‘Rusen!’ said Garstand. ‘Meet Rusen! Perhaps there are more like us, those who have faced the plague lords and lived. Perhaps we can find them. Perhaps we can figure out what’s going on.’

Varens wanted nothing to do with the idea. There were plague lords everywhere. The Death Guard, an ancient hatred from ancient days. They had ships. They sailed the void and the warp. That was how it worked.

A memory overtook him, of a monstrous man, corrupt with disease that should have killed him many times over, his face covered by a rotting respirator, his armour leaking pus. Varens had fought him, and others, others that had vanished into thin air.

‘No!’ he said, far more loudly than he had intended. He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to enjoy this brief peace. Time would come soon enough to face the enemy again. He had no desire to revisit his memories. Any more of this and he would end up like Bolus.

He could not articulate any of this. His throat wouldn’t let him.

‘Goodnight, Garstand,’ he managed, the words coming out far harder than he had intended.

The friendliness went from Garstand’s face. He let go of Varens, and stepped back.

‘Suit yourself,’ he said quietly, and there was something absent in his slack face. For all his dislike of the view, he tucked his bearded chin into his chest and looked away from Varens out over the marsh.

Varens hurried back inside, suddenly weak.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Imperator Gloriana

When the demands of war retreated, Roboute Guilliman was not idle. He worked like he always had, ceaselessly toiling for humanity, even if now he struggled for the species’ survival rather than its advancement.

Roboute Guilliman’s chambers were better stocked than most libraries, and far better ordered. At the heart of the primarch’s palace upon the Macragge’s Honour was his scriptorium. Most of the material originally within had been removed to the Library of Ptolemy on Macragge after the ship had come home. Guilliman had been quick to replenish it upon his rebirth. Beneath the scriptorium’s soaring dome, at a desk surrounded by circular walls of shelves that stretched seventy metres up, was where he spent what little free time he had.

Old paper made the air smell tart. Mouldering scrolls lay next to data crystals and magnetic tape. Runic inscriptions on crumbling bark lay on top of hololith cylinders containing true-pict tri-D representations of forgotten wars. Graven copper cubes, wherein languished thoughts captured from living brains, shared desk space with yellowed cardboard boxes full of images on simple chemical film that was brittle with time.

Thousands of years of history recorded upon every device employed by mankind surrounded the primarch, and this was but the smallest part of his collection. Much more he had studied, digested, processed and recorded onto more permanent data-capture systems to be filed back on Macragge.