by John French
‘You won’t let me die,’ Kadin had said. ‘You don’t have the strength.’
He heard Carmenta, her voice brittle with pain and crumbling control.
‘There are other voices in here with me,’ she said. ‘They are getting stronger and I am getting weaker. Soon I will be gone, and they will remain.’
He thought of the fate he had seen for Kadin, dead on a rusted deck, his head severed under Sanakht’s sword. He thought of Hemellion, the one-time king’s hate shaped by Sanakht until he walked onto the bridge of the Sycorax with a blade in his hand.
He sank the thoughts beneath his will.
‘Sacrifice must have meaning,’ he said. ‘It is the price for salvation.’
Sanakht’s mouth worked to form words. His eyes were wide with shock and rage. He looked like a wild animal that had just felt the snare tighten around its leg.
‘Why,’ he formed the word between slow breaths, ‘am I here?
‘Because I need you to serve our Legion one last time. I need one of our blood and brotherhood, one who can become what our Legion needs. You chose yourself, Sanakht.’
Sanakht looked down at the spreading pool of blood, then at the bloody-edged sword in his hand. Ahriman saw the question without needing to hear it.
‘I had to be certain,’ he said. ‘I had to be sure.’
‘The others will turn on you,’ snarled Sanakht. ‘Our brothers will not trust you, after what you have done, and if I fall here.’
‘But you will not fall here, brother,’ said Ahriman. ‘You will rise. None beside Ignis know what I have done, and none of them will. You saved me before, and now you make another sacrifice. That is what they will believe.’ He paused, coughed and tasted his own blood bubble from his lungs. There was not much time left.
Sanakht was still. Ahriman watched him and waited. He saw him again as he had been, brilliant, and loyal and blind.
‘I am sorry it was you who had to stand here, brother,’ said Ahriman.
‘No,’ spat Sanakht, and his sword rose in his hand again. ‘You have no power here, and you will die here, now.’ He lunged forwards.
The Grey Knights came out of the tunnel behind Sanakht with a spray of bolter fire.
The world was shaking. Astraeos ran for the doors to the landing platform. Behind him, the fortress of his brotherhood was dissolving and crumbling as fire and lightning ate its stone. In front of him Thidias and Kadin ran, their bronzed armour oily red in the inferno light. Behind him the clatter of booted feet blended with the din of battle. A flash of stark white light flooded the passage behind him. An instant later the blast wave lifted him from the ground and slammed him down. Liquefied rock pinged off his armour as he pushed himself to his feet.
‘Well met, my friend.’ Astraeos froze as he met the blue eyes. Ahriman stood above him, unarmoured, clothed in blue and silver robes, his face still and emotionless. He smiled. Nothing else moved. Dust and glowing gobbets of stone hung in mid-flight, the shadows cast by the flash of the explosion unmoving on the stone walls. The ground was still shaking, rumbling as though growing to a quake.
‘You…’ began Astraeos.
‘I am not here, Astraeos, wherever here is for you.’ He paused and the smile faded from his face. ‘And neither are you.’
Astraeos looked around at the motionless shrapnel and light of the explosion. An armoured figure hung in the air on the edge of the blast wave.
‘Memories,’ said Astraeos. Ahriman carried on with no sign of having heard.
‘If they took you and broke your mind then whatever you place at the core of your being will be where you are now.’ Ahriman turned his head, though his eyes did not focus on the scene around him. ‘This is a moment of definition for you, something that formed you and made you as you are now, the last point and lowest ebb. And if you are here so is this gift.’
Astraeos let out a breath that he knew was not real.
‘You knew,’ he said, shaking his head, blinking at the stilled memory of his brotherhood’s last moments. ‘You knew I would be taken. You knew they would strip my mind…’ His skin was tingling.
‘You are wondering if this is what I intended all along, if I abandoned you to death and torture.’
Astraeos turned away, his gaze meeting the frozen eyes of Thidias, twisting as he ran towards the doors.
‘You did, though, didn’t you? You wanted them to know where you were going, and you wanted them not to question how they knew.’
‘I will not pretend that what has happened will not have played out to my advantage, but it was not a certainty. Nothing is, Astraeos. It was merely a possibility that I prepared for.’
‘Why?’
‘You do not remember why because you could not be allowed to. That memory and others wait for you beyond this one, buried behind a moment you do not wish to move past.’
‘Why?’ growled Astraeos. Ahriman’s blank face turned to speak to the air.
‘There are advantages in the Inquisition’s coming. Draw one’s enemies together and they will destroy one another. But that is not why you, or I, are here now.’
Ahriman paused. A sound like distant thunder filled the silence, and the ground and walls shook. No other part of the scene moved.
‘It was your price, Astraeos, this possibility, and this gift hidden in the puzzle box of your mind. I could not deny you after what I asked of you, and what you have done.’
The thunder came again, louder, closer. Astraeos felt the sensations of the memory grow faint as the figures around him dissolved into cold blue light. Only the image of Ahriman remained, still staring towards some lost horizon.
‘If you live, then you will be amongst them. You will be amongst the forces of the Inquisition who destroyed your brothers.’
‘What was the price I demanded of you?’ asked Astraeos. His throat felt tight.
Ahriman’s head turned to Astraeos. He smiled sadly.
‘Revenge, Astraeos. The price was revenge.’
The world shook, and he wakened to the gun-roar of the Sigillite’s Oath.
XIX
Awakening
The doors rolled wide, and the figure which wore Maroth’s skin pulled itself from the lift shaft. The shadow-filled bridge fell away from it. Gravity had failed across most of the ship. Beads of blood and oil floated like polished stones in the monochromatic gloom. Other things drifted through the space too, corpses mostly, dead from fire or the pressure changes that rippled through the darkened Sycorax like a god shivering. Fires burned across the bridge, glowing in spheres as they ate oil and promethium.
The figure pushed off with its borrowed hands, and spun down the bridge. The Sycorax shook around it with a sound as familiar as the beat of its heart. Someone was firing on the ship. Beyond the bridge’s viewports light strobed from bright blue to angry red. The chamber lurched around it as the explosion twisted the ship in space.
Maroth… Maroth… Maroth… The name gargled and chuckled at the edge of its awareness, seeping from the flesh it inhabited. It had come here because the first truth of the universe was that nothing was insignificant, and what was about to happen needed the trappings of ritual.
It spun around a dead cogitator tower and saw the command throne. A robe-wrapped corpse drifted past, and it felt its body’s flesh shiver with change inside its armour. The armour over its back cracked. Wings unfolded with a snap of shearing ceramite. Viscous fluid sheened the iridescent feathers. It paused, and steadied itself on a towering bank of machinery. Then its wings creaked to their full span and beat the air. It could feel more change trying to press into the flesh of its host. It had to wait, had to control the bleed of its essence into the real. Too much too fast and it would burn this body to liquid, and then this fragment of its being would be forced back into the warp. It could not allow that. It needed to be here, it needed to be close, so that it was ready.
It pushed off again, and glided towards the command dais. The figure of Carmenta floated above her throne, te
thered in place by the cables linked to her flesh. Her hood had fallen back, and the slit in her throat smiled beneath the red lacquer mask. Close to her, the torn limbs and tattered flesh of a dead man hung in the air. A foot pirouetted lazily, glinting with the silver shackles of one of the Thousand Sons slaves. Hemellion: the human had been torn apart by machine claws. It noticed a hand, severed at the wrist, its fingers still clutching a crescent of sharpened metal.
It reached out and gripped the throne. Its fingers grew to claws and it cut through the cables holding Carmenta to her throne with a single swipe. She floated up, limbs slack and waving. For a second she looked almost as though she was alive and falling not up, but down into the drowning embrace of dark water. But she was dead, and the flicker of life was just an illusion. Another explosion rocked the ship. Somewhere a still-functioning alarm began to wail.
The figure settled onto the throne, the wings at its back furling behind it.
Yes, this was the right place to wait. This was as it should be.
Slowly it reached out with its clawed hands and peeled Maroth’s hound helm off as though it were rotting cloth. The face beneath changed even as it met the still air of the bridge. Flesh flowed, bloated and withered, eyes vanished then reappeared. A crown of horns rose from its temples, curling as they grew. Out beyond the towering viewports a warhead exploded, stuttering white light through the bridge. The creature saw the light, and felt the threads of destiny twist tighter.
‘Biorhythms rising.’ The dead machine voice welcomed Astraeos back to consciousness. Tremors ran though him. The ship was shaking to the drumbeat of its guns and the breath of its engines. His muscles clenched. The bands of metal around his body holding him to the slab bit into his flesh. Blankness filled his sight. The link to the servo-skull, which had allowed him to see during his interrogation, was broken. He was blind, his world a cocoon of touch and sound. Alarms were sounding somewhere in the distance. The needles embedded in his flesh trembled. His hearts were racing in his chest.
‘Neural overload detected.’
Close by he could hear the hum of the tech-priest floating closer, and the rising tone of bio-monitors. Somewhere further away he heard the Seraph guards left by the inquisitors shift under their ragged wrappings. His mind reached automatically for the warp, and found a cold wall of ice. There was no way out.
Something was coming closer. He could hear the wheezing sigh of the tech-priest’s breath pump. Memory shivered down his nerves. Seeds of knowledge cracked open in the core of his mind, and grew, blooming through his mind and body. The warp could not answer his call, but that was always a possibility, and one that they had prepared for. The tech-priests watching over him knew he had woken. He heard a click of metal fingers on control keys. The needles twitched in Astraeos’s flesh as they prepared to dump sedative into his blood.
‘Neural storm detected.’
‘Hidden behind this last memory is a gift,’ said the echo of Ahriman.
The last seed in his mind opened.
Astraeos convulsed. His muscles bulged. The metal bands across his chest and limbs bit deep. His hearts beat faster and faster. The chime of the bio-monitors was a stuttered scream.
‘Bio-rhythms critical,’ said a machine’s voice.
Astraeos gasped. His hearts were twin hammers in his chest. The tech-priest was almost beside him. He felt his hearts beat once more, and stop. His body slumped in the restraints.
The bio-monitor alarms silenced. In his mind everything became still, a bright whiteness. The tech-priest paused, as the silence grew second by second. A high dead tone rose from the machines beside Astraeos.
‘Total bio-neural failure.’
In the empty possibility of his suspended mind he heard the machine voice, and felt the touch of robes as the tech-priest leaned over him. Instruments extended with a low metallic click and electric whine. He could almost see the chrome and brass probes extending towards him. Something pricked his skin, stabbing deep. He did not move, he could not move. He was a last thought stored in a prison of flesh.
The tech-priest was leaning closer, oil-thick breath hissing from its mouth. Astraeos heard the whir of augmetic eyes focusing. Metal fingers touched his arm.
‘Life signs nil.’
The probes dug deeper into his skin. He heard a puzzled click of binaric. Everything was slowed as though held back behind a dam of stored seconds. The tech-priest’s joints hissed as he leaned even closer. Fabric brushed the back of Astraeos’s right hand.
The suspended stillness of his mind and body shattered. He twisted his hand, grabbed the tech-priest’s robes and yanked him off his feet. The adept fell across Astraeos, scrabbling, burbling panicked machine code. Astraeos clamped his grip closed, and yanked his head up. The plate and cables bonded to his scalp ripped free. He felt blood run down his face.
The Seraphs had sensed something was wrong. They were moving, ragged cloth swishing, bare feet thumping on metal.
The dried flesh and machine-grease stink of the tech-priest filled Astraeos’s nose. The collar around his throat stopped his rise, but it did not matter. They had muted his mind, bound him and taken his weapons. But he still had teeth.
‘Life signs nil,’ droned the bio-monitors.
The tech-priest thrashed. Astraeos twisted his head and bit down.
Blood and oil gushed into his mouth. Electricity burst across his gums as he bit deeper. The tech-priest was twisting and thrashing, gurgling in gasps of static. Astraeos’s teeth cut through cogs, and into flesh. Sensations burst into his awareness as his body ripped information from the meat. Fear, malformed logic and machine data poured into him in a rushing mess of impressions. With panic came the tech-priest’s desperate thoughts of the sedative and control restraints set into his wrist.
‘Life signs detected.’
The sound of the Seraphs’ accelerating steps rang on the decking. The dead numbness surrounding Astraeos’s mind tightened. The tech-priest was shrieking now, a single buzzing note of panic.
Astraeos shifted his grip on the tech-priest’s arm, fingers feeling for keys and switches on the metal limb. He found one and pressed. Something in the slab beneath him clicked and began to whir. A new alarm began to sound. The dying tech-priest twisted. Astraeos’s grip almost broke.
‘Restraint release process stage one activated.’ The machine system’s voice was almost lost beneath the blare of overlapping alarms.
His fingers fumbled at the wrist controls. He heard a series of pneumatic thumps from close by as aggression drugs were dumped into the Seraphs’ bloodstreams. His fingers found the keys on the tech-priest’s wrist again. He heard a crackle of activating power fields, and a wet snarl as the first Seraph leaped at him. He depressed the keys. The restraints snapped back into the slab.
He rose, throwing the tech-priest’s corpse from him. Cables and tubes pulled free of his flesh in a shower of blood and sparks. He was still blind, still locked into a world of sound and touch, but he was free. He heard the last paces of the Seraph’s charge, and dived aside.
A mane of energised cables whipped past him. The empty slab shattered. Astraeos hit the floor in a crouch. The Seraph was close. The buzz of its power lashes raised the hairs of his skin. He could hear its feet move as it twisted to strike again. He stood, and lashed a kick into the space where he knew it must be. His foot hit muscle, and he felt something break beneath the impact. The Seraph staggered, snarling a tongueless cry. The sound of two more sets of running feet rose against the peal of alarms. He ran to meet them,
The air sang as the Seraphs’ weapons lashed down towards him. He leapt. The shaking deck vanished beneath his feet, and he was twisting through a world made real only by sound. He knew that the Seraph he had kicked was already rising from the floor, ready to dive after him. He knew that the other two Seraphs were beneath him, their momentum driving them forwards even as their strides faltered. He had seen their kind before, in what seemed now like a life lived by someone else. He could a
lmost see them, faces hidden by visors of beaten metal, the tatters of their robes fluttering from muscled, hunched bodies, the stumps of their arms trailing lightning-sheathed whips.
Then he landed and the moment ended. He grabbed the closest Seraph as he came down. Instinct screamed at him to let go, but his hands clamped shut. He felt skin and muscle tear as he yanked the Seraph off its feet. It writhed, blood sheeting down its muscle. Astraeos’s hand found its head, locked around it and wrenched back. Vertebrae separated with a gunshot crack.
The second and third Seraphs were on him. He thrust the corpse of their kin at them. An energy whip ripped the dead Seraph in two. Warm liquid burst over him. He could hear the two Seraphs hissing. He spun the split body of the dead Seraph into the source of the sound. The energised whips on the corpse’s arms hit meat with a jolt of discharging lightning.
Silence. Astraeos went still. It was not true silence; alarms still trembled through the air and the deck still growled to the rhythm of distant battle. It was the silence of transition. For a long drawn-out instant Astraeos’s mind remained shackled, its thoughts cycling within his skull. The dead Seraphs twitched at his feet. Their psychic deadness vanished, and the warp returned. It almost overwhelmed him.
He dropped to his knees. Ice formed on his skin and vaporised in fire. His thoughts tumbled. Rage, elation and sorrow spun and snagged through him. He could hear voices calling him, telling him to let go, to let his mind free. Ghost hands pulled at his limbs, and claws plucked his skin. His will cut off the sensations like an axe. His mind hardened, focused. Thoughts formed and exploded outwards, found the warp and remade the real.
He began to walk forwards. Tongues of flame formed in his footprints, and licked up his body. His flesh tingled as wounds closed. Needles and cables fell to the floor as his muscles smoothed over puncture marks. He could feel time flowing around him, thick as tar. The Inquisition and their servants would know now that something was wrong, that he was free. That was good, it suited his purposes.
The metal hood clamped to his head glowed with heat and sloughed away in molten scabs. His face blistered as fresh skin and sinew grew. The fire drained into his eye sockets, spiralling around points of darkness. Sight returned. He looked out at the world through the pulse of flames, and saw that it had changed. Colours bled from every angle, swirling like ink stirred into water. Ghost impressions, too faint to see clearly, shifted through the air.