Dorn’s expression shifted for a second, with a curling of his lip. ‘I have crossed paths with the agents of the Officio Assassinorum on the battlefield. Those encounters have never ended well. Their focus is always… too narrow. They are tools best suited for courtly intrigue and the games of empire. Not for war.’ He folded his arms. ‘Speak, Custodian. What do you know of this?’
Valdor stiffened. ‘I… can’t say.’
For a moment, the tension on the primarch’s face resonated through the room and Valdor’s knuckles whitened around the haft of his spear; then Dorn turned away. ‘That is unfortunate.’
The Custodian bristled at the warrior-lord’s demeaning tone. ‘We all want the same thing,’ he insisted. ‘To preserve the Emperor.’
‘No,’ Dorn looked up at the windows, and he allowed himself a sigh. ‘Your first remit is to safeguard the life of the Emperor of Mankind above all else. Mine, and that of my brothers, is to safeguard the Imperium.’
‘The two are the same,’ said Valdor. There was a flicker of uncertainty in his words that he did not expect.
‘Not so,’ Dorn said, as he left. ‘A narrow view, Custodian.’ The primarch paused on the threshold and spoke one last time, without looking back. ‘This conversation is not ended, Valdor.’
Cirsun Latigue liked to pretend that the aeronef belonged to him. When he left the Iestan capital of a night and took the languid flight back to his home in the Falls, he liked to place himself by the window of the little gondola slung beneath the cigar-shaped ballute and watch the hab-towers flash past, imagining the workadays from the service industries and the vineyards seeing him cruise along by, their faces lit with envy at someone of such importance. The gondola was no bigger than a monorail carriage, but it was opulently appointed with chaises and recessed automata for beverages and other services. For the most part, it served important clients or the urgent travel needs of upper tier management, but for a lot of the time the craft sat at dock, unused.
The aeronef was not his property, however much he wished it so. It belonged, as his wife often told him he did, to the Eurotas Trade Consortium, and while his rank with the company was such that use of the aircraft could be a regular perk of the job, on some level he knew that he would never rise far enough to truly own something of such status.
That wasn’t something he liked to think about, though. Rather like his wife, more often than not. All his not-inconsiderable earnings as a senior datum-clerk, their appealing townhouse in the fashionable end of the suburbs, the private schola for the children… She appreciated none of it. Latigue’s love of the company flyer was a reaction against that. When he was in the aeronef, he felt free, just for a little while. And thanks to the correct application of some bribery and favours in the shape of a few deliberately mislabelled shipping forms, he had learned from one of the Consortium’s technologians how simple it was to adjust the aircraft’s docile, unsophisticated machine-brain in order to take the flyer to other destinations that didn’t show up on the logs. Places like the White Crescent Quarter, where the company was always agreeable, and for a man of Latigue’s means, quite affordable.
He smiled at that, listening to the soft chopping hum of the propeller as the aeronef crossed over Spindle Canyon, and he thought about ordering a change of course. The wife was at some interminable gaming event at one of her ridiculous social clubs, so there would be no judgemental hissing and narrowing of eyes when he came home. Why not stay out a little longer, he wondered? Why not take a cruise towards the White Crescent? The daring of the thought made him smile, and he began to warm to the idea. Latigue leaned forward, reaching for the command panel and licking his lips.
It was then he noticed the object for the first time. On the seat across from him, a peculiar little ball that resembled a seed pod. Gingerly, he reached for it, prodded it with a finger – and blanched. The thing was warm to the touch, and it felt like it was made of flesh.
Latigue’s gorge rose in his throat and he tasted the sour tang of the half-digested meat dish he had eaten at mid-meal; but still he could not stop himself from reaching out once more, this time carefully gathering up the object from where it lay.
In the light cast through the cabin windows, he saw that the ball was lined and strangely textured. He let it roll in his hand, this way and that, finally bringing it closer to his nose to get a better look.
When it opened he let out a yelp. Splitting along its length, the sphere revealed an eye, horribly human in aspect, hidden behind the fleshy covering. It rotated of its own accord and Latigue became aware that it was looking directly at him, and with something that might have been recognition.
Suddenly overcome with disgust, he threw the orb away, and it vanished under a low couch. Confused and sickened, suddenly all he wanted was to be down on the ground. The interior of the gondola was hot and stifling, and Latigue felt sweat gathering around the high collar of his brocade jacket.
He was still trying to process what had just happened when one of the cabin walls began to move. The velvet patterning, the rich claret-red and spun gold of the adornment, flowed and shifted as oil moved on water. Something was extruding itself out of the side of the cabin, making its shape more definite and firm with each passing instant.
Latigue saw a head and a torso emerging, saw hands ending in long-fingered digits. In the places where the shape-thing grew out of the walls, there was a strange boiling effect, and the light caught what appeared to be something like lizard-skin, rippling and throbbing.
Latigue’s reason fled from him. Rather than seek escape, he forced himself into the corner formed by the couch and the far side of the aeronef’s cabin, the window at his back. The head turned to him, drawn by the motion. The skin-camouflage of the velvet walls faded into a tanned, rich crimson that looked like stained leather or perhaps flayed flesh: as the figure pulled itself free of the wall with spindly legs, its head came up to show a patterned skull pointed into a snout, with a peculiar, plough-shaped lower jaw. Teeth made of silver angled back in long, layered rows. There were no eyes in the sockets above, only dark pits.
Latigue coughed as a smell like blood and sulphur enveloped him, emanating from the apparition. He vomited explosively and began to cry like a child. ‘What do you want?’ he begged, abruptly finding his voice. ‘Who are you?’
The reply was husky, distant, and strangely toned, as if it had been dragged up from a great depth. ‘I… am Spear.’ It seemed more like a question than an answer.
The creature took a first step towards him, and in one hand it had a curved blade.
The transport rumbled through the thermals rising from the surface of the Atalantic Plain, and inside the aircraft’s cargo bay, the bare ribs of the walls creaked and flexed under the heavy power of the thruster pods. Beneath the transport’s belly, a blur of featureless desert raced past, torrents of windborne rust-sand reaching up from the dusty ground to snatch at it. In the distant past, thousands of years gone, this region would have been deep beneath the surface of a vast ocean, one of many that stretched across the surface of Terra; all that was left now were a few minor inland seas that barely deserved the name, little more than shrinking lakes of mud ringed by caravan townships. Much of the vast plainslands had been absorbed by the masses of the Throneworld’s city-sprawls, but there were still great swathes of it that were unclaimed and lawless, broken with foothills sculpted by the long-forgotten seas and canyons choked with the wrecks of ancient ships. There were precious few places on Terra that could still truly be considered a wilderness, but this was one of them.