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Ahriman: Sorcerer – Extract

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I
Dreams

Soon it will be done.

Grimur Red Iron closed his eyes, feeling the growl of the boarding torpedo around him as it cut through the void. He ran his tongue across his teeth; they had grown long. He shifted, feeling the knot of mis-grown and damaged muscle twist on his hunched back. The hunt had been long, but it was almost done. Soon, he thought again and opened his eyes.

His pack waited beside him, their armour and weapons stained red by warning lights. Thirty figures of grey iron filled the narrow space. The marks of time and battle were on all of them: in the scars on their war-plate, in the worn handles of their weapons, but most of all in their silence.

A scream of tearing metal filled the air. The torpedo shook, and shook, with the roaring shriek of metal grinding past its hull. Grimur felt his muscles tighten against his bones, and braced. The torpedo slammed to a halt, and its tip exploded outwards. Smoke and molten droplets blew back into the hold. Grimur launched out of his seat and his pack kin rose as one to follow him.

He came out of the smoke at a run. A human stood before him, eyes wide in a face of stitched and scarred skin. Grimur noticed the filth-spattered overalls and the barbed iron collar around the human’s neck. His axe cut the man in half, from head to groin. Blood and bowel fluid flooded onto the deck. Another figure appeared, a ragged outline at the edge of sight. Grimur straightened and fired. The bolt shell turned the figure to red tatters and bone shards.

He could smell the warp’s sweet reek even within his helm, like the taste of rotting meat and honey. But it was the other scent that drew him on through the smoke and the strobing detonations, the scent of a soul that had walked these decks and touched this vessel’s skin. The one they sought had fled long ago, but his spoor remained. Sycld and Lother had followed the scent through the Underverse of the warp, and led them to this ship orbiting a dead star at the Eye’s edge. Half crippled and skeleton-crewed, the ship was almost a corpse, but it had still croaked its name in defiance as Grimur’s ships had run it down: Blood Crescent, it had hissed across the vox. That it would die was a certainty, but that did not matter, not truly; what mattered was that it spoke its secrets before the end.

Grimur ran through the hammering of gunfire and ducked into a wide passage mouth. His pack kin bounded forwards behind him, chainblades growling to life, teeth and bone amulets rattling on scarred grey armour plate. They moved without words or howls, like wolves that had seen many winters and lost their hunger for blood. More of the ship’s ragged and mutilated crew died, their bodies burst and hacked apart, their blood slicking the rusted metal of the decking. The thunder rhythm of bolters filled the air as the pack swept on through the murk, deeper into the rotting ship.

Crowds of slave crew fled before Grimur, choking the passage with screams and bodies. He cut his way through them without slowing down. Dark red blood drooled down his armour, pooling in its dents and matting the black fur of his cloak. He killed with every step – cutting, trampling and crushing. He killed in silence, his mouth closed over his long teeth, weapon and body moving as one. He felt only the smack of his axe hitting meat, and the judder of the haft in his hand. The rest, the blood slapping his armour, the cries of the dead, meant nothing. The joy of battle had left him long ago. This slaughter was just what it was, what it had always been: a means to an end.

A roar filled the passage as Grimur broke through the crowd of dead and dying crew. He looked up. A creature of twisted muscle stared back at him with bloodshot eyes. It stood head and shoulders taller than a Space Marine, its face hidden by a plate of hammered metal. It had no hands, just stumps fused with blades. Chains hung from hooks in its pale skin, clinking behind it as it paced forwards.

A blade-tipped arm punched towards him. Grimur saw the blow unfold. He kicked from the floor, twisted past the killing point, and buried the curve of his axe in the mutant’s head. The axe wrenched free, blood fizzing to smoke in its power field. The mutant began to fall. Grimur landed and kept running. Behind him the mutant’s body hit the deck in a shudder of dead muscle and fat.

The bolt-round exploded across his chest before he had taken another step. He stumbled, his helmet visor suddenly bright with warning runes. Pain spread across his chest. He caught his balance, and pivoted to face the direction of fire.

A Space Marine was advancing towards him, bolter held in one hand, a hooked chainaxe in the other. Flaking layers of red covered its armour and tatters of skin hung from the spikes studding its pauldrons. Severed human hands flapped from chains at its waist. It wore no helm, and it grinned with hooked iron teeth from a face of flayed muscle. It had a name for its own kind. A name which, like every other part of its fallen life, was a lie – a vile daubing covering the colour of its sins. The Harrowing, they called themselves.

Grimur leapt, his axe spinning low, old muscle unwinding into the cut. The Harrowing warrior almost killed him then. The chainaxe spun to life as it hacked forwards. Dried blood and skin scattered from the turning teeth. The cut was fast, very, very fast. Grimur just had time to half twist aside. Chain teeth chewed across his right shoulder and the snout of his helm. His helmet display blanked out in a flare of static. He lashed out with the butt of his axe, felt it hit armour and rock the Harrowing warrior back. He kicked out, still blind. His boot crashed into something solid, and a snarl of rage filled the air. His vision cleared in time to see the warrior’s chainaxe descending towards his head. He fired his pistol then, holding it low. The rounds took the other warrior’s legs out from beneath him. Grimur brought his axe around and down, and the warrior’s grinning head fell away in a wash of black blood.

Grimur straightened above the kill. Carefully, he clamped the pistol to his thigh, and reached up to pull the ruin of his helmet from his head. The foetid air met the bare skin of his face. He ran a bloody hand across his scalp, mottling the tangle of faded tattoos with blood. An old habit, but one he kept even here, even when the blood smelled of ruin. Around him the tunnel had become quiet, the sounds of battle a distant rumble. His pack kin were swift, and the rest of the murder-make would be done with soon.

The stink of the Harrowing warrior’s blood rose to fill his senses as he breathed. He could taste the tumours seeded in its flesh, and the dead meat of its body. He wondered whether he would one day be the same, if the light of the Eye would sink deep enough into his bones that he would no longer be a Lord of Fenris, if he would end his thread of life a beast walking in the frost-night of the Underverse.

Fenris. Could he even remember it? Sometimes it seemed just a name, a word to conjure faded memories of starlight glinting on the sea, the roar of cracking pack ice and the sight of blood clotting on snow.

‘He was here.’ Sycld’s voice broke Grimur’s thoughts, but he did not turn. He had known the Rune Priest had entered the passage without needing to see or hear him. He did not need to answer, either. Instead he bent down, dipped the tip of his armoured finger in the spreading pool of blood and then touched it to his tongue. For a second he just tasted salt and iron, then the blood memory came, a shimmer of half sensations, smeared with madness and corruption. He saw the decks of the ship he stood on sluiced with blood as sacrifices were impaled on altars, he saw a figure in power armour with a helm shaped like a hound, and he saw a fading image of a banner with a silver sword held in a black fist on a field of red.

The dead warrior had once been called Elscanar, but he had forgotten that name long before Grimur’s axe had cut his thread. The blood and flesh remembered, though.

Grimur straightened, aware again of the curve in his back and the hunch of his shoulders. Sycld’s frost-blue eyes looked back at him. Unconsciously Grimur’s hand went to the shard of red iron hanging on a cord around his neck. The Rune Priest had also removed his helm, and the plait of his white hair had uncoiled from the top of his shaven head to hang to his waist. Skeletal crow’s wings spread across his chestplate and pauldrons. Bird skulls, and dead eyes set in amber hung from the edges of his battleplate, clicking against the storm-grey ceramite as he moved. Pale, almost transparent skin pulled and creased over the sharp bones of Sycld’s face as he bared teeth that were long and needle fine, closer to those of a feline than a wolf.

He was young, at least young in the company of Grimur’s pack. When the hunt had begun Sycld had been newly blooded, his face full, his eyes golden and his laugh quick. Time and the hunt had changed that. He had found the wyrd was in him. His body was shrunken, flesh seeming to suck back into bone even as the wyrd bloomed in his soul. Now he rarely talked, and the rest of the pack turned their eyes from him as he passed. He was a nightwalker, a hunter of the underworld, and while he was still their kin, he stood apart even from the other Rune Priests.

‘Ahriman was here,’ said Sycld again, his voice low and dry. ‘I can feel his steps on the floors, his touch on the bones of the Blood Crescent. Time has passed but the scent is still strong.’

‘Strong enough for you to lead us to him?’

Sycld’s eyes fluttered closed, and his tongue ran across his teeth.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, after a pause.

‘We must have the scent,’ growled Grimur. They were close, he knew it in his bones and breath. The wyrd was not in him, but he knew. They could not fail now. They had given too much to fail now. ‘Take it from this one.’ Grimur inclined his head to the dead Space Marine at their feet.

Sycld held Grimur’s gaze for a long moment. Then the Rune Priest bowed his head and stepped forwards, strings of finger bones clacking against the haft of his staff.

‘By the edge of your axe, my jarl,’ he said. The seals on his gauntlet released with a hiss of pressure. Sycld knelt and ripped a handful of meat from the corpse. Blood oozed between his bare fingers. He brought it up to his face, and inhaled. The pupils in his pale eyes almost vanished. He breathed out. White mist filled the air. Grimur felt his skin prickle. His right hand tightened around the throat of his axe.

Sycld nodded once, and tilted his head back. His mouth opened wide, cartilage cracking, skin stretching. Grimur felt his hand close on the red iron amulet around his neck. Sycld’s jaws opened wider and wider. He dropped the meat into his mouth and his teeth closed. He swayed where he knelt, face still upturned, blood running down his distorted cheeks. There were no pupils in his eyes now. Frost bloomed across his armour. He began to shake.

Grimur lifted his axe, his eyes fixed on the Rune Priest. The warp had touched them all. It had wound its way inside their bones and bred with the beast that lurked beneath their skin. They were all one step from abomination, and when the Rune Priest ran the path of dreams he touched that fate. Sycld roared, the sound echoing and repeating, rolling with pain. Black blood and bile vomited from between his teeth. Grimur brought the axe up to strike.

The silence halted his blow. Sycld had slumped to the deck, his eyes and mouth closed, his fingers twitching.

‘Brother,’ said Grimur, but did not lower the axe. Sycld did not move. A whine and hiss of armour drew Grimur’s gaze upwards. Halvar and ten of the pack stood beside him, their weapons and armour sheened with blood. All of them had removed their helmets. Fresh blood marked the mouths and jaws of some.

This must end soon, or we will be lost.

‘We are clear to the central core on this deck,’ said Halvar, his gaze flicking to the beheaded warrior, and the slumped form of Sycld.

Grimur opened his mouth, but as he did so, Sycld’s eyes opened. The Rune Priest’s face had returned to its normal shape, and his eyes were hard as he stood. He reached up and picked a shred of meat from his teeth with a bare hand.

‘I have it,’ he said, his voice like wind murmuring across an ice field. ‘I can see the path he took, his shadow body dances on the edge of the netherworld, seeking some fragment of the past. We have the scent, we can hunt.’

Ahriman ran and the wolves ran after him. His breath panted in his lungs, and his bare feet bled into the dust. The night was a silver-scattered dome of sable above him. Tattered strands of light trailed from his left hand. He clenched his fist tighter, feeling the threads squirm against his fingers. Behind him howls rose to the moon. He looked back; the wolves were close, black blurs of movement near to the ground. Their eyes burned coal red and molten gold.

Too close. Far, far too close.

The howls came again. He looked ahead to where the cliff rose before him, close, so close. He leapt for the face of pale rock. Scree slipped beneath his feet, and suddenly he was tumbling back, and the howls rose in triumph.

This is not real, he thought as he fell. This air in my lungs is just a memory, the light just an idea.

He hit the ground. Air gasped from his lips, and he rolled to his feet. The wolves came out of the night, jaws wide, tongues of fire lapping from their throats. A stink of blood, smoke and matted fur was thick in the air. He stood.

This is not real. His eyes met theirs. It is a dream, a painting created by scraps of experience and imagination.

The wolves leapt, burning droplets of spittle falling from teeth of ice.

But a dream can still kill you.

Ahriman jumped up the cliff face. Jaws fastened on his ankle. He screamed and kicked down. His grip slipped, and he was swinging by one hand, feet scrabbling on the rock face. The golden threads of light writhed in his left hand, struggling to break free. The wolf bit deeper. Words bubbled up in his mind as blood scattered from the wound.

‘We have come for you,’ hissed a voice. ‘We will never tire. We will open your belly to the crows, and feed your soul to the serpent at the world’s heart. We are your oblivion, Ahzek Ahriman. Your soul will sing to the night forevermore.’

Ahriman felt his grip on the cliff begin to give. He looked down at the wolf hanging from his leg, its shadow-furred body seeming to swell. His eyes met the pits of fire in its skinless skull. Beneath it the other wolves scrambled at the cliff, their mouths smiles of flame.

No! He twisted to crash his right foot into the wolf’s snout. He felt its hold give, and he ripped his leg from its jaws. It fell to the ground, yelping in pain and rage. Blood was pouring from his leg down the face of the cliff. He gasped. Numbness was spreading up his body, ice crystals forming on his skin, his blood boiling. He looked up at the moon and sky at the top of the cliff, but the cliff was stretching up, growing taller even as he looked at it. He reached for the next handhold. The fingers of his right hand hooked onto the rock and he began to haul himself upwards. The wolves howled in frustration. He thought he heard voices in the cries, old voices shaped by hatred.

I must not fall. Not now. If I can only reach the top I will be safe. Beneath him the wolves were circling, watching, silent now that they had tasted his blood. He leant against the rock face, reached up with his free right hand, found a handhold and pulled.

The rock beneath his hand broke apart even as his grip tightened. He screamed as the burning in his muscles fought the coldness spreading from his leg. He looked down. The eyes of the wolves looked back.

A hand grasped his arm.

His head snapped up. He had an impression of a hooded face outlined against the stars. Hard fingers clamped tight on his flesh, and he had a fleeting sensation of wrinkled skin moving over whipcord muscle. Then he was being pulled up the cliff, and into the mouth of a cave.

He lay still, breathing hard, not caring that it was not real air filling his lungs. Firelight flickered against cave walls. The howls of the wolves were a distant murmur. He could hear logs crackling and popping as they burned. Wood smoke filled his nose. He flexed the fingers of his left hand. They were empty.

Ahriman’s head snapped up and he began to rise.

The figure standing above him straightened. A tattered robe the colour of rust hid its form, but could not hide its bulk. Muscled shoulders slumped under the worn cloth, and Ahriman saw scarred arms vanish within wide sleeves. A shadow-filled hood pointed briefly at him, and then back to the golden threads hanging from its fingers. The threads twitched and squirmed like snakes.

‘A long way to come for such a fragment of knowledge,’ said the figure, in a voice that crackled like the logs on the fire.

‘Give it back,’ said Ahriman softly, but there was a sharpened edge in the words. The figure shrugged, and held the threads out to Ahriman. He took them, noticing the pale skin stretched over the long bones of the figure’s hand. The threads folded back into his grasp again, warm and writhing against his skin. The robed figure began to shuffle away towards the light of the fire.

‘You will live,’ said the figure, bending and folding until it sat on the cave floor. Ahriman remembered the wound to his leg, looked down, hands reaching to clamp shut over bloody scraps of flesh. He stopped. His leg was whole. No blood marked the cave floor. He looked closer, probing with his fingers. As the firelight shifted he saw it: a pale mark on his skin, like a ragged white scar. It was cold when he touched it, but there was no pain.

He looked up. The figure was watching him. ‘The marks of their teeth will linger for a while, but they will fade in time.’

Ahriman ignored the words, his eyes scanning the cave, taking in the texture of the rock, the glint of crystals in the water-worn walls, the smoke-darkened roof, and the patch of night sky beyond the cave mouth. He understood the symbolism of each part of what he saw, but he was still surprised his mind had led him here.

‘You are thinking this is still a dream,’ said the cloaked figure.

Ahriman said nothing, but looked into the dancing heart of the fire. The wolves had almost had him, had almost pulled him down. No matter whether he felt the pain here and now, he would feel it later. They were getting closer each time he came to this land.

‘Perhaps it is still a dream,’ chuckled the figure. Ahriman tried to ignore it. ‘But perhaps not.’

‘It is,’ said Ahriman, and looked up at the hooded figure. The firelight caught the glint of a blue eye within the tattered hood. ‘This cave is a refuge, a metaphor of a sanctuary built from memories and scraps of imagination. It is a reaction of my mind to danger, nothing more.’ He reached down, lifted a handful of dust from the floor, and let it trickle slowly through his fingers. ‘This cave is like one in the mountains of Prospero. The stars and moon of the sky outside belong to Ullanor, and this dust is the dust of the land of my birth.’

‘What then am I?’ said the figure.

It was Ahriman’s turn to laugh.

‘A hooded stranger who asks questions, but hides his face?’ Ahriman pointed at his own bright blue eyes. ‘You are part of me, a part of my subconscious, which has broken free because of the trauma.’

The figure nodded slowly, stirring the embers at the edge of the fire with a blackened stick.

‘But the wolves…’ said the figure softly, and shrugged. ‘They were real enough to kill you, weren’t they?’ Ahriman looked up, his senses suddenly tingling. The stranger’s voice had changed, had become something he had not thought to hear again. The figure turned his head slowly to look at Ahriman, the hood hiding all but a single blue eye. ‘Tell me, why does Ahzek Ahriman run from wolves through his own dreams?’

Ahriman had become still. Somewhere far off his twin hearts were beating faster.

‘Father?’ he said. No, he thought even as the word came from his lips. This is not real, this is a dream, and your father is lost to you.

The figure gave a dry laugh, and turned its eye back to the fire. Slowly it reached up and lowered the hood. The head beneath was a lump of bone and glossy scar tissue. The right side of the face was warped and ravaged, the eye swallowed by malformed flesh. The lone eye glinted sapphire blue in the ruin of his face. Suddenly the figure looked like a colossus shrunken by time and twisted by pain.

‘You are wondering how this could be,’ said the scarred figure. ‘Whether the wolves bit deep enough to bring the idea of me to the surface, or if it is because of what you seek.’ The figure paused, drawing the tatters of his robes closer around him as though cold. ‘But part of you wonders if this is not your dream any more. Part of you can’t help wondering if your father knows what you seek, and has come to stop you. Part of you can’t help wondering if I am really here.’

Ahriman did not move. He should have anticipated this. His questing, and the flight from the wolves, had drained him. He had gone too far, and taken too much from the well of his unconscious. Slowly he extended his mind beyond the mouth of the cave, searching for the thread of physical sensation which would lead him out of this dream. Somewhere far off he could hear the rising drum of his hearts, and the sea surge of blood in his veins.

‘I am not here to harm you, Ahriman.’

‘No,’ said Ahriman. ‘You are not here at all.’

‘Is that a fact, or a hope?’ The figure stirred the embers again. ‘You seek the Athenaeum, don’t you?’ The question hung in the air, and the fire crackled in the silence. ‘All my thoughts and all my dreams, recorded and hidden away – a treasure trove of knowledge, a window into the past. That is why you are here, seeking the threads to lead you to it.’

‘My father does not even know that the Athenaeum exists. Only a few know it is real, even fewer know that I seek it now.’

Ahriman stood up, and took a pace towards the cave mouth. Somewhere he felt real breath fill his lungs; it tasted of incense and static. He looked out into the night, and placed his hand on the lip of the cave.

‘It will not give you the answers,’ said the figure. Ahriman looked back over his shoulder. The hunched and one-eyed figure was looking directly at him. Behind it a shadow danced on the wall, growing and shrinking, as it blinked between impressions of horns, wings and claws. ‘You followed me in war and treachery. You followed me over the precipice into hell, you believed me, and betrayed me, and yet still you wonder if you ever knew your father at all.’

‘I knew him,’ said Ahriman softly.

‘Then why seek the Athenaeum?’

‘For the future.’

‘A good answer, my son.’ The figure looked away, and Ahriman saw a smile struggle to form on the ruined face.

Ahriman frowned. Something in that smile was familiar, yet it did not remind him of Magnus but someone else, someone he could not place.

‘Speak your name,’ demanded Ahriman. The fire dimmed at the words, and the walls of the cave seemed to press closer. The one-eyed figure prodded the glowing logs again.

‘Go,’ said the figure. ‘The wolves will return soon.’

Ahriman took a step back into the cave. The figure raised a hand, and the fire became a white-hot pillar. The shadows grew on the walls, snaking into the light, swallowing it. Sparks, embers, and ash tumbled through the air. Heat stung Ahriman’s skin. Darkness embraced him, and the burning pillar of flame was all he could see. He tried to take a step forwards, but he was tumbling through lightless space, the light of the fire a single distant star that dimmed as he fell.

‘Wake, Ahriman,’ said a voice that seemed to be carried on the wind. ‘Wake.’

II
Brotherhood

Ahriman’s eyes opened, black pupils shrinking to pinpricks in the bright light. The chamber was quiet, as much as any part of a ship the size of the Sycorax could be quiet. The only noise was the distant slow throb of engines and power.

The chamber sat at the summit of a kilometre high tower that rose from a forest of lesser towers which ran down the spine of the Sycorax. It was small, its roof curved into a peaked dome like the inside of a closed flower. Symbols, each one finer than a hair, crawled across the walls in endless patterns, interlinking, flowing together, but never repeating. The symbols glowed with white light. Beyond the walls Ahriman could hear the murmur of minds, hundreds of thousands of minds, their thoughts pattering on the chamber’s wards like raindrops. And beyond the clouds of thoughts, the cold void cradled the ship’s hull.

He took a breath, allowing himself to feel and remember what it was to have a real body again. A red weal grew across the bare skin of his left leg even as he looked at it. Pain spread in its wake, as though he had been burned by ice. He hardened his will, isolating the pain and containing it at the edge of his awareness. His mind could defeat normal pain and heal normal wounds, but neither the mark on his leg nor the pain it brought were normal. Both would take time to heal. He coughed and tasted iron on his tongue. He touched his lips and his fingers came away red.

Close, far too close.

He had pushed too far for too long in the dream sending. In his chest he felt the shards of silver shift and cut a little deeper. The slivers were a remnant of an encounter with the Imperium he had forsaken, an encounter that had almost killed him. The part of his mind that perpetually hardened and healed the flesh around the shards in his chest had faltered as he had tired, and the poisoned slivers of silver had slid a little closer to his hearts. Even now his mind could not touch, feel or grasp them. They were unreachable by his powers. Had they been mundane metal he could have pulled them from his flesh with his will, or could have broken them down into atoms.

But they were not mundane. In fact, every time anyone had tried to remove them by any means they had slipped deeper into his chest. So he had contained them, wrapping them in flesh which hardened and healed as quickly as it was cut. Awake, dreaming, in trance or battle, part of his mind spun on, keeping the silver from his hearts, keeping him alive.

He focused, rebalanced every level and thought process of his mind. His heartbeats slowed. He tasted the blood in his mouth, saw the molecules spinning in its substance. He touched the silver, felt his mind slide away, like water from a sheet of glass. A part of his thoughts became like stone. The bleeding stopped, and the silver shards were still again.

Slowly he let out a breath, tasting its texture and scents. For a long moment he listened to the slow beat of the blood in his ears. A feeling of isolation and spreading calm. For now he was alone, watching the present become the past, allowing the moments to just form and vanish without care. He let the illusion of freedom last for nine double beats of his hearts.

Only then did he turn his inner eye to focus on the thing that he had brought from the dream. It sat in his awareness, a golden thread leading off through the churning storm of space and time. It was tattered by paradox and possibility, but it was enough to lead them true.

Without moving he extended his mind, touched the symbols worked into the walls of the chamber around him, and collapsed their barrier to the world beyond.

A tide of consciousness broke over him.

…it pleases, does it not… nesun’nth’agara… gods of the abyss let me live… what can I do… I will kill them… five thousand at least… I serve… sentun ushur… two by five by ten… in this instance impossible… what is this… how can that be… now will be best… where are we bound… the pillar… where will I get food… it is a good knife… ametrica… magir ushul’tha… what is it to you… sleep… I won’t… death for certain… system subroutine…

Hundreds of thousands of thoughts boiled around him, buffeting his mind like a spiralling wind. It was disconcerting, like plunging into water after years spent in a desert. He allowed them to wash over and through him, listening for meaning formed by their tides. He had been in the dream for longer than he had intended. The Sycorax and its fleet had been still in dead space for almost a month. It did not matter, of course, not given where they were going.

He blanked out the storm of voices, and reached out for a mind that he knew would be waiting for him.

+Astraeos,+ he sent.

+Ahriman,+ answered a thought voice, strong and clear above the clamour.

+We have it. Join me here.+

+As you will.+

The palace began in the distance. Astraeos watched the silver and marble towers rise on the black horizon. Darkness separated him from it, so that it seemed as though he were seeing it through an aperture cut into the wall of a lightless room. Slowly the image grew larger, though whether it was moving closer, or if he floated towards it, he could not tell.

It was not in the distance, of course. The palace was a mental construct, crafted from memory and imagination, and it held the knowledge of many mortal lifetimes. Each corridor and staircase led to a door through which another part of the past could be glimpsed. They were not Astraeos’s memories, though. The palace was part of another mind, Ahriman’s mind. In reality both he and Ahriman sat in a tower chamber, the light of oil lamps casting shadows over their still faces. More and more they met this way, within the architecture of Ahriman’s psyche, rather than in reality.

The Circle, Ahriman’s council which led his army of fractured warbands, met face to face. Ancient signs and formulae kept those gatherings safe from prying eyes or minds. Under the sign of that assembly all spoke with their true voices. He had asked Ahriman why they did not meet the same way. Ahriman had not answered, and left Astraeos to draw his own conclusions.

Even after all this time, walking into his master’s mind still made Astraeos’s skin crawl. High-pitched whispers rose around him. Invisible hands touched and tugged at his skin. He kept walking, holding on to the idea of having limbs, of there being a ground beneath his feet even though he could see none. Technically he could have appeared in any form he chose, but he always came as an image of himself as he was in the real: unarmoured, his skin scarred, and his right eye a glowing green lens in a metal setting. The tabard of red and black cloth he wore was the image of the clothing he had worn long ago in a different life. A sword hung at his waist, its pommel the head of a serpent.

He took another step and suddenly the palace was rising above him. The darkness was gone, replaced by the bright heat of a noon sun in a clear sky. He looked up at the palace walls. They had changed since he had been here last. Towers had grown from the upper wings, and new spire tops shone bright in the sun. Covered bridges of white marble now spanned wings that had been unconnected before. Complex geometric designs in azurite and porphyry winked from roofs and doors. To Astraeos the palace looked like a mass of coral grown in sunlit seawater.

He began to climb the steps. No matter which way he walked in the palace he would reach Ahriman – after all, this was Ahriman’s domain.

Summoned to my master, he thought, and felt a twinge of the old bitterness, but the feeling was tired and the fire it raised weak. It was my choice. No one else made it for me. Ahriman is right, we make our own fate. Even when we think we are bound to another it is a choice to bend the knee to their will.

The dry wind followed him as he passed through the doors and down the first corridors. Sealed doors lined the walls, each door different: some made of riveted metal, some of blank stone, some of etched glass. He passed windows which looked out on plains of sand dunes, spirals of dust rising from their crests in the wind. After only a few turns he had lost the sense of where he was within the palace, whether the windows were the same as he had seen from the outside, or if they looked out on somewhere else. Wooden shutters carved with birds hid the view from some openings, though he occasionally caught glimpses of other landscapes, of cities under red setting suns and lush jungles in twilight. He kept walking, following no path, making choices of which corridor or staircase to take without consideration. At last he emerged from a spiral staircase and found himself on a wide platform of black marble.

Ahriman stood before him. He wore no armour, but his robes were white silk. Tiny ivory amulets in the shapes of animal skulls hung from his shoulders and waist on tapers of blue silk. A table of polished wood and beaten copper stood before him. A stack of crystal cards sat on the table, flicking into different arrangements like leaves turned by a breeze. Ahriman turned to look at Astraeos.

‘I have it,’ he said, without preamble. He held out a hand. A strand of golden light hung in the air above his fingers, coiling and squirming into knots as Astraeos looked at it.

A thread of destiny, Astraeos thought. Plucked from the loom of time.

‘Is it enough?’ he said, stepping closer.

Ahriman gave a brief smile that did not reach his eyes.

‘Almost.’

‘There is no other way?’

Ahriman closed his hand and the strand of light melted into his skin.

‘Many, but all with greater risk.’

‘Tracking an individual’s destiny to one point in the future is not a risk?’

Ahriman turned back to the table. The crystal cards rose into the air before him, forming an orrery of images, each one turning and changing in relation to one another. A king in red looked from the face of one card, his right eye hidden by his hand. A priestess in burning robes glided past, her face changing to a skull as the card moved.

‘Knowledge is power,’ said Ahriman softly. ‘But the greatest knowledge is how to find more. There are too many uncertainties in what we attempt already, introduce more and…’ He extended a finger and tapped a card. It spun away, tumbling wildly end over end. It struck another card. Suddenly the delicately rotating arrangement was tumbling in chaos, collapsing into a fluttering storm of changing images: a blind crone, a man with a wolf’s head, a hunched scribe writing red letters on white parchment. Then two cards hit each other and shattered. Rainbow fragments expanded out, hit other cards, and soon there was just a sphere of bright crystal splinters.

‘I seek the lost book of my father,’ continued Ahriman, ‘penned by the remembrancer Kalimakus, and Inquisitor Iobel knows where it is and how it is protected. For that knowledge we fight a war. Others make the earth their battlefield, or space, but we are doing more – we are making war through time. The person we seek is unique. Perhaps there are others who know what we need, but Iobel is already linked to me, and that link allows us to see the paths she may take in the future. Knowing this we look for the points of intersection in time, the points of certainty. We choose one point and go to find her.’

‘So simple,’ snorted Astraeos. He had learnt many things from Ahriman. He was no longer what he was when he began, but there were things that still remained beyond his understanding. Most of them he had little desire to grasp.

Ahriman gave a sad smile, his eyes suddenly bright.

‘It is both simple and not,’ he said. Beside him the tumbling shards of crystal spun together. A tree of crystal dust grew in the air, reaching into the sky above them. Ahriman continued, his eyes turning to look up at the growing sculpture. ‘To see the future is like looking up at the branches of a tree. From the ground the trunk is visible, but after a while the tree begins to branch. Suddenly something that was one becomes several. Those branches in turn divide again, and again, and again. The further up you look the more the tree branches, the more the lower branches hide those that grow higher still.’

A broad canopy of crystalline foliage hid the sun above the tower now, each leaf a different colour. Astraeos thought he glimpsed the face of the red-robed king, high up and far away, just one shard amongst many.

‘And now we see that the tree is a living thing, its every inch moving between new growth and death. Leaves bud, wither and fall. The tree grows higher, and a wind rises. New branches spread above you. Some branches die, and become dry limbs creaking as they scrape at the sky. Sometimes the wind is just a breath that only stirs the thinnest twigs. Sometimes it is a gale. The tree sways, the branches thrash. And all the while, through every change, every stir of the air, every new growth, you are looking up, seeing the pattern of branches change, glimpsing its heights only to then have them hidden again. We see what is closest most clearly, what is further away perhaps not at all.’

Ahriman stood still, staring up, and then he looked down. The crystalline tree crumbled, glittering leaves falling through the sunlight with a sound like the ringing of a thousand glass bells. The pieces began to spiral as they fell, rotating like a dust devil around the table to coalesce at its centre. The cascade of crystal vanished, and a stack of crystal cards sat on the beaten copper surface of the table.

Ahriman reached down and picked up the topmost card, and held it out towards Astraeos. The priestess in the robes of fire looked out from her crystal prison, her face flickering between skull and flesh.

‘To predict the future is not to try and see one leaf on the tree – it is to see a forest, and find one tree, and on that tree to find one leaf.’

‘Is it even possible?’

Ahriman placed the card back on the pile.

‘It is, but it is not the easiest way to know the future.’

‘What is?’

Astraeos thought he saw something harden in Ahriman’s expression.

‘To destroy every other possibility except the one that will occur.’

Astraeos shivered, despite the heat of the sun.

‘The Athenaeum,’ he said softly. ‘Is it worth it, Ahriman?’

Ahriman looked away, but said nothing.

He has promised salvation to his Legion, thought Astraeos. What else can he do but try to understand what went wrong, to see if there was an error that could have been corrected.

‘There is something I must ask of you.’ Ahriman looked around again. Astraeos held the cold blue gaze.

‘Ask,’ he said.

Ignis stepped from the gloom of the gunship into the bright light of the Sycorax’s hangar bay. He paused at the bottom of the ramp. It had been a long time since he had been on board the ship, and longer still since he had breathed her air or walked her decks. Centuries had passed for him and in that time he knew that he had changed, but it seemed both time and change had touched the Sycorax more deeply. Blooms of verdigris crusted the recesses of plates and rivets. Geometric reliefs in bronze and lapis crawled over the decks and walls. Some of them looked as though they had grown from the ship’s bones. Figures in billowing yellow robes moved on the margins of the hangar, clicking with machine noise. All of them seemed to either be skeletal and tall, or bloated and squat. They were watching him. He could feel their eyes and curiosity prickle his mind.

Ignis began to count and calculate as he watched. The numbers and geometries of this situation were not good, but then what should he expect given what this ship was, and who commanded it? He turned his head, and saw the other craft in the hangar bay. Gunships, assault boats and shuttles of every mark he knew, and several that he did not, lay on the tarnished bronze deck. Groups of warriors hung close to each craft. Most were Space Marines, but each group was as different as the craft that had brought them. There was a warlord and his entourage, their armour glistening with an oily rainbow sheen, their helms curling with crowns of carved horn. There were others shrouded in grey, standing in a perfect circle, hands resting on the hilts of bared swords. There was a cohort in off-white battleplate, the eyepieces of each warrior weeping silver without ceasing. They all noticed him at last. Eyes turned slowly, a few weapons were touched. He watched questions and pride flicker in the auras of each.

And well they might look, Ignis thought. They were the leaders, emissaries, and chosen of the warbands that Ahriman had drawn to him or inherited from Amon’s Brotherhood of Dust. Here they waited to see the sorcerer lord who led them all, but Ahriman had left them like dogs waiting outside a feasting hall. Slighted pride and petty superiority foamed close to the surface of the watching warriors. All of them wanted favour, or fortune, or secrets. Ignis could read the desire in them without having to sense it in their thoughts. Each of them wanted to rise higher in their own schemes, but all believed that only the Thousand Sons could ever hope for Ahriman’s true favour. They hated that, as much as they feared the sorcerers and their Rubricae warriors.

And into this pattern of discord Ignis had walked; a lone figure, a newcomer to the sorcerer lord’s court. He could feel the aggression seeping into the air as his eyes skimmed the vast chamber. Even in his furnace-orange Terminator plate, he was a weakling in their eyes, another lost warrior drawn to the flame of power.

A hulking warrior in pearl-white battleplate broke from a cluster of identically armoured figures. Ignis watched the warrior out of the corner of his eye. He sighed inwardly. It was always going to be like this, and it was only going to get worse. He had not wanted to come, he really had not.

The white-armoured warrior was five strides away now. He had a hook-headed sword in his left hand. Symbols spidered the blade. Ignis wondered if the warrior really knew what they meant, or why they did precisely nothing.

The warrior halted two and seven-eighteenths of its blade length from Ignis. A vein twitched in Ignis’s temple as he noted the imprecision of the distance. He really should not have come.

‘I am Augustonar, first blade of the hundred that serve Iconis of the Broken Gate.’

Ignis let a breath out slowly, but did not look at Augustonar. The warrior tilted his helm, waiting.

‘My lord, whose word lives in eternity, wishes to know your name.’

Ignis flicked his eyes upwards. He could feel familiar minds in the vast structure of the ship, but all of them were distant.

My brothers, he thought. Then he frowned, sending the black electoos on his face into a dance of reforming patterns. Brothers – he had not used that word in a long time.

Augustonar’s voice growled out again.

‘I am Aug–’

‘You are Augustonar, first blade of a mongrel set of traitors, culled from a Legion of credulous scum.’ He looked directly at Augustonar. The warrior’s aura was a red blur of rage. ‘I am sorry – do these facts offend?’

Augustonar lunged forwards.

Credence came out of the dark hold of the gunship behind Ignis with a thump of extending pistons. The automaton made the deck in a single stride, weapons arming as it straightened to its full height. The orange lacquer of its body plating gleamed in the stablights. Geometric patterns etched down to the black metal spiralled across its every inch in lines no thicker than a blade edge. It was an echo of the colour and marks on Ignis’s own Terminator armour; not identical, of course, never that.

Credence hit Augustonar across the shoulder with a machine-clamp hand. The warrior lifted from the deck and slammed down ten paces away.

Ignis watched Augustonar try to rise.

The automaton coughed a stream of machine code.

‘No, the threat still seems to be present,’ said Ignis.

Behind Augustonar, the rest of the white-armoured warriors surged forwards. The cannon on Credence’s back rotated towards them.

Ignis closed his eyes. It was inevitable that it would come to this; the patterns and alignments would not allow for anything else.

+Enough!+ The telepathic shout snapped Ignis’s eyes open. He was in time to see the first three white warriors fall, the weapons of each tumbling from their hands. The rest halted.

A figure stood in front of Ignis. His armour was the blue of a sea beneath a noon sun. He had a sword in each hand, one sheathed in a crackling power field, the other in pale ghost light. Two jackal heads snarled in opposite directions from the high crest of his helm, and when he turned to look over his shoulder at Ignis the blank silver of his faceplate glinted beneath green eyepieces.

Ignis met the stare, feeling surprise roll through his mind. Credence rotated towards him, and clattered a query.

‘No,’ said Ignis. He paused, as he tried to select words. ‘No, it is not… a threat.’

The swordsman glanced back at the white-armoured warriors, who were backing away.

+Sanakht,+ sent Ignis. Credence clattered as the swordsman stepped closer. Ignis could see Sanakht’s aura harden with control, but there was something wrong with it, as though it was a flame cast by a broken lamp. +It has been a long time.+

Sanakht just stared at him, then turned away. +Not long enough perhaps,+ sent Ignis as Sanakht strode away across the deck.

Credence’s gun mount tilted upwards with a hiss of releasing pistons. The automaton gave a low rattle of questioning binaric.

‘That,’ said Ignis carefully, ‘is the first of my brothers I have seen in eight hundred years.’

Sanakht sheathed his swords as he walked from the hangar deck. The power sword with the hawk pommel went across his left hip close to his right hand, the jackal-capped force sword across his right. His fingers tingled as he broke the connection to the blade’s psychoactive core. Around him slaves, servitors and machine-wrights made way and lowered their gazes. He felt the breath held unreleased in his lungs.

Ignis had seen the weakness in him; it had been there, clear in the bastard’s eyes.

He had last seen Ignis on the Planet of the Sorcerers, staring at the circle of Ahriman’s surviving cabal from the cordon of those who had not been part of the Rubric conspiracy. Sanakht could remember looking between eyes filled with shock and anger, and amongst those looks there had been Ignis’s cold gaze. The Master of Ruin had not looked shocked, merely curious. Sanakht had been barely conscious, his broken soul leaking strength into the aether, but that cold, calculating stare had penetrated into his awareness, and had followed him through the centuries.

You are crippled, it had said. You are nothing.

Sanakht let out his held breath, and pushed his mind out into the aether. Behind the mirror plate of his helm, his face twitched at the effort.

+He is here,+ he sent.

+Alone?+ It was Astraeos who answered, the sending thick with raw power. Sanakht blinked. So Ahriman was still secluded.

+Yes, apart from an automaton bodyguard.+

+You are escorting him to the citadel?+

+He can make his own way,+ snapped Sanakht. +He is here. That is enough.+ He broke the mental link. A mote of pain pulsed at the corner of his eyes. He shook himself, careful to make sure that his discomfort did not show. All use of his abilities took effort. What once would have been like breathing to him, was now a matter of deliberate focus.

Why had Ahriman brought Ignis, one-time Master of the Order of Ruin, to him? The question pulsed in Sanakht’s mind as he ascended back up through the Sycorax’s decks. The Order of Ruin had been the masters of the sacred numerology of destruction in the old, long dead structure of the Thousand Sons. By their arts the Legion had levelled cities, arrayed armies for sieges, and determined patterns of attack. They had always been a strange breed, and Ignis more so than any. He had not been part of Ahriman’s cabal, nor part of Amon’s Brotherhood of Dust, but he had also left the thrall of Magnus. He was an outcast by his own choosing, a breaker of fortresses and worlds with no loyalty to anything. Yet here he was, called by Ahriman to stand with them in whatever was to come.

And where are we going that we need his kind? wondered Sanakht.

Kadin looked up into the daemon’s shark grin.

‘Can you hear me, brother?’ he said. The daemon hissed, and stirred in its web of chains. Kadin took a step back, his mechanical legs squealing as they cracked the ice from their joints. The chamber was small. White frost covered the silver of its eighty-one walls, ceilings, and floors. The glow of the sigils cut into every surface diluted the dark. The daemon hung at the chamber’s centre. Its flesh was moon white. The body of a Space Marine, which was now the creature’s host and prison, could still be glimpsed in its form, but only just. Its hands were sharp cradles of bone, and black quills had pushed from the skin of its torso. It looked at Kadin with eyes of glistening night.

‘I…’ began Kadin again, but the rest of the words drained from his mouth. He did not like coming here; it made him feel something he did not understand. However, he came anyway. The thing hanging in the chamber was not his brother any more, though it was as a brother that he talked to the creature. Cadar had died on the Titan Child many years ago, and even if a spark of his life had survived, the daemon bound into his flesh would have consumed it. At least that was what Ahriman said. Kadin hoped he was right. ‘We are still waiting,’ he said at last. ‘The fleet is ill at ease. Ahriman has said nothing of what he is doing, or where we will go next, or when. Astraeos and the rest of the Circle hold things together, but…’ He paused again. The daemon’s head had twitched around at the mention of Astraeos’s name. Its chains clinked, as though it had tensed against their grip. Kadin licked his lips.

He should not have mentioned Astraeos. That had been a mistake. The daemon was bound here because it could not be allowed free and it could not be destroyed. It was a creature of raw hunger, but it was strong. Astraeos had bound the creature to him to help save Ahriman, and the two remained linked. Astraeos had never called on the daemon again, but as long as Astraeos lived so the daemon had to remain shackled. Kadin himself had shunned the daemon’s cage for years, but recently he had felt himself drawn to it, and so he had come once, and then again, and again. He came and talked to his dead brother.

‘I can’t remember the home world any more,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t even remember how it was destroyed. What does that mean, Cadar?’ He shook his head, and a double set of eyelids closed over his eyes. ‘I think I used to be able to remember before the dead station, before… I was changed. But sometimes I am not sure. Does that matter, brother? Does it even mean anything?’

He shook his head, and turned towards the silver door out of the chamber. The daemon hissed behind him. Kadin raised his machine hand and tapped the door. The sigils flared, and he felt heat itch around his skull. Then the sigils dimmed and the door opened. He paused, one foot on the other side of the threshold.

‘It’s going to get bad,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know why, but I think it’s going to get very bad.’ The daemon remained silent. Kadin nodded to himself, eyelids briefly closing over his green, slitted eyes. He stepped from the room and the silver door sealed behind him.

Maroth waited for him in the passage beyond. The broken and blind sorcerer was crouched on the floor, the tatters of his robes hanging over his dented armour. He raised his head as the door sealed.

‘The answers of silence are pleasing?’ chuckled Maroth. His hound-shaped helm tilted up as though to emphasise the question. Kadin did not bother to look at him or reply. Maroth always followed Kadin when he visited the daemon in its gaol, as though he liked to be close to it even if he was never allowed to see it.

Kadin walked away from the silver door. His vox-link popped and crackled back into life as the door receded into darkness behind him; things were happening. It was as though the whole fleet had woken from sleep while he was not looking.

‘The war on fate, it is beginning, is it not, yes?’ breathed Maroth, as he scrambled to follow.

‘Yes,’ said Kadin. ‘Yes, I am afraid it is.’

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First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover illustration by Fares Maese.
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