Noble reasons all.

I listen to their doomed mantras and I sing them lustily to the shining beacon of light that reaches out to the farthest extent of the galaxy.

The one the Eye has spoken of is here.

TEN

Praetorians

Psychic Excavations

Blood Protects its Own

BENEATH THE PEAK known as Rakaposhi, the Legio Custodes kept their gaol – where those individuals deemed hostile to the Emperor were isolated from the world above. Dug into the rock of the mountain, its limestone walls were clad in adamantium plate, resistant to virtually all forms of weaponry and deaf to the pleas of innocence that echoed from its cells.

In an ancient, long-dead tongue, it had been known as Khangba Marwu, an all too literal name that gave some clue to its age. Only the most senior Custodians bothered to use its original name, and to those condemned to its cells, never again see the light of day, it had an altogether more prosaic name.

They knew it simply as the Vault.

Khangba Marwu had always been part of the mountain, or at least so it seemed to those who even knew of it. It had always been a site of incarceration, a hidden place to cage the most violent, the most dangerous, and the most reprehensible evils the world had known. No one knew who had first hacked its cells and passageways from the bedrock of the mountain, but its origins went far beyond the limits of memory and surviving documentation.

Stories of the heinous criminals incarcerated in its lightless depths stretched back thousands of years, their names now meaningless and their crimes long forgotten. Yet there were villains aplenty plucked from living memory who had darkened its sterile corridors and died insane within its unfeeling walls.

The lieutenants of the Pan-Pacific tyrant had been brought here, as had the Ethnarch of the Caucasus Wastes, the so-called ‘First Emperor’ and a being known only as the Reaper – a monster that legend said was an angel sent to cleanse mankind from the world. Uilleam the Red, the tyrannical blood-drinking prince of Albyon had been brought here for execution after his defeat at the Battle of the Blue Dawn. Uilleam’s debased followers conquered a quarter of the globe, but were finally halted by an army of powerful warriors raised by a Nordafrik warlord known as Kibuka, who was said to have called lightning from the clouds and granted his warriors superhuman strength. In time, Kibuka himself was hauled in chains to Khangba Marwu, but no history remained to tell of who had overturned his rule.

A persistent rumour told that the Emperor himself had designed a cell especially for Narthan Dume, but which had gone unused following the tyrant’s death during the final battle to bring down his inhuman regime. Scurrilous whispers maintained it had been the urging of Constantin Valdor that saw Durme executed in the ruins of his empire, a half-mad, half-genius psychopath deemed too dangerous to live.

Cardinal Tang had been bound for this specialised gaol, but like Durme he never saw the inside of his cell. Inmates who had suffered the worst tortures imaginable in his bloody pogroms broke open his isolation tank and tore his body apart with their bare hands before his transit from Nusa Kambagan could be arranged.

In all its long history, only one individual had ever escaped Khangba Marwu, a congenital dwarf named Zamora who was said to have once attained the rank of major in the proto-Legio Custodes, a fact that made the stories of his escape all the more ridiculous.

Since the beginning of the Great Crusade, Khangba Marwu had seen no shortage of inmates, deluded fools and doomsayers who raved and ranted of the Emperor’s folly or greedy opportunists who sought to exploit this new golden age for their own benefit. None of those incarcerated could boast a pedigree as infamous as Tang or Durme or Uilleam, but that would all change once this rebellion was put down.

Khangba Marwu’s most impregnable cellblock was even now being made ready to contain the most dangerous individual in the galaxy.

But could any facility on Terra hope to hold Horus Lupercal prisoner?

PRIMUS BLOCK ALPHA-One-Zero was never dark. The diurnal phases of the planet above were inconsequential to the workings of the Vault or the needs of its inmates. Darkness was an aid to escape, and was thus banished. Uttam Luna Hesh Udar halted before the last security checkpoint before the cells, allowing the bio-metric surveyors in the walls, floor and ceiling to verify his identity.

Air-samplers tasted his breath, body-mass sensors registered his weight and radiation detectors measured the decay rate of isotopes in his blood and bones. Over a hundred such measurements and genetic markers were compared against real-time data logs to ensure no intruders were able to penetrate Khangba Marwu’s security net without detection.

Uttam wore the gold armour of a Custodian, the cheek plates of his full-face helm folded back into its layered structure. His features were unmoving and expressionless, the result of a greenskin bacteriological pathogen that had left the upper right quadrant of his face unresponsive to muscle stimulus. His enhanced metabolism had easily purged the toxin, but the after-effects of the injury had reduced his reflexive response times to a level below the minimum required for front line service.

A proud man, Uttam had taken his removal from the fighting ranks of the Legio Custodes hard, but he had adapted and taken to his new role as gaoler of the Vaults with the same determination and attention to detail that had seen him closest to full infiltration in a Blood Game until Amon Tauromachian Leng’s most recent attempt.

Uttam had studied the young Custodian’s route to the palace, finding no fault with any of his decisions until the final moment when he had chose to throw caution to the wind and leap to the attack like a common assassin. Uttam would have drawn his victim in like a struggling insect in an arachnid’s web.

Far better to let the prey do the work and subtly calve it from its protectors.

Uttam stared into the blank slate above the armoured doorway, letting the retinal signifiers examine his eyes. This part always took longer than usual, his damaged eye making the machines work hard to establish his identity. This deep in the Vault, such measures were virtually unnecessary, but protocol was protocol, and Uttam never willingly ignored protocol.

The thought made Uttam turn to glance at the procession of veteran soldiers following him. Chosen from the most professional regiments based on Terra, they were armed with a collection of strange weapons, ranging from web-guns, plasma nets, iso-capacitors and mass-crushers to more commonplace melta-guns and hellguns.

A full head and shoulders over even the tallest soldier, Uttam could barely contain his disdain as they filed past the signifiers. It sat ill with him that these men were not Custodians, for the threat rating of the prisoners kept in Primus Block Alpha-One-Zero was far too lethal for these men to face, regardless of what weaponry they carried. Significant levels of the Legio’s operational strength had been despatched on a mission to Prospero alongside the Space Wolves. The purpose of the mission had not been stated, but there could be only one reason to send so many of the Emperor’s praetorians from his side at such a time.

Two soldiers in crimson battle plate and gold-mirrored visors guided a metallic box shaped like an oversized coffin floating on repulsor fields. A standard nutrition dispenser, it had been modified by the Vault’s Mechanicum staff to provide the specialised foodstuffs of these prisoners. Uttam found it incomprehensible that these men had been allowed to live. They were the most dangerous men on Terra, and no good could come of their continued existence.