Ahriman: Sorcerer (12 page)

The chamber was fading from Hemellion’s sight. The world was a white swirl of dust, and the cries of his murdered home.

But
if one witch can see my thoughts then others can too.

+I am sorry,+ said Sanakht’s voice from beyond the turning cloud. Pain filled Hemellion, blanking out his thoughts, crackling through him like a storm of lightning. He felt parts of himself vanish, crumbling even as he tried to cling onto them. +I trust you,+ spoke Sanakht, +but ignorance is the only thing that will protect us.+ As Hemellion’s mind was reshaped, he remembered one thing, one line that now seemed a lie shrieked at the universe.

He… He said he was weak… a child…

+Weakness,+ came the voice from the storm, +is a matter of degree.+

Hemellion blinked. He felt as though he had just stepped from darkness into bright light. Sanakht stood at the centre of the chamber, a dry leaf of parchment in his hand. Hemellion frowned. He could not remember why his master had summoned him, but it was not the first time he had come to Sanakht’s chamber for a reason he could not remember. A silver cup lay on the floor, dark liquid spreading from it in a thick pool towards the scrolls scattered across the floor. He bent down and picked up the cup. Sanakht looked at him, and Hemellion had to suppress a mixture of hate and fear as the mismatched eyes fastened on him.

‘How may I serve you, lord?’ he asked.

VIII

Mindscape

‘No one enters.’ Ahriman turned and looked at Kadin as the door to the chamber opened. The hiss and clunk of the door mechanisms sounded loud in the empty corridor. Behind him Maroth had crouched against the corridor wall, his hound helm swaying from side to side as though listening to a sound that was not there. The Cyrabor had cleared the deck levels for a kilometre in every direction around this spot.

The chamber beyond the door was not what Kadin had expected. Buried in the
Sycorax
’s machine decks, it might once have been a magazine or store for volatile chemicals. Small, and accessed by a single blast door, its walls were slab panels of plasteel. Dry rust ran round the chamber’s edges, and the only illumination came from a yellow light held behind a cage of brass in the ceiling. It had the feeling of a place that had fallen between needs again and again until it was forgotten.

A sarcophagus of black stone sat at the room’s centre. Its upper surface was carved in the vague likeness of a human. Kadin could see the impressions of a serene face, and arms folded across its chest. Sigils ran over the surface of the sarcophagus, incised into the stone. Kadin heard voices whisper at the edge of his awareness as he looked at them. He could understand the symbols, but was not sure how; they were demands to the warp to hold the one who lay within the casket quiet.

‘That is her?’ he asked. ‘Iobel?’

‘The princess of the blind,’ hissed Maroth from the corridor behind.

Ahriman nodded, not moving from the door, his eyes flicking over the chamber. He was armoured but bareheaded. In the space before the casket the deck was marked with lines burned into the metal. The lines and spirals made Kadin blink as he looked at them.

‘Why not simply rip it from her mind? If she has what you want, why not just take it?’

Ahriman’s eyes darted over the design on the floor, and then to the sarcophagus. Kadin thought he heard Ahriman muttering even though the sorcerer’s lips did not move.

‘Understanding,’ said Ahriman eventually, still not looking at Kadin. ‘Knowledge without context is useless. The facts are not enough. I must have everything that gives those facts meaning. Besides, who knows what else her mind might contain?’ Kadin saw something that might have been a grim smile flicker across Ahriman’s face, and then vanish. ‘And to take all of that requires… delicacy.’

Ahriman let out a long, measured breath, and his eyes closed briefly. Kadin felt the air become cold. His machine limbs twitched as pistons and servos spasmed. Maroth gave a low whimper from the shadows.

‘No one enters,’ repeated Ahriman, the breath of the words white as it came from his lips. ‘Sanakht and Ignis have primacy over the fleet while I am here.’ Kadin nodded, and unclamped the two-handed chainsword from his back. His machine fingers flexed against the worn grip.

Ahriman stepped through the door.

‘You think someone will try to interfere?’ Kadin asked. Ahriman shrugged, his face darkening with an expression that Kadin knew must be a frown.

‘I am not sure,’ said Ahriman. He walked to the centre of the design burned into the floor. Kadin thought he saw the lines and markings bend away from Ahriman’s footsteps. ‘Perhaps.’

‘He sees everything, yet sees nothing,’ cackled Maroth.

‘You don’t trust them,’ said Kadin. It was a flat statement. ‘Your brothers, you don’t trust them.’

‘I trust
you
to be what you are.’

‘And what is that?’

Ahriman said nothing, but looked at the deck, shifting his position minutely, his eyes flickering across the lines spiralling away from him.

‘And him?’ Kadin jerked his neck at Maroth. Ahriman glanced up, his eyes fastening on the broken and blind sorcerer. Maroth came with Kadin wherever he went now, attached to him like a second shadow. When Ahriman had summoned Kadin to his side Maroth had come too, hissing and muttering in his ruined armour. Ahriman had not objected, had not even remarked on the broken sorcerer’s presence. It was as though Ahriman did not even see Maroth.

‘He is nothing,’ said Ahriman.

‘Is that what Astraeos died knowing?’ said Kadin, his voice flat.

Ahriman’s eyes snapped up to his. Kadin could feel the fingers of Ahriman’s mind in his thoughts, trying to tease through the mangled web of his soul, searching for anger and treachery. He almost smiled. There had been the barest twinge of regret when he had heard that his brother had fallen, but then the fact had simply become one amongst many, as dead and cold as a fire’s ashes. He had thought about what that lack of a response meant, but had reached no conclusion.

‘I am sorry, Kadin,’ said Ahriman, after a moment.

Kadin did not bother to nod, but simply turned to face the corridor. He rested the tip of his chainsword between his feet, and gripped the hilt with both hands. Behind him the door sealed with a hiss of pistons.

‘Quietness,’ whispered Maroth to himself. Kadin did not reply.

Ahriman looked at the sarcophagus for a long moment. Around him he felt the warp waiting, its tides shaped by the patterns cut into the floor. In his mind’s eye golden planes of light rose from the design. Sigils hung as small suns of meaning and potential, some still, others orbiting one another in clusters. Within the web lay the casket, the slumbering mind within glowing with dreams. He had spent days constructing this ritual. Each part of it was like a vast and delicate machine of thought, symbolism, and aetheric power. It only waited for his mind to set it in motion.

He took a breath, feeling every molecule of air spin slowly into his lungs. He felt the rhythm of his hearts slow until his awareness was suspended between two beats. Everything was still before his unblinking inner eye. He waited, floating in the emptiness. He formed a thought, and sent it rotating through his mind. He formed a string of thoughts, and felt them take life as they fed off memory and imagination. He split his will, breaking apart thought after thought until his mind was filled with whirling and spinning consciousness. The warp tugged at his will, trying to pull the delicate construct apart. Slowly, carefully he let one of his hearts beat. His mind was no longer within his skull; it was floating free, unbound. The ritual designs etched into the chamber met his mind and the two joined. His awareness flowed into the casket, and into Iobel’s mind.

‘Is that what he asked you?’ said Ignis. Sanakht kept his gaze steady. Ignis was watching him, his face impassive.

The crucible chamber sat at the heart of the
Word of Hermes
, a bowl of raw iron wide enough to swallow a Titan. A ball of molten metal revolved in midair at the crucible’s centre, fuming heat and ruddy light. There were no doors, just the lip of the crucible a dozen metres up the curved iron walls. Deep channels ran across the inside of the bowl, straight lines intersecting with circular depressions scooped into the walls. Sanakht recognised geometry that might have made the sign of Thothmes, or the Idris Progression, or the Sigil of the Carrion, but each seemed to blur and merge together with other designs he did not recognise. The whole structure pressed around Sanakht’s mind like a metal clamp. He did not like it, but the ways of the Order of Ruin had always been strange.

Ignis waited for a long heartbeat then shrugged. ‘When he asked you to betray Magnus, was that how he asked?’

‘No,’ said Sanakht carefully. ‘He never called it treachery.’

Ignis tilted his head but did not look away or blink. The electoos on his face contracted, expanded and multiplied their geometry.

He has not denied me yet,
thought Sanakht.
Nor has he tried to kill me
. He felt hope tug at him, and fought it down. He could read nothing in Ignis’s expressionless face, and he knew that even if he could have looked into Ignis’s thoughts, he would have seen only numbers and symbols, each turning in intricate mental calculations like the cogs of a vast machine.
Perhaps he is simply waiting for his calculation to reach a clear conclusion before acting.
The Order of Ruin was many things, but haste had never been one of its flaws.

‘You agreed to join Ahriman, to become part of his cabal.’ Ignis paused again, tilting his head the other way. ‘Why?’

Sanakht saw it again then: the dust of the Planet of the Sorcerers, the shambling figures whose flesh and armour could not be told apart. He saw the yellow eyes blinking in blind clusters across the faces of those he had called friends. He looked down at his hand and saw it again as it had been, a thing of living metal and crystal scales. He closed his fingers slowly, one at a time.

‘We were dying, Ignis. Ahriman was not wrong in that.’

‘But wrong to do what he did?’ Ignis paused and blinked once, slowly. ‘Yes?’

‘No,’ said Sanakht, and gave a sad smile. ‘He was wrong to believe that we were worth saving.’

‘So you offer us the obliteration we deserved? Is that not what Amon believed?’

Sanakht shook his head. Like the rest of the Circle he had chosen to answer Amon and serve him. Ignis had not been a part of Amon’s Brotherhood of Dust, just as he had not been a part of the cabal who had cast the Rubric.

‘It ends with Ahriman. I do not seek to remake our Legion, or to bring us all redemption.’ He paused, thinking of Amon; in many ways he had been right, but in others he was the mirror of Ahriman, but a mirror with a different focus. ‘I know my limits,’ said Sanakht at last.

‘And Ahriman?’ Ignis asked, his voice level, but the black electoos twitched above his eyes.

‘He believes there is a way to save us all. A little more understanding, a little more perfection of knowledge, and he can correct his errors. There is a light dancing on the horizon for him, and what he has done already is only the beginning of the price he will pay to get a step closer to that end. He will drag us all with him. Salvation does not wait for us – only the darkness of damnation closing around us until we can no longer see where we began.’

Ignis did not move or speak for a long moment. The patterns on his face were still. Sanakht watched him, waiting. The clank of distant machines and the hiss of gas from a vent high above trickled into the silence.

‘How do you think to do such a thing?’ said Ignis at last, his expression as unreadable as ever. ‘Do you ask me to fire on the
Sycorax
? Do you hope to break the Rubricae from his will? Do you wish to try and persuade the entire Circle to face him?’ Ignis blinked again, but kept on speaking before Sanakht could answer. ‘All such methods will fail. The others will not join you. The
Sycorax
could face half the fleet and survive, and he…’ Ignis paused, and Sanakht saw something flicker in the black eyes. ‘He is a power like I have never seen. More even than before.’

Sanakht shook his head.

‘The others will stand against me. Ahriman has them all. They are starting to believe him again, they are starting to hope, just as they did before. I am alone, for now.’

‘So what do you intend?’

He still has not refused,
thought Sanakht,
but if this does not end as I hope then I will have to kill him.
He had no doubt that he could – his powers were weak, but Ignis’s powers were channelled in other ways, and even then a blade would silence him as easily as a thought.

‘I will wait until he has no strength, and I have strength he does not expect.’

‘You know that such a moment will come?’

‘Such a moment always comes.’

Ignis inclined his head as though acknowledging the point.

‘Why come to me? We are not…
friends
, Sanakht, we never were.’

‘Failure,’ said Sanakht, and let the word hang in the air with his breath. ‘That is what you called Vohal. We lost three of our brothers, and you said it was failure.’

‘A calculation. If we do this to remake ourselves, then to sacrifice ourselves to that end undoes the logic of victory.’

Sanakht nodded, and gave a tired smile.

‘So what is the calculation now, brother? Are you with me?’

Ignis stared at him, eyes still, the patterns of his face growing more complex. Sanakht just waited. At last the patterns settled and Ignis opened his mouth.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Iobel heard the hab-block detonate behind her. She took a pace, a curse forming in her mouth. The blast wave hit her. The ground vanished beneath her feet. She spun through the dust-filled air. Her armour cracked as she hit the ground and pain stabbed through her torso.

Her ears were ringing. Billowing grey clouds surrounded her. She sucked in a breath of air. Rockcrete dust and ash filled her lungs. She coughed, and felt something sharp shift in her chest. She could hear the mutant creatures crying out in pain. Some of them must have been caught by the blast; that at least was a small comfort.

‘Horeg!’ she shouted into the vox. She rolled over and came to her feet. The ground swayed under her. ‘Horeg? Linisa? Cavor? Any of you?’ Whoops of distortion answered her. ‘Answer, you useless bastards,’ she called again, and pulled the meltagun from her back harness. It lit with a whine. Powdered grey dusted the weapon’s silver and black iron casing.

‘If any of you can hear this, I think that I got the last of the Prophets, but their family are still everywhere.’ She turned, and took a step forwards as she spoke. Her foot crunched on broken rockcrete.

The creature came out of the mist in a single bound. She had an impression of pale skin, and reaching claws. She fired. A line of energy flicked into existence in front of the gun’s muzzle. The air shrieked with heat. The creature exploded into black steam. She spat, and wiped cooked blood from her eyes.

It was going to take a while to clear the city, even if she pulled in half the planet’s defence forces and the rest of the Arbitrators. It had been luck that she had found the Prophets, random chance playing her a strong hand, and her enemies a very bad one. She had been tracking a recidivist who had been dabbling in some very dangerous alien artefacts. That particular piece of heretic scum was still out there somewhere, but his trail had led her to Carsona and to dig into its under-culture, and there she had found the Prophets.