Astraeos raised his hand. A wave of telekinetic force ripped out along a line from the point of his palm. Weapon brutes and debris spun into the air. Some of the creatures were still firing as they tumbled. A stray round found a fuel line and a red mushroom of flame thumped upwards. The weapon brutes fell back to the deck with cracks of snapping bones. Machine-wrights were running for the blast doors even as they sealed. A fresh cluster of weapon brutes lumbered from their niches at the far end of the bay.
A shadow was spreading from the open ramp of the Storm Eagle. It coiled along the deck and the snout of the gunship like an exhalation of frozen night. The figure of the bound daemon emerged from the craft’s troop compartment. It floated forwards, moving with serene slowness. The surviving weapon brutes registered its presence and swivelled to fire. A sphere of lightning flashed around the daemon as a storm of rounds rose to meet it, sheets of white blotting out the red alarm lights. A smell of sweet flowers and spoiled meat filled the air. An arc of lightning whipped out, and a machine-wright exploded. The lightning jumped on, running from body to body, snaking across the metal of the deck in thick ropes.
The creature was roaring in Astraeos’s mind, and he bit back the shriek of glee that was rising in his throat. His vision crawled with ghost images as his mind boiled. He felt a part of his concentration slip, and a blow crashed into his right shoulder. He staggered, caught himself and ducked the second blow. A weapon brute, its guns dry, had barrelled into him, swinging its flesh-metal arms as clubs. His mind reached into the daemon’s chest and crushed its heart. It collapsed to the floor with a dull thump of slack muscle.
The Rubricae were beside him now, shooting any of the weapon brutes that tried to rise from where they had fallen. He glanced back to the Storm Eagle. Kadin had emerged, and behind him was Silvanus, supporting the crumpled form of Carmenta.
+Ready?+ he sent, and Carmenta nodded stiffly. He switched his sending to Kadin. +Get her to where she needs to be.+ Kadin did not acknowledge the order, but moved towards a tower of machinery which rose from the hold’s deck. Carmenta and Silvanus limped after Kadin, keeping close to his back as if sheltering from a high wind. Astraeos saw rounds spark off Kadin’s armour.
They did not have long: a minute at best, a handful of seconds at worst. Amon and his servants would be coming. Against those numbers, there was no hope. Astraeos smiled behind his helm as he pointed his sword and flame washed across a weapon brute. Its skin flaked black, the meat of its muscle cooking as it staggered and collapsed. There was next to no hope as it was.
To his left, the daemon was drifting forwards. Lightning reached out from its body and crawled over the hull of a hunch-winged craft. The fuel feeds linked to the craft ignited, and it rose into the air on a plume of oil-stained flame. Astraeos felt the wash of heat through his armour. He dived to the side as the craft crashed down onto the deck. A second explosion blossomed and became a red and black cloud that spread across the bay’s ceiling.
Astraeos came to his feet. The docking bay was a fire- and smoke-smeared vision of hell. Bodies lay scattered in blackened heaps; weapons fire still stitched through the smoke. As he watched, another bolt of lightning bleached the drifting smoke white. He heard the daemon cackle at the edge of his thoughts. The two Rubricae walked through the flames, their heads and weapons turning to fire at targets that Astraeos could not see.
+It must be now,+ he sent. The vox crackled, and Kadin was speaking in his ear.
‘It won’t work, brother. She collapsed when she connected to the machines. We–’
‘I. Am. Here. Librarian.’ The voice cut across the vox. It was a voice made of the scratch of static and the clicking of gears. It shook Astraeos’s skull.
+Take it,+ he sent, and mag-locked his feet to the deck.
A weapon brute, its left arm severed, loped towards him. He measured the distance to the charging brute with a glance. It would never reach him.
The sirens fell silent. Every light in the hangar bay went dark. For an instant, before his helmet display compensated, he felt as if he were watching flames and shadows dance in a cave far beneath the earth. Then he felt the deck tremble as the external blast doors ground open. Starlight met firelight, and a wind began to howl. A second later, the atmospheric containment field cut out. The open blast doors exhaled the rolling cloud of flame and smoke. Bodies were dragged across the deck. The living flailed as they tumbled out into the night beyond the Sycorax’s hull. Then, the sucking wind was gone and Astraeos was standing in dark silence. He began to move, and the daemon and Rubricae followed him. He reached out and touched Carmenta’s mind.
+Find Ahriman, mistress. Find him and keep us alive+.
It took three minutes for the forces on board the Sycorax to realise the scale of the threat they faced. Cohorts of bronze-armoured Cyrabor wardens mobilised from their lodges deep in the Sycorax’s gut. Sorcerers breathed commands into hundreds of Rubricae and they began to march through the corridors of their ship, silent but for the ring of their feet on the decking.
Amon, alone in his high tower on the spine of the Sycorax, received a sending from one of his inner circle, and rose from his meditation. He had taken five paces across the chamber when the Sycorax began to shudder.
The Cyrabor machine-wrights felt it first. Attached to the Sycorax by cables and webs of half-metal flesh, they began to babble and scream. They felt a presence rise through the ship’s systems like a shark emerging from the depths. It spread like poison, flooding from minor system to minor system until it was pouring into the controls of entire sections of the ship.
The Sycorax had swum the lightless depths of the Eye of Terror for millennia; the warp had permeated its hull and heart, and in a very real sense, it was alive. Every drop of blood spilled on its decks, every restless dream of its crew, every battle it had fought, had grown inside its bones. It was a proud creature with a mind like a king predator, but it was unprepared as a black cloud poured into its systems. The cloud spread to machines, to cypher slaves and datastacks, it spread between parts of the Sycorax not connected to anything else, and it spread even as the Sycorax tried to contain it. And all the while, as it subverted systems and melted overrides, the cloud called a name.
‘Titan Child,’ it roared, as if calling for vengeance for the dead.
Across the ship, bulkheads slammed shut on troops running to respond to the incursion. Plasma reactor vents flooded sections with glowing super-heated clouds. Outer deck holds opened to deep space. Emergency hatches opened in sequence, creating open passages from the depths of the Sycorax to the cold void. Hundreds of slaves, machine-wrights, warriors and drone breeds died in the minutes after they heard the alert sirens. They died scrabbling for weapons; they died in the dark, half waking from dreams; they died muttering prayers to the god of fate that had betrayed them.
The Sycorax reacted like a beast clawing at its own flesh as parasites ate it from within. It activated defence turrets in corridors packed with its own slave crew. Power, gravity and life support fluctuated across the ship. Airless dark swallowed the bridge, and the human slave crew choked as the atmosphere was sucked from the chamber. Electrical discharges ran through the hull, arcing between walls and floors.
Only the Thousand Sons moved through the ship with unblunted purpose. The sorcerers melted through closed bulkheads with blue-hot fire, and jumped through barriers like insubstantial ghosts as they moved to meet the enemy. With them came hundreds of Rubricae, slow marching statues of red armour, the green light cold and obedient in their eyes.
A cold peace had come to Ahriman after Amon had left. He had slid back into his own mind until he was walking through the palace of memories. It was quiet in a way that he had never realised possible. His footsteps echoed as they carried him down passages he had not walked for a very long time. He heard old memories scratching at the doors. Occasionally he paused, listened, and heard the voices of friends long gone. Sometimes his hand went to push a door open, but he always hesitated, an
d then walked on. He walked until he found himself in front of a small door. A carving of birds spiralling towards the sun covered the door’s dark wood. Dust had accumulated in the recesses. There were older doors in the palace, but this was a door he had not opened since he had first closed it. He hesitated, then pushed. The door swung softly open.
A wide balcony extended away from him to meet a view of dry desert, and a sky divided between clear blue and a layer of ochre storm cloud. A boy sat at the edge of the balcony, swinging his legs into the warm air, his hair stirring in a sudden gust of wind. He was tossing stones into the air, catching them without looking at them. Occasionally the boy would close his eyes, and a stone would halt in its fall to hang in the air. He looked no more than ten, but there was a seriousness to his face that made him seem older as soon as he looked up at Ahriman. The boy’s eyes were bright blue. He smiled.
‘Hello, Ahzek,’ he said, and the stone suspended in the air in front of him dropped into his palm. Ahriman smiled.
‘Ohrmuzd,’ said Ahriman, and watched as the memory of his true brother turned away, closed his eyes and tossed another stone into the air. It hung, the black water-polished ovoid turning slowly in front of Ohrmuzd’s closed eyes.
Ahriman sat by his brother. He had no armour, he realised – just a pale blue tunic that was the echo of the one Ohrmuzd had worn in this memory. He looked at his twin. The lines of the young face were the mirror of his own. He had remembered every gesture and syllable of this moment since it had first unfolded. At the time, he had wondered why. Later, with Ohrmuzd gone, he had thought he knew the reason. Now, as he gazed at his twin again, he knew he had been wrong before.
‘Stop it,’ said Ohrmuzd without opening his eyes. ‘You are distracting me.’
‘Sorry,’ said Ahriman, and looked towards the horizon. The dirty yellow cloud had grown, eating up the blue of the sky. A fork of lightning flashed at the cloud’s edge. A warm wind swirled over Ahriman’s skin, and he could smell the storm charge in the air. He frowned.
‘There was no storm,’ said Ahriman.
‘What?’ said Ohrmuzd, a note of irritation in his voice.
‘There should be no storm. This is the memory of the day before we were sent as aspirants to the Fifteenth Legion. There was no storm that day.’
Ohrmuzd shrugged. His face was smooth, unmarked by any of the many changes that would come in the years to follow. Ahriman felt his lips form a weak smile; he was in a sense looking at his own face; they had been almost indistinguishable except for perhaps a tendency for Ahriman’s forehead to crease when he was in thought, or worried. He had been worried that day; all the dire possibilities of what was about to happen to them had crowded his thoughts, so that he could do nothing but roll them over and over and over in his mind. Ohrmuzd had known, he had always known.
‘It will be all right, Az,’ said Ohrmuzd. Ahriman blinked, then stared at his brother as he had in his memory. He had said something, too, some frightened little question. ‘Stop that,’ Ohrmuzd had replied. ‘You always have to think the worst, don’t you?’
‘I am sorry,’ said Ahriman, and knew that he had said the same in the past.
‘And stop saying sorry.’ Ohrmuzd had opened his eyes and let the floating stone fall into his palm. ‘Can’t you just be excited? Think of what we might become, what we might learn, what we might do.’ He gave Ahriman a sharp look. ‘Have you been dreaming again?’
He had, of course. He had always dreamed and, even when he was a child, those dreams had had a tendency to come true. Ohrmuzd sighed. ‘They are not necessarily true, you know.’ His voice dipped the way it always had when he had found an opportunity to impart serious knowledge. ‘To talk of fate is foolishness.’
‘You never could resist quoting to show off,’ Ahriman chuckled.
‘Fate is for us to choose, to make our own. If we are destined for a particular future, it is because we have chosen that end.’ Ohrmuzd gave the solemn nod of a clever child pronouncing truth. Then he grinned. ‘Anyway, we will be all right.’ He glanced at Ahriman and there was fierceness in his eyes. ‘I will make sure it is all right, Az.’
Ahriman said nothing. He looked away from his brother, back to the storm that had rolled over the view like a curtain. The blue sky was gone, and the light had a shrouded, dirty quality. Rain began to fall, first a few drops, then more, until water was trailing out of the sky and streams rolled down the faces of the dunes. Ahriman breathed in. There had been no storm that day, but the air still smelled of the storms that he remembered.
‘I wish you had been right,’ said Ahriman, after a long pause. Ahriman suddenly could not remember what his brother had said next. ‘I have reached the end. It would have been better if we had never begun… If I had never begun. It’s over now at last.’
‘No.’
Ahriman’s head snapped around. Ohrmuzd was looking at him, wide blue eyes laughing as the rain ran down his face.
‘What did you say?’ The rain was swallowing the sound of his voice. A sheet of lightning turned the world white for an instant.
‘No, Ahzek.’ Ohrmuzd smiled, and then laughed into the storm. ‘It’s not over yet.’ Ahriman felt the ground tremble. He could not see through the rain. The thunder shook him.
His head came up, and his eyes opened to the darkness as the cell shook again. Above him, the chains holding him chimed as they rattled together. His heart was hammering. A metallic shriek was pushing into his ears. The floor and walls were glowing, the runes and marks etched into the stone blazing too bright to look at. The shackles around his ankles and feet were burning into his skin. The noise soared higher and higher. He could feel pressure inside and outside of his skull.
The door exploded in a shower of molten metal. Ahriman felt the warp meet his mind like a flood tide. His head was spinning as he saw a figure stride through the glowing wound that had been the door. The figure wore red armour and his helm was that of a Thousand Son, and he held a sword in each hand: one a curved khopesh, the other a straight blade wound with golden serpents. Ahriman recognised him; the way the figure moved marked him as clearly as if he had shouted his name.
+Ahriman,+ sent Astraeos as he paced forwards. Behind him, the bound daemon floated, its form rippling with dark cords of unlight. The shapes of two Rubricae filled the door like stone sentinels. Their armour was soot-black. Ahriman felt a knot of ice bunch in his chest. Astraeos raised his sword, and cut down. Ahriman could see the arc of the blade, could feel the power in the cut, the total focus that burned along its edge. The chains above Ahriman’s head parted and he fell to the floor. He looked up as Astraeos removed his helm and looked down at him.
Ahriman looked to the daemon hovering above. It had grown long needle blades of bone from its fingers. Blood dripped from the talon’s tips. The bound daemon was smiling its shark smile.
‘What have you done?’ breathed Ahriman. Astraeos sheathed his sword, a grim smile twisting his scarred face for an instant.
‘Fulfilled my oaths,’ he said.
They ran down corridors lined in silver and lapis, past banners covered in the languages of mankind’s long past. Lights pulsed on and off. They ran through blackness, then brightness. Ahriman’s bare feet rang on the deck as he ran, the chains still hanging from his wrists and ankles clattering in his wake. Blood trickled down his side from the lips of the ragged shell wound. Astraeos was moving in front of him, bolt pistol tracking every pulsing shadow. The daemon followed them, its presence crackling over the walls in arcs of black energy. He could hear it hissing in his thoughts. There were other presences in his mind; he could feel them probing, running after them like hounds in the warp.
My brothers, he thought. I am running again.
Doors and hatches opened at their approach, and sealed again after they passed. Sometimes they would not open and Astraeos would mutter and start in a new direction.
The Librarian’s thoughts were cold, aligned on their path but spread across a dozen mental processes th
at spun like interlocking devices. At another time, Ahriman would have been proud. Now, his thoughts were numb.
Why do I run? What am I running to preserve? A life lived on the margins, persisting without any purpose other than to draw the next breath?
They ran into a wide-mouthed passage, its pipe-clad ceiling reaching far above their heads. A toothed door opened to greet them at the passage end. The air was thin, the pressure and oxygen levels low. His hearts surged to compensate, but he could feel his steps faltering. Sharp, jagged pains filled his chest and his breaths were wet with blood.
Their hunters were close behind them, now; he could feel them converging on their position.
+‘Ahriman.’+ The shout was both sound and psychic sending. He felt an armoured hand close on his arm. He turned and met Astraeos’s gaze. ‘Move,’ growled Astraeos, and pulled him, but he resisted.
They are my brothers. Ahriman stopped in the middle of the passage. Astraeos turned to look back at him, and the bound daemon drifted to a halt. Ahriman looked down at the shackles around his wrists. Symbols spiralled across the loops of metal, half melted and distorted but still visible.
I will not run. Not again.
He turned to look behind him.
I will stand against fate, even if it destroys me.
Thirty paces behind them, a section of the wall glowed from orange to white. It bulged, like a blister forming on charring skin, and then blew outwards in a spray of molten metal.
The Omnibus - John French Page 29