‘Very well,’ said Ahriman. ‘Set us down.’
‘By your will,’ replied the servitor. The whine of thrusters rose in intensity, as the gunship slipped through a web of girders to settle on the torn remains of a platform. There was a thump as its landing feet magnetically locked to the deck.
Kadin had already opened his mag-harness, his bolter ready in his hands. The inter-armour comms were silent, but Ahriman could hear the words of Kadin’s battle oath in his mind like a whispered prayer. Sat beside his brother, Thidias was still, his thoughts a steady beat of battle focus. Astraeos shifted, and glanced at Ahriman.
Ahriman stood and moved to the assault ramp, his sword held ready in his hands. Astraeos rose, his own blade loose by his side.
‘Will you tell us now what you expect?’ said Kadin.
‘I am not certain,’ said Ahriman. He felt the stab of contempt in Kadin’s thoughts, but said nothing.
The high-pitched whine of the engines still shook the gunship as the pilot servitor held it poised to boost away at the slightest sign of trouble. Pistons pushed the hatch wide and the gunship’s air hissed into the darkness outside. Ahriman’s helmet display flickered to life, turning his world into night-piercing monochrome. Hard vacuum and gravity warning runes pulsed red at the edge of his sight. Threat markers glowed in unresolved amber. He stepped from the hatch and felt the magnetised sole of his foot clamp on to the platform. He began to walk, his feet locking and releasing with each step. For a moment it felt as if it were his armour walking, not him, as if he were a passive watcher inside. He shook his head, and saw Astraeos was already moving past him, heading towards where the wide platform met the cavern’s wall. Kadin and Thidias overtook him and spread to either side, their heads moving to scan the cavern. Ahriman followed.
‘All quiet,’ said Thidias, and a popping screech of static filled Ahriman’s ear. He had reached the wall that edged the platform like a cliff rising above a strip of tidal sand, and he stopped and looked back to where the gunship sat. Hard white beams of light still stabbed from its chin and wings, but the airless dark of the cavern seemed to swallow their brightness.
‘Unload,’ he said on a closed channel. Another wail of distortion answered him. For a second he wondered if they had heard him, then the servitors began to march down the gunship’s ramp. They moved in lumbering lockstep, their faces hidden by thick brass domes, their bodies clad in vulcanised rubber. Between them they bore the grey metal chests.
‘I have found a door,’ said Astraeos, his voice chopped by static. Ahriman turned his head and waited for Astraeos’s locator marker to settle in his vision.
‘Stay where you are,’ said Ahriman, and he began to move towards Astraeos’s marker. He found the Librarian on one knee, watching an opening in the cavern wall. The door was as tall as a super-heavy tank flipped on its end, a black gulf edged by the teeth of the blast doors pulled back into its frame.
‘I do not like it,’ said Kadin as he came up behind them. He too was looking up at the waiting doorway, his bolter tracking his eyes. ‘No energy readings, no life or movement signs, it’s like it was scooped out.’ He turned his head and looked at Ahriman. ‘What did you do to this place?’
‘They…’ began Ahriman and then paused. He had been there, he had helped. It was not his design, but he had had a hand in its completion. He thought of the Brotherhood of Darkness, the runes glowing on their midnight armour as they lowered the astropaths into the pyre on chains. They had screamed and screamed until their tongues charred in their mouths. Fat had dribbled off them as they burned. There had been shapes in the fire, shapes which pulled the burning psykers down into the embers. There had been hundreds of astropaths on the station and the pyre had burned for days. The Brotherhood of Darkness had watched from the shadows, their armour glistening with dried blood, whispering their prayers to the night, and Ahriman had stood amongst them.
Think what you were, and how far you have fallen
, said a voice in the back of his thoughts, and for a moment he thought he heard the rustle of crows’ wings.
Ahriman shook his head, and looked away from Kadin. He let his mind slide along the angles of the wall and through the doorway. His senses stretched across metal and airless space, flowing down lightless passages and tasting the pockets of stale air trapped behind sealed doors. It felt cold, as if he were swimming through black water under a crust of ice. His mind shivered. It was so easy, like running one’s hand through fine sand, or smelling wood smoke on a winter wind.
The darkness pressed against his thoughts; every inch of the station was bare of the smeared colours left by life, emotion and thought. He paused. Had he been wrong; was this place not what he thought after all? There was only one way to be certain. He let his mind dip just below the level of the real and opened his senses to the dimension beyond –
– a jungle of colour and light, splitting, re-forming, refracting and battering against eyes he did not have.
Heat, the smell of excreta, roses, a feather caress.
Shapes tumbling one over another, like oil mixing with blood and boiling gold.
A shape looked up at him with a pair of eyes the colour of amber and a chuckle spread across a face that formed as it grew. It laughed. There were more faces and a thousand eyes staring at him.
There were hands. Pale, soft hands pawing at black, enfolding liquid.
The stink of ash and urine, the cold of ice and the stickiness of drying blood –
Air gasped into Ahriman’s lungs. He could feel sweat beading on his skin. For a second he could see a lingering after-image, a luminous imprint of juddering hands reaching from a springing vortex of colour. He tried to move but felt his armour resist, and for an instant he felt panic. He was dead in his armour, trapped in its iron grasp, forever falling, forever drowning. Like his Legion, like the brothers he had destroyed.
‘Ahriman.’ Astraeos’s voice filled his ear, urgent and raw.
Ahriman tried to move and this time his armour unlocked as he tensed against it. His vision cleared. Biorhythm warning icons glowed cold blue in his eyes. He had passed out and his armour had locked around him, holding him unmoving. He turned his head. Thick hoar frost covered the platform around him, crawling up the cavern wall and doorway.
Astraeos stood five paces from Ahriman, his sword drawn. Green light clung to the sword’s edge and haloed his head. Thidias and Kadin stood further away, but both had their bolters levelled. Ahriman shook his head again. His throat was dry and his voice cracked when he spoke.
‘How long?’ he said, hearing his words echo in his helm, and the vox scratch and pop in his ear. Thidias glanced at Astraeos. Slowly the Librarian lowered his sword and the light soaked back into the blade. Beside him Thidias let the muzzle of his bolter point down to the floor. Kadin did not move.
‘Two seconds. I felt it,’ said Astraeos. Clicking static filled the pause. ‘Whatever you did, I felt it.’ Ahriman nodded, but said nothing.
He had intended to taste the warp; instead his mind had broken through the veil of reality. Transiting one’s mind to the warp was a delicate matter; it demanded ritual, and care. It should not have been that easy, he thought. He had simply punched through. He remembered the power flooding through him when he had faced Tolbek, the raw joy of it, the ease of power unlike anything he had felt before. But even here it should not have been so easy.
Slowly he took a step towards the door. His muscles were shaking; a taste of burned sugar and soured milk was still on his tongue. He extended his mind again, probing at the warp around them, letting it drift just ahead of his steps. He felt his senses want to leap ahead, to soar in the warp-thinned reality, but that was dangerous in a place like this. Any use of power without fine balance and control was a risk. He should have known that, and for a second he wondered why he had allowed himself to slip before.
The procession of servitors closed in behind them, their magnetised steps sending a tremor through the platform. Ahriman looked back to where Astraeos and his two brothers watched.
‘Follow,’ he said, and stepped across the doorway. Behind him Astraeos glanced at his two brothers and followed into the dark.
Kadin watched Ahriman as they walked through the station’s silent passages. The sorcerer could kill, Kadin had seen that truth, but he moved like a lord rather than a warrior. Kadin had seen it before, an arrogance that ran so deep it bled from words and gestures. It was the mark of one who would destroy anything, and break oaths for truths that only they could see. Kadin had seen his Chapter burn at the hands of such men. Now he was oathbound to ideals that might see him dead.
They turned into another passage. Straight and narrow, it seemed to stretch away into eternity. Kadin turned his head to look back. The servitor procession was ten paces behind him. He blink-clicked his helmet display to infra-vision. The heat fuming from the servitors’ bodies glowed from white to dark blue. He snapped back to the green glow of night vision, and returned his gaze to the tunnel ahead. Astraeos and Ahriman were ahead of him, their positions lit by green runes.
His eye lingered on Astraeos. The Librarian was changing, Kadin could see it; there was rage and defiance still but there was something else, something that perhaps the Librarian was not aware of. Astraeos still held to their former ways, but they were a Chapter of three, and the old oaths seemed thin to Kadin. They had broken their vows, and spilled blood to do it. They were warriors, clinging to lives they should have laid down. And now a new master had their words of loyalty.
Ahriman briefly halted in the darkness in front of Kadin. The sorcerer turned his head to look back. Kadin went still and met his gaze for a moment. Then Ahriman turned away and kept walking. Kadin followed, but his eyes stayed locked on Ahriman’s silhouette. Parchment strips haloed the sorcerer, floating in the zero gravity. Kadin had watched Ahriman attach them to his armour as they rode the gunship. He could not read what was written on the parchment, nor understand the words the sorcerer had muttered as the red wax had bonded them to the blue armour. Just another secret that their saviour was keeping to himself, but then Kadin would have expected no less.
Oaths. All they had were oaths, so Astraeos had said, but Kadin had seen every oath to him broken and broken his own in turn.
We are traitors,
he thought.
We call our vows sacred as we did when we had a thousand brothers. But they are gone.
The rune marking Ahriman pulsed green in Kadin’s eye. Green. Green for no threat. Green for friendly. The rune flicked to amber ringed by red. An alarm began to shrill in Kadin’s ear. He knew what it meant: the muzzle of his bolter had followed his stare to point at Ahriman’s back. The warning alarm sounded louder. He blink-clicked the warning away but kept staring.
We have fallen. There is no higher cause to give our allegiance to. Trust and we are dead.
He could feel his trigger finger tighten. The alarm started to scream again, filling his helm. He focused on Ahriman, seeing the path of the bolt-round, the point of impact, the secondary target points.
There is only survival.
Kadin blinked the targeting rune to threat. Red filled his eye.
And we survive alone.
Ahriman stopped, and turned. Kadin froze. The red targeting rune spun above Ahriman’s right eye. Kadin stared. Ahriman was completely still, his hands by his sides, his weapons sheathed. Astraeos had stopped a pace in front of Ahriman and was looking back.
‘Is something wrong?’ Astraeos’s voice crackled over the vox. Ahriman cocked his head, the red eyepieces still fixed on Kadin.
Slowly, the sorcerer shook his head.
‘No, it was nothing,’ said Ahriman, and walked away down the passage. Astraeos looked at Kadin for a heartbeat then turned to follow Ahriman. Kadin did not move. The red targeting rune held steady in his eye. Then he blinked it away and followed.
They reached the choral chamber after four hours. Ahriman had felt Kadin’s hostility itch at the back of his skull for every step of the journey. A well of bitterness boiled in the warrior; Ahriman did not need to read Kadin’s mind to know it. Distrust ran through Kadin’s being like worms burrowing deep into dead meat. There was no end to it, just a pause, a momentary cessation.
He is right not to trust me
, thought Ahriman.
The door to the choral chamber was small and framed by an arch of cut stone. Thorns, bones and angel wings crawled over the surface, and a carved skull looked down on him as he crossed the threshold. The space beyond was utterly lightless, and his helmet display fizzed with fog as it tried to pierce the gloom.
‘Bring light,’ said Ahriman. Behind him he could sense Astraeos, Thidias and Kadin taking up positions flanking the door. Ahriman smiled, but without humour. There was nothing here to guard against, at least nothing that a defensive dispersal could counter. The servitors followed, burbling acknowledgement of his order. Most of them would have to be destroyed after they were done. The whispers of the place would have got into the remaining meat of their minds. Ahriman was surprised they had functioned so far.
The servitors mag-clamped the metal chests to the floor and began to unfasten the heavy lids. The first chest held glow-globes which they ignited and sent spinning through the airless dark. Ahriman looked up as the spheres of light revealed the chamber around them. Hanging terraces of stone rose above them. Pillars circled each terrace, each pillar a figure carved in green stone that glittered with crystal impurities. There was an angel, its face hidden by its hands; there was a war saint, his face grim beneath a beaten copper halo; and there was a withered woman clasping a twisted staff, a snake coiling over her shoulders, her eyes hidden and her mouth sewn shut.