Ahriman: Sorcerer

by John French

  It was Hzakatris who spoke first.

  ‘What have you brought us here for?’ His voice hissed and buzzed from the vox-grilles of his Terminator armour. He raised a clawed fist, and delicately ran a bladed finger across the horns which curled from the temples and jaw of his helm. ‘Does Lord Ahriman still not deign to give us commands himself?’

  ‘Ahriman,’ said Ignis, and noticed Hzakatris’s aura flicker at the absence of title, ‘is locked in a room picking through the dirt of a witch’s mind. He does not know you are here, and if he did he would not care. If he knows who you are it is only as a convenient resource for him to expend before those he values more.’ Ignis allowed his lip to curl. ‘You are less than dogs to him.’

  Silence filled the gloom. Ignis waited, counting micro-seconds in his head. Chainblades spun alive, bolters clattered active and began to rise. Mavahedron let a length of chain rattle through his grasp, and the thrall-hounds bounded forwards with a wet howl.

  +Hold!+ The thought flashed from Ignis. Frost formed in the air around him, blanching Credence’s carapace from a pace away. Everything in the chamber stopped moving. Arms halted as they aimed or drew weapons. Fingers froze on triggers. Ignis had to fight down the sudden wash of fatigue at the sending. He had never been more than an aspirant in the disciplines of telepathy, and even after the Rubric had remoulded his powers, such an exertion of will cost him. That, and the temptation to allow it to become more than just will was always there, waiting for him to succumb.

  ‘I speak only truth to you,’ he lied, forcing any trace of fatigue from his voice. ‘And I speak it to you three alone.’ They were all watching him now, weapons not lowered but rising no further. ‘Ahriman thinks nothing of you, if he thinks of you at all. You are useful to him only because you compensate for his weakness with your strength. Without you, he would be nothing. When we attacked Vohal it was you three who were at the bloody edge of the void fighting, you who spent the strength of your warriors. And before that, on Guncua and the Exodus from Samatis, it was you in the vanguard, was it not?’ He watched their auras flicker, some with rage at the insult of his words, some with pride, all with resentment. They wanted to believe what he was saying because it was what they already believed.

  Mavahedron nodded once, slowly.

  ‘You speak truth,’ he said, voice creaking like an old tree in the wind. ‘But why do you speak it?’

  ‘Because I wish your aid,’ said Ignis. ‘Because I wish you to help me destroy Ahriman.’

  The laughter began as a dry rustle, and then rose to a pulsing croak. Everyone in the room looked towards Sulipicis. The hooded figure continued to laugh, then drew a breath and spoke.

  ‘The jester believes himself the king,’ said Sulipicis, his voice still edged with laughter. ‘Your breed cannot help it, can you? You are like fish that can only swim in a sea of treachery.’

  Ignis turned his head to stare at Sulipicis. Behind him Credence mirrored the gesture with a whir of gears. Sulipicis gave another snort of laughter.

  ‘I did not say that I refused to listen to what you say. And as for the rest – I meant it only as a compliment.’

  ‘Why should we help you?’ said Hzakatris. Ignis turned to look at him. Rage still flickered around Hzakatris. Ignis saw it form eddies in the warp as it bled from the Terminator’s mind.

  ‘Because I will divide the surviving fleet between you three when it is done.’

  None of them moved or spoke.

  ‘And,’ said Ignis. ‘I will gift a sorcerer of my Legion to each, blood bound to serve you alone.’

  ‘You would betray your brothers so?’

  Ignis made himself smile. He was not sure if the gesture was right, but he had practised it, and it had worked each of the other times; that it was needed a third time pleased him.

  ‘My Legion is dead,’ he said. ‘I have no brothers.’

  He had them then, he was sure. Now all that remained was to explain what he needed of them. How they would make no move until they had an advantage. How they had to follow his orders alone. And then he would have to reassure them that he would deal with the Sycorax…

  The pattern of thoughts snagged in his mind.

  Hzakatris was shaking his head, the horns of his helm scraping the collar of his armour.

  ‘No,’ Hzakatris’s voice grated through the gloom. ‘Ahriman is a deceiver, and an arrogant bastard, but I would sooner trust him than you. I will not join you in this folly.’

  It took two seconds for everyone else in the room to realise that Hzakatris had just ensured that either he or all of them had to die. And two seconds was too slow. Hzakatris’s bolters came up. Mavahedron and Sulipicis seemed frozen by surprise. Hzakatris squeezed the trigger.

  ‘Kill protocol!’ shouted Ignis.

  Fire spat from Hzakatris’s bolters. Credence slammed forwards. Rounds exploded off the automaton’s carapace. Hzakatris’s Terminators were moving now, guns clacking as they armed. Credence fired, the cannon on its back shrouding the Terminators in explosions. Hzakatris burst from the fire, fist raised and writhing with lightning. Credence smashed its hand into the warlord’s helm. Its fingers closed with a cough of pistons, and it yanked the warlord up as the cannon on its back rotated down. It fired.

  Hzakatris’s head and helm vanished in a spray of explosive rounds. Credence threw the armoured corpse aside in time to meet the first of Hzakatris’s bodyguards with a kick. The Terminator reeled back, and Credence kicked again, very hard on the exposed flesh of its face. The other two came on, chainfists and powerblades hissing and buzzing. Credence spread its arms wide. Power fields snapped into existence around its fists. The Terminators’ charge faltered as, too late, they realised what the automaton intended.

  Credence brought its fists together. The Terminator caught in the double blow lived for long enough to feel his armour fracture, and hear the roar as Credence triggered the flamer units bound to its wrists. Fire poured inside the cracked armour, and the Space Marine within became a soup of cooked flesh and bone. The automaton pivoted, holding the dead Terminator like a club, and used him to smash his comrade to the ground. Credence came forwards before the Terminator could rise, and punched down again, and again with perfect machine rhythm.

  Ignis let the automaton mash the Terminator for nine seconds.

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Kill protocol revoked.’ Credence straightened, and walked slowly back to stand behind Ignis. Once stationary it gave a lower series of clicks. Ignis looked up at it, eyebrow raised. The automaton’s armour was chewed by bolt fire and steaming with blood.

  Ignis looked back to the heap of broken armour and pulped meat that had been Hzakatris. It was a shame. He had been sure Hzakatris would turn against Ahriman. A frown formed on his forehead as he considered the imperfection in the pattern of events. It was an unfortunate, but luckily minor flaw.

  Ignis shook his head, and looked at the other two warlords. Neither had moved. ‘So, do we have an agreement?’

  Grimur watched the fire and tried to remember the cold of Fenris. The hall at the heart of Hel’s Daughter rumbled around him with the voices muttering around a dozen different fires. Once there had been many more fires, and the circles around each had been five deep, and the hall had rolled with voices. But that had been long ago, on a ship now lost to the storms. The hunt for Ahriman and his kin had claimed both ship and comrades. Those who clustered around the fires now spoke in the silences between words. They all wore their armour since the hunt had begun, only shedding it for repair. They were fewer, and older in years and scars. Firelight touched grey hairs, and glinted on teeth grown long through time.

  The chamber itself was black from the smoke of the fires. Pillars of raw iron reached up from the floor, their surfaces reshaped into dragons which bit and clawed the distant ceiling. Runes marked the walls, cut into the bare metal by axe blows. The names of those who had fallen on the hunt spoke to Grimur from those marks.

  They rarely gathered like this now, and
when they did they all knew that they were facing a turning in the hunt. The people of Fenris called such a moment ‘the laughter of the wind’, when the wind carrying the scent of the prey changed direction, and all might be lost by a single wrong decision. That was why they had gathered beside the fires, both here and on the other ships. The wind was laughing and leading them into a storm, so they looked into the fires and spoke, and remembered sagas no longer told.

  Sycld stirred at Grimur’s side, tilting his thin face towards his lord.

  ‘You must tell them soon, jarl,’ said the Rune Priest in a wet hiss.

  ‘Be silent,’ growled Grimur, without looking around. Sycld pulled away, but Grimur could feel the priest’s eyes still on him.

  We are the wights of the Underverse, thought Grimur. He gulped the bitter liquid from his drinking bowl. The fire danced in his eyes. We are the night walkers. There is no saga waiting for us, just death at the end of the chase, and the silence of snow falling to cover our skulls.

  Carefully he put the bowl down on the floor. The murmur of voices faded to silence. Grimur began to rise. Faces turned to look at him, amber irises reflecting gold in the dim light. His hand tapped his throat, and the vox pickup activated in the collar of his armour. Across each of his ships, the Wolves of his pack would hear him, and would see him stand in their halls as a hologhost. His axe came up with him. Its edge was a crescent of reflected firelight.

  He looked around, meeting the fire-touched eyes, feeling the twisted muscles of his back creak as he moved. He paused, tasting the tang of the smoke, and the scent of the blood mixed with the liquor in the drinking bowls. Fat hissed as it fell into the fires from charring meat. He opened his mouth, and felt his teeth unmesh.

  ‘We remain,’ he said into the silence. ‘No others stand with us. Others fall, their blood soaks into the snow, their cries fade behind us, but we remain. The years turn, the winters pass, and come again, and still we run on. Others forget the crimes of the past, others forget what was, but we remember.’ Grimur brought his axe up in front of him, and let his eyes touch the knotted serpents behind its cutting edge. ‘We remember. We run and we do not tire, not if a thousand winters pass.’ He looked up again, feeling the stillness amongst his warriors, the breaths paused to hear again the words they had heard so many times before. ‘We are vengeance,’ he said.

  The growls come then, rising through sharp teeth to shake the air. For a second Grimur felt as though he was back at his father’s side standing in the halls of the Fang, hearing the mountain ring to the sound of his brothers’ voices. He had been young then and was old now, and the growls that shook the air were fewer and heavy with time. This was not the cry of the young wishing for blood; it was the cry of old wolves reminding each other of what they had been and what they still were. He let his axe fall to his side and the cries faded.

  He looked up and nodded. Somewhere in the shadows one of the last Iron Priests saw the gesture and called on the spirits of the ship. A sphere of green light appeared in the dark, hanging above the fires. All eyes turned to it. Grimur’s ships had been hanging in the dead space between stars for weeks, waiting to hear where the hunt would carry them next. Grimur had kept his plans to himself. It was better that the rest of the pack were told when there was little time to brood on it.

  ‘The Cadian Gate,’ he said. ‘Our seers have walked the paths of dreams and seen that the prey has passed out of the Eye. He and his slave-kin are within the Imperium, and where they have gone we must follow.’ He paused. There was no shock, no ripple of surprise or unease, but he could feel the change in the hall, the shift in the pack’s mood. The skin of his back prickled, and the ice at his core hardened. ‘They have taken a serpent’s way through the storms. Such ways are closed to us, so we must pass through the Gate.’

  ‘If it is guarded, we will not pass.’ It was Halvar. The pack leader brought his armoured hand up to his face, and ran his thumb slowly over the scar tissue where his nose had once been. His eyes stayed fixed on the projection. After a long moment he turned to look at Grimur. Lifetimes of war on the borderlands of the Underverse lived in that look.

  ‘We will pass. A scattered fleet flees from the deep Eye, running on the clear tides towards Cadia. They are desperate, wild and panicked and will make Cadia in two weeks. That is when we will also reach the Gate, and slip through while the beasts occupy the blades of any who guard it.’

  ‘And if we do not pass unseen?’ said Halvar, and Grimur knew that he was just speaking what all would be thinking. ‘What if the guardians of the Gate see us, and bar our path?’

  Grimur shivered, and heard his axe clink against the thigh plate of his armour. It was the question that he had come here to answer. The question he knew he would have to answer as soon as Sycld had told him that Ahriman had left the Eye. What if we must face those who serve the Emperor, and what if they see us as enemies not friends?

  ‘Then we cut them down,’ he said.

  X

  Recall

  The sky was the grey of beaten iron. Iobel looked up and watched lightning writhe at the base of the anvil-headed clouds. The air was clammy against the exposed skin of her face. It tasted of storm charge and rust. She let out the breath she had held, and looked down. The dead world sank away from her in grey drifts of ash. The jagged teeth of mountains rose in the distance, while sharp daggers of grime-coated crystal covered the distance between like shards from the broken blade of a god.

  ‘Rain’s coming,’ said Linisa, her lilting voice crackling across the vox. Iobel glanced at her acolyte. Linisa’s armour was red and massive, like corded muscle cast in ceramite and exotic metal. The idea of the wisp-thin girl within the hulking suit was almost comical. Almost. The gun tubes ringing Linisa’s wrists only added to the effect. ‘You will want to get your helmet on,’ said Linisa. ‘The scans say these storms are acidic, bad enough to burn to the bone.’

  As though on cue the rain started. A single fat drop exploded on the ash and left a crater of grey mud. Iobel clamped her helmet over her head. The rain started to pour from the sky. The ground around her was a dancing sheet of liquid. She looked down at her gauntleted hands. The white lacquer was already blistered, and the grey ceramite beneath was fuming as the rain poured between her fingers. A bolt of lightning fell amongst the forest of crystal shards, and the grey world became white.

  ‘You say we have to cross that?’ said Linisa.

  ‘Yes,’ said Iobel.

  ‘Could the gun-cutter not have dropped us closer?’

  Iobel shook her head.

  ‘Atmospherics are too unstable.’

  ‘But walking is safer?’ Linisa raised her hands before Iobel could reply. ‘Just saying.’

  Iobel turned her gaze back to the broken land. In truth she was far from sure this was wise, but it had taken four years to find that this place still existed, and three times that time to reach it.

  Prospero, the world that had sired an order of traitors and sorcerers. She had been searching for it ever since Carsona, and here it was, beneath her feet. It had been a long journey, and she had learned things that she would have killed others for knowing. The Thousand Sons, the breaking of the Edict of Nikaea, Magnus the Red – all now loomed in her dreams, and with them the rasped words of a dying psyker linking them like a chain binding the present to the past.

  She felt the psychic thread tug at her mind, pulling her out there into the desolation which had once been a great city. It had latched onto her mind as soon as she had set foot on the planet. It was not a voice, more like a path left by the passing of others, a path that had been left for her, or those like her, to find.

  ‘You are sure there is something here?’ asked Linisa.

  Iobel said nothing, and Linisa had been with her for more than long enough to know what that meant. ‘All right,’ she sighed. ‘Best get moving.’

  It took them an hour to cross two miles. The rain had turned the ash into a grey mire. Even with the augmented strength of thei
r armour each step was a fight against the sucking tug of the mud. A white fog had risen soon after the rain had stopped. The readings on Iobel’s helmet display said it was both toxic and corrosive. She did not need the readings to tell her the last part, one glance at Linisa was enough. Her acolyte’s armour was grey, the red lacquer stripped clean from curved plates.

  Linisa swore every step of the way, moving through colourful and creative phrases in High and Low Gothic and the spire tongue of her birth hive. Iobel said nothing to stop the stream of invective; it gave her something else to focus on besides the voices of the dead.

  The ghost voices had begun as soon as they entered the fields of broken crystal. They rose in Iobel’s mind, roaring with rage, crying out in pain, babbling, pleading. She closed them out, but they always found a way back in, and each time they were stronger. Several times they almost drowned out her awareness of the psychic trail. She was starting to wonder if she had made a serious mistake. The whole landscape, from grey sky to grey ground, seemed to press on her mind. She was not even sure what she was expecting to find; nothing remained here now, just the shards of crystal cities, and the ashes of its past.

  ‘What was that?’ Linisa’s voice cracked across the vox, sharp and sudden. Iobel reached for the boltgun clamped to her back. She twisted, trying to see what Linisa had seen. The acolyte had moved close to her, arms raised, weapon tubes focused on the fog. Iobel instinctively extended her senses beyond her mind, and then recoiled.

  ‘Turn back now. You must turn back.’

  The voice was so clear that it sounded like her own. She shook her head to clear it. The fog was thick around them. Linisa was braced, legs sunk to the knee in the ash mud. Iobel could hear her own breathing fill her helm. She shifted her grip on the boltgun in her hands.