Fifteen days. His right shoulder had seized days ago, yet there had been no respite. It throbbed with crippling cramps from the sheer repetitive weight of hammering his spear down over and over again, thousands of times each day and night.
The tall form of Baroness Jaya’s Castigator was a motionless statue above them, staring back into the mist. Waiting, just as they were waiting. Diocletian had done well in finding her. Vyridion’s Knights were precious assets in the close-quarter brutality of these tunnel battles.
Jodarion, another of the Lords of Terra, collapsed into the road next to Ra, lying atop the last three legionaries he’d slain. Jodarion’s trembling hand managed to drag his blade-split helm free, baring his face to the ashy air. The Custodian sucked it in, in great wet heaves.
There was very little left of Jodarion’s face. He left some of it on the inside of his cleaved helmet, reduced to a red smear. Ra looked at the gasping, bloody skull next to him, all that remained of Jodarion’s head, half of the teeth hammered away, lost at some point in the last few days. The wounds had clotted almost at once, but the damage was done.
Ra suspected he looked little better.
The legionary nearest to him was still alive. A World Eater, bisected at the waist, was dragging himself closer to where Ra kneeled. His armour was more red than white, signifying some unknown change within his treasonous Legion.
‘Blood,’ the warrior murmured through a shattered mouth.
‘I was there,’ Ra tried to growl at him, but the exhausted words were a snarling whisper. ‘I was there the day we saved your mongrel primarch from certain death.’
‘Blood,’ the World Eater mumbled again. His helm had been crushed, savaging the skull and face within. His eyes were glazed, maddened, the pupils mere pinpricks.
‘If only we’d left him there.’ The Custodian laughed, feeling his reknitting bones and abused muscles stinging afresh with the squirted application of adrenal elixirs from inside his armour.
‘Blood…’
‘If only we’d left him to die in those mountains.’ Ra was smiling now. ‘The one primarch who couldn’t conquer his world. The one primarch who lived as a slave. The one primarch who had to be saved from death.’
‘Blood!’ The World Eater’s eyes resolved with the ghost of clarity. ‘Blood for the–’
A spear rammed through the World Eater’s spine, driven down between his shoulder blades. The power pack on his back shorted out and died. The warrior himself went into convulsions. Eyes that had so briefly cleared now rolled back into his broken head.
Above him, Solon wrenched the weapon left, then right, and finally pulled it free. The Custodian collapsed a breath later, using the World Eater’s corpse as a seat.
‘This has been the worst day since yesterday,’ Solon said with no trace of a smile in his tone.
Ra rolled onto his back, first seeing the empty mist above, then looking to his right. He saw Zhanmadao, the Terminator forced down to one knee, his firepike lost or broken who knew how long ago. Grinding gyro-stabilisers in the Cataphractii suit’s joints sought to bring the warrior back to his feet but Zhanmadao slouched forwards, head lowered. He refused to rise from his crouch, or he simply couldn’t manage it, instead adopting the pose of an ancient knight kneeling in prayer before an altar. Blood had dried while running from rents in his battleplate, and from his mouth in a slow trickle. When he lifted his head to look at Ra, a dirty chasm of scabbed blood and broken bone showed where one eye and one ear had been. Bare skull glistened in the gold mist.
Unable to speak, Zhanmadao grunted.
Ra tried to force a nod. Instead, his eyes fell closed.
He opened them a second later. An hour later. A year later. The Mechanicum’s tunnel was gone, as were his kindred.
He stood in the throne room, the Emperor’s laboratory has it had been half a decade before, not as it stood now. The walls lacked the hive-like hollows of thousands upon thousands of recesses awaiting stasis coffins. The machinery spat no sparks. The Emperor didn’t sit upon the Golden Throne. That great engine thrummed with automation, independent of the Emperor’s presence yet slaved to His invisible will and the ambitious heights of Imperial dreams.
‘Hello, Ra.’
Ra turned, feeling the broken-bone grind of his malfunctioning armour. He tried to kneel but the Emperor stopped him, a hand gripping his Custodian’s pauldron. The tribune grunted his gratitude.
‘Do you remember this day, Ra?’
The workers performed their duties around him, maintaining the rumbling machines, tending to the connective pipelines and power couplings. It could have been one of any number of days in the throne room, before…
No. There. There was Valdor. There was Amon. There was Ra himself, one of twenty of the highest-ranking Custodians present in a loose pack, speaking in voices too low, too far away, for Ra’s wounded manifestation to make out.
Ra’s mouth curled in a tired smile at the sight. How innocent we were.
He knew of what those ghosts spoke. He remembered it well. He even followed the movements of Amon’s lips, his memory providing the voice he couldn’t hear.
‘…no word from Aquillon.’
Aquillon. Prefect of the Hykanatoi. The Occuli Imperator, Eyes of the Emperor, assigned to watch over Lorgar in the waning years of the Great Crusade. Aquillon, who had never returned from his vigil. One of Ra’s own Dynastes Squad had travelled with Aquillon on that long, distant mission: Sythran – a warrior who had also surely fallen to Word Bearers treachery. Perhaps even on Isstvan itself in the high hour of treachery.
Stoic, dutiful Sythran. Ra hoped he had died well.
‘I remember, sire,’ said Ra. He watched Amon speaking of Aquillon, seeing one of his finest companions mouthing the very last words spoken before the sirens sounded.
The sirens began to sound.
‘Time is short, Ra,’ said the Emperor.
Men and women were standing still around them. The shouts were starting to rise, accompanying the flashing warning lights. The gathered Custodians spread apart in effortless awareness of each other’s killing reach, the most loyal hands in the Imperium reaching for their spears.
‘We may not reach the Dungeon, sire.’ Even here, Ra’s voice was a cracked ruin. ‘The Mechanicum has abandoned us and the convoy is near undefended.’
‘I know, my Custodian. I know. It is meaningless now.’
More shouting. Workers and scientists were running now, moving away from the overloading machines. The illumination of the throne room took on a strained, desaturated cast.
Constantin Valdor ran to the Emperor’s side, oblivious to the fact his master was playing no part in a performance that had all happened before.
The Emperor had turned to him then, Ra recalled, and said ‘Summon Jenetia Krole. Assemble the Ten Thousand.’ This time though, he did not.
‘At once, my liege.’ Valdor turned away to make it so.
‘Something is coming through!’ cried one of the human workers.
The Emperor ignored the spreading chaos. ‘Hear me, Ra. You must take word to the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood. I am leaving the Golden Throne. I am coming to you.’