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  Several hours later, clothed in expensive silks of black and ocean green, layered sashes of crimson and blue, and tight-fitting cream trousers tucked into knee-high riding boots with tall heels, Raeven followed his mother down the full height of the tower. She was reciting a list of the various dignitaries who were here to mark his and Albard’s Becoming. He tuned her out, thinking back to the night he’d spent with Lyx. As always, the memory stimulated a curious mix of shame and pleasurable guilt.

  When they reached the grand hall at the base of the tower, his mother turned her matriarchal countenance upon him and said, ‘Have you been listening to a word I’ve said?’

  ‘Not really,’ he confessed, hearing the swelling sounds of cheering and celebration from the streets beyond the tower.

  Before Cebella could berate him for his ignorant behaviour, a host of armed warriors swept into the hall, heavy brutish men, armed with a variety of ferocious-looking armaments designed to kill in a myriad of painful ways. Leading the warriors was a man clad in a heavy suit of gleaming silver fusion armour – the kind a man five centuries ago might have worn on the back of a horse, had he found one strong enough to bear him.

  He was powerful and broadly built, jowly where his youthful physique was finally yielding to his father’s genetics. The right side of his face was knotted with burn scars that had healed poorly over the years and his right eye had been replaced with an augmetic implant after a hunt for a rogue mallahgra had ended badly and its furious charge broke open his skull.

  Albard Devine, firstborn scion of House Devine, shook his head at Raeven’s attire. ‘You are not war-clad.’

  ‘Keenly observant as always, brother,’ agreed Raeven with a curt bow.

  ‘Why are you dressed like that?’ demanded Albard.

  His brother formed his words with great deliberation, as the hideous scarring made him sound like a simpleton if he spoke too quickly. Every time Raeven saw him, it reminded him how glad he was to be younger than Albard and thus spared the ritualistic burning of the firstborn male heir’s face upon his coming of age.

  ‘I am dressed like this,’ said Raeven, ‘because it’s ridiculous that we need to wear that outdated armour all the way up to the citadel just to take it off again. Those reactors are so old, they’re probably leaking radiation into your bones. Mark my words, you’ll regret wearing that clanking monstrosity when you’re trying to sire an heir.’

  ‘The men of Devine have worn the argent plate since we first rose to rule this world,’ said his brother, stepping in close and glaring at him. ‘You will not dishonour our father by disrespecting their memory. You will wear the silver.’

  Raeven shook his head. ‘No, I think I’m fine the way I am.’

  Albard’s nose wrinkled in disgust as the scent of the fragrant oils worked through Raeven’s hair finally reached him. Raeven saw a glint of recognition, and suppressed the urge to gloat at the thought of his brother recognising his wife’s oils.

  ‘You smell like you’ve been out whoring all night,’ said Albard, circling around him.

  ‘Well, now that you mention it, there was a lucky young lady...’ said Raeven.

  His brother’s gauntleted hand snapped out to strike him. Raeven swayed aside.

  ‘Come now, brother,’ he said. ‘You’re nowhere near fast enough to hit me anymore.’

  Albard looked past him to Cebella, and Raeven hid a smile as he saw the depths of hatred and decades of mutual loathing that passed between them.

  ‘This is your doing,’ said Albard. ‘Your viper’s tongue has made your son a cocksure lout.’

  ‘Albard, my son–’ began Cebella.

  Raeven’s brother cut her off with a bark of anger. ‘You are not my mother, witch. My mother is dead and you are just the whore that shares my father’s bed and gives me unwanted siblings.’

  The warriors behind Albard stiffened in expectation of Raeven’s response. They knew him well enough to understand that he was not a man to be underestimated. Raeven’s carefully cultivated air of urbane condescension and louche behaviour concealed a warrior of considerable skill, and many a foolish noble had only discovered that on the end of a charnobal duelling sabre.

  ‘Careful, Albard,’ said Raeven. ‘A man could take offence at such an insult to his mother.’

  His brother at least appreciated that he’d crossed a line, but it wasn’t in Albard to apologise; another trait he shared with their father.

  ‘Shall we get this over with, then?’ said Raeven, marching past Albard and his entourage of heavily armed warriors. ‘Father will be waiting.’

  Cheering crowds lined the Via Argentum as the carriage drew them higher up the valley. Thousands of men and women thronged the streets around the processional route, and thousands more packed the rooftops and windows overlooking it. Raeven waved to his people, blowing kisses to the girls and punching the air with his fist for the men. Both gestures were pure pantomime, but no one seemed to care.

  ‘Do you have to do that?’ said Albard. ‘This is supposed to be a momentous occasion.’

  ‘Says who?’ replied Raeven. ‘Father? All the more reason for it.’

  Albard didn’t reply, and remained seated, staring stoically from the open-topped skimmer carriage as it plied its stately path uphill. An entire regiment of huscarl cavalry rode ahead of their floating transport, two thousand men in silver uniforms and purple-plumed helms. Each man carried a tall, glitter-tipped lance in one hand, with a fusil-carbine sheathed at their back. Another five regiments of masked infantry followed behind them, marching in perfect lockstep with glittering silver-steel banners overhead and freshly issued las-rifles carried upon every shoulder.

  This was but a fraction of the armed forces commanded by House Devine.

  Far below, in armoured stockades, hundreds of thousands of mechanised infantry, divisions of superheavy tanks, batteries of artillery and entire cohorts of battle robots stood ready to obey the commands of this world’s Imperial Commander. That someone had seen fit to make Raeven’s father that man was just another example of the absurdity inherent in every facet of this new Imperium.

  Streamers and banners in black and gold, ivory and sea-green hung from every window, together with the entwined eagle-and-naga banner that had been the adopted heraldry of House Devine ever since the coming of the Emperor’s Legions ninety-seven years ago. After a bloodless compliance – thanks in no small amount to the meticulous records kept by each Knightly House – the planet’s existing calendars had been scrapped in favour of the new Imperial dating system.

  By its reckoning, the current year was ‘966.M30’, and the ‘One hundred and Sixty-Eighth Year of the Emperor’s Great Crusade’. It was a monstrously arrogant means of control, thought Raeven, but one which seemed to suit the emergent galactic empire perfectly.

  Numerous heraldic devices proclaimed the presence of other noble Houses, most of which Raeven recognised thanks to years of enforced study as a child, but some he did not. Most likely quaintly provincial Houses barely worthy of the name, who could perhaps boast a single warrior of note.

  Raeven sat back on the hard wooden seat of the carriage, basking in the adulation of the crowds. He knew most of it was for Albard, but didn’t care. People liked their warrior kings to look like warriors, and his brother fitted that description better than he.

  Yoked to the carriage and grunting with the effort of pulling it was a powerful creature with the wide, beast-of-burden shoulders of a grox and a long neck that reached at least four metres from its body. Atop that muscular neck was a ferocious, avian head with a razored beak and hostile eyes. The azhdarchid was a flightless bird-creature that roamed the grassy plains in small family groupings; comical to look at, but a deadly predator capable of taking down even a well-armed hunter.

  Cranial implants drilled into its skull rendered the beast subservient, though Raeven had often wondered what migh
t happen were they to be removed. Could a tamed beast ever reclaim its bestial nature?

  Nor was the azhdarchid the only beast to form part of their procession.

  Following with lumbering, heavy footfalls was the simian bulk of a mallahgra, one of the few great beasts remaining beyond the high forested mountains of the Untar Mesas highlands. Standing nearly seven metres tall when fully upright, and covered in thick fur the colour of bleached granite, the mallahgra was an incredibly powerful animal. Its short hind legs and long, pile-driving upper limbs were corded with muscle and easily capable of tearing their way through the thickest armour. Its bullet-shaped head was a nightmarish blend of armoured beetle and fang-filled shark maw that could swallow a man whole with one bite. It had six eyes, one pair angled forward like a predator’s, one either side of its skull like a prey animal, and another pair set in a ridged band of flesh at the base of its neck.

  Raeven’s brother knew from bitter experience that this curious evolutionary arrangement made them devils to hunt. Like the azhdarchid, the mallahgra’s animal brain was pierced by implants to suppress its natural instincts, and it too had been tasked with a duty in this parade.

  The mallahgra wore a tight-fitting set of stocks fashioned from brass and bone. Its clawed hands were locked within, and hung from the wide spar were half a dozen corpses that swayed with the rolling gait of the immense beast. The wind changed and the stench of dead flesh wafted over the carriage. Albard wrinkled his nose and shook his head.

  ‘Throne, they stink,’ he said.

  Raeven twisted around to observe the corpses. All were naked, and wore boards nailed to their ribs that proclaimed their crime.

  Only one transgression merited such punishment: heresy.

  ‘A price to be paid, I fear,’ he muttered.

  Albard frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The followers of the Serpent Gods are trotted out any time an act of ceremonial obeisance is to be undertaken,’ said Raeven. ‘After all, we must make a show of willingness to embrace the new order of the galaxy and demonstrate that we’re doing our bit to purge the planet of the old ways. The Imperial Truth demands it.’ He grinned. ‘A century ago, it could have been you and I hanging from the mallahgra.’

  ‘House Devine gave up belief in the Serpent Gods over a hundred years ago,’ said Albard, as the huscarl cavalry began peeling off in predetermined patterns.

  ‘Lucky for us, eh?’ said Raeven. ‘What was it mother said? Ah, yes – treason is merely a matter of dates.’

  Albard’s head snapped around at the mention of his stepmother, but Raeven ignored his brother’s hostility.

  The Citadel reared up before them, a solid mass of stone carved from the mountain by Mechanicum geo-formers. Raeven hadn’t even been born then, but he’d seen the picts and read the accounts of its creation – garish hyperbole about continents cracking, worlds being reshaped by the will of the primarchs... blah, blah, blah...

  As a piece of architecture it was certainly a striking edifice, a monument to the fortress-builder’s art, where no expense had been spared and no opportunity to add yet another defensive bulwark had been missed. Thick walls of ochre stone, high towers, a singular portal of silvered adamantium and cunningly-wrought approaches ensured that only a madman would dare assault its walls.

  Standing before the Argent Gate was Cyprian Devine, known as ‘the Hellblade’ to his enemies and as Imperial Commander to his subjects.

  Raeven knew him as father.

  Lord Devine stood ten metres tall in his Knight Seneschal armour, a towering construction of technologies that predated the Imperium by thousands of years. Hunched over as though about to charge, their father’s mount was all cruel curves and brutal lines. Its legs were piston-lined and looped with vapour-wreathed cabling, its black and green carapace segmented and overlapping like that of a giant swamp chelonian.

  The entwined naga and eagle was represented on fluttering banners hung from the gimbal mount of their father’s signature chainsabre and the twin barrels of his turbo lasers. As their carriage approached, the helmed head canopy split apart along a horizontal seam and lifted open, drizzling coolant fluid and vapour like gouts of hot machine-breath.

  Strapped into the pilot’s seat and hardwired into the mechanisms of his armour, the legendarily powerful figure of Cyprian Devine looked down on his sons as the cheering of the crowds rose to new heights, echoing down the valley sides like thunder. The two great beasts flinched at the noise, the mallahgra shaking the bodies hanging from its stocks and the azhdarchid letting loose an angry squawk. Gunfire salutes added to the cacophony and the music of a dozen colours bands swelled in anticipation as Albard and Raeven stepped down from the carriage.

  Lord Devine’s sons were to undergo the Ritual of Becoming, in order to take up their birthright as Knights of Molech.

  Such a moment in history was worthy of celebration.

  The corridors of the Sanctuary were polished steel, laid down over a thousand years ago by the first settlers to come to this world, so legend told. Lyx could well believe it. The deck plates, the iron-braced girders and hissing steam pipes that ran the length and breadth of the structure, were redolent with age. So distant was their construction that they didn’t even have the appearance of having been built by human hand.

  If she concentrated, she could feel the ever-present hum of the colossal generators buried in the rock of the mountain, the glacial heartbeats of the dormant engines in the vault below, and the distant burr of a million voices that echoed in every chamber when the nights grew long and the shadows crept from hiding. Lyx knew that she wasn’t the only one to hear them, but she suspected that she was the only one who knew what they really were.

  She passed a few servants, huscarls and men at arms, but none dared acknowledge her.

  Lyx had a temper, they said. She was unpredictable, they said.

  Volatile was another word they used.

  Lyx didn’t think she’d ever killed anyone, though she knew of at least one serving girl who would never walk again and another that she’d blinded with scalding tisane that hadn’t been sweetened to her exacting specifications. One footman had lost his hands after he had brushed past her in the stables and allowed his fingers to touch the bare skin of her arm. Raeven had crippled him in a monstrously one-sided duel, taking his fingers one at a time as the boy pleaded for his life with his arms upraised in supplication.

  The memory made Lyx smile, and she was beautiful again.

  All trace of her late night assignation and hasty exit from Raeven’s chambers had been thoroughly expunged by her handmaidens, who knew better than anyone how to conceal the evidence of her behaviour. Dressed in an appropriately archaic dress of copper panels, woven lacework and a plunging mallahgra-bone bodice, she swept through the darkened passageways like a ghost. She wore her hair in a glittering auburn cascade, threaded with silver wire and mother-of-pearl, carefully arranged to hide the serpent tattoo behind her ear.

  Lyx appeared every inch the Adoratrice consort she ached to be.

  Not to the brutish Albard, but to Raeven.

  The fates had chosen a different path for her: a repugnant, hateful path, but the voices still promised her that her fate could yet be changed. And if some societal norms and mores of convention had to be flouted in order to achieve that, then so much the better.

  She climbed the last iron-grille stairs to the upper levels of the Sanctuary, knowing that Albard and Raeven would soon be making their way to the great citadel.

  All the more reason to hurry.

  At the top of the stairs, another metallic corridor curved around the circumference of the building, but it was to the first door that Lyx made her way. She knocked tentatively and swept inside the moment it was opened.

  The room belied the Sanctuary’s outward appearance of age, filled as it was with gleaming banks of complex machinery, groaning
pipework, crackling glass orbs and throbbing generators. The man she had come to see closed the door, turning his fretful gaze upon her with longing and zealous heat.

  ‘Were you followed?’ he asked, breathless with anticipation.

  ‘Of course not,’ she snapped. ‘No one but you would willingly follow me.’

  The man’s mouth opened and closed like that of a landed fish, and it repulsed her that she had given him leave to touch her. Sacristan Nadezhda was a slender man of middling years, whose face was half human, half machine – one of the artificer class who maintained the towering Knights at the heart of the Sanctuary. The human part was partially obscured by the tattoo of a serpentine naga that coiled around his eye socket.

  Not quite Mechanicum, but not wholly human either.

  But just human enough.

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ he said, his relief evident in the relaxing of his permanent frown. ‘But they don’t know you like I know you. They don’t see the softness you try so hard to hide behind that patrician demeanour.’

  She wanted to laugh, but matters were afoot that kept a rein on her desire to mock him.

  ‘No one else gets to see it,’ she said, running a teasing finger over the swell of her plunging neckline. ‘Just you.’

  Nadezhda ran his paper-dry tongue over his lips, staring with undisguised hunger at her décolletage. ‘Do we have time for one last... you know, before Lord Devine’s sons arrive?’

  Lyx felt a pressure build behind her eyes that made her want to pluck the concealed bone-blade from her bodice and plunge it into Nadezhda’s throat, over and over again. She quelled it and let out a soft sigh. Nadezhda took that as affirmation and fumbled with the belt of his crimson robes.

  ‘Yes, my love,’ said Lyx, biting her bottom lip to keep the revulsion from showing. ‘But then I need you to do something for me. Something to prove just how much you love me.’

  ‘Anything,’ said Nadezhda.

  ‘I’m so glad you said that,’ she purred.

  Albard and Raeven marched side by side towards their father and, despite himself, Raeven had to admit that he felt somewhat underdressed. He hadn’t been about to wear the old suit of fusion armour set aside for him since his tenth year, but he wished he’d at least strapped on a sword belt or a holster. Even from here, he could see his father’s anger at his rich clothing.