‘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 Only the Mechanicum priests had the knowledge required to maintain such outdated technology, but they had little interest in servicing family heirlooms.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.