“You seem to have gleaned from somewhere the idea that I am here to right wrongs, to restore justice and bring down your oppressors, but this is not the case. I am not your hero. I am only your salvation.

“I will stand with you against the Darkness. I will confront the terror that pours upon us from the skies. I will imbue within you a burning faith in our distant Father on Earth that will rise up to empower you to live! And to fight! And to win!

“I will, through the sweat of my brow, the strength of my arm and the fire of my weapons, save your bodies from death and your souls from consumption by an Enemy too awful to speak of. But when the dust has settled and a new dawn breaks the horizon, you will still be slaves.

“This is the fate the Emperor has willed for you. Give thanks!”

- Sermons of Argen Spolk, Ch 4, s3

With a grimace, Dire walked away from Poldue, rubbing his throat. However hard he tried, he simply lacked the genetic disposition to keep up, physically, with his militant peers. He could understand the principles of tactical classes, and the concepts of command and strategy. But he lacked the charisma that was the fuel of such work. And when things went to the grounds of the gymnasium, with its obstacles and broken ground and live-firing servitor-guns, he was simply left splashing and wheezing just fighting against the risk of being left behind. The capacity to think and act decisively when fighting for breath simply didn’t exist within him.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be tactical when not half-dying from exhaustion and terror. He made it to his room without encountering any other antagonists and shoved the door open, making it crash against his bed.

‘Oi!’ snapped Lancet, sitting up from where he had been napping on Dire’s bed. The room was a cell barely large enough for the single bed - Dire’s - and the bunk bed that Lancet shared with Manchurian, the third member of their group. Despite that, the Schola had, against all common sense, managed to fit in the cell an ancient, battered wardrobe, over seven feet tall, into which the three of them had to fit their clothes and limited personal possessions. There were no locks on the rooms, so the wardrobe was defended by an array of improvised barriers that they had devised between them, requiring a complicated ritual of twists and pushes to reveal the actual lock, the key for which was hidden beneath a loose board in the darkest corner of the room which was, itself, trapped.

Whilst their beds had been routinely upset and soiled by attackers, no one had yet gained entry to their wardrobe.

Between the beds was a space only just wide enough to permit the door to open.

‘Aren’t you ready yet?’ shot back Dire. He had used the precious fifteen minutes of personal time between the morning lessons and afternoon lessons for his meeting with Malpas. They were due at the first lesson of the afternoon in less than five minutes. ‘I specifically asked you to get my slate ready!’

‘Alright, alright,’ moaned Lancet, grabbing the slate he’d left on Dire’s bed, stabbing at the screen with a finger. ‘I was just catching a nap.’

Lancet was due to go to the Departmento Munitorum of the Administratum, traditionally a destination for the lowest of the low, but Lancet was actually brighter than he liked to let on and had an ambition of joining the Officio Medicae and becoming a surgeon. It was a faint hope but on such slender threads were friendships built.

'No time,' grumbled Dire, snatching his slate from Lancet's grip. 'We need to get moving or we'll be late and I need a different favour, anyway.'

Lancet grabbed his bag and they both hurried back out into the corridor, joining the thin stream of progenii heading back to the teaching quarters.

'Poldue has summoned me,' said Dire, by way of explanation as they walked. 'He means to improve upon Codzecher's work,' he gestured at his discoloured cheek, 'and I am to be his canvas.'

'Well that's a pile of grox shit,' grumbled Lancet. 'How can I help?'

'I'm to gift him a bowl of sugar at the outset.'

'Oh, that cunning bastard!'

'Why only be a bastard when one can also be a bastard and make a profit?'

'And you’re going?' begged Lancet. 'He'll put you in the San!'

'Oh, no,' replied Dire with a chuckle. 'He's promised that I am to take myself there!'

'You’ll need sugar, then?' sighed Lancet, rifling to check he had all of his books in the leather satchel, embossed with the Schola’s emblem of a grinning skull settled upon six rods and surrounded by a wreath of flames.

'Indeed, I do.'

'Hmph,' grumbled Lancet. 'We should talk to Manchurian.'

The third occupant of their room was a peculiarity at the Schola. How Manchurian remained so fat was a mystery to everyone but himself. Somehow, he always had access to more food. And although he would huff and puff and sweat his way around the gymnasium, always coming dead last in whatever gruelling test the Drill Abbots had come up with, he never stopped, never gave up. He was also a master of the catechism, consistently placing in the top three in their whole year - across all twenty colleges - in the catechismal trials. This earned him a degree of goodwill amongst the Drill Abbots who saw a bishopric in the fat boy’s future, which meant that when the three of them needed to get away with something, it was invariably Manchurian who would take the starring role, as the one of them least likely to suffer a severe penalty for misbehaviour.

Manchurian had also developed a novel solution to his bullies. He let verbal taunting roll off his well-upholstered shoulders like water and, when things turned physical, he would embrace his opponents and simply roll on top of them until, humiliated and frustrated, they gave up. His one area of physical competence was wrestling, where he made up for a lack of technical skill with the coupling of mass and a surprising degree of physical grace.

But, as a fourth-floor student destined for the Ecclesiarchy, Manchurian spent his brief personal time mostly in one or other of the various chapels, sanctuaries and shrines dotted throughout the Schola, where he was expected to learn the rituals and assist the Drill Abbots and the handful of true priests of the Schola.

So Dire and Lancet hurried to their next lesson in the hope of catching Manchurian before the Abbot commenced instruction, but even as they shouldered their way through the door, Drill Abbot Kriffiths was slapping his metal cane upon the top of his desk and screeching:

‘Stand to! Stand to! The Honourable Justice, His Eminence Drill Abbot Judge Harmonius Kriffiths presiding!’

Kriffiths taught Imperial Law. It was interminably dull, dry and tedious, but once you understood the underlying principles of the system, as Dire did, it was incredibly simple. The law was a mess. It had been a mess for centuries and it was hard, frankly, to tell if it had ever not been a mess. Every precedent had a counter-precedent. Every ruling had an exception. Every act had a collection of loopholes so grossly obvious that they might as well have been written on crochet. The trick was not to observe a situation and to discern, within it, justice but, rather, to decide upon the outcome that suited one’s needs most closely and, from there, to assemble a legal argument that most robustly supported your desired result… and hope that one’s opponents weren’t able to build one more potent.

There was no way to win against Kriffiths, of course. Not only had he endured more than a century of service under the Adeptus Arbites, official adjudicators of the Imperium, but he also had a tendency to just invent whole legal precedents and dare his students to challenge him.

Dire was among the better arbitrators in his class, but the lessons were widely considered pointless by him and almost everyone else. The Ecclesiarchy would do what it wanted and no one could stop it. That was the beginning and end of almost all law, except canon law. It was marginally more important to be familiar with the laws that governed the clergy themselves if one intended to be among their number. But for those destined for careers in the laity, these lessons mostly came down to a mix of rhetoric, stamina and intellectual bludgeoning.

Consequently, Dire mostly switched off his ears while he covertly scribbled a summary of his predicament and passed it via Lancet to Manchurian, who had ended up in the row behind them thanks to arriving half a minute sooner.

‘...the argument as it would apply to, say, Baal Secundus, Mister Dire as you seem consumed with examining your lap, wherein I am certain there is no wisdom, perhaps you would provide an answer to us?’

‘Ah,’ said Dire, jerking his head up from reading the brief response passed back from Manchurian, scanning the sounds his brain had been only half-parsing for the last several minutes as he frantically looked for a mental handhold.

‘Is it possible, Mister Dire, that you weren’t listening?’ demanded Kriffiths with a screech.

‘Not at all, Your Honour!’ replied Dire, smartly, jerking to his feet. Admitting to not listening, or displaying any degree of weakness or doubt was an invitation to - best case scenario - latrine duties. ‘I w-was merely composing my thoughts in an attempt to ass-sail your p-potent argument with the p-paltry tools at my disposal.’

‘Then by all means, please grace this court with your arguments, Dire, before I deem your behaviour little better than time wasting!’

‘Ah… the argument would not pertain to Baal Secundus at all, Your Honour!’

‘And why not?’

‘B-because the world falls under th-the authority of the Adeptus Astartes! C-capitus angeli sanguis, ah, if m-my memory serves me!’

Kriffiths stared at him in silence for several seconds. Nowhere in Dire’s memory had he recorded exactly what kind of argument Kriffiths had been making. If it had been anything to do with the militant orders of the death angels, he would be facing far worse than latrine duty, but Kriffiths liked to lay that sort of procedural trap in his case studies. Once you got past the cynical reality at the heart of Imperial “justice”, the real goal was to learn where the few hard lines really lay. And one of those was that you do not draw the attention of the angels of death. They were uninterested in governance and disinterested in politics, so as long as the wise Imperial bureaucrat left them to smite the alien as the Emperor had intended, they played their role to perfection. But to draw their eye was to invite the scrutiny of their uncompromising and un-nuanced perspective. Weakness was to be crushed. Enemies were to be destroyed. There was no room to consider collateral damage and, historically, they would brook no interference in their decisions on how a conflict was to be conducted.

‘Indeed,’ said Kriffiths at last. ‘Mr Dire was alert to the risks of attempting to impose our assumptions of normal practice outside the boundaries of our authority.

‘Each of you,’ he went on, ‘has it in him to rise far above his current station, to positions of not merely global but galactic importance. Of the twelve current High Lords of Terra, no fewer than eight began their careers in the Schola Progenium.

‘Most of you will not rise even the tiniest fraction as far as those blessed minds, so deeply in tune with our Great Father, so perfectly in lock step do they march humanity towards its inevitable destiny!

‘Most of you will die long before even so lofty a role as planetary governor might be within your sights. But if - if - so help me a single one of you makes it so high, I would pray daily for his possession of enough wisdom to know that you do - not - piss off - a SPACE MARINE!!’

The spittle drying on his withered lips, Kriffiths turned his gaze, which had been roaming across the gathered faces of the class, back to Dire.

‘Sit, Dire,’ he croaked. ‘Now all of you write this down…!’

The lesson continued in a similar vein for an hour before they were dismissed to hurry to their next class. On the way, Dire dropped in at Machurian’s beefy elbow.

‘You already have sugar?’ he asked him, excited.

‘Not what I said,’ hissed back Manchurian. Talking between classes wasn’t forbidden, per se, but it was a good way to draw unwanted attention from seniors if you looked too happy or too social. ‘I said you don’t need to go to the kitchens. Too much of a risk.’

‘Don’t you go there all the time?’ asked Dire. He had always assumed that Manchurian sustained his eating habits by doing favours for the kitchen staff.

‘They change the staff there all the time,’ complained Manchurian. ‘I have to find new contacts every few months and the new boy is holding out on me. But if it’s sugar you want, there are easier places to get it anyway.’

‘Such as?’

But they were already at their next classroom and the next two hours would be consumed by High Gothic Intermediate.

*

‘We don’t have to go far,’ said Manchurian, Dire and - despite Dire’s protests - Lancet tagging close behind him. Classes were over. Refectory was closed. Evensong was, for the lack of a better word, sung. Manchurian had diligently plodded through his mandatory rituals. Both suns - the prime Arcturus and its diminutive companion, Genevera - had dropped beneath the far horizon and only the dim light of antique glow-globes threw forth any light on the corridors at all.

‘Where do we have to go?’ begged Dire. Last Chime was a bare hour away and they had left Chimaera with no idea where their friend was leading them.

‘Normally I’d stop in on my way back from chanting the sol est dimittus, so it’s a bit of a risk to be leaving the college, but it should be fine.’

‘C’mon Chunner,’ grumbled Lancet. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Here,’ said Manchurian, immediately dropping his voice to a whisper as they came to a halt a few metres short of an unassuming door: an old slab of heavy wood bound with ancient metal, set deep within a portal outlined in simply dressed stone.

‘But this is Mongrel’s storeroom,’ said Dire, feeling a chill down his spine. Drill Abott “Mongrel” Mungelion deserved his nickname. A retired Naval Regulator from the Navis Ministorum, he was a bullet-headed, mutton-jawed ox as wide as he was tall. A terrifying network of evil scars consumed the left-hand side of his face and half of his jaw was a crude, metal prosthesis that locked him in a permanent, drooling sneer. He was a Vagrant - a member of a special order of Drill Abbots whose job was to provide temporary cover to classes when the attending was unavailable. In theory it should mean that he could turn his hand to teach almost anything. But in practice, he dedicated his time to sadistically enforcing silent immobility upon whatever class was under his supervision. And there was one other thing that everyone knew about Mongrel: you did not try to go into his storeroom.

How and why he had his own storeroom, no one knew any more. Each Drill Abbot had their own classroom, which came with a storeroom so, presumably, Mongrel had been given one to account for the fact that he had no classroom of his own. But it had become the stuff of dark legend - especially in Chimaera, which was the college closest to it.

‘You’ve been in there?’ asked Dire.

‘A few times,’ said Manchurian, instantly raising his stock amongst his two room-mates. ‘I saw him leave, once, when I was on my way back from rituals, so I just opened the door to see what was there. And it’s, like, just a storeroom.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ asked Lancet in a hiss. ‘You’d be a legend!’

‘For opening a boring door?’ smiled Manchurian, the expression strangely sinister on his otherwise round and jovial face. ‘No. Secrets aren’t for blurting out, Lancet. They’re for carefully hoarding and sharing only when there’s an advantage to be gained.

‘But there is another point to note,’ he went on.

‘Which is?’

‘He has a bed in there, too.’

‘He sleeps there?’ squawked Dire. It was well past dark and almost Last Chime.

‘I’ve never seen him in it,’ Manchurian went on, ‘but he must do so, sometimes. I’ve never been in this late. I’ve no idea if he’s going to be in there now or not. But I know for a fact that the kitchen staff will be in until well after Last Chime and you’ll have to negotiate both the first and second under kitchens before you get even within arm’s reach of the pantry. And I’ve not idea where the sugar is in there. But here…’

He gestured towards the door that sat before them in menacing silence.

‘It’s on the right hand side, on the middle shelf, no more than three strides from the door. The bed is at the far end.’

‘I see,’ said Dire.

And see he did. Here were Lancet and Manchurian, the two of his fellows he trusted more than any other, with whom he had suffered through a hundred beatings and a thousand cold nights, huddled together beneath thin blankets. They had shared secrets and shared pain. But they were on the fourth floor, now. In two years they, too, would be preparing for the Finishing School and a career.

Manchurian was helping Dire, but he was also helping himself. If he had been helping himself to Mongrel’s sugar and had been noticed, then Dire was a credible candidate for the blame. If the Mongrel was in and awake, or woke up in the course of the theft, then Dire would take the fall not just for this trespass but for every trespass before it that Mongrel had noticed. And if he didn’t get caught, then he became a credible candidate to blame if Manchurian persisted in his thefts and he would be in his friend’s debt, and Manchurian would learn something new about Mongrel’s patterns of behaviour.

He had to give Manchurian credit for creating such an enviable win-win situation out of nothing.

And Lancet? What was he here for? Moral support? His motives might have been less transparent - and less predatory - but he was still there to watch Dire commit a theft and to learn some of Manchurian’s closely-guarded secrets.

But there was time to turn this all more firmly to his advantage.

‘I need you both to do something, then,’ said Dire, raising his eyes to lock each of them, for a moment, with the intensity of his stare.

‘U-us?’ said Manchurian.

‘Much less risky than what I’m about to do,’ said Dire, smiling. ‘I need you to go back to the last junction. Then kick up a fuss, like you’re having a fight or a fit, or something. Make it noisy. But make it brief. As soon as I signal, run! Run back to Chimaera and back to our room as fast as you can. Stop for nothing.’

'Um -' Machurian began, but Dire cut him off.

'You'll do this little thing for me, won't you?'

This was the question. Would Manchurian admit that his largesse in pointing Dire towards Mongrel's sugar stash was a calculated ploy to his own advantage? Of course not. He had no choice but to agree to Dire's request if he wanted to sustain the convenient fiction of friendship. Of course, Dire thought, the value of his friendship was about to be sorely tested if - or perhaps he should say "when", given the lucrative trade in secrets that made its way around the Schola - news of his association with the Inquisition were to leak out. Would he be ridiculed? Or feared? But for now, it was, to Manchurian at least, a known quantity and Dire was asking him to gamble on retaining it.

He honestly wasn't certain what his plan was. Would he set them to make a noise to draw Mongrel out? If he gave chase then snatching the sugar would be an easy job. But, if not, he would be awake for Dire's inevitable trespass. And what if he weren't even in? Or was woken by the noise, but elected not to investigate?

Manchurian nodded and looked at Lancet, who glared from one to the other, regretting his decision to accompany them which had gone from entertained observer to involved part a lot quicker than he would have liked and without getting to have any say in it at all! Finally, he also nodded.

'OK, we're in,' said Manchurian. 'What's the plan?'

Dire was still working on it.

'Just go down there and be ready,' he hissed. 'We need a lot of noise. Wake the ancestors if you must. But not until I signal. Like this.'

He gestured. Although the corridor was gloomy, his frantically waving hand's pale flesh was clear to see.

'If I don't gesture, just stay there and wait for me,' he added. 'And if Mongrel comes out without my signal, just go. As fast as you can.'

'No problem with that,' muttered Lancet, which Dire was glad of. He didn't want his companions to be caught, after all. That would do none of them any good.

'Fine, get going, then,' whispered Dire, turning to approach Mongrel's door. 'I get to do the hard part.'