"What could be mere about ten thousand years of inbreeding, internecine conflict, murder and eugenical fuckery?" she asks.

She is herself the outcome of murder and eugenical fuckery, in fact.

"We have little enough in the way of martial glory, other than Matthew Nonius. And even those histories are written in the grave markers of Cohort soldiers whose bones could not join the monuments."

"The Ninth's history is based around something not happening," she says with cool irony. "Each year it does not is accounted a victory."