Whereas Horus had been the half-forgotten threat of the past and the Beast the peril of the stormy present, Vangorich wondered what other dangers lay ahead for humanity. What revenants and warped monstrosities might the dread Eye of Terror vomit forth? What of the xenos? The orks had smashed the Imperium into a flaming wreck. What alien civilisations — forgotten, long dead or dying — were awaiting a cataclysmic resurgence? What of the species yet to achieve sentience, and monsters of the void yet to be discovered? Vangorich suspected that even if humanity survived the Beast, a weakened Imperium would embolden other warlords and galactic predators to take their opportunity for glory. Every broken world was a smouldering mountain of rubble, in whose shadow the wretched citizens of the Imperium would toil to rebuild their cathedrals, their cities and their lives. A living advertisement in stone and flesh that humanity was vulnerable to attack.
Such disturbing thoughts had led a restless Vangorich to walk the walls of the Palace. Finding himself in the inner arcades, he watched the bleary sun break the horizon from the Investiary. Here, the mighty primarchs had been immortalised in stone.
Mighty no more, they were now but memories. Their statues stood on towering plinths, bearing stone weapons and sculpted in poses of action and agency. It was the way the Imperium chose to remember them. The communal lie. The feeble-minded had little time for uncomfortable truths. From the lowliest gutter wretch to the lords of surrounding smog-wreathed spires, all carried the memory of the primarchs with pride. They were the sons of the Emperor, the warlords responsible for a golden age. Their shoulders, like pillars, had held the Imperium up above the flood of alien filth that washed through the galaxy.
They did not remember them as the squabbling siblings they had truly been, their hearts beating with jealousies and resentments that ran even deeper than those of mortals. They saw them as the pinnacle of human development — magnificent specimens with minds of tactical superiority and the engineered bodies of demi-gods. But everything about them had been superhuman, including the bitterness and hatred they harboured for one another. It amused Vangorich somewhat that the ancient architects had positioned the primarchs’ plinths in a ring about the circular arcade, so that they might regard one another — stony-faced — in an eternal stand-off.
Their choices and their inability to act until it was too late had been the doom of men a thousand years before. The primarchs were gone now — all of them. And in their place sat pompous oafs on thrones, great not of mind or body, but of reach. The High Lords of Terra had unrivalled power and influence. Like the primarchs, the Lords could damn the Imperium with a single decision. The galaxy was theirs to neglect. As the rising of the Beast had proven, their hunger for power and petty politicking had made the Imperium vulnerable. They had made humanity weak. Their existence had been, was and would continue to be a threat to everything the Emperor had worked so hard to build.
Lansung and Verreault held the Imperium to ransom with their ships and their soldiers. Kubik’s true allegiance belonged not to the Imperium but to the Machine-God and Mars. Wienand was free to pursue any dark agenda she wished, ready to see corruption in all who stood in her way, while Vernor Zeck was content in his blindness to the actual corruption before his very eyes. As for Gibran, Sark, Anwar, Tull and Ekharth — their crimes were dangerous incompetence. Their entangled institutions were a house of tarot cards upon which the future of the Imperium was written. When they were at their most needed, their structures had nearly collapsed, and the dominion of mankind with them. This category would no doubt also include whoever was elected to fill the seat of Ecclesiarch, for there were only such men to choose from. Who could know which of these parasites would be chosen for the seat of Lord Commander? All would crave such a position, for leeches always sought out the richest veins from which to feed.
This would not stand, Vangorich decided. He would not be remembered by history so. He would not be some footnote at the bottom of a vellum scroll, buried in a dusty vault. He would not be cursed for his inaction. He was there. A frequenter of the Palace. A member of the Council. An entrusted servant of the Emperor. He could achieve more in a day than even the most powerful Imperial subjects could in a score of lifetimes. The Imperium had been brought to its knees, and might not survive at all. Even if Thane returned victorious, it could not be rebuilt upon the weak foundations the High Lords of Terra would provide. The Emperor’s dominion in the galaxy had to be inviolable and absolute. It had to be strong, and such strength came from an adamantium will — the will to act and see the Imperium’s future preserved.
Vangorich stopped to look up. Mighty Vulkan, cast in stone, stood above him, his hammer held high. The expression on his face was one of potent resolution — like a smouldering volcano, building to blow. On the next towering plinth along, Rogal Dorn cast his grim unsmiling visage down upon the Grand Master. Dour. Intractable. Indomitable. So many of his sons had been lost in the war against the Beast. Those of Dorn’s bloodline, more than anyone else, had paid for the High Lord’s abuses. Looking up at him now, Vangorich found it uncanny how closely Koorland had resembled his genic father.
Vangorich thought on Koorland’s execution of Mesring and nodded to himself. He considered Vulkan’s wise words and his condemnation of the High Lords. A primarch had denounced the Council as unfit for purpose. The son of a primarch had demonstrated how such a problem might achieve resolution. They were not traitors to the Imperium or madmen. They were heroes.
The Grand Master of Assassins shivered as the last of the dawn’s scattered rays penetrated his deep hood. A cold front had moved in over the Palace, carrying with it dirty clouds and acidic rain that sizzled upon the marble. The capital was in for a storm, it seemed. It might have been a new dawn above the Palace and for the Imperium, but thunder was rolling in.
Guy Haley
The beheading
Chapter One
Death to the Beast!
The citizens of Terra crowded the streets in their millions. They sang out their praises to the Emperor with tears in their eyes. They roared their approval until they were hoarse. After months of terror, there was victory.
Terra’s most beloved sons were coming home, and the Throneworld had found its voice.
Maximus Thane led the heroes of the Imperium, standing tall in the cupola of the Land Raider Dorn’s Fist. The Imperial Fists marched in tight lockstep, their yellow armour gleaming in the smog-choked morning of Terra. The Imperial Fists were newly gathered as brothers still, and nearly half of those who had taken up the yellow and black to fight on Ullanor had fallen, but they marched as one: Excoriator, Executioner, Iron Knight, Soul Drinker, Black Templar, Crimson Fist and Fist Exemplar had cast off their prior identities and subsumed them into the deeper brotherhood of Dorn. Old ties dissolved into the rebirth of a greater past. Continuation would be their legacy, though none outside the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes would ever know the Imperial Fists had fallen.
Behind the reformed Imperial Fists came representatives of a dozen other Chapters of the First, Second and Third Foundings. They were small contingents in the main, but in some of them were contained every remaining member of their orders. The victory against the Beast had cost the Imperium dear.
After the marching Space Marines snaked a trail of armoured vehicles ten kilometres long, all brightly painted in the honourable heraldries of the Emperor’s chosen. Behind them the ground quaked to the tread of thousands of Astra Militarum Guardsmen, macroclades of Martian skitarii, and plodding, mighty mechanisms of the Legio Cybernetica. Machines and men of every conceivable type walked proudly past the Tortestrian Gate, Ballad Gate, and Bastion Ledge. Overhead soared flights of Navy Aeronautica fighters and Chapter Thunderhawks. Above them, the dim shapes of starships at low anchor coasted across the brown sky, serene as icebergs.