Ahriman: Unchanged

by John French

  ‘I have made a mistake,’ he muttered.

  ‘Were you talking to me, or simply failing to maintain your grim silence?’ Avenisi padded at his heels, pausing occasionally to stare into the distance at something he could not see. ‘How consistent the mortal temperament is.’

  Knekku blinked, and shook his head without looking at the creature.

  ‘That was what Magnus said before he vanished.’

  ‘Oh, I thought it was you reflecting on the choices of your life.’

  ‘Do you have a use besides mockery?’

  ‘Yes, but you have seen my better side before.’ It leapt up onto the step in front of him and flicked a glance back at him with five of its nine eyes. ‘It did not seem to be to your taste.’

  Knekku stared at it, and then stepped past the creature and continued to climb.

  ‘These stairs go nowhere,’ he said after a time.

  ‘They go everywhere, so long as you walk in the right direction.’

  ‘Then guide me,’ he snarled.

  ‘I am no Lord of Change,’ said Avenisi, and he could hear the shrug in the words without needing to see it. ‘The ways of the Labyrinth are not for me.’

  ‘But you walk it with me.’

  ‘The Labyrinth is for you. I can’t even really see it without you being here. I see it because you see it. You are reaching nowhere because you are going nowhere.’

  ‘If you will not give me aid, then give me silence.’ The weariness was now clenching in Knekku’s muscles and bones. He wondered if it meant that he was running out of time. Perhaps he was lying on the floor of his tower, the blood flowing from his pierced heart faster than his body could heal. Perhaps out in reality he was dying. He had to reach the end, though; somehow he had to find the Crimson King. Whatever had happened to his liege lord he would find him, and help him. What else should a son do for his father?

  He walked on, his thoughts turning over as steps passed under his feet. After a moment he realised that he could not hear Avenisi following him. He looked behind him. The creature sat nine steps lower down, ears cocked, staring at the fog beside the steps.

  ‘He is here. Within the Labyrinth.’ Avenisi twitched its eyes to him, and he had the distinct sense that it was waiting for a response. Knekku did not reply. The creature tilted its head, the gesture unsettlingly human. ‘You wanted me to help you, didn’t you? And you were starting to doubt that you could find Magnus here. So there you have it, I have given you aid rather than silence.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because the Labyrinth knows. Everyone and everything is here. It’s just a question of where.’

  Knekku shivered.

  He could not think clearly. His vision was swimming. How long had he been here? How many steps had he already trodden? How many more would it take before he found… anything?

  ‘There is no time for this,’ he said, turning away and beginning to climb again.

  ‘Because at any second the Planet of the Sorcerers might be attacked and laid waste? Here there is all time, Knekku. Everything has already happened, and nothing has happened yet.’

  Knekku glanced around. The landscape of stairs and steps had changed again. There were shadows lurking on the undersides of spurs of steps. He had the feeling that he was suddenly at the centre of a crowd, none of whom he could see.

  ‘How do I find him?’ he asked, the question feeling almost like surrender.

  ‘Once you have begun a path, the path itself does not matter. Why you walk it is everything.’

  ‘The clichés of wisdom from the lips of a daemon,’ snorted Knekku.

  ‘The rebuke of an all-knowing sorcerer who is lost in a simple puzzle.’

  Knekku felt his jaw clench, and raised his foot to take another step. Avenisi sighed, the sound conveying all the disappointment of a mother with a stubborn child.

  ‘At least try to trust me in this.’

  He whirled back around.

  ‘Trust? You talk to me like a simpleton, but I trusted you before and was rewarded with treachery, or have you forgotten?’

  ‘We don’t forget,’ said Avenisi calmly. ‘We can’t. That’s what happens when you are born of a realm without time. Everything happens. The order of it means nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Yes. Nothing. I would have thought that your millennia at the foot of the Crimson King’s throne would have taught you that. I followed you and served you as your tutelary. I helped you and guided you as I had to, and then I did not need to any more.’

  Knekku stared at the feline creature’s eyes, and remembered it as he had known it long ago: as a golden-winged presence circling his mind, like a tethered angel, and then how it had been the day that Prospero burned, when it had shed its angelic skin, and beneath had been a capering figure with spindle limbs, and a head like a crescent moon. It had laughed as the fire ate Tizca. That had been the last time he had seen the daemon.

  ‘If your nature is now as a guide, then perform your function.’

  It nodded and stretched, the human gesture blurring smoothly into the feline. Knekku waited while it blinked, yawned, and then cocked a single emerald eye at him.

  ‘Why do you seek the Crimson King?’ it asked. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Loyalty,’ he said without hesitation.

  Avenisi nodded.

  ‘Well, that is something.’

  He almost laughed, but he was feeling tired; sweat was thick on his brow and running into his eyes. He had never felt fatigue like this in the mortal realm. He wiped his eyes as he climbed another step. And froze.

  A corridor of crystal extended away from him to a vanishing point. The walls reached up to a night sky without stars or moon. Slowly he turned around. The corridor continued behind him to a point where it curved out of sight. There was no sign of the silver mist, or the steps he had been standing on. Light seeped from the crystal, and neither he nor Avenisi cast any shadows.

  ‘This seems like progress,’ said Avenisi. Knekku kept his eyes on the corridor ahead. He still felt fatigue, but it was more distant. The sensation of being watched had grown, though.

  ‘Who sent you to help me?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Asking that question again will not mean that I can give a different answer.’

  Knekku began to walk.

  I seek the Crimson King, he thought. I am here to help him, because he is my master, because he is my father, because I am loyal, because I am his son.

  Time and steps passed, or at least seemed to pass. He looked at the walls as he walked. His reflections walked with him, bouncing between the walls so that he was one of an infinite line of himself stretching away to where he could not see. When he noticed that some of the reflections were different he stopped looking, and kept his gaze on the way ahead. Even then he was sure that the reflections were looking at him.

  They passed through to junctions of many corridors, and doors which opened in many directions. At each of them Avenisi would ask him a question. What did he want most? What was the earliest memory he could recall? What was the taste of water in a dry throat? Some of the questions he could not remember after answering them. Sometimes he could not remember what he answered.

  They kept walking.

  The sky changed. Stars came and went. Snow fell for a while, spiralling out of a blue sky and melting when it touched his face. The meltwater tasted like honey.

  And they kept walking.

  He saw things. Even without looking at his reflections, things loomed in the space within or beyond the Labyrinth’s walls.

  Once, the crystal became utterly clear, and landscapes opened up to either side of him. On the right was a world of harsh sunlight and tall mountains. Battlements and fortresses scaled the mountainsides until they became towers pointing at the sun. He saw warriors in bronze armour move on th
e battlements, and saw their red pennants ripple in the wind. On the left was the hold of a warship. Servitors and robed tech-priests moved beneath towering hoists and cliffs of machinery. He watched as black and scarlet boarding pods were winched from the deck and lowered into the breeches of launch tubes.

  He walked on, and the walls clouded to ice and silver again.

  There were others in the Labyrinth. He saw their faces in the crystal. The first time he saw Ahriman he almost came to a halt. The Exile was there walking towards him out of a wall which had become slick black. Ahriman held a horned helm under his arm and a staff in his hand. The features of his face were unchanged, but there was something different about him: something broken, but also something bright and sharp, something that clung to his eyes. Knekku forced himself to keep walking forward until they were almost touching. Then the corridor curved away sharply, and the image of Ahriman slid past, and was gone.

  Others came and went, some clear, some clouded and indistinct. He knew some of them – Khayon, Hathor Maat, Arvida – but others were strangers who slipped away without him knowing why their images had come to him. A half-machine woman with a mask of cracked red lacquer seemed to follow him for a long while before melting back into blank glass.

  When the corner came, he took it without thought. He stopped, for a second uncertain if what he was seeing was a reflection beyond a dead end wall or if it was real.

  The walls flared out and curved around to define a small, circular space. He could see no exits, and when he turned it seemed as if the way behind him had closed. Only when he stepped back did the perspective change so that he could see the opening he had just passed through. At the centre of the space a figure sat beside a fire. A tattered red robe covered its body and a deep hood hid the face beneath. The dried branches crackled in the flames, popping and sending sparks into the air.

  Avenisi pushed past his legs, and walked to the fire. The robed figure raised a hand and stroked the creature’s head as though in familiar greeting. Knekku noticed that the fingers were twisted, and stick thin. He hesitated, and stepped closer. The crystal walls faded to shadows.

  The robed figure looked up as Knekku approached. Beneath the hood a single bright blue eye looked out of a face of scar tissue.

  ‘Greetings, Knekku,’ said Magnus. ‘It is good to see you again, my son. I am glad you found me.’

  ‘No,’ said Knekku, shock and anger rising against his fatigue. He forced the feelings down, forcing his own eyes to stay on the lone eye that was watching him. Control, he thought. Control is everything. This is just another trick of the Labyrinth, another stage to finding the Crimson King. ‘No. You are not him.’

  His father smiled, and gave a small shake of his head.

  ‘That very much depends on how you look at things.’

  The mountains found Iobel before she could reach anywhere else. They had begun as black smudges lurking beyond the heat shimmer, and Iobel had thought them a mirage until she noticed that they did not fade when the heat and light drained out of the day. The shadow of the peaks had grown larger with each cycle of sun and moon, until she had been able to see the light gleaming from their flanks. Then the sun rose, and they were there biting the sky above her like broken, black teeth. They had no foothills, no gentle rise of gradient before they stabbed upwards. The sand simply ran until it touched the sheer cliffs at their base. She walked until she could reach out and touch the black stone. It was warm, as though it stored the heat of the sun. Sand had frosted its sheen, but the edges of its spurs and cracks gleamed.

  She walked along the cliff base for two more cycles of light and dark before she found the opening. It was a cleft, a little wider than the span of her spread arms, and it seemed to run from the heights above all the way down to the desert floor. Cool shadow and windblown sand waited within. She hesitated before stepping in. She had come far, but still she had found nothing, and all she had were the cryptic words of a phantom child and the sense that the city on the horizon was waiting for her.

  Go to the beginning of things. That is where all things lead in the end.

  ‘All very well,’ she muttered to herself, ‘but very difficult to do without knowing where you are going in the first place.’

  Her hand went to the pocket of her robe without her thinking. The splinter of carved wood was there, its broken edge sharp against the tips of her fingers. Holding the piece of wood had become a habit when considering her progress, or lack of it. She took it out, looking at the birds flying across its surface. She pursed her lips. Every time she looked at it, it was both more and less familiar.

  ‘The beginning of things for Ahriman? For me? For Magnus?’ She shook her head. ‘For the Thousand Sons? For the Imperium? Where do things begin anyway?’

  She put the shard back in her pocket. The opening waited before her.

  ‘All right,’ she said, and glanced back at the trackless sand of the desert. ‘All right. The only way when in doubt is forward, yes?’ A trickle of sand blew past her into the dark cleft. ‘Or something like that.’

  The cool dark slid over her as she stepped into the mountain. For a moment she was blind as the brightness of the desert sun made the shadows pitch black. She waited until it passed, and began to move forward. The walls of the cleft were smooth and covered in ripple patterns which reminded her of the tracks left in silt by a retreating tide. Beneath her feet the sand continued to cushion her steps. The light from the top of the crack was a hair-thin line, but was enough to see by. Just. After a while she looked back. She did not think she had been walking for that long, but the opening in the cliff face was now a distant sliver of brightness. She turned and pressed on.

  She had been prepared for the light above to vanish as the desert beyond fell into night, but it did not. Instead it was the sound that changed. At first there had just been the sound of her footsteps on the sand-covered ground. Then she noticed that there was another sound, a distant murmur that could have been running water, or wind, or muffled voices. There was no water or wind, though, and if there was anyone there she could not see them. The sound grew, and faded, and grew again, and at last vanished. The silence came next. Total silence without the sound of steps or movement, so that she felt as though she was not walking but standing still while the black glass walls pulled past her. She thought of the silence as night after a while, but was not sure why.

  After sound returned, she stopped. She told herself she was resting, and then rebuked herself for the lie. She needed no rest. She was not alive, and if she was weary it was because that was part of the mindscape around her: she was tired because she was not sure that she had made the right decision. The entrance to the cleft was no longer visible behind her when she looked. That ended the half-formed thought of going back.

  The carvings of doors began soon after she started walking again. The back of her hand brushed the canyon wall and hit a hard edge. She yelped, jumping back from the rock face. Looking back at her was a carved door. At first she thought it was a real doorway, framed by a carved lintel and arch. She stepped up to it, hand extended, and her fingers found the polished stone inside the carving. It was flawless, and unyielding. She ran her fingers around its edge, but found no seam or join. It was not a true door; it was an image of a door stamped on the rock face. A few steps later she found another, and then another, until she was walking between them without cease. She wondered what part of Ahriman’s mind this might be, what the doors represented to him.

  She was wondering this when the walls vanished, stone replaced by flat dark that went on and on. Only the doors remained, hanging in the dark like graphite sketches on black paper. She was not breathing, she realised, and she had the feeling that if she let go of the sensation of ground beneath her feet, the idea of a body would also leave her.

  Warmth touched her back, and spread across her as she turned. A fire of heaped branches crackled and sparked in a shallow scoop
in the bare rock. The impression of rough cave walls flickered at the edge of the firelight’s reach. She had been here before, but then the figure beside the fire had been a scarred and hunched creature in a tattered red robe.

  Now, a copper-skinned angel sat cross-legged on the dusty rock. It seemed both huge and slight at the same time. Black horns curled from its brow. Furled wings projected from its back and shoulders. Iobel could see blood on the white feathers. Armour covered its torso. Golden symbols spun across the sculpted, metal muscle. The fire flickered as she stared, and for an instant the angel’s wings seemed cobwebs of bone, the skin grey and cracked. The shadows shifted and the fleeting impression passed.

  ‘Hello, Iobel,’ said the angel, reaching out to pick a half-burned branch from the fire and prod the embers. She could see something else now, something that hovered beside it like the translucent shadow of a flayed and burnt bat. She felt eyes glitter as they fastened on her. She felt it hiss hungrily at her. ‘You have been looking for me.’

  She stared at him for a long moment, and her hand went to the shard of wood in her pocket without her thinking about it.

  ‘He was right,’ she breathed, and realised that the feeling of breath and lungs had returned to her. ‘Ahriman was right. You are Magnus the Red. You are here inside his mind.’

  The angel smiled.

  ‘Inside his mind?’ the Crimson King said, glancing around them and then looking back to Iobel. ‘As you were told the last time you were here, nothing is ever as it seems.’

  XVII

  Returned

  Blackness.

  Total blackness. Edge to edge of sight.

  The sound of his hearts beating in a slow, extended rhythm.

  The taste of silver in the blood on his tongue.

  The warmth of the jade scarab in his fingers.

  Blackness.

  Except that it was not blackness now. Where there had been nothing there was a light: small, distant, like a pinprick in a curtain, but a light nonetheless. It grew, and more appeared. He would have thought them stars, but they were not stars. He knew that. He had seen them before. He had been here before.