Prologue
"There is always a man, always a lighthouse, always a city." – The Eldar philosopher Uthan the Perverse, "On the Nature of the Mon-Keigh. Chapter 32, Verse 25."
"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it." – Attributed to the poet Jean De La Fontaine, circa M2.
Constantine Valdor, Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes, stood upon one of the many observation balconies of the Imperial Palace, his red plumed helmet tucked under his right arm. The air was cold and thin, as was expected at such an altitude, but his gene-bred metabolism removed even the slightest of discomforts from the chill or the lack of oxygen. In the distance were the jagged grey peaks of the tallest Himalaysian mountains almost totally eclipsed by the artifice of master mason Vadok Singh. Even at this range, his keen eyes picked out the trails of worker gangs, like rivulets of tar streaking the dirty white surface of the snow-covered ground. If he had any talent at capturing the landscape in paints or drawings, this would have been an ideal vantage point to do so.
"It is a beautiful landscape," said a voice in accented Gothic. It was a mortal voice, flavoured by the richness of age coupled with the slurred consonants of an Asiatic tongue.
Valdor stiffened slightly before turning to face the newcomer. "Master Nagasena."
Yasu Nagasena, one of the finest hunters in known space, bowed from the waist, to which was strapped an ornate curved sword of ancient design. The scabbard was made of a dark wood, finely lacquered and knotted in embroidered cloth. The long hilt was also bound in cloth, though of a much more simple design to enable a firm grip. Attached to the pommel was a red gem, its faceted surface dull in the dim light of the evening. Nagasena wore an exotically-wrought set of carapace armour, made to resemble the long-extinct warrior nobles of his ancestral homeland of the Japonesic archipelago. His straight dark hair was pulled tightly into a neat ponytail, and he sported a short pointed beard.
"You summoned me?" Nagasena asked.
Valdor favoured him with a slight smile. The mortal Nagasena had never failed to amaze him with his perceptiveness, as well as his uncanny ability to be utterly undetectable until he wished otherwise.
"Indeed," said Valdor. "I have many other duties to attend to, so I shall be brief."
Nagasena nodded without speaking.
"It has come to our attention that unsanctioned individuals have gained access into the Palace outer precinct through unidentified means," said Valdor. The arch-custodian produced a dataslate, scrolling through a report until he had reached the appropriate page before offering it to Nagasena.
The hunter skimmed through the text.
"Evading the outer sensor nets entirely, bypassing all security checkpoints and even an Adeptus Custodes kill-team," Nagasena mused.
"I would have mobilized an entire detachment and led the search myself." Valdor continued. "… But for the fact that every single time we send squads to apprehend the targets-"
"They disappear." Nagasena finished. "But come no closer to the Palace proper."
Nagasena scrolled further, his eyes alighting upon a pict-capture of the target, which, while blurry, was the silhouette of two human beings against the white surface of the snow-covered streets of the Palace's twenty-second plaza district.
"Two targets?" Nagasena looked up from the dataslate into Valdor's steel-grey eyes.
Valdor nodded. "Go now, and apprehend them quickly before this gets further out of hand."
Nagasena bowed. "As you wish, my Lord."
The mortal hurried off, joined by another, slighter figure clad in a skintight black bodyglove that Valdor had not noticed before. The custodian dismissed the two from his mind, before replacing his helmet and proceeding back into the palace's echoing corridors.
"What a dreary place," said a cultured male voice as Valdor re-entered the palace corridor. "You'd think that after twenty-nine thousand years, humanity would have improved a little with regards to the mastery of aesthetically pleasing architecture."
"It was your decision to visit, dear brother," replied an equally cultured female voice, its cadence and tonal shift completely identical despite the difference in sex. "A 'last hurrah', as I recall. Once again, I would like to remind you that I don't believe in this exercise."
"That's what you said the last time," the male voice exclaimed with a note of exasperation.
"And look what happened the last time," the female voice retorted with equal exasperation.
Valdor blinked, his gene-enhanced eyes picking up two lone figures striding at a leisurely pace down the arched corridors. Despite his best efforts, he could not focus on them, and the helmet's auto-senses did not so much as register their presence apart from the visual representation. With a squint that the auto-senses interpreted as a need for magnification, he zoomed in on the figures, but for some reason – they appeared just as far away even without the magnification.
The two figures flickered and disappeared, then re-appeared once more, several metres closer. A man, and a woman.
Valdor's jaw set, and he levelled his guardian spear at them, the finely-honed blade crackling with energy.
"Halt, in the name of the Emperor of Mankind!" he bellowed, his voice somewhat distorted by the helmet's augmitters.
"In any case, I do believe we have been noticed," the female voice pronounced with detached, scholarly interest.
"Indeed we have," the male voice replied in agreement. "Consider it a slight change in our modus operandi. Being overly concerned with the Hawthorne effect has limited our observ-"
Valdor triggered a withering burst from the mounted bolter, the shells encountering naught but thin air, passing harmlessly through the space where the two figures should have stood. Alarms began to wail as the Palace's sensors registered the bolter discharge.
"How profoundly rude," the male voice pronounced with wounded dignity.
The two figures flitted closer and closer like a malfunctioning hololithic image, until they were before him, illuminated by the faint light streaming through the buttressed ceiling-windows of the palace.
A man and a woman, attired in clothing that Valdor had only glimpsed in the faded parchments and ancient codexes within the Emperor's labyrinthine archives – khaki and brown coats with white under-shirts, immaculately pressed and unblemished. The male wore pants the same colour and texture as the female's skirt, their hair and faces well-kept and somehow – extremely similar despite the fact they were male and female.
"The Hawthorne effect? Has that phenomena even been discovered yet?" the woman cocked an eyebrow quizzically.
"Discovers, will discover, discovered," the man replied genially. "Once again, it hardly matters, does it?"
"It might, if Mr. Landsberger even existed in this universe."
"Enough of this," Valdor gritted his teeth, swinging his guardian spear in a glittering arc that should have bisected both intruders. They merely stared at him in thinly veiled amusement, with an ever-so-slight hint of contempt.
"You missed," the man said, addressing him almost matter-of-factly.
"That is quite enough, Robert," the woman said. "We gain nothing by goading him."
"All in good fun, Rosalind," the man replied. "Still, I do believe we should expand our observation. There is much more to see."
The two winked out of existence once again.
Valdor waited a few more moments before lowering his spear, his keen eyes sweeping the corridor in the direction from which the two intruders had come.
The clatter of ceramite on stone in the distance announced the arrival of two of Valdor's fellow Custodes, their weapons primed and battle-ready.
"The servitors registered weapons' fire on the sensor grid," said Amon Tauromachean, his posture denoting concern despite the heavy helm concealing his features.
"We feared you'd been ambushed," Amon's companion, a younger Custodian by the name of Saturnalia, chimed in.
"Intruders," Valdor hissed. "The two that I'd just instructed the hunter Nagasena to track."
The two Custodes saluted briskly and moved off. There was no need for instructions – standard procedure would be to lock down the immediate area and conduct a detailed search of every room, alcove, and maintenance tunnel within a kilometre radius of the sighting.
Huge adamantium doors dropped from the arched ceilings at regular intervals, stalling the advance or retreat of any would-be invaders, while servitor drones and other automata conducted detailed scans of the premises.
Valdor gritted his teeth. There was nothing on Terra that could escape the scrutiny and pursuit of the Emperor's own Custodians. These two intruders would be found and interrogated, regardless of what technologies or witchery they possessed.
"So, we're quite far along the line of potential variables," she said as Robert pulled her up onto a particularly difficult-to-climb ledge near the summit of the highest point of the Imperial Palace. "And just as Elizabeth predicted – a few little things always stay the same."
This place had once been Mount Everest, but several millennia of industrialization and the touch of the Emperor's masons had turned the formerly white peak into a towering redoubt of forbidding majesty. The air was thin, and the temperatures inhospitably cold, but Rosalind and her brother had long since abandoned all notions of human limitation behind. A beam of the purest white light speared up into the grey-wreathed heavens, a cosmic lighthouse that guided humanity, both physically and metaphysically, toward a better future.
"I for one will never understand the universes' obsession with lighthouses," he said as he dusted off her skirt (despite not needing to).
"Odd, considering the chromosome you possess," Rosalind teased. "What, with all that phallic significance. She did say a 'Man', in addition to the lighthouse and the city."
"That's ridiculous, and you know it," Robert sniffed. "Unless the universes' authors are male-"
"Whether we like it or not, history shapes us as much as we shape it," Rosalind interrupted him curtly. "And history, especially before the 21st century, has been shaped more by men than women."
"Touché," Robert admitted. "But this is the 31st millennium."
"And the Emperor is a man," she reminded him. "A godlike man beyond sexual desires and such, but still a man nonetheless."
"So every great man builds a phallic emblem, like a lighthouse, to assuage his own ego? As a means of compensation?" Robert asked, incredulity colouring his cultured tones. "I don't have to listen to this."
"I wouldn't know," Rosalind replied. "I don't have the 'Why'."
Robert looked as if he was about to reply, before catching himself and smiling. "Funny. I liked that one."
"I thought you might," she returned the smile.
They stood for a while, watching the snow-covered tops of the Imperial Palace, and in the distance – the many gates leading to the center of the Emperor's domain. Further still were the ramshackle roofs of the Petitioners' City, which seemed to be somewhat out of place when compared to the neatly ordered lines of the Palace proper.
"Grim, but so very beautiful," Robert whispered.
"Irrelevant," Rosalind pronounced, turning away from the sight. "But I suppose all men must indulge their passions."
The snow began to fall in sheets, the culmination of several decades of snowfall in the span of a few seconds, and the wan light of Sol peeking through the pollution-laden clouds flickered as days, weeks and years passed in quick succession.
Towers rose like the stalks of rapidly growing plants, slender and buttressed with gothic spikes and arches, then clad in fat black slabs of armour-plating. Heavily-armoured super-soldiers in black-trimmed gold manned the walls as the permacrete was slowly clad in impregnable adamantium, their red eye-lenses glinting in the rapidly passing day-to-night and night-to-day.
"I've seen enough," Robert said, years passing in the moments between the syllables of his words. "Let's move on."