The Imperial Truth

by Laurie Goulding

  '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 flesh 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, sharklike 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. Raeven dropped Albard's sword as 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, he'd have seen my angry side.' 'Lucky for it then.'

  'If father hadn't intervened and given it such a swift death, 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 d
eployed 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 electro-magnetic pulse on the Via Argenturn.

  '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.'

  The bomber was a Sacristan, and he was a Sacristan 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 xenos 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 electro-magnetic 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. 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.