The Imperial Truth

by Laurie Goulding

  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 pre-determined 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 the Imperial Commander to his subiects.

  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 hands.

  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 out 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 unpredictab
le, they said.

  Volatile was another word that they might use.

  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 it.

  From a distance, Knight armour was impressive. Up close, it was 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 archive records 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, where 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 electro-magnetic pulse expanded in a dome of deadening force, shorting out every technological 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.

  Raeven blinked.

  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 dea
d 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, 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 electro-magnetic 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.