Ahriman: Sorcerer (6 page)

‘Sires,’ he said.

‘Cendrion,’ said Iobel with a nod.

The Grey Knight called Cendrion stood, and turned to the black casket at the centre of the platform. It stood taller than him, and was a little wider. The oily shell of a shield surrounded it, distorting its dimensions. Cables linked to sockets in the casket’s black surface snaked down into the platform. Transparent tubes sucked and bubbled with viscous liquid: arterial red, neon blue, polluted yellow. Two hunched tech-priests lurked behind and to the sides of the platform, the green light of their machine eyes glowing in the caves of their cowls. Machines ringed the casket’s base, thrumming with a low bass note. Iobel’s teeth ached as she looked at them: null-generators, shrouding the casket in a second layer of psychic deadness.

Cendrion gestured. Steam vented as a wide crack formed in the black metal. The front of the casket broke into a hundred pieces which folded back into its sides. A figure lay within.

He was not human, but like the Grey Knight, he had begun as human. He was a Space Marine. Thick bands of silvered adamantine looped around his wrists, waist, ankles and neck. Stitch scars ran across his bare skin – faded with age, but still visible – telling the story of the process which had changed him from a child into a weapon. The marks of war were there too, twisting the flesh in knots and ridges. The skin of his hands was glossy, as though it had once been stripped away and regrown. A halo of black iron and silver cables circled his head. Iobel could see the dried blood from where it had been riveted to his skull. Old marks showed that this had been done many times before. Wires hung from the empty socket of a bionic eye. His face was lean, proud and strong even in sleep. He had been like this when they found him, caged in ice and locked in the wreckage of a ship drifting close to Cadia.

Murmurs ran around the chamber, growing in volume.

‘What is he?’ asked the sour-faced girl. Izdubar remained silent, and just looked at the bound Space Marine.

‘Wake him,’ said Iobel. The murmuring faded to a hush.

Cendrion nodded to the tech-priests. They bent to the machine with a sigh of clockwork. A few moments later the colour of the liquid in the tubes began to change. The bound figure stirred. His lips twitched, gums peeling back as muscles contracted. One of the tech-priests reached out with a hand of tarnished bronze, and tapped a control on the pillar’s side. The halo of cables jerked, sparks running over the black iron clamp as it dug into the prisoner’s skull. Muscles spasmed as blue sparks spread across bare flesh. A smell of ozone and cooking meat rose to Iobel’s nose.

The figure’s one eye opened. His muscles became still as though at a command. Arcs of electricity continued to play over him. He did not make a sound. His head moved slowly, his one-eyed gaze holding on Cendrion for a long while before it moved to Izdubar, and then to Iobel.

‘You will answer me,’ said Izdubar in a level voice. The bound Space Marine just stared back. ‘Who do you serve?’

‘No one,’ said the Space Marine, and Iobel heard the hate rolling in the words.

‘But who did you serve? You have already told my comrades this, have you not? So, as you did before, tell us who you served.’

The edge of the Space Marine’s mouth twitched. On another face, belonging to a different species, it might have been a smile. To Iobel it looked like a predator baring its teeth.

‘Ahriman,’ said the prisoner. A murmur of sound ran around the room. Iobel realised that she had been holding her breath. Izdubar looked up at the tiers of faces nodding in agreement, before turning back to the prisoner.

‘Tell us, what is your name?’

‘My name…’ said the prisoner, his jaw chewing the words slowly. Then he shook his head. The silver cables linked to his skull rattled. ‘My name is Astraeos.’

IV

World Murder

Ahriman watched the fleet gather around the
Sycorax
. Engine fires and the dispersing energy of warp wake flickered across the depths of the crystal sphere which hung in the high dome of the
Sycorax
’s bridge. He shifted the direction of his thought, and the view widened, pulling back until the
Sycorax
was just one island of light amongst many. Beyond them a single star burned bright against the distant void. It was not a large star, but seen from the edge of the system it was clear and bright.

Like a candle,
thought Ahriman.
A lone flame to guide the lost through a storm-lashed night.
His mind flickered and the crystal’s bound vision glided closer, until the star’s planets were dots of visible light, and it had become a disc of raw white.
Or like a ghost light, dancing out of sight, leading the traveller to their grave.

The bridge at the summit of the High Citadel was a pile of armour and architecture which rose like a mountain at the stern of the
Sycorax
. The bridge itself was half a kilometre long, its armoured shell clad in bronze and supported by spars and pillars of black metal. Blue-green light shimmered up the walls and across the floor, as though the chamber were far beneath the ocean. A swarm of crew filled the bridge, webbed into machine cages by fleshmetal cables, or muttering over consoles. These were the Cyrabor, a sect of machine-wrights bred in some warp-soaked corner of the Eye of Terror, who had taken the
Sycorax
as both their goddess and nest. The air smelt of cinnamon and machine oil, as it did everywhere that the machine-wrights went.

He liked it here; of all the places that existed in the
Sycorax
, it was one of the few where he felt at peace without having to impose that state on his mind. The hum of the machines washed through him, and above it the clicking and hooting of the Cyrabor calling to each other, the mingled sounds rising and falling like the break and retreat of waves on a seashore. Above him the sphere of crystal hung like a great pearl of night.

He closed his eyes, and dipped his awareness into the web of telepathic voices stretched across his fleet. All had arrived, all were ready. They were a fusion of disparate renegades, traitors and outcasts, bound to his will by oaths, by hope, by the desire for power. Some were his brothers by blood, Thousand Sons like himself. Others were simple warrior bands whose only loyalty was to the promise of power. Of these he trusted few, liked even fewer, and found most vile, but they were a distasteful necessity; for what was to come he would need every weapon no matter the hand that wielded it.

‘Overkill,’ the voiced rasped behind him, its human tones riddled with static.

He did not answer, but watched the Cyrabor machine-wrights scurry through the bridge, yellow robes rippling around their bloated or spindle-thin frames. The image in the crystal sphere dissolved into blackness. Behind him his ears picked up the whisper of fabric as the figure on the great brass command throne turned her head. Metal-sheathed cables clinked as they shifted against each other. He heard the
click-hiss
as air sucked into metal lungs.

‘Are you ready, mistress?’ he asked.

‘Have you told them what you intend?’ asked Carmenta, electronic clicks wheezing between each word.

‘No,’ said Ahriman. ‘Not all of it, not yet.’ He turned to look at her. The green light of her eyes gleamed from the cracked red lacquer of her face. Crimson velvet swathed her, and cables swarmed over her like strangling vines. The brass and brushed plasteel of the throne rose around her like the setting for a queen of a forgotten age.

‘Do you tell any of us the whole truth, Ahriman?’

He watched her but did not reply.

She looks smaller
.
Every time I see her she always seems smaller.

‘You should trust them,’ said Carmenta. ‘At the least you should trust Astraeos.’

Ahriman shook his head.

‘That would be unwise,’ he said.

‘Trust, Ahriman. It is the only thing you do not have, and cannot buy or take by force.’

‘I trusted you,’ he said, and let the words hang in the heavy air.

‘You did,’ said Carmenta, and her machine gaze was steady under Ahriman’s blue eyes. ‘And we know where that led us. So why is it that you tell me things you keep from those bound to you by oaths and blood?’

‘It is necessary.’

‘Necessary that you keep secrets from them, or necessary that you tell some of those secrets to a dying traitor?’

‘You are not dying,’ he said.

A cough of distortion and clicking code came from Carmenta’s hood.

‘A good lie. The
Sycorax
is older than I am – older, stronger, and an unkind child. As much as I have made it mine, it has taken from me, and it takes more with each passing cycle. One day I will be gone.’ She seemed to nod, and breathed a stream of machine code to herself. ‘But of course you know this – you are Ahriman.’

He did not answer. She was right; he did know. He could feel the shape of her mind changing, breaking apart into islands of awareness and madness. Damaged long ago by the attempt to become one with a machine the size of a warship, the bond with the
Sycorax
was now pulling the old cracks wide. The ship was not only vast, but had grown ancient swimming the tides of the Eye of Terror. The warp was in its bones, chuckling in the fires of its reactors and whispering in its data links. Its spirit was corrosive and pernicious. Carmenta could not leave the embrace of the
Sycorax
, not now, but every day she lost a little more of herself. Sometimes – times like this moment – she would seem as she had once been, but more often she would not respond at all, or if she did it was only to look at him in confusion while she burbled in mangled machine code.

Her head began to loll towards her chest.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked again.

Carmenta’s head came up again. The light of her eyes fluttered, brightened, and became hard and steady.

‘To destroy a world?’ Somewhere far beneath the bridge, the
Sycorax
began to tremble as breeches swallowed shells, landing bay doors opened to the void, and the engines began to push the ship towards the lone star burning brighter than the rest of the heavens. ‘Yes, we are ready.’

‘Sire.’ The voice was close and insistent. Hemellion, 251st Bearer of the Regency of Vohal, heard the voice, shook his head, muttered, and rolled over in his bed. He had been up well after sunset, trying to persuade that old cur Setar that it was best not to march south as soon as high summer came. The discussion had not been successful, and there had been a good deal of soured wine before Hemellion had finally given up and withdrawn. ‘Sire,’ said the voice again, louder now. ‘Sire, please wake.’

Hemellion opened his eyes. His chatelaine Helana was leaning over him, her scaled and lacquered armour looking as though it had been donned in haste. He blinked, trying to clear the fog of sleep and wine from his eyes. Helana waking him rather than one of his bondsmen: that was odd. He sat up. The fire had burned low in the hearth, but the wicks of the oil lamps were alight. It was still night then. That was not good, not good at all.

‘Have the Western Clans begun to march?’

Helana shook her head.

‘No, sire.’

She looks shaken,
thought Hemellion.
No, not shaken, frightened
. That was bad; that was very bad. He pulled himself out of the bed, and felt the cold air wrap around him as he reached for a fur-edged robe.

‘Well, what–’

‘There are lights in the sky,’ she said. He stopped still, hands tying the robe around his neck. His flesh prickled, and cold sweat formed in the creases of his skin.

‘You are sure?’

Helana did not answer, but walked to one of the high windows and pulled the heavy shutters open. The night sky was a star-brightened strip across the horizon. In the east the curdled light of the Eye of Woe waxed against the darkness.

Hemellion stepped forwards, forgetting the coldness of the flagstones beneath his feet. He stopped before the window and stared. New stars burned in the night, pulsing with ragged light, moving even as he watched them.

They have returned. After all this time, the Imperium has returned to us again
. The thought fell through him, spreading cold fear and elation. The Imperium had not come to Vohal since the time of the 203rd Regent, and now they came again during his stewardship.

Vohal was a world of the Emperor, a seat held in trust as part of His realm amongst the stars. Long ago mankind had found it, and those few desperate settlers had given their new home a name from their species’ ancient past: Vohal, they called it. Wrapped in wind, cloud and clear blue skies it was much like the world the settlers had left, but though they came in a ship from across the stars, they found their new home was not a kind master. When the Great Crusade had discovered Vohal, its population was small, its cities few, and despots ruled its scattered cultures from fortresses of stone that stood on the horizon like broken teeth. The Imperium claimed Vohal, recorded its name, and left an official to ensure that it remained compliant. That official, remembered only in the pages of books, had been Hemellion’s ancestor, and his line had borne the stewardship of Vohal ever since.

Hemellion let his eyes dip to the fortress beneath the window. It had been built into the side of a mountain, and the result of hundreds of generations of stonecraft descended from his tower to meet the plains at the mountain’s foot. The outer walls were thick enough that three carts could drive abreast along their tops. Within those walls chambers extended back and down into the mountain itself, held safe behind iron-bound doors. The fortress’s purpose was to dominate a world in the name of the Emperor. Hemellion looked back to where that Emperor’s servants now filled the night with strange stars.

‘Light the signal fires,’ he said, his breath misting in the cold air. ‘Send riders to the near holds.’

‘Yes, sire,’ said Helana, and he heard the question left unspoken at the end of her words.

‘Yes?’

‘Why do they come now?’

‘Who knows?’ he said with a shrug. ‘They come when they will.’

‘What do they want?’

‘The same as any ruler wants from his lands and vassals – they come for tribute. The records speak of them taking armies to serve in wars across the stars, or coming to cull those with the witch-sight.’

‘And we…?’

He rubbed a hand across his face, feeling the stubble that had accumulated on the wrinkles of his face. He suddenly felt very tired. Forty years of life, twenty since his mother had died and left him the regency, and in all that time, in all the decisions and crises, nothing had made him feel as burdened as those small points of light shining in the sky.

‘We give them everything they ask for,’ he said. He was about to say something else when Helana gave a cry. He looked up. The stars were falling. As he watched they birthed smaller stars, until a net of fire fell through the night. Cries rose from the fortress, and more stars fell.

Ignis began to count time after the first salvo. The numbers streamed through his mind, forming shapes and patterns in his consciousness. Triangles became pyramids, spheres became circles, and spirals danced in his awareness as time sliced into ever thinner slivers. Beneath his feet the
Word of Hermes
shook as its guns added to the second salvo. Fresh streaks of fire began to reach for the world laid out in front of his eyes. This salvo had begun seven hundred and twenty seconds after the first. Two hundred and forty tonnes of active agent filled the warheads in each salvo. There would be three salvos.

The first shells would already be breaking apart in the lower atmosphere. The defoliant-agent would reach surface saturation within nine hours. Even if some of the other ships did not attain his level of precision it was still certain that every blade of grass, tree and leaf would be dust within twenty-seven hours. Once he would have considered that symbolism beautiful, or profound, or perfect. Now, watching the warheads begin to glow as they cut through the doomed planet’s atmosphere, he simply considered it a relief.

Clusters of falling shells formed a pattern in his mind’s eye. His subconscious caught the pattern, and multiplied it into spreading designs of fire, each part of the whole identical to every other part. He felt the pattern slip into the warp, and continue to grow. He let it multiply to the point that he could no longer control it, and then blanked it from his mind. He took a deep, slow breath.

Ahriman had commanded Ignis to engineer the planet’s end, but Ignis knew that the calculations of obliteration mattered little to his one-time brother. Only the result mattered to Ahriman, and Ignis could give him that. It was a simple task, and it let him touch the pattern even if only for a brief time. It was not much, but for now it was enough.

He blinked, eyelids closing for five seconds while he followed the progress of his design one more time in his mind.

He turned from the viewport, and found the blank mask of Credence staring at him.

‘All is well,’ Ignis said, and gave a small nod. The towering automaton clicked, and the gears in its shoulders cycled. Credence clacked another binaric query with its metal insect voice. Ignis thought that there might have been a tone of concern in the machine’s inquiry, but he knew that inferring genuine emotion to a capsule of silica in an armoured shell was madness. But then he did not understand expressions of emotion in humans either. He shook his head and replied anyway.

‘Yes, all is well in a personal sense too.’

He closed his eyes again, and let the voice of his mind slip free.

+Ahriman,+ he sent, feeling the thought reach across the void to the
Sycorax
.

+Ignis.+ The sending was delicate, but to Ignis it sounded like the low rumble of a rock slide. He flinched, and felt the counting and calculations slip from his focus. He bit off an angry mental retort, as he tried to pull the threads of number and pattern back together. +Ignis,+ came Ahriman’s thought voice. +What do you have to tell me?+