The Emperor's Angels radiated such terrible menace that Drew felt death brush the nape of his neck.
In that instant he found himself—and the high-born like him—faintly ridiculous. They had actually dared to threaten His Majesty the Savior, the Sun of the Imperium—a being before whom even daemons quailed.
No wonder they had invited a punishment this cruel.
Perhaps my life ends here—and House Ovelia will be purged as well, he thought through the fear.
It was possible. The Empire's New Sun had shown a will that brooked no compromise.
Forgiveness might be beyond reach.
But there was no choice left to him; only obedience remained. Any other path would end worse.
"Yes. I am Drew Ovelia. I will come with you—and accept whatever judgment His Majesty decrees."
The candidate-heir swallowed, forced his posture to hold, and shuffled on trembling legs as the Angels marched him inward.
He clung, barely, to his poise.
Along the way he passed nobles who could no longer walk, being dragged instead. The corpses on the floor were worse—stark, undeniable.
Drew recognized one at a glance: a scion of ancient Terran blood, heir to a marquisate, bearer of a tax-immunity writ signed by the Emperor Himself.
More exalted than Ovelia.
That man had tried to bargain with frontier defense lines and the lives of hundreds of billions, and had quietly backed the Ascolon revolt.
It had availed him nothing. His house was ash; his body lay discarded like trash.
CRUNCH—
An Angel's boot came down without the slightest deviation, bursting the noble's head like a melon. Augmetic eye, micro-gear, syrupy nutrient slurry splashed out.
Drew flinched as filth spattered his face.
He did not wipe it away. He did not even twitch. To draw notice would be to invite the bolt.
The Savior held the nobility's fate in his fist. The only prayer was for a sliver of clemency.
Punishment? Humbling? So be it—so long as they were not uprooted to the last branch, like those who left not even a seed behind.
Drew, like the rest, was truly afraid.
In all the ages since the Imperium's founding, no one had moved with a ruthlessness like the Savior's. Not even the creeping rot of Chaos had killed them all.
Word told of a Nurgle heretic who fled into the Plague God's Garden itself—and was still found, and somehow dragged out.
They had "cleansed" him with sanctified waters, destroyed the living plagues in his flesh one by one, perfumed him with sacred candle-wax…
Then strapped him atop a Holy Tower beneath a merciless sun. For a Nurgle cultist, there was no torment worse.
He died screaming.
There were many such tales.
Any soul bearing the rebels' blood—however faint—was marked. It was harsher than executing nine clans at once. They even dug up graves.
In fact, the New Sun had gone that far: Titan god-engines had leveled the chapels on Holy Terra where the proscribed lines interred their ashes.
They opened the bones of their forebears and scattered them in the streets for feet to grind into dust.
Drew shuddered.
Nobility was nobility because of the sanctity of blood. They revered their ancestors and treasured the name; that lineage was their credential.
To see ancestral ashes flung to the wind—this was a blow to the mind few high-born could endure.
Now, the image of the Savior that lived in their hearts was terror itself: relentless, absolute.
Any who were not loyal would be remade into nothing.
So the nobles in the great hall had learned docility.
Drew was brought through the hotel's interior into one of the suites refit as a "little black room"—what the Inquisitors, with a certain humor, called a luxury suite.
Down the corridor he glimpsed the implements of sentence; the screams bled together; the stink of blood overwhelmed even his nasal filters.
"I'm finished," he whispered, wobbling on his feet.
He could see the shape of his fate: torments that would break flesh and will alike until he disgorged every secret the Savior wished to hear.
He cursed himself, briefly, for not pledging sooner—had he only turned to the Sun earlier…
Too late now.
He even wished the corridor would stretch on forever, so he would never reach the door.
But the Angels halted before one and steered him to it.
His suite.
"Drew Ovelia. Enter and submit to questioning."
The Angel's vox was flat, metallic, without room for speech.
Drew lifted his head as if through water.
He did not look into his own chamber—but to the next door along, where another noble waited, pudgy and sweating.
Armageddon Sector. House Tartarus. They had once distinguished themselves in the First Armageddon War.
Drew traded a last, empty glance with the man—
—and then both were shoved through separate doors. The alloy portals boomed shut.
Inside the luxury suite.
"By the Emperor…"
Drew's breath snagged. Racks of instruments. Old blood that no cleaner could quite erase.
A pane of glass showed the sister suite across the hall—the fat noble he had just seen.
Connected rooms. So that one sees the other's judgment… to press the mind with fear, to break it faster. The thought came unbidden.
He had no time to think further. Two interrogators closed and injected him with a tailored cocktail—peeling back trained mental screens, leaving his limbs heavy and weak.
Brewed precisely for nobles drilled in memory discipline.
He knew, now, he was meat upon a board.
They strapped him—hard—into the chair.
"Drew Ovelia. Thirteenth child of the Ovelia patriarch—an interesting number. Core member of the Lacas Pan-Sector League…"
A figure in a jet-black coat with a red armband took the far seat. Immaculate. Eyes like a hunting hawk.
And smiling.
A cruel smile.
Drew's gaze stuck to the armband. That mark belonged to the maddest Inquisitorial faction in the galaxy.
The ones who had just pulled the rebel houses up by the roots.
His throat worked. He tried to beg… but fear had cut his voice.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
The Inquisitor rapped the table lightly, then slid a steaming cup across. His tone was gentle.
"Don't tense up. Drink first. We have time."
That made it worse. It felt like torment of another flavor.
Drew's hands shook as he lifted the cup. He clenched his teeth and swallowed it all—like taking a poison willingly.
"…It's… actually good," he thought, absurdly, as warmth slid down.
…
Across the glass.
The Tartarus noble watched as "the other one"—someone of his same class—was shown a chair… and even poured a hot drink.
The manner seemed almost… civil.
"Maybe it's just questions?" He clutched at a straw and loosened a fraction.
He pasted on a servile grin. "Inquisitor, my lord—I am loyal! I pledge absolute fealty to His Majesty the Savior. Whatever you—hey—HEY—"
The words drowned under the first blows of the cudgels. He jerked as they stuck him with a sensitivity ampule—multiplying all bodily sensation a hundredfold.
Every pain was now a hundred pains.
Before he could even form a plea they had locked him to a spiked frame. Barbed hooks bit his flesh; shock-batons crashed down in searing arcs.
A towel smothered his face. Drukhari-derived capsaicin wash sluiced into nose and mouth.
His scream tore the air. It filled the "suite."
This, the attendant noted, constituted the West Ice Vault Hotel's complimentary cudgel massage and facial treatment.
Merely the starter. The menu had many courses.
"K—khh—cough—Inquisitor, my lord—I'll confess—I'll tell you everything—I'm l-loyal—!"
Between spasms he shrieked himself hoarse, mind shattered by the disparity with the room he could see—and by his remorse for having opposed the Savior at all.
He would have begged for faint, or death.
"You can still shout. That means our service is inadequate," the torturer said with a thin grin. "Enhance the package."
"No—!"
His howls rose again and again.
None of it bled into Drew's room; the sound-dampening was perfect.
Seated, facing away from the glass, Drew never knew what unfolded across the hall.
He did feel the anxiolytics sink their hooks—his bodily panic eased, his thoughts steadied. The cup had done its work.
"Tell us everything you know concerning House Ovelia—particularly any part that touches disloyalty. Concealment will carry consequence."
The Inquisitor's voice was level now, the questions clipped and exact.
Drew crushed the tremor from his words and spoke.
He named the quiet arrangements, the hidden accounts, the illegal concessions; he laid out the lines of influence and the little schemes that bent Imperial law.
He held nothing back.
Guilt or innocence before statute seemed almost beside the point. What mattered, he realized, was his attitude—and whether the Savior would deem him worthy of a sliver of mercy.
The questioning ran on for days. They asked him, outright, whether he was loyal to the Savior; what he made of the New Order; how he would act henceforth.
His answers never wavered—
Loyalty. Only loyalty.
They had him copy the Savior's aphorisms by hand, hundreds of times, and chant them until they flowed like water from his tongue.
Then the psykers took him—mind-rake and soul-probe to test for lies. The pain flayed his thoughts raw.
He endured. He passed.
At some point beyond time, the end came.
The Inquisitor closed his dataslate.
"My questions are concluded. The Urth Inquisition will apply penalties to House Ovelia in accordance with the evidence you have provided."
He fixed Drew with a look—and, to Drew's surprise, a faint smile.
"Lord Drew—return to the hotel floor and await His Majesty's arrival. And remember: be grateful."
They escorted him out. The gore-streaked corridor gave way to the glare of opulent daylight.
For a breath, he felt reborn.
He remembered the implements and the executions; he understood that his earlier choice had been right.
But for the gifts sent before he set foot in the hotel—and for the pledge he had already made—the questioning would not have gone so gently.
House Ovelia would still be punished.
But the bloodline would live.
I would live.
Back in the great hall.
Many nobles waited in a haze of dread, bracing for verdicts to fall.
Then the vox-throats rang with a cold voice:
Those remaining in the hall had been provisionally judged loyal.
His Majesty the Savior—the Hope Primarch, the Sun of the Imperium—would arrive in two Terran hours to discuss the Empire's course, and the allocation of webway profit.
A carrot after the cudgel.
"Praise the Savior!"
Relief rippled through the high-born, an after-the-flood joy—and, unexpectedly, a prickle of gratitude.
They had been granted a reprieve—and even a seat at the webway's table.
Their families' dark futures had a pinprick of light.
Drew's hand found the little booklet of Savior's maxims in his breast pocket. "His Majesty grants us redemption," he whispered.
Gratitude swelled despite himself.
"Your Majesty the Savior—Sun of my heart!"
Across the hall, the pudgy Tartarus noble—post-ordeal, eyes wild with a new and awful reverence—crashed to his knees, nose and tears running.
"Your kindness… House Tartarus can never repay!"
He was not alone.
—
Aboard the dark-golden grav-limo.
"Deville is vicious," Eden said, half in awe. "The high nobility will take me for a demon in a crown."
Which was the point.
The Savior's mercy was for loyal Imperial souls—not for rebel lords who worshiped profit alone.
Not long before, Eden had sent word: Deville was to rein himself in.
A necessary leash.
The threat had reached its pitch; the political alliances were shattered. Press further, and despair might drive the nobles to burn everything down.
Worse: purge too many at once, and swathes of the Imperium would lie hollow—
A banquet for xenos and Chaos.
The aristocracy were not wholly worthless. Many were elite-schooled administrators; many more were the backbone of Imperial armies. They were—however wayward—a part of Imperial power.
The proper course was to seize control, keep the loyal, and kill the unforgivable.
In short: gather the strength one needs—many vassals, few enemies.
Now, the Savior's personal authority towered like a mountain. The reforms and webway commerce would push forward smoothly.
Within the Empire's bounds, no one would dare gainsay him.
Such concentrated power had eluded even the Emperor Himself; in those days He bargained with the Mechanicus and courted great houses—
To say nothing of the… unruly primarchs.
But now, when the Savior said east, none dared step west. This was an Emperor in truth.
"Time to harvest the fruits."
Deville the mad dog had broken the Empire's factions and taught the hotel's guests the curriculum.
Now Eden could go and "negotiate."
By day's end the great houses would suffer various sentences and disgorge mountains of wealth.
The rules of succession would change as well—from a single heir to shared inheritance among first, second, and third sons:
A Partition Edict.
It would blunt the consolidation of power, frustrate monopolistic dynasties, and keep Imperial strata from freezing solid—while tightening the center's grip.
As for deeper reforms—unnecessary.
He was a dictator-emperor. Parliaments and vote-houses and power-sharing would only bleed the Empire's strength.
He needed authority—now—to face the galaxy's fangs, not the Emperor's former fetters.
A new frown touched his brow.
When this was done, he would have to go to the Dark Angels' marches.
The Gloaming Marches—especially the tracts bordering the Eye of Terror—were first on the imperial reconstruction slate; stability there was non-negotiable.
But the latest intelligence was grim: an unknown Chaos legion had struck—and the strategium's augurs foresaw a horror descending.
Something that would not die.
Before long the grav-limo slid into the West Ice Vault's private tunnel.
The Savior—Imperial Emperor—alighted. Flanked by honor guards, Custodian Wardens, and the lightning-helmed elite, he strode slowly into the great hall.
(End of Chapter)
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