by John French
All without point, he thought, all defending an empty throne.
All of it was unfolding and growing with an unstoppable momentum. One thought occupied him now.
A king comes and goes as he pleases,+ Sar’iq had said.
But where are you, sire? he thought. His sight swept the city but no black tower broke from the mist. Why are you not here? The hour approaches. You should be here. Where are you?
No answer came, and the city went on and on blurring past and growing anew in front of him.
What if it is not this world that needs protecting? What if it is you? What if you are trying to protect us from a greater truth? He had struggled with that thought for days and weeks, even as the rest prepared for war. It itched at him, and he could not control it. Not with all the meditation or spear practice that time could offer. As each moment passed he expected to hear the summons in his mind and look across the city to see the black tower. No summons had come, and the question ticked through his mind and grew louder.
Where are you?
He turned around the flank of a tower which had grown barbs of silver. A circular plaza opened before him, stretching half a kilometre to the opposite wall of towers. A golden seal in the shape of a rayed sun covered the centre of the plaza. He slowed as he saw figures running from the centre of the seal, blue and white robes fluttering as they shouted in alarm. Not all were running, though. Gaunt figures in red stood at the edge of the disc. Haloes of flesh-metal tentacles waved above them like anemones sifting ocean water. Chrome skulls looked out from their hoods.
He paused, as he realised what was happening. A clank shook the ground. Knekku saw figures fall on the edge of the golden seal. The ring of machine-wrights raised their heads and tentacles to the sky, and he heard their static shrieks rise. The seal broke. Vast petals of metal sank down and spun away with a boom of gears. In the distance he heard the sound repeated nine times across the city. A figure rose from beneath the ground, straightening even as it was hoisted into the light. Liquid blue fire tumbled from its carapace like womb fluid. Gears the height of men twitched and juddered as it unfolded its weapons. Its head rose last, a lone beak of metal and bone with eyes of red light. It looked across the square and up at the encircling towers, and then turned its vast gaze to where Knekku hung in the air above it.
The daemon Titan roared, and its voice shook the aether.
Knekku’s disc bucked beneath his feet before his will stilled it.
Greetings, Czetherrtihor,+ sent Knekku, the sending low but filled with authority.
The Titan shook its head, and a second silent roar shivered across the city. Other calls answered, booming out with chained rage and pride. Knekku watched as Czetherrtihor stepped back, its armour plates shivering through colours. The machine looked at Knekku and bowed its head with a creak of metal.
Knekku nodded in return, and watched as the daemon machine strode from the plaza trailing a caravan of figures in red.
Knekku…+ He froze at the sound of the thought in his skull. +Knekku…+
He turned slowly, his skin prickling. He had forgotten what had been drawing him through the city. While he had watched the Titan rise, he had forgotten his worry, and the reason for it.
Sire? My lord Magnus?+
The black tower was there, rising high above the tops of the others. It looked thin, as though it were both taller and further away than he had ever seen it.
Knekku, I…+
He rose higher, and his disc burned the air as it soared towards the black tower. Knekku kept his senses looking on the shape as it grew above him. He did not want to think about what he had heard in Magnus’s summons. The voice in his skull had sounded stretched, cracked, broken. It sounded like it was dying.
IX
Voices
Calculus Logi Prime Lensus Marr spent his days and nights watching the void around the Eternal Warrior. Arrays of auspex and aether-sifts fed their output into his ears and eye sockets. Hundreds of lesser sensors reached out into the void, and ran data into the nerves linked to his ears and skin. He received a filtered summary of the output of all of the tertiary sensors, and occasionally directly reviewed the function of his subordinates. There were thirty-five calculus logi divided into four gradations who sat on each of the lower tiers of the sensorium dais. Marr sat at the top, his eyes plugged into thick creepers of cable which hung from the roof of the bridge above. His fingers flexed on the arms of his chair, the tips trembling in sympathy with the signal returns riding his nerves. He chewed his tongue, an old habit and one that he had never tried to shake. It was unimportant to his function, and that function was to see, sense and feel anything that moved around the ship. He had performed this function for sixty-one years.
The Eternal Warrior had been holding its position for seventy hours. It was not alone, but as the only battle cruiser in the sentinel group, it was the fulcrum around which the half-dozen other cruisers, light cruisers and frigates turned. The nearest – and only – stellar body was a rogue planet which sat in the void without sun to orbit or moon to circle it. The nearest stars were distant pinpricks, their radiance barely enough to cause a hum in his sensors. It was a dead reach of space, devoid of anything but banks of dust and gas, and the unmoving bulk of the rogue planetoid. There was nothing for millions of kilometres that did not move with total predictability.
To Marr, the space he watched was quiet. Worse, it was dull. It was a long way from his days of hearing the scream of reactor death and feeling targeters trying to find their mark. There was no reason to be where they were. Except, of course, for the fact that the Inquisition had bound the Eternal Warrior and its sisters to stand guard over this reach of space. Marr did not know the reason. To know more than was needed to serve was to risk one’s soul, but that did not mean he had not formed an idea. His task and purpose was to listen and watch, after all. He heard signals, and saw the rare comings and goings of the other ships that came to this place.
Then there were the anomalies. Clouds of light had appeared in the darkness several times during the Eternal Warrior’s vigil, billowing up across the stars like the edge of a storm covering the sky. Few others on the warships had seen them, but Marr had. He had glimpsed faces in them, vast faces locked in moments of rage and pain.
There were voices too, but Marr was not alone in hearing those. Often they were just howls: cold, and high, and filled with the promise of blood and ice. They shivered down the passages of the ships, and woke men and women from dreams of yellow eyes and sharp teeth. The commissars kept a careful eye on all the crew. Marr had seen a junior officer shot on the spot when he said that he could hear the howls all the time.
The true voices, when they came, were worse. They sounded so real, always so close but always from just beyond sight. They pleaded. They begged. They screamed.
Other incidents plagued the Eternal Warrior and its sisters. Objects moved when not being watched. Statues in the chapels wept silver and blood. Rust and soot formed patterns on the walls of the hull, patterns which brought bile to the mouth and pain to the eyes. The Black Priests moved through the ships muttering and scattering ash and water on the decks after these incidents. They were a strange breed, sable-clad and armed with straight silver-edged swords. Marr presumed the Inquisition had sent them. He did not like them – where the Black Priests walked, even the commissars moved aside and averted their eyes – but watching and listening to them had told Marr a secret. The Eternal Warrior and its battle group were guards at a gateway to somewhere else, somewhere forbidden to all.
Marr was comfortable with that fact. It added to his purpose: he was the eyes and ears of a sentinel of metal and fire, and nothing would pass without him seeing it. Or so he told himself.
When something did happen, he did not notice the first sign for several seconds.
Out at the edge of his sensor range two chunks of interstellar debris began to move.
Each was an irregular lump of dust and ice no larger than a battle tank. A drift of similar debris hung in a band around the rogue planetoid. They were too small and too few to present a hazard to anything of significant size, and their movements were so slow and predictable that Marr did not often bother to observe them.
But two of the lumps were now moving. Marr watched them slide one way and then back, before beginning to tumble in place, faster and faster.
He extended his sensors, calling aloud to the enginseers for more power for his instruments. Even as he did so other pieces of debris began to move, juddering and sliding in the vacuum like beads on a drum skin. The dust clouds began to swirl, slowly at first and then faster. Curtains of light slid out of the blackness, shimmering as they grew. Marr felt his mouth open to call an alert. The debris and dust were spinning, the sheets of light blazing between green and turquoise. His tongue began to move in his mouth. And froze.
No. I am afraid that will not happen.+ The voice was low and felt like it was speaking from just behind him. He tried to twist around, to pull the sensor feeds from his eyes. He could not. His body remained where it was, placid and unmoving, just as it had been for the last seventeen hours of his vigil. He could not move, he could not speak, he could only watch, and what he saw stabbed ice through him.
A cascade of light had swallowed the stars. As he watched, a slit opened in its surface, then another and another. Silent shapes slid through, pulling strands of sickly colour with them. It was a war fleet. On the bridge around him he heard no alarms, no voices shouting for guns to prepare to fire, no warnings, no panic.
There will be no warning,+ said the voice. Marr heard a clink close by, and knew that the loose rivets in his dais were rattling in their fittings. +You, and your underlings, and all of your kind on the other ships are mute. You are all seeing this but none of you will speak of it.+
But the astropaths and the Navigators, thought Marr. They will feel the warp displacement. They will see…
The Navigators will never waken, and the astropaths are dying even as you watch this.+
And Marr suddenly felt other images slide into his mind, like a dream unfolding while awake. He saw the chambers in the Navigator enclave, nutrient tubes enfolding their sleeping bodies. He saw them twitch and the liquid in the tubes cloud with blood. He saw the astropath chambers, and the withered men and women struggling to rise as smoke poured from their mouths, and their skin began to blacken and blister.
No, no this cannot be! Someone must notice, someone must realise.
No one will realise. No one will know that we are here. We have come too far for the likes of you to bar our path.+
Why? he thought. Why are you telling me this?
Because if your sensors die then someone on the bridge of your ship will notice. So, you see, you must live and watch a little longer.+
Marr saw that the ships were free of the holes they had bored into reality. He watched as the heat grew in their engines, and felt data roll into his awareness as their weapons armed. And still the bridge around him was silent.
But why tell me?
He heard a chuckle, and felt an echo of cruelty in his head.
Because someone should know that we return to our home, even if that witness is just you, Lensus Marr.+
He saw lights flare across the spines and prows of the closing ships as torpedoes and shells spat into the void.
My name is Ahzek Ahriman, and we are the sons of Prospero. We have come home.+
The first shells hit the Eternal Warrior. Marr found he could now scream, an instant before his vision blanked to white fire.
Silvanus steered the ship alone. Neither Ahriman nor the Circle rode in his mind. They had been with him as they left the remains of the Imperial ships burning at the threshold point. They had still been with him as the fleet jumped into the warp again, towards Prospero. He had felt them leave him as they rode the channel through the churning tides. They had watched through his eyes and then dropped away, one by one until he could feel just one presence at the back of his perceptions, and then he was on his own with the storms which cradled Prospero.
Sorrow and fury spun the Word of Hermes. To Silvanus the tides were cliffs of black and white blocks, shattering and reforming without cease. Sometimes the clear passage between them narrowed to almost nothing, and a jagged spur of storm would graze the ship. Silvanus would gasp then, and tumble over and over. He saw faces, thousands and thousands of faces painted in blood, lit by fire, melting under burning rain.
‘Why did this happen?’
‘Please, let her live, please…’
‘Why do this to us?’
‘You die here, dog.’
‘Why…?’
With each voice and sight which slammed into him he felt more confusion, and anger, and rage. The other ships of the fleet might be with him or might not. Without the psychic connection of Ahriman and the Circle, each ship was alone on the tides. It did not matter, though. They all had only one place to go to.
He and the ship rode the storm, rolling in the spill of wrath and bitterness and regret. He wanted to stop, but kept on, feeling a ship the size of a city creak and sing in time with the voices of a murdered world.
‘I am sorry,’ he found himself whispering to the tempest, and in the solitude of his own mind, and the warp-lit gloom of his navigation chamber, Silvanus Yeshar wept and did not know why.
Ahriman stood and watched the light of the oil lamp wash the wall behind it. For a second he traced the pattern of shadow and flame with his senses, tasting it for meaning and significance. There was none. The flame was just a flame, and the shadow just a pattern on the wall.
Everything in the chamber was still. Even the thrum of engine and shield was a muffled note on the edge of hearing. Helio Isidorus watched him from beside the door. The Rubricae’s bulk was a sketch in the darkness, the gold and lapis of his armour glimmering only dimly.
The Circle had withdrawn into the solitude of their own minds once the final step of the voyage was under way. None of them had said a word of what they were doing, and where they were going, since they had turned the Imperial sentinel ships to wreckage.
This is it, he thought. We will see our home again.
Ahriman placed his staff on a weapons rack. The blackness within its core shrank to a line in his mind’s eye. Building the Black Staff had been a great undertaking, almost as great as obtaining the Athenaeum. But for all the time, effort and blood both of those endeavours had cost, they were only components of the larger whole.
Prospero will have changed, but will we have changed more?
He pulled the helm from his head.
There is no turning back. There never was any turning back.
He glanced around, suddenly filled with the sense that he had heard something.
There was just Helio Isidorus, statue still, watching without seeing.
‘There are parts of you which are not wholly yours any more,’ Iobel had once said to him, ‘parts which think and dream outside of your skull.’
‘Are you there?’ he asked, the sound of his own voice hollow in the dark. ‘If there was a time for you to show yourself, this would be it.’
Nothing moved, and the only sound was the hum of his armour. He waited, but no figure in red robes stepped from the shadows. Eventually he let his eyes drop and walked to the small chest which sat in the corner of the bare room.
He knelt, and carefully opened the lid. A helm looked back at him, its beak blackened by soot. He took it out, and placed it on the floor. He pulled back a layer of fabric and looked down at the two objects which lay beneath. His hand hesitated as he reached for the silver oak leaf, but when he lifted it there was no sensation, no flaring of past pain or loss. He looked at it for a second, and then slipped it into a small silk pouch and tied it to his waist.
When he picked up
the scarab he did not hesitate, but his will hardened as his fingers closed over it. He watched the dim light find the cracks and chips in the jade. Slowly he reached his will into the stone, feeling the layers of sediment which had made it. He felt the slow tides of tectonics which had led to its birth, and the clink of metal which had brought it into the light of a world. And amidst the murmurs of its past he felt the ghost of a touch, a single moment of connection between the scarab and the mind of Magnus the Red. It had been given a purpose in that moment, and that purpose lingered. It had been part of a connection linking together all of the Thousand Sons in the instant they had been transported from Prospero to their refuge in the Eye of Terror, to the Planet of the Sorcerers.
Ahriman closed his hand. The shape of his mind changed. The scarab began to glow with heat. Inside his thoughts he spoke a word, and brought the glowing stone down onto the armour above his hearts. Heat flared in his chest, and the armour shrilled a warning as its surface began to melt. He pressed harder, and the scarab sank into the metal and ceramite. The thought in his mind ended. The shrill of the armour’s damage warnings vanished. He opened his hand. The carved jade was already cooling from red to dark green, and the molten armour had flowed into a spiral setting to hold the scarab in place on his chestplate.
Ahriman…+