by Various
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.
But it hadn’t escaped completely, and its systems were struggling to reset.
‘Typical,’ said Raeven. ‘Just when I need you most...’
He dragged Albard’s sword from its heavy scabbard, but cursed when he realised it was an energy sabre, and therefore now useless. The blade didn’t even have an edge, relying upon disruptive energies to cut through an opponent’s armour.
With a crash of splintering timber, the azhdarchid finally tore itself free of the yoke securing it to the skimmer carriage.
‘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 fresh 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, shark-like 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. 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, I’d have taken its whole arm off.’
‘Lucky for it then.’
‘If father hadn’t intervened, 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 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.