Ahriman: Sorcerer (21 page)

Grimur began to run faster, his twisted frame lumbering through stuttering strides. At his back a pack of Wolves who had once been men quickened their pace. The decks rang like thunder.

Lepidus pivoted from behind the corner, and fired four rounds – two high, two low. He was already running forwards as the gun-servitor’s head and track unit exploded. Behind him his brothers advanced in a staggered line, hugging the walls of the passage.

They were thirty paces from the next bulkhead. One narrower passage opened to the right after ten paces. His eyes had marked it as soon as he had spun from the last corner. This close to the ship’s engines the air itself shook and hummed with power, which meant he heard the servitor only an instant before it came around the corner. He dived towards the opposite wall as heavy bolter shells chewed the air and decking where he had been.

He came up and kept running forwards. The drum roll cough of a bolter echoed behind him, and the gun-servitor went silent. His brother behind him in the line had aimed and taken the shot the instant Lepidus had moved. They had not even slowed down. That was what brotherhood and the Codex meant – thinking as one, moving as one, synchronising without consideration and without pause.

Five strides from the bulkhead he shook the melta bomb free from his belt. He reached the door and swung the charge up, felt it mag-lock, and let go as he ducked to the right of the slab door.

One second.

He dropped into a crouch, pulled the two-thirds-empty clip from his bolter and slid a full clip home. An ammo counter flashed green in his lens display.

Two seconds.

Blue markers went still in his sight as the rest of the squad dropped into place either side of the door. Lepidus’s eyes skimmed the walls, noting the soot of old fires and the rune marks scraped through to the bare metal beneath.

What enemy do we face here?
part of his mind wondered. He tensed his leg muscles, and felt his armour mimic him.

Three seconds.

The melta charge detonated with a scream. Liquid metal exploded down the corridor from the centre of the door.

Lepidus was up and running through the glowing wound. Molten orange light fought against the darkness beyond. The passage broadened into a junction. The mouths of three other passages yawned darkness from across a wide floor. Lepidus had taken two strides when he heard the howl.

The sound ripped from Grimur’s throat as he broke from the dark. A ragged hole still glowed red in the breached bulkhead. A Space Marine in white armour had just run through it, two more behind him. Grimur could see the raptor head on their shoulders, and the flecks of liquid metal cooling on the armour plates. Blue light danced across his axe as he leapt across the gap. Behind him he heard chainblades and power fields light as the pack broke from the dark at a run. The white-armoured Space Marines were turning, the muzzles of their guns moving with their eyes.

They move as one,
thought Grimur as his arms swung up, the head of his axe dragging lightning behind him.
Like a single animal.

The Space Marines fired.

Lepidus’s first round ripped the left side from the howling warrior’s helm. The figure dropped to the deck. The second hit square, exploding across its chest in a spray of fragments and light. He ran on and switched fire, hammering rounds low into the mass of warriors swarming from the tunnel mouths. His brothers were already clear of the breach, firing as they moved. Explosions danced across the decking, throwing armoured figures to the floor. Plasma whipped through the air, glowing and shrieking as it turned armour and flesh to vapour.

Strength thirty to forty,
Lepidus thought. He reached the corner of another tunnel. Two of his brothers dropped close behind him. Movement and light filled the junction. Threat runes spun in front of his eyes. As one, Lepidus’s squad chose the leading threats and fired two rounds each. The first enemy fell, and they were already firing into the next, and the next, hitting each of them with a deluge of bolt fire.

He saw grey armour, blackened and dented, hung with bones and teeth, matted beast furs hanging from hunched shoulders. Yellow eyes flashed above mouths which glinted with sabre teeth. These creatures were not Space Marines, not any more. Their jaws distended as they howled, skin and muscle stretching. No matter what flowed in their veins, they were creatures of the Eye now, and they would not pass into the Emperor’s realm. Yet they poured into the fire and blood-daubed junction even as their brothers were cut down.

They were fast, of course they were fast. But they expected to have cut down their foes by now. Lepidus could read it in their movements as though they had screamed it. He pulled a frag grenade free, armed and threw it as he ran to the next tunnel mouth. Three more followed it from the hands of his brothers. A drum roll of detonations thumped into the air.

They just had to keep moving, keep pulling the enemy apart before their numbers and ferocity could prevail.

Lepidus dropped into cover, and raised his bolter. There were too many of them, even in an optimal position there were too many, and this was not an optimal position.

He did not see the blood-masked figure until it broke from the swirl of fire, its axe keening as it cut down.

Grimur felt the blow thump through the axe as it cut armour and bone. Inside, his blood was howling, straining at his skin. The white-armoured Space Marine staggered, crimson streaming from the stumps of his arms. Grimur could almost smell the warrior’s shock in the iron-scented air. He cut again, spinning his axe low. The Space Marine tried to jerk back, but he had misread the blow. The axe head slammed into the Space Marine’s knee. He fell. Grimur stamped down, felt, and heard, bone and armour break. Deep inside he could hear howls ringing across the moon-silvered night of Fenris.

No
.
Not now, not at this moment. These are noble warriors who die under our blades.

But the thought died, and he could feel the howling growing louder, echoing out of a dream.

He could feel his mouth opening inside the broken shell of his helm. Cartilage and bone cracked. He sucked a breath, felt his ribs and bones shift as blood-scented air filled his lungs.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Halvar split another of the white-armoured Space Marines on a broken sword blade. The Space Marine fired, even as Halvar wrenched him from the floor. Bolt-rounds shredded the front of Halvar’s armour. He jerked but did not let go, even with his armour ripped from his body. The Space Marine slid down the sword blade. Halvar’s hands were wet and black with blood. He snarled, the sound echoing from his broken speaker grille.

The broken sword ripped free. Blood glittered like red pearls as it scattered and the dead warrior fell. Out beyond them the pack was ripping into the remaining warriors. All control had gone. Feet skidded on the offal-streaked floor. Blades rang and screeched across armour plates. There were dead Wolves on the deck, their heads and helms ripped open by bolter rounds shot into their eyes.

It should not be like this,
thought Grimur, but his hand was already ripping the remains of his helm free. His eye caught a strip of honour parchment smeared to the warrior’s shoulder with blood. The name ‘Lepidus’ was still clear beneath the gore. Grimur stopped. His limbs were shaking, his whole body was shaking. Around him the fire and clash of weapons was a dim tide that echoed the racing of blood in his veins. He had not felt like this for a long time, not since before the hunt began. He wondered if it was the Eye, its malign presence tugging at their flesh and minds one last time before they broke free.

He forced his muscles to stillness. He looked down. Lepidus was still trying to rise, still trying to fight, but his blood was deep on the decking, and his movements were becoming weaker. Grimur looked into the dying warrior’s eye-lenses. A reflection looked back, stained in the red lenses’ light: a hunched warrior in chewed power armour, his face bared to show yellow fangs as long as fingers.

‘This is not a good death.’ The words were heavy on his tongue. ‘But you died well, cousin,’ Grimur said and swung the axe down in a clean arc.

Four of Grimur’s ships shook free of their attackers and clawed into the clear black beyond Cadia’s rim. One remained, the
Blood Howl
, tumbling on as its engines cooled and power dimmed. It would die later, its hull broken open by macro salvoes from three system monitors. The Space Wolves on board would die standing, their weapons in their hands, howling as the fire and void took them. As their brothers ran beyond the reach of Cadia’s defences, the Wolves of the
Blood Howl
called out a final message shouted into the night.

‘To the hunt’s end,’ they said. Spattered with the blood of a foe he wished he had not had to fight, Grimur Red Iron heard the signal, raised the amulet at his throat and touched it to his lips. It tasted of cold blood.

‘To the end,’ he whispered. Around him
Hel’s Daughter
shivered as power touched its warp drives and Geller fields. He turned, and walked from the blood-painted junction. His pack brothers watched him go, but did not follow.

‘Sycld,’ said Grimur into the vox.

‘Jarl,’ replied the Rune Priest’s thin voice.

‘We are clear of the gate. Go back to the Sea of Souls.’ He paused, thinking of the face he had seen reflected in the dead Space Marine’s eyes – the face of a beast dragged back from hell. ‘Dream us a course. Take us to him.’

XV

Connection

‘I don’t like it. Leaving my tower, I mean.’ Silvanus glanced at Hemellion as they turned a corner.

The red-robed serf said nothing, his face a fixed mask inside his hood. Hemellion looked old. His skin was folded, his mouth a line in a pattern of wrinkles. A slight stoop to his shoulders showed through the thick fabric of his robe. In truth he was no more than four or five decades old, but that time seemed to have cut deep marks in passing.
Apart from the eyes,
thought Silvanus. There was young anger in those eyes, glinting just beneath the surface.

Silvanus licked his lips. They had been walking for three hours, weaving their way through the ship towards its forward decks. Silvanus was already sweating under the layers of his attire. Black velvet and silver gauze covered him head to toe, hanging in heavy swathes. What he had said was true; he did not like leaving his tower. He did not like the other things that walked the
Sycorax
. He also did not like the way they looked at him: like he was no different. He coughed nervously.

‘Did they say why I had to come now?’ he asked. Hemellion said nothing, but turned through a wide door framed by feathers cast in brass. A platform of worn metal waited beyond, red-lit tunnels extending to a vanishing point at either side. Hemellion and Silvanus stopped in the centre of the floor. The doors closed like biting teeth, and the platform began to clank down the tunnel.

‘We are ready, is that it?’ said Silvanus, raising his voice above the clatter and clunk of the platform. Hemellion looked down, refolded the sleeves of his robes over his hands. The man was wearing gloves, Silvanus noted, rough black leather, worn at the palm.
Why am I talking
? wondered Silvanus.
He does not want to talk, but I want him to so much that I am babbling like an idiot.
He shook his head.
You are an idiot, that is why,
he said to himself. At the back of that thought, another voice wondered if it was because the man was the closest thing to a normal human being he had seen for a long time. ‘But why did Ahriman not come himself?’ he wondered out loud. ‘Or Sanakht?’

Hemellion turned his head slightly, and looked at Silvanus. The expression on his face was the same as if he had been looking at a plate of spoiled meat. He looked away.

The platform was moving faster now, the clatter of its cogged wheels and chains a single vibrating note. Cracked red lamps and dark openings flitted past. Silvanus thought he saw a cavern through one, a vast half-lit space filled with silent machines. He wondered if he had started the wrong way; he had seen Hemellion only once at a distance since the man had come on board.

‘You are Sanakht’s bondsman now, aren’t you?’ Silvanus called the question over the rattle of gears and rush of air. ‘Hemellion, yes?’

‘Slave.’ The word was so soft Silvanus almost did not realise Hemellion had spoken.

‘What?’

Hemellion was looking into the tunnel in front of the platform. The wind ruffled the hood of his robe around his head.

‘I am a slave, as are you, as is every soul in this… prison.’

Silvanus felt a lurch of elation, then a twinge of fear.

‘You should be careful of what you say.’

‘Why?’ Hemellion snorted. ‘They know.’

‘I–’

‘Witches, with sight to see through souls. That’s what they are. How can anything be hidden from them? They know what I think, and they don’t care. My thoughts are less than nothing to them.’

Silvanus shook his head. He suddenly wished that he had not nudged the man into speaking.

‘Such words are dangerous.’

Hemellion laughed, the sound loud enough to grate against the false wind. It was a nasty sound, cold and bitter.

‘Is that why you serve them so meekly? Because you are afraid of dying?’

Silvanus’s skin prickled cold. He thought of the voices that scratched in his senses when the warp closed over the ship, the faces he saw in the twisting of its storms, faces he had known, faces he wished he could forget.

‘You don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Oh no?’ Hemellion laughed again, throwing his head back, so that his hood fell away. He stopped laughing, and looked back down. His eyes were polished points of reflection in the stuttered light. Silvanus felt the instinct to run, but there was nowhere to go. Hemellion lunged for him, gripping layers of gauze and velvet. Silvanus flailed, but the veil and hood were ripped from his face. He fell trying to cover his head, braced for the blows he was sure would come.

Hemellion stood above him, the crumpled mass of fabric hanging from his gloved hands, its edges snapping in the air. ‘Look at you,’ he said.

Silvanus was suddenly aware of the folded skin of his face beneath his fingers, of the space where his nose and ears had been, of the red pupil which had formed when his left eye had become black from edge to edge.

Hemellion let out a slow, controlled breath.

‘I see you… and the rest, and I know everything I need to know about what the rewards of this life will be.’ He let go of the fabric. It whipped away into the retreating distance. Silvanus felt himself rise and reach as though to catch it, but it was already a ghost vanishing out of sight. He slumped back to the floor.

The platform was slowing, the flicker of lights steadying. They stopped before a doorway. It was larger than the one they had entered through, its frame thicker and unadorned, the metal of its surface darkened with a film of grease and dust. As the door opened, Hemellion stepped towards it.

‘Why live, then?’ Silvanus called, hearing the anger and hurt in his voice. ‘Why not put a knife through your throat, and be free?’

Hemellion looked at him. Silvanus thought he saw puzzlement form on the man’s face, but then it was gone, as though wiped away. Hemellion turned and walked from the platform.

Somewhere inside he is hiding something,
thought Silvanus as he pulled himself to his feet and stepped towards the door. Hemellion stopped, turning his head, face puzzled.

‘What was that?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ said Silvanus. After a second Hemellion shrugged and walked on.

+You called, mistress.+ Ahriman’s voice came to Carmenta out of the buzzing of the ship. Part of her found it reassuring to hear him. Part of her wondered why.

‘You are returned from your dreams,’
she said, and tried to make her voice sound strong even though she knew that he would sense the truth. She was talking through the ship’s mind interface units, thinking words which were transmitted into the systems of the ship. In a sense she was talking to the ship, or to herself, depending on how one chose to look at things. But she knew that Ahriman was there, his mind brushing the machine’s systems, so she was actually talking to him.

+You realised I was back before I could announce myself.+

‘You are surprised?’
She paused and felt tiredness bleed through her.
‘I can feel the ship, every rivet, every straining link of power and force. I can feel every soul breathe the air I exhale. There is a fire a kilometre down in the lower bilge levels. A fuel-flooded chamber was opened by a bilge gang. They lit a torch. Ten are dead. One is still screaming. There is a crypto-shunt linked to the forward sensor arrays that sings a song of pain to me, and always will, because no one can reach it without cutting through three metres of armour. I see all this and feel more. So yes, I noticed you return.’

+It hurts to see so much, doesn’t it?+

‘Yes,’
she said, and paused
‘I am going, Ahriman. I do not know if I will last another battle. The ship is taking more of me. It’s better now – when we are out of the warp. But when we cross back, when it wakes for battle… I did not understand why the Mechanicus called me a heretic all those years ago – now I know that they were right. One mind cannot harness a machine this powerful. There are other voices in here with me, all the time. They are getting stronger and I am getting weaker. Soon I will be gone, and they will remain.’

+You are stronger than that, mistress. You always were.+

She laughed, the thought sound ringing like breaking glass.

‘Liar. You always were.’

+You cannot be certain what will happen.+

‘For you to say such a thing? I can. I can feel it, Ahriman. I am not like you – I don’t need to see the future to know its course. The
Sycorax
will take me, or…’
She paused, and Ahriman sensed a focusing of thoughts and will.
‘Everything ends, one way or another.’

+I have never believed in futures I do not make.+

‘Of course not.’
There was laughter in her thoughts again.
‘You trust too much, and too little. You know almost everything but overlook what you do not understand. Your eyes see far but miss the cliff at your feet.’

+Was that a rebuke?+

‘No,’
she said, and he felt the shrug without needing to see it.
‘No, it was a farewell. That is why I called you, while I could, while I am still able. We are about to pass beyond and then into the crucible of battle, and everything has an end.’

She thought she felt an echo of uncertainty, as though Ahriman had formed a mental message only to leave it unsent, like a word lost in an open mouth.

‘Good luck, my friend,’
she said.

‘Are you ready, Navigator?’ asked Ahriman.

Silvanus looked around and swallowed. Eyes looked at him from every part of the chamber. Some were human eyes, or at least eyes of things that looked like humans, the dull ghost-light glow of the Rubricae’s eye-lenses, or the crystal glitter from within the Cyrabor’s masks. This was not what he had expected, but he should have realised that they were waiting to go somewhere, and wherever that was they would have to return to the warp. But even if he had been prepared he would not have expected this.

The vaulted chamber had the signs that it might once have been a place of gathering. A single platform wound up the inside of its five walls. Corroded balconies hung from its tiered roof, and its floor was a gentle bowl of worn stone. Cyan and orange rust blooms bulged from the walls, and formed jagged stalactites amongst the slumping balconies. Figures crowded the chamber, standing at the sides, lining the winding platform from floor to ceiling. At a glance many seemed to be the white-robed thralls, but others were hunched and twisted creatures bound in chains and watched over by masked guards. A crystal sphere floated in the centre of the chamber. Silvanus recognised it as a duplicate of that on the
Sycorax
’s bridge. Other small globes hung in the air around it, like stilled planets in a vast orrery. Silvanus dropped his gaze as soon as he looked at the spheres. He had a sudden urge to close his eyes and never open them again.

The air shimmered before his gaze, as though he was looking through a heat haze. A smell of rain, steel and charring wood filled his nose then vanished, then returned again. Beneath the black silk bandanna, Silvanus’s third eye was throbbing.

Beneath the floating spheres Ahriman stood. Focus radiated from him. Silvanus had to fight a sense of dizziness when he looked at him. He breathed in. The air tasted sour in his mouth.

Everything was about to get much, much worse. He was certain of it.

‘Silvanus?’ Ahriman spoke again.

‘Lord Ahriman.’ He nodded and made himself cross the floor. Behind him Hemellion had dropped away, vanishing to whatever insignificant shadow was his appointed place. Silvanus wished he could have gone with him.

‘Once again we have a course to steer,’ said Ahriman. Silvanus glanced up at the watching eyes, at the thrall psykers swaying in their robes, or rocking in their chains.

‘A simple one?’ he said, before he could bite the words off.

Ahriman said nothing, but tilted his horned helm to the side. Silvanus could not tell if Ahriman was looking at him or at the chamber.

‘Are you ready?’

Silvanus came to a halt three paces from Ahriman, and bowed his head. Above him the vast crystal sphere seemed to press down on him. He was sweating. His velvet and silk robes clung to his shivering limbs.

I must do this. It is what they keep me for. I cannot refuse.
Hemellion’s words floated through his mind, heavy with scorn.
Is that why you serve them so meekly? Because you are afraid of dying?

‘I am ready,’ he said, and looked up.

The red eyes of Ahriman’s helm were like slits cut into a furnace. Behind Ahriman the eyes of hundreds looked down at him. He frowned, then tried to hide it.
Where is Astraeos? Where is Sanakht, and Ignis? Are they not needed for this?

+No,+ said Ahriman inside Silvanus’s skull. +It is I alone who will help you, and weave the path for you to follow.+

Silvanus’s eyes twitched to the figures crowding the chamber’s wall.
What are they here for, then?
he wondered, and wished he had not.

He looked back to Ahriman and nodded.

The world vanished. He was floating through clouds of light and patches of dark. Patterns were forming, spirals and lines stretching between absences in the light. It was beautiful, like watching creation flower. Silvanus had no idea what he was looking at or what it meant.

Follow the path, Navigator,
he thought, then realised that the thought was not his own, and that somewhere he was reaching up and unwinding the silk from his forehead. The chamber was there, outlined in front of his eye in the flaring candle flames of hundreds of minds. As one, every psyker in the chamber screamed as their minds fused, and became a pyre. The crystal orb was a sun. The smaller spheres were spinning, changing colour and size. Silvanus looked into the crystal sphere. The patterns inside his mind spun, reconfigured and became a rushing tangle of threads.

Out beyond the sphere of Silvanus’s awareness, the
Sycorax
and its fleet breached the skin of reality and slid behind the stars. Beneath the sphere, his third eye burning white in his skull, Silvanus saw the path and its end.