Chapter 91 - Let Guilliman Punish You
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Loken finally understood why, after he awoke, his father Horus refused to speak of the Emperor of Mankind. Why Lord Guilliman and Lord Sanguinius did the same.
Even when he sought out his "uncle" Kaelen in private, or the older First Legion knight Kullen, a veteran of the same era but far his senior, neither of them would ever mention the Emperor in front of him.
The Cthonian youth had been puzzled by that. Then he laid eyes on the withered corpse seated upon the Golden Throne, and the puzzlement died.
Silence was the only answer.
Curze felt it too.
In the eyes of men from their era, the Emperor had been a great leader of humanity. His methods could be dirty or righteous. His reputation could be base or noble. None of that changed the fundamental truth of what He was.
But look at Him now. A desiccated, shrunken husk. If no one had said He was still alive, anyone seeing Him for the first time would assume He was already dead.
The sight hit both uncle and nephew like a physical blow. Loken couldn't stop the sob that escaped him. Curze shut his eyes and refused to look.
The Emperor's voice cut through the silence.
"You walk in and immediately start weeping. That's not like you, Loken."
"My Lord?" Loken could barely believe He could still speak at all.
"Yes, Loken. Kaelen installed a speech device for me, so I can talk whenever I please. Oh, damn it. Trajann. Did you hear my order?"
There was a third figure beneath the Golden Throne. Trajann Valoris, current Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes.
Loken and Curze could both see the Captain-General's expression had gone somewhere deeply uncomfortable.
"My Lord, our current level of gene-tech may not be capable of achieving—"
"You heard my request, Trajann! I said get me a femboy in the Custodian Guard!"
Trajann offered no rebuttal. He saluted in complete disarray, grabbed his Guardian Spear, and scurried out through a side door.
The exchange left Curze and Loken stunned. Loken had no idea what a femboy was, but that hardly mattered. The Emperor's tone, vulgar, casual, like a man haggling in a street market, was shock enough on its own.
In the Night Haunter's mind, only one thought remained.
The old bastard wasn't dead. And his tastes had only gotten worse.
"Ha..."
A wheezing, hollow laugh scraped out of Curze's throat.
"You really are exactly the same as before." He tilted his head back, his tone soaked in mockery. "No bottom lines whatsoever. Utterly willful. My tyrant father."
"Oh, shut up, you little brat. If you'd stayed neutral and watched from the sidelines during the Horus Heresy, I might actually have been pleased. Jaghatai Khan was far smarter than you."
"Heh."
Curze found it funny. He genuinely did.
Then the madness drained out of him, and what replaced it was grief. Fury. Something raw and old and wounded.
Like a child who had never stopped being wronged.
The roar that tore out of him made Loken's eardrums ring.
"I told all of you the rebellion was going to happen! Every single one of you, and not one of you listened! Including you, Father! You were too arrogant, just like when you descended on Nostramo, and the light blazing off you burned my people blind without a second thought. You took me away, but you never cared about me. You destroyed my kingdom. My achievements!"
"If I could do it over! If I could start again from the very beginning of the Great Crusade! If I could shatter the chains of fate before they closed around me, I would never become that weakling Konrad Curze! I would be the unbreakable Night Haunter! In the hell you built with your own hands, weakness is the greatest sin of all!"
Curze thrust both arms out, wrists forward. Demanding to be seized.
"Come on then! Punish me right now! Judge me for every evil I have committed! Why do you still let me live?! Don't give me any long-winded nonsense about forgiveness! Don't tell me you're going to lead me back to the light! Those words make me sick!"
The corpse on the Throne said nothing.
The hall held only Curze's ragged, uneven breathing and the faint hum of the speech device.
A long moment passed.
Then the Emperor's voice came again.
"It already happened again. Didn't it?"
The manic edge from His exchange with Trajann was gone. What remained was something quieter. A rare, settled calm.
"You still have a chance, Curze. My son. The situation is exactly the same as Horus's. No matter which of my sons commits what mistake, I will forgive him."
"In the past, I was always too busy. No time to stop and talk with any of you properly. But now we have all the time we could want to waste. Provided, of course, that our enemies are content to watch us sit here chatting."
At the word forgive.
Curze's massive frame began to shake.
Everything Kaelen had said in the dream was true. The figure on the Throne genuinely intended to pardon him.
For a man tormented this long by guilt and a savage, uncompromising sense of justice, a father's forgiveness should have been the greatest gift imaginable. Instead, Curze felt only terror. A deep, crawling unease.
This forgiveness violated everything he stood for. It shattered the closed loop of order he had built inside himself, the only structure that kept him from flying apart entirely.
"I am a sinner, Father." He clawed at his own hair, fingers digging in. "I don't deserve to be forgiven."
He began to pace, back and forth, and the words coming out of his mouth stopped making sense.
"Back then, in that dark place, I built a version of you out of rotting flesh and bone. I confessed everything to that lump of meat. And that lump of meat told me you would forgive me." He stopped. "But I don't want to be forgiven. I absolutely do not want that."
Loken knelt nearby and watched, his heart lodged somewhere in his throat. He was genuinely afraid the madman would snap and charge the Golden Throne.
The Emperor knew this son. Knew exactly how stubborn he was.
Reason wouldn't reach him. So He followed the wound instead.
"Fine." The Emperor's tone shifted. "As a father, in a private capacity, I forgive my child." A beat. "But, Konrad Curze, as a gene-primarch of the Imperium, as commander of the Eighth Legion, you are guilty."
Guilty.
The word stopped Curze cold.
"Your crimes are unforgivable. Therefore, you must accept punishment."
The Emperor delivered the verdict.
"Your specific sentence will be determined personally by the current Imperial Regent, Roboute Guilliman. Your brothers — Sanguinius, Horus, and Kaelen — will serve as supervisors of your conduct going forward. Until your sins are fully paid."
Passing this particular problem directly to Guilliman was the most effortless solution the Emperor could devise. Whether Guilliman would suffer a brain hemorrhage upon receiving the news was, frankly, no concern of the desiccated corpse on the Throne.
Then something remarkable happened.
Hearing that he was guilty. That a sentence would be handed down.
Curze, who had been coiled with restless, manic energy, let out a long, slow breath.
The taut muscles across his pale face went slack. And there, unprecedentedly, was something almost like peace. Strange and eerie, but real.
With a clear punishment, his sins had somewhere to go. The loop closed. His world made sense again.
If guilty, punishment must follow. Even if the one delivering it was Guilliman, whose head contained nothing but spreadsheets.
"Loken."
The Emperor turned His attention to Garviel.
He looked at Loken for a moment, and something like a quiet laugh came through the speech device.
"My Lord. I'm here."
Loken answered immediately.
"Aid your gene-father. Save the Imperium and humanity. I believe in you."
Three sentences. They weighed more than a thousand.
They burned themselves into Loken's soul.
Standing there, he had only one thought. The Emperor before him, reduced to a dried husk, occasionally saying things that made no earthly sense, was still that sovereign. Still irreplaceable. Still great.
One lifetime, ten lifetimes, a hundred, a thousand. However many the Emperor needed, Loken would give them. The same way he had once sworn to give every lifetime he had to Lupercal.
"I will cleave through every obstacle that stands in our way. I will never betray your trust. My Lord!"
➤ Next: Three Brothers' Plan to Bathe Curze
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