Ahriman: Sorcerer (8 page)

The Grey Knight moved just as fast. His hand came up, the barrels of his storm bolter wide open. Astraeos reached the edge of the platform and leapt. Rounds hammered after him. He hit the lowest stone tier and bounded up. A burst of shells turned the spot where he had landed to rock dust and spinning fragments. A figure in a red cloak swung a mace at him. He swerved, rammed his shoulder into the figure and heard bones crunch. Above and around him a hundred weapons and eyes turned towards him. His mind became fire. He roared. A sphere of white heat exploded outwards from him. Figures vanished, became ash, became heaps of cooking bone and fat, became shadows flash burned onto the grey stone. He leaped on, feeling his skin burn. He could hear voices talking to him in the flames. At the edge of sight figures were rising, half blind, weapons aiming.

Behind him Cendrion’s mind was expanding and reshaping. Astraeos could feel its heat and brilliance burn into the back of his skull. He leapt up another tier of stone. Hard rounds whipped around him. He was almost across the chamber, the ashes of the dead rising from his running feet. A round hit him in the shoulder. He staggered.

A human jumped down in front of him, layered plasteel armour ringing at the impact. The human raised a fork-headed spear. Astraeos rammed his will forwards and the human pitched into the air with a crack of shattering bone. He took another step. The chamber around him was a cauldron of movement and sound, people scrambling, drawing weapons, shouting. Somewhere beyond the sealed doors an alarm was screaming. Above him Iobel looked down from the higher tier. Blood was running from her eyes, nose and mouth. She raised a pistol, its fluted barrel fuming blue light.

The air went ice cold. The warp was suddenly calm, flat, like a frozen lake surface. On the platform Cendrion had paused, his head turning as though trying to hear a distant sound. Astraeos felt the blood thump once in his veins. Somewhere, far off yet just behind him, he heard the call of an unkindness of ravens.

VI

Circle

Cradled in the iron of her machine, Carmenta looked towards Vohal’s star. Ahriman’s fleet surrounded her, clinging close around the bulk of the
Sycorax
like pilot fish around a leviathan. They had dropped from the warp far beyond the system’s edge, fired their engines once, and then cut power and become almost invisible. For four months they had drifted through the night in silence, wrapped in cold, sipping energy from their reactors. Now they were within the outer boundaries of the system, and she could see the planet of Vohal as a disc of dirty yellow hung against the black. It had been two years since she had helped kill it; at least two years as she had lived them. Ahriman said that longer would have passed for Vohal and the Imperium, much longer. The planet had changed in that time, desolation settling over it as though it had never lived. As she looked at it, she saw that other things had changed too.

Squadrons of Imperial warships lay scattered all the way to the system edge. Any ships wishing to reach the dead planet would have to pass through this corridor of guns. It would take the
Sycorax
and the rest of the fleet days to reach the planet, and every second of that would be a battle. But they did not need to reach the planet; they just needed to be closer.

Her engines roared to full life. She felt the vacuum kiss her void shields. Blast hatches peeled back from guns along her flanks. The rest of the fleet woke an instant later. They accelerated out of the dark.

The Imperial fleet noticed them, and a trio of frigates broke away to intercept them.

She smiled. She would enjoy this.

The frigates fired. She felt the shells hit her shields, felt the shudder as explosions danced across them. It was like hail scattering against a stone roof.

Suddenly her thoughts stopped dead.

Pain cut through her. Her head came up, hood falling away from the cracked lacquer of her mask. She was no longer the
Sycorax
; she sat in a brass throne beneath the roof of a vast chamber.

Where am I?
she tried to scream, but her mouth was droning in clicks and whistles. Cables were strangling her body. Her eyes swam with green static.
What is this? What has happened? Where am I? Father? Mother?
Breath sucked from the slot of her mouth. She tried to stand. She could not. She saw figures come towards her. They had the faces of metal birds. Hands reached for her, touched her; she felt long fingers grip her, metal pincers lock around her wrists. She did not know who they were. They babbled at her, hooting and clicking like broken vox-casters. She tried to fight them off but they were all around her, holding her and pushing her down. They smelt of cinnamon and burned wiring.
What has happened to me?
She tried to scream again.

The void snapped back into place around her. She was part of the ship, but she was still trying to breathe, trying to scream without lungs. The
Sycorax
shivered, its engines spluttering, its shields sparking. She could hear something laughing at the edge of her thoughts – it sounded like the roar of a reactor and the pulse of power cables. It sounded like the ship.

+Mistress?+ came Ahriman’s voice in her thoughts. +Mistress, we are close now. Astraeos calls, we do not have long. We must be closer.+

‘Yes,’
she said in her mind, and somewhere she knew she was muttering on a throne.
‘I… It will be.’

Her engines coughed to fresh life, and the ship shot towards the inner system. The Imperial frigates were closer, their auspex dancing over her hull as they grasped for a firing solution. She reached out with her own sensors, tasted the range to each of them, and laughed with the voice of a thousand guns. The frigates vanished in clouds of growing explosions.

More Imperial ships came to meet her. A plough-fronted cruiser spilled bombers from its flanks as it closed. Beside it a silver-hulled strike ship came around, bombardment cannons hammering her. Carmenta felt her shields fail one after another. She replied in kind, her pulse shaking in time with the rhythm of the barrage. The rest of the fleet was firing, but she was blind and deaf to everything but the roar of her own guns. Explosions danced against the stars. The Imperial ships were burning, but they still fought.

A handful of Imperial destroyers spiralled towards her and loosed their torpedoes. More and more ships were turning to face her, even as she felt the distance to the planet close. The last of her shields collapsed in a silent thunderclap. A macro round hit her hull. She felt her skin crack, felt armour become molten tears. The scream of enemy range-finders filled her sensors. There were at least twenty ships closing on her. All of them had now turned towards her. Even those ringing Vohal had pulled away from the surface, their guns and auspex turning towards the system edge and her fire trail of approach.

A torpedo hit her upper hull just behind her prow. A sphere of white light blinked into existence. Towers ripped from their roots. Crystal domes shattered. Within her guts she heard the chattering cries of the slave crew, pleading with the ship not to take their lives, to spare them. She kept firing at every target that she could see. Fires licked from their hulls, and some were bleeding warm atmosphere and plasma into the black. They were dying, but so was she. She would die here and she would die soon. Her hull would break open. The city within would choke in silence and she would become nothing.

‘Now, there is no more time,’
she said in her own mind, and the message sang through the ship’s systems.

A storm was gathering on her upper hull. Arcs of light ran, snapped and tangled between the tower tops. A cloak of shimmering energy coiled over her hull. She could hear the mind voices of Ahriman and the Circle spiralling together.

A beam of plasma hit her prow. It bored into her. Molten stone and bronze bubbled from the widening hole as the
Sycorax
’s momentum drove it onto the beam.

A spill of damage data rose through her awareness, became pain, became agony. She cried out. In the bowels of the
Sycorax
, chained slaves that had never seen the light of stars clamped their hands over their ears as the walls shrieked.

‘Ahriman!’ she snarled, and the storm of sorcery forming around her broke.

Bright blue and pink light began to arc from the towers across her back. Deep in her hull, human and once-human crew fell to their knees, wailing prayers to their uncaring gods. And from their high towers Ahriman and the Thousand Sons loosed their minds. Frost and fire spread in sheets and plumes across her hull. Green ghost light spun in her wake. Her hull creaked, straining as the warp tugged on it. And through it all she could hear Ahriman, the focused pressure of his thoughts pushing into the realm beyond.

It began to snow in the desert. Clouds bubbled up across Vohal’s blue sky, hiding the sunlight behind iron grey. On the parapets of the fortress the sentinels looked up as the snow began to spin out of the sky. Sirens began to scream. Shouts echoed in the half-deserted corridors. Autoweapons armed and rotated to face the blizzard. Interference screamed across the vox. In orbit, the warships stationed over the fortress saw the clouds spread across the world beneath them. Some ships began to turn back to the planet, scrambling to turn their guns on the surface. Others rose to face the attack from the system’s edge.

The snow carpeted the desert. On the fortress walls men and women pressed their eyes to their heat sights but saw nothing. Then the first of the soldiers fell, hands clamped over her head. She shrieked over and over again. Those close to her turned, some made to help her. Then the tide of ghost calls struck. On every parapet soldiers staggered and fell, as the waking cries of hundreds of dead souls filled their heads.

Out on the plain beneath the fortress the first awoken Rubricae pulled itself from the ground. Dry dust and powdered snow fell away from its blue armour as it stood. Green light burned in its eyes.

An automated gun fired first. Las-bolts spat from the fortress’s high towers, hammering fire into the white wall of the storm. A line of las-fire hit the Rubricae, slamming into its high-crested helm, making it stagger. It fell to its knees, a molten hole showing the void within. The light in its eyes dimmed. The snow fell faster, tumbling in the rising gale. The Rubricae stood slowly. Light crawled over its armour. The gash in its helmet armour closed. It looked up at the fortress, its eyes bright holes into a furnace. It began to walk forwards. A second later another figure rose from the snow and dust, then another, and another.

Gunfire sheeted from the towers and parapets. Bolts of lightning fell from the clouds, thunder blending with the shout of the guns. The void shields surrounding the fortress blazed under the storm strikes. The Rubricae began to fire. Bolts shrieked as they cut through the blizzard, and smacked into the fortress walls. Kaleidoscopic flames sprang up where they struck, dancing across stone, leaping into the lungs of defenders as they opened their mouths to scream. Falling snow flashed to steam as it met the blaze.

The outer walls began to crack, stone shattering under dozens of impacts. More troops began to recover their senses and ran to the firing steps. Cyborgs with eyeless, gloss-red visors clanked from where they had stood guard deep within the fortress, breaking into piston-driven runs as storm winds and gunfire howled outside. They reached the walls and began to pour multilaser fire down onto the attackers. The Rubricae advanced, their armour rippling and glowing under the deluge, firing without pause.

A tower on the outer wall fell, sloughing away as though it were sand undercut by water. The Rubricae reached the slope of rubble that had been the tower and began to climb.

Ahriman saw every detail of the assault as though his eyes were the falling snowflakes. The minds of his brothers surrounded him, adding to his awareness, sharpening his focus. Eight minds unequal in strength, but perfectly balanced, perfectly unified. He was all of them, and they were all him. Together they were the Circle. Beyond them the human acolytes knelt, hands linked, white vapour pouring from their eyes as they fed the Circle with power.

The moment was here, the moment he had prepared for. It would not last long. What they did now was a near impossibility, a miracle created through knowledge and foresight. They had created a bridge between two points in space from the High Citadel of the
Sycorax
to the surface of Vohal. As the Rubricae advanced the Circle would appear within its walls. Astraeos’s mind was the beacon, the thread drawing them through the night.

The human acolytes shrieked as Ahriman pulled the strength from their minds and broke reality with it. The ghosts of stars rushed past them as they streaked through the warp towards the beacon of Astraeos’s call, towards the fortress on Vohal, towards Iobel. Time stretched out without end, and then reality snapped into place with a roll of thunder.

Sanakht’s eyes opened. For a halted heartbeat of time he stood still, weapons undrawn at his side. The Circle had manifested in a high vaulted hall of stone. The storm had ripped the roof open, and the light of gunfire and lightning blinked down through the ragged holes. Snow spiralled in the air.

Ahriman stood a pace away from him, his aura roaring like a blue and white flame above the horns of his helmet. Sanakht felt the heat and focus of the rest of the Circle. Once his mind had burned like theirs. Not any more; his power was a candle beside the inferno of Ahriman and the rest. He wondered, as he had many times before, if it would not have been better if Khayon had burned out all of his psychic ability; at least he would not have been able to see what he had lost.

Better to be broken than to be the weakling amongst the strong
.

The first gunshot shattered his thoughts. A pulse of las-bolts smacked into Sanakht’s chest and shoulder. Blue lacquer blistered from the impacts. Thirty humans stood in the chamber, all clad in gloss-crimson armour. Sanakht kicked forwards. His swords slipped into his hands. Both were curved, their blades inlaid with lapis and copper. A black jackal head capped the pommel of the blade in his left hand, a white hawk head the right. Power shuddered through the jackal blade as he sent his will into its crystal core, and a blue power field sheathed the hawk blade.

The crimson-armoured humans were moving, scattering into firing positions. Blast shutters began to slam down across the door out of the chamber. The air sang with the buzz of las-bolts. Sanakht covered the gap in a single double beat of his hearts. Red threat runes covered his helmet display.

The humans tried to pull back while still firing. They were fast and disciplined, but they were still too slow. He took the first one across the neck with the jackal blade. The human exploded. Fragments of cooked meat pattered off Sanakht’s armour. He spun forwards, power and force swords weaving through limbs and bodies. He lifted the intentions from his opponents’ minds in the instant before they became action. Shots and blade thrusts reached for him, but touched only
air. Here in the dance of blades and the spiralling of cuts he was still something of what he had been; here he was still a demigod of war.

The blast door shut and sealed with a metallic ring.

+Move, brother,+ shouted Ahriman’s thought voice. Sanakht ripped the hawk blade from a split torso as he felt the psychic pressure wave building behind him. Another human stood in front of him, its plasma gun levelled at his face. +Move now!+ Sanakht dived to the side. The human fired. A bolt of plasma flashed through the air above him.

The psychic shockwave ripped through the chamber. The armoured humans lifted from their feet, spinning through the air, screaming for the second before their bones exploded. Threat runes blinked out inside Sanakht’s helmet display as he rolled to his feet. The blast door was gone. Rock dust filled a ragged hole where it had been. Blood pattered on Sanakht’s armour as he ran through the breach.

Torn pieces of flesh lay amongst the rubble. He saw severed hands still clutching twisted lasguns. Blood seeped into the powdered rock as it settled. Targeting runes spun across his helmet display in search of a threat, but he had already seen the enemy that waited for him.