Ahriman: Sorcerer

by John French

  Ahriman stepped through the door.

  ‘You think someone will try to interfere?’ Kadin asked. Ahriman shrugged, his face darkening with an expression that Kadin knew must be a frown.

  ‘I am not sure,’ said Ahriman. He walked to the centre of the design burned into the floor. Kadin thought he saw the lines and markings bend away from Ahriman’s footsteps. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘He sees everything, yet sees nothing,’ cackled Maroth.

  ‘You don’t trust them,’ said Kadin. It was a flat statement. ‘Your brothers, you don’t trust them.’

  ‘I trust you to be what you are.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  Ahriman said nothing, but looked at the deck, shifting his position minutely, his eyes flickering across the lines spiralling away from him.

  ‘And him?’ Kadin jerked his neck at Maroth. Ahriman glanced up, his eyes fastening on the broken and blind sorcerer. Maroth came with Kadin wherever he went now, attached to him like a second shadow. When Ahriman had summoned Kadin to his side Maroth had come too, hissing and muttering in his ruined armour. Ahriman had not objected, had not even remarked on the broken sorcerer’s presence. It was as though Ahriman did not even see Maroth.

  ‘He is nothing,’ said Ahriman.

  ‘Is that what Astraeos died knowing?’ said Kadin, his voice flat.

  Ahriman’s eyes snapped up to his. Kadin could feel the fingers of Ahriman’s mind in his thoughts, trying to tease through the mangled web of his soul, searching for anger and treachery. He almost smiled. There had been the barest twinge of regret when he had heard that his brother had fallen, but then the fact had simply become one amongst many, as dead and cold as a fire’s ashes. He had thought about what that lack of a response meant, but had reached no conclusion.

  ‘I am sorry, Kadin,’ said Ahriman, after a moment.

  Kadin did not bother to nod, but simply turned to face the corridor. He rested the tip of his chainsword between his feet, and gripped the hilt with both hands. Behind him the door sealed with a hiss of pistons.

  ‘Quietness,’ whispered Maroth to himself. Kadin did not reply.

  Ahriman looked at the sarcophagus for a long moment. Around him he felt the warp waiting, its tides shaped by the patterns cut into the floor. In his mind’s eye golden planes of light rose from the design. Sigils hung as small suns of meaning and potential, some still, others orbiting one another in clusters. Within the web lay the casket, the slumbering mind within glowing with dreams. He had spent days constructing this ritual. Each part of it was like a vast and delicate machine of thought, symbolism, and aetheric power. It only waited for his mind to set it in motion.

  He took a breath, feeling every molecule of air spin slowly into his lungs. He felt the rhythm of his hearts slow until his awareness was suspended between two beats. Everything was still before his unblinking inner eye. He waited, floating in the emptiness. He formed a thought, and sent it rotating through his mind. He formed a string of thoughts, and felt them take life as they fed off memory and imagination. He split his will, breaking apart thought after thought until his mind was filled with whirling and spinning consciousness. The warp tugged at his will, trying to pull the delicate construct apart. Slowly, carefully he let one of his hearts beat. His mind was no longer within his skull; it was floating free, unbound. The ritual designs etched into the chamber met his mind and the two joined. His awareness flowed into the casket, and into Iobel’s mind.

  ‘Is that what he asked you?’ said Ignis. Sanakht kept his gaze steady. Ignis was watching him, his face impassive.

  The crucible chamber sat at the heart of the Word of Hermes, a bowl of raw iron wide enough to swallow a Titan. A ball of molten metal revolved in midair at the crucible’s centre, fuming heat and ruddy light. There were no doors, just the lip of the crucible a dozen metres up the curved iron walls. Deep channels ran across the inside of the bowl, straight lines intersecting with circular depressions scooped into the walls. Sanakht recognised geometry that might have made the sign of Thothmes, or the Idris Progression, or the Sigil of the Carrion, but each seemed to blur and merge together with other designs he did not recognise. The whole structure pressed around Sanakht’s mind like a metal clamp. He did not like it, but the ways of the Order of Ruin had always been strange.

  Ignis waited for a long heartbeat then shrugged. ‘When he asked you to betray Magnus, was that how he asked?’

  ‘No,’ said Sanakht carefully. ‘He never called it treachery.’

  Ignis tilted his head but did not look away or blink. The electoos on his face contracted, expanded and multiplied their geometry.

  He has not denied me yet, thought Sanakht. Nor has he tried to kill me. He felt hope tug at him, and fought it down. He could read nothing in Ignis’s expressionless face, and he knew that even if he could have looked into Ignis’s thoughts, he would have seen only numbers and symbols, each turning in intricate mental calculations like the cogs of a vast machine. Perhaps he is simply waiting for his calculation to reach a clear conclusion before acting. The Order of Ruin was many things, but haste had never been one of its flaws.

  ‘You agreed to join Ahriman, to become part of his cabal.’ Ignis paused again, tilting his head the other way. ‘Why?’

  Sanakht saw it again then: the dust of the Planet of the Sorcerers, the shambling figures whose flesh and armour could not be told apart. He saw the yellow eyes blinking in blind clusters across the faces of those he had called friends. He looked down at his hand and saw it again as it had been, a thing of living metal and crystal scales. He closed his fingers slowly, one at a time.

  ‘We were dying, Ignis. Ahriman was not wrong in that.’

  ‘But wrong to do what he did?’ Ignis paused and blinked once, slowly. ‘Yes?’

  ‘No,’ said Sanakht, and gave a sad smile. ‘He was wrong to believe that we were worth saving.’

  ‘So you offer us the obliteration we deserved? Is that not what Amon believed?’

  Sanakht shook his head. Like the rest of the Circle he had chosen to answer Amon and serve him. Ignis had not been a part of Amon’s Brotherhood of Dust, just as he had not been a part of the cabal who had cast the Rubric.

  ‘It ends with Ahriman. I do not seek to remake our Legion, or to bring us all redemption.’ He paused, thinking of Amon; in many ways he had been right, but in others he was the mirror of Ahriman, but a mirror with a different focus. ‘I know my limits,’ said Sanakht at last.

  ‘And Ahriman?’ Ignis asked, his voice level, but the black electoos twitched above his eyes.

  ‘He believes there is a way to save us all. A little more understanding, a little more perfection of knowledge, and he can correct his errors. There is a light dancing on the horizon for him, and what he has done already is only the beginning of the price he will pay to get a step closer to that end. He will drag us all with him. Salvation does not wait for us – only the darkness of damnation closing around us until we can no longer see where we began.’

  Ignis did not move or speak for a long moment. The patterns on his face were still. Sanakht watched him, waiting. The clank of distant machines and the hiss of gas from a vent high above trickled into the silence.

  ‘How do you think to do such a thing?’ said Ignis at last, his expression as unreadable as ever. ‘Do you ask me to fire on the Sycorax? Do you hope to break the Rubricae from his will? Do you wish to try and persuade the entire Circle to face him?’ Ignis blinked again, but kept on speaking before Sanakht could answer. ‘All such methods will fail. The others will not join you. The Sycorax could face half the fleet and survive, and he…’ Ignis paused, and Sanakht saw something flicker in the black eyes. ‘He is a power like I have never seen. More even than before.’

  Sanakht shook his head.

  ‘The others will stand against me. Ahriman has them all. They are starting to believe him again, they are starting to hope, just as they did before. I am alone, for now.’

  ‘So what do you intend?’


  He still has not refused, thought Sanakht, but if this does not end as I hope then I will have to kill him. He had no doubt that he could – his powers were weak, but Ignis’s powers were channelled in other ways, and even then a blade would silence him as easily as a thought.

  ‘I will wait until he has no strength, and I have strength he does not expect.’

  ‘You know that such a moment will come?’

  ‘Such a moment always comes.’

  Ignis inclined his head as though acknowledging the point.

  ‘Why come to me? We are not… friends, Sanakht, we never were.’

  ‘Failure,’ said Sanakht, and let the word hang in the air with his breath. ‘That is what you called Vohal. We lost three of our brothers, and you said it was failure.’

  ‘A calculation. If we do this to remake ourselves, then to sacrifice ourselves to that end undoes the logic of victory.’

  Sanakht nodded, and gave a tired smile.

  ‘So what is the calculation now, brother? Are you with me?’

  Ignis stared at him, eyes still, the patterns of his face growing more complex. Sanakht just waited. At last the patterns settled and Ignis opened his mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Iobel heard the hab-block detonate behind her. She took a pace, a curse forming in her mouth. The blast wave hit her. The ground vanished beneath her feet. She spun through the dust-filled air. Her armour cracked as she hit the ground and pain stabbed through her torso.

  Her ears were ringing. Billowing grey clouds surrounded her. She sucked in a breath of air. Rockcrete dust and ash filled her lungs. She coughed, and felt something sharp shift in her chest. She could hear the mutant creatures crying out in pain. Some of them must have been caught by the blast; that at least was a small comfort.

  ‘Horeg!’ she shouted into the vox. She rolled over and came to her feet. The ground swayed under her. ‘Horeg? Linisa? Cavor? Any of you?’ Whoops of distortion answered her. ‘Answer, you useless bastards,’ she called again, and pulled the meltagun from her back harness. It lit with a whine. Powdered grey dusted the weapon’s silver and black iron casing.

  ‘If any of you can hear this, I think that I got the last of the Prophets, but their family are still everywhere.’ She turned, and took a step forwards as she spoke. Her foot crunched on broken rockcrete.

  The creature came out of the mist in a single bound. She had an impression of pale skin, and reaching claws. She fired. A line of energy flicked into existence in front of the gun’s muzzle. The air shrieked with heat. The creature exploded into black steam. She spat, and wiped cooked blood from her eyes.

  It was going to take a while to clear the city, even if she pulled in half the planet’s defence forces and the rest of the Arbitrators. It had been luck that she had found the Prophets, random chance playing her a strong hand, and her enemies a very bad one. She had been tracking a recidivist who had been dabbling in some very dangerous alien artefacts. That particular piece of heretic scum was still out there somewhere, but his trail had led her to Carsona and to dig into its under-culture, and there she had found the Prophets.

  The Prophets were rogue psykers. They offered glimpses of the future to Carsona’s burgeoning underclass. In a sense she supposed they offered hope, a chance to make better choices, and the desperate had paid in coins, in favours, or in whatever they had. The Prophets were slaves themselves. Others held the rogue psykers’ chains, and took payment. Those hidden masters were the true criminals, reckless and greedy. A rogue psyker, even one who could just mewl out a few warp-addled prophecies, was a bomb just waiting to explode. And there had been a lot of Prophets in the city, all ticking down to doomsday, and all for wealth.

  It was the pettiness that made her most angry.

  She had found them though, and even though the city might have to be put to the flame, the other possibilities could have been far, far worse. The only question remaining was the big one – who had begun the whole thing? Somewhere behind the coin-takers and the mutant families, there had been a first mover in this heresy. Now that the Prophets themselves were done with, she would find out where this had begun.

  Something hit her on the back and fell to the ground. She looked down. A fragment of rockcrete the size of a finger lay at her feet.

  ‘Oh, Throne of Terra,’ she muttered.

  She felt another impact, harder this time. Then another and another, and suddenly she was covering her head, her cracked armour ringing as debris streamed past her as though drawn into the centre of a cyclone. A hooting bellow echoed through the fog. Her head snapped up as the sound rolled around her. Worms of mauve light were forming in the air. Screams were coming from the dust cloud. In her mind she could taste desperation and panic. The flavour of metal and rotting fruit itched at her teeth. She had misjudged, and misjudged badly – this was all about to become something much worse. Somewhere close by another uncontrolled psyker was awakening.

  A chunk of girder whipped her legs from beneath her, and suddenly she was falling. She never hit the ground. Invisible ropes lashed around her, pulling her up and through the air. She could smell burning silk, and hear the rattle of insects in the rising wind. Ghost voices called to her, promising her infinity. She hardened her will, focusing in the way that had kept her alive on the Black Ships. She was stronger than the voices on the wind, stronger than the whispers which were telling her to submit, to leave her own mind open to the storm of possibility that was just a wish away.

  A pillar of shattered stone came out of the mist and slammed into her. She heard a crack of breaking bone, and her left leg filled with fire. She did not scream. The invisible ropes vanished. She hit the ground, and tumbled across it. Black spots bloomed at the edge of her sight. She lay still. The pain was her world now, its edges defined by the walls of her will. Dust and debris streamed past her.

  She was in the remains of a hab-block. Its broken structural pillars rose around her like snapped fingers. She flexed her left hand and found it still held the meltagun. She spat, and watched the blood-thickened phlegm whirl away on the wind. The psyker was close. She could feel its presence fizzing in her awareness like a fire made of munitions. She looked up, and saw the entrance to the broken hab’s basement. Debris flew through the low door, and she could see light crackling in the darkness beyond.

  She tried to move, and felt the pain shiver up her side as she shifted her left leg. She closed her eyes and found the threads of pain pulling through her mind, red and jagged. She began to ravel them together into a place which was separate from her, a place where she could ignore them. It was not a psychic ability, just a consequence of training and willpower.

  It took her almost a minute before she could stand. Her bones crunched and ground in the sheath of her muscle as she limped towards the doorway down into the basement.

  There were more mutants here, but most were already dead or dying. Splinters of rockcrete and metal riddled most of them. Those that still lived croaked at her as she passed. Quills had sprouted from their skin, and milk-white eyes had opened across their flesh. Tatters of overalls hung from them like the half-shed skins of snakes.

  It was quiet in the basement. Above, the aetheric wind roared and the city pulled itself apart, but here everything was still. A man sat in the centre of the space. Detritus had gathered around him, small drifts of scorched paper, and ashes forming a spiral that covered the floor. Blue flames clung to the ceiling, silently rolling across the rockcrete without sound or smoke. The man looked up as Iobel entered. He was not old, but Iobel could tell that toil had stolen the best of his years. The flesh of his face sagged beneath the chequered pattern of his labour-glyph. Bloodshot eyes met Iobel’s, and the pupils contracted to dots. Something rippled under his skin.

  ‘What…’ he rasped, his jaw chewing the air. ‘What do I do?’ Iobel took a step closer. ‘I don’t know what to do.’ The man trembled. He was crying, she saw. ‘I just want it to stop. Please. Is this a dream? I think it might be a dre
am. I just want it to stop.’ He was shaking now. His cheeks were bright with tears. Iobel’s finger tightened on the meltagun’s trigger. The gun armed with a low whine.

  He looked up sharply, his skin rippling. ‘The Sons of Prospero,’ he said, and his voice was a hollow rasp. ‘I see Prospero’s cities now cast down. Its sons call to me. As they are its sons we are theirs. We are their vengeance.’ The last word echoed through the basement, rolling louder and louder. Dust and rock fragments rose from the floor. His face bulged. Iobel had an impression of fingers pressing against the taut skin.

  She pulled the meltagun’s trigger. The ray of heat hit the man in the centre of his chest. The fat and meat of his body vaporised an instant before his distorting skeleton exploded. A chattering scream split the air, rising like a flock of carrion. The blue fire surged across the ceiling, flames reaching like hands. Then it vanished, and Iobel was left in half darkness. A second later the debris began to hit the ground outside. It sounded like hail.

  Iobel let out a breath, then collapsed to the floor.

  Prospero. The word muttered through her thoughts, while a headache screamed behind her eyes. What had that meant? She had heard the ranting of madmen and demagogues, had taken the truth from thousands of heretics, and in all that time, she had learnt that there was rarely real truth in their words, and if there was it was best forgotten. But the dead psyker’s last words rang in her thoughts, like a sound caught in an echo chamber. The Sons of Prospero…

  ‘So that is how it began.’ The voice came out of the dark. She twisted and brought the meltagun up. Darkness flashed to daylight as she fired. There was nothing there. Just the rockcrete support pillars, and the briefly distorted shadows. She twisted where she lay on the floor, extending her mind again, smelling the warp, feeling its wounded flesh as though it were her own skin. She stopped.

  It was not there. The warp was gone. Beyond the skin of sensations inside her mind there was just a void.