‘What do you mean?’
‘Stop it, Drakan!’ she shouted. She circled, searching for traps and Assassins, wishing that she’d thought more calmly and ordered a kill-team to accompany her. Instead she’d rushed to the Inquistorial Fortress’ space port and taken the first craft she’d seen to get here. She regretted her haste. ‘He’s dying.’
‘I am so sorry to hear that,’ he said, and looked like he meant it. ‘He is a little stiff, but a good man in the most fundamental of ways. It is no wonder that you two have become quite close, which is amusing really, seeing as he tried to kill you. And now you’re here, threatening to kill me for allegedly killing him. Honestly, the contradictions of this life never fail to entertain me.’
‘Drop your act, Drakan!’
He shook his head. ‘This is no act,’ he said almost regretfully. ‘This is truly who I am.’
‘Give me the antidote,’ she said. She chanced a step towards him. Vangorich sat innocently in his lifeless garden in the ossified heart of the Imperium. She thought of the synthetic forest in the Inquisitorial Fortress. As pale a reflection of the past as it was, it was still alive. In the Sigillite’s Retreat there was only death.
‘I am afraid there is no antidote,’ he said. ‘Not if he has already collapsed. It will be a matter of time now. I am sorry.’
‘You admit it, then.’
‘I believe I just did, yes,’ he said with a little shrug.
‘Why did you do it? The crisis is over. The orks are done. We should be rebuilding.’
‘And we will,’ he said. ‘Which is precisely why I had to do it. Veritus would never agree with me, you see. I wanted the poison to be an insurance policy, the way I did with Mesring. You spoilt that for me, remember? You might agree with me though,’ he said speculatively.
A cold, sinking feeling clutched at Wienand. Her pistol wavered in her hand. The High Lords. Where were the other High Lords, right now? ‘What do you mean, Vangorich?’
‘The Officio Assassinorum is a check on the follies of empire,’ said Vangorich. ‘I know what it can do, what an abuse of power it could be to use it as the Emperor intended it to be used. That is why I have avoided acting. Until now. I was hoping Veritus could be controlled — not like Mesring, you understand, I never had any respect for him. I just needed enough leverage to convince Veritus what we are doing is right.’
‘You are Lord Protector. Why do you need him under your control?’
‘I did not want to be Lord Protector. I wanted Veritus in the role, I really did. I thought Veritus would do a much better job of it than me, though of course I needed some control. Thane flushed me out, and I’ve had to act.’
‘You were going to give him an antidote, but in small doses.’
‘Yes. But I haven’t, because there’s no need now. It’s gone too far.’ Vangorich made an apologetic face, like a scholam child caught stealing sweet treats. ‘Do you think that squabbling rabble in the Senatorum would actually make things better, when all they’ve done for a thousand years is stuff their greedy faces with the wealth of the Imperium? I didn’t want this, Wienand. I had no choice.’
‘Oh, Vangorich!’ she said in despair. ‘What have you done?’
‘Only what needs to be done. Thane saw that too, I think. If I look at it in a certain way, I might even say that I have his tacit permission. Don’t you see? The Imperium is as petrified as the wood of this bench.’ He patted the wood soundlessly. ‘If it is to come into leaf again, the old wood must be disposed of, and the new given chance to germinate. Try to see it as I do: we have the opportunity to instigate a new era for mankind!’
‘You are not the Emperor, you’re not the Sigillite.’
‘One of those people can do nothing, the other is dead so long I am sure his abilities and wisdom have been exaggerated greatly. You know what time and legend can do to a man’s reputation. We can never live up to the past because we invent it to punish ourselves. It was probably no better or worse than our own era.’
‘I can’t let you do it,’ she said.
‘You’d kill me? Then who would be the assassin?’ he said. His humour was tinged with sadness. ‘Best leave that sort of thing to me. It is what I am, after all. I am trying, Wienand, not like those fools in the High Twelve. I aspire to the greatness of the past — they’re simply overawed by it. Vulkan, a son of the Emperor Himself, denounced the Council. Koorland killed Mesring. Thane made me Lord Protector. It all makes sense. They have to die. I thought you of all people would understand that.’
Vangorich stating his murderous design out loud released something savage in Wienand. She fired, putting a las-bolt through Vangorich’s forehead.
Vangorich flickered. He blinked sympathetically at her. She opened up, putting beams of light through every part of the Grand Master, but they passed harmlessly through him. The wood of the bench smouldered. She looked around for the loops and projectors of a hololith unit, but could see none. The illusion was totally convincing, the best she had ever seen, lacking the ghost-like quality the majority of projections possessed.
‘A shame,’ sighed Vangorich’s projection. ‘I thought you would probably react like that, but I was holding out hope you would not. We really should work together. Now it seems I’ve some work to win you over. No matter, you’ll see the light.’
Wienand held up her vox-button to her mouth.
‘It’s too late, Wienand, you can’t save them,’ said Vangorich. ‘The order is given. The High Lords die today.’
Chapter Nine
The beheading
Long before dawn, Abdulias Anwar rose from his bed in an unlit cell. There were grander apartments in the Silent Mansions, but Anwar eschewed them. The terrible losses the Beast had inflicted had impelled him towards humility.
All astropaths were blind, but very few of them were sightless. Some pieced together a patchwork world gathered from foreseen events, apprehending their surroundings through anticipation. The more powerful might see through the eyes of other people. Some saw the world as a blinding vista of soul-light, a few sensed the echoes of the past that wove themselves psychically into the fabric of the universe. Theirs was a sad fate, constantly subjected to the ghostly replays of emotional events, many of great horror.
As the head of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Abdulias Anwar was a telepath of extraordinary ability. The human mind was an open book to him, if it were not carefully warded. His world was one of phantom shapes, a vision of sorts that wove the souls of living beings into a map of energy. It had been so long since Anwar had seen a face the memory had faded into the depths of his extraordinarily long life. Physical beauty was meaningless to him. What he did see was spiritual beauty. The souls of the living shone. Each person was a network of fibres, alive with the pulse of thought. The souls of good men were white, those of less noble tendency red. Blue indicated great sorrow, those burdened with their duties showed a dull yellow, and so on in a million hues. No man or woman was a single shade, save a rare few. Most were subtle blendings that changed from moment to moment.
From the reflected spirit light of humanity, Anwar could discern the shapes of the material world, albeit dully, a psychic false-colour rendering in blues and blacks. Behind this lurked the ever present maelstrom of the warp. Not all telepaths had the dread cosmic truth in front of them all the time like Anwar did, but he had been luckier than others and had learned to mask its presence.
Above it all was the light of the Astronomican, a constant beacon that shone through the intervening rock of Terra as if it were smoke, the bonfire of souls that bound the Imperium into one coherent entity. When he was younger, the undying blaze had kept him from sleeping. What it represented had terrified him. As he aged it had become his greatest comfort.