‘Your father too, and mine,’ pointed out Lyx.
Their mother’s womb had ejected Raeven mere minutes before Lyx, but sometimes it felt like decades. Today was such a day.
‘I’m aware of that,’ he said, pausing just before he reached the upper landing of the tower. ‘I want him to see the woman who replaced his own mother on one side, his former wife on the other. I want him to know that everything that was and should have been his is now mine.’
Lyx slipped her arm through his, and his mood lightened. As she had done since they were suckled babes, she knew his moods and needs better than he. To her loving populace, her beauty and body were sustained by calisthenics and subtle juvenat treatments.
Raeven knew better.
Many of his wife’s long absences into Lupercalia’s hidden valleys were spent undergoing nightmarish chirurgical procedures administered by Shargali-Shi and his coven of androgyne Serpent Cultists. Raeven had witnessed one such operation, a dreadful blend of surgery, alchemy and carnal ritual, and vowed never to do so again. The Ophiolater claimed to channel the Vril-ya, the power of the Serpent Gods once worshipped all across Molech in an earlier age. Raeven didn’t know if that was true or not, but the results spoke for themselves. Though nearly sixty-five, Lyx could easily pass for less than half that.
‘The serpent moons grow ever fuller,’ said Lyx. ‘Shargali-Shi will call the Vril-yaal to gather soon.’
He smiled. A six day bacchanalia of intoxicating venoms and writhing hedonism within the hidden temple caverns was just what he needed to lighten the coming burden of planetary command.
‘Yes,’ he said with a grin of anticipation, and all but bounded up the last few steps.
The entrance vestibule of the topmost chambers was dark, the two Dawn Guard standing sentinel at the onward doorway little more than dark silhouettes. Despite the poor light, Raeven knew both of them; soldiers from his mother’s personal detail. He wondered if they’d shared her bed, and judged it more than likely from the conspicuous aversion of their gaze.
They stepped aside as Raeven approached, one opening the door for him as the other bowed deeply. Raeven swept past them and moved through richly appointed antechambers, medicae bays and chambers of observation.
A trio of nervous Sacristans awaited them at the entrance to Albard’s private rooms. Each was red-robed, in imitation of their Mechanicum masters, plugged with bionics and rank with sweat and grease. Not quite Cult Mechanicum, but too altered to be thought of as human either. If not for their rote maintenance of the Knights, Raeven would have advocated their elimination years ago.
‘My lord,’ said a Sacristan Raeven thought was called Onak.
‘Does he know?’ said Raeven.
‘No, my lord,’ said Onak. ‘Your instructions were most precise.’
‘Good, you’re a competent Sacristan and it would have irked me to flay you alive.’
All three Sacristans moved aside with alacrity as Raeven pushed open the door. The air that gusted from within was musty and stifling, a fetor of urine, flatus and insanity.
A deep couch with a sagging footstool was set on the edge of a dimmed fireplace that was entirely holographic. Upon the couch sat a man who looked old enough to be Raeven’s grandfather. Denied sunlight and the rejuvenating surgeries of his half-brother, Albard Devine was a wretch of a human being, his skull hairless and pale as newly-hatched maggots.
Before his mind had snapped, Albard’s physique had been robust and stocky, but now he was little more than a drained revenant of parchment-dry flesh sunken over a rack of misaligned bones.
Albard had been cruelly handsome, bluntly so, with the stony harshness people expected of a warrior king. That man was long gone. A gelatinous lesion emerging from the burn scars he’d received upon his maturity leaked yellow pus into his long beard. Clotted with mucus and spilled food the beard reached almost to Albard’s waist, and the one eye that stared at the fire was jaundiced and milky with cataracts.
‘Is that you, Onak?’ said Albard, his voice a tremulous husk of a thing. ‘The fire must be dying. I’m cold.’
He doesn’t even realise it’s a hologram, thought Raeven, and his mother’s assurance that his half-brother would be in a state of relative lucidity seemed dashed.
‘It’s me, brother,’ said Raeven, moving to stand beside the couch. The stench of corruption grew stronger, and he wished he’d brought a vial of Caeban root to waft under his nose.
‘Father?’
‘No, you idiot,’ he said. ‘Listen closely. It’s me, Raeven.’
‘Raeven?’ said Albard, shifting uneasily on the couch. Something rustled beneath the couch in response to Albard’s movement, and Raeven saw the thick, serpentine body of Shesha. His father’s last surviving naga shifted position with creaking leathery motion, a forked tongue flicking from her fanged mouth. Well over two centuries old, Shesha was in the last years of life, near blind and her long, scaled body already beginning to ossify.
‘Yes, brother,’ said Raeven, kneeling beside Albard and reluctantly placing a hand on his knee. The fabric of his coverlet was stiff and encrusted, but Raeven felt the brittle, bird-like bones beneath. A haze of filth billowed from the coverlet, and Raeven felt his gorge rise.
‘I don’t want you here,’ said Albard and Raeven felt a flutter of hope that his half-brother was at least in touching distance of sanity. ‘I told them not to let you in.’
‘I know, but I have something to tell you.’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘You will.’
‘No.’
‘Father is dead.’
Albard finally deigned to look at him, and Raeven saw himself reflected in that glossy white, hopeless eye. The augmetic had long since ceased to function.
‘Dead?’
‘Yes, dead,’ said Raeven, leaning in despite the rancid miasma surrounding Albard. His half-brother blinked his one eye and looked past his shoulder, now aware of the presence of others in the room.
‘Who else is here?’ he said, sounding suddenly afraid.
‘Mother, my mother,’ said Raeven. ‘And Lyx. You remember her?’
Albard’s head sank back to his chest, and Raeven wondered if he’d drifted off into some chem-induced slumber. The Sacristans kept Albard moderately sedated at all times to keep the ravaged synapses of his brain from causing an explosive aneurysm within his skull.
‘I remember a whore by that name,’ said Albard as a rivulet of yellowed saliva leaked from the dry gash of his mouth.
Raeven grinned as he felt Lyx’s rising fury. Men had endured days of unimaginable agony for far less.
‘Yes, that’s her,’ said Raeven. He’d pay for that later, but more and more he relished the punishment more than the pleasure.
‘Did you kill him?’ said Albard, fixing Raeven with his rheumy gaze. ‘Did you kill my father?’
Raeven looked back over his shoulder as Cebella and Lyx drew closer to better savour Albard’s humiliation. His mother’s features were unmoving, but Lyx’s cheeks were flushed in the light of the holographic fire.
‘I did, yes, and the memory of it still makes me smile,’ said Raeven. ‘I should have done it a long time ago. The old bastard just wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t hand me what was rightfully mine.’
Albard let out a wheezing exhalation of breath as dry as winds over the Tazkhar steppe. It took a second for Raeven to recognise the sound as bitter laughter.