Ahriman: Unchanged

by John French

  He rose and whirled, lightning balling in his fingers, eyes searching for a figure in a red robe.

  Ahriman’s gaze met the glow of Helio Isidorus’s eyepieces.

  Ahriman…+

  He could hear the creak of armour as the Rubricae took a slow step across the floor.

  Be still,+ Ahriman commanded.

  Ahriman…+

  Cold poured up his spine.

  Be still!+

  Ice coated Helio Isidorus. Ahriman felt the spirit within the armour writhe, and felt its wild panic flood across the link between them.

  …Ah…ri…man…+ the voice rattled, and the Rubricae shook in place.

  Ahriman poured his will into a command to be still, to be silent, to go back to watching without seeing.

  They…+ The voice was a choking gasp of psychic meaning. Ahriman could feel desperation and confusion wash from Helio Isidorus. +They… voices… calling… me…+

  The Rubricae went still. Ahriman breathed out slowly, and his breath was white as it touched the air.

  I am sorry, my brother.+

  He listened, but there was only the low pulse of armour and ship. Except… just there on the edge of perception was another sound, a murmur like a cry caught in a wind.

  Voices.

  Voices he recognised from a time now so distant that it almost seemed unreal.

  ‘We are coming, my brothers,’ he said aloud to the dead. ‘We are coming.’

  ‘I do not want to go back.’ Ctesias felt himself swallow after the last word. The eyes of the Athenaeum stared at the space just over Ctesias’s shoulder. Its mouth was moving, but it made no sound.

  Ctesias nodded, as though the figure in the cage had answered. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the door, his armour in a low power cycle.

  ‘I thought I would not care.’ He snorted. ‘Why would I? I was not born on Prospero. What time I did spend there was just that, time spent. Not like you.’ He paused, and deliberately nodded. ‘Sorry, I mean not like Sanakht. He was born there, and learned how to look at the universe from the top of its pyramids. It gave him his name, his blood, his Legion. To him it would have meant something. Something like it means to Ahriman, and Gaumata, and the rest.’

  Ctesias shook his head, and then let it roll back against the collar of his armour.

  ‘Perhaps if I had shared that beginning, then I might have been different. Perhaps I would have been one of them, one of the high circle of the Legion in the Great Crusade, one of the favoured, respected not just for power but for wisdom.’ He laughed, a dry sound, which turned into a cough. ‘Perhaps not.’

  He let out a breath, and felt his eyelids flutter involuntarily.

  ‘I do not want to go back. I do not want to do this.’ He shook his head. ‘But what choice do I have?’ He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, yes, quite right. I have the same choice as ever. I have none. None. And I am not alone. Show me a living soul that believes that he has choice in anything, and I will show you the universe’s greatest fool.’

  The great spherical cages tinkled with a note just on the edge of Ctesias’s hearing. The tides of the warp were running wild and strong. At least here the wards and bindings placed on the chamber kept the worst of it at bay. At least here there were no voices.

  ‘Ahriman is so certain,’ he said after a while. ‘He can see salvation. For him it is already real. We just need to construct it, to turn it from design into reality.’

  His eyes closed as a dull throb pulsed in his temples. The efforts of his last preparations were still exacting their price. That had been one of the reasons he had told himself that he had come to the Chamber of Cages. In truth it was the only place on the ship he wanted to be at that moment, and he was not sure why.

  He shook his head again and picked a pebble from a pouch at his waist. It was small and grey, and unremarkable in every way except that it came from an island of mountains on a world of oceans and ice. A carved serpent wound across it, clutching a rune in its jaws. It had not always been Ctesias’s, but it had been his for longer than it had belonged to its first owner. Far longer. He began to roll the pebble across the backs of his fingers, not looking at it, not looking at anything.

  ‘It is worse than before,’ he said. ‘Worse than the first time we prepared to cast the Rubric. He is more certain than he was then. Belief like that is like a fire, liable to reduce everything to ashes. The others… Sometimes I wish I saw things their way, belief is so much more comfortable than doubt. And Ahriman is so certain… Not just that he can do it but that he has seen all the possibilities and corrected all the flaws. I suppose we have you to thank for that. All the insight he ever needed into the craft and knowledge of Magnus… I suppose a level of confidence is probably justified.’

  He gave a snort of laughter, but the sound was weary and held no humour. The pebble clacked slowly through his fingers.

  ‘Sanakht must have believed him. Even though he sided with Amon, the seed of belief in Ahriman must have been there. Otherwise why would he have done what he did?’

  The Athenaeum turned its head slightly, so that its blind eyes were on Ctesias. Its lips paused in their silent mutter for an instant.

  ‘I envy him. He believed. I just obey.’

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  ‘You know, I never cared that the Wolves came for us. Oh, I cared that they burned the place that had given me knowledge and could give me more. But I never saw it as unjust. It was completely justified.’

  He laughed.

  ‘I did not even mind the hypocrisy of their shaman ways. We were, and are, sorcerers, and we live for power and to make ourselves more powerful. That is the way we were then, and the way we are now. Most of the others just liked to believe that we had a better reason for what we did.’

  The pebble was still in his fingers. He flicked it up and caught it between forefinger and thumb.

  ‘I took this from one of them when they came to burn my pyramid. Almost the only thing left of him after I was done. All I could think of was that it was Magnus’s fault, him and the rest of the Sekhmet. They had made it happen, the Wolves were just the reaction. I remember thinking that if I had stood where they were, I would not have been so blind. I would have done what was needed by necessity not ideals. I was thinking that as I pulled the Wolves apart. The last one had a hooked axe, and hair that rattled on his armour because of the stones plaited into the locks. I took just this one. Never lost it since. Never tried to keep it, either. Somehow it is just still here, still with me.’ A small flicker of psychic energy clicked between his fingers and the pebble. ‘That is just the way of things, I suppose. Things remain that you were not expecting.’

  He went silent, and the Athenaeum continued to mutter without replying.

  Silvanus pulled the ship from the storm as much from instinct as knowing that they had reached the end. Its hull glistened as the Geller fields folded out of being. It sat in the void, ringed by lightning, the stars behind it hidden by washes of gas and dust which moved faster than anything in space should. The star at the heart of the system was a sickly point of yellow light. He slumped in his navigation cupola, his eyes open, but not focused.

  The storm has followed us, he thought. Roiling banks of energy rolled just underneath the surface of the vacuum, filling his third eye. Or perhaps it was always there and he had only… only just noticed.

  A balled mass of fatigue and pain was rising to fill his skull. He would need to find the drug injectors before it got worse. Sweet blank unconsciousness: no more than he deserved. His task was done. It would take time for the rest of the ships to arrive, and then it would take days to cross the gulf between where they had exited the warp and the planet. There was still so much that would happen, but whatever happened now he did not have to have a hand in it.

  He reached out, his fingers trembling as they found th
e comms switch and opened a vox-link.

  ‘This is Silvanus.’ He paused and licked the sour spit from his lips. ‘We are here.’

  Ahriman strode down the corridor, thought commands spilling from him as he moved. Helio Isidorus followed in lock step.

  The ship felt tense.

  When do we move to the planet?+ sent Ignis as he fell in beside Ahriman. The Master of Ruin’s surface thoughts were spinning in tight patterns. Ahriman noted that Ignis had not used their destination’s name.

  We move once the others are with us. The Pyromonarch just translated from the warp, and the rest will not be far behind.+

  The shuttles and landers are beginning their launch cycles.+

  Ahriman sent a pulse of acknowledgement. He knew that the servitors and thralls had begun the launch preparations, and he knew that Ignis knew he knew. The Master of Ruin was talking because he wanted to, not because he needed to. That was worrying.

  They walked a few steps further, the buzz of their armour masking the silence. He could sense Ignis forming another statement, his mind spinning through configurations of words.

  There is something you wish to say, brother?+

  It is calm.+

  Calm?+

  The warp. Ctesias was correct. It is highly unstable, and the closer to the system the more unstable it should be. I know this. I can see the progression.+

  Ahriman nodded.

  Your point?+

  It is calm and it should not be. The warp and the presence of the planet should be trying to tear us apart.+ Ahriman said nothing. He knew, and he thought he knew why. Ignis waited a full minute before speaking again. +It feels like it is holding back. Like it is waiting.+

  Ahriman nodded.

  It is,+ he said. +It is waiting for us.+

  Ctesias felt the transition back to reality as a soft thump in his guts. He looked up to the ceiling, eyes latching on to a distant point that he could not see but knew was there. He sat for a second, the rune stone still in his fingers, and then stood slowly.

  ‘Here we are,’ he muttered, still looking up. He blinked, gave a single nod, tossed the rune stone into the air and caught it. He looked at it again for an instant as it sat on his palm. The rune for life looked back at him from between the serpent’s jaws.

  ‘All…’ said the Athenaeum, and the word pulled Ctesias’s head up. The Athenaeum was standing in its cage, staring up at the ceiling. ‘All…’ it said again. ‘All my sons… however did it come to this?’ It looked at Ctesias. Its eyes had turned cold blue from edge to edge. Like stars. Ctesias could not move. His thoughts stopped. ‘You will return to me. When it begins you will return to me. And then you will remember what I have been telling you.’

  X

  Conversations

  The remains of the Imperial sentinel fleet spun in cold, expanding spheres. Building-sized portions of rockcrete and plasteel turned over beside the dots which were bodies and parts of bodies. In time the debris would fall into the weak embrace of the orphan planet, but until then it would mark the site of their failure.

  The ship came to the massacre site with caution, picking through the debris like a mourner searching for one corpse on a battlefield. It was a small craft, barely half a kilometre in length, and its hull was black and the crew which moved through its companionways and chambers wore dark hoods crossed with crimson and white. This was no simple warship, but a vessel that had been drawn into the service of the Inquisition and never returned to the wars of its former existence. It had taken a new name when it had taken on this duty, and its original name had been purged from the records. It was called the Blind Throne, and it had circled the gateways to Prospero for decades, checking the status of the sentinel fleets, always staying out of sensor range, tasting the aether with cadres of astropaths whose abilities far exceeded the norm for their kind. For those who guarded the secret of Prospero, the Blind Throne was the answer to who watched the watchers.

  It took forty-seven hours for it to find what remained of Calculus Logi Prime Lensus Marr.

  He woke to pain and the sensations of needles.

  said a half-machine voice. Marr could not see, and his attempts to move produced only shrill agony.

  ‘Do not try to move,’ said a croaking female voice, and the hard edge in the words made Marr’s thoughts freeze. ‘You do not have any limbs, or heart, and half of your skull is open.’ The cold fact in the words slid past him.

  What was she talking about? What was happening? Why was he–

  ‘We don’t have time, and you are going to die very soon, so I need you to focus. I need you to tell me everything you remember about how the fleet was destroyed.’

  He began to tell her but no words came, only a frantic scratching. He stopped, fresh panic filling him.

  What had happened to his tongue? What had happened to his limbs? She had said he was going to die.

  ‘You have no jaw or tongue, and your words are being transcribed by an auto-quill wired into what remains of your neck. Speak and we will see what you say. Focus on my voice, and tell me what happened.’

  He told her. He told her as the pain of needles began to crumble into an ache, and then to vanish. He told her all of it, and the only sound besides her questions was the clatter and scratch of a machine-quill moving across parchment.

  He paused when there was almost nothing left to say. He could not feel anything any more.

  Strange, he thought, with a cold detachment, a lifetime immersed in seeing and feeling more than any other creature and now it’s all gone, and I don’t miss it. I feel free. I feel relieved.

 

  ‘What was the last thing the voice told you?’ the female voice asked, controlled, but insistent.

  ‘It said…’ The sound of the quill scraping across the parchment stuttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It said they were the sons of Prospero. It said they returned at last. It said…’

  The quill went still, leaving only the soft noise of the parchment continuing to spool onto the floor.

  In the last grey instants of his life, Lensus Marr heard the female voice talking.

  ‘Send the beacon messages. Maximum import. Summon the rest of the sentinel forces. The Fifteenth Legion has come back to its grave.’

  Marr’s final shred of thought was a question which no one would ever hear.

  Why… why did they tell me who they were?

  Blackness cut the thought adrift, and assured that it would never be answered.

  The Changeling shrugged itself free of one face and took another. The last face had been that of a female human who served as a deck officer on the ship. She had not been ideal, but she had eventually allowed it to find a more suitable mask: the face of a human with authority.

  On the bridge it had moved amongst the banks of servitors wired into their consoles, nodding to the other humans that crossed its path, and ignoring the robed tech-priests tending the cliffs of machinery. No one noticed anything wrong. The Changeling waited until it reached the wide deck beneath the command throne.

  The human who sat atop the pile of worn steel was a lump of fat beneath a velvet uniform. The Changeling looked up at the commodore, and threw a salute.

  ‘Second Lieutenant Cordat reporting as command tier officer of the watch, commodore,’ it said.

  The commodore’s eyes shifted down to the Changeling, black pearls in a boulder of a face.

  ‘Yes, yes, stop flapping your hand and mouth, just get on with it.’ The commodore flicked a thick-fingered hand at the other human in an officer’s uniform standing at a dais at the base of the command throne.

  The Changeling approached the da
is, came to attention and offered a bow. The officer standing at the dais returned it before offering a baton covered with fine circuitry and moulded reliefs of stars and eagle wings. The Changeling took the baton, bowed, straightened and walked to the dais with precise high steps. The other officer did the same but away from the dais.

  Far off, in the cavern of the bridge, a great bell began to strike. Once it had stopped the Changeling slotted the baton into a port on the dais and applied the required blow to its brass casing.

  ‘Command tier watch assumed at the third striking of the hours. All is well in the great embrace of stars.’

  ‘Ruddy pantomime,’ growled the commodore. He coughed and then pointed down at the Changeling. ‘Hail the Defender of Truth, and find out why it’s taking them this long to give me a ready status. The whole group should have been prepared to translate six bells past. In fact I know the answer. It’s because Helical should have been thrown into the bilges before he got that ship under his arse, and he is probably struggling with the basic concept of forming a thought. But…’ he smiled and inlaid silver hawks glittered on his teeth, ‘we must observe the niceties, mustn’t we, Mister Cordat?’

  ‘Aye, commodore,’ said the Changeling, edging his words with the artificially dutiful tones of a man who really wanted to be more than a lieutenant. Just as Cordat would have done. The commodore’s lip twitched with irritation.

  ‘Hmmm.’ The commodore narrowed his eyes. He did not like the face that the Changeling wore. The dislike was to be expected, and meant nothing other than that the Changeling’s masquerade was perfect. The commodore opened his mouth to say something else, but the words never came. Raised voices came from the edge of the command platform. The Changeling turned to face a crowd of figures half dragging, half carrying a thin figure in a green robe.

  The Changeling came forward, arrogance fuming from his every movement.

  ‘Halt, and state your purpose before advancing,’ he called. Behind him the commodore snorted, but said nothing.

  A human in the uniform of a senior armsman stepped forward.

  ‘We are bringing him,’ growled the armsman, and jabbed the claw of a brass and plasteel augmetic at the green-robed figure lolling between two armsmen. Blood spotted the green robes and spit hung from the man’s lips in a sticky string. It was one of the mind-mutilated psykers that the Imperium used to communicate across the vast reaches of space. This one had only a few more years of nightmare and life left in it before it burned out, but for now the drooling human had enough in it to play his allotted role.