by John French
He took another step and suddenly the palace was rising above him. The darkness was gone, replaced by the bright heat of a noon sun in a clear sky. He looked up at the palace walls. They had changed since he had been here last. Towers had grown from the upper wings, and new spire tops shone bright in the sun. Covered bridges of white marble now spanned wings that had been unconnected before. Complex geometric designs in azurite and porphyry winked from roofs and doors. To Astraeos the palace looked like a mass of coral grown in sunlit seawater.
He began to climb the steps. No matter which way he walked in the palace he would reach Ahriman – after all, this was Ahriman’s domain.
Summoned to my master, he thought, and felt a twinge of the old bitterness, but the feeling was tired and the fire it raised weak. It was my choice. No one else made it for me. Ahriman is right, we make our own fate. Even when we think we are bound to another it is a choice to bend the knee to their will.
The dry wind followed him as he passed through the doors and down the first corridors. Sealed doors lined the walls, each door different: some made of riveted metal, some of blank stone, some of etched glass. He passed windows which looked out on plains of sand dunes, spirals of dust rising from their crests in the wind. After only a few turns he had lost the sense of where he was within the palace, whether the windows were the same as he had seen from the outside, or if they looked out on somewhere else. Wooden shutters carved with birds hid the view from some openings, though he occasionally caught glimpses of other landscapes, of cities under red setting suns and lush jungles in twilight. He kept walking, following no path, making choices of which corridor or staircase to take without consideration. At last he emerged from a spiral staircase and found himself on a wide platform of black marble.
Ahriman stood before him. He wore no armour, but his robes were white silk. Tiny ivory amulets in the shapes of animal skulls hung from his shoulders and waist on tapers of blue silk. A table of polished wood and beaten copper stood before him. A stack of crystal cards sat on the table, flicking into different arrangements like leaves turned by a breeze. Ahriman turned to look at Astraeos.
‘I have it,’ he said, without preamble. He held out a hand. A strand of golden light hung in the air above his fingers, coiling and squirming into knots as Astraeos looked at it.
A thread of destiny, Astraeos thought. Plucked from the loom of time.
‘Is it enough?’ he said, stepping closer.
Ahriman gave a brief smile that did not reach his eyes.
‘Almost.’
‘There is no other way?’
Ahriman closed his hand and the strand of light melted into his skin.
‘Many, but all with greater risk.’
‘Tracking an individual’s destiny to one point in the future is not a risk?’
Ahriman turned back to the table. The crystal cards rose into the air before him, forming an orrery of images, each one turning and changing in relation to one another. A king in red looked from the face of one card, his right eye hidden by his hand. A priestess in burning robes glided past, her face changing to a skull as the card moved.
‘Knowledge is power,’ said Ahriman softly. ‘But the greatest knowledge is how to find more. There are too many uncertainties in what we attempt already, introduce more and…’ He extended a finger and tapped a card. It spun away, tumbling wildly end over end. It struck another card. Suddenly the delicately rotating arrangement was tumbling in chaos, collapsing into a fluttering storm of changing images: a blind crone, a man with a wolf’s head, a hunched scribe writing red letters on white parchment. Then two cards hit each other and shattered. Rainbow fragments expanded out, hit other cards, and soon there was just a sphere of bright crystal splinters.
‘I seek the lost book of my father,’ continued Ahriman, ‘penned by the remembrancer Kalimakus, and Inquisitor Iobel knows where it is and how it is protected. For that knowledge we fight a war. Others make the earth their battlefield, or space, but we are doing more – we are making war through time. The person we seek is unique. Perhaps there are others who know what we need, but Iobel is already linked to me, and that link allows us to see the paths she may take in the future. Knowing this we look for the points of intersection in time, the points of certainty. We choose one point and go to find her.’
‘So simple,’ snorted Astraeos. He had learnt many things from Ahriman. He was no longer what he was when he began, but there were things that still remained beyond his understanding. Most of them he had little desire to grasp.
Ahriman gave a sad smile, his eyes suddenly bright.
‘It is both simple and not,’ he said. Beside him the tumbling shards of crystal spun together. A tree of crystal dust grew in the air, reaching into the sky above them. Ahriman continued, his eyes turning to look up at the growing sculpture. ‘To see the future is like looking up at the branches of a tree. From the ground the trunk is visible, but after a while the tree begins to branch. Suddenly something that was one becomes several. Those branches in turn divide again, and again, and again. The further up you look the more the tree branches, the more the lower branches hide those that grow higher still.’
A broad canopy of crystalline foliage hid the sun above the tower now, each leaf a different colour. Astraeos thought he glimpsed the face of the red-robed king, high up and far away, just one shard amongst many.
‘And now we see that the tree is a living thing, its every inch moving between new growth and death. Leaves bud, wither and fall. The tree grows higher, and a wind rises. New branches spread above you. Some branches die, and become dry limbs creaking as they scrape at the sky. Sometimes the wind is just a breath that only stirs the thinnest twigs. Sometimes it is a gale. The tree sways, the branches thrash. And all the while, through every change, every stir of the air, every new growth, you are looking up, seeing the pattern of branches change, glimpsing its heights only to then have them hidden again. We see what is closest most clearly, what is further away perhaps not at all.’
Ahriman stood still, staring up, and then he looked down. The crystalline tree crumbled, glittering leaves falling through the sunlight with a sound like the ringing of a thousand glass bells. The pieces began to spiral as they fell, rotating like a dust devil around the table to coalesce at its centre. The cascade of crystal vanished, and a stack of crystal cards sat on the beaten copper surface of the table.
Ahriman reached down and picked up the topmost card, and held it out towards Astraeos. The priestess in the robes of fire looked out from her crystal prison, her face flickering between skull and flesh.
‘To predict the future is not to try and see one leaf on the tree – it is to see a forest, and find one tree, and on that tree to find one leaf.’
‘Is it even possible?’
Ahriman placed the card back on the pile.
‘It is, but it is not the easiest way to know the future.’
‘What is?’
Astraeos thought he saw something harden in Ahriman’s expression.
‘To destroy every other possibility except the one that will occur.’
Astraeos shivered, despite the heat of the sun.
‘The Athenaeum,’ he said softly. ‘Is it worth it, Ahriman?’
Ahriman looked away, but said nothing.
He has promised salvation to his Legion, thought Astraeos. What else can he do but try to understand what went wrong, to see if there was an error that could have been corrected.
‘There is something I must ask of you.’ Ahriman looked around again. Astraeos held the cold blue gaze.
‘Ask,’ he said.
Ignis stepped from the gloom of the gunship into the bright light of the Sycorax’s hangar bay. He paused at the bottom of the ramp. It had been a long time since he had been on board the ship, and longer still since he had breathed her air or walked her decks. Centuries had passed for him and in that time he knew that he had changed, but it seemed both time and change had touched the Sycorax more deeply. Blooms of ver
digris crusted the recesses of plates and rivets. Geometric reliefs in bronze and lapis crawled over the decks and walls. Some of them looked as though they had grown from the ship’s bones. Figures in billowing yellow robes moved on the margins of the hangar, clicking with machine noise. All of them seemed to either be skeletal and tall, or bloated and squat. They were watching him. He could feel their eyes and curiosity prickle his mind.
Ignis began to count and calculate as he watched. The numbers and geometries of this situation were not good, but then what should he expect given what this ship was, and who commanded it? He turned his head, and saw the other craft in the hangar bay. Gunships, assault boats and shuttles of every mark he knew, and several that he did not, lay on the tarnished bronze deck. Groups of warriors hung close to each craft. Most were Space Marines, but each group was as different as the craft that had brought them. There was a warlord and his entourage, their armour glistening with an oily rainbow sheen, their helms curling with crowns of carved horn. There were others shrouded in grey, standing in a perfect circle, hands resting on the hilts of bared swords. There was a cohort in off-white battleplate, the eyepieces of each warrior weeping silver without ceasing. They all noticed him at last. Eyes turned slowly, a few weapons were touched. He watched questions and pride flicker in the auras of each.
And well they might look, Ignis thought. They were the leaders, emissaries, and chosen of the warbands that Ahriman had drawn to him or inherited from Amon’s Brotherhood of Dust. Here they waited to see the sorcerer lord who led them all, but Ahriman had left them like dogs waiting outside a feasting hall. Slighted pride and petty superiority foamed close to the surface of the watching warriors. All of them wanted favour, or fortune, or secrets. Ignis could read the desire in them without having to sense it in their thoughts. Each of them wanted to rise higher in their own schemes, but all believed that only the Thousand Sons could ever hope for Ahriman’s true favour. They hated that, as much as they feared the sorcerers and their Rubricae warriors.
And into this pattern of discord Ignis had walked; a lone figure, a newcomer to the sorcerer lord’s court. He could feel the aggression seeping into the air as his eyes skimmed the vast chamber. Even in his furnace-orange Terminator plate, he was a weakling in their eyes, another lost warrior drawn to the flame of power.
A hulking warrior in pearl-white battleplate broke from a cluster of identically armoured figures. Ignis watched the warrior out of the corner of his eye. He sighed inwardly. It was always going to be like this, and it was only going to get worse. He had not wanted to come, he really had not.
The white-armoured warrior was five strides away now. He had a hook-headed sword in his left hand. Symbols spidered the blade. Ignis wondered if the warrior really knew what they meant, or why they did precisely nothing.
The warrior halted two and seven-eighteenths of its blade length from Ignis. A vein twitched in Ignis’s temple as he noted the imprecision of the distance. He really should not have come.
‘I am Augustonar, first blade of the hundred that serve Iconis of the Broken Gate.’
Ignis let a breath out slowly, but did not look at Augustonar. The warrior tilted his helm, waiting.
‘My lord, whose word lives in eternity, wishes to know your name.’
Ignis flicked his eyes upwards. He could feel familiar minds in the vast structure of the ship, but all of them were distant.
My brothers, he thought. Then he frowned, sending the black electoos on his face into a dance of reforming patterns. Brothers – he had not used that word in a long time.
Augustonar’s voice growled out again.
‘I am Aug–’
‘You are Augustonar, first blade of a mongrel set of traitors, culled from a Legion of credulous scum.’ He looked directly at Augustonar. The warrior’s aura was a red blur of rage. ‘I am sorry – do these facts offend?’
Augustonar lunged forwards.
Credence came out of the dark hold of the gunship behind Ignis with a thump of extending pistons. The automaton made the deck in a single stride, weapons arming as it straightened to its full height. The orange lacquer of its body plating gleamed in the stablights. Geometric patterns etched down to the black metal spiralled across its every inch in lines no thicker than a blade edge. It was an echo of the colour and marks on Ignis’s own Terminator armour; not identical, of course, never that.
Credence hit Augustonar across the shoulder with a machine-clamp hand. The warrior lifted from the deck and slammed down ten paces away.
Ignis watched Augustonar try to rise.
The automaton coughed a stream of machine code.
‘No, the threat still seems to be present,’ said Ignis.
Behind Augustonar, the rest of the white-armoured warriors surged forwards. The cannon on Credence’s back rotated towards them.
Ignis closed his eyes. It was inevitable that it would come to this; the patterns and alignments would not allow for anything else.
+Enough!+ The telepathic shout snapped Ignis’s eyes open. He was in time to see the first three white warriors fall, the weapons of each tumbling from their hands. The rest halted.
A figure stood in front of Ignis. His armour was the blue of a sea beneath a noon sun. He had a sword in each hand, one sheathed in a crackling power field, the other in pale ghost light. Two jackal heads snarled in opposite directions from the high crest of his helm, and when he turned to look over his shoulder at Ignis the blank silver of his faceplate glinted beneath green eyepieces.
Ignis met the stare, feeling surprise roll through his mind. Credence rotated towards him, and clattered a query.
‘No,’ said Ignis. He paused, as he tried to select words. ‘No, it is not… a threat.’
The swordsman glanced back at the white-armoured warriors, who were backing away.
+Sanakht,+ sent Ignis. Credence clattered as the swordsman stepped closer. Ignis could see Sanakht’s aura harden with control, but there was something wrong with it, as though it was a flame cast by a broken lamp. +It has been a long time.+
Sanakht just stared at him, then turned away. +Not long enough perhaps,+ sent Ignis as Sanakht strode away across the deck.
Credence’s gun mount tilted upwards with a hiss of releasing pistons. The automaton gave a low rattle of questioning binaric.
‘That,’ said Ignis carefully, ‘is the first of my brothers I have seen in eight hundred years.’
Sanakht sheathed his swords as he walked from the hangar deck. The power sword with the hawk pommel went across his left hip close to his right hand, the jackal-capped force sword across his right. His fingers tingled as he broke the connection to the blade’s psychoactive core. Around him slaves, servitors and machine-wrights made way and lowered their gazes. He felt the breath held unreleased in his lungs.
Ignis had seen the weakness in him; it had been there, clear in the bastard’s eyes.
He had last seen Ignis on the Planet of the Sorcerers, staring at the circle of Ahriman’s surviving cabal from the cordon of those who had not been part of the Rubric conspiracy. Sanakht could remember looking between eyes filled with shock and anger, and amongst those looks there had been Ignis’s cold gaze. The Master of Ruin had not looked shocked, merely curious. Sanakht had been barely conscious, his broken soul leaking strength into the aether, but that cold, calculating stare had penetrated into his awareness, and had followed him through the centuries.
You are crippled, it had said. You are nothing.
Sanakht let out his held breath, and pushed his mind out into the aether. Behind the mirror plate of his helm, his face twitched at the effort.
+He is here,+ he sent.
+Alone?+ It was Astraeos who answered, the sending thick with raw power. Sanakht blinked. So Ahriman was still secluded.
+Yes, apart from an automaton bodyguard.+
+You are escorting him to the citadel?+
+He can make his own way,+ snapped Sanakht. +He is here. That is enough.+ He broke the mental link. A mo
te of pain pulsed at the corner of his eyes. He shook himself, careful to make sure that his discomfort did not show. All use of his abilities took effort. What once would have been like breathing to him, was now a matter of deliberate focus.
Why had Ahriman brought Ignis, one-time Master of the Order of Ruin, to him? The question pulsed in Sanakht’s mind as he ascended back up through the Sycorax’s decks. The Order of Ruin had been the masters of the sacred numerology of destruction in the old, long dead structure of the Thousand Sons. By their arts the Legion had levelled cities, arrayed armies for sieges, and determined patterns of attack. They had always been a strange breed, and Ignis more so than any. He had not been part of Ahriman’s cabal, nor part of Amon’s Brotherhood of Dust, but he had also left the thrall of Magnus. He was an outcast by his own choosing, a breaker of fortresses and worlds with no loyalty to anything. Yet here he was, called by Ahriman to stand with them in whatever was to come.
And where are we going that we need his kind? wondered Sanakht.
Kadin looked up into the daemon’s shark grin.
‘Can you hear me, brother?’ he said. The daemon hissed, and stirred in its web of chains. Kadin took a step back, his mechanical legs squealing as they cracked the ice from their joints. The chamber was small. White frost covered the silver of its eighty-one walls, ceilings, and floors. The glow of the sigils cut into every surface diluted the dark. The daemon hung at the chamber’s centre. Its flesh was moon white. The body of a Space Marine, which was now the creature’s host and prison, could still be glimpsed in its form, but only just. Its hands were sharp cradles of bone, and black quills had pushed from the skin of its torso. It looked at Kadin with eyes of glistening night.
‘I…’ began Kadin again, but the rest of the words drained from his mouth. He did not like coming here; it made him feel something he did not understand. However, he came anyway. The thing hanging in the chamber was not his brother any more, though it was as a brother that he talked to the creature. Cadar had died on the Titan Child many years ago, and even if a spark of his life had survived, the daemon bound into his flesh would have consumed it. At least that was what Ahriman said. Kadin hoped he was right. ‘We are still waiting,’ he said at last. ‘The fleet is ill at ease. Ahriman has said nothing of what he is doing, or where we will go next, or when. Astraeos and the rest of the Circle hold things together, but…’ He paused again. The daemon’s head had twitched around at the mention of Astraeos’s name. Its chains clinked, as though it had tensed against their grip. Kadin licked his lips.