Free Horus Rising by Dan Abnett

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.
    B EYOND 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