes covered with banners, but the attempt at concealment only made the wounds more obvious and drew the eye, from a deep-seated human instinct for self-preservation, to the ceiling. A piece of alien moon-rock extruded through the angelic frescoes. Most of the larger fragments from the attack moon’s destruction had missed the Palace or been broken up by the air-defence grids. This was one of the smaller ones. It was about the size of a Land Raider.
A large circular dais lit from multiple rigs and occupied by twelve high-backed chairs dominated the centre of the auditorium. It rotated slowly, almost imperceptibly, like the slow tick of a bomb mechanism, but Koorland’s genetics had been painstakingly coded to render him acutely conscious of such subtle changes.
The noise of several thousand, a fraction of what the intact arena could have held, rose exponentially as Koorland’s arrival was noted. Word spread. The clamour grew. Even with his great genetic gifts he could not separate the individual voices that cried out to him, but he recognised the fear and the doubt that Bohemond had diagnosed, the desperation for some sliver of hope. Whole districts had been lost to hive quakes and the calamities wrought by the unintended destruction of the ork moon. Millions had died in the Proletarian Crusade. Millions more had perished since. Rare skills had been lost forever. People starved. Families froze in the rubble of their homes for want of the fuel or blankets or warm food that Terra had long since exhausted the raw materials to manufacture for itself.
But here stood an Imperial Fist, the golden embodiment of endurance.
A symbol.
Koorland felt the weight of their attention. A tingle on the back of his neck, under the grizzled skin between his temples and eyes. Was this what Rogal Dorn had felt when he had manned the defences of Terra against the Arch-Heretic? Was it a feeling that the Emperor Himself would have recognised, as He stood upon this very site to declare His Crusade to retake the galaxy for mankind? The feeling that the world about them was about to be changed.
Tobris Ekharth of the Administratum currently had the podium, but stalled mid-sentence as Koorland took the steps onto the dais. The small man coughed nervously into the forest of pickups, scratchily echoing himself to every corner of the ruined colosseum. He dabbed a few droplets of sweat from his forehead on an embroidered cloth and leaned unnecessarily into the pickup field, blinking under the lights.