V2 Chapter 63: Wait — How Did He Become a Living Saint?
Without any particular awareness of how far they had walked, Duvette and the 112th's advance element had cleared the temple complex entirely and arrived at the temporary extraction point the Carpé dynasty had established on the daemon world's outer plain.
The defensive position was fully constructed. Behind rows of sandbags and reinforced cover, twin-linked heavy stubbers and autocannons sat on their mounts. A dozen heavy transport craft sat on the plain with their engines at low idle, ready to lift at any moment.
Venus Carpé was standing at the position's forward edge.
The Rogue Trader dynasty's heir had not stayed on her flagship in safe orbit. She had landed on the surface herself. The anxiety she was carrying showed through the composure she was trying to maintain, and the moment she saw the 112th's column she came forward immediately.
She had been out here the entire time. She had no idea what had happened inside the main temple, behind that curtain of Warp storm.
"Duvette, you're finally out. How did it—"
Venus moved quickly to meet him and got halfway through her question when she stopped. She did not finish the sentence. She did not finish the step.
Her gaze had gone past Duvette and locked onto the thirteen enormous figures following at the rear of the 112th's column.
For an ordinary Imperial citizen, or a standard-issue Astra Militarum soldier conditioned on official Ministorum doctrine, the white power armour would have meant nothing specific. Ten thousand years of Imperial propaganda and deliberate historical erasure had reduced the events of the Horus Heresy to a sanitised narrative: nine loyal Primarchs, nine founding Chapters. The other nine, the ones who broke their oaths, had been compressed into a formless category called the nine Traitor Legions, their names, their colours, their markings all systematically removed from any record that ordinary people might access.
Venus Carpé was not an ordinary person.
She was the sole heir of a Rogue Trader dynasty with roots deep enough that the Carpé family's restricted archive and classified navigation journals held knowledge that had no place in any public Imperial record.
When her eyes resolved the badge on those shoulder guards with complete clarity — the snarling black wolf's head and inverted crescent, the mark that carried an automatic death sentence in any Imperial territory — Venus felt the blood drain from her body in one moment.
That was the Sixteenth Legion. That was the architect of the Horus Heresy. The direct Legion of the Warmaster who had dragged the entire galaxy into ten thousand years of unending war.
The most absolute taboo in the Imperium's history was standing in front of her in the flesh.
The colour left Venus's face inside a second, the kind of white that belongs to people who have stopped feeling their extremities.
She looked at Duvette. Her lips were shaking. She was trying to form words and producing nothing intelligible. She was fairly certain that the next sound she heard would be Inquisitorial bolt rounds.
Duvette looked at the expression on her face and shook his head with complete calm.
"There's nothing to be afraid of, Venus. Relax." His tone had the quality of someone discussing a minor logistical inconvenience. "They're fine. They're Loyalists. They just got lost for rather a long time."
This did not help.
Venus's expression, if anything, became more complex and more desolate. Loyalists. In the political logic of the Imperium, the Sixteenth Legion had no Loyalists. The moment that white armour and that badge appeared in any star sector, the local Imperial forces would commit everything they had to destroying it.
She stood there and did the accounting silently.
She had brought the entire family fleet here out of ambition, full of projected returns on an undeveloped star region.
And what had she actually received?
Nothing of practical value. A Lord Inquisitor of extreme danger on one side of her. An Archmagos of incomprehensible authority pressing down from above. The first region they had explored was nothing but daemon worlds saturated with Warp pollution.
And now, the expedition's only tangible result was thirteen Astartes whose existence, if it became known to the wrong people, would bring the full force of Imperial high command down on everyone in this hangar, and a battered metal sceptre hanging from Duvette's belt that looked like something a maintenance servitor had pulled from a scrap heap.
Venus drew a long breath and pushed everything she was feeling down where it would not show.
She said nothing further. The only available exit from this situation was getting off this planet as quickly as possible. She turned without any wasted movement and began directing the Carpé dynasty's private soldiers to guide the 112th and their large and extremely problematic new companions onto the heavy transports.
The engines roared. The transport formation lifted clear of the dark-red daemon world's surface and climbed toward the enormous mechanical ark sitting in low orbit above.
When the transports settled onto the broad interior hangar deck of the Ark of Omen with a heavy thud, the pressure-equalisation doors descended with the sound of venting atmosphere.
This time it was not Qvo-77 waiting at the landing zone with his carefully constructed smile.
Belisarius Cawl himself was standing directly in front of the descent area.
The Archmagos's frame — enormous even by any standard that the word enormous is usually applied to — stood motionless, leaning on the great Omnissian axe, optical sensors burning red and fixed on the figures coming down the boarding ramp.
When those sensors resolved Entropy's Song hanging casually from Duvette's belt, a faint burst of electrical noise escaped Cawl's vocaliser without apparent intention.
The Archmagos who held the highest technical authority in the galaxy had, in this moment, entirely lost whatever restraint usually governs the enthusiasm of a ten-thousand-year-old researcher confronted with a Primarch-made artefact.
His lower drive systems produced a high-frequency shriek of servo-motors and the enormous frame accelerated forward with a speed entirely inconsistent with its size, moving directly toward Duvette with every trace of senior dignity left behind.
Then, roughly fifteen metres into this charge, Cawl stopped.
His primary optical sensor swivelled. He had seen them. The thirteen figures in pearl-white power armour with the wolf's head badge on their shoulders, following behind the 112th's soldiers.
In the instant Cawl stopped moving.
From somewhere in the dark pipework high above the hangar, a dense swarm of servo-skulls descended with an urgent chorus of alerts, dozens of them, red scanning light blazing from their eye sockets, and enclosed the Shadow Wolves in a complete perimeter before anyone could object.
"Servo-skulls."
Markus Sevian stopped walking. The weathered face showed no alarm. He looked at the hovering metal-and-bone instruments with their scanning beams playing across his armour, and spoke in a low voice that carried something close to recognition.
"In our time, the tech-priests of Mars used these to record everything around them as well."
Cawl did not acknowledge the words.
Deep-scan beams swept across each warrior's body and armour repeatedly. Data cascaded across the reception arrays on Cawl's half-mechanical face.
"Gene-sequence comparison complete. Confirmed: Sixteenth Legion, Sons of Horus genealogical lineage."
"Armour composition analysis complete. Confirmed: late Great Crusade era mass-production variant, Mark IV power armour."
"Warp radiation assessment complete. No prolonged deep-Warp exposure detected in target frames. Physical structure and genetic sequences confirmed stable. No active Chaos corruption or mutation process detected."
"Impossible."
Cawl's synthesised voice moved through the empty hangar. He continued producing his summary assessments in rapid succession, as though stating each impossible data point aloud was the only way to process it.
Markus Sevian waited through the scans in silence.
Then the sergeant who had crossed ten thousand years straightened his spine and addressed the supreme technical authority of Mars in a voice that was entirely quiet and entirely without doubt.
"No, Archmagos. Correct your data. We are the Shadow Wolves."
A brief shadow of pain crossed his face.
"Horus... is no longer our father."
Cawl showed complete indifference to this declaration.
He gave no sign that the words had reached him at all. Markus might as well have been a data terminal announcing its readiness. Cawl's frame rotated back toward the one thing in this hangar that was genuinely holding his attention, and his optical sensors locked onto Entropy's Song at Duvette's hip with an intensity that was not subtle.
"Show it to me." The request carried no politeness and no ambiguity. It was a command issued to an asset.
Duvette looked up at the red optical glow and shook his head without any hesitation.
"I'm afraid not, Archmagos."
He held Cawl's gaze without any of the usual adjustment a mortal makes when addressed at close range by something that size.
"As I stated in my communications report, this is a lost relic of the Eighteenth Legion's Primarch, the Lord of Fire and Drakes, Vulkan. Acting under the highest will of the Emperor, I am required to ensure it remains intact and to return it personally to the Salamanders, its rightful custodians, at the appropriate time."
The hangar's ambient mechanical noise seemed to diminish.
Cawl's enormous frame tilted forward. The shadow it cast covered Duvette completely. He looked at this mortal who had, apparently, just decided that saying no to the Archmagos Dominus of Mars was a thing he would do.
"Under the secondment agreement reached at fleet supreme command, Duvette Erdmann." The warning in Cawl's voice was entirely undisguised. "As a special observational subject under my direct authority, you do not possess the standing to refuse any reasonable data-collection request I make of you. Your existence, and the ownership of everything you carry—"
"He has the standing."
It came from nowhere.
"Archmagos! He absolutely has the standing! He is a Living Saint! He is the Emperor's chosen, the anointed of His supreme will, the sole executor of His boundless purpose in this corrupted universe!"
The voice came from a heavy transport's interior as its pressure door opened — shrill, cracked, entirely undone, the sound of a person whose rational faculties have been replaced wholesale by something that functions entirely on fervour.
The figure that came with it stumbled out of the transport's shadow and onto the boarding ramp.
Heinz Werner.
The Lord Inquisitor had pushed away the soldiers trying to steady him and was standing on the ramp under his own power, however unsteady that power currently was. The round face wore an expression that had not moderated since the temple. The bloodshot eyes were fixed on Duvette with the specific quality of someone who is not looking at a person but at the physical location of a divine presence.
Heinz raised both arms — the arms that had been carbonised to the bone and were now entirely restored — toward the hangar's vaulted ceiling, and his voice filled the steel space with the unmistakable register of religious proclamation.
"He is Saint Duvette!"
In the silence that followed that declaration.
Belisarius Cawl, who had been building toward applying significant institutional force to a mortal who had the audacity to refuse him, went completely still. The enormous frame straightened with the mechanical quality of a system that has encountered an input it has no prepared response for.
His optical sensors moved rapidly between two points: Duvette's expressionless face, and the Thorian Lord Inquisitor on the boarding ramp in his current state of complete devotional collapse.
The scan repeated twice.
Then, from the layered synthesiser that Cawl had operated for ten thousand years without producing anything resembling bewilderment, came something that had no precedent in its output history.
"Wait." Cawl looked at what was in front of him. "The designation of Living Saint requires formal involvement of the Adeptus Ministorum." He looked at Heinz. "Lord Inquisitor. Please explain how he has become a Living Saint."
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