by John French
Ahriman had seen such things many times, as if there were a limit to the imagination of atrocity. It was a truth he had observed time and time again in the fate of those who fell to the powers of the warp. The lowest and most basic natures surfaced first and most strongly, like impurities rising to the white-hot surface of a smelting crucible.
And what of me? he thought, as he hurried through a column-lined hold. Pyres burned here too and chants cackled through the air. I have fallen as far as these wretches, further perhaps; how can I consider myself unchanged? I am no better than them; their spirits run with rage, mine with pride. We are the same, only the path of our fall was different.
‘Did you like my work?’ The voice purred from the shadows. Ahriman stopped, realising that he had allowed his awareness of where he was to wander. Maroth stepped out from beside a metal-sided column. The soothsayer was showing his filed teeth, but no one would have called the expression a smile. One of his hands rested on the pommel of a sheathed sword, the other ran a string of knucklebones through his fingers. The bones clicked against the armour of his gauntlet. Ahriman could smell power on him, rank and thick like the breath of a daemon.
‘Your work?’ said Ahriman, though he knew that Maroth meant Astraeos. The soothsayer smiled and again the bones clicked through his fingers.
‘I ate the eye,’ he said. ‘Did you know, Horkos, it was once thought that to eat an eye would grant wisdom?’ He shrugged, the tanned skins across his shoulders flapping against the plates of his armour. ‘We will have to see. Perhaps you should try the other, if we take it from him?’
Ahriman remained silent, his head bowed in respect.
The eating of an eye does not grant wisdom, you fool, he thought. The sacrificer of an eye is the one who gains the boon, not the taker.
‘Of the other two captives… Well, if they do not bow to us then perhaps we can see what more than one eye will do.’
Once I would have taught you the depths of your ignorance. The thought snarled inside Ahriman’s mind, and he had to struggle to suppress it. He was Horkos, the oathbreaker, the lowest of renegades; he did not have such thoughts.
‘Yes, master,’ he said. Maroth chuckled, the sound like the rattle of dry scales.
‘Good. Come with me. There is something else I wish you to appreciate.’
Darkness folded around Ahriman as he followed Maroth. After a few minutes Ahriman could tell they were making for the outer hull, as the passages got narrower and colder, and the blast doors thicker. Eventually the thin air gave way to hard vacuum, and they had to don their helmets. Ships like the Titan Child let parts of their outer hull drain of heat and atmosphere. Like layers of dead skin, these void-cold sections provided a buffer against damage and drew no power.
It was as they walked down a lightless passage towards a sealed door that he felt his skin prickle and smelt an impossible copper tang in the helmet’s air. He stopped, his eyes fixed on the door ahead. There was something behind that door, something that radiated malevolence and hunger like heat from a forge.
‘You feel it?’ said Maroth, turning to look back at Ahriman. The front of Maroth’s helm was shaped into the muzzle of a hound, its eyes glowing in the gloom. Behind the hound’s snarl Ahriman was sure Maroth was smiling.
‘What is it?’ asked Ahriman, without moving. He had begun to close off portions of his mind, armouring his spirit with passive layers of protection.
‘Come and see,’ said Maroth, and stepped towards a closed door. It was small, and reinforced with thick spars of metal. In the red light of Maroth’s eyes the surface of the door sparkled. Smeared marks covered it: eyes, spirals, toothed letters and hooked lines, all daubed in dark frozen liquid. To Ahriman they were little more than childish scrawl. Maroth raised a hand, activated the lock, and pulled the door open.
Behind the door there was darkness so complete that it looked like a hole leading to oblivion. Ahriman could smell rotten flesh and dank water, the stench filling his mouth and nose though there was no air to convey it. Maroth looked back at him, raised a beckoning hand and stepped through. Ahriman paused. Every part of his being was screaming to run, to turn away from the waiting door, but he could not, he had to follow. Maroth would not let him escape this revelation. He stepped forwards and through the door.
Blackness. For a second he could see nothing except the icons pulsing on the edge of his helmet display. Then shapes appeared, outlined in pale light though there was no light. He saw Maroth, the soothsayer’s face turned towards him, eyes dim coals in an iron hound face. The other shape floated in space, its splayed limbs tethered by a web of chains to unseen walls. Rags covered its body, though he could still see the bulk of muscle and definition of a Space Marine’s frame. The skin of its face and hands was death-white and hairless. Crude stitches walked across its chest, closing a ragged fissure in muscle and bone. Strips of tanned skin hung from pins in its flesh, each crawling with burned marks that twisted as the eye caught them. Ahriman tasted bile in his mouth. The suspended figure stared back at him with black holes that had been eyes.
‘Is it not magnificent?’ said Maroth, the transmission of his voice edged with static. The creature turned its head and fixed its empty eyes on the soothsayer.
Run. Run now, you fool. The thought screamed in Ahriman’s head. The creature opened its mouth in a grin that went too wide and showed too many teeth. A black tongue ran across the glinting needle-sharp points. It hissed: a noise that should have been impossible in the airless chamber.
‘The Space Marine that Karoz killed,’ breathed Ahriman.
‘Its name was Cadar, I think. Yes. It was grievously injured, but its final thread of life had not been cut when it came to me. Very strong.’ Maroth nodded as if in approval. ‘The near-dead flesh made a pleasing vessel.’
Ahriman could see it; the Space Marine’s body was a sleeve of flesh, its spirit scooped out, and its form a mask of skin. A daemon coiled in the husk that remained, its essence night-black, oozing hunger and malevolence. It was not intelligent; it was pure instinct and desire. The bindings Maroth had placed on it pinned it in place like an insect to a table. He had misjudged the soothsayer; he was ignorant and crude, but he had acquired and applied lore Ahriman did not believe him capable of grasping. The fruit of that achievement was an abomination.
He looked away from the creature and saw that Maroth was watching him.
‘It is mine, and answers to me alone,’ said Maroth.
He wanted me to see this, Ahriman thought, to see the power he commands. It is not enough that he wields it; others must witness it and be awed. He bowed low, knowing it was what was expected. Above him the creature hissed. This will be the weapon he uses to destroy Gzrel and take the Harrowing. Did he bring me here to test its potency? Am I to be its first victim?
Maroth let Ahriman kneel for a long moment.
‘Rise, Horkos.’
Ahriman stood and looked into Maroth’s red eyes. No, he thought. I am his first ally.
‘Now you see,’ said Maroth, and turned to leave. Behind him Ahriman followed, feeling the empty gaze of the creature on the back of his skull.
Ahriman returned to his new quarters alone. Gzrel had given the space to him, but it was as much a calculated insult as a reward for service. At once vast and cramped, it was not so much a chamber as a void left in the structure of the ship. One wall towered into the darkness above, its surface covered with rivets and weld seams. The other walls met it at different angles and heights. Pipes ran through the space as if hurrying to other more vital areas. Some were as tall as a man, others no thicker than a finger; they snaked in bundles across the floor and spanned the space like vines. Thick, red-edged light oozed from the flames he had lit in bowls of machine oil. The room reeked of warm metal, oil smoke and stagnant air. Grey grease and dust covered the floor in a thick layer, muffling the sounds of his steps as he walked through the circular hatch. He looked up, his eyes reaching into the gloom beyond the tangled canopy of pipes. Ai
r, coolant, fuel, water and waste, all rushing through this forgotten fissure in a ship that stretched to six kilometres and could house thirty thousand souls. He stood at the heart of the ship, yet in a forgotten place. It was supposed to be a mark of his place within the Harrowing, but the isolation was almost pleasing.
He closed the hatch and turned, the barest hint of fatigue in his movements. His head ached, the presence of the bound creature lingering like a bruise on his mind. He thought for a moment of Astraeos; would he keep his silence?
If he told Gzrel… The lord of the Harrowing would not believe him.
Perhaps.
It would have been better to silence him.
He shook his head again. He needed to think, to reflect, and to remember.
Quietly he began to speak the formulae, feeling the syllables resonate in his mouth, tasting the subtle shifts in the aether around him. He walked as he whispered, his feet tracing a spiralling pattern with his steps. He had already placed the lamps in the correct positions and left them burning to prepare the way. Anyone looking at them would not have realised their significance. The pattern they formed, the steps he took and the focus of his mind built a structure within the warp that would close the chamber to all observation. The ritual pulled on memories from a place inside him that he had long ago walled off, but he needed privacy.
The air took on a dense, charged quality; the chamber swam in front of his eyes, and he could hear a sound like sand skittering over dry stone. Then with a final step and a final word the chamber snapped back into focus and silence fell.
He nodded to himself, as if to fix the conviction in place, and turned to a sealed chest that stood in a corner. The smell of dust filled his nose as he opened the pressed metal lid. Within lay skeins of pale fabric layered over bulky objects, their shapes lost beneath the material like buildings under thick winter snow. He pulled the fabric out, and looked at what lay beneath.
It was not much. Anyone looking at them would have thought them battered trinkets taken from a battlefield or burned temple. There was a hook-topped rod, its surface blackened and blistered, its shaft splintered; a carved scarab the size of a human hand, its polished stone chipped and worn; a fragment of polished metal in the shape of an oak leaf. Beside them lay the helmet, the faceplate looking up at Ahriman with blank eyes. It was red. A plate of tarnished bronze extended from above the eyeline to beneath the chin, forming a plough-like muzzle broken by two red crystal eyes. Two flowing lines of black lacquer extended beneath the left eye like tracks of tears. A forked bronze crest rose from the forehead. It was grimy and battered, as if it had been pulled off after battle and left to fade under a layer of dust.
Ahriman looked down at the face of the helmet for a second, then reached in and lifted it out of the chest. He held it, staring into its dirt-clouded eyes. He had wondered many times why he kept it and the other flotsam of another life. It was a risk; there might be some who remembered the Thousand Sons, who might recognise the helm, the scarab and the broken rod. There might even be some who remembered the name Ahriman. More, it was a reminder to himself of who he had been, and what he had done.
That, of course, was also why he kept them.
He was an exile many times over, a betrayer and destroyer of everything that had given his existence meaning. The Thousand Sons Legion had broken the decree of the Emperor against the use of psychic powers. They had done so believing they served the Imperium that had created them, and for that transgression their home world had burned. A few had survived, plucked out of the inferno by the will of their primarch, Magnus the Red. But it had been the power of daemons that had saved them, and the world they had fled to was deep in the Eye of Terror. On that world of dust reality and the power of the warp mingled and blurred. The barrier between wish and truth had vanished. Magnus, having ascended to something beyond flesh, had called their new home the Planet of the Sorcerers. The occult powers of the Thousand Sons had flourished, but so had the mutation and corruption of their flesh.
The Thousand Sons had begun to devolve into creatures of inhuman form, the instability of their genetic heritage given new potency by the powers of the warp. Armour had become flesh which blinked with lidless eyes. Hands and limbs dissolved into claws or boneless tentacles. Minds of refined thought and purpose became cauldrons of insanity, boiling with storms made of waking dreams. Some had seen it as a blessing, as a gift from the Great Powers which dwelt within the warp, or as a stage in their evolution towards demigodhood. Ahriman had seen the change for what it was: the slow death of everything they had been and the denial of everything they had aspired to be.
In his flame-lit chambers, Ahriman could see his Legion brothers as if they were standing in front of him. He had tried to save them. He found others that agreed that their Legion was on the brink of destruction. Together they had formed a cabal, and begun their work hidden from the eye of Magnus. Amongst the conspirators had been the most powerful psykers from a Legion of warlocks. Their end, as was always the way of the Thousand Sons, was to overthrow darkness with knowledge. Under Ahriman’s guidance they had created a cure for the mutation which was consuming the Legion. They had called it the Rubric.
The Rubric. He ran the phrase around his mind. A monolith to hubris.
He had believed it would work, that it would undo the change that was destroying his Legion. Instead he had simply destroyed his brothers with his own hand. Some had survived. The others had become spirit and dust bound inside their armour, little more than automata, echoes remaining to remind him of his own failure. They had become the Rubricae. Magnus had banished Ahriman and his cabal from the Planet of the Sorcerers. From that moment he was no longer a Thousand Son, no longer Ahzek Ahriman. He was nothing, a ghost living out his penance on the margins of hell.
He had not seen any of his brothers since, though he had heard tales of sorcerers or warlords that could only be Thousand Sons. He knew of only one who might still live, and then only in the loosest sense. He might be the last, the rest fallen to battle or madness, or worse. Looking into the face of the dust-covered helm Ahriman shuddered. One day he would die, and time would finally bury his existence.
No. He thought of the daemon speaking his name as it loomed above him. No. I am not free yet. Something remembers that I exist. Something is coming for me after all this time.
He was not breathing. Inside his armour his skin suddenly prickled with cold. He let the helmet drop from his hand back into the chest and stood. Something was coming. The warp was millpond-still, but he knew. The certainty was like the touch of a hand on his back in the dark. Something had found him, something in the great ocean of the warp. It was coming for him. He thought of the Planet of the Sorcerers, of the light of the ninth sun spilling across his open grimoires, of the presence behind him that should not have been there. The memory formed in his mind. No, not that, he thought, and the thought iced his breath into cold mist. Frost had formed on his fingertips.
I am fate come round at last. He started, looking round the chamber. His eyes flicked between the twisting pipes and the coiling shadows cast by the oil flames. Nothing.
‘Speak.’ His voice was thin, and the space seemed to swallow the word. ‘By the bindings upon this place, I command you to speak.’
Silence.
The flames seemed to flutter and dim. The sound of the ship, so like a heart, grew louder in his ears. He took a step back. He was muttering, the phrases coming to his lips from the depths of memory. All thought about the past, penitence and punishment faded. He was in the grip of an instinct more ancient than any legend or lore, the instinct of a man in a forest alone with the darkness and the sound of wolves.
The wheel handle on the circular entrance hatch began to turn. He could hear something scratching on the metal of the hatch.
Let me return to dust, he thought. Let me drift to the bottom and fade to nothing. Let that be my fate. But another voice, clear and cynically precise, spoke in his mind: Yet you still cling to life. H
ave you ever considered why?
The wheel handle stopped turning. The hatch began to open, grating on unoiled hinges. His hands and body were still, the chained storms of aetheric energy foaming about him, waiting to be unleashed.
‘You are the one they call Horkos?’ The voice was female and came from a slot in a cracked mask of red lacquer. Ahriman was silent, watching the figure that stepped through the hatch. She was tall and moved with a precise smoothness that reminded him of a pair of callipers tracing arcs across parchment. A hooded robe of ragged black fabric covered her form, dragging on the floor as she stepped closer. Mechadendrites attached to her back released the hatch’s outer handle and coiled to her back like metal-scaled snakes. Her eyes were glowing green augmetics.
‘I have been sent by your master,’ she said, and he could not miss the bitterness in the words. Still he did not move. Shape and form were no binding on those who knew the mysteries of the warp, or the creatures it spawned. ‘He sent me to summon you to his presence.’
She stepped closer, and now he realised that she wore no mask; the cracked red lacquer was her face. He also saw the collar of beaten iron circling her neck. Jagged runes ran across its surface, their shapes shadowed by the blood that had dried in their recesses. It was a slave collar, sealed around the neck while still hot. The runes were Maroth’s work, crude channels for pain and coercion. He let his mind brush hers, felt the hard lines of implanted logic and the rage simmering beneath.
‘I was sent to bring you,’ she said. There was a note of defiance in her voice. She would be no easy slave for the Harrowing. There was an imperious poise to her, a quality that made him fancy that he could see a glimmer of scorn in her artificial gaze. She was no tech-priest of Mars, though, he could tell that at a glance. She was something else, another outcast or renegade. Fragmented facts assembled in his mind and he realised what she was, at least in part.