‘And so we come to the heart of the matter,’ said the Master of the Administratum, Irthu Haemotalion.

He sat at the head of the long black granite table, his grey face a picture of studied mournfulness. He was wearing his heavy ceremonial robes, just as all the other High Lords did, though his were perhaps the most ostentatious, as befitted his role as first among equals.

It hadn’t always been thus. In other ages our military commanders might have assumed an unofficial pre-eminence, but this was an age of bureaucracy and inertia, in which the greatest power now lay buried within the unknowably complex rules of procedure, and so the master of bureaucracy was also the de facto master of the Imperium.

I watched it all unfold from my place at the foot of the table. The Twelve were gathered in their various finery, attended by their robed officials who sat behind them on smaller thrones. We were high up on the northern face of the Senatorum Imperialis, and thin light lanced down from high stained-glass windows. Two armed Lucifer Blacks guarded the heavy doors, and many more were stationed in and around the Council chamber’s perimeter. I could hear the gun-drones as they circled endlessly above us, as well as the whine of seeker-turrets in active service.

They were paranoid, all of them, insisting on incredible levels of security even within the most secure of all locations of the Imperium. But I could sympathise with that – they weren’t truly concerned about external threats here, they were concerned about each other.

We had already been in session for several hours, and the watery sun was high in the sky. A whole raft of measures had been addressed, with much consensus.

Now we were getting to the real business.

‘I must thank the cancellarius for his diligence in bringing this issue to Council again,’ Haemotalion went on, looking at me with sardonic eyes. ‘It seems that nothing could deter him from doing his duty on this occasion, even if it took much… persuasion to ensure that all views were taken account of.’

I despised the man. His intellect was possibly the greatest of all of them, and he was a master of figures and ledgers, just as he had to be, but there was a savage coldness in him that I had always found repellent. Of course, I merely smiled and bowed in acknowledgement.

‘It’s a weighty issue,’ the Master went on, intent on telling his peers what they already knew. ‘For ten thousand years the Lex has held the balance between our forces, all deriving from the original Lord Commander’s precepts. It was he who imposed the Codex on his Legiones Astartes brothers, keeping the peace between the Space Marines and the Adeptus Terra. And it was he, in consultation with the great Valdor, who issued the Edict of Restraint, under which the Custodian Guard were expressly enjoined to remain on Terra as guardians of the Enthroned Emperor. Many times, voices have been raised against this edict, and every time they have been quelled. But now, with the war at such a delicate stage, it comes to us again.’

‘It should never have done so,’ growled Raskian through a vox-filter. The Fabricator-General was a vast presence at the opposite end of the table, and took up almost as much room as the rest of the chamber combined. His nominally human-form body was locked into a whole series of stacked machines, all coughing and flickering amid a jungle of thick power lines. His head was the most unchanged part, though even that was bronze and emerald-eyed and hairless. ‘We’ve had a hundred crises, and never gone against the old pacts. What’s next – you dissolve the Treaty of Olympus?’

‘The Lex Imperialis is inviolable,’ agreed Aveliza Drachmar, the hatchet-faced mistress of the Adeptus Arbites. ‘It is unacceptable to modify its provisions at the first sign of military setback.’

So far, so predictable. I was happy to let the opposed parties make their cases.

‘Hardly the first sign,’ replied Merelda Pereth, Lord High Admiral of the Imperial Navy. She was a quietly cool character, used to giving orders under extreme pressure. I liked her. ‘You might argue we’ve shown considerable restraint.’

‘It’s still heresy,’ said Baldo Slyst, the ancient Ecclesiarch, and after Haemotalion the most absurdly over-embellished. He placed his many-ringed fingers before him on the stone table and fixed the rest of the High Lords with the bleak stare of a prophet. ‘The God Emperor’s Will was reflected in that Edict. To erode it now is weakness of faith.’

‘It is weakness of mind to change nothing when the facts demand it,’ countered Uila Lamma, the Paternoval Envoy of the Navigators. Alone among the High Lords, Lamma was a representative of the real power behind the Houses, the vast and bloated mutant who occupied the Paternoval Palace of the warp scryers.

I liked her too – as a servant like me, albeit an exalted one, she had retained some sense of proportion in life.

‘How many times have we seen the Lex bind our hands, when the Enemy has no law at all? We have held back from creating thousands more Chapters because we are held in thrall by the Lord Commander’s ancient doctrine. I say the day has long since passed for this. Let us unleash the Ten Thousand. Let us unlock the gene-labs and create new Space Marines to serve under our direct command. Let us re-form the Imperial Army, arm the Ecclesiarchy and end these divisions that cripple us.’

That was dangerous talk, and risked making the argument unwinnable. The first rule of political change was to limit what was being asked for – they would never go for a wholesale revision of the Codex Astartes.

Leops Franck spoke next, the stick-thin Master of the Astronomican and the last of those who opposed the motion. ‘You are forgetting your history, my lords,’ he whispered through his rebreather, making all strain to hear him. ‘Every crisis appears to its own generation as the greatest of them all. When the Beast threatened to destroy the Imperium, we did not unleash the Ten Thousand. When Nova Terra raised its heretical head, we did not unleash the Ten Thousand. When Vandire ushered in the Reign of Blood, we did not unleash the Ten Thousand. In every case, we held firm and the wisdom of millennia was affirmed. Waver from that now, and we will deserve to perish.’

‘But in all those ages,’ objected the one who had started all of this, Kerapliades of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, ‘we still held the Eye’s Gate. We could suffer all other wounds in the knowledge that hell was contained. That is what we risk now. You know as well as I do that our grip is slipping. When the Despoiler–’

‘The Despoiler cannot break the leaguer,’ said Slyst. ‘He has failed twelve times, and this shall be no different.’

‘Have you undertaken a warp journey in recent months, Ecclesiarch?’ asked Kania Dhanda, Speaker of the Chartist Captains and a strong ally of ours.

‘Nature itself is under strain. If he can bend the elements, then he can break the leaguer.’

‘And sedition has never been greater,’ said Kleopatra Arx, the Inquisition’s Representative. ‘We have long memories in the ordos, and we know when the tide is against us.’ She passed her cool, hard eyes across the assembled lords. ‘As I have been arguing for years, we are at breaking point now. We cannot burn the heretics fast enough, and we cannot slaughter the xenos quickly enough. This is not just another phase of trial for the Holy Imperium. This is our critical moment.’

By then, only two had remained silent. Fadix rarely spoke anyway, and busied himself making notes with a crystal stave on a bone-edged data-slate. That left Valoris.

He had come, just as promised. If any of the others were surprised by that, they did not show it. Once in place, there was no question of his right to be there. The vote of acceptance had been a formality, though he had barely spoken throughout it. Now he sat halfway along the sunlit side of the table, far bulkier and more imposing than any save Raskian.

In daylight his face was even more ravaged than I remembered it. I guessed one of his many battles had done that to him – it looked like acid had been left to run across his features, making them flared and angry. Now, slowly and deliberately, he leaned forwards and placed his gauntlets together.

‘Be aware, lords, what is at stake here,’ he said quietly. All listened. Even Fadix put down his pen. ‘The Custodians have always fought. We do not merely patrol the walls while others die in service. I am sure that none of you would have supposed otherwise, for you are all intelligent souls.’

It was strange to hear him speak again. The last time had been days ago, down in the crypts, something that had come to seem more like a dream than reality.

‘What is at stake is this – shall we fight as we did in the Great Crusade, at the forefront, and under the authority of the Senatorum Imperialis? And that question has no easy answer, for if we are to fight, then who is to command us? The Emperor cannot lead us as He did in the lost age. We are not bound to the will of the Council as are the Astra Militarum and the Imperial Navy. Perhaps you desire us to become another Inquisition, answerable to no one but the Emperor Himself, but if so you should be wary of what you wish for, as our goals may not be the same as yours.’

I could not tell where this was leading. His own views were still unclear to me, despite what he had said about my own role convincing him to come. I had hoped, perhaps unwisely, that the discussion here, when all was set out and the High Lords could demonstrate their own thinking, would be enough. After all, who could deny themselves more power? All we were offering was the chance for the Custodians to resume their rightful place.

‘There are a little under ten thousand of us,’said Valoris. ‘That is a mote against the storm to come. Even the Adeptus Astartes are few in number – it has always been the uncounted masses that have won our wars. And, of course, in the Age of Wonder, we fought alongside the Sisterhood.’

‘They are being recalled,’said Haemotalion.

Valoris looked at him with sudden interest. ‘I was not aware.’

‘The chancellor can enlighten you.’

I coughed, and half rose from my subordinate throne. ‘The matter was dealt with in mandatum 786734-56, following the reported devastation of the Fenris System. The anathema psykana were never formally disbanded, and do not come under the provisions of this act. It was the unanimous decision of the Council to seek out the scattered members of the old Sisterhood and issue a recall notice where they still existed. Some are already en route. Others are yet to respond.’

Valoris regarded me carefully. ‘This was your doing?’

‘It was the doing of the Council.’

‘An interesting time to remember them. It should have been done centuries ago.’

I bowed in apology. ‘The war has driven much away that should have remained intact. I am told the Sisters are… hard to live with. They never had the allies here that they needed.’

I may have been a little too candid there. In truth, the long decay in our management of those pariahs was more down to the ossified nature of our command and control structures. They had never been deliberately ignored, just gradually run down over millennia as other priorities took over, and the widely held suspicion of their esoteric natures made them easy prey for zealous enemies.

‘It is the restoration of something that should never have been allowed to lapse,’ said Lamma. ‘We are going back to the old structures that allowed us to conquer the stars.’

‘And Dissolution of the Lord Commander’s edict would complete the picture?’ asked Franck, scornfully. ‘You overstate your case, Envoy.’

‘It has to be done,’ urged Kerapliades, ever the most forceful of the High Lords in this. ‘While we debate, Cadia burns. Can you doubt that even a tithe of the Ten Thousand would turn the tide back?’

‘I can doubt it,’ said Haemotalion dryly. ‘The Captain-General says it himself – they are a grain of dust.’

‘One that could inspire others,’ argued Pereth. ‘If I could bring a regiment of them to the front line, just a single regiment, and the troops could see it, and know that the Emperor has not forgotten them–’

‘He never has,’sniped Slyst.

‘But they may well believe we have,’ retorted Dhanda.

‘It should never have come to this table,’ snarled Raskian again, growing surlier.

‘All things belong at this table,’said Arx.

I could see then that the argument was dissolving. All those who were in favour before remained in favour now, and vice versa. My hopes for a wavering individual to settle the matter were clearly in vain, and the rancour now risked derailing the issue even further.

I looked over to Haemotalion, and caught his eye. We understood one another instantly. Vile man though he was, he knew how things worked.

‘Enough, please, my good lords,’ he said, holding up his hand. The chamber settled down. ‘The first arguments have been made. Any move towards Dissolution must command a majority of this chamber. To save us from more futile debate, I propose we gauge the balance of opinion now. If there is a majority in favour, we may proceed with further discussion. If not, then there are many other matters to detain us.’

This was the moment. With Valoris in play, I had the votes I needed. I felt a sudden lurch of fear, as if I were looking over a cliff at the waves crashing below. After so many long years of labour, we were finally at the point of decision.

‘Place your votes, if you will, my lords,’said Haemotalion.

One by one, the High Lords put their hands out before them. An upward palm indicated consent, a downward palm dissent, a clenched fist abstention. Raskian and Kerapliades were first, on opposite sides of the argument. Then the others followed suit, some forcefully, some with more reserve.

Soon eleven hands were on the table. Fadix was the only abstention, and the Master of Assassins looked at me coolly as he placed his fist on the stone. Just as predicted, five votes either way were placed, leaving only Valoris to cast his.

I looked up at him, my heart thumping. I could already see it happening. I could see the old Legio Custodes reborn at this moment, taking the fight at last to the Enemy, and it would be my work. Even if only a fraction of them took ship, I had seen what they could do in combat – there could be nothing, surely nothing, that would stand against them.

I felt my palms grow sweaty. All eyes turned to the Captain-General, who waited calmly, as if he were listening to something beyond our hearing. The tension became unbearable, and I had to restrain myself from blurting out something unwise.

And then he moved, lifting his massive arm from the stone and extending it outwards. With a lurch of pure horror, I saw his heavy palm turn over to face the tabletop.

But he never placed it. Just as he moved, every one of the High Lords suddenly received the same burst of tidings from their own private comm-feeds. Adjutants leapt out of their seats, frantically checking and then double-checking what they had just heard, before racing to confer with their masters.

The doors at the far end of the chamber slammed open, and robed officials raced in, ignoring the shouts of the Lucifer Blacks.

For a moment I genuinely had no idea what the commotion was about, until I saw Kerapliades shouting out in dismay and suddenly knew, with terrible certainty, what must have happened.

Only one piece of news could have halted that Council in mid-session, for the astropath relayers would never have dared to disturb them for anything less. By the time I had activated my own external channel and heard Jek’s frantic voice at the other end, I already knew what she would tell me.

‘My lord!’she cried, her voice cracking with anguish. ‘It’s gone! It’s gone.’

‘Tell me plainly,’ I snapped. I could feel everything collapsing around me, everything I had worked and risked so much for, gone in an instant, and it made me desperate.

‘Cadia,’Jek said, already in tears. ‘It’s fallen. It’s over, my lord. It’s all over.’