The Omnibus - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  VI

  MEMORY’S ASHES

  Alone in his chambers, Ahriman closed his eyes and fell back into his memory. The sensations of his body dimmed in his awareness. His heartbeat and breathing slowed to almost nothing. His thoughts dropped away and quiet blackness filled him.

  ‘Memory is a machine.’ Ahriman remembered Pentheus tapping his ivory cane on the floor to emphasise each syllable. The old scholar had loved the sound of his own voice even though it had been dry with age. Pentheus had given Ahriman and his true brother their first lessons in logic, philosophy and rhetoric when they were still boys on Terra. Ahriman and Ohrmuzd had called him a desert lizard, but never to his face, and they had taken every word of his lectures to heart. ‘Most people treat it like something that is fixed in quality,’ Pentheus had continued, wiping sweat from the wrinkles of his face. ‘They forget and consider it natural. They remember useless details and do not understand why. They miss the fact that they have neglected one of the greatest devices of the human mind. Memory is knowledge, and knowledge is power.’

  Ahriman smiled at the recalled words, and began to walk to the palace of his own memory. At first, it was like walking down a dark passageway, the light of the present growing dimmer in the distance. Then, the darkness vanished and he was standing on white marble steps under a blue sky and bright sun.

  He turned away and looked up. The palace unfolded towards the sky above him, its white walls glittering in the light. Towers rose from its tiered floors, and its painted wooden shutters had been thrown open to allow the wind to blow through its halls. The palace had never existed in reality, of course. It was a construct, built from millions of memories layered together: the steps were his memory of the ascent to the White Temple of the Ionus plateau, the sky’s colour and heat had been Prospero’s, and the wind had stirred the air of his childhood.

  At his back, the sun’s heat prickled sweat from his skin. He wore no armour here, just the memory of a simple white robe. He took a step forwards, noting the warmth of the stone beneath his feet. Such details were important. Memory was built on more than images or words, it was a web of sensations linked to a point in time. Remember the smell of a place and you would see it. Remember the exact shade of a flower’s petals and you would recall the name of its species.

  Ahriman walked up the steps to the palace doors, and pushed them open. The corridor beyond was cool. Mirror-lined shafts opened in the roof every few metres. Rugs of red, white and blue softened the floor under Ahriman’s feet as he stepped forwards. Doors lined the corridors on both sides. Each was different: some were grimy plasteel and looked like they belonged on a starship or inside a bunker, others were painted wood, or glass, or burnished metal. There were hundreds of doors in this corridor alone and tens of thousands more in the rest of the palace. Once it had grown in size with every day, new floors and rooms layering on top of his oldest and deepest recollections. Now, his mind had added a thin layer of dust to every surface as a sign of his neglect.

  As he walked down the corridor, he reflected that the palace was another mark of hypocrisy. He had spent so long hiding and forgetting, but the palace still stood, the memories within preserved. In truth, he had never considered dismantling it; though there were doors he had never opened since he had first sealed them.

  Sounds filled his ears as he walked past each door. He heard voices of people long dead, snatches of conversations, and the muted rumble of battles. Part of him wanted to stop, to go through each door and relive the past contained within. He walked on.

  The first door he sought was bare grey stone, unadorned except for a silver ring that hung from a loop. Ahriman looked at the door for a long time. It was the last door he had added to the palace. He took the ring in his hand and pulled. The door opened and he stepped into the space beyond.

  The chamber was open to the sky. The light of two red suns touched Ahriman’s face and sweet, incense-perfumed air filled his lungs. Out beyond an arched window, the towers of the Planet of the Sorcerers marched away to the horizon. Shelves ran the circumference of the room, rising from the floor to where the wall gave way to the sky. White marble jars stood in neat rows on the shelves. Polished jet beast-heads capped each, and gilded script ran down their sides. At the chamber’s centre, a black-bound book lay on a silver and obsidian plinth.

  For a long moment Ahriman did not move. Then he began looking along the shelves, his eyes taking in each name picked out in golden script. Once he had looked at every one, he came back to the first.

  Nycteus, he read. As good a place to start as any. He reached out, picked up the jar and opened its lid. Fragments of sight and sound surrounded him, flickering like images fast-wound through a pict feed. First came the face, and he watched as it changed, ageing and scarring from the first moment he had met Nycteus as an aspirant to the last instant he had seen him. Then snatches of psychically exchanged thought, then times shared. He relived battles fought at the birth of the Imperium, and saw it fall into war while Nycteus stood beside him.

  ‘It must be done. I am with you, master,’ Nycteus had said as he bowed his head and joined the cabal. Then he saw his young adept friend bow in the dust beneath Magnus, and beg forgiveness for what they had done. Suddenly the memories became small fragments: a tale told by a renegade captain, a rumour of a sorcerer fighting alongside a warband of the Night Lords Legion, a name overheard in the slave stations of Naar.

  Finally the memories ended and Ahriman looked to the rows of jars. Each one represented his memories of one of the Thousand Sons. Here they all lived in his mind, the past hoarded with any scraps he had chanced on during his years of exile. He had never examined the memories kept in each, only adding to them when he found a trace of what might have become of them. He supposed it had been a penance of sorts. After a long moment he moved on to the next.

  When he was done he opened his eyes. He was trembling, but he had what he needed.

  ‘Nothing. Just like the others,’ said Astraeos.

  Ahriman did not reply. A wind coiled through the broken tower, carrying the damp reek of rain. He turned around, allowing his eyes to take in the details while his mind soaked up what psychic traces lingered in the warp.

  The tower was not a tower, of course, but the description sufficed. It had been a starship. Half a kilometre long and formed like an arrowhead, it now thrust up from the surface of the dank moon. Perhaps the moon had pulled the ship into its crust, or maybe the moon had grown from the ship like an uncontrolled cancer. The walls had become floors, ceilings walls, and the whole remade by the touch of the warp and the hands of those who called it home. Metre-thick blooms of turquoise rust submerged its buttresses and gunports. Pale curtains of fungus hung from its crenellations, glowing a sickly green in the perpetual gloom. The stranded ship’s spine had bent and twisted so that it looked like a crooked finger of coral growing from a weed-covered seabed.

  The room they were in was the highest point of the tower. Looking at what remained of its structure, Ahriman thought it might have been a gathering chamber of sorts. Tiered steps ringed an open space whose floor was a wide circle of pitted copper. Rain fell in curtains across wide holes in the high walls. The gunship which had brought them from the Titan Child squatted on a wide ledge beyond one of the breaches. Thidias and Kadin moved amongst the wreckage, their boltguns held loose in their hands, eyes sweeping across the debris.

  ‘There was a battle,’ said Thidias, bending down to run a finger over the glassy edge of a tear in the wall. Ahriman nodded. He could feel the fading touch of death pooling in the warp around the tower. ‘No corpses, this time.’

  ‘They were burned to ash, and the rain washed it away,’ said Ahriman as his mind filtered through the psychic residue around them. The warp infected the tower as it did the dank moon, muddying his mind as he tried to pry meaning from his surroundings. He could taste the smoke of burning flesh, thick and greasy. A blurred image filled his mind’s eye: slow-moving figures in red armour and high-cr
ested helmets. He twitched and opened his eyes to look at the holes punched in the walls. The echo of the detonation had prickled heat across his skin. Hundreds of warriors had dwelt here, building their strength before plunging back into the heart of the Eye. They had all died in under an hour.

  Ahriman extended his hand and fragments of midnight-blue armour rose from the rain-splattered floor. He concentrated, feeling the edge of each sliver. He waved his hand and the fragments slid together, forming the shell of a Space Marine breastplate. A bat-winged skull grinned at him from between the web of cracks.

  ‘Night Lords,’ said Ahriman. ‘Or a splinter of them.’ His hand dropped to his side and the breastplate crumbled back to shards and fell to the floor. He turned and began to reach his mind through the rest of the wreckage, feeling for a trace of his brother. It was there, like a dull ache under the psychic skin of the tower. His name had been Memunim. He had been an adept of the Raptora, and the Seal Keeper of the Fifth House of Prospero. He had never been a friend but he had been loyal when Ahriman knew him.

  He was also the twelfth of Ahriman’s brothers that he had tracked down only to find them gone. What had Memunim become after the banishment? Had he fallen into the service of petty and vicious masters, or had his path been darker?

  ‘How many more?’ said Astraeos.

  Ahriman looked at Astraeos. They held each other’s gaze for a long minute. He had known that it would come to this eventually. They had circled the edge of the Eye for months, riding the storm’s edge until the Titan Child trembled and Egion the Navigator had pleaded for rest. They had yet to find a single one of Ahriman’s brothers. Some of the rumours he had stored in his memory had proved false, others had led them true, but always they arrived to find either slaughter or those they sought gone. Astraeos had followed Ahriman’s commands without question, but with every week that passed on board the Titan Child, the renegade’s frustration grew.

  ‘Until I find an answer,’ said Ahriman.

  ‘What answer?’ Astraeos gestured at the charred chamber and the rain blowing in through the holes in the wall. ‘There is nothing here to give any answers.’

  Astraeos shook his head and turned away.

  ‘At least this one fought,’ said Thidias quietly. Ahriman looked towards him. Thidias caught the look and shrugged. ‘If it is the same hunters as came for you, then they must have given the same choice. Come with us, or fight.’ Thidias bent to pick a spent bolt shell-case from the floor.

  ‘Come with us or burn,’ growled Kadin from beside a melted wound in the chamber wall.

  Ahriman withdrew his psychic senses. There was nothing here that he had not seen in all the other places he had been in these last months. Each of his brother Thousand Sons had received emissaries as Gzrel had Tolbek, and had either accepted the emissary’s offer or fought. He suspected that many had been taken rather than killed, but he could not be sure. He walked to the largest of the wall breaches and looked out. Cold rain dappled his armour and ran down the creases of his face. They could spend a mortal lifetime tracking down each of his fellow exiles, but he had a feeling that they would only find more cold ashes.

  You knew what you would find before you began, he thought. He thought of the rumour he had heard again and again over the years of his exile, the one step he had hoped to avoid. Do you not want answers?

  Ahriman watched as cloaks of grey rain dragged across the pools of the surrounding swamp. Behind him Astraeos, Kadin and Thidias watched him in silence. He did not like the decision he had reached; it was the choice he had resisted ever since he had begun his search.

  ‘One more,’ said Ahriman, and turned to see the three renegades exchange glances. ‘One more journey. But this journey will be deeper into the Eye than we have been before.’ He looked at Astraeos. ‘And you will need to help me if we are to reach where we go alive.’

  Astraeos’s face remained unreadable, but distaste rippled through his surface thoughts. Kadin and Thidias watched their brother in silence. Finally he bowed his head.

  ‘Come,’ said Ahriman, and moved to where the gunship crouched under the falling rain.

  ‘Who are they?’ called Thidias. When Ahriman turned to look back at him the grey-haired warrior shrugged. ‘These sorcerers you are looking for. Who are they?’

  Ahriman paused. He would have to tell them something of the truth; only a thread of loyalty bound them together.

  ‘They are the brothers I betrayed,’ said Ahriman and turned away.

  +Again,+ sent Ahriman. Astraeos blinked the sweat from his human eye. His head felt heavy and a pain spread through his forehead from the metal of his augmetic. Across from him, Ahriman’s eyes stayed fixed on him, unblinking.

  The chamber they occupied was a crystal- and brass-enclosed platform at the top of a tower high on the Titan Child’s spine. The only light was that of the stars and the angry, bruised-flesh glow of the Eye of Terror. They sat to either side of the floor’s centre. Circles traced in charcoal and oil surrounded them. Ahriman wore an off-white robe, Astraeos a grey tabard edged in crimson. They had not moved in nine days.

  Astraeos let his gaze lock with Ahriman’s and let his mind form the image of a candle flame.

  +Good,+ said Ahriman. Astraeos felt a stab of cold between his eyes. The image of the candle flame grew in his perception. +Now,+ sent Ahriman. The flame split and became two. Astraeos blinked and the two flames began to flicker, one dimming while the other brightened, then reversing. The flames split again. Now four flames each flickered to a different rhythm. Astraeos was not breathing, and the beat of blood was almost silent in his veins.

  Suddenly the flames split again, and again and again until thousands of flames sparkled in his mind’s eye. Waves of rhythm flowed across the field of flames in increasingly rapid and complex patterns. Astraeos held the image firm in his thoughts. The patterns were not under his control, but that was not the lesson. He had to hold the image together as Ahriman changed it. They were learning to share their strengths, to become stronger by being of one mind. At least that was what Ahriman had said. Astraeos was still not sure that he believed him.

  The flames were gone. In his mind’s eye there was only a field of golden thread that wove together, forming images from smoke and light: a bird beating its wings, a scarab eating the disc of the sun, a jackal-headed man with nine arms, each holding a bright symbol. He could not feel his body now. The division between what his mind saw and imagined it saw had vanished, but he knew that if his concentration slipped the vision would shatter. He felt his mind stretch, as if the architecture of his soul were realigning. He had trained his mind and powers for war and strength, and trained others to do the same, but he had never known anything like this. It felt like burning, like the joy of breathing after suffocating, like laughter and tears.

  The image vanished. Astraeos’s eyes opened. Rage flashed through him. He wanted the sensation back; he wanted to feel the universe singing to the tune of his will. Ahriman’s eyes did not move from his; they seemed to glow like sunlight catching ice. Coolness spread through Astraeos, and the euphoria drained from him, leaving a cold emptiness and a taste like iron on his tongue.

  ‘What are you doing to me?’ said Astraeos. The words felt thick in his mouth. Ahriman gave a small shake of his head, stood and walked to a vox-horn mounted by the chamber’s only door.

  ‘Mistress Carmenta,’ said Ahriman. ‘Please wake Egion and bring the ship to warp transit readiness.’ Her reply was short, and Ahriman turned to look back at Astraeos.

  ‘I have done what I said I would do. I have trained you so that our minds can work in concert,’ said Ahriman. ‘We are about to steer deeper into the Eye of Terror, following a broken path. I will need to be in communion with Egion as he guides the ship. For that I need you to lend me your strength.’

  ‘No,’ said Astraeos without moving. ‘No, you were doing something else as well.’

  Ahriman stared at him for a long moment.

  ‘Your mind wa
s built to be a fortress, but here…’ Ahriman gestured to the jagged pupil of the Eye of Terror. ‘Here the warp is everywhere. We breathe it. We touch it when we dream. Your mind will not withstand that, not over time, not as we pass deeper into the Eye. Your mental defences are no proof against it: they are too blunt, too simple. To survive where we must go, you need to be able to ride the tide, not stand against it. What I am giving to you is only the beginning.’

  ‘I swore to obey you, not to become like you.’

  ‘You must, or you will fall.’ For a second, Astraeos said nothing. He thought he believed Ahriman, and part of his soul ached to ascend to the heights it had touched under Ahriman’s tutoring.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Astraeos, his voice cold. ‘Did the brothers you betrayed believe you?’

  Ahriman stared at him for a long minute. Astraeos’s gaze did not waver. Then Ahriman let out a slow, controlled breath and walked slowly to the chamber’s door.

  ‘We have a few hours before our journey begins,’ said Ahriman without looking back at Astraeos. ‘Rest. You will need it.’

  Ahriman walked the decks of the Titan Child alone. It had become a habit, he realised, a way of trying to release the pressures of worry. Its effectiveness was limited. Passages opened silently before him as his thoughts churned on. In places, the darkness was absolute; in others, the low arrhythmic pulse of a dying glow-globe lit his path. He passed lifeless servitors, slumped against walls or collapsed on the floor. An aura clung to everything he looked at, like a ragged layer of luminous green mist seeping from the edges of sight. It had a taste in his mind, as well: dust and grave soil. The passages went on; now narrow with rust-layered pipes running over walls, ceiling and floor, now wide and silent apart from a distant hum like a sleeping heartbeat.

  It was his fault, of course. All of it. Ohrmuzd’s death, the banishment from the Planet of the Sorcerers, this doom that stalked him and his exiled brothers. He had set it all in motion without realising, the entire line of cause and effect that stretched back to before he had cast the Rubric. Intentions and ignorance of consequences did not matter. He would never escape it, and the only way of trying to solve anything was to pile another risk on the mistakes of the past. He would have to use more power to try and find answers, but then what?