The Horus Heresy: The Devine Adoratrice

Slender tendrils of fragrant smoke drifted from fang-mouthed oil burners, filling the bed-chamber with a delicious mix of cinnamon and honeysuckle. A fine sheen of oiled sweat and perfumed breath completed the indulgent atmosphere. Early morning sunlight shone in golden streaks through the slatted timber louvres over the windows, spilling languidly over the breathless couple that lay in the sumptuous bed, their eyes unfocused, their limbs entwined and their minds blissfully self-absorbed.

Three bottles of fine Caeban wine sat on a handmade table beside the bed, and red stains all across the sheets were testament to the wildness of its consumption. Raeven slipped his arm from Lyx’s shoulders and traced a finger over the coiled tattoo behind her ear that was normally hidden by her auburn hair.

‘Do you know how much trouble you’d be in if anyone saw that?’ he asked.

‘You’ve seen it,’ she replied.

‘Yes, but I’m not going to report you for a cult tattoo.’

‘Then why should I worry?’ she said with a grin. ‘You’re the only one who gets to see it.’

‘Not even Albard?’

‘Especially not Albard,’ she laughed, but he saw through her levity.

‘You’re not really mixed up with the Serpent cult are you?’

Lyx shook her head and kissed him. ‘Can you really imagine me dancing naked in the forest?’

‘I am now. Is that what they do?’

‘That’s what they say,’ said Lyx. ‘That, and sacrifice virgins and mate with nagas.’

Raeven made a disgusted face. Like most people, he’d heard the rumours about the vile practices of the Serpent cult – their misguided belief in old gods and their abhorrence of all forms of authority. And like most people, he’d dismissed them as just that, rumours.

‘Anything left to drink?’ asked Lyx.

He reached over her to examine the bottles. All were empty, and he slumped back onto the bed with a sigh.

‘No, it’s all gone.’

‘We drank it all?’ asked Lyx, turning onto her side. She gave him a full-lipped smile as the movement pulled the sheets down her body. Raeven took a moment to savour the nut-brown colour of her flesh and the way it rose in goosebumps in the chill air of the high bedchamber.

‘I’m afraid so,’ he said.

‘That explains why my head feels like one of your father’s pet nagas is squeezing it.’

Raeven rubbed his eyes and ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. Like Lyx, his skin was the colour of young oak, ridged by cut lines of defined musculature. He was slender where his brother was bulky, and toned where Albard could only generously be described as ‘stocky’.

With nothing nearby to drink, Raeven reached up and pulled down a coiled pipe of leathery azhdarchid skin and sucked upon the copper end piece, until the smouldering embers in the bowl on the shelf above the headboard took light. He puffed a stream of aromatic smoke into the air, making a pillow of his arm.

‘I doubt if old Oruboros or Shesha could even break an egg open, these days,’ he said at last. ‘It’s a stupid comparison to make.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she pouted.

‘I do, but you’re prettier when you’re sad.’

‘That must be why you’re so cruel to me.’

‘One of the many reasons,’ agreed Raeven, letting the soothing effects of the smoke ease away the disquiet he always felt when he woke in the same bed as Lyx. As enticing as her bodily charms and paramour’s skills were, he couldn’t quite rid himself of the feeling that there was something unnatural about their...

Their what? Lovemaking? Hardly, since there was little love lost between them.

Rutting had something of a ring to it, in that it perfectly encapsulated the frenetic violence of their coupling, but didn’t quite express the frisson he took from its taboo nature. Raeven glanced over at the ring on Lyx’s finger and almost laughed as his genhanced eyes read the betrothal inscription laser-etched upon its platinum surface.

‘What’s funny?’ asked Lyx.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I just caught a glimpse of the vow Albard had inscribed on your ring.’

She pulled her hand below the sheets, and her face flushed. She shrugged.

‘It’s a nice ring, and you insist I keep it on.’

‘Yes,’ said Raeven, letting the smoking pipe coil back up to the bowl. ‘I like to know what I’m defiling.’

She smiled and reached over to pull him towards her. Her fingers brushed over the steel-rimmed sockets bored through the meat of his body at his neck and spine. He saw her flinch at the cold, metallic presence in his skin, and took a moment to savour the look of distaste that flashed in her eyes.

‘You don’t like them?’ he asked.

‘No, they’re cold.’

‘You should be used to that by now,’ said Raeven, pushing her down onto the bed. He leaned down to kiss her, but she turned her head to the side.

‘Did it hurt?’ she asked. ‘When the Sacristans cut you open, I mean?’

Still supporting himself on his elbows, Raeven nodded. ‘Yes. The Sacristans had us immobilised with muscle inhibitors, but father decided we would undergo the surgery without the benefit of pain-blockers, just like they did in his day. We were paralysed, but awake the whole time.’

She flinched at the thought of being cut open by the iron-faced priests of Mars and their lickspittle Sacristans. Raeven felt his jaw clench at the memory of the procedure, strapped in a bronze gurney in the depths of the Sanctuary as he and Albard faced each other across the expanse of bottle-green ceramic tiles and sterile steel.

‘I suspect father expected me to scream, but I was damned if I’d give him the satisfaction.’

‘What do they feel like now?’ she said, probing the edges of the sockets in his flesh and sliding her fingers inside, despite her avowed distaste. So like her to express squeamishness one moment, naked interest the next. She’d been like that the first time he’d taken her to his bed, pleading with him that what they were doing was wrong, but coming back night after night for more of the same.

‘They feel like part of me,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Like they’ve always been a part of me.’

‘Albard’s are infected,’ said Lyx, rubbing the skin around the neural connector, and Raeven saw her breathing was becoming heavier. ‘He has me rub counterseptic poultices on them several times a day.’

‘Does he like that?’

She shook her head. ‘No, he hates it.’

‘Good,’ said Raeven, kissing her and feeling her body respond to his touch.

Later, with Lyx asleep, Raeven slid from his bed and padded softly across the floor of his chambers. This high in the valley, the air was cold, but thick mallahgra pelts hunted by his grandfather in the jungles of Kush kept his feet pleasantly warm. Sweat cooled rapidly on his skin, and he pulled a sea-green robe edged in xenosmilus fur around his naked body. Beyond the louvres, he could hear the sound of the city preparing for the day’s celebrations – the excited hubbub of tens of thousands of voices.

Though Raeven was hundreds of metres above the city in one of the three Devine Towers, he fancied he could still hear the cosmopolitan mix of accents as the people gathered there came from all across the world to honour the Becoming of Lord Devine’s sons. Merchants from Loquash would be haggling with the painted men of Aenatep. Artisans of the Clockwork City would unveil their ticking, mechanical marvels – hoping to avoid the attentions of the Sacristan Guard – while the various Houses would no doubt be parading the best and bravest of their knights, boasting of their great hunts and the productivity of their satrapies. And the people of Lupercalia would bear this intrusion of so many thousands to their city with the stoic surety that not one of the newcomers could hold a candle to House Devine.

Raeven pulled back the heavy drapes and pushed out through the louvred shutters to the stone-walled balcony beyond, as though the city were his and his alone.

The stepped expanse stretched out before him, filling the width of the valley from one side to the other and cascading down its length to the fertile plains below. Colourful structures of every conceivable shape, size, height and orientation jostled for space amid streets that bore the qualities of the Emperor’s Legions that had brought this world back into the embrace of the Imperium.

Where the Lion had raised the Dawn Citadel in the tapering reaches of the upper valley, the streets around it were rigidly arranged in an unbending grid pattern. And where local geography interfered with that plan, it had been engineered away by the Mechanicum. Lower down, the streets were woven together like intricate knotwork, the free-flowing yet ordered nature of this street-plan said to be a representation of Lord Horus’s war-making. The Khan had chosen not to make his mark in stone, and had instead taken himself into the wild places and high mountains. No one knew exactly what legacy the primarch of the White Scars had left, though fireside tales whispered that he had spoken of secret things to the tribes and noble Houses that existed at the edges of the world.

The one portion of unity amid the chaotic nature of the city’s plan was the Via Argentum, a laser-straight processional that climbed the length of the valley from its wide-mouthed opening to the rocky fortress built into the ochre stone of the mountain. Raeven held a hand over his eyes and looked up at the artfully shaped peak, less a geological feature than a man-made statement carved into the face of the world.

Arms slipped around his waist, and Raeven smelled the jasmine oil Lyx liked rubbed onto her skin. He could feel that she was naked, and he wondered if he had time to take her back to bed before his mother came to fetch him.

‘Are you nervous?’ she asked.

He looked at the marbled dome of the citadel, the early morning sun catching the copper banding between the coffered azure panels. He shook his head, angry that she might think him afraid of what this day promised.

‘No,’ he said, pushing her away. ‘I have been prepared for the Ritual of Becoming since my tenth summer. I know who I am, and I’m ready for whatever happens. If a dullard like father can go through it, then I don’t think I’ll have any trouble.’

‘I heard that the firstborn of House Tazkhar died and that his three brothers went mad after they went through it.’

‘House Tazkhar?’ sneered Raeven. ‘What do you expect from nomadic dung-burners who can’t even build a proper city? Some shit-smeared shaman masquerading as a Sacristan probably poured holy naga venom into their neural connectors.’

‘You shouldn’t get angry,’ said Lyx. ‘You need to be calm. The Throne Mechanicum imprint is based on your neural state at the moment of connection.’

Raeven rounded on her and laughed, a bitter bark of derision.

‘And you’re a Mechanicum priest now, are you? What other pearls of wisdom do you have for me, or does your insight only stretch to the blindingly obvious?’

Lyx pursed her lips. ‘You are in a foul mood this morning.’

‘I am what you make me,’ he returned. ‘I always have been.’

Lyx’s hand flashed out to slap him, but gene-manipulation in the male bloodline of House Devine over the centuries ensured that Raeven’s reaction speed was far faster than hers. He caught her hand and twisted the arm savagely around her back. He pushed her back into the room and threw her face-down upon the bed. She turned to face him as he opened his robe, her expression the same mixture of revulsion and devotion she’d worn since childhood.

Before he could do more, the door to his chamber opened and a statuesque woman in a flowing dress of iridescent scales swept imperiously within. She wore a headdress of nagahide, and a number of venom-blinded servants followed in her wake, each bearing a selection of outfits for him to choose from.

‘Mother!’ said Raeven, planting his hands on his hips and sighing in exasperation. ‘Don’t you knock anymore?’

Cebella Devine shook her head and wagged an admonishing finger. ‘What mother needs to knock at her son’s door on the day of his Becoming?’

‘Clearly not you,’ said Raeven.

‘Hush now,’ said Cebella, running an elongated fingernail across the sculpted lines of his chest. ‘You don’t want to be angry with me. Not today, of all days.’

‘Spare me, mother,’ snapped Raeven. ‘Lyx has already given me the benefit of her extensive knowledge on the matter.’

Cebella’s expression hardened and she turned to face the young girl on the bed, who stared back at her with withering contempt.

‘Get dressed, Lyx,’ said Cebella. ‘It is inappropriate for you to be here today.’

‘Just today?’ Lyx laughed.

‘If you plan to be Raeven’s Adoratrice consort, you need to start acting like one.’

‘Like you are to Cyprian?’ hissed Lyx, her fingers curled into fists. ‘I hardly think so.’

‘Get out,’ said Cebella, her face a granite mask. ‘Albard will be here soon. Take the servants’ tunnels and don’t let me see you until after matters are concluded.’

‘With pleasure,’ said Lyx, visibly controlling her fury and gathering up her clothes. She slipped them on with practiced speed and, fully attired, sashayed to Raeven’s side to plant a kiss on his cheek. ‘Until later.’

Cebella snapped her fingers and said, ‘Someone open the drapes. This room smells like a brothel.’

‘Well, you’re the expert there,’ Lyx muttered, throwing a final barb and darting past Cebella to vanish though the door.

‘Right,’ said Cebella, turning her critical gaze upon her son. ‘Let’s see if we can make you vaguely presentable.’

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 might 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.

Assuming he survived the Ritual of Becoming, he would be made to answer for his attire.

From a distance, Knight armour was impressive. Up close, it was downright terrifying.

Raeven had never seen the god-engines of the Mechanicum, but couldn’t imagine that they would be any more fearsome than this. He knew that they were bigger, of course, but in the vid-captures he’d watched, they were giant, lumbering things; mountains in motion that won battles through sheer scale of firepower rather than any tactical finesse.

A Titan was a war machine, a Knight was a warrior.

Raeven’s teeth itched at the presence of the Knight’s ion shields and, even from below, he felt the heat of his father’s displeasure.

Though he projected an insouciant air of disinterest, Raeven had studied the elaborate protocols and observances of the Ritual of Becoming closely. He knew there would be lengthy catechisms about duty, honour and fealty to be recited, and mnemonics to aid in the bonding process and ensure a perfect conjoining with the suit of armour he would pilot after a successful imprinting.

Only now did it dawn upon Raeven that, after tonight, he would no longer be the same man. Bonding with his armour would change him forever, and a sliver of doubt oozed into his skull, like a worm through a rotten apple.

Albard dropped to one knee before Lord Devine, his fusion armour’s servos whining with the movement.

Raeven hesitated, but before he could mirror his brother’s movement, he heard screams behind him. Shots were fired, followed by what sounded like the detonation of a grenade. He spun around in time to see a man sprinting from the crowds, his long robes billowing behind him like a cape. His face was partially augmented, a coiled tattoo inked around the skin of his left eye. Men and women lay dying behind him, scattered by an explosion that had blown a hole in the barrier separating the crowds from the Via Argentum.

The man ran towards Cyprian Devine’s mount, and Raeven saw something strapped to his chest like cross-wise bandoliers – a series of wired black boxes and rows of what looked like miniature generators. Shots from the House guard streaked the air, bright las-bolts and solid slugs, but the man led a charmed life as every shot sliced past him without effect. Raeven ducked behind the still kneeling Albard as a bullet whined past his ear and another tore up a chunk of the roadway at his feet.

‘The Serpent Gods live!’ screamed the man as he reached the carriage, depressing a home-made trigger. Raeven felt a moment’s disbelief as he saw something familiar in his appearance, but before he could register what it was, a huscarl’s bullet finally took the man’s head off just as the device upon his chest detonated.

The blast lifted Raeven from his feet, but the man hadn’t been wearing a bomb in the conventional sense – the chemical sniffers would have detected that long before he’d gotten this far. It was something far more dangerous: a powerful electromagnetic pulse expanded in a dome of deadening force, shorting out every device within a hundred metres.

The skimmer carriage slammed down onto the road, lasrifles flatlined and energy cells were discharged in an instant.

And the cranial implants of the mallahgra and azhdarchid blew out in twin showers of sparks.

‘No...’ Raeven murmured.

The mallahgra loosed a wet bellow and tore the stocks from its neck with the ease of a man removing a loose necktie. It hurled the brass and bone contraption into the crowd, the corpses flying off with the force of the throw. Nictitating membranes on its multiple eyes flickered, as if the beast had only just awoken from a long hibernation to find a rival in its feeding grounds. The azhdarchid reared up, clawing the air with its poleaxing wings and screeching in anger to find itself yoked to a lump of dead metal.

‘Get me up!’ grunted Albard, straining under the weight of his armour.

Raeven stared stupidly at his brother. ‘What are you talking about? Get up yourself. You’re the one in armour.’

‘Fusion armour,’ pointed out Albard, and Raeven suddenly understood.

‘You can’t move,’ said Raeven. ‘The systems are fried.’

‘I know, damn you,’ hissed Albard. ‘Now help me.’

Raeven looked up, and the mallahgra roared as it saw an object against which it could direct its anger. Mounted huscarls charged the beast, las-lances dipped and crackling energy arcs dancing over their conductive tips, but the beast smashed them aside as it charged with a knuckle-bounding lope. Men and horses flew through the air, broken in half and turning end over end.

Gunfire stitched across the mallahgra’s hide, setting light to its fur but unable to penetrate its rugose skin and the ultra-dense layers of muscle tissue beneath. Raeven turned to see what in the name of all things wondrous was keeping his father from the fight – of all the weapons here at this moment, a Knight was the one thing that could conceivably kill an angry mallahgra.

Cyprian Devine’s Knight armour fizzed and crackled with arcing traceries of angry lightning, its onboard systems fighting to keep themselves alight. The Knight had been at the very edge of the blast, spared the full force of the electromagnetic pulse.

But it hadn’t escaped completely, and its systems were struggling to reset.

‘Typical,’ said Raeven. ‘Just when I need you most...’

He dragged Albard’s sword from its heavy scabbard, but cursed when he realised it was an energy sabre, and therefore now useless. The blade didn’t even have an edge, relying upon disruptive energies to cut through an opponent’s armour.

With a crash of splintering timber, the azhdarchid finally tore itself free of the yoke securing it to the skimmer carriage.

‘Hurry, Raeven!’ pleaded Albard. ‘Help me!’

His brother’s eyes were filled with fear. Albard could hear the mallahgra – its bloodcurdling roar and the thump of its clawed hands powering it forward – but he couldn’t see it, and that fear of the unknown had unmanned him. He’d already lost an eye to a beast like this and was in no hurry to be standing in the way of this one.

‘Sorry, brother,’ said Raeven, still clutching the impotent sword.

He stood, but before he could turn and run, the mallahgra was upon him.

Its multiple eyes were bloodshot and confused, which was no surprise, but it knew fresh meat when it saw it. A three-clawed hand swiped for him, but Raeven’s honed reflexes carried him out of the way. He dived and swung the sword, the blade bouncing from the monster’s thick hide without effect. It roared and snapped its segmented, shark-like head toward him. Serrated teeth sliced through his thin clothing and tore a deep furrow across his chest and shoulder. He cried out in pain, rolling beneath its slashing paws.

More soldiers were coming forward, shooting from the hip at both beasts. The azhdarchid met their charge, its heavy wings slashing out like bludgeoning clubs and dewclaws tearing through half a dozen men with every arcing sweep. Its razored beak bit armoured warriors and their mounts in two with each bite.

Raeven scrambled to his feet, running towards the Citadel and hoping that someone inside would have the presence of mind to open the damned gates. He pulled up short as a whining, screeching steel leg stomped past, almost slamming into him as it went. The wake of the Knight’s passage spun Raeven around, and he fell as the energised force of the ion shield pushed him down. Sparks and breached fuel lines drooled in the wake of the Knight’s steps.

The mallahgra launched itself at Cyprian, throwing both its arms around his mount, but Raeven’s father was in no mood for a close-quarters brawl.

Turbo lasers blitzed with killing fire, punching bloody craters deep into the beast’s chest and ripping scorched chunks from its back. It bellowed in anger and pain, but its stunted nervous system would take more punishment before it would drop. A thundering blow slammed into the Knight’s canopy – which Raeven saw had remained stubbornly open – sending blades of broken steel stabbing inside.

Its jaw closed on the Knight’s head with a throaty bellow, but the teeth slid clear, chewing silver gouges in its armoured carapace. Scads of torn armour plating fell around Raeven, and he jumped aside as heavy lumps of chewed metal slammed down. The turbo lasers blazed again, and this time the mallahgra knew that it had been hurt.

Sticky blood rained down as Lord Devine freed his chainsabre arm and its internal generator finally overcame the effects of the electromagnetic pulse. The enormous chainsabre roared to life and the spinning teeth, each larger than a man’s forearm, revved up with eye-blurring speed.

The screaming blade plunged into the mallahgra’s gut, tearing up into its heart and lungs and exploding from its shoulder in a welter of shredded bone and meat. The beast howled as Cyprian wrenched the madly revving sabre from its body, and its arm and most of its right side peeled away from its spine.

Rightly was Cyprian Devine known as the Hellblade.

Finally accepting that it was dead, the mallahgra slumped to its knees, its remaining arm falling limply to its side as it slid down the front of the blood-spattered Knight. The carcass fell onto its side and the noxious stink of it mingled with the burnt electrical smell of the wounded machine.

Cyprian rotated the body of the Knight to look down at Raeven. Blood covered his father’s features, and Raeven saw two spars of steel impaling his body – one through the stomach, the other through a shoulder. The Knight’s armoured frame sagged in sympathetic pain, but Cyprian Devine wasn’t about to let potentially mortal wounds slow him down.

‘Get your brother into the Sanctuary,’ he ordered through gritted teeth.

With the immediate danger over, Raeven stood and wiped a hand across his face.

‘You can’t mean to go through with the Becoming?’ he said. ‘Not after all this?’

‘Now more than ever,’ snapped Cyprian. ‘Do as I say, boy. Both of you must imprint with your armour tonight. The suits have been consecrated and prepared, they are awaiting you in the Vault Transcendent. If you do not bond with them now, they will never accept you.’

Raeven nodded as his father turned the Knight and set off with a lopsided stride after the rampaging azhdarchid. Its screeching, hooting cries came from farther down the valley, where Devine soldiers were still trying to bring it down.

A slow smile spread across Raeven’s face as he realised the people around him were cheering his name, but it took him a moment to understand why.

He stood beside the corpse of a gutted mallahgra with a blade in his hand, a blade that now began to spark into life and blaze with violet energy. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t killed this beast, only that he’d stood against it.

He raised the borrowed sword and yelled, ‘Devine!’

Two regiments of Dawn Guard awaited them within the citadel, but whatever ceremonial splendour had once been imposed on their ranks had been shed the moment word came through about the assassination attempt. Officers and soldiers discarded high-fluted helms, fluttering pennants and gilded breastplates of ornamented gold and silver. They wanted to march out to fight alongside their lord and master, but their duty to Lord Devine’s sons kept them within the citadel.

Raeven felt a twinge of regret that the mallahgra’s attack had robbed him of this chance to parade in front of these men on his way to the Sanctuary, but contented himself with the crowds cheering his name from beyond the walls.

‘If I was a superstitious man, I’d be inclined to think that this attack was a bad omen,’ he said.

‘If I believed in omens, I might agree with you,’ said Albard, wheezing and breathless with the effort of walking in bulky fusion armour with a fried generator and no motive power.

‘Did you see the size of that mallahgra?’ said Raeven, letting out a pent-up breath as the sliced meat of his arm throbbed painfully. ‘Throne, I thought that brute had me.’

‘We almost died out there,’ Albard gasped, his scarred features ashen and his eyes wide.

‘I nearly died,’ corrected Raeven, holding out his bloodied arm and doing his best to hide just how much it really hurt. ‘That beast wasn’t looking at you like you were its next meal.’

‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ said Albard.

Raeven dropped into a fencing stance and held out Albard’s sword. ‘Me?’ he said with a wide grin. ‘It’s the mallahgra that’s the lucky one. If your sword hadn’t shorted out, I’d have taken its whole arm off.’

‘Lucky for it then.’

‘If father hadn’t intervened, I swear I’d have cut it apart, piece by piece.’

The twin-drum fusion generator on Albard’s armour sparked with alarming bangs of overloaded control mechanisms and hissed with venting gasses. Irreparably damaged electrical systems leaked blue-tinged smoke.

‘Help me get this damn suit off,’ snapped Albard, and the fleeting moment of fraternal bonhomie was snuffed out in a heartbeat.

Raeven backed away from his brother as a piercing whine built from the generator. He knew from long years of training in a similar suit that the archaic systems of fusion armour were dangerously temperamental. Only the Mechanicum priests had the knowledge required to maintain such outdated technology, but they had little interest in servicing family heirlooms.

‘I’m not your damn squire,’ said Raeven. ‘Do it yourself.’

‘Hurry, before the fusion reactor burns through the plates.’

Raeven shook his head and waved forward a trio of Sacristans who awaited his leave to approach. ‘You three, get him out of his armour. Quickly! Before the fusion reactor burns through the plates.’

The red-robed men ran to help Lord Devine’s eldest son. A Sacristan with a bulky, hazard-striped cylinder strapped to his back attached cables to inload deactivation codes to the reactor core and frost-limned pipes to inject coolant fluids. The remaining two deployed power tools to undo bolts, remove locking clasps and peel rapidly-heating plates from Albard’s body in smoking lumps of silvered metal.

As Raeven watched them work, he had a sudden flash of memory, recalling the man who had detonated the electromagnetic pulse on the Via Argentum.

‘He was a Sacristan,’ he said.

‘Who was?’ said Albard.

‘The bomber. He was wearing a Sacristan’s robes.’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Albard, glancing down at the men working to remove his useless armour. ‘What possible reason could a Sacristan have for assassinating father?’

‘Trust me, he’s an easy man to dislike.’

Another memory came to him – the bomber was a Sacristan, and he was a Sacristan that Raeven had seen before. En route to a clandestine rendezvous in Lyx’s bedchamber some months ago, he’d seen the man loitering in the upper chambers of Albard’s tower. Wanting the Sacristan gone, he’d chastened him for his tattoo’s resemblance to a Serpent cult icon. Bowing and scraping, the man had promised to have it removed, and Raeven had put the matter from his mind.

He’d put the Sacristan’s presence down to Knightly business, but that seemed an unlikely explanation now.

Albard shrugged off the last of his armour and stepped away from its smoking remains as though it were a pile of xenosmilus dung, or a petitioning freeman.

‘Thanks for nothing, Raeven,’ said Albard, staring at the ruined plates.

‘I told you it was stupid to wear–’

‘What did you just call me?’ said Albard, leaning in close with a threatening scowl.

If Raeven’s brother thought to intimidate him with scholam-yard theatrics, he was even more foolish than he’d taken him for.

‘You were going to have to take it off at the Sanctuary,’ said Raeven. ‘After tonight, you’ll never wear it again anyway, so why do you care?’

‘It is a priceless relic of our family’s legacy,’ said Albard. ‘And it’s ruined. I was to pass it to my firstborn upon his coming of age, and he to his.’

The inevitable escalation of their squabbling was averted by the arrival of an officer of the Dawn Guard and a mismatched squad of troopers. Some still wore portions of their ceremonial armour, and they looked like a troupe of comic actors playing soldiers.

‘My lords,’ said the officer. ‘We need to get you out of here right now.’

‘What for?’ said Raeven. ‘The mallahgra’s dead, and if the azhdarchid’s hasn’t been killed by now I’ll be very surprised.’

‘True, my lord,’ answered the officer, ‘but from what I understand, a Serpent cultist detonated an electromagnetic bomb on the Via Argentum.’

‘And he had his head blown off,’ pointed out Raeven. ‘So he’s probably not too much of threat now.’

‘It’s unlikely he was working alone,’ replied the officer. ‘He will have accomplices.’

‘How can you know that?’ demanded Albard.

‘It’s what I would do if I was planning to assassinate Lord Devine.’

Raeven slapped a hand on the officer’s shoulder and grinned at his brother. ‘Good to know we’re being protected by men who’re thinking of ways they might kill us, eh?’

The officer blanched, and Raeven laughed.

‘Lead on, my good man,’ he said. ‘Before the Serpent cult sees us all dead.’

Escorted by three hundred heavily-armed soldiers, Albard and Raeven made their way through the fortified precincts of the Dawn Citadel. What should have been a measured, triumphal approach to the Sanctuary was instead made in haste, with every man alert for the possibility of another treacherous attack. They traversed three more gates, each opened just wide enough to permit them passage before being slammed shut.

At the heart of the citadel was the Sanctuary.

Where the rest of the Dawn Citadel was built from the same ochre stone of the mountains, the Sanctuary had been constructed by Molech’s first settlers, and its structure bore little resemblance to the fortress raised around it.

That it was ancient beyond imagining was clear, its circular plan evident in the geodesic dome that had clearly once graced the hull of a starship. Almost the entirety of the Sanctuary’s structure had once been part of an interstellar vessel – its structural pylons scavenged from the ship’s superstructure, its walls from exterior hull plating and its towering black and silver gates from some vast internal chamber.

This was the gateway to the Vault Transcendent. When the Knights of Molech rode to battle, they sallied forth from this portal.

The Sanctuary had been added to and embellished over the millennia since its construction, and what might once have been functional and drab was now garlanded with colourful banners, steel-formed gargoyles and bladed finials. An Imperial eagle banner streamed from a spired cupola at the dome’s centre, with flags bearing the heraldry of the various Knightly Houses arranged around it on a lower level. The symbolism of the banners’ arrangement was obvious, and Raeven marvelled at its lack of subtlety.

When the Emperor snapped his fingers and called the people of Molech to war, they had no choice but to answer.

Was it just him who was angered at the dominance evident in the way every element of Imperial iconography was elevated beyond that of Molech? Surely he couldn’t be the only one to see it, but it appeared he was the only one who cared.

Grand processional stairs of black iron began at either side of the main gateway, circling around the building before meeting above it at a smaller circular entrance – one more suited to the scale of mortals. This upper entrance irised open and twin columns of red-robed Sacristans emerged, descending the stairs to bring the sons of Lord Devine to their Ritual of Becoming. Raeven put aside his resentment towards the Imperium as he imagined riding through the Transcendent Gate, hardwired into his own suit of Knight armour.

He glanced over at Albard, expecting to see the same flush of excitement in his scarred features as he knew must be evident on his own.

But his brother’s face was deathly pale and a sheen of sweat coated his skin.

The Chamber of Echoes was not named for its acoustic properties, though they were impressive enough. Raeven’s booted footfalls rang from the distant ceiling, a suspended canopy of thick cables and hissing pipework like jungle creepers or an impossibly vast nest of snakes. The floor was a patchwork of steel grilles, deck plates from the forgotten starship that had been cannibalised to create the structure of the Sanctuary.

A dim ultraviolet light shone through the pipes above, and flickering electro-flambeaux burned in iron sconces that had once been the piston covers of an engine housing. Two enormous mechanised thrones stood upon an elevated rostrum at the heart of the chamber, arranged so that those who sat upon them would be facing each other.

‘The Throne Mechanicum,’ said the acolyte who had led them within, ‘through which you will each bond with your armour.’

They made several circuits of the internal structure of the Sanctuary, shedding their accompanying Sacristans as the robed acolytes of the Mechanicum took up positions throughout the building in preparation for the ritual. Eventually, only one was left, a shaven-headed drone who normally attended their father.

Without needing to be told, Raeven knew which of the Thrones was his, and he climbed the iron steps of its heavy, drably functional machinery to sit down. No sooner had he done so than heavy steel bands snapped into place at his ankles and wrists. A silver cowl rose from the rear portion of the throne and slipped smoothly over his head. Raeven felt the heat of electrical contact as whirring cable plugs slotted home in the input sockets bored into the back of his neck and spine.

The sense of invasive penetration was sharp and cold, but not unpleasant.

With connection established, Raeven blinked as he heard a susurration of half-heard voices around him, as though an invisible host of distant observers had silently entered the chamber to witness his Becoming.

‘My lord,’ said the Sacristan, gesturing to the throne opposite Raeven’s.

Albard nodded, but made no move to climb the steps to his throne.

‘What’s the matter, brother?’ said Raeven. ‘Nervous?’

Albard shot him an angry look. ‘This isn’t how it’s supposed to work,’ he said. ‘The catechisms, the words we are to speak. This isn’t what I expected.’

The Sacristan nodded. ‘Given the unfortunate incident before the Argent Gate, Lord Devine has instructed us to dispense with much of the formal ritual associated with the Becoming.’

The Sacristan’s tone left no room for doubt as to what he thought of that particular instruction. Like their Mechanicum overseers, the Sacristans were great respecters of tradition, ritual and dogma.

‘But that’s to help us bond with the Knight armour,’ protested Albard.

‘Lord Devine felt you would be more than capable of establishing a connection without it,’ said the Sacristan. ‘He was most insistent.’

Albard swallowed hard, and Raeven savoured his brother’s discomfort. Normally as brusque and arrogant as their father, to see him so obviously frightened was a rare treat.

‘My lord, if you please,’ said the Sacristan.

‘Alright, damn you,’ snapped Albard, finally climbing the steps and sitting upon his throne.

The restraint mechanisms fastened around his brother’s limbs and the silver cowl rose to envelop the upper portion of his skull. Albard jerked as the communion umbilicals slotted into his body, grimacing as their whirring mechanism scraped the infected skin around his input sockets.

Raeven’s eyes met Albard’s, and he allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction as he saw the weakness deep within his brother – buried, and all but invisible to most people who knew him. But it was there now, horribly exposed and glaringly obvious.

‘Ready, brother?’ said Raeven.

Albard said nothing, his jaw clenching and unclenching in fear.

Satisfied that both men were secured within their thrones, the Sacristan leaned down and whispered into Albard’s ear. Such were the perfect acoustics of the chamber that Raeven heard every word, and his eyes widened at the look of horror on his brother’s face.

‘The Serpent Gods live,’ said the Sacristan.

Dawn was making its way up the valley as Cebella Devine watched Lyx climb the steps to the high walls overlooking the scene of the previous day’s carnage. Cebella’s huscarl bodyguards were keeping a respectful distance, and she felt her heart race as Lyx approached.

‘Is it done?’ asked Cebella, without turning to face the girl.

‘It is,’ confirmed Lyx.

‘And?’

‘There were... complications,’ said Lyx, clearly relishing the look of irritation that flitted across Cebella’s face.

‘Don’t draw this out, Lyx. Tell me.’

‘Raeven imprinted successfully. His Knight is a colt in the stable, wild and strong.’

‘And Albard?’

Lyx paused, her face a mockery of loss. ‘It grieves me to say that after the incident on the Via Argentum, Albard’s mind was unprepared to endure a night in the Chamber of Echoes.’

‘Does he live?’ asked Cebella.

Lyx nodded. ‘He does, but his Knight refused to bond with him and the bio-neural feedback from that rejection has irreparably damaged his mind. I fear he is lost to us.’

Cebella finally deigned to face Lyx and the two women shared a look that an outsider might have mistaken for shared grief, but which was in fact shared complicity.

‘Your pet Sacristan made quite a spectacle of himself,’ said Cebella at last.

‘A man will do foolish things for the sake of lust,’ agreed Lyx.

‘But he failed to kill Cyprian,’ said Cebella. ‘Impaled twice and the cantankerous old bastard still breathes. I almost admire him for that. Almost.’

‘Yes, Cyprian still lives, but look at what Raeven achieved,’ pointed out Lyx. ‘The people saw him stand and fight a mallahgra with only a powerless sword. From such tales are legends born.’

‘Do we have need of legends?’

‘We will,’ said Lyx, as a momentary dizziness swept through her and she blinked away the image of a fiery amber eye and a sweeping storm that stretched from horizon to horizon.

‘Another vision?’ asked Cebella, extending a hand to steady her.

‘Perhaps,’ nodded Lyx.

‘What do you see?’ demanded Cebella, keeping her voice low.

‘A time of great change is coming to Molech,’ said Lyx. ‘It will be many years from now, but when it comes, a terrible war will be fought. House Devine will play a pivotal role in it.’

‘Raeven?’

‘He will be a great warrior, and his actions will turn the tide of the war.’

Cebella smiled and released Lyx’s arm. She looked up into the lightening sky and pictured the worlds over which her son would claim dominion. Lyx was not the only Adoratrice to have the sight, but her secret powers waxed stronger than any that Cebella had known before.

‘You have grand ambitions for your twin brother,’ said Cebella.

‘No more than you, mother,’ said Lyx. ‘No more than you.’