The light went from the cherub’s eyes. It flew off, motor buzzing. The primarch watched it go back to its roost with critical eyes. The wings were more than adornment; from the sound of it, there was not enough lift in the gravity impeller to keep it aloft. The machines of this millennium were crude. The engineers among his brothers would probably have caught the thing in a net and rebuilt the motor; he was close to doing so himself. Either that, or tossing it out of an airlock into the void and replacing it with something less ghoulish.

He refrained from acting out his thoughts. Consideration, evaluation, action. That was his way. Roboute Guilliman was not a slave to impulse.

Thinking on the cherub brought another unwelcome flash of what he had seen behind the Eternity Gate: the corpse in the ungentle embrace of Mechanicus technology, part meat, part machine, and the terrible screaming of the soul syphons…

He shook his head to quash the memory. He could not fix everything. Not all at once. Guilliman deliberately put the grotesque device from his mind and returned to his desk. He did not sit, but pulled out a new book and stood flicking through it. He was unwilling to continue reading the chronolog’s ranting today. The man was a thousand years dead. His words could stand another day’s wait.

Three minutes later and he had absorbed half the book’s contents. Nothing interesting – another small world of small deeds and small men.

The door to the library opened with a soft whoosh of equalising pressure. Voices too low for even Guilliman’s superior hearing to catch blunted themselves on his books. The primarch looked up. He resolved to avoid judging the priest until he saw him in person, but previous experience had coloured his perceptions of the adepts deeply. Would the man start to wail like the last one, or collapse into religious ecstasy? The possibilities were as irksome as they were limited.

Lorgar, thought Guilliman. He would have enjoyed crowing about this.

The soft slap of sandals on marble echoed around the library. By this humble sound was the next militant-apostolic prelate to the primarch announced. It was far better than the herald cherub’s synthesised warbling.

Frater Mathieu was a slight man. His crossed arms were buried in the sleeves of the plain cream robes of the Acronite Mendicants he wore. Guilliman doubted he would have recognised his habit without the information he had gathered on the priest. The sub-orders of the Adeptus Ministorum were so numerous even he had no hope of memorising them all.