Ahriman: Sorcerer (17 page)

‘What does it foretell?’

‘A storm,’ said Izdubar. ‘A storm rising in the future.’ Izdubar closed his eyes. A muscle twitched on his jaw line. In that instant she saw that he was not as young as he seemed; he was old, and very tired. ‘Sometimes when I think of it I can smell the pyre of that future.’ She saw a shiver pass through him. ‘That is what we fight against, Iobel. That is the war demanded by the truth you have sought for half your life.’ He pointed to the symbol she still held in her hand. ‘Will you join us in it?’

You must not go further…
the voice whispered from behind her, and Iobel turned, but there was only Cavor looking down through the crystal at the Thousand Sons legionary. His hands were thrust into his coat pockets, his augmetic eyes glowing bright as he stared at the black suit of armour. She frowned; the light of his eyes was blue. She was sure that…

She felt her mouth opening and words rising to the surface of her mind, pushing towards her tongue. She tried to bite them back, to scream. A clinging feeling of nausea slid through her. She swayed. The chamber was rolling and spinning around her.

What is happening? What is–?

The room blinked. Blackness surrounded her. She was so cold. A wind scraped dust over her skin, but there was no wind and her skin was buried beneath layers of fabric.

The crystal-floored chamber snapped back into place around her.

Iobel was standing looking at Izdubar who was looking back at her, his face grave.

Something had just happened, hadn’t it? She blinked, but the feeling was fading. Izdubar was still looking at her.

‘Will you join us, Iobel? Will you see the Athenaeum of Kalimakus?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will.’

Everything in the room stopped moving. Izdubar stood still, his face frozen between expressions.

Footsteps rang on the crystal as Cavor came to stand in front of her. He crouched, looking down at the Rubricae with his bright, blue augmetic eyes.

‘His name was Kyloris,’ said Ahriman with Cavor’s mouth. ‘He was born on Prospero, on the ninth day of the first transit. Clever, but never gifted. He was a good warrior. Now he is just a memory within a memory.’ He looked at Iobel. ‘You know why we are here, don’t you? I could see part of you struggling to keep me from the end of this memory.’ He smiled. ‘Strong Selandra Iobel, so strong for a human.’ The chamber began to fade. ‘But not strong enough.’

The shadows in the walls began to grow. A wall of pressure clamped around her, bearing down on her thoughts. Heat blazed through her mind. She felt the shell of her defences buckle. The room had almost vanished in a grey blur of swirling dust. This was the end, she knew. One more step through her memories, and Ahriman would have what he wanted: Apollonia, the secrets of the Ordo Cyclopes, the Athenaeum of Kalimakus. Her will had proved to be weak, and now it would not only betray her, but mankind.

Ahriman stepped towards her, growing taller, the details of Cavor’s stolen face falling into darkness. His hand was reaching for her, its fingers growing like spreading shadows.

No,
she thought.
No.
And the thought became iron. There was another way. A way of seeing what was happening that she had not realised before.

This is a memory
.
And it is mine.

She was not a powerful psyker, but here she did not need to be.

Beneath them the shields and manacles holding the Rubricae boiled away in a flash of light.

‘Tell me,’ she said slowly. ‘If this is a memory, what if I choose to remember it differently?’

The Rubricae exploded through the crystal floor. Ahriman fell, his imagined body flickering between substance and shadow. Iobel was already across the room, running towards the door and whatever was beyond. The Rubricae landed in a crouch on the cracked floor, eyes burning bright. Ahriman rose into the air, shedding Cavor’s shape like a cloak. He reached for Iobel.

The Rubricae came up from its crouch in a single bound. Ahriman twisted in the air as the Rubricae slammed into him. Flames and lightning exploded from them as they hit the wall.

The door was in front of Iobel. She reached out, and she turned her memory over like a key in a lock. The door vanished in a burst of debris. Iobel ran through the cloud of dust. She could feel her pulse hammering through her. Splinters of metal and rock raked her face, drawing blood.

It is not real,
she screamed at herself.
It is not real.

Her feet skidded out from beneath her and she was tumbling across a floor of white marble. She rolled, and came to her feet. A long corridor stretched in front of her. Closed doors led off it on both sides, and sunlight was streaming through windows open to a blue sky.

Where is this?
Where am I?

Locked together, wreathed in flames. Ahriman and the Rubricae came through the remains of the door behind her.

XII

Broken

The inquisitor was there when Astraeos woke again.

‘Tell me what you remember,’ said the inquisitor.

Astraeos did not speak. In his mind he saw his brothers firing from parapets, the light of their burning home staining their armour. Silver-grey warriors walked through burning halls, haloed by warp light, cutting down all they found without a word. The towering form of a Dreadnought walked before the grey warriors, shaking the tiled floor with its tread. He saw Chapter Master Thidias take his cloak of office from his back as the pyre leaped higher.

‘What is a king when there is nothing left to rule?’
Thidias had asked.

‘Silence,’ said the inquisitor. ‘Do I take it that the memories of your treachery have returned to you?’

Astraeos felt the muscles of his jaw clench.

‘We broke no oaths,’ he said.

The inquisitor raised an eyebrow.

‘We? So you are a son of greater treachery, rather than a lone creature of heresy? Or perhaps you mean Ahriman, and the rest of his enslaved kind.’ The inquisitor waited. The tubes puncturing Astraeos’s flesh sucked and clicked in the silence. ‘You are not like him, are you? You are not one of the Thousand Sons, even though you serve one. Even amongst my fellow inquisitors there are few who could tell you this, but the Thousand Sons did break their oaths. They broke one after another until there was nothing to hold them back from the abyss. That is the truth.’ He watched Astraeos, the ghost of a frown on his face. ‘Do you remember your master? Do you remember Ahriman?’

Do you remember Ahriman…?
The words echoed in his head. Pieces of things he did not understand, or had not realised were there, clustered around the words.

Remember Ahriman…

He saw Ahriman in battered armour the colour of rust and dried blood. He saw the sword glow as it severed his chains. He saw a million candles burning in the darkness of his mind. He saw his brothers: Cadar the instant before the chainblade opened his chest, Thidias standing in the airless dark of a dead void station, Kadin with his face a mass of blood-slicked scar tissue.

Ahriman…

‘He is not coming for you,’ said the inquisitor. ‘Not now, no matter what oath he swore. You are abandoned, Astraeos.’

I am a traitor,
thought Astraeos.
No matter what the cause, I have made the fallen my brothers.

‘What did he promise you? Power? Revenge?’

‘If there is a way to undo what has been done I will find it,’
Ahriman said in the stillness of his mind.
‘You have my oath.’

‘Hope,’ said Astraeos. He felt cold, as though something of the memory of the lonely human boy he had been bled into the present.

He has abandoned you… He is not coming… no matter what oaths he made.

‘Hope?’ The inquisitor shook his head slowly, and rubbed a hand over his eyes. ‘We make your breed so different, don’t we? Take a boy, cut away his future, his fear. Fill him with secrets that only the Emperor can truly understand, clad him in muscle and armour and surround him by war. What are we left with? Machines? No, machines cannot feel loyalty, cannot reason, cannot strive to reach the impossible. They can break, but they cannot fall. What hope did he offer you, Astraeos?’

Silence hung in the seconds after the question.

The inquisitor let out a slow breath, and shook his head.

‘I do not wish to do what must be done, but I will. You are a traitor, Astraeos, but you could still serve the Imperium if you choose. Tell me what else you remember, tell us of Ahriman and what he intends.’

Astraeos felt anger rise in him. They had killed his Chapter, they had made him an outcast, stripped him of everything which had made him loyal.

‘An oath binds us above all else, but for loyalty there must be an oath from kings to those they serve.’
They had been Thidias’s words.
Thidias
. Now dead and left in the dark.

‘No,’ said Astraeos.

The inquisitor nodded. There was no sorrow in the gesture, just acknowledgment that there was no other way.

‘Cendrion,’ said the inquisitor. A Space Marine in hulking silver armour stepped forwards. Astraeos wondered that he had not noticed him in the shadows. His false eyes skated over the warrior, taking in the script marching over the pauldrons, the vials and rolled scrolls which hung from golden wire across his chest and shoulders. Silver tattoos spiralled over the warrior’s night-black skin, as though his armour was growing over him. A sword as tall as a man rested in his hand. He looked at Astraeos with steel-grey eyes.

It is one of them, one of the kind that killed our Chapter. One of the kind who made me a traitor
. Shock spilled through Astraeos, and then the rage returned, brighter, burning deeper and clearer than before.

‘You do not wish to do this?’ said Astraeos, and felt the ice pour into the words as he spoke. ‘One day, inquisitor, you will be judged, and in that moment you will look up into your own face and know the truth. Your soul will shriek when it passes into the fire.’

The inquisitor’s expression did not flicker.

‘Withdraw the Seraphs,’ he said. ‘Let the warp in.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Cendrion without looking away from Astraeos. The inquisitor’s lips twisted into a weak smile.

‘You are here, are you not, my friend?’ The inquisitor glanced to the other figures standing half in shadow. Beside the crone and the glass-eyed man, the three hunched figures stirred under their black shrouds. ‘Withdraw,’ said the inquisitor, and the bent figures shuffled backwards as though melting into the gloom.

The warp touched Astraeos’s mind, and he was aware of it curling and flowing a shadow’s width away. He was also aware of Cendrion. The warrior’s presence battered into his mind like the heat of a young sun. Astraeos’s own mind was sluggish, and even as he tried to reach for the warp he knew something was wrong. Pain lanced through him. He tasted blood again, and felt his sight blur with nausea. He pulled his mind back. A smell of metal and cooking meat came from the machines clamped over his head.

The inquisitor looked up at Cendrion.

‘Open his mind,’ he said.

Iobel ran. Behind her Ahriman and the Rubricae rammed into a pillar of white marble. Splinters and flames exploded from the impact. The Rubricae’s hands locked tight around Ahriman. Iobel glanced back as her feet pounded down the corridor. Her eyes met Ahriman’s for a split second. Dazed confusion flared in her. She did not know what was happening, or how it had happened. She had made a terrible, terrible misjudgement. Their gazes broke, and the feelings vanished from Iobel’s mind. She stumbled, half falling.

Ahriman broke the Rubricae’s grip. It reeled back a pace, found its balance and launched forwards again. Ahriman rammed his palm towards it. Iobel screamed as the Rubricae’s chestplate shattered. Pain exploded across her torso. Confusion came fast after the pain. The Rubricae took a shaking step towards Ahriman, its hands rising weakly. Cracks spread across its shape, radiating from its chest. It came apart, pieces of its empty shell falling to the floor like wind-blown leaves.

Iobel did not move. Ahriman turned towards her. He looked as he had when she had seen him in the moment he had come for her on Vohal: armoured in blue and silver and robed in turquoise, his head covered by a six-horned helm. He took a step forwards and the helm dissolved into a face with smooth lines and bright eyes. The armour rippled and became a plain robe of white, tied at the waist with a knotted red cord. He moved slowly, as though wary of provoking her.

She was breathing hard, muscles held between stillness and flight. But of course she was doing no such thing, she realised. Wherever her body was, this was just a creation of imagination, a landscape of the mind. From the need to breathe to the fatigue in her limbs, all of it was a fiction.

Ahriman took a step closer, carefully, eyes not moving from her. Then she realised why, and where she must be. This was not her mind; it was his.

She met his eyes and knew at that moment he saw the revelation in her. She felt a cold smile form on her lips. ‘You have made a mistake, Ahriman. There is no sorcery here, only strength of will. Here I am as strong as you.’

He began to move. Iobel closed her thoughts like a fist and slammed them outwards. Ahriman froze. His face was as unreadable as carved stone, but Iobel knew that something that might come close to fear moved beyond the mask.

‘You cannot run,’ he said. His voice was measured and calm. ‘There is no way out of here, inquisitor.’

‘True, but what will it cost you to bring me down? How much damage could I do here, inside your mind?’

‘You are here until I have what I need.’

‘The location and secrets of the Athenaeum.’

‘You will give it to me one way or another. All I have to do is reach into you and take it. You buried it deep, but it is there.’ He raised a slim finger and placed its tip against his temple. ‘I can feel it.’

Iobel kept her thoughts steady, her will poised to break or remake more of this mindscape if he moved. She needed time. Time to find a way out, time to destroy her memories of the Athenaeum.

‘Why seek it?’ she said. ‘You must know what it says already. You were there, weren’t you?’

He shook his head slowly.

‘Mistakes, inquisitor. Mistakes made in the past that I did not understand at the time, and that I will set right in the future. That is what the Atheneaum will help me do.’

She did laugh then, and the sound made the cracked walls shake.

‘You wish for atonement?’

‘Not the atonement your kind can grant, inquisitor.’

His eyes were bright in his unmoving face. The laughter died in her throat.

‘Oh, great Throne on Terra, it is true.’

Ahriman seemed to let out a breath.

‘I have broken everything I sought to save. That is my burden, but one that I will see undone.’

‘Your burden? You are damned, Ahriman. There is no salvation in hell for your kind.’

‘How can I have betrayed something that no longer exists? The Imperium you serve is not the Imperium I helped create.’

‘Then what salvation do you seek?’

His eyes widened, then hardened.

‘The only kind that matters,’ he said softly, and seemed to shiver. When he looked back at her his shape seemed to have blurred and stretched. Behind him, the light dimmed to shadow. ‘You speak of the Imperium and our kind, but what of your kind, inquisitor? I have seen what your kind do through your own eyes. I have seen worlds burned to take one life. I have heard the arguments for what must be done for the good of all. I have touched the ashes that form in your steps. You ask me what salvation can be mine. I ask you, what can be yours?’

She could sense the palace shifting around her, corridors reconfiguring to trap her, walls forming to close off doors into other parts of Ahriman’s mind.

‘There are no innocents,’ said Iobel. ‘If we do not act then who will? Being right does not make me inhuman, it just makes us see that the inhumane is necessary. But what you do, it is beyond that, it is a pyre made of reason for the sake of false ideals.’

Her mind was ghosting through every detail she could sense, searching, probing. But as she opened her mouth to speak again she knew that she had bought what time she could. There was only one option left to her.

‘Fine words. I might say the same of you, Selandra Iobel.’ Ahriman nodded, with a sad smile.

‘You might, but there is a difference.’

Ahriman raised an eyebrow.

‘I
am
right,’ she said, and swung the full strength of her mind at the imagined world like a wrecking ball.

The walls and ceiling around her blew apart. Splinters of stone, wood and glass spun into the air beyond, falling against gravity. Iobel soared through the destruction, and out into the air and sunlight beyond. Wings snapped free of her shoulders, armour sheathed her skin in silver. She swooped, struck a white tower, and felt it break apart at her touch. Half-formed memory images spilled into the sunlit air, flapping like silk pennants. She spiralled back into the palace, trailing a shock wave of destruction. A cyclone of shattered stone, glass, and wood spiralled around her as her flight corkscrewed through the palace. She burst back into daylight. The light in the sky flickered between neon white and yellow. She did not know where Ahriman’s manifestation was, it did not matter. Every part of this place was Ahriman, every stone a fragment of his mind to break, every tower a pillar of his thoughts. She would not survive this, of that she was sure, but she would break him before he could take her knowledge.

She landed on a tower top. The white stones shook beneath her as she gripped them. The world was juddering around her, the sky swimming. It was trying to shake her free, trying to spit her out. High above her, a black stain was spreading across the face of the sun, spilling across its burning circle
.
She had to keep moving. She gripped the parapet, pulled herself up, and leapt again before the tower toppled.

The cries of crows cackled through the air, louder than the roar of falling rubble and shattering stone. Far below her she heard thousands of wings beating against the air.

She landed on a higher tower. Cracks spread across the stones. A roar of fracturing marble rose around her. She took another step as half the tower top broke away just behind her. She jumped. Her wings beat. She looked down. The tower fell away beneath her gaze, crumbling downwards in a fountain of dust and stone. Around it more and more towers began to topple, blocks and fragments of glass flowing down as a void opened beneath. She beat her wings and rose towards the sun even as it became a black disc.

‘Iobel!’ The roar shook the sky. She looked down, and saw Ahriman rise from the collapsing palace. He came as a murder of crows, a storm of black wings and jagged shrieks. They poured up to her, moving faster and faster even as the ground dropped away below and the palace fell into the abyss. Iobel could feel her wings becoming heavier. She tried to focus, to hold onto the possibility of the idea of flight, but it was draining away from her even as she tried to grasp it. The crows surrounded her. Black feathers hid the blue sky. Carrion cries rose higher and higher. She realised she was screaming as the crows swallowed her.