‘If you are here…’
‘Show yourself…’
‘Show…’
‘Yourself…’
‘You…’
‘Yourself…’
She walked deeper into the ruins and did not call out again. After several hundred paces she realised that the shadows were moving. They turned around the bases of the statues, as though the sun was tracking behind her. But the sun was not moving.
She paused, and the shadows became still pools. In front of her a breeze lifted a thin tongue of sand from a dune. Her eyes flicked towards it, and then stopped.
Something was standing beside her. Right beside her. Close enough that its face was next to hers. She could not see it clearly, just the outline of it filling the corner of her eye. It had been there before, standing at the edge of sight when she glanced at the windblown sand, but it had been further away. She stayed very still. She was certain that if she turned to look at it there would be nothing there. But it was there.
‘You have been watching me, haven’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said a thin voice, and the shadow beside her stepped into sight. He was the image of a gaunt man. Wrinkled and spotted skin clung to bones. She could see the strings of muscles standing out in his neck. He was also breathing heavily, ribs rising and falling under a deep-blue silk tunic. Rings rattled on his fingers. Bracelets of ebony and bone circled his wrists and neck. He looked like a priest from a past age, still clinging to life even as he withered.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘I mean you no harm,’ said the man. ‘But I have never seen anyone else in the city. No one has ever found it before.’
Iobel raised an eyebrow at the last word. A note of authority had drifted into the man’s voice. She looked into his eyes. They were dark, and steady. There had been strength in his features once, she noted.
If not a priest, she thought, then perhaps a king.
He straightened, and when he stood tall Iobel had to look up at his face. With the sky behind him his features lost some of their definition, and for a second he seemed a shape cut out of darkness.
‘You have not answered my question,’ she said.
‘I was called Amon,’ said the old man.
He shivered and the rings on his wrists and fingers rattled. Iobel kept her eyes steady on him. The words of the boy beside the fire slid through her mind.
‘Amon…’ she said. ‘I know the name. I heard it spoken by the Athenaeum once, and I have seen Ahriman’s memories of the warrior who bore that name. He was a Thousand Son, a warrior. He was nothing like you, even in memory.’
Amon chuckled drily, and stepped out of the shadow. He had the same face, but now seemed younger, smooth-skinned and handsome.
‘You think that shape and form are fixed? In the world of flesh and bone that was always a lie, and here it is a joke.’ He flicked his hand and it dissolved to grey sand, but when he raised his arm the hand was whole and glittering with rings. ‘Come now, you know this. I can see that. Don’t play the fool with me. I am Amon, tutor to Magnus the Red, and before him the greatest scholar of Prospero. I walked in the presence of the being you called Emperor, and knew each of his sons. That is a fact that does not have one shape.’
‘Go to the beginning of things,’ the boy had said. ‘That is where all things lead in the end.’
‘Are you where it began for Ahriman?’ Iobel looked around at the ruins. ‘Is this city the beginning? Is that why I found you?’
‘Almost the right question,’ Amon chuckled. ‘No, I am not the beginning of things, Iobel.’
Her head snapped around. He was watching her, eyes unblinking.
‘Yes. I know who you are, and I know that you are looking for the father of the Thousand Sons.’
She watched him, weighing up the options now before her.
‘Have you–’
‘Seen him? No.’
‘Then why are you here other than to exercise a need to patronise?’
He laughed, the sound booming through the ruins and across the dunes.
‘Have you wondered why you are looking for Magnus?’ He caught her eyes, and grinned an unkind grin. ‘No. I didn’t think so.’
‘I have my reasons.’
‘Your reasons? Or someone else’s reasons?’
‘Who else’s could they be?’ she asked.
‘Ahriman’s,’ he said, and stepped closer. ‘This is his mindscape. It may be a far reach of his mind, but it is made of consciousness and subconscious. In a way it is his will that I speak these words, that these grains of sand fall from my hand.’ Amon reached down and scooped up a fistful and let it spill through his ringed fingers. ‘We are dreams that have lost their way, and our thoughts are not our own.’
Iobel thought of a figure in a red cloak, sitting beside a fire while Ahriman explained that she was dead. He had not seen the figure, nor heard what it had said to Iobel.
‘He is right,’ it had said. ‘But nothing is ever as it seems.’
‘This realm is not wholly Ahriman’s any more,’ she said, watching as he moved around her. ‘Too much of the warp has touched it, too many complexities layered on top of each other, too many structures built to sustain his power. He is not master of himself, and he is not master of me. You choose how you appear. I choose to follow this path.’
‘Choose? Choose? Do the prisoners in a jail choose the rags they wear? That is what we are, both of us.’ He raised his hands and spread them out in front of her, and she realised that he cast no shadow, and that the edges of his shape blurred when she was not looking directly at them. ‘I am as you find me because this is all that is left. I am Amon, but Amon grown from the scraps of memory left to Ahriman. Fragments put back together in the shape of someone who once lived.’
‘You are dead, then.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ He curled his lip, and Iobel shivered. ‘But yes, there is no living Amon out there in reality. After I was… undone, he sent half of the memories of me out here to the edge of his being.’ He paused and looked at Iobel, his eyes calculating. ‘But I forget, of course you know this…’
Iobel frowned.
‘I have seen you in Ahriman’s memories when you were a warrior of the Thousand Sons, but I have never seen you die.’
His lip curled again.
‘He chooses to forget that moment. That is why I am here. An exile in his mind, a thorn caught in his confidence.’
‘What was it he did not wish to remember of you?’
‘That I was a man once. A man who would have aged and died had he not become a warrior of the Emperor. That I was a teacher. That I was right more often than I was wrong. That he killed me rather than admit that he was wrong.’
‘Then why do you exist at all?’
‘I could ask the same of you. Why do you still exist, inquisitor?’
‘I am an aberration Ahriman cannot remove,’ she replied.
He shrugged, as though conceding the possibility and implying its improbability.
‘If that is true, then perhaps I am the same. Perhaps I persist in the idea that another might have been right. Perhaps doubt is my function.’ He let out a long breath, and his face looked like the image of weariness and age. ‘We are almost done. Thank you, Iobel. I think if I had known you in life I would have found you most amusing,’ he said. The sky was darkening, and the sun had vanished behind the horizon without crossing the sky. ‘Ask your question, inquisitor.’
‘Where did it begin?’ she asked. ‘For Ahriman, where did it all begin?’
‘A good question.’
‘Do you know the answer?’
‘There are so many possibilities. Prospero… the Planet of the Sorcerers… both could be beginnings depending on which journey you mean.’
‘Give me the answer!’ she snapped.
The wind blew over the bare sand.
‘To reach the answer you have to ask another question,’ said a fading voice. ‘Not why did a journey
begin, but who began it?’
She looked up.
Daylight struck her skin. The night had vanished. A wind was scudding across the space in front of her. She frowned.
A small, dark object was sticking up from the ground. She bent down, shielding her eyes from the glare. It looked like a piece of wood, about the size of her spread hand, half buried in the sand. She reached out, gripped it, and gently pulled it free. The wood was dark, worn, and its edges were splintered. The surface was battered, but she could make out birds spiralling upwards towards a slice of a broken sun. She turned it over, trying to think if she had come across it before. It seemed familiar, like a piece of something she had seen and not understood.
She straightened, and tucked the fragment into her robes. Around her the empty desert rode on towards a horizon of mirages.
The Changeling ran. The shell of armour moved with it. Nearby, other monstrous figures in halved black and red followed it. Yellow light strobed around it. Breaching pods sat in rows before them. Steam and sparks vented from cables and pipes as they broke free of the pods’ flanks.
‘Enemy ships entering weapon range,’ came a human voice in its ear. The Changeling recognised the voice of one of Commodore Ishaf’s lieutenants. Tension and control bled from the words.
‘Strike Force Incarnidus ready in two hundred and thirty seconds,’ said the Changeling into the vox. Umiel’s voice slid out of its mouth flawlessly.
Space Marines were peeling off behind it as it ran on. Pistons rammed hatches shut on the flanks of breaching pods. Mag-hoists dropped from the roof with a roar of chains unravelling. Pods rose into the air and swung towards the waiting breeches of launch tubes. Each of them was a narrow cone of armour the size of a tank. Weapon pods ringed the iris hatches in their bases. Blade-shaped legs sat folded on their flanks. If they hit the hull of a ship, those legs would latch onto the armour like the jaws of a tick, and the weapon pods would cut a breach in the hull for their passengers to drop through.
The Changeling reached its pod, and swung up into the gloom of its insides. Umiel’s honour guard followed it. Mag-harnesses locked over each of them. A metallic boom shook the gloom as a hoist grasped the pod and yanked it into the air. The launch breech closed over it with a drumroll of clanks. The hoist broke free. The Changeling glanced across the honour guard, eyes taking in weapons locked to thigh armour, noting the spin of readiness runes flowing across the helmet display. Just as Umiel would have.
‘Strike Force Incarnidus stands ready to launch,’ said the Changeling. ‘The hammer falls at your word.’
‘Stand by, Incarnidus,’ said a human voice.
The Changeling waited. Its senses slid free of its shape and skimmed outwards, finding the eyes of command crew on the bridge half a kilometre above, worming into the senses of servitors and of pilots riding the void close by. It watched with a thousand eyes as the next step in its path drew nearer.
The ship the Changeling rode was a battle-barge. Crimson and black marked her hammer-head prow, speaking her role as a war-craft of the Angels Sanguine. Her guns were powerful enough to break cities, and three hundred warriors of the Adeptus Astartes stood ready in her hull. Like all of her kind, she bore a title which proclaimed the belligerence of her makers. Wrath of Ages, she was named, and she was not alone.
Beside the Wrath of Ages, dozens of ships bore down on Prospero. The fire of their engines cut the vacuum. Squadrons of sharp escorts rode above and below the larger ships. Swarms of gunships and bombers circled them, glinting with malice and starlight. Prospero was a smudged circle of light in the distance. Its surface flashed and shimmered as though it were a spherical storm cloud.
Even this far away, the Changeling could feel the warp pushing from behind the planet, and the wounds of its past pulled wide. In the space between the planet and the Imperial fleet, hundreds of ships hung in loose clusters. The warp had marked each of them. Faces snarled around gun ports. Hulls in dozens of colours glimmered with an oily sheen. Spirals of light skidded over the spines of turbolasers. It was a fleet without unity, but the sons of Prospero who had answered Ahriman’s call commanded all of them. Those who had decided to take their swords and strength elsewhere had already gone or were running for the system edge. Those who remained waited to face the Imperium as it came to burn their home world for a second time.
At the core of the waiting ships hung a vessel with a gold and black hull. On her bridge, the Changeling saw the mind of her master burning cold and bright, and it heard the command slip from his lips.
‘Fire,’ said Khayon, and the black ship spoke the first word of the battle.
Streams of plasma blinked through the void. Shells hammered out. Shields fizzed and stuttered. Then the Imperial fleet replied. Torpedoes and shells cut the darkness into slivers. More ships around Prospero began to fire. Seen from above the vector of the Imperial attack, the battle was a crescent of engine fires closing on the scattered arrowhead of defenders. The volume of fire grew. Shells and las-blasts met in mid-flight, and detonations swallowed the void between the fleets.
The Changeling felt the ship shake around it. Chimes of warnings rose to its ears. The battle-barge was holding back from the first wave. Backed by rapid strike vessels, its task was not to meet the defenders head-on, but to break through them. It had a task to perform; it was here not just as warrior, but as executioner. Once they were through the defenders they would scatter to the ships in low orbit and clear them so that the battle-barges could drop close enough to fire the cyclonic warheads down onto the planet.
‘All units, we are at the line of fire,’ came a droning servitor voice. ‘Prepare for launch. May the fire of fury light your path.’
The Changeling smiled with a stolen face, and waited.
One.
The torches dimmed as Knekku counted the first beat of his right heart. The sounds and psychic murmur of the Planet of the Sorcerers faded.
‘Listen to me, governors of the hidden and silent ways.’ The chant came from his lips with a mist of frozen breath. His muscles felt like lead.
This is not what you should be doing, said a voice at the back of his thoughts. There has to be another way.
Two.
He raised the silver dagger in both hands. The thought in his head reached out and touched the blade. It shone bright, and the torches dimmed further. The tower chamber was a crumbling circle of dimming light now.
‘Hear me, watchers of the Labyrinth.’ He could feel ice forming in his throat and lungs.
You have a task. You have a duty. Ahriman and the Exiles return, and you must meet them. The thoughts drummed with rising insistence in his skull, even as he pushed them away. But then the dry rasp of the Crimson King’s last words to him cut through him.
+I have made a mistake, my son.+
Three.
The dagger punched through skin, muscle and bone. Light and pain exploded through him. Darkness came down on him in an avalanche.
His right heart stopped.
He stood up.
He was no longer in the tower. His body was still there, on the stone floor with a ritual knife in its chest. But his mind and soul had slipped sidewise into the deepest realms of the warp. He was a mental projection, a thought form cast into the Sea of Souls.
He felt no different, though. He was dressed as he had been in the tower. The red and blue of his robes rose as though in a wind, but there was no wind. He looked up and the world clattered into place piece by piece before his eyes. He was standing on a flight of stone steps. Sheer drops opened to either side of him. A silver haze hid the depths beneath. Above him other flights of steps branched from his own, curving away to meet at impossible angles. The mist hid the distance the further he looked.
He looked at his chest. A light pulsed beneath the skin, glowing like a sun trapped beneath his ribs.
‘Beating still,’ purred a voice from above him. He looked up, hands rising. A wide feline face looked back at him from a bottom step just abo
ve his head. The head turned, and its fur became the colour of brushed copper. Two rows of eyes looked at him. The iris and colour of each one was different. ‘You will exist here for a while, Knekku. You have bought yourself time. Enough time? Now that is an interesting question.’
The creature panted, licking the air with a pink tongue. Knekku recognised it, even though he had never seen its shape before.
‘Avenisi?’
‘It has been a long time, my old friend. What is it for you? A thousand years lived since Prospero? Two? Three? More?’
Knekku looked at the daemon that he had once called his tutelary. When he had last seen it, the daemon had shed fur and feline shape for claws and tentacles of heat. That had been on Prospero, and he had never sought the creature out again since. He knew why. It was the sense of betrayal, as sharp now as it had been when he and the rest of the Legion saw the true nature of the angels that had been sharing their thoughts for decades.
‘Why are you here now?’
‘To help you walk the Labyrinth. To help you find the Crimson King.’
‘I did not summon you.’
‘And I did not call you into the Labyrinth, but here we both are.’ It jumped and landed delicately on the steps just beside him. Its fur was blue, but it changed hue as it moved. ‘Shall we start? You do not have unlimited time.’
‘What if I do not wish your aid?’
‘Then you will be at a decided disadvantage.’
‘Who sent you to me? Who knew that I would step into this place?’
‘Everyone. No one. Someone.’
‘I have no more need of riddles.’
‘No, you have need of some very specific help, and so here I am. You need to start moving or the Labyrinth will swallow you up. It does not like things that aren’t trying to find something.’
Knekku looked up at the steps above him, and froze. They had gone. Instead of steps leading upwards, there were now steps leading down into the silver mist. He considered for a second, shaping his thoughts into hard control.
‘You did not really think this through, did you? So unlike you to act out of panic without considering all the steps and possibilities. Perhaps you have changed more than I thought.’
The Omnibus - John French Page 86