‘You are well-informed, tetrarch,’ says Ventanus.
‘Information is victory, my brother,’ the tetrarch says, and laughs.
Ventanus explains his errand, the diplomatic function.
The tetrach listens. His name is Eikos Lamiad. His rank is tetrarch and also Primarch’s Champion. The four tetrarchs represent the four master worlds that command the fiefdoms of Ultramar under the authority of Macragge: Saramanth, Konor, Occluda and Iax. Lamiad’s fiefdom is Konor, the forge world. The tetrarchs are the four princes of Ultramar, and they rule the Five Hundred Worlds, standing in the hierarchy of power below Guilliman and above the Chapter Masters and the planetary lords.
‘I know the seneschals,’ says Lamiad. ‘I can introduce you.’
‘I would appreciate that, my lord.’ Ventanus replies. ‘It is a matter of expediency.’
Half of Eikos Lamiad’s face, the right half, is heroically handsome. The other half is a pale porcelain blank seamlessly embedded into the flesh, an elegant estimation of the missing face. The left eye is a gold-pupilled mechanism that winds and counter-circles like an antique optical instrument.
Lamiad was grievously wounded during the defence of Bathor. Shuriken shrieker rounds blew his skull apart and dismembered his body, but the worshipful Mechanicum elders of Konor Forge rebuilt him, respectful of his service and his good governance of their world holding.
It is said he would inhabit a Dreadnought chassis now, but for their ministrations.
‘Do you like the Holophusikon, Ventanus?’ the mighty champion enquires. His entourage of servitors, bearers, aides and battle-brothers is silent and stoic. All of them are in rich, ceremonial dress.
‘“Like”, lord?’
‘Appreciate, then?’
‘I have not given it much thought, lord.’
Lamiad smiles, the half of his face that can.
‘I sense a reservation, Remus,’ he says.
‘If I may speak candidly?’ Ventanus says.
‘Do.’
‘I have been to many worlds, lord, Imperial and not Imperial. I have, I think, lost count of the number of repositories of all wisdom I have been shown. Every world, every culture has its great library, its archive of wonders, its data store, its trove of lore, its casket of all secrets. How many ultimate archives of all universal knowledge can there be?’
‘You sound jaded, Remus.’
‘I apologise.’
‘Cultural archiving is important, Remus.’
‘Information is victory, lord.’
‘Indeed,’ says Lamiad. ‘We need to store our learning. We have also, during the Great Crusade, learned vast amounts by acquiring the archives of compliant cultures.’
‘I understand the–’
Lamiad raises his hand, a soft gesture.
‘I wasn’t reprimanding you, Remus. While I acknowledge the import of careful data gathering, I am also tired of the overly reverential way in which places like this are regarded. Oh, another holy repository of the most secret secrets of all, you say? Pray tell me what secrets you might keep that I have not learned from a thousand crypts just like this?’
They laugh.
‘You know what I like about this one, Remus?’
‘No, lord. What?’
‘It’s empty,’ says Lamiad.
The Holophusikon was commissioned thirty years before, during the development of Numinus City. It is younger than both of them, younger than their careers. Construction work has only recently been finished. Curators have just begun to import objects and data for display and storage.
‘They are usually so old, aren’t they?’ Lamiad remarks. ‘Dusty tombs of information, closed and guarded for unnumbered centuries, with special keys, and special rituals to get in, and all that tedious mystery. What I like about this place is its emptiness. Its intent. It is a proposition, Remus. It’s a great undertaking that looks forward, not back. It is open, and ready to be filled with mankind’s future. One day it will be a universal museum, and perhaps it will stand, alongside the libraries of Terra, as one of the greatest data repositories in the Imperium. For now, it is an ambition, built of stone. A deliberate statement of our intention to establish a robust and sophisticated culture, and to maintain it, and to record and measure it.’
‘It’s a museum of the future,’ says Ventanus.
‘Well said. It is. A museum of the future. For now, that is exactly what it is.’
‘And that’s why you’ve come here?’ asks Ventanus.
Lamiad shows him the exhibit he was inspecting when Ventanus arrived. In a sterile suspension field is the stabilised corner of a fire-damaged banner. Body heat triggers the hololithic placard, revealing origin details.
It is part of the banner that Lamiad carried on Bathor. This exhibit, one of the first few hundred chosen, honours him and his achievement, and commemorates that great battle.
‘I have tours of service planned that will take me from Ultramar for at least ten years,’ Lamiad says. ‘I felt I should come and see this before I embarked. See it with my own eyes.’
He looks at Ventanus.
‘Well, with my flesh eye and the one the Mechanicum made for me.’
They talk of the muster for a while, and of the coming campaign. Neither of them mentions the XVII.
Then Lamiad says, ‘They say Calth will be named a major world soon. It is developing fast, and its strengths are evident. The shipyards. The fabrication. Its status will be upgraded, and it will control a fief of its own.’
‘I will not be surprised,’ replies Ventanus.
‘It will have its own tetrarch too,’ says Lamiad. ‘It will have to. As a major world, it will be obliged to appoint a military governor, and produce a champion and a champion’s honour guard for the primarch.’
‘Indeed.’
‘There is talk of Aethon. Aethon of the 19th. As a potential candidate for the post.’
‘Aethon is a fine candidate,’ Ventanus agrees.
‘There are others in consideration. There is, I am told by our beloved primarch, some art to the choosing of a tetrarch.’
‘And it can’t be a tetrarch, can it?’ says Ventanus. ‘Perhaps you will all become quintarchs once there are five of you?’
Lamiad laughs again.
‘Perhaps they will coin another title, Remus,’ he says. ‘One that is not numerically specific. Calth won’t be the last, merely the next. Ultramar grows. As we meet the future and fill this Holophusikon, we will have more than Five Hundred Worlds, and more than five fiefdoms. Like the emptiness of these halls, we must be ready to accommodate the changes and the expansions to come.’
He turns. Figures in long, pale green robes are approaching them, followed by attendants.
‘Here come the seneschals,’ says the Primarch’s Champion. ‘Let me introduce you so you can get your business done.’
6
At the orbital Watchtower, Server of Instrumentation Uhl Kehal Hesst communes with the noosphere.
The code is speaking. It is gabbling.
The pleats of his floor-length Mechanicum robes are so crisp, he looks as if he has been carved by stone-masons. He stands at the summit of a Watchtower that is similarly straight and slender. The tower casts its shadow across Kalkas Fortalice, the armoured citadel that faces Numinus City across the glittering width of the Boros. It is a cauldron of walls and castellated towers, a city in its own right, but a place of defence, a lifeguard set to stand at the shoulder of Numinus and protect it from harm.
Ten thousand people work in the Watchtower, and another fifty thousand function in the gun towers and administration buildings around it. It is alert, a sentient place, its noospheric architecture designed on Hesst’s forge world, Konor, and supported by technologies supplied directly from the fabricatories of Mars.