‘As you wish.’ For a brief moment, the man who stood at the Emperor’s right hand, the man who wore the rank of Regent of Terra, studied his careworn face in the curvature of the glass. Malcador was himself once more, the cloak of the Master of Assassins gone and faded, the identity shuttered away until the next time it was needed.
He took a deep draught of the tea, and savoured it. He sighed. The effects of the counter-psionics in the room were not enough to cause him any serious ill-effect, but their presence was like the humming of an invisible insect, irritating the edges of his witch-sight. As he sometimes did in these moments, Malcador allowed himself to wonder which of the clade leaders had an idea of who he might really be. The Sigillite knew that if he put his will to it, he could uncover the true faces of every one of the Directors Primus. But he had never pursued this matter; there had never been the need. The fragile state of grace in which the leaders of the Officio Assassinorum existed had served to keep them all honest; no single Sire or Siress could ever know if their colleagues, their subordinates, even their lovers were not behind the masks they saw about the table. The group had been born in darkness and secrecy, and now it could only live there as long as the rules of its existence were adhered to.
Rules that Malcador had just broken.
His companion finally gave himself up to the light and stepped into full visibility, walking around the table with slow, steady steps. The hooded man was large, towering over the Sigillite where he sat in his chair. As big as a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes, out of the darkness the man who had observed the meeting was a threat made flesh, and he moved with a grace that caused his rust-coloured robes to flow like water. A hand, tawny of skin and scarred, reached up and pulled back the voluminous hood over a shorn skull and queue of dark hair, to reveal a face that was grim and narrow of eye. At his throat, gold-flecked brands in the shapes of lightning bolts were just visible past the open collar.
‘Speak your mind, Captain-General,’ said Malcador, reading his aura. ‘I can see the disquiet coming off you like smoke from a fire pit.’
Constantin Valdor, Chief Custodian of the Legio Custodes, spared him a glance that other men would have withered under. ‘I have said all I need to say,’ Valdor replied. ‘For better or for worse.’ The warrior’s hand dropped to the table top and he absently traced a finger over the wood. He looked around; Malcador had no doubts that the Custodian Guardsman had spent his time in this chamber working out where the room might actually be located.
The Sigillite drowned the beginnings of a waxen smile in another sip of the bittersweet tea. ‘I confess, I had not expected you to do anything other than observe,’ he began. ‘But instead you broke open the pattern of the usual parry and riposte that typically comprises these meetings.’
Valdor paused, looking away from him. ‘Why did you ask me here, my lord?’
‘To watch,’ Malcador replied. ‘I wanted to ask your counsel after the fact–’
The Custodian turned, cutting him off. ‘Don’t lie to me. You didn’t ask me to join you in this place just for my silence.’ Valdor studied him. ‘You knew exactly what I would say.’
Malcador let the smile out, at last. ‘I… had an inkling.’
Valdor’s lips thinned. ‘I hope you are pleased with the outcome, then.’
The Sigillite sensed the warrior was about to leave, and he spoke again quickly to waylay him. ‘I am surprised in some measure, it must be said. After all, you are the expression of Imperial strength and nobility. You are the personal guard of the Lord of Earth, as pure a warrior-kindred as many might aspire to become. And in that, I would have thought you of all men would consider the tactics of the Assassinorum to be…’ He paused, feeling for the right word. ‘Underhanded. Dishonourable, even?’
Valdor’s face shifted, but not towards annoyance as Malcador had expected. Instead he smiled without humour. ‘If that was a feint to test me, Sigillite, it was a poor one. I expected better of you.’
‘It’s been a long day,’ Malcador offered.
‘The Legio Custodes have done many things your assassins would think beyond us. The sires and siresses are not the only ones who have marque to operate under… special conditions.’
‘Your charter is quite specific on the Legio’s zone of responsibility.’ Malcador felt a frown forming. This conversation was not going where he had expected it to.
‘If you wish,’ Valdor said, with deceptive lightness. ‘My duty is to preserve the life of the Emperor of Mankind above all else. That is accomplished through many different endeavours. The termination of the traitor-son Horus Lupercal and the clear and present danger he represents, no matter how it is brought to pass, serves my duty.’
‘So, you really believe that a task force of killers could do this?’
Valdor gave a slight shrug of his huge shoulders. ‘I believe they have a chance, if the pointless tensions between the clades can be arrested.’
Malcador smiled. ‘You see, Captain-General? I did not lie. I wanted your insight. You have given it to me.’
‘I haven’t finished,’ said the warrior. ‘Vanus was right. This mission will not please the Emperor when he learns of it, and he will learn of it when I tell him every word that was spoken in this room today.’
The Sigillite’s smile vanished. ‘That would be an error, Custodian. A grave misjudgement on your part.’
‘You cannot have such hubris as to believe that you know better than he?’ Valdor said, his tone hardening.
‘Of course not!’ Malcador snapped in return, his temper flaring. ‘But you know as well as I do that in order to protect the sanctity of Terra and our liege-lord, some things must be kept in the dark. The Imperium is at a delicate point, and we both know it. All the effort we have spent on the Great Crusade, and the Emperor’s works, all of that has been placed in most dire jeopardy by Horus’s insurrection. The conflicts being fought at this very moment are not just on the battlefields of distant worlds and in the void of space! They are in hearts and minds, and other realms less tangible. But now, here is the opportunity to fight in the shadows, unseen and unremarked. To have this bloody deed done without setting the galaxy ablaze in its wake! A swift ending. The head of the snake severed with a single blow.’ He took a long breath. ‘But many may see it as ignoble. Use it against us. And for a father to sanction the execution of his son… Perhaps it may be beyond the pale. And that is why some things cannot be spoken of outside this chamber.’
Valdor folded his muscular arms over his chest and stared down at Malcador. ‘That statement has all the colour of an order,’ he said. ‘But who gives it, I wonder? The Master of Assassins, or the Regent of Terra?’
The Sigillite’s eyes glittered in the gloom. ‘Decide for yourself,’ he said.
Before the Emperor’s enlightenment, the Sentine’s precinct house had been a place of idolatry and ancestor worship. Once, the bodies of the rich and those judged worthy had been buried in crypts beneath the main hall, and great garish statuary and other extravagant gewgaws had filled every corner of the building, with cloisters and naves leading here and there to chapels for every deity the First Establishment had brought with them from Old Earth. Now the crypts were cells and memory stacks, armouries and storage lockers. The chapels had different tenants now, icons called security and vigilance, and all the artworks and idols were crushed and gone, a few saved in museums as indicators of a less sophisticated past. All this had taken place a long time before Yosef Sabrat had been born, however. There were barely a handful of living citizens on Iesta Veracrux who could recall any vestiges of a past with religion in it.