Ahriman: Sorcerer (29 page)

‘The dream is no more,’ rasped the Rune Priest, pointing forwards, fingers splaying to send a whirl of broken shards and shadow towards a cluster of red-robed humans. His eyes were rolled back into his head, his skin ice white. ‘The moon rides red in the sky, and its tears are silver.’

Sycld was in the grip of the dreams that had led them here.

A blow struck him and spun him from his feet. He had not seen it coming, had not seen the warrior that struck it. He fell, seeing a shape in vast Terminator armour loom above him. Sorcerous fire washed from the Terminator, and the great sword in his hand, tinting the silver of his armour the colour of forge fire. He remembered Prospero, and the smell of flesh charring in armour as the Thousand Sons had turned their witchcraft on Grimur and his brothers. The sorcerers had worn crimson then, but now they were creatures of silver that glittered like the flanks of the glass pyramids on that now-dead world.

The sorcerer’s sword was descending. Grimur sprang up, turning the blow with the flat of his axe and ramming its edge into the sorcerer’s eyepieces. Crystal and silvered ceramite shattered. Blood kissed the axe’s field and cooked into smoke. Grimur let go of the axe with one hand and grabbed the ruined front of the sorcerer’s helm. Claws ripped from the tips of his fingers and tore the helm from the sorcerer’s head. The face beneath was a mask of blood and white exposed bone.

The sorcerer twisted away, still alive and somehow still able to see. Grimur leaped, his claws closing on the sorcerer’s skull and ripping it from the collar of the armour. He landed on top of the silver giant as it hit the ground. He paused, feeling the race of life in his veins. Around him the pyramids of Prospero burned again in his memory. He raised his clawed hand, looking at the blood drooling from the broken skull. This was victory unfolding around him, victory and release. Ahriman would not survive, for they had run him and his kin down. He wanted to touch that realisation, to know his victory through his dead enemies’ eyes.

He opened his mouth and let the blood of his enemy touch his tongue. Ice and heat shuddered through him. The sorcerer’s last sensations and thoughts unfurled in blurred tatters in his awareness. He went still, seeming to shrink, breath coming slow and shuddering from his bloody lips. He looked around, blinking, eyes focusing and refocusing. Slowly he stood.

He turned his eyes to Sycld. The Rune Priest seemed to feel his lord’s gaze, and turned his head at the same moment.

‘The path, the red path beneath the moon,’ croaked Sycld. ‘We are there, we are at the dream’s end.’

Grimur looked at the Rune Priest, at the ghost light crawling over his staff. He looked down at the head of his own axe and the blood thickening on his clawed hands. He thought of all that he had done to reach this point, and all the things that he had allowed or caused to be done.

We followed dreams.
And we never asked who was their master.
The prey that runs may run from fear or to draw on the hunters. Revenge,
he thought,
is an axe with two smiles.

He looked into Sycld’s blank eyes. The Rune Priest had gone still as though propped up on a stake.

‘I…’ he said. ‘I can’t see it any more… the scent, the dream path… I…’ His voice cracked, faltered and became something else.

‘Wolf,’ said Sycld’s mouth, but the voice was a hollow rumble. ‘The thread of your fate is yours again. No longer will my dreams guide you. You may live, or you may fall, and I will care not, but I wish you to know one thing. I want you to remember it until your soul goes back into the pit of night.’ Sycld’s mouth twisted into a smile as though pulled by strings. ‘I want you to know that you have served me well this day. That truth is my thanks.’

Grimur stood, silent, hunched and bloody in his patched and battered armour. Then he brought his axe up. Sycld shuddered and opened his mouth to speak again. The axe fell.

Silvanus kept his eyes shut, all of them. He pressed his hands over his face, and did not move. It did not help. He could still see. He could see the warp. It shone on the other side of his fingers, lighting his veins and bones. And it was angry. He knew that with a certainty that frightened him because he did not know how he knew.

+Navigator,+ the voice in his skull called: Ignis. He would not answer. He would not do what they asked. He would not look, he would not.

+Navigator.+ The thought voice roared in his skull. Bright motes of light burst in his mind.

‘No,’ he moaned. ‘No, please.’

+Navigator, you will heed our will.+

‘No,’ he moaned again, and felt bile rise with the words. His teeth felt wrong in his mouth, and the vomit taste was sweet on his tongue. He was suddenly aware of the loose flaps of skin on his face and between his fingers, the red veins bright in the light of the warp. ‘No,’ he whispered.

+Silvanus.+ The voice was like cool water. Silvanus stopped moaning. He felt the defiance in him rise and break. His hands fell from his face. His eyelids were closed, but the folds of skin over his face made it seem as though they were just two shut eyes amongst many.

He opened his eyes. Vision filled his tri-ocular awareness. The chamber walls were simply a sketch of substance, the ship a ghost, and the souls within it made of light that changed colour with every beat of their hearts. He breathed, focusing and trying to calm the twitching in his face and hands.

He raised his gaze. The black vortex, which had formed where the moon had vanished into nothing, spun before his eyes. It was like looking into a lightless tunnel. Storm winds ringed it, spiralling down into its core like water draining through a hole
.
The
Word of Hermes
was poised on the edge of that vortex, and beside it a clutch of other ships.

‘That is where we must go?’ he asked.

+Yes, we will pass through the storm.+

‘And then?’

He waited, feeling Ahriman’s presence still at the edge of his thoughts.

+Then we begin the path back to where this began.+ Ahriman’s thought voice paused. +We return to the Planet of the Sorcerers.+

Epilogue

Leaves of crystal crunched beneath her feet as she crossed the summit of the tower. Ahriman did not look up at her approach, but kept his eyes on the transparent sliver of mirror lying on a plinth of black marble.

‘You have rebuilt it,’ she said. ‘Or should it be you have rebuilt yourself?’ He straightened. The cloth of his robes caught the warm wind, and pressed itself against his skin. The shard of mirror winked the deep blue of the sky back at him. ‘This
place
is different,’ she said.

‘Everything changes,’ he said. Carefully he picked the piece of mirror up between thumb and forefinger. He gazed into the still surface for a long moment, and then tossed it up into the air. The shards of crystal on the floor followed it in a cascade of colours. A tree formed in the air, its trunk a rainbow, its branches a swaying pattern of reflected light.

He looked down from the tree. The palace of his memory extended away and down around him. Towers of rippled black stone and silver rose like half-burned candles from a web of bridges and stairs. Some were brass, others jade, others verdigris-dusted bronze. Domes and cupolas sat like blisters amongst the reaching fingers of the towers. Here and there the white marble of the original palace could be seen peeking out from the new. The whole now resembled something grown rather than built, a vast coral reef of stone and metal, which sprouted new structures even while he watched.

‘You will fail,’ she said, her voice closer behind him.

‘So you have said before,’ he replied and turned.

Iobel stood before him. She had shape, but it was like a charcoal sketch pulled into three dimensions, a blur for a body, limbs that bled into nothing, a face formed by suggestion and shadow. She turned, and appeared to look out over the memory palace.

‘You did not try to find me.’

‘I have found you now,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘What need is there to hunt you through my own mind?’

She smiled.

‘You don’t know how I am still here, do you? Have you ever thought how much of your mind now exists beyond you, out there in the warp?’ He watched her but said nothing. ‘I have walked the edges of your psyche, Ahriman. There are parts of you which are not wholly yours any more, parts which think and dream outside of your skull.’ She looked back at him, her eyes two smudges of shadow under the sun. ‘I am here with you now and forever, sorcerer. I live in the shadow of your mind, and until you fall I will walk with you.’

He turned away from her, and started down a flight of stairs which spiralled down from the tower’s summit.

‘You will fail,’ she called to him, but he did not respond. ‘I have seen the insides of your knowledge, I have walked your thoughts. Even with the Athenaeum you will fail. The Crimson King will oppose you. Time itself will defy you. You are alone. Kadin, Carmenta, Astraeos – everyone gone, all spent to take you closer to ruin.’ Ahriman kept walking, descending through the towers and storerooms of his past. High above him Iobel’s voice called after him. ‘Only enemies and betrayers remain to you now, Ahriman.’

The waking was slow and filled with pain.

Cendrion, Cendrion, Cendrion…
his name beat softly around him, like a reminder left for him to find as he returned from sleep. His limbs were dull aches, both numb and brittle at once. Shocks ran up and down his nerves, while blackness filled his eyes. He reached out with his mind as soon as he was aware, and found the minds of his brothers present but distant.

+What is happening?+ he asked them, but they did not reply.

He tried to wake further, tried to move, but could do neither. He waited.

Sight returned, sudden and sharp in its brightness. He tried to blink, but could not. Static fuzzed across the monochrome vision of a chamber hung with thick cables and chains. Inquisitor Izdubar stood in front of him, a patient expression on his thin face. The crone Malkira and the glass-eyed Erionas stood at his shoulders.

‘He has woken?’ asked Izdubar, glancing to someone that Cendrion could not see.

‘Where. Am. I?’
Cendrion heard his own voice echo through the chamber like metallic thunder. Izdubar looked up at him again.

‘Titan,’ said Izdubar. ‘The Hall of Ancients.’

Cendrion understood then. The knowledge shivered through his body which was now no more than a broken foetus curled inside the iron womb of a Dreadnought sarcophagus. The pain in his limbs was a ghost, a scrambled sensation that now related to nothing at all.

‘How. Long?’
he asked.

‘Eight years since Apollonia, seven in warp travel, one in preparation,’ said Erionas, with cold precision.

‘Ahriman?’
he growled.

‘Escaped with a few vessels.’ Izdubar paused, his tongue poised on his teeth. ‘And with the Athenaeum. Only the
Sigillite’s Oath
returned from the battle. Ahriman had… allies that attacked us and gave him a chance to dive back into the storm.’

‘The. Storm…’
he began, the words forming ponderously.

‘We cannot hope that it destroyed him. He planned for it, and the allies that rode on its winds,’ said Malkira. Cendrion thought that she had withered even further in the time since he had last seen her.

‘Allies?’

‘Space Marines taken and twisted by the warp,’ said Erionas. ‘They fled after Ahriman dived into the storm. We recovered bodies, though. The creatures bore the mark of Russ.’

‘The. Wolves. Of. Fenris?’
Cendrion growled, half in shock, half in anger.

‘A remnant perhaps, or a diseased offshoot.’ Izdubar tilted his head. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Our eye has turned on the sons of Russ,’ said Malkira.

Cendrion let the thoughts and information flow around him. He kept feeling the tug of unconsciousness, like a hand trying to beckon him down a dark set of stairs. He shut it out, and asked the question that above all others he now needed answered.

‘Why. Have. You. Woken. Me?’

‘Because it is not only the inheritance of Ahriman’s saviours that we have discovered,’ said Erionas. ‘The gene-samples taken from the traitor Astraeos, before his escape, have been identified, as has the Chapter that created him.’

‘Chapter?’

‘Oh, yes,’ smiled Malkira. ‘He is not of the ancient breed of traitors, but of a Chapter that lives now, and still claims loyalty to the Imperium.’

Izdubar looked from the crone back to Cendrion.

‘I know I have asked much of you, but now I must ask more of you and your brotherhood.’

‘What. Is. Your. Will?’

‘Their home world, and every one of their kind must burn, Cendrion. You will lead the execution of that sentence.’

Cendrion looked back into Izdubar’s thin emotionless face.

‘As. You. Will. It,’
he said.

The warriors watched the sorcerer as he walked between their lines. The polished bronze of his armour shimmered under the dirty light of the fires. Blue and green stones set amongst etched patterns of feathers and claws winked in the low light. A helm covered his face, its surface smooth and featureless except for a single blue gem set into its forehead. A serpentine amulet of azurite, brass, and copper hung from his neck. The silver staff in his hand tapped on the stone floor in time with his steps. Some amongst the warriors stirred as the sorcerer passed, their hands brushing their weapons as though half in temptation and half in threat. The sorcerer paused in his procession, his head turning slowly to look at the stirring warriors. Stillness formed under that gaze. After a second the sorcerer continued, his tread unhurried.

When he was at the foot of the altar he stopped and looked up at the three figures who stood beside a wide bowl in which yellow and red flames danced. Each of them wore armour that bore the echo of Prospero in its lines. The heads of serpents, hawks and jackals looked out from carved armour plates, and high crests rose above slit-visored helms. They watched the sorcerer for a long moment, not moving.

‘I am Calitiedies,’ said one. ‘These are my brothers, and this is our circle of warriors.’ Calitiedies paused, and his eyes flicked to the armoured figures lining the temple’s tiers. ‘You come before us bearing the marks of ancient lore on your armour, and knowing the words of passing from ancient Prospero.’ Calitiedies blinked slowly, and the air became taut. Beside him the flames in the wide bronze bowl dimmed and shrank. Throughout the temple weapons armed with a roll of metallic clatters and the shiver of energy fields. ‘But you are not of our blood, and you have never seen the skies of Prospero. Who are you, that you can come so before us and hope to live?’

The sorcerer looked around slowly, as though taking in the temple and all its occupants with brief interest.

The fire in the bronze bowl exploded upwards, flames writhing blue as the light drained from the air. Calitiedies began to move, but the voice stopped him in mid-step, and the invocation forming in his mind died before it could complete. The voice was not loud, but the air quivered at its sound.

‘I am Astraeos,’ said the sorcerer, ‘and your oaths will be mine.’