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.