He smashed his left hand in, and caught the falsehooded swordsman across the side of the head. There was enough weight in the punch to stagger the man backwards. He blundered into one of the old assaying machines, scraping its metal feet across the stone tiles and buckling one of its insectile legs.
The swordsman recovered his balance, and discovered he was no longer a swordsman. The spatha had been ripped from his hand.
The Caucasian weighed the captured sword in his right hand. He snapped it around, and put the flat of it across his adversary’s cranium, knocking him down.
The Caucasian turned from his fallen foe, the spatha in a low, defensive grip. Two more falsehooded opponents were oozing out of the Hall’s shadows to confront him.
He blocked both their blades at once, and rallied against them in a series of dazzling, turning cuts and thrusts. The percussive clash of swords rang through the gloom. More sparks shot out, bright and brief, as if the three sword blades were made of flint.
He wrong-footed one of his opponents, and clubbed him down to his knees with a blow of his spatha’s pommel. The other swordsman came at him, thrusting his blade, but he turned it aside deftly so that the stroke ran out harmlessly under his arm, and drove the heel of his left hand into the man’s face, cracking him backwards onto the floor.
He started to run as the pair of them struggled to rise again. The game was done. Escape was the only acceptable conclusion remaining to him. He ran for the doors, threw them open and sprinted through the thick gloom of the portico towards the lawns outside the Hall.
They were waiting for him. Five custodes, fully armoured, their faces hidden by their golden, hawked visors, stood in a semicircle around the mouth of the portico. They had their Guardian spears, those great, gilded hybrids of halberd and firearm, aimed at his chest.
‘Yield!’ one of them ordered.
He raised his stolen sword for the last time.
He was not the first occupant of the cell, and he would not be the last. The stone walls, floor and ceiling of the cell had been painted in a bluish-white gloss, like the skin of a glacier. Fingernails and other sharp edges had scored away the paint over the years, inscribing the walls with scraped frescoes of men and eagles, of armoured giants and lightning bolts, of ancient victories and long shadows. They were simple, elemental marks that reminded him of primordial cave paintings showing hunters and bison.
He added his own.
After a night and a day, the cell door rumbled open. Constantin entered. The master of the custodes wore a simple monastic robe of dark brown wool over a black bodyglove. He leaned his huge back against the cell wall, folded his mighty arms and regarded the prisoner on the cot.
‘Trust you, Amon,’ he said. ‘Trust you to get closer than anyone else.’
‘Amon’ was the start of his name, the earliest part of it. The second part was ‘Tauromachian’ and, together, these two words served most circumstances in which his name was used or spoken. He was Amon Tauromachian, custodes, first circle.
Violent obliteration notwithstanding, custodes lived long lives, far longer than mortal men, and they accumulated long names in those lifetimes. Following ‘Tauromachian’, which was not a family name but at least one that described the occupation of the bloodline that had provided his gene-source, there came ‘Xigaze’, the site of his organic birth, then ‘Lepron’, the house of his formative study, and then ‘Cairn Hedrossa’, the place where he was first tutored in weapon use. ‘Pyrope’, seventeen words into his nomenclature sequence, remembered his first live combat, deployed on an orbital of that name. So on, and so on, each new piece of his name honouring an action or a life landmark. Each was awarded him formally, by the masters of the first circle. ‘Leng’ would now become part of his name, the latest ultimate part, recognising his feat in the blood game.
A custodes’s name was engraved inside the chest plate of his gold armour. The name began at the collar, on the right side, just the first element exposed, and then wound like a tight, secret snake around the inside of the plate. For some custodes like Constantin, the oldest veterans, accumulated names had filled up the linings of their torso plates, and the tails of their snakes now ran out around the bellies of the plates, looping like incised belts through the abdominal decorations. Constantin Valdor’s name was nineteen hundred and thirty-two elements long.
Amon’s custodes armour and armaments had been stored in the House of Weapons during his absence. As he walked along the Southern Circuit with Constantin to reclaim them, he asked about the progress of other blood games.
‘Zerin?’
‘Apprehended before he had even crossed into the Imperial Territories. He brushed a gene-sniffer in Irkutsk.’
‘Haedo?’
‘Detected by sweeps in the Papuan Deserts four months ago. He made it as far as Cebu City by dust yacht, but we had a scoop team waiting for him.’
Amon nodded. ‘Brokur?’
Constantin smiled. ‘He got into the Hegemon in the guise of a Panpacific delegate before he was spotted. An impressive feat, one that we did not expect to be bettered.’
Amon shrugged. Blood games were a fundamental element of Palace security and a duty of the custodes. It was a matter of honour for them to play blood games out to the very best of their abilities. Using their ingenuity and comprehensive inside knowledge of the Palace and, indeed, Terra itself, the custodes volunteered to test and probe Imperial security, to expose any weakness or chink in Terran defences. They would play wolf to test the hounds. At any given time, at least half a dozen custodes were loose, operating secretly and autonomously, devising and executing methods of penetrating the great Palace.
There would be scrupulous debriefings and extensive interviews, examining Amon’s strategies and dismantling his techniques. Every scrap of information, every morsel of advantage, had to be extracted from the blood game. He had penetrated the Palace. He had got further than anyone else. He had come within striking distance.
‘I wonder if I have caused offence?’ he mentioned to Constantin. ‘I raised my hand against him.’
Constantin shook his head. He was a giant of a man, bigger even than Amon, like one of the over-scaled statues in the Investiary brought to life. ‘He forgives you. Besides, you would not have hurt him.’
‘My blow was blocked.’
‘Even if it hadn’t been, he would have stopped you.’
‘He knew I was there.’
Constantin scratched at his chin. ‘He won’t tell me how long he knew. He wanted to see how long it would take the rest of us to notice you.’
Amon paused before replying. ‘In the past, he has not seen much sense in blood games. He considered them worthless.’
‘That was the past,’ Constantin replied. ‘Things have changed since you were last among us, Amon.’
In the House of Weapons, he and Constantin armoured themselves. Amon felt the old familiarity of the handmade plate sections, the buckles and clasps and the magnetised seams. The weight settled on him reassuringly.
In arming chambers on the lower levels of the House of Weapons, servitors and slaves were ritually plating a squad of proud Astartes of the Imperial Fists, anointing them with oils and whispers as they locked each piece of armour in place. The squad was preparing for a long patrol shift on the southern ramparts.