‘To what?’ asked Nilus, looking up from the bowl. ‘What are you going to tell them? You haven’t even told me why you need to get Rogal Dorn, and we have the bond of mutual suffering, and now this rather inadequate cell, to share.’

She glanced at the Navigator, but he had gone back to stirring the broth suspiciously. She had woken to find Nilus curled up in the corner of the cell. It wasn’t a proper brig, just a small storage space by the look of it. The crew of the freighter had ripped out the inner locking mechanism, and sealed them in with a bowl of broth, and a plastek jug of water that tasted like metal and dust. She had slept in spite of herself, exhaustion overriding fear and uncertainty. Mercifully, she had not dreamed. This had been the first time she and Nilus had spoken to each other since they had reached the Antius. Given the breathless scramble to escape the prison ship, it was also, she realised, the first time they had ever really talked at all.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You can keep your secrets. I am sure you have more than a few.’ He paused, then glanced up at her, eyes sharp and wary. ‘You were the remembrancer, weren’t you?’

Mersadie stiffened, cautious.

‘I was a remembrancer,’ she replied after a moment, then folded her legs to sit on the floor. ‘There were a lot of us.’

‘But I recognised your name. You were well known, a bit famous even, yes? You and… What was her name? The imagist.’

‘Keeler,’ she said, the name heavy in her mouth. ‘Euphrati Keeler.’

‘That was it. You were both quite the thing, weren’t you?’

‘That was our job,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘To see the Great Crusade for people who would never be able to see it.’

He smiled, the expression a crooked twist to his mouth.

‘But, I remember the talk – you got close to the heart of things. Very close. Practically a step away from the Warmaster.’

She blinked, and…

…a door slamming open, followed by heavy metal-on-metal footsteps. Mersadie knew it was a Space Marine even before the impossibly huge shadow fell over her. She turned to see a shadowy form behind her, robed in a cream tunic edged with sea-green trim. The Warmaster’s equerry, Maloghurst, was known as ‘the Twisted’, as much for his labyrinthine mind as the horrible injuries that had broken his body and left him grotesquely malformed.

‘Loken,’ he said, ‘these are civilians.’

‘I can vouch for them,’ said Loken.

Maloghurst turned his eyes to her…

She shivered. Nilus was watching her, the oily black of his whiteless eyes glittering above his crooked smile.

‘Why were you in the Nameless Fortress?’ she asked him.