‘You did,’ said Thane. ‘You lied for so long that you cannot stop. You lied even to yourself. Look into your innermost self, Grand Master. I believe you will find that you intended to rule all along, and I was blind not to see.’
Vangorich smiled, exposing dirty teeth. In the smile, the lines around the mouth, the set of the head, there was a flash of the man he had been.
‘Give me time, everything will be set to rights. Protecting the Imperium and protecting humanity are not always the same. I will make it better, you will see.’
Thane looked at the filthy Vangorich. His suaveness, intelligence and wit were gone. Time was cruel to mortal men. What bit at Thane the most was that Vangorich was right, he should have stayed. He had set personal honour over duty.
‘It is too late. You failed in your ambition as you failed your Emperor,’ said Thane. ‘It is time for you to step down, Vangorich. Come and face judgement. You shall be tried by the new High Lords of Terra. Justice served shall be a warning to all those who think themselves mightier than the Emperor’s will.’
Vangorich stood and laughed, clapping in delight.
One hundred and fifty boltgun slides were racked back.
‘What a marvellous speech,’ he said. ‘But no, I must decline. You see,’ he said impishly, ‘you are making a terrible mistake.’
‘I made my mistake a hundred years ago,’ said Thane. ‘I should have heeded your suggestion, and let Veritus lead the Senatorum.’
‘You’re making another one now,’ said Vangorich. His eyes gleamed with incipient madness. ‘And it shall be your last.’
A klaxon blared its rising-falling song. Blinking lights shone in the alcoves along the temple walls. A hundred capsules rose from the floor into them, rotating amber lights on their tops. They locked into place with loud thunks. Swirling gas filled each, lit with blue light. Inside them were the indistinct forms of human bodies, clad in tight-fitting synskin. In an asynchronous cacophony, the gas vented from the capsules.
‘This is Temple Eversor,’ said Vangorich. ‘Allow me to introduce its acolytes.’
The Space Marines opened fire, shooting at the capsules, but they were made of centimetres-thick armourglass, and though they cracked and fractured, they did not break. One by one the shapes inside came alive, twitching gauntlets raking against their prisons.
The doors opened, releasing more methalon fumes into the room. Water vapour condensed in the chilled air, cloaking everything with a dense, freezing fog. The warriors around Thane disappeared into coils of white. Thane activated false-colour heat vision. He saw his men. The Eversors were as cold as the gas, and he did not see them coming.
Boltguns went off all around him; somewhere he heard Vangorich’s insane laughter.
The fight that followed was one of the hardest of Thane’s life. Black-suited killers reared up in the mist, moving too fast for him to hit easily. The shouts of battle-brothers rang in his helmet. Space Marines came into sight, only to be cut down by the flashing finger blades of Temple Eversor’s crazed killers.
‘Fall back to the door!’ ordered Thane. ‘Defensive cordon!’
His dwindling men formed up around the entrance, back-to-back, boltguns blazing. A handful of Eversors got behind them, causing great loss before they were cut down. Casualty screed scrolled endlessly on Thane’s faceplate display. Black, skull-masked Assassins darted in and out of view, clawing men down. In their turn, the Assassins died messily, blasted apart by mass-reactives or detonated by uncontrollable bio-feedback when their hearts stopped. Such was the force of their explosions that Space Marines went down, battleplate holed by fragments of hyper-velocity bone shards and armour.
‘Keep them back!’ yelled Thane. ‘Keep them back!’
Executioner pistols fired, loud brazen boltguns one moment, silent toxin needlers the next.
The Eversors pressed nearer. Fighting became close and desperate, and the firing discipline of the Adeptus Astartes collapsed. The group disintegrated into individuals fighting for their lives in melee. At close quarters Vangorich’s killers excelled. The warriors fighting at his side became fewer, going from one hundred, to seventy-five, to fifty, to twenty, to ten.
Thane battled on, his power sword the flaring dividing line between his life and death. He parried and cut, but his blows cleaved only the mist. The Assassins were faster than the wind, near impossible to hit. They fought in a frenzy that appeared at first to lack control, but after a time Thane discerned a pattern to their combat, and was awed by their skill.
His actions became reflexive, time blurred. Only rarely had Thane fought so hard. As a Space Marine he regarded himself as the pinnacle of the transhuman type. The Eversors, though unstable mentally and physically, challenged that belief.
Thane fought with a dancing monster with a blue death’s head for a face. It leapt around, howling like an animal. After minutes of duelling, Thane spotted a weakness in its attacks and brought his sword up, hilt first, swinging the point up and through the Eversor’s stomach wall and gutting it. Before it died, it slashed down with its neurogauntlet. Monomolecular blades sliced through ceramite and plasteel, biting into Thane’s flesh. Toxins surged from micropores all up the blades, pumping into the Chapter Master’s body.
He roared in agony. He had never felt such pain. He stumbled and fell to his knees, paralysed by the poison.
When his body had purged the toxins sufficiently for him to move, he looked up, his eyes streaming with tears. The mist was clearing. He heard a final round of gunfire, a scream, and the clash of power armour falling to the floor.
A dark shadow fell across Thane’s face. An Eversor stood over him, ready to deliver the final blow.
‘Halt!’ called Vangorich. He walked through the last dispersing tendrils of mist. ‘You have lost, Chapter Master Thane, and it is your life that is forfeit.’
‘No,’ said the Eversor, and stood back. Trembling with the effort of disobeying its programming, the killer pulled its skull mask from its face. Yanking cables from its head, it cast the mask aside. Most of the flesh of the face beneath had been peeled away, replaced with close-fitting augmetic devices. Elsewhere there was naught but shining, polished bone inscribed with devotional text. But there was just enough of the features left for Thane to recognise him.
‘Krule!’ he said.
Through a mutilated mouth, Krule managed to speak.
‘My name is Esad Wire,’ he said.
He stood aside, leaving Thane a clear shot at Vangorich.
Thane raised his bolt pistol.
Vangorich’s eyes widened. He held up his hands. ‘Wait! Did you ever hear the story of the end of Konrad Curze?’
‘No more stories, Drakan,’ said Thane, and ended Vangorich’s life with a single bolter shell.
Swaying, feeling nauseous from the residue of the poison in his blood, Maximus Thane stood. He gripped his wounded arm. He was alone amid a carpet of broken bodies, Space Marine and Assassin alike. He called out for survivors, but no voice answered. Relief flooded him when he voxed the Thunderhawks and found all was well outside.
‘Send the Apothecaries. They have a harvest of sorrow ahead of them,’ he said. He turned away from Vangorich’s broken corpse. Too weary to raise his sword, he dragged it across the ground as he walked unsteadily back towards the stairs and the daylight beyond.
Of Esad Wire, there was no trace.
Chapter Seventeen
A matter of control
To the psychic sight of Eldrad Ulthran the skein was a living being, a complicated braiding of the life threads of every living thing in the galaxy. The main flow of fate resembled the corded trunk of a tree. From its mighty sides grew innumerable branches. Most were small, looping back to rejoin the main course of destiny; many more withered and died before long, the potential choices that predicated them so unlikely they would never come to be, or the creature intended to set those events in motion meeting its end before it could. Others branched many times into complex networks of possibility all their own. A few of these split the skein, forming mighty boughs upon the tree of fate. Sometimes a single choice could dictate a different future entirely.