The ancient hall of the Nicor was large enough for what was needed and old enough to have been the setting for a great number of things that could not easily be described afterward.
Nolan stood at its center in full Starfire Glory, his back straight, and extended his left arm forward with the black bracelet turned upward on his wrist. Around him, at a careful radius, a Librarian detachment from the Blood Ravens Great Company had taken their positions in a loose formation, their eyes already half-closed against whatever they were about to release. Chief Librarian Kahurangi of the Carcharodons occupied the position directly to Nolan's left, his pale face composed and still, the specific concentration of a psyker preparing to do serious work with serious tools.
The temperature in the hall dropped in the seconds before anyone did anything. The cold came quickly, with the quality of cold that has nothing to do with ventilation systems: a drop in the ambient pressure of the air, the frost that appears on metal surfaces when something is drawing heat from the environment and converting it to a different kind of energy. It spread outward from the bracelet.
Nolan held his position.
Then the psykers opened themselves to it.
Psychic power poured from each of them toward the bracelet, guided channels of warp-touched energy flowing in from six points simultaneously, and what it did when it reached the bracelet was something that no standard Mechanicus analysis would have produced a useful description of. Wisps of light bloomed at the bracelet's surface: not one color but a mixture of three, red and blue and green spiraling together, the combined output reading the signal encoded in the device and translating it into something the Webway could process.
Nolan's eyes moved quickly across the text that condensed in the air above the bracelet, letter by letter.
He read it once. Then he looked up.
Twelve meters away, a circle of absence opened on the hall's metal floor: approximately three meters in diameter, its interior showing the distorted reflection of the surrounding hall as though a mirror had been set into the floor at a slightly wrong angle. The Webway portal held at that size, stable.
Gabriel and the Blood Ravens company officers who had been standing at the hall's edge, ostensibly observing and in practice watching with the focused attention of warriors who do not fully trust that a Webway portal appearing in their flagship's hall is going to produce something friendly, brought their bolt guns up in a smooth simultaneous movement. The ring they formed around Nolan tightened.
The first figure to step through wore dark green power armor, a white hood drawn up over the helmet, and carried a great sword across the back wrapped so thoroughly in bandaged cloth that not one millimeter of the blade was visible. The magnetic boots touched the Nicor's floor first, the step deliberate and unhurried, the posture of someone who has navigated a very large number of situations that warranted caution and has learned to manage his pace accordingly.
Behind him, two more warriors in dark green followed. The winged crests of their helmets, narrow and swept back in the style of the First Legion's ancient design, caught the hall's lumen light as they emerged and oriented themselves to the new space.
The Webway portal did not close. It held its mirror-surface, reflecting the warped outlines of the hall back at itself.
Nolan let the blood Ravens keep their bolt guns for exactly two more seconds, then said quietly: "Stand down. These two are not from the Inner Circle. They are Fallen. They are ours."
Gabriel's weapon lowered first. The others followed, though not all the way.
"New blood?" The figure in the white hood looked past Nolan to the Blood Ravens arrayed around the hall, the two dark green warriors flanking him. The mechanical distortion of his helmet's vox-grille could not fully conceal the amusement in the voice underneath it. "The boys of a new Great Company, from the look of the shoulder markings. It seems you have been acquiring skills, brother Primarch."
"I've been busy," Nolan said. "As you would know, if you ever used the bracelet for anything other than making me worry about whether you're dead."
He stepped forward.
The figure pulled the white hood back from his helmet, revealing the faceplate underneath: dark green ceramite, an older design than anything the present Chapters used. He opened his arms.
The two figures that faced each other in the center of the Nicor's ancient hall were, in every quantifiable measure of posture and scale and the specific quality of presence that a Primarch projects, nearly identical. Gabriel and the Blood Ravens, having served alongside Nolan for weeks and believed they understood his bearing reasonably well, found themselves momentarily unable to account for the fact that there were now two of him in the same room. Several bolt guns rose a fraction of an inch before discipline reasserted itself.
"It has been a while," Lord Cypher said.
"It has," Nolan said, and the two of them closed the distance and embraced with the specific economy of a greeting that does not require elaboration to carry its full weight.
He stepped back and looked at his counterpart with an expression that was mostly fond and partly exasperated.
"The red signal. I was told that means an urgent call from the wolf cub." He gestured at the bracelet. "You are demonstrably not the wolf cub."
Cypher's two Fallen companions had taken this opportunity to survey the hall in the quiet, methodical way of warriors assessing an unfamiliar space. When Nolan's gaze moved to them, both went to one knee simultaneously, the movement exact and unambiguous.
"Sons of the Lion, greeting the Primarch." Their voices came together in the low register that the First Legion's Astartes were bred to produce.
Nolan looked at them for a moment.
"Rise, children of the Lion. Until your gene-father returns openly to the Imperium, the road ahead will require patience." He said it without softening the truth of it, which was what they would have wanted. "You have my acknowledgment."
They rose.
He turned back to Cypher.
"The hall is not the place for this." He gestured toward the far end of the ancient space, away from the Blood Ravens and the Carcharodons officers still watching the scene with the focused attention of people who have many questions and have decided this is not the moment to ask them. "Walk with me."
The far corner of the hall had the advantage of distance. Nolan stood with his back to the wall and kept his voice below the ambient sound of the ship's systems, which in a battle-barge of this age produced a constant low background noise that was actually useful for private conversation.
"The Lion," he said, without preamble. "Tell me where the search stands."
Cypher was quiet for a moment in the way of someone who has rehearsed this answer and does not enjoy giving it.
"I entered the Rock," he said. "Got closer than I had any right to expect without triggering the Inner Circle's outer perimeter. As close as I've ever come to making the kind of fuss that would have required me to leave the sector in a hurry." A pause. "I found nothing. No trace. No sign that he's been there, or that he ever was."
"The Watchers?"
"Spoke, after a fashion. The way they speak." Cypher's voice carried the specific flatness of someone describing a conversation that yielded very little. "They suggested, in their way, that the Lion's sleeping place is not in the Rock. Or if it was there once, it has been moved."
Nolan was quiet for a moment.
"The Emperor," he said.
Cypher inclined his head slightly. "That was my conclusion as well."
"He is the eldest brother," Nolan said. "The first the Emperor created. The Father has always maintained a particular concern for the first." He turned this over briefly. "The Inner Circle's obsession has reached the scale it has precisely because the Lion's continued absence left the wound open with nothing to close it. If the Emperor had not intervened at some point, the genetic bond between the First Legion's Astartes and their gene-father would have guided them straight to him."
"That is what I concluded," Cypher said.
"Then you continue looking." Nolan put one hand briefly on Cypher's pauldron, the weight of the gesture measured. "When the time is correct, the Emperor will give you something to work with. He always does, eventually. When that moment comes, we address it together."
Cypher accepted this without argument. He had been operating alone for a very long time, and the offer of an ally who could actually match the scale of the problem was not something he was inclined to decline.
"Now," Nolan said, "tell me what actually made you activate the red signal in Russ's name without asking him."
Something in Cypher's expression shifted.
"The wolf cub has never learned to use psychic power," he said. "It is not in his nature, and it is not in the nature of the warriors he leads now. The Thirteenth Company are Wulfen, most of them. The mutation has kept the consciousness mostly intact, which is more than anyone could have expected, but the ability to produce a Librarian capable of maintaining a Webway contact was beyond them. I have kept a separate monitoring arrangement for Russ for some time. A particular function I established specifically for his situation, because I knew this day would come." He paused. "He would not have contacted you himself. If all his warriors died fighting, he would fight alone until there was nothing left to fight with. That is simply what he is."
"So you sent the signal for him."
"Without his knowledge. Yes."
Nolan exhaled slowly through his nose.
"What is he fighting?" he said, though something in his expression already suggested the answer was not going to be simple.
"He and the Thirteenth Company are pinned," Cypher said. "By the Daemon Prince who is attempting to open a passage directly to the Eye of Terror. The ascended Primarch." He met Nolan's gaze steadily. "Magnus himself."