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.