‘You painted this today?’ asks Kartono.

‘I did,’ confirms Nagasena.

‘I do not see what you see, master.’

‘Nor would I expect you to. We all see with different eyes, and how we perceive the world around us is coloured by the landscape within our heart. You look on the world and see the optimism of a life spent away from hunting and killing, but I see…’

‘What? What do you see?’

‘Ah… I am an old man, Kartono, and my eyes grow dim,’ says Nagasena, suddenly reticent. ‘What do I know?’

‘Tell me what you see,’ pleads Kartono.

Nagasena sighs and looks into the depths of the painting. ‘I see a time of darkness ahead for us. The world knows it and it is afraid of the bloodshed to come. I fear we are about to walk into the lair of a sleeping dragon and awaken the most terrible danger imaginable.’

Kartono shakes his head. ‘You are speaking of Horus Lupercal. What have we to do with the rebel Warmaster? His army will be ashes by now. Ferrus Manus and the rest of Lord Dorn’s strike force will be celebrating victory even as we speak.’

‘I fear you are wrong, Kartono,’ says Nagasena. ‘I believe the Warmaster is a more terrible threat than anyone can imagine. And I believe that Lord Dorn has gravely underestimated how far his reach has spread.’

Nagasena puts down his brush and makes his way from the tower. He descends its seventy-two steps and enters his rose garden, wishing he could spend more time here, but knowing that such a desire is impossible. Kartono follows him, and they move through the delicately proportioned and harmoniously appointed chambers of the villa like ghosts.

‘What are you planning?’ asks Kartono, as Nagasena enters his private chambers. Three walls are painted white, adorned with long silk hangings and ancient maps of long vanished lands, while the other is covered with shelves laden with rolled up scrolls and heavy textbooks. A narrow desk of dark walnut sits low in the centre of the room, and writing implements are arranged neatly on its polished surface.

‘I am preparing,’ answers Nagasena cryptically, running his hands over the one bare wall in the chamber in a series of complicated patterns.

‘Preparing for what?’

The wall in front of Nagasena slides back to reveal a deep compartment filled with racked weapons and armour. Conversion generators, web-guns, long rifles, energy blades, digital lasers, plasma pistols, cestus gauntlets, shot-casters, fire-lances, photon-nets and stasis grenades. Implements of pursuit and capture.

‘For the hunt,’ says Nagasena.

‘Who are we hunting?’ asks Kartono, exasperation beginning to enter his voice.

Nagasena smiles, but there is no warmth in it, for he knows the answer will only confound his friend further.

‘I do not know yet,’ says Nagasena.

SIX

Woe-weavers and Doomsayers

Acceptance

The Red Eye

NEWS OF THE massacre on Isstvan V spread, as all bad news does, with gleeful rapidity, as if those who bore it took unseemly relish in passing it on. The effect on the populace of the palace was immediate and contradictory. In the worker habs of the Brahmaputra Plateau, riots broke out between those who railed against the notion of the Warmaster’s treachery and those who decried him as a faithless oath-breaker. In the precincts of Ter-Guar, ten thousand wailing women knelt before the towering fortress of the Eternity Gate and begged the Emperor to give the lie to the news.

Woe-weavers and doomsayers roamed the streets, screeching of brother turned on brother as they wailed and gnashed their teeth with zealous frenzy. Panic swept through the palace like the dreaded Life-eater virus, leaving ashen hopes and broken dreams in its wake. Men wept openly before their wives and children, their faith in the infallibility of the Emperor shaken to the core. That Horus Lupercal could have betrayed his father was terrible beyond imagining, but to learn that so many of the Emperor’s sons had followed him into rebellion was more than many could bear.

The people of Terra were waking up to a very different reality, one with which many of the globe’s inhabitants found themselves unable to cope. To have a dream so precious that its demise made life unbearable was the cold reality of the day following the news of the bloodshed on Isstvan V.

Hundreds of inconsolable citizens of Terra threw themselves from the cliffs of the palace or quietly took blades to their necks and wrists in the cold confines of their homes. On the Merican plains of Jonasburg, the seven thousand men and women of a bio-weapons storage facility exposed themselves to a pernicious strain of the newly-developed gangshi virus and perished in the flames of automated decontamination procedures rather than live in a world where the Emperor could be betrayed.

When word reached the Diemensland prison island, the inmates declared themselves loyal servants of the Warmaster and slaughtered their overseers. Regiments drawn from the Magyar Ossurites mustered in the Meganesian heartlands, but the battle to retake the island would take many bloody weeks.

All over the globe, the solid certainty of the Imperium’s invincibility was crumbling, but worse was to come. As the sun reached its zenith above the hollow mountain and the shadows hid, word came that one of the Emperor’s sons had fallen on the sands of Isstvan V. Ferrus Manus, beloved gene-sire of the Iron Hands was dead, slain, it was said, by the hand of his most beloved brother.

It was impossible to believe, ridiculous. That a demi-god could be slain was preposterous, the lunatic notion of a delusional fool. Yet as the hours passed and fragments of information eked from the City of Sight, it became harder to deny the truth of Ferrus Manus’s death. People tore out their hair and mortified their flesh in bloody honour of the Emperor’s fallen son. Vulkan too was rumoured to be dead, though no one could yet say for sure whether this was true or fevered speculation. Yet even as cold facts spread into the global consciousness, they came on a tide of wild rumour and manic embellishment that grew with every retelling.

Some tales spoke of the Warmaster’s fleet breaching the outer perimeter of the solar system, while others had his warships on the verge of entering Terra’s orbit. False prophets arose on every continent, spreading a credo of falsehoods and misinformation until Imperial Arbitrators or gold-armoured warriors of the Legio Custodes silenced them. As more and more lies spread across the world, suspicions began to form in the minds of Terra’s leaders that not all were the result of panic and the mutational power of rumour and distance, but of deliberate misinformation by agents of the Warmaster.

The cryptaesthesians passed word to the Legio Custodes of numerous messages sent to Terra with concealed subtexts, hidden encryptions and suspicious routings. Acting on such information, the Custodians made numerous arrests, all of which only fanned the flames of unrest. The notion of the enemy within turned brother upon brother, neighbours into potential spies, and any word of dissent marked a man out as a traitor.

In such a climate of fear, the people of Terra turned to whatever gave them comfort. To some it was the solace of loved ones, to others it was the oblivion promised by alcohol or narcotics. Some swaddled themselves in hope that the Imperium was strong enough to weather this terrible storm, placing their faith in the Emperor’s wisdom and the power of his remaining armies.

Others’ faith in the Emperor was of a radically different stripe, and the clandestine churches of the Lectitio Divinitatus grew from small gatherings of like-minded individuals to massed congregations that met in secret basements, echoing warehouses and other such unremembered spaces.

In time of turmoil, the human mind seeks solace wherever it can, and never more so than in times of war. For it was clear to everyone on Terra that the Warmaster’s treachery was no longer simply an isolated rebellion.