by John French
The blast wave went on and on, stealing sound and shattering thought. Seconds ground against each other like the edges of shattered bone. Volumes of space expanded and crumpled into wild vortices of being. The vast and incomprehensible mechanism of Magnus’s domain splintered.
Storm fronts of emotion and power collided within the warp. Shockwaves of fury ripped out and out. Branches of spite reached into reality, shining with the heat of suns. Laughing fire spread across the roof of the sky on warp-saturated worlds close to the Planet of the Sorcerers. Stars screamed. Slits opened in the spaces between. Storms of paradox poured out and out. Daemons stampeded, scrabbling to escape the raw fury of what was happening.
The shapes of vast ships formed within the inferno column, mountain ranges of armour pushing back into being. The flames screamed over them without touching them. They hung above the broken City of Towers. Jutting spires and the mouths of guns pointed down at the ruins which jabbed back from the planet’s surface.
At the heart of the manifestation stood Ahriman, his staff raised. Beneath his feet, the red dust and rubble was fusing to glass. The blaze washed through him as though he were not there. They were one: the moment and the fire. Out in the inferno his brothers stood, dark shadows of men cloaked in flame. Above, his ships hung like the heads of hammers waiting to fall. The dead of Prospero were with them too, their bodies of animated wreckage and ash frozen in the instant they had been transported through the warp.
And it was all still. It was all a picture reflected in the deep well of Ahriman’s mind. A single slice of existence waiting to change into something else, waiting for him to change it into something else. He held on to it, felt it pull against his grip, felt the planes of its power begin to slide apart. He needed to let it go, needed to let it become the future. But he held on for an instant more.
He felt the minds of his living brothers still connected to him. They were ready. They were with him, and their future was here: all planned, all prepared with Ignis’s relentless precision. Gaumata’s mind waited to take the fire into his grasp. Gilgamos’s sight was already spreading with Ahriman’s own into the immediate future, testing the threads of events before they happened. Kiu’s presence burned with hard-edged focus as he felt for the greatest threats. Ignis’s thoughts ticked and spiralled on, marking the significance of each factor, altering where needed, calculating without cease. And beneath them, all the others moving in lesser ways, each a part of the whole, each a part of him.
He was not Ahriman, he was all of them, and they he: their wills were his, their strength his. How could any hope to defy him?
He was all.
The pain in his chest sent the taste of silver to fill his mouth.
He needed to let go.
We are returned,+ he sent, and the fire and destruction shouted the words through existence.
He let go.
XVIII
Unleashed
How far to the hangar?+ called Ctesias as he ran.
Too far,+ replied Ignis. The imprecision of the answer almost made him break stride but he never had a chance.
Ctesias felt them manifest an instant before the psychic shockwave flipped him from the deck. He struck the ceiling. Pipes ruptured under the impact. Steam vented into the air. He was falling again. Heat poured into his mind as the backlash of manifestation poured past his will. Gravity changed direction before he hit the floor. He was falling down the shaft of the corridor. He punched his hand out to slow his fall. A section of piping came away in his grip.
The end of the passage was a lit hatch far beneath, but it was coming up to meet him fast. He extended his will into the walls, felt it catch and dug in. Sparks surrounded him. He was slowing, but not fast enough. He glanced up. Ignis was falling after him, slashing at walls, floor and ceiling with unlit lightning claws as he spun. Credence followed, its limbs wrapped around the Athenaeum, its carapace ripping into the corridor as it ricocheted down towards them.
Gravity righted itself.
Ctesias hit the floor, and slid to a halt. Pain radiated from his chest. His daemon names were insect wings beating at the inside of his skull. The warp was a bleeding, swirling roar all around him. He could taste ash and smoke. He pushed himself to his feet.
Ignis struck a second later. His Terminator armour punched through the floor grating into the piping beneath.
Where are we…+ he began to ask Ignis.
We have arrived.+
Yes, but where are we on the ship?+
Where we need to be.+ Ignis reached out, blades folding back into his fists as he yanked a hatch open. The noise of a hangar deck reached through the door. He could see lights beyond, and shapes moving around the carrion machines.
How did we stop at this precise…+
Metal thunder roared through the passage as Credence slammed to a stop and struck the opposite wall. Sparks and dark fluid gushed out and ignited in a ball of oily light.
Ctesias swore and scrambled to check on the Athenaeum. Its body lay limp and still in Credence’s embrace. Ctesias let out a breath of relief. Ignis shrugged.
As soon as I felt us arrive I knew we were out of time to be in place. I cut the gravity in the corridor to slow us down.+
Ctesias felt a curse rise to his lips, but bit it off and just turned back to the open hatch.
Insane.+
Credence clattered as the automaton pulled its fist free of the debris.
No, not intended as a compliment,+ snapped Ctesias at it.
Ignis rotated his head towards Ctesias, a detail of his electoos reconfiguring above his right eye. Ctesias shrugged and shouldered into the launch bay.
Winged daemon engines lay in staggered grids on the deck. Their hulls were a blued silver, which glistened like wet pearl as Ctesias looked at them. Wings swept back from behind huge, bleached avian skulls. Amongst the smaller breed of machine their larger kin sat, fuming smoke from warming engines. Liquid fire dripped from weapon pods. Chromed spider-servitors scuttled over their wings. Ctesias could hear the rising kill-instinct of the daemons bound within each machine. He shut out their presences with a thought and kept moving forward.
Open outer doors,+ Ignis’s command flicked out. Something heard and obeyed. The far wall of the hangar cracked. Sheets of armour folded outwards. And the breath of the inferno reached in.
The spider-legged servitors were dropping from the daemon craft. Pipes popped free from fuselages. Wet red apertures sucked shut and sealed in the daemon machines’ flanks. The air was glistening with the haze of anti-grav. Engines breathed blue and red cones into the hot air. The sound was the shriek of chained eagles. The warp was rolling over and through Ctesias.
His heartbeat was rising as a part of his mind felt the moment he had been preparing for stride closer. The parts of daemon names clacked through his thoughts like dried bones in a bag. His skin was tingling. The names were rubbing together, straining to be let free, to be recombined and spoken. Bile was in his mouth, but he grinned without being able to help it.
He could begin to let go. Soon he would not have to hold these chains in his soul. He would be able to let the things which itched at the edges of his thoughts out. And then… then there would be peace. It would not last, but for a time, he would be free. All that needed to happen first was for him to help destroy the City of Towers.
There was something else too, but it was not clear enough for him to put into words.
He looked at the fire beyond the doors. The machines were shaking, straining against the cold-iron chains holding them to the deck. He had thought of using one of the gunships to reach the surface. Suddenly, though, that did not seem adequate or appropriate.
He slid into his memory, and pulled a string of syllables down onto his tongue. They bit into his flesh as he breathed them out. The words slid into the hot air, coiling like worms as they fell, fattening and flattening
into sheets of oily light. Clicking and hooting filled his ears. A daemon grew before him. Its body was flat, like a creature pulled from a seabed. Fangs fringed its edges. Swirls of blue and bright yellow mottled its skin as it fattened. Silver blisters grew on its back, and then popped. Liquid metal flowed together, hardening into a shell. The last words dropped through the air, and cut into the silver to glow blue. Ctesias swallowed the sugar taste on his lips, and stepped onto the floating disc. His will gripped the daemon and it became utterly his. He rose higher, his staff in his hand, tapers of inked skin fluttering in the wind.
Give him to me,+ he said, pivoting to where Ignis and Credence waited, and nodding at the limp form of the Athenaeum.
Ignis blinked slowly, once, and gave a small nod. Credence took a clanking step and laid Sanakht on the disc at Ctesias’s feet. A pulse of will, and tendrils of silver rose up from the disc and bound the body in place.
Ctesias rose higher, pivoting smoothly as he did so. The doors to the burning world lay before him. The beginning of vast and ancient names tingled on his tongue.
Not yet, he whispered in his thoughts.
See you on the surface,+ sent Ignis.
Only if we survive,+ replied Ctesias. The disc shot forward and out of the ship, and into the winds of the firestorm. Behind him he heard the cold-iron chains shatter one by one, and the daemon engines soared from their roosts to follow him.
Sar’iq came to the top of the tower at a run. A gale met him. A blast of heat struck him in the face. His skin blistered and charred. His body shunted the pain aside before it could touch his consciousness, but his eyes fizzed as they saw the blazing column of the manifestation. He shielded his face before spitting a curse. A thought pulled his helm from his waist and a second later it snapped into place. Cool darkness wrapped his burned features, and he blinked through streaming eyes as the helm display lit with a storm of runes. The scar image of the manifestation was still there, pressed into his eyes. In his mind he heard it shrieking with a furnace’s hunger.
Red heat warnings chimed as he raised his head. His display dimmed, but the brightness was not just light, it was an inferno of souls.
Control. No matter what Knekku said, Sar’iq understood control. Control was standing there for a long instant, discarding one by one the pains flaring behind his eyes as the silk of his robes burned from his armour, and the enormity of watching impossibly high towers rise like branches caught in a hurricane. Control was allowing all these things to just happen to him, around him and before him, noting each one, and letting intellect dominate instinct.
They are here, he thought, knowing that stating that fact clearly to himself was important. It was not an accident, or an act of terrible chance. It was the beginning of the battle they had been waiting for. They had been wrong. Knekku, himself, the rest: all wrong. The defences laid in the void, the daemons circling the planet in the warp: all had been pointless. Ahriman had found a way.
Brothers,+ he reached out with his senses. He gasped. Heat poured into his mind. The voices of his brothers were there, but all of them were calls of shock and confusion. The whole planet was reeling.
He steadied himself…
And the column of fire exploded into a burning wave.
Sheet-white brightness swallowed his sight. Sound vanished. Seconds expanded outwards. His armour locked solid as fire winds tried to pull him from the ground. He crouched instinctively, his mind layering kinetic shields over him. Neon scars blinked behind his eyelids. Air and debris rushed past him.
The wave passed. He rose from where he had crouched. Twists of light walked across the sigils cut into his armour. The world before him was a tangle of brightness and ruin. Glowing clouds billowed amongst the broken teeth of towers. Twisted and still melting pinnacles rose from the sinking bed of smoke. A white haze covered the sky. Ships hung in that sky, their hulls glowing like iron pulled from the forge. The silence hung for a moment, a false promise of calm after a storm’s passing.
The ships fired. Beams of stuttering light slid down to touch the devastation. The fog flashed. Explosions shook and shook the air, and death screams rose in the warp.
‘Curse you, Knekku,’ muttered Sar’iq. His brother was a fool, but he was lost in the Labyrinth and Sar’iq would not leave him to the enemy. To move him would be to kill him. There was no choice.
Sar’iq pulled his sword free. The twin forks of the blade caught the fire from the air. A whirl of smoke and glowing energy began to spin around him. His mind reached out, will pouring against the wild force shaking the warp.
Brothers,+ he called. +To me. Hear my will.+ Across the planet’s surface and in the broken sky his mind pulled others to their feet. Silent calls rippled out from them in turn. Creatures rose from the murk, fur and feathers coated in blood and soot, bellowing with pain and soul-thirst. Machines that were not machines clanked into movement, hooting and braying as their feet added a new echo to the still trembling ground.
Sar’iq heard the answers, and raised his sword. Spirals of grey ash and tatters of illusion surrounded him. His Rubricae rose from where they had fallen to the ground. Their armour was black from the fire wave. Sar’iq pulsed a silent command and the muzzles of their guns raised to point at the wall of smoke before them.
Shapes moved on the other side of that wall, marching closer.
The first pristine blue Rubricae broke from the smoke and fired up at the parapets.
Blue fire trailed the shots as they buzzed through the air. Sar’iq reached his will towards the Rubricae, and forced it to quiescence. The force of the backlash made him gasp. He reeled. More Rubricae were coming out of the smoke, firing as they marched.
Sar’iq hesitated for a second.
Fire,+ he willed, and his scorched Rubricae obeyed. The space between the fortress tower and the approaching enemy vanished in a blur of blue flame. Rubricae fell, juddering as warp fire fought with the enthralments in their armour.
But the enemy Rubricae kept coming, walking forward in lock step.
Above him, the fleet stopped firing.
Sar’iq looked up.
Daemon engines sprayed from the ships, shrieking as their wings cut the burning air. Sar’iq smiled behind the copper flames of his faceplate, and stabbed his sword at the sky. Black lightning poured from the blade-tip and turned a daemon engine into ashes. He whipped the arc through the air, sawing through the flock of machines. Bombs began to fall. Bright green and blue flames blossomed amongst the still smouldering ruins.
Too many, of course, too many for him alone. But he was not alone. He could feel minds, vast and terrible, moving in the aether. He had called to them, and they were coming.
A flight of aircraft howled towards him. He smiled. Las-fire poured down at him. The air was beating thunder now. He was still smiling. Stone became vapour across the tower top where he had been standing. From the chamber beneath the summit, Sar’iq let the illusion fall into smoke.
Welcome, brothers,+ he called to the ships and advancing columns of Rubricae.
His mind unlaced the matter of his bones, and his blood. The armour across his back parted. Red tendrils poured out, licking the air as they grew and branched. Bones cracked and split. Wings shook free of his back and spread on the wind. Gore shivered from their rainbow feathers, as they beat and pulled him into the air.
Welcome,+ he sent, casting his thought out without care. He raised his sword again and its forked blade sucked a branch of black lightning from the air.
It was going to be a duel of fire and will and destruction that had been denied for millennia.
Welcome, brothers, to our realm.+
Behind him Czetherrtihor, First Sentinel of the Sorcerers, Titan Host of the Nine-Fold Bindings, broke through the clouds of smoke and flame and roared with a voice of hellfire and iron.
Ahriman.+
He heard a voice in his head.
Ahriman.+
There was silver in his thoughts.
Ahriman.+
He could taste it.
Ahriman.+
No, the silver was not in his thoughts.
Ahriman.+
The silver was in his hearts.
He gasped and came up from where he had fallen to his knees. Thoughts battered into him, connections to minds spread out around him like a web. Ignis, Gilgamos, Gaumata, Kiu, Ctesias, and on and out through the still rolling blast wave of their arrival.
Time…
He had lost time. Perhaps just an instant, perhaps more.
How long?
He did not know.
Time…
Pain beat in his chest.
Silver in my hearts… Silver cutting deeper and deeper…
Ahriman.+
They were calling him. They were beyond Magnus’s defences. They had returned to the Planet of the Sorcerers. They had returned home…
They had to move.
They had to…
He had to focus.
The ground was red-hot glass beneath his feet. Spirals of smoke whirled past. Helio Isidorus was at his shoulder. He could feel the heat of destruction beating through the warp. He could hear everything. He could feel everything. He could see everything.
Time…
He did not have…
His will hammered down.
Time.
The world stopped.
There was no time.
He was time. Everything happened in the eye of his mind. Nothing happened beyond that was not by his will or design.
The planet was reeling in shock. Its foundations were shaking. Tens of thousands of thrall warriors and mutants had died already. Those that remained were kneeling in dust and ruins, vomiting and screaming as wild tides of emotions burned their minds. There were others, his brothers who served Magnus. They had not fallen, nor panicked, but they were scattered and their thoughts and powers confused by shock. Some had responded. He could feel the presence of daemon-bound Titans striding to meet him. Formidable, dangerous, but not unpredicted. He looked further, looking for the one presence he knew would be there, the one presence that could upset what he would do.