The Omnibus - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  Again it had been Ctesias who broke the quiet.

  ‘A grand ritual will fail, no matter how elaborate, and no matter how strong the sympathetic connection between Prospero and the Planet of the Sorcerers.’ The summoner had shaken his head, his eyes wide with disbelief. ‘It will fail, because there is no way for it to succeed. You mean to breach the power of Magnus, of the planet itself. To do that would require–’

  ‘Sacrifice,’ he had said, and the word had fallen like a stone.

  The galaxy of souls spun past faster and faster around Ahriman. Colours exploded outwards, and he was stretching with them, becoming thin, becoming a cord pulled between two points. It was terrifying, and mind-breaking, and he looked upon it and felt only calm.

  ‘We must give something to take this path,’ he had said. ‘You are right on all counts, all of you. For us to break our exile, Prospero must burn for a second time. Every memory, every shred of what was, every scar left by the coming of the Wolves will be called up. The storm that sleeps under the skin of Prospero will be wakened. When wakened the fire will be set, and the power of that death pyre will send us across the gap between worlds to the Planet of the Sorcerers.’

  ‘You cannot mean this.’ Ctesias had said the words, but he had seen them unspoken in the eyes of all the others.

  ‘I do mean it,’ Ahriman had said, and looked between each of his lieutenants. ‘It is the only way. We are fighting a war for our future. The past only has value if it can serve our will.’

  All of the Circle had said nothing, but he had felt the silent struggles of thought and feeling underneath that silence. Under the protections cast over the gathering, he had not had the ability to read those thoughts and emotions, but he had not needed to; they were the same as his own had been when he had realised what he would need to do.

  ‘If we fail…’ Gilgamos had said slowly, looking at each of the others as he spoke. ‘If we fail, our Legion remains broken and dead. What comfort will the remains of false glory give?’ Then he had looked directly at Ahriman and bowed his head. ‘Prospero will burn, and we will rise.’

  Ahriman remembered the words and felt time and space flatten and curve around his soul. Behind him the pyre of Prospero was a light he could never look at. Ahead the kaleidoscope of colours turned faster and faster, and the point of light waiting in the distance became a flat circle of white, around which existence turned, and turned, and turned without cease.

  ‘We will rise,’ he had said, and bowed his head. A second later the rest had followed, their voices coming one after another, each one louder than the last.

  ‘We will rise.’

  ‘We will rise.’

  ‘We will rise.’

  And the memory of his brothers’ voices was a roar in his soul.

  ‘We rise!’

  And everything stopped.

  Ctesias fell without moving. Time broke like a sheet of ice beneath him and he was drowning in eternity. The lights of the corridor beyond the chamber door, the bulk of Credence and Ignis were sliding away. The thrum of the ship’s deck beneath his feet was a single curt note of vibration.

  He fell on and on and nothing ended.

  Time slammed back into place. He gasped. The blare of alarms stabbed into him. He reached out instinctively with his mind, and stopped as his will slid down into nothing.

  ‘We are crossing the bridge between worlds,’ growled Ignis.

  ‘Thank you for the observation of the obvious,’ he snarled and pushed himself up on his staff. ‘How long do we have?’

  ‘That question has no logical answer.’

  ‘Before we manifest on the other side.’

  Ignis shrugged.

  ‘I have no answer.’

  Ctesias cursed and began to stride down the passage.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  ‘This is my ship. I have command.’

  ‘This is not the most optimal time for you to develop a sense of entitlement,’ he spat. ‘If there are still enemy on board, do something about that.’

  ‘Full countermeasures are in place. They are still an active threat, we should–’

  ‘We should get to the launch decks. Whenever this subjective journey ends we need to be ready to fight, or it will not matter whose ship this is.’

  Ignis paused, and Ctesias thought he might be about to argue, but instead the moment passed and he began to follow at a deck-shaking run.

  ‘You are correct. Our positional alignment in the pattern cannot be out of place.’

  Around them the ship marked their paces with flashes of red and yellow.

  Ctesias began to mutter strings of syllables. Within his mind caged pieces of daemon names rose in his memory. He glanced at the body of the Athenaeum draped across Credence’s arms. At the back of his head, part of him still felt as though he were falling without moving.

  The Changeling ran down the companionway, a mortal weapon in each of its hands. Warning lights dyed the air, strobing red and yellow. Gunfire roared from behind it. It heard the stuttered bark of a bolter reply, and the soft booms of detonations as the shells hit their targets.

  ‘They are closing, captain.’ The voice scratched from the vox-unit in its helm: Kadel, sergeant of Umiel’s honour guard and the only other one of the squad still alive.

  Alive… a strange word. The Changeling wondered what it really meant. In the warp everything simply existed: nothing alive, nothing dead.

  They were deep inside what Umiel would have thought of as the enemy ship. If he had been there, the Angels Sanguine captain would not have known that it was called the Word of Hermes, or that it had borne that name since it had slipped its birth-cradle above Jove, nor that it had once had the honour of bearing the primarch of the IX Legiones Astartes to meet Magnus the Red. The Changeling knew those facts, however, those and many more. In a sense it had been here before. Such things were irrelevant now, though, all that mattered was where it needed to reach; who it needed to reach. They and the ship were hurling through the warp propelled by the pyre of Prospero. When it reached its destination, the Changeling needed to be ready.

  A shape stepped into the passage in front of the Changeling. The strobing light caught chromed plates and the flash of a visor. Skin stretched across the figure’s armour plates as it brought its weapon up. The Changeling ducked. A spear of lightning shot from the gun. The air flashed as it cooked. The Changeling came up out of its crouch and rammed its weight into the figure. It was a metal thing of pistols and wires, but with a spark of sentience within: a cyborg. It lurched backward, steadied itself and then leapt back with a snap of pistons, tendrils of electricity dancing across its body. The Changeling ducked aside as another fork of lightning cracked down the passageway. Shouts came from further down the corridor where Kadel was firing at other targets.

  The cyborg hissed forwards. Its head turned. The visor covering the front of its face was translucent silver. The withered face beneath looked soft, like flesh left in water too long. Patterns in hair-thin gold wound over every inch of its frame. The Changeling could feel the warp slithering through its substance.

  The Changeling fired the bolter in its hands. Three rounds hit the visor, and blew the front of its face off. It did not fall. Dead nerves triggered its lightning gun. The Changeling began to move, began to try to stretch reality around itself. The lightning bolt struck its torso and flashed through its armour. The side of the chestplate blew out. Shards of ceramite ripped into its left arm. Flesh dissolved down the side of its body. Black and blue ectoplasm poured down its leg. It folded to its knees. The cyborg was twitching where it stood, nerves firing at random. The Changeling fired from the floor. Half a clip of bolt-rounds ripped the cyborg to shreds of metal. It let the gun drop when the clip had only two rounds in it.

  It could not feel true pain, or fatigue, but for its kind the closest to both was to feel the warp begin to pull it back to it. It was thinning, its grip on reality weakening. This was not its realm, and the foul acidity of
reality was eating at its strength as it drained away. It would have to call on–

  ‘Captain?’

  The Changeling looked up. Kadel stood five paces from the Changeling, gun in his hands, armour glinting with fresh damage. Kadel’s eyes moved to the hole in the Changeling’s armour and the glowing ichor pouring onto the deck. The shock in his mind flicked over into action. The gun muzzle came up, the finger tightening on the trigger.

  It was not supposed to be like this. The end of this path was so close. It was not supposed to be like this. Fate had spun around and made certainty uncertain. If it had been a different breed of creature, the Changeling would have found the change in its fortunes delightful in every respect. But it was not, and it would not fail its creator.

  It fired first. The shell left the barrel of its boltgun a fraction of a second before Kadel’s. The two rounds met in mid-air. Kadel reeled as the blast kicked him backwards. The Changeling peeled power from the warp and shunted the blast away as it forced itself up. Kadel recovered, raising his head to find his target. The Changeling’s last bolt shell punched through his eye-lens. Kadel’s skull exploded inside his helm.

  The Changeling looked down at the two creatures dead at its feet. The light kept strobing: red, yellow, red, yellow, red.

  The neatness of its path had gone. That was unfortunate. It was running out of faces.

  The alarms were still ringing, and the ship still quivering as it rode its own path through the immaterium. The Changeling resisted the tug of the warp and began to re-sculpt its body.

  It had one more face to wear and then the ordinances by which it walked the mortal world would be broken.

  It had one more face to wear before it delivered Ahriman his reward.

  It turned and staggered into the flashing murk. With each step its stride became smoother. Armour healed like skin, and the smears of ectoplasm blurred and vanished.

  One more face.

  Sar’iq, Magister Exalted of the Thousand Sons, paused as he climbed the tower, and looked up at the sky. A silent fork of lightning flicked across the heavens. A second later he heard the growl of thunder, and the steps shook beneath his feet. His cohort of Rubricae lined the stairs and palisades of Knekku’s tower fortress. The lightning lit the sky again.

  Sar’iq stared for a long second, watching with both his eyes and his mind. The lightning storms were growing in intensity both within the warp and in reality. Something was happening, but he could not feel what. Strange occurrences were not unusual on the Planet of the Sorcerers, but this was different. He could feel it like a shift in the wind before a sudden deluge.

  +Have the carrion brought any news from the edges of the realm?+ he asked, his thought reaching through the city to the minds of his peers and disciples. Wordless negations came almost instantaneously.

  He felt his skin prickle, and he shook himself before he began his climb again. Ahriman was out there, and he would come, but there had been no sign of him yet, no probing of the Planet’s occult defences, no attempt to steer ships through the void and make a landing, no unleashing of forces subtle or otherwise within the warp. Nothing.

  Apart from the fact that we know he is coming, thought Sar’iq. Apart from that. And now the lightning, and the feeling that something had shifted without him noticing.

  Why now, of all times, have you become silent, Knekku? he wondered, and climbed higher. There was no point in sending the thought as a question. He had not been able to sense or reach Knekku in thought since the setting of the planet’s ninth sun. Amongst the other signs and portents, it was the one that disturbed Sar’iq the most. Knekku was a troubling individual, gifted without a doubt, loyal too, but headstrong. In many ways he reminded Sar’iq of Ahriman.

  He climbed on. Knekku’s central tower was a cylinder of crystal-flecked granite. It was without embellishment, and did not connect to any of the other towers within the city. Most of the towers and pyramids formed bridges with other structures, even if only temporarily, spanning the gulf between allied sorcerers with bridges of silver, emerald, or mother of pearl. Knekku’s tower did not, and never had, made such connections. It stood alone, to most eyes appearing smooth and featureless. Only to those to whom Knekku had spoken his seal did the entrances and stairs appear. Sar’iq was one of those few, and so he climbed to find his brother.

  First the lightning and now Knekku is nowhere to be found, he thought, bad auguries both.

  Sar’iq climbed until there was almost no tower above him, and then spoke the words of Knekku’s seal. A door appeared in the granite wall. It did not form, or open, it simply became. Sar’iq moved towards it. High above there was another jagged flash of light, and then another, before the thunder of the first had even reached his ears. The tower shook, both tremors running together. Sar’iq glanced at the sky. The lightning was still there, crackling in a web across a spreading pool of black cloud. Lower down, the Rubricae shivered where they stood, the movement perfectly synchronised.

  Sar’iq was about to call out with his mind to still the cohort, but he glanced through the door into Knekku’s tower before the thought connected with his will.

  He froze, and then started forwards, curses spilling from his lips and mind.

  Knekku knelt on the floor at the centre of the chamber. Thick frost covered him. Circles of candles stood around him, and incense torches had burned to cold cinders in the wall brackets. Beneath the pelt of ice crystals he could see Knekku’s hands were wrapped around the hilt of a dagger which projected from his chest. Tiny, frozen rubies of blood hung in the air, sparkling with cold light.

  What have you done? he thought, and then his eyes found the scattered tomes and parchments covering the lecterns and altars at the chamber’s edge. And he knew what Knekku had done, and why.

  ‘You fool,’ he hissed. ‘You nine-fold fool.’

  Knekku had stepped beyond, into the realm of pure spirit. He had gone to look for Magnus in the only place he could be sure to find him. He had walked into the Labyrinth.

  Sar’iq was just stepping towards Knekku when the world shattered.

  Ahriman and his host manifested at the heart of the City of Towers. A column of fire rose from the ground, struck up at the sky and expanded outwards. A blast wave followed the light. Towers snapped. Gravity quavered. Stone blocks and shards of obsidian rose into the air and plummeted upwards. Molten silver fell as rain. The air howled as it spun with blue and pink fire. Mutants sat atop battlements became scraps of bone and fur. Those further away, but who saw the light of the manifestation, fell to their knees, eyes cooking in their skulls.

  The inferno touched the atmosphere and burned on into the vacuum beyond. Silver towers floating at the edge of the sky tumbled towards the stars like embers caught in an updraught. The daemons within the towers howled as they melted inside their prisons. And the blast went on, howling into cold space. Sorcerers across the planet reeled, their thoughts ringing. Human slaves thousands of miles away from the manifestation screamed for an instant before flames poured out of their mouths and they became living torches.

  The City of Towers shook like a forest in a hurricane. Mortal warriors and mutants fell from battlements and their screams were taken by the shriek of the fire. The manifestation burned brighter, and ever brighter, a blinding column at the heart of the city. The towers on the edge of the manifestation began to tremble, fighting to keep their shapes. Silver blinked to stone, to glass, to crystal, to iron. Windows and doors stretched wide as the towers screamed with the sound of shattering crystal. They slumped into the inferno, one after another, like candles on the edge of a bonfire.

  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 sp
ite 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.