‘The withdrawal proceeds apace,’ translated the bald girl. ‘All forces are en route to the Impossible City.’
‘He was so weary, Jenetia. I fear news of our failure only added to His burdens.’
‘The failure was Kadai’s,’ replied the girl-child, watching her mistress’ hands. ‘Not yours. Not mine. Kadai reached too far, with too much pride, against your counsel and my wishes. Regardless, even Kadai could not have known of the hordes infesting the outward tunnels.’
Ra found precious little reassurance in that, no matter how true it might be. Krole noticed his reluctance. ‘You and I will hold this vile city until it falls, tribune. And when it does, we will go back to fighting tunnel by tunnel, as we did when we were first ordered into the web. There is no other choice.’
Ra nodded and said nothing. There was nothing to say. Defeat was inconceivable.
‘What are our master’s wishes?’ the child asked.
Ra forced the tension from his muscles, his armour joints murmuring at the subtle change in demeanour. ‘He commanded me to tell you that you must enact what He referred to as the Unspoken Sanction.’
Krole’s pupils were pinpricks in the alien light. ‘He said this?’ asked the young girl. ‘You are truly certain?’
Ra knew better than to ask what the command might mean. The Sisters were an order apart. They had their secrets just as the Ten Thousand had theirs. Such was the Emperor’s will.
Ra met the Sister-Commander’s eyes. Sensing his sincerity, Krole nodded and signed a reply.
‘Sister Kaeria Casryn will accompany Diocletian on his return to the surface,’ said the young girl, ‘in order to enact the Emperor’s command.’
‘As you wish,’ Ra agreed.
Jenetia followed this with a question, her eyes darkly urgent.
‘Will He join us?’ Melpomanei asked.
‘He remains bound to the Golden Throne. The forces besieging him outside the webway are growing in strength. He won’t stand with us.’
Melpomanei watched her mistress’ hands with a distant gaze, her mouth moving all the while. ‘What He commands, we will enforce.’ As she finished signing, Jenetia shifted once more. Rather than gesture a full sentence, she merely reached up over her shoulder, close to the back of her neck, and tapped her fingertips to Veracity’s long grip. It was enough for the child to translate. ‘Is the Emperor well?’
‘The pressure torments Him, but He remains resolute. Beyond the assault against His psychic defences, He spoke of a new presence, drawing near. Something old. Something already in the webway.’
Jenetia cut him off with a gentle wave of her hand. The motion moved seamlessly into more sign language. ‘That is why I am here,’ said Melpomanei. ‘If you have finished your meditations, will you please come with me?’
‘As you wish.’
The Custodian followed as the commander strode from the cathedral. Together they looked across the mist-wreathed vista of Calastar as the Impossible City stretched before them, around them, above them. Gone were the times such an insane view triggered disorientation in even Ra’s enhanced senses. Now when he looked at the eldar ruins, he saw a bastion of Mechanicum-armoured and gun-platformed towers and bridges that would be infinitely easier to defend than several hundred separate tunnels – but with no margin for error. Withdrawing to the city itself meant losing any fallback point.
The entire city was an unlikely hybrid of Imperial technology grafted onto time-eaten eldar wraithbone. When it came to the Impossible City, Ra’s awe had long ago been replaced by cold calculation and concerns of logistics.
And there stood the Godspire, where a golden Stormbird swinging in to land was silhouetted by the mist of middle distance. Three propellered Mechanicum ornithopters flapped in a slow arc above the landing gunship. The Koloborinkos flyers were mercifully silent at this distance. Up close, the machines’ flapping wings and spinning rotors gave off a brutal roar.
Scarcely even a quarter of the Godspire’s height, yet standing as a colossus above the marshalling Mechanicum forces, was the Scion of Vigilant Light. Freshly returned from one of the widest and tallest tunnels, the Warlord Titan was crawling with repair crews and maintenance servitors, who swarmed over its armour plating like ants clustering over a kill.
‘Are you troubled?’ Ra asked the Sister-Commander. ‘I cannot read your expressions.’
Jenetia Krole elaborated with several gestures for the girl to speak aloud. ‘Have you heard the reports of Thoroughfare HG-245-12-12?’
Ra nodded, paying heed to the background murmur of the dimmed vox reports playing at the back of his focus, whispering of the unfolding war. Fighters at the barricades fighting, falling, launching counter-attacks. The endless cycle. He had dulled them to near-mute while sparring and meditating upon the Emperor’s will, yet he knew at once of which report the Sister-Commander spoke.
‘I have already requested the Mechanicum send one of the Uridia-caste patrols,’ Melpomanei qualified. ‘They are less efficient since Adnector Primus Mendel was slain, but they assured me it would be done. Now you tell me the Emperor Himself has sensed this being’s approach. A Protector and its war machines may not be enough. What would be powerful enough alone for the Emperor to sense? What could be out there?’
‘There are a million things out there,’ Ra replied, ‘each more impossible than the last.’
Jenetia Krole signed her reply slowly and very clearly. ‘This,’ said Melpomanei, ‘is something different.’ She hesitated then, almost awkward as she signed once more. ‘May I ask what form the Emperor’s message took?’
Ra found the concept of what he’d seen, that pure and ancient world, difficult to frame in simple words. Jenetia noted his hesitation and stared, intrigued.
‘He showed me His childhood,’ the Custodian admitted, ‘and told me of the moment He first learned that humanity needed rulers.’
It was gratifying, in a way, to see Sister-Commander Jenetia Krole – the Soulless Queen of the Imperium – show genuine shock. As much as Ra felt discomfort at the sight, it was still a revelation to witness. Her hands hesitated in the air before her breastplate before moving into another series of smooth signs.
‘His childhood?’ the young girl said. ‘Elaborate please, Custodian.’
Ra felt the cold of Krole’s fierce adamance. ‘I saw Terra. More accurately, perhaps, I saw Old Earth.’
‘Neither Kadai nor Jasaric ever spoke of receiving such a vision. The future, the present, the recent past, yes. All of those. Never a reflection of Old Earth.’
‘I saw what I saw.’
‘Yet why would He show you this?’ the girl asked, her neutral tone conveying none of Jenetia’s mute amazement.
‘You ask a stone why the wind blows, commander. I don’t know.’
‘I must think on this. Thank you, Custodian.’ The Sister-Commander clicked her fingers, beckoning the girl, and offered Ra a polite bow of farewell.
He didn’t return it. He bowed and knelt only to one man. He did however force a weary smile to Melpomanei, aping the pleasant expression in an attempt to be disarming.
For the first time, Melpomanei spoke without her mistress signing. ‘You look monstrous when you pretend to be human,’ said the little girl.
Ra kept smiling. ‘As do you, soulless one.’
Three