‘Where you stand now,’ the Emperor said, ‘is the present. Do you see the top of the cliff?’
‘Of course, sire.’
‘That is the future. You see it. You know what it is. Now reach it.’
Ra hesitated. ‘Now?’
‘Climb, Custodian. You questioned the nature of my foresight. I am granting you an answer.’
Ra moved to the rock face, looking over the stone, finding his first grips. He tested them, finding them strong, even against the weight of his armour. The weaker ones, he avoided.
Less than ten heartbeats had passed when a rock cracked and crumbled in his gauntleted hand. Ra skidded, arresting his fall by clutching at the stone; another gave way, sending him the last few metres to the rocky ground in a breathy cloud of white dust.
‘You looked for places to safely grip,’ said the Emperor, ‘yet you have already stumbled. You did not know the stone was weak.’
‘It looked strong.’
The Emperor smiled, and it was by far the most unpleasant sight Ra had ever witnessed. Emotion painted across a human face, as false as the grotesques at any masquerade. ‘Yes,’ the Emperor agreed. ‘It did, and you only learned the truth too late. Now climb.’
Ra hesitated once more, a hesitation that bordered upon defiance. As if such an action were even possible for one such as he in the presence of his master.
‘It is not necessary, sire. I believe I understand now.’
‘Do you? Look out across the water, Ra.’
Ra returned to the Emperor’s side and did as he was bid. The water rippled in sedate waves, sloshing around the rocks that lined the shore. At the horizon’s very edge, he could see the mirroring lip of another landmass.
‘I see another land. An island, perhaps.’
‘It is Albia, many thousands of years ago. But that is unimportant. You see the shore. You know it is there. You know you could reach it by ship, or by swimming, or by flight. That is what you know.’
The Emperor’s dark eyes lost their focus. He faced towards the distant shore but Ra doubted He was still seeing it. ‘So you journey towards it. But all you can see is your destination. You cannot see the beasts below the water that devour travellers. You cannot know if the wind will blow and throw you aside from your course. And if the wind does blow, will it send you east? West? North? South? Will it shatter your craft completely? Perhaps there are rocks beneath the water, impossible to see until they grind and tear at the hull of your ship. Perhaps the inhabitants of that far shore will fire upon your craft before you can make landfall.’
The Emperor turned back to Ra, though curiously His eyes didn’t clear. ‘But you can see the shore, Ra. Did you fail to predict any of those possible flaws between here and there?’
‘Perhaps I predicted them all, sire. Perhaps I factored in the possibilities of each one occurring.’
‘Maybe so. And what of the eventualities you could not predict? Each passing moment is rich with a hundred thousand possible pathways. The craftswoman making your boat may suffer a heart failure before she can gift it to you. Or she decides not to offer you the boat at all. You say the wrong words to her. You offer the wrong currency. She lies to you, for she is a thief. An enemy sabotages your boat before you set sail. You reach halfway across this channel of water, only to see a more appealing coast to the east or west. Minute after minute, possibility upon possibility, path after path. All variables you are unable to see from where you stand at this moment.’
The Emperor reached out as if He could crush the coast in His golden gauntlet. His expression was cold in its pale ferocity. ‘I can see the coast, Ra. I know what awaits me there. But I cannot see all the infinite vicissitudes between here and there.’
At last, He lowered His hand.
‘That is foresight, Ra. To know a trillion possible futures, and to be left to guess at the infinite ways of arriving at each one. To map out even one possible eventuality, taking into account every decision that every living being will make that will impact upon the others around it, would take all of the lifetimes I have already lived. The only way to know anything for certain…’
He trailed off, gesturing to the distant shore.
‘Is to reach the other side,’ said Ra.
The Emperor nodded. ‘When the vault was attacked and the Primarch Project compromised, should I have destroyed them all? Or do as I did, and trust that I would be able to restore them to grandeur? If I had destroyed them to prevent their abduction, would the Imperium have risen as it has now done? Or would the Great Crusade have stuttered and failed without its generals? There are no answers yet, Ra. We are in the middle of the sea, beset by strange tides and unexpected beasts, but not yet thrown off course.’
‘I won’t fail you, sire.’
The Emperor closed His eyes and winced as pain flickered across His dusky features. He touched all ten fingertips to His face beneath the weight of some silent strain.
‘My liege?’
‘The forces of Magnus’ Folly press harder against the Mechanicum’s junctions. I do not know how this can be. Their efforts were already relentless and monumental. Coupled with the intrusions within the original web, I fear time is growing short.’
‘We’ve failed to destroy the Echo of the First Murder. Why did it pull back from us? How can it be stopped?’
The Emperor swallowed, His eyes bloodshot and haunted in their distraction.
+Awaken, Ra.+
Ra opened his eyes, his senses immediately attuning to the sound of sirens.
Fourteen
Zephon’s bandoliers rattled as he walked, the bound arsenal of rad-grenades clinking against his red ceramite. He felt like an imposter in his own skin: the volkite pistols holstered on his thigh plates hadn’t been fired in years, nor had he sparred with the power sword sheathed on his backpack. Similarly, he’d done nothing more than clean and maintain the bolter he now carried over one shoulder, hanging by its thick strap of Baalite mutant hide-leather.
After an airspeeder conveyance had carried him halfway across Himalazia to the Palace’s high-security core, he walked ever-downwards through the beating heart of the Imperium, occasionally resorting to subterranean transit pods or the elevator platforms in constant operation.
He had spoken to Diocletian and Arkhan Land, the former telling him of the dark wonders of the Impossible City and the foes faced by the Ten Thousand, the latter waxing loud and long about the structure of the webway and its potential for mankind. He had reviewed the Archimandrite’s implanted map, and yet… doubts lingered. Or perhaps it was hope that lingered. Zephon wished feverishly for such enlightenment to be lies.
The Blood Angel had no idea what to believe. He knew only that the Ten Thousand had chosen him to serve the Emperor, and he would do so to his dying breath.
And so, he journeyed to join them.
Through districts that had evolved into librarium archives; through museum sectors given over to the teeming refugee masses; through storage chambers and arsenals and even old Terran foundries, the Blood Angel walked in solemn silence, his gait exaggerated slightly by the bulky twin turbines of his jump pack. The double engines rose above his pauldrons, wings in intent if not in form. Servo-skulls drifted endlessly past, pausing to aim their sensoria-cluster eye needles at him, scanning him for Unified Biometric Identification. Inevitably they would give a satisfied click and drift away.
Towards the end of the first day he passed the first seal. The ever-locked iris gate wasn’t locked for him; he entered without hesitation, passing a phalanx of one hundred Imperial Fists on one side of the gate, then five Custodians on the other. The former greeted him with grim formality. The latter ignored him completely.