the slums and the hive-towers. The enforcers were soon run ragged trying to keep up with it. We received tidings of more rioting across the southern hemispheric zones, fuelled by both panic and long-stoked resentments. The downtrodden impoverished could put up with much if they believed that the Imperium could at least keep them safe; once they lost that sense, our grip on their loyalty was loosened.
My first direct experience of this came two days after Navradaran had left the Palace. Tribune Italeo requested my presence at the south-eastern wall-zones, following entreaties made to him by the regular garrison commanders. These were the Outer Palace walls, you understand, running around the gigantic estates for hundreds of kilometres. Even if all ten thousand of my brothers had patrolled those walls there would still have been gaping swathes of emptiness, and so instead many regiments of psycho-conditioned mortal soldiers were used to bolster our limited numbers. Some were drawn from regiments famed in the outside Imperium, such as the Lucifer Blacks, while others were virtually unknown outside Terra, like the white-robed Palatine Sentinels.
I answered the call, and was met at the landing site by the captain of the 156th regiment, the Tramman Standards, a man with a name badge reading Leovine Werrish. We arranged our rendezvous just inside the vast concave sweep of the curtain wall, the wide landing site falling under its shadow as the sun struggled to climb over the eastern horizon. Above us, the grey screen of Terra’s unquiet skies churned away, and hot-ash wind danced around us.
He did his best not to be daunted by my presence. Even for those who served within the sacred confines of the Palace, though, we were a rare and imposing sight.
‘My lord Custodian,’ he said, kneeling.
When he rose again I could see how drawn his face was. He had the kind of fatigue that only comes from long periods of near-constant action without respite, the kind that gets into the bones and never loosens its bite.
‘They tell me you are having trouble, captain,’ I said.
‘I don’t know where it all comes from,’ he said, too tired to make any attempt to hide the scale of the problem. In fact, I could hear the size of it for myself – a dull rolling roar from the far side of the massive walls, the telltale sound of thousands of voices raised in anger. ‘There’s a madness out there.’
‘You have done your best, I am sure.’
He looked hollowed out. ‘I’m glad you’re with us, lord. Will… ah, the rest of your detachment be here soon?’
If I smiled at that he would not have seen it, for I was wearing my full panoply of war and my face was enclosed in gold. There was no detachment. It was unusual for us even to consider deploying as a ‘detachment’ – my chamber would come with me when they were called, but the need for that was rare and I would only consider summoning them in the utmost extremity. He could not possibly know that, though. Perhaps he had served with the Angels of Death in some other warzone, and had seen how they used their bonds of brotherhood to multiply their unique prowess, and it was logical enough for him to assume that we operated in the same fashion.
‘Let us see this, then,’ was all I said.
He bowed hastily, signalled his departure to an escort of thirty equally weary staff officers, and the two of us moved to where my Talion grav-lander was waiting on the apron. I took the pilot’s seat, and Werrish strapped himself into the counterpart, looking ludicrously small among restraint strapping designed for one of my kind.
We lifted off, and headed for an egress gate built into the wall’s structure. For a little while, all we had ahead of us was the gently curving slope of pure black adamantium. Steps were carved every two hundred metres, zigzagging up the windswept face towards the walkway at the top – thirty metres across and overshadowed by a high, embattled parapet. Defence towers loomed at hundred-metre intervals, massive gun-citadels crowned with lascannons and heavy bolters, all angled outwards into the cityscape beyond.
Then the egress gate opened – twin blast doors sliding apart to reveal the glowing red innards of the wall itself. We passed within, and saw the racks of attack craft hanging from launch-cages within the dimly lit interior, then the ammunition trains for the towers above, then the strobing power beams for the void