The stream of holy men went on for an hour, as if the carved range of hills were full to bursting with them. They filled the avenues between the warriors standing to attention, though they set no foot on the carpet running down the very centre aisle. None dared do that, for that was Guilliman’s alone to tread.

They sang and mumbled and prayed. A dozen bishops and all their aides and servitors and whispering confidantes stalked after the priestly horde in pompous parade, each vying with the others in displays of opulence or contrary poverty. Finally, there came a veritable wagon train of sacred arks bearing the bones of dead saints and fallen heroes of the Indomitus Crusade, these also accompanied by immense throngs of the faithful.

In their pageantry, in their sheer number and bombast, the priests almost overshadowed the arrival of the primarch.

Almost, but not quite.

Frater Mathieu was the only priest looking down upon the arrival. He was stood upon on a wide prominence over the steps, carved from the flesh of the land earlier that week. There were twenty cardinals up there, too, somewhere at the back in the crowd, but they affected a lack of interest in the lower orders of clergy. They were closer to the Emperor; they had no need to watch the devotional display of their inferiors.

In form, the promontory of the August Victorium was, Mathieu supposed, a sort of balcony, with a balustrade and doors that led to the rooms within the hill, and the long colonnade above it whence the cyber-angels came. It had all the appurtenances of a balcony, but it was so immense that the word did it no justice. It ran for almost a kilometre, and was crammed with officials of every kind. There were few warriors upon it. All but the mightiest leaders stood with their soldiers upon the square, many upon raised platforms or standing within the cupolas of enormous command vehicles so that their importance was understood.

Well, thought Frater Mathieu, perhaps not so few warriors.

He had counted them as they arrived, before the crowds got too thick. There were thirty-six Chapter Masters, a further eighteen Space Marine lords, all the upper leadership of the remaining Chapters of the Unnumbered Sons and their larger supra-Chapter groupings, six Adeptus Custodes, three canonesses of the Adepta Sororitas, five generals, various warlords and others of similar rank, Captain Felix, Captain Sicarius, all twenty of Guilliman’s Victrix Guard, the Commissar General, the Admirals Primus, Secundus and Tertius, several rear admirals, dozens of commodores, more dozens of shipmasters – including Brahe – and scores of other men and women of war.

But numbers were relative.