The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

Diocletian held a stolen relic in his hands, dirtied by the very fact he had to touch it. Once more he fought the urge to grind it beneath his boot – an urge he’d been resisting since the trophy first came into his possession. He left it on the battlements, relieved to be rid of it even temporarily. Soon he would leave it with the Captain-General. Let Valdor add it to whatever archives were being collected by those still on the surface.

Mere years ago, it was forbidden for any to set foot here but the Ten Thousand, the Sisterhood and their mutual king. No others were permitted to walk where the Ennara Towers had risen into the polluted sky, for here the Emperor liked to contemplate the heavens, speaking to His most loyal warriors of His dreams among the stars. Now the battlements that had risen in the tower’s place were swarming with gun-servitors and Imperial Fists overseers. The stars were eclipsed by a forest of drifting searchlights, hundreds of them aimed skywards at the gently toxic clouds. Each stabbing beam of light hunted the sky for foes that couldn’t possibly be anywhere near Terra, but their readiness was unquestionable.

‘So much has changed,’ Diocletian said, looking across the vista of squat gun towers.

Kaeria started, surprised at his tone.

Diocletian fixed his companion with a neutral look. ‘Never that,’ he said. ‘I don’t mourn the loss of the Palace’s beauty. I mourn what all of this represents. Dorn and Malcador have both conceded that Horus will reach Terra no matter what stands in the Warmaster’s way. This is not precaution. This is making ready for war.’

Kaeria turned to look across the newborn battlements once more.

‘What?’ Diocletian asked.

She favoured him with a brief glance, the light of challenge in her eyes.

‘I have no time for your disapproval, Sister. The tribune is not here. I am. Let that be the end of it.’

A low purr of servos and pistons cut into the silence that followed. Kaeria nodded towards a doorway in the nearby battlement tower. An archwright stood there, cowled by the cloak of her order. Three bronze-plated artificers with metalsmith tools rising from prehensile servo-arms linked to their hunched spines flanked the priest in silent vigil.

‘Golden One,’ came the tech-priest’s greeting. ‘Honoured Sister.’

‘Archwright,’ Diocletian replied. Many souls even among the Imperium’s hierarchs would greet such a consummate artisan with no small gravitas. Kaeria bowed out of simple respect, but no warrior of the Custodian Guard would bow to anyone but his sire.

The archwright was an iron-boned elder, locked into a posture harness to keep her withered muscles upright, her cybernetics and bionics draped in a robe of Martian red and Terran gold. Whatever was left of her original face was surgically buried under reconstruction plating and an insect’s portion of ferrotic eye-lenses. She was female only insofar as her original biological template had been female. That is to say, in the mists of centuries past, she’d been born as a girl-child on Mars. The frail construct that approached both warriors now had evolved far beyond notions of gender.

‘I am Iosos,’ the decrepit genius stated. ‘I have been appointed to attend you before tomorrow’s war council.’

‘We need no attending,’ Diocletian replied at once. ‘We have artificers already deployed where we do battle.’

‘The Captain-General believes that the sight of one of the Omnissiah’s Custodians wounded and with his armour damaged will harm morale among the Palace’s pilgrims and defenders.’

For a moment Diocletian couldn’t even frame a response. He would have laughed had the notion not been so impossibly tragic, as if the morale of the refugees sitting safe within the Palace’s new walls mattered one iota. The war was being fought and lost far from Terra, without any of those dregs even raising their weapons against the foe.

‘Their morale,’ he said with patience he didn’t feel, ‘is beyond irrelevant.’

‘That may be so,’ Iosos conceded, ‘but the Captain-General insisted, Golden One. As First of the Ten Thousand, his command takes primacy.’

Kaeria gave her companion a sideways glance. Diocletian backed down, clenching his teeth to prevent himself speaking the dismissal on the tip of his tongue. Kaeria was right: this wasn’t a fight worth having.

‘You may work,’ Diocletian said, his tone passionless in acquiescence.

The archwright drew nearer, leading the three servitors. Diocletian held himself motionless as the archwright ran skeletal metal digits across his war-plate. The shaking of the tech-priest’s limbs ceased as liquid-pressure compensators in her arm supports adjusted for stability. Several of the struts in her harness vented tiny breaths of cryo-steam in a song of quiet hisses.