Ashes of the Imperium: The Scouring, Book 1, page 21
Then Guilliman stood.
‘My brothers,’ he said. ‘Lords of the Imperium. I wish I were not standing here addressing you now. I wish it were my father, who has sacrificed so much to preserve His realm. His are the words that ought to be spoken here, and His are the policies that ought rightfully to guide us.’
The audience listened carefully, as did the other High Lords and primarchs. The air felt charged.
‘I wish also that I could tell you more concerning His condition. The truth is that there is much we still do not know. He lives. He commands the mechanisms of the Throne, which in turn enables Terra to prosper. But He does not speak, nor does He move. Yet. We believe that He will soon return to His rightful place at the head of this Council, and we will welcome that day, for in His absence we are but pale shadows.’ He hesitated. Prayto rarely saw his master display much emotion – anger, on a few occasions, but even that rarely. Suddenly he seemed to be infected by the general air of uncertainty, as if for the first time he was truly aware of the enormity of taking control of not just the Legion, but of everything. The creator was gone, and only His subjects, childlike and bewildered, remained.
Then control returned – it had only been a fraction of a second. ‘But we cannot linger in grief. Decisions must be made. The way things were done in the past was not perfect – too often intentions were not made clear. Uncertainty was allowed to linger. So this Council has been convened, in sight of all, to chart the way ahead. Never again can we afford to be divided. From this day forward, we must act as one.’
They were fine words, but Prayto found he didn’t yet believe them. He still didn’t see how the Council could end with anything other than Dorn’s intentions being adopted. He had long since learned to have faith in his primarch – history had vindicated that over and over – and yet with Vulkan here, and the Wolf King returned, surely there was no prospect for restraint any longer.
‘I announce today that Terra is secured,’ Guilliman went on. ‘While operations continue across the globe, we now have confidence that the Palace and the Himalazian plateau are cleared of the enemy. The void war over Terra was short and decisive – the greater part of their fleet was destroyed in orbit. Forces under my command have driven the remains from the Sol System, and have commenced targeted attacks on residual elements attempting escape. We judge that all surviving enemy assets are in full flight, and that their only objective is to escape destruction. In pursuance of the security of the Throneworld, I have ordered elements of our battlefleet to begin withdrawal to the core. No Thirteenth Legion vessels have passed beyond the Mandeville delimiter. My intention, and the focus of our strategos’ work, is now to bring Luna back into compliance. Substantial enemy forces remain stranded there, and though they have limited capacity to strike us here at present, the threat cannot be allowed to grow. Intelligence tells us that the enemy established facilities for the rapid production of Astartes fighters, making use of gene-looms created by the Selenar cults. This is an alpha-level threat to the integrity of the entire system, and must therefore be eliminated. A full-scale assault, making use of all Legion resources in-system, is my intention.’
He finished speaking, letting the words sink in.
Inevitably, after a short pause, it was Dorn who responded.
‘I will echo the words my brother has spoken concerning our father,’ he said. ‘But otherwise, I must be blunt. The course he advocates is, as he knows, madness. It is caution when we should be throwing caution aside. It gives our enemy, whom we defeated by straining every sinew here on Terra, just what they require: time. As of this moment, they are in disarray. Their confidence and their power, which we faced for months here in this place, have evaporated. This is the moment. This is the moment to strike them from the galaxy once and for all. Luna will be reconquered in time. Mars will be reconquered in time, and its forges placed back under the control of the esteemed Fabricator Locum. But now we must be bold. We must cast aside restraint. We must turn our ships around and send them back into the void, full speed, and overtake those who caused this thing. They still live. They still live. That is the greatest shame of all. We must hunt them down, one by one, until every last one has been eliminated.’
‘But where can they flee to, brother?’ asked Guilliman. His tone was reasonable, respectful. ‘No hiding place exists for them. Their powers are taken from them, their foul patrons are destroyed. All they can do is cower while we rebuild our strength, after which, in due course, we may eradicate them at our leisure.’
‘You do not know that,’ said Dorn. ‘All you have is conjecture. What if the power that animated them revives? What then?’
‘Our father destroyed that power.’
‘You hope so. That is all – groundless hope.’ Dorn turned to his brothers. ‘We were wrong before. We were slow, our response burdened by ignorance. We did not understand what we faced until we were almost destroyed by it. But now we do know what it is, we do know what it can do, and so we must go after it. Everything mobilised, everything placed back into full crusade service.’
‘Just like the first time,’ said Guilliman.
‘Yes. What is wrong with that?’
‘Because it was haste that nearly killed us. Do you not remember, Rogal? Why we were pushed so hard, all the time, to conquer more worlds, faster, ever faster? Do you not remember all of us asking the Sigillite for clarity, and getting none, simply being told the Crusade was everything? You counsel repeating every mistake we ever made.’
‘No, I counsel acting decisively.’
‘You want everything to be as it was.’
‘Yes! I yearn for that! Why do you not?’
‘Because it was broken, my brother. We must change.’
‘With you at the summit, no doubt.’
That was the first tang of vitriol, offered in part-jest but with an undertow of acid. An uneasy silence followed. Guilliman didn’t react in kind, but instead turned to his brothers. ‘Any other views?’ he asked.
‘No one doubts your valour, brother,’ said the Lion. ‘Nor discounts what your Legion has done here. I would be content to follow almost any strategy you advocated, I think, save for this one. Rogal is right – you must see this. We have all tasted the bitter poison of Chaos, one way or another, and we would be fools to believe that its potency is gone. Though Horus is dead, others of our brotherhood are living still, and they will not be slow to rearm. We must strike them now, before they have a chance to recover.’
‘So say the Wolves of Fenris,’ said Russ. ‘We have been hunting them in the void for long enough that we know their ways. I will not have my warriors guarding empty walls while the chance remains to slay them as they run.’
Guilliman’s expression became a little weary. Prayto could almost see the riposte forming on his lips – maybe the time for guarding the walls was before – but he did not say it. Instead, he turned to the others, offering them a chance to contribute.
‘You wanted me here,’ said Vulkan. ‘So I listened to everything you said. Carefully. And perhaps, had I not gone into the wastes to see what was done there, I might even have agreed with you. But I think we all know what this enemy is now. We are not fighting xenos, who are no better than animals – these were our people, given every gift, who have made themselves lower than vermin. They cannot be allowed to endure. Nothing else matters.’
Prayto remembered the blood on the dust, the weeping of the traitors, the clenched, dark fists. He remembered how good, briefly, it had felt to fight alongside that titan. Yes. Yes, there was justice in that.
The Great Khan spoke next. His voice, when it came, was a foul rattle flecked with blood, barely audible. ‘Build later,’ he rasped with effort. ‘Hunt now.’
That left Raldoron. Something like trepidation was etched on his features, though it wasn’t from the prospect of speaking amid such company, but more from the lingering shadow over his surviving Legion. ‘In our judgement,’ he said, ‘Luna can wait. We must overtake the surviving traitors and destroy them. What strength remains in my Legion will be added to that cause.’
Now it was Dorn’s turn to stand. ‘You wished for this Council, brother. You wished for anything we did to be decided on the basis of unity, and you have heard what we all believe. This cannot be allowed to wait any longer – we must launch the ships.’
Prayto felt deflated. The Council had all been so carefully prepared, an intended demonstration of resolve that would propel the Imperium to its next great phase of reconstruction. And now Guilliman stood alone, all eyes on him, looking strangely, and suddenly, diminished.
But then another voice intervened.
‘Your pardon, Lord Dorn,’ came Zagreus Kane’s interjection. ‘Not all have spoken. And had you waited for them to do so, you would find that not all are in agreement. The Mechanicus cannot lend its support to any pursuit of traitor elements while Holy Mars remains under the control of hereteks. We laboured long for you here on Terra, and do not begrudge it, but we were always promised that the sacred forges would be recovered.’
‘And the Sisterhood, too,’ came a woman’s voice – a member of the Anathema Psykana, translating the thoughtmark of Aphone Ire, for any who could not follow the signs. ‘Our ancestral citadels are on Luna, and it is an abomination that they remain under occupation. We too have suffered. We too demand a response.’
Dorn looked shocked. It wasn’t as if the High Lords had never spoken before – they often had, in the War Council and elsewhere – but they had never gainsaid the will of the primarchs, not so openly, never in such coordination.
Next the Lord Commander Militant spoke. ‘I echo the contribution of my esteemed colleagues. As for the Imperial Army, we cannot support a crusade, not yet. We do endorse the plans, already far-advanced, for the reconquests of Luna, then Mars.’
Haardiker agreed, then Rantal, Zhi-Meng, Ossian. Even Su-Kassen, who had been close to Dorn during the great defence and had always been a hawk on matters of war, stood to support the High Lords’ position. Finally, Pentasian spoke, as if summing up the entire corpus of his peers.
‘Vengeance will come,’ he said, not meeting Dorn’s eye but addressing Guilliman directly. ‘But, for now, the priority must be to secure our own home. The Administratum stands ready to lend all support to this effort.’
A ripple of murmuring ran around the chamber, some of it alarmed, some excited. This was unprecedented. For once in his life, Dorn looked at a loss. You could almost see the calculations running through his mind – could he just ignore this? Could he browbeat them into changing their minds? Could the Legions simply act alone? Hassan, too, seemed dumbfounded, as if assurances he’d been given had turned out, at the last moment, to be entirely false. His aides immediately turned to him, whispering urgently.
Prayto quickly tallied the numbers. Six primarchs had spoken for Dorn. Ten others, including Guilliman, had spoken against him. Only Valdor had said nothing, and it seemed he did not plan to change that. Had Guilliman anticipated this? Or hoped it might happen? Prayto wasn’t sure, even now – it had felt very much as if he’d expected Vulkan at least to support him, maybe the Khan too.
But it was impossible not to see the symbolism. The Legions had always ruled. The Crusade had been theirs, a sacred task ordained for them by the Emperor. Now the various other instruments of the Imperium had asserted themselves en masse for the first time. No Emperor would overrule them, no Sigillite would intervene. And it wasn’t clear, even from a first impression, how they could be denied – at a minimum, every Legion required tech-priests to sustain a full-scale campaign. They relied on heavy auxiliary support, from Army regiments to Fleet battle groups. They needed the services of the Departmento Munitorum, the Navigators, the astropaths, things that had always been taken for granted but whose cooperation now seemed, at least in principle, to have been made conditional.
‘How carefully you always prepare the ground,’ murmured Dorn, glaring at Guilliman with a mix of admiration and contempt.
‘They have their own minds, Rogal,’ Guilliman replied, unperturbed. ‘Or do you wish to deny them their place at this table?’
For a moment, it seemed as if he might just do that. To look at them then – Dorn, Russ, the Lion, all of them, hemmed in like beasts by the pygmies around them – it was almost farcical. They could have drawn their blades, compelled fealty, and none could have resisted.
But, for all the horror that had taken place here, this was still the Imperium. It had the Lex; it had the sacred conventions passed down from the Emperor Himself, who despite being silent still ruled over them all. The Council had been called, and its rules were known by all. Some pressures, some weights, were ancient, predating all souls in that chamber, save only for Valdor, who still said nothing.
‘You will have your vengeance,’ Guilliman said to Dorn. ‘Believe me, when the hour comes, I shall stand beside you as we hunt down every last traitor soul. But not yet. Until Sol is secure, nowhere is secure.’
Still Dorn bristled. Still he hesitated. He was looking for a way out, just as he had done during the long months of calculation – one unconsidered thing, one way he could salvage this.
In the end, he didn’t have to. The Lion, aways the proudest, always the most regal, stood up.
‘No division between us,’ he said. ‘That must be the mantra from this hour forward. If the will of the Council is to bring Luna back into compliance, then so be it. My Legion will be pledged to the cause.’
One by one, the other primarchs either granted their assent, or merely held their silence. Finally, Dorn took his seat again, his face like breaking thunder. Guilliman spoke once more, detailing more of his long-gestated plans. There would be no delay now – the ships were already waiting, and as soon as they were provisioned the assault would begin. For the first time since the days of the Crusade itself, the Imperium would be launching a true offensive. The long retreat was over, and the reconquest would soon begin.
Prayto half-listened as he scanned the chamber once more. The expressions on the faces of most delegates were easy to read – shock, for the most part. A frantic murmuring broke out as nobles and adjutants began to speculate among themselves as to what this would all mean. Finally his eyes rested on Khalid Hassan again. The Chosen was smiling wryly to himself in bemusement, but that might have just been more subterfuge.
Interesting, Prayto thought to himself, making a note to investigate further when time allowed. Some game has been conducted here, to be sure, but not by him. Who, then, is the player?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Luna was never a secondary consideration for the enemy. It was not simply a stage on the journey. In many ways, it was as integral to their future plans as Terra was. They knew that the Throneworld would, if their Warmaster prevailed, be permanently compromised by the warp, forever placed in that twilight realm between hard reality and the well of dreams. Luna was to be their solid fortress, a citadel orbiting the tear in the universe that their treachery had created. It would have been a shadow city of tortured souls, a manufactory of rampant perversions, the place from which fresh and terrible armies would have been created to march out on a universe writhing in perpetual agony. So it should come as no surprise to discover just how much strength had been landed there. When the fortunes of the war suddenly reversed, that strength was stranded. Its legionaries, its Titans, its war machines of Fallen Mars were all left in place as the Grand Fleet was dismantled above them. It would have been clear to them right from that moment that they were doomed, but they had nowhere else to go. They had to turn from being the aggressor to being the defender. They had to become like the enemy they had just been fighting, just as desperate, just as dogged, just as ingenious. And they did so without a second thought, because they too were Astartes. They too, as much as they hated to recall it, were still sons of the Emperor.
– Diomedon of Luna, A Life on the Margins: Personal Reflections on the Reconquest
He had watched it all take place. Once the final landings had been completed, he’d watched the Grand Fleet grind its way across the narrow gulf to the Throneworld. The heavens were still on fire then, ignited by the defenders’ diminishing efforts to hold them in the void. You could witness it from Luna without augurs for much of the time – the pinpoints of light on the distant orb, the gradual reduction of its grey-yellow surface to charred black. It was like an ember slowing dying to ash, bombarded into slag.
Perhaps he should have felt angry that he wasn’t there, with his brothers, with the Warmaster’s own Legion as they brought retribution for all those lies. At times he had done, but not often. Too much to do. Too much to build, and so little time to do it.
It had not been easy, despite all the power placed at his command. The Sons of Horus had never much respected their Apothecaries, though they recognised their usefulness. Suddenly, though, the situation had made them supremely valuable. You couldn’t leave it all to the gene-witches, no matter how resourceful they were – Legion supervision was required. He’d asked for the assignment himself, a long way back when the Warmaster’s plans were being forged in the deep void. He’d gone to Abaddon for the order, of course; even then, he’d never have dared go near what Lupercal had become.
‘It must happen very quickly,’ the First Captain had told him, his oddly thin face illuminated by the flicker of a single tallow candle on board the Vengeful Spirit. ‘More quickly than ever before.’
Always with the haste. Thus it had ever been, right from the start – hurry, hurry, conquer it all lest ruin overtake you. But this time, at least, the warnings were apposite. It had to be done quickly, far more quickly than ever before. And he, Chief Apothecary Vardesh Kraiya, would be in command of it.
