‘Sister Amendera,’ she began, and even her whispers rose to fill every corner of the cavernous Sanctum Aphonorium, ‘How may I be of service to you?’
Kendel’s hand fell to the crimson leather of her belt and her fingers toyed with it a moment; Leilani knew the subtle cue from her many months of service as the Oblivion Knight’s adjutant. Her mistress was framing her thoughts, marshalling them into ready formations in much the same way she commanded her Witchseeker squads. The novice wondered if Kendel had ever made an ill-considered statement in her entire life.
~You continue to be troubled.~ The Knight spoke in ThoughtMark, one of the symbolic sign languages employed by the Silent Sisterhood. Small in scale, full of delicate gestures of finger and thumb, it served to convey concepts of great subtlety or intricate nature. It was far more graceful than the large, sharp motions of BattleMark, the command language used by the Sisters to communicate on the field of conflict, far more complex and nuanced. Many of the fine inferences of Kendel’s intent could not have been translated directly into spoken Imperial Gothic. There were shades of degree in her statement that no human voice could ever have delivered, and thus Leilani felt hobbled as she replied with crude words.
‘It is so,’ she agreed. ‘The news from the outer rim is difficult for me to assimilate.’ The words tumbled out of her in a rush, echoing slightly off the curved steel walls of the meditation chamber. The novice was feeling increasingly uncomfortable speaking out loud in this hallowed place. The Aeria Gloris, as with every starship in service with the Divisio Astra Telepathica, was equipped with aphonoria, great spaces within their hulls where sound-deadening technologies rendered the closest equivalent to absolute quiet. To break that silence seemed an obscenity, a defacement; yet Sister Amendera made no move to step aside and usher Leilani into the nearby antechamber, concealed from them by ornate curtains of black and gold.
Perhaps it was some sort of test, like the question? Yes, that had to be it. Kendel had made it clear during Leilani’s duty under her command that she expected much from the young aspirant, and not for the first time the novice-sister wondered if she would be found wanting. ‘What we witnessed in the Somnus Citadel,’ she continued, ‘the… creature brought back from Isstvan aboard the starship Eisenstein.’ The girl shook her head, recalling a mutated Astartes warrior that had run riot across the Sisterhood’s lunar stronghold, the freakish aberration that had once been a loyal warrior of the Emperor. ‘These things pull at my reason, mistress, and I find it difficult to hold my mind upon the tasks at hand.’ She looked away, to the steel decking beneath her boots. ‘All this talk of traitors and heresy. Horus…’
The Warmaster’s name left her lips and it seemed louder than a gunshot. She stumbled over her thoughts and looked up once more.
Kendel nodded once. ~These reports of his rebellion are hard news. It would be a lie to say that no sister remains unaffected by the terrible duplicity that is said to be unfolding.~
‘It has robbed me of my focus,’ Leilani admitted. ‘I think of good men, of the noble Astartes we have often fought alongside, and then to conscience such monstrous deceit among their ranks…’ She shivered. ‘The Astartes and the primarchs are line kindred of the Emperor of Mankind himself, and if they are wracked by such division then…’ The novice’s throat went dry as she tried to utter the words. ‘What if such horror reaches our ranks, mistress?’
The other woman looked away. ~You would not be aware,~ she signed, ~but I met him once. The Warmaster. He was everything they say of him. And if he truly has turned his face from the rule of Terra, then it will be the war to end all wars to give him his censure.~
Leilani felt sobered by the Oblivion Knight’s direct statement. In her service to the Sisters of Silence, the novice had been exposed to many sights – psykers driven insane by their ability to touch the churning madness of the warp, human beings whose flesh and minds had been twisted beyond all recognition, things less than alive that boiled with infernal psychic power – but all these were enemies she could understand, they were foes that, although reviled, Leilani could grasp in her reason. But the traitors? What possible motive could they have? This was the greatest era of humankind, with the galaxy turning at their feet and the Great Crusade at its height; why would one so highly placed as the Warmaster Horus wish to put a match to the Emperor’s utopia, when its completion was so close at hand?
~Who can know?~ replied Sister Amendera.
The novice blushed, suddenly aware of the echo around her, realising that she had voiced those last few thoughts aloud.
The swish of the fine silk curtains hanging across the chamber entrance drew the attention of both women, as the Null Maiden Sister Thessaly Nortor entered. Her taut, scar-sharpened face was drawn in a scowl and she gave a blunt BattleMark reply, clearly having heard the novice’s last words. ~Target Warmaster. Traitor. Uprising status Flawed/In Error Condition. Insurrection will be Terminated in short order before Rebellion can Expand/Cause Collateral Damage.~
Nortor shot Leilani a hard look, a clear scolding in her eyes. The second-in-command of the Storm Dagger cadre had made no secret of her disdainful opinions of the Warmaster’s mutiny. The other woman’s breath rasped quietly through the mechanical apparatus at her neck; where Mollitas and Kendel showed bare flesh, almost three-quarters of Nortor’s throat had been replaced with a mechanical augment. Made of a polished silver-steel, her artificial implant served the function of flesh destroyed during an engagement against the Jorgalli, inside one of the xenos’s bottle-worlds. As well as her neck, much of the Null Maiden’s lungs were also synthetic proxies assembled by the Sisterhood’s biologians. On one level, Leilani was privately envious of the dour Sister Thessaly; Nortor’s larynx had been lost to the acidic bite of the bottle-world’s alien atmosphere, and she had refused to allow her augmentation to be fitted with an artificial replacement. The woman was as silent a Sister as was humanly possible.
‘We can only hope that the Warmaster sees the error of his ways,’ offered Leilani, but even as she said the words they seemed little more than weak and foolish optimism.
~He must recant.~ Nortor’s obvious annoyance calmed slightly and she switched to the more reasoned language of ThoughtMark. ~To oppose the Emperor is the height of madness. The only explanation is that the Warmaster has grown envious of his father’s greatness.~ She shook her head. ~That, or he has lost his mind.~
In the other Sister’s retort, the novice heard the echo of similar words that had chimed from elsewhere in the Sisterhood. Even as news of the rebellion spread, so too there was the talk of a different movement in motion: a growing sect of veneration for the leader of humankind. Such reverence seemed ill-fitting; Leilani balked at the use of the term ‘worship’ in connection with a being so avowed to a secular path for his people, and yet this so-called Lectitio Divinitatus was raising its head in the strangest of places. If anything, the novice found the question of this school of thought almost as hard to swallow as the concept of Horus’s perfidy; and yet, while the Emperor was no deity, it could not be denied that his magnificence was so great that granting him such exalted status was at least an understandable mistake. But it was something to be expected of common, unsophisticated tribals from the feral worlds, not the educated men and women of the Imperium.