Dan Abnett - The Horus Heresy - Horus Rising

that's what she'd take. She'd use the novelty and unfa-miliarity of her first planetfall as a theme around which her remembrance would hang.

'It's a beautiful evening,' the iterator announced, coming to stand beside her. He'd left his sloshing bags of vomit at the foot of the ramp, as if he expected someone to dispose of them for him.

The four army troopers delegated to her protection certainly weren't about to do it. Perspiring in their heavy velvet overcoats and shakos, their rifles slung over their shoulders, they closed up around her.

'Mistress Oliton?' the officer said. 'He's waiting.’

Mersadie nodded and followed them. Her heart was beating hard. This was going to be quite an occasion. A week before, her friend and fellow remembrancer Euphrati Keeler, who had emphatically achieved more than any of the remembrancers so far, had been on hand in the eastern city of Kaentz, observing crusader operations, when Maloghust had been found alive.

The Warmaster's equerry, believed lost when the ships of his embassy had been burned out of orbit, had survived, escaping via drop-pod. Badly injured, he had been nursed and protected by the family of a farmer in the territories outside Kaentz. Keeler had been right there, by chance, to pict record the equerry's recovery from the farmstead. It had been a coup. Her picts, so beautifully composed, had been flashed around the expedition fleet, and savoured by the Imperial retinues. Suddenly, Euphrati Keeler was being talked about. Suddenly, remembrancers weren't such a bad thing after all. With a few, brilliant clicks of her picter, Euphrati had advanced the cause of the remembrancers enormously.

Now Mersadie hoped she could do the same. She had been summoned. She still couldn't quite get over that. She had been summoned to the surface. That fact alone

would have been enough, but it was who had summoned her that really mattered. He had personally authorised her transit permit, and seen to the appointment of a bodyguard and one of Sindermann's best iterators.

She couldn't understand why. Last time they'd met, he'd been so brutal that she'd considered resigning and taking the first conveyance home.

He was standing on a gravel pathway between the tree rows, waiting for her. As she came up, the soldiers around her, she registered simple awe at the sight of him in his full plate. Gleaming white, with a trace of black around the edges. His helm, with its lateral horse-brush crest, was off, hung at his waist. He was a giant, two and a half metres tall.

She sensed the soldiers around her hesitating.

'Wait here.’ she told them, and they dropped back, relieved. A soldier of the Imperial army could be as tough as old boots, but he didn't want to tangle with an Astartes. Especially not one of the Luna Wolves, the mightiest of the mighty, the deadliest of all Legions.

'You too.’ she said to the iterator.

'Oh, right.’ Memed said, coming to a halt.

The summons was personal.’

'I understand.’ he said.

Mersadie walked up to the Luna Wolves captain. He towered over her, so much she had to shield her eyes with her hand against the setting sun to look up at him.

'Remembrancer.’ he said, his voice as deep as an oak-root.

'Captain. Before we start, I'd like to apologise for any offence I may have caused the last time we-'

!lf I'd taken offence, mistress, would I have summoned you here?'

'I suppose not.’

"You suppose right. You raised my hackles with your questions last time, but I admit I was too hard on you.’

'I spoke with unnecessary temerity-'

'It was that temerity that caused me to think of you.’ Loken replied. 'I can't explain further. I won't, but you should know that it was your very speaking out of turn that brought me here. Which is why I decided to have you brought here too. If that's what remembrancers do, you've done your job well.’

Mersadie wasn't sure what to say. She lowered her hand. The last rays of sunlight were in her eyes. 'Do you... do you want me to witness something? To remember something?'

'No.’ he replied curtly. 'What happens now happens privately, but I wanted you to know that, in part, it is because of you. When I return, if I feel it is appropriate, I will convey certain recollections to you. If that is acceptable.’

'I'm honoured, captain. I will await your pleasure.’

Loken nodded.

'Should I come with-' Memed began.

'No.’ said the Luna Wolf.

'Right.’ Memed said quickly, backing off. He went away to study a tree bole.

You asked me the right questions, and so showed me I was asking the right questions too.’ Loken told Mersadie.

'Did I? Did you answer them?'

'No.’ he replied. Wait here, please.’ he said, and walked away towards a box hedge trimmed by the finest topiarists into a thick, green bastion wall. He vanished from sight under a leafy arch.

Mersadie turned to the waiting soldiers.

'Know any games?' she asked.

They shrugged.

She plucked a deck of cards from her coat pocket. 'I've got one to show you.’ she grinned, and sat down on the grass to deal.

The soldiers put down their rifles and grouped around her in the lengthening blue shadows.

'Soldiers love cards.’ Ignace Karkasy had said to her before she left the flagship, right before he'd grinned and handed her the deck.

BEYOND THE HIGH hedge, an ornamental water garden lay in shadowy ruin. The height of the hedge and the neighbouring trees, just now becoming spiky black shapes against the rose sky, screened out what was left of the direct sunlight. The gloom upon the gardens was almost misty.

The garden had once been composed of rectangular ouslite slabs laid like giant flagstones, surrounding a series of square, shallow basins where lilies and bright water flowers had flourished in pebbly sinks fed by some spring or water source. Frail ghost ferns and weeping trees had edged the pools.

During the assault of the High City, shells or airborne munitions had bracketed the area, felling many of the plants and shattering a great number of the blocks. Many of the ouslite slabs had been dislodged, and several of the pools greatly increased in breadth and depth by the addition of deep, gouging craters.

But the hidden spring had continued to feed the place, filling the shell holes, and pouring overflow between dislodged stones.

The whole garden was a shimmering, flat pool in the gloom, out of which tangled branches, broken root balls and asymmetric shards of rock stuck up in miniature archipelagos.

Some of the intact blocks, slabs two metres long and half a metre thick, had been rearranged, and not randomly by the blasts. They had been levered out to form a walkway into the pool area, a stone jetty sunk almost flush with the water's surface.

Loken stepped out onto the causeway and began to follow it. The air smelled damp, and he could hear the clack of amphibians and the hiss of evening flies. Water flowers, their fragile colours almost lost in the closing darkness, drifted on the still water either side of his path.

Loken felt no fear. He was not built to feel it, but he registered a trepidation, an anticipation fliat made his hearts beat. He was, he knew, about to pass a threshold in his life, and he held faith that what lay beyond that threshold would be provident. It also felt right that he was about to take a profound step forward in his career. His world, his life, had changed greatly of late, with the rise of the Warmaster and the consequent alteration of the crusade, and it was only proper that he changed with it. A new phase. A new time.

He paused and looked up at the stars that were beginning to light in the purpling sky. A new time, and a glorious new time at that. Like him, mankind was on a threshold, about to step forward into greatness.