'What I felt? Why would anyone be interested in that?'

'Humanity is a sensible race, sir. Future generations, those that our remembrances are intended for, will learn more from any factual record if those facts are couched in an emotional context. They will care less for

the details of the battles at Ullanor, for instance, than they will for a sense of what it felt like to be there.’

'Are you saying that I'm boring?' Loken asked.

'No, not at all,' she began, and then realised he was smiling. 'Some of the things you have told me sound like wonders, yet you do not yourself seem to wonder at them. If you know no fear, do you also not know awe? Surprise? Majesty? Have you not seen things so bizarre they left you speechless? Shocked you? Unnerved you even?'

'I have.’ he said. 'Many times the sheer oddity of the cosmos has left me bemused or startled.’

'So tell me of those things.’

He pursed his lips and thought about it. 'Giant hats.’ he began.

'I beg your pardon?'

'On Sarosel, after compliance, the citizens held a great carnival of celebration. Compliance had been bloodless and willing. The carnival ran for eight weeks. The dancers in the streets wore giant hats of ribbon and cane and paper, each one fashioned into some gaudy form: a ship, a sword and fist, a dragon, a sun. They were as broad across as my span.’ Loken spread his arms wide. 'I do not know how they balanced them, or suffered their weight, but day and night they danced along the inner streets of the main city, these garish forms weaving and bobbing and circling, as if carried along on a slow flood, quite obscuring the human figures beneath. It was an odd sight.’

'I believe you.’

'It made us laugh. It made Horus laugh to see it.’

'Was that the strangest thing you ever knew?'

'No, no. Let's see... the method of war on Keylek gave us all pause. This was eighty years ago. The keylekid were a grosteque alien kind, of a manner you might describe as reptilian. They were gready skilled in the arts of combat,

and rose against us angrily the moment we made contact. Their world was a harsh place I remember crimson rock and indigo water. The commander - this was long before he was made Warmaster - expected a prolonged and brutal struggle, for the keylekid were large and strong creatures. Even the least of their warriors took three or four bolt rounds to bring down. We drew forth upon their world to make war, but they would not fight us.’

'How so?'

"We did not comprehend the rules they fought by. As we learned later, the keylekid considered war to be the most abhorrent activity a sentient race could indulge in, so they set upon it tight controls and restrictions. There were large structures upon the surface of their world, rectangular fields many kilometres in dimension, covered with high, flat roofs and open at the sides. We named them "slaughterhouses", and there was one every few hundred kilometres. The keylekid would only fight at these prescribed places. The sites were reserved for combat. War was forbidden on any other part of their world's surface. They were waiting for us to meet them at a slaughterhouse and decide the matter.’

'How bizarre! What was done about it?'

'We destroyed the keylekid.’ he said, matter of factly.

'Oh.’ she replied, with a tilt of her abnormally long head.

'It was suggested that we might meet them and fight them by the terms of their rules.’ Loken said. 'There may have been some honour in that, but Maloghurst, I think it was, reasoned that we had rules of our own which the enemy chose not to recognise. Besides, they were formidable. Had we not acted decisively, they would have remained a threat, and how long would it have taken them to learn new rules or abandon old ones?'

'Is an image of them recorded?' Mersadie asked.

'Many, I believe. The preserved cadaver of one of their warriors is displayed in this ship's Museum of Conquest,

and since you ask what I feel, sometimes it is sadness. You mentioned the overseers, a story I was going to tell. That was a long campaign, and one which filled me with

misery.'

As he told the story, she sat back, occasionally blink-clicking to store his image. He was concentrating on the preparation of his armour, but she could see sadness behind that concern. The overseers, he explained, were a machine race and, as artificial sentients, quite beyond the limits of Imperial law. Machine life untempered by organic components had long been outlawed by both the Imperial Council and the Mechanicum. The overseers, commanded by a senior machine called the Archdroid, inhabited a series of derelict, crumbling cities on the world of Dahinta. These were cities of fine mosaics, which had once been very beautiful indeed, but extreme age and decay had faded them. The overseers scuttled amongst the mouldering piles, fighting a losing battle of repair and refurbishment in a single-minded obsession to keep the neglected cities intact.

The machines had eventually been destroyed after a lasting and brutal war in which the skills of the Mechanicum had proved invaluable. Only then was the sad

secret found. The overseers were the product of human ingenuity,'

Loken said.

'Humans made them?'

Yes, thousands of years ago, perhaps even during the last Age of Technology. Dahinta had been a human colony, home to a lost branch of our race, where they had raised a great and marvellous culture of magnificent cities, wim thinking machines to serve mem. At some time, and in a manner unknown to us, the humans had become extinct. They left behind their ancient cities, empty but for the deathless guardians they had made. It was most melancholy, and passing strange.'

'Did the machines not recognise men?' she asked.

'All they saw was the Astartes, lady, and we did not look like the men they had called master.’

She hesitated for a moment, then said, 'I wonder if I shall witness so many marvels as we make this expedition.’

'I trust you will, and I hope that many will fill you with joy and amazement rather than distress. I should tell you sometime of the Great Triumph after Ullanor. That was an event that should be remembered.’

'I look forward to hearing it.’

There is no time now. I have duties to attend to.’

'One last story, then? A short one, perhaps? Something that filled you with awe.’

He sat back and thought. There was a thing. No more than ten years ago. We found a dead world where life had once been. A species had lived there once, and either died out or moved to another world. They had left behind them a honeycomb of subterranean habitats, dry and dead. We searched them carefully, every last cave and tunnel, and found just one thing of note. It was buried deepest of all, in a stone bunker ten kilometres under the planet's crust. A map. A great chart, in fact, fully twenty metres in diameter, showing the geophysical relief of an entire world in extraordinary detail. We did not at first recognise it, but the Emperor, beloved of all, knew what it was.’

"What?' she asked.

'It was Terra. It was a complete and full map of Terra, perfect in every detail. But it was a map of Terra from an age long gone, before the rise of the hives or the molestation of war, with coastlines and oceans and mountains of an aspect long since erased or covered over.’

IThat is... amazing,' she said. He nodded. 'So many unanswerable questions, locked into one forgotten chamber. Who had made the map,

and why? What business had brought them to Terra so long ago? What had caused them to carry the chart across half the galaxy, and then hide it away, like their most precious treasure, in the depths of their world? It was unthinkable. I cannot feel fear, Mistress Olitan, but if I could I would have felt it then. I cannot imagine anything ever unsettling my soul the way that thing did.’