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to one knee, his head bowed.
    With the pressure lapsed, Loken found he could no longer support himself. Hands grappling, he began to slide back over the lip where he had been hanging. He couldn’t get any purchase on the gleaming onyx.
    He slipped off the edge. A strong hand grabbed him around the wrist and hauled him up onto the platform.
    Loken rolled over, shaking. He looked back across the ring at the golden throne. It was a smoking ruin, its secret mechanisms exploded from within. Amidst the twisted, ruptured plates and broken workings, a smouldering corpse sat upright, teeth grinning from a blackened skull, charred, skeletal arms still braced along the throne’s coiled rests.
    ‘So will I deal with all tyrants and deceivers,’ rumbled a deep voice.
    Loken looked up at the god standing over him. ‘Lupercal…’ he murmured.
    The god smiled. ‘Not so formal, please, captain,’ whispered Horus.
    ‘M AY I ASK you a question?’ Mersadie Oliton said.
    Loken had taken a robe down from a wall peg and was putting it on. ‘Of course.’
    ‘Could we not have just left them alone?’
    ‘No. Ask a better question.’
    ‘Very well. What is he like?’
    ‘What is who like, lady?’ he asked.
    ‘Horus.’
    ‘If you have to ask, you’ve not met him,’ he said.
    ‘No, I haven’t yet, captain. I’ve been waiting for an audience. Still, I would like to know what you think of Horus—’
    ‘I think he is Warmaster,’ Loken said. His tone was stone hard. ‘I think he is the master of the Luna Wolves and the chosen proxy of the Emperor, praise be his name, in all our undertakings. He is the first and foremost of all primarchs. And I think I take offence when a mortal voices his name without respect or title.’
    ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, captain, I meant no—’
    ‘I’m sure you didn’t, but he is Warmaster Horus. You’re a remembrancer. Remember that.’

THREE
    Replevin
    Amongst the remembrancers
    Raised to the four
    T HREE MONTHS AFTER the battle for the High City, the first of the remembrancers had joined the expedition fleet, brought directly from Terra by mass conveyance. Various chroniclers and recorders had, of course, been accompanying Imperial forces since the commencement of the Great Crusade, two hundred sidereal years earlier. But they had been individuals, mostly volunteers or accidental witnesses, gathered up like road dust on the advancing wheels of the crusader hosts, and the records they had made had been piecemeal and irregular. They had commemorated events by happenstance, sometimes inspired by their own artistic appetites, sometimes encouraged by the patronage of a particular primarch or lord commander, who thought it fit to have his deeds immortalised in verse or text or image or composition.
    Returning to Terra after the victory of Ullanor, the Emperor had decided it was time a more formal and authoritative celebration of mankind’s reunification be undertaken. The fledgling Council of Terra evidently agreed wholeheartedly, for the bill inaugurating the foundation and sponsorship of the remembrancer order had been countersigned by no less a person than Malcador the Sigillite, First Lord of the Council. Recruited from all levels of Terran society – and from the societies of other key Imperial worlds – simply on the merit of their creative gifts, the remembrancers were quickly accredited and assigned, and despatched to join all the key expedition fleets active in the expanding Imperium.
    At that time, according to War Council logs, there were four thousand two hundred and eighty-seven primary expedition fleets engaged upon the business of the crusade, as well as sixty thousand odd secondary deployment groups involved in compliance or occupation endeavours, with a further three hundred and seventy-two primary expeditions in regroup and refit, or resupplying as they awaited new tasking orders. Almost four point three million remembrancers were sent abroad in the first months