‘A thousand thanks,’ Vangorich said, ‘for your confidence and your service to a beleaguered Imperium.’
‘If there is anything more I can do to serve the Imperium,’ Creutzfeldt said, lowering his head, ‘then do not hesitate to call upon me.’ He brought a fat thumb up to his lips. A tiny cut bled on the digit and the cardinal sucked it clean.
‘As you say, cardinal,’ Vangorich said, ‘woe betide the foe that underestimates the Imperium of Man. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are other matters that demand my attention.’
‘My lord,’ Creutzfeldt said, bowing and backing away from the Grand Master. He turned and tapped his way along the battlements with his smouldering crosier.
Vangorich watched him go. The cardinal would be making his way through the monstrous halls and chambers of the Palace, back to the Ecclesiarchal quarters set aside for his visit. There he would take ill and crash to the polished floor of his chambers. For where bullet and blade had failed to fell Abriel Creutzfeldt on Fendrik’s World, a microscopic pinprick of lethal poison would end the cardinal. He would be found dead, his heart having finally given out after the many trials of his hard and illustrious life.
Vangorich regretted the decision. He liked Creutzfeldt. As he knelt before him, the poison-tip slivers of crystal he wore in his hair waiting to pierce his hood and the cardinal’s unsuspecting flesh, he had wavered. The cardinal would have made an excellent High Lord of the Adeptus Ministorum, an Ecclesiarch the floundering Imperium deserved and needed. Unfortunately, Vangorich’s need for secrecy and security trumped all other concerns. He had let his guard down. Expressed genuine fears and given voice to thoughts a High Lord of Terra could not afford to have. He could not allow word of such weakness to leave the cardinal’s lips, and so he asked for a blessing, and the cardinal’s hand on his head.
As ever, Vangorich was a walking arsenal of silent death. If he were to be searched — a scandal for a High Lord of Terra — the Adeptus Custodes would find no blades or pistols. He carried disguised and concealed weaponry that the blunt security measures of the Palace were ill-equipped to detect. He had made a choice to deploy that weaponry and to end an ally he could not now afford to have.
These were the dark choices of a man of his station, and it was time to make more. While humanity died by the world and the Adeptus Astartes fought for their superhuman lives, Drakan Vangorich would not allow Terra to fall. Like a colossal edifice tottering on faltering supports, the Imperium needed to be strengthened. Reinforced. Structural weaknesses would be torn out and new foundations established. It needed men and women who would lift a smashed Imperium upon their shoulders, rather than cowards content to wander through the wreckage full of fears and excuses, cowards who hid within the walls of their Emperor’s fortress — dead men walking everyone else to their doom through the halls and corridors of the Palace.
Vangorich thought on the bodies he would have to step over to secure such a future. With worlds dying, primarchs dying, First Founding Chapters being exterminated to a man, Drakan Vangorich wasn’t sure that anyone would notice.
Three
Cold. Dark.
The nightside of Inwit was a swirling black storm of pain and numbness. Out on the ice wastes, away from the baroque glory of the hives and the welcome warmth of a distant sun, there was a solemn gathering. When the Adeptus Astartes entered a system or descended upon a world, such arrivals were usually accompanied by destruction and bombast. With orbital bombardment and the descent of drop pods. With death.
Not so with Inwit. The ice world hung glistening in the void, its peace left reverently undisturbed. It was an important world of the Imperium. A capital of a system cluster. A sector Naval base. The assembly ground for local Astra Militarum regiments.
The status of these establishments meant little to the Space Marines. What did matter was the history of the frozen world, for it had witnessed the arrival of a primarch. Inwit had been the hallowed home world of Rogal Dorn.
It had been appropriate, therefore, following the horrifying events on Ullanor, that the bearers of Dorn’s genetic legacy should congregate on Inwit. In silence. In mourning. In unity. The Imperial Fists had been destroyed. The last of their noble number had lost his life, and with him a Chapter of the First Founding had been lost to the Imperium. Only their Successors remained, each Excoriator, Crimson Fist, Black Templar, Soul Drinker, Executioner, Iron Knight and Fist Exemplar carrying with him all that was left of the Imperial Fists. All that was left of Dorn. So there, on the dark side of Inwit, in the flesh-searing cold, the Successors of the Imperial Fists gathered to honour their fallen brethren.
Without informing the planetary governor, the Admiral of the Fleet or the ruling huscarls, Adeptus Astartes frigates made their silent and sombre approach before deploying their gunships. Using their training and knowledge of Inwit’s defences, representatives of the seven Successor Chapters made atmospheric entry on the dark side of the planet without being detected. It was not difficult for the Space Marines, especially with every eye and augur directed at the void in expectation of the Beast’s coming. The rolling in of the green tide. The arrival of the apocalypse.
Coming in low across the predator-stalked wilderness that was the Splintering Land, Thunderhawks homed in on a ritual beacon — a beacon announcing in code the impromptu inception of the Feast of Blades. As reigning champions, the Fists Exemplar had the right to announce the Feast. With the Imperial Fists destroyed and the Chapter Masters of the Successors due to meet, Thane could think of no better way to commemorate the loss of their noble brothers.
Sending for the Sword of Sebastus — the blade awarded to the Chapter whose champion emerged victorious — Thane had summoned the Chapter Masters of the Imperial Fists Successors to Inwit. Dorn had become a man there; more than a man. He had led his Legion into the Heresy and into the trials of the Iron Cage that had been waiting for them thereafter. He emerged carrying the Sword of Sebastus, a weapon that came to be known as the Dornsblade. It was the honour of Chapters victorious in the Feast of Blades to receive the relic-weapon’s custodianship. With their reigning champion, Kalman Volk, lost on Eidolica, Thane decided to honour all three of Volk, Chapter Master Koorland and the Dornsblade by taking the champion’s place himself.
Thane stepped out onto the frozen floor of the arena. Without his plate, the Chapter Master was a rime-encrusted sculpture of scars and muscle. On this occasion, it had been decided that the combatants should fight not in power armour, but in carapace armour, as had been the tradition in ages past. In their frozen fists each gripped a simple gladius, weapons taken from the frigates’ fighting cages. While still holding an edge, the battered blades were notched and simple in design. With every member of every Successor Chapter needed to defend the Imperium, no one wanted to risk an accidental death.
Pain had been the path of the Imperial Fists, however. They indulged their agonies in the pain-glove, on their fortress battlements and in the bloody siege-breaking assaults for which they were famous. While deaths were undesirable during any Feast, the ceremony demanded that the combatants gave each other their best. That meant the brutality of bruises, sliced flesh, smashed teeth, broken bones and sense knocked clean from skulls. Through the infliction of such pain, one battling participant upon another, each Space Marine sought to achieve communion with their brothers and their primarch.
It was snowing. Flakes sizzled on the roaring braziers that burned about the arena, their guttering flames struggling in the stormy darkness. Beneath his boots, Thane felt the ice creak. The arena had been hastily hewn from the bleak landscape of the Splintered Land. Black mountains rose about them on all sides, and the hollow between had been decorated with blocks of ice to create an arena of frozen angularity. While blocks were used to create obstacles within, the ice forming the arena’s exterior was crowded with the silhouettes of Space Marines. The armoured shapes of Crimson Fists standing with Fists Exemplar. Soul Drinkers side by side with Executioners. Iron Knights holding their own before the storm while Excoriators exchanged solemn encouragements with Black Templars. Chapter serfs and servitors of all the Chapters moved about their masters, seeing to their sparse needs. Gunships idled on the terraced mountainsides, providing heat and shelter for those that needed it. Meanwhile, the icy maelstrom and perpetual darkness closed in, the Feast of Blades all but lost in the howl and bluster of Inwit’s fury.