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following the ratification of the bill. ‘Arm the bastards,’ Primarch Russ had been reported as saying, ‘and they might win a few bloody worlds for us in between verses.’
    Russ’s sour attitude reflected well the demeanour of the martial class. From primarch down to common army soldier, there was a general unease about the Emperor’s decision to quit the crusade campaign and retire to the solitude of his palace on Terra. No one had questioned the choice of First Primarch Horus as Warmaster to act in his stead. They simply questioned the need for a proxy at all.
    The formation of the Council of Terra had come as more unpleasant news. Since the inception of the Great Crusade, the War Council, formed principally of the Emperor and the primarchs, had been the epicentre of Imperial authority. Now, this new body supplanted it, taking up the reins of Imperial governance, a body composed of civilians instead of warriors. The War Council, left under Horus’s leadership, effectively became relegated to a satellite status, its responsibilities focused on the campaign and the campaign alone.
    For no crime of their own, the remembrancers, most of them eager and excited at the prospect of the work ahead, found themselves the focus of that discontent everywhere they went. They were not welcomed, and they found their commission hard to fulfil. Only later, when the aexector tributi administrators began to visit expedition fleets, did the discontent find a better, truer target to exercise itself upon.
    So, three months after the battle of the High City, the remembrancers arrived to a cold welcome. None of them had known what to expect. Most had never been off-world before. They were virgin and innocent, over-eager and gauche. It didn’t take long for them to become hardened and cynical at their reception.
    When they arrived, the fleet of the 63rd Expedition still encircled the capital world. The process of replevin had begun, as the Imperial forces sectioned the ‘Imperium’, dismantled its mechanisms, and bestowed its various properties upon the Imperial commanders chosen to oversee its dispersal.
    Aid ships were flocking down from the fleet to the surface, and hosts of the Imperial army had been deployed to effect police actions. Central resistance had collapsed almost overnight following the ‘Emperor’s’ death, but fighting continued to spasm amongst some of the western cities, as well as on three of the other worlds in the system. Lord Commander Varvarus, an honourable, ‘old school’ veteran, was the commander of the army forces attached to the expedition fleet, and not for the first time he found himself organising an effort to pick up the pieces behind an Astartes speartip. ‘A body often twitches as it dies,’ he remarked philosophically to the Master of the Fleet. ‘We’re just making sure it’s dead.’
    The Warmaster had agreed to a state funeral for the ‘Emperor’. He declared it only right and proper, and sympathetic to the desires of a people they wished to bring to compliance rather than crush wholesale. Voices were raised in objection, particularly as the ceremonial interment of Hastur Sejanus had only just taken place, along with the formal burials of the battle-brothers lost at the High City. Several Legion officers, including Abaddon himself, refused point blank to allow his forces to attend any funeral rites for the killer of Sejanus. The Warmaster understood this, but fortunately there were other Astartes amongst the expedition who could take their place.
    Primarch Dorn, escorted by two companies of his Imperial Fists, the VII Legion, had been travelling with the 63rd Expedition for eight months, while Dorn conducted talks with the Warmaster about future War Council policies.
    Because the Imperial Fists had taken no part in the annexation of the planet, Rogal Dorn agreed to have his companies stand tribute at the ‘Emperor’s’ funeral. He did this so that the Luna Wolves would not have to