SIX

Nine-tenths of the lore
Tarnhelm
Adoratrice

Though its original purpose had been subverted, the so-called ‘Quiet Order’ of the Sons of Horus still met in secret. The dormitory halls had once housed thousands of deckhands, but only echoes dwelled here in the normal run of things.

Before Isstvan, a time that no longer held meaning for the Legion, the lodge had met only as often as campaign necessity allowed. It had been an indulgence permitted by the primarch, encouraged even, but always subservient to the demands of war. Now it met regularly as the Sons of Horus learned more of the secret arts.

Close to a thousand warriors gathered in the long, vaulted chamber, an army of sea-green plate, transverse helm-crests and crimson mantles. War-blackened banners hung from the dormitory arches, and bloodied trophies were speared on long pike shafts along the chamber’s length. Wide bowls of promethium billowed chemical fumes and orange flame. A slow drum beat of fists on thighs echoed from the walls of stone and steel.

The sense of anticipation was palpable.

Serghar Targost felt it too, but he forced himself to keep his steps measured and his bearing regal. The captain of the Seventh Company was broad and powerful, as were all legionaries, but there was a density to him that gave sparring partners pause when they drew his name in the training cages. His blunt features were not those of a true son, and the old scar bisecting his forehead had been overwritten by a more heinous wound.

An Iron Hands Terminator had struck him in the dying moments of Isstvan V and the impact trauma had almost ended him there and then. The enclosing pressure of his helm had kept the broth of his brain from oozing through the pulverised ruin of his skull. The Apothecaries had sutured the bone fragments together beneath the skin, fixing the largest shards in place with dozens of tensile anchors on the surface of his face.

With Lev Goshen’s help, Targost had attached the ebon claws torn from the scaled pelt of a dead Salamander to the protruding ends of the anchors, giving him the spiked features of a madman. He could no longer wear a battle helm, but Targost considered it an acceptable trade off.

Targost moved through the Sons of Horus, pausing now and then to observe their labours. Sometimes he would offer instruction on the precise angle of a blade, the correct syntax of Colchisian grammar forms or the required pronunciation of a ritual mantra.

The air sang with potential, as though a secret symphony existed just beyond the threshold of perception and would soon burst through into life. Targost smiled. Only a few short years ago he would have mocked the absurd poetry of such a sentiment.

Yet there was truth to it.

Tonight would see the lodge change from a fraternity of dabblers into an order favoured by the touch of Primordial Truth.

Everyone here knew it, and none more so than Maloghurst.

The Warmaster’s equerry entered the chamber via one of the vertical transit spines, clad in a long chasuble of ermine over his battleplate. Maloghurst gave a respectful nod. No rank structure existed within the Quiet Order, save that of lodge master, and even the Warmaster’s equerry had to respect that office.

‘Equerry,’ said Targost as Maloghurst limped to accompany him.

‘Lodge master,’ replied Maloghurst, turning to match Targost’s pace despite the fused mass of bone and cartilage within his pelvis and lower spine that stubbornly refused to heal. He walked with the aid of an ebony cane topped with an amber pommel-stone, but Targost suspected the equerry’s wounding was no longer as debilitating as he made out.

‘I doubt there is a more abandoned space aboard the Vengeful Spirit,’ said Maloghurst with a grin. ‘You realise, of course, that the lodge has no more need to hide itself in shadows.’

Targost nodded. ‘I know, but old habits, you understand?’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Maloghurst. ‘Traditions must be maintained. Even more so now.’

Maloghurst had earned the soubriquet, ‘the Twisted’, for having a mind that wove labyrinthine intrigues around the Warmaster, but the old nickname had assumed a more literal connotation in the opening shots of the war-making on Terra.

The other Terra, where the misguided fool who believed himself Emperor had stood against the Sons of Horus.

No, Targost reminded himself, back then the Legion had still been the Luna Wolves, their name not yet reflecting the honour of the warrior that led them. Maloghurst had healed, and despite the poor taste of the old nickname, he desired it kept.

They moved through the throng, and as news of Maloghurst’s arrival spread, the warriors parted before them to reveal their destination.

Atop a raised plinth marked with chalked geometric symbols stood two structural beams welded together to form an ‘X’. Chained to the cross was a legionary stripped of his armour with his head fixed in place by a heavy iron clamp across his brow.

Ger Gerradon, late of Tithonus Assault, he’d taken two Chogorian tulwars through the lungs on Dwell, and by the time the Apothecaries got to him his oxygen-starved brain was irrevocably damaged. Nothing remained of the man he had once been, just a drooling meat-form who could serve no useful purpose within the Legion.

Until now.

Sixteen hooded lodge members arranged in a circle around Gerradon held weeping captives taken in the assault on Tyjun. Highborns for the most part, some native to Dwell, some Imperial imports; men and women who’d thrown themselves on the mercy of the Sons of Horus only to find they had none to give. In any conventional war they would be bargaining chips, tools of negotiation, but here they were something altogether more valuable. They sobbed and debased themselves with begging or attempts at bargaining, while others offered their loyalty or things far more precious.

A reverent hush descended on the chamber as Maloghurst and Targost stepped onto the plinth. Maloghurst made a meal out of his step, and Targost shook his head at the equerry’s theatrics.

‘Let’s get this done,’ said Targost, holding out his hand.

Maloghurst shook his head. ‘You can’t simply rush this, lodge master,’ he said. ‘I know you are all about the fundamentals, but this is not a breach to be stormed. Ritual is everything here, Serghar, the proper order of things must be observed, the right words spoken and the offerings made at precisely the right time.’

‘Just give me the knife,’ said Targhost. ‘You speak the words and tell me when to open their throats.’

The captives wailed and their captors tightened their grips.

Maloghurst produced a long dagger from within his robes, its blade curved and worked from dark stone. Its surface was chipped and crude, like something hacked from the ground by savages, but Targost knew its edge to be sharper than any arming chamber tech could match.

‘Is that…’ he began.

‘One of the blades Erebus crafted?’ said Maloghurst. ‘No, not that one of course, but one like it.’

Targost nodded and took the blade, testing its heft and flexing his fingers on the leather-wrapped handle. It felt good in his grip, natural. Made for him.

‘I like it,’ he said and turned to Ger Gerradon.

Like him, Gerradon wasn’t a true son, his features bearing a malnourished sharpness from a Cthonian childhood that no amount of genhancing could ever restore.

‘A loyal member of the lodge and a ferocious killer,’ said Targost. ‘A man born for assault duties. It’s a blow to the Legion to have lost his sword arm.’

‘If I have the truth of it, then Ger will fight alongside his brothers with a new soul within him.’

‘What the Seventeenth Legion call a daemon?’

‘An old term, but as good a word as any,’ agreed Maloghurst. ‘Lorgar’s sons call their twin-flames the Gal Vorbak. Ours will be the Luperci, the Brothers of the Wolf.’

Gerradon’s eyes were open, but unseeing. His lips parted, as though he was trying to speak, and drool spilled onto his chest.

‘Nothing of the man we knew remains,’ said Maloghurst. ‘This will restore him.’

‘Then let’s get it done,’ snapped Targost.

Maloghurst stood before Gerradon, placing a tattooed hand on his scarred chest. Targost didn’t remember the Twisted having tattoos, but recognised their provenance. The books Erebus had shown him, the ancient texts said to have been borne to Colchis from Old Earth, had been filled with stanzas of artes rendered in the same runic script.

‘Be ready with that knife, Serghar,’ said Maloghurst.

‘Have no fear on that score,’ Targost assured him.

Maloghurst nodded and began to speak, but in no language Targost had ever heard. The more the equerry spoke, the less Targost believed it was a language in any sense that he could comprehend.

He saw Maloghurst’s mouth moving, but the motion of his lips wasn’t matching the noise in Targost’s ears; like rusted metal grating on stone, a death rattle and a tuneless singer combined.

Targost coughed a wad of mucus. He tasted blood and spat onto the deck. He blinked away a momentary dizziness and tightened his grip on the stone dagger as the bile in his stomach climbed his gullet. Targost’s eyes widened as noxious black smoke streamed from the blade. The miasma clung to its edges and Targost felt the weight of murder in the dagger’s long existence. The temperature plummeted, his every exhalation visible as a long plume of breath.

‘Now,’ said Maloghurst and the sixteen hooded warriors pulled the captives’ heads back to expose their necks.

Targost stepped towards the nearest, a young man with handsome features and wide, terrified eyes.

‘Please, I just–’

Targost didn’t let him finish and plunged the smoke-edged dagger deep into his throat. Blood fountained from the grotesque wound. The hooded warrior pushed the dying man forward, and Targost moved on, opening one throat after another with no heed of his victims’ horror or last words.

As the last one died, their blood lapped around Targost’s boots and spilled over the edge of the plinth. The chalked symbols drank deeply, and Targost felt a tremor in his hand.

‘Mal…’ he said as his arm lifted the blade to his own throat.

Maloghurst didn’t respond, his lips still twisting in opposition to the unsounds he was making. Targost twisted his head, but the world around him was a frozen tableau.

‘Maloghurst!’ repeated Targost.

‘He can’t help you,’ said Ger Gerradon.

Targost looked into a face alight with malice and perverse enjoyment of suffering. No longer slack with brain death, Gerradon’s features were pulled in a rictus grin. His eyes were milky white and empty, like the unpainted eyes of a doll. Whatever their ritual had drawn from the warp was not Ger Gerradon, but something incalculably old, raw-birthed and bloody.

‘Sixteen? That’s the best you could do?’ it said. ‘Sixteen measly souls?’

‘It’s a sacred number,’ hissed Targost, fighting to keep the blade from reaching his neck. Despite the freezing temperatures, sweat ran in runnels down his face.

‘To who?’

‘To us, the Legion…’ grunted Targost. ‘We’re the Sixteenth Legion, the twin Octed.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said the warp-thing. ‘Sacred to you, but meaningless to the neverborn. After everything Erebus taught you people, you still manage to get it wrong.’

Anger touched Targost, and the blade’s inexorable path to the pulsing artery in his neck slowed.

‘Wrong? We summoned you, didn’t we?’

The thing wearing Gerradon’s flesh laughed. ‘You didn’t summon me, I came back of my own accord. I have so much to teach you.’

‘Came back?’ said Targost. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m hurt you don’t recognise me, Serghar.’

The smoking edges of the gore-encrusted blade touched Targost’s neck. Skin parted before its razor tip. Blood pumped as he pushed it deeper into his neck.

‘Who am I?’ rasped the daemon. ‘I’m Tormaggedon.’

Rassuah flew the pathfinders from Old Himalazia to Ultima Thule, the outermost structure still considered to be in Terran orbit. Discounting the as yet unfinished Ardent Reef, Ultima Thule was the most recent addition to the inhabited plates that made stately circuits around humanity’s birth rock; smaller than the supercontinent of Lemurya, less productive than the industrial powerhouse of Rodinia and without the grandiose architecture of Antillia, Vaalbara or Kanyakumari.

It had been constructed sixty-two years previously, by workers since assigned to distant sectors of the Imperium. Eclipsed in scale and power by its grander brethren, its entry in the Terran orbital registry was little more than a footnote.

Over the course of its life, Ultima Thule had been quietly forgotten by the vast majority of Terra’s inhabitants. And where most orbital architects would lament such a fate for their creation, anonymity had always been the goal of Ultima Thule.

Its structure comprised of a pair of matte-black cylinders, five hundred metres in length and two hundred wide, connected by a central orb-hub. No armoured windows pierced its structure and no collision avoidance lights strobed to warn of its presence. Any space-farer lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Ultima Thule, could be forgiven for mistaking it for dead orbital junk.

That appearance was deliberately misleading, for Ultima Thule was one of the most sophisticated structures orbiting Terra, its endless suites of auspex quietly monitoring spatial traffic throughout the system.

A docking bay opened on its dark side, remaining visible only as long as it took to retrieve the void-capable Valkyrie. Auspex-hardened blast doors shut behind the assault carrier, and Ultima Thule continued its procession around the planet below as though it had never existed.

Anonymous and forgotten.

Silent and invisible.

Just as Malcador had decreed when he ordered it built.

The Repository was cool, the air kept at a constant relative humidity and temperature. The more fragile artefacts stored here were hermetically sealed in stasis fields, and Malcador tasted the tang of the recessed power generators.

Crystal-fronted cabinets lit up at his passing, but he spared their contents little notice. A book that had once plunged the world into war, sketches by the Polymath of Firenza the Emperor had – wisely, it turned out – deemed too dangerous for Perturabo to see, the half-formed sculpture of beauty incarnate.

Malcador had lied when he told young Khalid Hassan that these rough formed walls were all that remained of the Sigillite Fortress, but some truths were uncomfortable enough without burdening others with them.

The chamber was smaller than those that surrounded it, and it took Malcador a moment only to reach the stele of Gyptia. It sat on a reinforced timber cradle, the black gloss of its original construction undimmed by the passage of millennia. Lives had been lost to retrieve this fragment of humanity’s soul, as was the case with many of the objects stored here.

Malcador closed his eyes and placed his fingertips upon the cold surface of the stone. Granodiorite, an igneous rock similar to granite. Hard wearing, but not indestructible.

Given what it had unlocked in ages past, there was a pleasing symmetry to what it now allowed him to do. Malcador’s breathing slowed and the already cooled air chilled yet further.

‘My lord,’ he said.

Silence was Malcador’s only answer, and he feared the holocaust raging beneath the palace was too fierce, too all-consuming for a reply. Beneath wasn’t strictly speaking correct, but it was the only preposition that seemed to fit.

Malcador.

The Emperor’s voice echoed within his mind, stentorian and dominant, yet familiar and fraternal. Malcador felt its power, even over so immeasurable a distance, but also the effort it was taking to forge the link.

‘How goes the fight?’

We bleed out every day, while the daemons grow ever stronger. I do not have much time, my friend. War calls.

‘Leman Russ is on Terra,’ said Malcador.

I know. Even here, I can feel the Wolf King’s presence.

‘He brings word of the Lion. Twenty thousand Dark Angels are reportedly bound for Ultramar.’

Why does he not make haste for Terra?

Sweat ran down Malcador’s back at the strain of maintaining this connection. ‘There are… unsettling rumours of what is happening in Guilliman’s domain.’

I cannot see the Five Hundred Worlds. Why is that?

‘We call it the Ruinstorm. Nemo and I believe the slaughter on Calth to have been part of an orchestrated chain of events that precipitated the birth of a catastrophic and impenetrable warp storm.’

And what do you believe Roboute is doing?

‘It’s Guilliman, what do think he’s doing? He’s building an empire.’

And the Lion goes to stop him?

‘So the Wolf King says, my lord. It seems the warriors of the Lion stand with us after all.’

You doubted them? The First? Even after all they accomplished in the time before the others took up their swords?

‘I did,’ admitted Malcador. ‘After Rogal’s secret emissaries to their home world returned empty-handed, we feared the worst. But Caliban’s angels came to the Wolves’ aid when Alpharius threatened to destroy them.’

Alpharius… my son, what chance did you give my dream? Ah, even when war presses in from all sides, my sons still seek to press their advantage. They are like the feudal lords of old, scenting opportunity for their own advancement in the fires of adversity.

The regret pained Malcador’s thoughts.

‘Russ still plans to fight Horus eye to eye,’ said Malcador. ‘He sends my Knights to guide his blade and no words of mine can sway him from his course.’

You think he should not fight Horus?

‘Russ is your executioner,’ said Malcador tactfully. ‘But his axe falls a little too readily these days. Magnus felt it, now Horus will feel it.’

Two rebel angels. His axe falls on those deserving its smile.

‘And what happens when Russ takes it upon himself to decide who is loyal and who deserves execution?’

Russ is true-hearted, one of the few I know will never fall.

‘You suspect others may prove false?’

To my eternal regret, I do.

‘Who?’

Another long pause made Malcador fear his question would remain unanswered, but at last the Emperor replied.

The Khan makes a virtue of being unknowable, of being the mystery that none can answer. Some among his Legion have already embraced treachery, and others may yet.

‘What would you have me do, my lord?’

Keep watching him, Malcador. Watch the Khan more closely than any other.

‘I have never wanted to fly anything so much in all my life,’ said Rassuah.

Looking at the sleek, wedge-shaped craft with its jutting, aerodyne prow, Loken couldn’t help but agree with her.

‘I’m told it’s called Tarnhelm,’ he said.

‘Call it what you want, but if I’m not flying it within the hour, there’s going to be blood spilled,’ said Rassuah.

Loken grinned at her eagerness. He disliked aircraft on principle, but even he recognised something beautiful in the Tarnhelm.

Perhaps because it looked so utterly unlike any other aircraft in the Legiones Astartes inventory. The warcraft of the Legions were designed to be brutal, in appearance as well as effect. Their form followed function, which was to kill as quickly and efficiently as possible. Tarnhelm’s sleek lines spoke of an altogether different purpose.

Its basic structure was constructed around a central crew section with bulbous drive pods at the rear that tapered towards the prow and formed the ship’s delta-winged shape. Without any pennants or beacons, there was nothing to give any clue to its identity or affiliation.

‘What is it?’ asked Varren. ‘It’s not an attack ship or a guncutter; too few armaments. And there’s not enough armour for it to be a troop transport. One good hit is going to gut it. I don’t understand what it is.’

‘This is a craft designed to pass through the stars unseen,’ said Rama Karayan, and all eyes turned to look at him, as it was the most any of them had heard him say.

‘Why in the world would you want to do that?’ asked Callion Zaven, his expression as confused as Varren’s. ‘The point of the Legions is to be seen.’

‘Not always,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘What the Khan called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease before the enemy even knows he is there.’

Zaven looked unconvinced. ‘Shock and awe becomes a lot harder when no one sees it coming.’

‘It’s got teeth, mind,’ said Ares Voitek, his servo-arms unlimbering to point out the barely visible seams of recessed weapon nacelles and missile pods. ‘But as Macer says, it’s not an attack ship.’

‘It’s a draugrjúka,’ said Bror Tyrfingr.

Seeing the looks of confusion among his fellow pathfinders, Bror shook his head and said, ‘Don’t you people understand Juvik?’

‘Juvik?’ asked Rubio.

‘Fenrisian hearth-cant,’ said Tubal Cayne. ‘It’s a stripped-down, simplified language. No subtlety to it – punchy and declarative, just like the warriors that speak it.’

‘Have a care, Tubal,’ warned Bror, squaring his shoulders. ‘A man could take offence at that.’

That seemed to confuse Cayne. ‘I don’t see how. Nothing I said was untrue. I’ve met enough Space Wolves to know that.’

Loken expected anger, but Bror laughed. ‘Space Wolves? Ha, I forgot that was your idiot name for the Rout. If I didn’t think you were being completely serious I’d rip your arms off. Stay by my side and I’ll show you just how subtle a Space Wolf can be.’

‘So what’s a draugrjúka?’ asked Loken.

‘A ghost ship,’ said Bror.

A grey-robed servile with augmetic implants worn around her skull like a tonsure had met the pathfinders in the docking bay, and she now led them aboard the Tarnhelm. The vessel’s interior was stripped back, with only the barest minimum of fitments that would allow it to carry crew.

Its astropath was kept in sealed cryo-stasis, and its Navigator had yet to be implanted in the tapered cupola on the dorsal section. The long-axis of the ship was a cramped dormitory, with alcoves serving as medicae bays, equipment stowage and sleeping areas. Individual crew compartments were set towards the rear of the craft, with a slender nave reaching from the communal areas of the ship to its tapered prow.

Rassuah made her way towards the bridge, while the rest of the pathfinders stowed their equipment in cunningly arranged lockers and weapon racks.

The Knights Errant had been extant only a short while, too short for any real traditions to bed in, but a custom that had been readily adopted was for each warrior to retain a single artefact from his former Legion.

Loken thought back to the battered metal crate in which he had kept his meagre belongings; the garrotting wire, the feathers and the broken combat blade. Junk to any other eyes than his, but there had been one item whose loss had grieved him.

The data-slate Ignace Karkasy had given him, the one from Euphrati Keeler. That had been a treasure beyond value, a record of the time when the universe made sense, when the Luna Wolves had been a byword for honour, nobility and brotherhood. Like everything else he had once owned, it was gone.

He snapped his chainsword into the locker’s blade rack, careful to fix it in place. Its blade was fresh from a manufactory city in Albyon and inscribed with a boast that it was warranted never to fail.

Just like the thousands of others forged there.

His bolter was no different, the product of manufactories geared for war on a galactic scale, where the ability to mass-produce reliable weaponry was of far greater importance that any considerations of individuality. Lastly, he placed the mirror tokens Severian had given him into the locker. Loken had thought about throwing them away, but some fatalistic instinct told him that he might yet have need of them.

He closed the locker, watching as the rest of his pathfinders stowed their gear. Tubal Cayne unpacked a piece of surveying gear, a modified theodolite with multiple auspex capabilities, Rama Karayan a rifle with an elongated barrel and oversized sight. Ares Voitek had his servo-harness with its burnished gauntlet icon, and Bror Tyrfingr stowed what appeared to be a leather cestus gauntlet of entwined knotwork with ebon claws like knife blades.

Callion Zaven appeared at Loken’s side, opening the locker next to him and slotting home a custom-worked boltgun with a clawed wing motif acid-etched onto its platework. Within the Luna Wolves, such weapons had been for officers, but the killing fields of Murder had shown Loken that many of the warriors in the III Legion wielded heavily embellished armaments.

Zaven saw Loken’s attention and said, ‘A poor effort, I know. Not a patch on my original bolter.’

‘That’s not your touchstone?’

‘Throne, no!’ said Zaven, unbuckling his hand-tooled leather sword belt and holding it between them ‘This is my touchstone.’

The sword’s handle was tightly wound golden wire, its pommel an ebony talon. The quillons were swept eagle wings with a glittering amethyst mounted at the centre of both sides.

‘Draw it,’ said Zaven.

Loken did so, and his admiration for the weapon increased tenfold. The weapon had heft, but was incredibly light. The handle and setting had been wrought by human hand, but the blade had never known a smith’s hammer. Curved like a Chogorian sweep-sword and milky white, dappling to a jaundiced yellow at its edge, the blade was clearly organic.

‘It’s a vapour-wraith hewclaw,’ said Zaven. ‘Cut it from one of their warrior caste on Jupiter after he’d stuck it through my heart. By the time I got out of the apothecarion my Legion had already moved on and I found myself part of the Crusader Host for a time. Disappointing, but it gave me the time to work the hewclaw into a duelling blade. Try it out.’

‘Perhaps another time,’ said Loken.

‘Indeed so,’ replied Zaven, taking no offence as he took the sword back from Loken. He grinned. ‘I heard how you put down that odious little bastard, Lucius. I wish I’d seen that.’

‘It was over quickly,’ said Loken. ‘There wasn’t much to see.’

Zaven laughed, and Loken saw a glint in his eye that might have been admiration or could have been appraisal. ‘I don’t doubt it. You’ll have to tell me about it someday. Or perhaps we might match blades on the journey.’

Loken shook his head. ‘Don’t you think we have enough enemies before us without looking for them in our own ranks?’

Zaven put his hands up, and Loken was instantly contrite.

‘As you wish,’ said Zaven, his eyes darting to Loken’s equipment case. ‘So what did you keep?’

‘Nothing,’ said Loken, blinking away the after-image of a hooded shadow towards the rear of the compartment. His heartbeat spiked and droplets of sweat beaded on his forehead.

‘Come on, everyone keeps something,’ grinned Zaven, oblivious to Loken’s discomfort. ‘Rubio has his little gladius, Varren that woodsman’s axe, and Qruze keeps that battered old boltgun. And Cayne has… whatever grubby engineer’s tool that is. Tell me, what did you keep?’

Loken slammed his locker shut.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I lost everything on Isstvan Three.’

Aside from the times he’d been deflowering his half-brother’s wife, Raeven had always hated Albard’s tower. Situated in the very heart of Lupercalia, it was a grim edifice of black stone and copper sheeting. The city was in a state of mourning, black flags and the entwined eagle and naga banners hanging from every window. Raeven’s late father might have been a bastard, but he was at least a bastard who’d earned his people’s respect.

Raeven climbed the stairs slowly, taking his time and savouring this culmination of his desires. Lyx and his mother followed behind, as eager as him to consummate this sublime moment.

The tower was kept dark. The Sacristans assigned to Albard’s care claimed his eyes could not tolerate light beyond the dimmest lumen. Raeven’s spies told him Albard never ventured beyond the tower’s top chambers, confined by lunacy and infrequent brushes with moribund lucidity.

‘I hope he’s rational,’ said Lyx, his sister-wife’s words seeming to take their cue from Raeven’s thoughts as they so often did. ‘It won’t be any fun if he’s lost in madness.’

‘Then you should prepare yourself for disappointment,’ said Raeven. ‘It’s a rare day our brother even knows his own name.’

‘He will be rational,’ said his mother, climbing the steps with wheezing mechanical awkwardness.

‘How can you be so sure?’ asked Raeven.

‘Because I have seen it,’ replied his mother, and Raeven knew not to doubt her. That Adoratrice consorts were privy to many secrets was well known all across Molech, but that those of House Devine could witness things not yet come to pass was known only to Lupercalia’s Knights.

The Devine Adoratrices had preserved that ability for thousands of years by keeping the genestock of their House from being diluted by inferior bloodlines. It surprised Raeven that Lyx had not seen what his mother had, but the ways of the Adoratrice were not his to know.

Cebella Devine, his mother and Adoratrice Drakaina to his father, was now at least a hundred years of age. Her husband had rejected cosmetic juvenat treatments for vanity’s sake, but Cebella embraced them with gusto. Her skin was lifted back over her skull like tightened plastic, fixed in place with surgical sutures to a grotesque headpiece that resembled a device of skull-violating horror.

A hunched pair of biologis servitors followed in Cebella’s wake, tethered to her via a series of hissing pipes and feeder tubes. Both were venom-blinded and implanted with numerous monitoring devices and gurgling, hissing cylinders containing gel-nutrients, anti-senescence compounds and restorative cell cultures harvested from vat-grown newborns.

To keep Cebella’s brittle bones from undue stresses, an ingenious scaffold of suspensor fields, exo-lattices and fibre-bundle muscles had been surgically bonded with her skeletal structure.

‘You’d better be right,’ snapped Lyx, straightening her bronze-panelled dress and arranging her hair. ‘It’ll be pointless if he’s no better than a beast or a vegetable.’

Lyx had once been wed to Albard, but her vows had been broken even before he’d put his betrothal ring on her. Though it had been their mother that engineered Raeven and Lyx’s relationship, Cebella held a depthless contempt for her daughter that Raeven could only attribute to jealousy of her apparent youth.

‘It won’t be pointless,’ he said, shutting them both up before they could get into one of their all-too-frequent arguments. His mother’s sickly flesh contorted with what he presumed was a smile, though it was hard to tell. ‘After all this time, I want to see the look in his eyes when I tell him I killed his father.’

‘Your father too, and mine,’ pointed out Lyx.

Their mother’s womb had ejected Raeven mere minutes before Lyx, but sometimes it felt like decades. Today was such a day.

‘I’m aware of that,’ he said, pausing just before he reached the upper landing of the tower. ‘I want him to see the woman who replaced his own mother on one side, his former wife on the other. I want him to know that everything that was and should have been his is now mine.’

Lyx slipped her arm through his, and his mood lightened. As she had done since they were suckled babes, she knew his moods and needs better than he. To her loving populace, her beauty and body were sustained by calisthenics and subtle juvenat treatments.

Raeven knew better.

Many of his wife’s long absences into Lupercalia’s hidden valleys were spent undergoing nightmarish chirurgical procedures administered by Shargali-Shi and his coven of androgyne Serpent Cultists. Raeven had witnessed one such operation, a dreadful blend of surgery, alchemy and carnal ritual, and vowed never to do so again. The Ophiolater claimed to channel the Vril-ya, the power of the Serpent Gods once worshipped all across Molech in an earlier age. Raeven didn’t know if that was true or not, but the results spoke for themselves. Though nearly sixty-five, Lyx could easily pass for less than half that.

‘The serpent moons grow ever fuller,’ said Lyx. ‘Shargali-Shi will call the Vril-yaal to gather soon.’

He smiled. A six day bacchanalia of intoxicating venoms and writhing hedonism within the hidden temple caverns was just what he needed to lighten the coming burden of planetary command.

‘Yes,’ he said with a grin of anticipation, and all but bounded up the last few steps.

The entrance vestibule of the topmost chambers was dark, the two Dawn Guard standing sentinel at the onward doorway little more than dark silhouettes. Despite the poor light, Raeven knew both of them; soldiers from his mother’s personal detail. He wondered if they’d shared her bed, and judged it more than likely from the conspicuous aversion of their gaze.

They stepped aside as Raeven approached, one opening the door for him as the other bowed deeply. Raeven swept past them and moved through richly appointed antechambers, medicae bays and chambers of observation.

A trio of nervous Sacristans awaited them at the entrance to Albard’s private rooms. Each was red-robed, in imitation of their Mechanicum masters, plugged with bionics and rank with sweat and grease. Not quite Cult Mechanicum, but too altered to be thought of as human either. If not for their rote maintenance of the Knights, Raeven would have advocated their elimination years ago.

‘My lord,’ said a Sacristan Raeven thought was called Onak.

‘Does he know?’ said Raeven.

‘No, my lord,’ said Onak. ‘Your instructions were most precise.’

‘Good, you’re a competent Sacristan and it would have irked me to flay you alive.’

All three Sacristans moved aside with alacrity as Raeven pushed open the door. The air that gusted from within was musty and stifling, a fetor of urine, flatus and insanity.

A deep couch with a sagging footstool was set on the edge of a dimmed fireplace that was entirely holographic. Upon the couch sat a man who looked old enough to be Raeven’s grandfather. Denied sunlight and the rejuvenating surgeries of his half-brother, Albard Devine was a wretch of a human being, his skull hairless and pale as newly-hatched maggots.

Before his mind had snapped, Albard’s physique had been robust and stocky, but now he was little more than a drained revenant of parchment-dry flesh sunken over a rack of misaligned bones.

Albard had been cruelly handsome, bluntly so, with the stony harshness people expected of a warrior king. That man was long gone. A gelatinous lesion emerging from the burn scars he’d received upon his maturity leaked yellow pus into his long beard. Clotted with mucus and spilled food the beard reached almost to Albard’s waist, and the one eye that stared at the fire was jaundiced and milky with cataracts.

‘Is that you, Onak?’ said Albard, his voice a tremulous husk of a thing. ‘The fire must be dying. I’m cold.’

He doesn’t even realise it’s a hologram, thought Raeven, and his mother’s assurance that his half-brother would be in a state of relative lucidity seemed dashed.

‘It’s me, brother,’ said Raeven, moving to stand beside the couch. The stench of corruption grew stronger, and he wished he’d brought a vial of Caeban root to waft under his nose.

‘Father?’

‘No, you idiot,’ he said. ‘Listen closely. It’s me, Raeven.’

‘Raeven?’ said Albard, shifting uneasily on the couch. Something rustled beneath the couch in response to Albard’s movement, and Raeven saw the thick, serpentine body of Shesha. His father’s last surviving naga shifted position with creaking leathery motion, a forked tongue flicking from her fanged mouth. Well over two centuries old, Shesha was in the last years of life, near blind and her long, scaled body already beginning to ossify.

‘Yes, brother,’ said Raeven, kneeling beside Albard and reluctantly placing a hand on his knee. The fabric of his coverlet was stiff and encrusted, but Raeven felt the brittle, bird-like bones beneath. A haze of filth billowed from the coverlet, and Raeven felt his gorge rise.

‘I don’t want you here,’ said Albard and Raeven felt a flutter of hope that his half-brother was at least in touching distance of sanity. ‘I told them not to let you in.’

‘I know, but I have something to tell you.’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘You will.’

‘No.’

‘Father is dead.’

Albard finally deigned to look at him, and Raeven saw himself reflected in that glossy white, hopeless eye. The augmetic had long since ceased to function.

‘Dead?’

‘Yes, dead,’ said Raeven, leaning in despite the rancid miasma surrounding Albard. His half-brother blinked his one eye and looked past his shoulder, now aware of the presence of others in the room.

‘Who else is here?’ he said, sounding suddenly afraid.

‘Mother, my mother,’ said Raeven. ‘And Lyx. You remember her?’

Albard’s head sank back to his chest, and Raeven wondered if he’d drifted off into some chem-induced slumber. The Sacristans kept Albard moderately sedated at all times to keep the ravaged synapses of his brain from causing an explosive aneurysm within his skull.

‘I remember a whore by that name,’ said Albard as a rivulet of yellowed saliva leaked from the dry gash of his mouth.

Raeven grinned as he felt Lyx’s rising fury. Men had endured days of unimaginable agony for far less.

‘Yes, that’s her,’ said Raeven. He’d pay for that later, but more and more he relished the punishment more than the pleasure.

‘Did you kill him?’ said Albard, fixing Raeven with his rheumy gaze. ‘Did you kill my father?’

Raeven looked back over his shoulder as Cebella and Lyx drew closer to better savour Albard’s humiliation. His mother’s features were unmoving, but Lyx’s cheeks were flushed in the light of the holographic fire.

‘I did, yes, and the memory of it still makes me smile,’ said Raeven. ‘I should have done it a long time ago. The old bastard just wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t hand me what was rightfully mine.’

Albard let out a wheezing exhalation of breath as dry as winds over the Tazkhar steppe. It took a second for Raeven to recognise the sound as bitter laughter.

‘Rightfully yours? You remember who you’re talking to? I’m the firstborn of House Devine.’

‘Ah, of course,’ said Raeven, standing and wiping his hands on a silk handkerchief he withdrew from his brocaded coat. ‘Yes, well, it’s not like our House can be led by a cripple who can’t even bond with his Knight, now is it?’

Albard coughed into his beard, a dry, hacking retch that brought up yet more phlegmy matter. When he looked up, his eye was clearer than it had been in decades.

‘I’ve had a lot of time to think, over these long years, brother,’ said Albard, when the coughing fit subsided. ‘I know I could have recovered enough to leave this tower, but you and Lyx made sure that never happened, didn’t you?’

‘Mother helped,’ said Raeven. ‘So how does it feel, brother? To see everything that should have been yours is now mine?’

‘Honestly? I couldn’t care less,’ said Albard. ‘You think after all this time I care what happens to me? Mother’s pet Sacristans keep me barely alive, and I know I’ll never leave this tower. Tell me, brother, why in the world would I care what you do anymore?’

‘Then we’re done here,’ said Raeven, fighting to keep his anger from showing. He’d come here to humiliate Albard, but the wretched bastard had been hollowed out too much to appreciate the pain.

He turned to face Cebella and Lyx. ‘Take the blood you need, but make it quick.’

‘Quick?’ pouted Lyx.

‘Quick,’ repeated Raeven. ‘The Lord Generals and the Legions have called for a council of war and I’ll not start my governorship by having anyone doubting my competency.’

Lyx shrugged and pulled a naga-fang filleting knife from the many concealed folds of her dress as she stood above the shrivelled wraith of her former husband and half-brother.

‘Shargali-Shi needs the blood of the firstborn,’ said Lyx, dropping to one knee and resting the blade against the side of Albard’s neck. ‘Not all of it, but a lot.’

Albard spat in her face.

‘This may be quick,’ she said, wiping her face, ‘but I promise it will be agonising.’