James Swallow - Nemesis

absently traced a finger over the wood. He looked around; Malcador had no doubts

that the Custodian Guardsman had spent his time in this chamber working out where

the room might actually be located.

The Sigillite drowned the beginnings of a waxen smile in another sip of the

bittersweet tea. “I confess, I had not expected you to do anything other than observe,”

he began. “But instead you broke open the pattern of the usual parry and riposte that

typically comprises these meetings.”

Valdor paused, looking away from him. “Why did you ask me here, my lord?”

“To watch,” Malcador replied. “I wanted to ask your counsel after the fact—”

The Custodian turned, cutting him off. “Don’t lie to me. You didn’t ask me to

join you in this place just for my silence.” Valdor studied him. “You knew exactly

what I would say.”

Malcador let the smile out, at last. “I… had an inkling.”

Valdor’s lips thinned. “I hope you are pleased with the outcome, then.”

25

The Sigillite sensed the warrior was about to leave, and he spoke again quickly to

waylay him. “I am surprised in some measure, it must be said. After all, you are the

expression of Imperial strength and nobility. You are the personal guard of the Lord

of Earth, as pure a warrior-kindred as many might aspire to become. And in that, I

would have thought you of all men would consider the tactics of the Assassinorum to

be…” He paused, feeling for the right word. “Underhanded. Dishonourable, even?”

Valdor’s face shifted, but not towards annoyance as Malcador had expected.

Instead he smiled without humour. “If that was a feint to test me, Sigillite, it was a

poor one. I expected better of you.”

“It’s been a long day,” Malcador offered.

“The Legio Custodes have done many things your assassins would think beyond

us. The sires and siresses are not the only ones who have marque to operate under…

special conditions.”

“Your charter is quite specific on the Legio’s zone of responsibility.” Malcador

felt a frown forming. This conversation was not going where he had expected it to.

“If you wish,” Valdor said, with deceptive lightness. “My duty is to preserve the

life of the Emperor of Mankind above all else. That is accomplished through many

different endeavours. The termination of the traitor-son Horus Lupercal and the clear

and present danger he represents, no matter how it is brought to pass, serves my

duty.”

“So, you really believe that a task force of killers could do this?”

Valdor gave a slight shrug of his huge shoulders. “I believe they have a chance, if

the pointless tensions between the clades can be arrested.”

Malcador smiled. “You see, Captain-General? I did not lie. I wanted your insight.

You have given it to me.”

“I haven’t finished,” said the warrior. “Vanus was right. This mission will not

please the Emperor when he learns of it, and he will learn of it when I tell him every

word that was spoken in this room today.”

The Sigillite’s smile vanished. “That would be an error, Custodian. A grave

misjudgement on your part.”

“You cannot have such hubris as to believe that you know better than he?”

Valdor said, his tone hardening.

“Of course not!” Malcador snapped in return, his temper flaring. “But you know

as well as I do that in order to protect the sanctity of Terra and our liege-lord, some

things must be kept in the dark. The Imperium is at a delicate point, and we both

know it. All the effort we have spent on the Great Crusade, and the Emperor’s works,

all of that has been placed in most dire jeopardy by Horus’ insurrection. The conflicts

being fought at this very moment are not just on the battlefields of distant worlds and

in the void of space! They are in hearts and minds, and other realms less tangible. But

now, here is the opportunity to fight in the shadows, unseen and unremarked. To

have this bloody deed done without setting the galaxy ablaze in its wake! A swift

ending. The head of the snake severed with a single blow.” He took a long breath.

“But many may see it as ignoble. Use it against us. And for a father to sanction the

execution of his son… Perhaps it may be beyond the pale. And that is why some

things cannot be spoken of outside this chamber.”

26

Valdor folded his muscular arms over his chest and stared down at Malcador.

“That statement has all the colour of an order,” he said. “But who gives it, I wonder?

The Master of Assassins, or the Regent of Terra?”

The Sigillite’s eyes glittered in the gloom. “Decide for yourself,” he said.

Before the Emperor’s enlightenment, the Sentine’s precinct house had been a place

of idolatry and ancestor worship. Once, the bodies of the rich and those judged

worthy had been buried in crypts beneath the main hall, and great garish statuary and

other extravagant gewgaws had filled every corner of the building, with cloisters and

naves leading here and there to chapels for every deity the First Establishment had

brought with them from Old Earth. Now the crypts were cells and memory stacks,

armouries and storage lockers. The chapels had different tenants now, icons called

security and vigilance, and all the artworks and idols were crushed and gone, a few

saved in museums as indicators of a less sophisticated past. All this had taken place a

long time before Yosef Sabrat had been born, however. There were barely a handful

of living citizens on Iesta Veracrux who could recall any vestiges of a past with

religion in it.

The cathedral’s second life as a place of justice served the building well. It was

just as impressive a home for the Sentine as it had been for the long-departed priests.

Sabrat crossed the long axis of the main hall, past the open waiting quad where

citizens queued and argued with the luckless jagers on desk duty, and through the

checkpoint where an impassive, watchful gun-servitor licked his face with a fan of

green laser light before letting him by. He threw a cursory nod to a group of other

reeves from the West Catchment, all of them gathered around a nynemen board with

tapers of scrip, waving off an invite to join them in a game; instead he took the spiral

stairs up to the second level. The upper floors were almost a building inside a

building, a multi-storey blockhouse that had been constructed inside the hangar-like

confines of the main hall, and retrofitted into the structure. The room was in the same

state of shabby, half-controlled clutter as it ever was, with bales of rough vinepaper

and starkly shot picts arranged in loose piles that represented some sort of untidy

order, if only one knew how to interpret it. In the centre of the room, a pillar studded

with brass communication sockets sprouted thick rubber-sheathed cables that snaked

to headsets or to hololiths. One of them ended in a listening rig around the head of

Yosef’s cohort, who sat bent over in a chair, listening with his eyes closed, fingers

absently toying with a gold aquila on a chain about his wrist.

“Daig.” Yosef stopped in front of the man and called his name. When he didn’t

respond, the reeve snapped his fingers loudly. “Wake up!”