More Chaos Space Marines from Black Library

• AHRIMAN •
Book 1: AHRIMAN: EXILE

Book 2: AHRIMAN: SORCERER

THE TALON OF HORUS
A Warhammer 40,000 novel

NIGHT LORDS: THE OMNIBUS
Contains the novels Soul Hunter, Blood Reaver and Void Stalker

THRONE OF LIES
A Warhammer 40,000 audio drama

KHARN: EATER OF WORLDS
A Warhammer 40,000 novel

CHOSEN OF KHORNE
A Warhammer 40,000 audio drama

WORD BEARERS: THE OMNIBUS
Contains the novels Dark Apostle, Dark Disciple and Dark Creed

STORM OF IRON
A Warhammer 40,000 novel

IRON WARRIOR
A Warhammer 40,000 novella

SIEGE OF CASTELLAX
A Warhammer 40,000 novel

CRIMSON DAWN
A Warhammer 40,000 Quick Read

DARK VENGEANCE
A Warhammer 40,000 novella

PERFECTION
A Warhammer 40,000 audio drama

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

‘The past is not ours to own. We think, because we can remember it, that it belongs to us, that we can go back to it, that we are the same person who lived those moments, breathed that air, and made those choices.

We are not the same.

We are a stranger living with memories that belong to someone else.

And the past belongs to itself.’

– Kallista Eris, from manuscript notes on
the development of history, suppressed

Prologue

Ahriman closed the book. Silence washed around him as the voices of his thoughts and memories faded. The dwindling light of candle flames greeted him when he raised his eyes. The sigils and lines drawn on the floor and walls whispered as his mind brushed them. The chamber was small, barely a cell. There was only one door, a rust-scabbed hatch with a wheel handle. He sat on the floor, legs crossed, back straight, white robe stained with sweat. Symbols spiralled out from him. The metal glinted when the flame light sputtered. Both candles had nearly burned out, and clods of wax hung from the base of their floating suspensor discs. He had entered the room for the last time eighty-one hours before, and once he left he would not return. For him this room, and the time within it, would never be repeated.

He blinked slowly, and ran a hand across his scalp.

‘So,’ he said at last. ‘That is it. That is the answer.’ The words sounded redundant as soon as he spoke them, but he had felt the need to say something. He needed to mark this moment somehow.

He looked down at the closed book sitting on the low table in front of him. It was as thick as the width of his palm. The binding was tanned hide stained black. The pages within were sheets of reed pulp, pressed, dried and cut to size. Soot and water had made the ink he had used to write every word and draw every symbol on those pages. The stains still clung to the fingers of his right hand.

As an object the book was a simple thing, devoid of high artistry or flourish. It was just what it needed to be. He felt a tug of resentment at the journey that it represented. It had taken months to fill its pages. Every step had taken long hours of listening to the Athenaeum babble its stream of revelation, and then weeks of analysis, composition and deduction. Those steps had taken place across the leaves of the book before him.

Others would call it a grimoire, but it was not. It was a mystery unravelled piece by piece, page by page, mark by mark. He had not known what the end would be when he had begun. He had not known even if there would be an end. There had been, though. He had reached an answer at last.

‘I should have known,’ he said.

He raised his hands and rubbed his eyes. In his chest, shards of silver shifted closer to his hearts as they beat on.

The Rubric… The word turned in his skull.

‘Such a small and a great thing to have missed the first time.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘And no one can know. Not until the end. Trust… that was my mistake. Let them know some but not all. Let them wonder until it is too late.’

He paused, and let the spoken words hang as a taste on his tongue.

‘Let it be done,’ he said to the silence, and then stood and walked to the door. The book remained on the low table. Shielding barriers in the warp snapped as he broke the room’s protective charms with a thought. Awareness of the ship and the minds within it reached out to him, like welcoming hands. His senses became whole again.

A simple thought formed in his mind and kindled in the warp. Flames leapt up from the book, blazing from red to blue heat in a second. Ash fountained into the air, and settled on his skin in a grey film.

Ahriman pulled the door open, and stepped through without looking back.

I
Sorcerers

+I am not here to break you,+ sent the Oathtaker, as he took another step closer to the lone figure at the chamber’s centre. Lightning flashed outside the ragged hole in the wall. The air was rancid, laden with the musk of rotting vegetation and stagnating water. +I am here because I need you, Memunim. I am here to accept your service.+

The Oathtaker stepped closer again. The polished bronze of his armour drank the gloom from the air, making him a shadow amongst shadows. The blue and green stones clasped in feathers and claws were also dark, as though they were eyes which had closed. Only the bright sapphire set in the blank faceplate of his helm shone. Its light was blue, and cold, and unwavering. His silver staff tapped out each step, the sound low yet clear even over the noise of distant battle and thunder.

Another flash of lightning, then another, the booms echoing in the space and the light showing the foetid land far below. Looking out from the hole in the wall it seemed that the chamber was high within a tower. It was not a tower, though; it was a ship. Its aft was buried in the swamp, its prow was a rusting minaret of armour and gun batteries. Fungus had bloomed across its bulk, swallowing kilometres of buttresses. Its spine was twisted so that it resembled a crooked finger beckoning to the grey clouds. Vast and rooting and all but deserted.

+I am your master now, sorcerer,+ sent the Oathtaker.

Memunim swayed and then caught himself. The high crest of his helm was an echo of the traditions of Prospero, but it was a dim resemblance. Carved serpents crawled over the crest and the faceplate twisted with teeth and crystal eyes. His robes were tattered, and still smouldering at the edges. The blood was concealed under the armour plates, but it was there, leaking from wounds and mouth. He was in a lot of pain.

+I will not submit to you,+ hissed Memunim.

+But you will,+ said the Oathtaker. +You are strong. You are strong, and you have honour. But not enough of either, and not enough to match the hate you try to drown in blood.+

A wall of force struck the Oathtaker without warning. One instant the warp had been still and the next it had become a blunt hammer. His will rose to meet it, but almost too late. He staggered. Splinters of light tumbled in the air. Memunim struck again, with a grunt of pain and effort.

The Oathtaker was ready this time. His mind met the wave of power with equal force for an instant, and then it collapsed into a single sharp point. The wave shattered. Actinic light exploded outwards. A note hung in the air, vibrating through bones, teeth and eyes. Behind the single eye of his helm, the Oathtaker tasted hot metal and burning hair. He lowered the staff, his shoulders relaxing. Memunim had fallen to the floor.

The Oathtaker crossed the last few steps, and looked down.

+You were born on the slopes of the Cattabar Mountains above Tizca,+ sent the Oathtaker, his thought voice calm. +The sun’s first light would rise above the sea and wake you before the rest of the house. Sometimes you would get up and go to sit on the ledge of your window and watch the sun march across Tizca. The wind from the sea would smell of salt and the dew mingling with dust. When the Legion–+

+Who are you?+ Anger bled from Memunim’s aura, coiling red and sharp black.

+When the Legion came for you, a rare storm had come across the mountains and rain danced on the stones of the streets and on the faces of the pyramids.+

Memunim was shaking.

+You cannot know–+

+Your mother was proud,+ the Oathtaker’s sending sliced on as he took another step forwards. +But your father did not want you to go. “How can I let him go?” he asked. “How can a father let his son walk into such a future?” You said–+

+How can you know?+ The thought was a roar of confusion and rage.

+You said that it was everything that you wanted. That he should be proud.+

The Oathtaker took another step and halted. Memunim’s aura was contracting, hardening. The Oathtaker inclined his head a fraction. The crystal eye in his helm was a cold blue star.

+Your birth father died ten years later, and he never saw you again. He never saw his world burn for the Legion he gave his son to, he never saw what you became.+

The roar split the warp. A creature rose from Memunim. In the Oathtaker’s sight it was a winged serpent made of red light and silver reflections. It was a thought form, a construct of will and power flung from the body of a psyker into the raw energy of the warp. It was power unshackled by flesh and matter, a shadow cast by the soul’s light, and it was utterly and completely dangerous. It dived at the Oathtaker.

+Now,+ sent the Oathtaker. The thought form was almost on him, its mouth a wide slit of fire and daggers. He stared back at it.

A flat boom of silence filled the chamber. Two shapes sketched in starlight fell on Memunim’s thought form and ripped it from the warp. Frost flashed across the chamber’s floor and ceiling, then exploded into black flame. Memunim was on his knees. Blood oozed from the seals of his helm. He was alive, though. The Oathtaker watched the pain pulse and fracture in Memunim’s mind.

He turned his head and looked at the figures who had stepped into being from nowhere. The sapphire scales of Zurcos’s battleplate scattered the dim light as he drifted forwards, his robes of rags and tatters dancing to an invisible wind. Calitiedies came more slowly, his sceptre lit with chained fire, his bolter drawn. Fatigue from manifesting thought forms pulsed in their auras. Nine Rubricae walked behind them, their red and bone armour smoking from their transition into reality.

+He is ready?+ asked Zurcos, his thought voice a hiss of static and dry sand.

The Oathtaker looked at Memunim still trying to find the strength to rise.

+Yes.+

+Has he sworn it?+ asked Calitiedies.

The Oathtaker did not reply, but extended a hand, palm upwards, fingers open. Memunim rose into the air. His mind and will struggled, until the Oathtaker tightened his grip. Memunim’s helmet released and floated free with a series of clicks and a hiss of pressure. Burn scars and stitch marks covered the face beneath. Half-clotted blood ran from his eyes, mouth, and ears.

+No one…+ began Memunim. +No one could know such things about me.+

+But I do. I know you better than the birth father who never saw you become a warrior. You are strong but you are weak. You wonder what happened to the dream which led you here, and you look at yourself and see a creature clinging to the shadows, and keeping the company of crows. You want to be more again but cannot see how. You want to follow the light, not survive in the shadows.+ Memunim turned his head. The Oathtaker met his flickering gaze. +I know you, Memunim, and because of that I know that you will give me what I came here for.+

+…service…+ Memunim’s thought was a blur of fading consciousness.

Zurcos laughed. The sound joined the distant noise of gunfire and battle, from far down at the tower’s foot.

+I will give you more than you can dream. From you I will take the only thing that matters: your oath.+

The silence in the chamber was complete. Even the warp hushed to a low sway of potential.

+You asked who I am,+ sent the Oathtaker as he stepped forward. His will twitched and his own helm slid from his head. He was close enough that he could see his own face in Memunim’s suddenly wide eyes: a face of smooth skin without scar or expression, a mouth set in a hard line, and above that mouth a pair of eyes which were not eyes at all. Twin pools of fire looked out at him from the reflection. He leaned forwards, feeling Memunim’s mind recoil from his proximity.

‘My name,’ he said, and the sound of his true voice made the sorcerer flinch with surprise. ‘My name is Astraeos.’

The whispers of daemons followed Ctesias from his sleep. He rubbed the wrinkled skin of his face, and spat. He could taste ash and sugar on his tongue, never a good sign. He picked the silver goblet up from the arm of the stone throne and drank the wine within in a single gulp. It did not help. The sweet burning taste was still in his mouth and would be for hours, and the whispers would take even longer to fade.

He stood slowly, joints cracking as they straightened. New knots had formed in his remaining muscles while he slept.

Slept. The thought almost made him laugh. He never slept unless he could help it, and when he did he never dreamed.

He looked at the armour hanging on the wall frame opposite the throne. Brass conduits linked it to slabs of machinery behind the walls, feeding its power cells and systems. His staff hung beside the armour, parchment and dried strips of skin hanging from it.

He stepped from the throne to the dais beneath it. His legs trembled as they transferred his weight, and the ash and sugar taste almost began a stream of bile from his stomachs.

He glanced at the armour, and then at the twelve paces of stone paving separating him from it. He closed his eyes.

‘This is really not worth the trouble,’ he sighed, and flicked his fingers. Codes of force pulled the armour and staff from the wall. Cables disconnected and it spun up and into the air. Ctesias raised his thin arms as though waiting for an embrace. The armour slotted over him piece by piece. His staff came to his hand last of all. It cackled as his fingers closed over it. The faces cast into its cold iron and silver length twisted and grinned at him. He ignored it, focusing instead on the feeling of strength the armour gave him.

In truth he was not weak, at least not in mortal terms. He could break a human’s arm with a single blow, and fight for days without feeling true fatigue. Strength was relative, though, and for a warrior of the Thousand Sons, he was a withered, almost broken creature. At least in body. His mind was another matter.

He rolled his shoulders and listened to the fibre bundles purr as they followed the movement. It felt reassuring. Whenever he had to move around the Word of Hermes, or any of the other ships of Ahriman’s small fleet, he preferred to do so encased in war-plate. Gilgamos, Kiu, Gaumata and the others of Ahriman’s inner circle often wore robes when battle was not imminent. Ignis did not, of course, and was rarely seen out of his fire-orange Terminator plate. Ctesias grinned at the thought that of all his Legion brothers, he shared a point of concordance with the Master of Ruin.

He did not resent his own weakness. It had been his choice, one of the many things he had spent to learn the names of the daemons which now sat in his memory waiting for him to set them free. That knowledge was greater than the strength of muscle and bone. Yet, even so, he preferred to go amongst his brothers with his armour to fill the space that wasted flesh had left in his bearing. Everything had a price, and he had never been blind to that fact. He served Ahriman for the same reason that the knowledge he bore had cost him in body and soul; it was a price for a reward, or a penance for a past misdeed. As with everything, it depended on how you looked at it.

He nodded to himself and licked his lips. It would be soon. Ahriman would call them soon, and then… and then he would have to perform his function.

‘And then what?’ he said aloud to himself, and listened to the dry rasp of his own voice. ‘What will Ahriman do with you once he is done?’

He shook his head. The question had no useful answer, and he did not have time. He wanted to go to the Athenaeum again before the summons came.

With a creak of muscles and a whir of armour he walked from his chamber.

+Helio Isidorus,+ sent Ahriman. A pulse of will as delicate as a silk thread ran through the name. The Rubricae remained on the iron dais, the blue armour a dead weight, the light in its eyes gone. Ahriman waited, allowing his own mind a measure of rest.

Patience is the first virtue of wisdom, he thought to himself.

Still the Rubricae did not move. The bowls of flame above the altar were drinking the last of their oil. The warp had settled back into its wild flow, shaking off the order he had imposed. The symbols which had flowed across the Rubricae’s armour like leaves on water had sunk back beneath its surface.

He refocused his mind, letting the quiet of the chamber seep into him. The space was one of the Word of Hermes’s smaller forges. Vast crucibles and pneumatic hammers lurked in the shadows nearby, silent and cold. The altar he had used was in fact an anvil slab. On its smooth top metals were once beaten to sheets, and weapons given their shape. It had served his needs, though.

+Helio Isidorus,+ he called again.

Light grew in the Rubricae’s eyes. Ahriman breathed, and pulled again with his will.

The Rubricae rose from the dais. It shed motes of silver light as it moved. It straightened, and turned its crystal eyes on Ahriman. He heard a voice too distant to understand, but loud enough to hear. For a moment he thought it was calling his name.

A door clanked open behind him, and the buzz of servos driving heavy armour stole the silence.

+A success?+ sent Ignis, and Ahriman’s mind filled with a sensation of hard edges and ticking cogwork.

+A success,+ answered Ahriman without turning.

Ignis stalked into the chamber, his automaton bodyguard clanking in his wake. The machine was called Credence, and it followed Ignis everywhere.

Helio Isidorus twitched at the approaching pair, and then moved with sudden speed, picking up and aiming a boltgun before Ahriman’s will froze it in place. Credence had raised its own fists. The gun on its back armed with a metal cough.

‘Hold!’ snapped Ignis, and the automaton became still. For a second the two guardians faced each other, weapons readied. ‘Desist,’ said Ignis. Ahriman pulsed his will to Helio Isidorus. The Rubricae lowered its boltgun, and shifted back into utterly still readiness.

+That Rubricae seems unusually aggressive,+ sent Ignis, as he crossed the last distance to Ahriman’s side.

+His name is Helio Isidorus,+ replied Ahriman. +You should remember him. He shared three campaigns with you.+

+I try not to remember the dead. It is a waste of thought.+

Helio Isidorus moved back, and settled into statue-like stillness.

Ignis stepped up to the altar, and extended a silvered talon from his left gauntlet. He tapped the altar. The talon blade rang with a high, clear note.

+You learned what you needed from this latest dissection?+

Dissection. Ahriman felt a pulse of anger at the word, but suppressed it. In Ignis’s literal universe of symbolic resonance and numerology, what better word was there for what Ahriman had done? He had forced Helio Isidorus’s spirit down, and down, until it was a murmur in a dead shell of armour. Then he had pulled the power that animated the suit to the surface and examined it like a chirurgeon teasing through intestines. He had done it before. Hundreds of times before. He did not like it, but the Rubricae returned to their normal state once he had finished. Yes, dissection was as good a name for it as any. He just did not like the word’s callous edge.

Ahriman swallowed the taste of anger. He was always more prone to emotion after these rituals.

+It will not be done again. I have learned and confirmed all that is needed.+

+For the second Rubric,+ stated Ignis.

+Yes,+ replied Ahriman, and felt his thoughts pause. Something was not right. Ignis was a creature of straight lines and measured paths, but his presence and the shape of his thoughts were disrupted, as though they were following unfamiliar patterns.

+Will it work?+ asked Ignis, turning to look directly at Ahriman.

+The Rubric?+

+Yes.+

Ahriman nodded slowly.

+Of course, you were not one of us when I… when the Cabal cast the Rubric for the first time. You did not see the steps to its conclusion. You only saw the result.+

+Am I one of you now?+

+Do you care how I answer?+

+No.+

Ahriman watched Ignis’s utterly still features as the electoos blurred across them.

What must it be for such a mind as his to have doubt?

He nodded slowly.

+It will not be the same as the first Rubric,+ he sent carefully. +The subject is the same. The outcome is the same that we originally intended, but it will not be the same. Too much has changed.+

He blinked, and felt a wave of fatigue pull at his thoughts. Perhaps the ritual had taken more out of him than he had realised? He felt his fingertips begin to tremble. Pain licked his hearts, and he tasted silver. His hand went to his chest before he realised it was moving. He thought of the sharp shards of silver slowly eating into his hearts whenever his focus slipped from keeping them locked in place. The shards had come from a bolt-round fired by an inquisitor called Iobel, and they remained with him, unable to be removed by surgery or sorcery.

No, he thought. Not yet. Not yet. His will hardened, and the pain in his chest faded. He could still taste silver when he looked back up.

Ignis was watching him, silent and unmoving.

+I knew less when I cast it the first time.+ He paused his thoughts as he dabbed at the blood on his lips. A bitter smile twitched his mouth as his fingers came away marked red. +The power I wielded then was… naïve. And the curse on our Legion was more straightforward. Our brothers were flesh – drowning in mutation, but flesh nonetheless. Now we are dealing with spirit, and dust, and echoes of being. The cure cannot be exactly the same because the point we start from is not the same. And there are other considerations.+

He gestured to Ignis, and then at the ship and everything beyond it. +We are fewer than the Cabal were, and now we will have to enact it while fighting a battle against Magnus and our brothers that serve him.+ He paused, his own thoughts turning through all the possibilities, uncertainties, and factors. Complexity branched into paradox, and slid out of sight into a grey haze. He sighed. +What we will cast will be the Rubric because it is grown of the same seed, and has the same purpose, but it is a sibling to the first, not its child.+

Ignis waited for nine seconds, then tilted his head, and blinked once.

+A very precise answer…+ he began.

+…to a different question,+ finished Ahriman. +I am aware of both the question you asked and the answer I have given, Ignis.+ He turned away, gestured with a strand of will, and the last flames vanished in the bowls of oil. Cold shadows suddenly lay on the empty altar.

+I created the first Rubric from the work of Magnus,+ he sent. +I remember its every detail. I have gone back to the root of his work. I have looked into his knowledge and thoughts as they come from the Athenaeum. I have found the flaws in the original work, and created solutions for each. I have examined the nature of what happened to us and our brothers. I have rebuilt it, and then done it again and again. It will work, because this time it is built on knowledge that was not there before. It is flawless.+

+But untested?+

+It cannot be tested. To test it is to enact it, and to do that requires more than power. Every factor must be perfect. For that we need to go back to where the first Rubric was cast, and we need the power of a storm so great that it will scar the warp. We need to be at the foot of Magnus’s throne, in the dust of that world. Then, and only then, can we do this, only then will it work.+

+I know the alignments required.+

Ahriman nodded.

+I have never thanked you, Ignis,+ he said, and let a tired smile rise across his face. +For joining me in this, for all that you have done.+

+Flattery.+

+No. Sincerity.+

Ignis shook his head.

+I came to you when you needed someone who could progress your designs. I know the value of an outsider, someone whom no one else either likes or trusts. That value is high for one such as you.+

Ignis’s aura and thoughts had not shifted as he spoke. It was not a challenge, just a blunt statement of what he saw as fact.

This undertaking is not a quest for him, thought Ahriman. It is a problem. That is what holds him to me, not the goal, but the challenge and beauty of its… shape. At least that is what most of him believes.

+I know you do not share the dream, Ignis, but that does not stop you being a part of it.+

The Master of Ruin nodded, and the tattoos on his face became still.

+Just as Sanakht is now a part of it.+

Ahriman’s skin prickled, and he thought of the swordsman, so loyal for so long. Madness and bitterness had curdled that loyalty to betrayal. Ahriman had punished him by making him the living vessel for the Athenaeum of Kalimakus. In his mind he saw the fire of the Athenaeum flare as he thrust Sanakht into its embrace. Now he sat in the Chamber of Cages and spoke the secret thoughts of Magnus the Red. Only Ignis knew that Sanakht had not given himself to that fate willingly.

+Yes, he has played his part. He is gone, but mortality is not a span of time, it is a wave passing through the ocean of existence, and that does not end when our lives end.+

+Poetic,+ sent Ignis. +I never liked poetry.+

Ahriman moved, towards a door out of the chamber and his next task.

+We have a problem,+ sent Ignis, before Ahriman could take more than two steps.

+Yes?+ he said, and turned. The tiredness in his blood and bones felt suddenly fresh and insistent.

+With the Athenaeum,+ sent Ignis, and the lines across his face twitched. +And Ctesias.+ Ahriman waited. +He is suspicious,+ Ignis continued. +He seems to have become fixated on the Athenaeum. He spends all of the hours he is not muttering to the neverborn in the Chamber of Cages.+

+It was always a risk.+

Ignis raised an eyebrow.

+If he realises that Sanakht did not go willingly to the fire?+

+None of the others can know what was done,+ sent Ahriman, and began to walk to the door. He could still taste silver. That was not good.

+That is the second answer you have avoided giving me,+ called Ignis.

+The second?+ replied Ahriman without stopping.

+You intend to cast the Rubric for a second time. How can you be sure it will work?+

Ahriman paused, swallowing the taste of metal.

+It will work,+ he sent at last, and started walking again. +I am certain.+

II
Spoken and Unspoken

‘…rise… I cannot see…’

The voice droned on, each word flat and emotionless.

‘…war is coming with him…’

Ctesias listened and let the words roll over him without letting their meaning touch his thoughts. It was better that way. On reflection he would have preferred to be anywhere else. But he had chosen to come. So he stood and listened without listening.

‘…destruction is change…’

He shifted his weight and felt his armour creak in sympathy with his bones as he moved. His face was closer to skull than flesh, and inked sigils spidered his brow, cheeks, and neck beneath a spill of white hair. When he breathed he could hear the click of cartilage in his chest. He felt his nerves ache and the tremor in his fingers. The room and the caged thing at its centre had that effect on him, but also drew him here again and again.

‘…ashes are the cradle of the future…’

The space where he stood had become known as the Chamber of Cages. Its walls formed a cylinder of adamantium that Ctesias could cross in twelve strides. Its roof was a distant shadow. The floor was a single hatch closed by an iris of pitted metal. The only other way in and out was the small door set into the wall just behind where Ctesias stood. It had been a store for a torpedo warhead, but now it was a prison. A sphere of silver struts hung in the air at the chamber’s centre, and within that three more spheres, each smaller and more intricate. Blue tongues of flame lapped over the cages, filling the chamber with ripples of light. It felt like looking up at the sun from beneath the surface of an ocean.

‘…what would you tell him…?’

Ctesias tried to look at the body in the cages as little as possible. It was human, but magnified in stature and then redrawn by delirium. Its features jumped between the human and the monstrous, like pages of drawings flicked until they blurred together: a head of a bird, horns, scales, feathers, tails, fire, thorns, dry leaves, dead eyes, claws, fangs, bubbles of skin, ruby eyes, smoke and heat haze, a young warrior with hope and sorrow in his eyes.

‘Ctesias?’

His name brought Ctesias’s eyes up suddenly. The figure in the cage was not a blur of images any more and his voice sounded alive, and confused, and terrified. ‘Ctesias. Where am I? What is happening?’

Ctesias swallowed. He had never liked Sanakht. No, that was not right; he had loathed the swordsman with an intensity that he reserved for only one other amongst his Legion brothers. But what Sanakht had become, what he had done to himself, sent echoes of emotions through Ctesias that he could not puzzle out.

‘You…’ he began. In the chamber he had to use his mundane voice, and as the word formed he found his mouth dry. ‘You are with us, Sanakht. You are with your brothers, on a ship.’

‘I… cannot remember. I cannot remember…’

‘You…’ he began again, then paused. Why was he speaking to the thing in the cage? He shook his head. ‘You gave yourself to the fire of knowledge, brother. You took on the burden of being the voice of the Athenaeum. The warp speaks through you now. You see and tell our father’s thoughts and all he knows and sees.’

‘I cannot remember…’ The figure in the cage shook its head, blinking. He looked just as Sanakht had done when he lived, before he had gone down to the moon of Apollonia with Ahriman, before he had become a conduit through which the secrets of Magnus poured like water from a cracked chalice.

‘You will not remember,’ said Ctesias carefully. He did not know why he was talking. There was no use to it. Sanakht was gone; what was speaking to him now was just an impression left by what had been. He licked his lips. ‘There is nothing for you to remember.’

The figure – who looked so real and so alive – shivered.

‘Fire.’ He was suddenly breathing hard, eyes darting around him, blindly, panicked. ‘I can feel fire, Ctesias.’

Ctesias found himself taking a step towards the cage.

‘I cannot see,’ said the figure.

‘This is not real, brother. You are gone. You are feeling nothing.’

‘I cannot see you,’ said Sanakht, his voice ringing with confusion and agony. ‘What is happening? Please. What is happening? I–’ His voice stopped, but his mouth kept fighting to form words, and then words vomited from him, spilling out in red smoke as his skin and flesh blinked to flakes of ash. ‘I can see its shadow but not its shape. Help me. He is coming and war is coming with him. Please brother you were the best of my sons is revenge enough payment for the loss of salvation…’

‘Sanakht?’

The flow of words stopped and his eyes fastened on Ctesias. They were wide with terror and shock. Around them his form bubbled through every shape of nightmare.

‘I…’

Sanakht’s mouth forced the words out as his body twisted and flowed.

‘…am…’

Sanakht pressed against the silver bars of the inner cage. Blue fire crawled over his writhing flesh.

‘…burning.’

‘Sanakht!’ Ctesias shouted, but the figure in the cage had slumped back, its head lolling to its chest. Ctesias was breathing hard. His blood was hammering through his withered flesh. ‘Sanakht?’ he called, but a drone of endless words was the only reply.

‘He still speaks.’

Ctesias turned at the sound of the voice. He had missed the sound of the hatch opening. Ignis stepped through, his armour buzzing as he moved. Credence loomed just beyond the door, lacquered orange plates flexing as though the automaton was unhappy at not being able to enter.

‘Yes,’ said Ctesias. ‘He still speaks.’

‘I was voicing a statement,’ said Ignis, his tone flat. ‘The fact that the Athenaeum is still speaking is manifestly obvious. There was no need for you to confirm it.’

Ctesias closed his eyes and let out a slow breath.

‘Then why say anything?’

‘No other conversational opening presented itself.’ Ignis looked up at the layered cages holding the figure of what had once been Sanakht. ‘Your bindings still hold.’

‘Another statement rather than a question?’ sighed Ctesias.

‘Correct.’ Ignis glanced at Ctesias. His face remained impassive but the patterns of his tattoos realigned. ‘You look like there is something that has disturbed you. That is not like you, Ctesias. Is your shrivelled soul unsettled by something?’

Ctesias gave a single shake of his head.

‘I have no soul.’

‘That I can believe,’ said Ignis, and glanced up at the cage and the voice of the Athenaeum. He looked like he was about to say something, but Ctesias cut him off.

‘I was surprised that he did it,’ said Ctesias. ‘Sanakht was always loyal to Ahriman, but he also followed Amon against him. For him to then give himself, for him to become this conduit so that Ahriman could take Magnus’s secrets… That is a contradiction, don’t you think?’

Ignis shrugged.

‘He did just that, though. That is answer enough.’ He looked back to Ctesias. ‘Things change. People change.’

‘Yes, they do,’ said Ctesias, then shivered and turned his back on the cage. ‘How long until we translate back into the storm?’

‘A day, two at the most. The Navigator needs rest.’

‘That almost sounded compassionate.’

‘The Navigator asked for rest, and Ahriman agreed.’

‘I knew it could not be from your kindness,’ said Ctesias, a cold grin forming on his face. Ignis did not smile back. Ctesias reflected that he would have been more worried if the Master of Ruin had returned the gesture.

The silence returned and stretched. Ctesias kept his gaze on the caged figure.

‘Why does Ahriman keep the Athenaeum? He spent months listening to and questioning it, but now does not even talk about it. If he has taken what he needs from it then why keep it… alive?’

‘Knowledge,’ replied Ignis. ‘Knowledge pulled from the mind of our father Magnus without him knowing. You expect Ahriman to cast that aside?’

‘No… but perhaps he should.’

‘For you to say such a thing…’

‘Yes,’ said Ctesias, nodding but not looking at his brother. ‘There is something out of place, something Ahriman is not telling us about what he has done, and what he intends.’

‘You speak manifest truths like they are mysteries,’ said Ignis. ‘He is Ahriman. The experiences of your mutual history must have taught you poorly.’

‘No.’ Ctesias shook his head. He was still looking at the Athenaeum, remembering it speaking with Sanakht’s voice. ‘No, I think I have learned the past’s lessons well enough.’

‘Then be satisfied.’

‘Why are you here, Ignis?’ he asked, rolling his shoulders to release the stiffness which clung to his half-withered muscles. ‘Not to fulfil some new-found need for companionship, I am sure.’

Ignis shrugged as though the answer was obvious.

‘I am here to summon you. Ahriman has called a gathering. It begins.’

+I failed.+ Ahriman’s words shivered through the chamber.

Ignis felt the minds of the living flicker in surprise. Silence strangled every movement and breath. It was not just the quieting of sound, but the stilling of thoughts, and the muting of mental noise. Ahriman turned to look at the warriors standing on tiers above and around him. Every sorcerer brother serving Ahriman stood in the chamber, and with them their Rubricae entourages. They were few, when measured against the Legions of old, but these living sorcerers alone were a force enough to drive a world to its knees. Every eye and mind in the chamber was totally focused on Ahriman. The pressure of that focus shimmered above the assembly in a heat haze. Ignis watched. Even for him to hear Ahriman say those words was like a knife blow. Behind his shoulder, Credence’s hum of flexing servos had faded to nothing.

+You have all walked paths that I would not have chosen for you,+ Ahriman resumed. +You walked them because of me, because of the future that I convinced you of. You believed. You followed me, and that first dream failed. And we have all paid for that error. Even those who stand elsewhere, far away from this place, on other worlds and following other fates, all of us, all we Thousand Sons suffered for a failing. For my failing.+

Ahriman looked up, as though looking through the roof of the chamber and the layers of decks above to some distant point of light.

Ignis watched and counted the seconds, noting the metre and timing of Ahriman’s every gesture and word: perfect. Impossibly perfect. Ignis had been the Master of Ruin of the Thousand Sons, in a time when such titles meant more than pride and a failure to let go of the past. The numerology of destruction was his obsession, and the configuration and meaning of all things was his craft. In the universe he saw, every detail mattered.

+We are the exiled ones,+ sent Ahriman, looking down again. +We are the sons cast from Magnus’s side and who have borne punishment for daring to defy fate, a broken circle at the edge of existence, fugitives, outcasts, proof of what awaits those who deny the whims of gods. We believed in our own vision. We reached high. We were cast down.+

He brought his Black Staff down on the platform top.

+But fate is still a lie!+

A shockwave rang through the warp. The living staggered, and the Rubricae twitched where they stood.

+Nothing is inevitable! Nothing is certain! Nothing is written! If the path to salvation lies through the halls of purgatory, then so be it!+

The words faded slowly. Ahriman looked around the chamber at the thousands of dead and living eyes looking back at him. In spite of himself, Ignis felt his twin hearts pause between beats. Emotion was not a part of his universe. But in that moment, under Ahriman’s gaze, he felt something that he struggled to understand.

Ahriman nodded.

+We have suffered but still we stand. We are warriors against fate, my brothers, and now we are going to war one last time. We are returning to the land from which we were banished. We will stand on the Planet of the Sorcerers. There we will enact a second Rubric. The dream of the past will be made anew. We will see it done, you and I.+

In the warp, Ignis watched as the cloud of thoughts and emotions rose from the assembled sorcerers like a fractal haze of shock and hope. He watched it bloom outwards. His flesh was crawling with heat. He looked at Ahriman standing still and silent in the paused instant he had created. Time was sliding. Ignis could almost feel the momentum of events begin to turn and roll, like a great stone beginning its journey down a mountainside. He shivered once without being able to stop it.

But, he thought to himself, you still have not said how we will return, Ahriman.

Behind him, he heard Credence shift with a clatter of gears. Ignis nodded without looking at his guardian.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I am not sure I want to know how either.’

III
By Your Will

Knekku had not seen his father, the king, for eighty-one years when the Tower of the Cyclops returned to the horizon of the Planet of the Sorcerers. He had frozen when he had first seen it from the window of his tower.

‘Sire?’ he had whispered, and then stared as emotion and thoughts buzzed through him. Instinct had said run, but control – the core of his mental architecture – made him collapse the ritual he had been preparing, and only then begin walking through the city, towards Magnus the Red’s tower.

Will we get answers? he wondered as he walked. Will you tell us where you have been? Will you tell us why? The thoughts held no hope. He knew better than to hope, but still could not help asking the questions. Magnus had always been a creature of secrets, even before he ascended, but for decades Knekku had seen no sign of his master. That worried him. He could not help it. It was one of the prices of loyalty.

The city had changed since Knekku had last crossed it. The paths that he had walked only a day before had vanished. He recognised nothing he had seen previously. Even the air smelled different, the breeze edged with smoke and ice. Only the Tower of the Cyclops remained unchanged. It was always there, on the horizon. Sometimes it appeared so close that its shadow fell across him, but when he looked up again it would be so distant that he could hardly see it. Knekku never lost sight of it, though. He could not, even if he had wanted to. It would always be there, waiting until he reached it. Its presence was a summons.

The city changed as he passed through it. He did not see it, but he did not need to. The Planet of the Sorcerers was change, after all. Like the Crimson King, whose realm it was, its faces and purposes were a choice rather than a necessity. It existed in both the realm of the real, and the vast sea of possibility which was the warp. Mundane planets had the rules of gravity and the chains of psychics to govern them. On the Planet of the Sorcerers, gravity and natural laws were servants of the Crimson King.

Thinking of this, Knekku reflected that trying to understand Magnus was like trying to swallow a moon. That had not stopped him, though. Others had come and gone, had betrayed the Crimson King or simply left his service to serve themselves. Many who remained did so only to serve their own ends. But not Knekku. He had been nothing before Magnus had called him to the brotherhood of the Thousand Sons, and he remained to serve his lord king.

He walked on. The haft of his spear tapped the stone road with each step he took. The wind stirred the white silk of his robes against his armour. He wore his helm, its high crest the same deep blue and burnished gold as the rest of his battleplate. The dust in the air caught on the ridges of the ram’s skull worked into the helm’s faceplate. Behind its red eyes he looked out at the world through a curtain of projected sigils and geometric lines.

It began to rain. Silver drops fell from the blue sky, and exploded on the dusty stones beneath his feet. Around and above him other towers reached for the clouds in forests of twisted silver, sapphire and jade. Lights shone in their high windows, and the wind carried snatches of voices down to him.

‘…what is sought cannot be unsought once found…’

‘…the fifth, crossed with the Aleph of the first…’

‘…it is a form of wisdom, though it is imperfect…’

‘…rest and then make the attempt again…’

‘…the heart should be sufficient. The blood is unnecessary…’

He recognised some of the voices. Many he did not. Some he knew were the voices of people who had been dead for centuries. He did not let his mind dwell on them. Like the changing city, the voices were as much a feature of his own mind as they were of the world that he walked through. That did not mean they were not real. Nothing on the Planet of the Sorcerers was so simple.

A movement caught his eye. He looked up to see a flock of winged creatures take flight, weaving between bridges of spun glass connecting some towers. He thought he saw a figure on one of those high walkways, hunched under a tattered red robe, face hidden. He had seen no one else since he had left his tower, though the city was far from deserted. Its silence and emptiness were for him alone, the planet mirroring the isolation in his mind. But he had seen the figure in the red robes twice out of the corner of his eye since he had begun to walk towards the Tower of the Cyclops.

‘You may show yourself,’ he called up to where he had seen the red figure. His voice came back to him in echoed fragments.

‘Show yourself…’

‘…Show yourself…’

‘…Yourself…’

‘…Self…’

‘…Self…’

‘…Self.’

He blinked and the red-robed figure vanished from the high bridge, leaving Knekku only the feeling of being watched.

He turned around, and…

The Tower of the Cyclops stood in front of him, rising up and up, seeming to grow as Knekku looked at it. Its base stretched to either side beyond his sight, as though the tower’s roots were a range of mountains. Carved patterns stretched across the black glass. Whirls, droplets, and serrations blended with balconies, and stairs, and platforms. Lights burned in high windows. It seemed as though it had always been there, as though there was no other way for reality to be. There was no door at its base, and no stair leading to the ground.

Knekku stilled his mind, closed his eyes and walked towards the base of the tower. After seven hundred and twenty-nine blind paces he opened his eyes again.

The wall of the tower was beneath his feet. The summit was now a sharp point jutting into the sky ahead of him like a headland into a sea. Behind him the ground was a cliff, the towers of the city a wall of silver needles. He walked around windows, and climbed over buttresses and secondary towers which pointed in every direction. He never had to look at his feet; the steps and paths and bridges he needed were always there even when his eyes told him they were not. It was a game, and a lesson, and Knekku knew both how to play and that he had not mastered all it had to teach.

Time passed in days, and then in seconds and then in hours, each taking no longer than a single step up the tower.

When he reached the top he stepped off the edge, and stepped on the tower. The world righted itself without him being able to notice how. He knelt immediately, setting his spear down as he touched the stone floor with his head. Inside his helm his eyes were closed again.

Only then did he realise he was not alone. Eight other presences knelt beside him on the tower top. The mind of each of them was a shaped star of power and will. They were his brothers, the most powerful of the living Thousand Sons on the planet at that moment. Each of them had powers that could make reality a dream, and draw dreams into being. But each of them was nothing beside the presence that loomed above them. Knekku could see it even with his eyes closed.

A figure of white-hot fire sat on a throne at the centre of the tower top. Blazing light sketched the shape of bare limbs and smooth muscle. Its left hand held a sceptre of black iron capped with a globe which swirled with blackness and starlight. A single blood-red eye sat at the centre of its face beneath a crown of curled horns. It was a vision of the divine and the terrible, and it was a lie. Knekku knew that each of the sorcerers kneeling with him would be seeing a different vision, and that none of them were true.

Magnus the Red, Crimson King of the Thousand Sons, and Most High Sorcerer of Sorcerers looked down at them.

How may I serve? The words were halfway between thought and speech when Magnus spoke.

+The Exiles are returning,+ said the Crimson King.

The words filled Knekku’s head, and he felt sweat bead his skin. The shock came an instant later. The calm pool at the centre of his mind churned.

It cannot be true. It cannot. How can it be?

Magnus’s thought voice came again, rumbling like high thunder.

+He is returning, and war is coming with him.+

It was an impossibility. A lie. Something that could not be. Ahriman’s exile was not simply a statement, it was a ban that transcended meaning. He could have tried to return already, but he would never have succeeded. Exile was a wall in existence, not just a word. But the Crimson King had said Ahriman was returning, and that truth expanded outwards like a silent bomb blast.

It was Sar’iq who broke the silence. Sar’iq, Favoured of the Fire, Magister Exalted of the Thousand Sons, and Magnus’s chosen aide in war.

+He lives then, sire? Ahriman lives?+

Magnus turned his eye. The fire of the Crimson King’s form flickered to furnace red for an instant. Then he turned his gaze to Knekku. The touch of his stare was ice. At Knekku’s side, his spear vibrated against the stone floor.

+Rise, my sons.+ Magnus’s command pulled the nine sorcerers to their feet. Knekku stood smoothly, grasping his spear. He felt the others’ eyes on him. The shock thinned, draining away to leave questions in its wake.

+He has found a way to defy your banishment, sire?+

Magnus seemed to be looking directly at Knekku. He wondered if all of the others had the same impression.

+He is drawing closer.+

+But the banishment. He cannot return. It is ordained.+

And then Magnus did something that sent a second shudder of surprise through Knekku. The Crimson King’s gaze dipped and he looked away, shaking his head slowly.

+He will find a way. Of that I have no doubt.+

For an instant Knekku thought that he felt a tinge of pride in Magnus’s voice.

+How can even he–+ began Knekku.

+You must be ready,+ sent Magnus, still staring at a point out of sight. +You will prepare us, Sar’iq.+ Knekku felt power pass from the Crimson King to his brother in a breath of cold light. +I give you the words of control over my realm. You will be my hand and voice as we make ready to meet what is coming.+

Will you not be with us, sire? Knekku wanted to say, but he knew that Magnus would have heard the words even though they were not spoken. The Crimson King remained silent, and Knekku bowed his head.

+It will be done, sire, by your will,+ sent Sar’iq, and then Knekku and the others echoed the last words with a single voice of thought.

+By your will.+

Astraeos was never alone.

There is no way back. You must act soon. Your vengeance will be lost if you hesitate.

Voices whispered inside his skull as he walked through the temple. On and on they whispered.

The future is dead. Hope is a lie. There is no redemption.

Sometimes they were the voices of his dead brothers, Thidias, Kadin, and a thousand more.

Hope is the worst poison. Trust only buys betrayal. Nothing lasts.

Sometimes they were the voices of Ahriman, and Carmenta, and Silvanus.

Vengeance is the only truth.

But no matter the voice, he knew that the thoughts were not his own.

Eyes were averted as he passed through the warriors who remained within the pillared chamber. None spoke to him, and none raised their eyes to watch him pass. Once his brothers had bowed and greeted him from respect, but they were gone, and now fear cowed his slaves. He did not care. Fear, or weakness, or thirst for power bound them to his will, and so long as the chains were strong, the metal they were forged from was immaterial.

He reached the lower steps beneath the sanctum, and began to climb. The building at the top of the steps was small, just nine metres at its widest point, and its domed roof reached its zenith thirty-six metres above the temple floor. It had only one door, a single panel of smooth obsidian set in an arch of gold and lapis. The walls of the sanctum were granite, polished so that the crystals within them sparkled like stars in a night sky.

The temple itself was large enough to swallow a legion of Titans. Great pillars reached up to a vaulted roof so high that it seemed like sculpted sky. Censers the size of battle tanks fumed incense into the warm gloom, and the smoke drifted up to form a flat layer about the pillar tops. Gongs and chanting echoed through the air without ceasing.

He reached the obsidian door and it dissolved into smoke as he stepped across its threshold. The door closed on the clamour behind him and the quiet of the sanctum chamber drowned him. The sounds of the temple faded to nothing. Spills of red velvet hung on the sanctum’s walls. Braziers burned in cages atop poles, their flames a cold blue. A chair of silver and ebony sat beneath a floating circle of rose and white flame.

Astraeos’s helm unlocked and lifted from his head. He let go of his staff and it rose into the air. The rest of his armour floated from him in polished scales. Beneath the plates his body was briefly a sculpture of muscle. His image blinked and his flesh became twisted and scarred, his eye sockets empty pits in a torn face.

Another blink and he was a figure of roaring flame beneath transparent skin, his skull a grinning setting for lidless eyes.

Blink, and he was a creature of claws, horns and wings, his smile a curved saw of needles.

Blink, and he was again muscle and skin, but the fire remained in place of his eyes. Robes formed in the air and settled over him. He sat carefully on the chair.

This was a rare place for him, a place where the warp and reality were the same, a point of stillness, a point of neutrality in his split existence.

Are you going to hear me now? said a voice inside his head. It was not a whisper this time, but the roar of cracking ice.

I wish peace, Astraeos replied. He knew that the daemon could hear each thought in his skull before it fully formed.

If you wanted peace I would not be here, Astraeos.

Peace for a moment only.

Is this weakness, my son, my brother, my flesh? The daemon’s voice clicked and rattled and he could feel its presence coiling and sliding through him.

It is a moment, replied Astraeos, that is all.

A moment is a handful of time. Have your moment and possibilities slip through your fingers, each one an opportunity cast aside.

A moment.

You cannot afford such a sacrifice. You gave me your soul because you wished vengeance on Ahriman for the destruction of your brothers, your honour, and your future. Such a reckoning is no small thing, and Ahriman is no weakling. Flinch for a moment, doubt for a moment, hesitate for a moment, and all will fail.

What do you care if my vengeance comes to nothing, daemon?

I care because you care.

Your kind are lies and malice. You care for nothing. You are the carrion of existence.

But I do care. You called to me and I answered. I am nothing but the answer to what you want. I am not your torment, Astraeos. I am the answer to your prayers.

Astraeos’s mind remained silent for a second.

Show yourself, he commanded.

Do you wish a mirror?

Show yourself.

As you will, said the daemon.

A figure appeared in front of him, as though pulled out of a hidden door in the air. Its limbs hung to the floor, on too many joints and too many bones. Talons of splintered glass curled at the ends of long fingers. Its skin was the blue of hot flame. Yellow cloth draped from its body in billowing folds. Its head was a shrouded lump set low between its shoulders. Curled horns protruded from the fabric covering its face. Nine wings of tattered, multicoloured feathers shivered on its back. A single eye looked at Astraeos from out of a tear in the shroud across its face.

It had once been bound into the body of Cadar, Astraeos’s brother, and he had bound it to himself to help save Ahriman from death. Only later, when despair had claimed him, had Astraeos called it into him. Now he shared his body and mind with it, twin flames burning in a single skin.

The daemon returned Astraeos’s stare, and flexed its pinions with a clatter of bones. The light in the room dimmed.

Does your hate grow weak, Astraeos? said the daemon, still speaking inside Astraeos’s own thoughts. Ahriman lied to you. He let you become an instrument of ruin, and made you the cause for which the Imperium murdered your Chapter. Do you wish to forgive him for that?

Astraeos felt each word of the daemon as a surge of remembered pain so bright and real that for a second the present faded.

He remembered.

He saw himself become an angel of death. He saw his home world burn and his brothers fall to the vengeance of the Imperium. He saw Ahriman, a half-broken warrior clad in armour taken from the dead. He heard again the oaths he had made, and the promises they had bought. He saw his last brothers die or become monsters. He saw the faces of the inquisitors looking down at him bound on a bed of iron. He saw again what he had seen in the moment he should have died, but had not. A circle of fire cut through time, a paradox made real by the warp. The Imperium had destroyed his Chapter because of him. He was the cause and consequence of his fall. And at the centre of that circle was Ahriman.

But you are unmaking me, he thought. His thoughts and emotions and memory were eroding: hour by hour, second by second, instant by instant. All the balance of his soul was stripping away to leave a simple hunger. He was becoming like a dagger tip, sharpened, shining, and with one purpose.

I am not unmaking you, spoke the daemon within. I am creating what you need to be. If you want to keep all the rattle and confusion of mortality then you should forgive Ahriman. You should let him be and be satisfied that he will go unpunished.

Astraeos looked at the daemon, and felt the fires which were in his eyes blaze.

As I am, so shall he be. His future will die. His hope will become poison.

The daemon shivered, claws clicking together, wings rattling like laughter.

By your will, it said.

+That is how we will return.+ Ahriman’s mind went silent. Stillness rippled out from the last words of his sending. For an instant he could feel the tension waiting to tip into reaction, like a stone balanced on the edge of a blade.

They have their answer now, he thought.

The five members of the Circle stood around Ahriman, each of them the point of a pentagrammatic star. He looked at them in turn, seeing and tasting the shape and nature of their minds. Gaumata’s ever-shackled fury burned as a coal-lit halo behind his broad face and red eyes. Directly opposite him, his birth brother Gilgamos was a pillar of changing thoughts. Ctesias’s mind was an exploded mass of contradiction and healed damage. Kiu seemed as calm as the still edge of his hooked axe, but Ahriman could feel the warrior struggling to process the shock. Only Ignis, his mind a flower of geometric patterns, showed no surprise.

They had all been waiting ever since gathering to know how they would break Magnus’s ban and return to the Planet of the Sorcerers. Now they knew. He was sure it was an answer none of them liked. He did not blame them; necessity always had a bitter flavour.

He waited, watching their reactions form in them as their natures and the words he had just spoken combined within their thoughts. The light in the chamber pulsed very slightly, echoing the living silence.

The chamber was on the Pyromonarch, Gaumata’s ship and the command ship for Ahriman’s main assault elements. When the Circle gathered it was on a different ship each time, rotating through the fleet’s principal vessels so that each felt favoured and none felt preferred. The chamber they used for this latest gathering was a space at the centre of a maze of flame-touched gold. Firelight seeped out from behind every corner and join, as though the walls were holding back an inferno.

Gaumata broke the silence first.

+It will be difficult.+

+It will be near impossible.+ Ctesias spat the thought out. +You think it is still as it was? That what was done did no more than burn the surface and lace the air with acid?+ The summoner paused, breathing out disbelief and contempt. +What was done will have left a scar, a still bleeding scar. The aether around it will be like thin ice over a hungry sea. That is at best, and the worst is much more likely.+

Gaumata turned his head and eyes, dislike radiating from him in smouldering waves.

+You know for certain that what you say is the truth?+ he growled at Ctesias. +You have seen and know?+

+I have not seen, and I do not need to know,+ Ctesias shot back. +Neither do you, or have you decided to add omniscience to your other personal qualities?+

+There were ways in the past,+ added Kiu, his thought measured, balanced between an assertion and a question. +Stable routes through the aether…+

+The stable routes which once existed will be screaming tides of agony and destruction.+ Ctesias shook his head. +Without exception.+

He is afraid, thought Ahriman. Or something like afraid. They all are. And, he reflected, they should be.

+There may be other ways,+ ventured Kiu. +As one door closes another opens, does it not?+

+Oh, spare me your well-worn wisdom,+ sneered Ctesias, the contempt in the sending like biting into a bitter fruit.

+There are ways.+ Ahriman’s sending cut through the blur of exchanged thoughts. It had gone just as he had known it would. They had needed their doubt and shock, but now he needed them to move past those emotions. +There are ways of reaching it. Those ways are both guarded and perilous. I have seen it through another’s eyes. I have made this journey already, brothers. It is possible, and it is dangerous beyond imagining. Even so it is only the first and smallest danger on the path we now walk.+

+You have seen the planet?+ sent Gilgamos.

+I have seen it.+

+How?+ asked Gilgamos, and Ahriman could almost taste the eagerness and awe in the augur’s question.

+The inquisitor,+ sent Ignis, the thought a flat statement.

Ahriman nodded. He thought of Iobel, of the ghost made of another’s memories persisting within his own.

+Iobel went there. She found out that it still existed, and then found out how to reach it. While none of you have seen it in millennia, I have. I have walked the ashes with her feet and breathed the air with her lungs. It is still there, it can be reached, and we will go there.+

Ahriman looked at Gaumata, the flame crest of his psychic hood a dim silhouette beneath a halo of conflicted emotion and thought.

Just like all of them, thought Ahriman to himself. Just like me.

Ctesias broke the moment.

+Ignoring the fact that it may have changed, it will be guarded. The Imperium will not have left such a mark of infamy there for any to find.+

+The Imperium does not remember that it even existed,+ sent Ahriman, then looked around the Circle again, nodding at each of them as they met his gaze. +Its name, like ours, is lost to time and wilful self-deception. The virtue of the blind, the armour of contempt, the shield of ignorance, call it what you will. We and our past are not dead to them, we never existed. Only myths persist, distortions created by time and the gap between knowledge and fear. We are the ghosts and monsters of this age, creatures that slither out of the dark places to punish those who think that they dwell in the light. The small, small number who know something of us fear us even more, and guard that knowledge with atrocity. While we have been fighting our own wars, the Imperium removed us from history.+

+But it is guarded and protected, yes?+ asked Ctesias. The summoner’s fingers were fidgeting where they held his staff. He looked between the others for support. +It is not the ignorant masses that worry me. The inquisitor passed those defences because her kind will have put them in place. We do not have the advantage of being loyal members of the Imperium with unrivalled authority.+

+The summoner has a point, master,+ sent Gilgamos. +If we must overcome significant resistance then our strength for what comes after will be less.+

Ahriman looked at Gilgamos. The augur held his gaze. He knew what Gilgamos meant. They all knew what he meant. Their first destination was just the first step, a waypoint on the way to their ultimate goal. They would still have to breach the defences of the Planet of the Sorcerers, and then they would have to face their brothers, and the forces which had gathered to Magnus’s throne.

Magnus… They would have to face their father, the master who had taught them all, and who had now become a being of transcendent power. They would have to do all this, and enact the Rubric. Ahriman knew that his belief was the only thing that was holding them on this course.

+We will overcome anything that we need to,+ he sent at last. +That is beyond question.+

+You have seen the future? You know it will work?+ asked Kiu, and there was an edge of eagerness in the sending, a need for the blessing of destiny, a need for certainty.

+I know it,+ sent Ahriman, and then turned his gaze on each set of watching eyes. +We must prepare. You are all correct, each one of you. Even this first step will demand much, and what follows will demand more. We must be ready, we must look at every chance and possibility, and gather every strength we have.+

His hearts each beat once, and then Gilgamos bowed his head.

+By your will,+ sent the augur.

The rest followed one after another.

+By your will.+

+By your will.+

+By your will.+

Ctesias hesitated, glancing at each of the others, then he gave a small, reluctant nod.

+By your will,+ he said.

Ahriman bowed his own head in acknowledgement.

+This is the true beginning, brothers,+ he sent. +We return to the Planet of the Sorcerers, but first we return to our home. We go to Prospero.+

IV
Control

The daemons hissed at Knekku as he looked down at them. They filled the circle of bronze. They looked back with rows of black jewel eyes. Their wet leather wings rustled as they squirmed together. He took a step closer to them. Behind him, his mortal thralls waited. Each wore a robe of white silk and a mask of blackened silver. One of the daemons hooted and snapped its teeth at Knekku. Some of the thralls whimpered. He could feel their minds struggling to contain the power within. None had yet died, but blood stained some of their robes in fresh, spattered roses. Before he was done, they would be consumed. Of the rest half would be useless, the light of their powers burned away within them. He would need to expend more of his mortals before this task was complete. Many more.

He looked down at the crowded flock of daemons. One of the creatures opened its jaws, its pink tongue twisting inside rows of triangular teeth. A hiss gargled from its throat and it snapped its jaws shut, black pearl eyes glittering fear and resentment. The rest were struggling and snapping at each other as they tried to reach the top of the heap. None of them came close to the boundary of their invisible cage.

Knekku raised his hand, and formed his thoughts into a shape which resonated with the circle on the ground. A wave of tension flickered through him. The daemons cringed and tried to crawl away from him, hissing and snarling. They were weak things, the remnants of lost souls who had fallen between the favours of the great powers of the warp. Hunger, cowardice and spite were the blood and skin of their being, but in the gaps between the realms they were without counting, and there was little they did not hear or see.

Knekku formed a command and let it flow into the circle of daemons. They hissed as they felt his will tighten on them.

Watch, it would have said if it could have been expressed in words. Watch and bring word.

The daemons hissed, their calls clattering into the air. And then they were still, every limb frozen, every eye fixed on him.

Go, he willed, and dropped his hand. The binding circle broke and the daemons streamed into the air, wings beating, their screeches echoing as they spilled from the tower’s windows into the red sky beyond. As they climbed higher, he saw them dissolve into black smoke.

He watched for a second and then let his gaze fall. A sliver of fatigue itched at the back of his eyes. He had performed eighty-one summonings since the rising of the ninth sun, but he had only just begun his work. Sar’iq had commanded that the furies be unleashed to watch the currents of the immaterium. It was thorough, he supposed, but he could not help feeling that it was pointless. If Ahriman was coming then it would be by means that the carrion daemons would not see.

Control…

He had to do his father’s will, and that was that Knekku obey Sar’iq and prepare for the Exiles to come with war.

He glanced at the books and scrolls laid out on lecterns and benches at the edge of the chamber. He took a step towards them, and then stopped.

Control…

He had a lot to do to play his part in Sar’iq’s preparations, and how much time any of them had was an unanswerable question. Some of his brothers had gazed into fires and read the future in pools of daemon blood, and all of them had seen nothing. Ahriman could arrive in the next second. Such blindness to future events had disturbed not just the augurs, but all of Magnus’s court. In such circumstances, focus was vital.

Control…

Knekku glanced at the open pages again. He had spent precious time summoning the grimoires and having the scrolls hauled from vaults which were not entirely part of reality. Symbols and lettering wound over the parchment. A haze hung above them as the knowledge bound onto their substance pulled at the air. He tensed, ready to turn away and begin the next summoning and binding.

He did not move, but kept looking at the books. Each of them was the record of a vision of a place which those who knew of it called the Labyrinth. From the dreams of prophets to the words babbled by tortured daemons, all he could find lay a few steps away from him.

His hand twitched as though about to rise and pull one of the texts through the air to him.

The Labyrinth was something that few of his kind had not heard of, but most did not speak of it, and if they expended energy in the pursuit of its secrets they kept it to themselves. He had heard of it only from the mouths of daemons, and never pursued it. Until now.

The Labyrinth was said to be everywhere at once and to have never existed. Its corridors were made of crystal which reflected every truth and lie. It was the warp, and it was also a real place which could be walked just like the labyrinths built to confuse mortals. It was both metaphor and reality. Everything and everyone that ever had existed was inside the Labyrinth. And if Magnus could be found anywhere, he could be found within it.

No, he thought. He should not look further. He had spent too much time already prying through obscure knowledge, and he could spend no more. Magnus was his master and his king. If he was not with them it was for reasons that had to be respected.

Yes. What else could be the case? The Crimson King was unbounded in insight and power. Yes, that was the truth.

Yes.

But…

But what if he was not gone by choice? Knekku remembered the sense of fatigue that had edged the Crimson King’s presence when he had manifested on his tower. What if something was weakening him? What if he was lost on the Great Ocean?

Knekku had begun to step away, but could not.

What if his father needed him? His eye caught a silver athame resting beside the pages of an open book on which a diagram of ritual markings squirmed in black and red ink. He hesitated. In the Labyrinth there would be answers.

He took a step forwards, and the pages rustled with static.

+Knekku?+ Sar’iq’s sending cut into his mind, and halted his next step.

+My brother,+ he replied, forcing down and obliterating the anger which had risen before he could stop it.

+Your master, Knekku. Not your brother. Not while we are at war.+

+You have my apologies, master.+ The sudden rebuke told Knekku that Sar’iq had noticed the delays in Knekku’s tasks. But if he knew, or guessed, why, Knekku could not tell. He had hidden his research into the Labyrinth from eyes and minds beside his own, but secrets were not easily kept on the Planet of the Sorcerers.

+You have unleashed our watchers into the tides?+

+The task is approaching completion.+

+You will complete it without delay, and then join us to raise more of the towers into the sky.+

Knekku turned away from the grimoires, and closed his eyes for a second.

Control…

+Yes… my master.+

+I can free you.+

The Oathtaker’s voice spoke in Memunim’s mind. Unconsciousness fell away from him. His head came up, and the movement dug the teeth of the collar into his neck. Pain shot through him. Instinctively his mind reached out for the aether. White agony bored into him, pulling his mind down into his flesh. His muscles were convulsing, breath sawing from between his teeth. He tried to call power to his thoughts, but the pain grew, and he felt the warp fleeing from his grasp. He blinked and the cell came into focus.

He hung by chains bound to his wrists and neck by rough metal shackles. They had taken one of his eyes, and flayed the skin from his hands. The runes cut into the dark metal glowed hot red on the edge of his mind’s eye. Rust and crusted blood mottled the narrow walls. A single yellow light shone from within a cage above him, and foul-smelling liquid pooled around the clogged grate in the floor beneath him.

The Oathtaker stood just inside the sealed door.

‘I… will… not… serve,’ said Memunim, his jaw struggling to form the words. The Oathtaker stepped closer. The sickly yellow light gleamed on bronze armour, oily shadows catching in the claws, wings and talons worked into its surface. The single blue gem set into the centre of the Oathtaker’s blank helm shone.

Memunim curled his lip, and spat. The clot of acid-phlegm and blood hissed into steam just above the surface of the bronze armour. He felt something grind in his chest, and dropped his eyes.

+Do not think you are alone, Memunim,+ sent the Oathtaker. +You are not alone. Just as you are now, so once was I.+

The words surprised Memunim, and he glanced up before he could help himself. Since he had been taken from the tower there had been pain. That did not bother him, not even when they had taken his left eye, or peeled the skin from his hands. He was a creature built in body and mind to overcome more pain than a knife could bring.

+You are not alone,+ sent the Oathtaker again. Memunim stared back. For a second the Oathtaker’s words had tugged at something within him, but it was nothing, just more posturing. He was going to die. He knew it, and now that the inevitable had come around at last he found the thought almost a relief.

+One more beat of blood,+ continued the Oathtaker, +one more second of the future becoming the past. Eventually living is just habit.+

The Oathtaker – who had said in the ruined tower that his name was Astraeos – reached up and pulled the helm from his head. The face beneath was different than when he had last shown it. Scars twisted the cheeks. The fire which had blazed from his eyes was gone, and the left eye socket was an empty pit. It was the face of a warrior who had endured much and wore that past on his skin.

‘You were a warrior son of Prospero,’ said the Oathtaker, his true voice low and steady. ‘You saw your home world burn. You were there when everything you had was destroyed by the Imperium which created you. You endured, clinging on to existence, while watching your brothers fall one by one. You clung on, waiting, one half of your soul knowing that no salvation would come, the other half searching for it. You allowed yourself to believe that there was a way to save your brothers, to save yourself. You trusted and let that trust become loyalty, become hope.’

With the words memories surfaced: grey wolves running across the fire-drowned ruins of Tizca, the towers of the Planet of the Sorcerers beneath its warp-bloated suns, the light of the Rubric searing through twisted flesh, and then the silence as his dead brothers walked from the clouds of dust.

‘Tell me, Memunim, where did the hope Ahriman gave you lead?’

Memunim held the Oathtaker’s gaze. Memories flickered past in snatches of darkness and bloodshed, each moment an instant of a life that he no longer understood. The sensation of the past was more real now than the pain of his flayed hands, or the barbs digging into his neck from the collar. He had believed in Ahriman, he had believed that the Legion could have a future, and that the lever of knowledge could turn over the order of the universe. He had believed, and followed, and helped murder the future he had been promised.

‘You are not alone,’ said the Oathtaker, and Memunim blinked as he refocused on the face in front of him. It had changed again. It was a face that he felt he knew, a face that fitted in somewhere between memory and dream.

‘Who…’ he began, and heard that the defiance had gone from his words. ‘Who are you?’

The Oathtaker smiled, and there was pity, and weariness, and the coldness of a knife edge in the expression.

‘You know who I am,’ he said.

Memunim shivered.

‘You sound like him,’ he said, his breath dry on his tongue. ‘You sound like Ahriman.’

For a second Memunim thought he saw a spark of fire in the Oathtaker’s empty eye socket. When he spoke, his voice was calm and level.

‘Where you are now, Memunim, is at the end of a path you have walked which has led you nowhere.’ He nodded, and stepped back. ‘But there are other paths, and other ends that you can serve.’

Memunim shook his head. He wanted to stop talking. He wanted the pain to rise so that he could go back to the darkness, so that he could forget.

‘You have already offered me my dreams, but I will not follow dreams, not again.’

‘I cannot offer hope. That is lost to us both, but I can offer you a different dream.’

Memunim hesitated. He could turn aside now. He could go into the cool dark of the night, where his memories might remain, but where he would not have to own them.

The Oathtaker was watching him. Shadows had crept over his face, pooling in the socket of his missing eye, pulling the gleam of his armour into dull bronze. The staff in his hand was no longer silver but polished bone and twisted ebony.

Memunim thought of Ahriman, of that last moment on the Planet of the Sorcerers when they had stood amongst the newly made Rubricae, the moment when Magnus had come for them. He had thought that Ahriman would kneel and ask forgiveness, for how could he not? Yet Ahriman had stood unbowed, and said that he was satisfied. Memunim remembered the instant before Magnus had scattered the Cabal to the stars.

‘What dream remains to me?’ he asked.

The Oathtaker’s staff was a sheet of blue fire as it spun. The chains holding Memunim sheared, and the barbed collar fell from him. He landed on the floor. The warp flooded in as it met his thoughts.

‘Revenge,’ said Astraeos, looking down at him. ‘I will give you revenge.’

Memunim paused for a long moment then closed his eyes, and bowed his head.

‘You have my oath,’ he said.

Ahriman stopped at the centre of his chamber and listened. It was quiet. At least it was as quiet as a warship ever was. Air stirred through vents. Pipes and conduits hummed just behind the walls and floor. An echo of something deep and mechanical moving in the ship’s guts growled at the edge of hearing. It was the silence of the mind, though, that really struck him. All of those unspoken voices muttering on the edge of his awareness, all the thoughts and feelings screaming at him from other minds, all the colours and textures of desires and fears and hopes washing over him: all were silent here.

The chamber was not large. He could have crossed it in six strides, and the ceiling was low enough that his head almost touched the bare metal. A pallet stood against the wall opposite the doors. Small ledges sat just below his eye line on the two other walls, beside empty racks for armour and weapons. In its past the room had been an arming chamber for a line officer of the Thousand Sons Legion, a sergeant perhaps. Now it was his.

He moved over to where a plain wooden chest sat at the foot of the pallet. The smell of dry cedar filled his nose as he opened the lid and took the clay bowls, oil and fire tapers from within. The slow flicker of oil flames cut into the shadows as he filled and lit each bowl. He paused, letting his eyes touch every object in the room, while his mind noted the relative position of each of them. All was well.

Removing his armour took longer. Without the power of his mind, or the hands of serfs, he had to peel it off himself, plate by plate, rivet by rivet. It took time. A process which would have been accomplished in a thought became a series of slow, mechanical steps. He let the rhythm of the task take him. His mind stilled. All of the patterns running through his thoughts stopped. The world became the snap and clink of metal and ceramite, and the heft of each plate in his hands.

Occasionally he glanced towards the door. Helio Isidorus stood just inside the threshold and to the left, a sculpture in blue and gold armour. The lights in the Rubricae’s lenses were faint wisps of green. The incantations worked into the chamber smothered the Rubricae’s presence. It was still there, though. He could feel it watching him.

He lifted his helm from the floor by its horns. He felt the nicks and chips press into the skin of his fingers. He set it on its stand. The dim flame light caught in the gloss red of the eye-lenses. He glanced at the Rubricae again as he bent down and picked up a segment of shoulder plating. Helio Isidorus stared back blankly.

‘Do you wish he could talk?’

The armour clattered to the floor as Ahriman whirled, his hands sweeping up and arming his bolt pistol in a blur of fluid muscle. His mind raced out, ready to dissolve the wards around the room and pull the power of the warp in. Helio Isidorus had not moved. Ahriman held his breath and heartbeats still. He turned, the pistol tracking his gaze. Nothing. The full force of the warp still remained a dim surge beyond the intact wards. Nothing out of place or altered. He turned slowly back to the Rubricae.

‘Helio Isidorus?’ he said. The Rubricae did not respond. Ahriman did not let the muzzle of the bolt pistol drop.

‘He cannot speak,’ said a voice. Ahriman whipped around. His finger tightened on the trigger, and froze.

A figure sat on the floor of the chamber. A red robe covered its shrunken body, and a ragged hood its head. It had one of the pieces of armour in its hands and was turning it over slowly. An impression of hunched muscles shifted under the red fabric. Ahriman glimpsed withered and scarred skin.

His finger tensed on the pistol trigger.

‘He does not hear, either,’ said the figure. ‘Helio Isidorus is just an echo, the sound of a name caught in a bottle.’ The figure looked up, and the light pushed the shadows into the recesses of its face. A single bright blue eye flickered between Ahriman and the pistol in his hand. ‘But of course you know that, my son. Who knows a creature better than its creator?’

Ahriman lowered the pistol, and shook his head. He had seen the figure before, in his dreams. In those dreams the figure had claimed to be his father, had claimed to be Magnus. The scarred face grinned back and spoke again.

‘You are wondering how I can be here, outside of your dreams, aren’t you?’ The figure tossed the piece of armour it had been examining onto the floor. It landed with a metallic clang. ‘How I can be moving in this physical realm?’

‘Unless this is the dream,’ said Ahriman, ‘and I have crossed into it without noticing.’

‘A valid possibility. Or I could be a waking hallucination brought on by mental strain, or psychic fatigue. Or I could be a voice of some part of your mind that has become separated from the main channel of your thoughts. After all, your inquisitor is something like that, is she not?’

‘No matter the cause, you are not here. You are not Magnus. You are not my father. You are not real.’

‘Yet still we are talking.’

Ahriman shook his head, and closed his eyes. He turned and made for the door, his mind reaching out to dissolve the wards and open the room to the full current of the warp.

‘Do you not want to know why I am here?’ asked the figure.

‘I want nothing that you can give me,’ said Ahriman.

‘Not even a warning?’

Ahriman stopped. The door was just a pace away. To his right Helio Isidorus stood facing back into the room. For a second Ahriman thought the light in the Rubricae’s eyepieces grew.

‘If he could hear, what would you say to him?’ asked the figure from just behind Ahriman. ‘What would you tell him of what is to come? Would you tell him that it will be over soon? Would you tell him that after all this time he is going back to the beginning of it all? Would you tell him of what it might cost?’ The figure raised its right arm. The sleeve fell back to expose a hand. Slowly the figure reached up to Helio Isidorus.

Ahriman’s hand closed on the figure’s wrist just before its fingers could touch the Rubricae’s faceplate.

A long instant grew, and then the figure looked at where Ahriman’s fingers encircled its own wrist. A solid wrist.

Ahriman released his grip and stepped back. Shock and revulsion flooded through him like a pressure wave, tingling along his nerves and fizzing in his blood. He reached for the idea that if this was a dream or illusion, then every part of it could seem real and yet not be real, but all he could think of was the touch of wrinkled skin in his grasp.

‘I am here to tell you something that you do not yet know,’ said the figure. ‘I am here to warn you, Ahriman.’

Ahriman shook his head. His hearts were sudden thunder in his chest, as though only now catching up to the last few minutes.

‘Magnus would not help me. If he knew what I intend he would do everything in his power to destroy me.’

‘Yes,’ said the figure. ‘Yes. He would.’

Ahriman looked back into the single blue eye beneath the frayed red hood. He felt words coming to his tongue, but before they could form, the figure spoke again.

‘Something is coming, my son. Something I cannot see, something you have not seen. Something you have overlooked.’

‘What…?’ began Ahriman, but the figure shook its head and stepped back.

‘It is getting closer, but its path began long ago. I can see its shadow but not its shape.’

Ahriman blinked. There was sweat in his eyes, sweat pouring from him. His limbs were shaking. The figure was stepping further away, and the oil flames were going out one by one.

‘Why?’ called Ahriman. ‘Why would you come here to warn me if you know what I intend?’

‘You are my son,’ said the hooded figure.

Ahriman blinked, and when his eyes opened again he was standing before his half-filled armour rack, under Helio Isidorus’s unwavering gaze. At the edges of his sight the oil flames still burned.

V
Absence

+Are you ready?+

Knekku glanced over to where Sar’iq stood. The other warrior wore his armour, but had removed his helm, and raised his forked sword.

Knekku nodded once.

Sar’iq spun forward, fire exploding from him in a spiral. Knekku’s mind flicked out and shattered the illusion. Shards of mental force tumbled through his mind’s eye. Sar’iq was still standing where he had been. Knekku thrust, the tip of his spear flashing to blue with heat. The image of Sar’iq collapsed into mist. Knekku felt the other warrior’s sword descend out of thin air as Sar’iq’s body formed from the dust. Knekku spun back, his mind reforming as his spear caught the blow. The force slammed down his arm. A silent, black explosion ripped across the tower top as the power within both weapons kissed. The blow slid down the spear haft towards the ground.

+You are slower than the first time,+ laughed Sar’iq.

Knekku’s will slammed out. Sar’iq’s armour crumpled as he lifted into the air. The warrior spun through with the force of the impact. Knekku watched his brother’s body tumble, and felt a crack open in Sar’iq’s mental defences. Knekku stabbed his thoughts into Sar’iq’s mind, and split them into a storm of splinters. Thousands of sensations tore into the walls of Sar’iq’s control.

Sar’iq landed on the tower floor. The stone cracked beneath him. Knekku lashed the blade of his spear down. The tines of Sar’iq’s sword caught the strike. Knekku pulled the blow back, but Sar’iq’s mind was buzzing through the forked sword, locking it and the spear together. Sar’iq rose, spun and the movement yanked Knekku off his feet. Now it was him who was falling. Knekku stabbed again at Sar’iq’s mind.

There was a slow beat of time.

And then Sar’iq’s will clamped down like a pair of jaws. Pain flashed through Knekku. Colours exploded in front of his eyes, bright stars of sapphire and ruby. Fire ran down his nerves. His muscles were hardening, his blood tingling on the edge of boiling. He hit the floor. Armour damage runes blinked back at him from his helmet display as stone and ceramite cracked. He tried to rise, but his muscles were locked. Sar’iq stood above him, green fire racing between the tines of his forked sword.

+Done?+ The question held the echo of a smile.

+Done,+ replied Knekku, and the pain and paralysis fell from him instantly. He rose. His spear was still in his hand. He glanced at the cracks running through the jade from the point where he had hit the ground. He gestured and the stone flowed back into mirror-pool smoothness.

+Your actions were predictable to any that knows you,+ sent Sar’iq.

Knekku nodded. Sar’iq was of course right. That was why he had led so many of the Crimson King’s warriors in the never-ceasing battles within the Eye. Knekku supposed he should have been grateful that Sar’iq had kept to a single shape for their bout.

+Something is eating your mind and stealing your strength, Knekku,+ sent Sar’iq. +Tell me what it is.+

Knekku turned away to look up above the tower. The last of the nine suns shimmered at the edge of the horizon, pulling long shadows as it dipped lower and lower. The sky had cleared, the caul of aetheric energy thinning into a dome of bruised blue. The wind rose as the sky darkened, bringing with it the sounds from the forest of towers and the black mountains beyond. Floating silver towers skimmed the last of the light as they drifted above the city. Distant voices and low avian calls touched Knekku’s ears and mind, but they were faint, the noises of a world quieting as the day slid into darkness.

For an instant he thought of the light failing over the seas of Prospero, staining the wave tops red and gold. He had watched those seas when he had been a boy, in the few years he had known his birth father. He could not even remember that father’s name, but he remembered the sound of the boat when they rode the tide back from the seas. And he remembered the sun fleeing the sky the last time they had come from the sea and seen Tizca. The next day his birth father had gone to sea alone, and never come back. There had been years after that, years he could not remember and had been pleased to sacrifice as the price for becoming one of the Legion, for becoming one of the Thousand Sons. But the memory of that sunset and the absence that followed it remained.

+Tell me, brother,+ sent Sar’iq again.

+When did you last see our father?+ Knekku sent, keeping his eyes on the red distance.

+Not since our summons.+

+Nor I.+

+A king comes and goes as he pleases,+ sent Sar’iq.

+Yes,+ sent Knekku, and looked from the horizon to his brother. +But why has he gone?+

+Put it from your mind. He sees further than any, and knows more than can be known. If he is not here then it is because it suits his purposes.+

Knekku nodded, but the gesture was slow and doubtful.

+And if it is for another reason?+

+There can be no other reason. He sees. He knows.+

Knekku nodded. The last sun was a sliver on the edge of the world. The blue fled the sky, and for an instant the towers caught the last rays and both heaven and earth were crimson.

No one saw it happen.

On the Word of Hermes, half-machine crew hurried on clanking legs. The engines hummed and crackled with power. The ship’s cyborg sentinels stood in their wall niches, waiting for a signal to wake them fully, waiting to slip free of the pain of their last flesh and become the killing engines they were, waiting as they had waited before, without end, and without the ability to hope. In their sanctums, sorcerers wove their dreams, or sat without sleeping, muttering their secrets to the dark. Deep within the superstructure – where light was the dull glow from heat vents, and where the residue of over-filtered air sat in still, dark pools – creatures which had been human scuttled across the walls on fleshmetal hooks, and thought of nothing but the next taste of blood.

None of them had eyes to see into the Chamber of Cages. Not even Ignis, sitting in the ship’s iron crucible of a bridge, saw the shadow of what happened pass across his inner eye.

In its cage the Athenaeum became quiet and still. The fire died in its eyes and its words dried up. It sat within its layered cages, panting as though exhausted.

It twisted its head, suddenly breathing harder. Blood began to run from its empty eye sockets.

‘I must be free…’ it said. ‘My sons, where are my sons?’ It tried to rise to its feet, but its limbs collapsed. The sphere cage rang, and smoke sizzled into the air as a scream rang out. ‘Where are you? I must be free. I am not… I am not…’

It crouched on the platform, body heaving with sawing breaths. Its flesh began to shake, and the inner sphere began to tremble in sympathy. Lightning wormed across the bars. Lines of red heat split its skin.

‘Don’t leave me here! You cannot leave me here! You cannot!’

It arched its head back with a crack of bone. The cages clanged as they trembled one after another. Luminescence wept from the sigils cut into the cold iron and pure silver.

‘I must be free!’ it shouted. Smoke choked the air as frost coated every surface. ‘I will find a way. I must find a way.’

The cages were bowing, bolts and sigils creaking.

The sound of running feet and shouts echoed in the corridor outside the hatch. The Word of Hermes was no longer sleeping; every living thing on board could feel the pressure building in its heart.

‘My sons, where are my sons?’ called the Athenaeum.

The hatch seals began to whir open, shrieking against the thickening ice.

‘Why…?’ called the Athenaeum.

The hatch crashed open. Ctesias bounded through, staff in hand, eyes sweeping across the ice and lightning fading to nothing on the cage.

‘Why can’t I see…?’ the Athenaeum croaked as its tongue twisted in its mouth. Ctesias stared at it. The fires lit in its eyes, and it folded back to the bottom of the cage. ‘Why am I lost in this labyrinth?’ it managed, and then the babble of words came up from its throat and began to drone into the stillness.

Ignis came through the open hatch as Ctesias was still staring at the figure in the cage.

‘A problem,’ he stated, eyes moving across the chamber.

Ctesias shook his head.

‘An anomaly.’

‘What kind of anomaly?’

‘I…’ Ctesias frowned. ‘I do not know.’

‘You have been waiting.’

Ahriman looked up from the dry leaves rattling across the stone flags of the courtyard. The face looking down at him was a grey smudge in the air, edges and mouth and nose defined by thin shadows. The rest of her shape was a watercolour blur painted against the details of the palace behind her. Through her he could still see towers, bridges and minarets biting into the overcast sky.

‘I was not sure you would come,’ he said.

‘The great Ahzek Ahriman, unsure?’ Selandra Iobel gave a cold laugh as she settled at the opposite end of the stone bench on which he sat. ‘I am flattered.’

‘I am glad you came,’ he said.

‘The only person you can talk to is the memory of an enemy, is that it?’ The laughter crackled through her voice. ‘Is there any further for you to fall?’

Silence formed after the question. Ahriman watched as a spiral of wind caught the dry leaves and pulled them into the air.

‘I want to ask you something,’ he said at last.

‘There is nothing that I can tell you. Everything I knew, you know.’

Ahriman stood, the blue fabric of his robes dragging on the stones as he turned to Iobel.

‘Will you walk with me?’

For an instant she neither moved nor replied. Then she rose, and fell in next to him as he began to walk. They passed from the courtyard in silence. Corridors of carved stone and arched bronze led them away. In some passages the light of the sky – always a dull steel grey – fell through windows and skylights. In others the light came from burning torches, or oil lamps hung from the roof on brass chains. Doors lined every corridor and stair: narrow openings closed by blackened boards, towering arches housing double doors of iron and silver, simple frames for carved oak panels. No two doors were the same, and many were different if looked at more than once. Slivers of noise scratched at the doors from the other side. The corridors changed as they walked them. Walls reconfigured, carvings crumbled and grew like flowers, stairs unwound from flat floors or collapsed into nothing.

The palace was a memory. Each room was a store of the past, each corridor, wing, and tower a grouping of knowledge. Every detail was a construction of imagination and intellect, none of it real, but all of it deliberately created. And the palace went on and on, growing ceaselessly, its edges sprawling in new wings and layers. It existed in Ahriman’s mind and the only part of it that he knew he could not control was the ghost memory of Iobel.

‘You have found how to keep me out of parts of your mind,’ said Iobel, pausing to rest a spectral hand against a door lacquered with blue- and gold-feathered birds. ‘Even here there are doors that will not open to me. I would almost say that you do not trust me.’

‘I do not. You are an enigma, a cyst of consciousness within my own mind that I cannot remove. You should not exist. In life you did everything you could to destroy me. So no, I do not trust you, inquisitor.’

‘Prudent.’

She went silent, and they took several more steps. Before them a tiled arch framed a view of a marble bridge spanning the gap between two towers. The bridge had no railings or walls. Like much of the rest of the memory palace, it was a replacement conjured after the previous version had been largely destroyed. After Iobel had destroyed it. Part of him could not help but admire her for that.

‘How long until you go to Prospero?’ she asked as they stepped onto the bridge. Ahriman glanced at her, unable to hide the twinge of surprise. He had been very careful to keep his immediate plans out of reach of the revenant of the dead inquisitor. Or so he had thought.

Iobel laughed, the sound dry and humourless.

‘You have closed doors to me, but your mind is my world, Ahriman. I can see the shape of even the secrets you hide from yourself. Sometimes I wonder if I am actually you, if the only difference between us is the belief that I am separate.’

‘Isn’t that the only difference between all minds?’

Iobel’s shadow body shrugged.

‘Did you come here for philosophical discussion, or to ask me something?’

They were almost at the middle of the bridge. Beneath it a canyon of carved stone and tarnished metal cut down into shadow. Ahriman stopped, and Iobel halted with him. The sky was still the leaden grey of a half-forgotten autumn. Far off, darker clouds stained the horizon. The wind pulled at his robes, and brushed the scent of coming rain over them.

‘Magnus knows I am coming,’ said Ahriman quietly.

‘That should not be a surprise,’ said Iobel. ‘He is a creature of the warp now, a daemon prince of Change. The warp’s currents are his blood and breath. Even the thought of what you intend will send ripples through the Great Ocean. He will be ready for you. You know that.’

‘My father will oppose me, just as he did before. He believes that the fate I sought to save our Legion from was not a curse. If he still feels anything, he hates that I defied him, he hates that I did not agree, that I saw and sought another path.’

‘Just as he did with the Emperor.’ Iobel nodded. ‘Just as you all did. That chain of defiance led you from one betrayal to another. Magnus will destroy you, but perhaps you will do him harm. He is beyond death, but even a creature such as he can be crippled, or weakened.’

The dark crack of a smile spread across Iobel’s face.

‘The prospect pleases you,’ said Ahriman.

‘Pleases me?’ Iobel shook her head. ‘If I could do nothing else other than see you, your father and all your works made into ashes, I would end this ghost life more than satisfied. If I can bring that about I will. You and Magnus both deserve nothing but ruin, Ahriman.’

‘I am not my father.’

‘No, but you are much alike in pride, and vision, and ignorance. You both deserve to be forgotten.’

Ahriman was watching the shapes of birds wheel above a distant range of towers.

‘I do not understand him, perhaps I never did.’

‘What does it matter, now? You are going back to the Planet of the Sorcerers. You are going to defy him again, perhaps even confront him. Understanding is not required for that, only ignorance and blindness.’ The shadow of a frown formed on the image of Iobel’s face. ‘Why are we talking of Magnus?’

‘I… saw him,’ said Ahriman, aware of the hesitation in his voice. ‘He came to me, and gave me a warning.’

‘You saw him?’

Ahriman nodded, his eyes fixed on a point in the distance.

‘A scarred man in an old cloak.’

‘You have seen him before?’

‘Yes, but always in dreams.’

Iobel’s outline darkened.

‘I think I understand now why you summoned me.’

Ahriman glanced at her.

‘You say that I do not understand what I am,’ he said, ‘that I am blind to myself.’

‘Never was there a soul who saw more and perceived less.’

‘But you see clearly, inquisitor. Is that not what you always claimed?’ He flicked a glance at her, but her image appeared to be staring into the distance. ‘Even within my own mind you say that you have walked paths that I do not know.’

Iobel’s shadow form flickered. The outline of her features hardened and darkened.

‘I will not help you,’ she said, her voice edged with iron. ‘I will never help you.’

‘Have you seen him, Iobel?’ he asked. ‘On those lost paths in my mind, have you seen my father?’

For a long moment she said nothing, but hung silent before him, the gauze-thin edges of her form stirring as she looked at him.

‘No,’ she said at last, and turned and stepped from the bridge into the drop beneath. Ahriman watched as the grey shimmer of her outline spun on the rising wind, and then was lost in the shadows. He nodded once to himself, and then walked on across the bridge. Above him a growl of thunder stirred the darkening sky.

VI
Preliminal

Ahriman’s fleet sat in stillness while the stars turned around it. There were ships which had been at war since before the creation of the Imperium of Man, and others which had been taken from conquered foes and given new names. At their heart, the three greatest ships formed a flat triangle: the Word of Hermes, Pyromonarch and Soul Jackal. Cliff hulls stretched kilometres from aft to stern. Weapons serrated their flanks, and cities of towers and domes rose from their spines. Yet for all their similarity, they were as different as their masters. The Word of Hermes was a black spearhead, its guns stacked in layered tiers down its flanks and ascending across the curve of its back. Pyromonarch was a split-hulled barque, resembling a vast trident head. Burning gas vented without ceasing from gargoyles dotting its hull. Soul Jackal glimmered with a cold light which clung to its silvered body.

Within each, the slave crews worked without cease. Chained mutants hauled ammunition from ordnance holds. Creatures of flesh and metal skittered over obelisks of machinery, and hooded throngs gathered to pour blood and ashes onto the breeches of macro-weapons. Prayers were muttered and screamed in the dark spaces of the deep holds as the mortal dregs called to the gods to protect them from the future.

On the flight decks of the Word of Hermes, cyborgs pulled aircraft into place with cold iron chains under the gaze of sorcerers. The machines twisted as they were dragged across the deck, mouths opening on their oil-sheened fuselages. Each had consumed flesh and blood when they had come from the binding chambers, but the daemons within still hungered. There would need to be more blood to quiet them, and more again before they were ready for war.

Alone in the Chamber of Cages, Ahriman watched the Athenaeum and asked the question again.

‘Is there another way?’

The Athenaeum looked at him.

Was there accusation in the blank pits of light? Was there hate? Was there laughter?

‘…the tenth circle divides the first when the light of the fifth shines…’ the words babbled on.

‘The Rubric. Is there another way it can work?’

‘…light tunnels the labyrinth waits there is no time in the labyrinth everything has already happened…’

Ahriman shook his head and turned. He did not know why he had come to the chamber to ask the question again. His fleet was preparing, and the ritual had already been begun by him speaking his intent. He had come, though, pulled by hope that the answer would be different.

‘The Rubric…’ the voice said behind him. He turned back from the door, snake fast, at its sound. The Athenaeum sat at the bottom of its spherical cage, hugging itself with twitching limbs. Red coals smouldered in its eye sockets. The skin over its bones was blackened and dry. ‘The Rubric…’ The words cracked like burning logs, and the Athenaeum began to crumble as it spoke. ‘The Rubric is a circle, no part ending, no part lesser, no part greater, all in one, one in all, life to life, death to death, dust to dust…’

Ahriman listened until it had ended and the Athenaeum was a pile of desiccated bones and scraps of skin. It had happened just as it had happened before, and its words had been the same. He watched the heap at the bottom of the cage until it caught light, and began to burn. The shadow of a curled body formed within the flames after a few seconds. The fire died and the Athenaeum sat there once more and continued to babble. Ahriman waited for a heartbeat, then walked from the room. Helio Isidorus followed, a silent companion to his circling thoughts.

‘The same answer as before,’ Ahriman said to himself. ‘There is no other way.’

The names of the Rubricae coiled around Ignis, pulling at the thread of his thoughts with cold fingers. The syllables rattled through him, each one forming and then vanishing as his mind leapt to the next. On and on, like rounds rattling through a rotor cannon. His eyes were closed, but in his mind he was rising through a web of pale mist. Balls of corpse light flared around him as the names breathed from his mind. Dry fingers pulled at his skin, and sound echoed back as the void swallowed the names. They might have been voices. Sometimes he thought he heard his own name. Sometimes the sounds were just shreds of noise, fragments of sorrow, or confusion, or anger brushing him with dry bone fingers.

He kept on speaking names. He could do that. The act of recitation had a simple, mechanical purity to it that would have appealed to him – that was, if it had not been for the feeling that he was dancing across a film of ice covering a depthless pool. He did not like that, not at all. It lacked precision.

Beside him Gaumata’s molten presence was close, ghosting through the litany of names. The pyromancer’s mind pulsed, bleeding the sensation of burning and the taste of smoke as he wove amongst the ghost sea. Ignis could feel that Gaumata was following his own, more complex path, braiding his name and the names of Rubricae together in great chains. Together they were preparing the Rubricae to be guided in battle. The minds of many of Ahriman’s living followers would be needed elsewhere, and so the host of the dead would need to be controlled by fewer of them. This coiling and linking of names was preparation for that need.

And preparation for the Rubric.

Ignis watched the pattern of the next syllable in his mind. A small fragment of his awareness broke off to watch Gaumata’s gleaming path.

Cold ice slammed into Ignis. He could feel hands on his face, squeezing at his eyes. Dust was scraping over his skin, coiling like a strangling snake. He felt his focus slip. The litany of names choked off in his mind. The void of mist and light was gone. Two glowing pits in a dry skull face pressed against his mind’s eye. A mouth cracked open between teeth of cold starlight. He tried to pull away but the sand and dust were all around him, pulling him down. The cold wheels of logic in his thoughts spun on, telling him that he had made a mistake, that his chances of survival were vanishing into a void.

The corpse mouth was still opening before him, the void within towering around him. He could see faces looking at him from out of the blackness. His skin was burning, peeling back from bones that were crumbling to ash, and he was screaming and screaming for his brothers to help him, to make it stop, but his voice was pulling from him like a rope, and he could hear his name being called, and with it thousands and thousands more, and all he could hear was screaming as the idea of him crumbled, and there was just light… and he did not know who he was… or what he was… and he was still screaming as a cage of metal closed over him, and…

Heat and pain exploded through Ignis. He felt talons punch into his consciousness. He rammed his will against the strangling embrace and tried to force the burning shards out of his thoughts.

+Be still, you fool,+ hissed Gaumata.

Ignis’s thoughts froze.

The burning claws dug deeper into his mind.

An abyss opened beneath him, calling him to fall, and fall, and fall without start or end. The claws ripped him up and away from the dark. Half-formed thoughts scattered after him. He thought he heard his name carried on a gust of dry, rattling wind.

‘Ignis…Ignis… Ignis…’

He was lying on the floor, polished amber pressed against his bare face. He pushed himself up. His skin and skull were burning inside and out. The breath coming from his mouth formed white mist in the air.

A foot of splayed metal toes and a shin of black-etched orange armour filled his sight as he raised his eyes from the floor. Something clicked with a sound of electronics and cogwork from above his field of sight.

Credence, he thought, surprised by his own feeling of relief.

‘I am… alive,’ he said. The amber floor shook as Credence stepped away.

+No thanks to your own actions,+ came Gaumata’s sending.

Ignis stood up. His armour hissed as though in protest, and the interface sockets on his spine needled shrill pain into his nerves. He looked at Gaumata. The pyromancer’s armour was the blue of deep water, edged with thick coils of gold. He wore no helm, but the broad features of his face sat beneath a crest of silver and bronze which rose like a frozen halo of fire above his skull. Fine silver wires linked crest and skull, and Ignis’s eyes caught the tick of sparks along them. Always a bad sign.

+I thought that you were a creature of precision, Ignis, not prone to distraction.+ Gaumata stared at him, his pupils black pinpricks in blood-red irises.

+I am unused to it,+ he sent flatly. +You have my thanks for your actions in preventing what might have occurred.+

+Gods, you are a bloodless reptile, Ignis,+ growled Gaumata, as he shook his heavy head. +You know, I sometimes thought that it was a shame they took fear from us. A little fear can be a valuable thing, but in your case any feeling at all might improve you.+

Ignis blinked. Others had said something similar to this before. He had not understood then. He did not understand it now.

+I made an error in focus, and judgement. It will not occur again.+

Gaumata snorted and turned to rest his hands on the rail of the platform. He looked down at the cavernous deck space beneath them. It was the ship’s largest muster deck, and though Ignis could see its farthest walls, a human would have struggled to see more than a distant blur.

Beneath the platform immobile figures stood in ranks across the muster chamber floor, each a statue in sapphire and gold, each with a bolter held across its chest. Each looking into space with coldly luminous eyes. There were as many here as he had ever seen gathered in one place. It was a… legion was not the correct word. Legion had once meant something else, something now broken and discoloured by blood. He nodded to himself. It was not the correct word, but it would suffice.

Gaumata’s eyes glittered as they scanned the expanse. He shook his head again, bit the edge of his lip, and twitched his mouth as though snarling at something someone had said. Ignis waited. He did not try to understand the pyromancer’s expressions. They, as always, seemed rather human. That did not make him comfortable. He let the silence deepen.

At last Gaumata straightened.

+Do not lose focus, when dealing with the Rubricae. Do not think that this is just a process.+ Gaumata shook his head again, the fingers of his right hand flexing as red flame rolled around the digits. +The Rubricae do not respond because you call their name. Do you understand? They respond because their name is a thread that pulls what is left of them a little closer to the light. Pull too hard and they come too close. They remember too much, and they…+

+Become angry.+

+Become dangerous. Potentially, that is.+

+You believe that? That there is something left of them inside, something that can remember, something that can feel?+

+Yes. You do not?+

Ignis looked down at the ranked Rubricae. He formed the name of a warrior he had not seen for almost a thousand years. One of the crested helms twitched upwards, and two pale motes of light stared up at him from behind crystal eyepieces.

He looked back.

Empty shells of armour spun with sorcery, he thought. Nothing more. He tilted the shape of his will. The Rubricae looking at him tilted its head to the side. You call them by their names, and they respond, they walk and fight, and watch, but who is to say that what drives them is even anything to do with what they were in life? Once we believed that we had angels on our shoulders, and they were daemons. How much easier is it to believe the same lie than the truth?

He shrugged, allowing his thoughts to sink down under the comforting spiral of numbers and ratios and the symbolic geometry of all things.

+No,+ he sent. +I do not think they are anything more than they seem.+

+And what is that?+

+The dead.+

+So why are you with us, Ignis?+

+Always the same question,+ he replied, the sending flat and emotionless. +It is, I suppose, the rational thing to ask.+

Gaumata waited while Ignis remained silent, looking down at the Rubricae. The formulae spun on in his mind, and he watched time spin fresh angles in his thoughts.

After a long minute Gaumata shook his head, and a mental shrug pulsed from his mind.

+We need to complete the preparations. The Rubricae must be ready. We must be ready. We will ascend again and commence the bonding from the beginning.+

Ignis nodded, and straightened. The lone Rubricae looking upwards dropped its gaze and was again a single statue amongst thousands.

+I will bear your advice in mind this time.+

Gaumata shrugged.

+Do or don’t as you please. If you repeat your error I may not be able to save you. I may not choose to save you.+

+Again you are nothing if not rational.+

Credence gave a blurt of machine code. Ignis met Gaumata’s red stare with a mind and face blank of emotion.

Gaumata breathed out, and turned away with the slightest shake of his head. Ignis thought he caught the smell of burning and the heat of a flame brushing across his mind. A second later it was gone, and he felt Gaumata’s mind begin to reshape its thoughts as the pyromancer’s will branched out and began to pull the warp to it. The silent murmur of names began.

Ignis glanced down one last time, and for a second his skin prickled inside his armour.

Every Rubricae was looking up at them.

He turned his own gaze away, and pushed his mind outwards. He and Gaumata spun towards the waiting presence of the Rubricae.

+If you believe that something still lives within them, brother, do you wonder if they want us to succeed?+ asked Ignis, as the dry presence of the dead touched his mind. +Have you wondered if they might not wish to return?+

Gaumata did not answer, and after a moment the pair began to speak the names again and the darkness lit with a web of cold fire.

…ih’hal’hrek, Ctesias intoned the fragment in his mind. Bile and the taste of spoiled meat filled his mouth, and the stone of the throne was cold against his skin. He coughed, and had to fight to keep from wiping his hand across his lips. His fingers twitched against his palm. His hand began to move on its own, crawling up his chest towards his face like a spider.

He stopped it with a snap of will.

He held his thoughts still for three seconds. He had to be careful. His hand moving while he spoke might seem to others to be a small thing, but he had lived nine centuries by knowing that small mistakes were the seeds of ruin.

If he wiped his mouth now, then he might do it again the next time he had a similar sensation. From there it might become a habit. Every time he thought of eating meat he would wipe his lips. After a while the habit might change, might become a need to replace the scent with that of incense. That habit of replacing the smell of decay with sweet smoke would become compulsion, and then an obsession so strong, and so deeply buried in the psyche, that a particular smell and taste would drive him to burn everything he could touch.

That was the power of the warp. No matter how small the connection, or how tiny the beginning, a daemon could use your own mind to destroy you. It might take millennia, but the legions of the warp had the patience of eternity.

Ctesias felt his body still, his hearts steady, and the taste fade from his tongue. Very carefully he moved his focus to another compartment of his mind, and touched the memory within.

…vel’rek’hul’scb’th’rx…

The image of a head of split skin and rolling fat filled his mind. He saw broken horns, eyes of pus and blood, and a mouth which split wide above a glistening throat sac. He blanked the vision, and stilled the tremor in his spine.

He let out another breath, and opened his eyes. The silver marks laid into the floor around the chair still glimmered with a green-blue ghost light. The candles he had set at each of the key points around the pattern had burned down to the last inches of tallow.

He waited to move. It always paid to wait after such a practice. Unwanted mistakes or effects on the physical world might not be immediately apparent. Patience in this, as in all things, rewarded one with continued life.

He watched the flames lick the molten candle wax. The substance of each had come from the flesh of dead thralls. The human psykers served in death as they had in life, as fuel, albeit of a different type.

‘Enough,’ he breathed, and felt the air rattle in his chest. ‘Enough… for now.’

Nine hours. He had sat on the stone chair within the circles of candles for nine hours. He was sure that Ignis would have expressed scorn at the fact that he had not predicted the length of the meditation to within a second.

It had been meditation, rather than a ritual, because the intent had not been to call anything into being, or cause any effect in the warp whatsoever. In fact the intent was the exact reverse. For nine hours he had moved through his memory, touching and checking each of the isolated compartments in his psyche. Each cell within his mind contained a fragment of a word, or in some cases, just a single syllable, or even just the pieces to make a syllable. Walls of mental strength separated each fragment. Woven together, the syllables would make a name: a true name of a daemon.

Even hearing a part of such a name could break a mortal’s sanity. Even the name unspoken corroded the substance which held it. Written in a book, the paper would burn, and turn to living, screaming flesh. Cast in metal, that metal would rust, melt, take form and scuttle into shadows. Etched into a goblet the glass would shatter, and the fragments become clouds of sharp edges thirsting for blood. To speak one such name, to use it to summon, bind, or dismiss a daemon was to do something both terrible and extraordinary. Ctesias had done just that, and not just once, but many times. His mind held thousands of daemons’ true names, from petty creatures to the greater daemons from the highest circles of Ruin. His own soul was his grimoire, and his mind was the hand which turned the pages.

‘Move,’ he said to himself, and found the word dry on his tongue. He licked his lips, blinked, and sucked a sip of air. ‘Move. Strength is in the mind not the body, so stand, you fossilised lump of dung.’ His own words almost made him laugh, but he coughed instead, thick fluid racking from his throat.

He rose to his feet, the robe covering the lower half of his body clinging to him as fresh sweat beaded his flesh. He closed his eyes one last time. Tiny ghost impressions of the daemonic fragments he had touched clung to the edges of his thoughts. They would have to be purged before he left the candlelight.

He readied his will, and then stopped, a wild fancy suddenly tugging at his thoughts. He felt the edges of his lips twitch. It would be pointless, an act of bravado seen by no one but himself. And such things were dangerous.

He grinned, and clapped his hands once, and raised them above his head. His will rushed out, carrying the detritus of his meditation with it.

A galaxy of images filled the air. He saw the snarling jaws of a three-headed hound, a great bull’s head with eyes of night, a flattened tangle of brass teeth and molten eyes, a tumbling mass of arms and mouths, a blunt stump of a body made from boils and chewed fat. On and on they went, a great spherical explosion of horror. He watched them as they flew out, the countless images becoming thin as they reached the edge of the candlelight.

His smile faded as the candles dimmed and went out one by one.

He nodded to himself and made for the chamber door, and what rest he could find.

‘It will be enough,’ he said to himself quietly. ‘I hope it will be enough.’

VII
Synchronicity

The space hulk had no name before the Oathtaker gave it one. Perhaps the first ship, which had begun the agglomeration, had had a name, but that name had been lost to time and change. Churned and thrown through the warp by storm tides, that first lost ship had crashed into another wreck, and the two had become one. Eventually the warp had spat the fused ships out into the cold embrace of space. Asteroids and comet ice had slammed into the mass of wreckage, adding to her bulk. Then the warp had reached back into reality and pulled its child back into its tides. More dead ships had fused with her. The core of her creation had vanished, and a vast ball of detritus had remained. At last a current had snagged her and pulled her down into one of the dead seas of the Eye of Terror. There she had sat, until the Oathtaker had come for her. He had given her many things, and one of those was her first and only name. Monolith he called her, and with his gifts she changed again.

To see the Monolith from a distance was to see a twisted moon made of jagged edges. Seen closer – so that the lights of ships holding close to her skin could be observed – she looked like the swollen carcass of a great sea creature feeding a school of scavenger fish. To eyes looking at her through a viewport on those ships, she was a jagged cliff, blocking out the stars. Canyons crazed her surface, each one wide enough to swallow a battle cruiser. Prows of ships jutted from her like broken sword blades. Pockets of iridescent gas clung to kilometre-deep folds in her skin, and pinprick points of light shone in fields across mountain ranges of crushed hulls.

The Oathtaker watched as smaller ships slid close to the Monolith’s surface. Gantries reached out and gripped the ships, pulling them close like a mother hugging her young. Each ship was kilometres long and held tens of thousands of creatures. Most were mutants bred on worlds within the Eye’s depths. Herds of mutants and covens of cultists already warred with each other for his favour in regions of wrecked ships. It was an army of the crazed and the twisted, and much of it had gathered to him without him needing to call. They had come like carrion slinking towards the smell of death.

The Oathtaker’s mind licked at the shifting currents of the warp. His lieutenants stood behind him like an honour guard, as though they needed to be present for this moment. The Thousand Sons, he had always thought, had a need for ritual and significance. Nothing could simply be; every action had to be tinged with the momentous.

+Ahriman will sense our coming,+ sent Calitiedies. The Oathtaker did not turn or look at his lieutenants.

+He may, but does that matter?+ replied Zurcos.

+Surprise is an advantage. He who gives away an advantage unnecessarily is a fool,+ sent Calitiedies.

+The strength we have here–+

+You forget what we face.+ Calitiedies shook his head as he cut through Zurcos’s sending. +You forget who we face. Ahriman and all of the Exiles that he can gather to him. Alone he is dangerous enough. With the others at his side…+

+We were always few,+ sent Zurcos, +and Amon scattered or broke those who would not join him. After that the few became even fewer.+

+From a certain view within the warp, Amon is out there still,+ sent the Oathtaker. His thought voice was soft, but silenced every other mind. +He is out there now looking for you and the other Exiles, making his Brotherhood of Dust, preparing for a war that will never begin.+ He looked to where Memunim stood in fresh armour, silent at the back of his brothers. +That is one of the reasons that Ahriman is blinded to what we do. He came looking for you all, and found you gone. He believed that it was Amon. He heard long ago of powers gathering to a lord of sorcerers, but he assumed it was Amon. Now he believes that time has passed. We are hidden in Amon’s shadow.+

+You said that was one reason he does not see us,+ sent Memunim, the message coiled with coldness. +What are the others?+

The Oathtaker paused and felt the tension grow in the silence.

+Go,+ he sent, and pulsed his dismissal. +The tides are moving and the warp whispers. The time is almost on us.+

The Fortress where they gathered did not exist and could not be understood. If a mortal mind had perceived them – the gathered creatures, the chamber and the being at its heart before which they bowed – that mind would have collapsed into insanity before it could begin to describe what it had seen and heard. Had such a mortal lived long enough and been strong enough to speak it might have spoken of a library and of creatures with feathers and wings, and a vast pillar of mouths and light. If such a mortal had spoken, all its words and screamed description would have been a lie, for no mortal could perceive the Court of Change or the Changer of Ways. But in the Realm of Chaos a lie served as well as a truth.

‘He must continue!’ hissed one of the throng.

Feathers ripped, and beaks clacked in dissent. Sparks of blue and pink snapped through the chamber. The web of stairs shifted. Blue figures screeched and ran as columns of paper shifted and collapsed. Sheets of undiscovered lore exploded and began to fall upwards and downwards, burning to ash or folding into birds. The throng of the court ignored the disturbance. It might portend the death of worlds or the fall of endeavours long in the making, but all of it was insignificant compared to the argument at hand.

‘He does not acknowledge his place in the greater designs…’ spat a figure.

‘Worship is worthless,’ replied another.

‘Only the unworshipped say so.’

‘His ignorance is a greater delight than the possibility of his acknowledging the truth.’

‘He is dangerous.’

‘He is weak, a failure at every turn.’

‘Is that not because it has been ordained that he will fail?’

‘Nothing has been ordained on the matter.’

‘You are sure?’

‘It is a matter of paradox.’

‘Platitudes are not wisdom.’

‘Wisdom holds no truth.’

‘He has served us.’ The voice ended the babble. High in the reaches of the Library, the imps of knowledge hesitated as the silence fell. It was never silent in this place.

The throng of daemons crouched in cowed terror.

Above them, the being which they were both a part of and utterly removed from stirred in its wrappings of light and lightning. Mortals in their ignorance called it a god, but it was no god. It was something beyond gods and prayers. Magic and fate coiled around it like fog winding around a tower. Countless mouths opened and closed across its skin. Tongues licked lips. Fangs glistened. Beaks snapped at the air. Far out, in the infinity of paradox which stretched from the Fortress, the silence of the Changer of Ways sent daemons scurrying in fear. The greater daemons and princes of the Court of Change waited. They could feel destinies rolling over and threads of existence snapping as the god of magic and lies – which was a god only by theft – contemplated the fate of a lone mortal.

‘He has served, and served well,’ said the god. Each mouth spoke the same words, but each used a different language and intonation. ‘He has earned the reward he deserves but does not crave. That reward will be his.’

A ripple passed through the Court of Change at the pronouncement. On the shelves and tiers of the library the blue daemons hissed to each other behind their hands.

The god – which was only a god in the sight of mortals – shifted and spoke again.

‘Bring the Thief of Faces.’

The greater daemons glanced at each other, trying to think how to obey or twist their master’s command. They all knew the being which the Changer of Ways had summoned, but none of them knew where it was or how to bring it to them. That was its nature, to be unknown.

‘I am here,’ called a voice, and the throng of daemons parted around a lone member of their gathering. It grinned at them with its flayed vulture face, and then that face was gone. A new creature crouched in the air before them. Soft, blue silk hung across its body, and it had no face, just a black space beneath its hood. The other daemons hissed at it, but it bowed its cowl very slowly, like a wading bird dipping its beak into still water. Like all of them it had many names and titles, but to the mortals who were tormented by knowledge of its existence, it was the Changeling, and only the god – which was greater than gods – knew its true name.

‘You will go to Ahriman,’ commanded the Changer of Ways. ‘Walk the subtle paths. Your presence must not interfere with his undertaking. You must arrive only at the end. Not before. Not after.’

The Changeling bowed low.

‘And once I have reached him?’

‘He will have given all he can, and danced his last. Give him my gift in payment for his service. When it is over I will release him.’ A murmur of surprise ran through the court; no pawn in the Great Game had ever been set free from its bonds. Even in death, the souls of the deluded and the damned served the Great Conspirator. But the god spoke on in one voice. ‘Give him the gift of oblivion. When all is done, Ahriman will become as dust. He will become nothing. That is my gift, from my hand to yours, from yours to his.’

‘It will be,’ said the Changeling to the god.

Their minds gathered in silence. Ahriman watched and sensed them as the presence of his Circle coalesced around his mind. Only Ignis and Ctesias stood with him in the physical world. Gaumata, Kiu, and Gilgamos stood at the centre of their own ritual circles on ships separated by hundreds of kilometres of empty space. Beyond the hulls of the fleet the stars were distant flecks of brightness, and the engines of each craft glowed like the craters of slowly waking volcanoes. To Ahriman, his brothers were each close enough that he could touch them with the slightest thought.

Each member of the Circle appeared as a construct of symbolism. Ctesias was a sphere of verdigris-mottled bronze scales, each one etched with letters from secret scripts and each one shifting its position from one instant to the next. Ignis was a framework of white lines, ever collapsing and expanding. Gaumata appeared as a branching set of flames, Kiu a shimmer of sharp edges and rainbow colour, Gilgamos a rippling fold of black feathers. Ahriman did not know how he appeared to their minds, nor if they sensed and saw each other as he saw them.

Tendrils of thought and emotion reached between them. Ahriman could taste and feel their minds. All were controlled, all were ready, but each was also unsure. They were pilgrims stepping out on a path which they could not see the end of. Yet they were here, with him, because of him.

+It is time,+ he sent.

The Circle’s thoughts and power fused. Corposant formed around the towers on the backs of every ship in the fleet. Power built in reactors. Crew in the deep decks fell to their knees as the warp drives began to rumble.

+Silvanus,+ called Ahriman and felt the shudder of revulsion as the Navigator’s mind answered.

They had done this many times before, their minds and ships bound together by will, the path before them lit by their minds. But this was different. If there had ever been a last chance of turning back, this was that moment.

Cradled in the minds of his brothers, Ahriman let the moment pass. Then he formed a single word of command.

+Now,+ he sent.

Neon worms enveloped the Monolith. From within the warp, Astraeos felt the blood patter onto the deck in a hundred sacrificial circles. The debris fields around the agglomeration shuddered. Chunks of hulls and banks of dust skidded outwards, stopped, and then began to race inwards. Screams filled Astraeos’s ears, echoing up from thousands of kilometres of twisted stone and metal. His own mind was pulling away from his body, spinning into the power gripping the Monolith. He could see it from far away, from within, from the smallest dark core of silence at its centre.

The agglomeration was creaking. It was a sheet of rippled light, it was a line drawn across space like a razor slit. It was a mote of dust tumbling on the wind beside countless more. And he was part of it. He was creating this. Shrieks rose within him, cradling him, feeding him as thousands of mortal witches ripped their souls apart and sent their minds into oblivion.

Debris began to hit the agglomeration. Bodies made of light and slime formed on the Monolith’s surface, scrabbling at the stone and metal with claws, hands and teeth. They chittered and giggled, hooting with glee and anticipation as the chorus called more and more of them into being.

Astraeos’s body was far away, but his senses were everywhere: in the iron walls, in the mouths of the screaming slaves, in the ammonia- and salt-scented air, in the throats of the mutant herds as they brayed in terror and adoration.

The daemons began rocking the agglomeration out of reality like a tide prising a stone out of sand. Blood and silver were weeping from walls. Chained slaves exploded as their organs grew and split their skins. All colours were a kaleidoscope, all sounds a single cry, like a raven calling in still, dry air.

And then, with a howl of sudden silence, the daemons tore the agglomeration from being, and threw it into the depths of oblivion.

The storm broke over the Word of Hermes. Claws of light scraped over its shields. Walls of screaming faces loomed above it, stretching to an impossible height. The warship ploughed on, twisting in the wild current.

High on its back, Silvanus looked out at the warp’s fury and tried not to blink. Breath wheezed from his open mouth, and sweat oozed from the folded skin of his face. Warp-light swirled in the gloss surface of his third eye. The two others were open too, splinter patterns of colour without iris or pupil. He had not blinked for hours, or perhaps it was days. Crusts of blood clogged his eyelashes. In his head he could feel the minds of Ahriman and the Circle. He was the centre of a web of thoughts and sight which held Ahriman’s fleet together as it tumbled through storm and fury.

A wide mouth opened before the Word of Hermes. His thoughts twitched and the ship responded by shuddering. There was no way around it. They would have to go through.

Hold course, he thought, not bothering to wonder if the sorcerers had heard him. They always did. Every ship in the fleet would be following his direction.

The storm’s mouth opened wide before him. Each fang was kilometres long. Silvanus felt vomit spill from his mouth as his hands began to scrabble at the arms of his chair. The storm roared into his mind and ears. A wall of human shrieks poured into him. The throat beyond the teeth was a spiralling tunnel of reaching hands and pleading faces. He could taste blood on his lips, could feel it running from the pores in his skin. He wanted to close his eyes, to shut out the voices, to fall into a sleep without dreams, without sensation, without anything. He would look away. He had to.

+Silvanus.+ The voice cut into his mind.

He did not look away. He could not.

The tunnel narrowed in front of him. The hands were brushing his skin. Fingers pulled at the sagging folds of his face. He felt nails pinch, and draw blood. The end of the tunnel was a shrinking disc of darkness.

+Silvanus, listen to me.+

The hands were crawling over his face, pulling it down, tumbling him end over end.

+Silvanus, the storm has us. You have to focus.+

He had to close his eyes. The screams were inside him now, the endless torrent of despair tumbling him over and over.

+We will create an opening, but it will not last. You have to be ready. Do you understand?+

A spider of fingers crept over his mouth and clamped it shut. He could not breathe. His body heaved and shuddered.

+Do you understand?+

His lungs were burning. Something was pulling at his eyelids, something with hooked claws.

+Do you understand?+

He forced his jaw open, bared his teeth and bit down. His teeth clashed together. A jet of blood flicked across his sight. He could taste iron. Something was writhing against his tongue. He spat, heaved a breath, and spoke.

‘I understand,’ he said out loud, forcing the words out with a spray of blood.

No reply came, and the storm bellowed at him. The hands and faces vanished under a tide of glistening eyes.

+Clear the way,+ said Ahriman’s voice.

Heat lanced into Silvanus’s head. His vision shimmered. Pressure formed across his skin and squeezed. He could hear voices, their words ringing out as one, their tones merging even as he listened. He could not keep his eyes open. He did not want to keep them open.

Burning light shot from his forehead. The agony was infinite. The light burned blue-white as it cut through the sea of eyes before him. Shrieks filled his mind and ears. The beam of light grew wider. Orbs exploded in spheres of glowing ectoplasm. The voices in his mind were a single roaring note of mental force. He could feel them, every one of them, could taste the texture of each mind and personality: Ctesias’s jagged emptiness, Kiu’s burning pride, the slow molten fury of Gaumata, Gilgamos a web of silver thoughts, the drone of Ignis’s intellect, and binding them together was Ahriman.

The light vanished.

For an instant Silvanus was floating in stillness, and quiet. He could smell burning, and taste bile mixing with the blood on his tongue. A pool of empty blackness waited before his eyes, its edges the ragged tatters of a wound. He stared at it, his heart a half-broken drum in his chest. He could still feel the impression of Ahriman and the Circle’s thoughts in his mind.

I should let the storm have us, he thought. I should let us go to its embrace.

He knew that they could hear him, and he knew that they did not care. He had wanted to die so many times, but each time the door had opened he had turned away.

Curse you, Ahriman, he thought. Curse you to beyond the reaches of time.

The passage through the storm was almost closed now. He dived for the gap, and Ahriman’s fleet dived with him. The storm rushed to close on him, clawing at him, screaming at him in rage, laughing at his cowardice. Then it was past, and he dropped the Word of Hermes into reality an instant before his eyes closed.

When he woke, it was to the smell of excrement, vomit and sweat. He lay for a second in the embrace of his chair, and then heaved himself free. The ship was steady in real space, he could tell by the vibrations of the deck under his feet. His skin was sticky with dried fluid, and congealed blood caked his lips. He remembered the arms reaching for him out of the storm, remembered the hand clamping his mouth shut, remembered biting his way free as he suffocated. He raised a hand reflexively to wipe the crust from his chin.

His hand smeared a fresh jelly of blood on his face. He looked at the deck beside his navigation chair before he looked at his hand. The tips of three of his fingers lay on the velvet cushion floor, bitten clean off and spat out. He looked at his hand. The blood on it was still fresh, but the skin covering the three newly grown digits was fresh, pink and glossy, like a burn scar beneath a scab.

You should have gone to the storm, he thought. You should have had the courage to die long ago.

He stared at the new flesh, and felt his empty stomach contract, and then fell to his knees and retched.

VIII
Transitions

The sun rose red above the bleached horizon. Iobel walked on, feeling the heat beat down on her, and the dryness become a thirst in her throat. She did not look around, there was no point. Sand extended to meet the sky in every direction. She had looked up once to see a shimmer of water on the horizon, but had known that it was a mirage, just like the cities which beckoned from the distance.

She kept on walking.

She had stopped sweating, a bad sign. She had wanted to stop and rest for some time, but the desert had withheld even a scrap of shade. The promise of water, cities and forests loomed in the distance only to dissolve as the sun moved. She was tired, and thirsty, and she very much wanted to stop. The presence of each of those sensations was strange, very strange in fact. In a very real sense they meant nothing; she had no body, and the sun’s heat was no more real than a memory. That, in truth, was what the desert was: a crystallised reflection of a world of imagination. And she was the same.

In the way that most would consider it, she was dead, and the shadow which walked across the dunes was a ghost walking in a realm no thicker than a thought. She should have been able to shrug off the heat and fatigue, should even have been able to rise from the ground and skim the desert like a hawk. But she could not. She had tried and failed. The desert pressed on her, squeezing her into the shape of a thin figure climbing dunes and breathing dry air through cracking lips.

When night came, it came quickly. The sun seemed to fall to the horizon. The sky darkened from blue to indigo to black. Stars lit, shining bright and hard, as the heat drained from the air. She found she was shivering. The breeze slipping across the dunes now felt like a knife.

She pulled the robe closer around her. In the sunlight the fabric had been deep blue, like the surface of an ocean spun in threads. Under the stars it was black, and the idea caught her that she was a shadow left over from the day.

But shadows don’t feel their teeth chattering, she thought. She kept on moving, following the light of the brightest star in the sky. No more mirage cities grew and withered on the horizon. Sounds gathered in the distance, cries which rose and lingered in her ears even after they were gone. They sounded like animals, jackals perhaps, or even some form of feline. Once she thought she heard a human voice cry out, and the sound had made her pause, ears and eyes reaching into the dark. The cry had not come again, and she had walked on.

She saw the light a long time before she reached it. The desert had become a frozen sea of silver. The fire was a pinprick flicker, far off and weak, but in the steel and sable monochrome it shone clear. She watched the light for a while, blinking to try and keep the cold and fatigue from pulling her eyes shut. Then she pushed off the crest of the dune she had paused on, and slid down into the dip beneath. The firelight disappeared behind the silhouette of the next dune, but it was there again when she reached the top. She moved towards it, step by step, until it was a blur of orange filling the bowl just beyond the next crest of sand.

She paused. She could taste the smoke, heavy with a dry resin scent. It seemed familiar, but she could not say how.

Given what you are, and where you are, and how far you have come, she thought to herself, now seems like a strange time to become timid, Selandra.

She climbed the face of the dune, and looked down into the space beyond. A fire burned at the base of the slope. It was large, and she could see tree branches standing out as twisted lines amongst the flames. A figure sat beside it, huddled beneath a robe much like her own. She could not tell if the figure was truly small, or only seemed small. Somewhere close by, a jackal cry cut into the night.

She glanced behind her, and then back to the fire and the figure.

‘So easy to find,’ she muttered to herself. ‘That’s never a good sign.’

She slid down the slope, as soft and silent as a breath of breeze. The figure beside the fire did not look up as she walked into the circle of light.

‘Did you know I would come looking for you?’ she asked as she sat and felt the warmth wash over her face. ‘Or is this supposed to be a convenient coincidence?’

The figure’s head snapped around. Iobel had the impression of wide eyes beneath dark hair, and the soft features of a boy’s face. She felt a surge of surprise, and the figure leapt up and back. The firelight caught a knife clutched in his hands. He circled to the opposite side of the fire, eyes fixed on her.

‘Who are you?’ he snapped, and she caught the tremor of fear in his voice. His eyes were dark and bright in the firelight. Slowly, without breaking her gaze from the boy’s, she raised her hands, palms open. Light caught the reflections of rings on her fingers.

‘I am sorry,’ she said carefully, keeping her voice level. ‘I did not mean to startle you. I… saw the light. I thought someone I am looking for made the fire. I thought you were them.’ She stared at the boy for a second. There was something in the face that was familiar. ‘It is not you, is it?’ she asked carefully. ‘If it is, I would appreciate it if we could move past this… lack of understanding.’

The boy shook his head and jabbed the air with the knife.

‘You are from them, aren’t you? I will not come with you. I won’t.’

Iobel tilted her head. The boy was starting to shake as the adrenaline trembled through his muscles.

Familiar, she thought, familiar… But it did not feel like it had before, and she was starting to believe that in this realm of dream and memory that difference mattered a great deal.

‘You leave me alone!’ spat the boy, but he did not move closer.

‘I am sorry,’ she said again, and let her hands drop. ‘I am not here for you.’

The boy did not move for a second. She kept her eyes on his, steady, calm, patient. Slowly, breath by breath, the knife point dipped lower. At last he gave her an obviously considered look and sat down.

‘May I stay by the fire?’ she asked.

The boy nodded but said nothing. He was staring into the fire, the knife gone into the folds of his robe.

The warmth was starting to seep into her, and she could feel herself begin to flutter down towards unconsciousness.

She jolted upright, eyes wide. Sleep, warmth, tiredness… What was she doing? None of those feelings were real. She had no body, no skin to feel the warmth of fire or the ache of fatigue. This, like her, like the sky and sand and heat, was the underworld of Ahriman’s mind. Nothing here was real, and everything was here because of him.

Somewhere in the distance another jackal call shivered on the low breeze.

She looked at the boy. His face was thin and the creases of worry seemed out of place on one so young. How old was he, seven, eight perhaps?

‘Who is it you thought I was?’ she asked. His eyes flicked to her, and then back to the fire.

‘Them,’ he said. ‘They will want to take me back, but I won’t go. I did nothing wrong.’ He looked back into the fire, the frown scoring the skin of his forehead. Iobel was about to ask another question when he spoke.

‘Who was it that you thought I was?’ he asked, his eyes sharp, calculating, measuring.

‘Someone I have met beside a fire once before,’ she said.

‘A friend?’

She felt the chuckle come from her lips before she could stop it.

‘An enemy,’ she said. ‘A very old enemy.’

‘Then why are you looking for them?’

She shrugged.

‘Because… because unanswered questions are not something I like.’ She paused, felt herself bite her lip, and then shrugged again. ‘And because if I can find him, there might be a way of destroying him and another enemy at the same time.’

‘Destroy…’ said the boy carefully, ‘enemies… You don’t sound like a good person.’

‘Good?’ She almost laughed again. ‘No, no, I am not.’

She glanced out into the dark behind her at the sound of another jackal’s cry, closer this time.

‘Do not worry,’ said the boy. ‘They won’t come close to the fire.’

He nodded confidently as she looked back to him. The frown had faded from his face.

Familiar…

She had walked and seen the far reaches of Ahriman’s memories, but had never seen this face before. But it was… so… familiar.

He looked away and picked up a dried branch from a pile on the ground beside him, and placed it on the fire.

‘What is the name of this enemy you want to find?’ he asked as the wood blackened and began to catch.

‘Magnus,’ said Iobel, and glanced at his face as she did. ‘He is called Magnus.’

The boy shook his head.

‘What is he? What does he look like?’

‘An old man in a tattered red cloak. He has a scarred face and only one eye. The eye is blue.’ The boy’s face did not show a flicker of recognition. ‘But I think he might look like anything or anyone as he chooses.’

‘A djinn?’ said the boy, a smile on his face. ‘You are chasing a spirit of dust and air?’ He shook his head. ‘You know they do not exist? They are just a mythological echo, a shadow left by the past.’ He straightened slightly as he delivered his verdict, like a student proud to demonstrate knowledge learned, but not fully digested. It almost made her want to smile.

‘Perhaps you are right,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we are both right.’ She took a breath. The smoke from the fire smelled slightly sweet. ‘Who are the people you are running from?’ she asked carefully. He did not look up from the fire. ‘You seem to be very educated to be hiding from jackals beside a fire.’

‘I am not hiding,’ he snapped, but then sighed, the gesture seeming like an imitation borrowed from an older soul. ‘I did something I shouldn’t have. I made something happen that means that I don’t want to go back.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing, really. But they will find out. They will have to, and they will take me away. I know they will.’

She heard another jackal call, and then an answer, further off. She did not look around this time.

‘Who are they?’

‘My brother,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘People who come from my brother.’

She felt cold prickle up her spine. She took a slow breath.

‘Your brother?’

‘Yes.’

Iobel tried to keep her face still and her breathing steady, even as her thoughts were racing. All she could do was stare at the boy’s face, the eyes made black by the firelight, the simple youth and humanity in the features. And familiarity clicked over into recognition.

The boy was talking again, his eyes on the fire. The flames pulsed and streamed in the wind. But there was no wind.

‘I can’t go back. It is not my time. Not yet.’ He looked up at her and she thought for an instant she could see the bright blue glitter from his irises.

‘What is your name?’ she asked.

‘Does it matter?’ he asked. He was staring at her now, his eyes hard and old in a young face.

A growl chuckled just behind her. Wet, meat-rank breath touched the skin of her neck. She turned and began to rise, hand reaching for a branch from the fire.

A wall of eyes looked back at her from the dark. The flames caught the teeth and tongues beneath the discs of reflected light. Iobel’s hand closed on… nothing. The fire was gone. But the jackals’ eyes still shone, as cold and bright as coins in moonlight.

The boy stepped from behind her, his movement smooth as he raised a hand to the nearest jackal. The creature was the size of a pack-beast. Blood glistened on the fur of its head. The boy ran his hand down the creature’s neck, and a breath sighed from its jaws. The boy turned to look at her, and his eyes were now the same as those of the jackals behind him.

‘I have not seen the djinn you seek, Selandra Iobel,’ he said, the words cold and solemn. ‘But this is a realm of secrets, and those who hide them.’

‘It’s you, isn’t it, Ahriman?’ she asked. ‘This is your memory of yourself before you were taken by the Legions. A memory cast to the edge of yourself.’

The boy smiled for the first time, and she saw that his teeth were black stumps crumbling into dust within the circle of ragged lips. The shadows in the crevices of his face were cracks in paper-thin skin.

‘I am not my brother,’ he said. ‘Just as you are dead, so am I.’ The eyes of the jackals were unblinking beside him. Around her the dark deepened. ‘But this is the realm of the dead past, and here I am free.’

The chill folded over her, cutting her, wringing her out.

‘Free?’ she managed to say.

The boy shook his head, as though weary.

‘You are not a good person, Iobel, nor an honest one, but thank you for sharing my fire. You may never reach the end of your journey, and if you do, you may wish you had not.’ She blinked and there was just blackness and cold, and his voice seeming to call to her from high above. ‘Go to the beginning of things. That is where all things lead in the end.’ And then she was floating in the dark, and could hear nothing at all.

She came to under the high sun with the sand pressed against her face. The wind was already stripping the cool from her skin. She had not slept, but for a moment had simply stopped being. There was no sign of a fire, nor any footprints save her own, already blurred by the wind.

She pulled her robe closer around her and began to climb the face of another dune. On the horizon, cities of glass shimmered. She walked on, wondering if night would come again.

The Changeling waited. Patience was a part of its nature, just as was its impatience with order. Both qualities drove it to perform its amusements for the Great Unknowable Changer Of All, but it was patience that made those grand jests possible. And the task it had been bound to was amongst the greatest and grandest. It would take subtlety, a great deal of subtlety, and the most circuitous of routes between where it was and where it needed to be.

So it lay in the gap between two events: one which had happened, and one which had almost happened.

It watched. It saw the details of the past pinwheel into the present and twirl on into the future. It did not try to see where those spinning puzzles of cause and effect would go. It could not see, and it did not care. There were others that observed such things endlessly, but just as their nature was to predict and to shape, the Changeling’s nature was to confuse, to muddle, to spoil. It was its lord’s infinite whim and spite.

It watched as a boy grew on a planet which would one day die. The boy became a creature greater than a man, and discovered the powers within himself. Calamity and mischance brought the boy, who was now a warrior, to ruin. The whirl of cruelty and pride was delightful, or it would have been delightful if the Changeling had been a creature who could feel.

It watched and millennia passed and no time passed at all. And then the event it had been waiting for happened.

It was a small thing, a very small thing.

A human on a ship went to sleep. The human was a man, and the man had been born on the ship and grown old on it. He did not know it, but he was dying. His body had grown weak through years of pulling chains to raise shells through the hole in the floor and up through an opening in the deck above. The polluted water and thin food had done the rest. In a week or a month or a year he would fall while pulling the chain, and never stand up. Except none of that would now happen.

The Changeling reached into the man’s dreams, and he never woke.

Though he had never realised it, the man was gifted. Just like the boy who had become a warrior, he had the seed of the extraordinary in him, but the seed had never grown, and the man had never realised that the dreams he had for his three decades of life were not his own.

The Changeling rose in place of the human when the shift bell sounded. It shivered beneath its blanket and coughed just as the mortal, whose skin and face it wore, had done every morning.

‘Up and move,’ called a machine voice, and a whip licked the deck. The Changeling shuffled forwards, shedding the blanket. There was a lot of noise, lots of flesh sweating and hurrying. It watched carefully, looking for the next face.

The tip of a whip caught the Changeling’s human face. It reeled back, feeling the wet blood wash from the cut on its cheek.

‘Move faster,’ said a voice from just above. The Changeling glanced up. A slab-bodied overseer was looking down at it. A metal jaw covered the lower half of his face. A sheen of oil clung to the muscles. The whip was spooling back into the metal of his right arm. ‘Stare at me any longer and I will pull your face off.’

The Changeling bobbed its head and scuttled away.

It would have to wait until it could exchange faces with the overseer, but it could not wait too long. It had to be wearing the right face when the ship reached Prospero.

Knekku searched the city but did not find the Tower of the Cyclops. He had not expected to. The disc beneath his feet was a circle of polished silver. A ribbon of fine tentacles trailed from its edge as it slid through the air. Knekku could hear the disc whispering and burbling to him even as it moved in response to his will. Bridges and shifting streets flicked past him. Crowds of mutants and slaves knelt at his passing, and he felt the ritual words leave their lips, but he never looked at them. His gaze was always on the distance.

The forest of towers changed as he moved through it. They had begun to alter their shape and size, too. Glass had clouded to granite, and walls had grown cannons and blades. Chasms had opened at the city’s edge. Cliffs of black gas now separated regions of the planet. A heavy fog of silver mist coiled through the towers and pyramids, hiding and revealing details at whim, and even with his second sight Knekku could not see through it. He could hear the calls from within it, high laughing calls that sounded like cruelty and hunger. Within the aether, great wheels of sharpness and spikes swung out and sang in the warp. So thin was the skin between reality and unreality that he could see through it sometimes. The Planet of the Sorcerers was becoming a fortress, its defences clicking into place like the gears of a mechanism.

All without point, he thought, all defending an empty throne.

All of it was unfolding and growing with an unstoppable momentum. One thought occupied him now.

+A king comes and goes as he pleases,+ Sar’iq had said.

But where are you, sire? he thought. His sight swept the city but no black tower broke from the mist. Why are you not here? The hour approaches. You should be here. Where are you?

No answer came, and the city went on and on blurring past and growing anew in front of him.

What if it is not this world that needs protecting? What if it is you? What if you are trying to protect us from a greater truth? He had struggled with that thought for days and weeks, even as the rest prepared for war. It itched at him, and he could not control it. Not with all the meditation or spear practice that time could offer. As each moment passed he expected to hear the summons in his mind and look across the city to see the black tower. No summons had come, and the question ticked through his mind and grew louder.

Where are you?

He turned around the flank of a tower which had grown barbs of silver. A circular plaza opened before him, stretching half a kilometre to the opposite wall of towers. A golden seal in the shape of a rayed sun covered the centre of the plaza. He slowed as he saw figures running from the centre of the seal, blue and white robes fluttering as they shouted in alarm. Not all were running, though. Gaunt figures in red stood at the edge of the disc. Haloes of flesh-metal tentacles waved above them like anemones sifting ocean water. Chrome skulls looked out from their hoods.

He paused, as he realised what was happening. A clank shook the ground. Knekku saw figures fall on the edge of the golden seal. The ring of machine-wrights raised their heads and tentacles to the sky, and he heard their static shrieks rise. The seal broke. Vast petals of metal sank down and spun away with a boom of gears. In the distance he heard the sound repeated nine times across the city. A figure rose from beneath the ground, straightening even as it was hoisted into the light. Liquid blue fire tumbled from its carapace like womb fluid. Gears the height of men twitched and juddered as it unfolded its weapons. Its head rose last, a lone beak of metal and bone with eyes of red light. It looked across the square and up at the encircling towers, and then turned its vast gaze to where Knekku hung in the air above it.

The daemon Titan roared, and its voice shook the aether.

Knekku’s disc bucked beneath his feet before his will stilled it.

+Greetings, Czetherrtihor,+ sent Knekku, the sending low but filled with authority.

The Titan shook its head, and a second silent roar shivered across the city. Other calls answered, booming out with chained rage and pride. Knekku watched as Czetherrtihor stepped back, its armour plates shivering through colours. The machine looked at Knekku and bowed its head with a creak of metal.

Knekku nodded in return, and watched as the daemon machine strode from the plaza trailing a caravan of figures in red.

+Knekku…+ He froze at the sound of the thought in his skull. +Knekku…+

He turned slowly, his skin prickling. He had forgotten what had been drawing him through the city. While he had watched the Titan rise, he had forgotten his worry, and the reason for it.

+Sire? My lord Magnus?+

The black tower was there, rising high above the tops of the others. It looked thin, as though it were both taller and further away than he had ever seen it.

+Knekku, I…+

He rose higher, and his disc burned the air as it soared towards the black tower. Knekku kept his senses looking on the shape as it grew above him. He did not want to think about what he had heard in Magnus’s summons. The voice in his skull had sounded stretched, cracked, broken. It sounded like it was dying.

IX
Voices

Calculus Logi Prime Lensus Marr spent his days and nights watching the void around the Eternal Warrior. Arrays of auspex and aether-sifts fed their output into his ears and eye sockets. Hundreds of lesser sensors reached out into the void, and ran data into the nerves linked to his ears and skin. He received a filtered summary of the output of all of the tertiary sensors, and occasionally directly reviewed the function of his subordinates. There were thirty-five calculus logi divided into four gradations who sat on each of the lower tiers of the sensorium dais. Marr sat at the top, his eyes plugged into thick creepers of cable which hung from the roof of the bridge above. His fingers flexed on the arms of his chair, the tips trembling in sympathy with the signal returns riding his nerves. He chewed his tongue, an old habit and one that he had never tried to shake. It was unimportant to his function, and that function was to see, sense and feel anything that moved around the ship. He had performed this function for sixty-one years.

The Eternal Warrior had been holding its position for seventy hours. It was not alone, but as the only battle cruiser in the sentinel group, it was the fulcrum around which the half-dozen other cruisers, light cruisers and frigates turned. The nearest – and only – stellar body was a rogue planet which sat in the void without sun to orbit or moon to circle it. The nearest stars were distant pinpricks, their radiance barely enough to cause a hum in his sensors. It was a dead reach of space, devoid of anything but banks of dust and gas, and the unmoving bulk of the rogue planetoid. There was nothing for millions of kilometres that did not move with total predictability.

To Marr, the space he watched was quiet. Worse, it was dull. It was a long way from his days of hearing the scream of reactor death and feeling targeters trying to find their mark. There was no reason to be where they were. Except, of course, for the fact that the Inquisition had bound the Eternal Warrior and its sisters to stand guard over this reach of space. Marr did not know the reason. To know more than was needed to serve was to risk one’s soul, but that did not mean he had not formed an idea. His task and purpose was to listen and watch, after all. He heard signals, and saw the rare comings and goings of the other ships that came to this place.

Then there were the anomalies. Clouds of light had appeared in the darkness several times during the Eternal Warrior’s vigil, billowing up across the stars like the edge of a storm covering the sky. Few others on the warships had seen them, but Marr had. He had glimpsed faces in them, vast faces locked in moments of rage and pain.

There were voices too, but Marr was not alone in hearing those. Often they were just howls: cold, and high, and filled with the promise of blood and ice. They shivered down the passages of the ships, and woke men and women from dreams of yellow eyes and sharp teeth. The commissars kept a careful eye on all the crew. Marr had seen a junior officer shot on the spot when he said that he could hear the howls all the time.

The true voices, when they came, were worse. They sounded so real, always so close but always from just beyond sight. They pleaded. They begged. They screamed.

Other incidents plagued the Eternal Warrior and its sisters. Objects moved when not being watched. Statues in the chapels wept silver and blood. Rust and soot formed patterns on the walls of the hull, patterns which brought bile to the mouth and pain to the eyes. The Black Priests moved through the ships muttering and scattering ash and water on the decks after these incidents. They were a strange breed, sable-clad and armed with straight silver-edged swords. Marr presumed the Inquisition had sent them. He did not like them – where the Black Priests walked, even the commissars moved aside and averted their eyes – but watching and listening to them had told Marr a secret. The Eternal Warrior and its battle group were guards at a gateway to somewhere else, somewhere forbidden to all.

Marr was comfortable with that fact. It added to his purpose: he was the eyes and ears of a sentinel of metal and fire, and nothing would pass without him seeing it. Or so he told himself.

When something did happen, he did not notice the first sign for several seconds.

Out at the edge of his sensor range two chunks of interstellar debris began to move. Each was an irregular lump of dust and ice no larger than a battle tank. A drift of similar debris hung in a band around the rogue planetoid. They were too small and too few to present a hazard to anything of significant size, and their movements were so slow and predictable that Marr did not often bother to observe them.

But two of the lumps were now moving. Marr watched them slide one way and then back, before beginning to tumble in place, faster and faster.

He extended his sensors, calling aloud to the enginseers for more power for his instruments. Even as he did so other pieces of debris began to move, juddering and sliding in the vacuum like beads on a drum skin. The dust clouds began to swirl, slowly at first and then faster. Curtains of light slid out of the blackness, shimmering as they grew. Marr felt his mouth open to call an alert. The debris and dust were spinning, the sheets of light blazing between green and turquoise. His tongue began to move in his mouth. And froze.

+No. I am afraid that will not happen.+ The voice was low and felt like it was speaking from just behind him. He tried to twist around, to pull the sensor feeds from his eyes. He could not. His body remained where it was, placid and unmoving, just as it had been for the last seventeen hours of his vigil. He could not move, he could not speak, he could only watch, and what he saw stabbed ice through him.

A cascade of light had swallowed the stars. As he watched, a slit opened in its surface, then another and another. Silent shapes slid through, pulling strands of sickly colour with them. It was a war fleet. On the bridge around him he heard no alarms, no voices shouting for guns to prepare to fire, no warnings, no panic.

+There will be no warning,+ said the voice. Marr heard a clink close by, and knew that the loose rivets in his dais were rattling in their fittings. +You, and your underlings, and all of your kind on the other ships are mute. You are all seeing this but none of you will speak of it.+

But the astropaths and the Navigators, thought Marr. They will feel the warp displacement. They will see…

+The Navigators will never waken, and the astropaths are dying even as you watch this.+

And Marr suddenly felt other images slide into his mind, like a dream unfolding while awake. He saw the chambers in the Navigator enclave, nutrient tubes enfolding their sleeping bodies. He saw them twitch and the liquid in the tubes cloud with blood. He saw the astropath chambers, and the withered men and women struggling to rise as smoke poured from their mouths, and their skin began to blacken and blister.

No, no this cannot be! Someone must notice, someone must realise.

+No one will realise. No one will know that we are here. We have come too far for the likes of you to bar our path.+

Why? he thought. Why are you telling me this?

+Because if your sensors die then someone on the bridge of your ship will notice. So, you see, you must live and watch a little longer.+

Marr saw that the ships were free of the holes they had bored into reality. He watched as the heat grew in their engines, and felt data roll into his awareness as their weapons armed. And still the bridge around him was silent.

But why tell me?

He heard a chuckle, and felt an echo of cruelty in his head.

+Because someone should know that we return to our home, even if that witness is just you, Lensus Marr.+

He saw lights flare across the spines and prows of the closing ships as torpedoes and shells spat into the void.

+My name is Ahzek Ahriman, and we are the sons of Prospero. We have come home.+

The first shells hit the Eternal Warrior. Marr found he could now scream, an instant before his vision blanked to white fire.

Silvanus steered the ship alone. Neither Ahriman nor the Circle rode in his mind. They had been with him as they left the remains of the Imperial ships burning at the threshold point. They had still been with him as the fleet jumped into the warp again, towards Prospero. He had felt them leave him as they rode the channel through the churning tides. They had watched through his eyes and then dropped away, one by one until he could feel just one presence at the back of his perceptions, and then he was on his own with the storms which cradled Prospero.

Sorrow and fury spun the Word of Hermes. To Silvanus the tides were cliffs of black and white blocks, shattering and reforming without cease. Sometimes the clear passage between them narrowed to almost nothing, and a jagged spur of storm would graze the ship. Silvanus would gasp then, and tumble over and over. He saw faces, thousands and thousands of faces painted in blood, lit by fire, melting under burning rain.

‘Why did this happen?’

‘Please, let her live, please…’

‘Why do this to us?’

‘You die here, dog.’

‘Why…?’

With each voice and sight which slammed into him he felt more confusion, and anger, and rage. The other ships of the fleet might be with him or might not. Without the psychic connection of Ahriman and the Circle, each ship was alone on the tides. It did not matter, though. They all had only one place to go to.

He and the ship rode the storm, rolling in the spill of wrath and bitterness and regret. He wanted to stop, but kept on, feeling a ship the size of a city creak and sing in time with the voices of a murdered world.

‘I am sorry,’ he found himself whispering to the tempest, and in the solitude of his own mind, and the warp-lit gloom of his navigation chamber, Silvanus Yeshar wept and did not know why.

Ahriman stood and watched the light of the oil lamp wash the wall behind it. For a second he traced the pattern of shadow and flame with his senses, tasting it for meaning and significance. There was none. The flame was just a flame, and the shadow just a pattern on the wall.

Everything in the chamber was still. Even the thrum of engine and shield was a muffled note on the edge of hearing. Helio Isidorus watched him from beside the door. The Rubricae’s bulk was a sketch in the darkness, the gold and lapis of his armour glimmering only dimly.

The Circle had withdrawn into the solitude of their own minds once the final step of the voyage was under way. None of them had said a word of what they were doing, and where they were going, since they had turned the Imperial sentinel ships to wreckage.

This is it, he thought. We will see our home again.

Ahriman placed his staff on a weapons rack. The blackness within its core shrank to a line in his mind’s eye. Building the Black Staff had been a great undertaking, almost as great as obtaining the Athenaeum. But for all the time, effort and blood both of those endeavours had cost, they were only components of the larger whole.

Prospero will have changed, but will we have changed more?

He pulled the helm from his head.

There is no turning back. There never was any turning back.

He glanced around, suddenly filled with the sense that he had heard something.

There was just Helio Isidorus, statue still, watching without seeing.

‘There are parts of you which are not wholly yours any more,’ Iobel had once said to him, ‘parts which think and dream outside of your skull.’

‘Are you there?’ he asked, the sound of his own voice hollow in the dark. ‘If there was a time for you to show yourself, this would be it.’

Nothing moved, and the only sound was the hum of his armour. He waited, but no figure in red robes stepped from the shadows. Eventually he let his eyes drop and walked to the small chest which sat in the corner of the bare room.

He knelt, and carefully opened the lid. A helm looked back at him, its beak blackened by soot. He took it out, and placed it on the floor. He pulled back a layer of fabric and looked down at the two objects which lay beneath. His hand hesitated as he reached for the silver oak leaf, but when he lifted it there was no sensation, no flaring of past pain or loss. He looked at it for a second, and then slipped it into a small silk pouch and tied it to his waist.

When he picked up the scarab he did not hesitate, but his will hardened as his fingers closed over it. He watched the dim light find the cracks and chips in the jade. Slowly he reached his will into the stone, feeling the layers of sediment which had made it. He felt the slow tides of tectonics which had led to its birth, and the clink of metal which had brought it into the light of a world. And amidst the murmurs of its past he felt the ghost of a touch, a single moment of connection between the scarab and the mind of Magnus the Red. It had been given a purpose in that moment, and that purpose lingered. It had been part of a connection linking together all of the Thousand Sons in the instant they had been transported from Prospero to their refuge in the Eye of Terror, to the Planet of the Sorcerers.

Ahriman closed his hand. The shape of his mind changed. The scarab began to glow with heat. Inside his thoughts he spoke a word, and brought the glowing stone down onto the armour above his hearts. Heat flared in his chest, and the armour shrilled a warning as its surface began to melt. He pressed harder, and the scarab sank into the metal and ceramite. The thought in his mind ended. The shrill of the armour’s damage warnings vanished. He opened his hand. The carved jade was already cooling from red to dark green, and the molten armour had flowed into a spiral setting to hold the scarab in place on his chestplate.

+Ahriman…+

He rose and whirled, lightning balling in his fingers, eyes searching for a figure in a red robe.

Ahriman’s gaze met the glow of Helio Isidorus’s eyepieces.

+Ahriman…+

He could hear the creak of armour as the Rubricae took a slow step across the floor.

+Be still,+ Ahriman commanded.

+Ahriman…+

Cold poured up his spine.

+Be still!+

Ice coated Helio Isidorus. Ahriman felt the spirit within the armour writhe, and felt its wild panic flood across the link between them.

+…Ah…ri…man…+ the voice rattled, and the Rubricae shook in place.

Ahriman poured his will into a command to be still, to be silent, to go back to watching without seeing.

+They…+ The voice was a choking gasp of psychic meaning. Ahriman could feel desperation and confusion wash from Helio Isidorus. +They… voices… calling… me…+

The Rubricae went still. Ahriman breathed out slowly, and his breath was white as it touched the air.

+I am sorry, my brother.+

He listened, but there was only the low pulse of armour and ship. Except… just there on the edge of perception was another sound, a murmur like a cry caught in a wind.

Voices.

Voices he recognised from a time now so distant that it almost seemed unreal.

‘We are coming, my brothers,’ he said aloud to the dead. ‘We are coming.’

‘I do not want to go back.’ Ctesias felt himself swallow after the last word. The eyes of the Athenaeum stared at the space just over Ctesias’s shoulder. Its mouth was moving, but it made no sound.

Ctesias nodded, as though the figure in the cage had answered. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the door, his armour in a low power cycle.

‘I thought I would not care.’ He snorted. ‘Why would I? I was not born on Prospero. What time I did spend there was just that, time spent. Not like you.’ He paused, and deliberately nodded. ‘Sorry, I mean not like Sanakht. He was born there, and learned how to look at the universe from the top of its pyramids. It gave him his name, his blood, his Legion. To him it would have meant something. Something like it means to Ahriman, and Gaumata, and the rest.’

Ctesias shook his head, and then let it roll back against the collar of his armour.

‘Perhaps if I had shared that beginning, then I might have been different. Perhaps I would have been one of them, one of the high circle of the Legion in the Great Crusade, one of the favoured, respected not just for power but for wisdom.’ He laughed, a dry sound, which turned into a cough. ‘Perhaps not.’

He let out a breath, and felt his eyelids flutter involuntarily.

‘I do not want to go back. I do not want to do this.’ He shook his head. ‘But what choice do I have?’ He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, yes, quite right. I have the same choice as ever. I have none. None. And I am not alone. Show me a living soul that believes that he has choice in anything, and I will show you the universe’s greatest fool.’

The great spherical cages tinkled with a note just on the edge of Ctesias’s hearing. The tides of the warp were running wild and strong. At least here the wards and bindings placed on the chamber kept the worst of it at bay. At least here there were no voices.

‘Ahriman is so certain,’ he said after a while. ‘He can see salvation. For him it is already real. We just need to construct it, to turn it from design into reality.’

His eyes closed as a dull throb pulsed in his temples. The efforts of his last preparations were still exacting their price. That had been one of the reasons he had told himself that he had come to the Chamber of Cages. In truth it was the only place on the ship he wanted to be at that moment, and he was not sure why.

He shook his head again and picked a pebble from a pouch at his waist. It was small and grey, and unremarkable in every way except that it came from an island of mountains on a world of oceans and ice. A carved serpent wound across it, clutching a rune in its jaws. It had not always been Ctesias’s, but it had been his for longer than it had belonged to its first owner. Far longer. He began to roll the pebble across the backs of his fingers, not looking at it, not looking at anything.

‘It is worse than before,’ he said. ‘Worse than the first time we prepared to cast the Rubric. He is more certain than he was then. Belief like that is like a fire, liable to reduce everything to ashes. The others… Sometimes I wish I saw things their way, belief is so much more comfortable than doubt. And Ahriman is so certain… Not just that he can do it but that he has seen all the possibilities and corrected all the flaws. I suppose we have you to thank for that. All the insight he ever needed into the craft and knowledge of Magnus… I suppose a level of confidence is probably justified.’

He gave a snort of laughter, but the sound was weary and held no humour. The pebble clacked slowly through his fingers.

‘Sanakht must have believed him. Even though he sided with Amon, the seed of belief in Ahriman must have been there. Otherwise why would he have done what he did?’

The Athenaeum turned its head slightly, so that its blind eyes were on Ctesias. Its lips paused in their silent mutter for an instant.

‘I envy him. He believed. I just obey.’

He rubbed the bridge of his nose.

‘You know, I never cared that the Wolves came for us. Oh, I cared that they burned the place that had given me knowledge and could give me more. But I never saw it as unjust. It was completely justified.’

He laughed.

‘I did not even mind the hypocrisy of their shaman ways. We were, and are, sorcerers, and we live for power and to make ourselves more powerful. That is the way we were then, and the way we are now. Most of the others just liked to believe that we had a better reason for what we did.’

The pebble was still in his fingers. He flicked it up and caught it between forefinger and thumb.

‘I took this from one of them when they came to burn my pyramid. Almost the only thing left of him after I was done. All I could think of was that it was Magnus’s fault, him and the rest of the Sekhmet. They had made it happen, the Wolves were just the reaction. I remember thinking that if I had stood where they were, I would not have been so blind. I would have done what was needed by necessity not ideals. I was thinking that as I pulled the Wolves apart. The last one had a hooked axe, and hair that rattled on his armour because of the stones plaited into the locks. I took just this one. Never lost it since. Never tried to keep it, either. Somehow it is just still here, still with me.’ A small flicker of psychic energy clicked between his fingers and the pebble. ‘That is just the way of things, I suppose. Things remain that you were not expecting.’

He went silent, and the Athenaeum continued to mutter without replying.

Silvanus pulled the ship from the storm as much from instinct as knowing that they had reached the end. Its hull glistened as the Geller fields folded out of being. It sat in the void, ringed by lightning, the stars behind it hidden by washes of gas and dust which moved faster than anything in space should. The star at the heart of the system was a sickly point of yellow light. He slumped in his navigation cupola, his eyes open, but not focused.

The storm has followed us, he thought. Roiling banks of energy rolled just underneath the surface of the vacuum, filling his third eye. Or perhaps it was always there and he had only… only just noticed.

A balled mass of fatigue and pain was rising to fill his skull. He would need to find the drug injectors before it got worse. Sweet blank unconsciousness: no more than he deserved. His task was done. It would take time for the rest of the ships to arrive, and then it would take days to cross the gulf between where they had exited the warp and the planet. There was still so much that would happen, but whatever happened now he did not have to have a hand in it.

He reached out, his fingers trembling as they found the comms switch and opened a vox-link.

‘This is Silvanus.’ He paused and licked the sour spit from his lips. ‘We are here.’

Ahriman strode down the corridor, thought commands spilling from him as he moved. Helio Isidorus followed in lock step.

The ship felt tense.

+When do we move to the planet?+ sent Ignis as he fell in beside Ahriman. The Master of Ruin’s surface thoughts were spinning in tight patterns. Ahriman noted that Ignis had not used their destination’s name.

+We move once the others are with us. The Pyromonarch just translated from the warp, and the rest will not be far behind.+

+The shuttles and landers are beginning their launch cycles.+

Ahriman sent a pulse of acknowledgement. He knew that the servitors and thralls had begun the launch preparations, and he knew that Ignis knew he knew. The Master of Ruin was talking because he wanted to, not because he needed to. That was worrying.

They walked a few steps further, the buzz of their armour masking the silence. He could sense Ignis forming another statement, his mind spinning through configurations of words.

+There is something you wish to say, brother?+

+It is calm.+

+Calm?+

+The warp. Ctesias was correct. It is highly unstable, and the closer to the system the more unstable it should be. I know this. I can see the progression.+

Ahriman nodded.

+Your point?+

+It is calm and it should not be. The warp and the presence of the planet should be trying to tear us apart.+ Ahriman said nothing. He knew, and he thought he knew why. Ignis waited a full minute before speaking again. +It feels like it is holding back. Like it is waiting.+

Ahriman nodded.

+It is,+ he said. +It is waiting for us.+

Ctesias felt the transition back to reality as a soft thump in his guts. He looked up to the ceiling, eyes latching on to a distant point that he could not see but knew was there. He sat for a second, the rune stone still in his fingers, and then stood slowly.

‘Here we are,’ he muttered, still looking up. He blinked, gave a single nod, tossed the rune stone into the air and caught it. He looked at it again for an instant as it sat on his palm. The rune for life looked back at him from between the serpent’s jaws.

‘All…’ said the Athenaeum, and the word pulled Ctesias’s head up. The Athenaeum was standing in its cage, staring up at the ceiling. ‘All…’ it said again. ‘All my sons… however did it come to this?’ It looked at Ctesias. Its eyes had turned cold blue from edge to edge. Like stars. Ctesias could not move. His thoughts stopped. ‘You will return to me. When it begins you will return to me. And then you will remember what I have been telling you.’

X
Conversations

The remains of the Imperial sentinel fleet spun in cold, expanding spheres. Building-sized portions of rockcrete and plasteel turned over beside the dots which were bodies and parts of bodies. In time the debris would fall into the weak embrace of the orphan planet, but until then it would mark the site of their failure.

The ship came to the massacre site with caution, picking through the debris like a mourner searching for one corpse on a battlefield. It was a small craft, barely half a kilometre in length, and its hull was black and the crew which moved through its companionways and chambers wore dark hoods crossed with crimson and white. This was no simple warship, but a vessel that had been drawn into the service of the Inquisition and never returned to the wars of its former existence. It had taken a new name when it had taken on this duty, and its original name had been purged from the records. It was called the Blind Throne, and it had circled the gateways to Prospero for decades, checking the status of the sentinel fleets, always staying out of sensor range, tasting the aether with cadres of astropaths whose abilities far exceeded the norm for their kind. For those who guarded the secret of Prospero, the Blind Throne was the answer to who watched the watchers.

It took forty-seven hours for it to find what remained of Calculus Logi Prime Lensus Marr.

He woke to pain and the sensations of needles.

<Subject conscious,> said a half-machine voice. Marr could not see, and his attempts to move produced only shrill agony. <Fifty per cent of cognition remaining, estimated time until failure of biological matter six hundred and twelve seconds.>

‘Do not try to move,’ said a croaking female voice, and the hard edge in the words made Marr’s thoughts freeze. ‘You do not have any limbs, or heart, and half of your skull is open.’ The cold fact in the words slid past him.

What was she talking about? What was happening? Why was he–

‘We don’t have time, and you are going to die very soon, so I need you to focus. I need you to tell me everything you remember about how the fleet was destroyed.’

He began to tell her but no words came, only a frantic scratching. He stopped, fresh panic filling him.

What had happened to his tongue? What had happened to his limbs? She had said he was going to die.

‘You have no jaw or tongue, and your words are being transcribed by an auto-quill wired into what remains of your neck. Speak and we will see what you say. Focus on my voice, and tell me what happened.’

He told her. He told her as the pain of needles began to crumble into an ache, and then to vanish. He told her all of it, and the only sound besides her questions was the clatter and scratch of a machine-quill moving across parchment.

He paused when there was almost nothing left to say. He could not feel anything any more.

Strange, he thought, with a cold detachment, a lifetime immersed in seeing and feeling more than any other creature and now it’s all gone, and I don’t miss it. I feel free. I feel relieved.

<Subject losing condition function. Biological matter critical failure.>

‘What was the last thing the voice told you?’ the female voice asked, controlled, but insistent.

‘It said…’ The sound of the quill scraping across the parchment stuttered.

‘What?’

‘It said they were the sons of Prospero. It said they returned at last. It said…’

The quill went still, leaving only the soft noise of the parchment continuing to spool onto the floor.

In the last grey instants of his life, Lensus Marr heard the female voice talking.

‘Send the beacon messages. Maximum import. Summon the rest of the sentinel forces. The Fifteenth Legion has come back to its grave.’

Marr’s final shred of thought was a question which no one would ever hear.

Why… why did they tell me who they were?

Blackness cut the thought adrift, and assured that it would never be answered.

The Changeling shrugged itself free of one face and took another. The last face had been that of a female human who served as a deck officer on the ship. She had not been ideal, but she had eventually allowed it to find a more suitable mask: the face of a human with authority.

On the bridge it had moved amongst the banks of servitors wired into their consoles, nodding to the other humans that crossed its path, and ignoring the robed tech-priests tending the cliffs of machinery. No one noticed anything wrong. The Changeling waited until it reached the wide deck beneath the command throne.

The human who sat atop the pile of worn steel was a lump of fat beneath a velvet uniform. The Changeling looked up at the commodore, and threw a salute.

‘Second Lieutenant Cordat reporting as command tier officer of the watch, commodore,’ it said.

The commodore’s eyes shifted down to the Changeling, black pearls in a boulder of a face.

‘Yes, yes, stop flapping your hand and mouth, just get on with it.’ The commodore flicked a thick-fingered hand at the other human in an officer’s uniform standing at a dais at the base of the command throne.

The Changeling approached the dais, came to attention and offered a bow. The officer standing at the dais returned it before offering a baton covered with fine circuitry and moulded reliefs of stars and eagle wings. The Changeling took the baton, bowed, straightened and walked to the dais with precise high steps. The other officer did the same but away from the dais.

Far off, in the cavern of the bridge, a great bell began to strike. Once it had stopped the Changeling slotted the baton into a port on the dais and applied the required blow to its brass casing.

‘Command tier watch assumed at the third striking of the hours. All is well in the great embrace of stars.’

‘Ruddy pantomime,’ growled the commodore. He coughed and then pointed down at the Changeling. ‘Hail the Defender of Truth, and find out why it’s taking them this long to give me a ready status. The whole group should have been prepared to translate six bells past. In fact I know the answer. It’s because Helical should have been thrown into the bilges before he got that ship under his arse, and he is probably struggling with the basic concept of forming a thought. But…’ he smiled and inlaid silver hawks glittered on his teeth, ‘we must observe the niceties, mustn’t we, Mister Cordat?’

‘Aye, commodore,’ said the Changeling, edging his words with the artificially dutiful tones of a man who really wanted to be more than a lieutenant. Just as Cordat would have done. The commodore’s lip twitched with irritation.

‘Hmmm.’ The commodore narrowed his eyes. He did not like the face that the Changeling wore. The dislike was to be expected, and meant nothing other than that the Changeling’s masquerade was perfect. The commodore opened his mouth to say something else, but the words never came. Raised voices came from the edge of the command platform. The Changeling turned to face a crowd of figures half dragging, half carrying a thin figure in a green robe.

The Changeling came forward, arrogance fuming from his every movement.

‘Halt, and state your purpose before advancing,’ he called. Behind him the commodore snorted, but said nothing.

A human in the uniform of a senior armsman stepped forward.

‘We are bringing him,’ growled the armsman, and jabbed the claw of a brass and plasteel augmetic at the green-robed figure lolling between two armsmen. Blood spotted the green robes and spit hung from the man’s lips in a sticky string. It was one of the mind-mutilated psykers that the Imperium used to communicate across the vast reaches of space. This one had only a few more years of nightmare and life left in it before it burned out, but for now the drooling human had enough in it to play his allotted role.

‘Pass and approach,’ said the Changeling, his nose rising with disdain as the armsmen and astropath moved past him.

‘Kald,’ said the commodore to the senior armsman with a simple nod, which the armsman returned. The Changeling knew that this display of comradeship between commanding officer and underling would have irritated Cordat, and arranged his face accordingly. The commodore noticed, but ignored his watch officer’s discomfort.

‘We had to bring him, commodore.’ The senior armsman jerked his head at the green-robed psyker. ‘He said he had a communication that he had to give to you personally.’

‘Thank you, Kald,’ said the commodore, and turned his gaze to the psyker. Dislike crawled across the folds of his cheeks as he looked down at the limp figure. ‘What do you have to tell me, astropath?’

The psyker took a heavy breath, and licked its lips.

The Changeling waited. It knew what was about to be said, and it knew why. It was, after all, the reason it was here on this particular ship at this particular moment.

‘A blue sun, which is an eye, burns in a sky of black stone,’ rasped the astropath. ‘Silver eagles circle with thunderbolts in their claws. Spears fall from the firmament.’

‘Witch-tongued riddles,’ breathed the Changeling in Cordat’s voice, with the slightest shake of his head. Cordat would have said just that, or maybe something different but equally stupid. He would also not have noted the colour drain from the commodore’s cheeks at the words.

‘Be silent, Mister Cordat!’ The shout roared down from the throne, and drops of spit spattered down the commodore’s uniform. The Changeling jumped back as though whipped, mumbling something about meaning no offence. The commodore was not looking at him, however; he was staring at the astropath.

‘Confirm meaning,’ said the commodore, his voice sounding dry.

The astropath turned its head as though looking around with eyes that it no longer had.

‘Not all should hear the…’

‘Confirm the meaning!’

The astropath jerked its head back, paused and then nodded.

‘It is as you suspect,’ it said. A drop of sweat fell from its nose.

The commodore nodded slowly, his eyes still on the astropath.

‘Kald,’ said the commodore, his voice low and hard. ‘Go and find Commissar Sarn. Tell him that we need a full vigilance protocol in place throughout the ship. Do it now.’ The senior armsman saluted and vanished.

The Changeling opened his mouth to ask the kind of stupid question that the commodore expected from Cordat. The commodore cut through his words before they came.

‘Mister Cordat, signal all ships, immediate full battle readiness. We translate to the warp in one bell. All ships to institute full vigilance protocols. Do it now, Mister Cordat, and do it without asking that idiotic question that is fighting to get past your lips.’

The Changeling blinked with Cordat’s eyelids, and then moved to obey, shouting at other officers and crew. Sound began to build in the cavern of the bridge. The commodore was tapping command keys on the throne. An alarm began to boom through the ship. Pict screens were descending on articulated brass arms. The commodore’s face was prickling with sweat, each bead glinting in the electric blue glow of data.

The Changeling turned from its tasks, and called up to the human atop the throne.

‘What course do we set, commodore?’

The commodore looked down at him.

‘Tell the Navigators to use the charts sealed with the mark of the hammer. Break the seals. They will steer us to the star named Prospero.’

The ship was a cacophony of noise around them. Machines clattered and buzzed, choirs of voices called out the rhythm of orders, and the deck hummed with the roar of engines and reactors waking from slumber.

The commodore’s eyes were racing across the screens which surrounded him. His fingers were dancing on the throne’s ivory keys. The screens rotated and swapped almost too fast to see. His wide mouth was a thin line above his jowls.

The Changeling began to ask the question that Cordat would have not been able to restrain himself from asking.

‘Commodore, why are we–’

‘Because we have been called, you stupid boy! We have been called to war by the Inquisition.’ The commodore looked down at the Changeling, and the creature saw fear in the human’s eyes, a great deal of fear. ‘And something tells me we are not alone.’

It took Knekku a second to cross the distance to the tower of Magnus. It was the longest second of his life. Panic and control warred in his veins and nerves. All he could think of was the cracked sound of the Crimson King’s summons echoing in his mind. When he reached the top of the Tower of the Cyclops, he stepped from the disc and knelt without looking at the throne before him.

+Sire,+ he sent.

+Rise…+ sent the Crimson King. The word pulled him to his feet, but he kept his sight from the throne. Something made him not want to look. +Look at me.+ Knekku did not move. The words had not been a command, they had been a plea. +Look at me, my son.+

He looked. The figure on the throne was an angel of copper and silver. Black horns curled from its brows and white wings hung from its shoulders. It was an image of magnificence and might.

But there was blood on the feathers and the copper skin was stretched tight over the shapes of bone. The single eye in the forehead was half closed, as though fighting to stay open. No blinding light radiated from him, just a fog of weariness which rose and fell like the breath of the sea.

+Where have you been, sire?+ Knekku felt the question pull from his control before he could stop it.

The Crimson King raised his head, and looked at Knekku as though he had not seen him arrive.

+My son…+ he sent, and the lips of his mouth moved with the sending. +My son…+

Knekku fought down a wave of dismay.

+How may I serve, sire?+

+I have…+ The Crimson King stared at him, his thought trailing off. +I walked the paths. I walked the storms. I saw where the thunderbolts are born, Ctesias. Are you there? I was the thunderbolt and the fury…+

Knekku felt the blood trying to surge from his hearts.

Ctesias? His thoughts raced in confusion. Why did he call me Ctesias? What does that dried abomination have to do with…?

Control, he thought, and cut the spiral of questions and panic free. Control.

Not for the first time he remembered that talking to the Crimson King was like talking to a being that was speaking in several places at once and not always to the same person.

+Sire, I will summon Sar’iq.+

+No!+ The command crushed Knekku to the ground. Pain and light exploded in his skull. A long moment passed and when Magnus spoke again the sending was faint, almost frail. +No… Sar’iq is a device. You understand. I need you, my son. I need you.+

Knekku raised his head and saw that the Crimson King was trembling.

+I… I tried to see it, Knekku. I tried to bargain for the future at the heart of the eternal court. I…+

Knekku felt his thoughts stop. Emptiness filled him, and he was falling without moving, tumbling into the meaning of what his master was telling him.

+But I was not alone. I… I could not see them.+ The Crimson King shook his head, the mortal gesture more terrifying than anything Knekku had seen. +I thought they were gone. They should be gone. There should only be me.+ With the last words the thin figure rose on the throne, lips parting, skin splitting and bleeding magma. Anger and pride billowed from him. Cracks of fire ran over his body. The stones of the tower top split with heat. Knekku stepped back, and felt his own thoughts flush with rage. He fought to control it but…

The Crimson King fell back onto his throne, the fire and heat vanishing as quickly as it had risen. His head dipped and his eye closed. When his voice came again it was cracked and dry.

+I need you to serve me, Knekku. I have…+

The thought trailed away.

Knekku felt a shiver run over his skin.

Where have you been, sire? What is happening?

The Crimson King arched in his throne. His fingers gripped the arms. The black stone splintered. The tips of the fingers began to crumble to ash. Knekku came forward, and grey dust spiralled from the throne as its occupant’s arms began to crumble. His skin was no longer copper but dull grey, the wings burnt branches of crooked trees. The wind was gusting over the tower, rattling and dry.

+Sire!+ he shouted as the Crimson King came apart and dissolved into air. At the centre of the dust storm the great horned head lifted for a second, its eye shuddering open. Cracks spread around the mouth.

+I have made a mistake, my son. I have made a very grave mistake.+

The wind gusted. Knekku leapt up on the dais, his hand reaching for his master. Then the wind vanished, and he was standing before an empty throne.

XI
Prospero

The dead planet wore its ruin like a crown. A pall of clouds swirled across its sphere. Lightning spread from the never-ending storms, branching across thousands of miles. Mountain peaks clawed through the iron-grey sheet. Debris coiled around it in rings. Occasionally a fork of lightning would reach impossibly from the atmosphere, touching the inner orbits.

Ahriman stood on the highest tower of the Word of Hermes, and looked down through the crystal viewport as Prospero grew before him. The thoughts of his brothers circled his mind. Out in the curve of space above the ship, the rest of his fleet moved with him. There was no clamour, no mad rush to launch landing parties, just precise commands passed in thought. They would settle into ultra-low orbit with care. And once they were in place…

He raised his head and closed his eyes.

+Prepare to descend to the surface.+ The thought reached his brothers instantly.

+Who will go with you?+ It was Kiu, his mind hard-edged and tense.

+All of you,+ he replied. +And all of our brothers.+

The engines cycled to silence. Outside the gunship the wind was beating rain against the fuselage. Ignis looked around. None of the rest of the figures in the compartment had moved.

He felt the instinct to reach out with his thoughts, but then stopped. He did not want to taste the warp here. Not yet. Not until he had to.

In the compartment beside him, Credence gave a low clatter of static and binary. Ignis did not reply. He was looking at Ahriman. Their master did not move.

The blue and crimson silks of Ahriman’s robes seemed black in the yellow light of the compartment. He held his staff across his knees, its shape sliding out of focus. Ctesias sat on the opposite side, resting his head against his own staff. Strips of dry skin covered with script hung from the summoner’s armour like a cloak of feathers. They rustled as he clicked a pebble though the fingers of his left hand. Ignis would have said that Ctesias was praying if such a statement was not laughable. Beside them, sixteen Rubricae sat immobile.

‘The other craft will be through the upper atmosphere by now,’ said Ignis, his voice rumbling from his vox-grille. It had been seventy-five seconds since the gunship had powered down. He had been counting.

Ahriman turned his head sharply, but did not stand. Neither did Ctesias.

Ignis waited for another five seconds to elapse and then stood. His Terminator armour unclamped from the wall as he straightened.

Ahriman looked around again, and then stood. The hatch was directly before him. Beyond it, the sound of the rain was a drum beat. Ctesias pushed himself to his feet, dry skins rustling. Ignis felt a murmur of will from Ahriman and the Rubricae rose as one.

Ahriman’s hand was on the hatch release. Ignis watched the armoured fingers touch the command keys. He felt the breath stop in his throat. In the ever-shifting geometry of his thoughts he had lost count of the passing seconds.

Ahriman activated the control.

There was a clank of pistons and a hiss of released pressure.

And then a slit of light appeared at the edges of the assault ramp.

The light grew, expanding into a square of grey slashed by rain. The ramp hinged down until it pressed into the mud. Ahriman stepped out. Water began to pour down his armour. Ignis could see the lacquer begin to blister as acid ate it. Ahriman reached the edge of the ramp. Ignis could see other shapes now, the dim smudges of mountains hiding in the distance. Ahriman bent down, and the gauntlet of his left hand peeled back from his fingers with a series of clicks. The rain hissed as it touched his skin. Slowly, he bent down further and picked a handful of earth from the ground. The fine grey silt began to wash away as Ahriman rolled it between his fingers.

Then he let his hand fall.

Ignis felt the breath he had been holding leave his lungs. A shimmer rose from Ahriman, and a mist cloaked him as the rain began to flash to steam before it struck him. The blistered skin of his hand glowed, and then became smooth and whole again. On his palm sat a small heap of grey dust. Ahriman closed his fingers over it, and stepped from the ramp onto the surface of Prospero.

Somewhere out on the edge of Ignis’s awareness, in a place where his mind noticed patterns that even he could not explain, he felt something vast, ephemeral, and terrifying begin to turn.

They walked through the grey world. The rain fell without pause, hissing as it stripped the lacquer from the armour of the Rubricae. Ctesias wanted to scream. He had wanted to scream ever since the gunship had broken through the atmosphere. Now, on the surface, with his feet sinking into the mud, it was taking every inch of his will not to let the scream free. It was not his scream. It was Prospero’s.

He could feel them, all of them, all of the trapped echoes of pain and rage and confusion spinning just under the skin of every grain of ash, and every burning drop of rain. Prospero was no longer a planet. It was a corpse, and the echoes of its murder clung to the bones.

He glanced at Ignis, but the Master of Ruin showed no sign of sharing Ctesias’s discomfort. Grey water was streaming from Ignis’s Terminator armour but leaving no mark. Credence walked behind its master, piston-driven feet slamming into the mud and sucking as it drove its steps forward. To their front Ahriman walked alone, heat and steam hazing the air around him. The Rubricae flanked them. Their blue armour had corroded to grey, as though the world was slowly reclaiming them. The rest of the gunships had descended after Ahriman had stepped onto the surface, bringing every Thousand Son in the fleet down with them. Gilgamos, Kiu, Gaumata, and the other sorcerers walked with them somewhere out in the murk, dragging their dead brothers in Ahriman’s wake.

+Halt.+ Ahriman’s command reached Ctesias through the cries of the dead, and he stopped before he realised what he was doing. The Rubricae froze where they were. Credence settled its weight with a clatter of gears.

Ahriman was still walking forward, his steps taking him to the top of a low rise which had appeared before them. The rain was a charcoal wall all around them. Thunder split the sky above, and lightning turned the rain to a flight of falling arrows. Ahriman stopped at the top of the rise, and beckoned to Ignis and Ctesias.

+Come,+ he sent. +You should see. You should both see.+

Ctesias hesitated. He could feel something wet running from his nose and ears. The taste of iron was clotting on his tongue. Ignis was moving past him, wading up the slope to Ahriman’s side. Ctesias blinked as a wave of sound washed through him. For a second he had thought he had heard a wolf howl close by. No, that was wrong; he had not thought it. He had heard a wolf howl, but it was a howl uttered thousands of years ago. He swallowed the blood in his mouth, and struggled after Ignis and Ahriman.

The land was just as grey seen from the top of the rise as it had been from the bottom.

+What did you want us to see?+ asked Ctesias, and did not bother to keep the fatigue from the sending.

+Something ails you, summoner?+ asked Ignis, his sending flat and cold.

+This place… it…+

+It calls to you,+ sent Ahriman. Ctesias raised his gaze to meet Ahriman’s eye-lenses. +The pain and wounds of the past are close here. This world is a scar over a deep wound.+

Ctesias blinked, and swayed.

…There were shapes in the rain. Grey shapes, and golden figures and the flash of edges, and the roar of fire, and the wail of a blade ripping out a throat, and blood, as red as spilled rubies, and teeth, and…

‘I can hear them,’ said Ctesias, the words forced out from between clenched teeth. ‘I can see them. They are still here.’

+Echoes,+ sent Ahriman, and the roar and whirl of sound and shape within Ctesias howled as though in answer. +Echoes, and death, and fragments of life caught like threads on thorns.+

‘I…’ snarled Ctesias. He could feel all of the careful walls of thought in his mind beginning to creak. Why was this happening? He had more control than this. Had something weakened him? Countless shards of daemonic names threw themselves at the walls of their prisons. He was coming apart from within.

…a blade swung at him, teeth spinning along its edge. Fire and red smoke bloomed into the air. Figures tumbled, limbs like snapped twigs, and the wolves were there, bounding through the fire, fur black in the inferno light…

+Ctesias,+ said a voice, and he felt hands pull him up from where he had fallen. +Brother.+

Brother… Brother… Brother…

And with the word came calm. He looked up, and saw, not a wolf, but the molten orange and black iron mountain of Ignis looking down at him. The Master of Ruin released his grip and stepped back. Ctesias could still hear the wolves howling, millennia ago.

+I hear them too, brother,+ sent Ignis. Ctesias blinked, not sure what to say, or whether he should say anything at all.

Brother. The Master of Ruin had not called him brother since…

+We all hear them and see them, Ctesias,+ sent Ahriman. Ctesias turned to him. +You are perhaps more open to them.+

+Because I am so well known for my sentimentality?+

+No,+ sent Ignis flatly. +Because you have half a soul.+

Ctesias found he wanted to laugh.

+Thank you, as ever, for the insight,+ he sent, and then added, +brother.+ He turned to look around at the rain-shrouded distance. +Besides this moment of bonding, why did you bring us to stand on this spot, Ahriman? I can see little to recommend it over the hundred others we passed.+

Ahriman gestured at the hidden distance. Ctesias looked, and the shroud of rain pulled back before his eyes.

Shards of crystal reared from the murk, marching off towards grey-sided mountains like the broken teeth of a god scattered on the earth. Some rose hundreds of metres into the clearing sky, others leaned against each other as though for support. Tangled metal and heaps of rubble rose amongst the shapes of eroded stone buildings. Clefts meandered across the open areas and around islands of wreckage, water glittering at the bottom of steep banks of ash. Further away, Ctesias could see a band of rippled black reaching to the edge of sight.

+The sea…+ he sent without intending to. Ahriman nodded slowly, still looking out across the jumble of crystal and ash. Ctesias could see breaks in the ruins now, lines and depressions which divided larger heaps of debris. +Then this is…+

+Tizca,+ sent Ahriman.

Ctesias blinked. Over the ash and ruins another city rose, bright and shining. Sunlight reflected in blinding sheets from the sides of crystal pyramids. Paved roads ran between buildings of marble. Bronze statutes stared from the pinnacles of temples at the sky above. Then the flames came, and the scream of drop pods falling from a sky hidden by smoke. Fires roared from the hearts of pyramids, and the avenues were rivers of running figures and gunfire. He blinked and the memories became the present. The shining pyramids became the heaps of broken glass, and the fires cooled to ash.

I am standing on what was the outer gate of Tizca, thought Ctesias. This heap of ash was once the threshold of the City of Light. A last thin scatter of rain pattered on the tapers of dried skin hanging from his armour.

Ctesias turned at the sound of squelching footsteps from behind him. Kiu, Gaumata, and Gilgamos were climbing the low rise to join them. Stretched behind them were rank upon rank of Rubricae. Vapour rose from their acid-mottled armour, though he noticed that the blue seemed to be flowing back over the damage. The Rubricae’s eyes were bright points of light.

Ctesias turned away from them and looked back at the remains of Tizca. The downpour pulled further back as the clouds above thinned. In his head the voices of the past became quiet.

+Prospero knows we are here,+ said Ignis.

+It does not want us here,+ Ctesias sent in response.

No one replied. Ahriman stood slightly separate from them, utterly still, the radiance of his mind withdrawn to a hard sphere. Ctesias wondered what he saw, and then was glad that he did not know.

+It is time,+ sent Ahriman at last. The presence of his mind expanded outwards. It felt poised, hardened, and the response was a murmured mirror of hardening resolve. They all knew what was about to be done. They had all prepared for it.

The voices were a pressure on the edge of Ctesias’s senses. He wanted to be back on the ship, in the quiet of the Chamber of Cages with the Athenaeum. He found he was leaning on his staff more with every step.

Ahriman walked down the slope and into the remains of Tizca, and with him all the dead and living of the Legion that had once called it home. They moved in silence. Above them the cloud was gone and the sun was already beginning its descent, and the first touch of night was staining the sky’s edges.

They halted in the centre of a wide bowl amongst the ruins. Ignis did not recognise the place at first. Ravines crossed the ground, and a crooked finger of bronze and crystal jutted upwards from a hill of rubble and sludge. Then his mind added together how far they had come, and the placement of mountains and sea. They stood where Occullum Square had sat. Battle, sorcery, and erosion had broken its paving and gouged the earth so that where he stood would have been ten metres beneath the ground. The spire of twisted bronze at its centre was the spine of the focusing crystal which had brought the light of the stars to the Reflecting Caves, a kilometre beneath the city.

Ahriman stood near the centre of the square which had been the centre of the city and the centre of the Thousand Sons’ realm. He raised the Black Staff.

Every Rubricae and sorcerer in the square and in the ruins beyond slid into place. Seen from above, their positions formed a design that echoed the geometry of the ruined city. Ignis felt the pattern blast every other design from his mind. It was his, but to feel it become real was like nothing he had known. An oily haze rose from them to smudge the darkening air. Fog rose as water boiled from pools and streams.

Ignis could feel heat and ice crawling inside his flesh from the outside as his thoughts harmonised with those of his brothers. There was a second of balance in which he knew that he was connected to each and every one of the other Thousand Sons on Prospero, and them to him. He felt the molten thoughts of Gaumata, the rattle of Ctesias’s memories, and beyond them the cold ocean-swell of the Rubricae. Then Ahriman’s will changed the shape and Ignis’s teeth snapped shut as power lashed through him. He was shaking in place, and he could feel Ahriman’s mind sliding into its next configuration, rising up and up through levels of complexity and control.

+Is it wise?+ Ignis had asked when Ahriman had explained what he intended.

+Wise?+ Ahriman’s thought voice had been calm, untouched by surprise or judgement. +No, perhaps it is not wise, but it is necessary.+

A new pulse of will rippled through Ignis and he felt it pull his own mind into a new shape. He could hear words rising within him, just below awareness.

+You don’t know who will come,+ he had said, and felt the unease of the Circle as they had followed his thought.

+I do, and they need to be here,+ Ahriman had replied. +I owe it to them.+

The sky was clear above the ruin of Tizca. Curtains of aurora light opened above the square, shimmering between shades of violet and orange.

+They will not arrive in time,+ Ignis had pressed. +The tides of the warp will scatter them across centuries. Some may even have tried to reach here and failed.+

+No,+ Ahriman had replied. +The call will find them, and those that can will come.+

Ignis’s mind was no longer in his body; it was scattered across the ruined city and in the sky above and in the ground below. The bones of Tizca were keening, vibrating in tune with the thoughts of the Thousand Sons. In the Reflecting Caves, a kilometre beneath the surface, shards of crystal began to glow.

+They will hear and come,+ Ahriman had said. +The moment will call out, and the warp will hear. We began a pattern by returning, a pattern which has its own momentum, a pattern which pulls other events to it. You know this, Ignis. Prospero was our home, and what will be done is a nexus in a new beginning.+

Ignis felt a final moment of realignment, and the words which had been rising within him poured out of him and lanced into the beyond. The aurora light flashed. Beneath his feet, Ignis felt the ground shake.

+They will come even if it seems impossible, even if they do not know why. Time will not stop them. For some perhaps the call has already reached them, even though we have yet to begin. This is not causality, or prophecy. It is destiny.+

The surge of power ended. Around Ignis the sludge had dried and cracked. He steadied himself. He felt drained, but knew this was just the beginning. He looked at where Ahriman stood. An aura of dirty sunlight clung to him, pulsing as though in time with slow breaths.

+What do we do now?+ sent Ctesias, rolling as much of his pain into the message as he could. +Wait?+

Ahriman gestured up at the sky.

+Look,+ he sent.

There – on a line with Ahriman’s outstretched arm – were stars shining in the fading blue of the sky.

‘Ships…’ breathed Kiu aloud.

Ahriman let his hand fall.

+They heard. They are here.+

XII
Gateways

The Monolith fell back into reality. The daemons clinging to its hull shredded into blotches of light and shadows of shape. Only the strongest remained, holding onto their presence even as their bodies withered. The Monolith had changed as it rode the Sea of Souls. In places, stone and iron had run like molten wax and set in impossible shapes. The dead lay beside the claw marks of daemons, or fused into the substance of the agglomeration. Within the hull the mortal creatures screamed as the warp drained from the corridors and wreckage. The hundreds of thousands that still lived wept for joy at returning to reality, but more wailed as the touch of the gods vanished. Their joy and despair would be brief. The Monolith would go back to the Great Ocean and its cloak of daemons would return. Like a bullet passing through air, and then flesh, and then air again, its journey into reality was no more than a flicker in its trajectory through time and space.

In the vast central chamber around his throne room, the Oathtaker felt the return of reality, and thrust his sword down into the circular pool of blood at his feet. Cold brilliance exploded upwards. Red serpents rose from the writhing liquid. Memunim, Zurcos and Calitiedies reeled where they stood around the pool. The serpents plunged down, engulfing them, flowing into them, through them, and out to the swaying circles of mortals in the chamber beyond. Screams shattered the silence, rising and rising in discordant terror as the light and blood flowed out and out.

The Oathtaker watched, feeling the warp ripple and then begin to spiral. He had been waiting for the Monolith to pass back into reality. It was a strange feature of what he was doing that joining two places in the physical realm was easier than trying to punch through from the warp into a specific time and place. The blood in the pool had been from sixty-four slaves: one-third had asked to die for him, one-third had resisted, and the last third had known nothing of their fate.

The screaming of the mortals reached a peak.

And there it is, said a smiling thought in his mind.

The surface of the pool rippled, and then snapped to stillness. The screams became silence. Every figure in the room had slumped forward, heads bowed. A low beat rose in the silence.

Thump-thump. Thump-Thump.

The Oathtaker looked down into the mirror surface of the pool. A figure in bronze armour looked back at him, a staff in its hand, a single blue jewel burning in its helm like an eye. Behind him, a jagged shadow twisted.

Thump-thump. Thump-Thump.

Every strand of life in this chamber is yours, he thought in the daemon’s voice. Every beat of life is an instant of time you steal from them, and an instant in the place you will go.

Thump-thump. Thump-Thump.

He stepped onto the surface of the pool. Beneath the surface a vortex descended through reality. He looked down. His reflection was so clear that two figures walked in perfect step on either side of a sheet of glass.

Thump-thump. Thump-Thump.

Are you with me, daemon? he thought.

Always, came the reply, and his reflection fell away from him into the vortex beneath.

Ahriman, he thought, as the vortex pulled his ghost image down and down through storms and stars. I am coming for you.

The ship of black and gold was the last to come to the gates of Prospero. It was called the Incarnate, and it came alone, sliding from the curtains of dust which hung over the stars. Its hull was the black of wrought iron. Branching veins of gold crawled across its prow and back, each a battle scar. It was a mistress of destruction, and those who knew her name feared the sight of her, not for the power of her guns but for what her coming represented. For who her coming represented.

Five Imperial ships lay in the dark. The largest of them was the light cruiser The Pity of Swords. Beside her two pairs of frigates hung close, like young beside their mother when the wolves howled. They had only been free of the warp for a handful of hours. The astropathic messages that had called them from their patrol of the nearby systems had borne the ciphers of the Inquisition and had given them no option but to obey.

Obey they had, and now they watched the bare patch of the void which was one of the forbidden gates to Prospero. A ship which passed through this point could jump into a warp route which would allow them to cross the storms beyond. It was a cruel and fickle passage and no vessel had braved its currents for millennia. The will of the Inquisition was clear, however; none must pass the gate into the realm beyond.

The Incarnate came silently at first, hiding its translation from the warp in the roar of the storms. On board The Pity of Swords, neither astropaths nor Navigators sensed the black and gold ship’s coming. Sensors swept the void, but the Incarnate had cut its engines, and cooled its reactor to an ember once it had begun its attack run. It watched with its own eyes, eyes that could see the flicker of souls within the hulls of the Imperial ships. The sentinels would realise it was there soon, but by then it would be too late.

The first alert came as a cry from an auspex servitor on one of the Imperial frigates. Within seconds sirens rolled through the hulls of each of the Imperial ships. The Incarnate lit its engines and shed its silence in a howl of weapons fire. Turbolasers and ectoplasma batteries struck the Imperial frigates. Void shields flared and failed in a heartbeat. The frigates scattered, engines pushing them towards the Incarnate as their own weapons roared.

The Pity of Swords slewed as it turned its flank to its opponent and fired. A rolling broadside splashed across the Incarnate’s shields. The frigates’ engines burned white as they curved behind the larger ship. More fire poured out from it, and two of the smaller ships detonated in spheres of plasma. The Pity of Swords rolled, turning its fresh broadside to face the Incarnate. The two remaining frigates fired again, and the last void shields stripped from the Incarnate in a shimmer of light.

The captain of The Pity of Swords watched as the black and gold ship closed. They were almost at the range where she could have seen it without the aid of auspex systems. Close, very close, but that was as it needed to be. They needed this to count.

She took a breath to give the order to fire.

The order never came.

Screams echoed through the bridge. Men and women fell to the deck clutching their eyes and ears. Bright slits opened in mid-air above the deck. Frost flashed across every surface as the slits split wide. Figures stepped from out of the holes. Pale-green energy wound over their black armour, and shone from their eyes beneath the high crests of their helms. They moved as one, boltguns rising, steps shaking the deck. The captain had enough time to half speak a curse, and pull her pistol from its holster.

The black-armoured warriors fired at the exact same moment. Rounds drummed into the air. Green and blue fire exploded amongst reeling bridge crew. Flesh became ash, and the howl of living flames swallowed the screams. The boltguns fired in perfect synchronicity for three seconds. Once they were silent, only the flames eating the banners hanging from the ceiling of the bridge disturbed the stillness. Then the black-armoured figures lowered their weapons and stepped back into the holes in reality they had come from.

The Pity of Swords remained silent as its murderer slid past. The two frigates tried to break away, but a deluge of weapons fire left them drifting, their hulls venting gas, flames eating the air within.

The Incarnate reached the translation point, and ripped back into the warp. Beyond the swirl of storms, the call of Prospero waited.

The boarding corridor echoed with the tread of armoured feet. The Changeling watched the warriors approach, marking every detail of their armour, movement and surface thoughts. There were five of them, all armoured, all hung with weapons, and with minds shaped like slabs of tempered iron. Each of them wore different colours and symbols: two in black set with white hawk heads, two in split red and black with winged skulls staring from their shoulder guards and chests, the last in storm grey slashed with golden lightning bolts. They flowed forward despite their size, each movement precise and relaxed. Menace bled from them into the aether. Space Marines. That was what the mortals called them, a title as inadequate as it was overblown. The Changeling watched them, measuring and judging each. It had to make a selection, and it had to make it before its window of opportunity closed.

The corridor was a two-hundred-metre tube of segmented plasteel slung between the hulls of two warships. The air was ice cold, and the Changeling shivered as it stood beside the commodore’s palanquin. The four servitors carrying the mobile throne wheezed clouds of grey air from the plugs in their throats. Half a dozen officers stood either side of them, their velvet uniforms dripping braid. All of them watched as the Space Marines approached, eyes never moving from the lacquered plates and helms.

‘Don’t say anything unless they address you directly,’ said the commodore. The Changeling arranged its face into an expression of pale tension. The other officers were similarly tense and struggling to control their fear. It found that response curious, but then what of the nature of mortal creatures was not strange beyond understanding? Their nervousness would be useful, though.

The five Space Marines halted before the commodore. They did not bow or salute, but waited. The commodore sniffed, and offered a nod.

‘Greetings. I am Commodore Ishaf, master of the Lore Unbreakable.’

The foremost warrior in red and black tilted his head in acknowledgement.

‘I am Umiel, of the Angels Sanguine. This gathering is a waste of time. We have been summoned by oaths, just as you have, and we must go to the place of battle.’

The Changeling made Cordat’s face tighten, and colour flare in his cheeks.

‘You will address the commodore as Lord of the Fleet, he has–’

‘All the authority he requires,’ growled Umiel. ‘And nothing that will be made greater with words or gestures.’

The Changeling shrank back, his hand trembling on the hilt of his ceremonial sword.

‘Keep your tongue, lieutenant,’ hissed the commodore, the rolls of his face flushed with anger, his words taut. He nodded again at the Space Marines. ‘Forgive my officer, he has not… seen your kind before.’

Umiel did not even seem to register the words, as though their value and meaning did not exist in his universe.

‘We have answered the call. Ten ships of our Chapters and twelve companies stand ready to honour the oaths. We did not come to bow and exchange words.’

‘I appreciate that, but understand this was not my will, nor do I claim leadership over this force.’

‘Who then?’ asked one of the other Space Marines.

‘That would be me,’ said a booming voice from the passage behind the Changeling.

The Changeling turned to look, a perfect look of shock on Cordat’s stolen face. The Space Marines flinched for their weapons, and the Changeling felt them suppress the instinct to respond to surprise with violence.

A figure was stalking down the boarding corridor, the segmented rings clanging under her tread. She was taller than both mortals and Space Marines. Back-slung legs of iron carried her with a bounding stride. Pistons slid smoothly beneath armour plates. Two sets of arms hung from her torso, each one held close, like the limbs of a mantid. At the centre of the torso – folded behind sheets of charcoal-grey armour – a wizened head looked out. White hair clung to the liver-spotted scalp, and the flesh of the face was wrinkled to the point that the mouth was only visible when it opened.

‘You are mine,’ she said, and showed a flash of polished jet teeth. ‘And yes, captain, this gathering, which you feel so unnecessary, is occurring because of me. Commodore Ishaf, I have already boarded and commandeered your ship as my own for the conflict.’

On his palanquin, the commodore gestured and his bearers lowered him to the floor, where he bowed his head as deeply as he was able. Beside him, the Changeling and the rest of the officers knelt.

‘You are?’ asked the Space Marine in storm grey. The head in the machine turned, and the eyes were glints in their sockets.

‘I would have thought that was obvious, but I have never been entirely sure if your kind are as clever as you are good at killing things.’ The Space Marine did not move. ‘And there you were saying that words and signs and gestures are worthless, or something else equally vacuous in sentiment.’ She held her smile. ‘I am Lady Inquisitor Malkira, Warden of the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath, and Convenor of the Third and Fifth Conclaves of Vohal, and I am the person to whom you will now – reluctantly – bend your knees.’

She snarled the last words through clenched teeth. Umiel knelt, and the other four Space Marines followed him. Malkira watched them, lip curled, though whether in amusement, contempt, or habit the Changeling could not tell.

‘Now that we have got the tiresome business of who is bound to whom out of the way, you can all get off the floor.’ The Space Marines stood, and the servitors hoisted the commodore back into the air. ‘You are here because before you do exactly what I command, I need you to understand several things.’

She had their total attention. The Changeling could feel the focus and uncertainty running off the mortals. Even the Space Marines were bending every part of their awareness to her. Around them, the boarding corridor creaked as one or both of the ships altered position fractionally.

The Changeling noted the precision of Malkira’s arrival. The inquisitor had engineered every part of this situation to strip those present of authority and power. They stood nowhere, literally between places, the reason being that she had willed it so. It was a careful lesson, reflected the Changeling: you are mine now, to do with as I see fit.

‘This is it,’ she said. ‘The forces assembled here are all that will come. We cannot wait for any more to answer. You all have come because of oaths and pacts that your predecessors or gene ancestors made to people like me. In some cases those oaths were made to me personally hundreds of years ago. I know…’ The corner of her lip curled. ‘The years have been kind. Those oaths were made because of the possibility of what is now happening.’

She sighed, and the plates of her exo-frame shifted.

‘There is no real time for history, or reasons. Suffice to say that an old evil has returned to the place that birthed it. We do not know what it intends, but we do not need to know. Our response, and our duty, is clear. We must destroy that evil at any cost.’ She paused, old eyes suddenly weary. ‘The enemy that we will face was created by the Imperium. They were once like you. They were once warriors. Do not let this give you pause. They are worse than traitors, they are abominations. Death is a mercy. Suffering without end should be their fate, but survival means more than retribution. And that is what we serve now. Mankind must survive, and for that this enemy must burn.’

Every eye was on Malkira, every sense and mind absorbing the words she spoke. The Changeling could feel the moment it had been waiting for coming.

‘We make passage from here to a world called Prospero,’ said Malkira, ‘and once we have reached it we will enact the judgement of Exterminatus. No matter the cost, it must be done.’

Umiel moved first, his right hand forming a fist over his left heart.

‘By our blood, and at the Emperor’s will, it shall be.’ He bowed his head. The other four Space Marines followed.

The commodore’s flesh had drained of colour, but he nodded, then saluted.

‘We will do as you command, lady,’ he said, his voice stiff.

The Changeling could sense the resolve and shock blending in the man’s heart and words. The mortal knew that what was happening would see him and his crew dead. They were weapons of the Inquisition now, and he was intelligent enough to know that few survived such service. Ignorance protected the realm of men. Even if they succeeded, all of them had begun the walk to execution.

‘Good,’ said Malkira. She turned and began to stalk back towards the far end of the corridor. ‘Be prepared to make warp transit within an hour.’ The commodore followed her, the palanquin servitors running to keep up.

The Changeling lingered.

Umiel and the rest of the Space Marine commanders waited a moment longer, then moved in the opposite direction. Already the corridor between the two ships was shaking as it readied to disengage. The rest of the mortal officers were hurrying to keep pace with the commodore’s palanquin.

The Changeling spread its awareness out, and every instant of the passing seconds became like the whirl of intermeshing gears. Every glance, every movement, and every sound: it could feel them all. It knew no one was looking at it, that neither mortal nor Space Marine would glance towards it. It stood at a perfect blind spot: an intersection at which its sliver of the universe was utterly unseen.

It dissolved its shape. Where Lieutenant Cordat had been, a spiral of light rose.

It waited for a single second. It waited as Umiel glanced back from the rear of the group of Space Marines.

It became a line of fire, and struck the Space Marine’s left eye. It burned through crystal, vitreous humour, and into the meat of the brain before a sound came from Umiel’s throat. The fire flashed through Umiel’s flesh, burning it to smoke.

The fingers of Umiel’s armour flexed for an instant and then were still.

The Changeling filled the space within the armour in an eyeblink. Its shape and face were not perfect, but they did not need to be. It had time before it needed to remove the helmet.

‘Umiel, does something vex thee?’ The blunt voice came across the vox built into the helm. The Changeling recognised the voice from memories that had been Umiel’s until three seconds before. The voice belonged to Castior, Captain of the Fifth Company of the Black Consuls. The other Space Marine had paused five strides from the Changeling. Had it heard something, or seen the spasming of Umiel’s hands?

The Changeling shook his head, keeping its face turned away from Castior. The melted eyepiece reformed in its socket.

‘No, brother,’ said the Changeling with Umiel’s voice, and turned to fall in beside the Black Consul. They walked towards the strike cruiser waiting at the end of the boarding corridor. ‘Everything is as it should be.’

XIII
Ghosts

The first ship descended as the sun drifted towards Prospero’s horizon. It came alone, scudding through the atmosphere. Then another followed, and another, and another. Ahriman watched them, and felt the minds within them, familiar and yet not.

Welcome, brothers, he wanted to call to them. Welcome home.

But he sent nothing, and kept his mind still and silent and waited. More ships arrived while the first landing craft and gunships were still streaks of heat in the sky.

The Circle waited with him, sharing his silence, but not his calm. Disquiet buzzed in them like static charge. He felt Kiu’s mind begin to form a question.

+We wait,+ sent Ahriman before Kiu could ask.

+What do they intend?+ asked Gaumata.

+I do not know,+ replied Ahriman without looking away from the sky. A gunship was plunging down towards them. Heat lit its wings, and the thrust from its engines formed banners trailing behind its body. It buzzed low and a boom rolled in its wake as it arced across the ruined city.

+Friendly,+ sent Ctesias.

The gunship came back around.

Other craft were now thick above the city, brighter than the fading sun.

A flicker of thought pulsed from Ahriman and the Rubricae across the city moved as one. Lines opened along spaces which had been streets and squares. For a moment Tizca appeared again, drawn in the light of the Rubricae’s eyes. The gunship swooped low, and Ctesias felt the minds within brushing over the city. Other landing craft were touching down across the city or at its edge.

+Say nothing,+ sent Ahriman.

The gunship slammed to a halt above the ruins of Occullum Square and hung, thrusters roaring. Backwash sent the air beneath it swimming and flickering as it sank to the ground. Ctesias could see the colour of the hull now: brushed silver and pitted bronze. Sigils glowed on its flanks. He watched their meanings change as he read them. The gunship’s ramp opened and several figures descended, weapons ready, caution rolling from them. Bronze bird claws and eyes of emerald covered their silvered armour. There were twelve of them, and Ahriman recognised one of them. The rest were warriors bred by another Legion. The silver-armoured figures came to a halt.

+Ahriman?+ sent the figure at the centre of the silvered warband.

+Credus,+ he replied.

Credus’s mind flared, its light dimming and brightening.

+It is you, but by the wheel of stars I did not believe it.+

+Why have you come, Credus?+

+I had a dream of you standing atop the Temple of Knowing. There were stars in the sky. You said nothing, but the stars moved and I understood that I needed to return here.+ His stream of thought halted, but Ahriman said nothing. Across the city no mind broke the silence. After a second he continued. +I do not know why I came here. I only know that I had to.+

+But you are here now, and I am here, and your brothers are here. You are a warrior, Credus. A warrior comes to fight or serve. Which have you come for?+

Credus turned his head to the surrounding lines of Rubricae.

+I am not here to die, Ahriman.+

+I am pleased.+

Credus bowed his head. A ripple of surprise passed through the silver-clad warriors at his side. Ahriman looked up just as a landing ship in emerald and blue swung overhead and banked to set down on the edge of the city. The lights of descending craft were growing as the scream of thruster jets multiplied, and the exiled Thousand Sons filled the ruins of Tizca.

+But why are you here, Ahriman?+ sent Credus as he raised his head again. +Why did you call?+

+We should wait,+ sent Ahriman. +This is something all of you should know.+

He waited as the sound rose and thrusters cut the darkening air.

The Thousand Sons have not gathered since I destroyed them, he thought. Now we are not a Legion, and when we last saw this place we were different.

He could feel the conflicting emotions of Ctesias and the rest of the Circle. They had sensed the minds of their brothers gathering out there in the dark. Not all of those who had come wanted to be there. Many would go when they knew what had drawn them back to the ruin of their first home. Some might even turn on him. He was no longer their master, and many were closer to enemies than brothers. Some were so changed that he barely recognised their minds. But he knew them all, and he felt the weight of their souls rise and blend into the shroud of pain around Prospero.

At last a final craft dropped slowly from the sky, and silence fell. The curtains of aurora light had stilled. The lights of the orbiting ships were bright flecks against the smears of green and red and the failing day. The universe beyond the veil was holding its breath. Out in the city, Ahriman felt his brothers watch and wait.

What were we when we last stood here? What are we now?

He bent down, and took a handful of dust from the ground. It had begun to dry, but in his fingers it was still thick, like clay, like flesh. He ran it through his armoured fingers, watching it smear and squeeze across the remains of the blue lacquer. He looked up at the sea of dead and living.

+Brothers.+ He sent the word, and felt the response like a breath of cold wind. +My brothers. You were called here. You were called and you came. Some of you for honour, some, no doubt, for hate.+ He hesitated and looked at the clod of grey earth in his hand. +It does not matter.+ He looked up. +Thank you. Thank you for answering the call.+

+We did not come for you.+ The thought, a distant mental voice, cracked through the warp. Inside his helm, Ahriman frowned. He had almost recognised the thought voice. Almost, but not quite.

+No,+ he replied. +You came because you felt that you had to be here, now, no matter the cost, or distance. You had to stand on this world at this moment.+

He paused.

One more step, he thought, just one more step.

+This is the end,+ he sent at last, the sending simple and direct, like the voice of a friend rather than a warlord. +After this we will not be as we are now. We have known betrayal and tragedy and mistakes. But we have also known brotherhood. We have looked at the universe and its lies have burned us. But we have seen its beauty too, and known its truth. It has been a long road to this moment. Too long a road. But it will be the end. We have been laid low. Our own hands and the whims of fate have broken us. But this will be the end.+

His eyelids slid shut for an instant inside his helm. On the edge of his awareness he could feel something pulling at his will, impatient, insistent.

One more step…

+I have come here to send Prospero to the fire.+ He opened his eyes and saw that clouds had begun to rise on the far side of the mountains. +This grave which was our cradle will become a pyre. Its flames will send me to the realm of our father, to the Planet of the Sorcerers. There I will undo all that has been done to us. I will remake us.+

The silence rippled out and back like a shockwave through water.

+This will happen. You have been called not because I willed it but because this is the death of all that was, and the start of all that will be. You are here because the death of the past called to you to witness it.+

He shook his head, his eyes catching the unmoving Rubricae.

+I ask nothing of you. I have taken too much from you already. If any wish to follow me, you may. If not then go, or stand vigil over what will happen here.+

+And if they would stand against what you intend. What then?+

The thought voice turned every eye to the darkness at the edge of the ruined square. Cords of purple fire ran through the air. The lines joined, forming a triangle which then folded into a space which was not there. A figure stepped through the triangular hole, and down to the ground. It was a Rubricae, but its armour was coal black and edged with gold. It came to a halt, its head turning slowly as its eyes ran across the gaze of its blue-clad kin. A second figure followed.

Ahriman saw the black robes, and felt the warp heat of the marks stitched into the cloth. The figure stopped, and behind it the tunnel in reality folded out of being. The black sorcerer looked at Ahriman, hand resting on the amber-capped pommel of his sword. Strength burned off the figure in cold sheets of lightless flame. Ahriman met the sorcerer’s gaze.

+I knew you would be here,+ he sent.

+Truly?+ The figure inclined his head, its aura flickering amused red for an instant.

Ahriman shook his head. At the back of his mind he remembered a wound cut into nowhere. He saw the image of warriors stepping from the nothingness, firing as lightning spiralled through the air. Amongst them had been a warrior with an axe, the blade’s smile stained by the fire of the growing Rubric.

Ahriman let out a slow breath. He had not seen it himself, of course. In that instant the Rubric had had full command of his mind and senses. The memory had been Sanakht’s. It had been the moment when the swordsman had saved Ahriman’s life.

+Have you come to try to stop me again, Khayon?+

Iskandar Khayon, Chosen of the Despoiler, Lord Vigilator of the Black Legion, and once a son of Magnus the Red, turned his gaze on the glowing eyes watching him from across the square and beyond.

+I like your little warband,+ he sent.

+You came alone,+ replied Ahriman after a heartbeat’s pause.

+I am never alone, Ahriman. The smallest claw of the true Legion came with me, but they wait above.+

Ahriman glanced up, his mind skimming upwards to the orbiting ships, but he could not pick out Khayon’s trace on any of them. When he looked down, Khayon had not moved.

+You will not stand with me again, though?+

+The Thousand Sons were no more for me a long time ago, Ahriman.+

+Yet here you are, without your master…+

+Abaddon is my brother, not my master, and the Black Legion are my kin now. I am here to honour a debt, not brotherhood.+ A brittle note edged the thought connection.

Ahriman shook his head.

+You were never one to be driven by guilt.+

Khayon laughed once, the sound a sharp crack in the still air.

+I am not here because I tried to kill you. A lack of perspective was always one of your finer qualities.+ Khayon went still again, and when his thought voice reached Ahriman again it was speaking to him alone. +There are other deeds that can place a burden on a life. And the Legion pays its debts.+

Cold skittered across Ahriman’s skin. He felt something dark at the edge of his thoughts, like a void opening beneath previously solid ground.

+You speak of things that I have not lived… yet?+ Ahriman left the thought hanging, but Khayon turned, looking up at the darkening night smeared with aura light and scattered with the fires of warships. Fresh blots of colour bled across the dome. Lightning stabbed at the mountains, and storm clouds were racing across the horizon.

+You will need to begin soon,+ sent Khayon. +The warp is wakening, and the torch bearers come to light your path of fire.+

The rain began to fall, hissing and drumming on the armour of the Rubricae as they moved through the city. Ctesias watched them from a spur of broken plinth. The flayed skin tapers hanging from his amour were smears of ink on half-dissolved tatters. He tried not to move. It was all he could do to not let the pain in front of his eyes swallow his skull.

The lightning had not faded, but was walking across the ruins. He could see and feel the shapes of the armies moving across that space.

Yes, he thought, army was the correct word. Armoured figures were spreading through the ruins, forming patterns that changed as soon as they were complete. Circles and spirals of thought rose from the minds of the living. Nothing was still, everything was moving and resonating both in the physical world around them and within the warp. The steps of the ritual had been going on for hours, and would continue for many more.

The pain in his head and the voices had started again not long after Ahriman’s pronouncement, quieter than before but slowly growing. The tone and texture had changed as well; before there had been anger, and sorrow but now it felt cold, like mourners singing above a grave. He wanted it to stop, and all he could think of was the quiet of the Chamber of Cages. Here even the babbling of the Athenaeum seemed like a pleasant contrast to what was clawing at his head.

More craft were descending through the night, some to take away those who had chosen not to remain on the surface, or to return others to the ships that would wait in orbit. Above the storm clouds hundreds of ships were moving, some leaving, some moving further out to wait in the gulf between Prospero and its system edge. A few were sinking through the upper atmosphere. He saw the Pyromonarch settle into position as gunships swarmed around her. Gaumata was returning to his ship with cohorts of Rubricae. Their position in what was about to happen lay not on the surface but above.

Ctesias watched the ships become like islands of iron in a sea of clouds, and waited for his own transport to appear. Among them was the Word of Hermes, and on board her was…

+You are out of alignment.+ The sending chopped into his thoughts. He squinted up at the dark shape of Ignis and his ever-present automaton. A finger of lightning split the air above the dead city, throwing white light over Ignis’s armour. Ctesias did not move.

+Ctesias–+

+Out of alignment, yes. I both heard and understood you.+

+Correct this error.+

+I am not going to correct anything, Ignis.+

+You will–+

+I am going back to the ship.+ Ctesias winced and clutched his staff. +Now. I am going back to the ship now.+

Behind Ignis, Credence clattered and cycled its weapon systems.

+Oh, be quiet, you pile of pistons. If you really want to kill me for that then just do it and have done.+

Credence’s shoulder cannon swung around.

Ignis raised a finger. The automaton froze.

+It is not possible for you to leave. The required patterns–’

+Will not be overly affected by my being on the ship. I know the plan, Ignis. I know my place and importance in this… scheme, and it is not here and not now. So I am going back to the ship to…+ He looked across the shifting sea of figures and ruins beneath a sky of lightning and night. He thought of the Chamber of Cages. +To have some peace while that is possible.+

+Why would you wish for such a thing?+ asked Ignis.

+And there…+ chuckled Ctesias, +is a question which reveals more than the answer.+

+Ctesias…+ sent Ignis again, as a gunship swooped in above them.

The downdraft blew the rags of Ctesias’s robes around him. Stablights shone from its wings, washing over him and Ignis. Ctesias pulled himself up with his staff, swayed and took a step as the gunship settled down with a roar of thrusters. Its front hatch was already cracking open.

The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that he needed the quiet of the Chamber of Cages. Yes, that was what he needed. He was sure of it. He was just not sure why.

+I will be there to do what Ahriman needs,+ sent Ctesias. +Have no fear of that.+

+Every detail of this is vital. You know that. We helped design this moment with him.+

+Yes, we did, but I am still going back to the ship, and to the quiet of the Chamber of Cages.+

Ctesias mounted the assault ramp. Ignis was still staring at him.

+I will come with you,+ sent Ignis, and followed up the assault ramp and into the gunship.

Ctesias was too shocked to reply.

The howls of the wolves rose from the edge of memory. Ahriman listened to them, far off yet close by, separated by time but not by distance. Gunshots clattered against the wash of fire, and the blast winds of great explosions. There were voices on those winds, too.

‘…fall back to the Temple…’

‘…go, my son…’

‘…the south districts are burning…’

He felt something pass, jostling him as it ran past. Cold flashed across his skin.

‘…we trusted you…’

Then another presence was buffeting him, and the voices were closer, louder, rising with the tones of fire and steel.

‘…get to the temple…’

‘…my last gift…’

‘…if you wish to die that is a gift I can grant…’

The noise was all around. Shrapnel rang from his armour. Gunfire boomed louder and louder in the chorus. The ground shook, and shook, and shook to the fall of bombs.

‘…Ahriman, do as I ask you…’

‘…Ahriman, what do we do?’

‘…Ahriman…’

He opened his eyes, and the ghosts vanished. Rain pattered from the plates of his armour and slid from it in runnels. Lightning cut the sky. Eyes and minds watched him from the plain around him and the sky above. They were all where they needed to be. Positioned. Watching. Waiting. Thousands of strands of incantation had been blown into the warp, and the placement of each soul in the ruins of Tizca was as it should be. They waited. And the warp waited with them.

Ahriman looked at where the Black Staff rested in his fingers. He opened his other hand. A small pinch of mud dried to dust lingered on his palm. A spot of rain fell into the centre of the ash. Slowly he unfolded a thought and pulled a tiny silk bag into the air. The dust flowed up into the air and into the bag. Strings tightened, and the handful of ashes tied itself to the crest of the staff.

A last pause.

A last beat of hearts and blood.

A last breath.

He raised the staff.

His will and thoughts roared.

The warp heard.

The ghosts of Prospero rose again.

Arcs of ghost light rose from the ashes and reached into the void. Vast pale shapes slid across Prospero’s face. Mouths howled from storm clouds. Cords of lightning stabbed at the stars. The psychic shockwave struck the ships holding in low orbit and ran on into the dark, trailing screams in the vacuum. On board the Word of Hermes, Silvanus had a second to flinch and then the world exploded from inside his head. Screaming waves of colour drowned his sight. He was falling, his muscles bunched tight enough to crack bones.

He hit the floor of his navigation chamber left arm first. The bones shattered from wrist to shoulder. He did not feel it. There was no space in his head for him to feel anything. Shapes and sounds flew at him: red screams, ice as white as the stab of needles, and through it spun lines which called names and words he did not know but understood.

+Rise,+ called the warp as it twisted. +Rise.+

Ignis felt the pattern snap into being and staggered. Behind him Credence growled a query. A step in front of him Ctesias stumbled. Strings of lightning ran up and down the passage walls. The hull of the Word of Hermes moaned. Silver tears were rolling down the dark metal of the walls.

He forced himself to straighten, forced his mind to roll with the power that was pouring through it. He had helped design what Ahriman was doing, had crafted the ratios of incantation and measures of alignment in the elements. He could feel the touch of formulae he had designed spiralling though the warp, but they were changing, combining, expanding beyond anything he had conceived.

And he was in the wrong place.

Ctesias was ahead of him, moving fast.

‘Wait,’ he shouted with his true voice, but Ctesias did not seem to hear or slow. Ignis felt something he was sure must be rage. This was something to do with the Athenaeum, and it would be like Ctesias to take this most critical of moments and use it as cover for… what? Had he deduced that Sanakht had been a sacrificial victim rather than a heroic martyr? Had the Athenaeum revealed something to him? Had he a different intention?

Ignis pushed forward, straining to take a step towards the sealed door just a few metres away. Smoke bled from the joints in his armour. The warp was vibrating on the other side of the shadows. He had to reach the chamber with Ctesias. It did not matter why Ctesias was doing this; Ahriman had given Ignis the task of watching him and making sure that he did not become a danger rather than a necessary weapon. Ahriman had been unequivocal on that.

He took a step and then another. Heat was bubbling through his veins. The sounds of battle were all around him, booming like a storm tide.

‘Ctesias!’ he called, but the summoner was moving faster not slower, and the warp spun and locked into deep parts of his thoughts. Fire and dead voices roared in his ears. He was part of it, locked into the grand mechanism that was growing through the warp from Prospero as its dead heart wakened. He was a cog, spinning to the rhythm and needs of something vast and other. He could feel the muscles clenching randomly under his skin. He could taste metal.

The world blinked.

The ground beneath his feet was not the deck of the Word of Hermes; it was the earth of Prospero. Fire clothed the sky with detonations. He was straining forward, the wreckage of his armour hanging from his body as he pulled a maniple of war automatons behind him. The wolves charged from the smoke. The automatons locked in place and fired. Casings cycled from their cannons. He could hear the fraction of a second between each shot.

Credence’s fist slammed into his back.

He began to turn, cyber commands spitting out…

But the vision of Prospero burning was gone. Credence’s bulk filled the ship’s passage behind him. In front of him, Ctesias was at the door of the Athenaeum’s chamber. Light and shadows were swaying across the walls and floor.

Ignis staggered forward. Numbers fell from his lips without him being able to stop them. He could feel every second pass. Every angle between every edge and corner in the corridor.

Ctesias pulled the hatch open and lunged through. Blue light shone from beyond. Ignis felt his muscles writhing under his skin as he forced his limbs with every shred of will. The door was past him, and he was through into the light of the chamber beyond.

The screaming of Prospero stopped. Stillness and silence hit him like a blast wave. He fell to his knees, gasping. Ctesias stood just inside the door hatch. The spherical cages hung at the centre of the room, but their bars were strips of black against a blinding light.

‘Ignis…’ hissed Ctesias. ‘I am where I need to be now. Can you hear it? Can you hear the quiet?’

Ignis forced strength into his limbs. His fists slammed into the floor grating, and he began to push himself to his feet. He stood, his muscles and armour screaming at each other as they moved together.

Ctesias had taken off his helm, and Ignis could see his eyes gazing at the caged Athenaeum. And those eyes had become cold and blue. Like stars.

‘I am here,’ said Ctesias, though to whom Ignis was not sure.

The bars of the spherical cages were blackening, their edges orange with heat. Worms of light ran under the Athenaeum’s skin. Its eyes were bright suns. Bones and blood glowed under the surface of its skull. It was looking at its hands.

‘I cannot… see.’ It flexed each finger one at a time. ‘Ctesias…?’ It turned its head, and looked at Ignis. ‘Where is Ctesias?’

Ignis stared back. The voice and the look was not the Athenaeum’s. It was the voice of something else. Something that had once been called a primarch and then a daemon. It was the voice of Magnus the Red.

‘Why am I here?’ asked the voice, and the glowing figure was at the bars of the innermost sphere. ‘I am lost, Ctesias.’ Ignis tried to move but could not. ‘Ctesias,’ said the Athenaeum. ‘You must free me.’

The echoes of the dead rose from the ashes of Prospero. They soared into the sky as columns of shrieking light. They pulled themselves from the sludge in bodies of tangled wreckage and splintered armour. They shook the ruins of Tizca with their pain.

Ahriman watched as a body of crystal and twisted girders grew from the ground before him. It towered against the sky, and bellowed with a mouth of broken swords. The shockwave shattered the crystal ruins around Occullum Square. The howl went on and on, rising higher and higher, growing as the pain of Prospero’s death vented into reality. It was deafening, soul-breaking. Ahriman felt the patterns of the ritual unfolding as the border between reality and the warp cracked.

The creature rising from the debris turned as it grew. Ahriman felt its gaze fall on him. The shriek coming from its mouth was the scream of shells, and the howl of wolves. Its arm formed as it raised it into the sky. Shards of armour and lumps of ash flowed together. Rain was streaming from the sky and exploding from the creature as ice. It struck down at Ahriman. The creature’s arm shattered. It reared back, debris sucking back as its form grew with rage.

Ahriman could feel the bitterness and confusion rolling up from the well beneath Prospero. All those who had died on this ground, all the humans burned, all the Wolves and Thousand Sons who had fallen, the lost rage and hate of all of them was free now. It was like a fire burning through a forest.

+Hold, brothers,+ he sent, and felt the thousands of minds connected to him hear. He could not feel each individual, but he did not need to. He was the apex, the balance point of everything that was about to happen.

Far off at the edge of his awareness he felt ships break from the warp, and cut towards Prospero.

+They are coming, brothers. The Imperium comes.+

He felt them understand, and changed the shape of his thoughts. The change rippled out through his brothers’ minds, and in the warp–

The cascades of lightning froze. The scream of the dead vanished. The rain became a curtain of glittering beads hung against bruised clouds. Ahriman could not turn or blink. He did not feel shock, or surprise. He could not. He was still, an unmoving part of a tableau that he could only see and hear.

Something like a hiss of breath rattled close behind him. He felt wet warmth on the back of his head.

+This will pass,+ said a voice from behind him. +Just as all things will pass. I have not stopped your ritual. It will continue. Its end is almost inevitable, and I have no desire to see you fail. Not yet.+

A figure moved into the space before him. Its skin was flame blue, and the nine wings which dragged behind its back glinted with tarnished colours. It did not look at Ahriman, but turned to look across the vista before them both.

+Your failure and ruin will come soon, but only when you are ready for it.+ It turned to him then. A single blue eye burned beneath its cowl. +Did you think that I would not have my vengeance on you, my traitorous son?+ It tilted its head, and crystal razor teeth glinted beneath the burning eye.

XIV
Perspectives

The city was there when the dust storm had passed. Iobel had seen the storm coming, had seen it rise up against the sky and roll across the land. The wind had dropped just before it had swallowed her. She had had a handful of seconds to look up and see the ochre cliff loom above her. Then the dust had been all around her, whipping her skin and pouring into her nose and mouth. She had folded to the ground. She had stayed there, curled into a ball, her robe pulled across her face as the storm dragged over her.

When the wind dropped, she found her limbs wrapped in a dull heaviness; the storm had half buried her. She rose – blinking at the sunlight – and saw the city. She stood at the centre of an open space, which might have been a square or a broad avenue. Fragments of walls and pillars pointed up at the sky. Sand dunes rose and fell as far as she could see. The wind and sand had dug into the rubble, sculpting it into shapes that resembled half-melted wax rather than stone.

She turned full circle. Column caps and the stones of buildings sat here and there. Most were the same colour as the sand, but some were grey, or dull green and blue. What looked like statues stood submerged up to their waists. Each of them must have been as tall as a battle Titan. She made out the lines of what might have been heads, torsos and limbs, all weathered to blurred impressions. She could imagine that great and grim faces would have looked out to the edge of the world from where she stood. Except, of course, what she was seeing was just as real as what she could imagine. The statues had been weathered, not by sand and wind, but by forgetfulness, slowly grinding down the details and burying them under time.

‘Hello?’ she called. ‘If you are here, Magnus, then show yourself.’

The words sounded foolish, and an echo was the only answer.

‘If you are here…’

‘Show yourself…’

‘Show…’

‘Yourself…’

‘You…’

‘Yourself…’

She walked deeper into the ruins and did not call out again. After several hundred paces she realised that the shadows were moving. They turned around the bases of the statues, as though the sun was tracking behind her. But the sun was not moving.

She paused, and the shadows became still pools. In front of her a breeze lifted a thin tongue of sand from a dune. Her eyes flicked towards it, and then stopped.

Something was standing beside her. Right beside her. Close enough that its face was next to hers. She could not see it clearly, just the outline of it filling the corner of her eye. It had been there before, standing at the edge of sight when she glanced at the windblown sand, but it had been further away. She stayed very still. She was certain that if she turned to look at it there would be nothing there. But it was there.

‘You have been watching me, haven’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said a thin voice, and the shadow beside her stepped into sight. He was the image of a gaunt man. Wrinkled and spotted skin clung to bones. She could see the strings of muscles standing out in his neck. He was also breathing heavily, ribs rising and falling under a deep-blue silk tunic. Rings rattled on his fingers. Bracelets of ebony and bone circled his wrists and neck. He looked like a priest from a past age, still clinging to life even as he withered.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘I mean you no harm,’ said the man. ‘But I have never seen anyone else in the city. No one has ever found it before.’

Iobel raised an eyebrow at the last word. A note of authority had drifted into the man’s voice. She looked into his eyes. They were dark, and steady. There had been strength in his features once, she noted.

If not a priest, she thought, then perhaps a king.

He straightened, and when he stood tall Iobel had to look up at his face. With the sky behind him his features lost some of their definition, and for a second he seemed a shape cut out of darkness.

‘You have not answered my question,’ she said.

‘I was called Amon,’ said the old man.

He shivered and the rings on his wrists and fingers rattled. Iobel kept her eyes steady on him. The words of the boy beside the fire slid through her mind.

‘Amon…’ she said. ‘I know the name. I heard it spoken by the Athenaeum once, and I have seen Ahriman’s memories of the warrior who bore that name. He was a Thousand Son, a warrior. He was nothing like you, even in memory.’

Amon chuckled drily, and stepped out of the shadow. He had the same face, but now seemed younger, smooth-skinned and handsome.

‘You think that shape and form are fixed? In the world of flesh and bone that was always a lie, and here it is a joke.’ He flicked his hand and it dissolved to grey sand, but when he raised his arm the hand was whole and glittering with rings. ‘Come now, you know this. I can see that. Don’t play the fool with me. I am Amon, tutor to Magnus the Red, and before him the greatest scholar of Prospero. I walked in the presence of the being you called Emperor, and knew each of his sons. That is a fact that does not have one shape.’

‘Go to the beginning of things,’ the boy had said. ‘That is where all things lead in the end.’

‘Are you where it began for Ahriman?’ Iobel looked around at the ruins. ‘Is this city the beginning? Is that why I found you?’

‘Almost the right question,’ Amon chuckled. ‘No, I am not the beginning of things, Iobel.’

Her head snapped around. He was watching her, eyes unblinking.

‘Yes. I know who you are, and I know that you are looking for the father of the Thousand Sons.’

She watched him, weighing up the options now before her.

‘Have you–’

‘Seen him? No.’

‘Then why are you here other than to exercise a need to patronise?’

He laughed, the sound booming through the ruins and across the dunes.

‘Have you wondered why you are looking for Magnus?’ He caught her eyes, and grinned an unkind grin. ‘No. I didn’t think so.’

‘I have my reasons.’

‘Your reasons? Or someone else’s reasons?’

‘Who else’s could they be?’ she asked.

‘Ahriman’s,’ he said, and stepped closer. ‘This is his mindscape. It may be a far reach of his mind, but it is made of consciousness and subconscious. In a way it is his will that I speak these words, that these grains of sand fall from my hand.’ Amon reached down and scooped up a fistful and let it spill through his ringed fingers. ‘We are dreams that have lost their way, and our thoughts are not our own.’

Iobel thought of a figure in a red cloak, sitting beside a fire while Ahriman explained that she was dead. He had not seen the figure, nor heard what it had said to Iobel.

‘He is right,’ it had said. ‘But nothing is ever as it seems.’

‘This realm is not wholly Ahriman’s any more,’ she said, watching as he moved around her. ‘Too much of the warp has touched it, too many complexities layered on top of each other, too many structures built to sustain his power. He is not master of himself, and he is not master of me. You choose how you appear. I choose to follow this path.’

‘Choose? Choose? Do the prisoners in a jail choose the rags they wear? That is what we are, both of us.’ He raised his hands and spread them out in front of her, and she realised that he cast no shadow, and that the edges of his shape blurred when she was not looking directly at them. ‘I am as you find me because this is all that is left. I am Amon, but Amon grown from the scraps of memory left to Ahriman. Fragments put back together in the shape of someone who once lived.’

‘You are dead, then.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ He curled his lip, and Iobel shivered. ‘But yes, there is no living Amon out there in reality. After I was… undone, he sent half of the memories of me out here to the edge of his being.’ He paused and looked at Iobel, his eyes calculating. ‘But I forget, of course you know this…’

Iobel frowned.

‘I have seen you in Ahriman’s memories when you were a warrior of the Thousand Sons, but I have never seen you die.’

His lip curled again.

‘He chooses to forget that moment. That is why I am here. An exile in his mind, a thorn caught in his confidence.’

‘What was it he did not wish to remember of you?’

‘That I was a man once. A man who would have aged and died had he not become a warrior of the Emperor. That I was a teacher. That I was right more often than I was wrong. That he killed me rather than admit that he was wrong.’

‘Then why do you exist at all?’

‘I could ask the same of you. Why do you still exist, inquisitor?’

‘I am an aberration Ahriman cannot remove,’ she replied.

He shrugged, as though conceding the possibility and implying its improbability.

‘If that is true, then perhaps I am the same. Perhaps I persist in the idea that another might have been right. Perhaps doubt is my function.’ He let out a long breath, and his face looked like the image of weariness and age. ‘We are almost done. Thank you, Iobel. I think if I had known you in life I would have found you most amusing,’ he said. The sky was darkening, and the sun had vanished behind the horizon without crossing the sky. ‘Ask your question, inquisitor.’

‘Where did it begin?’ she asked. ‘For Ahriman, where did it all begin?’

‘A good question.’

‘Do you know the answer?’

‘There are so many possibilities. Prospero… the Planet of the Sorcerers… both could be beginnings depending on which journey you mean.’

‘Give me the answer!’ she snapped.

The wind blew over the bare sand.

‘To reach the answer you have to ask another question,’ said a fading voice. ‘Not why did a journey begin, but who began it?’

She looked up.

Daylight struck her skin. The night had vanished. A wind was scudding across the space in front of her. She frowned.

A small, dark object was sticking up from the ground. She bent down, shielding her eyes from the glare. It looked like a piece of wood, about the size of her spread hand, half buried in the sand. She reached out, gripped it, and gently pulled it free. The wood was dark, worn, and its edges were splintered. The surface was battered, but she could make out birds spiralling upwards towards a slice of a broken sun. She turned it over, trying to think if she had come across it before. It seemed familiar, like a piece of something she had seen and not understood.

She straightened, and tucked the fragment into her robes. Around her the empty desert rode on towards a horizon of mirages.

The Changeling ran. The shell of armour moved with it. Nearby, other monstrous figures in halved black and red followed it. Yellow light strobed around it. Breaching pods sat in rows before them. Steam and sparks vented from cables and pipes as they broke free of the pods’ flanks.

‘Enemy ships entering weapon range,’ came a human voice in its ear. The Changeling recognised the voice of one of Commodore Ishaf’s lieutenants. Tension and control bled from the words.

‘Strike Force Incarnidus ready in two hundred and thirty seconds,’ said the Changeling into the vox. Umiel’s voice slid out of its mouth flawlessly.

Space Marines were peeling off behind it as it ran on. Pistons rammed hatches shut on the flanks of breaching pods. Mag-hoists dropped from the roof with a roar of chains unravelling. Pods rose into the air and swung towards the waiting breeches of launch tubes. Each of them was a narrow cone of armour the size of a tank. Weapon pods ringed the iris hatches in their bases. Blade-shaped legs sat folded on their flanks. If they hit the hull of a ship, those legs would latch onto the armour like the jaws of a tick, and the weapon pods would cut a breach in the hull for their passengers to drop through.

The Changeling reached its pod, and swung up into the gloom of its insides. Umiel’s honour guard followed it. Mag-harnesses locked over each of them. A metallic boom shook the gloom as a hoist grasped the pod and yanked it into the air. The launch breech closed over it with a drumroll of clanks. The hoist broke free. The Changeling glanced across the honour guard, eyes taking in weapons locked to thigh armour, noting the spin of readiness runes flowing across the helmet display. Just as Umiel would have.

‘Strike Force Incarnidus stands ready to launch,’ said the Changeling. ‘The hammer falls at your word.’

‘Stand by, Incarnidus,’ said a human voice.

The Changeling waited. Its senses slid free of its shape and skimmed outwards, finding the eyes of command crew on the bridge half a kilometre above, worming into the senses of servitors and of pilots riding the void close by. It watched with a thousand eyes as the next step in its path drew nearer.

The ship the Changeling rode was a battle-barge. Crimson and black marked her hammer-head prow, speaking her role as a war-craft of the Angels Sanguine. Her guns were powerful enough to break cities, and three hundred warriors of the Adeptus Astartes stood ready in her hull. Like all of her kind, she bore a title which proclaimed the belligerence of her makers. Wrath of Ages, she was named, and she was not alone.

Beside the Wrath of Ages, dozens of ships bore down on Prospero. The fire of their engines cut the vacuum. Squadrons of sharp escorts rode above and below the larger ships. Swarms of gunships and bombers circled them, glinting with malice and starlight. Prospero was a smudged circle of light in the distance. Its surface flashed and shimmered as though it were a spherical storm cloud.

Even this far away, the Changeling could feel the warp pushing from behind the planet, and the wounds of its past pulled wide. In the space between the planet and the Imperial fleet, hundreds of ships hung in loose clusters. The warp had marked each of them. Faces snarled around gun ports. Hulls in dozens of colours glimmered with an oily sheen. Spirals of light skidded over the spines of turbolasers. It was a fleet without unity, but the sons of Prospero who had answered Ahriman’s call commanded all of them. Those who had decided to take their swords and strength elsewhere had already gone or were running for the system edge. Those who remained waited to face the Imperium as it came to burn their home world for a second time.

At the core of the waiting ships hung a vessel with a gold and black hull. On her bridge, the Changeling saw the mind of her master burning cold and bright, and it heard the command slip from his lips.

‘Fire,’ said Khayon, and the black ship spoke the first word of the battle.

Streams of plasma blinked through the void. Shells hammered out. Shields fizzed and stuttered. Then the Imperial fleet replied. Torpedoes and shells cut the darkness into slivers. More ships around Prospero began to fire. Seen from above the vector of the Imperial attack, the battle was a crescent of engine fires closing on the scattered arrowhead of defenders. The volume of fire grew. Shells and las-blasts met in mid-flight, and detonations swallowed the void between the fleets.

The Changeling felt the ship shake around it. Chimes of warnings rose to its ears. The battle-barge was holding back from the first wave. Backed by rapid strike vessels, its task was not to meet the defenders head-on, but to break through them. It had a task to perform; it was here not just as warrior, but as executioner. Once they were through the defenders they would scatter to the ships in low orbit and clear them so that the battle-barges could drop close enough to fire the cyclonic warheads down onto the planet.

‘All units, we are at the line of fire,’ came a droning servitor voice. ‘Prepare for launch. May the fire of fury light your path.’

The Changeling smiled with a stolen face, and waited.

One.

The torches dimmed as Knekku counted the first beat of his right heart. The sounds and psychic murmur of the Planet of the Sorcerers faded.

‘Listen to me, governors of the hidden and silent ways.’ The chant came from his lips with a mist of frozen breath. His muscles felt like lead.

This is not what you should be doing, said a voice at the back of his thoughts. There has to be another way.

Two.

He raised the silver dagger in both hands. The thought in his head reached out and touched the blade. It shone bright, and the torches dimmed further. The tower chamber was a crumbling circle of dimming light now.

‘Hear me, watchers of the Labyrinth.’ He could feel ice forming in his throat and lungs.

You have a task. You have a duty. Ahriman and the Exiles return, and you must meet them. The thoughts drummed with rising insistence in his skull, even as he pushed them away. But then the dry rasp of the Crimson King’s last words to him cut through him.

+I have made a mistake, my son.+

Three.

The dagger punched through skin, muscle and bone. Light and pain exploded through him. Darkness came down on him in an avalanche.

His right heart stopped.

He stood up.

He was no longer in the tower. His body was still there, on the stone floor with a ritual knife in its chest. But his mind and soul had slipped sidewise into the deepest realms of the warp. He was a mental projection, a thought form cast into the Sea of Souls.

He felt no different, though. He was dressed as he had been in the tower. The red and blue of his robes rose as though in a wind, but there was no wind. He looked up and the world clattered into place piece by piece before his eyes. He was standing on a flight of stone steps. Sheer drops opened to either side of him. A silver haze hid the depths beneath. Above him other flights of steps branched from his own, curving away to meet at impossible angles. The mist hid the distance the further he looked.

He looked at his chest. A light pulsed beneath the skin, glowing like a sun trapped beneath his ribs.

‘Beating still,’ purred a voice from above him. He looked up, hands rising. A wide feline face looked back at him from a bottom step just above his head. The head turned, and its fur became the colour of brushed copper. Two rows of eyes looked at him. The iris and colour of each one was different. ‘You will exist here for a while, Knekku. You have bought yourself time. Enough time? Now that is an interesting question.’

The creature panted, licking the air with a pink tongue. Knekku recognised it, even though he had never seen its shape before.

‘Avenisi?’

‘It has been a long time, my old friend. What is it for you? A thousand years lived since Prospero? Two? Three? More?’

Knekku looked at the daemon that he had once called his tutelary. When he had last seen it, the daemon had shed fur and feline shape for claws and tentacles of heat. That had been on Prospero, and he had never sought the creature out again since. He knew why. It was the sense of betrayal, as sharp now as it had been when he and the rest of the Legion saw the true nature of the angels that had been sharing their thoughts for decades.

‘Why are you here now?’

‘To help you walk the Labyrinth. To help you find the Crimson King.’

‘I did not summon you.’

‘And I did not call you into the Labyrinth, but here we both are.’ It jumped and landed delicately on the steps just beside him. Its fur was blue, but it changed hue as it moved. ‘Shall we start? You do not have unlimited time.’

‘What if I do not wish your aid?’

‘Then you will be at a decided disadvantage.’

‘Who sent you to me? Who knew that I would step into this place?’

‘Everyone. No one. Someone.’

‘I have no more need of riddles.’

‘No, you have need of some very specific help, and so here I am. You need to start moving or the Labyrinth will swallow you up. It does not like things that aren’t trying to find something.’

Knekku looked up at the steps above him, and froze. They had gone. Instead of steps leading upwards, there were now steps leading down into the silver mist. He considered for a second, shaping his thoughts into hard control.

‘You did not really think this through, did you? So unlike you to act out of panic without considering all the steps and possibilities. Perhaps you have changed more than I thought.’

‘Silence,’ he growled, flicking a glance at Avenisi. When he looked back, the steps to his left had now become a set in front of him and another set to his right.

‘You are here to find the Crimson King,’ said Avenisi quickly. ‘What is your beginning?’

‘The beginning of–’

‘The reason, the thought that made you decide to do this, the thing you remember when you think of him?’

I have made a mistake, my son. The thought formed before he could consider it, and as it did so, his perspective seemed to shift so that the steps that had appeared on his left now were just shadows cast onto the mist, and the steps leading down now led upwards.

‘Come on,’ said Avenisi, and slid past him. ‘One step after another.’

Knekku looked at the feline shape of the daemon as it bounded up the steps, its paws never truly touching the stone. It paused and looked back at him, head cocked to one side, its rows of eyes blinking between a rainbow of colours.

He hesitated, and then began to climb.

XV
Pyre

Ahriman looked into the single blue eye of the daemon. He could think, but the thoughts had no feeling. What he was seeing was impossible. Simply impossible.

+Oh, it is possible,+ said the daemon. +I have been waiting for this moment, watching you, helping you towards it, steering your path until you could not help but be here. Until you could not turn back. Until you were ready for the only reward of betrayal.+

Ahriman tried to form words, to move his limbs, but found he could not even twitch his fingers. A whirl of light hung immobile around him. To either side of him his Rubricae stood unmoving, their glowing eyes seeing nothing.

+This is not really happening. That is why you can do nothing. I am not fighting you. I am not changing what you are doing in any way. This is simply a join between two moments, a gap in time that I have filled with this… visitation.+

The daemon shifted closer, its shape scattering through rain and smoke like a projected image.

+When the Wolves came, I would have let this world burn for our sins. We deserved to die here, all of us. But you… You dared to think yourself higher than me. You fought. You did not accept punishment. You defied me.+ It gestured with a glass claw at the city and the unfolding ritual. +And now you will pay with everything you have ever cared for.+

Ahriman could feel thoughts and reactions trying to shake free of the moment, but all he could see was the daemon, all he could think of were its words.

+I am your nemesis, Ahriman. I am the shadow that follows your deeds and steals the lustre of your glory. I am the bitterness that strangles hope. I am the father you forgot, and defied, and betrayed. And I am waiting for you just as I have waited and watched for all this time.+

The daemon pulled back, its spine creaking, and the shadows of its cowl grew and flowed out like a new skin. Its shape fell away from it like fat falling from a cooking corpse. It shrank to a body of scarred muscle. It hung in the air, silver chains hanging from it, its eyes black holes above a needle-filled mouth. It was the image of the daemon that Maroth had bound into the body of one of Astraeos’s brothers, the daemon which he had thought was a raw force of dumb hunger, the daemon that he had allowed to sit at the heart of his flagship for years.

+I have been with you for so long, watching you, guiding you, helping you. You never questioned why you let me persist amongst your kin. You never pushed beyond the holes I dug in your mind. So many holes, over such a long time… but now I want you to see. I want you to know that I speak not just truth. I speak of destiny, a destiny I have made for you. Out there along the path, I am waiting, and I will see you broken.+ It smiled its needle smile.

The daemon came closer, and Ahriman could see the frozen rain and the broken city through it.

+I would have let you go on in ignorance, but there are many faces to vengeance, and to know you will fail and watch it all come apart is a pleasure I cannot deny.+

The daemon turned, its shape rippling and reforming as it looked away. A new face and form looked at Ahriman in its place, like the other side of a coin revealed as it was flicked over.

Ahriman felt the beginnings of shock shake the frozen instant.

+You destroyed me. You destroyed my brothers. You made me like you, and then you abandoned me to fate.+ Ahriman felt something vast, and cold, and dark whirl around him. +You made me an oath that you would save my brothers. Now I repay its breaking with an oath to you. If there is a way to undo all that you intend to do, I will see it done,+ said Astraeos. At the edge of sight, the raindrops seemed to be sliding slowly down the sky. The lightning flashes were swelling with brightness. +And you know I can fulfil this oath. I am fate come round at last.+

The moment broke and the sound of the storm washed over him with a roar of returned fury, and shock and revelation hit Ahriman like a falling mountain.

The door ripped from the frame with a boom of shearing bolts. Credence gripped the sides of the frame and yanked the opening wider. Ignis felt blood running from his mouth. His sight was smeared red. The Athenaeum, or Sanakht, or something else was a glowing wash of light behind the silhouette of Ctesias. The sounds of the ritual rising from Prospero were gone. In their place was a resonating note, like struck glass, or a voice gathering air to scream. Ignis felt breath sawing from him.

His eyes went to the Athenaeum. If it had substance, he was not seeing it any more. The figure within the cage was a tongue of rainbow flame. He needed to get up. He needed…

‘I must be free,’ said the Athenaeum in a voice which was a chorus. ‘My sons. I will be free.’

Ctesias was a frozen statue, his eyes mirrors to the blaze of the figure inside the cages.

The Athenaeum reached up and touched the bars.

‘I will be free,’ it said, and the metal of its cage fell apart like a burnt cobweb.

Ignis knew that he was too late.

The Athenaeum was walking on air. Its eyes were holes of fire. A crown of flames circled its head. It extended a hand to Ctesias as though to bless him.

Credence rammed through the door behind him, tearing the frame from its fitting. The Athenaeum’s fingers were almost touching Ctesias’s face. Credence’s fist hit Ctesias. The Athenaeum roared in anger. Fire streamed from its mouth. Credence’s armour plates bubbled, and it twisted to place itself between the Athenaeum and Ctesias.

‘Ignis!’ shouted Ctesias. Ignis saw that the summoner was rising from the floor, hand outstretched, but he was reaching towards Ignis rather than the burning figure of the Athenaeum, and his eyes had cleared. Ctesias’s staff lay on the deck between them. Ignis interpreted and calculated the summoner’s intent and meaning, as Credence gave a clatter of warning. The Athenaeum lifted the automaton from the floor with a gesture. Ctesias raised his hand.

Ignis lunged, scooped up the staff, and threw it in a single movement. The cold iron rang as Ctesias caught it, whirled it upwards, and spoke three syllables that stole the heat from the air. Sigils cut into the walls flashed to blinding brightness. Ignis felt the bindings punch into his mind. The Athenaeum spasmed, its back curving impossibly as a jet of red flame breathed from its mouth. It twitched, and then the flames vanished and it fell to the deck.

Ctesias was breathing hard. Blood spotted his chin.

Ignis looked at him, his own mind still reeling. He opened his mouth to ask what had happened, but Ctesias spoke first.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

Ignis paused, blinked, and calculated.

‘It… had you under its…’

‘Spell…’ hissed Ctesias.

Ignis tried to decide if the summoner was joking. Ctesias tried to stand, but his legs did not seem able to respond.

‘The power flowing through it,’ continued Ctesias through heavy breaths, ‘the power must have corroded the bindings of the chamber and cages.’ He gestured at the glowing marks on the wall. ‘I am once again glad that I am thorough in considering the worst possible outcome as the most likely to occur.’

Ignis blinked again. Had Ctesias not heard the Athenaeum speak? Had he not heard it call to them not as brothers, but as sons? Was he lying? Ignis paused, his mind trying to calculate a way of proceeding. What would Ahriman do?

He closed his mouth.

Ctesias was trying to stand again.

‘We need to take it,’ he was saying. ‘The Athenaeum cannot be destroyed, or rather I do not want to think what would happen if we tried. This chamber is useless now. It is subdued again, but the bindings on it will need tending. So it must remain with me. Curse my shrivelled flesh!’ He tried to stand and fell back again, panting.

Ignis was just about to move forward, when Credence stepped above Ctesias and hoisted him to his feet with a thump of pistons. Ctesias looked surprised and then laughed.

‘Take it.’ He gestured to the crumpled body of the Athenaeum. Credence pivoted towards it but did not move.

Ignis was still thinking. He had thought Ctesias had discovered that Sanakht had become the Athenaeum unwillingly, but now he was far from sure, and he was a very long way from knowing what he should do besides follow the pattern of events he and Ahriman had designed.

‘Do it,’ he said to Credence. The automaton scooped the Athenaeum up and held it across its arms.

‘Best we make for the launch decks,’ said Ctesias. ‘After all, the pyre is about to start, and then… we will need to be ready, will we not?’

Ctesias began to move. Ignis lingered. Something was still wrong with Ctesias, something in his sudden recovery and focus.

Credence clicked a query. Ignis nodded slowly, and they both followed Ctesias. After all, what choice was there? Ctesias was right: there was soon going to be no time to ponder mysteries.

My son…

Time crashed back into being. Ahriman gasped. Driving rain was lashing the city around him. He could feel the thoughts of his brothers, the ritual spinning in their skulls, on and on with growing momentum.

My son…

The daemon’s face and words shouted in his mind, cutting through his calm, breaking his focus and sending it flying into blank doubt.

My son…

It could not be. They had remade Magnus. All those millennia ago, they had made him complete. It could not be…

Unless…

My son…

A tendril of aetheric energy struck his mind. His awareness reeled. Around him colossal figures of mangled armour and broken crystal roared their anger. Kine shields broke the dark with stuttered flashes of white. The warp was everywhere; matter was a shadow in its ascendant light. He was falling while standing.

Astraeos’s face was looking at him from the dark, shining with hate, clear as the carved side of a coin.

I have been blind. I have not seen what I should. Ahriman thought of the red-robed figure in his dreams. He thought of Iobel, of the words she had once shouted at him from the highest tower of his memories.

‘You will fail. You are alone. Only enemies and betrayers remain to you now, Ahriman.’

Everything was slipping free of his control. All the power, all the careful lines of structure and significance stretching through matter and time, all the points of focus, all were breaking open. The incantation rose in the warp like a thunderhead painted in blood and blinding light. It reached the boundaries of its creation and broke against the chains of will holding it together. Ahriman could feel it pressing against reality, against his mind. Blood vessels popped in his nose, and his throat filled with the taste of iron. In his chest, the slivers of silver bit into his hearts as the full force of his will rushed out. His mind met the trailing elements of the ritual.

I will not fail.

He found the last pool of calm in his thoughts and poured his focus into it.

The world slowed to the beat of his hearts. The silver shards in his chest were sharp teeth biting into his awareness, but he rode over the sensation. He could see and feel the immediate future. He saw the ships breaking through the cordon in space. He saw the bombs falling through the air. He saw the flash and felt the blast wave rip the flesh and armour from his bones. He saw the thousands of his brothers he had gathered beside him blasted to grey ash to spin on the fire-wind. It would happen. The future was crowding forward, stealing the time he needed.

He formed a single thought, and cast it upwards past the clouds and into the void. He did not send it to one mind. He did not know who still remained to hear. The ships holding the Imperial fleet back were not with him, not truly. They had decided to stay for this moment, perhaps drawn to fight the battle they had lost together millennia ago, perhaps from loyalty that called them to stand with him. It did not matter why they were there, only that they were.

+More time,+ he called. +We need more time. For the Legion which made us, we need more time.+

The sending flew into the churning warp, rising like a burning arrow fired at a night sky. He reached out, feeling the rhythms of the ritual, hearing its infinite song. His mind was one with it again. On and on it went, beautiful and terrible, and incomplete.

Please, he thought, silently to himself. Hear me. Give me time.

+We will give you what time we can,+ said a thought which rose to fight the clamour of dead voices and thoughts. Ahriman knew the voice.

+Thank you, Khayon,+ he sent. +We will meet again.+

+That… that is certain,+ called Iskandar Khayon’s fading voice.

Ahriman looked at the sky, and felt the tides of time shift back a stride. He reached out to all the minds that were linked to him and spoke.

+It comes, my brothers.+

And the minds of the Exiles answered him in silent unison.

+We rise.+

‘Angels of Terra…’ whimpered Silvanus, ‘forgive and protect me.’

He tried to find the shutter controls again, but his hands were not working properly. Nothing was working properly. His fingers were nerveless strips of rag, and the heat of a fever smothered his skin. Part of him was amazed that he was still alive. His head felt like it was being stabbed from the inside. Everywhere he looked, all he could see was burning. A streaked lattice of explosions filled the space above the ship. The Word of Hermes was so close to Prospero now that the storms almost covered it. It was unshielded, that protection stolen by the power discharging from the storms churning around it, but clung to its position, thrusters fighting the forces pulling at it.

Above the Word of Hermes the battle flashed brighter than the stars and sun. The near void was a cauldron of sheeted light and bursts of plasma. The Imperial fleet was breaking through. Slab-muzzled grand cruisers led the vanguard. They drove through the net of defenders. The ships facing them began to break apart; some fired final shots and ran, their loyalty expended. Others held position, or cut across the front of the closing fleet, firing and taking wounds as though both were a victory. They were not moving as a whole; the unity of the initial defence had dissolved under the guns of the Imperial ships.

‘Come on. Come on. Please…’

His fingers slipped off the shutter controls again. He was breathing hard, the rolls of skin hanging from his torso quivering as he sobbed. The inside of his head was still bright with the visions coming from the planet beneath his feet. The warp was shining with tattered light. Serpents of fire were twisting over everything. A cloud of debris struck the crystal viewscreen in front of him, ringing like rain. He looked up.

A nearby ship nosed downwards as torpedoes struck its upper hull. Explosions blistered its back. Towers snapped along its spine. He could almost hear its hull scream as it bowed before the onslaught. Fire flashed within the exposed superstructure. The warp sparkled as thousands of souls burned with terror before they died. Prospero pulled them down into a howling embrace.

An Imperial ship punched through the battle’s fire. Molten threads of armour smeared its hammer-head prow. It came around, hard, its guns pounding down at the ships holding still in Prospero’s atmosphere. Silvanus knew what it was. He had once steered one through the warp for three decades. It was a battle-barge of the Adeptus Astartes, and it was bearing down directly on the Word of Hermes.

At the centre of the inferno, the black-and-gold-hulled Incarnate came about and powered towards the battle-barge. Its shields split the explosions, hissing with light as they collapsed. Guns fired down its flanks, cutting through enemies. It bore down on the battle-barge, engines pushing it on like a thrown spear. Silvanus could see the spite radiating from the Incarnate in waves as it dived towards its prey.

Silvanus’s hands went still on the shutter controls. Small shards of debris were pinging from the crystal.

The battle-barge was close, its guns and open hatches dark eyes looking back at him. The Incarnate fired. Dorsal lasers drew a line of blinding colour between it and the battle-barge. The Imperial ship’s shields snapped to nothing. The Incarnate was closing, relentless, vengeful. But alone.

Another Imperial ship broke through the layer of fire. It was smaller, but still a mountain range of metal and weaponry. Golden lightning bolts the size of hab-blocks marked its prow. It was a strike cruiser, a lesser but no less deadly breed of Space Marine craft, and it shook gunships free as it cut towards the planet. A second battle-barge came close on its heels. The equal of the first, its hull was charcoal black from prow to stern. A great silver hawk’s head sat atop its bridge.

The Incarnate pivoted as the new arrivals bore down on it. Sheets of battery fire and streams of laser light punched towards the three Space Marine ships. Fire scattered from their void shields. The black and gold ship was at the centre of a closing claw of enemies. It gave a last furious broadside, slid over on its axis and shot away from Prospero towards clear space.

Silvanus heard a moan escape his lips.

What was Ahriman doing? Why had he not foreseen this disaster? What was he doing on the planet? Why had he done this?

The three Space Marine ships closed on Prospero. The guns of the ships in ultra-low orbit remained silent. If they fired they would send themselves tumbling down to the surface.

The trio of enemy ships swelled in Silvanus’s view. The silhouettes of gunships, bombers and fighters flickered around them.

‘Merciful–’ he began.

One of the battle-barges fired. A flat sheet of light exploded out from one of the nearby ships. Silvanus did fall, this time, hands spasming as they tried to grip air. The Word of Hermes jolted as the blast wave struck it. Silvanus was on the floor. For an instant he was blind, and then the light of what was coming next poured down into his eyes from the viewport. Somehow he could see, as though his eyes had just shrugged off their second of blindness. Somewhere else, at some other time, he would have wondered how that was possible, and then found all the possibilities terrifying. The terror of what he saw next stole those thoughts.

Small shapes were falling from the battle-barge, tumbling into Prospero’s upper atmosphere. He saw the pinpricks of fire as their thrusters caught their rolling fall and steadied them. He recognised them as soon as he saw them, even though he had never seen them used before. He had always been in his quarters when the ships he had steered to war had done their work. But he did not need to have seen them before to know what they were or what their purpose was. They were breaching pods, and they meant that the Angels of Death were coming.

He raised his hands to cover his eyes, but could not cover them. Pale flames crawled beneath everything, and he could almost hear the dead calling to the living to join them.

‘I don’t want to see,’ he cried, but watched without blinking as the breaching pods tumbled towards the Word of Hermes. Cones of heat enveloped them as they bit into the ship’s shell of air. Munitions detonated around them, tossing them like seed pods in a gale. Silvanus tried to shield his eyes as the lascannon cluster beneath his tower fired. Slashes of white pulsed across his retinas. The bladed sides of the pods dug into the ship’s back. Sparks flew as spinning mouths of diamond teeth and melta torches began to bite into the hull.

Above, the battle-barge and strike cruisers cut their fire. For an instant the view above was still and silent. Even the warp seemed to slide into calm for a second. To Silvanus – lying on the floor of his chamber, in a tower of a ship he never wanted to steer, above a world which was a suppurating wound in the warp – the silence of the ships was the worst thing he had ever felt.

The Wrath of Ages looked down on Prospero. High in its bridge Inquisitor Malkira felt Shipmaster Gylro look up at her. He was an old warrior, even for a Space Marine, and time and battle had sharpened rather than blunted the edges in his soul. She liked him for that.

‘We are in place, honoured inquisitor,’ he growled, the pause and full formality of his address almost endearing. ‘We have a clear firing path to the primary detonation site and are holding steady.’

Malkira nodded slowly without looking at him. She could feel the hundreds of eyes on the command deck watching her, even though they weren’t looking directly at her. The command deck was an amphitheatre of tiered control systems at the heart of a half-kilometre-wide chamber. Human serfs, servitors and tech-priests crowded those tiers, tending the primary controls for the ship. They were all watching her, waiting for her to speak her command. None of them would remember this moment. None of them could be allowed to, not even Gylro. He, and the most valuable serfs and tech-priests, would be mind-wiped. The rest would be disposed of.

‘We still have boarding groups on the ships in ultra-low orbit,’ said Gylro.

‘Why were they launched in the first place?’

‘Captain Umiel’s orders issued before you came aboard. In case the ships tried to escape.’

Malkira raised an eyebrow, but kept from saying what she thought of Umiel’s decision. It did not matter. He and those he had taken with him would pay enough of a price for their mistake. Gylro knew that, and knew that his Chapter was about to lose a tenth of its strength at a stroke. That he had mentioned the boarding parties was understandable, that he was not pressing the point showed control she could only admire.

‘We proceed,’ she said, and Gylro bowed his head without a word.

She had transferred from the Eternal Warrior to the battle-barge Wrath of Ages during the engagement. Her shuttle had skimmed the battle sphere with an escort of a dozen void fighters, dodging splash explosions and evading interceptors. It had been risk beyond the tolerance of several of the fleet’s commanders, but she had simply said that she had decided to look the world she was going to burn in the eye. She had the feeling that Gylro had respected her for both her actions and sentiment. That, and the fact that she held the authority of the Emperor.

‘Show it to us,’ she said.

Gylro gestured, and somewhere in the high tiers the tech-priests saw the gesture and made it so. Plates of armour unfurled on the outside of the hull. Light poured through a vast crystal and bronze ceiling, scattering from the dust and incense smoke. Prospero filled the view, its surface a swirl of storm clouds and angry light.

She looked at it. Her eyes were not the same as those she had looked on it with the last time she was here. Eight centuries, and three sets of fresh eyes, had come and gone since then: eight centuries of war against the warp and the children of Prospero. Dead worlds and lost souls swam briefly in her conscience. Izdubar, dead for seven decades, his face still young even when his heart finally failed. Erionas, gone to the Ghost Stars never to return. Iobel, taken by Ahriman all those centuries ago, surely dead now by any reckoning. Malkira had been old when she met them all, and now here she was, the last of them, standing with her hand on the axe of execution. For so long they had hunted the Thousand Sons, and now here were so many of them, returned to the cradle of their corruption.

‘It is over,’ she said softly to herself, and then flicked her gaze to Gylro. The veteran Space Marine’s expression was stone. She nodded once, and looked back up to Prospero.

Gylro brought his fist to his chest and bowed his head. Malkira kept her eyes on the witch-storm hiding the planet’s surface. The ship’s master turned and spoke to the command crew, his voice a thunderclap even over the clatter and buzz of machines.

‘Cyclonic bombardment ready to commence at your word, inquisitor.’

The ritual phrases of Exterminatus rose in her mind, but when she opened her mouth the words that came were a simple order spoken with a clear voice.

‘Burn it.’

A long minute later she thought she felt the vast ship shudder. The shells cut down through the atmosphere, streaks of heat pulling out behind them, so that they seemed like burning droplets of fire. On the other side of the planet other battle-barges and strike cruisers would be commencing their own bombardments. The deed was done, Prospero would burn for a second and final time. Nothing could stop that now, the shells were falling, they just needed to strike the ground.

The glow of each shell grew as the air thickened around them, and then the storm clouds closed over them.

A shiver passed through the remains of her body. All this time and now she was here. The war would never end, but at this moment she would see an enemy she had fought all her life fall. She had not wept in hundreds of years, another gift of her renewed eyes, but she blinked as the nerves prickled at the edge of her sight.

‘Burn,’ she said.

Ahriman’s mind ascended. The last moment of the ritual was unfolding in the aether around him. Thousands of thoughts in hundreds of minds reached the end of their cycles. Alignments of time and objects snapped together.

Ahriman reached out with his will. Formulae unfolded from the core of consciousness: old words and dead secrets. The ritual spun on as he tried to pull its threads to him. The memory of the daemon, and of Astraeos, yanked his thoughts, even as he shaped them.

The death echoes of Prospero shrieked with full fury. The power of the warp poured across the barrier between worlds. The ground writhed as scraps of bone rose in spirals of dead faces. The flood of power and the ritual which had called it met. Crimson light poured upwards from the ground, staining the underside of the clouds red. Rubricae and sorcerers stood still, as the slices of seconds flicked past.

The final components of will and thought snapped into place in his mind. The warp froze. The bloated mass of power and emotion rippled, shrank to a sphere, then melted to a hard plain of intent and purpose. Ahriman could feel every part of it. He was every part of it, and all the minds connected to it. Just as he had been before.

He opened his eyes to the real world. Everything was moving with the slowness of a broken pict screen. Around him the Exiles of the Thousand Sons stood in the ruins of Tizca. Above him lights swelled within the storm cloud as the shells fell from the heavens.

He reached up to his chest. The cracked back of a jade scarab found his fingers. His mind was suddenly empty, suddenly still. He felt the stone of the jade scarab. It was warm to his touch, just as it had been before, when Prospero had died under the axes of the Wolves. He knew that perhaps he alone of his brothers had kept that broken memento of their first flight from Prospero. Then it had unified the Legion, as Magnus had given the last of his power to save those who survived.

Now, Ahriman did not need it to draw his brothers together. They were him and he was them. But the scarab mattered. It was not a connection to his brothers. It was a connection to the past, a connection to that first journey across space and time, a connection to the bridge that Magnus had created between Prospero and their refuge in the Eye. A key to opening that way again.

You cannot step in the same river twice, he thought, the ancient words rising unbidden to his mind. Above him tears of flame fell from the frozen sky.

For it is not the same river.

He gripped the scarab and closed his eyes.

And you are not the same man.

The cyclonic torpedoes detonated as they struck the skin of Prospero. The first warhead spilled fire from horizon to horizon faster than the sound of the explosion. The second hit as the fires of the first were dimming to yellow. As the third struck, the flames were already roaring in the air. The ships of the Thousand Sons that were in ultra-low orbit sank beneath the flames and did not rise. Within minutes the planet was a ball of whirling fire too bright to look at with the naked eye.

On the bridge of the Wrath of Ages, Malkira flinched as implanted membranes snapped closed over her eyes. Even then she could see the burning as a glowing whirl on her retinas. She heard several of the crew cry out. Some were in pain. Some shocked. Some so awed that they called for forgiveness.

The judgement of a god, she thought.

The fire burned on. Storm systems of flame danced across the surface as they devoured air and matter. The Imperial ships in close orbit felt the firestorm tingle across their hulls. Black curtains of ash rose in mockery of the aurora lights which had filled the planet’s skies. And then – with the suddenness of a snuffed candle – the fires vanished.

Where Prospero had been, a cinder remained. Fire-scoured rock lay bare under an airless sky. The ruin of the past, the seas, the shards of history, all settled slowly in a blank black layer. And the warp was silent, the voices of past murder fled, the rivers of spite stilled.

A handful of the ships that had stood against the Imperium fled, or began to drift, like fish stunned by a shockwave. The rest broke from battle. The Imperial ships remained for longer. Ten hours after the fire had abated, a gunship took Malkira to the surface. She stood on the cooling ground while a flight of fighters and strike craft circled. She was alone. There was no reason for anyone else to be with her, in fact there were limited practical reasons for her to have descended to the surface at all. She did not need practical reasons, though.

She stood on Prospero, her breath fogging the crystal of her helmet visor as she breathed. The ground was black glass beneath her. The light of the galaxy glinted from slumped ranges of debris.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. As though everything had been swept away into oblivion.

Part of her – a large part – would have liked something tangible to mark this moment. She snorted.

A skull to cap a grave, a head to mark the fate of traitors…

There would be no such thing. Ahriman was gone, and with him whatever purpose had brought him back to his Legion’s world. A host of his corrupt kin had gone with him to the fire. That, she supposed, should feel like victory.

She took one final look around her, and then stalked towards her gunship.

‘Instruct all ships. Set signal beacons at the edge of the system. They are to transmit these words: “Look upon the wages of hubris. The Emperor sees. The Emperor knows.”’ The gunship’s engines kindled. She stepped onto the ramp, nodded and the machine rose up. ‘Burn all remains of enemy ships, and prepare to pull out. I want nothing left to disturb the silence.’ Through the open hatch the ground fell away beneath her. ‘We are done here.’

XVI
Labyrinth

Astraeos surfaced from the pool of blood. Runnels of pale fire fell from him. Shadows of tattered wings flexed in the air above him. The figures encircling the pool were rising from where they slumped. Some did not, but stayed on the floor, limbs tangled under white robes. Worms of static rolled over every surface, and arched into the air.

Astraeos felt reality judder as it gripped him again. He felt hollow. Ahriman had seen him and heard him, but what had he thought? Had he seen Astraeos and felt guilt? Had he felt dread? He could not know. He had thought it would be different, but it had been nothing, just words spoken at a gauze-thin image.

So, did that meet your expectations? asked the daemon from inside Astraeos’s thoughts.

You spoke to him? thought Astraeos, carefully.

You noticed, said the daemon, and Astraeos heard the bitter amusement in the thought.

Yes, he replied. There had been an instant when he had seen Prospero, when he had been facing away from Ahriman before turning, and he had heard words spoken just beyond comprehension. What did you say to him?

Only what needed saying.

He felt a shiver pass through his body and soul. He had gone so far, running after the promise of revenge, that he had never asked…

Why do you help me?

You ask that now?

You told Ahriman something… something that he understood. I could feel it. You…

I have my reasons for what I have done and what I do, and they are my own. They are my… nature.

Why?

The daemon’s laughter bubbled up through his mind and spilled out of his own lips. Heads twitched towards him as the mortal cattle of the chamber woke.

‘Too late to ask that. Far too late,’ said the daemon aloud. Astraeos clamped his teeth shut to bite the words off, but the daemon was still speaking in his thoughts. The answer does not mean anything. All that matters now is what mattered when you called me to you. The vengeance you crave will be yours. That I promise you.

+Master,+ called Zurcos. The shrouded sorcerer was shivering at the edge of the clotting pool of blood. +Did it…+

The Oathtaker nodded, and Astraeos and the daemon replied with one voice.

+It is done, the way is open, the bond made.+ The Monolith groaned in answer. Plates and girders twisted as the warp reached out and gripped it again. +We go back to the warp. We go to battle.+

The Monolith shuddered around him. Lightning shivered across its bulk, and wound through its bones. The cries of the mutants echoed through its halls. In the chamber, the Oathtaker raised his staff and spoke an ancient word.

Light flowed out, running through the ship like a night running before a rising sun. The warp flooded into the Monolith. Daemons shook free of the shadows, and spun through the hull.

With a last flicker the Monolith plunged back into the Great Ocean of the warp.

Knekku climbed, but the steps he took never led anywhere. New flights of stairs led off at all angles, sometimes up, sometimes at right angles to the flight he was on. No matter which he took the world adjusted around him, up changing to down, down to up. The patterns created by the stairs were never the same, yet he had the inescapable feeling that he had not moved at all, that he was standing still and branches of stairs and stone were just spinning around him.

‘I have made a mistake,’ he muttered.

‘Were you talking to me, or simply failing to maintain your grim silence?’ Avenisi padded at his heels, pausing occasionally to stare into the distance at something he could not see. ‘How consistent the mortal temperament is.’

Knekku blinked, and shook his head without looking at the creature.

‘That was what Magnus said before he vanished.’

‘Oh, I thought it was you reflecting on the choices of your life.’

‘Do you have a use besides mockery?’

‘Yes, but you have seen my better side before.’ It leapt up onto the step in front of him and flicked a glance back at him with five of its nine eyes. ‘It did not seem to be to your taste.’

Knekku stared at it, and then stepped past the creature and continued to climb.

‘These stairs go nowhere,’ he said after a time.

‘They go everywhere, so long as you walk in the right direction.’

‘Then guide me,’ he snarled.

‘I am no Lord of Change,’ said Avenisi, and he could hear the shrug in the words without needing to see it. ‘The ways of the Labyrinth are not for me.’

‘But you walk it with me.’

‘The Labyrinth is for you. I can’t even really see it without you being here. I see it because you see it. You are reaching nowhere because you are going nowhere.’

‘If you will not give me aid, then give me silence.’ The weariness was now clenching in Knekku’s muscles and bones. He wondered if it meant that he was running out of time. Perhaps he was lying on the floor of his tower, the blood flowing from his pierced heart faster than his body could heal. Perhaps out in reality he was dying. He had to reach the end, though; somehow he had to find the Crimson King. Whatever had happened to his liege lord he would find him, and help him. What else should a son do for his father?

He walked on, his thoughts turning over as steps passed under his feet. After a moment he realised that he could not hear Avenisi following him. He looked behind him. The creature sat nine steps lower down, ears cocked, staring at the fog beside the steps.

‘He is here. Within the Labyrinth.’ Avenisi twitched its eyes to him, and he had the distinct sense that it was waiting for a response. Knekku did not reply. The creature tilted its head, the gesture unsettlingly human. ‘You wanted me to help you, didn’t you? And you were starting to doubt that you could find Magnus here. So there you have it, I have given you aid rather than silence.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because the Labyrinth knows. Everyone and everything is here. It’s just a question of where.’

Knekku shivered.

He could not think clearly. His vision was swimming. How long had he been here? How many steps had he already trodden? How many more would it take before he found… anything?

‘There is no time for this,’ he said, turning away and beginning to climb again.

‘Because at any second the Planet of the Sorcerers might be attacked and laid waste? Here there is all time, Knekku. Everything has already happened, and nothing has happened yet.’

Knekku glanced around. The landscape of stairs and steps had changed again. There were shadows lurking on the undersides of spurs of steps. He had the feeling that he was suddenly at the centre of a crowd, none of whom he could see.

‘How do I find him?’ he asked, the question feeling almost like surrender.

‘Once you have begun a path, the path itself does not matter. Why you walk it is everything.’

‘The clichés of wisdom from the lips of a daemon,’ snorted Knekku.

‘The rebuke of an all-knowing sorcerer who is lost in a simple puzzle.’

Knekku felt his jaw clench, and raised his foot to take another step. Avenisi sighed, the sound conveying all the disappointment of a mother with a stubborn child.

‘At least try to trust me in this.’

He whirled back around.

‘Trust? You talk to me like a simpleton, but I trusted you before and was rewarded with treachery, or have you forgotten?’

‘We don’t forget,’ said Avenisi calmly. ‘We can’t. That’s what happens when you are born of a realm without time. Everything happens. The order of it means nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Yes. Nothing. I would have thought that your millennia at the foot of the Crimson King’s throne would have taught you that. I followed you and served you as your tutelary. I helped you and guided you as I had to, and then I did not need to any more.’

Knekku stared at the feline creature’s eyes, and remembered it as he had known it long ago: as a golden-winged presence circling his mind, like a tethered angel, and then how it had been the day that Prospero burned, when it had shed its angelic skin, and beneath had been a capering figure with spindle limbs, and a head like a crescent moon. It had laughed as the fire ate Tizca. That had been the last time he had seen the daemon.

‘If your nature is now as a guide, then perform your function.’

It nodded and stretched, the human gesture blurring smoothly into the feline. Knekku waited while it blinked, yawned, and then cocked a single emerald eye at him.

‘Why do you seek the Crimson King?’ it asked. ‘Do you know?’

‘Loyalty,’ he said without hesitation.

Avenisi nodded.

‘Well, that is something.’

He almost laughed, but he was feeling tired; sweat was thick on his brow and running into his eyes. He had never felt fatigue like this in the mortal realm. He wiped his eyes as he climbed another step. And froze.

A corridor of crystal extended away from him to a vanishing point. The walls reached up to a night sky without stars or moon. Slowly he turned around. The corridor continued behind him to a point where it curved out of sight. There was no sign of the silver mist, or the steps he had been standing on. Light seeped from the crystal, and neither he nor Avenisi cast any shadows.

‘This seems like progress,’ said Avenisi. Knekku kept his eyes on the corridor ahead. He still felt fatigue, but it was more distant. The sensation of being watched had grown, though.

‘Who sent you to help me?’ he asked softly.

‘Asking that question again will not mean that I can give a different answer.’

Knekku began to walk.

I seek the Crimson King, he thought. I am here to help him, because he is my master, because he is my father, because I am loyal, because I am his son.

Time and steps passed, or at least seemed to pass. He looked at the walls as he walked. His reflections walked with him, bouncing between the walls so that he was one of an infinite line of himself stretching away to where he could not see. When he noticed that some of the reflections were different he stopped looking, and kept his gaze on the way ahead. Even then he was sure that the reflections were looking at him.

They passed through to junctions of many corridors, and doors which opened in many directions. At each of them Avenisi would ask him a question. What did he want most? What was the earliest memory he could recall? What was the taste of water in a dry throat? Some of the questions he could not remember after answering them. Sometimes he could not remember what he answered.

They kept walking.

The sky changed. Stars came and went. Snow fell for a while, spiralling out of a blue sky and melting when it touched his face. The meltwater tasted like honey.

And they kept walking.

He saw things. Even without looking at his reflections, things loomed in the space within or beyond the Labyrinth’s walls.

Once, the crystal became utterly clear, and landscapes opened up to either side of him. On the right was a world of harsh sunlight and tall mountains. Battlements and fortresses scaled the mountainsides until they became towers pointing at the sun. He saw warriors in bronze armour move on the battlements, and saw their red pennants ripple in the wind. On the left was the hold of a warship. Servitors and robed tech-priests moved beneath towering hoists and cliffs of machinery. He watched as black and scarlet boarding pods were winched from the deck and lowered into the breeches of launch tubes.

He walked on, and the walls clouded to ice and silver again.

There were others in the Labyrinth. He saw their faces in the crystal. The first time he saw Ahriman he almost came to a halt. The Exile was there walking towards him out of a wall which had become slick black. Ahriman held a horned helm under his arm and a staff in his hand. The features of his face were unchanged, but there was something different about him: something broken, but also something bright and sharp, something that clung to his eyes. Knekku forced himself to keep walking forward until they were almost touching. Then the corridor curved away sharply, and the image of Ahriman slid past, and was gone.

Others came and went, some clear, some clouded and indistinct. He knew some of them – Khayon, Hathor Maat, Arvida – but others were strangers who slipped away without him knowing why their images had come to him. A half-machine woman with a mask of cracked red lacquer seemed to follow him for a long while before melting back into blank glass.

When the corner came, he took it without thought. He stopped, for a second uncertain if what he was seeing was a reflection beyond a dead end wall or if it was real.

The walls flared out and curved around to define a small, circular space. He could see no exits, and when he turned it seemed as if the way behind him had closed. Only when he stepped back did the perspective change so that he could see the opening he had just passed through. At the centre of the space a figure sat beside a fire. A tattered red robe covered its body and a deep hood hid the face beneath. The dried branches crackled in the flames, popping and sending sparks into the air.

Avenisi pushed past his legs, and walked to the fire. The robed figure raised a hand and stroked the creature’s head as though in familiar greeting. Knekku noticed that the fingers were twisted, and stick thin. He hesitated, and stepped closer. The crystal walls faded to shadows.

The robed figure looked up as Knekku approached. Beneath the hood a single bright blue eye looked out of a face of scar tissue.

‘Greetings, Knekku,’ said Magnus. ‘It is good to see you again, my son. I am glad you found me.’

‘No,’ said Knekku, shock and anger rising against his fatigue. He forced the feelings down, forcing his own eyes to stay on the lone eye that was watching him. Control, he thought. Control is everything. This is just another trick of the Labyrinth, another stage to finding the Crimson King. ‘No. You are not him.’

His father smiled, and gave a small shake of his head.

‘That very much depends on how you look at things.’

The mountains found Iobel before she could reach anywhere else. They had begun as black smudges lurking beyond the heat shimmer, and Iobel had thought them a mirage until she noticed that they did not fade when the heat and light drained out of the day. The shadow of the peaks had grown larger with each cycle of sun and moon, until she had been able to see the light gleaming from their flanks. Then the sun rose, and they were there biting the sky above her like broken, black teeth. They had no foothills, no gentle rise of gradient before they stabbed upwards. The sand simply ran until it touched the sheer cliffs at their base. She walked until she could reach out and touch the black stone. It was warm, as though it stored the heat of the sun. Sand had frosted its sheen, but the edges of its spurs and cracks gleamed.

She walked along the cliff base for two more cycles of light and dark before she found the opening. It was a cleft, a little wider than the span of her spread arms, and it seemed to run from the heights above all the way down to the desert floor. Cool shadow and windblown sand waited within. She hesitated before stepping in. She had come far, but still she had found nothing, and all she had were the cryptic words of a phantom child and the sense that the city on the horizon was waiting for her.

Go to the beginning of things. That is where all things lead in the end.

‘All very well,’ she muttered to herself, ‘but very difficult to do without knowing where you are going in the first place.’

Her hand went to the pocket of her robe without her thinking. The splinter of carved wood was there, its broken edge sharp against the tips of her fingers. Holding the piece of wood had become a habit when considering her progress, or lack of it. She took it out, looking at the birds flying across its surface. She pursed her lips. Every time she looked at it, it was both more and less familiar.

‘The beginning of things for Ahriman? For me? For Magnus?’ She shook her head. ‘For the Thousand Sons? For the Imperium? Where do things begin anyway?’

She put the shard back in her pocket. The opening waited before her.

‘All right,’ she said, and glanced back at the trackless sand of the desert. ‘All right. The only way when in doubt is forward, yes?’ A trickle of sand blew past her into the dark cleft. ‘Or something like that.’

The cool dark slid over her as she stepped into the mountain. For a moment she was blind as the brightness of the desert sun made the shadows pitch black. She waited until it passed, and began to move forward. The walls of the cleft were smooth and covered in ripple patterns which reminded her of the tracks left in silt by a retreating tide. Beneath her feet the sand continued to cushion her steps. The light from the top of the crack was a hair-thin line, but was enough to see by. Just. After a while she looked back. She did not think she had been walking for that long, but the opening in the cliff face was now a distant sliver of brightness. She turned and pressed on.

She had been prepared for the light above to vanish as the desert beyond fell into night, but it did not. Instead it was the sound that changed. At first there had just been the sound of her footsteps on the sand-covered ground. Then she noticed that there was another sound, a distant murmur that could have been running water, or wind, or muffled voices. There was no water or wind, though, and if there was anyone there she could not see them. The sound grew, and faded, and grew again, and at last vanished. The silence came next. Total silence without the sound of steps or movement, so that she felt as though she was not walking but standing still while the black glass walls pulled past her. She thought of the silence as night after a while, but was not sure why.

After sound returned, she stopped. She told herself she was resting, and then rebuked herself for the lie. She needed no rest. She was not alive, and if she was weary it was because that was part of the mindscape around her: she was tired because she was not sure that she had made the right decision. The entrance to the cleft was no longer visible behind her when she looked. That ended the half-formed thought of going back.

The carvings of doors began soon after she started walking again. The back of her hand brushed the canyon wall and hit a hard edge. She yelped, jumping back from the rock face. Looking back at her was a carved door. At first she thought it was a real doorway, framed by a carved lintel and arch. She stepped up to it, hand extended, and her fingers found the polished stone inside the carving. It was flawless, and unyielding. She ran her fingers around its edge, but found no seam or join. It was not a true door; it was an image of a door stamped on the rock face. A few steps later she found another, and then another, until she was walking between them without cease. She wondered what part of Ahriman’s mind this might be, what the doors represented to him.

She was wondering this when the walls vanished, stone replaced by flat dark that went on and on. Only the doors remained, hanging in the dark like graphite sketches on black paper. She was not breathing, she realised, and she had the feeling that if she let go of the sensation of ground beneath her feet, the idea of a body would also leave her.

Warmth touched her back, and spread across her as she turned. A fire of heaped branches crackled and sparked in a shallow scoop in the bare rock. The impression of rough cave walls flickered at the edge of the firelight’s reach. She had been here before, but then the figure beside the fire had been a scarred and hunched creature in a tattered red robe.

Now, a copper-skinned angel sat cross-legged on the dusty rock. It seemed both huge and slight at the same time. Black horns curled from its brow. Furled wings projected from its back and shoulders. Iobel could see blood on the white feathers. Armour covered its torso. Golden symbols spun across the sculpted, metal muscle. The fire flickered as she stared, and for an instant the angel’s wings seemed cobwebs of bone, the skin grey and cracked. The shadows shifted and the fleeting impression passed.

‘Hello, Iobel,’ said the angel, reaching out to pick a half-burned branch from the fire and prod the embers. She could see something else now, something that hovered beside it like the translucent shadow of a flayed and burnt bat. She felt eyes glitter as they fastened on her. She felt it hiss hungrily at her. ‘You have been looking for me.’

She stared at him for a long moment, and her hand went to the shard of wood in her pocket without her thinking about it.

‘He was right,’ she breathed, and realised that the feeling of breath and lungs had returned to her. ‘Ahriman was right. You are Magnus the Red. You are here inside his mind.’

The angel smiled.

‘Inside his mind?’ the Crimson King said, glancing around them and then looking back to Iobel. ‘As you were told the last time you were here, nothing is ever as it seems.’

XVII
Returned

Blackness.

Total blackness. Edge to edge of sight.

The sound of his hearts beating in a slow, extended rhythm.

The taste of silver in the blood on his tongue.

The warmth of the jade scarab in his fingers.

Blackness.

Except that it was not blackness now. Where there had been nothing there was a light: small, distant, like a pinprick in a curtain, but a light nonetheless. It grew, and more appeared. He would have thought them stars, but they were not stars. He knew that. He had seen them before. He had been here before.

I am Ahriman, he thought to himself, as though his name were an anchor holding him still.

More lights were kindling in the dark, some bright, some weak specks of illumination. And the first light he had seen was growing brighter and brighter.

‘How can we go back?’ Ctesias had asked all that time ago when he had told them what he intended. ‘The banishment, Ahriman, it is more than words, you know that. We could try to find the Planet of the Sorcerers for ten millennia and never reach it.’

‘There is a way,’ he had said.

‘What way?’

‘The same way that we came to it the first time. From Prospero.’ There had been silence after his words, and then Ctesias had breathed out in awe, and Ignis had blinked. They had understood then. When Leman Russ and his Wolves had destroyed their home world, Magnus had given his strength to send the survivors through the warp to a world made in mocking reflection of Prospero. He had sent them tumbling across a bridge spanning time and space, and so saved them. And the world they had come to was named the Planet of the Sorcerers.

‘The first journey,’ Ahriman had said, ‘left a scar on the warp. A connection.’

‘Sympathetic connection,’ Gilgamos had breathed, and then shaken his head. ‘But to open such a path would take more than the power that Magnus himself used the first time.’

‘It will take all of our strength and more.’ Ahriman had nodded. ‘And it begins now.’

The sheet of lights began to spin as Ahriman flew on. He had no substance, no flesh or bones. He was his mind, falling towards a hole in the future. The points of light shimmered as they passed; some grew, some vanished, some flared to small suns before crumbling. He knew what they were. Each light was a candle flame floating alone in the dark, and each light was a soul. He was beneath the surface of reality looking out at the universe of the living.

‘Every step we take from here will be measured and weighed to aid our purpose.’ He had glanced at Ignis but the Master of Ruin had been looking into space, facial tattoos a blur as they mirrored the deepening thoughts within.

Again it had been Ctesias who broke the quiet.

‘A grand ritual will fail, no matter how elaborate, and no matter how strong the sympathetic connection between Prospero and the Planet of the Sorcerers.’ The summoner had shaken his head, his eyes wide with disbelief. ‘It will fail, because there is no way for it to succeed. You mean to breach the power of Magnus, of the planet itself. To do that would require–’

‘Sacrifice,’ he had said, and the word had fallen like a stone.

The galaxy of souls spun past faster and faster around Ahriman. Colours exploded outwards, and he was stretching with them, becoming thin, becoming a cord pulled between two points. It was terrifying, and mind-breaking, and he looked upon it and felt only calm.

‘We must give something to take this path,’ he had said. ‘You are right on all counts, all of you. For us to break our exile, Prospero must burn for a second time. Every memory, every shred of what was, every scar left by the coming of the Wolves will be called up. The storm that sleeps under the skin of Prospero will be wakened. When wakened the fire will be set, and the power of that death pyre will send us across the gap between worlds to the Planet of the Sorcerers.’

‘You cannot mean this.’ Ctesias had said the words, but he had seen them unspoken in the eyes of all the others.

‘I do mean it,’ Ahriman had said, and looked between each of his lieutenants. ‘It is the only way. We are fighting a war for our future. The past only has value if it can serve our will.’

All of the Circle had said nothing, but he had felt the silent struggles of thought and feeling underneath that silence. Under the protections cast over the gathering, he had not had the ability to read those thoughts and emotions, but he had not needed to; they were the same as his own had been when he had realised what he would need to do.

‘If we fail…’ Gilgamos had said slowly, looking at each of the others as he spoke. ‘If we fail, our Legion remains broken and dead. What comfort will the remains of false glory give?’ Then he had looked directly at Ahriman and bowed his head. ‘Prospero will burn, and we will rise.’

Ahriman remembered the words and felt time and space flatten and curve around his soul. Behind him the pyre of Prospero was a light he could never look at. Ahead the kaleidoscope of colours turned faster and faster, and the point of light waiting in the distance became a flat circle of white, around which existence turned, and turned, and turned without cease.

‘We will rise,’ he had said, and bowed his head. A second later the rest had followed, their voices coming one after another, each one louder than the last.

‘We will rise.’

‘We will rise.’

‘We will rise.’

And the memory of his brothers’ voices was a roar in his soul.

‘We rise!’

And everything stopped.

Ctesias fell without moving. Time broke like a sheet of ice beneath him and he was drowning in eternity. The lights of the corridor beyond the chamber door, the bulk of Credence and Ignis were sliding away. The thrum of the ship’s deck beneath his feet was a single curt note of vibration.

He fell on and on and nothing ended.

Time slammed back into place. He gasped. The blare of alarms stabbed into him. He reached out instinctively with his mind, and stopped as his will slid down into nothing.

‘We are crossing the bridge between worlds,’ growled Ignis.

‘Thank you for the observation of the obvious,’ he snarled and pushed himself up on his staff. ‘How long do we have?’

‘That question has no logical answer.’

‘Before we manifest on the other side.’

Ignis shrugged.

‘I have no answer.’

Ctesias cursed and began to stride down the passage.

‘Follow me,’ he said.

‘This is my ship. I have command.’

‘This is not the most optimal time for you to develop a sense of entitlement,’ he spat. ‘If there are still enemy on board, do something about that.’

‘Full countermeasures are in place. They are still an active threat, we should–’

‘We should get to the launch decks. Whenever this subjective journey ends we need to be ready to fight, or it will not matter whose ship this is.’

Ignis paused, and Ctesias thought he might be about to argue, but instead the moment passed and he began to follow at a deck-shaking run.

‘You are correct. Our positional alignment in the pattern cannot be out of place.’

Around them the ship marked their paces with flashes of red and yellow.

Ctesias began to mutter strings of syllables. Within his mind caged pieces of daemon names rose in his memory. He glanced at the body of the Athenaeum draped across Credence’s arms. At the back of his head, part of him still felt as though he were falling without moving.

The Changeling ran down the companionway, a mortal weapon in each of its hands. Warning lights dyed the air, strobing red and yellow. Gunfire roared from behind it. It heard the stuttered bark of a bolter reply, and the soft booms of detonations as the shells hit their targets.

‘They are closing, captain.’ The voice scratched from the vox-unit in its helm: Kadel, sergeant of Umiel’s honour guard and the only other one of the squad still alive.

Alive… a strange word. The Changeling wondered what it really meant. In the warp everything simply existed: nothing alive, nothing dead.

They were deep inside what Umiel would have thought of as the enemy ship. If he had been there, the Angels Sanguine captain would not have known that it was called the Word of Hermes, or that it had borne that name since it had slipped its birth-cradle above Jove, nor that it had once had the honour of bearing the primarch of the IX Legiones Astartes to meet Magnus the Red. The Changeling knew those facts, however, those and many more. In a sense it had been here before. Such things were irrelevant now, though, all that mattered was where it needed to reach; who it needed to reach. They and the ship were hurling through the warp propelled by the pyre of Prospero. When it reached its destination, the Changeling needed to be ready.

A shape stepped into the passage in front of the Changeling. The strobing light caught chromed plates and the flash of a visor. Skin stretched across the figure’s armour plates as it brought its weapon up. The Changeling ducked. A spear of lightning shot from the gun. The air flashed as it cooked. The Changeling came up out of its crouch and rammed its weight into the figure. It was a metal thing of pistols and wires, but with a spark of sentience within: a cyborg. It lurched backward, steadied itself and then leapt back with a snap of pistons, tendrils of electricity dancing across its body. The Changeling ducked aside as another fork of lightning cracked down the passageway. Shouts came from further down the corridor where Kadel was firing at other targets.

The cyborg hissed forwards. Its head turned. The visor covering the front of its face was translucent silver. The withered face beneath looked soft, like flesh left in water too long. Patterns in hair-thin gold wound over every inch of its frame. The Changeling could feel the warp slithering through its substance.

The Changeling fired the bolter in its hands. Three rounds hit the visor, and blew the front of its face off. It did not fall. Dead nerves triggered its lightning gun. The Changeling began to move, began to try to stretch reality around itself. The lightning bolt struck its torso and flashed through its armour. The side of the chestplate blew out. Shards of ceramite ripped into its left arm. Flesh dissolved down the side of its body. Black and blue ectoplasm poured down its leg. It folded to its knees. The cyborg was twitching where it stood, nerves firing at random. The Changeling fired from the floor. Half a clip of bolt-rounds ripped the cyborg to shreds of metal. It let the gun drop when the clip had only two rounds in it.

It could not feel true pain, or fatigue, but for its kind the closest to both was to feel the warp begin to pull it back to it. It was thinning, its grip on reality weakening. This was not its realm, and the foul acidity of reality was eating at its strength as it drained away. It would have to call on–

‘Captain?’

The Changeling looked up. Kadel stood five paces from the Changeling, gun in his hands, armour glinting with fresh damage. Kadel’s eyes moved to the hole in the Changeling’s armour and the glowing ichor pouring onto the deck. The shock in his mind flicked over into action. The gun muzzle came up, the finger tightening on the trigger.

It was not supposed to be like this. The end of this path was so close. It was not supposed to be like this. Fate had spun around and made certainty uncertain. If it had been a different breed of creature, the Changeling would have found the change in its fortunes delightful in every respect. But it was not, and it would not fail its creator.

It fired first. The shell left the barrel of its boltgun a fraction of a second before Kadel’s. The two rounds met in mid-air. Kadel reeled as the blast kicked him backwards. The Changeling peeled power from the warp and shunted the blast away as it forced itself up. Kadel recovered, raising his head to find his target. The Changeling’s last bolt shell punched through his eye-lens. Kadel’s skull exploded inside his helm.

The Changeling looked down at the two creatures dead at its feet. The light kept strobing: red, yellow, red, yellow, red.

The neatness of its path had gone. That was unfortunate. It was running out of faces.

The alarms were still ringing, and the ship still quivering as it rode its own path through the immaterium. The Changeling resisted the tug of the warp and began to re-sculpt its body.

It had one more face to wear and then the ordinances by which it walked the mortal world would be broken.

It had one more face to wear before it delivered Ahriman his reward.

It turned and staggered into the flashing murk. With each step its stride became smoother. Armour healed like skin, and the smears of ectoplasm blurred and vanished.

One more face.

Sar’iq, Magister Exalted of the Thousand Sons, paused as he climbed the tower, and looked up at the sky. A silent fork of lightning flicked across the heavens. A second later he heard the growl of thunder, and the steps shook beneath his feet. His cohort of Rubricae lined the stairs and palisades of Knekku’s tower fortress. The lightning lit the sky again.

Sar’iq stared for a long second, watching with both his eyes and his mind. The lightning storms were growing in intensity both within the warp and in reality. Something was happening, but he could not feel what. Strange occurrences were not unusual on the Planet of the Sorcerers, but this was different. He could feel it like a shift in the wind before a sudden deluge.

+Have the carrion brought any news from the edges of the realm?+ he asked, his thought reaching through the city to the minds of his peers and disciples. Wordless negations came almost instantaneously.

He felt his skin prickle, and he shook himself before he began his climb again. Ahriman was out there, and he would come, but there had been no sign of him yet, no probing of the Planet’s occult defences, no attempt to steer ships through the void and make a landing, no unleashing of forces subtle or otherwise within the warp. Nothing.

Apart from the fact that we know he is coming, thought Sar’iq. Apart from that. And now the lightning, and the feeling that something had shifted without him noticing.

Why now, of all times, have you become silent, Knekku? he wondered, and climbed higher. There was no point in sending the thought as a question. He had not been able to sense or reach Knekku in thought since the setting of the planet’s ninth sun. Amongst the other signs and portents, it was the one that disturbed Sar’iq the most. Knekku was a troubling individual, gifted without a doubt, loyal too, but headstrong. In many ways he reminded Sar’iq of Ahriman.

He climbed on. Knekku’s central tower was a cylinder of crystal-flecked granite. It was without embellishment, and did not connect to any of the other towers within the city. Most of the towers and pyramids formed bridges with other structures, even if only temporarily, spanning the gulf between allied sorcerers with bridges of silver, emerald, or mother of pearl. Knekku’s tower did not, and never had, made such connections. It stood alone, to most eyes appearing smooth and featureless. Only to those to whom Knekku had spoken his seal did the entrances and stairs appear. Sar’iq was one of those few, and so he climbed to find his brother.

First the lightning and now Knekku is nowhere to be found, he thought, bad auguries both.

Sar’iq climbed until there was almost no tower above him, and then spoke the words of Knekku’s seal. A door appeared in the granite wall. It did not form, or open, it simply became. Sar’iq moved towards it. High above there was another jagged flash of light, and then another, before the thunder of the first had even reached his ears. The tower shook, both tremors running together. Sar’iq glanced at the sky. The lightning was still there, crackling in a web across a spreading pool of black cloud. Lower down, the Rubricae shivered where they stood, the movement perfectly synchronised.

Sar’iq was about to call out with his mind to still the cohort, but he glanced through the door into Knekku’s tower before the thought connected with his will.

He froze, and then started forwards, curses spilling from his lips and mind.

Knekku knelt on the floor at the centre of the chamber. Thick frost covered him. Circles of candles stood around him, and incense torches had burned to cold cinders in the wall brackets. Beneath the pelt of ice crystals he could see Knekku’s hands were wrapped around the hilt of a dagger which projected from his chest. Tiny, frozen rubies of blood hung in the air, sparkling with cold light.

What have you done? he thought, and then his eyes found the scattered tomes and parchments covering the lecterns and altars at the chamber’s edge. And he knew what Knekku had done, and why.

‘You fool,’ he hissed. ‘You nine-fold fool.’

Knekku had stepped beyond, into the realm of pure spirit. He had gone to look for Magnus in the only place he could be sure to find him. He had walked into the Labyrinth.

Sar’iq was just stepping towards Knekku when the world shattered.

Ahriman and his host manifested at the heart of the City of Towers. A column of fire rose from the ground, struck up at the sky and expanded outwards. A blast wave followed the light. Towers snapped. Gravity quavered. Stone blocks and shards of obsidian rose into the air and plummeted upwards. Molten silver fell as rain. The air howled as it spun with blue and pink fire. Mutants sat atop battlements became scraps of bone and fur. Those further away, but who saw the light of the manifestation, fell to their knees, eyes cooking in their skulls.

The inferno touched the atmosphere and burned on into the vacuum beyond. Silver towers floating at the edge of the sky tumbled towards the stars like embers caught in an updraught. The daemons within the towers howled as they melted inside their prisons. And the blast went on, howling into cold space. Sorcerers across the planet reeled, their thoughts ringing. Human slaves thousands of miles away from the manifestation screamed for an instant before flames poured out of their mouths and they became living torches.

The City of Towers shook like a forest in a hurricane. Mortal warriors and mutants fell from battlements and their screams were taken by the shriek of the fire. The manifestation burned brighter, and ever brighter, a blinding column at the heart of the city. The towers on the edge of the manifestation began to tremble, fighting to keep their shapes. Silver blinked to stone, to glass, to crystal, to iron. Windows and doors stretched wide as the towers screamed with the sound of shattering crystal. They slumped into the inferno, one after another, like candles on the edge of a bonfire.

The blast wave went on and on, stealing sound and shattering thought. Seconds ground against each other like the edges of shattered bone. Volumes of space expanded and crumpled into wild vortices of being. The vast and incomprehensible mechanism of Magnus’s domain splintered.

Storm fronts of emotion and power collided within the warp. Shockwaves of fury ripped out and out. Branches of spite reached into reality, shining with the heat of suns. Laughing fire spread across the roof of the sky on warp-saturated worlds close to the Planet of the Sorcerers. Stars screamed. Slits opened in the spaces between. Storms of paradox poured out and out. Daemons stampeded, scrabbling to escape the raw fury of what was happening.

The shapes of vast ships formed within the inferno column, mountain ranges of armour pushing back into being. The flames screamed over them without touching them. They hung above the broken City of Towers. Jutting spires and the mouths of guns pointed down at the ruins which jabbed back from the planet’s surface.

At the heart of the manifestation stood Ahriman, his staff raised. Beneath his feet, the red dust and rubble was fusing to glass. The blaze washed through him as though he were not there. They were one: the moment and the fire. Out in the inferno his brothers stood, dark shadows of men cloaked in flame. Above, his ships hung like the heads of hammers waiting to fall. The dead of Prospero were with them too, their bodies of animated wreckage and ash frozen in the instant they had been transported through the warp.

And it was all still. It was all a picture reflected in the deep well of Ahriman’s mind. A single slice of existence waiting to change into something else, waiting for him to change it into something else. He held on to it, felt it pull against his grip, felt the planes of its power begin to slide apart. He needed to let it go, needed to let it become the future. But he held on for an instant more.

He felt the minds of his living brothers still connected to him. They were ready. They were with him, and their future was here: all planned, all prepared with Ignis’s relentless precision. Gaumata’s mind waited to take the fire into his grasp. Gilgamos’s sight was already spreading with Ahriman’s own into the immediate future, testing the threads of events before they happened. Kiu’s presence burned with hard-edged focus as he felt for the greatest threats. Ignis’s thoughts ticked and spiralled on, marking the significance of each factor, altering where needed, calculating without cease. And beneath them, all the others moving in lesser ways, each a part of the whole, each a part of him.

He was not Ahriman, he was all of them, and they he: their wills were his, their strength his. How could any hope to defy him?

He was all.

The pain in his chest sent the taste of silver to fill his mouth.

He needed to let go.

+We are returned,+ he sent, and the fire and destruction shouted the words through existence.

He let go.

XVIII
Unleashed

+How far to the hangar?+ called Ctesias as he ran.

+Too far,+ replied Ignis. The imprecision of the answer almost made him break stride but he never had a chance.

Ctesias felt them manifest an instant before the psychic shockwave flipped him from the deck. He struck the ceiling. Pipes ruptured under the impact. Steam vented into the air. He was falling again. Heat poured into his mind as the backlash of manifestation poured past his will. Gravity changed direction before he hit the floor. He was falling down the shaft of the corridor. He punched his hand out to slow his fall. A section of piping came away in his grip.

The end of the passage was a lit hatch far beneath, but it was coming up to meet him fast. He extended his will into the walls, felt it catch and dug in. Sparks surrounded him. He was slowing, but not fast enough. He glanced up. Ignis was falling after him, slashing at walls, floor and ceiling with unlit lightning claws as he spun. Credence followed, its limbs wrapped around the Athenaeum, its carapace ripping into the corridor as it ricocheted down towards them.

Gravity righted itself.

Ctesias hit the floor, and slid to a halt. Pain radiated from his chest. His daemon names were insect wings beating at the inside of his skull. The warp was a bleeding, swirling roar all around him. He could taste ash and smoke. He pushed himself to his feet.

Ignis struck a second later. His Terminator armour punched through the floor grating into the piping beneath.

+Where are we…+ he began to ask Ignis.

+We have arrived.+

+Yes, but where are we on the ship?+

+Where we need to be.+ Ignis reached out, blades folding back into his fists as he yanked a hatch open. The noise of a hangar deck reached through the door. He could see lights beyond, and shapes moving around the carrion machines.

+How did we stop at this precise…+

Metal thunder roared through the passage as Credence slammed to a stop and struck the opposite wall. Sparks and dark fluid gushed out and ignited in a ball of oily light.

Ctesias swore and scrambled to check on the Athenaeum. Its body lay limp and still in Credence’s embrace. Ctesias let out a breath of relief. Ignis shrugged.

+As soon as I felt us arrive I knew we were out of time to be in place. I cut the gravity in the corridor to slow us down.+

Ctesias felt a curse rise to his lips, but bit it off and just turned back to the open hatch.

+Insane.+

Credence clattered as the automaton pulled its fist free of the debris.

+No, not intended as a compliment,+ snapped Ctesias at it.

Ignis rotated his head towards Ctesias, a detail of his electoos reconfiguring above his right eye. Ctesias shrugged and shouldered into the launch bay.

Winged daemon engines lay in staggered grids on the deck. Their hulls were a blued silver, which glistened like wet pearl as Ctesias looked at them. Wings swept back from behind huge, bleached avian skulls. Amongst the smaller breed of machine their larger kin sat, fuming smoke from warming engines. Liquid fire dripped from weapon pods. Chromed spider-servitors scuttled over their wings. Ctesias could hear the rising kill-instinct of the daemons bound within each machine. He shut out their presences with a thought and kept moving forward.

+Open outer doors,+ Ignis’s command flicked out. Something heard and obeyed. The far wall of the hangar cracked. Sheets of armour folded outwards. And the breath of the inferno reached in.

The spider-legged servitors were dropping from the daemon craft. Pipes popped free from fuselages. Wet red apertures sucked shut and sealed in the daemon machines’ flanks. The air was glistening with the haze of anti-grav. Engines breathed blue and red cones into the hot air. The sound was the shriek of chained eagles. The warp was rolling over and through Ctesias.

His heartbeat was rising as a part of his mind felt the moment he had been preparing for stride closer. The parts of daemon names clacked through his thoughts like dried bones in a bag. His skin was tingling. The names were rubbing together, straining to be let free, to be recombined and spoken. Bile was in his mouth, but he grinned without being able to help it.

He could begin to let go. Soon he would not have to hold these chains in his soul. He would be able to let the things which itched at the edges of his thoughts out. And then… then there would be peace. It would not last, but for a time, he would be free. All that needed to happen first was for him to help destroy the City of Towers.

There was something else too, but it was not clear enough for him to put into words.

He looked at the fire beyond the doors. The machines were shaking, straining against the cold-iron chains holding them to the deck. He had thought of using one of the gunships to reach the surface. Suddenly, though, that did not seem adequate or appropriate.

He slid into his memory, and pulled a string of syllables down onto his tongue. They bit into his flesh as he breathed them out. The words slid into the hot air, coiling like worms as they fell, fattening and flattening into sheets of oily light. Clicking and hooting filled his ears. A daemon grew before him. Its body was flat, like a creature pulled from a seabed. Fangs fringed its edges. Swirls of blue and bright yellow mottled its skin as it fattened. Silver blisters grew on its back, and then popped. Liquid metal flowed together, hardening into a shell. The last words dropped through the air, and cut into the silver to glow blue. Ctesias swallowed the sugar taste on his lips, and stepped onto the floating disc. His will gripped the daemon and it became utterly his. He rose higher, his staff in his hand, tapers of inked skin fluttering in the wind.

+Give him to me,+ he said, pivoting to where Ignis and Credence waited, and nodding at the limp form of the Athenaeum.

Ignis blinked slowly, once, and gave a small nod. Credence took a clanking step and laid Sanakht on the disc at Ctesias’s feet. A pulse of will, and tendrils of silver rose up from the disc and bound the body in place.

Ctesias rose higher, pivoting smoothly as he did so. The doors to the burning world lay before him. The beginning of vast and ancient names tingled on his tongue.

Not yet, he whispered in his thoughts.

+See you on the surface,+ sent Ignis.

+Only if we survive,+ replied Ctesias. The disc shot forward and out of the ship, and into the winds of the firestorm. Behind him he heard the cold-iron chains shatter one by one, and the daemon engines soared from their roosts to follow him.

Sar’iq came to the top of the tower at a run. A gale met him. A blast of heat struck him in the face. His skin blistered and charred. His body shunted the pain aside before it could touch his consciousness, but his eyes fizzed as they saw the blazing column of the manifestation. He shielded his face before spitting a curse. A thought pulled his helm from his waist and a second later it snapped into place. Cool darkness wrapped his burned features, and he blinked through streaming eyes as the helm display lit with a storm of runes. The scar image of the manifestation was still there, pressed into his eyes. In his mind he heard it shrieking with a furnace’s hunger.

Red heat warnings chimed as he raised his head. His display dimmed, but the brightness was not just light, it was an inferno of souls.

Control. No matter what Knekku said, Sar’iq understood control. Control was standing there for a long instant, discarding one by one the pains flaring behind his eyes as the silk of his robes burned from his armour, and the enormity of watching impossibly high towers rise like branches caught in a hurricane. Control was allowing all these things to just happen to him, around him and before him, noting each one, and letting intellect dominate instinct.

They are here, he thought, knowing that stating that fact clearly to himself was important. It was not an accident, or an act of terrible chance. It was the beginning of the battle they had been waiting for. They had been wrong. Knekku, himself, the rest: all wrong. The defences laid in the void, the daemons circling the planet in the warp: all had been pointless. Ahriman had found a way.

+Brothers,+ he reached out with his senses. He gasped. Heat poured into his mind. The voices of his brothers were there, but all of them were calls of shock and confusion. The whole planet was reeling.

He steadied himself…

And the column of fire exploded into a burning wave.

Sheet-white brightness swallowed his sight. Sound vanished. Seconds expanded outwards. His armour locked solid as fire winds tried to pull him from the ground. He crouched instinctively, his mind layering kinetic shields over him. Neon scars blinked behind his eyelids. Air and debris rushed past him.

The wave passed. He rose from where he had crouched. Twists of light walked across the sigils cut into his armour. The world before him was a tangle of brightness and ruin. Glowing clouds billowed amongst the broken teeth of towers. Twisted and still melting pinnacles rose from the sinking bed of smoke. A white haze covered the sky. Ships hung in that sky, their hulls glowing like iron pulled from the forge. The silence hung for a moment, a false promise of calm after a storm’s passing.

The ships fired. Beams of stuttering light slid down to touch the devastation. The fog flashed. Explosions shook and shook the air, and death screams rose in the warp.

‘Curse you, Knekku,’ muttered Sar’iq. His brother was a fool, but he was lost in the Labyrinth and Sar’iq would not leave him to the enemy. To move him would be to kill him. There was no choice.

Sar’iq pulled his sword free. The twin forks of the blade caught the fire from the air. A whirl of smoke and glowing energy began to spin around him. His mind reached out, will pouring against the wild force shaking the warp.

+Brothers,+ he called. +To me. Hear my will.+ Across the planet’s surface and in the broken sky his mind pulled others to their feet. Silent calls rippled out from them in turn. Creatures rose from the murk, fur and feathers coated in blood and soot, bellowing with pain and soul-thirst. Machines that were not machines clanked into movement, hooting and braying as their feet added a new echo to the still trembling ground.

Sar’iq heard the answers, and raised his sword. Spirals of grey ash and tatters of illusion surrounded him. His Rubricae rose from where they had fallen to the ground. Their armour was black from the fire wave. Sar’iq pulsed a silent command and the muzzles of their guns raised to point at the wall of smoke before them.

Shapes moved on the other side of that wall, marching closer.

The first pristine blue Rubricae broke from the smoke and fired up at the parapets.

Blue fire trailed the shots as they buzzed through the air. Sar’iq reached his will towards the Rubricae, and forced it to quiescence. The force of the backlash made him gasp. He reeled. More Rubricae were coming out of the smoke, firing as they marched.

Sar’iq hesitated for a second.

+Fire,+ he willed, and his scorched Rubricae obeyed. The space between the fortress tower and the approaching enemy vanished in a blur of blue flame. Rubricae fell, juddering as warp fire fought with the enthralments in their armour.

But the enemy Rubricae kept coming, walking forward in lock step.

Above him, the fleet stopped firing.

Sar’iq looked up.

Daemon engines sprayed from the ships, shrieking as their wings cut the burning air. Sar’iq smiled behind the copper flames of his faceplate, and stabbed his sword at the sky. Black lightning poured from the blade-tip and turned a daemon engine into ashes. He whipped the arc through the air, sawing through the flock of machines. Bombs began to fall. Bright green and blue flames blossomed amongst the still smouldering ruins.

Too many, of course, too many for him alone. But he was not alone. He could feel minds, vast and terrible, moving in the aether. He had called to them, and they were coming.

A flight of aircraft howled towards him. He smiled. Las-fire poured down at him. The air was beating thunder now. He was still smiling. Stone became vapour across the tower top where he had been standing. From the chamber beneath the summit, Sar’iq let the illusion fall into smoke.

+Welcome, brothers,+ he called to the ships and advancing columns of Rubricae.

His mind unlaced the matter of his bones, and his blood. The armour across his back parted. Red tendrils poured out, licking the air as they grew and branched. Bones cracked and split. Wings shook free of his back and spread on the wind. Gore shivered from their rainbow feathers, as they beat and pulled him into the air.

+Welcome,+ he sent, casting his thought out without care. He raised his sword again and its forked blade sucked a branch of black lightning from the air.

It was going to be a duel of fire and will and destruction that had been denied for millennia.

+Welcome, brothers, to our realm.+

Behind him Czetherrtihor, First Sentinel of the Sorcerers, Titan Host of the Nine-Fold Bindings, broke through the clouds of smoke and flame and roared with a voice of hellfire and iron.

+Ahriman.+

He heard a voice in his head.

+Ahriman.+

There was silver in his thoughts.

+Ahriman.+

He could taste it.

+Ahriman.+

No, the silver was not in his thoughts.

+Ahriman.+

The silver was in his hearts.

He gasped and came up from where he had fallen to his knees. Thoughts battered into him, connections to minds spread out around him like a web. Ignis, Gilgamos, Gaumata, Kiu, Ctesias, and on and out through the still rolling blast wave of their arrival.

Time…

He had lost time. Perhaps just an instant, perhaps more.

How long?

He did not know.

Time…

Pain beat in his chest.

Silver in my hearts… Silver cutting deeper and deeper…

+Ahriman.+

They were calling him. They were beyond Magnus’s defences. They had returned to the Planet of the Sorcerers. They had returned home…

They had to move.

They had to…

He had to focus.

The ground was red-hot glass beneath his feet. Spirals of smoke whirled past. Helio Isidorus was at his shoulder. He could feel the heat of destruction beating through the warp. He could hear everything. He could feel everything. He could see everything.

Time…

He did not have…

His will hammered down.

Time.

The world stopped.

There was no time.

He was time. Everything happened in the eye of his mind. Nothing happened beyond that was not by his will or design.

The planet was reeling in shock. Its foundations were shaking. Tens of thousands of thrall warriors and mutants had died already. Those that remained were kneeling in dust and ruins, vomiting and screaming as wild tides of emotions burned their minds. There were others, his brothers who served Magnus. They had not fallen, nor panicked, but they were scattered and their thoughts and powers confused by shock. Some had responded. He could feel the presence of daemon-bound Titans striding to meet him. Formidable, dangerous, but not unpredicted. He looked further, looking for the one presence he knew would be there, the one presence that could upset what he would do.

Magnus…? he thought, but felt nothing.

Magnus was not there.

That could not be right…

He thought of the daemon grinning at him against the background of Prospero, and the figure beneath the red robe in his dreams.

He broke the thought off before it grew. There were things that needed to happen now. Time, once let slip, would flow on without remorse.

They needed to take the ritual sites. The Rubricae standing in the burning fog around him would pour outwards, and more were poised on gunships above, ready to dive to the surface. The daemon flying machines were already scattering in the wake of the fire wave, but they were not enough. The planet was reeling from the first moment of attack, but that would not last. Even he, and all who stood with him, could not break the Planet of the Sorcerers and the hosts of the Crimson King. At least not alone.

He broke the moment.

Time snapped back with a boom of sudden sounds.

+Ctesias,+ he called, and felt his thoughts connect to the summoner’s mind. +Now, Ctesias. Call them.+

The first true name came out of Ctesias’s mouth as a black serpent of smoke. It grew as he bit through the syllables. The disc was circling in the air, hundreds of metres above the ruin caused by Ahriman’s manifestation on the surface. The Athenaeum twitched in its bindings but remained still. His mouth was dry. Blisters popped in his throat. The serpent wormed out and out, light and colour splitting its body as it swam into being.

Ctesias felt his lips split and blood flowed down his chin. He had pulled his helm off, and the furnace heat of the planet’s air scoured his face. He kept on speaking. The serpent began to wind around itself and swell. Fissures of blue light ran through it. Smoke became scales. And it grew and grew.

‘Cth’arg’gan…’ he intoned as the black knot of daemon flesh grew in the air. Laughter chirruped in Ctesias’s ears. A long neck thrust from the mass. Claws ripped the cracks wider. Huge pinions spread out as the last of the casing fell away from the creature within. It stood on air, its wings scattering burning blood with each slow beat. Quills covered its translucent skin. It looked at Ctesias, red eyes mocking in a flayed vulture skull.

Ctesias could not speak, but he did not need to. He had already bound the daemon and it knew his will and would obey.

‘Uth’alg’carn’a’ha…’ Unclean sounds kept pouring from Ctesias’s mouth.

The vulture-headed daemon clacked its beak. Ctesias felt the bark of mocking laughter as a shiver in his skull, but the daemon had already turned in mid-air, its wings furling as it plummeted to join the daemon engines spiralling around the ruined towers. Other shapes, both vast and small, moved across the ground as the defenders of the planet swarmed back into the City of Towers.

He gripped his staff and the names ripped from him. The true names were coming from his lips faster now. Chains of broken sounds poured out of him as he collapsed the cells of his memory. Larvae of rotting flesh tumbled from wet blisters. Wings of dry skin flickered. Clouds of flies blended with the smoke. Black splits opened in nothing. Hunched creatures with countless eyes and teeth leapt from the shadows of their birth. They followed the vulture daemon down to battle, whooping and buzzing with glee. Cosmic rivalries meant nothing to them. There, in that moment, the god they served was Ctesias.

And the names poured on, pulling hounds of flayed skin and brass from the embers of ruins, and calling legions from the air.

He saw the first of them reach the defenders, saw the blood arc up as the first mutant died. Then fresh fire and lightning rippled across the ground as the hosts met. The air began to buckle, like paper shredded by raindrops.

He was still speaking names as his disc skimmed between ruined towers. Daemons tumbled into being in his wake. He was barely conscious now, but his mouth kept moving as his mind emptied its secrets into reality. Through blood-blurred eyes, he could see the first wave of defenders die, and flee, and his daemons pull them down. Blood was cooking as it pooled in the rubble. He saw goat-headed mutants try to stand and become scraps of fur and chewed meat.

That did not matter. He was almost spent, but the last names in his mind were those he had buried deepest, those that he had split and split, and chained in darkness so deep that he could forget that they existed. They were the greatest daemons he had ever captured, exalted creatures, enthroned princes in the courts and circles of their gods. And – by fate and ill fortune – his to call.

He had begun to speak the first shuddering syllable of those last names as he skimmed around the stump of a jade tower.

The world vanished in a deluge of neon fire. His disc saved him, jinking aside as the torrent of fire chewed the rubble beneath where he had been.

His head came up as the disc slewed around. The half-formed name he had been speaking bit into his cheeks.

A battle Titan towered above him. A second city of towers rode on its shoulders. Gun mouths studded its body, dripping flame and molten gold. Cracked bone and silver chains hung from a frame that flowed like muscle but gleamed like chrome. Shields of pearlescent light cloaked it, and copper-skinned daemons clung to its joints. The cannon on its left arm clanked as the barrels turned.

He looked at it, unable to move or speak.

The horns set in its head bellowed. It was laughing at him. And he knew why. He knew it. Long ago, in an age of different masters and different mistakes, he had bound nine daemons into its broken body. He had created it, and now on the planet he had been exiled from, he faced it and knew that he should have given it to the lava seas after it had fallen in battle the first time. Czetherrtihor, Fallen Warlord Titan of Legio Tempestus, tilted its head – as though examining something fascinating but insignificant – and fired.

The host of the Exiles spread through the ruins. Rubricae marched through the rubble, firing, falling, and rising again without faltering. The dead of Prospero went with them. Giants of shattered armour and crystal strode forwards, bellowing with the voices of burning wolves. Bolts of fire slammed into them, tearing chunks from their bulks even as their bodies reformed. They waded through packs of mutants, scattering them with sweeps of arms made of broken weapons and spikes of glass. Gunfire latticed the air. Lightning and telekinetic storms rolled across the curtain of the sky. Ctesias’s daemons stained the smoke with witch-light. Above, the shapes of the circling daemon machines were ragged shadows beneath the bellies of the warships.

And the Rubricae marched on and on, silent, following this last call to war without a whisper. Ahriman went with them.

Do they know? he wondered for a second. Do they feel the world of their rebirth beneath their feet? He pushed outwards, touching the minds of Kiu and Gilgamos as they marched with the vanguard. They could feel it: the resonance of where they were and what they were doing. They stood now on the ground they had been banished from, on the world which had shaken to the first Rubric. The echoes of those moments were still there, trembling beneath the surface of the air, sleeping in the stones and dust. The circle was closing.

+Inner focal points reached. There is a lot of resistance.+ Gilgamos’s sending from the edge of the city was laced with tension as the augur skimmed the near future for threats. Time was awash with contradictions, and beyond a few minutes everything dissolved into wild uncertainty. Ahriman breathed calm into his brother. Everything was as it should be, chaos was a part of the pattern, part of the unfolding future they were creating. They were almost ready, and when they were, the new Rubric would rise.

All they would then need to do was hold until it was done.

XIX
Shards

‘What was that?’ Knekku’s eyes stayed fixed on the air opposite the fire. For an instant there had been a female human standing there. The firelight had glinted from polished armour and the feathers of raven wings had furled at her back. She had looked at him with frosted eyes. He had opened his mouth to speak. Then she had not been there, as though she had slid out of being.

‘A ghost,’ said the hooded figure from beside the fire.

‘There are no ghosts,’ said Knekku, shaking his head but keeping his eyes on the empty shadows.

The figure laughed, and Avenisi hissed from beside him.

‘Accurate. Overly analytical and based on one view of truth to the exclusion of all others, but accurate.’ The figure turned to reveal a wound of a smile. ‘It has been a long time, Knekku. I had almost forgotten the shape of your soul.’

Knekku turned, snarling, eyes searching for an opening in the stone walls beyond the circle of light.

‘I have no–’

‘Time for this?’ said the figure, and something in its tone made him turn. The hooded figure was stirring the fire with a blackened stick again. ‘Is that it? You have no time for this conversation? You have been walking for what feels like days, but for your body it has only been a handful of hours. What could have happened in mere hours, Knekku? Can calamity fall in such a short time?’

The figure dropped the stick it had been stirring the fire with. The flames leapt up. The shadows were suddenly a pitch-black void. Knekku took a step back, his hand rising on instinct. Light poured between his fingers. There were shapes in the fire. He could see towers melting like candles. War machines strode beneath flocks of winged daemon engines. Warriors in high-crested helms marched forwards from hurricane winds, firing as they advanced. He stepped closer.

‘This is…’

‘Happening now,’ said the robed figure. ‘Or maybe it is what is going to happen, or what has just happened?’ The robed figure shrugged. ‘From here it is difficult to tell.’

Knekku spun and strode into the dark.

‘You will not reach the battle in time,’ called the voice from behind him. He turned. The flames had shrunk, and the scenes within had melted into nothing. ‘Chances are you will not reach it at all. Not alone. Not in this place.’

‘You are not Magnus.’

The figure shrugged, and its robe shifted over hunched shoulders.

‘But I am. I am your father. I was there when you were raised to the rank of Torquaret in the mysteries of Prospero. I gave you the Crusade Banner of the Legion to bear on Gelph. When your death had come for you on Prospero, you called out to me, to ask me to forgive your weakness in falling. When you woke on the Planet of the Sorcerers, it was with life in your veins and without your wounds. You never knew I heard your cries, Knekku, none of you did.’

The scar tissue on Magnus’s face set in an unreadable expression.

‘I did hear, my son.’

Knekku shook his head.

‘What happened to you, sire?’

‘I am no king!’ Magnus spat, and he began to rise, anger twisting his face and blazing in his eye. Knekku flinched back a step. Avenisi leapt away, hissing, hackles raised. Magnus stopped, his exposed flesh trembling, and then folded back to his seat. When he spoke, his voice sounded old and tired. ‘I am no king. My shame was to ever pretend to a crown, even in jest.’ He nodded to himself. Avenisi relaxed and slunk back to his side, but kept its eyes open and watched Magnus without blinking. ‘You asked what happened to me.’

‘You said to me that you had made a mistake. That is why I came for you.’

‘I did not tell you that, but mistakes have been made.’

‘You said you were–’

‘I said that I was Magnus the Red. I said that I was your father. And that I am, Knekku. That I am.’ Magnus turned his head and looked to where the shadows hid the cave wall. ‘But I am not alone.’

Knekku felt his anger rise. He thought of his primarch, a broken and burning angel on a throne, and of the vision he had seen in the fire, of the world he had said he would protect being torn down. He shook his head slowly.

‘I came here to find the Crimson King. End this dance of words. Take me to him.’

‘I cannot.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he is already here.’ Magnus raised a hand and flexed his fingers, running them through the shadows. ‘He is sat at this same spot, a shadow away, a reflection away.’ The fire dimmed and the darkness around them thickened, the red-robed figure of Magnus becoming a dim smudge. Images of other seated figures flickered into being where he was: a hunched creature of claws and teeth, a copper angel, a grey ghost in chains, and on and on, their features blurring like the faces of flicked divination cards. Behind each he glimpsed walls of black rock, of shining crystal, of twisted bone, backdrops which ranged from a palace, to the bars of a prison, to the ruins of a city.

Then the flicker-blur image ceased and the scarred face of Magnus, his father, looked at him from beneath its red cowl. Knekku opened his mouth, struggling to process what he had seen.

‘How…?’ he began.

Magnus shook his head, and fixed his one eye on Knekku.

‘Listen,’ he said.

Iobel glanced to the side and then back to the Crimson King. Red light bled from his eye.

She shook her head.

‘This is a dream of Ahriman’s,’ she said. ‘It cannot be anything else. I am dead. I am a memory.’

‘Who is not? Seen from one point in time, all of life has already been lived.’ The Crimson King leaned forwards, and something like pain moved across his face. ‘Existence is a memory.’

‘But this is…?’

‘It is the Labyrinth. It has always been, and always will be. Every soul who seeks and dreams passes through it.’

‘The warp,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said the Crimson King. ‘The warp. In a manner you cannot comprehend, this is the warp.’

‘And if that is true, what am I?’

‘A traveller, an echo, a curiosity, choose your metaphor, inquisitor. You came seeking me and here you find me.’ The Crimson King’s voice rose. The light grew in the fire. His wings rustled, and vast feather-edged shadows spread across the cave walls. When he spoke again his voice was the deep growl of a volcano. He no longer seemed broken or weak. He seemed magnificent, and powerful, and terrifying. ‘And now, Iobel, you will do my will.’

She tried to take a step backwards, but could not move, and the eye of the Crimson King was boring into her. She had been wrong to come this far, wrong to follow her need for answers. She was…

She was already dead.

‘No…’ she growled. ‘You are just another lost dream, and you have no dominion over me.’

The pressure around her fell away. The radiance around the Crimson King slipped. She could see the weakness and wounds on him again now, the cracks in his copper skin, the brittleness of his angelic form. She spat, and turned her back.

‘Wait.’ The voice caught her as she began to walk away. ‘I can give you what you are seeking, Iobel.’

She turned. The Crimson King sat again, his presence somehow diminished from even what it had been before.

‘What do I seek?’ she asked.

‘Answers.’ She did not move or speak, but after a second the Crimson King began to talk again. ‘I was broken. Long ago, in the War against my brothers and father. My reach exceeded my power, and in reaching further still I shattered.’

‘How?’

‘That is another tale, and one that I will not speak. Besides, how it happened is of no importance now. Only the consequences matter.’

He reached into the fire and took a fistful of embers. He flung them into the air. The bright motes struck the darkness, and light radiated from them as images unfolded from nowhere.

A statue of a great bird shimmered before her eyes. It stood atop a cliff, and behind it a blue sky rose in a dome. Sunlight winked from the multi-coloured stone of the statue.

‘The bird of many colours,’ growled Iobel, ‘a symbol of the vile god you enslaved your Legion to. I know enough of your heresy already, and I am growing tired of metaphor.’

He ignored her.

‘This is an old story, and one that has many meanings, but in this case the metaphor is so direct that it is as close to literal truth as I can show you.’

The image broadened and she saw a path running down the cliff beneath the statue. A figure climbed the path, red robe and copper skin clear under the light of the sun. The figure rounded the last bend, and halted as it saw the stone bird. For a second the red figure stood, and then took a step towards the statue. As the first step touched the dust of the road, the statue rocked, and then toppled over the edge of the cliff. She watched the stone bird fall, its carved feathers cutting through the sunlight as it plunged to the ground. Shards flew up from the impact, and the sound of shattering crystal filled the firelit cave.

Iobel stepped closer, unable to help her sudden curiosity. The floating image was now of the ground at the base of the cliff. Pieces of stone covered the ground. Some of the shards were small, almost grains of sand, others were larger and still bore the graven marks of feathers, or the tips of claws.

‘The statue is you,’ she said.

Magnus nodded.

‘I fell and was broken into many pieces, some small, some large, but all part of a whole, and each less than that whole.’

Iobel’s eyes found a small piece from which an eye looked back at her in blue crystal.

‘You are just one piece,’ she breathed. ‘A divided being, each part separate from the other.’

‘It almost destroyed me, and would have done, if it had not been for Ahriman.’

‘He–’

‘Saved me, or saved something. Just as with everything my greatest son does, there were flaws he did not see. Flaws that even I did not sense at the time.’

‘Flaws?’

Magnus did not reply, but gestured at the image of the stone shards. They flew through the air, joining together as they ascended, until the stone bird stood once again on the edge of the cliff.

‘Whole again,’ said the Crimson King. ‘Except…’ And Iobel saw then that the bird only had one eye. Where the other had been, a cracked hole waited for a missing piece of stone. The view slid down the cliff again, to the bare patch of ground at its base. Except that it was not completely bare. Winking up from the dust were shards of coloured stone.

Iobel stared at each of them. The images faded as she looked away.

‘Which are you?’ she asked. ‘Fragment or statue?’

‘I am the Crimson King,’ he said, and again his form seemed to grow. ‘I am the Prince of Change, flawed, but undiminished.’

‘But you are not whole,’ she said, her voice hard as the wheels of logic turned over in her mind. ‘You are not the one who came to Ahriman in his dreams, or who spoke to me before. They are acting on their own?’ she breathed. ‘You are at war with yourself.’

The hooded figure did not blink or move.

‘You are just a shade,’ said Knekku, breaking the silence after Magnus had stopped talking. ‘You pretend to a throne that is not yours. You are an error, an aberration. I serve Magnus, Crimson King of the Planet of the Sorcerers.’ He raised his hand and pointed his finger at the hooded figure. ‘And you are not he, no matter what else you are.’

Magnus shook his head.

‘A body without a soul is just a husk. A machine without all of its parts is just as broken as the part that is missing. If I am an aberration, so are the others. So is the facet of me that has sat upon his tower and played the great game of gods.’

‘And what game have you played, father?’

Magnus shivered and hunched his shoulders.

‘I am your father. You are my sons. I have failed you so often and for so long that I could not let you descend into nothing. Even after the Rubric, I could not let you be used.’

‘What have you done?’

‘You say that the throne is not mine, and that is true. Kings are cruel. Their crowns strangle their souls. The Crimson King had to be checked, those parts of me which are him, had to be countered.’ Magnus raised a hand and the sleeve of the robe fell from his arm. The flesh beneath was the red of raw scar tissue. ‘I am weak, my power a poor part of the Crimson King’s. I could not act alone.’

Knekku had gone still. Facts were snapping into place in his mind, pieces of history and memories combining and becoming something greater, something hidden and vast.

‘Ahriman…’ he breathed.

‘Just as sons need their father, so a father sometimes needs his sons. I needed an agent. I needed someone who would not hesitate to do what was needed, someone who was already on the path to defying fate. So I chose the finest of my sons, the most like myself, the most able, the most visionary. I did not set him on his course. I did not need to. He was already walking the path, I simply helped him follow his nature.’

‘The Rubric… it came from you.’

‘From my book,’ he snorted. ‘The Book of Magnus. When I wrote it I was whole, but the part of me that laid down the beginnings of that incantation, that was the part that became me.’

‘You knew what would happen to us?’

‘No. Or perhaps yes. Or perhaps it does not matter. Time and fate and causality are not strict masters, as you know well, Knekku.’

‘But the Rubric failed. Ahriman failed. You failed.’

‘Yes. And no. Ahriman fell, the weight of his actions dragging him down and down into silence where he wallowed in the darkness of his sins. Until I sent him an emissary.’ The crackle of the fire filled the pause. ‘He was almost gone, the fire of his conviction almost burned away by doubt. But he is my son, and he only needed a reason to rise again. Amon, in his bitterness, gave him that reason, and I… I gave Amon his dream of peace through the annihilation of the Legion.’

‘What are you speaking of? Amon has not been seen since the banishment.’

‘He died, Knekku. I sacrificed him to bring Ahriman back to his true self.’

Knekku felt himself shiver.

‘You claim to be our father, but you sacrifice your own sons–’

‘For a greater end. Yes, I did, and I do. Just as you would.’

‘So Ahriman returns to the Planet of the Sorcerers because that is the end you shaped for him? Why?’

‘He intends to cast the Rubric again. He intends to save the Legion from both the flesh curse and the effects of its first casting.’

‘And he believes that it will work?’

‘Of course he does.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he has looked into the thoughts of his primarch, and found the one thing that he was missing the first time he cast it.’

‘So he was right, it could work?’

‘Your faith in him, and me, is gratifying, but no. It will not work. It will not do what he hopes or intends. It will do something quite different.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I am Magnus, father of the Thousand Sons. Because I changed what Ahriman’s second Rubric will do. Because it is, in truth, my Rubric.’

Iobel laughed. She could not help it, and did not try to stop it.

‘You are a fool, Magnus, just as your deluded sons are.’ She sat, folding herself to the floor. ‘You betrayed the Emperor, your father and creator, and now Ahriman does the same and comes to your world with the power to remake what you have created, and you do not see the jest in that?’ She spread her hands to the fire. ‘Talk all you like, Crimson King, explain all you can. I will watch you, and Ahriman, and all your sons burn, and I will laugh.’

‘Except you won’t,’ said the Crimson King. ‘You are judgement, Iobel. You are strong even here, and the echo of your strength keeps its shape. I know the loathing you have for me, for the powers I wield, and what I and my sons have done. We are enemies, you and I. But… your judgement and need to know more are what brought you here, and they will not let you allow Ahriman’s flawed Rubric to succeed.’

‘You,’ she said, voice dripping contempt, ‘are lying.’

‘I am not. I am telling you what has happened. I was broken, and remade. But that process was imperfect. Minor shards of my being survived and conspired against me, thinking they were the true heart of my being, the rightful heirs to the throne of my existence.’

‘How delightfully ironic and irrelevant.’

‘Except it is relevant to everything. One such shard has set Ahriman on his course, and lit the fire of the second Rubric in his mind. Ahriman believes he will save my Legion, but he will not.’

‘Again, an end I can only applaud.’

‘He will not because this second Rubric is built on false foundations, foundations taken from my works, from Ahriman’s own memory, and from what you called the Athenaeum.’

For the first time since she had sat by the fire, Iobel felt cold.

‘You knew it existed.’

‘Yes. The Athenaeum was a stream of knowledge flowing from my being, from all my being. I was blind to its existence for a long time, but a part of me, one stray shard of my being, found it. A weak and ragged thing, it is still subtle, and knowing. It used the Athenaeum to feed secrets into existence. From those secrets it grew a following of those who craved that knowledge. I used it to create you. From you, Ahriman learned of the Athenaeum, and then went to find it. Having it, he listened to it. He believed he was seeing into my soul. A mistake you can hardly blame him for. After all, inquisitor, you had believed the same, and for far longer.’

Iobel had gone very still, her eyes fixed but her thoughts remembering the Ordo Cyclopes. The order of inquisitors who had dedicated their lives to defending mankind against the secrets of the Thousand Sons. All of it built on knowledge taken from the Athenaeum of Kalimakus.

The Crimson King nodded at her slowly.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see I have your attention now. You are beginning to see the implications. It burns, does it not? Revelation has that property, when it breaks our beliefs.’

‘But the lore that came from the Athenaeum was true.’

‘Yes, it was. It is much easier to manipulate using truth rather than lies. You learned many secrets, but those only served to convince Ahriman of its worth, and my ignorance of its existence. When it was in his hands, and babbling my knowledge from out of poor Sanakht’s lips, it still spoke truth. For the most part. Apart from a few subtle and crucial points.’

‘The second Rubric,’ breathed Iobel.

‘Ahriman believes the Athenaeum showed him the flaw to his original work. It did not. It changed the Rubric. It will not do what Ahriman intends. It will not bring about the resurrection of the Legion. It will bring the last of my lost shards together,’ said the Crimson King. ‘But it will not make me whole, it will destroy me.’

‘No. You said that it is easier to manipulate with truth than lies. You are speaking truth as a lie. The Rubric is going to put you back together, but this other you, this part of yourself with which you are at war, it will be in control. It will take the throne from you. That is what you mean by destruction.’

‘Clever, Selandra Iobel.’

‘I will enjoy watching what you say come to pass.’

‘No, no you will not.’ His voice was flat certainty. ‘You will go and you will do what I cannot. You will stop Ahriman.’

‘There is no reason–’

‘The Imperium, Iobel, my father’s empire of folly, all the souls shielded by ignorance. You swore to protect them, did you not? If you do not stop him then you will not be serving them, you will be serving what I will become. For all my power, I am a broken prince. Made whole again, though… Your kind claim to have the strength to make the choice between ends that are only terrible, and those that are apocalyptic. Choose now, Iobel.’

‘How can I allow myself to believe you are telling the truth?’

‘Can you afford to believe I am not?’

She stared into the fire, and felt herself shivering.

‘Why don’t you–’ she began to ask, but the Crimson King cut her off.

‘I cannot. I tried, and…’ He looked away and the shadows deepened over him, his skin seeming to char and grey. Cracks ran over his skin, and his shape blurred as though he were made of dust being eroded by wind. ‘I am trapped.’

‘How can I stop him?’

‘By returning to the beginning of things.’ The words echoed through her, tingling with the weight of familiarity and prophecy.

‘I was looking for that. I was looking for that because that is where I would find you.’

‘No, you were not. You were looking for the heart of him, the secret drive at the core of Ahriman. You always have been.’

‘Where does this begin?’ she asked and the ground began to shake beneath her. The fire was guttering. The shadows and cave walls cracked, and bent as though they were paintings on tilting walls. She was falling but the Crimson King’s voice followed her.

‘It begins where all things do,’ called the Crimson King. ‘It begins with blood and guilt. It begins within.’

‘It would have worked,’ said Magnus. ‘I would have been whole again, but change is inexorable, and subtle in its jests.’

Knekku said nothing, he did not know what to think, let alone what to say. He had lived all of his life never knowing a sensation like it.

This must be doubt, he thought to himself, and glanced at the figure who claimed to be his father. Magnus was watching him, and nodded softly as though in answer to his thoughts. He felt reassured, and then disturbed by that feeling.

‘What went wrong?’ he asked to break the silence.

‘Your Crimson King, my other face, my greater-self,’ Magnus replied, his voice curdling with scorn. ‘He learned what I intended and decided to interfere. He discovered the Athenaeum and dipped his mind into its stream of consciousness, hoping to alter what Ahriman learned, and so turn the Rubric to his own advantage.’

‘As is right,’ said Knekku.

Magnus snorted.

‘Except for all my greater-self’s might and power he made a mistake. He succeeded in insinuating himself into the Athenaeum, but once in the stream he could not break free. And the currents of our minds are the fire of suns and the ice of eternity.’ He reached into the fire and pulled a handful of coals from the centre. They glowed in his palm, but his skin remained untouched by their heat. ‘He burned, and only broke free at the cost of leaving something trapped in the flow, an echo in the signal.’

Knekku remembered the broken angel form of the Crimson King crumbling on his throne.

I have made a mistake…

‘But he succeeded in undoing your plan?’

‘Oh yes, he succeeded in that,’ sneered Magnus. ‘He altered the design that I had seeded into Ahriman’s new Rubric, but my greater-self made a mistake. A very grave mistake…’

‘What?’

‘The Rubric that Ahriman will cast, and which he believes will save the Legion, will work, but at a cost, a sacrificial cost.’

‘What cost?’

‘Me,’ said Magnus and tipped the cooling embers back into the fire. A cloud of sparks fountained up. ‘Me, and the thing you call the Crimson King, and all the rest, whatever, and wherever they may be. All the pieces of me. All of us annihilated.’

‘You could have altered it again, corrected the mistake…’

‘No. I cannot, Knekku. Time has run out. We are on the brink. There is no way back.’

‘The Crimson King…’

‘Weakened, trapped here in the Labyrinth. He can do no more to change what he has done than I can.’

Knekku rose to his feet, silk robe rippling as he straightened. The light caught his shape and threw a towering shadow on the wall behind him.

‘I believe you,’ he said, and paused, the words forming in his mind slowly, ‘but I serve the Crimson King.’

Magnus chuckled.

‘You are my son, faithful, unswerving in loyalty, strong in certainty. That was always your greatest quality, Knekku. But simple loyalty will not serve you in this.’ Knekku frowned as Magnus bent down and Avenisi uncurled from a shadow and slunk to Knekku’s side. ‘Avenisi will lead you back out of the Labyrinth once you are ready.’

‘Ready?’

‘You would go and break Ahriman in battle?’

Knekku nodded.

‘If you do, you will fail.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘Understanding is the expression of knowledge, and knowledge is power, my son.’ Magnus lifted a hand and beckoned, creased skin creaking around crooked joints. ‘Come, I will give you knowledge.’

Knekku hesitated for a second and then stepped forward and bent down to hear his father’s words.

The daemon let the images fade from the broken mirrors. The voices around it became silent. It let what it had heard and seen roll through what passed for its consciousness.

Things were far worse than it had suspected. Far worse and far better. The others were blind to its hand moving amongst their schemes. The King bloated by power and authority, and devoured by subtlety, and the Father chewing at the possibility of guiding Ahriman against his rival, both blind to what they had each done, both traitors to themselves. They deserved nothing but to see what they wanted most taken from them.

The daemon rose from where it had squatted amongst the discoloured and crazed mirrors of the Labyrinth. It stretched its wings, and the movement sent cobwebs billowing from where they hung over silver-framed doorways.

It was weaker than they, but it would take their victories from them even as they reached out to claim them. It could not believe that both the mortal shade and the sorcerer had swallowed the hooks of deception so easily, but then the warp had a punishment for the credulous, and it was the agent of that punishment.

All would suffer. It would make certain of it.

It spread its wings, and the floor tilted to become a cliff. The walls and doors flicked past it as it plunged down, back along its path, back to the Monolith, back to Astraeos, and the last step of their journey.

XX
Ritual War

+Launch,+ commanded Gaumata, and the Pyromonarch spat his gunship from its belly. He felt the rush as gravity slammed into him. The fuselage was ringing with heat as it kissed the air. He felt the others follow, and felt the flames peel back from the rune-etched wings. The flight of gunships spread out from the Pyromonarch. +Hear my will,+ he sent.

The minds of lesser sorcerers on board the other gunships aligned with his thoughts. Their wills became his.

The gunship began to judder as searing winds slammed into it. He peeled a layer of awareness away and touched the mind of Ignis across the aether. Information flicked between them without words. The precise locations and timings of the second-wave assault became reality. Gunships clustered into diamonds and spread outwards. At the back of Gaumata’s mind he could feel Ignis, watching, counting. Gravity pressed his flesh against his armour.

+Ten seconds to target,+ sent Gaumata.

The fingers of the Rubricae were twitching on the grips of their bolters.

Gaumata’s gunships screamed towards the surface of the planet. Burning haloes shrieked in their wake. Beneath them, beast-headed mutants looked up from amongst the rubble. The gunships fired. Casings rattled into the wind. Shells punched the ground. Stone shards and shrapnel scythed through flesh. Blood and broken meat spattered the earth. Gunfire and witch-lightning leapt up at the gunships, met their shrouds of fire and became nothing.

Within the lead gunship of his wing, Gaumata held the core of his mind still. His Rubricae were rattling in their harnesses as the fire in his soul mirrored into them. He was sculpting the fire which followed them, watching the altitude shrink through the pilot-servitor’s machine eyes.

A beam of light stabbed up from the ground, touched the gunship to his left, and the machine became a ball of falling light. Scabs of metal peeled away, and flew upwards. Rubricae within tumbled through the air as the fuselage vanished around them. They fell in silence, green light chewing them as the air screamed past.

Altitude was vanishing. Gaumata pulsed a command. The gunships stopped firing. The mutant troops still alive amongst the ruins beneath them raised their weapons, or began to flee. The blaze was a hungering roar at the edge of Gaumata’s will. Bullets and las-bolts hissed up as a greeting. The ground was a looming wall. Alarms began to shriek. The gunships were daggers descending on the edge of a burning wave. More of the mutants began to run.

+Now!+ he willed. The craft snapped level. Gaumata felt gravity punch his body, and gave the fire its freedom. It washed down, pouring past them to cover the already scorched ruins. Bodies blasted to flakes of black bone and droplets of fat.

+Outer node locations scoured,+ he sent into the web of his brothers’ minds. +Deploying.+

Gaumata stood. Maglocks snapped free of his armour. A hatch opened at the end of the compartment. Heat blasted in. Warning runes burned at the edges of his helmet display. The Rubricae pivoted towards the hatch. Gaumata parted the carpet of flames as they skimmed lower. The open hatch kissed the ground. Gaumata leapt forward. The Rubricae stepped out behind him, hit the ground, and tumbled over and over like thrown dolls.

Gaumata landed in a crouch. His armour screeched as servos and fibres absorbed the impact. Walls of flame surrounded the landing site and curved away into a wide ring. As desolate as it looked, the site was one of eighty-one spread through the ruins of the City of Towers. Together they made a design, a sigil marked by fire on the surface of the planet. That sigil was only one part of the Rubric, but it was a vital part.

+Rise!+ called Gaumata.

The Rubricae pulled themselves upright. He felt presences moving within the flame. The Rubricae raised their weapons. The chain of Gaumata’s morning star rattled taut as he pulled the barbed head from the ashen ground. Shadows grew in the wall of fire. He could feel the things moving behind its surface, heat sliding off them as they walked through it. He began to spin the morning star, its head a red comet.

The surrounding wall of fire split. A blackened Rubricae stepped from out of the sheet of roaring heat, smoke pouring from its armour.

Gaumata felt the cords of will holding its being.

It fired. Pink fire sliced from the muzzle of the gun. Gaumata heard the buzz of the bolt-rounds as they met the air. The morning star was a blurred disc around him, his thoughts running through its crystal core. He pivoted, force and will bending time in a slow beat. The morning star’s head struck the bolt-round in mid-air. Pink and blue light burst out, screaming in hunger. His will changed, and the explosion was sucked into the spiked head. The morning star spun on in his hands. His own Rubricae fired, and more of their enemy brethren stepped from the blazing wall to reply.

Another sorcerer stepped from the blaze, robes slick with cold light, an axe in his hand. He pointed its head at Gaumata, the gesture as much a promise as a challenge.

Gaumata was spinning forwards. The sorcerer threw his axe. Gaumata heard it scream as it spun end over end. He ignored it, his body a blur, his will splitting over and over into bright petals. The sorcerer was moving too, pistols suddenly in hands, barrels roaring.

Gaumata met the thrown axe head-on, and smacked it from the air. His mind detonated the bolt-rounds in flight. The sorcerer stood his ground. The air tightened and time began to stutter. The other sorcerer was slipping across the ground without moving, his axe back in his hand. A bolt-round struck Gaumata’s shoulder. Pain exploded through his arm an instant before his helmet display washed red. Tendrils of azure fire were writhing through the break in his pauldron. He could feel charring muscle peeling from his shoulder bone.

Anger roared through Gaumata’s thoughts. He yanked a swathe of fire into being and enveloped the sorcerer in its folds. The sorcerer’s mind flared and his focus faltered. The head of Gaumata’s morning star whipped down and crushed the sorcerer’s chest. He fell, and the weapon’s spiked head ripped free in a shower of splinters and charred bone.

Gaumata looked down at the broken sorcerer trying to rise. He wondered who it was behind the faceplate, and if they had ever spoken each other’s names. He whipped the morning star up, and brought it down. Heat exploded outwards. Ceramite shattered. The blood and bone fragments were powdered ash before they could touch the ground. The corpse juddered as the meat and bone cooked within the armour shell. Gaumata was still. The Rubricae that had been firing at him had frozen, their heads turning as though they were struggling to hear a distant voice.

He shivered and looked at his left pauldron. Blue flames still licked at the crater in his left shoulder. He reached his other hand inside the wound. The flames leapt onto his fingers. He crushed them. Radiance began to pool in his ruined flesh. He reached his will out and found the frozen Rubricae who had belonged to the dead sorcerer. They turned, guns rising, and faced the wall of fire. Within it more shadows were moving.

Gaumata stepped back amongst them and readied his mind.

+We are here, Ahriman. The outer points are taken. Let your Rubric speak.+

The Word of Hermes stilled beneath Ignis’s feet.

Guns silent, he thought. Time elapsed since last shot fired, three seconds. Time until impact of shell, fifteen seconds.

He stood on the empty launch deck, the fire- and warp-saturated air tingling on the exposed skin of his face. The deck was bare, the machines gone to scream on the burning gale and add their own fire to it. Behind him Credence stood in silence, while Ignis waited, and counted, and watched. The warp was beautiful. In every direction flowers of destruction were opening with perfect, fractal purity. Even the tide of daemons spilling out in Ctesias’s wake simply soaked into the whole.

It was working. Each second pulled another motif of the whole pattern out into full existence. Pure, perfect change, both directed and wild, expanding in ratios and angles of time and reality. This was war as it always should have been, sacred and eternal. Ignis’s mind floated through it and over it, seeing ancient marks inscribed in folds of smoke and chains of tiny interactions, the keys of the universe written in bullets and scrawled in the screams of the dying. Ahriman would have his Rubric. The foundations were laid, the fuel piled, but this moment before, this rising intersection of will and intellect and mystery, this was what he had come to witness. It was why he had come this far. It was the payment he had been promised, and now he held it in his mind’s eye he knew that the universe would never allow him to have such a gift again.

The electoos on his face stopped moving. The black lines sank beneath his skin, leaving his face bare, his eyes blinking.

It is over, he thought. It just needs to finish.

The wounded daemon engine came out of the smoke and flames. He had a second to take in the sight of a cracked fuselage hanging from a sinuous body which grew as he looked at it. He had enough time to turn his head as it crashed into the deck. Pale blood-lubricant splattered from the daemon engine’s body, and hissed as it began to eat the deck. Ignis hesitated, his mind caught between thought and action.

Part of his brain knew that what he was seeing was one of the carrion machines that had launched from this spot before. Wounded, it had returned to its roost. The daemon engine thrashed, shedding fragments of machinery. It loomed above him, a roiling mass of flesh and scales and wings. Three saurian heads flicked and snapped wildly as it rolled over. Wings beat bloody feathers onto the deck. Something had taken bites out of its flesh. Wild pain flooded from it as it rolled over and over in its own ichor. It hoisted itself up onto rows of clawed legs, and the eyes of all three heads found Ignis. It lurched forwards, blood squelching and hissing in its wake. Ignis shook himself free of shock. Claws snapped over his fists and flared with lightning. The daemon engine reared up, mouths wide with razor grins.

Credence moved before Ignis had taken a step. The automaton fired as it charged. Rounds thumped into the daemon engine. Chunks of scale and bloody flesh scattered from it.

Credence struck. Blunt fists of plasteel rammed into flesh, pistons strained. Ignis was moving forward as he saw the automaton rip a chunk of blubber and steel from the thing’s flank. Acid blood spattered Credence’s carapace. The creature twisted, trying to bite its tormentor. Credence punched both its fists into the wound it had torn, and fired the flamers on its wrists. Liquid heat bored into bloody flesh. The daemon engine lashed around, swelling with pain. Its bulk struck Credence with the force of a battering ram. The automaton skidded backwards, falling, carapace cracking. The daemon engine vomited blood and silver bile from its three mouths, then gave a final high shriek, and began to collapse.

Ignis could not see Credence amongst the juddering bulk of flesh and feathers.

Something moved behind him. Something red and black, and armoured. Something which stepped through an open hatch like a shadow forming as the sun rose. Ignis turned, armour grinding as he yanked his momentum around.

A Space Marine stood nine paces away from him.

Its armour was a hard skin split vertically into night-black and crimson. Golden wings crested its helm, and spread across its chest and shoulder pads. It held a boltgun.

A survivor from one of the Imperial boarding parties, his mind reasoned as the shock began to fade.

For an instant the two gazed at each other, neither moving.

Ignis launched himself across the space, claws and mind extending.

Time slowed. Ignis felt something move in the warp, very close, like a sea predator sending a ripple across the surface of still water. His claws were bright with lightning. The red and black Space Marine shivered back from the blow. Ignis’s claws split empty air. Inside his mind entire sets of calculations broke. His mind was tumbling, reduced in an instant to instinct and uncertainty. He lashed out with a wall of telekinetic power. The Space Marine slammed backwards, its image distorting at the edges. Ignis changed the pattern of his thoughts and pinned it to the deck with invisible force.

Except it was not there. It was standing, flowing up from the floor like a puppet pulled by its strings. Ignis hesitated for an instant. The Space Marine blinked forwards, the afterimage of the last place it had been burning in Ignis’s mind. He could not see where it was, but in his mind a subconscious projection told him where it must be.

His claws sliced into the space beside him just as the Space Marine coalesced. A single claw caught the Space Marine’s shoulder and opened the ceramite with an explosion of lightning. Ignis pulled back, anticipating his enemy, blood scattering from the ruin of the flesh beneath the breached armour.

But the Space Marine had not moved at all. Glowing energy and ichor flowed from the wound in its shell. It slammed forward before Ignis could react, and its hands gripped his arms with impossible force. Ignis’s mind stabbed kinetic force at the Space Marine, and…

…slid into nothing. It brought its helm to his face. Its left eyepiece vanished. Blackness looked out from within.

Ignis fell to his knees, cold clawing into his thoughts. The Space Marine in front of him changed. One instant it was one shape, and the next it was…

Ahriman’s mind lifted from his body.

The sky that greeted him was a cauldron of light and noise. There were Rubricae all around him, Rubricae in lines and circles. Beyond them more stood on the fused glass plain, a maze of statues. Machine creatures circled above under the shadow of the warships. The battle was a turning cyclone now, spreading outwards from the kilometres-wide eye in which Ahriman’s forces had arrayed themselves. The lash of its destruction was a background murmur in Ahriman’s awareness.

He was a thought form now, pure will and intent fused with the power of the warp. Mortal eyes could not normally see this aetheric expression of power. But on the Planet of the Sorcerers, on the blurred boundary between the warp and reality, Ahriman’s thought form was a blinding star rising to the heavens.

On the ground, the bodies of the sorcerers stood still. Their armour had locked around their limbs. Ahriman looked down on them with eyes of starlight. Auras flickered around the Rubricae like cloaks caught by a wind. A chorus of rising voices surrounded him as the names of the living and the dead rose from his brothers.

+…Kidath, Misharn, Altpet, Katamat, Sorteth…+

Every name would be spoken. Every name of every warrior who had been a Thousand Son. The litany of names rolled on, becoming louder, becoming a single voice spoken by many, becoming a summons shouted into eternity.

+…Ashtagoth, Tabakis, Za’afarok…+

Ahriman heard more voices join, thousands of names drumming on the taut membrane of the universe.

+…Helio Isidorus, Madaeth…+

The storm cell of battle and sorcery turned faster and faster, its eye growing wider, and Ahriman felt his thought form reach the apex of its ascent.

+…Ahriman…+ His own name roared through him. His thought form shattered, pieces of golden light falling like snow. He was broken. He was a thousand ideas falling from the sky. He was a thousand-thousand words never spoken.

The litany of names sliced on and on.

He was Kiu’s memory of Arcanakt, a brother dead under a wolf’s axe.

He was Mabius Ro, a hollow echo of a life rattling inside a shell of armour.

He was Kiu, guilt and power rubbed together to make strength.

He was…

…all of them. There had only been one moment like this before in his existence.

He spoke, and all his brothers’ voices were his.

And from his soul and mind the first words of his new Rubric slid into being.

Ctesias screamed as the ground blurred beneath the disc at his feet. It had moved without command, directly towards the Titan. Columns of burning rounds stabbed the rubble around him. Fragments of metal and stone struck his armour like hail. His helmet display was a swarm of warnings. The Titan was the sky above, its guns the only sound. Ctesias could feel daemon names pushing up his throat, trying to find his tongue and be spoken. But they had to take the last scream of his life from his lips first. The Titan bellowed. The deluge of explosions rattled Ctesias’s spine as the daemon machine’s shadow fell over him. He was close enough that he could read the script worked into its hull, and see the pale mutant creatures hanging in amber from its cables.

He was beneath it now. The presence of the daemons within it beat against his mind. The blue and silver of its armour plates swirled like a mirage. It turned. Its armour drank the heat from the air as it moved. Witch-ice fell from its shoulders with every step.

The disc pitched beneath Ctesias’s feet as it tried to remain beneath the Titan’s arc of fire. The Athenaeum was silent, its empty eyes blank pools.

The last great daemon names bulged in his mind.

He spoke the first great name. It came up onto his tongue like a tentacle reaching from within. He had not meant to loose them unless he needed to, certainly not all of them.

But there was no point fighting, and he was too tired to try.

The Titan stamped down. Fused glass and stone fountained up from the impact. Its head twisted downwards. Red light glowed in the sockets of its dead bird head. Its beak clanked open. Fire rolled in its metal throat.

The name pulled itself free of Ctesias’s mouth, black smoke and orange light vomiting forth with it. The disc began to spin in sudden panic. The smoke swelled in the air. The orange light split into sharp edges and hard metal. The Titan’s warhorns bellowed in challenge. Wings of wet flesh snapped out from the shape forming from Ctesias’s words. A great head rose from the smoke, its substance congealing as it moved. Scraps of flayed fur and skin hung from its wet muzzle. Black smoke poured between teeth the size of sword blades.

The disc spun away wildly. Ctesias could feel his skin withering as his summoning pulled life from his flesh.

The daemon he had called raised its axe before the Titan and clashed it against its teeth. Ctesias had stolen its name from a scroll of dried skin, and on realising what it was decided to never let it free. But now it was free. Its name – the name that clung to the torn meat of the nightmares that were its history – was Doombreed.

The Changeling brushed its hand across the orange and black Terminator armour. It stood slowly, feeling the full shape of its new face: the final face it would wear in this endeavour. The heap of metal and flesh at its feet still lived even though the Changeling had stolen its face and would wear its name. The mortal’s death was ordained far in its future, and that fate was not for the Changeling to alter.

It walked towards the silent shape of a gunship which lurked at the edge of the hangar deck. It had to move around the mound of flesh and metal which had been the winged daemon engine that had crashed onto the deck from the sky outside – a useful distraction.

The mound of flesh was bubbling, its substance boiling into vapour as reality ate it. Something within it twitched. The Changeling paused. Its senses were already extended across the space around it, and it could sense no spark of life, nor of aetheric force within the daemon engine. There was something, though, a presence like the ticking of a mortal timepiece…

A body of metal ripped itself free from the mound of flesh. Ichor ran from its plating as it stamped through the mire of entrails and blood. The Changeling did not move. It was genuinely puzzled, it had not seen this thing in the path to its objective. It dipped into the life of the face it wore, and found a name and a purpose for the… automaton.

‘Credence,’ it said in Ignis’s voice. The automaton took a step forwards. Its left arm hung stiff, cables and pipes flapping from half-severed joints.

It clacked a stream of machine noise.

‘No,’ said the Changeling. ‘All is as it should be.’ It turned and began to walk towards the gunship.

Credence did not move. The Changeling turned.

The automaton clanked.

The Changeling shook Ignis’s head.

‘Remarkable. You are correct. I am not he.’

The automaton tried to arm its weapons. Mechanisms clanked as they chewed on twisted gears and clogged flesh.

The Changeling charged. Credence lashed out, its one functioning arm a blur of blunt metal.

The Changeling slid under the blow, twisting through the air. Claws snapped over its hands. Green and pink light shivered down their edges in place of lightning.

The automaton gave a clank of confusion.

The Changeling punched both sets of claws up into the armoured casing atop Credence’s torso. The automaton stopped moving. The Changeling pulled the claws free. Credence stood for a second, and then fell to the deck with a crash of dead iron.

The claws withdrew as the Changeling walked from the unmoving machine. The gunship woke to command, and the Changeling swung into its waiting compartment.

‘Take me to the surface,’ it commanded the servitor pilot. ‘To Ahriman.’

Czetherrtihor breathed fire. White heat bleached the smoke-stained air.

Doombreed pulled an arm out of the flowing dark. A stave of twisted bone rattled in its fist, thousands of skulls calling out in fury. The Titan’s breath broke over the sceptre, and was sucked into the mouths and eyes of the skulls. Ctesias could feel the warp draining into the sceptre, spiralling into a cyclone. Doombreed laughed with the sound of breaking shields and falling walls. It charged, hooves cracking the fused glass beneath its strides. The Titan bellowed in reply and surged forward to meet it. Fire and smoke and the clang of metal boomed out. The broken towers shook.

Doombreed’s axe struck the Titan across the chest. The god-machine lurched back. The roof of a jade tower exploded under its foot. Silver and burning oil poured from a gash in its plating. Doombreed was still growing, smoke becoming red muscle as it fed on the slaughter surrounding it.

The cannon on Czetherrtihor’s left arm broke apart, barrels and machinery stretching like dribbling quicksilver. The weapon shook into a mane of metal tentacles. The Titan lashed Doombreed, parting muscle and fur. Black blood fell to the ground. The tentacles tightened. Doombreed opened its mouth, rammed its bulk forward, and sank its teeth into the Titan’s gut. Czetherrtihor wailed. In the towers on its back, priests and mages shouted in sympathetic pain.

The scene spun above Ctesias, flicking past in smeared snatches, against a streaked backdrop of fire and the cries of lesser daemons staining the air.

Czetherrtihor ripped free of Doombreed’s jaws. Fluid, splinters of armour, and cords of flesh drooled from the rent in the Titan’s chest. Doombreed flicked its head up, like a dog. Its jaws snapped wide and it swallowed the bleeding metal down. The Titan trembled. It flicked its lashes feebly.

Doombreed leapt forwards, wings snapping out. The ground fell away beneath it. It landed on Czetherrtihor’s back. Crystal and gold bastions shattered beneath it. The Titan twisted. The daemon on its back swelled with the promise of victory. The Titan fired its weapons. Wild spears of energy bored through the air. Doombreed clawed forwards, reached down from the Titan’s shoulders, and rammed its bone sceptre into Czetherrtihor’s head. The daemons within the Titan shrieked. Doombreed twisted the impaled head to the side. A neck of flesh and cabling was pulled from the Titan’s shell. Doombreed raised its axe, and brought it down.

Light exploded upwards. Doombreed straightened and raised Czetherrtihor’s severed head to the sky in silent tribute to its bloody god as the Titan collapsed beneath it.

Ctesias was not looking, though, he was coughing and spluttering as the disc spun away from the manifestation of hate and fury he had brought to this battle.

The warp was broken, churning, wild.

‘Oh, no… please…’ he managed as the panicked disc spun through the ruins and the sounds of daemons and sorcery and machines pulling each other apart. ‘Please…’ But the word of pleading was not enough. Another name was coming to his mouth. He did not know what it was. He should be done; he should be speeding to Ahriman’s side with the Athenaeum. But for some reason he was not there, he was kneeling on a spinning disc of silver and daemon flesh, another name forcing itself from the depths of his soul. And Ahriman was far away.

And then a thought, cold as the touch of frosted silver.

Why had he brought the Athenaeum with him? And the questions snapped on, firing like bullets through the stretching moment as a syllable forced itself from within him.

Why?

Why?

Why?

He saw the image of the Athenaeum in its cage reaching towards him.

‘Ctesias, please…’ it said, and its hand reached for him. ‘Free me. Listen to me. Free me.’ And then its lips had moved but he had not remembered what it had said. Lying on the disc as the Planet of the Sorcerers spun in fire around him, he still could not, but he knew that the answer was coming.

It was clawing up his throat and past his teeth.

The Rubric began and the battle spun around it. Seen from above the Rubric was a circle of golden light at the centre of a ring of roaring flames. Beyond that fire a band of devastation heaved with lightning as daemons met the armies of the planet pouring inwards. This outer band was a tide line of death and broken reality. Bodies heaped the scorched and molten ruins. Daemons leapt from islands of debris which floated up towards the sky like bubbles rising to the surface of oil. Rivers of ichor wound up the sides of ruins. Things rose from the dead as half-banished daemons congealed with shredded corpses. Witch-acolytes in coloured robes walked amongst herds of beast-headed mutants. Hulking creatures without eyes or ears swung copper bells above their heads. Peals of glowing sound pulled daemons from the skies and broke them on the ground.

Further out again, amongst the still standing towers, turbolaser blasts met kilometre-wide kine shields as the ships overhead spread their fire wide across the surface. Towers broke from the bedrock and rose like spears towards the warships. Beams of glittering light stabbed from their pinnacles. Daemon engines spun amongst the silver towers like crows.

And on and on across the planet its denizens woke and marched to war.

Seen from a distance, the battle was a spreading circle of destruction. Only the heart of that circle was still, like the eye of a storm.

But that stillness was a lie.

Ahriman saw the battle he had brought to his father’s domain, and felt his last and greatest spell tear through him.

It came with words and symbols and flashes of pain. There were words which were the explosion of bolt-rounds, sigils which were the taste of blood in a dying mutant’s mouth, stabs of sensation as a silver tower crashed to the ground and shattered. Everything was there, in finer and finer detail right down to the motion of things too small and strange to give names to. He could see everything.

He had been here before, but that first time the Rubric had been planned, prepared for and enacted with care. This time the Rubric was a primal roar of power.

He could do nothing.

He could do everything.

The universe was a canvas.

Time was a thread between his fingers.

He was the centre of an eye which saw existence, and made it real by seeing.

He could not feel the individual minds of his brothers, he could not tell the difference between the minds of his allies and enemies. He could not tell the difference between the warp and himself.

I am not a god, came a thought that felt like a message. I am not so mundane.

I am will, and sight, and the strength of mortals given immortal power.

Fear me.

He felt his being reach out and out and out.

Hate me.

He needed them now. The last of his brothers. He needed Ctesias and Ignis and Kiu and Gilgamos and Gaumata. He needed them with him. By his side.

Pity me.

The Rubric spread, its halo rising bright beneath the iron shadows of the warships. It had been a creation not of years, not of centuries, nor millennia, but of an existence. He had been casting this spell all his life, and now he was living its end point, its summation.

Rubric… a word which in ancient lore meant ‘notation of instruction’. An imperative. A command.

‘Renew,’ he spoke in silence. And reality heard. And obeyed.

XXI
Beginnings

It took years for Iobel to reach the city. When she finally saw it – rising above her like fingers of coral wound in silver and bronze – she did not believe it was real. She stood swaying under the sun and blue sky.

Her robes had become rags. The blue of the fabric had faded to grey. Years of walking from mountain caves to desert plains, from lightless dark to bright sun: she had felt every step of her feet and watched every cycle of sun and moon. She had walked without purpose for much of that time, the words of the Crimson King half forgotten. She had stopped and sat on the ground without moving for months, and let night and day wash over her.

How long had passed for Ahriman since she had passed into the Labyrinth and back? Had her years been his? Had it been days, hours, seconds? Had it been no more than the time taken for him to blink?

She had thought about dying, but thinking of it had made no difference, neither had trying to drown herself in sand or open her veins. She had neither lungs to fill nor blood to wet the sand. She did not know what she was, but she could not die. Neither the land nor the journey would let her.

She had kept walking, a pilgrim without end, and the words of the Crimson King had walked with her.

‘It begins where all things do…’ called the voice on the wind.

She had tried to retrace her steps back to the entrance to the Labyrinth. The mountains were there, jagged shadows on the lip of the world, but they never drew closer, no matter how long she walked or how much she stared at them. The city sat on the opposite edge of land and sky. She had tried to walk away from it, but every time she blinked or looked away and then back, it was there.

‘It begins with blood and guilt,’ said the memory. ‘It begins within.’

Within.

She gave up trying to shake the city from her sight.

Is it inevitable? Do I have a choice? Why did I listen to the Crimson King?

She was an inquisitor. She existed to make the choices that others could not, to choose between possibilities which were terrible and those which were worse.

‘You are judgement,’ he had said, but if she was judgement then she could not remember of what. She just was, a piece of debris lost in a dream held together by stubbornness and habit as much as will. She did not have to follow the Crimson King’s words. They had the taste of snake venom to her, and the touch of a puzzle box filled with blades. Purposes and possibilities lurked down every path she took, and she was not sure which choice was truly the one she had to take.

If I have to stop Ahriman, how can I do that from within his mind?

From within…

And with that thought the city had moved closer, growing as she watched. She had taken a step closer, keeping her eyes on it as it swelled beyond the nearest dune. It grew as though her one step had been a thousand. She took another step, and another, and another, and another, feet a blur, the sand a cloud in her wake. Towers stabbed higher and higher. Windows and bridges of bronze winked in the sunlight, and she was running without knowing why, the dust stinging her eyes.

She stopped. A marble step was beneath her bare foot, cool against her skin. The palace of Ahriman’s memory had gone. A city of black glass and polished stone had replaced it. Towers rose and fell like waves crashing against cliffs. Bridges and stonework reconfigured. Doors opened and vanished in walls.

She hesitated and began to climb the steps. A set of double doors stood open at the top. As she drew closer she saw that they sagged on their hinges, their black wood cracked and weathered. It had the feeling of a once important thing submerged under things of greater weight. She looked upwards as she crossed the threshold. Knowledge, rendered into the shape of stone and buttresses, climbed up to the sun.

Where did this begin? she thought, and she found the splinter of carved wood was in her hand again. Where does everything begin for Ahriman?

She stepped over the threshold, and cool shadow took her. She walked through corridors of marble. Light streamed through windows covered by mesh screens. Cracks ran through the paved floor. She passed doors of painted wood, rough iron, and swirled glass. Each one was different, each one unique. She recognised the corridors and their cool dust smell, even if she did not recognise any of the doors. A strange feeling of comfort grew in her as she went further from the entrance. This was somewhere she had been before, somewhere familiar.

She took turns at random, climbed and descended stairs without thought, but never found the outside of the memory city, just the corridors and the doors, and their smell of time as dust.

Sounds came from behind the doors, voices, cries, tears. She knew them; she had walked these floors before. She did not look at the splinter of wood that the boy had given her all that time ago, beside a fire in the desert. She knew what it was now. She should have known sooner.

She found several broken doors, some without frames, some pulled from their hinges, some split in two, as though cleaved by an axe. None were carved with birds or a sun, and she found no whole doors to match the piece held in her fingers.

In the end it was the black door which found her first. She turned a corner and there it was. It was obsidian, its surface polished to a mirror sheen, without handles or hinges. It drew her to it. She could feel something behind it, something which itched her skin, and blew away thoughts of what she was doing. She found herself stood before it, hand reaching towards its liquid night surface.

‘Secrets,’ said a voice from behind her. She spun around. A hole gaped in the opposite wall. Broken and splintered pieces of dark wood ringed the view of a wide balcony and the desert beyond. A small figure with dark hair sat on the edge of the balcony, tossing coloured stones up and catching them again. His eyes were closed. Beyond him she could see a track of shallow footmarks crossing the dunes into the distance.

‘Secrets, they are what are behind that door,’ said the boy. He tossed a stone into the air, and it stopped in mid-air just in front of his face. He turned his head towards her and opened his eyes. The stone dropped. He caught it without breaking her gaze. ‘You shouldn’t look at them. That’s why they are secret.’

She looked at him, and then at the broken door between them. Birds climbed up a broken panel hanging from the remains of the frame. She withdrew the shard from her pocket and held it up between finger and thumb.

‘Yours?’

The boy snorted.

‘It’s just part of the door.’

She stepped through the broken frame, crossing the balcony. The boy was swinging his legs over the side as she sat beside him.

‘The beginning of things?’

The boy nodded, and smiled, but the smile was old on his young face.

‘Yes.’

‘And the end.’

He shrugged, and looked out across the desert. She followed his gaze. A dark smudge was swelling in the space between dunes and sky.

‘A storm…’ she said, and frowned as lightning flashed in the distance. A warm charge filled her nose.

‘I ran in front of that storm,’ said the boy, and tossed and caught a stone again. ‘It’s a large one too, a great monster of a thing.’

‘If this room is part of Ahriman’s memory, then what is that storm?’

The boy shrugged. He was not looking at her but at two small stones rolling across the backs of his fingers, staring at them intently. She noticed that each one was not smooth but carved into the shape of a scarab. The boy’s face twitched, and the frown on his face deepened.

‘He is my brother, you know. No matter what else, he is that.’ His eyes were wide when he looked up at her. ‘My brother.’

‘You mean it,’ she said, her breath catching, ‘don’t you? You are not the memory of a Legion warrior. You are Ahriman’s true brother, his sibling by…’

‘Blood,’ finished the boy. ‘Yes, though I was his Legion brother too, but that was… later. We were born here, in the Archamid Empire of Terra.’ He looked out at the oncoming storm. ‘Our little realm gave its fealty to the Master of Mankind as He made Terra the Throne World of the Imperium. We gave Him our loyalty, and we gave His Great Crusade our children. We became a small part of a greater dream.’ He paused and bit his lip, eyes focusing on something only he could see. ‘We were both given to the Legion. We endured the trials together, and left our humanity behind together. We learned of war, and honour, and the brotherhood of warriors together.’ He stopped and placed the scarab stones on the floor beside him, one blue, one green.

Iobel frowned at the stones, and shook her head.

‘When I was alive I read every record that still existed of the Thousand Sons. There was no mention of a birth-brother to Ahriman. Nor did I find you anywhere else in Ahriman’s memories.’

The boy laughed, the sound bright and clear.

‘The base nature of reality is loss, slow change, and slower decay. Knowledge is not immune to that law. There were ruins on Terra when I lived, strange monoliths out in the sand. No one knew who made them, or how long ago they had been built. They could have been centuries old, or millennia old. No one knew any of the answers. No one knew even where to begin finding the questions.’

He paused. A fork of lightning flashed across the horizon.

‘What is your name?’ she asked.

‘Ohrmuzd,’ he replied. ‘My name was Ohrmuzd.’

Knekku ran through the Labyrinth. Ahead of him Avenisi was a blur of fur and muscle. He could feel the beat of his heart slowing in his chest.

‘How much further?’ he called.

Avenisi did not answer. Crystal walls and stairs flew past. Voices and reflections chased him. He ignored them. The words of Magnus were the pounding of his feet and breath.

‘The Rubric cannot be stopped,’ Magnus had said.

‘There must be–’

‘It cannot be stopped because it has already begun.’ The words had held Knekku still, frozen. ‘In the world, where your body lies with a dagger in one heart and your blood frozen in the air, it began ninety-one seconds ago.’

The walls of the Labyrinth shrieked and shifted as he ran. Passages split. Doors opened and vanished before him. Floors and ceilings rotated, spaces folded like paper. The only fixed point was Avenisi bounding ahead of him, coat shimmering between colours.

‘It can be stopped,’ he had said. ‘We can break the circle, destroy–’

‘It will not work,’ Magnus cut him off with a shake of his head. ‘This Rubric has its own momentum now, a momentum that will reach its end one way or another. The warp will not have it any other way.’

‘Then there is no point to what you have told me.’

‘There is a point,’ said Magnus, and Knekku thought he saw something move across the scar-tissue face, something like sorrow. ‘The Rubric will reach an end, but that end can be… altered.’

‘How?’

Avenisi whipped around a corner in front of him. Knekku skidded after the daemon. A door of branching crystal and silver loomed ahead. He stopped. Blank darkness waited beyond. Avenisi bounded forward, fur shimmering between colours of fire. Knekku did not move. The daemon twisted before the portal.

‘Come on. Time is running fast.’

Knekku took a step, but then stopped again.

‘This second Rubric is different in many ways,’ Magnus had said, ‘but at the root there is a single change that eclipses all others.’

Avenisi hissed with impatience, but Knekku did not move.

‘The first Rubric was an incantation to change the nature of reality. The second will change things also, but it is not just a ritual. It is a sacrifice.’

He closed his eyes. He had always been faithful to his father and master. He had seen and done many things to keep that faith, things that had taken every sliver of his mental control to do.

‘Ahriman is going to offer something in exchange for what he believes.’

Knekku did not fill the silence. He could feel the answer without needing to voice the question. Magnus had nodded as though hearing the unspoken thoughts.

‘He is going to offer himself. He dies and the Legion lives.’

Knekku opened his eyes and began to walk towards the door. Two strides and his walk was a run. Avenisi bounded forward with him. The sheet of blackness beyond the silver door flowed over him, and he was falling through nothing.

‘He will die?’

‘If he does he will bring about the destruction of me, and the Crimson King, and the Legion he wants to save.’

‘But if you are right, it is already begun…’

‘Yes, it has, but it has not ended,’ Magnus said. ‘Not yet.’

‘I was real, Iobel,’ said Ohrmuzd. ‘I lived, and bled, and fought for my Emperor, and for ideals which I saw change humanity.’

Iobel let out a breath, and looked around both the balcony and the broken door into the memory-city beyond.

‘Why does he keep the memory of you here, Ohrmuzd?’

‘Because I am no longer alive. The Flesh Change came to our Legion while we were still without a primarch to guide us.’ He took a deep breath, and again he was a boy speaking with an old man’s bitterness. ‘It cut our heart out, turning our finest into monsters… We did everything we could to contain it, but we could do nothing to stop it. Until we found Prospero. Until Magnus.’

‘I know. I have seen those times from inside Ahriman’s eyes, and in the words and records that remain from that time. Magnus did not save you. He sold you to damnation.’

Ohrmuzd nodded.

‘Yes. He did. Sold our souls and bought a future. At least for some of us.’

He went silent again.

‘The Flesh Change…’ said Iobel, and he nodded once.

‘It came for me, and I did not survive. I died, but I lived in my brother, a thorn of guilt snagged in his soul, a seed of purpose.’

Iobel shivered.

‘You… you are the beginning.’

The boy waved his hand over the stones, and they began to orbit his hand. He watched them, his gaze steady.

‘In every disaster visited on the Legion he saw me. In every failure, in every chance of saving his gene brothers, in every twist of fate, he saw me and the fact that he had failed to save me. He kept me here, down in the deepest point of his memory, sealed behind a door he never opened. Every other memory of me he has discarded over time until I remained in just one moment in his past.’

‘When you were boys, before the Legion…’

Ohrmuzd smiled.

‘The day before we went to the Legion, the last day before everything changed. This day…’ He gestured at the desert and the balcony. The storm was closer now. Jagged spines of light leapt down the dirty wall of cloud. ‘I was a prisoner of his conscience, a pearl of guilt and self-loathing at his core.’

‘But you are free now.’

‘Free…? None of us are free, Iobel. We are all just dreams of people, no matter what we think or feel. I am Ohrmuzd, yes, but I am also Ahriman. Just as the ghost of Amon out there in the desert is Ahriman. Just as you are Ahriman.’

‘No,’ said Iobel. The storm was coming fast across the dunes now. Wind spilled across her. She could smell the lightning charge in the air. ‘No… I am Selandra Iobel. I am an aberration, a ghost. I have walked the Labyrinth of the warp. I have spoken to the Crimson King. I–’

‘Have believed a lie. You are a memory, a metaphor for a part of a mind so divided and complex that it can send part of itself to walk its own depths, and even beyond. Magnus is broken into many pieces in the realm of the warp, but Ahriman broke within a long time ago. You are just a part of him, given the stolen cloak of a memory.’

She was breathing hard, trying to rise. The storm was a blank ochre curtain drawn across sky and desert. Heavy drops of rain began to fall. She was shaking. She needed to get away. She…

…went still.

The storm broke over the balcony. Lightning cracked the sky. Streams spilled from the tops of dunes and ran down to join in brown torrents. She did not move. She did not need to move.

She saw it now, her drive to find Magnus, the inexplicable will which had pushed her on to find answers, to find the answer to Ahriman’s mysteries.

She looked at the boy and nodded.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I think I have always known. Ever since I died. I just…’

‘Allowed yourself to believe otherwise.’

‘You, Amon, the desert…’

‘A journey of decision, an argument within Ahriman’s mind beneath the layers of consciousness.’

‘The Crimson King, that–’

‘A father talking to his exiled son through the only part of his mind that would listen.’

‘What part of him am I?’

‘The part that judges himself. The part that wishes he was still a loyal servant of the Imperium. At least, that is what I would guess.’

‘And you?’ she asked.

The storm rolled around them. The daylight had become rain-blown twilight.

‘I am two things,’ said Ohrmuzd. ‘I am his guilt, and that is the beginning of all he is. And, just as I am his beginning…’ A flash of lightning caught his eyes. They shone, like the eyes of a jackal prowling the edge of a fire’s light; like the silver of coins. ‘…so I am his end. I am the thing that will drive him to his death and come and claim his soul. That is the point about obsession. In the end it always asks you to pay the only price that matters.’

‘Why am I here? The Crimson King said I had to stop Ahriman. He said that the Rubric was still flawed, that it would do greater harm to the future.’

Ohrmuzd smiled through the rain, and then tilted back his head and laughed.

‘The future… greater harm… You can hear him in your words now, can’t you?’ His eyes were still blank silver. ‘You are here because there has to be a choice. The Crimson King knew that, and he knew that he could only stop that choice going one way by appealing to you.’

The boy stood, and shook the rain from his skin like a dog. He tilted his head, mouth smiling around a pink tongue. Iobel felt her skin tingle as the rain ran down it. The lightning struck the ground next to the balcony. White light stole the dark. Iobel raised her hand to shield her eyes. When she lowered it, the boy was closer. The edges of his shape were blurring into the ragged cloak of rain. He took another step, back hunching, yet seeming taller. His silver eyes were bright above his pink smile.

‘What is the choice?’ she asked, the iron in her voice spreading through her limbs as she spoke.

‘The last and only choice, Iobel,’ he said, and she saw that the rain was running off dark fur, and that his face had lengthened into a long muzzle above sharp teeth. ‘Life, or death.’

XXII
Losses

Ahriman… Ahriman… Ahriman…

He could hear his name. It was all around him, threading through the names of all of his brothers. The Rubric was a chorus now. He was its centre but also its outer edge. He flew, not through substance, but through being. He could see it all. He could feel it all: every atom and how it came to be there, every string of causality and its end.

They could all feel it now. Every one of the Thousand Sons would feel it, no matter where they were, or what abyss of time and space separated them from him. There was no time. There was no space. They were all one, and everything else had no meaning and no power. He was Sar’iq circling on feathered wings above a black tower a kilometre away. He was Kiu, on guard by his side. He was Khayon, standing on the bridge of a ship, closing his eyes as pain touched his thoughts for a second.

He held them all, and for a second he watched them all, from the greatest warrior-mage to the last empty Rubricae.

And then silence.

The whirl of visions ceased, and the voices within him were quiet.

On the surface of the Planet of the Sorcerers, fingers froze on triggers, breaths stilled on tongues.

This is the apex, he thought, and knew that it was the only thought which moved amongst the millions of minds around him. The Rubric had reached its highest and fullest extent. It was a loaded spring waiting to unwind, waiting to become what he had made it.

Voices came to him, quiet whispers from the gale of words and names.

I do not want to die, said a weak voice within him.

You do not deserve to die, said another.

Is this the salvation you seek? asked the voice of Magnus.

This is the only salvation that can be mine.

Iobel laughed. It was the only thing to do. The creature which had been Ohrmuzd stalked forwards. Rain shivered from his black pelt. Breath steamed from between his fangs. His arms lengthened, nails now blades of bone.

‘Tell me,’ she said, her tone icy with casual disdain. ‘If this is a war of self-belief within a world of dreams and metaphor, what makes you think that you have the advantage?’

Ohrmuzd laughed, and the sound was a bark of thunder. He tensed and then leapt. Iobel watched him rise against the rain, jaws wide, bladed fingers splayed. She leapt to meet him. Armour formed around her as she moved. Silver and black plates slid over muscle. Wings of raven feathers snapped free into the wet air. A mace formed in her grasp as she swung. Ohrmuzd tried to twist aside, but she was fast, faster than thought. The mace hit his open jaw. Broken teeth sprayed out. Impact force rippled through his skull. He reeled, black blood pouring over the remains of his jaw. Iobel spread her wings to hold her still in the air as Ohrmuzd fell.

His hand flashed out, and she felt talons split her leg armour open and snag in her flesh. Ohrmuzd plummeted with the rain, and she fell with him.

They hit the ground and rolled across the stone balcony. Blood flicked out from them as they spun over and over. Iobel rammed her hand forwards, gripped Ohrmuzd’s broken jaw, and pulled it down. He howled. Her mace rose, and hammered down towards the side of his skull. He kicked out. Feet slammed into her. She catapulted backwards. Her wings caught the rush of passing air and she spun high. Ohrmuzd rose, bones cracking, red drooling over broken teeth. He gripped his jaw and yanked it back into place with a snap.

‘You know you should not fight me,’ shouted Ohrmuzd, and his voice was a wet growl. ‘He was your enemy. Don’t you want to see him die?’

Lightning cut the air above her. Iobel reached out, will reshaping the world, and pulled the thunderbolt from the air. It blazed in her hand. Her eyes were black holes in her face. She threw the lightning. Ohrmuzd shimmered out of being. The thunderbolt struck. Chips of marble spun outwards from where he had been. He crouched on a different patch of stone, eyes still and unblinking.

‘Is it not the punishment he deserves?’ he snarled. ‘For the Legion he destroyed, for all those he trod as dust beneath his feet. We deserve to see him go back to the dust from which he came.’

She dived, the mace an arc of spiked iron. He moved as she struck. The floor cracked beneath the blow. She rose and turned, but he was on her, clawed hand slashing into her side.

Red streaking the silver of her armour.

Pain that she could not banish.

Bright lights winking like stars at the edge of sight.

Wet iron on shaking breaths.

It’s not real, she thought. None of it is real.

She stood straight, wings folding into her back.

Ohrmuzd circled, watching, claws loose by his side.

She forced a bitter smile to her face.

‘I would see Ahriman and all of his traitor Legion burn, and then delight in dancing on the embers,’ she said. The mace was heavy in her hand. She could feel broken ribs inside her chest. The pain of breathing felt very real. ‘But I am a servant of higher purpose, so what I want really does not come into it.’

She exploded forwards. The mace was a blur around her as she struck high and low, weight and momentum carrying her from blow to blow. Ohrmuzd was on the ground scrabbling backwards, and she could feel the shudder of impact, and feel air hissing between her bared teeth. The rage within her was the lightning and the storm’s roar. She would not let Ahriman win, she would not let him have the salvation of death, she would not–

The talons flashed out, faster than the blink of light in the sky.

The mace fell from Iobel’s hands. She looked down. There was blood. A river of blood flowing from the ruin of her neck. Suddenly, for the first time, nothing felt real at all.

Ohrmuzd caught her as she fell. She looked up. The face of the boy looked down at her. The rain was pouring over his face. His eyes were dark. He reached down and touched her cheek.

‘It is over now,’ he said.

Her last reply was a choked gargle hiding a stream of curses.

The Changeling braced, wrapping itself in a telekinetic shell, as the alarms reached a crescendo. The psychic shockwave ripped through the gunship as it banked above the ground. It had dropped down through the eye of the fire-hurricane, and was skimming low towards the centre of the ritual. Then a single cord of power had struck down from the sky like a spear. The shockwave hit a second later. Warning lights flashed. Alarms rang through the gunship’s compartment. Arcs of purple lightning ran through the fuselage. The servitor pilot was babbling static as his synapses burned out. The gunship began to spin like a thrown toy. The servitor pilot gave a last cry of electronic pain.

The gunship hit the ground. Metal shredded from its belly. Chunks of rough glass ripped from the surface. Engines roared. Flames spilled back across the gunship’s tail as fuel sprayed onto hot metal. The wings sheared off, caught the air and tumbled up like paper caught in a gust of wind. The nose clipped the ground and the fuselage flipped over and landed in a fireball.

The Changeling pulled itself free of the wreckage, and walked through the fire. The telekinetic sphere surrounding it fizzed as it met the wash of flames. It could not sense Ahriman, but it did not need to; the roaring column of warp energy was like a banner above him. It began to move. It was almost out of time.

The fire-hurricane vanished before Ctesias hit it. The disc was spinning beneath him, following the only strand of will he could hold in his head.

Ahriman… Ahriman… Ahriman… The name was a rope pulling him back across the fused ruins towards the heart of the Rubric.

The air was tight across his skin. The name came from his mouth, distorting the air around his lips, pulling the taste of cinnamon and sugar onto his tongue. He was kneeling, his hands gripping the writhing silver and flesh of the disc. Beside him the Athenaeum was thrashing. Red light poured from its eyes and mouth. Cracks ran across its flesh. Skin charred and peeled.

And the name came on and on from Ctesias’s mind, pulling something vast from the deep warp. He could feel its shapes now, could hear its inhuman thoughts as it forced its way back into being. He knew what it was, what was seeded in his mind and what was being called through the Athenaeum.

Why? he wanted to scream. Why is this happening? Why do I call the Crimson King into being?

But the questions vanished, and the disc spun on over the burnt plain, towards the heart of the Rubric. Towards Ahriman. And the next piece of Magnus’s immortal name shrieked across his broken world.

Knekku gasped. Ice rattled onto the floor. Air filled his lungs and with it pain struck his skull. His fingers were still locked around the handle of the knife in his chest. He pulled it out. Another gasp. Half-frozen blood spilled down his front. His head was spinning, the sight of the Labyrinth and the hard edges of reality colliding in his eyeballs. He pushed himself up. The knife fell from his fingers. The light of battle was spilling in through the chamber door. He took a step. The wound in his chest was already healing, his mind closing blood vessels and knitting bone.

+Faster, you fool,+ hissed a voice which cut through the pain in his head.

Avenisi had shed the feline shape it had worn in the Labyrinth. It flapped closer and he glimpsed a form like a half-flayed bat. Light wobbled with its wingbeats, and milk-white venom oozed from a twitching scorpion tail.

+Time is no illusion here, and it is draining away. Can’t you hear?+

A high keening note filled the warp, growing louder and louder. He did not need to hear it; he could feel it booming in his head. The planet itself was fighting, and losing.

He kept moving. Commands flowed from his mind. Armour plates flew from brackets on the wall and clamped over his flesh as he moved. Another thought and his spear whirred through the air and found his hand. His helm snapped into place. Prosperine runes rolled around his sight. Avenisi landed on his shoulder, its stinger draped across the back of his neck. He was through the door, steps a blur beneath his feet. He touched the summit of the tower.

A vista of ruin filled his eyes. Fire and smoke poured up to a sky blistered with the hulls of warships. The shadows of Titans staggered amongst the felled ruins of towers. Beyond them a circular plain gleamed with reflected light. He could see and sense figures on that plain, ranked in a pattern that yanked at his will as his eyes skidded over it.

Shock rose in his mind. He cut it away. Thoughts flowed from him. The summit of the tower rocked beneath his feet and rose free, bearing him upwards. Flesh tendrils linked to the rest of the tower stretched and broke. He could see where Ahriman was. A banner of white light hung from tortured sky to fused ground. He pivoted towards it. The black disc hissed as it obeyed his will.

+Brother.+

He looked up. Beating wings shadowed the sky as Sar’iq swooped down.

+Follow,+ Knekku called, as his disc shot forwards. Beside him Sar’iq rose like a hawk on a thermal. +Call the others. Call everyone and everything.+

+You found the Crimson King?+ called Sar’iq. +He is returning?+

But Knekku was not listening and did not answer. The fire, and ruin, and swarming armies were a smear of shape and colour beneath him. His eyes held to the heart of a spiral of light and destruction at which he would face Ahriman, and save the Exile’s life.

Will it be like the fire that killed my world? Astraeos asked. The Monolith was howling. He could feel threads of his thoughts pulling free as the warp tumbled through him. The light of their destination grew before him.

He could feel the daemon moving through his thoughts, holding him close. He was losing things from his mind. He could feel them dropping away, but once they were gone he did not know what they were.

Will it burn like my world? he asked the daemon.

Yes, said the daemon.

What was my world?

It was your home.

And it burned?

It did.

Why?

Because of him.

Because of Ahriman?

Yes.

He was my brother. He was my friend.

He is your enemy.

He is my enemy.

They were there. The warp boiled in front of them, bleeding as war and sorcery tore it apart. The Monolith rose to the Planet of the Sorcerers like a shark rising from a dark ocean.

He felt another thought appear as the surface of reality came closer.

This… this means something?

Yes, said the daemon. This means everything.

The world went white. One instant Ahriman was drowning in existence, the next it was gone.

Sound vanished. Sensation became a shrinking list: air in lungs, thoughts circling his mind, blood drumming through veins, hearts beating, silver sharp in his chest.

Silver.

‘It is time.’ The voice was not his own. Ahriman did not recognise it, but he knew that he should know it. He had heard it before. It had always been there.

‘I do not want to die,’ he said.

‘You do not want to live either,’ said the voice.

The taste of air was vanishing. He could not feel the wet thrum of blood in his body. His hearts and the shrill stab of silver were the same now.

Drum– thump. Drum-thump…

Silver.

Silver in his hearts.

Silver cutting through the thread of his life. There was not much of it, just a handful of razor-edged shards. Not enough to make a knife, nor mould a coin to pay a ferryman. Enough, though, just enough.

The silver had come from Terra, and been smelted by blind smiths, and kissed by the psykers before they were given to the Golden Throne. His mind could not touch it. All his power simply slid from it. Everything he knew of its origin he knew from the mind of the person who had shot him with a bolt-round capped with that silver.

He thought of Iobel, of that first brief, and ultimately fatal, meeting. He saw the muzzle flash of her bolter and felt the wet thump as the round passed through a joint in his armour and exploded in his chest. He felt the blood pouring from a thousand tears in his flesh.

Drum– thump. Drum-thump…

‘You won’t be able to remove them all,’ he had said to Carmenta, now long gone to her grave in the void. ‘Two of them are hooked into the flesh next to my hearts. Seal the wound.’

In a sense he had been killed then, with one shot.

An eon ago.

A lifetime ago.

He felt all the will he had expended to keep the silver from his hearts finally fall away.

Drum– thump. Drum-thump…

His hearts beat, and their rhythm and the rhythm of his thoughts, were all there was.

This is all there is. When all the mysteries are broken, and all the fire of existence tamed, it is just this, a circle of red running through flesh, waiting to end.

Drum– thump. Drum-thump…

Out beyond this quiet realm the Rubric wrapped him, body and soul. It did not need him any more. His will was done. All that was needed from him now was this one last instant.

It ends here, he willed.

The silver cut. His hearts beat once more each…

Drum– thump. Drum-thump.

…and then not again.

XXIII
Saviour

One moment of time, narrow enough to cut, wide enough to smother the rest of existence.

A column of light rose from the surface of the Planet of the Sorcerers. It split as it rose. Branches of pulsing neon spread across the sky, and struck down. Shafts of light transfixed sorcerers in mid-stride. Rubricae froze as brilliance engulfed them. The living became silent. Haloes of ragged smoke burst from the ghostly legions. The seams of their armour glowed, flowing golden script surfacing on their plate. Seals broke. Dust poured out, and spiralled into the light. Voices came with them, louder than the roll of thunder and the scream of guns. The Rubricae howled and their voices were the storm calls of a Legion dying without end.

The mutants and humans close to the Thousand Sons fell, their life draining from them in a second. The hordes of lesser daemons hissed and growled and clawed over each other to get away. Most failed and were pulled apart by the vortices growing over each of the Thousand Sons. The fires of battle and the cries of the dying stuttered, the stride of destruction paused.

On his disc Ctesias felt the last syllable of the summoning name catch, and then the fire blasted his soul apart from within.

Knekku felt it just before the Rubric struck and began to turn. Time stopped. His sight inverted light and dark. And the fire rose through him and blazed on to touch Sar’iq and pin him to the air.

On the Word of Hermes Ignis lay still as his body flared blinding white.

The universe stuttered.

And then – like a judgement thrown from the heavens – the Monolith tore from the warp.

The space hulk punched into existence, tearing through reality like a bullet shot at a sheet of silk. A wave of warp energy rode outwards. Ships, silver towers and daemons turned over, half-sliding out of existence. Warring interpretations of physics tore hulls and bodies apart, and sent shreds of stone, metal, and flesh down towards the planet’s surface. The debris burned with a thousand colours as it fell. The Monolith itself struck the upper atmosphere and sent a bow wave of burning air and lightning hammering down into the ships holding position over the City of Towers. The Word of Hermes pitched and skidded across the sky. The Last Truth broke down its spine. The spirits bound into the warship’s hull flooded out and blasted apart in the shockwave of the warp breach.

The Monolith’s psychic impact met the last moment of the Rubric like a tidal wave washing over an erupting volcano. Raw force and sculpted power met, blurred, sheared. The incantation faltered.

The Rubricae’s screaming haloes shrank, and they began to move, heads juddering, hands gripping empty air.

Knekku’s eyes snapped open and found the plain of glass speeding by beneath him.

Ctesias shuddered, and he had a second before the word in his mouth snapped free from his lips.

Ignis rolled as the Word of Hermes pitched, and gravity blinked. He struck a wall and fell back to the deck like a rag doll.

Within his sanctum Astraeos, the Oathtaker, host of the vengeance of Magnus, rose. His bronze armour flowed and shone with liquid heat. The crystal eye in his helm was a sun. The staff in his hand was a ragged splinter of flame haloed with darkness. A cloak of warp energy dragged shadows and screams after him, and a second shape walked with him. Its wings and claws were the edges of reflections and its eyes falling sparks. His armies rose with him, crying out in obedience and terror.

Daemons leapt from their perches on the Monolith’s surface and plunged down to embrace their prey. Assault craft poured from its flanks like insects shaken free of a hive. Warships broke from the surface of the agglomeration. Tendrils of flesh and ichor trailed from the wounds they left. They fired, ectoplasma scarring the sky. Burning shells the size of tanks ripped silver towers from the air. Beams of laser fire scored the backs of Ahriman’s warships. The Planet of the Sorcerers shook. Cracks shivered down the sides of its mountains and snaked across its plains. Its nine suns began to drift in their orbits. Chunks of land ripped free of the surface and flew into space.

Astraeos felt Ahriman’s Rubric waver even as it redrew reality. The daemon sharing his soul was a roar in his ears, a line like a blade edge cutting through every other sensation. Calitiedies, Memunim, and the rest of his sorcerers were staggering as the Rubric poured its soulfire through them. Astraeos yanked them back to awareness with a thought.

+It is now. The moment of retribution is here. Stand with me. Honour your oaths, and have vengeance.+

He raised his staff and brought it down. The substance of the Monolith vanished beneath them, and they were plummeting through sky and red-lit gloom.

Gaumata shrieked. The morning star fell from his hands. The air flashed. Black sky, silver lightning pinning him to the ground. Agony and brightness flowed through him. His flesh was molten sludge inside his skin. He could not move. He felt like an insect in an experiment jar, his thoughts the last beatings of wings against glass. It was working. The Rubric was within him. He was changing. Becoming. Shining.

The sky split. A hammer of metal and fire cracked the dome of the heavens. A tangled face of broken ships thrust down towards the earth. The power running through Gaumata sputtered. The shock sent him to his knees.

Shapes rained from above, drop-ships falling through legions of grinning daemons. He saw them but could not move to raise a weapon. The black sky blinked to silver. Lightning flicked to dark cracks. The Rubricae around him were juddering in place.

Something thumped into the ground close beside him. Gaumata pushed himself to his feet. A daemon unfolded and bounced towards him. Its headless body was a trunk of pale flesh, like a toadstool upended and given life. Multi-coloured fire poured from the ends of three arms. Gaumata found enough will to slam a kine shield up in front of him. Heat and cold cut into his thoughts as his shield and the daemon’s fire fought against each other. The daemon spun, hissing in frustration. Gaumata dropped the shield and reached out with his will, pulling the fire from within the daemon’s flesh. It came apart in mid-bound. Flakes of charred skin fell from the air.

Gaumata looked around. The Rubricae were folding to the floor like puppets falling from snapped strings. More daemons were plunging from the sky, hitting the ground. Half a kilometre away a vast drop-ship landed in a cloud of smoke and dust. He reached out to the nearest Rubricae, calling their names by instinct. They juddered to their feet. Gaumata pulled them forward, and they began to move, guns rising weakly. His mind was spinning. He could feel the Rubric on the edge of consciousness, still present but receding, like waves drawing down a shore.

He spun a wave of fire around him, and spat it at a cluster of bounding daemons. It blew them to black slime. The effort almost made him fall. He was drained. His limbs felt like they were separate from him.

It was not supposed to happen like this. The Rubric should have been in ascendance. The world should be changing…

Walls of debris rose as another drop-ship hit the surface. The flanks of the first split, and a blurred wave spilled from the dark within. The cries blended with the chorus of battle as the horde spilled forward.

Gaumata raised his hand, fingers glowing with heat, armour sweating ice.

And the force of the Rubric crashed through him again.

Knekku almost fell from the sky as the Rubric receded and surged back into force. Sar’iq tumbled, wings flailing, as the incantation ran through them. They caught themselves just before the ground, rose and climbed. The battle was behind them, the sky above a mass of iron and strobing light. It felt separate, as though they were alone. They were not alone. Behind them the living and the neverborn followed, cracked light and sickly swirls of colour in their wake. They were the human and mutant warriors, the summoned hordes and the daemon machines. They met the armies pouring from the sky, and the two blurred into a churning sea. Chunks of flaming debris cut the air beside them. Falling bodies and the cries of the dying rose and submerged in the boom of psychic discharge.

+Stay with me, brother,+ Knekku called to Sar’iq. His chest wound was oozing blood, and the Rubric was coursing through his flesh and his thoughts. +No matter what happens, stay with me.+

The epicentre of it all lay before them. A cluster of figures at the centre of spirals of bodies linked by cords of light and shadow. As he looked at it, he felt the air tighten and flicker. Boulders and pieces of buildings rose into the air as though flicked from a snapped sheet of cloth. From the agglomeration that had appeared in orbit, a comet fell directly downwards. Knekku could see figures within the falling ball of light, figures haloed and winged with brilliance.

Astraeos unfolded his mind and his thoughts became wings. First two and then a third, then a halo of shimmering feathers. Orange and pink heat spread from their edges as they cut the air. Daemons flew beside him, sliding in and out of existence at will, their shapes rings of feathered flame. His sorcerers fell with him, roped to him by thought. Fire and lightning spat from their eyes and hands. Acid fell as black rain from the clouds which formed in their wake. Screeds of las-fire and scythes of light reached up from the battlefield to embrace them. Astraeos shrugged it away. Across the surface of his mind the vengeance of Magnus the Red laughed, and he felt its whispers pouring into him, opening secrets, pulling the world to him and making it break before him.

Energy drained into him even as it lashed at him. He could feel his stray thoughts pulling chunks of masonry the size of tanks from the ruined city. Around him the threads of Ahriman’s Rubric flapped like a sail in a storm. He saw the incantation dance in the warp, saw its structure shiver as it struggled to remain whole. Its genius pattern filled his inner eye, and part of him marvelled at its majesty.

It is beautiful, he thought.

The ground loomed beneath. Spirals of figures covered it, some standing, some struggling to rise. These were Ahriman’s Rubricae and followers. Astraeos could see the Rubric warring inside them, pulling them apart as it flicked between destruction and miracle.

There, said the voice of vengeance in his thoughts. There he is.

And he saw the figure standing at the centre of the spirals. Two others stood beside him, weapons in their hands. Threads of lightning joined them to Ahriman. Scabs of soul-light broke from them as they struggled to move. The Rubric had them and was ripping them apart as it fought to stay whole. Only Ahriman was still, a single point of light at the centre of destruction.

You see, said his thoughts, I keep my oaths.

Astraeos hit the ground. The crust of fused glass shattered. Calitiedies, Zurcos, and Memunim landed a second later. They were struggling as the Rubric pulled them into its embrace, but he had strength enough for them as well. They rose, staff and sword and axes pale with witch-frost. Ahriman stood before them, the struggling Rubricae surrounded them. The two sorcerers beside Ahriman forced themselves forward. Astraeos knew their names; they were called Kiu and Gilgamos. He had known them once, long ago, when he had served Ahriman. They had been brothers to him, of sorts.

+Take them,+ he willed.

Kiu raised his sword. A bladed wave of force ripped out from its tip. Zurcos raised his hands and ripped Kiu’s sword from being. Gilgamos spun to stand before Ahriman, his shape a shadow. Calitiedies walked forward, and the ground broke with his steps. Shards of glass flew upwards like daggers. Kiu closed his fist and the glass became dust. Memunim ran forwards, a black disc forming before him. Gilgamos appeared in front of him, blinking into solidity, and hacked down. Memunim’s shield met the blow. Light and sound vanished, and then crashed back again. Calitiedies was chanting. The air thickened. Shimmers of heat cloaked Kiu, and then vanished as the power was pulled away. Hundreds of layers of force and thought formed and fled as the Thousand Sons’ minds met and sheared against each other.

Astraeos felt it all, but watched none of it. His single inner eye stayed fixed on Ahriman, frozen in place. Astraeos walked forward, sliding through the battle like a knife, his wings dragging on the splintered ground, his armour shining with the snap of reflection as the Rubric bleached the darkness and stole the light again.

He is fighting to hold on to the Rubric, said the voice of his thoughts. He won’t let go. It’s breaking, but he knows it will work, that it can be complete, that he is almost there, that he has almost succeeded.

Astraeos raised a hand, and touched Ahriman’s faceplate. He could feel the cyclone of sorcery just beneath. Ahriman was still there: almost dead but still on the threshold of life, the last second of his existence draining into the Rubric.

+I am here, old friend,+ he sent. At his back he felt the force and heat of the battle stir his feathers. +I know that you can hear me. I am here, and I want you to know that I have taken from you everything you ever dreamed of and sacrificed for. Your Rubric ends now, Ahriman, at the moment when it could have succeeded. Your hearts are dead in your chest, but you are still here, caught between the desire and the goal. Break from it, bring yourself back from the brink and defend yourself, and it fails. Do nothing and I will rip your mind and soul apart as the last threads of hope fall from your fingers. You will die not in sacrifice, but in failure.+ He reached a single bladed finger up under Ahriman’s chin. +Choose,+ sent Astraeos, and in his soul the daemon of vengeance laughed.

The disc beneath Knekku’s feet hit the squall of psychic power around Ahriman. It screeched as competing forces ripped through it. A towering spiral of power tore through the air. A creature stood before Ahriman, armoured in bronze, its back cloaked with wings, its hand at Ahriman’s throat. Knekku dived towards them. The disc screamed and split in two. Scales of stone and flesh and metal flew behind him. He leapt. His remaining heart was hammering in his chest. His will and soul and being poured into the core of his spear. The bronze-clad figure was a haloed presence, its power utterly focused on Ahriman.

The melee surrounding the two figures paused as the combatants turned their minds towards him. Sar’iq dived amongst them, ghost images flowing around him, skeins of force deflecting fire and lightning. Ahriman and the daemon were there, just beneath Knekku, their presence mountains of light in the dark of the warp. He landed, rolled, and sliced down with his spear. The spear blade sliced the tip from the daemon’s claw.

Astraeos staggered. A wave of psychic force clawed up his arm. Armour curled away from flesh, and sloughed to the ground. The daemon within him shrieked as thoughts and memories filled the gap between their fused souls.

A tower under a blue sky.

A red cloak rippling in the wind.

A dank cell filled with the smell of blood and the clank of chains.

‘I will take your eye,’ said a bitter voice from the dark, ‘for wisdom, you understand.’

And a sorcerer was before him with a spear like a frozen thunderbolt. The daemon within shouted a name.

Knekku!

Black blood fell from his severed talons even as they regrew.

Knekku watched as the creature recoiled. The instant hesitated on the edge of the future. Black veins were writhing up the creature’s bronze armour. Its wings beat against the smoke-filled air. It shook… and lunged forwards.

Knekku spun the spear, turning with the momentum of his first blow, but he knew that he was dead. He had nothing left. His will had been in the blow he had struck. He was spent. He was nothing now. Avenisi flung itself at the creature, scorpion tail lashing, shrieking in the language of daemons. The creature swatted the familiar from the air with a backhanded blow. Avenisi fell, its broken body bursting into flames.

Control.

No, not nothing. He was the son of Magnus, and servant of the Crimson King. He was loyal to the last. He was the protector of this domain.

Control.

He turned from the creature looming above him. He did not know why it was there. It did not matter why.

Control.

Ahriman was there, a statue chained to a tree of lightning.

Knekku leapt, spear tip turning to the sky.

‘For you, my father,’ he said in silence. ‘For you, my king.’

The lightning of the Rubric touched Knekku’s spear tip at the instant that his momentum crashed him into Ahriman. Arcs of white light leapt up the haft of the spear. And Ahriman was falling, and Knekku was at the heart of the Rubric, and the incantation was clawing through him as it earthed into his soul.

Ahriman fell.

And fell.

And fell.

The world became small suddenly, as though time had been crumpled into a ball.

No, he cried, but he had no voice. There was just the receding sound of thousands of voices growing fainter, and a well of darkness extending below him.

No.

No.

Above him he saw a light flare.

The ocean of names and power engulfed Knekku. The Rubric had found its fulcrum, had found its price, and it was him. He felt the power, felt the fire of gods as blood in his hands, and time as the last breath in his mouth.

Control is everything.

‘What do you wish?’ a voice seemed to say, and he thought he saw the universe laid out before him like the land seen from a high tower of an impossible fortress. He saw what Ahriman could have done, saw what could have been and what could be again. He was the sacrifice to bring renewal. He had taken that place from Ahriman, and so, now, the Rubric was his. It was for him to choose how it would end.

‘No,’ said a voice, and he thought he saw Ahriman falling away beneath him, reaching up, despair on his face.

‘It has to end, Ahriman,’ Knekku called. ‘This is a circle that must be broken.’

‘No!’ called Ahriman, as the dark grew and he became smaller. ‘Please. This is the fate of our Legion. It is not yours to choose.’

‘No, it is not.’ He paused, feeling the last speck of his will fade as he died. ‘Nor is it yours.’

XXIV
Reforged

The Rubric ended in a thunderclap. The shockwave spilled across reality and through the warp beyond. Armies fell to the ground. Daemons were blasted into shadows, and then the shadows crumpled to nothing. War engines fell from the sky in flocks. Dust and debris ripped from the ground, shards of metal and rock falling without sound. Doombreed was the last to tumble back into un-being, howling with unspent rage, its harvest of skulls clattering against its armour.

After the shockwave came the silence, settling like a smothering blanket on the devastation. On the surface of the Planet of the Sorcerers, a rolling wave of dust and smoke swallowed sounds and shapes. The summits of the rearing towers projected from the cloud like the masts of drowned sailing ships. The armies of mortals and machines lay in heaps, the dead indistinguishable from the insensible. Amongst the leaning trunks of towers, a wounded Titan rocked in the cascade of rubble that had engulfed it. The daemon that had lived within the god-machine had been blasted from its metal host, and the machine’s last, corrupted systems could only twitch its limbs and call out in broken static. Ghost forms drifted through the void. The ships and flying towers lay like stunned fish, rolling slowly over in an invisible surge.

Within the tainted reality of the Eye of Terror, the wave was visible as a shimmering curtain of pulsing light. Daemons trapped within its current howled and fought to break free only to be dragged down and dissolved into froth. Far beyond the Eye, dreamers on distant worlds woke from nightmares of falling towers. In the halls of Terra, the Apex Astropath of the Silent Mountain blinked back blood-tinted tears. On far Macragge, the hand of the Chief Librarian of the Ultramarines trembled suddenly as it drew a card from the Emperor’s Tarot.

And while the wave of paradox rolled on, down amongst the dust and ruins at its epicentre, the first figures began to rise.

Dust filled Ctesias’s world, edge to edge, up to down, hiding ground and sky. He rolled through the air. He felt things strike him, registered pain, but it was distant, something happening to a version of him just next door to the him that was having the thought. Silence flowed over him. The body of the Athenaeum spun away from him, limbs slack, eyes dark.

And Ctesias realised that he had stopped talking. The name of the Crimson King was complete. He had spoken it. He had summoned him.

Where… he began to think.

A looming shadow rose through the murk, swallowing the light, pressing up to the sky.

Sar’iq picked himself up off the ground. His wings were ragged and bleeding. Dust filled his throat as he breathed. Shapes moved on the far side of the swirling veil. His sword was a dead weight in his hand, his skin slimy with sweat. He had been fighting two enemies when the Rubric had blasted him to the ground. He could not see those he had been fighting, and he did not have the strength to search for them with his mind.

For a second he wondered where Knekku was, and where the armies that had been flooding across the plain behind them had gone.

Then he heard the roar. It was a roar of return, and triumph and rebirth. He stepped backwards. A black shadow was hurtling through the dust cloud, pushing it aside, rolling coils of static across the ground before it. He saw figures lying on the ground, some rising, some still and unmoving. Enemies or allies, he could not tell. He raised his sword.

The shadow was on him before he could move. The dust cloud parted as a figure of light and molten muscle strode into sight. Great horns curled from his chest, and a single eye shone from the centre of a head crowned by leaves of blue and white flame.

The figure paused. Sar’iq fell back to his knees. The eye of the Crimson King burned as it looked upon him.

+Rise, my warrior,+ and Sar’iq felt strength flow into his mind and limbs as he stood.

+Sire…+ he began, but the Crimson King was already moving past him, blurring like a tornado.

The dust slid across Ahriman’s sight as his eyes opened. The world was floating past above him. Silence rang in his ears. A breath passed through his lips. It tasted of metal, of spun sugar and bitter wine. His mind was a mirror of the dust haze above. Thoughts began to form.

The Rubric…

He remembered…

Another breath. He was alive…

He was alive.

His hand moved to his chest without him thinking and flinched away, fingers shaking. His hearts were beating, no sharp silver slicing deeper with each beat. He was whole. He was alive.

I have failed. The thought blinked through him. The feeling of life drained down to the pit of his mind. He closed his eyes. He felt numb. I have failed.

The sound of grinding armour pulled his eyes open. A figure loomed in the churning dust.

‘Ahriman,’ said the figure.

‘Ignis?’ he replied, squinting up. Static edged his helmet’s display.

The face of Ignis looked down at him. Tattooed lines flickered over his impassive features. He tilted his head, and extended a hand down to Ahriman.

‘Take my hand, Ahriman.’

Get up. Astraeos tried to obey but his body defied him. He could not see. The warp was a blank abyss, like a sea flattened to utter calm in an instant.

Get up, you fool! the daemon hissed.

Is that you? he asked, and tried to understand how to move his limbs. What is happening?

Move, if you want to live more than a second!

What is happening? Who am I? What am I?

You will be nothing if you do not obey! It is coming.

He found his legs in the blur of sensations and twisted to stand. He could feel something move over his skin. Armour?

His fingers felt wrong, too long, too sharp.

Something was in his head, something coiling and black. What was it? Why was it there? Who was he?

He shook his head. He could see something in the distance: a light growing brighter and brighter.

Move! He felt his leg jerk as though yanked by a cable.

The light burst from the haze. Flames reached up as a figure of flowing muscle grew into being above him. There were other shapes in the distance behind the giant, but they were indistinct. He felt that he should run, should fight, but was not sure how. He could not remember why he was there. Something was moving at the back of his mind, burrowing deep, hissing.

+Come,+ said the Crimson King, and the voice was inside Astraeos and all around him. +You have lost. Do not cower behind the mortal’s skin.+

+Usurper!+ The word ripped from Astraeos’s mind before he realised what was happening. The wings on his back snapped out and yanked him into the air. He could feel pressure flowing through him from the warp. His bones were extending, talons growing to scythes, jaw distending as his mouth filled with glass fangs. And he was doing nothing, just feeling, as something within him threw his body at the Crimson King. Cold light lashed from Astraeos’s eyes. The Crimson King did not move as the light stabbed at his torso. Copper skin split, and golden blood spattered out.

+You are weak,+ said the Crimson King. +I always was weakest when driven by vengeance. You have nothing left, you have expended your strength, and that of your host. Your only hope is to yield, and become part of us again.+

Astraeos watched from within as he snarled and dived, claws flickering between ice and fire as they reached for the blue eye in the Crimson King’s face.

+And even if you do not yield,+ said the Crimson King, and raised a hand. The movement was slow, but so fast that Astraeos felt the strike before he saw it. The Crimson King punched through Astraeos’s armour and soul, and clamped his fist shut. +You are me, and I will not be defied.+

Time skipped a beat. Astraeos felt something writhe within him, felt its barbs dig deeper. Then the instant was gone, and the Crimson King ripped the daemon from him. Pain and anguish flashed through Astraeos, and he dropped, wings broken, blood running from eyes and ears and mouth.

The Crimson King brought his hand up to his lone eye. Something that looked like the shadow cast by a mass of thorns thrashed in his grasp. A burning mouth opened wide beneath the Crimson King’s eye. It closed on the essence of the daemon which had shared Astraeos’s soul. An eyelid closed over the burning eye. The Crimson King seemed to grow, stretching, its shadow swelling. The billowing dust flexed in the air as though the world breathed in. The eye opened. The red giant looked down at Astraeos.

He waited.

+You have my pity,+ said the Crimson King. Then he folded into the dust and was gone.

Astraeos lay on the ground, distorted limbs tangled, waiting for a death which did not come. Memory returned, all of it, one piece at a time.

He hunched over, head in his hands. His helmet was dissolving, and the blood running from his eyes fell between his fingers and onto the dust he knelt on.

The Changeling reached its hand towards Ahriman. The sorcerer was looking up at it.

‘Take my hand,’ it said, again, with Ignis’s voice.

Take it and everything ends for you now, intoned the Changeling to itself. Take it and claim your reward. Claim the peace of oblivion.

Ahriman did not move.

You have to take this gift without knowing, said the Changeling to itself. Just as you serve in ignorance, so your reward must be taken in ignorance. You have done enough, and our master is pleased. This is your reward. Take it.

‘How are you here, Ignis?’ asked Ahriman.

‘By a long path,’ replied the Changeling. Ahriman held still and then reached up to take the offered hand.

‘Where are the others?’

‘Does it matter?’

Ahriman’s fingers pulled back a fraction, his hand hesitating an inch from the Changeling’s grasp.

‘The Rubric…’ Ahriman began.

‘Is done.’

‘It failed,’ said Ahriman. ‘I failed.’ The Changeling heard the catch in the words, not just despair, but… almost a question. ‘Have I failed, Ignis? Where are the Rubricae? Do they survive? Are they… altered?’

The question seemed to catch on the wind.

And the Changeling felt a voice speak, a voice so vast that it was the sound of the falling dust, and the distant cries of the dying, and the crackle of fire on the other side of the void.

‘Leave him, my child,’ it said. ‘He still has dances to dance for me. Peace will not be his. Not yet.’

The Changeling dropped his hand, and stepped back. It felt hollow. It would take these memories from Ahriman’s life. He would never remember that this brief meeting had occurred. It supposed that it was a gift of a kind; just not the one it had come here originally to give.

Ahriman was staring at the Changeling.

For an instant the Changeling let its first face – its one true face – look back at Ahriman.

A single gasp of shock.

Then the dust pulled a veil between them, and the Changeling, and all memory that it had been there, was gone.

XXV
Failure

‘Take my hand,’ said a voice.

Ahriman looked up, blinking at the blur of static inside his helm. The dust was gusting around him. He was on his knees, his tattered robes fluttering around his armour. The Black Staff lay, half buried, by his side, cold and sullen. He blinked, but aching fog filled his skull and clouded his eyes.

‘Do you want to stay down there and die?’ said the voice, and this time Ahriman’s eyes found the speaker. Ctesias stood above him. The summoner was leaning on his own staff, one arm twisted unnaturally at his side. The robes and parchment strips had burned from his armour, and it was a ruin of gouged plating and exposed wires. His head was bare and he looked more like a walking cadaver than ever. ‘If you do, then you are going about the right way to make it happen.’

‘I failed,’ said Ahriman. The words were the only ones his mouth could find to say.

Ctesias’s skin tightened over his skull.

‘Not the first time, but if you do not want it to be the last then we have to move now.’

Ahriman found a smile forming behind the mask of his helm.

He looked at Ctesias’s offered hand. The fingers were shaking with fatigue. He hesitated.

You have failed! screamed a voice in his skull.

He grasped the proffered hand.

‘Have I done enough to inspire loyalty in your mercenary soul, Ctesias?’

‘You were better when you were half dead,’ hissed Ctesias, and pulled Ahriman to his feet with a snarl of effort. They stood for an instant, and then Ahriman took an unsteady step. ‘You may want that,’ said Ctesias, and nodded to the Black Staff slowly sinking under accumulating dust. Ahriman looked at it, and then picked it up. Dust fell from its crest of horns.

‘Where…’ he began to ask. Ctesias was already moving away.

‘Anywhere that is not here.’

‘The Athenaeum…?’

Ctesias shook his head, but did not look at Ahriman. The dust was everywhere.

‘Gone, and we have to hope that we will not find what became of it.’

‘And the Rubricae?’

Ctesias did not answer for a second.

‘I have not looked for any of them,’ he said carefully.

‘Then we look for them now,’ said Ahriman, and felt the smallest spark of hope in his own thoughts.

Have I failed? It might have worked. Even with Knekku’s sacrifice it might…

‘If that is your will,’ said Ctesias, but Ahriman did not hear the words, or the lead in their tone. He was already walking through the red twilight, his senses searching.

They found Astraeos before they found any of the living or dead. The renegade Librarian knelt on the ground, his skin bare, his eyes empty pits. The wings and talons had melted from his body, and his armour lay about him in tarnished shreds. Ctesias saw him first, and his hand closed on Ahriman’s shoulder before he thought about what he was doing.

‘It is him,’ said Ctesias. ‘You should not…’

‘I think…,’ said Ahriman, carefully shrugging Ctesias’s hand away, ‘I think that there is nothing to fear here.’ He looked at the kneeling figure. ‘Not now.’

Ctesias wanted to say something, but could think of nothing.

‘Astraeos,’ said Ahriman and stepped closer to the motionless figure. ‘Brother?’

The head came up slowly, the empty eye sockets haloed with runnels of caked blood.

‘I was never your brother, Ahriman. That was just the first lie you convinced me of.’

‘I did not lie.’

Astraeos tilted his head back, mouth wide. A rattling roar came from his throat. It took a second for Ctesias to realise that it was laughter. It faded slowly, and Astraeos shook his head.

‘Do you even know what you have done?’

Ahriman reached up and pulled his own helm off. Shadows clung to the hollows of his face.

‘I thought you dead, Astraeos,’ said Ahriman. ‘That you had gone to the death you wanted at the hands of those who had wronged you. I thought you had found redemption in your own eyes.’

‘In my own eyes?’ Astraeos was shaking at the jest only he could see. Fresh blood marked his cheeks and lips. ‘In my own eyes.’

For a second the only sound was the hiss of the dust wind, and the fading rattle of laughter.

‘Why did you do… this?’ asked Ahriman eventually.

‘Why?’ Astraeos’s empty eye sockets fastened on them. ‘That you need to ask should tell you enough. You destroy and corrupt by existing, Ahriman. That you do not see that fact is the only condemnation I need speak.’

Ahriman shook his head.

‘I am sorry.’

Astraeos was still for a second, and then stood. Dust powdered his scarred flesh. He moved slowly, as though powered by will as much as strength.

‘I do not need your sorrow,’ he said, taking a step half into the enveloping cloud of dust. ‘I have the only comfort I need. I came here to see all you dreamed of broken. You came here to find salvation. We both are broken again, but I…’ He reached down to where the ground was hidden beneath the powdered caul. ‘I alone have what I came for.’

A murmur of will slipped from Astraeos’s mind. Blood washed from his nose and ears at the effort.

+Rise,+ commanded Astraeos.

And, slowly, like a wreck pulled from the bed of the sea, a lone Rubricae rose from the ground and stood upright. Cold light glowed in its eyepieces, haloing in the murk. Ctesias did not need to touch it with his own mind to know that it was still a shell, rattling with the voice of a lost soul.

Ahriman’s eyes were locked on the Rubricae. Behind it the dust was thinning, as though it were a curtain pulled aside on cue. More Rubricae were rising from their coverings of dust. Dead light shone in their eyes, as they turned to look back at Ahriman.

Astraeos stepped back.

‘Look upon your works,’ he said.

Ahriman fell, slowly, to his knees. The Black Staff wavered in his hand. His helm slid from his grasp. His eyes remained open and fixed on the ranks of slowly standing figures.

Astraeos turned his empty eyes on Ahriman once more, his features set in grim triumph, and then turned and began to limp away.

‘Where are you going?’ called Ctesias. ‘You will not survive.’

Astraeos stopped, and half turned. Ctesias thought he saw a flash of amusement on the blood-streaked face.

‘You are broken,’ said Ctesias, still not sure why he was speaking. ‘You are blind.’

‘Yes, I am.’ Astraeos nodded, and walked on. ‘He taught me well.’

The Exiles fled for a second time. The awe and terror of their arrival became a gathering of loose handfuls of forces and a disorganised scattering of ships. Few opposed them. There was little will for that; anger had drained along with strength.

On the surface of the Planet of the Sorcerers, the dust began to drain from the air. Broken towers and dunes of rubble emerged from the haze. The surviving mutants staggered and brayed as they formed ragged herds. The sorcerers of Magnus raised their heads, and sent their first thoughts out through the aether. They sensed the gunships and assault craft roaring back to the ships above. They saw the warships that had hung over the city come about and power away into the dark.

+We should stop them, sire.+ Sar’iq sent the thought as he watched ragged streaks of craft fleeing up through the thinning dust.

Behind him, the presence of the Crimson King remained silent, his shape a pillar of light wrapped around the shadow of a man.

+If we act now we can destroy them once and for all,+ sent Sar’iq again, as more lights fled the surface and moved from the sky above.

+No, Sar’iq.+ The Crimson King’s sending was a deep rumble in Sar’iq’s thoughts. +They have done no more than repeat their first crime. Failure is judgement and punishment enough.+

In his navigation tower on the Word of Hermes, Silvanus wept in the dark, wet slits opening and closing down his back with each raking breath. The ship was shivering to life, and he knew that everything had gone wrong, he had seen it even though he had tried to blind himself. He was alive, but he knew that now he would have to perform his function again. Slowly he began to slide his body across the floor towards the navigation chair.

+Silvanus?+ The voice was Ctesias’s, and for a second Silvanus found himself wondering where Ignis was. Then he let the thought fall away; it really did not matter.

‘Yes, master,’ he said to the air, ‘I know. We are running.’

In the shadows of the cave, the robed figure of Magnus watched the flames. Light danced in his lone eye. In the cage of fire it saw the Word of Hermes slip away from the Planet of the Sorcerers. It nodded once to itself, and waved a hand over the flames. The fire roared up, becoming a pillar of light reaching upwards without end, and then fell back into cold embers. The robed figure stood and turned, its limbs twitching as though old muscles were fighting fatigue. It began to limp away. Behind it, the image of both cold fire and cave collapsed and folded into nothing.

XXVI
Rubricae

Ctesias pulled the hatch shut on the chamber. Ignis waited in the passage outside. The Master of Ruin seemed somehow incomplete without his automaton at his side. Ignis had recovered, but his memory of what had happened to him had not. Something had attacked him during the battle. The torn frame of Credence had told part of an incomplete story, but mysteries were the least of their current concerns.

‘Has he spoken?’ asked Ignis. Ctesias shook his head.

‘Not a word or thought.’

Ignis nodded, the tattoos on his face fixed. They had exchanged the same question and answer enough times that the exchange had taken on something of a grim formality. Neither of them used their thought voices. Both of them had taken to shutting off their minds when they did not have a specific need to touch the warp. It was as though Ahriman’s silence was seeping out into the survivors of his forces.

Days and weeks had passed since they had fled the Planet of the Sorcerers. In that time Ahriman had not spoken or moved from his chamber. Between them Kiu, Gaumata, Gilgamos and Ctesias had pulled what forces and materiel they could from the battlefield, but Ahriman had come from it silent, walking only where guided, his eyes unfocused, mind and voice silent. Only when he had reached his sparse chambers had he moved briefly by his own will. Ctesias had watched Ahriman pull a blackened and dented helm from within a metal casket. Black soot covered the helm’s crown and crow-like snout. Ahriman just sat with it, turning it over and over in his hands.

‘What do we do?’ asked Ignis.

‘I do not know.’

Ctesias rubbed his eyes, and let out a deep breath. He had surprised himself that he had not simply left. That he came back to try to coax a response from Ahriman time and again was something he did not understand enough to be surprised by. That Ignis waited outside the door for news each time was a fact that Ctesias did not have the energy to question.

‘I do not know,’ he repeated with a weary shrug.

Gaumata’s strides shook the passageway as he ran. Disorganised clusters of slaves and mortal crew scampered out of his way.

+Ctesias!+ he called. A sharp pain stabbed into his skull as he projected the message. His mind was still weak from the battle, and the effects of the second Rubric. +Ignis!+

Neither Ctesias nor Ignis answered. Their minds – as they were so often now – remained hidden and sullenly silent. Gaumata muttered a curse to himself, and twisted down a companionway. There were fewer crew here. Even Ignis’s servitors now seemed to shun the passages around Ahriman’s chambers.

He turned a corner and almost cannoned into Ignis. The Master of Ruin pulled back sharply, electoos shivering across his face in surprise. Behind him Ctesias was a hunched shadow.

‘Brothers,’ breathed Gaumata. A frown formed on Ctesias’s wrinkled face, and his mouth began to open with a question. Gaumata cut him off. ‘You have to bring him. You have to bring him now.’

The Rubricae stood in perfect silence and stillness. Some still showed the marks of battle on their armour. Others were pristine, their blue lacquer gleaming under the stablights. Ignis did not look at them. His eyes, and the eyes of all the others, were focused on the figure who stood at the centre of a circle that had formed in their ranks.

The lone figure’s armour was the same as the others, its plates etched with Prosperine runes, and edged in silver and gold. Only the chains leading from its wrists to cleats in the deck marked it apart. The chains, and the high-crested helm that sat on the deck beside it.

Ignis found that he could not look away. Ever since they had followed Gaumata into the hold he had been able to do nothing else but stare at the figure. What else was there to do in the face of the impossible, in the face of a miracle?

+He is the only one?+ asked Ahriman.

+Yes,+ replied Gaumata. +I do not know how I did not sense it before, but every other Rubricae on our ships has been examined. This…+ his thought voice trailed off, and Ignis could feel Gaumata reaching and failing to find a concept. +This is the only one. He must have been brought up with the rest of the Rubricae we recovered from the surface. I do not know how I missed the… difference.+

Ahriman did not answer, but stepped towards the chained figure. Ignis felt a pulse of will and the chains crumbled. The lone figure flinched, eyes flicking to the vanished chains, and then up to Ahriman.

+It is all right,+ sent Ahriman, and then spoke with his true voice. ‘There is nothing to fear.’ He extended a hand, and the lone figure flinched again. ‘I am your brother,’ said Ahriman, and then nodded to where Ignis, Ctesias and Gaumata stood behind him. ‘We are your brothers.’

The lone figure’s eyes moved across Ignis and the others, and then back to Ahriman.

‘My brothers?’ said the figure.

‘Yes,’ said Ahriman. ‘Do you not remember?’

‘I remember…’ Frowning eyes darted across the empty air. ‘I remember… light… bright light…’ Jaw and lips moved for a second, but no more words came.

+When I discovered him that is all he would say,+ sent Gaumata. +I touched his mind. It is blank, no memories, besides that of a bright light. It is as though nothing existed for him before… before the Rubric.+

Ahriman shook his head slowly, and reached out and grasped the figure’s shoulder. Armoured fingers clacked on ceramite.

‘No, you remember one other thing, don’t you, brother? I can see it in you. Deeper down, just beyond the light. You remember something else.’

The figure glanced down at Ahriman’s hand on his shoulder. Muscles moved smoothly beneath unscarred skin. Ignis could see the slow beat of blood in his neck.

Impossible. The thought echoed in his head. Impossible…

‘Who are you, my brother?’ asked Ahriman.

The figure looked up into Ahriman’s shining eyes.

‘I… I am Helio Isidorus.’

Ahriman breathed out slowly.

‘Yes. You are.’

Epilogue
A Final Beginning

+I wondered if you would come here.+ The Oracle’s thought echoed across the spherical chamber. Ahriman did not look up as he crossed to stand at its centre. His head was bare, and each breath he took tasted different: smoke, burnt spice, and ozone warring in his senses. The walls were black stone, polished to a mirror shine so that they pulled reflections of him from the air. Some burned with haloes of luminous fire, some seemed to scream, and one was not looking at him. He did not let his eyes linger on them.

Menkaura, the Oracle of Many Eyes, floated above him. Silver armour covered the Oracle’s body, its surface bright but reflecting nothing. A smooth, blank-fronted helm covered his head. Eyes spun about him in circular arcs. The iris of each eye was bright, vivid blue, and all of them were fixed on Ahriman.

+It has been a long time.+ The Oracle’s thought voice came from every direction.

‘Since we saw each other?’ Ahriman asked. ‘Or since the Banishment?’

+Both.+

Ahriman nodded once, but remained silent. The Oracle’s eyes slowed in their orbits.

+You have been here before,+ said the Oracle. +We have met already, but while that meeting is in the past for you, it is in the future for me. That explains much. How many times have you come here?+

Ahriman paused, and blinked slowly.

‘Twice.’

+Such is time. Mortals think it a river, but it is not. It is an ocean. An ocean twisted by storms, and churned by whirlpools. We meet in the future, but in the past that has already happened. Perhaps you are even here now because of what I said, but have not yet said. I see futures. I see them stretch into the dark, their golden threads ever thinning, ever tangling, and ever breaking. But if I watch from the past then what do I see? Past? Future? Neither?+

‘A fine explanation.’ Ahriman paused, the brief shadow of a smile forming at the edge of his mouth. ‘I will take your recitation of my own words as a compliment.’

+Take it as you will.+ The Oracle’s eyes paused, and then reversed direction. +You have questions.+

‘Who does not?’ he said.

+Questions have no cost, but truth must be paid for.+

‘It always must.’

Silence and stillness formed in the chamber. Ahriman saw the pupils of the eyes narrow.

+You are not as I thought you would be, Ahriman.+

‘Time, Menkaura. Time and choices change everything.’

+Truth.+ The Oracle floated slightly closer to Ahriman. +Why are you here?+

‘I come for answers.’

+I am an Oracle.+ The thought voice was cold and emotionless. +Ask and I will answer.+

Ahriman nodded.

‘What will happen now?’

The Oracle’s eyes went still.

+Do you give your bond in payment?+

Ahriman bowed his head.

‘I do.’

+As you wish,+ sent the Oracle.

The eyes rolled in the air so that Ahriman could only see the vein-threaded whites. They began to turn, spinning on new paths and in patterns. Some began to burn, the jelly within cooking to steam, others crumpled into ash or swelled to bulging spheres. Every colour of pupil flashed past Ahriman, yellow split by black, red, black without edge or break. When the Oracle spoke, his thought voice was thin, as though it were calling from far away.

+I… I cannot see…+

Ahriman shivered at the words. There was panic in them, the blind panic of a creature drowning in dark water. Threads of black tarnish spread across the mirror of Menkaura’s armour. He was vibrating in the air, his body flickering like a stuttering projection. Ice spread across Menkaura, cracking as it thickened and fell, flashing to steam before it hit the floor.

+Ahriman!+ called Menkaura. +I cannot see!+ The Oracle was moving, juddering through the air, his hands opening and closing as they reached into emptiness. Shattered-glass images of dead futures exploded in Ahriman’s mind, spinning as they tumbled past without end.

Then sudden calm, and ringing silence.

Menkaura was shivering in the air, his orbiting eyes moving with weary slowness.

+I cannot answer you,+ sent Menkaura, and the voice was filled with exhaustion. +Your future is closed to me. The paths you will walk are now the paths of thorns and shadow, and whether they will end with victory or defeat I cannot see.+

‘A question that cannot be answered is an answer in itself.’ Ahriman nodded, and turned to walk away. ‘You have my thanks, Oracle.’

+If you find what you seek it will not be as you imagine,+ called Menkaura. Ahriman turned. The Oracle was rising higher, his eyes gliding in smooth orbits. +You were right. Time and choices leave nothing unchanged. You are not unchanged, Ahriman, and neither is your dream. You should not begin again without realising that.+

Ahriman paused.

‘You said that you cannot see what will happen. The future remains to be written.’

+I do not foretell, Ahriman. This is not prophecy. I do not need to be able to see the future to speak truth.+

Ahriman stared at him for a long moment.

‘I apologise. I have not given payment for your answers.’

A sound shivered on the edge of Ahriman’s mind. It took him a second to realise it was a dry chuckle.

+But you have, Ahriman, and you will. That I do know.+

Ahriman did not answer, but walked away. After several steps he felt the spherical chamber fade, the image of the floating Oracle a presence vanishing behind him. He did not look back, even when he heard Menkaura’s voice call to him out of the distance.

+Good fortune, old friend. I will wait for us to meet again.+

Acknowledgements

The ending of a trilogy is the ending of a journey, and the longer the journey has been the more people you meet and the more people help you along the way. This has been a long journey, and so the roll call of thanks is also appropriately vast.

To Liz, for the infinite help.

To Christian Dunn, for giving me the chance to start this walk into the warp.

To Graeme Lyon and Nick Kyme, for bringing me over the finish line.

To my co-conspirators and fellow dream weavers: Graham McNeill, Chris Wraight, and Aaron Dembski-Bowden, for their inspiration and guidance.

To Ead Brown, Colin Goodwin, Trevor Larkin, and Greg Smith, for all their enthusiasm and support.

And now – for the sake of emphasis – a pause.

To the people of Black Library through the ages of this series: Sarah, Adam, Lynne, Karen, Rik, Christian, Ceri, George, Rachel, Ragnar, Nick, Eve, Stuart, Laurie, Lindsey, Michael, Claudia, Andy, James, Ash, Rosie, Stephanie, Darius, Emma, Amy, Adi, Ead, Carol, Neil, Mark, Caroline, Graeme, Matt, Anthony, Daniela, Vince, Chris, Mal, Phil, Ken, Eddie, Mike, and Tom, for the past five years.

Thank you all.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

About the Author

John French has written several Horus Heresy stories including the novellas Tallarn: Executioner and The Crimson Fist, the novel Tallarn: Ironclad, and the audio dramas Templar and Warmaster. He is the author of the Ahriman series, which includes the novels Ahriman: Exile, Ahriman: Sorcerer and Ahriman: Unchanged, plus a number of related short stories collected in Ahriman: Exodus, including ‘The Dead Oracle’ and ‘Hand of Dust’. Additionally for the Warhammer 40,000 universe he has written the Space Marine Battles novella Fateweaver, plus many short stories. He lives and works in Nottingham, UK.

An extract from Ahriman: Exodus.

The daemon rose through the night before me.

I knew I was dreaming. I could feel the unreal substance of it around me, as light as warm wind, as cold as deep oceans. I knew that anything I saw, or heard, was not real, and that kindled something close to fear in me.

Perhaps that surprises you, but dreams are not what you think. They are not your mind scrabbling through the detritus of experience. They are not the universe babbling meaning to you as you slumber. They are the point at which your soul meets all the truths you cannot see. A dream is the most dangerous place that you can go, and you go ignorant and unarmed.

I am not ignorant, and in the land of the mind I am far from unarmed.

But as I looked at the daemon I knew that something was wrong. Very wrong.

I have not dreamed for a thousand years. It is not something I can risk. It is not something I thought I was capable of anymore. And this was not simply a dream. It was a manifestation.

The daemon’s shape formed as it moved, smudging depth and substance from smoke. Its body resembled a feathered lizard. Nine short legs broke its flattened bulk, each toe tipped with a mouth and tongue. Its head was a cluster of snapping jaws, and slitted, yellow eyes. I could hear voices, laughter and pleading just on the edge of hearing. 

I knew the daemon. It had been my hand that had unleashed this creature upon the Silvered Host at Cvenis, and seeded its soul parasite into Taragrth Sune. It had many names amongst mortals – Chel’thek, The Dragon of the Hundredth Gate, The Speaker of Infinity – but only I knew its true name, and so only I held its chain of slavery. Given that, and where my body lay, its presence was more than just a problem. It was a sign.

‘You,’ I said, my voice heavy with false authority, ‘are not supposed to be here.’

The daemon’s mouths clacked open and shut.

‘But I am, little mage,’ it breathed. ‘I am here.’

‘I have your name,’ I said. ‘Your passing is at my sufferance. You rise into being at my will.’

It laughed with the sound of cracking cartilage.

‘Command me then, half-mortal. Bid me back to the dark. The chains rust, and fire pours upon the days as yet unborn. The chiming of the broken bells calls this doom. The Three will defy your exodus. They will drag you apart from within, and eat your carcasses as they cool.’ It grinned with a thousand mouths. ‘You are hunted. You and your master.’

‘I have no master.’

Its laughter clattered out again, its flesh shivering beneath copper feathers.

This is the way of daemons. Like predators of old Terra, they posture, growl and magnify their appearance to cover weakness. But, like the growl of the wolf and the snarl of the lion, it is bravado that breathes from between sharp teeth.

‘Everything has a master,’ it smiled a wide, sagging smile. ‘But you are not mine.’

It had gone snake-still. I had to act now.

It burst towards me.

I began to form the thing’s name, reaching into the compartments of my mind to unlock, and combine each fragment.

‘Sah-sul’na’gu…’

The syllables sprayed from my lips, but the daemon was already lunging at me, its body growing as it moved. Its skin tore, arms reaching from within its swelling form. Fingers stretched and became razors of bone. 

‘…th’nul’gu’shun-ignal…’

The skin of the dream clogged and stretched as I spoke. Sounds of tearing skin and weeping cries stole the daemon’s roar.

‘…g’shu’theth…’

Un-words poured from me. They burned in the idea of air. The daemon’s body began to crumble, skin and meat hissing to slime. Flesh stripped from its reaching claw. The last component of its name unlocked in my mind.

‘…ul’suth’kal!’ I spat the last piece of it.

The daemon froze. Shivering in place, the edges shimmering to nothing.

‘You.’ The daemon’s voice hissed from its dissolving throat. ‘Are. Weak.’

‘Not yet,’ I said, and thrust it back into oblivion.

Click here to buy Ahriman: Exodus.

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First published in Great Britain in 2015.
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