Bones snapped. Blood spurted from Karkasy's nostrils.

'Mark my words!' he coughed. 'Nothing we build will last forever! You ask these bloody locals!'

A bootcap cracked into his sternum. Bloody fluid washed into his mouth.

'Get off him! Get off him!' the officer was yelling, trying to rein in his provoked and angry men.

By the time he managed to do so, Ignace Karkasy was no longer pontificating.

Or breathing.

Counsel

A question well answered

Two gods in one room

TORGADDON WAS WAITING for him in the towering ante-hall behind the strategium.

There you are,' he grinned.

'Here I am.’ Loken agreed.

There will be a question.’ Torgaddon remarked, keeping his voice low. 'It will seem a minor thing, and will not be obviously directed to you but be ready to catch it.’

'Me?'

'No, I was talking to myself. Yes, you, Garviel! Consider it a baptismal test. Come on.’

Loken didn't like the sound of Torgaddon's words, but he appreciated the warning. He followed Torgaddon down the length of the ante-hall. It was a perilously tall, narrow place, with embossed columns of wood set into the walls that soared up and branched like carved trees to support a glass roof two hundred metres above them, through which the stars could be seen. Darkwood panels cased the walls between the columns, and they were

covered with millions of lines of hand-painted names and numbers, all rendered in exquisite gilt lettering. They were the names of the dead: all those of the Legions, the army, the fleet and the Divisio Militaris who had fallen since the start of the Great Crusade in actions where this flagship vessel had been present. The names of immortal heroes were limned here on the walls, grouped in columns below header legends that proclaimed the world-sites of famous actions and hallowed conquests. From this display, the ante-hall earned its particular name: the Avenue of Glory and Lament.

The walls of fully two-thirds of the ante-hall were filled up with golden names. As the two striding captains in their glossy white plate drew closer to the strategium end, the wall boards became bare, unoccupied. They passed a group of hooded necrologists huddled by the last, half-filled panel, who were carefully stencilling new names onto the dark wood with gold-dipped brushes.

The latest dead. The roll call from the High City battle.

The necrologists stopped work and bowed their heads as the two captains went by. Torgaddon didn't spare them a second glance, but Loken turned to read the half-writ names. Some of them were brothers from Locasta he would never see again.

He could smell the tangy oil suspension of the gold-leaf the necrologists were using.

'Keep up,' Torgaddon grunted.

High doors, lacquered gold and crimson, stood closed at the end of the Avenue Hall. Before them, Aximand and Abaddon were waiting. They were likewise fully armoured, their heads bare, their brush-crested helms held under their left arms. Abaddon's great white shoulder plates were draped with a black wolf-pelt.

'Garviel,' he smiled.

'It doesn't do to keep him waiting,' Aximand grumbled. Loken wasn't sure if Little Horas meant Abaddon or the commander. 'What were you two gabbing about? Like fish-wives, the pair of you.'

'I was just asking him if he'd settled Vipus in.’ Torgaddon said simply.

Aximand glanced at Loken, his wide-set eyes languidly half-hooded by his lids.

'And I was reassuring Tarik that I had.’ Loken added. Evidently, Torgaddon's quiet heads-up had been for his ears only.

'Let's enter.’ Abaddon said. He raised his gloved hand and pushed the gold and crimson doors wide.

A short processional lay before them, a twenty-metre colonnade of ebon stone chased with a fretwork of silver wire. It was lined by forty Guardsmen of the Imperial army, members of Varvaras's own Byzant Janizars, twenty against each wall. They were splendidly appointed in full dress uniforms: long cream greatcoats with gold frogging, high-crowned chrome helms with basket visors and scarlet cockades, and matching sashes. As the Mournival came through the doors, the Janizars brandished their ornate power lances, beginning with the pair directly inside the doorway. The polished blades of the weapons whirled up into place in series, like chasing dominoes along the processional, each facing pair of weapons locking into position just before the marching captains caught up with the ripple.

The final pair came to salute, eyes-front, in perfect discipline, and the Mournival stepped past them onto the deck of the strategium.

The strategium was a great, semi-circular platform that projected like a lip out above the tiered theatre of the flagship's bridge. Far below lay the principal command level, thronging with hundreds of uniformed

personnel and burnished aide servitors, tiny as ants. To either side, the bee-hive sub-decks of the secondary platforms, dressed in gold and black ironwork, rose up, past the level of the projecting strategium, up into the roof itself, each storey busy with Navy staff, operators, cogitation officers and astropaths. The front section of the bridge chamber was a great, strutted window, through which the constellations and the ink of space could be witnessed. The standards of the Luna Wolves and the Imperial Fists hung from the arching roof, either side of the staring eye banner of the Warmaster himself. That great banner was marked, in golden thread, with the decree: 'I am the Emperor's Vigilance and the Eye of Terra.’

Loken remembered the award of that august symbol with pride during the great triumph after Ullanor was done.

In all his decades of service, Loken had only been on the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit twice before: once to formally accept his promotion to captain, and then again to mark his elevation to the captaincy of the Tenth. The scale of the place took his breath away, as it had done both times before. .

The strategium deck itself was an ironwork platform which supported, at its centre, a circular dais of plain, unfinished ouslite, one metre deep and ten in diameter. The commander had always eschewed any form of throne or seat. The ironwork walk space around the dais was half-shadowed by the overhang of tiered galleries that climbed the slopes of the chamber behind it. Glancing up, Loken saw huddles of senior iterators, tacticians, ship captains of the expedition fleet and other notables gathering to view the proceedings. He looked for Sindermann, but couldn't find his face.

Several attendant figures stood quiedy around the edges of the dais. Lord Commander Hektor Varvaras,

marshal of the expedition's army, a tall, precise aristocrat in red robes, stood discussing the content of a data-slate with two formally uniformed army aides. Boas Comnenus, Master of the Fleet, waited, dramming steel fingers on the edge of the ouslite plinth. He was a squat bear of a man, his ancient, flaccid body encased in a superb silver-and-steel exoskeleton, further draped in robes of deep, rich, selpic blue. Neady machined ocular lenses whirred and exchanged in the augmetic frame that supplanted his long-dead eyes.

Ing Mae Sing, the expedition's Mistress of Astropathy, stood to the master's left, a gaunt, blind spectre in a hooded white gown, and, round from her, in order, the High Senior of the Navis Nobilite, Navigator Chorogus, the Master Companion of Vox, the Master Companion of Lucidation, the senior tacticae, the senior heraldists, and various gubernatorial legates.

Each one, Loken noticed, had placed a single personal item on the edge of the dais where they stood: a glove, a cap, a wand-stave.

'We stay in the shadows.’ Torgaddon told him, bringing Loken up short under the edge of the shade cast by the balcony above. This is the Mournival's place, apart, yet present.’