'I... I do not see the merit in it, lord/ Garro admitted.

The primarch turned away from the viewport. 'Then watch and learn, Nathaniel.'

IN THE CONFINES of the Stormbird's spartan crew compartment, Garro once again felt dwarfed by his commander. Mortarion sat across the gangway from him, hunched forward so that his head was only a hand's span from the battle-captain's. The Death Lord spoke in a fatherly tone. Garro listened intently, absorbing every word as the small ship crossed the void between the Endurance and the Vengeful Spirit.

'Our role at this war council is an important one/ Mortarion said. 'The data you hold in your hand is

the lit taper for the inferno that is about to engulf the Isstvan system.' At this, Garro opened his palm and studied the thick spool of memory-wire there. We bear the responsibility of bringing the news of this perfidy to the Warmaster's ears, as it was our battle-brothers who came across the warning that Isstvan has turned from the Emperor.'

Garro examined the coil. It was so innocuous an object to contain so volatile a potential. The little device hardly seemed capable of representing the death warrant of entire worlds. Before they had departed the Endurance, the primarch had shown Nathaniel the pict record contained on the spool, and the images left him with a chill that he found difficult to shake off.

He saw it again, the recall fresh and close to the surface. Garro had watched the terrified face of a woman loom in the assembly hall's hololithic tank, a shape of haze and shade like some mythical spirit bent on haunting the living. She was a minor officer of the army, a major. At least, she was somebody wearing the uniform of one. Garro saw glimpses of a stone stockade's walls among the jumping shadows, the dance of orange light from a chemical candle. Perspiration made her sallow face gleam, and the slender tongue of flame reflected from her anxious green eyes. When she spoke, it was with the voice of a person broken by horrors that no mortal should ever have lived to witness.

'It's revolution/ she began, pushing the words from her lips like a desperate curse. She rambled on, speaking of'rejection' and of'superstition', of things a line soldier like her had never believed could be real. 'Praal has gone mad/ she growled, 'and the Warsingers are with him.'

Garro's brow furrowed at the names and his master halted the replay, providing an explanation. The noble Baron Vardus Praal is the Emperor's Designate Imperi-alis on the capital world of the system, Isstvan III.'

'He... She means to say the governor of an entire world broke with the rale of Terra to throw in with some pagan idolaters?' Nathaniel blinked, the idea unconscionable from a man of such significant rank within the Imperium. 'Why? What madness could compel such a thing?'

'That is what my brother, Horas, will have us learn,' intoned the primarch.

The Astartes studied the woman's face, blurred in mid-motion as she turned to look at something out of view of her picter's lens. 'The other word, "Warsinger", my lord, I am unfamiliar with it' He wondered if it were some kind of colloquial name, perhaps some sort of honorific.

'They were a local myth, according to the records of the 27th Expedition that enforced compliance here over a decade ago, a cadre of fantastical shaman warriors. Nothing but anecdotal evidence of their existence was ever found.' Garro's master was circumspect, and he tapped the hololith controls with a slender finger, letting the recording ran on.

With abrupt violence, the woman drew a heavy stub pistol, and shot and killed something indistinct at the margins of the image pick-up. She hove back into view, filling the screen, her unchained panic leaching out through the hologram. 'Send someone, anyone/ she pleaded. 'Just make this stop-'

Then there was the scream.

The sheer wrongness of the noise, the utterly alien nature of it made Garro's gut knot, and his fingers tightened reflexively around a bolter trigger that was

not there. The impact of the sound beat the woman down and shredded the picter's image control, shifting the replay into a stuttering series of blink fast flash frames. Nathaniel saw blood, stone, torn skin, and then silent darkness.

'No word from the Isstvan system followed this/ said Mortarion quietly, allowing Garro to measure and understand what he had just viewed. 'No vox transmissions, no picter relays, no astropathic broadcasts'

The battle-captain gave a stiff nod. The scream had cut though him like a knife-edge, the echo of it a weapon turning to pierce his heart. Garro shook off the eerie sensation and turned back to his liege lord. Mortarion explained that by pure chance, the distress signal had been picked up by the crew of the Valley of Haloes, a supply hauler in service to the XIV Legion. Suffering a dangerous Geller Field fluctuation while in transit to the Death Guard's Sixth Company flotilla at Arcturan, the Valley had emerged from the imma-terium to effect emergency repairs.

There, as the ship drifted in space at the edge of the Isstvanian ecliptic plane, the desperate message had found purchase. Data addressing the rate of energy decay, pattern attenuation and the like were scrutinised by tech-adepts, revealing that the transmission had been flung into the ether more than two years previously. Garro considered the frightened officer he had seen on the hololith and wondered about her fate. Her last, awful moments of life were frozen and preserved forever while her bones lay out there somewhere, forgotten and decaying.

'Did the crewmen of the Valley detect anything else of import, master?' he asked. 'Perhaps if the men aboard the transport were fully debriefed-'

Mortarion glanced away, then back. 'The Valley of Haloes was a casualty at the Arcturan engagement. It was lost with all hands. Fortunately, this recording of the Isstvan signal was conveyed to the Terminus Est before that regrettable event.' The primarch spoke with a leaden finality on the matter that Garro felt compelled to accept.

The Death Lord placed the spool in the battle-captain's hand. 'Carry this burden for me, Nathaniel. And remember, watch and learn.'

INSIDE, THE VENGEFUL Spirit was no less impressive than it had been from a distance, the vast open space of the landing bay so wide and long that Garro imagined it would be possible to dock a starship the size of a small cutter in here with room to spare. An honour guard slammed their fists to attention in the old martial manner, saluting with hand to breast instead of the usual crossed palms of the aquila.

The battle-captain kept pace behind the Deathshroud and Mortarion, while Garro in turn was followed by a contingent of warriors from Typhon's First Company, their lockstep footfalls pulsing like ready thunder as the XIV Legion's contingent marched on to the Warmaster's flagship. Garro could not help but glance around, taking in as much as he could of Horus's vessel, committing everything he saw to memory. He noticed other Stormbirds on landing cradles in the process of refuelling for return flights, one adorned with the snarling fanged mouth of the World Eaters and another trimmed in regal purple with the golden wings of the Emperor's Children.

'My brother, Fulgrim, has not graced us with his presence/ murmured Mortarion, casually dismissing

the purple Stormbird with thinly veiled sarcasm. 'How like him.' Garro peered closer and saw that the ship did not fly the pennants associated with the carriage of a primarch. Indeed, he recalled that there had been no sign of the Firebird, Fulgrim's assault ship, among the war fleet.

He found himself wondering if this was some element of the politics that his master had spoken of before. Garro frowned. He had always fancied that the primarchs were an inviolate fraternity, comrades of such exalted status that they were beyond any petty emotions like rivalry or contention, but suddenly such thoughts seemed naive. Astartes warriors like Garro and Grulgor were raised above normal men, and yet they still disagreed in their manners, more often than Nathaniel would have liked. Would it be surprising then to learn that the primarchs, who stood above the Astartes as much as the Astartes stood above mortal men, were also prey to the same differences?