CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
The Lords of the Seven stood close together in a circle in the dim stone chamber, lit only by the sole shaft of light pouring down through the oculus in the ceiling, and faced each other silently, donning their all-black robes and black hoods. Immortals, beings who had led the Empire through century after century, who had been there all the way back at the Great Forming, these seven men stood in the shadows, on the periphery of the sunlight, silently staring into it, as they had for millennia.
For millennia, they had stood there and stared into the light, seeing visions, watching the past, forming the future as it swirled through the dust in the light, deciding on a course for the Empire. These beings represented the four horns and two spikes of the Empire, and the sev
