They lapsed into silence as he sat on one of the other chairs. She took another drink from her cup, and waited.

He opened his mouth, not sure what he was going to say, but she spoke instead.

‘You want to know about her, don’t you? About Keeler.’

He closed his mouth, then nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘You believe, don’t you? You are a follower of the Lectitio Divinitatus.’

‘My wife…’ he began, then paused, closing and opening his mouth. ‘No, not really, but…’

‘A dangerous thing to be part of a proscribed cult – even worse if your soul isn’t in it.’

‘I… Do you… Are you…’

‘Do I believe?’ she said. She smiled, took another sip from her cup, then gave a short laugh. ‘I have seen things… When you know the truth, does that leave room for faith or does it become fact?’

‘But Keeler,’ he asked, and heard the hunger in the words as they came from his mouth. ‘She is real then, you knew her?’

Mersadie looked at him for a long moment, and then put the cup down.

‘I owe you thanks, Master Vek, thanks and apologies that you do not have to accept. But I can’t offer you certainty. I can’t even offer hope.’

‘You said, though, that you needed to reach the Praetorian, that the saint… that Keeler–’

‘Do you know what the Crusade and the Betrayal have taught me?’ She was looking directly at him, now, and there was a hardness in her eyes. ‘We are small things, we humans. We mean very little. Our lives are narrow and short, and our dreams, even if noble, will not shift the stars in the sky. We are not the movers of this age. Horus is, and the Emperor. The choices and the hope and the ruin belong to them.’

Vek breathed in sharply. His hands twitched. Mersadie did not move.

‘I am sorry, Master Vek,’ she said. ‘You asked about Keeler, about what I am doing and why I am doing it. I thought you deserved an answer.’

‘But you talk of…’ He paused, the fear taking the sounds of the name from his tongue. ‘You talk of the Warmaster, not the saint.’

‘Because if there are arch-traitors and saints, then hope is their realm, the realm of cosmic change and slaughter and sorrow. They are the ones who will decide tomorrow, and if there are any tomorrows after that. We are human, Master Vek. Our lives only matter in quantity. We can dream and despair and cling on to what we have, but those things live only in us. Our hope is our own, and if the universe cares, it does so by accident. That is why people pray to the Emperor and call my old friend a saint. Because deep down, they know that they cannot change the great course of events.’