Ahriman: Sorcerer (23 page)

The warhead reached its final depth and detonated. It had lived in flight for a hundred and seventy-two seconds. The surface of the moon crazed around the impact site, collapsed and then exploded upwards. The ground rippled like water, dust rising in waves across grey dune seas. Rocks sheared and slumped into chasms. At the centre of the detonation a jagged wound stared up through the spreading clouds of dust like a shattered pupil in a blind eye.

Ignis watched as the breaking of Apollonia’s surface unfolded across his helmet display. His armour was shaking around his flesh, ringing in time with the
Word of
Hermes
’s rolling fire. In his right eye the latticework of fire and explosions above the moon multiplied in complexity.

The moon’s defences were still active. Slaved weapon platforms, drifts of mines and deadfall torpedoes glittered like chains of jewels hung against the sable of space. The defences were formidable indeed, but not enough, never enough. Grids of turbolaser fire reached out towards the ships of Ahriman’s fleet. Energy shields shattered. The fleet replied. Torpedoes slid into weapon platforms to explode in flowers of white light. Broadsides of plasma fire sliced through orbital stations. Globules of burning matter tumbled through a haze of vented gas and liquid. The numbers, the timings, the angles, all were just parts of a growing pattern which he had set in motion and he controlled.

Something stirred at the back of his mind, and he felt a silent chuckle shiver through him. He stood at the pattern’s centre, his mind linked to a psyker on each of the vessels, his soul feeling the warp echo as the numbers and angles built and built. The warp spun around the moon, spiralling into it like a whirlpool, pressing close, thinning the skin of all things. The moon itself glowed like a sun in his mind. Space close to it blurred with skeins of colour. Distances seemed to change as he looked at them, and smudges of unlight crackled across its surface. He could see it with his soul, like lightning bleaching storm clouds to white. It had been a long time since he had let the ratios of ruin have full sway, and the possibility was just too tempting, and far, far too dangerous.

Ignis shook his head, and went back to watching his ships strip Apollonia’s defences a piece at a time. Another weapons platform fragmented into fire. Thick lines of las-light flickered out from another platform and drew a line across the hull of a ship, slicing off sheets of pale bone and oily blue growth from the hull. The ship rolled, its engines misfiring.

The
Synetica
, thought Ignis, and recalculated the fleet’s effectiveness based on this loss. Numbers spun through his awareness. His hearts beat faster, as wild deviations entered into the matrix of destruction. The
Synetica
exploded, its hulls bursting with fire like a corpse bloated with air. Behind the fire cloud the rest of the fleet moved around the moon. Flowers of plasma bloomed amongst the las-light and the stitched lines of turret fire. It was beautiful to Ignis’s eyes, a sculpture in calculation etched in fire. The calculations resolved and became a sum which reached into the infinite. All was ready.

+Surface breach open,+ he sent.

Astraeos lay bound to his bed of steel. Consciousness returned to him again, and with it came pain. The empty sockets of his eyes ached with the dull rhythm of his pulse. The bolts securing the metal hood to his scalp were hard points of sharpness. The needles linked to the tangle of injector tubes twitched every now and again, as they sucked blood from his veins and pumped drugs in. Over it all the sickening shadow of his warp-blocking guardians smothered every thought and sensation in a coiling blackness. The shackles were vibrating against his flesh. The edges had rubbed and cut into the meat of his arms. And he could feel dry blood layering his skin.

This time when he awoke he made no sound. He had already emerged from the drug coma several times over the last… in fact he had no idea how long it had been since the inquisitor had left. There had just been dreams in which he would see the home world of his Chapter burn again and again. The dream always ended in the last moments before he fled the inferno. He would look back through the flames and see the silver warriors, and the Dreadnought striding at their head. He would wake, as now, to the bitter sharpness of his imprisonment. He would lie for a few moments in the blackness of his blindness, then the needles would jerk in his flesh, and the drugs cast him back to his dreams of a burning fortress and a dying world.

He kept his breathing low, his pulse controlled. The vibration of the shackles and the slab beneath him was a new sensation to wake to. He thought he knew what it was – battle. The ship he was on was firing its guns and receiving fire, recoil and explosions juddering its metal bones. He tried to judge the severity of the battle from the shudder of the metal; intense was his guess, a big storm of a fight.

Is this the death of Ahriman?
he wondered.
Have I woken to the moment when the Inquisition enact their execution?
A hollow space opened within him at the thought.
My last oath broken.

He felt his pulse rise, fought to slow it, but too late. A machine chimed nearby.

‘
Biorhythms rising
,
’ said a metallic voice. He heard a rustle of fabric and a click of gears as the tech-priest came close. He opened his mouth, drew breath. The needles in his flesh twitched and he felt the dull hammer of the sedatives fall.

‘No–’ he managed, and then he was falling back into soft darkness and the rising crackle of memories.

Hemellion sat and listened to the scrape of steel on stone. Every now and again, he stopped and raised the crescent of metal up, so that its edge caught the light of the oil lamp. He turned the blade over, watching its sharpness emerge. A distant
clunk
rang dully through the small room. Beside him the flame from the bowl of burning oil fluttered. He turned his eyes up to the shadow-clung corners of the chamber. The sound faded. He dropped his head and started sharpening again.

The blade had been a piece of metal he had pulled from the edge of a floor. He had been sharpening it for days now. First by the light of the glow-globes, then in the half dark when the globes had failed a few hours before.

He began again. The stone scraped down the edge, and he listened as it became sharper.

He thought of Helana back on Vohal, scraping a stone down the edge of her sword every morning. She had stopped every now and then, raised the sword, looked at the edge and continued. Ten years. Ten years of keeping her blade sharp to protect him from assassins. She had been one of the last to die. He thought of looking down into the fortress courtyard on so many mornings, of the sparks flying into cold winter air as the grindstone sharpened swords, and scythes, and knives. He thought of the corpses he had seen in the last days before Vohal died. Ragged smiles grinned up at him from necks, and he saw the knives still clasped in the hands of the corpses who lay furthest from the others. Mercy, a gift given at a knife’s edge at the end of hope.

He thought, and listened to the whisper of the stone on the blade’s edge.

He thought of the dust on the cracked lips of starving mouths.

Dust.

That was all that remained.

Dust scattered on the wind, dropped from an uncaring hand.

Ahriman’s eyes had looked down at him, and then Sanakht’s.

He thought, and thought, his memories winding around his hate. He did not think of the passing time, or of the shake and shudder of the ship, or why he thought of it now as a ship and not a city. He did not wonder why no other thoughts entered his mind, or what he was going to do. He thought of the blade, of the razor scrape of the stone on its edge, of its sharpness.

+Send us,+ sent Ahriman. Light shot into the air from the serpentine patterns cut into the floor. Sanakht felt the warp twist around them. He fought to keep his head from spinning. He stood beside Ahriman. Beside them sixteen Rubricae stood in two perfect circles. The chamber was a blur beyond a brilliant curtain. Rainbow light shattered from the crystal pyramid above them.

Sanakht’s lips peeled back from his teeth as pressure built in his skull. The transposition to the inside of Apollonia was possible only now that its shell was broken. Wild currents of warp energy surrounded the moon like a shifting mesh. Something about the moon itself seemed to cause these distortions, as though to protect it from exactly what Ahriman was doing. Opening up a gate through such a tangle of warp eddies and streams was close to suicide.

The breach blown in the moon’s crust by the seismic charge had opened a channel of opportunity. That channel was narrow and dangerous, but Ahriman was still going to take it. They could have dropped into the labyrinth by gunship, but he had wanted to get as close to the core of the moon as possible. That, at least, was what he had said.

The curtains of light surrounding Sanakht and Ahriman turned blinding white. Ahriman’s focused power screeched around Sanakht’s mind. The chamber vanished around them and he was streaking through oblivion like a burning arrow shot at the night sky.

XVII

Patterns

Darkness ahead, darkness behind,
thought Sanakht, as he followed Ahriman. The tunnel around them was circular and completely smooth, as though carved from the black rock by water. No light reflected from the walls, floor or ceiling. The Rubricae’s eyes shone cold and lifeless in their helms, but did nothing more than sketch the lines of their armoured heads. Even his helmet display could not pierce the gloom. The warp did not help either. He had tried to reach out with his mind, but at once had found his focus ripped away as though caught in a racing river.

The Labyrinth.
That was what Ahriman had called it, and Sanakht now understood why. The moon was not solid. Tunnels extended beneath its surface, forming a vast honeycomb of polished black rock. At its core, at the end of a path twisted through the dark, lay the Athenaeum. The warp was here, running through the walls and the still air of the tunnels, pouring down to some invisible depths. It was not just a labyrinth in the physical realm, it was a labyrinth of the psyche. It felt familiar, though he had no idea why, like walking through the ruin of a long-lost home. How deep they had descended or how far there remained to go, he did not know. Ahriman alone moved with purpose, floating ahead of them, robes rippling as though in an invisible wind.

Sanakht felt the sudden tug of the secret that he had buried within himself beneath layers of thought baffles and masking. It nestled there, warm and tempting with its promise. It would begin soon. No, he would not allow it to come to the surface. Not yet. He was too close and there was still too much risk.

Ahead of him he saw Ahriman twitch, and then stop. The Rubricae froze around him. Sanakht felt his hearts still. Had his mask of surface thoughts slipped? Had Ahriman looked deeper into his mind for some reason? No – he would have known. Weak as he was, he would have known, and besides what cause would Ahriman have not to trust him?

+Is something amiss?+ asked Sanakht, and heard his thoughts echo as real sound.

‘Amiss… amiss… amiss…’

+Is this labyrinth different from what the inquisitor told you?+

‘Told you… you… you…’

Ahriman turned where he hung, and looked up as though at a sky which was not there.

‘It is not a labyrinth,’ said Ahriman with his true voice. No echo followed. ‘These tunnels and the warp currents which surround them are simply a by-product of how it formed. It is a map, carved out of the moon’s cold core by the warp. The whole structure is a stabilised ball of substance and aether.’

‘It was made by chance?’ said Sanakht.

Ahriman’s reply cracked dully through the air.

‘No, nothing here is chance. Its passages are a map of trickery and deceit, and the warp vibrates through it.’ Ahriman pivoted back to face the darkness ahead. ‘It was made by thoughts pouring from beyond into reality. It is an echo of those thoughts, like a footprint left on the soft sand beside an ocean.’

The Rubricae clattered back into motion as Ahriman glided forwards. Sanakht followed, his hand brushing the pommels of his swords.

‘Whose thoughts?’ asked Sanakht, as he came level with Ahriman. ‘You said that this place was shaped by thoughts, but whose?’

‘Our father’s,’ said Ahriman.

Hemellion stepped onto the
Sycorax
’s bridge. He stopped, staring down at the worn brass of the floor, noticing the old marks cut into the head of each rivet.

Why am I here?
He knew where he was. He had been here before, many times. He knew that, knew that this was the… bridge? Yes. That was it. He knew that this was the centre of the ship…

But what is a ship?

A figure moved past him, moving fast, its tattered robe flicking in its wake. He blinked. He was not sure he knew what a ship was or why he knew that he stood on one, but he knew that it did not matter, and neither did why he was here. All that mattered was that he
was
here.

He looked up, his eyes slowly focusing. Something was happening. He could see figures moving about the tiered pits of metal sunk into the bridge’s deck. They wore yellow and had masks like animals. He stared at one. Its mask was in the shape of a snake or a lizard with scales of opal.

Cyrabor
… Was that their name? It felt like it should be.

More cries filled the air, rising over the metal clatter. There was some kind of panic, he was sure, but it all seemed very distant. He was where he needed to be, and that was good.

He looked down at his hands. They looked old. How had that happened?

No. That was right, he was old. He had grown and lived on a world of stone, and rain. He was not there now, he was here, on a ship…

He began to shuffle forwards. The silver chains around his ankles clinked against the brass floor. No one seemed to look at him. Shouts and clanks of metal echoed up to the high roof above. Black smoke chugged from a cluster of slab-like machines. Strange thick smells filled his mouth and nose. He kept moving, weaving between hurrying Cyrabor. In the distance the command throne rose above the smoke, sound and rushing figures. He could see a red figure on the throne, made small by distance and the vastness of the chamber.

In the folds of his robe the sharpened sickle of metal sat in his hand. It felt cold. He could not remember why he had it, or where it had come from, but that did not matter. All that mattered was that he was here.

He kept moving.

Ignis glanced up as Credence came to stand beside him. He did not need to ask if the Navigator was secure; he could feel the pathetic man’s thoughts scratching at the walls of his new prison.

The automaton clattered and buzzed at him.

‘All is well,’ he said, then nodded to himself. It was true, all was as it should be, every piece was in place, every factor in the pattern calculated, and every progression unfolding on its necessary path. His mind was connected to other minds throughout the fleet. Some of those minds commanded ships, some simply stood beside those that did. That web of coordination had been necessary to get Ahriman into the correct position, but it was not necessary now, at least not in the same configuration. He broke the connection to several minds, and focused on others, bringing them to the surface. They had all been waiting for this moment; all of them stood ready to act.

+Now,+ he sent, and in his mind the pattern bloomed into full life.

Carmenta saw the first shots and thought it was a mistake. Ahriman’s fleet was spread in high orbit above Apollonia. Some clustered together, others spread far apart, arranged by Ignis in a pattern that she had not tried to understand. The last of the moon’s defences had been stripped and most of the ships had settled into silence.

The
Malicant
was the first ship to move
.
Shaped like a serrated spearhead of soot-crusted copper, it was the warship of Mavahedron and his slave clans. It pirouetted away from the rest of the fleet on a burst of thrust. Carmenta watched it, her sensors drawn by the movement. The
Malicant
fired its guns. Light raked the void, and exploded around a pair of black-hulled frigates. Carmenta saw the shockwave as their shields collapsed, and suddenly time was crawling as surprise flooded her. The
Malicant
fired again, and the frigates exploded one after another.

Then time snapped forwards, and more ships were breaking formation and firing. Sound exploded from the vox. Cries of shock and rage rang through Carmenta’s sensors. Fire slashed the dark. Shields burst. Plasma and laser energy carved into hulls, and atmosphere vented into the void. Where there had been order, there was now a spinning tangle of ships scrambling to bring their guns to bear. Where there had been a single fleet there was now the fire and rage of battle.

Treachery, or terrible error, it did not matter; Ahriman’s fleet was tearing itself apart. She had always doubted that the ties of allegiance binding the fractured warbands together would hold, and now they were shattering before her eyes. She would not allow it. Orders flowed from Carmenta into the
Sycorax
. She began to turn, her sensors reaching for firing solutions, tiered batteries of her guns rotating to targets.

She froze. The impulses commanding her weapons teetered on the edge of completion. She had missed something, something obvious yet significant. She gazed at the ships spinning wildly above Apollonia, at the streaks of flame and the fires kindling in wounded hulls. Then she realised what had held her will from firing. None of the ships tearing at each other had fired on her. She sat untouched, while the rest of Ahriman’s fleet began to burn.

No
,
not all of the rest.
She saw it then, the ships that floated amongst the unfolding carnage, untouched, serene.

What was this? What was happening?

She thought of her words to Ahriman.

‘Remember that they followed Amon once, and that they tried to destroy you.’

She felt numb. Treachery: it was the only answer. Ahriman had gone, and now his enemies moved against him.

Her will surged into her guns, and her sensors reached and locked onto targets.

The silver ship ripped into existence with an exploding pressure wave of aetheric energy.

The
Sigillite’s Oath
punched through the fabric of reality like an arrow through ragged cloth. Its engines burned to nova brightness. Around the fire-ringed moon of Apollonia ships began to turn like vulture heads looking up from a corpse. The strike cruiser accelerated, twisting its course into a corkscrew as the first distant salvoes streaked past it. Its own guns were still out of range, but would not be for long.

Transit from the warp to reality was dangerous. Making that jump within the bounds of a star system was suicidal. The smallest of navigational errors and a ship could exit into the heart of a sun or the core of a planet. Few ships ever attempted such a feat and survived, but that was exactly what the
Sigillite’s Oath
had done. Steered by the finest Navigators in the Imperium, it had cut through the warp storm gathering around Apollonia, and emerged almost on top of Ahriman’s fleet.

Cendrion felt the backwash from the warp exit spill over him as he marched through the pulsing yellow alert light. His brothers marched beside him. The clank and hiss of armour echoed in time with the ring of their strides. The shriek of torn reality was fading in his mind, but he could taste the rise of the growing storm. It tasted of lightning and blood. Above it the psychic voices of the Eighth Brotherhood rose in communion.

+Mahalalel stands ready.+

+Iofiel stands ready.+

+Gadal stands ready.+

The sendings soared through Cendrion’s awareness. He could feel the ghosts of his brothers’ thoughts. Barakon’s psycannon was a brief weight in his hands. The dark closed over him as the hatch of a Stormraven hissed shut behind Sabaoc. Pain itched up his spine and neck as he was Anak waking in the embrace of his Dreadnought coffin. He listened, allowing the walls between his mind and his brothers’ minds to dissolve. They were one, a brotherhood joined in blood and soul.

+Strike force Ishen stands ready. Launch pattern locked. The blade is drawn.+

+ Strike force Sangrian stands ready. The blade is drawn.+

+Strike force Caspian stands ready. Teleportation targets confirmed. The blade is drawn.+

‘They have already broken through to the labyrinth fortress?’ Izdubar’s words pulled at Cendrion’s focus. The inquisitor lord strode ahead of him, his oil-black armour gleaming in the pulsing light. The two other inquisitors, Malkira and Erionas, walked beside him. Both were armed and armoured. Malkira was a giant of pistons and chrome, Erionas a spectre in grey robes and layered red plate. Cavor followed them, his body bulked in an armoured enviro-suit. Holstered pistols and bandoliers of bullets clinked in time with his steps.

‘Apollonia’s surface is breached,’ said Erionas. He was breathing hard, as though not used to moving so swiftly. ‘An assault is likely to be in progress. But…’ Erionas stopped in his tracks, crystal eyes dancing with data.

‘What?’ barked Izdubar.

‘The enemy fleet is firing on itself.’

‘An unexpected advantage,’ nodded Izdubar. ‘How long until the rest of the fleet catches up to us?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Erionas. ‘The storm is rising up fast. Perhaps they will not arrive at all.’

‘Then we stand alone,’ said Izdubar.

They turned a corner and a blast door peeled open in front of them. Before them a wide chamber opened and spread into the distance on either side. Machines towered into the space above, crawling with lightning. Incense and ozone hung thick in the air.

+Ship weapons approaching range. We are at the moment of execution.+

Cendrion stopped at the centre of a circular depression in the deck. Behind him the thirty brothers of his strike force followed to stand in clusters around him. The inquisitors stood next to him. He could hear the pulse of their thoughts: Malkira’s eagerness bright beside Erionas’s cold indifference, Cavor’s fear of what they were about to do bleeding out of him even as he tried to control it. Above them the vast machines began to keen. The beat of the yellow alert lights rose. The warp was churning around them now, scraping the skin of reality thin.

He glanced at Izdubar. The inquisitor lord looked back, the red eyes of his lion helm glowing bright.

He nodded once.

Cendrion blinked an amber rune at the edge of his sight. The yellow light became red. A heat haze blur rose around the machines.

He looked at the red rune. Cendrion could feel the teleporters poised to reach into the warp, gripping it like fists ready to yank them through space and time. In their gunships and boarding torpedoes the rest of the brotherhood waited to be unleashed into the void.

+Strike force Cendrion stands ready.+ He blinked the activation rune. The machines shrieked. +The blade falls.+

Ignis was shaking. Geometry glowed in the air of the crucible. Lines and circles broke, reformed and connected into a different pattern. This was how he saw the battle as Ahriman’s fleet consumed itself, not as the projection of machines, but as arcs of warp fire cut into reality. His mind held all the values of strength, and his senses saw the death he wrought as it created geometry in the beyond. The storm rose in answer. The patterns and ratios written in death and fire pulled the billowing fury of the storm on and on, faster and faster. It was coming. It was almost complete. Almost.