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puzzled. Some of the metaphrasts nearby looked up from their study, annoyed at the interruption. They quickly looked down again when they saw the noise had issued from an Astartes.
    ‘What is the Mournival, Garviel?’ Sindermann whispered.
    ‘You know very well…’
    ‘Humour me. Is it an official body? An organ of governance, formally ratified, a Legio rank?’
    ‘Of course not. It is an informal honour. It has no official weight. Since the earliest era of our Legion there has been a Mournival. Four captains, those regarded by their peers to be…’
    He paused.
    ‘The best?’ Sindermann asked.
    ‘My modesty is ashamed to use that word. The most appropriate. At any time, the Legion, in an unofficial manner quite separate from the chain of command, composes a Mournival. A confratern of four captains, preferably ones of markedly different aspects and humours, who act as the soul of the Legion.’
    ‘And their job is to watch over the moral health of the Legion, isn’t that so? To guide and shape its philosophy? And, most important of all, to stand beside the commander and be the voices he listens to before any others. To be the comrades and friends he can turn to privately, and talk out his concerns and troubles with freely, before they ever become matters of state or Council.’
    ‘That is what the Mournival is supposed to do,’ Loken agreed.
    ‘Then it occurs to me, Garviel, that only a weapon which questions its use could be of any value in that role. To be a member of the Mournival, you need to have concerns. You need to have wit, and most certainly you need to have doubts. Do you know what a nay-smith is?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘In early Terran history, during the dominance of the Sumaturan dynasts, naysmiths were employed by the ruling classes. Their job was to disagree. To question everything. To consider any argument or policy and find fault with it, or articulate the counter position. They were highly valued.’
    ‘You want me to become a naysmith?’ Loken asked.
    Sindermann shook his head. ‘I want you to be you, Garviel. The Mournival needs your common sense and clarity. Sejanus was always the voice of reason, the measured balance between Abaddon’s choler and Aximand’s melancholic disdain. The balance is gone, and the Warmaster needs that balance now more than ever. You came to me this morning because you wanted my blessing. You wanted to know if you should accept the honour. By your own admission, Garviel, by the merit of your own doubts, you have answered your own question.’

FOUR
    Summoned
    Ezekyle by name
    A winning hand
    S HE HAD ASKED what the planet was called, and the crew of the shuttle had answered her ‘Terra’, which was hardly useful. Mersadie Oliton had spent the first twenty-eight years of her twenty-nine-year life on Terra, and this wasn’t it.
    The iterator sent to accompany her was of little better use. A modest, olive-skinned man in his late teens, the iterator’s name was Memed, and he was possessed of a fearsome intellect and precocious genius. But the violent sub-orbital passage of the shuttle disagreed with his constitution, and he spent most of the trip unable to answer her questions because he was too occupied retching into a plastek bag.
    The shuttle set down on a stretch of formal lawn between rows of spayed and pollarded trees, eight kilometres west of the High City. It was early evening, and stars already glimmered in the violet smudge at the sky’s edges. At high altitude, ships passed over, their lights blinking. Mersadie stepped down the shuttle’s ramp onto the grass, breathing in the odd scents and slightly variant atmosphere of the world.
    She stopped short. The air, oxygen rich, she imagined, was making her giddy, and that giddiness was further agitated by the thought of where she was. For the first time in her life she was standing on another soil, another world. It seemed to her quite momentous, as if a ceremonial band ought to be playing. She was, as far