Ahriman: Sorcerer

by John French

  ‘Mistress.’

  Iobel tried to focus on the voice, but there was blood in her eyes, and her thoughts felt soft and unfocused. She felt hands begin to lift a weight pinning her legs. She blinked, and looked up. Cavor knelt above her. His mouth twitched to show his broken-toothed smile. Behind him the silver mountain of Cendrion was turning, his head tilted upwards to the domed ceiling. At his feet lay the body of Astraeos. Blood was pumping from what had been the Space Marine’s face. She could hear shouting, running feet, the sounds of panic.

  ‘Stay still, mistress,’ said Cavor. She frowned. Her head hurt a lot. She rolled onto her front, pushed herself to her knees. Purple and black spots bloomed in her vision. The ground felt like it was spinni–

  …A web of light and colour spinning into a storm, growing, filling her sight. Ashes and ice and… The vision snapped from her awareness.

  She bit off a yell of pain, blinked away the afterglow of the image.

  She felt hands trying to steady her. She flicked them away and stood, her teeth gritted. Smoke was bubbling through the chamber. All around her people were moving. Thunder and gunfire rolled overhead. Cavor was at her side, chromed guns drawn, his head twitching. She could see shapes moving through the smoke, clusters of people with weapons drawn.

  ‘Did you see that?’ she said, feeling her mouth struggle to form each word.

  ‘Mistress?’

  …A web drawing tighter, each strand a line of fire in the night…

  She was breathing hard, sweat prickling her cold skin.

  No one was moving. Her eyes flickered over them. Can’t they feel it? Can’t they–

  …The web drew around her, drawing tighter, and she was alone with just the sound of her own rising pulse…

  She blinked and found Cendrion’s silver-grey eyes on hers.

  +Inquisitor?+ he sent, but his voice was distant as though he was moving away from her, as though she was falling. She could feel herself shaking now.

  +Can’t… you… see… it?+ she sent. Cendrion’s brow flickered. Then he looked up, and then back at her. He nodded once as though in apology. His mind punched into hers. It was like being stabbed by a crystal knife.

  …black stillness, and beyond the stars spinning in a blur…

  +Run,+ he sent, as his mind withdrew. He raised his sword: its edge was suddenly burning. He looked upwards as thunder echoed through the castle’s stones. +Run. Now!+

  Iobel took a step, her hand moving to draw the hand cannon from her second holster.

  The ceiling vanished. Her vision flashed white, each person and object becoming a black shadow. It was still, silent, like the image of an explosion burned onto the retina before the eye could close.

  Figures of shadow stood around her, looming taller and taller, their edges blurred, their shapes without depth. Iobel realised that she could not feel her own heartbeat.

  +Iobel.+ The voice was all around her, holding her in place.

  A shriek rang through the chamber. A tongue of white flame cut through the growing dark. One of the shadows was falling, its shape twisting and shrinking like a burning scrap of paper. Colour and shape blinked back into place. She was at the centre of a circle of giants armoured in sapphire blue. She had an impression of blood flicking across white silk robes, of a figure falling with a whine of armour. Cendrion was there, moving faster than she could track. She saw his sword rise and come down.

  One of the blue warriors moved to meet him, slashing out with a blade-tipped staff. Cendrion sidestepped the blow, and cut down. Another sapphire warrior fell. She felt the force holding her weaken. Other shapes moved in the glowing cloud of dust. She dipped her gun in her good hand.

  She saw him then, one figure amongst the ring of warriors. His armour was silver-edged blue, and his eyepieces glowed red beneath his horn-topped helm. He nodded once as though in greeting.

  +Now,+ called a voice in her head. +It must be now or the alignment will pass.+

  Cendrion was a pace away, his sword a sheet of blinding light.

  +What of Astraeos?+ said another voice.

  Iobel raised her gun, until the muzzle was pointing at the red eyes. Her finger tightened on the trigger.

  +Now.+

  The world vanished, and there was just the rushing of a storm wind and the spinning of stars.

  VII

  Loyalty

  The jungle of his dreams closed over Ahriman. The leaves stirred around him as he slid between them. He paused, cocking his head to listen. The creak of insects and the murmur of the wind in the canopy answered him. Heat pressed close to his skin. Sweat beaded across his body and dribbled down his muscles.

  The fatigue of the real following me into the unreal, he thought, as he took a heavy breath. The efforts of the battle on Vohal still clung to his mind and body like a fever. Out in reality, he sat in the Sycorax’s High Citadel as it cut through the warp. The ship and the rest of his fleet had broken off their attack and run back into the warp as soon as the Circle and the Rubricae had materialised on the Sycorax again. The diversion the void assault had provided had cost them a handful of vessels. There had been other costs, though. Here, in the landscape of his dreams, he had no doubt that the oppressive heat of the jungle was his mind’s way of expressing his weariness.

  The jungle had once covered Sarlina, a world which had been conquered by the Thousand Sons in a different age. The shadows were different, though; something within his psyche had touched them, and made them grow until they seemed to flow around him like black oil.

  He began to move forwards again, feeling the mud ooze around his feet. A flat-bodied insect emerged from beneath a leaf, its carapace a luminescent blue, its fringe of waving antennae tapping at the heat-thickened air. Ahriman watched it move across the leaf.

  ‘Are you here to find me?’

  The voice came from just in front of him. Ahriman leapt back, muscles whipcord tense, eyes scanning the darkness in front of him. A pool of shadow split to reveal a one-eyed face beneath a ragged hood. The lone eye glowed red within the cowl.

  ‘You are looking for me, aren’t you, my son?’ The figure’s voice rattled dry from cracked lips.

  Ahriman straightened. The figure shuffled forwards to where the luminescent insect still sat on a leaf.

  ‘You were the best of my sons,’ said the figure.

  ‘The memory of Magnus’s last words to me,’ said Ahriman, and turned away.

  ‘Quite right. I am not here. I am just an idea, a cyst in your memories formed around the idea of your gene father. You are tired. Your mind is allowing things to manifest that it would normally not. This is a form of conversation with yourself. I am not here. I am a dream. Why break with the simplest explanation? Unless…’ Ahriman turned. The twisted figure was smiling at him, and the flat insect had crawled to sit on the palm of the figure’s hand. ‘Unless it is wrong.’

  ‘Why would you be here?’

  The figure looked back at the insect, raised a long finger and brushed one of the waving antennae.

  ‘Because you are looking for me. You are looking for me in the past, wondering if there were more secrets that I kept from you even before Prospero burned.’

  Far off a distant howl shivered through the dark. Ahriman’s head came up. The leaves were rustling, rubbing their edges together like wet teeth.

  ‘Then why not answer me now?’ said Ahriman as he looked around again.

  The figure had gone.

  Another howl rose through the night, closer this time. Ahriman stood, eyes moving across the shadows, and then he began to slide through the dream again, running towards wakefulness.

  Grimur watched the stars. His axe rested in his hand, and the hunched muscle of his back twitched in complaint at his stillness. Beneath his feet the chunk of the broken star ship turned over again. Sealed in his armour, his boots mag-locked to the metal, it seemed as though he was still and the universe turned around him. He stood on the largest piece of wreckage they had found: a half-kilomet
re-long chunk of plasteel, blackened and torn by explosions. Smaller pieces of debris spun in the distance, all slowly drifting away from the point where the ship they had been part of had died. To Grimur they looked like burned splinters of bone.

  The vox clicked, and Sycld’s breathing wheezed from the static before cutting out. The Rune Priest had climbed down into the crushed and broken passages that ran through the wreckage. He would be crawling over the girders, baring the flesh of his hands for a few seconds to press them against the scorched plating. He needed to touch the bones of the dead ship to connect with the spirits, and hear the echoes of the past.

  Grimur shivered, and touched the red iron shard hanging around his neck. He had never liked the ways of the wyrd. He had liked Sycld once, but that young warrior had disappeared a long time ago. They were pack brothers and always would be, but that did not alter the fact that they stood apart. Sycld walked the paths of the dead, and nothing could alter that. Long ago, during Grimur’s few human years on Fenris, he had seen a woman in a cloak of crow feathers freeze the sea around five of his blood-father’s ships. The waves had become white mounds, the black depths bowls of dark ice. The woman had made a sign and the frozen sea had crushed the ships. Grimur’s father had turned the rest of the war fleet back from the attack after that. The woman had laughed, and the sound had carried on the wind that had filled his father’s sails. Even now, many lives of men later, Grimur could still hear the crow-cloaked woman’s laugh, and the screaming of warriors as the ice sea ate them. To him that sound was the voice of the wyrd.

  The vox clicked again. Grimur waited for the Rune Priest to speak.

  ‘The trace is here,’ panted Sycld.

  ‘Enough?’

  ‘Yes. It was not his refuge for long, but it carries his soul-spoor even now.’

  Grimur nodded, though there was no one to see. He looked up. Slowly spinning islands of debris winked back with reflected light. His helmet display flickered with runes, bracketing the pieces of wreckage with data, framing them with projected arcs of movement. Out beyond the debris field his ships waited, five dark shapes sliding against the void on comet trails. The ships had not started in the service of the Wolves. Grimur had taken them from slain enemies, and given them names that reflected their new purpose. Hel’s Daughter, Storm Wyrm, and Crone Hammer were the largest, three scarred sisters of war. Beside them ran Death’s Laughter and Blood Howl: smaller, faster, their twin spirits like murder daggers. Behind the ships, the Eye of Terror spread across the heavens. Folded wings of glowing gas flickered between colours as he watched, the darkness at their centre a malignant pupil staring back.

  For so long the Eye’s tides have been our home, he thought. What will become of us when the hunt is done? All those who have fallen, who have died with an axe in their hand and wounds to their front – Oulf, Haakon, Inge, and the rest – will be forgotten. Our tale is a saga that can never be told.

  ‘What can we be after it is done?’ he said to himself.

  ‘Lord?’ came Sycld’s voice. Grimur blinked his helmet display back to a standard view, and looked down again at the twisted metal beneath his feet.

  ‘What was its name? The ship, what was its name?’

  ‘Titan Child – a renegade ship fleeing from retribution.’

  ‘So are all that come to this place.’ The vox crackled, but Sycld said nothing.

  Grimur shook his head. He brought the curve of his axe up, and clinked its edge on his helm. His twisted back twinged as the muscles woke. He remembered making the same gesture under a burning sky once before. The axe he had held then was broken, and the remaining shard of its red blade hung over his chest like an iron tooth, but then, as now, the vow in the gesture remained.

  If we die unremembered, but with great deeds done, it will be enough. He felt the previous bleak mood shake free from his mind like snow from fur. Time will remember us even if men do not speak our names.

  ‘We return to the ships,’ Grimur said into the vox. ‘You will guide us.’

  ‘I can see the way. I can feel the scent pull at my waking, calling me into the paths of dream. I know the course we must steer.’

  There had been a cold note in Sycld’s voice, as though he were speaking a warrior’s doom, or talking of an unclean death in battle. Grimur paused, suddenly aware that he did not want to ask the question which was forming on his tongue.

  ‘Where?’ he asked at last. The vox rasped and clicked.

  ‘Out of the Eye, into the Allfather’s realm.’

  Grimur nodded to himself, his fingers resting on the red iron shard hanging from his neck.

  Of course – the prey returns to the lands he betrayed. And we… He smiled inside his helm, baring a yellowed fang at the Eye above him. We follow.

  ‘Failure,’ said Ignis. The word hung in the High Chamber. Ignis looked around the circle, his eyes lingering on Ahriman. Hard blue eyes met Ignis’s stare. He suppressed a shiver. Ahriman’s face was unmarked by time or battle. Except the eyes; they shone with a controlled insight that made Ignis’s skin crawl inside his armour. What are you beside me? they seemed to say. What can you claim to know that I do not already know? Ignis held Ahriman’s gaze and repeated his judgement.

  ‘It was failure,’ he said. Behind him the looming bulk of Credence clicked and shifted as though uncomfortable. Ahriman’s eyes twitched to the automaton then back to Ignis. ‘There is no other way of seeing it.’

  The Circle remained silent. There were five of them now, each unarmoured and robed in white. Beside Ignis stood Kiu, Gaumata, Ctesias, and, of course, Sanakht. Even here the crippled swordsman wore his twin blades. Ahriman stood at their centre, his bare feet resting on a serpentine sun spread in silver across a floor of obsidian. The whole chamber sat at the apex of the High Citadel of the Sycorax. The light of the stars glimmered from beyond the crystal pyramid which formed the chamber’s roof. Scented resin burned on brass tripods close to the walls. Shadows hung at its edges, hemming in the small circle of figures with emptiness and silence. The warp lapped at the chamber walls, held back by the incantations woven over the gathering. Ignis normally did not like being separated from the Great Ocean, but under Ahriman’s gaze he was suddenly glad that this moment was confined to the real.

  ‘It worked,’ said Sanakht, from across the circle.

  Ignis felt his jaw muscles tighten involuntarily. Sanakht was frowning, his handsome features creased in puzzlement beneath his ash-blond hair.

  ‘It did.’ Ignis bit the words off with brittle care. ‘But not without cost.’

  ‘Success always has a cost,’ said Sanakht, shaking his head slowly, as though stating a simple truth to a child.

  ‘A platitude,’ said Ignis, blinking once.

  ‘A fact.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ignis carefully, making his face smile. ‘You, of course, are best placed to tell us about the cost of failure.’

  Sanakht’s frown flickered, and Ignis was suddenly aware that the swordsman’s hands were resting upon his weapons. He had not even seen Sanakht move.

  He is still fast, thought Ignis, even if his inner strength is broken. Part of him wondered if Sanakht could reach and kill him before being stopped by the rest of the Circle. Then he wondered if any of them would stop him. He was an outsider here, even if he shared their blood. He decided that it was irrelevant. Credence gave a dull binaric click, which sounded like agreement. Ignis let his false smile fade. Sanakht took his hands from the pommels of his swords.

  ‘Three of our number gone,’ Ignis gestured at the gaps in the circle. ‘Three. For one human soul. If the salvation of the Legion is our aim, how can this calculation have any other answer?’

  ‘Four,’ said Ahriman quietly. They all looked towards him. He met each of their gazes, and then looked at the empty space where Astraeos would have stood. ‘We lost four, for one human soul.’

  ‘One soul who has what?’ asked Ignis. Around the circle the others shifted in discomfort. They all wanted to ask the same
question, had wanted to ask it ever since Ahriman had begun this endeavour, of that Ignis was certain; he could feel the hunger in the air.

  ‘Secrets, brother.’ Ahriman looked up at Ignis. All of the Circle had gone completely silent. All of them had followed and obeyed Ahriman at every step, but Ignis knew they had all asked what Ahriman intended before and received the same reply. Now, at long last, it seemed they would get a different answer. ‘The answer is secrets. Or rather one secret that the Imperium has buried deep.’ They were all still now, all of them watching. ‘The inquisitor we captured knows this secret, and we have bought that knowledge with the lives of our brothers.’ Ahriman paused, nodding slowly as he looked around the circle. ‘Her name is Selandra Iobel. Our paths have crossed before.’

  ‘How?’ Gaumata’s slow voice rose into the silence. Ahriman looked into the pyromancer’s wide face. Red and black eyes glittered back.

  ‘She was on the ship I took Silvanus from. The silver in my chest is from her weapon. She almost killed me,’ said Ahriman. Surprise rippled around the circle. ‘And in that moment our minds connected. In that one instant she knew me, and somehow recognised me. She did not think that meeting chance – she thought that I had come for her because of what she knew, because of Apollonia.’

  ‘What is Apollonia?’ Sanakht spoke. The swordsman’s eyes seemed to have sunken into his ageless face.

  So even Sanakht has been kept in the dark. Ignis felt a twinge of pleasure at the thought.

  ‘A place the reborn Imperium has hidden from itself. It is a planet, or perhaps a system, but in Iobel’s mind Apollonia has another name linked to it. When she thought of Apollonia, she thought of an Athenaeum, a library of knowledge.’ His gaze stopped once again at the circle’s centre. ‘She called it the Athenaeum of Kalimakus.’

  Stillness and complete silence formed after the words.

  Inside his mind Ignis slotted the fact into calculations which he had not been able to complete since Ahriman had summoned him. Kalimakus had been Magnus the Red’s personal remembrancer, psychically bound to the primarch so that he was not a scribe but a conduit. He had not been seen since Prospero had burned, and his fate had never been known. Until now.