The First Wall

by Gav Thorpe

  ‘Fulgrim has already wearied of the attack and withdrawn from the vicinity of the Lion’s Gate,’ Abaddon told him. ‘Angron rampages without purpose outside the walls and Mortarion continues his bombardments. I see little to be gained from their participation.’

  ‘Horus and his ascended brothers are the chosen of the gods – they are the will of Chaos given form,’ the Word Bearer replied. He stepped back, looking at his handiwork. The runes glimmered, soft green and dark red. ‘To be in their favour is to be favoured by the gods themselves. These are forces you will learn to balance when you come to accept your destiny.’

  ‘If it is my destiny, then it will happen whether I accept it or not,’ Abaddon growled. ‘You seem keen to persuade me I must make a choice whilst telling me that I have none.’

  Layak had no response to this and busied himself at the augur terminal for some time, daubing ritual marks on the console in the blood of the slain. With his staff he ignited the fluids, so that sigils danced in flames, strange intersections of the mystical and mechanical.

  ‘None of this would have been possible without the patronage of the gods,’ Layak told Abaddon when his ritual was complete. ‘Victory is not certain except by their favour.’

  ‘Victory is never certain.’

  ‘Without the gods, your ambitions would have died in a flame-lit lodge on Davin.’ A note of anger entered Layak’s voice, the first time Abaddon had heard such a thing. ‘Without the gods the Warmaster’s star would have ascended and fallen, and even the shadow of his memory would have eclipsed anything you had achieved.’

  This time it was Abaddon who was robbed of a retort. He was unsure where the cause and effect lay between Horus seeking the power of Chaos and the gods reaching out to him.

  ‘Is it done?’ he asked, pointing towards the augur terminal. ‘The sensor array will fail completely?’

  Layak examined the images that flickered across the screen. Abaddon saw spirals and jags, coming together like waves or overlapping flames. To his eye they were meaningless shapes.

  ‘Volk has seen the beacon and is coming. Darkness will fall when we need it.’

  ‘Then we will press on,’ said Abaddon, clenching his fist. ‘The Imperial Fists strengthen their grip on the skybridges – it is only a matter of time before we face a counter-attack from within the Palace. Kroeger has extended too far without consolidation, rushing the attack. If we fail to seize our objectives in the next thrust, we will never do it.’

  ‘And you think you will seize victory by your strength alone?’ Layak cackled. ‘Such hubris.’

  Abaddon held up a lightning-wreathed glove.

  ‘Not by my strength alone, but in the close-fought war, a single blow can turn the course.’

  Sanctum Imperialis, western zone, four days since assault

  The environs of the Sanctum Imperialis were a sprawling refugee camp. Several thousand square kilometres of habs and dorms and other blocks inside the Eternity Wall had been cleared in preparation for fresh assault. Some, like the Palatine Arc, had been hit by the enemy, turned to rubble, scoured by flame and toxin. Tens of thousands, later hundreds of thousands, had been displaced, fleeing through the Lion’s Gate into the city around the Sanctum Imperialis before that impenetrable barbican was closed against the coming of the enemy.

  The streets throbbed with a different life. Firelight replaced lumens that had been turned off to conserve energy. Against the thundering backdrop of siege guns, the murmur of a thousand conversations echoed down regal boulevards. Fountains had become wells. Plazas had become markets. Every scrap of material was pressed into use as shelter, transport or both.

  And into the mass of humanity, Amon followed Keeler.

  ‘I wonder what a Custodian sees when he looks upon this,’ she said, casting out a hand to encompass the mass of people making their homes in the streets, archways and abandoned buildings.

  He did not answer straight away. Very little surprised Amon, but he took a small delight in seeing how places could change so dramatically. He had seen the Imperial Palace raised upon the ancient city of its foundations – a city that the Emperor had apparently built in a past age before Old Night. A monument to mankind – not its master, the Emperor had assured His creations. It had been a place of beauty and awareness of humanity’s strengths and frailties. Not just a museum, but a building block to the future. A template not a temple.

  Function had started to subsume its form. It became a capital not just of Terra, but of a burgeoning empire beyond the stars. The Administratum had grown out of the need to officiate such an immense endeavour. Hab-blocks, arcologies and hives had appended the statue-flanked processionals and broad cloisters. Edifices dedicated to a different kind of deity, laying sacrifice at the idol of bureaucracy, hoping to tame a galaxy with numbers in vid-ledgers.

  The Emperor had been concerned with the webway project and the Custodians had accompanied Him. They had surrendered the greater part of the Palace to humans, overseen by Malcador – though not wholly mortal in body, certainly in mindset. It amazed Amon even now to think of the sprawling otherworld a few kilometres beneath his feet, past the wards and gates and bastions of the Imperial Dungeon. It also gave him pause to recall the limitless horde of Neverborn that waited below, closed off from Terra by arcane machines and the will of the Emperor. The traitors did not need vile rituals to summon their unnatural allies: a legion of the warp tested the defences constantly, a whole dimension yet a paper’s breadth away.

  ‘I see the flotsam of a Warmaster’s pride,’ he told her. ‘Seven years ago, the Imperium was turned upon its axis by the selfishness of Horus. That moment has led directly to this and every suffering felt here, every hurt upon the people of the Emperor that has followed, can be laid upon him.’

  Keeler said nothing in reply.

  Rogal Dorn had come to turn the Palace into a fortress. Immense walls, domineering towers and buttresses by the thousand had strengthened the Sanctum Imperialis, and about it the great curtain fortifications of the Eternity Wall and the Ultimate Wall had been raised and widened, each stretch a city-state in its own right. Administrators remained but labourers in their millions joined them. The latter were eventually given guns and became soldiers, ordered to defend the ramparts their hands had built.

  Amon had changed with it all yet remained constant at his core. Through the blood games he had learned of the ever-shifting ­societies and ecosystems that existed both in the centre and at the fringes of the Imperial Palace. Some things never changed, like the demagogues and black marketeers and gangsters. Only the means of trade, threat and payment altered with the passing decades.

  And in the last months the Palace had metamorphosed into something new again.

  His presence caused some reaction, a stirring among the listless crowds, but this close to the Sanctum Imperialis the presence of a Custodian was not rare even if it was not commonplace. A few desperate souls called out petitions for aid, the more unhinged demanding audience with the Emperor Himself. Others approached with thanks for the Custodian’s vigilance, mistaking his presence for one of the irregular patrols through the growing encampments.

  ‘It is no surprise the dispossessed have a ready ear for the sermons of the Lectitio Divinitatus,’ he said to the self-professed Holy Lady of Terra. ‘When one has no power, one will seek hope from any source.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Keeler with furrowed brow.

  They passed across a square dominated by a wide bonfire. Among the flames Amon recognised the broken shapes of shelving and Administratum lecterns. The building on the far side was a counting house, the windows long since broken in, the contents looted. Makeshift lamps flickered inside.

  ‘Have you considered the alternative?’ Keeler continued. ‘If these impoverished folk do not turn their thoughts to worship of the Emperor, where else might they seek succour?’

  ‘You do not understan
d the extent of the folly.’

  ‘I have witnessed first-hand the darkness of the warp that can consume a soul,’ she replied quietly. ‘You forget that I saw the Warmaster fall prey to that same delusion.’

  ‘All the more reason that such knowledge should not be shared widely,’ Amon told her. He stepped carefully over blanket-wrapped forms. Only the faintest of movements showed them to be alive not dead, in the grip of deep fatigue and oblivious to everything else.

  ‘To accept His own divinity does not suggest any other exists,’ countered Keeler.

  ‘Where did you hear such a thing?’ Amon asked sharply.

  Keeler pulled out a book from a bag over her shoulder. Amon did not need to look at it closely to know that it was the Lectitio Divinitatus.

  ‘It is the wisdom in these pages,’ she told him.

  ‘Yet it is a sentiment that fell from the lips of Lorgar, one who has long since passed from veneration of the Emperor to a far darker life.’

  ‘Knowledge is power, ergo ignorance is weakness,’ Keeler said. ‘It is a battle into which the Emperor would have His servants go unprepared and unarmed. Is it any wonder that so many have fallen when it appears to them that the Emperor deceived them?’

  ‘The Emperor is above judgement. I have walked beside Him many times and would not claim to know His mind in these matters.’

  ‘Yet you are sure He would condemn my faith?’

  ‘To accept any superstitious nonsense invites speculation and unreason. It is the path that leads to the end of everything the Emperor has built. It is to combat those very powers that…’ Amon fell silent, aware that he should not share too much with Keeler. She had a unique perspective on events around Horus, but the secrecy of the webway and the Emperor’s true goals was inviolate. ‘To know is to be tempted.’

  ‘I know and I am not tempted.’ She stopped at the steps into the portico of the Administratum building and looked up at Amon’s face. ‘The Emperor gives me the strength to resist their wiles. Did He not create you to be immune to such desires also?’

  ‘Each Custodian is a singular labour, imbued with individual strength and purpose,’ Amon told her. ‘When primarchs can be led astray, there is little hope for the common human to withstand the barbs and lures of the hidden foe.’

  ‘I do not think we will agree, nor that this will be our last discussion on the matter. All I ask is that you approach what you see,’ she gestured to the building’s interior, ‘with an open mind.’

  ‘And you think I will see something different today? This is the fifth gathering you have brought me to, and all I see are empty rituals and charlatans.’

  ‘Perhaps that is for the best, from your point of view. What if you were to witness a true miracle of the Emperor? Would you accept it?’

  Amon said nothing, but simply gestured for Keeler to proceed him into the counting house.

  A man and a woman waited in the foyer but remained silent, standing aside to allow them to pass the main stairwell and head towards a hall beyond. Ducking through the arch, Amon found himself in a circular chamber about thirty metres across, the floor muddied from many footfalls, the original mosaic design lost beneath the grime. The ceiling was black with soot from a handful of fires, a few broken skylights acting as chimneys.

  The first thing that struck him was the singing. Those gathered were mostly knelt in haphazard lines on an old carpet that had been salvaged from somewhere, hands in their laps. He picked out three dozen different voices from the assembled worshippers, some of them skilled, many of them not. The effort that went into the singing was not related to the quality of the outcome. He stopped at the threshold for a short while, listening to the words, decoding the euphemism and metaphor as best he could.

  It was a song of praise, and of hope, and thanks.

  ‘For what do they thank the Emperor?’ he quietly asked Keeler, who waited beside him. ‘Their homes are destroyed. They live in abject poverty. It is likely they will die of exposure or violence very soon.’

  ‘But they are still alive today,’ said Keeler, eyes glimmering with moisture. She held her hand to her breast, the lump of the book inside her coat beneath it. ‘The Emperor has guarded them through the tribulation when so many others have perished.’

  ‘Survivor bias is not blessing.’

  Keeler ignored him and entered. Kyril Sindermann had come ahead of the pair to prepare the way and was leading the verses from in front of the group. There were several others with him, presumably the group leaders.

  As their presence was noticed, the singing faltered and stopped. The congregation turned their attention to the newcomers, some with gasps, raising hands to mouths in surprise. At first Amon thought it a reaction to his presence, for he had come clad in full panoply, as Keeler had suggested. But he heard whispers – ‘The blessed one is here!’ ‘She walks among us!’ – and saw that though eyes strayed to him, they lingered on Keeler. It was the first time he had been in the presence of a human, except Malcador, that had commanded more attention than him.

  Keeler responded, her face flushed in the firelight, eyes wide. He heard her heart racing.

  ‘Come, come,’ Sindermann called out, ushering them to the front of the group. He made introductions but Amon did not recognise any of the names as people of significance. The congregation were of a kind, much like those he had seen on his previous excursions with Keeler. Men and women, mostly older than average because the younger, healthier ones had all been drafted into the Imperial Army. There were a few he took to be adolescents, not quite old enough to be trained with a lasgun.

  They looked at him with a mixture of suspicion and awe. The first was due to the illicit nature of the gathering, he had learned, and the second down to his existence as a creation of the Emperor’s labours. He found himself uncomfortable under their gaze, but showed nothing of his feelings in his expression, a study in calm interest.

  And the evening continued in predictable fashion, with a few more songs, some discussion of certain passages from their holy book and an exchange of goods in the form of food, drink, medi­cines and such that had been scavenged since the last gathering. These were taken by the group leaders for distribution to those most in need, or so they claimed. Whether they were true to their word was not Amon’s concern.

  Finally, prayers were offered to the Emperor in exchange for protection, guidance and forgiveness. The last of these confused Amon particularly, as though the Emperor cared anything for the supposed moral infractions of these people. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Amon approached Sindermann and the other cult leaders.

  ‘It is such an honour to receive your visit, Custodian,’ said a grey-haired woman called Coral. She looked at him oddly, hand half moving towards his armour and then withdrawing. ‘To think that you have been in the presence of the God-Emperor.’

  Amon stiffened on hearing that term, plucked as it was from the forbidden book written by the traitor Lorgar. That it had entered common parlance was testament to the price of laxity. Coral acted as though something of that supposedly divine connection might be passed off by simple proximity.

  ‘Sindermann assured us that you are not here to condemn our practices,’ said another, a dark-skinned man with a walking cane, dressed in the robe of a minor administrator.

  Amon glanced at Keeler. She raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I am seeking those that may have witnessed strange phenomena,’ said the Custodian. ‘A shared vision or dreams, perhaps. Voices, images, anything that cannot be explained by natural law.’

  ‘Like signs from the Emperor?’ asked the youngest of the trio, a mother with a babe in a sling no more than a few months old. Amon realised the child must have been born since the siege began. His surprise must have slipped through his guarded expression.

  ‘His father fights on the walls,’ the woman said proudly, stroking the babe’s cheek. Her voice quav
ered a little. ‘At least, he did when I last heard a month ago. I pray to the Emperor to see him safe through his travails. I don’t suppose you could get word of him?’

  She looked at Amon with a hope that was in stark contrast to her sunken features and dark-rimmed eyes. He could see that the child was malnourished also, as were most of the congregation. Their clothes were tatters, homes destroyed. Yet they gave thanks to a fiction of the Emperor and asked for news of loved ones rather than decrying the Master of Mankind who surely some might blame for their predicament.

  The sheer scale of the battle for the Imperial Palace meant that any single soldier could not be accounted for. Whole companies died without remark. It did not seem productive to share this point with the desperate young woman.

  ‘I do not think it possible,’ he told her softly.

  ‘Life goes on,’ said the older woman. ‘Horus cannot halt all of humanity.’

  ‘Indeed, the great cycle continues,’ said Keeler, joining them having finished a conversation with one of the congregation. She looked at the mother. ‘What do you know of the group that meets in the Basilica Ventura?’

  ‘A strange lot,’ said the man, limping closer. ‘Gave themselves a name. What was it, Chikwendu? The ones that follow Olivier?’

  ‘Oh…’ The older woman rubbed her chin for a moment. ‘The Lampbearers? Lamplighters?’

  ‘Lightbearers!’ said the young mother. ‘I saw one of their emiss­aries on the west arch road just this morning.’

  ‘Yes, the Lightbearers,’ said Chikwendu. ‘You want strange happenings, the Lightbearers are the ones to watch, for sure. Olivier, he’s claiming he can heal the sick, and that’s just the start of it.’

  Amon exchanged a look with Keeler. She smiled and held her hands out to the group leaders, embracing each in turn.

  ‘Stay strong,’ she whispered to each of them.

  ‘My thanks for your assistance,’ Amon said with a nod of acknowledgement. He was about to depart but felt he could not do so without some further comment. It was not his place to fuel false worship, but nor was it his duty to quash all sense of hope. ‘This time shall pass. The Emperor will prevail.’