The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,99

side, and so it was with much irritation that I responded to a summons from his much-diminished private staff and travelled halfway across the Palace to find him.

He had always been a sallow figure, but now he looked positively ghostly. I tried to imagine how he felt about the recent disasters. He was the Master of the Administratum, that stupendously vast edifice that controlled the flow of information between systems and the centre. More than any of us he traded in communication, the endless tide of parchment that was our empire’s oxygen. Now, though, he was blind and near powerless, cut adrift from his own servants by the madness of his astropaths and the impossibility of void travel. Other High Lords, like Arx or Fadix, could still use their curtailed networks of control and subterfuge, but Haemotalion’s realm was the visible Imperium, its scholars and its scriptoria, and that had been revealed as perhaps the most fragile Adeptus stratum of them all.

We walked together in the cloister of an old oratory set within his sprawling private estate, its stonework caked in spidery lichen. The skies above us still burned with that mournful ember-glow, and every so often we would look up at it, fearful that the blood-rain would start again. Haemotalion, a tall and gaunt figure beside my waddling frame, twitched as he walked, a nervous tic I had never noticed him suffer from before.

‘You’ve been hard to reach, chancellor,’ he said.

‘Apologies, Master. There’s been much to attend to.’

‘No doubt. But this is a time for the Council to remain strong. We must rebuild, and swiftly. And yet, there have been disturbing rumours.’

I looked at him. I genuinely didn’t know what they might be. ‘Oh?’

Haemotalion pressed his lips sceptically together. ‘You want me to say it? You want me to say the words? Very well. Your friend, the primarch. That’s the problem. What are we to make of him?’

I had no idea. No one had any idea. There were no precedents. The last living primarch had disappeared into myth thousands of years ago, and even the great archives of the Lex did not stretch back that far.

‘He is the Lord Commander,’ I ventured.

‘He was the Lord Commander. He was many things. He was part of the rebellion that brought us so close to annihilation he curtailed his own power to prevent it happening again.’ Haemotalion sniffed. ‘They’re still saying this brings us a new dawn. I fear it only brings the old night back.’

I didn’t have an argument. Just as it had been before my mad obsession with the Adeptus Custodes, I had reverted to being a cipher for the views of the powerful.

‘Do the others feel likewise?’ I asked.

‘Some do. There’s been too little time to form a consensus.’ He stopped walking and drew closer. ‘He’s no longer within the great halls. They tell me Valoris took him down to the heart of the ­Sanctum. I’m informed he’s still there. They say he’s descended into the Throneroom itself.’

I looked at him steadily. ‘If any can do so, surely it’s him.’

‘None of us ever ventured it.’

‘Did you ever wish to?’

The Master was in no mood for humour, however bleak. ‘He’ll take control,’ he said. ‘That’s the danger. We’ll win this battle, only to see Terra taken from us. And what then? Another Great Crusade? A purge of all we’ve striven to build? You can see it, I trust. The danger.’

I remembered how I had felt on Luna, witnessing that pain of recognition in Guilliman’s eyes. I found myself thinking that a purge of all we had striven to build might be no bad thing.

‘Now, perhaps, you understand the folly of what you were trying to engineer before,’ the Master said, starting to walk again. ‘You would have sent the Custodians into the inferno at Cadia, just when they were needed here. Without them, we’d have lost the Lion’s Gate. The enemy might have breached the Inner Sanctum. You’ve played a reckless game, cancellarius, and need to remember where your loyalties lie.’

Perhaps he sensed my shell-shocked state and so felt able to speak to me thus. I would never have tolerated it before.

‘The Council must remain strong,’ he repeated. ‘While the Lord Guilliman remains within the Sanctum, we have our chance to act. I have already agreed with Pereth to forbid all fleet movements off-world. Arx has instructed those close to her to cordon off the sites on Luna and begin to limit the fallout from the Lion’s Gate encounter. We