of my bed sliding from sweaty limbs.
‘Lights,’ I said, and three pearly suspensors glowed into life.
My room was in disarray, and for a moment I thought it had been ransacked. Then I remembered the events of the evening, the entertaining company and the copious wine we had all sunk, and discounted that.
I got up blearily, pulling on a robe and twisting the sash around my fleshy waist.
‘Report,’ I ordered, speaking into the comm-bead implanted in my wrist.
‘Violent incursion in sector lamba-sept of the Inner Palace,’ came the voice of the duty officer, a man named Rivo Jemel. ‘Countermeasures enacted, but severity required notification.’
‘I’ll be there,’ I said, slipping on shoes and reaching for a heavy cloak. ‘Send me the coordinates.’
Then I was running. I was not a good runner, you will not be surprised to hear – I waddled like an overfed fowl, my loose shoes slapping on the polished floors. As I went, as part of standard procedure, I was joined by members of my household guard, who jogged along behind me in deference to my uncertain pace.
The destination was close. I reached an internal groundcar transport and we bundled inside it, then hurtled down the transit tubes towards the inner ring of the Palace interior. Through brief flashes from the armourglass portals I saw the high spires streak by through the night, their flanks lit with sodium glare-points.
My earpiece was by then full of shouted orders, incoming reports, exclamations of surprise and horror. They had all known about the widespread disorder beyond the walls, but to have something take place inside – that was something else.
I let them jabber. I was already ahead of them, notified first and in the best position to act. The groundcar slammed into its terminus, now deep inside the Senatorum Imperialis complex itself, and we disembarked. The six guards fanned out around me protectively, and we plunged further in, racing through half-lit anterooms and audience halls.
I knew them all. Perhaps more than any mortal man then living I knew how to get from one side of the labyrinth to the other, and so we made swift progress. By then I could already hear the snap of lasgun impacts, followed by the crash and splatter of priceless things breaking.
We broke into a semi-ruined chamber, thick with old dust and the faded remnants of some Telech-era frescoes. The suspensors had been blown, and so we saw what happened only through whirling pools of head-mounted lumens.
They were servitors – huge, vat-bulked servitors with heavy chainglaives. They had been stamped with the livery of the Palace, wore their ragged uniforms over obscenely muscled bodies, and were rampaging, storming down the centre of the long room like enraged groxes. I estimated twenty of them were loose, charging at a nervous line of Palatine Sentinels arrayed at the far end.
My guards crouched to fire, levelling lasrifles.
‘Hold,’ I said, walking out beyond their protection. The barrage of comm traffic in my audex-feed was giving me information they couldn’t have heard, and I felt a tremor of excitement, tinged with terrible fear.
I knew, you see, what was coming next.
He broke through at the far end of the chamber, where the Palatines were, and instantly rendered them superfluous. Great panelled doors smashed back on their hinges, rammed hard against the walls and splintering. Light flooded through the opening, dazzling and iridescent.
He looked magnificent. If I’d not been so blindsided I might have fallen down and worshipped that apparition. He moved like something out of legend – far faster than I was able to follow, impossibly fast for his huge bulk, a whirlwind of gold and black. The air screamed around him, blazing from where his great blade scythed and burned.
He cut through the servitors as if they were nothing at all, just random tatters of useless machinery thrown up as an affront to his immortal dignity. I could barely even follow how he did it – the movement was so ludicrously quick, so horrifically powerful – and even then I had the sense that he was barely tested.
He flung his spear out wide and sent three of them – three of them – sailing into the far wall to crunch and slither in a tangled mess. He punched out, breaking the neck of a fourth, then blasting a fifth with the stave-mounted bolter. The noise was incredible, a wall of snarling plasma-burn that seemed to wreathe him in a cloak of distortion, and yet he said nothing at all.
Only mindless servitors would