more oppressed. It was not the monolithic architecture, for I had ventured almost as far on previous occasions. Like all my order, I knew the twisting ways of the Inner Palace perfectly. I could not place the source of my unease, but it had grown with every step, and that troubled me.
Now, poised on the threshold of the final gate, I could feel cold sweat-lines running down my neck. My blood was pumping in my temples.
‘The Hataeron are with the Emperor,’ said Heracleon, speaking the words as if they were some rite of ascension. ‘They alone see Him with mortal eyes. Once inducted into the brotherhood, they never leave His side.’
I understood that. I had known it from the very beginning. Such a sacrifice would have been worth it a thousand times just for the certainty that it was His desire for me to serve there.
But I felt nauseous. The air was thick, shimmering with heat and psychic afterburn. The very stones were swimming in it, blazing with it. For a moment, it felt as if they were screaming at me.
‘Brother?’ asked Heracleon. ‘Do you hear?’
I nodded, working hard to remain focused. This was all part of the first trial. I had to remain calm. If it were not difficult to pass the threshold, then all might do it.
‘And so the first step is the greatest,’ the tribune went on. ‘Take it, and witness the most profound sphere of duty.’
The Companions parted. For a moment, I saw the Last Door ahead of me. Its surface was black and pitted, fused together from old ceramite. In the centre, where the two doors met, an ebon face had been carved. It was a human face, austere, mournful, encircled with a halo of fire.
Then the image split in two, and the doors swung inwards. I saw what lay beyond – ranks of pillars, marching into a mist-thick distance. I saw the energy-feeders, each one the size of a Titan, hanging from the stalactites of the unseen roof. I saw the power lines, ribbed and massive, coiled across every surface like engorged serpents. The air was golden, thick as milk, spilling out of the doorway like a tarnished sunrise.
Through the haze, the swimming motes of power, I laid eyes on the nexus itself. It was hard to gauge size in there – everything shook in a heat-tremor of psychic intensity. I saw impossibly old panels, fluted like organ pipes, rising up and up through the mist, webbed with patina and repeatedly repaired. I saw arcs of lightning snap and twist, and blood-cyclers wheezing, and smelt a pervasive stench as sweet as rotting meat.
And somewhere in the heart of that titanic construction, somewhere in the midst of the stacked terraces and the baroque platforms and the gantries and the forests of cabling, lost like a pearl in the heart of some obscene mechanical clamshell, I glimpsed just a slip of flesh, a shred of hairless grey, perhaps a scalp, perhaps the fragment of a face, buried under it all, slaved to it, dominating it, dominating everything.
I tried to take a step, to move through the gate, and felt the air shimmer against me.
I lost the vision. The gold bled out of the air, and I felt my focus shatter.
‘Take the step,’ said Heracleon.
I couldn’t move. My mind instructed my body, but it didn’t obey. Every attempt to pass that doorway resulted in the same dreadful pressure. I raged against it, bringing all my strength to bear, but it was like trying to force myself through stone.
I withdrew, and the pressure relented.
I could see Heracleon looking at me quizzically.
‘You do not obey,’ he said.
I turned shakily to face the tribune, having to concentrate just to keep my footing. I felt drained and humiliated, and could not hope for my brothers to understand it. I was not accustomed to failure, but there was no way I could cross that threshold.
‘I… cannot,’ I said, which was just about all I could get out.
Then I turned my back on the Throne, for as long as I had lived the object of all my devotion, and stumbled back out into the dark.
Aleya
I came too late. In all that happened afterwards, the blood and the folly, I think that remains the hardest burden to bear.
I had a sense of it from a long way out. I’d taken the interceptor back up into the hull of my transport, the Cadamara, and ordered the captain to make full haste back to Arraissa. It