Ahriman: Sorcerer (22 page)

+Follow,+ he said in Ahriman’s voice, and across the fleet sorcerers heard and obeyed.

XVI

Apollonia

‘Help us, Silvanus. Please, my son, help us.’

The voice was real. Silvanus could hear its rasping tones tingle in his ears.

Ropes of green, gold, and red liquid streamed past him, shattered, reformed, changed, swirled and tore. Black voids opened and closed in the kaleidoscope, like winking eyes. Sound screamed in his ears, stuttering like a looped recording, billowing like a storm wind, shrieking like glass shattering over and over again. And all the while he was racing forwards, accelerating, spinning like a seed caught in a gale.

This was not the warp Silvanus knew. Before it had always appeared to him as creases of white and black lines, like an ever redrawn and folded sketch on parchment. This was a different warp, one seen and given shape by another mind. And there were the voices, which called to him from the edge of his sight.

‘Please…’

The worst of them was the voice of his father.

‘Help us…’

His father, a decade dead by the time Silvanus went into the Eye.

‘Can you hear us, my son?’

The old man had withered away in darkness on Terra. In life Silvanus had met the man who had sired him twenty-one times. They had said that, in the end, Yanved Yeshar had died scrabbling in his own vomit, his bloated body unable to rise, his heart no longer able to beat. Yet here was his voice as clear as though he sat just behind Silvanus’s shoulder. Silvanus did not look around. He would not look around.

A sphere of gloss blue and silver stars imploded in front of him. Expanding droplets scattered outwards. Silvanus dived, stretching himself to slide between two spheres which had started to burn with white and black fire. Somewhere, he knew the
Sycorax
had moved with him, its shielded bulk cutting through the squall. His path was the ship’s, he was the Navigator.

A giggle bubbled up from somewhere out of sight. It felt soft, velvet and milk made into sound.

‘So long watching, but never listening,’ purred a slow voice, both deep and sharp. ‘Do you not want to listen now?’ Stars of silver spun around him. He could taste sweat and smell morning dew.

So soft,
so warm, a voice to drown in and never wish for air.

‘Do you not want to touch? Yes?’

He felt his gaze waver. The colours changed faster. The floating spheres broke. Dribbles and strings of rainbow colour became vast cubes, which stacked and combined and broke, tessellated and reformed.

What is happening?
The thought screamed in his mind, and he wondered if somewhere he was shouting the question from a mouth he could no longer feel. Even in the Eye it had never been like this, it had never been…

‘What do you wish?’ The voice was the clatter of counting wheels, and the scratching of quills. ‘It can be yours.’ The voice cackled, now buzzing like a hive of insects. ‘It can beeeeee–’

‘Please, my son.’ His father’s voice broke through, louder than before. Silvanus could feel the tears in the old man’s words. ‘We watch you, son. We watch you as you dream and wake. Please help us…’

Then the other voices were all around him, growing louder, blurring into one.

‘Help… Can be… Touch, yes..? Watch… Watch… Watch…’

The way ahead was suddenly a canopy of dark leaves lit by twilight. He could hear howls behind him, chuckling on a wind that made the branches and leaves thrash as he spun towards them. He could feel breath behind him, could smell rank meat caught in sharp teeth.

He wanted to turn to look behind him.

He would turn, he would look.

His gaze began to turn. At the edge of sight he saw yellow eyes glitter through the wind-tossed leaves.

+Follow my voice.+ The words gripped Silvanus and yanked his gaze around. +It is I, Navigator. I am here. I am here beside you.+

Ahriman
. Before him the leaves parted to show a gap leading into the dark beyond. Behind him the howls rose, and the voices screamed and pleaded and laughed.

+Follow my voice.+ The words were clear, like the ringing of a bell on a still night.

‘If we can just come with you…’ said his father.

+Only my voice.+

The twilight jungle was falling past him now, faster and faster, the path twisting but never fading.

‘We could be free…’ said a voice.

+They are phantoms, Navigator.+

‘We could all be free…’

How long have I been in here?
Am I still navigating the ship or am I gone?
Cold terror rose in him.
Am I just one more voice trapped in the storm
?

+My voice is all that is real.+

‘We could help you…’

And then the canopy of leaves fell away beneath him, and emptiness was all around him.

+Now,+ commanded the voice of Ahriman, and Silvanus closed his eye. The warp vanished and he was flying through blessed blackness, the fading screams of his dead father following him into the welcome silence.

The
Sigillite’s Oath
trembled as it cut through the warp. Nightmare claws clattered and sparked against its shield, and black currents pulled at its course, but it cut on, straight and true. In its empty strategium Brother-Captain Cendrion watched the image of the moon turn in the cone of cold light. It looked pitiful, a discarded bauble on the edge of greater things. The true planet which it circled was many, many times its size. A vast bloated sphere of gas, its violet surface swirled with white clouds, it owned the right to be called a planet, yet it was its child moon that gave the system its name.

Apollonia.
He had read that name on bloodstained pages in the deep archives on Titan. Fragments of prophecy, lore on the nature of the warp and its potential – he had seen all marked with the glyph of the moon whose image now revolved before him. He knew now where those pages of lore had come from he had not known until now.

So many secrets. One layered upon another until it becomes our skin, until it becomes armour.

But that was the point, he realised; there was no absolute armour, nothing which could be buried so deep that it could not be found.

He waved a hand and the projected moon shrank. Apollonia became a speck, pirouetting without a care against the swirled background of her parent planet. The moon’s necklace of weapon stations vanished. The silent drifts of torpedoes and mines waiting in cloud banks became a smudge of distortion. There were defences enough around Apollonia to turn back a small fleet, but it was not a small fleet that they would face. If Ahriman had learned what he needed from Inquisitor Iobel then he would come with all his might. The defences would not stand that.

And so we race through the warp,
thought Cendrion,
and hope that we are in time.
Around him he felt the creak of the
Sigillite’s Oath
’s shields as the warp tried to grip its hull. It was a fast ship, fast beyond what most would believe possible. Far behind her, lost in the shattered swirl of the warp, a greater fleet followed, heavy with warships loaded with fleet-breaking fire power.

But will even that be enough?
He was not a pessimist; he was a warrior, and a warrior could allow himself no false hope.
Truth is our weapon, as ignorance is a shield.

Cendrion shivered. His armour buzzed in sympathy.

‘Cold, my friend?’

Cendrion kept every part of his features set, but inside he stiffened. Izdubar stepped up beside him. The inquisitor had donned armour. Black lacquered plates hid his slight body, and a sable cloak hung from his shoulders. A tri-barred ‘I’ ran down the moulded muscle of his chest, wreathed in silver laurels. A tiny daemon’s skull with ruby eyes stared from the symbol’s centre.

Izdubar raised his hand in front of him, thumb and forefinger held apart, as though he was sighting through them at the holo display of Apollonia.

Izdubar’s thumb and finger snapped shut. The inquisitor held his hand still for a second then dropped it with a sigh of servos.

‘If only it were so easy,’ breathed Izdubar. ‘Take what is at this moment one of the greatest dangers to mankind and make it vanish with a snap of our fingers.’

Cendrion shifted, and his silvered armour sighed as it moved with his muscles. He bore no sword, and though that was right and proper, it made him feel uneasy. Within him a fragment of his subconscious spoke the words of detestation and the names of the fallen in a never-ending litany. He listened to the thoughts rise and fall in rhythm. Far off on the edge of his awareness he heard the minds of his brothers, each an echo of his own. The
Sigillite’s Oath
was just one ship, but seventy-three Grey Knights walked its decks, their minds like torches beside the thousands of candle flames spread through the rest of the ship. Comfort was not a concept he easily understood, but in moments like these he came close to understanding what it must mean to humans.

‘You think that I had that power already?’ said Izdubar, as though in answer to a remark that Cendrion had not made. ‘That I should have destroyed the Athenaeum? If it no longer existed, then Ahriman and his kind would not seek it. We would not now be at risk of letting it fall into his hands.’ The inquisitor rested his hands on the brass rail which circled the cupola. ‘Yes, I could have done that long ago, with a word, with a… a click of my fingers.’

Cendrion turned to look at Izdubar. The man looked young, but was not. Two hundred years, three hundred? Cendrion was not certain, but in all the time he had known Izdubar the inquisitor had never seemed to age, as though he did not have time for it. Direct, deep, ruthless: those were the words which followed Izdubar. Cendrion supposed others found those qualities admirable, but he just found Izdubar unsettling, like a weapon whose balance never felt true but no one could understand why.

‘One gesture and it could all have been gone, but what then? What would we lose? The war we fight is a war of knowledge, and we cannot fight what we do not understand. Destroy this and we blind ourselves. And does it not serve a purpose? A light that draws our enemies to us just as fires once drew wolves to our ancestors. We do not act only as protectors here, Cendrion.’ Izdubar looked up from the star field, his eyes emotionless but glinting with reflected light. ‘We are hunters.’

The Wolves rode on the edge of the storm. It rolled and roared around
Hel’s Daughter
, rattling its hull with fury. It had begun soon after they had returned to the warp after clearing the Cadian Gate. The storm had grown even as they had tried to outrun it, as though it was pushing them before it. Grimur did not like that; it was an ill omen, one amongst so many.

‘The moon broken at midwinter looks at us,’ rasped Sycld from where he lay on the floor. Ice radiated from the Rune Priest’s body and climbed the navigation chamber’s walls. Blood marked Sycld’s lips, and formed pink crystals on his cheeks. ‘Silver are the warriors of blade and book, and they come to the fire.’

Grimur touched the fragment of red iron on its thong about his neck. They had been riding the bow wave of the storm for days now, and all the while Sycld dreamed and Grimur watched over him, axe in hand. The Rune Priest’s dream was the thread leading them on towards Ahriman, but it was taking its toll. Sycld’s skin was snow white beneath its crust of ice, his face so hollow it seemed a skull. Grimur did not want to know how Sycld was holding onto his dream hunt. Other Rune Priests guided the other ships, but each followed Sycld’s lead; he was the master of the pack, the strongest, and the one who saw the path most clearly.

What if he fails now?
thought Grimur.
What if the evil that has touched us worms its way into his flesh? What if I have to cut his thread?

‘The king without a land, with a blade like the moon in his hand,’ gasped Sycld, and Grimur’s fingers twitched on the haft of his axe. Around him the witch ice thickened on the navigation chamber’s walls, and the storm beat on their hull.

‘Peace, brother,’ whispered Grimur, although he did not know why. ‘Lead us true. Do not fail us now.’

A storm was coming. Silvanus lay on the floor of his tower and wept. The tears were pink with blood against his white skin. He could feel the warp itch and tug at the edges of his thoughts. They had ridden a storm to reach Apollonia, and now it seemed to have followed them, circling the moon, its growing fury grating against reality like claws. He could taste it, could see it sometimes out of the corner of his eyes when he opened them. He kept them clamped shut now, but even in the darkness behind his eyelids the storm still laughed at him.

‘Go away,’ he moaned. ‘Please, please leave me alone.’

The chamber door hissed open. Silvanus did not look up. It would be one of the other slaves come to bring him food, or… He did not care who it was. The storm was inching closer with every beat of his heart. The laughter was a raw chuckle of sharpening steel and dry bones now.

The floor rang like a struck gong. Silvanus looked up, eyes wide. Colours blurred and mixed at the edge of his sight, but even through his tears he could see the shape that stood above him. It towered to the ceiling, a brutal approximation to a human form made from pistons and flame-orange plating.

‘What are you…’ he began, then realised what he was talking to, and swallowed. Above him Credence cycled its shoulder plates. The whir of gears grumbled like a resigned sigh.

‘Navigator.’
The word boomed from its speaker grilles. Silvanus clamped his hands over his ears, but in the ringing echo he recognised the recorded voice of Ignis. The cannon on Credence’s back turned from side to side, before arming with a cold metal
clang
.
‘You. Come. With. Me.’

The seismic shell rushed into the void on a tongue of flame. Twenty-seven milliseconds later its secondary charge fired. Rockets drove the fifty-metre-long metal dart down into gravity’s grasp. Thin atmosphere skidded down its length. Its point began to glow. Thirty-six seconds after it had left the muzzle of its gun, it shed its primary rockets. Curved sheets of ceramite came free, caught the moon’s atmosphere and snapped away. Now a finned blade of silver, the warhead fell, spinning, drawing a luminous line across the moon’s black sky. Inlaid patterns of golden wire began to melt from the warhead casing. White-yellow drops formed spirals in its wake. The slim silver arrow struck the grey crust and vanished. Dust plumed into the thin air, rising high on the weak gravity. Driving deep, its adamantine casing glowed as it drilled through rock and compacted dust.