‘Why?’ asked Su-Kassen. She was almost running to keep up with Dorn as he strode into his sanctum. Glow-globes lit as he crossed the black marble floor. ‘What can a remembrancer have to tell us?’

Archamus and a squad of Huscarls spread through the room, feet ringing on the floor. Dorn stopped, and turned to look at her. His gaze almost made her stumble. His eyes were dark mirrors in a face of carved stone.

‘Because once before messengers came to me in the ship. They told me the truth that we all now live – that the Warmaster was a betrayer. I did not believe them then, I did not want to hear…’

Su-Kassen thought she saw something then, something in the deep distance of his eyes, something she could not place in a being like Rogal Dorn.

‘It is not often that we get to learn from the mistakes of the past,’ said Dorn. ‘Mersadie Oliton showed me the truth. Here, in this room…’ He turned his head to look at a point in open space, as though something moved in the still air. ‘She showed me what she had seen… and that changed everything.’ He looked back at Su-Kassen.

She could feel herself frowning, a doubt forming on her lips.

A shrill alarm rang out.

Su-Kassen gasped.

Blackness, a feeling of nausea, a sound of screaming.

She blinked and put a holo-monocle to her eye. Light flooded her vision as alert information poured onto the display.

Cold flooded her.

‘Lord Praetorian,’ she said, staring at the tactical data as the sound of alarms rose to a clamour. ‘Something is happening in the inner system…’

Static was suddenly washing through the vox-link. The holo-monocle shorted out. She stumbled back.

A sound bubbled up in her earpiece, rustling, laughing, saying something that sounded like words.

‘…is all around you… the only name you will hear…’

‘Lord…’ she began.

‘Bring the ship to full alert,’ said Dorn, and began striding for the doors.

Mersadie stumbled. The floor of the passage met her hand as she caught herself. Lights popped and bubbled in her eyes. Voices and memories tumbled over each other in her skull.

‘Take the iterator and the remembrancer back to their quarters,’ said Maloghurst…

Maggard shoving her through a door…

‘Euphrati, what is wrong? You never talked like–’

‘You need to understand, Mersadie.’

‘I understand you have a story,’ she said. The wolf stood before her, the white fur of its back silver beneath the moonlight. ‘A particularly entertaining one. I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’

The wolf turned, its teeth a smile of sorrow.

‘Which story?’

‘Horus killing the Emperor.’

‘Where…’ she managed, pushing herself up as Loken reached to help her. ‘Where are we?’

‘The Phalanx,’ he said. His eyes were dark, human, not the eyes of a wolf.

‘The Phalanx…’ she repeated, blinking, feeling the world turn around her.

The eyes of five Imperial Fists held on her, red in black-and-yellow helms.