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Archmagos – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

SOLANA OF MARS

Slitho Gallifa, the master of the Light of Reason, called Solana of Mars minutes after the four-hour translation bell rang. With the uncanny prescience that dogged her in the warp, she knew it was the captain the moment the hardline vox-unit bolted to the wall of her quarters started to squawk, and if she didn’t exactly intuit it, she could guess what he wanted. She resented the intrusion. She was lying on her bunk. She didn’t want to go anywhere. She should have risen hours ago, but was too worn out by the psychic pressures of traversing the immaterium to do much of anything. She wished to stay where she was, and she just knew he was going to ask her to leave.

‘Mistress? Mistress, are you going to receive this communication?’ Eremenitas asked. More urged, she thought irritably. He’d been with her the whole way, lurking in the corner of her cabin, upright the whole time because he didn’t need a bed. Eremenitas was a shadowed block, his heavy track unit solid as a piece of Jovian furniture. The protruding glass bulbs of his false eyes and the high dome of his silvered brain case glimmered out of the shadows. She avoided looking at him. Despite his entirely artificial face, she always had the feeling he disapproved of her, and right then, with that headache, she couldn’t stomach that.

‘Mistress historitor?’ he said. He was trying to be gentle. It wasn’t working.

‘I’m going,’ she groaned, sounding far more petulant than she meant to.

Bare feet slapped onto a cold metal floor. She begrudged getting up to walk across the room, and, worst horror of all, lifting her leaden arm to depress the ‘receive’ rune.

The button sank into its housing with a sullen reluctance she empathised with. An amber light indicated the line was open.

Gallifa’s voice crackled out of the voxmitter. The Light of Reason was a new ship, less than a decade old in a navy in which the average age was measured in hundreds of years. It was a novel pattern, designed to convey the regent’s servants as quickly as was possible in this benighted age of warp storms and war. Many of the same type had led the torchbearer fleets in the opening years of the Indomitus Crusade.

Guilliman’s return had prompted something of a renaissance in ship construction, led, of course, by the multitalented Belisarius Cawl.

‘Renaissance’ was such a subjective term. Solana knew many magi who preferred words like ‘blasphemy’ when applied to Cawl’s approach to technology. Either way, the Light was blessed with the finest technologies. In realspace the signal over the hardline was crystal clear, almost as if the speaker was right next to her. In the warp the signal burred and popped as if it were widecast through extreme magnetic turmoil, not sent a short distance down a well-insulated wire. Simple malfunction wasn’t all of it. There were voices on the edge of hearing, voices which spoke words that were almost comprehensible. Voices she shouldn’t listen to but strained so hard to hear it made the roots of her teeth ache.

The thought of those voices made her feel sick.

‘Madam historitor, we shall be emerging from the warp within three hours, forty-nine minutes ship time.’ Behind Gallifa’s voice a tormented something laughed. The static roared as if frightened, obliterating the master’s next words. ‘…ially extend an invitation to attend both the translation and shutter-opening ceremonies upon the command deck. Might I presume you will attend?’

Solana was too tired to sigh. Gallifa courted her favour assiduously, though that was no surprise. Nearly everyone saw her as a direct link to the primarch; it didn’t matter that she was most emphatically not.

She didn’t want to go among people. She wanted to be left alone. All the excitement she had felt at the start of her journey, being sent to personally report on Belisarius Cawl, the greatest mind in the galaxy, to really speak to him, to a rare man who might actually get something done… All that was gone. After the awful pressures of the warp voyage it seemed a grey duty, no more interesting than any number of other so-called vital assignments she’d fulfilled as one of the Founding Four of the Logos Historica Verita.

She didn’t care about any of that. She wanted to sleep.

From the corner of her eye she caught the bottle of the pharmasomna tincture nestled between her notebooks on the chamber’s single shelf. Maybe if she drank enough she’d stay unconscious until it was all over. If she were really lucky, she might not even dream.

She shook the thought away. She was already taking four times the dose prescribed by the ship’s chirurgeon. Not only was that dangerous, but she felt guilty for having the pharmasomna in the first place. There were thousands of people aboard the Light of Reason; few of them had access to real medical care. What was their recourse when nightmares shook their sleep? Prayer? She’d seen how well that worked. The Emperor wasn’t listening. He was rather busy these days.

‘Mistress Solana?’ Gallifa’s voice was an odd blend of solicitousness, concern, and annoyance that his offer had not been taken up with alacrity.

She had to swallow twice before she could speak. Omnissiah, her mouth was so dry.

‘My apologies, shipmaster. I was sleeping, and am a little dull-headed. I would be delighted to attend,’ she said, which was the exact opposite of how she felt.

Too often, protocol took precedence over desire.

‘Excellent. We shall expect your arrival in say… two hours?’

‘I look forward to it,’ she said. Not at all, she added to herself.

At least this all meant the journey through the warp would be over soon.

‘Thank the Machine God,’ she murmured.

Her hand slid off the button. The connection light flickered from green to red, then went dark.

‘An unwelcome offer?’ Eremenitas asked.

‘Any offer would be unwelcome right now.’

She fought the urge to clamber back into bed and pull the coverlet over her head. Instead, she decided to dress, and began to unlace her nightshirt. It was a little strange having Eremenitas in there, but there was no chance of impropriety. Eremenitas wasn’t a man any more. He’d carved away all those parts of himself so as to better be able to think. For many Martians, sexuality was an unwelcome distraction. She only used the masculine pronoun in Gothic to avoid confusion. Gender was a matter for more biological beings than they.

‘I didn’t know you were awake,’ she said.

‘You know I don’t sleep. I was thinking.’

‘That’s what you do, isn’t it? Cogitate, cogitate, cogitate.’ She winced at the whine in her voice.

‘The paths to comprehension are many.’ Eremenitas’ voice rose slightly with indignation. He knew what effect the warp had on her, and was usually more emollient. Maybe it was getting to him too. ‘I follow mine, as you follow yours.’ He paused. ‘Most of the time.’

Eremenitas was a machine aesthete far down the path to the final knowing, and thus hardly human at all. For all that, she found he could be surprisingly tart.

She let the nightshirt drop around her shoulders and pool upon the floor, revealing her far more modest suite of modifications. A run of electoos down her left arm to contact points on her fingers; an interface port embedded in the right forearm, the dataspike coiled out of sight in her hollow metal radius; a steel finger, the smallest, on the same hand that held a group of molecular manipulators as feathery-fine as the arms of sessile sea creatures. There was her memcore plug gleaming low down on the shaved part of her head. She wore most of her hair long now, hiding the tattoo of the Machina Opus across the right of her skull. She couldn’t remember when she’d started concealing it, or why, beyond a vague disappointment that the crusade had not gone as she had expected, and her own people had often stood in her way. The memcore was an unsurprising augmetic – no real magos went without one. Her eyes had a silvery cast, simple full-spectral range upgrades, enhanced low-light vision and an internal retinal display. Then there was the banded casing of the fibre bundles that replaced her right sternocleidomastoid muscle. Not elective, that one, but the result of a las bolt on Fhalami Delta that had come within a fraction of an inch of her carotid artery.

She’d avoided further enhancement. That was unusual for a member of the Machine Cult, but then her very unusualness was why she’d ended up in the Logos Historica Verita in the first place. She supposed her rebellion against the strictures of the Cult began there, with an instinctive rejection of body modification, long before she was hauled away for modus innovatum. She was, in her way, as big a rebel as Cawl, and yet she was celebrated as Guilliman’s Martian inductee, Solana of Mars! The irony dogged her still. A rebel elevated to representative of the thing she was rebelling against. She thought, for a while, that she had won, but the Logos hadn’t proven to be any more freeing than life on Mars.

For example, she had not chosen her name. It wasn’t her real title. Fabian wasn’t ‘Fabian of Terra’, Viablo hadn’t been ‘Viablo of Jupiter’. My, how it still smarted, to be the political choice, but at the beginning Guilliman needed someone from Mars in his nascent organisation of truth-seekers for all the obvious reasons, and she was it. After all, without a Martian in his new organisation, Guilliman would have denied himself much access to information, he would have caused offence, and in both ways he would have seemed weak.

There we are, she thought. Politics again. Fine for the regent, but it left her with the lingering doubt as to whether she’d been chosen for her talents or for what she was: a presentable member of the priesthood who was sufficiently opposed to its ways to be biddable to the Imperium.

‘And what exactly do you mean by “most of the time”, Eremenitas?’

‘I mean that for you the pursuit of comprehension is of lesser importance than it is for me.’

‘Because only the Omnissiah knows all, comprehends all.’

‘Don’t pretend your lack of application is caused by respect, madam.’

Maybe he did not mean to condemn her. Maybe he simply spoke truthfully. Eremenitas was supremely rational. On the other hand, he spoke Gothic with her all the time. He never used the Lingua Technis, and binharic only in moments of danger. That spoke volumes about his opinion of her as a real magos.

Nevertheless, she was grateful he had ended up sharing her quarters. As the crusade had ground on and on and on, she’d found it increasingly hard to spend nights in the warp alone. Nearly two decades in, sleep was elusive.

Their quarters were generous by Naval standards, though not as generous as some she’d had on other ships. Five paces to the tiny wardrobe from her bed. Inside were the ceremonial robes of a tech-priest. A long undershift woven with thread of gold circuitry patterns, all purely decorative; a habit of heavy fibres dyed Martian crimson to go over that; then a long tabard of white and black edged with cog-tooth patterns and carrying a bronze cast of the Opus Machina in the Martian mode, a high-collared shoulder piece, chain-link belt, and more. There was always more when it came to ceremonial garb. It all looked so… heavy. She took out her undergarments – these at least were light, comfortable, and her own choice – and shrugged herself lethargically into them. She glanced over her shoulder.

‘Could you help me dress, Eremenitas? It is unfair to wake my attendants. None of them have weathered this voyage well.’

‘Of course, madam.’

Eremenitas trundled out of the corner. He started with a lurch she thought would topple him, so hard did it set his columnar body swaying. A number of limbs extended themselves from this central pillar. He picked up the shift and lifted it. Solana let it slide over her head and arms, grunting as the weight of the garment settled on her.

‘I’ll not miss this ridiculous dress-up. These aristocrats and their displays.’

‘It is expected. You are a high-ranking magos, Solana.’

‘I thought I’d left all that behind when I was chosen for the Logos.’

Eremenitas gave a pitying chuckle. ‘Really, why do you think you were chosen?’

‘I was just reflecting upon that,’ she said drily.

‘Arms up again!’ Eremenitas helped her pull her habit on. ‘Power has its own visual language. Discomfort is a key part of the syntax. You must dress as people expect. Influence comes through display.’

‘Whatever. I’ll be glad to be back in Logos battle dress. Ow!’ She looked sharply over her shoulder. ‘Watch it. Bits of this are sharp!’

‘Apologies. This part is tricky.’ He proceeded with more care. ‘Take comfort.’

‘Very amusing.’

‘Take comfort,’ he repeated, continuing smoothly over her interruption. ‘You will not be alone. All the nobles and higher officers will be sweating in their finery, pulled in and pushed out, powdered and puffed.’ He sounded amused at this human vanity.

‘It’s not as if the Prime Conduit is even going to care,’ she said, as Eremenitas offered her the tabard. She bent for him to slide the stiff brocade over her head. Everything went over her head. She stood, then he laced the sides up. His simple pincer manipulators were surprisingly dextrous. ‘And I should be exempt. I’m a historitor first, only Martian second, Omnissiah preserve me.’

‘These displays are not for Cawl. As an agent of Roboute Guilliman, you must be all things to all people, and that means the right dress for the right time. It is as important as the correct selection of weapons, or the correct mathematical proofs in astrogation. You were chosen by the primarch partially because you were a member of the Cult, ergo, in times like these you must dress like one. Like it or not, madam, you are and always will be one of us.’

‘I know that,’ she said. She still sounded peevish. She’d better kill that.

She reached for the belt.

‘Here, let me,’ Eremenitas said, extending a pincer past her. It was funny, she thought, not really thinking it funny at all, how the Logos had started out with deliberately plain uniforms, yet by convoluted roads she had come to sport this gothic horror. It was emblematic of every effort Guilliman had made to simplify matters. The Imperium got in the way of making things easier, and more and more she was forced to employ the very same inefficient methods that were strangling the God-Emperor’s domain. Clothes were only the start of it. She hitched the belt over her waist and held it while Eremenitas did up all the many pointlessly tiny hooks on the back.

She wondered what the rest of the Founding Four would make of that. Fabian, Mudire, Viablo… She could only guess. She’d not seen Fabian or Mudire for years, and Viablo was dead.

They got the shoulder piece on. It was moulded in a such a way it forced her shoulders further back than she was strictly comfortable with. Eremenitas helped her pull the deep hood of the habit over the top and arrange it atop the rest of the ensemble.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Fit for the finest of forge-fanes.’

She smoothed down the various layers. ‘Emperor alive, I’m going to cook in this thing.’

‘Hm,’ said Eremenitas. What he meant by that she had no idea.

‘I can manage the rest,’ she said, slapping away a handful of manipulators reaching out to make final adjustments. She tried to will a little energy into her limbs, and mostly failed. The flesh was weak. She reminded herself that in a few hours they’d be back in the materium and all this torment would go away.

If they survived translation.

Eremenitas’ tracks spun in opposite directions, turning him around on the spot so he faced the other side of the wardrobe. When Solana saw what he was reaching for she snapped.

‘For the Emperor’s sake, spare me the hat. I’ll wear my field cap and they can like it.’

The other magos dipped his head and fetched the cap. For some reason known only to himself, he’d kept the flesh assemblage of upper shoulders and neck. It was a strange biological interruption in the machine he’d made of the rest of his body. He held her cap while she did her hair, and applied an amount of makeup commensurate with the minimum expected for someone of her rank. A touch of rouge, a little black under the eye, gently impressed skull and cog on each cheek: seeing as she looked mainly human, that was the least people would expect. She drew the line there. No powdered face or gold-leaf circuitry. She took her hat, tugged it onto her head with a businesslike manner that was pretty much entirely faked.

‘How do I look?’

‘A fine balance of a person acquiescing to the social mores of a situation while maintaining a demonstrative amount of individuality.’

‘Like one of the most influential women in the Imperium?’

‘The melange of respect for the traditions of others and agency in choosing to disregard certain aspects of them as indicated by your manner of dress is appropriate for such a person, I would agree.’

She nodded briskly. Now, she was getting into the role. Being angry helped.

‘That’ll do. Let’s go.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2025.
This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Lorenzo Mastroianni.

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