Ahriman: Sorcerer (14 page)

He recognised them all, but was not sure why. None of them seemed to have reacted to him suddenly appearing on the opposite side of the chamber to them. He looked at each of them again, tried to blink but without success.

The floating four-armed figure turned to look at him. Its tri-lens eye rotated faster, then clicked to stillness.

‘Subject can see us now.’ The voice was the same machine clatter as before. They all turned to look at him then. The man with the thin face frowned, and raised a crooked finger.

‘Closer.’

He floated forwards, passing over the figure buried under the snake swarm of sucking tubes. As he did so he saw a reflection glide across the glass of one of the fluid-filled vials: a polished skull without a lower jaw, a cluster of lenses filling its left eye socket. He kept on moving forwards, his mind suddenly tumbling. A servo-skull: he recognised it, and felt the shock roll through his narrow awareness.

The thin man’s face was now level with his vision.

‘Tell me, can you speak?’

No,
of course he could not speak. The word echoed through him in mute frustration. He could not…

A sound gurgled up from the figure on the table.

‘N… No.’

‘Good,’ said the thin-faced man, then gave a narrow smile that was not a smile.

He understood then, and knew why he was seeing through a servo-skull, knew why no one had looked at him when he first saw the chamber. He was the figure on the table. The injured flesh was his. The mouth speaking through the slot in the metal mask was his. And he had no eyes.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘I,’ said the thin-faced man carefully, ‘am of no concern. You however, you are very much the focus of things.’ He glanced at the hovering tech-priest. ‘Though I understand your cognition is impeded at present, we will help you recover it.’ He nodded carefully. ‘We will help you remember.’

‘Remember?’

‘Yes, and let me start by giving you something. We will need more of you, much more, but you will need to lead us there, and for that we need somewhere for you to start. Your name.’ The thin-faced man paused. ‘Your name is Astraeos.’

Astraeos.
The name rolled through him, like an echo of a shout carrying through fog.
Yes… Yes. That was… that is my name.

‘Why am I here?’ asked Astraeos.

The thin-faced man folded his arms, a long finger resting on his jaw.

‘A very good question,’ he said.

IX

Storm Calm

The fleet waited in unquiet calm. Two dozen ships lay in the dark, their engines silent. Distant starlight lapped against their hulls, sketching their shapes in silver. Time ticked on and the millions who lived in the ships waited. On the bridges of the warships, in close cramped sub-decks, and in lightless bilges they waited. Most did not know why, but they felt it all the same, a tautness that stretched between heartbeats like a drum skin waiting for the first strike to fall.

In the steam-filled gorges between the
Sycorax
’s shield stacks, the mech-scavengers folded their brass wings over their bodies and hooted into the quiet. The Cyrabor gathered in their forge-fanes, clicking at each other in their half-machine tongue. In the domed library of the cruiser
Metatron
Gilgamos watched the stars beyond the viewports. At his side three Rubricae stood, statue still, the light in their eyes dim.

In his quarters Hemellion sat, his legs curled under him, staring at the wick of a candle burning lower. He thought of the faces of those he had known, of the sun falling through mist on a cold morning. He thought of the son he had sent away from the capital so that he would learn of the world he would one day rule. For an instant he wondered where his son would be now, then he remembered that he knew. Tears rolled down his cheeks in silence, and he stared at the candle flame and waited.

Silvanus could not sleep. The drugs had stopped working, and would not work again, no matter how many he took. He sat on the hard floor of his oculary, looking at the circle of mirrored glass in his hands. He did not want to look into the reflection; he did not want the answer it would give. But even the hands that held the mirror gave an answer – they were changing. The bones were longer, the skin thinner, the nails finer and sharper. He raised the mirror, and looked at his face. The flesh was sagging under his eyes, and the pupil in his left eye had swollen to swallow the iris. The features of his face were disappearing, melting back into smooth flat skin. Slowly he lowered the glass.

How long?
he wondered.
How long do I have before I cannot recognise myself?

Carmenta drifted between wakefulness and the slumbering dreams of the
Sycorax
. Every now and then she could hear the Cyrabor talking as they stood around her throne. They were talking about her, their half-machine voices clicking and purring like oiled cogs. They thought she could not understand them. They were saying that she would not last much longer, that the ship would take her soon, that the portents all said that her end was coming.

But I am the mistress
. The slow, cold embrace of her ship folded over her.
I am
Titan Child
. I am
Sycorax
.
I am a goddess of the void
.
How can I die?

No answer came, just the whispers of the Cyrabor fading into the restless quiet.

And on and on through the fleet time drew taut, and the whispers passed between lips both high and low: What now? When would the waiting end? Where would the answer lead them?

The chainblade roared to life in Kadin’s hands. Sparks rose from where the teeth caught the decking at his feet. After a second he stopped the blade’s motor, and listened to the teeth slow to stillness. The corridor was quiet again.

Kadin watched the stillness of the corridor. The cracked glow-globes cast ragged pools of light over the metal gratings of the floor. At his back the door of the chamber through which Ahriman had passed days before remained shut. Kadin had heard sounds, sand blowing across metal, calls like the cries of birds, laughter even. Frost had leaked from the door seals and spiralled down the walls of the corridor. The door had glowed deep red then cooled with a tinkle of contracting metal. But even those moments had not broken the feeling that the whole ship and fleet had settled into a dreamless night.

Kadin turned his head and looked into the blackness at the other end of the corridor. He kept watching until it melted away from his eyes, and he could see the dot of the distant bulkhead in grey monochrome. He looked back down. He would have closed his eyes, but his eyelids would not stay shut any more, and his eyes saw regardless of how deep the darkness. He had grown in the dark, learned to fight in the dark, killed his first man in the dark. So many memories were gone, but he could still remember the warmth of the blood as it washed over his knife arm. The dark had been mother and father; the dark had been fear and the racing heart of the hunt.

What remains?

He triggered the resting chainblade. It rattled to life and noise filled the corridor, tumbling down the long space. He gunned it louder, felt it shake the metal of his grasp. He cut the motor, listening to the sound drain back to nothing.

A few memories of a child in the dark, afraid and hungry – that is what remains.

He gunned the chainblade again, and listened to the silence vanish as the metal teeth sang.

Maroth knelt. Above him, the daemon stirred, and its silver chains clinked. He raised the blind eyes of his helm. The daemon looked back, its own eyes like pools of mirror-black water. The host body had changed again. Maroth could see the red muscles beneath the stretched skin. Horns grew from beneath the temples of its head, reaching up like bare, twisted branches. Its lips had pulled back from its teeth, and it grinned with a cage of translucent needles. He could hear it breathing, the air sucking wetly, even though its chest was still.

Nothing here is as it seems,
thought Maroth.
The silence is not silence, and the quiet is a storm waiting to break. I am not the broken husk of a sorcerer, and Ahriman is not my master.

‘Sire,’ said Maroth, his voice strong and clear in the blue light of the burning lamps.

‘Now,’ said the daemon, its voice crackling like fire spreading through a forest. ‘It begins now.’

‘Yes, sire,’ said Maroth.

Ignis watched the warlords arrive. He had chosen one of the main hangar decks for the meeting, partly because it was as far as he was willing to let the warlords onto his ship, and partly because he had every intention of just opening the blast doors to the void if all went as wrong as it might. Night filled the vast chamber, broken only by the pilot lights guiding the gunships to their stands on the deck. Credence stood just behind him. The automaton buzzed at him every few seconds.

‘No,’ Ignis muttered in reply. ‘That course of action is unnecessary at this point.’

Credence gave a short clatter of binaric.

‘In this case your threat assessment is in error,’ said Ignis.

Another pause, another blurt.

Ignis glanced up at the automaton’s sensor sockets. ‘Yes, I am sure.’

He turned back to watching the warlords and their entourages cross the deck. They walked with the blunt arrogance of those trying not to show that they were unsure of why they were there. It almost made Ignis smile. All of them commanded ships and warbands in Ahriman’s fleet. Most of them had been part of one Legion or another during the Great Crusade and subsequent rebellion against the Emperor. All of them had fought in the wars in and around the Eye of Terror, some for hundreds of years, some for much longer. And all of them held to no higher ideal than their own thirst for power. They came one by one, each flanked by a clutch of warriors that fumed violence like smoke from a fresh fire.

First came Hzakatris, so called Master of the Hellforged, clad in armour which looked like cancerous bone. He brought three of his blooded warriors with him, each one of them clad in Terminator plate looted from battlefields across the Eye. They clanked with poor repair as they moved. Behind him was Mavahedron, alone apart from his thrall-hounds, the beasts snarling at the ends of taut bronze chains. Sulipicis was last, face shrouded, his black and gold armour half hidden by tattered grey robes. A crescent of blank-helmed and black-armoured warriors flanked him. Each bore a two-handed sword before them. Ignis thought they looked like a mourning guard marching beside a corpse.

Ignis felt the muscles in his jaw tense as the three warlords halted in a ragged arc before him. His eyes lingered on each of them, his second sight picking up their shifting auras: anticipation, caution, distrust, spite, and hunger. He had a sudden urge to tell Credence to open fire. This was the third of these parlays he had arranged, and by now he was feeling a sense of inevitability about the outcome of each.

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.