This was the shining, beating heart of all human endeavour, the throne and the birthplace of a species that stood astride the galaxy, its splendour and dignity vast enough that no one voice could ever hope to encompass them with mere words. Terra and her greatness were the jewel in the Imperial crown, bright and endless.
And yet; within a metropolis that masqueraded as a continent, there were a myriad of ghost rooms and secret places. There were corners where the light did not fall – some of them created for just that purpose.
There was a chamber known as the Shrouds. Inside the confines of the Inner Palace, if one could have gazed upon the schematics of those bold artisans who laid the first stones of the gargantuan city-state, no trace of the room or its entrances would have been apparent. To all intents and purposes, this place did not exist, and even those who had need to know of its reality could not have pinpointed it on a map. If one could not find the Shrouds, then one was not meant to.
There were many ways to the chamber, and those who met there might know of one or two – hidden passageways concealed in the tromp l’oeil artworks of the Arc Galleries; a shaft behind the captured waterfall at the Annapurna Gate; the blind corridor near the Great Orrery; the Solomon Folly and the ghost switch in the sapphire elevator at the Western Vantage; these and others, some unused for centuries. Those summoned to the Shrouds would emerge into a labyrinth of ever-shifting corridors that defied all attempts to map them, guided by a mech-intellect that would navigate them to the room and never twice by the same route. All that could be certain was that the chamber was atop a tower, one of thousands ranged in sentry rows across the inner bulwarks of the Palace, and even that was a supposition, based on the weak patina of daylight allowed to penetrate the sailcloth-thick blinds that forever curtained the great oval windows about the room. Some suspected that the light might be a deception, a falsehood filtered through trick glass or even totally simulated. Perhaps the chamber was deep underground, or perhaps there were more than one of them, a suite of dozens of identical rooms so exacting in similarity that to tell them apart would be impossible.
And once within, there was no place on Earth more secure, save for the Emperor’s Throne Room itself. None could listen in upon words spoken in a place that did not exist, that could not be found. The walls of the chamber, dark mahogany panels adorned with minimalist artworks and a few lume-globes, concealed layers of instrumentality that rendered the room and everything in it completely dead to the eyes and ears of any possible surveillance. There were counter-measures that fogged radiation detection frequencies, devices that swallowed sound and heat and light, working alongside slivers of living neural matter broadcasting the telepathic equivalent of white noise across all psychic spectra. There was even a rumour that the chamber was cloaked by a field of disruption that actually dislocated local space-time by several fractions of a second, allowing the room to exist a heartbeat into the future and out of reach of the rest of the universe.
In the Shrouds there was a table, a long octagon of polished rosewood, and upon it a simple hololithic projector casting a cool glow over the assembled men and women gathered there. In deep, comfortable seats, six of them clustered around one end of the table, while a seventh sat alone at the head. The eighth did not sit, but instead stood just beyond the range of the light, content to be little more than a tall shape made up of shadows and angles.
The seven at the table had faces of porcelain and precious metals. Masks covered their countenances from brow-line to neck, and like the room they were in, these outer concealments were far more than they appeared. Each mask was loaded with advanced technologies, data-libraries, sensoria, even microweapons, and each had a different aspect that was the mirror of its wearer; only the man at the head of the table wore a face with no affectation. His mask was simple and silver, as if it had been carved from polished steel, with only the vaguest impression of a brow, eyes, a nose and mouth. Reflected in its sheen, the panes of information shown by the hololith turned slowly, allowing everyone in the room to read them.
What was written there was damning and disappointing in equal measure.
‘Then he is dead,’ said a woman’s voice, the tone filtered through a fractal baffle that rendered her vocal pattern untraceable. Her mask was black and it fit skin-close, almost like a hood made of silk; only the large oval rubies that were her eyes broke the illusion. ‘The report here makes that clear.’
‘Quick to judge, as ever,’ came a throaty whisper, similarly filtered, from a motionless mask that resembled a distended, hydrocephalic skull. ‘We should hold for certainty, Siress Callidus.’
The ruby eyes glared across the table. ‘My esteemed Sire Culexus,’ came the terse reply. ‘How long would you have us wait? Until the revolt reaches our door?’ She turned her jewelled gaze on the only other woman seated at the table, a figure whose face was hidden behind an elegant velvet visor of green and gold, vaned with lines of droplet pearls and dark emeralds. ‘Our sister’s agent has failed. As I said he would.’
The woman in the green mask stiffened, and leaned back in her chair, distancing herself from the ire of Callidus. Her reply was frosty and brittle. ‘I would note that none of you have yet been able to place an operative so close to the Warmaster as Clade Venenum did. Tobeld was one of my finest students, equal to the task he was set upon–’
That drew a derisive grunt from a hulking male behind a grinning, fang-toothed rictus made of bone and gunmetal. ‘If he was equal to it, then why isn’t the turncoat dead? All that time wasted and for what? To give the traitors a fresh corpse at Horus’s doorstep?’ He made a spitting sound.
Siress Venenum’s eyes narrowed behind their disguise. ‘However little you think of my clade, dear Eversor, your record to date gives you no cause to preen.’ She drew herself up. ‘What have you contributed to this mission other than a few messy and explosive deaths?’
The fanged mask regarded her, anger radiating out from the man behind it. ‘My agents have brought fear!’ he spat. ‘Each kill has severed the head of a key insurrectionist element!’
‘Not to mention countless collaterals,’ offered a dry, dour voice. The comment emerged from behind a standard-issue spy mask, no different from the kind issued to every one of the sniper operatives of Clade Vindicare. ‘We need a surgeon’s touch to excise the Archtraitor. A scalpel, not a firebomb.’
Sire Eversor let out a low growl. ‘When the day comes that someone invents a rifle you can fire from the safety of your chair and still hit Horus half a galaxy away, you can save us all. But until then, hide behind your gun sight and stay silent!’
The sixth figure at the far end of the table cleared his throat, cocking his head. His mask, a thing made of glassy layers that reflected granulated, randomised images, flickered in the dimness. ‘If I might address Sire Culexus and Siress Callidus?’ said Sire Vanus. ‘My clade’s predictive engines and our most diligent infocytes have concluded, based on all available data and prognostic simulations, that the probability of Tobeld’s survival to complete his mission was zero point two percent. Margin of error negligible. However, it did represent an improvement in proximity-to-target over all Officio Assassinorum operations to date.’