He stood apart from his officers to watch the man’s slow and bloody execution. Holzhauer was a staunch veteran, and he looked down on the convicted trooper without pity or regret, only the hard stare of reproach. It was a matter of pride to him that the Chasseurs handled their own affairs. The Commissariat would not be needed to maintain order while he lived.

His Chasseurs were the bones upon which his reputation had grown. And iron discipline was the force that made them fear him more than any foe they had yet faced.

‘And, unlike the Cadians,’ Holzhauer liked to say, ‘I have never lost a battle.’

When the punishment had finished, the Elnaur Chasseurs turned and marched under the gothic façade of the Cathedral of Saint Helena Richstar, back to their barracks halls.

The corpse was cut down from the whipping post and dragged away, leaving a pool of blood on the floor. Holzhauer turned his back on the mess, and as he did so his attendant aides-de-camp and officers did likewise, their smartly polished boots coming to a smart at-ease.

‘A good death,’ Adjutant Lehr remarked.

Holzhauer made no response. His thin lips remained sealed, his closely shaved cheeks as cold and blue as freshly whetted steel. The conversation died. The officers followed their commander’s gaze.

Holzhauer was watching a black-robed figure march across the square towards them. The priest was not dressed in their usual barracks garb but in full battle dress – battered carapace breastplate and shoulder guards over his dark vestment and silk surplice embroidered with a golden skull.

As Father Bellona reached the doors of the cathedral, he pulled his pistol from its holster and used the butt to hammer a nail into the faded wooden doorway. It took only five sharp cracks before the deed was done. A scrap of parchment fluttered like a struggling prisoner beneath the nail.

An Ecclesiarchy adept had come running at the sound of the banging – a bald and hunched figure in his forties with the air of an over-officious clerk. ‘Heresy!’ he shouted. ‘These words are heresy!’

Lord-Marshal Holzhauer lifted a finger and one of his aides stepped forward to hold the adept back.

The adept managed to get a few strangled shouts out. ‘Stop this!’ Holzhauer heard. The lord-marshal took no notice. He would decide what was or was not to happen here.

Holzhauer stepped forward to where the parchment still tugged against the nail, caught in the morning breeze.

The Imperium is a dying man. Filled with cancerous growths, the rot comes not from its body… but from the head itself. The Emperor’s regents have failed him.

The words written upon it were…

‘Heresy!’ the adept hissed in strangled horror.

‘Take the adept away!’ Holzhauer snapped.

The sound of scuffles rose behind him. The adept managed to get his mouth free. ‘Lord!’ he gasped. ‘These are the lies of the unclean!’