Eventually she found what she sought. Amidst the blood-splashed dark blue of arbitrator riot-plate and the rustic browns and blacks of the cultists, she caught the flash of paler tan. She approached the body slowly and dragged the corpse of an arbitrator off the top, whose lower torso had been blown open by bolt fire.
Beneath, she found Nzogwu. The inquisitor had been shot through the back of the head, the upper part of his skull blown away. His eyes, curiously untouched by blood or brain matter, were open and staring. He hadn’t even had time to draw his plasma pistol. It had been a betrayal and an execution, carried out as one. At least it appeared to have been quicker than the fate of the rest of the retinue. She had found Tibalt, Janus and Ro in the Theocratica’s commandeered state room, all of them little more than shredded meat and spilled organs. Even the servo-skull had been shattered and broken.
Rannik looked at the body of her master for a long time. Then she reached down and closed his eyelids, before removing the front of his carapace armour and slipping a hand inside his fatigues. Her fingers brushed something cold and hard in his breast pocket, and she pulled it out. It was the inquisitor’s rosette, the badge of his authority. She wrapped it by its strap around her left wrist, then unbuckled the holster from around Nzogwu’s waist and fastened it around her own, plasma pistol and all. Then she sat down, next to the body.
It would be a long time before anyone came. She would have to move eventually, find unspoiled food, drinkable water. For now, however, there was nothing to be done, nothing other than to sit and wait, down among the dead and the damned.
She was neither, and that knowledge made her smile. A higher power had chosen her.
There would be a reckoning.
_________ Epilogue
The Tempestus Scions had beaten Rannik when they had first found her. She was transferred via shuttle to a holding cell and held through a day and a night cycle before Vex finally identified her. She had not been the only prisoner, he told her, but she was the only one still alive.
The Imperium had come to Piety V in force. Imperial Navy atmospheric air wings had filled the skies above Pontifrax, and Astra Militarum troop shuttles had followed soon after. They found death, and precious little else. The shrine-city was a smouldering ruin, black smoke still rising from the wreckage of its great basilicas and churches. The streets were choked with corpses and the refuse of battle.
The Guard spread their cordon, securing the planet’s collectives and the smaller reliquary towns. Most of them were the subject of riots and looting. Purge teams moved in and began the slow, grim business of weeding out the surviving xenos taint.
Rannik saw none of it. She was moved from her cell to an interrogation chamber, a spartan place of cold, gleaming metal surfaces and harsh lumens. She was seated, hands magnicled behind her back. Before her was a table, her effects set upon it. There was the plasma pistol, its charge cells removed, and her scarred and battered flak plate. Her arbitrator badge sat alongside Nzogwu’s rosette, gleaming in the buzzing light.
A klaxon sounded, and the door to the room scraped open. A tall man entered, clad in white robes. He was young, but the left side of his face was a mess of puckered, hideously burned flesh. He paused as the door banged shut behind him. His grey eyes looked Rannik up and down – grimy and blood-splattered, hair unkempt, her face bruised and swollen by the ministrations of her captors.
She returned his gaze, and smiled.
‘They’re calling it the Piety Five massacre,’ the man said slowly.
‘They’re right,’ Rannik replied. ‘It was a massacre. And worse.’
‘You witnessed it from the beginning?’
‘I did, Legate Inquisitor Frain,’ Rannik said, still smiling. ‘And I have so much to tell you.’
About the Author
Robbie MacNiven is a Highlands-born History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. He has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Carcharodons: Red Tithe, Carcharodons: Outer Dark, The Last Hunt and Legacy of Russ as well as the short stories ‘Redblade’, ‘A Song for the Lost’ and ‘Blood and Iron’ for Black Library. His hobbies include re-enacting, football and obsessing over Warhammer 40,000.
An extract from Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion.
I have considered it. Making an end to it all. Of course I have. I looked to the skies. I saw good souls succumb to weakness, and foul souls seize their moment.
What of it?
We all doubt.
I have lived over two hundred standard years. Too long, I think now. I have buried two wives, and seen seven children enter service and leave me for the void, and still I remain here, old, stubborn, in irritatingly good health despite an atmosphere of toxins both natural and political.
I am alone again now. Strange to say that, surrounded as I am by the quadrillions of the Throneworld, and yet it is truer now than it has ever been. The faces pass me by. I know all of them. I know their histories and their allegiances. I see the plots they hatch and hear the whispers they make under gilded archways, and I grow numb to it all, for it matters so little. Even now, hard against the End of Time, when the death rattle of our species has become audible even to the thick-eared, they still grasp for a little more of the things we have always desired – coin, power, knowledge, gratification.
We are yet animals, at heart. Nothing has changed that. Not even He could change us really, though I think He wanted to once. I like to believe that we must be a disappointment to Him. If we are not, then His ambitions for us must have been so very poor, and that strikes at all I believe and hold dear.
I am Alexei Lev Tieron, and I was a supremely powerful man. I was not a warrior, nor was I a witch, nor was I a commander of great vessels. My power came only from the Lex Imperialis – a cold source, but an ancient one. Like so many within the bureaucracy that swathes us, I was protected by words written on parchment. It gave me my station and defined it. Without this piece of paper, the meanest hive-ganger could have ended me with impunity – she would have ripped the jewels from my fingers and tried to sell them for weapons, and none would have come to my aid, for this galaxy only recognises strength.
But there are many kinds of strength. I learned this during schola, when I was as sickly as I am now hale, and the smooth-limbed scions of noble houses sought to crush my spirit with their brutishness. I might have died in that hateful place, had I not possessed the one talent that has preserved me ever since – the ability to deflect the ambition of others, to make it swerve, to direct hatred onto a target other than myself, to emerge from the lattice of competing egos intact and with no one aware of what veils have been cast over their stupid, powerful eyes.
No, I was not a witch. I just understood the pull of glory while having little attraction to it. I saw a man, or a woman, and I knew what they desired. I knew what to say to them, and I knew where to direct them. If they wished to do me harm, I found them prey more alluring. If they wished to help me, I extracted a suitable price. Thus I weaved my path between the paths of others, evading death while it devoured my rivals, until I reached the pinnacle, gazing back on a life of dissemblance and brokered deals. Compromise was my way, and for that I am despised, but that is as it should be. The Emperor has many servants, and we cannot all be power-armoured killers, can we?
I had many titles. This Imperium adores titles. The governor of the lowliest backwater rock will have a hundred names, each more ludicrous than the last. As for myself, only one really mattered: Cancellarius Senatorum Imperialis. Chancellor of the Imperial Council, in Low Gothic. Should you be inclined to trace that title back to its origins, you will find the true meaning of the words.
I was a doorkeeper. I watched people come and go. I made note of their intent, I had soft words with the ones who carried the weapons. I considered those who might be better suited to more exalted positions, and those who might be better extinguished. Over time, that capability g
enerated a mix of terror and attraction. Many were afraid of what I could do to them; others speculated wildly on what I might desire, so that they might buy me and make me their creature. I was always amused by both reactions, for I did not act from malice and I cannot be bought. I was a cipher. Even now I wish for nothing other than that which I already possess, for I possess a very great deal.
I served in that station for nearly eighty years. I saw the composition of the High Twelve change over that span as death and rivalry took its toll. Some of those lords were vicious, many of them narcissists. Two were positively psychotic, and I remain convinced that a slim majority were always technically insane.
And yet – here’s the thing – they were all quite superlative. You doubt this? You wish to believe that the masters of the Imperium are men and women of grasping inadequacy, forever squabbling over their own ambitions? Believe away. You’re a fool.
There are twelve of them. Twelve. Consider what that means. More human souls now live than have ever lived. In the absence of the active guidance of He who sits on the Throne – may His name be blessed – it is those twelve alone who have guided our ravenously fecund species through ten thousand years of survival, within a universe that most assuredly desires to chew on our collective souls and spit the gristle out.
Many lesser mortals might have wished, in their idle moments, that they too could have risen to the heights, and sat on a throne of gold and ordered the Imperium as it ought to have been ordered – but they did not do it, and these ones did. They faced down the demands of the Inquisition, the belligerence of Chapter Masters, the condescension of mutant Novators and the injunctions of semi-feral assassins, and held their power intact. They orchestrated every response to every xenos incursion and patiently calibrated the defences of the Endless War. They withstood insurrections and civil strife, zealotry and madness. Every one of them is a master or mistress of the most strenuous and the most acute capability, though they burn out quickly – I have seen it – for the cares of humanity are infinite and they themselves are most assuredly finite.
So mock them if you will, and tell yourself that they have fattened themselves on the labour of the masses and that they dwell in glorious ignorance while the galaxy smoulders to its inevitable ending. That is idiocy and it is indulgence. I served them for a good mortal span, judging them quietly even as they gave me their orders, and I tell you that though they had their many flaws, they were, and have always been, the greatest of us.
I never thought it would end. I never thought I would live to see the dawn of a day when the High Lords did not govern the Imperium as the highest arbiters of the Emperor’s Will. In this, as in so much else, I have lived to see my error. Now, as I contemplate what must come next, I understand the true import of what I witnessed.
For the first time since He drew mortal breath, they no longer rule. For the first time since the Emperor was placed on the Holy Golden Throne, the High Lords no longer govern the Imperium that preserves His memory.
This is how it happened.
I remember the date. I remember the time, and remember the angle of the dying sun through my banqueting chamber’s windows. You need not be detained with the figures, for all that has changed. In time, I suspect we will measure things from a different fulcrum, for they cannot remain as they were.
What is important? I do not know any more. My belly was full, as it was so often then. I was dining well from a table set with silver platters. All of it was real – fruits conveyed from the farthest reaches of the Segmentum in cryo-tanks. I felt the tight berries burst in my mouth as I chewed. One of those alone would have bought a hive spire on a lesser world, but we were on Terra, at the top of the pyramid, and barely gave it a thought.
Perhaps that offends you. Perhaps you think that we were insensitive to indulge ourselves at a time when so many wanted for the basic necessities of life.
I care nothing for your judgement. I care not for piety of any kind, and I do not regret the way we were then. We were sophisticates swimming in an infinity of resources, and we laboured for our luxuries. Above all, do not mistake indulgence for corruption – their elision is frequent but not inevitable, whatever some inquisitors might think.
I looked down the table, and saw the balance of power arranged at every place setting. The mighty were decked in their heavy gowns of office, weighed down with medallions and caskets. Their flesh was bronzed or black or gold, painted with the filigree of fine Martian improvements. They murmured to one another, keeping heads bowed so the words did not travel beyond the hearing of their present counterpart. They were accompanied by pleasure-companions – catamites, courtesans and confidantes, who were arrayed even more spectacularly in jerkins and gowns of silk and ruffs of lace. All skin was flawless, all eyes were bright, all conversation was fluid.
I held court, and enjoyed doing so. I saw the Lord Constable of the Synopticon lean in close to the neck of the Mistress Plenary of Catacombs and breathe something intended to be scandalous. She absorbed the information without reaction, which was little surprise, as she knew he was destined for removal in a week’s time. She knew that because I had told her. She was the sponsor of the one who would replace him, so I judged it prudent to keep her informed, only asking for the standard level of discretion in return.
They were all at the same game, my guests – angling, jostling, manoeuvring – and that gave me no little pleasure, as they were all stepping, to a greater or lesser extent, to the moves I had given them.
I took another bite, then reached for a golden goblet of opalwine. My hands were heavy with silver, my arms draped with a cloak of thick velvet. Only as I drew the rim to my lips did I notice the presence hovering at my arm.
I had no servitors in my employ. I detest them, and even now will not admit them to my chambers. All my staff were human-normal, trained at the finest scholae and destined for positions of their own within the Adeptus Terra. This was one of those who had excelled – a student plucked from the Schola Havrath before he had turned fifteen standard, now my poison-catcher, his blood swimming with anti-toxins.
‘Lord,’ he whispered softly, lowering his head.
I turned to him. ‘What is it, Galeas?’
‘Forgive me. The Master awaits in your reception chamber.’
I did not need to ask which one. There were three Masters among the Twelve. The Master of the Astronomican, Leops Franck, would not have travelled here without warning, for he never went without an entourage of over a hundred attendants and that required planning; while the Master of the Administratum, Irthu Haemotalion, would not have deigned to visit me, but would have required me to visit him, such were the requirements of precedence that he set great store by. That left one: the Master of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Zlatad Aph Kerapliades.
My heart sank. I was enjoying myself. Kerapliades was a bore, a man atrophied by his work and shrivelled into a drab kernel of pessimism. If he had come here, it would be due to some dire portent delivered by his ranks of dream-speakers. The portents scryed by Kerapliades were always dire, and had been since his first blinded interpreter had been bound to the God-Emperor’s holy will.
But he was a High Lord. If he was here, then I needed to be with him. I observed rank, for all my many sins – not even my many enemies ever accused me otherwise.
‘Thank you,’ I said to Galeas in the closed-speech of our household. ‘Ensure he’s comfortable – I will be there presently.’
I did not move immediately. Others would have observed Galeas leaving, and to follow him too swiftly would have invited speculation. I ate some more, I drank some more, I planted a seed of gossip in the mind of the Urbanius Cardinal of the Opheliate Tendency and exchanged pleasantries with a major general of the Astra Militarum segmentum command.
When the time was right, when the ebb and flow of the conversation had taken its own course, I rose from my seat and pulled my robes aroun
d me.
‘You’ll have to get along without me for a little while,’ I said. ‘Try not to eat everything, or each other, while I’m gone.’
Then I was out into the corridors, padding along the polished floors of my domain. I was dimly aware of movement in the shadows – my cadres of close protection bodyguards, hanging within las-shot range, tracking my every move. After so many years I barely noticed them, and even had they not been clad in cameleo-plate I might have forgotten they were there altogether.
My aide-de-camp Anna-Murza Jek fell in alongside me, her long gown whispering over the black marble.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked, never breaking stride.
‘He’s flanked by his nulls,’ she said, speaking quickly as she always did. ‘That makes things difficult. This is a guess – he’s worried about Cadia.’
‘I’m worried about Cadia.’
‘I don’t have much else.’
‘Run a grid-search over his senior staff movements.’
‘Already under way.’
‘How many of our people do we have in the Scholastia?’
‘Thirty-seven.’
‘Make contact with them all, and have reports in my chamber before dawn.’
‘Already under way.’
I reached the doors to my reception chamber, turned to Jek and smiled. ‘When you’re done, have a drink.’
‘If there’s time, lord,’ she said, bowing and withdrawing.
The doors opened.
My reception chamber was a wonderful place. It ought to have been – I had eighty years to refine it. The objects within it were the most exquisite, the decoration a study in good taste. On occasion, despite all the changes, I still spend time there, enjoying it. The High Lords have their own palaces, and the spires of the Senatorum are the most magnificent in the entire galaxy, but I still prefer the oasis I made there. It acts as the exemplar of the message I wished to send at all times – that we are more than guns and fury. We are an ancient species with subtle tastes. We are intelligent. And we are still here.
Carcharodons: Outer Dark Page 29
